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Elon Musk: Treat All Input as Error | AI Podcast Clips

So the magic of deep learning is that it gets better with data, you said there's a huge inflow of data, but the thing about driving, the really valuable data to learn from is the edge cases. So how do you, I mean I've heard you talk somewhere about autopilot disengagement being an important moment of time to use. Is there other edge cases or perhaps can you speak to those edge cases, what aspects of them might be valuable or if you have other ideas how to discover more and more and more edge cases in driving? Well there's a lot of things that are learned. There's certainly edge cases where I say somebody's on autopilot and they take over and then okay, that's a trigger that goes to a system that says okay, did they take over for convenience or did they take over because the autopilot wasn't working properly? There's also, like let's say we're trying to figure out what is the optimal spline for traversing an intersection? Then the ones where there are no interventions are the right ones. So you then say okay, when it looks like this, do the following and then you get the optimal spline for a complex, navigating a complex intersection. So that's for, so there's kind of the common case. You're trying to capture a huge amount of samples of a particular intersection, when things went right and then there's the edge case where, as you said, not for convenience but something didn't go exactly right. Somebody took over, somebody asserted manual control from autopilot and really, like the way to look at this is view all input as error. If the user had to do input, all input is error. That's a powerful line to think of it that way.

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Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #308

How are these interacting with our fighters if they are? How are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're acting perhaps as a swarm, especially off the East Coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects? The following is a conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot, including roles as a combat lead, landing signals officer, and rescue mission commander. He and people in his squadron detected UFOs on multiple occasions, and he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences and about the importance of investigating these sightings, especially for national security reasons. Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from WPI and an interest in career roles in advanced technology development, including multi-agent collaborative autonomy, machine learning assisted air-to-air combat, manned and unmanned teaming technologies, and most recently, development of materials through quantum simulation. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ryan Graves. What did you think of the new Top Gun movie? How accurate was it? Let's start there. I thought the flying was really accurate. I thought the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission, of course, had a lot of liberties. But one thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening. The chess game between, like in a dog fight between the pilots and the enemy or between the different pilots? I'll even speak to just that particular mission they flew there. And for that particular mission, it's kind of a chess game with yourself to get everything in place. So what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario, which means they have to ingress low due to the surface-to-air threats, the integrated air defense systems that are nearby. And they have to ingress low and pop up like we see in the movie. And in that particular movie, that was a pre-planned strike. They knew exactly where they're going. But there's a scenario where we have to operate in that type of environment and we don't know exactly where we're going to strike or we're going to be adapting to real-time targets. And so in that scenario, you would have one of those fighters down low like that operating as a mission commander, as a forward air controller. And he's out there calling shots, joining on those other players in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target. So that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing. Can you actually describe for people who haven't seen the movie what the mission actually is? Yeah. What's involved in the mission? So in this particular mission, it's kind of what we would call a pre-planned strike. So there's a known location that's in a heavily defended area. And the air crew, in this case, I believe it was four F-18s on the initial package. Their job was to ingress very low down a canyon to stay out of the radar window of the surface-to-air threats. What does ingress mean? Ingress means that they're going to be pushing from a start location towards a target or the objective. So there's an ingress portion of the mission and an egress portion of the mission. Oh, okay. Like the entrance and the exit type of thing. Correct. Got it. But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit, right? Because when we're entering someplace, we have the option to enter. But when we go drop a bomb on location or exiting, we don't have that luxury. We don't have that option. So it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level. Got it. And so they were flying low to the ground, and then there's a surface-to-air missiles that force them to have to fly low. Is that a realistic thing? It is realistic. So driving those aircraft in the clutter. All radar systems, or most I should say, are essentially line of sight. And so they're going to be limited by the horizon or any clutter out there. And even a number of radars, if they are located up high and looking down towards that aircraft, the clutter, all the objects such as trees and canyons can have effect on radar systems. And so it can be a type of camouflage. So that's the camouflage for the radar. But what about the surface-to-air missile? Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles that fly so low? Like fly, I guess, below their level? As far as I know, you can fly under any radar right now. We don't have necessarily radars that can look through anything. So there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself. But with a larger number of assets and distributed communication networks, where those radars are looking makes all the difference. And I said they're ingressing past an IAS, and that's an integrated air defense system. And that linking of air defense systems is what makes it so hard, so complicated, is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated from each other. So that if you took out the target that was shooting at you, it still has ability to intercept you from another radar location. So it's distributed and it's stronger that way. You mean the surface- to-air missiles, like it's a distributed system in that if you take out one, they're still able to sort of integrate information about your location and strike at you? Correct. And there's a lot of complication that can go, you know, once we start thinking about distributed systems like that and the ability to self-heal and repair and adapt to losses. It's an interesting area. Are you responsible for thinking about that when you're flying an airplane? To some degree. When we ingress to an area like that, we're presented with information about targets, air-to-air or air-to-surface, or surface-to-air, I should say. And we can essentially see where essentially the danger zone, if you will, is located. And so essentially we would stay out of that. And so having a full picture of the environment is extremely important because, you know, at the end of the day, if we go in that circle, we can die pretty quickly. So it's absolutely crucial. So there's regions that have higher and lower danger based on your understanding of the actual, whatever the surface-to-air missile systems are. So you can kind of know. That's interesting. I wonder how automated that could be too, especially when you don't know. It seems like in the movie they knew the location of everything. I imagine that's less known in most cases. And also a lot of those systems might be a little bit more ghetto, if I can use that technical term. Like I've gotten ad hoc, maybe is the, I don't know. But having just recently visited Ukraine and seen a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought, there's a lot of improvised type of systems. So you take high tech, like advanced technology, but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding to the uncertainty in the dynamic environment. And so from an enemy perspective or whoever's trying to deal with that kind of system, it's hard to figure it out because it's like me, I played tennis for a long time and it's always easier to play, this is true for all sports, play tennis against a good tennis player versus a crappy tennis player. Because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty. And that's really difficult to deal with. It seemed like in the movie, the systems were really well organized. And so you could plan. And there's a very nice ravine that went right down the middle of them. That's how movies work, isn't it? Yeah. But no, I absolutely agree. So what you say is a very good point. And as, if we were to take a chunk of airspace and break it up into little bits, there'd be places that are better to fly or less good to fly. And we are seeing that now with what they call manned, unmanned teaming. We see tactical aircraft or some type of aircraft or platform that's being automated. And it's not being automated in a traditional sense where people think aircrew are flying them around to conduct missions, but it's very high level, objective orientated mission planning that allows the aircrew to act more as a mission planner, mission commander, versus having to just pick the right assets or fly them around or manipulate them somewhat physically. So actually going back to the chess thing, can you elaborate on what you mean, playing a game of chess with yourself? When you're flying that mission, what exactly do you mean by that? Well, there's a few people you're usually fighting against in the air. There's the bad guys, and then there's physics and mother nature, right? So when we're down at about 100 feet, it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot, and it's a chess game for the WIZO to process the information he needs and then communicate it to all those other aircraft that were flying around to ensure that they're putting their weapons on the right target. What's the WIZO? WIZO is a weapons systems officer. He's a backseater who is not a pilot, but they're responsible for radar manipulation and communications and weapons deployments of certain natures. So the chess game is against physics, against the enemy. Time. Time. What about your own psychology? Fear? Uncertainty? No. No, there's no time for that type of self-reflection while we're flying. I want to get to that, but I don't want to forget the point that you made about increased randomness being a tactical advantage. As you mentioned, you can introduce autonomy in there, and when you bring autonomy in there, and my expectation would be as we bring different abilities and machine learning, as we gather more data, we're going to be able to bring the tactical environment around that jet, that the war space that it goes into will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective, where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly because the system is providing a new tactical solution, essentially, for that particular scenario, instead of just training to particular tactics that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal, right? But not necessarily the most lethal, because they have to be trainable. But if we can introduce AI into that and to have a level of randomness, or at least the appearance of randomness due to the complexity, I would consider it like a stochastic tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters won't be able to engage in that fight because it would be unsafe, essentially, for anything else. And I think that's where we have to drive to because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse cat game about who's tactics and who knows what. But if knowledge is no longer a factor, it's going to make things a lot different. That's really interesting. So out of the many things that are part of your expertise, your journey, you're also working on autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, the use of AI and machine learning and manned-on-man teaming, all that kind of stuff. We'll talk about it. But you're saying, sort of, when people think about the use of AI in war, in military systems, they think about, like, computer vision for perception or processing of sensor information in order to extract from it actionable knowledge kind of thing. But you're saying you could also use it to generate randomness that's difficult to work with in a game-theoretic way. Like, it's difficult for human operators to respond to. Exactly. That's really interesting. Okay, so back to Tom Cruise and Tom Gunn. What about the dogfighting? What aspects of that were accurate? So dogfighting is kind of an interesting conversation because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set nowadays by traditional standards, because the ranges with which we engage and employ weapons are very significant. And so if we're in a scenario, we're in a dogfight like that, a lot of things have probably gone wrong, right? And that's kind of how this mission was set up, right? It was a, you know, a no-win type scenario, most likely. And so for a dogfight, the aircraft size and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it so it's not very theatrical, right? The aircraft looks small, and while it's intense with the systems I have and the sensors and what I'm feeling and all that, if I, you know, we've done it and we've done it, right? We take video of that and it's just like a blue sky and you see a little dot out there. So not very interesting. And so anytime it really looks interesting in a dogfight arena, that's most likely fiction because we really only get close for, you know, a millisecond as we're zipping past each other at the merge. You're breaking my heart, right? I know. Breaking my heart. No, I understand. In a dogfight, you can go and have fun, but, you know, in a dogfight specifically. Maybe that was more common in the earlier wars, the World War II and before that, where the, is it due to the sort of the range and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved? Correct. And the accuracy of the targeting systems at range. But there's also a train of thought that hasn't necessarily been tested out yet, which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare, EW and or unmanned assets, the battle space may get so complex and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky or wasted such that you're going to be in close with either IR missiles or guns if it's a no kidding, you know, must defend type scenario. First of all, what's electronic warfare? You know, it's basically trying to get control of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest of whatever operation is going on. So in the tactical environment, a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar or can we deceive the missile or just, you know, stop their guidance, things of that nature. And it's a battle in the space of information, of digital information. Yeah. Well, F-22 and F-35, right? F-22 is a big, expensive aircraft and it was made to be a great fighter. But the F-35 is not as great of a fighter, but it's an electronic warfare and mission commander platform of the future, where information is what's going to win the war instead of the best dogfighter. And so it's interesting dichotomy there. What's the best airplane ever made, fighter jet ever made? I know the aviators in the audience are going to hate my answer because they're going to want that sexy, you know, muscly F-14 Tomcat type fighter or maybe P-51 type aircraft. But the F-35 is maybe not the best dogfighter, but it doesn't have to get in a dogfight, right? It's like how you'd be the best knife fighters, not getting a knife fight sometimes. Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. It looks pretty sexy. There's two real strengths you can have as a fighter. You can have the ability to kind of out muscle your fighter, your opponent, and beat them on G's and power and raid around on them. And then there's the other side of that, which is you can be overly maneuverable. You can bleed energy quickly. And that's what the F-18 was good at because it had to be heavier to land on aircraft carrier. We had to give it extra bulk, but it also needs special mechanisms to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier. So it made it very maneuverable. And what that leads to a lot of times is the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight, which is very good. But if you do make that sharp turn, you're going to bleed a lot of your energy away and be more susceptible for follow on shots if that one's less susceptible. And so there's just kind of aggression, non-aggression game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting. Where does the F-35 land on that spectrum? F-35 lands somewhere behind the F-22s. So there'll probably be a row of F-22s or F-18s, and F-35 will be out back, but it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare that's happening in front of it. Is it one of the more expensive planes because of all the stuff on it? It certainly is, yeah. In the movie, they have Tom Cruise fly it over Mach 10. So maybe, can you say what are the different speeds, accelerations feel like Mach 1, 2, 3, or hypersonic? Have you ever flown hypersonic? No. How tough does it get? I'm just going to call out the BS of ejecting at Mach 10, just for the record, because in the movie, there's been, I think, at least one ejection that was supersonic. And I'll just say, you know, it was not pretty, but he survived. So there would have to be some interesting mechanisms to eject successfully at Mach 10, but I'll digress on that for the moment. Yeah, that seemed very strange. And he just walked away from it. But anyway, so, you know- He seemed disheveled. Okay, it's Tom Cruise. It's like Chuck Norris or something. Indestructible. Indestructible. Also doesn't age. Yeah. But anyway, so what's interesting to say about the experience of that as you go up? Does it get more and more difficult? In the end of the day, crossing the sound barrier is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway. You don't really notice anything. To cross that, at least in F-18, because we have a lot more weight than most fighters, is typically we'll do that in a descent. And we'll do that full afterburner, just dumping gas into the engine. And so that'll get us over the fastest I think I've gone with about 1.28. But what's interesting, people don't realize, is that if I take that throttle and I'm an afterburner and I just bring it back, just bring it back to mil, which is full power, just not afterburner, the deceleration is so strong due to the air friction that it throws you forward in your straps. Almost, you know, I would say, you know, maybe like 70% as strong almost as as trapping on the boat. It's pretty strong. So it's almost like a reverse car crash just for the deceleration. So the acceleration, you know, is usually kind of slow and you don't feel anything, of course, when you're crossing through it, but the deceleration is pretty violent. The deceleration is violent, huh? Okay. But is there a fundamental difference between like Mach 1 and hypersonic, Mach 5 and so on? Does it require like super special training? And is that something that's used often in warfare? Is it not really that necessary? No. So hypersonic human flight, if it exists, is not something that's employed tactically in any sense right now that I'm aware of. So, you know, when I think of hypersonic technology, I think of missiles and weapon systems and delivery platform. I don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily. I can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps, but those would be more efficient, very long, long range. I imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle, honestly. The thing you experience is the acceleration, not the actual speed. There's been just a small tangent, a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons, like missiles from, you know, Russia bragging about that. Is this something that's a significant concern or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapon systems? Hypersonics, I do think, pose a challenge for our detection systems because there are, you know, there are design considerations in these sensor systems as always, right? And when you build them and the technology progresses to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology, you know, there's a problem. But with the, you know, the all domain and kind of cross domain data linking capabilities we have, it's less of, you know, it's more of an in-depth you know, it's more of an integrated picture, I'll say. And so the hypersonics are really, what it is, is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem? You're just shortening the time available to do that. We call something like that the kill chain, right? It's from locating a target and identifying it and, you know, essentially authorizing its destruction by whatever means, employing and then actually following up to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense, right? Does it need another re-attack, something of that nature. And so there's an old dog fighting framework you could call it, it's called the OODA loop that kind of made its way in the engineering of business now, but the old observe, orientate, decide, act was initially a fighter mechanism in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent and break it up so that he can't process his kill chain on you. And so hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows of opportunity to react to that. I wonder how much do you have to shorten it in order for the defense systems not to work anymore? It seems like it's very, you know, I'm both often horrified by the thought of nuclear war, but at the same time wonder what that looks like. When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems, I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon can reach the United States by missile with the defense systems. But then again, I also understand that these are extremely complicated systems, the amount of integration required, and because you're not using them, I mean, there could be, you know, there's like an intern somewhere that like forgot to update the code, the Fortran code that like is going to be make the different, because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test, which is really scary. Of course, the systems are probably incredible if they could be tested, but because they can't be really thoroughly tested in actual, in an actual attack, I wonder. I guess one assumption there would be that these hypersonic missiles would only be launched in a case of attack. It'd be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects that we could use to flex those systems. Another thing that actually happened, I just have a million questions I want to ask you, it's fascinating to me, is there's a bird strike on the plane. Does that happen often? Yeah, it's a serious issue. And it damaged the engine and they made it seem like it's a serious, exactly a serious issue. I've hit birds. I know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face through the cockpit, right? Shattered the cockpit, knocked him out. I think that, actually, I don't know him personally, but as a story I know from the command I was at, and I believe the back seater had to punch out and punch them both out because he was unconscious, you know, in the front seat from the bird. It can kill you from hitting you. It's, you know, it's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour. It can take out an engine very easily. Every airport I've flown at in the Navy, I've had to check the bird condition, if you will, to see how many birds. We've had to cancel flights because there's too many of them around the airport. Some airports even have bird radars, military airports. Is there systems that monitor the bird condition? There is, yeah. There's actual radar systems and you can go in the certain bases, you have to call up and they'll tell you what it is for the day or for that hour, and other ones have it in like their weather report that goes out over the radio. What are some technological solutions to this, or is this just because it's a low probability event, there's no real solution for it? I would say it's not a low probability event. I mean, this is happening a lot. I mean, although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common, or I'll say a catastrophic hit, either a near miss or a hit, or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it is pretty common. And in fact- It seems stressful. It is. It's so common in fact that we know that you never want to try to go over, or you never want to go under a bird if you see it in front of you. You always want to try to go over it because what they'll do immediately if they see you is, and you startle them, they'll bring their wings in and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path. It's interesting. I didn't know they did that. But so if you immediately, if you try to go under them, they're gonna be dropping into you. So you typically want to try to go above them. Is this something you can train for or no? Is this one of those things you have to really experience? It's a skill set that you somewhat train for in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense, right? Being able to react to your environment very quickly and make decisions quickly. So is that one of the more absurd things, challenges you have to deal with in flying? Is there other things, sort of maybe weather conditions, like harsh weather conditions? Is there something that we maybe don't often think about in terms of the challenges of flying? Birds in a way aren't a ridiculous threat for us. It's a safety threat that, you know, anything physical in the air is something that we really have to be careful about. Whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us or whether it's a turkey vulture at 2000 feet or a flock of 5000 birds like at the runway and we have to wave off, you know? And although they're low probability, a lot of bases will have like actual environmental protecting agency employees that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds or different animals that may be in the runways or flying about. Wow. I didn't know what a turkey vulture is and it really does look like a mix between a vulture and a turkey. And look kind of dumb. No offense to turkey vultures. In that movie, who was the enemy nation? Was it, I mean, I think, I guess they were implying it's Iran or was it Russia? I didn't think they were implying any particular nation state, frankly. I think they did a somewhat decent job of having some ambiguous fifth generation fighters. The location and the stockpile, like I get like how the story kind of insinuates certain things, but they seem to do a good job of not having anything directly pointing to another nation, which I thought was the good move. I enjoy these type of movies as an aviator and as an American, right? Because it's a feel good movie, but we shouldn't be celebrating going to war with any particular country, China, Russia, whoever may have these weapons. It's fun to watch, but it would be an incredibly serious event to be employing these weapons. Yeah, we'll talk about war in general, because yeah, the movie is kind of celebrating the human side of things and also the incredible technology involved, but there's also the cost of war and the seriousness of war and the suffering involved with war, not just in the fighting, but in the death of civilians and all those kinds of things. Well, you were a Navy pilot. Let's talk a little bit more seriously about this. You were twice deployed in the Middle East flying the FAA-18F Super Hornet. Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a Navy pilot? Sure. I joined the Navy in 2009, right after college. I went to, essentially, the officer boot camp, officer of candidate school. I applied as a pilot and I got in as a pilot. That was the advantage of going that way, is that I could essentially choose what I wanted, and if I got in, great. If not, I didn't get stuck doing something else. So you knew you wanted to be a pilot? I did. I joined, I went through my initial training. I went through primary flight training that all aviators go through, and I did well enough that one of the first lessons they teach you in the Navy is that you can have a great career in the Navy and you can see the world and do what you want, but at the end of the day, it's all about the needs of the Navy and what they need. So they may not have the platform you like, or you may not necessarily get to choose your own adventure here, but I was lucky enough that there was one jet slot in my class, and I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to get it. It was a jet slot. So, yeah, what that means is that I was assigned, actually, tail hook at that point, which meant I would go trained to fly aircraft that land on aircraft carriers. And there's essentially three aircraft that do that at the time. There's F-18 and the E-2 and the C-2. C-2 is kind of like the mail truck for the boat. E-2 is one with the big radar dish on top, and then there's all the F-18s. So E-2 is comms, C-2 mail truck? Yeah. C-2 basically brings all the mail. They're on the shore, and they're the ones that bring supplies to the ship via air and people. Sorry if I missed it. Is it a plane or is it a helicopter? It's a plane. Okay. All right. And the F-18 is a fighter jet. Correct. Okay. And so I selected tail hook, which meant I could get one of those other ones, but 80% or so are jets. So I was in a good spot at that point. And that's when I went to Myrtie, Mississippi to fly my first jet, which was the T-45 Gozhawk. Cool. So what kind of plane is that? Is that what you were doing your training on? That's the jet aircraft you get in before you actually go to the F-18. It is carrier capable. So go to the boat for the first time in it during the day, drop fake bombs, do dogfighting, low levels, formation flying day and night. Well, it's a pretty plane. Yeah. And it looks like a cone so that no one hits it. Okay. So it's usually not used for fighting. It's used for training? It's used for training how to fight. Got it. So what was that like? Was that the first time you were sort of really getting into it? Yeah. That was really interesting because before that, it was a 600 horsepower prop plane. And going from that to the T-45 is one of the biggest jumps in power in Navy machine operation. How much horsepower does the T-45 have approximately? Yeah. Like 15,000 or so. So it's a huge jump from 600, you said, horsepower about? Yeah. So it's a big, big leap. But it's a jet, so it performs differently. It's faster. And what that means, not just because it's faster, your whole mind needs to be faster. Everything happens faster in the air now. Right? Those comms happen faster. Your landing gear has to come up faster. Everything just happens faster in a jet. And so it's a big jump. And I'll never forget going on my first flight in that aircraft. It was a formation flight for someone else. And I was just in the back watching and there was an instructor in the flight. And so what that means is instructor is in a single aircraft and then there's three or four other aircraft and they're learning how to do joins and they're learning how to fly in formation. And as a new student in the back, it's amazing, right? Because photo op time and all this, I'm seeing aircraft up close for the first time. It's awesome. And on the way back, we couldn't get our landing gear down, ironically. So to make a long story short, because it's overall not that exciting, we couldn't get the gear down. We actually went to go do a control injection to the target area where that is, about 15, 20 miles to the north of the base. Wait, did you just say that's not that exciting? Because that to me is pretty exciting. First of all, that must be terrifying early on in your careers, having seen those things. How often does that kind of thing happen? More than you would think. More than you would think. So there was no significant panic? This is understood? This is what has to be done in this case? I think I was probably just too dumb to realize the significance of it. Because as a new student, not really appreciating just what is ahead of me if we are ejecting. But at the time, it was more, it was just like rote, right? Because I was back there and then I went from an observer mode to a, I'm going to provide you the help that I can provide you as a member of this crew mode. And so it was less about, I'm on this 20 mile trip and thinking about how vulnerable I am. We're going through checklists, we're talking to people, we're getting ready. So no, it wasn't fearful. And the whole time we were doing one of these to try to get the gear down. So we're unloading the jet and then loading it back to try to get the gear out with a stick. And it came down, it came down halfway there, just on its own. So we came back around and we did a safety trap in case there was a problem with the gear. And that was my first flight. A little bit of serendipity, but I'm going to fast forward a bit. And I went back to the squadron as an instructor about five or six years later. And I was an aviation safety officer at this point, which meant I was responsible for investigating mishaps. And a student went in and he went in the backseat of a form flight, just like the one I went on. And he went out and he ended up ejecting on that flight. Exact same type of flight. They went out and they had a runaway trim scenario. And it caused the aircraft essentially just inverted itself almost 180 degrees at about 600 feet over the ground. And they punched out just slightly outside the ejection window at about 300, 400 feet or so, but they were completely fine. And then about two months later, we had another ejection. And about three months after that, we had another ejection. So unfortunately, it can be more common than people think. What does it feel like to get ejected? Thankfully, I don't know. I can describe it to you. I can tell you what it's like from what I've heard, but I truly think it's one of those things that you just don't understand until it happens. It's like instantaneous about 250 Gs, which is only possible because of inertia in our blood. So you can actually get like 250, 300 Gs for like a few milliseconds, and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 Gs to get you away from the vehicle itself. And so, you may lose consciousness if you do, you know, who knows where you wake up. You know, you could be in a tree, you could still be falling, you can be in the water. The physics of that is fascinating, how they eject safely. Do you know the story about how that was tested at all? I don't know the full story, but there was an air force- I'm guessing nobody knows the full story. It's probably a lot of shady stuff going on. But anyway, you mean like in the early, early days or- They took a flight dock up to a rocket sled and just see how much their body could take it. And he turned a lot of his body into, in the mush, in the process of getting that science done by saving a lot of lives. People used to be tougher back in the day. That's how science used to be done. So how did your training continue? So how did it take me, take me farther through your career as you work towards graduating towards the F-18s? So in VT-9, where I was a student, there's two phases. There's an intermediate phase, there's an intermediate and an advanced. Intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft. And at that point, you truly hear, all right, you're going jets now, or you're going to go one of the other aircraft that land on the aircraft carrier. I was told I was going jets at that point. And then we go into same squadron, same aircraft, same instructors, but it's called advanced now. And now we're learning how to dogfight for the first time. We're doing what we call tactical formation, which is just like aggressive position keeping. We are doing dogfighting and low levels and all sorts of great stuff. So it's really that first introduction to that tactical environment and really putting Gs on the jet and on your body and maneuvering. Is there like tactical formation, is collaborating with other fighter jets a part of that? It is. So flying in a, that's what you mean by formation? So literally having an awareness. Is this done for you or are you as a human supposed to understand like where you are in the formation, how to maintain formation, all that kind of stuff? Is it done autonomously or manually? There's a great autonomy point on any of this I've thought about. But what we do, it's all manual. So I'm looking at his wing and I'm looking at different visual checkpoints that form like a triangle, right? Like an equal out triangle, essentially. And then as that triangle is no longer equal, I can tell my relative position against that aircraft. That's really cool. And so that's what I'm staring at for sometimes hours on end, several feet away, doing one of these if I'm in the weather, that's all it is. So you get, it's almost like, is it peripheral vision or is it your focal? No, we're staring directly at it. The peripheral is coming on my stuff, right? My sensors and all my instruments. And so he is my gyroscope at that point, right? While you're flying, not looking straight. Correct. I'm flying like this for hours. It can hurt your neck. We don't like doing this as much. And I don't think it's just me, right? It's a weird thing where when you're like this, it's actually harder to fly formation slightly than here because being in line of your hand movement and of the aircraft somehow has an effect on our ability to be more precise and comfortable. It's strange. Interesting. Yeah. So, but so there's a symmetry to the formation usually. So one of the people on the other side really don't like being on that side. Is it, who gets like the short straw? How do you decide which side of the formation you are? It's a good question too because there's kind of rank in some sense. So if it's a four-person formation, right? You have a division lead who's qualified to lead a whole division, but maybe the other ones aren't. And he has a dash two and that's his wingman essentially. And then in a division, there's two other aircraft. And then you have another senior flight leader. That's the dash three position. And then you have dash four, the last one. And if you are all lined up on one side, like fingertip, one, two, three, four, that dash four guy is going to be at the end of that whip. So if you're flying formation, each one's making movements relative to the lead. Dash four is kind of at the end of that error, you know? And so his movements are kind of like a whip. It's very difficult to fly in that position and close. Can you elaborate? Is it because of the air, the air dynamics? What's a whip? If this is the flight lead and this is dash two, flight lead is rock steady and just doing his thing. And flight two is going to be working that triangle, moving a little bit, right? And he has this small error bubble that he's doing his best to stay. But dash three is flying off dash two. And so his error bubble is dash two plus his own. And dash four- So it gets more and more stressful as you get further out. And difficult, yeah. Okay. What's the experience of that, staring for long periods of time and trying to maintain formation? How stressful is that? Because we're doing that when we drive, staying in lane. And that becomes, after you get pretty good at it, it becomes somewhat, it's still stressful, which actually is surprisingly stressful. When you look at lane keeping systems, they actually relieve that stress somehow. And it's actually creates a much more pleasant experience while you're still able to maintain situational awareness and stay awake, which is really interesting. I don't think people realize how stressful it is to lane keep when they drive. So this is even more stressful. So do you think about that? Or is this, yeah, I guess how stressful is it from a psychology perspective? It's very stressful. So I taught students how to do this as well. And so at our feet, we have two riders. And if I'm flying off of flight lead over here, what you'll find a lot of times is you'll be flying, or like if I'm the instructor and the student's flying, I'll start to notice that he's having a harder and harder time keeping position. And what I'll notice typically is he's locked out his leg. They'll lock out the leg that's closest to the aircraft they're flying against and push on the rudder subconsciously, because their whole body's trying to get away from the aircraft because they're so uncomfortable being close to it. And so I'll tell them, I can fix their form with just a couple words. I'll say, wiggle your toes. And they'll wiggle their toes and they'll loosen all the muscles in their legs. They realize they've been locked up and their formation flying will get a lot better. And so, you know, there's a lot of stress associated with that. There's some interesting psychological or visual issues such as vertigo as you're flying. So if you're flying with him and then you fly right into a cloud, right? That's when it's very stressful because you have to be very close in order to maintain visual. You might be on a thunderstorm, right? And so you have to be very tight. You might start raining and then he's turning, but you might not even know that. You might not even be able to see that turn. And so all of a sudden you might look while you're in a turn thinking you were straight and level and you look just maybe back at your instruments very quick and you realize you're like in a 30 degree turn and your whole concept of where you are in the world starts getting very confused. And you immediately get this sense of, it's weird. Like I look at the HUD and it feels, all my senses are telling me it's spinning, but it's not, you know? And so I have to trust my instruments even though it feels like it's spinning. And the same thing can happen when you're flying formation off of someone's and it can be very dangerous and disorientating. But the point is to try to regain awareness by trusting the instruments. Like distrust all your human senses and just use the instruments to rebuild situational awareness. Not in this particular case because our situational awareness is predicated off of our flight lead. So in a sense I'm just trusting his movements. And so he's my gyroscope. But you're absolutely right. If I was by myself, I would trust my instruments, but I can't just stop flying form and trust my instruments because now I'm going to hit him. Oh yeah, you have to pay attention to him. So he's my reference. So the instruments are not helping you significantly with his positioning. It's all completely manual. So is there a future where some of that is autonomous? Yeah, and I've thought about automating that flight regime. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that all the formation keeping that we do is designed to enhance the aviators' ability to maintain sight. So we fly very tight formation so that we can go in weather and to reduce groups of traffic coming into the boat. We fly in one particular position so that all of the flight crew can look down the line and see the flight lead. So everything has to do with the two aircrew visually maintaining sight of each other and defending each other. In a combat spread, I might be looking, I may be three miles away from him flying formation directly beam and looking around him to make sure nothing's there. So as I'm looking into automating this process, I thought, well, sure, it's easy to get a bunch of aircraft to fly in formation off each other. It's trivial, but why? What is the best formation? Why are they doing that? And that opened up a much more interesting regime of operations and flight mechanics. And that's when we get back to kind of stochastic mindset, where we can bring in aircraft close to do some type of normal flying or reduce congestion around airports. But when we consider flying in formation and tactical environment, we can be much more effective with non-traditional formation keeping or perhaps no formation keeping perhaps. So autonomy used for formation keeping, not for convenience, but for the introduction of randomness that's hard to- Like to a real-time mission planner, yeah. Right. And then that's where you also have some human modification. So it's like manned, unmanned teaming enters that picture. So you use some of the human intuition and adjustment of this formation. The formation itself has some uncertainty. I mean, it's such an interesting dance. I think that is the most fascinating application of artificial intelligence is when it's human AI collaboration, that semi-autonomous dance that you see in these semi-autonomous vehicle systems in terms of cars driving, but also in the safety critical situation of an airplane, of a fighter jet, especially when you're flying fast. I mean, in a split second, you have to make all these kinds of decisions. And it feels like an AI system can do as much harm as it can help. And so to get that right is a really fascinating challenge. One of the challenges too, isn't just the algorithms of the autonomy itself, but how it senses the environment. That of course is going to be what all these decisions are based off of. And that's a challenge in this type of environment. Well, I got to ask, so F-18, what's it like to fly a fighter jet as best? I mean, what to you is as beautiful, powerful? What do you love about the experience of flying? For me, and I think I'm an outlier a bit, it wasn't necessarily the flying itself, right? It wasn't necessarily the soaring over the clouds and looking down at the earth from upside down. I came to love that, but it wasn't necessarily the passion that drove me there. I just had no exposure to that. The only exposure I had was reading and going in the woods and science fiction and all that. And so what seemed to kind of drive me towards that was just a desire to really be operating as close to what I thought was the edge of technology or science. And that's the path that I chose to try to get close to that. I thought that being in a fighter jet and all the tools and the technology and the knowledge and the challenges and the failures and victories that would come with that just seemed like something that I wanted to be a part of. And it wasn't necessarily about the flying, but it was about the challenge. And like I said, as a person from a small town, a small high school, being able to get my hands or even just near something of such technological significance was kind of empowering for me. And that's kind of what bore the love of flight from there. Having some level of mastery in that aircraft, it really feels like it is extension of your body. And once I got there, then the kind of love of flying kind of followed. So you sort of, one is the man mastery over the machine, and second is the machine is like the greatest thing that humans have ever created, arguably. The things that Lockheed Martin and others have built. I mean, the engineering in that, it's however you feel about war, which is one of the sad things about human civilization is war inspires the engineering of tools that are incredible. And it's like, maybe without war, if we look at human history, we would not build some of the incredible things we built. So in order to win wars, to stop wars, we build these incredible systems that perhaps propagate war. And that's another discussion I'll ask you about. But this, do you, this is like, this is a chance to experience the greatest engineering humans have ever been able to do. Like similar, I suppose, that astronauts feel like when they're flying. I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to take that route. I was gonna apply to test pilot school. It just didn't work out for me. I ended up having a broken foot during my window, but long story short, I ended up after my time in my fleet squadron, and we can get back to the rest of the timeline if you want, but I went to be an instructor pilot instead. And then, you know, I was talking about this with a squadron mate earlier today about how, you know, I certainly wouldn't be talking with Lex today if I ended up going to test pilot school. Why is that? I never would have, I never would have had the, I wouldn't, maybe recklessness, I don't know, but the willingness to have a conversation about UAP while I was, you know, that led me to the decision to get out once I went there. And it kind of enabled me to talk about UAP more publicly. And if I stayed in the Navy, then I don't think that would have happened. I wouldn't have been able to if I went that route. Well, as a small tangent, do you hope to travel to Mars one day? Do you think you'll step foot on Mars one day? If you asked me that five years ago, I would have said yes, I want to. In fact, I would like to die on Mars. Now I have some hesitations, and I have some hesitations because I'm hopeful and optimistic, and I think that, you know, I think that we are truly like on the brink of a very wide technological revolution that's going to kind of move us how we used to move information and data in this last century. We're going to be manipulating and managing matter in that next century. And so I think that, I think our reach as humans is going to get a lot wider, a lot faster than people may realize, or at least... Wait, are you getting like super ambitious beyond Mars? Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean... Like Mars seems kind of boring. I want to go beyond that. Is that what... Do you mean the reach of humanity across all kinds of technologies, or do you mean literally across space? Across space, you know. So, you know, we're going to be, I think that as artificial intelligence and machine learning start broaching further into the topic of science or the area of science, and we start working through new physics, we start working through, or I should say, past the Einsteinian frameworks, as we kind of get a better idea of what space-time is or isn't, we may have, we may find, you know, answers that we didn't know that we were looking for, and we may have more opportunity. And I'm not saying this is something I'm, you know, betting the farm on, of course, but maybe that's a road I want to explore on Earth instead of on Mars. Maybe there's technology that can be brought to bear with new science and harder engineering that is a road that doesn't go past Mars to get outside the solar system. So there are different ways to explore the universe than the traditional rocket systems. If we can continue sort of your journey, you said that you were attracted to the incredibly advanced technologies of the F-18s and just the fighter jets in general. Let me ask another question, which seems incredibly difficult to do, which is landing on a carrier, or taking off from a carrier and landing on a carrier. So what's that like? What are the challenges of that? Taking off is pretty easy. It's procedurally somewhat complex, where there's a lot of moving parts, almost like a clock, you know, you're almost in a pocket watch, so it's sensing you're a part of the machinery. And so long as you press the right buttons and do the right things, and you're shooting off the front. So there's like a checklist to follow, and there's several people involved in that checklist, and you just got to follow the checklist correctly. Essentially, yep. Lots of ways to screw it up, but you'll know how to screw it up. But landing on the back of the boat is a whole different animal. There's a lot more variables. There's essentially one or two people responsible for the success of that. The landing signal officer, who actually represents a team of specially trained aviators who are responsible for helping that aviator land on the boat, and the pilot himself. And it is a hard task to actually fly precisely enough to be good at it. So to fly, quote unquote, the perfect pass, you essentially have to fly your head through a one foot by one foot box. That's essentially the target you're shooting for. Plus or minus probably about five knots on airspeed, although we don't really judge it by airspeed. It's something called angle of attack, but generally, you know, pretty tight parameters there. And you can do everything perfect and still fail, right? So when we go to touchdown, we immediately bring the power up, and we rotate as if we were bouncing off the deck. And if we catch it, then we slow down. And then someone tells us to bring the power back, which we do. We don't do it on our own, because it's such a violent experience. You can think you're trapped or not, or something breaks, and you bring your throttle back. And that's a very serious thing. It happened to the best of us. I'll admit, I've done it once. When I first got to the squadron, it's called Ease Guns Land. And so, you know, I came in the boat, and I brought the power. I cracked the power back a little bit before I've been told to, or that my aircraft had finished settling in. And I was a big faux pas, right? So especially as a new guy. So it's a very serious business. There's a lot of eyes on you, and there's a lot of ways to screw it up. But the physical, you know, rush of like having a great pass, and then like, there's just a, like the crash of into the boat and all that, the physical sensation from it, you know, when everything's going great, you know, it's top of the world, it's a great feeling. How much of it is feel? How much of it is instruments? How much is other people just doing the work for you, catching you, as long as you do everything right? There's a few systems we use. One is called the BAL, and the BAL is external to our aircraft. B-A-L-L? Correct. BAL, like ball? Okay. It's an IFLOS landing system, which stands for something very long, convoluted. But essentially, it's a mirror with lights on it. And you see the light at a different cell based on your position relative to an ideal glide slope. So if you're right on it, you're right in the middle, and if you're below, you're low. And as I add power and maneuver the aircraft, that ball, you know, I see that ball rise, I see that ball low. It's a lagging indicator though, right? And your jet is a lagging engine too, right? It takes time to spool up the engine. So that adds to the complexity. You have to think ahead a bit, you know, so you don't want to, you can't just bring the power up and leave it there. You have to bring the power up, touch it, bring it back. And oh, by the way, your landing area is moving not just away from you, but also on an angle, right? Because we have an angled deck. And so you're constantly doing one of these to correct yourself as you go. That seems so stressful. And every time you do one of those, maybe it's a 30 degree angle bank, right? I'm losing lift, right? And so I have to compensate with power each time I do that. So I'm doing another one. Because you have to maintain the same level you're always lowering. Like it's a constant rate of descent that's increasing from about 200 feet per minute to about 650. And every time you do this, that's messing with that. Okay. So you have to compensate. And you're doing that manually. Do it manually. All right. And then of course, as you come down that glide slope, it becomes more and more narrow and you have to, of course, modulate your inputs such that they're smaller and smaller because they have a bigger and bigger effect as you get closer in. And what happens too, when you get in close, is that right before you cross over, if this is the boat right here, your table, right before you kind of get your wings over the boat itself, this big wind from the main tower of the boat is where it dips down. So the wind actually goes down and it's called the burble. It'll actually pull the aircraft down, increase your rate of descent. So at that particular point, you need to, you know, increase your power and try to compensate against that. And so that's kind of a third variable that's trying to screw you up on your way down. What's the most difficult conditions in which you had to land or you've seen somebody had to land? Because I think you were also a signal officer as well. I was, yeah. I was the headlanding signal officer for my squadron. So you've probably seen some tough landings. I have. I've seen a ramp strike, which is when a part of the aircraft hits before the landing area, which is basically the round out of the boat. That is before the landing area. So they basically struck the back of the boat coming in. Yeah. It was just their hook. So it wasn't the aircraft and they were fine. That one was kind of ugly. But it like rips that part of the aircraft. Absolutely. And then you land on your bellies, that kind of thing. In this particular case, it hit and then it gave and essentially dragged the hook on the, on the surface after that. And so he was able to grab a wire at that point. When does that kind of thing happen? Just a miscalculation by the pilot or is it weather conditions? I wouldn't even call it a miscalculation. I mean, I'm going to put the blame on the pilot because he's the only one in the cockpit, but then the day he's reacting to the situations he's dealing with. And so it may be errors or he may be doing the best with, you know, the conditions that he's been given. On that particular one, you just got too high a rate of sand. It's very common. And that's what you see it with new pilots. You see it with older pilots. You see it with older pilots, right? New ones and complacent ones. What you see is they'll try to make the ball go right where they want it in close. They think they can beat the game a little bit and they try to. And so we have sayings we teach pilots, you know, as a landing signal officer, we tell them like, don't recenter the high ball in close. It's one of the rules to live by. And so when the ball's up high, don't try to bring it back in close to like the center point when you're in close, because what you're doing, you bring the power off and you're going to crash right down. And that's what happens, right? Because you got the verbal pulling you down. You might be correcting, which is decreasing your lift. And then you have that type of maneuver. How are you supposed to do all of this in harsh weather conditions? So that's the one I want to tell you about. That's the hardest one. And what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi lights on, that's a really shitty day. 99 taxi lights on. What's that mean? So everyone put your taxi lights on because you're about to land on the boat. And you don't see the boat? Weather is so bad that the landing signal officer on the boat can't see you either. And you can't see the boat and you won't be able to see it when you touch down. So we call that a zero-zero landing. And you turn on the taxi lights so that the LSO who has a radio in his hand that looks like a phone from 1980 is talking directly to the pilot. And he's looking at that little light in the rain and he's telling him, you're high, you're low, power, things like that. Come right, back to left. And literally talking him down to land on the boat right there. And the pilot, usually it comes as a surprise to the pilot to land because he's just listening to the voice, can't see the ball, can't see the boat. And all of a sudden you just hit the boat. You crash. I mean, you crash. We're going about 1600 feet per minute descent at that point. So you're going super fast. So all of this is happening fast. You don't know at the moment it's going to hit. So you're just going into the darkness and just waiting for it to hit. Maybe not dark though, a lot of times it's white. Into the light, you're going into the light. It's almost like a light bulb. And then there's a voice from an 80s phone. I got it. This is terrible. But so you still have to, so this kind of thing happens. You still have to land. Sometimes you just don't have a place to divert. But in a sense we're trained for that because we do the night landings as well. And I think you'll find this interesting, but I always found that the night landings where in these particular cases, you're usually lined up behind the boat, maybe 10, 15 miles. Whereas the other ones, it's like a tight circle, the landing pattern. And so we can potentially see the boat way out there. If the lights were on, which they're not, but we can maybe see like the string of aircraft in front of us. But what's interesting is that it can take a while. It can take, you might be 15 miles out and your lights are turned down as dim as possible. You have a cloud deck maybe at six or 7,000 feet so that the starlight, there's no moon, but let's say the starlight's blocked out, right? Because just the starlight alone, no moon. You can see the boat, you can see the water. But when that goes away, it's like closing your eyes, right? You can't tell anything. It could be upside down. It could be in any position. And for me, it was almost a meditative process that I had to snap myself back out of when I was on like a long straightaway. And then I would see the light pop up in the sea of darkness, right? No lights anywhere. Can't even see the horizon. I just see a light out there. My instruments were telling me, and they're turned down as far as they can go, right? So I can barely see them. So my eyes can adjust. And I'm just staring at this light in the distance. And it's just very meditative and it's the hum behind you. And then at like four miles, it's almost like, oh, the light is a little bit bigger. And you almost kind of have to snap back to it and be like, oh, I need to like kind of like look around a little bit and engage my brain, link it back to my body and like do this thing. Because you're going to have to actually land. Well, is there just, you said you don't necessarily feel the romantic notion of the whole thing, but is there some aspects of flying where you look up and maybe you see the stars or yeah, that kind of thing that you just like, holy crap, how did humans accomplish all of this? Like, am I actually flying right now? I used to have those moments on the boat when I was catching planes land, I would, they would trap and it'd be nighttime and it's just all this chaos in the middle of the ocean and nothing. And I would have these moments where I'd be like, how the hell did I end up here? You know, this one moment in time next to an aircraft landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you know, where did my life, you know, how did my life go to end up here? How interesting. But what I did start to enjoy was the night vision goggles and putting those on and looking up at the stars flying around, especially over the ocean. What do they look like? There's just so many. There's just so many stars that, you know, you normally can't see. They're shooting stars all the time. Almost every flight you'd see them with the goggles on. So it was a great pleasure to take advantage of the lack of light pollution in some cases, especially on deployment to go grab some goggles at night, go out some quiet spot in the ship that no one can see me and just kind of look around, you know? Yeah, it's humbling. Quick break, bathroom break? Yeah, what am I? A quick stretch of legs. You got a few cool patches. I do. So this is a VFA-11 Red Rippers patch, typically going actually on our arm. So this is actually what we call the Boar's Head or Arnold. So this is actually the Boar's Head from the Gordon's Gin Bottle. Yeah. In 1918, we were in London or the UK somewhere and we apparently partied with the owner and founder of Gordon's Gin. We had a great time and there's a signed letter in our ready room that says we can use the logo in perpetuity. Oh, nice. Yeah, so I'd like to give you that patch. I drank quite a bit of Gord, so this is good. And I'd like to give you that coin from our squadron. The Red Rippers, that's a badass name. Thank you, brother. You're welcome. So let's jump around a little bit, but let me ask you about this one set of experiences that you had and people in your squadron had. So you and a few people in the squadron either detected UFOs on your instruments or saw them directly. Tell me the full story of these UFO sightings and to the smallest technical details, because I love those. I'll do my best. So we returned from, and when I say we, I mean, not my squadron, but VFA-11, the Red Rippers. I was a somewhat junior pilot at the time. I joined them on deployment in 2012, where they had been already out there for about six months or so, operating in the vicinity of Afghanistan. I joined them and then we flew back and still as a relatively new guy, we came back and we entered what's considered a maintenance phase where we slow down the tactical flying a bit, kind of recuperate, do some maintenance on the aircraft. And our particular model of the F-18, the lot number, was plumbed for the particular things that were needed to upgrade the radar from what's known as the ABG-73 to the ABG-79. And the ABG-73 is a mechanically scanned array radar. It's a perfectly fine radar, but the AESA radar is kind of a magnitude jumping capability, kind of an analog digital kind of mindset. Got it. So it's a leap to digital. ABG-73, 79. Are these things on a carrier? Like, what are we talking about here? This is our— How big is the radar? Yeah. So this is actually the radar. It's in the F-18 itself. Okay. So when you say that we're chosen, this is to test the upgrade to the new, the 79, ABG-79. Less of a test and more of just, hey, it's your turn to get the upgrade. Like, we're all going to these better radars. They were building ones off the line with the new radar, but we were this weird transitionary squadron in the middle that transitioned from the older ones to the new ones. But it's not particularly rare to fly with different types of radar because in the, in what we call the fleet replacement squadron, essentially the training ground for the F-18, you have all sorts of F-18s with different radars. So you are used to having multiple ones, but in the actual deployable combat squadron, we upgraded. And when we upgraded, we saw that there were objects on the radar that we were seeing the next day with this new radar that weren't there with the old radar. And these were sometimes, you know, the same day. You might go on two flights. The one in the morning might be with the older radar, the one in the evening with the new radar. And you'd see the objects with the new radar. And that's not overly surprising in some sense. They are more sensitive. Perhaps they're not filtering out everything they should be yet, or perhaps there's some other type of error. Maybe it needs to be calibrated, whatever. It was relatively new and we were somewhat used to there being software problems with these types of things occasionally, just like anything else. And so, okay, maybe this is a radar software malfunction. We're getting some false tracks, as we call them. What were you seeing? And so what we would see are representations of the objects. So this is off of our radar. We're not seeing a visual image here. This is kind of like what's being displayed to us almost like in a gaming fashion, right? Like the icon, right? So the icon is showing us, hey, something is there. And here's the parameters I can understand about it. So this is in the cockpit, there's a display that's showing some visualization what the radar is detecting. Correct. And there's two different ways to do that. The first one is like the actual data, like the radar where it's showing me the data kind of as if it's in front of me and I'm selecting those contacts. And there's another screen called the situational awareness page. And that's kind of a God's eye view that brings all that data into one spot. And so I'm going to talk about this from the SA page, from the situational awareness page versus the individual radar ones because it's easier. But- Can you- sorry, sorry to linger on that. So the individual displays are like first person and then the SA is when you say God's eye view, it's like from the top, the integration of all that information as if it's looking down onto the earth? Yes. Is that a good way to summarize it? It is. But for the aviator, it's slightly different because those two radar displays I talked about are at the bottom of that display is kind of representative of where I am. And so I see what's in front of me. Got it. Whereas the situational awareness page, the aircraft is located in the center of that. And then all around me, you know, based off of the data link and wherever I'm getting information from, I can see that whole awareness page. I can see all the situation. So I'm going to kind of talk about this from the situational awareness page, which is a top down view, just to kind of frame our minds instead of jumping around. And so what we would see out there is we'd see these indications that something would be there and they would have a track file. That track file, that thing that represents the object has a line coming out of it. And that represents, it's called the target aspect indicator. So there's some tracking from the radar. Correct. So it's showing you where the objects are going. This is all pretty cool that the radar can do all this. So radar locks in on different objects and it tracks them over time. Correct. That's coming from the radar, that's like built in feature. Mm-hmm. Okay, cool. Out there we're seeing it. We don't have to necessarily like pull things into our tracker in some sense, right? Like it's all out there and then we can kind of choose to highlight on stuff or to kind of focus in on it more so. But the information should all be out there. And so we'd see that target aspect indicator, that line. On a typical aircraft, you know, it would kind of look like this. It would be coming out and it would go steady. And if they turn, you know, it would be like, boop, boop, boop, boop, and you see them turn, right? Like it's not magic. But this object, they would, the target aspect would kind of be like all over the place. Like kind of randomly in a 360 degrees, you know, from that top down view, that line would be in any place. So kind of, you know, is it unable to determine the target aspect? Is it stationary? You know, and that's just how it puts it out and it's not used to seeing it. So I'm not saying that's necessarily super weird, but it was different than what we were used to seeing because we weren't used to seeing stationary objects out there very much. And what was also interesting is that these weren't just stationary on a zero wind day, right? These are stationary at 20,000 feet, 15,000 feet, 500 feet, you know, with the wind blowing, you know? And so much like the sea, you know, when we're up there fighting, it affects everything. We consider the wind when we're, you know, shooting missiles, when we're flying or fuel considerations, it's like operating, you know, in that volume of air, like the ocean, everything's going with the current. And so anything that doesn't go with the current, you know, is immediately kind of identifiable and strange. And that's why these were initially strange is because they would be stationary against the wind. So if you had something like a good drone in a windy conditions, what would that look like? Would it, it would it not come off as stationary? Would it sort of float about kind of thing? No, I think what the drone technology we have today, they could stay within a pretty tight location. Well, I meant like DJI drone, not like I'm saying like generically speaking, you know, military speaking, not a military drone. No, I have a DJI drone myself even, and, you know, maybe not a hundred knots, but if that thing's in 30 or 40 knot winds, you know, the amount of distance it's going to be kind of doing one of these, like that change is not something I'm going to detect from maybe many miles away. Interesting. So it could look very stationary, but that wasn't necessarily, and what's interesting about this story is that there's not like the one smoking gun, right? You have to kind of look at everything and that's what I don't like about the Department of Defense and just generally people's take on this is that everything is kind of based around a single image, you know, or that one case, but a lot of the interestingness comes from the duration or the time it's been out there, how they're interacting relative to other objects out there. And you don't get that information when you just look at a frame for a second, you know, everyone kind of bites off in the shiny object, but. So you yourself, from your particular slice of things you've experienced and seen directly or indirectly, you've kind of built up an intuition about what are the things that were being seen. I wouldn't go that far. I've just been able to, you know, eliminate some variables because of how long I've observed it. So like you said, yes, can a drone stay in a particular position against a wind like that? Certainly, but I don't think it can do that and then go 0.8 Mach for four hours after that, you know? And so when you look at it outside of that moment in time, then it eliminates a lot of the potential things it could be, at least from my perspective. So what kind of stuff did you see in the instruments? We'd see them flying in patterns, kind of racetrack patterns or circular patterns, or just going kind of straight east. I occasionally see them supersonic, 1.1, 1.2 Mach, but typically 0.6 to 0.8 Mach just for extremely extended periods of time, you know, essentially all the time. And this is airspace where there's not supposed to be anything else at all. And it's pretty far out there. It starts 10 miles off the coast, goes like 300 miles. Can you say the location that we're talking about? Off the coast of Virginia Beach. Got it. And so nobody's supposed to be out there? It's possible for people to be there. It's not necessarily restricted, but it's well monitored and we're out there every day all day. And so, you know, people know to stay clear if a Cessna goes bumbling in there, everyone's going to know about it. FAA is going to, you know, call them out, going to tell us about it. So, incursions happen, not a big deal, but they're pretty rare, honestly, because everyone knows the area and we've been operating there for decades. And what are the trajectories 0.6 to 0.8 Mach that these objects were taking? Typically, they would be in some type of circular pattern or kind of racetrack pattern when they were at those speeds, or I just see them kind of, and it wasn't always like a mechanical flight description. And when I say that, I mean like an autopilot is going to be just very precise, right? It's going to be locked on straight. And whereas I could see an airplane, I could tell if the pilot's flying it, right? Because it's not going to be perfect. The computer's not controlling it. And these seemed more like that. Not that they were imprecise, but that they were even much more erratic than that. So like, it wasn't like a straight line in a turn. It was just kind of like a weird drift like that in that direction. So it wasn't controlled by a dumb computer, not disrespected computers. So it wasn't controlled by autopilot kind of technology. It's not the sense that I got. So how many people have seen them in the squadron? Sort of how many times were they seen? How many were there times when there's multiple objects? Once we started seeing them on the radar enough and we would get close enough, we'd actually see them on our FLIR as well. So our advanced targeting pod, it's essentially a infrared camera that we use for targeting, mostly in the air to surface environment. We don't use it in the air to air arena. It's just not that good of a tool, frankly. But we would see IR energy emitting from that location where the radar was dropping us off. So the radar, we'd lock onto the object and our sensors would all look there. And so then we could see that it's looking at the right piece of the sky. But there's energy actually coming from there. So now we started thinking that, okay, maybe not radar malfunctions, maybe more, maybe something is physically here, of course. And then people started to try to fly by and see it. And at this point, I would say maybe 80 to 90% of our squadron had probably seen one of these on the radar at this point. Everyone was aware of it. There was small communication, I think, between squadrons of the same area that had the same radar. So I knew it wasn't just our squadron for whatever strange reason. Because other squadron would be out there and we would talk to them. But hey, careful, there's an object. Are you aware of that? They would be aware of it. And then, of course, people would want to go see what they look like. People would try to fly by it. I try to fly by him. I like how that's an of course. Of course. Of course you'd want to fly by it. There's an argument against that kind of perspective that maybe the thing is dangerous, so maybe we don't. But perhaps that's part of the reason you want to fly by it, is to understand better what it is if it's a threat. We have a lot of context now that we didn't back then. You know, so it was still a, hey, is this a balloon? Is this a drone? You know, at a certain point. And we're also aware of, you know, potential intelligence gathering operations that could be going on. We're up there flying our tactics. We're emitting. We're practicing our EW. You know, we're turning at particular times. Like there's stuff that can be learned. It's not a secret. And, you know, countries keep different fishing vessels and whatnot in international waters off there. So it's not exactly a secret that we're being observed out there. So to think that a foreign nation would want to, you know, somehow intercept information, whether that's our radar signals or our jamming capabilities to try to break that down or understand it better, be ready for that next fight. I mean, that's what scares me about this scenario, because we didn't jump right to aliens or UFOs. We thought, you know, this is a radar malfunction we need to be aware of. It's a safety issue. And then, you know, this could be a tactical problem right here, because everything we do is based off of crypto and, you know, locations. Everything's classified we do out there, right? And so over time, if you gather enough data about those fights and just monitor them forever, just like some nations do with other piece of technology or software, they could probably learn a lot. And so we have to be cognizant of the fact and defend against it. LUIS So what can you say about the other characteristics of these objects like shape, size, texture, luminosity, how else do you describe object? Is there something that could be said? So you said, like, this is the Tektown radar, step one. Now you have FLIR images that can give you a sense that that's actually a physical object. What else can be said about those physical objects? DAVID So eventually someone did see one with their own eyeballs, multiple people. And they saw it in a somewhat interesting way. The object presented itself at the exact altitude and geographic location of the entry points into our working areas. So we enter at a very specific point at a certain altitude and people leave the areas at the same point at a lower altitude, probably one of the busiest pieces of sky on the eastern seaboard. So two jets from my squadron went out and they went flying and they entered the area where these objects went right between the aircraft. LUIS So they're flying in formation and the object went between the aircraft. DAVID They went between the object, I think. I don't think that the object was moving. I don't think it aggressively went at them. I think it was located still there and then they flew through it. But they didn't have it on their radar. And that would, I think the radar might have been malfunctioning. I don't know that for sure. I would like to look into it, but my supposition is that if their radar was malfunctioning, it would make sense that they wouldn't avoid the object that was there because they knew these were physical at that point. And we would go up to these objects all the time and try to see them. We couldn't see them and we didn't know what it was. Was it that were they just not there? Were they being fooled? Was something happening? Were they moving, dropping altitude at the last minute? You know, we're going by pretty quick, so it's difficult to tell. But perhaps if his radar wasn't working, he wasn't receiving energy from the jet. And the jet, of course, didn't know that it was there. And so whatever the case was, they flew right by and they described it just as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere. And the kind of the apex of the cube were touching the inside of that sphere. That's an image that's haunting. So what did they think it is? What did they think at that moment that they, is it just this kind of cloud of uncertainty that they're just describing a geometric object? It's not on radar, so it's unclear what it is. Yeah. What was the, any kind of other description they've had of it in terms of the intuition from a pilot's perspective? You know, you have to kind of identify what a thing is. To answer the first part, they actually canceled the flight. They actually canceled the flight and came back because they were, you know, it's like if there's one of these out here and we're almost hitting them and it's right there, then perhaps we need to get a different jet with better radar. So they came back and they're in their gear and they're talking to the front desk and talking to Skipper and like, hey, we almost hit one of those damn things out there. And this kind of was one of those kind of slight watershed moments where we all were kind of like, all right, this is a serious deal now. Maybe we thought they were balloons or drones or malfunctions, or maybe we thought it was spying, but at the end of the day, if we're going to hit one of these things, then we need to, you know, we need to take care of the situation. And that's actually when we started submitting hazard reports or haz reps to the Naval Aviation Safety kind of communication network. And it's, you know, it's not like a big proactive thing where people are going to investigate. It's more of a data collection mechanism so that you can kind of share that aggregate data and make sure that things are progressing. And so it wasn't a mechanism that would result in action being taken, but we were hoping to at least get the message out to whomever was maybe running a classified program that we were not aware of or something like that, that, hey, like you could kill somebody here. Like you've grown too big for your britches here. Take a step back. So that was our concern at that point. That's kind of where we were thinking this was going. What's the protocol for shooting at a thing? Was there a concern that it's a direct threat, not just surveillance, but a threat that a thing that could be, yeah, a threat. At least from my perspective, like that never really crossed into my mind. I thought it was potentially an intelligence, you know, failure that could be being watched and information gathered. But I didn't think that it was something that would proactively engage me in a hostile manner. It wouldn't really make sense either to, it would be shocking to like have one of these objects take out an F-18, but there's no real tactical advantage other than fear, perhaps. Psychological. Yeah. I've learned a lot about the psychological warfare in Ukraine. That's a big part of the war in terms of when you talk about siege warfare, about warfare, wars that last for many years, for many months, and then perhaps could extend to years. But yes, it didn't seem, it didn't fit your conception of a threatening entity. Correct. Correct. So looking back now from all the pieces of data you've integrated, you've personally added, what do you think it could be? I don't know. I don't know what it could be. I think we've been able to categorize it successfully into a few buckets. We've been able to say that, you know, this could be US technology that someone put in the wrong piece of sky or, you know, perhaps was developed and tested in an inappropriate spot by someone that wasn't being best practices. Is there, sorry to interrupt, is there a sort of modularity to the way the military operates, the way it's possible for one branch not to know about the tests of another? Yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that that could occur, right? And so if we just make that assumption, we can integrate that into our analysis here and just say, okay, but at the point we're at now, you know, we have to assume that that's not the case, right? With everything that's been going on and the statements have been made and the hearings, I think that if it was a non-communication issue, we're in big trouble at this point. What about it being an object from another nation, from China, from Russia? Or even one of our allies, perhaps, right? Maybe that's, you know, I don't think it's controversial to say that our allies could be gathering information about us or anything of that nature, but that would be an extreme case, but I think it's just important to say, right, to not just say Russia or China and just call them the bad guys and assume that if they don't have it, no one can do it. And so from my perspective, you know, anyone else, anyone else, and it doesn't necessarily need to be a foreign power, it could be a non-government entity, perhaps, although I think that's very unlikely. But again, these are things you must consider if you kind of throw everything other than the US under scrutiny. But, you know, from what has been reported and the behaviors that have been seen, it would be, I would expect to see remnants of that technology elsewhere in the economy. There seems to be too many things that require advanced technology that would be beneficial commercially as well as in other military applications for it to be completely locked away by one of our competitors. Now, I could see us perhaps locking something away if we're already in the lead and having it to pull out as needed. But for someone that's perhaps in a power struggle and they're in second place, they might be more aggressive with the development of different types of technology willing to accept bigger risks. Do you think it could be natural phenomena that we don't yet understand? I think that there are a number of things that this is going to be, right? I don't think there's one thing at the end of the day, but I certainly think that that is part of what some of this could be. I don't think it's what we were seeing on the East Coast, and I don't think it is related to the Roosevelt incident, or I'll even go out and say the Nimitz incident. But what's the Roosevelt incident? The Roosevelt incident, typically referred to as the gimbal and or the go fast video. And then the Nimitz is from what the David Fravor has witnessed directly and spoken about. We'll talk about that as well. I'd just love to get your sort of interpretation of those incidents. But yeah, so in this particular case, natural phenomena could be a part of the picture. But you're saying not the whole picture? Yes. Yes. And we can't discount it. Oh, the other thing is, what about the failure of pilot eyesight? Like sort of some deep mixture of actual direct vision, human vision system failure, and like psychology, like seeing something weird, and then filling in the gaps, because in order to make sense of the weird. I've tried to expose myself to scenarios like that, that I don't necessarily think are right, but I've explored them to see if they could have some truth. And one example is, let's imagine a scenario where if we're seeing these objects every day off the East Coast, I can imagine a technology or an operation where you had some type of traditional propulsion system operating drones in order to gather data like we had discussed. And I could envision a clever enough adversary that could perhaps destroy or somehow remove these objects and replace them with new objects, essentially, when we're not looking, right? And that accounts for the large airborne time. And so I explore options like that, and I try to see what evidence and assumptions need to be made in order to prove or disprove that. And you would need so much infrastructure, you'd need so many assets. And so I try to explore some of those fallacies and some of those concerns. And as aviators, we're trained into many actual physical eyesight and kind of illusion training. So like at nighttime flying, there's so many things that can happen flying with false horizons. And so we receive hours of training on that type of stuff. But this just falls outside the category from my perspective. What was the visibility conditions when in the times when people were able to see it? And we just earlier discussed complete nighttime darkness. In this case, was it during the day? It was a perfectly clear day that particular incident. Yep. In a world that's full of mystery, I have to ask, what do you think is the possibility that it's not of this earth origin? I like the term non-human intelligence in a sense. Because again, there's a lot of assumptions in there that may cause us to go down the wrong roads. It could, you know, these could be something that are weather phenomena of earth, right? Or something else that is just something we don't understand and can't imagine right now that's still of this earth. If we consider extraterrestrial or something that came from a physical place far away in space time, you know, that leads us to some detection assumptions that we would need to make. And so I just try to not categorize it under anything and just say, hey, is this demonstrating intelligence? And start from there as a single object. What can we learn about it kinematically? How it's performing? What does that mean for its energy source? What does that mean for the G-forces inside? And then step it out a level and say, okay, how are these interacting with our fighters if they are? How are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm, especially off the east coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects, right? And so we might be able to determine some things about their maybe, you know, sensor capabilities or the areas of focus, you know, if we can determine how they're working in conjunction with each other. But, you know, seeing one little flash of an object doesn't provide that type of insight. But we have the systems for it, but it's kind of, you know, an irony, but it's a fact of life, the reality that many of these well-deployed, highly capable systems are held under the military umbrella, which makes it difficult to provide that data for scientific analysis. So there's probably a lot more data on these objects that's not being, that's not made available probably even within the military for analysis. I think so. Yeah, I think there's a lot of data that could be made available. And, you know, that's one of the reasons why, you know, I've been engaged with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to build, you know, a large resources of cross-domain expertise so that if or when that data is available or that there's additional analysis needed, you know, we can spin up those teams and make that analysis. So there was recently a House Intelligence Subcommittee hearing on UFOs that you were a part of. What was the goal of that hearing? And can you maybe summarize what you heard? The hearings, from my perspective, seemed a bit disingenuous, kind of top level. I think... Who was it run by, sorry to interrupt, like, who were the people involved and what was the goal, the stated goal? Congressman Andre Carson did chair the committee, and he was, I think, ultimately responsible for bringing it all together. You know, I think the intent from Congress was to try to bring light to what has been happening with the Navy and to help show the American people that Congress is taking this serious because something serious is happening. But, you know, the sense I got seemed a bit disingenuous. They talked around it a lot. They, you know, advertised their love of science fiction. But they, you know, they didn't treat this, I would say, in the manner it deserved as a potential tactical threat if it's coming from a foreign power. And I get it, though. At the same day, they have very specific objectives within the DOD, right? They have a very important job. Their job isn't necessarily to do exploratory science for no reason. So I applaud and I encourage their efforts on the intelligence side to help understand this. But my concern is that they play a role they're not well suited for, which is doing science. And the Pentagon has opened a new office to investigate UFOs called All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What do you think about this office? Do you think it can help alleviate in the way which this hearing perhaps has failed to improve more the scientific rigor and the seriousness of investigating UFOs? I think that remains to be seen. I think it's a step in the right direction, but it's a step that was taken because the previous step didn't happen, right? So the AOI-MSG was the progeny, essentially, of the AARO or ARO. And the name was changed because nothing was happening and it was essentially just a confusing mess of words that were created to make this topic unpalatable. The Airborne Object Identification Synchronization Management Group. Quite the mouthful. I practice that. But the new All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, from my perspective at least, at least the perspective that they're putting out, they seem to want to be open. They put out a Twitter handle. They're going out on Twitter and communicating, saying they want to keep this open. But that's going to run into a classification wall. Well, so Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick seems like an interesting guy. He does, yes. So he's got a, I haven't looked into deeply, but he seems to have sort of, he's coming from like a science research perspective, like a background. So he might be at least in the right mindset, the right background to kind of lead a serious investigation. I think so. I'll just say generally, you know, the office has been receptive to AIAA reaching out in order to collaborate, which has been a positive sign. Also pass the same kudos to Dr. Spergel and NASA's effort as well. I see these organizations that are standing up, I do see them as good faith efforts that are coming about through a lot of difficulty and negotiation most likely, right? And I see these as a small door opening that if we can take advantage of can lead to a much more productive relationship between these organizations. How do you put pressure on this kind of thing? Does it come from the civilian leadership? Does it come from sort of Congress and presidents? Does it come from the public? Does the public have any power to put pressure on this? Or is the giant wall of bureaucracy going to protect it against any public pressure? What do you think? I think we've been in that latter state for a while, but, you know, society seems to be a bit different nowadays. You know, we have the ability to communicate and to group and to form relationships in a way that hadn't been able to be present in the past. We've been able to do research for better or worse on our own, you know, in a way that hasn't been able to happen before. And so I sense that people are a bit less willing to kind of buy the bottom line statement from those in power as they used to be back when they didn't have access to those tools. And so I do think there is a massive role for the general society, general populace to play to show that they are interested in this. Because it's not that I don't think the politicians or the leaders in the Pentagon, it's not that they don't like this topic necessarily or think it's toxic per se, but they exist in a culture where this has been toxic and they don't feel comfortable talking about it. And these are people that have spent their entire careers, you know, working towards a goal and getting to very high positions within government. And so this is very against their nature to take a stance on a topic like this. And so the fact that these are standing up, even if they do have a small budget or if they struggled a bit at first, I still think it's a massive change, you know, and it's a big step away from that stigma that has been pervading this topic for so long. And you're actually part of alleviating the stigma for somebody that's as credible, as intelligent, as like varied in background, able to speak about these things. That's a big risk that you took, but it's extremely valuable because it's alleviating the stigma. I thank you for saying that, but it didn't feel like much of a risk for me. You know, I didn't come out about aliens, right? Or whatever. I had a safety problem that I started asking questions about. And, you know, I went down a road as a Navy trained aviation safety officer, right? That sent me to school for six weeks in Pensacola to be a safety officer, you know. We're almost hitting these objects and it's not something that happened in the past and we want to understand it. It's happening right now. Like these occurrences are still happening. Aviators are flying right now, are still flying by these things. And in fact, I mentioned I was an instructor pilot. I had a student call me about eight months ago or so. And he's like, hey, sir, you know, I made it to the fleet finally. You know, I had trained him how to fly and then he goes to F-18. He goes another year of training and then he gets out to his squadron on the East Coast and he's flying with a senior member of the base NAS Oceania where the fighters fly out of Senior 05, 06. And it was kind of a bad weather day. And so they said, hey, you know, if the weather's not good enough for us to do this dog fighting set, we'll go out and do a UAP hunt, you know, see if we can't find any things or take a look at them, you know. I don't know if it was in jest or not, but, you know, this, they actually did this. They would say it's not in jest because there were notices that were being briefed about this being a safety hazard at this point. And so now that I think about it, it likely wasn't in jest. Long story short, they went flying. The weather was too bad. They did go on a UAP hunt and they physically saw one, you know, and he called me up and said, hey, sir, I saw a Cuban spear. They're still out here, you know, years later. And so it's almost like a generational issue, you know, for these fighter pilots, at least on the East Coast. But that's great that they can talk about it, right? Exactly. Exactly. They feel at least comfortable. They have a reporting mechanism. And so that was one of the problems that I noticed, that we have a lot of reporting mechanisms to take care of safety issues and even tactical issues when the time's right in order to keep track of what's going on. But there's no way to communicate about this. Sure, we could submit a hazard report, but nothing's actually being investigated. And if this is a tactical vulnerability or something more, it deserves attention. If I could ask your sort of take your opinion of the different UFO sightings that the DoD has released videos on. So what do you think about the Tic Tac UFO that David Fravor and others have cited? That's a truly anomalous experience. I can't do like mental models in my head to find potential solutions to discredit that, right? As much as I try, right, just as a logical process, as a practice, I can't pick it apart in the way that we were just talking about a moment ago about, you know, thousands of drones being like sent up in very tricky manners, right? I can't really bring myself to a clever solution that, you know, other than just saying the pilots are lying or is error, you know? And I believe, you know, I know Dave Fravor, you know, I consider him a friend. We talk a lot. I have zero, zero reason to disbelieve anything he says. Yeah, I agree with you. But in terms of the actual UFO, is there something anomalous and interesting to you about that particular case? Maybe one interesting aspect there is how much do I understand about the, you know, water surface and underwater aspects of these UFOs? It seems like a lot of the discussion is about the movement of this particular thing that seems to be weird, anomalous, seems to defy physics. But what about stuff that's happening underwater? That's interesting to me. If I had advanced technology, I would certainly like to operate in part underwater because you can hide a lot of stuff there. Mm-hmm. You think it would be somewhat as easy as traveling through interstellar space, at least, right? Yeah. You know, I wish I had a great answer for that. But as an aviator, that's a kind of a black box for us. We don't have great what I would call cross-domain tracking, right? I can't see something go underwater and then follow it underwater. So it's literally not your domain, like underwater, like leave that for somebody else. Yeah, and you know, I use that terminology because it's kind of important, right? Cross-domain tracking is something that we haven't had to necessarily worry about, right? Because airplanes operated in the air and submarines operated underwater and space planes operate in space, right? But you know, there's going to be, you know, that's going to blur, I think, as we move along here, especially in the air and space regime. And being able to perhaps transition my radar contact at 40,000 feet to another radar system that can track it up to 200,000 feet, you know, that might be a value. And so we seem to be missing that right now. So what about the go fast and the gimbal videos that you mentioned earlier? There was like, what's interesting there to you? So the gimbal, I'll talk about that one first. I was airborne for that one. The person that recorded it is a good friend of mine. But I mean, both air crew, I knew both of them, but the wizard himself, very close friends, went through a lot of her training together. We went to the same fleet squadron. He ended up transitioning to be a pilot and then came to where I was instructing. So I got to instruct him a bit on his transition. And, you know, the way that was, was, was we went out on a air to air training mission. So simulating an air fight against our own guys. They're acting like the bad guys and kind of go head to head against each other. And when we fly on those missions, we all fly out together, more or less. We set up and then we kind of attrite from the fight as we either, you know, run out of gas or something happens. And so people usually go back onesies or twosies. And so the air crew that recorded the gimbal, they were going back to the boat and we were on what's called a workup training event. And so this is like a month on the boat where we're essentially conducting wartime operations, more or less, to stress ourselves out and to kind of do the last training block before we go on deployment, essentially. So it's pretty high stress. They actually do send aircraft from like land bases to kind of try to penetrate. And we're expected to go intercept them. And so we're kind of practicing like we play. And so he saw these objects on the radar, the gimbal and a fleet of other aircraft or vehicles. And they initially thought it was part of the training exercise that they were sending something in to try to penetrate the airspace. And so they flew over to it. And as they got close enough to get on the FLIR, you know, I think everyone has heard the reaction and they realized that it wasn't something they were expecting to see. Can you actually describe what's in the video and what's the reaction in case they haven't seen it? Yeah, a lot of swearing. But so what you see on the FLIR footage is a black or white, depending on when you look at it, object that's somewhat shaped like a gimbal. It appears almost as if someone put two plates together. And then there seems to be almost like a small funnel of IR energy at the top of the bottom of those plates, in a sense. So almost as if, you know, there's a stick going in between two plates, but not that pronounced, right? So there's an energy field that kind of went to a funnel on the top and the bottom, at least that's how it's being portrayed on the FLIR. There's a lot of conversation about that being glare, things of that nature, but it was actually a very tight IR image. It just was nondescript shape, which was interesting. Typically, we would see the skin of the aircraft. We can see the flames coming out of the exhaust, especially at those ranges. And there was no flames, or there's no exhaust here? There was no exhaust. There was no, you know, there was no outgashing of propellant in any manner, right? It was just an object that had nothing emitting from it that was stationary in the sky. Well, not stationary, but it was moving along a path, right? It wasn't falling out of the sky. And it continued along, if we were to consider it from a God's eye view, again, on the SA page, it continued along in a path. And from the perspective, that top-down view, it just went in the other direction. So no, just an instantaneous direction change from that perspective. You also hear them, you know, very excitedly talking on the tapes about, you know, whatever the heck this thing is, and look at the SA, there's a whole formation of them. And so the SA is a situational awareness page. And again, it's a large display that gives that God's eye view of all the radar contacts. So the video is actually showing just one. And then they're speaking about many of them on the SA display. Correct. Correct. And what they essentially saw was, if we were to consider above the object north, so kind of offset to the north of the object, there was a formation of about somewhere between four and six of these objects in a rough wedge formation, you know, so kind of side by side like this. And again, not in a like autopilot type manner where it was very stiff. It was very kind of non-mechanical, the flight mechanics again. And these objects were in that formation and they were going along and then they turned pretty sharply, but they still had a radius of turn and then went back in the opposite direction. And during that turn, they were kind of like all over the place. Like it wasn't tight. They weren't even like super, they weren't flying in a way I would expect them to be flying in relation to a flight lead. They were flying as if they were flying close to each other, but not in formation, which was kind of strange, right? And then when they rolled out, they kind of tightened backed up. Like, so when they basically, they started that turn and then 180 degrees out, essentially they start flowing in the opposite direction and kind of got back in that formation. And while that was happening, the gimbal object was proceeding, was it left or right? And as those, the formation kind of turned up to the north and was just passing back it, the gimbal just kind of went back in the opposite direction. So to follow it back in that direction. And in the, in the FLIR itself, you know, you see the object changes orientation quite a bit. So you see it more or less level, maybe can it about 45 degrees. And then you see it kind of moving around like this, almost as if it was a gimbal. I've come to learn after some, you know, having seen some research online and people really looking into this, that it seemed that the object actually climbed in the opposite direction. And so the reason it looked like it turned immediately is because it turned like this, it turned in a vertical fashion like that, which is pretty interesting. That's kind of like another example of a flight mechanics that we don't normally operate because we don't change our directions by maneuvering in the vertical. If we can help it, it's, you're just killing the fuel, you know? And so if you're like a surveillance platform looking at a flight, you're not really looking at the object. If you're like a surveillance platform looking to spend as much time around something, you're not going to, you know, climb 500 feet every time you make a turn. Unless you're Tom Cruise. Unless you're Tom Cruise, naturally. Okay. So is that one of the more impressive flight mechanics you've seen in video form? So not the direct eyesight reports, but like in terms of video evidence that we have? I think so. We were seeing a lot of these, but we weren't just going on recording them all day. We just kind of put them in that safety bucket, be like, all right, there's objects over there. We're just not going to go near it, you know? And so we weren't putting our sensors on them that much. We were gathering the data kind of secondarily, but we weren't primarily focusing on it to see all the details. So that's so fascinating because you have a busy day, you have a lot to do. All right, well, there's some weird stuff going on there. We're just not going to go there. And that says something about sort of the, about human nature, about the way that bureaucracies function, the way the military functions. It fills up your day with busy, important things, and you don't get to, I mean, that is something that I'm in a sort of absurd way worry about, which is like we fill our days with so much busyness. Then when truly beautiful things happen, whatever they are, truly anomalous things, we just won't pay attention because they don't fit our busy schedule. Beautiful. I think that's right on the nose, and it's on my nose because, you know, I didn't give this topic the attention it deserved until I left, right? Until I left and I went to be an instructor pilot where I had more time, you know? I had more downtime to kind of process and think and get out of exactly what you just described. And that's kind of what broke me out of it and got me thinking more about it. Why do you think the DOD released these videos? It's a great question. Did the DOD release it or did they kind of get out on their own in some sense? So I don't know the answer to that question, but my understanding of the situation is that the DOD talked about them so much because they're already out there in a sense. And so, you know, they could, they had a choice where they could have just straight up lied and said it wasn't theirs or it was fake. But again, I think our culture now is too open and the information moves too freely to do things like that. And it kind of left them in a pickle that they had to respond to. So what was the role of Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program, AATIP? From your perspective, from what you know, maybe your intuition, is AATIP a real thing that existed? I was in a position as an aviator that never would have exposed me to anything like that. But I was curious about what people knew. And I think in my mind maybe hoped or, you know, hoped someone was looking into this in some sense. But on the day that Gimbel was recorded, I heard that they caught something extra interesting on the FLIR. And I went to the Intel debrief space to go see the film. And, you know, everyone's gathered around watching, very interesting. And I heard the Admiral was coming down. And so I was like, I'm going to hang out back, you know, quietly, mind my own business and see, I just want to see his reaction and try to read it to see if this is brand new or if it is something that they've been dealing with, you know. And, you know, he came in and he watched a video for like five or six seconds and went, hmm, and then like turned around and walked out. And, you know, I was like, he's definitely seen these before. There's no way that he only watched it for a few seconds and don't have more interest. It was, you know, too bizarre. So kind of going back, does the office exist? Well, you know, I've heard that the Admiral essentially reported back to the Pentagon about that case real time, essentially, after he left, right? So he basically went back and I was told he reported that to either AATIP directly or to other, you know, somehow the information got there. So from my perspective and from what I've experienced, it seems like, yes, it was a thing. But, you know, as an aviator, I wouldn't know either way, right? That's just my experience from what happened. But it seems like there's somewhere to report to. At the time, it seemed like there was at least some place to complain to, if not report to. Let me ask you about sort of people that are taking a serious look at the videos and just the different UFO sighting reports. So there's a person named Mick West, who is a skeptic and tries to take a skeptical view on every single piece of evidence on these UFO sightings. What do you think about his analysis? He tries to analyze in a way that debunks some of these videos and assign probabilities to their explanations, sort of leaning towards things that give a very low probability to alien, extraterrestrial type of explanations for these UFOs. What do you think about his approach to these analysis? Well, two parts to his approach. One, I commend him for all the good work and effort he put into it. I've seen him build some models and things of that nature. And so I think that's something that's absolutely needed in this environment. No one's asking anyone to believe anyone here, right? Trust but verify should certainly be the mantra. But where I have a disagreement with his approach is that he's approaching from a debunker or from a debunker standpoint, from my perspective, not speaking for everyone, but when I hear that, that tells me that you're driving towards a particular conclusion, which has been a very safe process for the past X years, right? It's been a very safe business to be in to tell people that they haven't seen aliens, but times have changed a little bit. And the tactics I've seen to try to retain that view on reality has included things such as completely dismissing what the aircrew are saying. And I think that is a fallacy to think that we have to take the human outside of that analysis. So those are the two things I disagree with. When you put the night vision on and you look at the stars and you look out there in the vast cosmos, only a small fraction of which we can see, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there? Do you think about this kind of stuff? I do. You know, I'm of the theory that we are not the only people out there. I think it would be a statistically silly comment to assume we are, although I get that we are the only data point that we currently have. Although I'm willing to jump over that fence and say that, yes, there most likely is intelligent life elsewhere. Although I'll concede that it is a possibility we are early or it could be limited or it could be in a manner that we don't recognize or can really understand. I spend so much time thinking about how we anthropomorphize things on this UFO topic. And we've done it to ourselves with media in a sense, right? We've trained ourselves what to think about what we think is true or what this would be like. And by doing so, I think we're closing ourselves off to a lot of what the possibilities could be and the things that we could miss. You beautifully put that the thing that drew you to fighter jets is the technology. So if you were to think, to imagine from an alien perspective, what kind of technologies would we first encounter as human beings if we were to meet another alien civilization in the next few centuries? What kind of thing would we see? So you're now at the cutting edge and you see the quick progress that's happening. That was happening throughout the 20th century, that's happening now with greater degrees of autonomy with robots and that kind of stuff. What do you think we will encounter? I think we're gonna see the ability to manipulate matter like we used to manipulate information. Like I think that's what, whether that means being able to pop something on the table that didn't exist or to influence a chemical reaction somewhere, but being able to manipulate and treat matter as if it was information. And so being able to design specific materials, being able to move past a lot of the barriers that seem to limit our progress with things such as miniaturized fusion or even just fusion in general, is, you know, a lot of it is matter-based, is material-based and our ability to not, manipulate, we can only discover materials in a sense. And so I think that a complete mastery of the physical reality would be one of the key traits of a very intelligent species. Well, you're actually working on some, maybe you can correct me, but sort of quantum mechanical simulation to understand materials. So is that, do you see sort of the early steps that we're doing on quantum computing side to start to simulate, to deeper understand materials, but maybe to engineer and to mess with materials at the very low level that aliens will be able to do and hopefully humans will be able to do soon? Yeah, I think that's, you know, so if we think about how, what materials are made of, it's just a collection of atoms, but each one of those atoms has a lot of data associated with it. So if we want to kind of calculate how they interact with each other, it requires a massive amount of computational resources. So much so that it can't be done in a lot of cases with classical computers. And that's where quantum computers come in. Although we don't have a perfectly functioning quantum computer at this point, one of the things that we're working at at Quantum General Materials is to essentially bridge that gap between what classical computer can do as far as simulating materials. And of course, what a fully functioning quantum computer would mean for being able to design materials. And so, you know, having the ability to study matter at a very fundamental level and under a level and unleashing artificial intelligence and machine learning on that problem, I think is, you know, in a sense, you know, alien in a way that we're able to advance our science using, you know, a process that we may not fully understand with a perhaps a non-human based intelligence in some sense. And so we may find patterns in the processes, right? How does our machine learning output, you know, can we match behaviors with what we're observing with what maybe a machine learning algorithm with output, right? Can we try to classify the intelligence in that manner perhaps? And so, you know, at GenMAT, we're looking at these materials, we're considering what these algorithms could have used for later on. Could we perhaps reverse the process and determine what a unique or anomalous material, what type of properties it potentially could have? And you said GenMAT, right? What's, what is GenMAT? GenMAT is a quantum general material. So it's the company I work for. We essentially are working on a couple of verticals. One of them is our quantum chemistry work, where essentially we're bridging the gap between essentially physics and chemistry. We're working on those problems and again, implementing artificial intelligence machine learning into that process so that we can design those materials from the ground up. Additionally, we are what we consider a vertically integrated material science company, which means we can generate our own data. And so within the next quarter coming up, we are launching a satellite in the space. They'll have a fairly advanced hyperspectral sensor in there, which is intended to be the first launch that will help us detect different types of materials using our advanced knowledge of quantum chemistry, right? We're going to be leveraging that experience in order to better analyze that data. Oh, interesting. So materials that are strange or novel out there in space. Not necessarily, but we'll be looking back at Earth to be able to detect mineral deposits on Earth. Got it, got it. Getting the greater perspective from out in space to do analysis of different materials. Interesting. Yeah, I was really impressed by the DeepMind. I got to hang out at DeepMind recently and they really impressed me. The possibility of the application, as you were saying, of machine learning in the context of quantum mechanical simulation for materials. So to understand materials. It's really, really, really interesting. So manipulate matter, huh? I would say the next thing is forces, right? Or maybe fields. So manipulating or managing gravity. Can we maneuver within fields in some manner that allows us to perhaps move propellant less or in other manners, right? And so I think essentially having a deeper understanding of different fields and being able to interact with them I think would be a potential avenue for travel or advanced travel, right? Propellant less travel. Can we quantum entangle gravity fields together and propel a ship by the gravity field of a planet, the mass of a planet, and a drive on a ship? There's all sorts of interesting things. Yeah, people look back at people like you and say, wow, they used to fly with this kind of propellant. It seems like to be a very antiquated way of flying. And they were very impressed with themselves, these humans, that they could fly like birds. It's like so much energy is used to fly such short distances from that perspective. We can only throw so many rocks at the back. There needs to be a better way. Exactly. It just seems dumb. It's like Flintstones or something like that. We're getting good at it, but there's a limit, right? We need new science. It's extremely good. I mean, that's an interesting sort of trade-off, how much do you invest in getting really good at it. I tend to believe the reason why it would be very important and very powerful to put a human on Mars is not necessarily for the exploration facet, but in all the different technologies that come from that. So there's something about putting humans in extreme conditions where we figure out how to make it less extreme, more comfortable. And for that, we invent things like the DOD sort of helping invent the internet and all the different technologies we've invented. It's almost like an indirect consequence of solving difficult problems, whether that problem means winning wars or colonizing other planets. And so I don't think Mars will help us figure out propulsional systems or to crack open physics to where you can travel close to the speed of light or faster than the speed of light, but it will help us figure out how to build some cool technology here on Earth, I think. So I'm a big proponent of doing really difficult things, really difficult engineering things to see what kind of technologies emerge from that. But let me ask you this, do you think US government is hiding some technology, like alien spacecraft technology? I have no information either way. And if you did, you probably wouldn't tell me. But my assumptions, you know, like what did my heart tell me? My heart tells me something's going on, but I have no evidence for that. Maybe that's me wanting something to go on. Maybe that's a human feeling to want to know am I government's in control of what some strange unknown thing is. What's your sense if such a thing happened, would this kind of information leak? Would this kind of information be released by the government? I mean, that's the worry that you have is because when you don't understand a thing and it's novel, you want to hide it so that some kind of enemy doesn't get access to it and use it against you. I wonder if that is the underlying assumption. It's the one people always jump to that it's for to maintain secrecy of technology. And I assume that's part of it. I wonder if there's any other reasons that we would want to not talk about it. I imagine that in such information would have a shock to the social economic system of any country if not the world. And so I wonder if perhaps that was part of the concern as well, how society can react to it. I mean, we're anti-fragile enough now with everything that's going on and with our communication networks that, you know, why not now? I don't know. But that's something I think about as well. Yeah, the effect on the mass psyche of something like this, that there's another intelligence out there, we had trouble enough to deal with a pandemic, to have something of this scale, basically having just an inkling of a phenomena that we have no understanding of and could lead to complete destruction of human civilization or a flourishing of it. And what do you do? What does a bureaucracy of government do with that? Especially when they're the ones holding the reins of power and such a communication would relinquish that power essentially, some degree. Since you think there's aliens out there and you're somebody that's thought about war quite a bit, do you think alien civilizations, when we meet them, would want war? Would they be a danger to us? Would they be a friend to us? What's your intuition about intelligences out there? My intuition tells me that when two people like yourself and myself or anyone get together, often the output is greater than the individuals. And when we work together, we can typically do things that are more impressive and better than if a single person works alone. And now I know that war has driven technological progress, but perhaps there's other mechanisms that can do so. But regardless, I wonder if we truly think about advanced society that has been perhaps thousands or millions of years ahead of us, I would imagine that same truth to be there, that people working together, creatures working together is a good thing for society or its society as a whole. And if we consider that, as we imagine a society growing and expanding, in a sense, the ultimate output of a planet could only be achieved in some senses if everyone was working towards the same goal. And there might be wonders and secrets and things that we can't imagine just simply because of the timeframes that we live under and we think in. But if a planet has a single unit and it almost is as an entity itself at a certain level, if everything's working towards the same output, I could almost imagine an intelligent species that approached us planet to planet instead of person to person because that's how they've evolved and they've assumed any intelligent species would understand that working together is better than not. And so my heart tells me that at a certain point, love and caring and desire to work together is much more powerful than the technological progress that war would bring. I hope so as well. Well, let me jump to the AI topic that you've done. So you've done research and development efforts focused on multi-agent intelligence for collaborative autonomy, machine learning AI stuff that we've been talking about for combat, for air-to-air combat, manned-on-man teaming technologies, all that kind of stuff. What's some interesting ideas in this space that fascinate you? Randomness. Being able to not predict what the enemy's doing almost no matter what, because there's a level of randomness that's within the tactical envelope. Even a- Utility of randomness. The utility of randomness in an increasing- Sounds like a book you should write. That would be a good title. Name my band. Name your band. Yeah. So yeah, can you elaborate that? So like trying to deeper understand how you can integrate randomness through AI in the context of combat. In order to make yourself, in order to take away the enemy's ability to try to predict what you're going to do to disrupt their technological progress cycles so that they don't have a clear target to aim at. And if you don't have a clear target to aim at, it's hard to hit it. Additionally, more distribution of assets and capability. So imagine being able to digitally model your weapon or your system or your entire tactical engagement or scenario. Allow a machine learning to help you better understand the technology that you need to build in order to defeat a particular scenario. And I'm talking hardware now, not just the tactic itself. And being able to use large amounts of simulation and machine learning to build individual assets that are small boutique using advanced manufacturing techniques for a mission or for a particular battle. Instead of just having these large things against an enemy, you're building systems and technology for individual cases. What about manned and unmanned teaming? So man and machine working together. Is there interesting ideas there? I approach it from the position that the human should be commanding from the highest level possible. So mission objective based targeting. And so if, just for example, if there's a building here and I want that building to go away, that's the message I want to communicate. I don't want to tell certain vehicles to be in a certain spot. I don't want to know how much fuel they have. I don't even want to know what capabilities they have necessarily. I just want to know that I have the ability to select from a cloud of capabilities and the right assets are going to arrive such that they deal with the contingencies around the target such as protection systems or EW and then can prosecute the target to the high enough probability of satisfaction that's needed by the mission. And that's the power of the human mind is it's able to do some of these strategic calculations but also ethical calculations, all that kind of stuff. That's what humans are good at. Does it worry you a future where we have increasingly higher autonomy in our weapon systems, in our war? So you said building. What about telling a set of fully autonomous drones to get rid of all the terrorists in the city? So you said multiple buildings, region, that kind of, so greater and greater autonomy. So that's a fear, right? You're viewing it from a we can cover more perspective, which is fair and a lot of, I don't approach it from that topic. At least I don't think of it that way, at least morally. I think that with the advancement of warfare, assuming we have a just and moral leadership, if that's the case, then I am an advocate for increased autonomy and technology because I see it as an ability to be more precise. And if we trust the moral leadership of our government, then we would want to be as precise as possible in order to mitigate effects that we don't want. So I know that's not a satisfying answer and it leaves us maybe with bad feelings but. No because having experienced sort of directly seen what it looks like when deliberately or carelessly war leads to the death of a large number of civilians as it does in currently in Ukraine, the value of precision given ethical leadership becomes apparent. So there's something distinctly unethical about the murder of civilians in a time of war. And I think technology helps lessen that. Of course, all death is terrible, but there's something about schools, hospitals being destroyed with everybody inside being killed. It's particularly terrible. It is. And you approached it from the angle of more autonomy enables a wider swath of destruction. And that's where we get back into who's making the decisions based off of this. And my hope again would be that we would have the leadership that would use these things when needed in the precise way as possible to minimize that. And I've seen that firsthand. I've seen that in country. I've seen not blue forces, but I've seen truck bombs go off on school buses driving around Afghanistan while escorting convoys. And it wasn't easy then and I'm sure it's not any easier now, especially after what you've just seen. Do you have thoughts about the current war in Ukraine, maybe from a military perspective, maybe from the Air Force perspective? So I can just mention a few things, there's the Baraktar drones that are being used. They're unmanned. I think they have capability to be autonomous, but they're usually remotely controlled. They're used for reconnaissance, but they're also used by the Ukraine side for reconnaissance. And I think also to destroy different technologies, tanks and so on, different targets like this. So there's also on the Russian side, the oil and tan. There's the fighter jets, MiG-29 in the Ukraine side and the Su-25 in the Russian side. Is there anything kind of stands out to you about this particular aspects of what this war looks like that's unique to what you've experienced? Maybe not unique, but it's just been absolutely incredible to see the footage. You know, I mean, we're watching war on Twitter, you know, essentially, and to see, you know, these aircraft flying down low, spitting flares out, getting shot down, you know, it's incredible to see this happening, you know, live for everyone to see. So that's just kind of a quick meta comment. But as far as the actual, you know, I think these small form factor UAVs where they're just like strapping weapon to it and flying over and trying to drop it at the right time or any of this, these type of commercial applications of technology into this ad hoc warfare area is incredibly interesting because it shows, you know, how useful that technology can be outside of the military, right? Like these, like, especially like DGI, right? Like there's obviously a lot of technology in there is being leveraged for other capabilities within, you know, PLC military, or at least we would assume. What happens if that is more widespread, right? Like what if we were creating our own drones and they were being used against us? Would we want to have some type of kill switch or something like that, right? So what I think governments are going to have to consider, like all these tools that are going to be easily available to just any person could be turned into a tool of war. How do we stop that from being turned against us? You know, especially as we look at, you know, 10 years from now when we have a large number of autonomous UAVs delivering packages and doing everything else over our country and any one of those could be potentially a weapon if we don't have the proper security. Well there's, we're now in Texas and Texas values its guns and it sees guns as among other things, a protector of individual freedom. You could see a future perhaps where, and I've certainly experienced this in the empowering nature of this in Ukraine, where you can put the fight for independence into your own hands by literally strapping explosives to GGI drones that you purchase on your own salary. I mean, one of the interesting things about the voluntary army in Ukraine is that they're basically using their own salary to buy the ammunition to fight for their independence. This is the very kind of ideal that sort of people speak about when they speak about the Second Amendment in this country. That it's interesting to see the advanced technology version of that, especially in Ukraine, sort of using computer vision technology for surveillance and reconnaissance to try to integrate that information to discover the targets and all that kind of stuff. To put that in the hands of civilians is fascinating to see. To sort of fight for their independence, you could say that to fight against authoritarian regime of your own government, all that kind of stuff. It shows you how complicated the war space in the future is going to be, you know, invading a land like that where people have, you know, that many different types of resources. It's going to absolutely change warfare. I mean, hopefully that creates a disincentive to start war. To go to war with a, yeah, sort of it changes the nature of guerrilla warfare. It does, yeah. And, you know, I don't think Putin was expecting to be in that engagement quite as long as he has, of course, but it can show you how you can get caught up, you know, if land wars turn into an inescapable quagmire each time due to the complications around the society's ability to access interesting tools. You know, it could be, you know, it could be a huge demotivator for aggression. Well, let me ask you about this. Do you think there will always be war in the world? Is this just a part of human nature? I think so. I think it is. Until we move past resource limitation, there's always going to be at least that one particular cause of conflict. And then we can also consider all our psychological lizard brain emotions that cause us to, you know, act out, although, you know, hopefully we have enough things in place to stop that from rising to the level of war. But you know, we have our own biology, our own psychology and evolution to combat. But there are pragmatic reasons to exert violence sometimes, unfortunately, and one of those cases could be resource limitations. And so your question was, do I think there will always be war in this world? My unfortunate answer is perhaps yes, but once there's more than one world and we're less resource constrained, then perhaps it'll be a valve of sorts for that. I talked to Giacco on this podcast. I told him about a song called Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. And the question I asked him, I'd like to ask you the same question, is like the song goes, do you think we're fools to wage war on our brothers in arms? And Giacco said, our enemy is not our brothers in arms, they're the enemy. And so this kind of notion that we're all human, that's a notion, that's a luxury you can have. But there is good and bad in this world, according to Giacco. I hear that anger and hate when I was in Ukraine, among some people, where there was a sense where you could be brothers and sisters, you could have family, you can have love from Ukraine to Russia. But now that everything changed and generational hate for some people have taken over. So I guess the question is, when you think about the enemy, is there hate there? Do you acknowledge that they're human? I never had any hate or discontent when I was doing my job, I'll say. But I was also never in a true life or death situation where they were gonna kill me if I didn't kill them. But I think that environment isn't one born out of hate. Being in that type of scenario, in a sense, it's how to be alive, right? Our natural state is to be fighting for survival in a sense. And so I think there's great power and strength and clarity, perhaps, in that. And it's not always born out of hate, but out of necessity. And we can't always control that. And I think as we focus on ourselves so much, we only dance on that pinhead when we find ourselves fighting for things that we need. And we're always taking from someone else at this point. And so as someone that's been in combat, and very high above it, I'll say, right, where I didn't feel like I was in particular danger, I rationalized it and I made my wife do it knowing that there were people on the other side that were going to die that were on our side than not. So it was always a very human thing. It was never a reaction, an emotional reaction of any sense. So you were able to see the basic, it's human versus human. There's some aspect of war that is basically one people fighting each other. Yes. At the end of the day, especially I would say in aviation, tactical aviation, there's almost a kinship with your enemies in a sense, because you know them in a sense, right? You know what they've been through, you know what training they've been through, you know where they failed, and you know what type of person they are, because it's a very unique person that does that job and usually can spot them. I guess it's the kind of respect you have for the craftsmanship of the job that's taken on. Certainly. And that person didn't come out in his $100 million jet because I pissed him off. You know, it's not an emotional response. We're both there maybe because we chose to be in some sense, but at the behest of someone else and outside of our control and power. So in a sense for me, it's almost a challenge that we've engaged upon agreeably, but that's such a romantic version that I have the luxury to have being high in my castle in the jet up there, not on the ground. So I understand that it's a bit more romantic than perhaps, you know, someone on the ground experiencing all the horrors down there, because everything looks very small from above. And that's another aspect of war with greater autonomy. When you're controlling the mission versus, you know, have a Genghis Khan type of intimacy in terms of the actual experience of war where you directly have, you murder with a sword versus a gun versus a remotely controlled drone versus a strategic mission assignment to an autonomous drone that executes. Abstracted away until it's just a small decision. And my worry is the people without a voice are completely forgotten and silenced in all of these calculations. I spoke to a lot of people, poor people, and they feel like they've never really had a voice and they're too easily forgotten, even within the country of Ukraine. It's the big city versus the rural divide. You know, it's easy to forget the people that don't have a Twitter account and don't, that their basic existence is just trying to survive, trying to put food on the table. They don't have anything else. Anything else in the day are the ones that truly feel the pain of war, of the supply chain going down, of the food supplies going down, of a cold winter without power. You're still young, but you've seen some things. So let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and give advice to young people. Whether they're fascinated by technology or fascinated by fighter jets, whether they're fascinated by sort of engineering or the way the stars look at night, what advice would you give them? How to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of? I'd suggest that they don't fear looking foolish. I spent a large portion of my life considering the laughter or the comments at my statements as indication that I shouldn't pursue that. And so, you know, I kind of woke up to that fact a bit later, but I would encourage, you know, I would advise that people, you know, trust in themselves and trust in the things that they care about. It doesn't matter if they're good at it. All that matters is that they find something that they can apply love and care to and they will grow better at it and then most likely make the world better because of it. And don't be afraid to look stupid. Don't be afraid to look stupid. Yeah, that's one of the things that I think as you get older, you're expected to be, to have it all figured out. And so you are afraid to take on new things. But I think as long as you're always okay looking stupid and having a beginner's mind, you can get really, really far even later on in life. So this isn't just advice for young people. This is really advice for everybody. Maybe a dark question, but has there been a difficult time in your life, a really dark place you've gone in your mind that stands out that you had to really overcome? I would suggest that I've been pretty firm ground for most of my life. I haven't had too many personal tragedies, I'll say, that have really defined me. Certainly none that I would think are outside the norm. So there is no truly low point. Actually, I have one. And it's tough for me because I've spent most of my life beating emotions and high emotional responses out of my system, right? Because that's what flying is, right? It's keeping a steady line and doing what you need to do. In fact, there's been studies that have shown reduced adrenaline production in fighter pilots for a number of years after they get out. But getting out of the Navy was difficult for me. And I wasn't expecting it to be. A lot of bravado and machoism, of course, in the military, especially in the fighter community. And we all have our plans made up to get out. And none of it really accounts for any type of mental health or anything like that. It's all very much, where am I going to get my paycheck from? Where am I going to move to? And whether it's the Navy or just individuals, truly understanding the difference that makes. And when I got out, it was difficult for me. I think a lot of guys in that job, when they get out, they almost... At least I had anxiety when I got out because I was so used to being highly involved in something that just was I was always involved with that when I got out, I didn't know how to fill that space essentially. And while I wouldn't say it was an overly traumatic experience, I think it's one that's not accounted for enough that people that are getting out. So I would encourage them to take it serious and actually think about it and respect the change because it is a big one. Well, if I may say, you found a place in nature currently, a home, is there, can you speak to that being a source of happiness for you? Absolutely. An escape from the world? Certainly, very much is. Was it deliberate that you found it there? That's home for me. So I moved back up to the Boston area and my wife and I had an idea after moving about eight or nine times in the Navy of kind of what we wanted just generally. And it was all really about the land and not about the house. You know, we just wanted privacy and to be nearby. And so we ended up finding a lot of land, you know, a parcel of land. We put a house on it and it provides me with a sense of peace that I think I can only get when I'm in nature. A sense of clarity that helps me think, helps me relax. Maybe it's the relaxing that helps me think, I don't know. But being surrounded by nature and birds and animals for me has always allowed me to, I don't know, feel most in touch with my own thoughts in a sense. Just provides clarity. And so this little sanctuary you could say I've built allows me to, you know, interface via a fiber line at my house but also feel like I'm a million miles away sometimes, which is the best of both worlds. And you can just walk outside to escape it all? Yes. To experience life as hundreds of generations of human species have experienced it. Maybe it's the dichotomy. My desire for the vastness of technology and experience compared with the most basic baseline that we have. Isn't that strange? How do you square that? I don't know. How drawn you are to the cutting edge and still the calm you find in nature? I think it makes sense. Nature is vastly superior to almost all of our technology. From a technology perspective? Yeah, it is. And so in a way it's being surrounded by perfection in a lot of senses. In the military and in general, have you contemplated your mortality? Have you been afraid of death? What's your relationship like with death? I was willing to accept an oversized amount of risk, I'll say, when I was younger as an aviator. Not in the jet, but just that was my life. I felt like I was going to live forever. And going out in the war, strangely, didn't really change that because as an aviator, again, we're riding up high on our horse up there. There were times when I was in situations that could have resulted in death from flying or from emergency in the aircraft. But I'll be honest, I never really sat down to think about the mortality of it afterwards. I feel like I kind of signed a check at the beginning and it was my job to perform as well as I could. And if something happened in that, then I better damn well be sure I would do my best at the time then. So I maybe didn't personally reflect on it as much as one would think. Because once you get in that machine, it doesn't give you a lot of time to sit back and philosophize on your current situation. And the same, just like we weren't seeing these, or when we were seeing these objects off the coast, we weren't necessarily examining them every day, right? We'd put them into that bucket because it wasn't something that was going to kill us right away. And thinking about death when you're so close to it all the time would be debilitating. It would probably make you worse at your job. It would. Well, maybe you can think about death when you look out when you go out into nature and think like the fact that this whole ride ends is such a weird thing. And the old makes way to new. And that's all throughout nature. And if you just look at the cruelty of nature, or the beauty of nature, however you think about it, the fact that the big thing eats the little thing over and over, and that's just how it progresses. And that's how adaptation happens. Death is a requirement for evolution. And whether evolution allows us to see objective reality or not, it still gives you some interesting thoughts about perspectives of death, and especially concerning it's a biological necessity as far as evolution is concerned. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that there's been like a hundred billion people that lived before us, and that you and I will be forgotten, this whole thing we're doing is meaningless in that sense. But at the same time it feels deeply meaningful somehow. I guess that's the question I want to ask. When you go out to nature, with family, what do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? Or maybe when you put on the night goggles, the night vision goggles and look up at the stars, why are we here? I can't speak for everyone, but at least the way I interpret it, or at least I feel like I interpret my way here, my job is, I feel like my role is just to be curious about the environment in a manner that allows us to understand as much as possible. I think that the human mind, whether it's just the mass inside our skull, or whether there's some type of quantum interactions going on, our mind has an incredible ability to output new information in a universe that is somewhat stale of information. Our minds are somewhat unique in that we can imagine and perceive things that could never ever have possibly naturally occurred, and yet we can make it happen. We can instantiate that with enough belief that it's true and it can happen. So for me, I feel like I just need to encourage that, to encourage interaction with reality such that it leaves us in newer and grander interactions with this universe. And all that starts with a little bit of curiosity. Exactly. Ryan, you're an incredible person. You've done so many things and there's so much still ahead of you. Thank you for being brave enough to talk about UFOs and doing it so seriously, and thank you for pushing forward on all these fronts in terms of technology. So from just the fighter jets, the engineering of that, to the AI ML applications in the combat setting, that's super interesting, and then now quantum. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking today. It was an honor. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Buzz Aldrin. Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/qLDp-aYnR1Y

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Impostor Syndrome - Pave Your Own Path | AMA #4 - Ask Me Anything with Lex Fridman

A couple of related questions on imposter syndrome, self-doubt in general. Mike asks, I'd love it if you could talk about imposter syndrome. Grateful for all you're doing. And a fist, like a fist bump emoji. Thanks Mike. That could be one of my favorite emojis. I didn't know that existed. I love it. Okay. Iwegzi asks, how do you deal with feeling inadequate? I'm studying robotic engineering and while I'm doing okay in classes, there are a few very bright people getting A pluses in everything. Maybe I'm not smart enough or maybe I'm just not working hard enough. How do you come to terms with yourself and your abilities and stop envying others? You are a very successful and bright person yourself. So I don't know if you will be able to relate. Yeah, no, I can certainly relate. I certainly don't see myself as successful and certainly don't see myself as a bright person. Okay. How do you think imposter syndrome and just self-doubt in general? There's a lot I could say here. I definitely suffer. I don't know if I love the term imposter syndrome, but for what it's worth, I definitely suffer from imposter syndrome. I think there's a few interesting things about human psychology to say here and there's a few productive things to say here. So one, the underlying problem with imposter syndrome is, and just any kind of self-criticism and self-doubt, is that you're comparing yourself to others. And that kind of comparison is not fundamentally productive for your own development, for your own growth, except in little bits here and there as in moderation for fuel. I think that's where envy comes into is again comparing yourself to others. To me, I've certainly experienced envy as we all have, especially when you're first getting into a particular line of work or efforts. But what I learned, and actually here, again, I admire Joe Rogan. I think he taught a lot of people, like in this case, it's in the comedy world, that sharing and sending a lot of love and promoting others is better for everybody, including for yourself. It's ultimately the path to happiness as opposed to being envious of others or comparing yourself to others in a negative light is being happy for others, other people's success. When I see somebody succeed, I think there's two things that I feel that I have learned ultimately make me happy and make me a better person. One thing is I feel just pure, simple joy at their success. It's just, if you allow yourself, it's fun to see other people succeed at something they're good at, something they're passionate about. It's just fun, just being a spectator of it. If you allow yourself to not see it through the lens of comparison and striving, we're just mortal beings and you don't need to see it as a race. If you just see it as an observer of something beautiful. And I certainly just enjoy others being good at their art, at their skill, at their craft. This can be more difficult if that person is doing something very similar to what you're doing. That's when it gets more challenging. But I assure you, at least for me, even in that case, it's beautiful to appreciate the work of others. Just be happy for their success. And the other is, it's a neighboring feeling, but it's an inspiration. I wouldn't see it as the dark, it's like the positive side of envy. Sort of realizing, holy crap, that's possible. Now, if that's possible and he or she is human, then I could do that too. I'm human too and I can get to that level. There's no, all the amazing, rich, powerful, brilliant people I've gotten a chance to meet, especially with the podcast in the past year, the number one lesson I've learned talking to them is that they're all human. They are not very different from me. Many of them have huge amounts of flaws. They all suffer from laziness, procrastination. They all have imposter syndrome. They're all human. They're all human and they're not much different from you and I. And that means when you see excellence, that should be an inspiration. Wow, that's possible. When somebody gets to the four minute mile, that's possible. That shouldn't be like, oh, I can't believe they got to the four minute mile first or something like that, no. That means if four minutes are possible, then maybe 350 is possible, right? And you just push it and push it and push it further, especially with people that are working closer than you feel. Those are the two feelings I feel. And the other kind of neighboring feeling in terms of why comparison is a useless process is, at least for me, I believe that success in life is finding your own thing, finding and paving your own path. Not getting farther on somebody else's path than them or not sort of outracing somebody else on an already paved path, it's forming a new path to creating something new, hopefully something fundamentally new, so new that nobody could have even imagined, but even new in small ways. So paving your own way. And their comparison doesn't matter. I think that's one other instructive feeling when you're envious of others. If they're getting an A plus in a particular class, if they're in academia, you can have sort of all kinds of metrics, citations, which university you are in, where you are in the hierarchy of faculty position, assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, what kind of awards you have, recognitions you have, what kind of grants you have in terms of amounts of money. In business, it could be the profits, it could be as silly as your social media presence of followers and all that kind of stuff. All of those are measures of your place in somebody else's race. That rhymes. It could be a haiku even. I think the thing you need to do is to pave your own path. I early on realized that, I became disillusioned. So for a long time, getting A's for me meant success. Excelling at school was success. And at a certain point in college, I realized that it's a trap for my skill level, that the creative, it's hard to put into words, but there's a certain thing you become if you allow yourself to be introspective, to look at yourself in the mirror and ask the question of what am I good at? What will the path that I can pave, something new, look like? And you realize that school deludes you into thinking it's important to go down somebody else's path. Now, for a lot of people, school might be very effective. There could be success in academia for a lot of people. Getting a PhD and diving in deep in a particular topic is actually how they find their art, how they discover their beauty. Through that process, they find a problem that's fundamental. For me, the thing I would like to create in this world is some weird mix of deep scientific ideas, but also artistry, and also doing very crazy things in terms of both business and ideas that requires you to take a path that's nonlinear. And so when you see other people getting better grades, I was in that point. I realized I don't care about grades anymore, and I care about diving deep and exploring worlds that fascinate me, feeding the passion, feeding the fire of that passion, rediscovering different aspects of that passion. So my advice in terms of when you have self-doubt is to not, self-doubt is grounded in your comparison to others. Instead, focus on finding the passions in your life, irrespective of others, something totally new. Find something that you're excited about. Now, this could be a painful process of, this is the beauty and the suffering of the creative process. It can take a while, but you shouldn't be distracted by what the world tells you to do. You should focus on this journey and discovering that passion, because then comparison won't matter. Within that passion, the only comparison you'll be making is to how far you've gone down the road yourself of achieving that passion. One of the things you have to kind of think is you have to look ahead and think of, so when you imagine your passion, now for me, there's particular things I've talked about it. I haven't been able to articulate it well, but it's something about companionship with artificial intelligence systems, of having deep connections, whether that's, whatever the space is. It could be in personal robotics in the home, or it could be with autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomous vehicles. It could be any kind of human-robot interaction context. I have visions, like literally I can visualize the world that I would love to help create. And that really helps you pave different little paths that are off the beaten road, off the beaten path, that it allows you to not listen to others. It allows you to not use the metrics of comparison to others. And that's how I don't even acknowledge imposter syndrome as a thing. I feel it all the time. I feel like a fraud all the time. I get more and more now. More, it's kind of hilarious. As you get older, you get more prestige and so on. You get called, I get called a thought leader, which is the most ridiculous label of all time. Or more sort of common is expert. You know, I'm an expert in autonomous vehicles, or an expert in artificial intelligence, or an expert in whatever. And any time somebody says that kind of thing, it seems silly to me. It seems that I know so little. And the more I learn, the less I feel like I know. So that feeling of imposter syndrome in comparison to others, in the silly context of conferences where everyone's like Dr. Friedman, you know, that kind of thing, it seems absurd. But it's useless in the grand scheme of my pursuit of my passions. There's no imposter syndrome. I truly, so there's a mix of humbleness. Just like you heard now, I generally have a profound humbleness about my place in this world. But I also have an ego. And that ego has to be maintained too. It's a powerful thing, it's a useful thing. And I have a belief, a self, a deep self-belief that on that path I'm traveling, that new path I'm paving, I am the best person in the world to pave that path. That little unique little road is I am the right person. This is the right time. I am the best person in the world for that. So there I am, like, it's not an imposter syndrome. There I'm truly meant to be great. And that's my own little corner of the universe. You know, there's billions of them. But that's mine. And at that, I'm the greatest in the world. And there you have to have that ego. It might turn out to be nothing, but I'll be the best at nothing. It might turn out to be something great, and then I'll be the best at that degree. But that's where I get that confidence. That little gem, that little fire always burns because it is mine. I had to quickly Google one of my favorite poems to insert here. It's called In the Desert by Stephen Crane. That kind of gets to this point of having your own little place in the universe and appreciating it, deeply appreciating it without jealousy, without envy, having this little piece. He writes, in the desert, I saw a creature, naked, bestial, who squatting up on the ground held his heart in his hands and ate of it. I said, is it good friend? It is bitter, bitter, he answered. But I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. Okay, being read like this, it sounds absurd. Stephen Crane is an absurd poet. I love his work. But it's basically, it's your own, it might be bitter, it might be some sort of definitions of success in this world. Your path, your journey, your career might be a failure. But it shouldn't be a failure in your eyes. You should be true to the journey and to your passion and pursue as much as possible, as much as possible. The money, all the material, possessions, all that doesn't matter. As much as possible, as long as you can feed yourself and maintain minimum shelter and feed your family, the pursuit of the passion should overcome everything. And then all the other things of self-doubt, of imposter syndrome and things like that will fade away. Now, all that said, I should mention that, you know, I'm full of contradictions in some sense. I should mention that being self-critical is a superpower. Being self-critical, I think, is a superpower. But it's also a poison. It's a interesting balance you have to strike. I guess it would, if I was trying to be poetic, I would say that self-criticism, self-doubt is a poison. Self-criticism, self-doubt is a poison, and then gratitude is the antidote for the poison. But that poison is exceptionally useful for growth. That self-criticism, sometimes bordering on self-hatred, there's a, man, the human psyche is an interesting dance. Those demons could be useful. It could be useful for growth. Of hating the work you've done could be useful for improving. I remember Marvin Minsky said something like this, saying that he's hated everything he's ever done. Now, that can come off sounding wrong, and I think there's, again, you can have too much of the poison, but a little bit. Like Tom Waits says, I like my town with a little drop of poison. I think that little poison could be really useful. So the self-criticism, self-doubt I have, the feeling I often, if I give a lecture, if I have a conversation on the podcast, or I have a paper I submit, I write something someplace, or try to articulate a point, or I have an exchange of ideas with people on something technical. I often leave feeling full of, sort of, maybe hating how inarticulate, unintelligent, how lacking I was in my ability to arrive in some clean insight, to provide something valuable to that conversation, to that lecture, to that debate. So there's a kind of self-hatred, a self-criticism, and a lot of people might say, well, that's really dark. That's, you know, you shouldn't feel that way. But I think that's really useful. And in general, the way I approach this kind of feeling of self-doubt and self-criticism in comparison to myself, what I could be, and perhaps is grounded in a comparison to others, is I do a little bit of moderation about things I'm working on currently, and things I've done recently. But always, in every individual moment, I have a deep, profound gratitude. Like, I have some water here. Ah, delicious. I have a, it sounds absurd, but I have a deep gratitude for the fact that I have the ability to have water in front of me. By the way, this water bottle, clearly, it's Powerade. I refill it with water. I just keep using this bottle. And I do the same, people always say, plastic bottles in the podcast. I refill them for me as much as I can with water. So, for example, I have a general dissatisfaction of how inarticulate I am with, for example, answering this very question. I, you know, I could do a lot better, I think. And I'll feel that way, especially after I stop recording. That's fine, and I think that'll grow, that'll help me be better next time. But throughout it, I'm deeply grateful for this water. I'm deeply grateful for having a shelter. It's windy and cold outside right now, and I am here in a heated environment that, you know, keeps me warm. I can have, I have a coffee maker, I can make a coffee, and I'm still alive and healthy, and I have incredible people I get to talk with. Just that whole, every single moment, whether I'm sleep deprived, whether I just stub my toe on something, whether I'm going through even difficult stuff, you know, difficult emotional, the loss of different kinds, strategies, it's still, I'm deeply appreciative of the water and the heat and the plenty of love in the world around me. So it's that balance of self-criticism and deep gratitude for every single part of the individual moment that make up life. That allows you to be happy and have a little bit of fire under your butt to, that doesn't even, that's an expression that doesn't even make sense, to a little bit of fire, motivating fire to drive you, to give you a reason, to give you a sort of an itch to improve, to grow, to challenge yourself, to go outside the comfort zone, and throughout it, again, that gratitude. So I hope that gets to it. I think imposter syndrome is a natural feeling, but it should not be, it should not lead to envy, so the darker side is your comparison to others. I think the way I would advise, and the way I try to live life myself is when I compare myself to others and see their success, I'm enjoy, I'm really happy for them. I enjoy watching them excel. I use it as an inspiration, and any kind of degree of self-doubt I do have, I use it as fuel. I use it as fuel for myself to improve. And again, isn't everything, I've come back to this often, but gratitude for every single moment is essential, essential for happiness, essential for clarity of thought. You know, I've talked about burnout in a previous thing, and people said, you know, people have different views on burnout and so on. I think if you're just deeply grateful and appreciative of every moment, then burnout becomes less likely. I know people suffer in different kinds of ways from all kinds of different angles, they have different life paths. I can only speak to myself. To myself, life is easier if every part of every moment of every day is filled with something you can be deeply appreciative of. And I think it is. The fact that we're alive, the fact that we get a chance to experience this moment, to me, is a beautiful gift.

https://youtu.be/l5Uw8qG7vZU

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Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320

The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capozzola, a historian at MIT specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Christopher Capozzola. Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start? On the one hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914 that brought sort of the major powers of Europe into conflict with one another. But I actually think it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers, particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry over the colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia. And so by the time you get to the summer of 1914, and in a lot of ways I say the war has already begun, and this is just the match that lights the flame. So the capacity for war was brewing within like the leaders and within the populace. They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war, it's a good idea to go to war, it's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kind of thing. Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just a sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale. Yes, yes and. Right, so yes, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict in Europe itself. And the and is that war and military conflict are already happening, right? That there's war, particularly in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, in the Balkans, conflict is already underway. And the European powers haven't faced off against each other. They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states. But in some ways that war is already underway. So do you think it was inevitable? Because World War I is brought up as a case study where it seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event led to the war. And if you change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense is that the drums of war have been beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no matter what, or very likely to have happened. Yes, historians never like to say things are inevitable. And certainly, you know, there were people who could have chosen a different path, both in the short term and the long term. But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable conflicts in the system of empires in the world in 1914. I can't see, you know, it didn't have to be this war, but it probably had to be a war. So there was the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US, because USP called it empire at that moment yet. When do you graduate to empire status? Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire, you know, the United States has formal colonial possessions. And it has sort of mindsets of rule and military acquisition that would define empire in a kind of more informal sense. So you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting World War I into the hands of the German Empire and Kaiser Wilhelm II? You know, that's a really tough call to make. And, you know, that deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years. I think there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right, and, you know, would point toward a generation of arms buildup, you know, alliances that Germany made and promises that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro-Hungarians. And so yes, there's an awful lot of responsibility there. There has been a trend lately to say, no, it's no one's fault, right, that, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleepwalking into the war, right, they backed into it inadvertently. I think that lets everyone a little too much off the hook, right. And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on the system of empires itself, on the system. But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the most responsibility is definitely Imperial Germany. So the leader of Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Josef I, his nephew is Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated. And so that didn't have to lead to a war. And then the leader of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured, sort of started talking trash, and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion, plus all the other players. So what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled? What's the role of US, what's the role of France, what's the role of Great Britain, Germany, and Austro-Hungarian Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks, right, following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, it sort of triggers a series of political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums, sort of demanding sort of that one or other power sort of stand down in response to the demands of either Britain, France, or in turn, Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses from the other side. And so it escalates. And once that escalation is combined with the call up of military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last one to kind of get ready for conflict. So even throughout it, they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver. And they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish, it might be, you know, sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later, because diplomacy is failing now. That turns out not to be the case. Diplomacy fails, it's not a skirmish, it becomes a massive war. And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines. They have very little influence over what happens that summer. How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations to a global war? Is there a place where there's a phase transition? Yeah, I think the phase transition is in over the course of the fall of 1914. When the Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France, in many ways, they're fighting the last war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And they really do sort of, you know, kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against France to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion. France turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the Germans expected. And then the battle lines sort of harden. And then behind that, the French and the Germans, as well as the British on the side of the French, start digging in, literally, right, and digging trenches, trenches that at first are, you know, three feet deep to, you know, to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet, 10 feet deep, you know, two miles wide, that include telegraph wires that include whole hospitals in the back. And then at that point, you know, the front is locked in place. And the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing the war up to 11, right, sort of massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which work, right. And so the war is stuck in this, but that's the phase transition right there. What were the machines of war in that case? You mentioned trenches, what were the guns used? What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating that led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right. And so you see sort of machine guns, you see artillery, you know, these are the kind of the key weapons of war on both sides, right. The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another, not, you know, sort of rifle or even sort of, you know, machine gun kind of attacks. In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings, right. You know, tens of thousands of them poured over the top in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines. And it would work for a little while, you know, but holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be even more demanding than gaining it. And so often, you know, each side would retreat back into the trenches and wait for another day. And how did Russia, how did Britain, how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the France one is the easy one. But what is the order of events here? Right. How it becomes a global war? Yeah. So Britain, France, and Russia are at this time and in, they're in alliance. And so the conflicts, you know, in the summer of 1914, that lead sort of to the declarations of war happens sort of one after another, right, at the end of August, in late August of 1914. And all three powers essentially come in at the same time, because they have promised to do so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before 1914, that committed them to defend one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire have their own sort of set of secret agreements that also commit them to defend one another. And what this does is it sort of brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment. They're also, for many of these countries, bringing not just their national armies, but also their empires into the conflict, right? So Britain and France, of course, have enormous sort of global empires, they begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials. Germany has less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman Empire, of course, have their own sort of hinterland within the empire. And very soon, all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict. Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is? I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction. At the beginning, no, but very quickly. The scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over-the-top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers, and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home. You know, there is, of course, censorship of the battlefields, and specific details don't reach people. But for civilians and in any of the warring powers, they know fairly soon how destructive the war is. And to me, that's always been a real sort of puzzle, right? So that by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917, they know exactly what they're getting into, right? They're not backing into the war in the ways that the European powers did. You know, they've seen the devastation, they've seen photographs, they've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway. When you say they, do you mean the leaders or the people? Did the death and destruction reach the minds of the American people by that time? Yes, absolutely. You know, we don't in 1917 have the mass media that we have now, but there are images in newspapers, there are newsreels that play at the movie theaters, and of course some of it is sanitized. But that combined with press accounts, often really quite descriptive press accounts, gory accounts, reached anyone who cared to read them. You know, certainly plenty of people didn't follow the news, felt it was far away, but most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this war was. Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks. There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front where the bullets are flying, like literally one kilometer away, you start to not feel the war. You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to like get assimilated to it, or you start to get used to it. And then when you get as far away from like currently what is Kiev, you start to, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war, but it's still somehow distant. And I think with the United States, with the ocean between, even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant. Like the way a movie is, maybe, yeah, like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else. Even if your loved ones are going, or you are going to fight. Yeah, that is absolutely the case. And in some ways that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, except for the areas where, in Belgium and France, where the war is right there in your backyard. For other people, yeah, there is a distance. And soldiers of course feel this very strongly when they, European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often deeply resent what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war. So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved? And could it have stayed out? To answer your last question first, yes, right. That the United States could have, could have stayed out of the First World War as a military power. The United States could not have ignored the war completely. It shaped everything. It shaped trade, it shaped goods and services, agriculture, whether there was a crop coming, whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories. So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war on Germany and Austria. And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by a series of events. So President Woodrow Wilson has been president through this entire period of time. He has just run in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the United States out of war. But then in early 1917, the Germans in some ways sort of twist the Americans' arms. The Germans' high command comes to understand that, you know, that they're stuck, right? That they, you know, they're stuck in this trench warfare, they need a big breakthrough. Their one big chance is to kind of, is to sort of break the blockade, to push through that the British have imposed on them, to break through it against France. And so they do. And along with this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships. The Germans know full well, this will draw the United States into war. But the Germans look at the United States at this moment, a relatively small army, a relatively small Navy, a country that at least on paper is deeply divided about whether to join the war. And so they say, let's do it. But they're not going to get any American soldiers there in time, right? You know, it was a gamble, but I think probably their best chance. They took that gamble, they lost, right? In part because French resistance was strong, in part because Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the Germans thought they would. So the American people were divided. American people were absolutely divided about whether to enter this war, right? From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate across the political spectrum. It doesn't break down easily on party lines about whether it was in the US interest to do this, whether American troops should be sent abroad, whether, you know, Americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the European empires. Eventually, as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915, then in much greater numbers in 1917, you know, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that, you know, our response is necessary. And the actual declaration of war in Congress is pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any means. Lopsided towards entering the war. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's really interesting because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems to, nobody wants to be the guy that says no to war for some reason. Once you sense that, in terms of, sorry, in terms of politicians, doesn't you appear weak, but I wonder if that was always the case. So you make the case that World War I is largely responsible for defining what it means to be an American citizen. So in which way does it define the American citizen? When you think about citizenship, what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is sort of the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the second is a more amorphous definition of like, what does it mean to belong, right? To be part of America, right? To feel American, to, you know, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it, right? And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war, right? So both of those things are on the table. Being a citizen who is a citizen, who isn't, matters. So people who had never carried passports or, you know, anything before suddenly have to. But also what it means to be an American, right? To feel like it, to be part of this project is also kind of being defined and enforced during World War I. So project, you know, is a funny way to put a global war, right? So can you tell the story, perhaps that's a good example of it, of the James Montgomery Flag's 1916 poster that reads, I want you. Right. A lot of people know this poster, I think, in its original form, its memefied form, I don't know, but we know this poster and we don't know where it came from, or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know where it came from. It actually comes from 1916. Does this poster represent the birth of something new in America, which is a commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says what it means to be an American is somebody that fights for their country? Yeah. So the image, it's, in fact, I think one of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States, but in the entire world, right? And you can bring it almost anywhere on earth in 2022 and people will know what it refers to, right? And so this is an image that circulated first as a magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster, where the figure is Uncle Sam sort of pointing at the viewer with his finger, sort of pointing and saying, I want you, right? And the I want you is a recruitment tool to join the US Army. And this image, you know, really kind of starts as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg. It initially appears under the heading, what are you doing for preparedness? Meaning to prepare in case war comes to the United States. And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral. In 1917, it's turned into a US Army recruiting poster. And then it reappears in World War II, reappears generations after, you know, like you said, it's now gets remixed, memefied, it's all over the place. I think for me, it's a turning point. It's a sort of window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens. And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media, and what we would probably call propaganda, are being sort of mobilized for the first time in this new kind of way. Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the empire is born, the expanding empire is born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire that seeks to have military influence elsewhere in the world? Yes, but I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested in what happens to the people who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, right, rather than just the one, you know, whether he's pointing at us. And, you know, so yes, he's asking us to do that, but how do we respond? And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the machines of history, the mechanisms of history. It's not the Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing to step up. Absolutely. And, you know, the American people responded for sure, but they didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster, right? And I think that's, you know, kind of a crucial aspect that, you know, there never would have been sort of global US power without the response that begins in World War I. What was the Selected Service Act of 1917? So one of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do, right, is to register for Selective Service, for the draft, right? And the law is passed very soon after the US enters the war. It's sort of, you know, demanding that all men, first between 21 and 30, then between 18 and 45, register for the draft, and they'll be selected by a government agency, by a volunteer organization. So it's a requirement to sign up. It is a legal requirement to register. Of course, not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war, 24 million men register, almost 4 million serve in some fashion. What was the response? What was the feeling amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act? Well, this is a bigger turning point than we might think, right? In some ways, this is a tougher demand of the American public than entering the war. It's one thing to declare war on Germany, right? It's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forms that allow your own government to send you there to fight. And this is especially important at a time when the federal government doesn't really have any other way to find you, unless you actually go and register yourself, right? And so, you know, ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine, but at least a half a million of them don't, right? And simply never fill out the forms, move from one town to another. But you said 20 million did? 20 something? Yeah, about 24 million register, at least 500,000. Is it surprising to you that that many registered since the country was divided? It is. And that's what I, you know, sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people to register for the draft? And it's certainly not coming from the top down, right? You know, there may be a hundred sort of agents in what's now called the FBI. You know, it's certainly not being enforced from Washington. It's being enforced in, you know, through the eyes of everyday neighbors, you know, through community surveillance, all kinds of ways. Oh, so there was like a pressure. There's a lot of pressure. Interesting. So there was not a significant like anti-war movement, as you would see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this. There was a significant movement before 1917, but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized anti-war movement after that, particularly when the government starts shutting down protests. So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up against some of the freedoms, some of the rights that are defined in our founding documents, what was that clash like? What was sacrificed? What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process? I mean, I think on some level the fundamental right, right, is liberty, right? That conscription sort of demands, you know, sacrifice on the behalf of some for notionally for the protection of law. So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight. Yes. You know, and there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who had religious objections to all war, right, not political objections to this war. And some, you know, several thousand were able to take those provisions. But even then, they faced social sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation. You know, so those liberty interests, both individual freedom, religious freedom, you know, those are some of the first things to go. So what about freedom of speech? Was there silencing of the press, of the voices of the different people that were object? Yes, absolutely, right. And so very soon after the Selective Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news in 2022. What's the Espionage Act? The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill, it contains about 10 or different provisions, very few of which have to do with espionage. But one key provision basically makes it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment, right. And that provision is used to shut down radical publications, to shut down German language publications. And, you know, this is really has a chilling impact on speech during the war. Could you put into words what it means to be an American citizen that is in part sparked by World War I? What does that mean? Somebody that's should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country? Somebody that's willing to fight to spread freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American ideals? Like what, does that begin to tell the story what it means to be an American? I think what we see is a change, right. So citizenship during World War I now includes the obligation to defend the country, right, to serve. And I think that's a big part of it. To serve and to, if asked, to die for it, right. And we certainly see that. And I think we see the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out of this time period. But, you know, when you start making lots of demands on people to fulfill obligations, in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see not necessarily during the war, but after. More demands for free speech protections, more demands for equality, for marginalized groups. And so, you know, obligations and rights are sort of developing in a dynamic relationship. Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked a sense like, oh, crap, we can't trust centralized power to drag us into a war. We need to be able to. So there's the birth of that tension between the government and the people. It's a rebirth of it. You know, of course, that tension is always there. But in its modern form, I think it comes from this. Reintensification of it. So what about, you said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? Yeah. So the Espionage Act, you know, sort of empowers federal organizations to watch other Americans. They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft, anyone who is trying to kind of organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who might have sympathy for Germany, which basically means, you know, all German Americans come under surveillance. Initially, you know, this is very small scale, but soon every government agency gets involved, from the Treasury Department Secret Service to the post office, which is sort of reading mail, to the Justice Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. You know, it's a really significant enterprise. Much of it goes away after the war. But of all the things that go away, this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully. Is this also a place where government, the size of government starts to grow in these different organizations? Or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government? Oh, it's exponential growth, right? That, you know, that over the course of the war, by almost any metric you use, right, the size of the federal budget, the number of federal employees, the number of soldiers in the standing army, all of those things skyrocket during the war. They go down after the war, but they never go down to what they were before. And probably gave a momentum for growth over time. Yes, absolutely. Did World War I give birth to the military-industrial complex in the United States? So, war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties involved. So, I guess I would maybe break that into two parts, right? That, on the one hand, yes, there is war profiteering, there are investigations of it. In the years after the war, there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played, you know, too much of a part in the war. And that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term military-industrial complex, it's best, you know, to think of it as, you know, at what point does the one side lock in the other, right? That military choices are shaped by industry, you know, objectives and vice versa. And I don't think that that was fully locked into place during World War I. I think that's really a Cold War phenomenon when the United States is on this intense kind of footing for two generations in a row. So, industrial is really important there, there is companies. So, before then, weapons of war were created, were funded directly by the government. Well, were like, like who was manufacturing the weapons of war? They were generally manufactured by private industry. There were, of course, arsenals, sort of 19th century iterations where the government would produce its own weapons, partly to make sure that they got what they wanted. But most of the weapons of war for all of the European powers and the United States are produced by private industry. So, why do you say that the military-industrial complex didn't start then? What was the important thing that happened in the Cold War? I think one way to think about it is it's, the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a dial to a ratchet, right? So, during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry dials up fast and high and stays that way and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War, sort of the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet. Yes, it becomes unstoppable. It goes up again. And in the way that you start, I think the way the military-industrial complex is often discussed as a system that is unstoppable. Right. Like it expands, it almost, I mean, if you take a very cynical view, it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find places where it can help through military conflict, it creates tensions that directly or indirectly lead to military conflict that it can then fuel and make money from. That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who are critical of the First World War and then also of Dwight Eisenhower, right? When he's president and sort of in his farewell address where he sort of introduces the term military-industrial complex. And some of it is about the profit motive, but some of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in stopping this, right? And that no one had a voice in stopping it and that the ordinary American could really do nothing to sort of, you know, to kind of to dial things down. Is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today with like Eisenhower speaking about the military-industrial complex? So for example, we'll have people criticizing the spending on war efforts, but they're not discussing the machinery of the military-industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature works, the way that we get ourselves trapped in this thing. They're saying like, there's better things to spend money on versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war that's going to lead to more war. Like it pulls you in somehow. Yeah, I would say throughout the Cold War and even after the end of it, there has not been a sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, right? What we really need and what serves our interest and to what extent sort of other things like market forces, profit motives, belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that in the generation after the First World War, that conversation was on the table, right? Through a series of investigations in the US, the Nye Committee in Britain, a Royal Commission, journalistic exposés. This would have been just talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936 as people were starting to worry that storm clouds were gathering in Europe again. Yeah, but it always seems like those folks get pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader. Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, etc. And I think it's important to realize that in the generation after World War I, this was a serious civic conversation. It led to investigations of defense finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France in public finance of war material. And I think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the 21st century. Is there any parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason I bring it up is because you mentioned there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was already established, and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. So there's a case made that America had a role to play, NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine. Is there some truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I? Or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine? I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine. But I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by a fundamental conflict in the European system of empires, in the global system of empires. So in many ways, if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts in the Mediterranean and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater conflict. And so I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World War III look like World War I, it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place, that escalate wars out of people's expectations. That's, I suppose, what I was implying, that this is the early stages of World War III, that in the same way that several wolves are licking their chops or whatever the expression is, they're creating tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable imperative for a global war. That's, I mean, many kind of people that are looking at this are really worried about that. Now, the stopping, the forcing function to stop this war is that there's several nuclear powers involved, which has, at least for now, worked to stop full-on global war. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. In fact, what is one of the surprising things to me in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century, we can go to something that involves nuclear powers, not directly yet, but awfully close to directly, go to a hot war. And so do you worry about that, that there's a kind of descent into a World War I type of scenario? Yes. I mean, that keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep the citizens of both the United States and Russia up at night. And I think, again, it gets back to what I was saying, that in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war could have been different. And so I think it's important for leaders of both countries and of all of the sort of related countries, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers, to really sort of imagine off-ramps, and to imagine alternatives, and to make them possible. Whether it's through diplomacy, whether it's through other formats, I think that's the only way to prevent sort of greater escalation. What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War, in terms of how they defined what it means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war, what the leaders were doing? Is there interesting differences and similarities? Besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about World War I in the United States, and everyone still remembers Civil War. I mean, it's true. And the American Civil War defines American identity in some ways, along with the Revolution and the Second World War, more so than any other conflict. And it's a fundamentally different war. It's one because it is a civil war, because of secession, because of the Confederacy. This is a conflict happening on the territory of the United States, between Americans. And so the dynamics are really quite different. So the leaders, particularly Lincoln, have a different relationship to the home front, to civilians, than, say, Wilson or Roosevelt have in World War I and II. Also, the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar to the way we tell the story of World War II, there's a reason to actually fight the war. The way we tell the story is we're fighting for this ideal that all men are created equal, that the war is over slavery, in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about in the moment, like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion? And the same with World War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil, Hitler being evil. I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust, is how you can formulate Hitler as being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case to be made that we wouldn't see World War II as such a quote-unquote good war, that there's an atrocity that had to happen to make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative of why we get into this war. Perhaps such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I, and so that doesn't stay in the American mind. We try to sweep it under the rug, given though overall 16 million people died. So, to you, the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for ideas and fighting on the homeland, but in terms of people's participation, you know, fighting for your country, was there similarities there? Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, the Civil War in both the North and the South, troops are raised overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the North and the South, but, you know, it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through conscription. And so, in fact, you know, the mobilization for volunteers, often organized locally around individual communities or states, creates sort of multiple identities and levels of loyalty, where people both in the North and the South have loyalty both to their state regiments, to their sort of community militias, and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country, right, over the United States, and so the Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable visions of that. But, you know, that sort of nationalism that comes out of the Union after the victory in the war is a kind of crucial force shaping America ever since. So what was the neutrality period? Why did the U.S. stay out of the war for so long? Like, what was going on in that interesting, like, what made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the interesting dynamic there? I always say that the United States entered the war in April of 1917, but Americans entered it right away, right? They entered it, you know, some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the side of Britain and France. At least 50,000 joined the Canadian army or the British army and served. Millions volunteer, they sent humanitarian aid. I think in many ways modern war creates modern humanitarianism, and we can see that in the neutrality period. And even if they wanted the United States to stay out of the war, a lot of Americans get involved in it by thinking about it, caring about it, you know, arguing about it. And, you know, at the same time, they're worried that British propaganda is shaping their news system. They are worried that German espionage is undermining them. They're worried that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere in American elections and American news cycles. You know, and at the same time, a revolution is breaking out in Mexico, right? So there are sort of, you know, concerns about what's happening in the Western Hemisphere as well as what's happening in Europe. So World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it didn't. How did World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their own story in this trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen? How did the Soviet Union, Russia allow World War II to happen? And how did America allow World War II to happen? And Japan. Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right? That in some ways, in Germany, the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of World War I leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger-pointing, blame that that makes German politics very ugly. As one person puts it, brutalizes German politics. It places resentment at the core of the populace and its politics. Yeah. And, you know, so in some ways that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of resentment and hate that comes from the Nazis. You know, for the United States, in some ways, the failure to win the peace sets up the possibility for the next war, right? That the United States, you know, through Wilson is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will be the war to end all wars. But because the United States failed to join the League of Nations, you see that the United States really sort of on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story is more complicated, right? And I think it's worth bearing that in mind, that World War II is a two-front war. It starts in Asia for its own reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan, right? It is a time of massive economic expansion. A lot of that sort of economic wealth is poured into sort of greater industrialization and militarization. And so when the military wing in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s, they're in some ways flexing muscles that come out of the First World War. Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles? What's interesting about that dynamics there? Of the parties involved, of how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Is there, or again, is it inevitable? So the war ends, and very soon, even before the war is over, the United States in particular is trying to shape the peace, right? And the United States is the central actor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there, he's presiding, and he knows that he calls the shots. So he was respected. He was respected, but resentfully in some ways, by the European powers, Britain and France and Italy to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed more. They had two goals, right? They wanted to shape the imperial system in order to make sure that their fundamental economic structures wouldn't change. And they also wanted to weaken Germany as much as possible, right? So that Germany couldn't rise again. What this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of the imperial system and makes, bankrupts Germany, starves Germany, and feeds this politics of resentment that make it impossible for Germany to participate in a European order. So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that if Britain stayed out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess, and we would potentially even avoid World War II. There's kind of counterfactual history. Do you think it's possible to make the case for that? That there was a moment, especially in that case, staying out of the war for Britain, that the escalation to a global war could have been avoided, and one that ultimately ends in a deep global resentment? So where Germany is resentful not just of France or particular nations, but is resentful of the entire, I don't know how you define it, the West or something like this, the entire global world. I wish it were that easy. And I think it's useful to think in counterfactuals, what if. And if you believe, as historians do, in causation, then if that one thing causes another, then you also have to believe in counterfactuals, that if something hadn't happened, then maybe that wouldn't, you know, that would have worked differently. But I think all the things that led to World War I are multi-causal and nuanced, and this is what historians do. We make things more complicated. And so, you know, there was no one thing that could have, you know, that could have turned the tide of history, you know. And, you know, oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school, or oh, if only Fidel Castro had gotten into the major leagues, you know. Those are interesting thought experiments, but few events in history, I think, are that contingent. Well, Hitler is an example of somebody who's a charismatic leader that seems to have a really disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So, you know, if you look at Stalin, you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role. And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that there's a singular nature to Hitler, that you could play the counterfactual, that if there was no Hitler, you may have not had World War II. He, better than many leaders in history, was able to channel the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive expansion of the military, and I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans, and was able to effectively start the war. So, is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been stopped? Could we have avoided if he just got into art school? Right. Or again, do you feel like there's a current of events that was unstoppable? I mean, part of what you're talking about is, is Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader who's able to mobilize, you know, the nation, and part of it is Hitlerism, right? His own sort of individual ability to play, for example, play off his subordinates against one another to set up a system of that nature that in some ways escalates violence, including the violence that leads to the Holocaust. And some of it is also Hitlerism as a leader cult, and we see this in many other sort of things where a political movement surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable. So yes, the World War II we got would have been completely different if a different sort of faction had risen to power in Germany. But, you know, Depression-era Europe was so unstable, and democracies collapsed throughout Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, you know, whether they had charismatic totalitarian leaders or not. Have you actually read one book I just recently finished? I'd love to get your opinion from a historian perspective. There's a book called Blitzed Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Oler. It makes the case that drugs played a very large, meth essentially, played a very large role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of this book, saying that it's, kind of to what you're saying, it takes this one little variable and makes it like this explains everything. So everything about Hitler, everything about the blitzkrieg, everything about the military, the way the strategy, the decisions could be explained through drugs, or at least implies that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book, because Hitler and Nazi Germany is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history, and this was not, drugs were almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along this semi historian, because I don't think he's even a historian. A lot of his work is fiction. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. So he tells a really, that's one of the criticisms, he tells a very compelling story that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of Hitler. What are your sort of feelings and thoughts about, if you've gotten a chance to read this book, but I'm sure there's books like it, that tell an interesting perspective, singular perspective on a war? Yeah, I mean, I have read it and I also had this sort of eye-opening experience that a lot of historians did, and they're like, why didn't we think about this? And I think whether he's, you know, the author Oller is, you know, sort of not a trained academic historian, but the joy of history is like, you don't have to be one to write good history. And I don't think anyone, you know, sort of criticizes him for that. I like the book as a window into the Third Reich. You know, of course, drugs don't explain all of it, but it helps us see, you know, it helps us see the people who supported Hitler, the ways in which, you know, it was that mind-altering and performance-altering drugs were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield, the ways in which, you know, I think that we don't fully understand the extent to which the Third Reich is held together with like duct tape from a pretty early phase, by like 1940 or 41 even. You know, it's all smoke and mirrors. And I think that wartime propaganda, both Germans trying to say, you know, we're winning everything and America trying to mobilize and the other allies, you know, to mobilize against Germany, described a more formidable enemy than it really was by 1941 and 42. Yeah, I mean, I could see both cases. One is that duct tape doesn't make the man, but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape. Yeah. Because it does seem to solve a lot of problems. And I do worry that this perspective that the book presents about drugs is somehow to the mind really compelling, because it's almost like the mind, or at least my mind, searches for an answer. How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation. And drugs is one popular one when people talk about steroids in sports. The moment you introduce the topic of steroids, somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person was on steroids. Lance Armstrong. Well, it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas, certain explanations are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the full context. And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person, both for the military genius and the evil. And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do. Something about the mind, maybe it's just mind that's sticky to this. Well, drugs explain it. If the drugs didn't happen, then it would be very different. It worries me how compelling it is of an explanation. Yeah. So that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the third rank than an explanation of it. But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler, the man. For some reason, discussing his habits, especially later in the war, his practices with drugs, gives you a window into the person. It reminds you that this is a human being. Like a human being that gets emotional in the morning, gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful, sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of the human being. Somehow we construct, which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, construct an evil monster out of Hitler, when in reality, he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson there is the Solzhenitsyn lesson, which is all of us, to some degree, are capable of evil. Or maybe if you want to make it less powerful a statement, many of our leaders are capable of evil. That this Hitler is not truly singular in history. That, yeah, when the resentment of the populace matches the right charismatic leader, it's easy to make the kind of, not easy, but it's possible to frequently make the kind of initiation of military conflict that happened in World War II. By the way, because you said not a trained historian, one of the most compelling and, I don't know, entertaining and fascinating exploration of World War I comes from Dan Carlin. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the blueprint for Armageddon, which is the telling of World War I. What do you think about Dan Carlin, you yourself as a historian who has studied, who has written about World War I? Do you enjoy that kind of telling of history? Absolutely. And I think, again, you know, you don't need a PhD in history to be a historian. Does every historian agree with that? He gets quite a bit of criticism from historians. You know, I mean, we like to argue with each other and nitpick with each other, but the one thing I have no patience for is when we like pull rank on each other. You know, I think we depend on, you know, if you're a historian in a university with degrees and research materials, you know, you depend on the work of people in some local community like recording oral history, saving documents. And history is a social science, but it's also a storytelling art. And, you know, history books are the ones you find on the shelves and bookstores that people read for fun. And you can appreciate both the knowledge production as well as the storytelling. And when you get a good oral storyteller like Dan Carlin, there's a reason that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people tune in. Yeah, but he definitely suffers from anxiety about getting things correct. It's very difficult. Well, our first job is to get the facts correct and then to tell the story off of those. But the facts are so fuzzy. So, I mean, you have probably my favorite telling of World War II is William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or at least not telling of Nazi Germany. And that goes to primary sources a lot, which is like, I suppose that's the honest way to do it. But it's tough. It's really tough to write that way, to really go to primary sources always. And I think that one of the things that Dan tries to do, which is also really tough to do, perhaps easier in oral history, is try to make you feel what it was like to be there. Which I think he does by trying to tell the story of individual soldiers. And do you find that telling, like individual citizens, do you find that kind of telling of history compelling? Yeah, I mean, I think we need historical imagination. And I think historical imagination teaches something very valuable, which is humility and to realize that there are other people who've lived on this planet, and they organized their lives differently, and they made it through just fine too. And I think that that kind of meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting people unlike you in the present. Unlike you, but also like you. I think both are humbling. One, realizing that they did live in a different space and time, but two, realizing that if you were placed in that space and time, you might have done all the same things, whether it's the brave, good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, absolutely. And you get also a sense of possibility. There's this famous line, right, that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. But I think the other half is true as well, which is those who do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it. We're not the first people on this planet to face any certain kinds of problems. Other people have lived through worlds like this one before. It's like when you fall in love as a teenager for the first time, and then there's a breakup. You think it's the greatest tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person. Even though like Romeo and Juliet and so on had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it is. We have lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism, which I think is at the core of I Want You poster. Is nationalism destructive or empowering to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis, has slowly parted ways. Somehow nationalism is when patriotism gone bad or something like this. Yeah, they're different. Patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion and a feeling of love of country, literally. And in some ways, that's a necessary condition to participate in nationalism. Whether to me, I think nationalism is crucial in a world organized around nation states, and you have to sort of believe that you are engaged in a common project together. And so in the contemporary United States, in some ways that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past. But you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, and you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom you share this nation, and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or going to war to defend them. That's a vision of what we might call civic nationalism. That's the good version. The question is whether you can have that without having exclusionary nationalism, hating the other, fearing the other, saying, yeah, you're part of this nation against all others. And I think there's a long tradition in America of a very inclusive nationalism that is open, inclusive, welcoming, and new people to the shared project. That's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalism is based on, you know, ethnic hatreds and others that we see throughout the world. Those are things to be afraid of. But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the big umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom, and everybody else is against freedom and against human nature, and it just so happens that it's half and half split across the world. So that's imperialism. That feels like it beats the drum of war. Yeah, and I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture, and certainly, you know, the United States as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something than to clarify exactly what we're for. Yeah, yeah. The Cold War, China today. That's not only the United States, I suppose that's human nature. We need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war. Yes, or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference. You know, you compete with competitors. You fight with enemies. Yeah, with competitors is a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition. What lessons, what are the biggest lessons you take away from World War I? Maybe we talked about several, but you know, you look back at the 20th century, what, as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization, about history from looking at this war? I think the lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And at the end of the day, in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. And in the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives. They did, and people who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that, right? And it sort of, you know, reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the world. Yeah, the cost of a death of a single soldier is not just, or a single civilian, is not just the cost of that single life. It's the resentment, that the anger, the hate that reverberates throughout. One of the things I saw in Ukraine is the birth of, at scale, of generational hate, not towards administrations or leaders, but towards entire peoples. And that hate, I mean, overnight, that hate is created, and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate. It takes decades, and it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert that hate into other places. One of the biggest things I thought was not part of the calculus, and when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, is the creation of hate. When you drop a bomb, even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers, which in that case, it didn't, there's a very large amount of civilians. What does that do to the, yeah, like, how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single bomb you drop? And I calculate that, like, literally, in the Pentagon, have a chart, how many people will hate us, how many people does it take? Do some science here. How many people does it take, when you have a million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists? How many of them will do something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United States, will do something that will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot, a chart. It was more about short-term effects. Yes, it's, again, it's the idea of using military force to solve political problems, the idea of using military force to solve political problems. And I think there's a squandering of goodwill that people have around the world toward the United States. You know, that's a respect for its economy, for its consumer products, and so forth. And I think that's been lost, a lot of that. Do you think leaders can stop war? I have, perhaps, a romantic notion, perhaps, because I do these podcasts in person and so on, that leaders that get in a room together and can talk, they can stop war. I mean, that's the power of a leader, especially one in an authoritarian regime, that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions associated with the ego. Yes, leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand from the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped. So the people ultimately have a really big say. They do. You know, that it was mass movements by people in the United States for the nuclear freeze, in Russia, pushing for openness that brought, for example, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to Reykjavik to sort of debate, you know, and eventually sort of put caps on nuclear weapons. You know, those two people did, you know, made choices in the room that made that possible. But they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people. Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a lot of responsibility on the German people, for example. In both wars, we fans of history tend to conceive of history as a meeting of leaders. We think of Chamberlain, we think of Churchill and the importance of them in the Second World War. I think about Hitler and Stalin and think that if certain conversations happened, they could have, the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many times Hitler and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient, they could have been easily stopped. And the pacifists, the people who believed Hitler, were foolish enough to believe Hitler, didn't act properly. And if the leaders just woke up to that idea, in fact, Churchill is a kind of representation of that. But in your conception here, it's possible that Churchill was also a representation of the British people, even though seemingly unpopular. That force was, they gave birth to somebody like Churchill, who said, we'll never surrender, right? Yes. She'll fight in the beaches. Yes. And I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader who has his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. And it's a dynamic art of leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're bound by them. Well, then if we conceive of history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents. You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in a couple of years here, or in one year, called the History of American Presidential Elections. So if the people are in part responsible for leaders, how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today? So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles, I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation than we were in the past? What do you understand about the American citizen in the beginning of this century from the leaders we have elected? Yes, obviously we are a divided country in our rhetoric, in our day-to-day politics, but we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history, right? The most obvious, of course, being the American Civil War, 150 years ago. And the distinction is not just that we haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally one society, one economy, and deeply integrated as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like the American people in the past. That look nothing like the United States in 1861. Will political rhetoric continue to be extreme? Of course, but we're not as divided as people think we are. Well, then if you actually look throughout human history, does it always get, so outside of the people, do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been? So there's a kind of perception that has been very close and there's a lot of accusations, a lot of tensions, it's very heated, it's almost fueling the machine of division. Has that often been the case? It has. We are, it has and it hasn't. I mean, I do think right now is different. And there it's worth distinguishing, are there deep social or economic divisions, which I don't actually think that there are, versus partisanship in particular, sort of the rivalry between the two parties. And it's very clear that we are in an era of what political scientists call hyper-partisanship, and that the two parties have taken sort of fundamentally different positions and moved further apart from one another. And that is what I think people talk about when they say our country is divided. So the country may not be divided even if our politics are highly partisan. That is a divergence from other time periods in our history. So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually an illusion of division. I sometimes feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals. And the things that people allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's like a media machine and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And because of that, somehow, I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted for. There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or a bug. Whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to, even if there's not a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can always have a tension of ideas in order to make progress, to figure out how to progress as a nation. I think we're figuring that out in real time. On the one hand, it's easy to say that it's a feature of a political system that has two parties. And the United States is in some ways unique in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways, you would think that would be the feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights. That said, we can even see in parliamentary systems and all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of irreconcilable division, a kind of politics of emotion, are proliferating around the world. Some of that, as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social media, and other formats. So I don't know that other countries are experiencing sort of political conflict. I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. So I've had the fortune of being intellectually active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election, then the Obama, and it's just every election since. And it seems like a large percentage of those elections, there's been a claim that the elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy, corruption, malevolence on the other side. I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016, a lot of people I know said that election was rigged, and there's different explanations, including Russian influence. But I don't know that there's influence. And then in 2020, I was just running in Austin, along the river, and somebody said like, oh, huge fan of the podcast. And they said, like, what do you think of this is just not right, what's happening in this country, that the 2020 election was obviously rigged, from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. Do you think there's a case to be made for and against each claim, in the full context of history, of our elections being rigged? I think the American election system is fundamentally sound and reliable. And I think that the evidence is clear for that, regardless of which election you're looking at, in some ways, whether you look at a presidential election, or even a local county election for right, that the amount of sort of time and resources and precision that go into voter registration, vote counting, certification processes, are crucial to democratic institutions. I think when someone says rigged, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're coming from, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a complex system. So on the left, when they say rigged, they may be pointing to a wide range of ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering, misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say rigged, they may be concerned about voter security, about ways in which the mainstream media may control messages. In both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as, my vote didn't get counted right. But the deeper concern is, my vote doesn't count. My voice isn't being heard. So no, I don't think the elections are rigged. So let me sort of push back, right? There's a comfort to the story that they're not rigged. And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories say, sure, it's nice to be comfortable, but here's the reality. And the thing they articulate is there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have nonstop close elections. There's so many financial interests. There's so many powerful people. Surely you can construct, not just with the media and all the ways you described both on the left and the right, that elections could be rigged, but literally, actually in a fully illegal way, manipulate the results of votes. Surely there's incentive to do that. And I don't think that's a totally ridiculous argument. Because it's like, all right, well, I mean, it actually lands to the question, which is a hard question for me to ask, because ultimately as an optimist of how many malevolent people out there and how many malevolent people are required to rig an election. So how many, what is the phase transition for a system to become from like a corruption light to corruption, to high level of corruption? Such that you could do things like rig elections, which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world even today. So yes, there is interference in elections and there has been in American history, right? And we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas in the 1960s or LBJ to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections. And there are incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential as hyper-partisanship makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of black and white or life and death. And you will see people organizing every way they can to shape elections. We saw this in the 1850s when settlers, pro and anti-slavery, flooded into Kansas to try to determine the outcome of an election. We see this in the reconstruction period when the Ku Klux Klan shows up to block the doors for black voters in the South. This history is not new, it's there. I think the reason why I think that the system is sound is not... Or the reason... When I say I believe that the election system is fundamentally sound, I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency. I'm saying this is something that we need to do and to work on. So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust. Even if there is corruption, even if there is rigging, the force that corrects itself corrects and ensures that nobody gets out of line is much stronger than the other incentives, which are the corrupting incentives. That's the thing I talked about corrupt... Visiting Ukraine, talking about corruption, where a lot of people talk about corruption as being a symptom. If the system creates the incentives for there to be corruption, humans will always go for corruption. That's just... You have to assume that. The power of the United States is that it constructs systems that prevent you from being corrupt at scale. At least, I mean, depends what you believe. Most of us, if you believe in this country, you have to... You believe in the self-correcting mechanisms of corruption, that even if that desire is in the human heart, the system resists it, prevents it. That's your current belief. Yes, as of today. But I do think that that will require oversight by institutions, ideally ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics, which is very difficult right now. And it will require the demands of the American people, that they want these elections to be fair and secure. And that means being willing to lose them, regardless of which party you're in favor of. So what do you think about the power of the media to create partisanship? I'm really worried that there's a huge incentive, speaking of incentives, to divide the country. The media and the politicians, I'm not sure where it originates, but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a very cynical perspective on journalism, but it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly as possible, you're gonna maximize the number of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to elect people that are gonna be the most divisive maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not beyond either feeding, or if you want to be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that lead that division, like the narrative of an election being rigged. Because if you convinced half the populace that the election was completely rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot of clicks. And the very cynical view is I don't know if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy in service of getting more clicks. It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks, just because the fire as the thing burns down will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame on the media here? The machine of it? You're diagnosing the incentive structure, you're depicting that with 100% accuracy. But I think history teaches that you might be giving the media too much causal power. That the American people are smarter than the media that they consume. And even today, we know that. People who consume, even people who consume just Fox or just MSNBC know what they're consuming. Right? And so I don't think that media will be the solution. And I certainly don't think that returning to a media structure of the mid 20th century with three news channels that all tell us one story, that's no golden age that we're trying to get back to, for sure. Well, there is a novel thing in human history, which is Twitter and social media and so on. So we're trying to find our footing as a nation to figure out how to think about politics, how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of democracy, of our interaction with government and so on on this new media or medium of social media. How do you think Twitter changed things? Do you think Twitter is good for democracy? Do you think it has changed what it means to be an American citizen? Or is it just the same old media mechanism? It has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It may have changed the day-to-day sound of being and the experience of it. It got noisier, it got louder, and it got more decentered. I think Twitter is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a fundamentally democratic platform, and in some ways it democratizes institutions that had gatekeepers and authority figures for a very long time. But on the other hand, it's not a democratic institution at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and it operates under those principles. And so that said, it's an institution of American and global life, and that the people of the United States have the authority to regulate or reshape as they see fit, both that and other major media players. One of the most dramatic decisions that illustrate both sides of what you're saying is when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that was a good idea, and make the case that that was a bad idea? Can you see both perspectives on this? Yes. I think, I mean, the simple fact of the matter is, you know, Twitter is a platform. It has rules of service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had violated the terms of service and blocked him, right? And if you have rules, you have to enforce them. Did it have, you know, consequences? It had direct and predictable consequences, you know, that of creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken a side in politics, or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended consequences? You know, this is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended consequences. And we don't know, you know, sort of what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from various media platforms under these notions, right, that they had violated terms of service, etc. So, you know, so I guess we'll see. Well, to me, so I'm generally against censorship, but to take Twitter's perspective, it's unclear to me, in terms of unintended consequences, whether censoring a human being from being part of your platform is going to decrease or increase the amount of hate in the world. So, there's a strong case to be made that banning somebody like Donald Trump increases the amount of resentment among people, and that's a very large number of people that support him, or even love him, or even see him as a great president, one of the greatest this country has had. And so, if you completely suppress his voice, you're going to intensify the support that he has from just the regular support for another human being who ran for president to somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that set of people. Now, the flip side is removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump might lessen the megaphone of that particular person, might actually level the democratic notion that everybody has a voice. So, basically, removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving the center, the calm, the thoughtful voices more power. And so, in that sense, that teaches a lesson that don't be crazy in any one direction. Don't go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler, don't, like, you have to stay in the middle. There's divisions in the middle, there's discussions in the middle, but stay in the middle. That's sort of the steel man, the case for censoring. But I, boy, is censorship a slippery slope. And also, boys, Twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company. It seems like it's a medium of communication that we use for information, for knowledge, for wisdom, even. During the period of COVID, we used it to gain an understanding of what the hell is going on, what should we do, what's the state of the art science. Science fundamentally transformed during the time of COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle that science usually goes through. And some of the best sources of information for me, from the conspiracy theory to the best doctors, was Twitter. The data, the stats, all that kind of stuff. And that feels like more than a company. And then Twitter and YouTube and different places, Twitter and YouTube and different places took a really strong stance on COVID, which is the lazy stance, in my opinion, which is we're gonna listen to whatever CDC or the institutions have said. But the reality is, you're an institution of your own now. You're kind of the press. You're like, there's a, it's a really difficult position. It's a really, really difficult position to take. But I wish they have stepped up and take on the full responsibility and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech. Yes, they need to do that. But I'm struck by some of the things that you said, ways in which in which Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think in a democratic society, democratic polities should cede that power to for-profit companies. Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has that power? Because my sense is Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power to start wars, to change the direction of elections. Maybe in the sense in the ways in which a wave has the power to wash away sand. It's still the medium. It's not in itself an actor. It's how actors use the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the platform and access to it. Unfortunately, it's not, maybe it's similar to the wave. It's not just a medium. It's a medium plus. It's a medium that enables virality, that benefits from virality of engagement. And that means singular voices can have a disproportionate impact. Like not even voices, singular ideas, dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so that actually threatens, it's almost like, I don't know what the equivalent is in nature, but it's a wave that can grow exponentially because of the intensity of the, the initial intensity of the wave. I don't know how to describe this as a dynamical system, but it feels like, it feels like there is a responsibility there not to accelerate voices just because they get a lot of engagement. You have to have a proportional representation of that voice. But you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that. A strong democracy can and should and will be. I mean, I think the other thing a historian will tell you about Twitter is that this too shall pass, right? But I do think, you know, the structures of the platform, of the algorithm, of this and other major players are eligible for scrutiny by democratic institutions. So in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections leading up to the 2024 elections, so one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass. So don't make everything about, this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to be like the message of every single election as I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump, what do you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the tension will grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think it'll be like AOC versus Trump or whoever, whatever the most drama-maximizing thing, or will things stabilize? I think I can, you know, historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict this one, that it will not be a calm and stabilized election. I think as of the time that we're talking in 2022, we don't, there are too many sort of open questions, particularly about whether Joe Biden will run for re-election. He says he will, but the jury I think is out on that. You know, I can't predict whether Donald Trump will run for election or not. I think, you know, we do know that President Trump doesn't like to start things he can't win, and if the polling data suggests that he's not a credible candidate, he might be reluctant to enter the race and might find more appealing the kind of sideline, kind of kingmaker role that he's been crafting since he left the White House. You know, I think there are plenty of people who are, you know, dreaming that there's some sort of centrist candidate, you know, whether it's a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican who will, you know, save us from all of this, either within the party or in a third-party run. I don't think that's likely. Why aren't we getting them? Why don't you think it's likely? What's the explanation? There seems to be a general hunger for a person like this. You would, but the system sorts it out, right? You know, that the primary systems and the party, you know, party candidate selection systems, you know, will favor sort of more, you know, more partisan views, right? More conservative Republicans, more liberal Democrats as the kind of center candidates. It seems like the system prefers mediocre leaders, mediocre partisan leaders, if I take a cynical look, but maybe I'm romanticizing the leaders of the past, and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past. Yeah, I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century. Okay, and the 20th. Well, let me ask you about platforming. Do you think, Donald, it's the Twitter question, but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald Trump on this podcast. As a historian, what would you advise? I think, I mean, you know, this is a difficult question, right? For historians who want, you know, sort of want to make sure that they know sort of what Americans are thinking and talking about, you know, four centuries later. So one of the things that, you know, at least my understanding is that when President Trump was banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted. And that is one of the most valuable sources that historians will use to understand the era. And parts of it were sort of, you know, archived and reconstructed. But, you know, but in that sense, I think that that is also a real loss to the historical record. And I mean, I think that your podcast shows you'll talk to anyone. So I'm here, right? Right, right. So, you know, I'm not in the business of saying, you know, don't talk to me. That's one of the difficult things when I think about Hitler. I think Hitler, Stalin, I don't know if World War I quite has the same intensity of controversial leaders. But one of the sad things from a historian perspective is how few interviews Hitler has given or Stalin has given. And that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that talking to Donald Trump, that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin, is really valuable from a historical perspective to understand. But then you think about the moment when you talk to him, but then you think about the momentary impact of such a conversation. And you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you could steer or flame, what is it, feed the flame of war or conflict or abuses of power and things like this. And that's, I think, the tension between the journalist and the historian. Because when journalists interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me is they're often very critical of the dictator. They're basically attacking them in front of their face as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're doing is they're signaling to the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind of thing. But that's not very productive. And it's also why the dictators and leaders often don't do those interviews. It's not productive to understand who the human being is. To understand, you have to empathize. Because few people, I think, few leaders do something from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good. And not even for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing good for the people around them. And for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing great for the, they're doing the right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And to understand that, you have to, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them. I bet if you legitimately poll people in North Korea, they will believe that their leader is doing the right thing for their country. And so to understand that, you have to empathize. So that's the tension of the journalist, I think, and the historian. Because obviously the historian doesn't care. They really want to, they care obviously deeply. But they know that history requires deep understanding of the human being in the full context. Yeah, it's a tough decision to make. Yeah. Well, I think it's both for journalists and historians, the challenge is not to be too close to your subject, right? And not to be overly influenced and used by them, right? When you're talking to a living subject, which historians do, too, it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate their story with the rest of the record, right? And that may paint a different picture of the person, and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from kind of just telling someone else's story. And historians also have the benefit of going back 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out, playing two truths and a lie, which parts are accurate, which are not. And journalists do that work in a day-to-day basis. But historians, we get a little more time to think about what we're doing. Well, I personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace, to people, to censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people. Like, that you owe, I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country a deep empathy and understanding of the leaders they support, even if you disagree with what they say. I mean, that's the... To me, I'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship. To having a good conversation with Donald Trump is ultimately valuable, because I think, especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a singular person. He represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have. And whatever those feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people, but also talking to the man. And then seeing the interplay there, what does this really represent in this period in history, in this slice of the world? Yeah, ultimately understanding, I think, leads to compassion and love and unity, which is how this whole thing progresses. The tension between the different sides is useful to have a good conversation, but ultimately coming up with the right answer and progressing towards that answer is how you make progress. Do you think a pure democracy can work? So we have this representative democracy with these contentious elections and so on. When we start a civilization on Mars, which becomes more and more realistic technologically, we can have a more direct access to be able to vote on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think it can work? I don't think we have to go to Mars to do it. I think the answer is not to flip a switch and turn on something called pure democracy when people are not ready for it, when their incentive structures are not sort of structured for it. But you can experiment with more democratic forms of governance, one after another, whether it's experimenting with technology to find new ways of getting greater rates of participation in democracy. I think that we see some experiments in more complicated systems of voting that, in fact, might actually be more reflective of people's choices than simply picking one candidate, sort of rank choice voting or runoffs, other kinds of things. I think that we can think more creatively about something like participatory budgeting, in which we put all this money into the government and then we should, as a people, there are more democratic ways of how we spend it. I think the most urgent, in some level, is a more democratic form of foreign policy making, that foreign policy making, decision making about the military, about foreign policy, is in many ways insulated from popular participation in modern American history. I think technology is not going to solve this. It's a combination of technology and human creativity. But I think we can start heading that direction. Whether we get there before we get to Mars, I don't know. What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals of the history of American elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class? And how will those fundamentals be met by the students that receive that wisdom? So what do you think about this, Dan? It's such an interesting idea, and I hope you do go through with this kind of idea, is look at the history while the next one is happening. Yes. I think it's worth remembering that the students who are typical American students who's in college right now, has lived their entire life after the election of 2000 and Bush v. Gore. After 9-11, probably. And yeah, absolutely. After all of these things. So on the one hand, they take partisanship and contentious elections for granted. They don't, I think, share sort of some vision that things used to be different. They don't remember a world that had lots of moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans running around in it. But in some ways, it's a way of looking back into the past to find other ways of organizing our politics. It's also a way of reassuring students that we have been through contentious and even violent elections before in our history, and that people have defended the right to vote. People have risked their lives to vote. I think they will understand that as well. And maybe knowledge of history here can help de-escalate the emotions you might feel about one candidate or another. And from a place of calmness, you can more easily arrive at wisdom. That's my hope. Yeah. Just as a brief aside, you—brief aside, but nevertheless—you wrote the book Bound by War that describes a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this slice of geography and power, so most crucially through the partnership between the United States and the Philippines, can you tell us some aspect of the story that is often perhaps not considered when you start to look more at the geopolitics of Europe and Soviet Union and the United States? How did the war in the Pacific define the 20th century? Yeah, I came to this book Bound by War from a sense that our stories were too lopsided toward Europe, that American history, when viewed from the Pacific, specifically in the 20th century, helps us understand American power in some new ways. Not only American projection of power into Asia, but also the ways in which American power affected people in Asia, either in places like the Philippines, where the United States had a colony for almost 50 years, or Asian Americans, people who had migrated or their descendants in the United States. And those linkages between the United States and Asia, particularly the US-Philippine connection, I think were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century, because it's a way, kind of a new way of seeing American power in the 20th century. And I think that's one of the new ways of seeing American power from a different angle, you see it in that way. What are some aspects that define America from when you take the perspective of the Pacific? What military conflict and the asymmetry of power there? Right, so I start in 1898, with the US invasion of the Philippines, its conquest and annexation. And I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century that's often completely overlooked, or described, I think incorrectly as merely a war with Spain, right? That the war in the Philippines is our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. It's a form of counterinsurgency. You know, this is the US army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again, in the Second World War, in Korea, Vietnam, and even after 9-11. Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history? Well, that's the interesting part, right, is that the book focuses in particular on Filipinos who fight with the Americans who fought, you know, sort of in the US Army and Navy over the course of the 20th century. And they are in a fundamentally ironic position, right? They are from the Philippines, and they're fighting for the United States, which is the colonial power occupying their country. And I think that that irony persists, right? So if you look at sort of polling data, where they ask people all around the world, you know, do you think positively or negatively about the United States, that the highest responses are from the Philippines, right? Filipinos view the United States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right? They think more favorably of Americans than Americans do. And so, you know, sort of unpacking that irony is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book. What was the People Power Revolution, and what lessons can we learn from it? You kind of assign an important, a large value to it, in terms of what we can learn for the American project. Yeah, so in 1986, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, is overthrown by a popular revolution known as People Power, in the wake of a contested and probably almost certainly rigged election that sort of, you know, confirms his rule. When that is overturned through sort of mass movements in the Philippines, it's also sort of confirmed in many ways by the reluctance of the United States to intervene, to prop up a Cold War ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout his administration. The Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan's president at the time, basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for Reagan himself. But he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative political, sort of foreign policy voices, in particular, Paul Wolfowitz in the State Department and others, who see sort of movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of take fire in the late 20th century in Latin America, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, and, you know, all around the world until it hits the wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. What's that wall? What do you mean by it hits the wall? So there are global movements for democratization, for opening up throughout the world, starting in the 1980s. And, you know, obviously they continue in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You know, I say it hits the wall in China with the protests in Tiananmen Square that are blocked and that are crushed, and I think represent a real sort of turning point in the history of democratic institutions on a global scale in the late 20th century. So there's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not. And that's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century. No, I think the lesson is maybe one that, you know, we talked about earlier, that there's this dynamic dance between leaders, whether totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements, and the people that they're leading. And, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Let me ask a big ridiculous question, because we talked about sort of presidential elections. Now, this is objectively, definitively, you have to answer one person, who's the greatest president in American history? Oh, that's easy. Abraham Lincoln. Is that easy? Not George Washington? You know, Washington had the statesman qualities. He understood his power as the first president. Also relinquished power? He was willing to relinquish power. But Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, a fundamental moral character, and just the ability to kind of fight the fight of politics, to play the game of it, to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, to kind of, you know, make to, you know, to work with his enemies, to block them when he had to. And, you know, I mean, he gets the United States through the Civil War, so you got to give him some credit for that. And he's pretty good at making speeches. You know, obviously it helps that he's a remarkable speaker and able to convey those kinds of visions. But, you know, but he is first and foremost a politician, and probably the best one we have. The best one we have. Both at getting elected and at ruling. In some ways better at the doing than at the getting elected, right? You know, that he, you know, the election of 1860 is a, it's just a hot mess, you know, that could have worked out many different ways. And even the election of 1864, you know, when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected. So, you know, both times he sort of, you know, he's not a master campaigner by any means, but he was a master politician as a governor. Do we have leaders like that today? Is it, so one perspective is like, leaders aren't, ain't what they used to be. And then another perspective is, well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past. We forget the flaws and remember the great moments. Yeah, both of those things are true, right? On the one hand, you know, we don't, we are not surrounded by people of Lincoln's caliber right now. That feels like the case. And I think that, I think we can say that with some certainty. But, you know, I always like to point to President Harry Truman, who left office with, you know, some truly abysmal presidential ratings, was dismissed as a, throughout his presidency, as a, you know, as unqualified, as not knowing what he was doing, etc. And then, you know, turns out, with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood. Better at getting elected, right? You remember that sign, do we defeat Truman, right? He showed them, right? And better at holding power and better at sort of, you know, kind of building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone, demonstrated that he won the long game. And some of that is the victors do write the story. And I ask myself very much, how will history remember Vladimir Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember Putin? That too, is not obvious. Because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics, the, how the nations, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold, rather. So, it's very interesting to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and so on. I think it's probably an unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be remembered as a great president from this time. You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people, and they do, but it's unclear. It's fascinating to think about when the robots finally take over, what, which of the humans they will appreciate the most. Let me ask for advice. Do you have advice for young folks, as they, because you mentioned, the folks you're teaching, they don't even, they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the thing to load up. Every single web page is suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes, and then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone. They don't know any of that. So, for those young folks that look at the contentious elections, that look at our contentious world, our divided world, what advice would you give them of how to have a career they can be proud of, let's say they're in college or in high school, and how to have a life they can be proud of? A life they can be proud of. Oh, man, that's a big question. Yeah, I've never given a graduation speech. This is like warm-up. Let's look for raw materials before you write it. If I did, I think I would advise students that history teaches that you should be more optimistic than your current surroundings suggest. I think it would be very easy as a young person today to think, there's nothing I can do about this politics. There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle. There's nothing I can do about the planet, etc., and just give up. I think history teaches that we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run, but we know that the people who give up are always the losers. So don't give in to cynicism or apathy. Optimism paves the way. Yeah, because human beings are deeply resilient and creative, even under far more difficult circumstances than we face right now. Well, let me ask a question that you don't even need to, that you wouldn't even dare cover in your graduation commencement speech. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This whole project that history studies and analyzes as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point? All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human or reach for a higher ideal. Why? Why do you think we're here? I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian to the clergy, clergy. But in the end, there's less distance between the two than you think. If you think about some of the answers to that question, what is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions, often they have a fundamentally historical core. It's about unifying the past and the present in some other non-earthly dimension. So I think there is that. I think even for people who don't have religious belief, there's a way in which history is about the shared human condition. And I think historians historians aspire to telling all of that story. We drill down on the miseries of war and depressions and so forth, but the story is not complete without blueberries and butterflies and all the rest that go with it. So both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history that we're in this together. Christopher, this is a huge honor. This is an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us back to a war that not often discussed, but in many ways define the 20th century and the century we are in today, which is the first world war. The war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the future wars and defines our struggle to try to avoid World War III. So it's a huge honor you talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capozzola. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about World War I that haunted the rest of the 20th century. This is a war to end all wars. George Santana, a Spanish American philosopher responded to this quote in 1922 by saying, only the dead have seen the end of war. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/SK4kMPmgKW0

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Elon Musk: What's Outside the Simulation? | AI Podcast Clips

So when maybe you or somebody else creates an AGI system and you get to ask her one question, what would that question be? What's outside the simulation? And then this impression occurred.

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Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast #302

Let me ask you to this question, whether it's bell curve or any research on race differences, can that be used to increase the amount of racism in the world? Can that be used to increase the amount of hate in the world? My sense is there is such enormous reservoirs of hate and racism that have nothing to do with scientific knowledge of the data that speak against that. That, no, I don't wanna give racist groups a veto power over what scientists study. The following is a conversation with Richard Heyer on the science of human intelligence. This is a highly controversial topic, but a critically important one for understanding the human mind. I hope you will join me in not shying away from difficult topics like this, and instead, let us try to navigate it with empathy, rigor, and grace. If you're watching this on video now, I should mention that I'm recording this introduction in an undisclosed location somewhere in the world. I'm safe and happy, and life is beautiful. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Heyer. What are the measures of human intelligence, and how do we measure it? Everybody has an idea of what they mean by intelligence. In the vernacular, what I mean by intelligence is just being smart, how well you reason, how well you figure things out, what you do when you don't know what to do. Those are just kinda everyday common sense definitions of how people use the word intelligence. If you wanna do research on intelligence, measuring something that you can study scientifically is a little trickier. And what almost all researchers who study intelligence use is the concept called the G factor, general intelligence. And that is what is common. That is a mental ability that is common to virtually all tests of mental abilities. What's the origin of the term G factor, by the way? It's such a funny word for such a fundamental human thing. The general factor, I really started with Charles Spearman. And he noticed, this is like, boy, more than 100 years ago. He noticed that when you tested people with different tests, all the tests were correlated positively. And so he was looking at student exams and things, and he invented the correlation coefficient, essentially. And when he used it to look at student performance on various topics, he found all the scores were correlated with each other, and they were all positive correlations. So he inferred from this that there must be some common factor that was irrespective of the content of the test. And positive correlation means if you do well on the first test, you're likely to do well on the second test, and presumably that holds for tests across even disciplines. So not within subject, but across subjects. So that's where the general comes in. Something about general intelligence. So when you were talking about measuring intelligence and trying to figure out something difficult about this world and how to solve the puzzles of this world, that means generally speaking, not some specific test, but across all tests. Absolutely right, and people get hung up on this because they say, well, what about the ability to do X? Isn't that independent? And they said, I know somebody who's very good at this, but not so good at this, this other thing. And so there are a lot of examples like that, but it's a general tendency. So exceptions really don't disprove. You know, your everyday experience is not the same as what the data actually show. And your everyday experience, when you say, oh, I know someone who's good at X, but not so good at Y, that doesn't contradict the statement of about, he's not so good, but he's not the opposite. It's not a negative correlation. Okay, so we're not, our anecdotal data, I know a guy who's really good at solving some kind of visual thing. That's not sufficient for us to understand, actually, the depths of that person's intelligence. So how this idea of G factor, how much evidence is there, how strong, you know, given across the decades that this idea has been around, how much has it been held up that there's a universal sort of horsepower of intelligence that's underneath all of it, all the different tests we do to try to get to this thing in the depths of the human mind that's a universal, stable measure of a person's intelligence? You used a couple of words in there, stable. We have to be precise with words? I was hoping we can get away with being poetic. We can. There's a lot about research in general, not just intelligence research, that is poetic. Science has a poetic aspect to it, and good scientists are very intuitive. They're not just, hey, these are the numbers. You have to kind of step back and see the big picture. When it comes to intelligence research, you asked how well has this general concept held up? And I think I can say, without fear of being empirically contradicted, that it is the most replicated finding in all of psychology. Now, some cynics may say, well, big deal, psychology. We all know there's a replication crisis in psychology, and a lot of this stuff doesn't replicate. That's all true. There is no replication crisis when it comes to studying the existence of this general factor. Let me tell you some things about it. It looks like it's universal, that you find it in all cultures. The way you find it, step back one step, the way you find it is to give a battery of mental tests. What battery? You choose. Take a battery of any mental tests you want, give it to a large number of diverse people, and you will be able to extract statistically the commonality among all those tests. It's done by a technique called factor analysis. People think that this may be a statistical artifact of some kind. It is not a statistical artifact. What is factor analysis? Factor analysis is a way of looking at a big set of data and look at the correlation among the different test scores and then find empirically the clusters of scores that go together. And there are different factors. So if you have a bunch of mental tests, there may be a verbal factor, there may be a numerical factor, there may be a visual spatial factor, but those factors have variants in common with each other. And that is the common, that's what's common among all the tests, and that's what gets labeled the G factor. So if you give a diverse battery of mental tests and you extract a G factor from it, that factor usually accounts for around half of the variants. It's the single biggest factor, but it's not the only factor. But it is the most reliable, it is the most stable, and it seems to be very much influenced by genetics. It's very hard to change the G factor with training or drugs or anything else. We don't know how to increase the G factor. Okay, you said a lot of really interesting things there. So first, just to get people used to it in case they're not familiar with this idea, G factor is what we mean. So often there's this term used, IQ, which is the way IQ is used, they really mean G factor in regular conversation. Because what we mean by IQ, we mean intelligence, and what we mean by intelligence, we mean general intelligence. And general intelligence in the human mind from a psychology, from a serious, rigorous scientific perspective actually means G factor. So G factor equals intelligence, just in this conversation to define terms. Okay, so there's this stable thing called G factor. You said, now, factor, you said factor many times, means a measure that potentially could be reduced to a single number across the different factors you mentioned. And what you said, it accounts for half, half-ish. Accounts for half-ish of what? Of variance across the different set of tests. So if you do for some reason well on some set of tests, what does that mean? So that means there's some unique capabilities outside of the G factor that might account for that. And what are those? What else is there besides the raw horsepower, the engine inside your mind that generates intelligence? There are test-taking skills, there are specific abilities. Someone might be particularly good at mathematical things, mathematical concepts, even simple arithmetic. Some people are much better than others. You might know people who can memorize, and short-term memory is another component of this. Short-term memory is one of the cognitive processes that's most highly correlated with the G factor. So- So all those things like memory, test-taking skills account for variability across the test performances. But you say you can run, but you can't hide from the thing that God gave you, the genetics. So that G factor, science says that G factor's there. Each one of us have- Each one of us has a G factor. Oh boy. Some have more than others. I'm getting uncomfortable already. Well, IQ is a score. And an IQ score is a very good estimate of the G factor. You can't measure G directly. There's no direct measure. You estimate it from these statistical techniques. But an IQ score is a good estimate. Why? Because a standard IQ test is a battery of different mental abilities. You combine it into one score, and that score is highly correlated with the G factor, even if you get better scores on some subtests than others. Because again, it's what's common to all these mental abilities. So a good IQ test, and I'll ask you about that, but a good IQ test tries to compress down that battery of tests, like tries to get a nice battery, the nice selection of variable tests into one test. And so in that way, it sneaks up to the G factor. And that's another interesting thing about G factor. Now you give, first of all, you have a great book on the neuroscience of intelligence. You have a great course, which is one I first learned. You're a great teacher, let me just say. Thank you. Your course at the teaching company, I hope I'm saying that correctly. The Intelligent Brain. The Intelligent Brain is when I first heard about this G factor, this mysterious thing that lurks in the darkness that we cannot quite shine a light on, we're trying to sneak up on. So the fact that there's this measure, stable measure of intelligence, we can't measure directly. But we can come up with a battery test or one test that includes a battery of variable type of questions that can reliably or attempt to estimate in a stable way that G factor. That's a fascinating idea. So for me as an AI person, it's fascinating. It's fascinating there's something stable like that about the human mind, especially if it's grounded in genetics. It's both fascinating that as a researcher of the human mind and all the human psychological, sociological, ethical questions that start arising, it makes me uncomfortable. But truth can be uncomfortable. I get that a lot about being uncomfortable talking about this. Let me go back and just say one more empirical thing. It doesn't matter which battery of tests you use. So there are countless tests. You can take any 12 of them at random, extract a G factor and another 12 at random and extract a G factor. And those G factors will be highly correlated like over 0.9 with each other. That's very, so it is a ubiquitous. It doesn't depend on the content of the test is what I'm trying to say. It is general among all those tests of mental ability. And tests of mental abilities include things like, geez, playing poker. Your skill at poker is not unrelated to G. Your skill at anything that requires reasoning and thinking, anything, spelling, arithmetic, more complex things. This concept is ubiquitous. And when you do batteries of tests in different cultures, you get the same thing. So this says something interesting about the human mind that as a computer is designed to be general. So that means you can, so it's not easily made specialized. Meaning if you're going to be good at one thing, Miyamoto Musashi has this quote, he's an ancient warrior, famous for the book of five rings in the martial arts world. And the quote goes, if you know the way broadly, you will see it in everything. Meaning if you do one thing is going to generalize to everything. And that's an interesting thing about the human mind. So that's what the G factor reveals. Okay, so what's the difference, if you can elaborate a little bit further, between IQ and G factor? Just because it's a source of confusion for people. And IQ is a score. People use the word IQ to mean intelligence. But IQ has a more technical meaning for people who work in the field. And it's an IQ score, a score on a test that estimates the G factor. And the G factor is what's common among all these tests of mental ability. So if you think about, it's not a Venn diagram, but I guess you could make a Venn diagram out of it, but the G factor would be really at the core. What's common to everything. And what IQ scores do, is they allow a rank order of people on the score. And this is what makes people uncomfortable. This is where there's a lot of controversy about whether IQ tests are biased toward any one group or another. And a lot of the answers to these questions are very clear, but they also have a technical aspect of it that's not so easy to explain. Well, we'll talk about the fascinating and the difficult things about all of this. So by the way, when you say rank order, that means you get a number, and that means one person, you can now compare. Like you could say that this other person is more intelligent than me. Well, what you can say is, IQ scores are interpreted really as percentiles. So that if you have an IQ of 140 and somebody else has 70, the metric is such that you cannot say the person with an IQ of 140 is twice as smart as a person with an IQ of 70. That would require a ratio scale with an absolute zero. Now, you may think you know people with zero intelligence, but in fact, there is no absolute zero on an IQ scale. It's relative to other people. So relative to other people, somebody with an IQ score of 140 is in the upper less than 1%, whereas somebody with an IQ of 70 is two standard deviations below the mean. That's a different percentile. So it's similar to like in chess, you have an Elo rating that's designed to rank order people. So you can't say it's twice. One person, if your Elo rating's twice another person, I don't think you're twice as good at chess. Exactly. It's not stable in that way, but because it's very difficult to do these kinds of comparisons. So what can we say about the number itself? Is that stable across tests and so on or no? There are a number of statistical properties of any test. They're called psychometric properties. You have validity, you have reliability. There are many different kinds of reliability. They all essentially measure stability, and IQ tests are stable within an individual. There are some longitudinal studies where children were measured at age 11. And again, when they were 70 years old and the two IQ scores are highly correlated with each other. This comes from a fascinating study from Scotland. In the 1930s, some researchers decided to get an IQ test on every single child age 11 in the whole country. And they did. And those records were discovered in an old storeroom at the University of Edinburgh by a friend of mine, Ian Deary, who found the records, digitized them, and has done a lot of research on the people who are still alive today from that original study, including brain imaging research, by the way. So really, it's a fascinating group of people who are studied. Not to get ahead of the story, but one of the most interesting things they found is a very strong relationship between IQ measured at age 11 and mortality. So that, you know, 70 years later, 70 years later, they looked at the survival rates and they could get death records from everybody. And Scotland has universal healthcare for everybody. And it turned out if you divide people by their age 11 IQ score into quartiles, and then look at how many people are alive 70 years later, I know this is in the book, I have the graph in the book, but there are essentially twice as many people alive in the highest IQ quartile than in the lowest IQ quartile. It's true in men and women. Interesting. So it makes a big difference. Now, why this is the case is not so clear since everyone had access to healthcare. Well, there's a lot, and we'll talk about it, you know. Just the sentences you used now could be explained by nature or nurture. We don't know. Now, there's a lot of science that starts to then dig in and investigate that question. But let me linger on the IQ test. How are the test design, IQ test design, how do they work? Maybe some examples for people who are not aware. What makes a good IQ test question that sneaks up on this G-factor measure? Well, your question is interesting because you want me to give examples of items that make good items. And what makes a good item is not so much its content, but its empirical relationship to the total score that turns out to be valid by other means. So for example, let me give you an odd example from personality testing. So there's a personality test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, MMPI. Been around for decades. I've heard about this test recently because of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. I don't know if you've been paying attention to that. But they had psychology- I have not been paying attention to it. They had psychologists on the stand, and they were talking, apparently those psychologists did, again, I'm learning so much from this trial. They did different, a battery of tests to diagnose personality disorders. Apparently there's that systematic way of doing so, and the Minnesota one is one of the ones that there's the most science on. There's a lot of great papers, which were all continuously cited on the stand, which is fascinating to watch. Sorry, a little bit of attention. It's okay, I mean, this is interesting because you're right, it's been around for decades. There's a lot of scientific research on the psychometric properties of the test, including what it predicts with respect to different categories of personality disorder. But what I wanna mention is the content of the items on that test. All of the items are essentially true-false items. True or false, I prefer a shower to a bath. True or false, I think Lincoln was a better president than Washington. Mm-hmm. What have all these, what does that have to do? And the point is the content in these items, nobody knows why these items in aggregate predict anything, but empirically they do. It's a technique of choosing items for a test that is called dust bowl empiricism, that the content doesn't matter, but for some reason, when you get a criterion group of people with this disorder and you compare them to people without that disorder, these are the items that distinguish. Irrespective of content, it's a hard concept to grasp. Well, first of all, it's fascinating. Because I consider myself part psychologist because I love human-robot interaction, and that's a problem, half of that problem is a psychology problem because there's a human. So designing these tests to get at the questions is the fascinating part. What does dust bowl empiricism refer to? Does it refer to the final result? Yeah, so it's the test is dust bowl empiricism, but how do you arrive at the battery of questions? I presume one of the things, now again, I'm going to the excellent testimony in that trial, because they also explain the tests, that a bunch of the questions are kind of, make you forget that you're taking a test. Like, it makes it very difficult for you to somehow figure out what you're supposed to answer. Yes, it's called social desirability. But we're getting a little far afield because I only wanted to give that example of dust bowl empiricism. When we talk about the items on an IQ test, many of those items in the dust bowl empiricism method have no face validity. In other words, they don't look like they measure anything. Yes. Whereas most intelligence tests, the items actually look like they're measuring some mental ability. So here's one of the- Oh, so you were bringing that up as an example as what it is not. Yes. Got it. Okay, so I don't want to go too far afield on it. Too far afield is actually one of the names of this podcast. So I should mention that. Far afield. Far afield. Yeah, so anyway, sorry. So they feel the questions look like they passed the face validity test. And some more than others. So for example, let me give you a couple of things here. One of the subtests on a standard IQ test is general information. Let me just think a little bit because I don't want to give you the actual item. But if I said, how far is it between Washington DC and Miami, Florida within 500 miles plus or minus? Well, it's not a fact most people memorize, but you know something about geography. You say, well, I flew there once. I know planes fly 500 miles. You can kind of make an estimate. But it's also seems like it would be very cultural. So there's that kind of general information. Then there's vocabulary test. What does regatta mean? And I choose that word because that word was removed from the IQ test because people complained that disadvantaged people would not know that word just from their everyday life. Here's another example from a different kind of subtest. What's regatta, by the way? Regatta is a sailing competition, a competition with boats. Not necessarily sailing, but a competition with boats. Yep, yep. I'm probably disadvantaged in that way. Okay, excellent. So that was removed. Anyway, what you were saying. Okay, so here's another subtest. I'm gonna repeat a string of numbers. And when I'm done, I want you to repeat them back to me. Ready? Okay, seven, four, two, eight, one, six. That's way too many. Seven, four, two, eight, one, six. Okay, you get the idea. Now the actual test starts with a smaller number, you know, like two numbers. And then as people get it right, you keep going, adding to the string of numbers until they can't do it anymore. Okay, but now try this. I'm gonna say some numbers. And when I'm done, I want you to repeat them to me backwards. I quit. Okay, now, so I gave you some examples of the kind of items on an IQ test. General information. I can't even remember all. General information, vocabulary, digit span forward and digit span backward. Well, you said I can't even remember them. That's a good question for me. What does memory have to do with your future? Let's hold on. Okay, all right. Let's just talk about these examples. Now, some of those items seem very cultural and others seem less cultural. Which ones do you think, scores on which subtests are most highly correlated with the G factor? Well, the two advances less cultural. Well, it turns out vocabulary is highly correlated, and it turns out that digit span backwards is highly correlated. Now, you have decades of research to answer the question, how do you figure? Right, so now there's like good research that gives you intuition about what kind of questions get at it. Just like there's something I've done, I've actually used for research in semi-autonomous vehicle, like whether humans are paying attention, there's a body of literature that does like end-back test, for example, where you have to put workload on the brain to do recall, memory recall, and that helps you kinda put some work onto the brain while the person is doing some other task, and does some interesting research with that. But that's loading the memory. So there's like research around stably what that means about the human mind. And here you're saying recall backwards is a good predictor. The transformation. Yeah, so you have to do some, like you have to load that into your brain and not just remember it, but do something with it. Right, now here's another example of a different kind of test. It's called the Hick paradigm, and it's not verbal at all. It's a little box, and there are a series of lights arranged in a semi-circle at the top of the box, and then there's a home button that you press. And when one of the lights goes on, there's a button next to each of those lights. You take your finger off the home button, and you just press the button next to the light that goes on. And so it's a very simple reaction time. Light goes on, as quick as you can, you press the button. And you get a reaction time. From the moment you lift your finger off the button to when you press the button with where the light is. That reaction time doesn't really correlate with IQ very much. But if you change the instructions, and you say three lights are gonna come on simultaneously, I want you to press the button next to the light that's furthest from the other two. So maybe lights one and two go on, and light six goes on simultaneously. You take your finger off, and you would press the button by light six. That's, that reaction time to a more complex task, it's not really hard. Almost everybody gets it all right. But your reaction time to that is highly correlated with the G factor. This is fascinating. So reaction time, so there's a temporal aspect to this. So what role does time? Speed of processing, it's the speed of processing. Is this also true for ones that take longer, like five, 10, 30 seconds? Is time part of the measure with some of these ideas? And that is why some of the best IQ tests have a time limit. Because if you have no time limit, people can do better. But it doesn't distinguish among people that well. So that adding the time element is important. So speed of information processing, and reaction time is a measure of speed of information processing, turns out to be related to the G factor. But the G factor only accounts for maybe half or some amount on the test performance. For example, I get pretty bad test anxiety. Like I was never, I mean, I just don't enjoy tests. I enjoy going back into my cave and working, like I've always enjoyed homework way more than tests. No matter how hard the homework is, because I can go back to the cave and hide away and think deeply. There's something about being watched and having a time limit that really makes me anxious, and I could just see the mind not operating optimally at all. But you're saying underneath there, there's still a G factor, there's still. No question. There's no question. Boy. And if you get anxious taking the test, many people say, oh, I didn't do well because I'm anxious. Yeah. You know, I hear that a lot. Yeah. Well, fine, if you're really anxious during the test, the score will be a bad estimate of your G factor. Yeah. It doesn't mean the G factor isn't there. That's right. And by the way, standardized tests like the SAT, they're essentially intelligence tests. They are highly G loaded. Now, the people who make the SAT don't wanna mention that. They have enough trouble justifying standardized testing, but to call it an intelligence test is really beyond the pale. But in fact, it's so highly correlated because it's a reasoning test. The SAT is a reasoning test, a verbal reasoning, mathematical reasoning. Yeah. And if it's a reasoning test, it has to be related to G. But if people go in and take a standardized test, whether it's an IQ test or the SAT, and they happen to be sick that day with 102 fever, the score is not going to be a good estimate of their G. If they retake the test when they're not anxious or less anxious or don't have a fever, the score will go up and that will be a better estimate. But you can't say their G factor increased between the two tests. Well, it's interesting. So the question is how wide of a battery of tests is required to estimate the G factor well? Because I'll give you as my personal example, I took the SAT in, I think it was called the ACT where I was too, also, I took SAT many times. Every single time I got a perfect on math. And verbal, the time limit on the verbal made me very anxious. I did not, I mean, part of it, I didn't speak English very well, but honestly, it was like, you're supposed to remember stuff. And I was so anxious. And as I'm reading, I'm sweating. I can't, you know that feeling you have when you're reading a book and you just read a page and you know nothing about what you've read because you zoned out? That's the same feeling of like, I can't, I have to. You're like, nope. Read and understand and that anxiety is like, and you start seeing the typography versus the content of the words. Like that was, I don't, it's interesting because I know that what they're measuring, I could see being correlated with something. But that anxiety or some aspect of the performance sure plays a factor. And I wonder how you sneak up in a stable way. I mean, this is a broader discussion, but that's like standardized testing, how you sneak up, how you get at the fact that I'm super anxious and still nevertheless measure some aspect of my intelligence. I wonder, I don't know if you can say to that, that time limit sure is a pain. Well, let me say this. There are two ways to approach the very real problem that you say that some people just get anxious or not good test takers. By the way, part of testing is, you know the answer, you can figure out the answer or you can't. If you don't know the answer, there are many reasons you don't know the answer at that particular moment. You may have learned it once and forgotten it. You may, it may be on the tip of your tongue and you just can't get it because you're anxious about the time limit. You may never have learned it. You may never, you may have been exposed to it, but it was too complicated and you couldn't learn it. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons here. But for an individual to interpret your scores as an individual, whoever is interpreting the score has to take into account various things that would affect your individual score. And that's why decisions about college admission or anything else where tests are used are hardly ever the only criterion to make a decision. And I think people are, college admissions letting go of that very much. Oh yes, yeah. But what does that even mean? Because is it possible to design standardized tests that do get, that are useful to college admissions? Well, they already exist. The SAT is highly correlated with many aspects of success at college. Here's the problem. So maybe you could speak to this. The correlation across the population versus individuals. So, you know, our criminal justice system is designed to make sure, well, it's still, there's tragic cases where innocent people go to jail, but you try to avoid that. And the same way with testing, it just, it would suck for an SAT to miss genius. Yes, and it's possible, but it's statistically unlikely. So the, so it really comes down to, to which piece of information maximizes your decision-making ability. So if you just use high school grades, it's okay, but you will miss some people who just don't do well in high school, but who are actually pretty smart, smart enough to be bored silly in high school, and they don't care, and their high school GPA isn't that good. So you will miss them in the same sense that somebody who could be very able and ready for college just doesn't do well on their SAT. This is why you make decisions with taking in a variety of information. The other thing I wanted to say, I talked about when you make a decision for an individual, statistically for groups, there are many people who have a disparity between their math score and their verbal score. That disparity, or the other way around, that disparity is called tilt. The score is tilted one way or the other, and that tilt has been studied empirically to see what that predicts. And in fact, you can't make predictions about college success based on tilt. And mathematics is a good example. There are many people, especially non-native speakers of English, come to this country, take the SATs, do very well on the math and not so well on the verbal. Well, if they're applying to a math program, the professors there who are making the decision or the admissions officers, don't weight so much the score on verbal, especially if it's a non-native speaker. Well, so yeah, you have to try to, in the admission process, bring in the context. But non-native isn't really the problem. I mean, that was part of the problem for me. But it's the anxiety was, which it's interesting. It's interesting. Oh boy, reducing yourself down to numbers. But it's still true. It's still the truth. It's a painful, that same anxiety that led me to be, to struggle with the SAT verbal tests, it's still within me in all ways of life. So maybe that's not anxiety. Maybe that's something, you know, like personality is also pretty stable. Personality is stable. Personality does impact the way you navigate life. Yeah. There's no question. Yeah, and we should say that the G factor in intelligence is not just about some kind of number on a paper. It also has to do with how you navigate life, how easy life is for you in this very complicated world. So personality's all tied into that in some deep fundamental way. But now you've hit the key point about why we even want to study intelligence. And personality, I think, to a lesser extent. But that's my interest, is more on intelligence. I went to graduate school and wanted to study personality, but that's kind of another story how I got kind of shifted from personality research over to intelligence research. Because it's not just a number, intelligence is not just an IQ score. It's not just an SAT score. It's what those numbers reflect about your ability to navigate everyday life. It has been said that life is one long intelligence test. And who can't relate to that? And if you doubt, see, another problem here is a lot of critics of intelligence research, intelligence testing, tend to be academics who, by and large, are pretty smart people. And pretty smart people, by and large, have enormous difficulty understanding what the world is like for people with IQs of 80 or 75. It is a completely different everyday experience. Even IQ scores of 85, 90, you know, there's a popular television program, Judge Judy. Judge Judy deals with everyday people with everyday problems, and you can see the full range of problem-solving ability demonstrated there. And sometimes she does it for laughs, but it really isn't funny because people who are, there are people who are very limited in their life navigation, let alone success, by not having good reasoning skills, which cannot be taught. We know this, by the way, because there are many efforts. You know, the United States military, which excels at training people. I mean, I don't know that there's a better organization in the world for training diverse people. And they won't take people with IQs under, I think, 83 is the cutoff. Because they have found, they are unable to train people with lower IQs to do jobs in the military. So one of the things that G-Factor has to do with is learning. Absolutely. Some people learn faster than others. Some people learn more than others. Now, faster, by the way, is not necessarily better, as long as you get to the same place eventually. But, you know, there are professional schools that want students who can learn the fastest because they can learn more, or learn deeper, or all kinds of ideas about why you select people with the highest scores. And there's nothing funnier, by the way, to listen to a bunch of academics complain about the concept of intelligence and intelligence testing. And then you go to a faculty meeting where they're discussing who to hire among the applicants. And all they talk about is how smart the person is. We'll get to that. We'll sneak up to that in different ways. But there's something about reducing a person to a number that in part is grounded to the person's genetics that makes people very uncomfortable. But nobody does that. Nobody in the field actually does that. That is a worry that is a worry like, well, I don't wanna call it a conspiracy theory. I mean, it's a legitimate worry. But it just doesn't happen. Now, I had a professor in graduate school who was the only person I ever knew who considered the students only by their test scores. And later in his life, he kind of backed off that. But... Let me ask you this. So we'll jump around. I'll come back to it. I tend to, I've had political discussions with people. And actually, my friend Michael Malice, he's an anarchist. I disagree with him on basically everything except the fact that love is a beautiful thing in this world. And he says this test about left versus right, whatever. It doesn't matter what the test is. But he believes, the question is, do you believe that some people are better than others? The question is ambiguous. Do you believe some people are better than others? And to me, sort of the immediate answer is no. It's a poetic question. It's an ambiguous question, right? Like, people wanna maybe, the temptation to ask better at what? Better at sports, so on? No, to me, I stand with the sort of the Fonny documents of this country, which is all men are created equal. There's a basic humanity. And there's something about tests of intelligence. Just knowing that some people are different, like the science of intelligence that shows that some people are genetically, in some stable way across a lifetime, have a greater intelligence than others makes people feel like some people are better than others. And that makes them very uncomfortable. And maybe you can speak to that. The fact that some people are more intelligent than others in a way that cannot be compensated through education, through anything you do in life. What do we do with that? Okay, there's a lot there. We haven't really talked about the genetics of it yet. But you are correct in that it is my interpretation of the data that genetics has a very important influence on the G factor. And this is controversial. We can talk about it. But if you think that genetics, that genes are deterministic, are always deterministic, that leads to kind of the worry that you expressed. But we know now in the 21st century that many genes are not deterministic, that are probabilistic, meaning their gene expression can be influenced. Now, whether they're influenced only by other biological variables or other genetic variables or environmental or cultural variables, that's where the controversy comes in. And we can discuss that in more detail if you like. But to go to the question about better, are people better? There's zero evidence that smart people are better with respect to important aspects of life, like honesty, even likability. I'm sure you know many very intelligent people who are not terribly likable or terribly kind or terribly honest. Is there something to be said? So one of the things I've recently reread for the second time, I guess that's what the word reread means, the rise and fall of the Third Reich, which is, I think, the best telling of the rise and fall of Hitler. And one of the interesting things about the people that, how should I say it? Justified or maybe propped up the ideas that Hitler put forward is the fact that they were extremely intelligent. They were the intellectual class. It was obvious that they thought very deeply and rationally about the world. So what I would like to say is, one of the things that shows to me is some of the worst atrocities in the history of humanity have been committed by very intelligent people. So that means that intelligence doesn't make you a good person. I wonder if there's a G factor for intelligence. I wonder if there's a G factor for goodness. They need you in good and evil. Of course, that's probably harder to measure because that's such a subjective thing, what it means to be good. And even the idea of evil is a deeply uncomfortable thing because how do we know? But it's independent, whatever it is, it's independent of intelligence. So I agree with you about that. But let me say this, I have also asserted my belief that more intelligence is better than less. It doesn't mean more intelligent people are better people, but all things being equal, would you like to be smarter or less smart? So if I had a pill, I have two pills, I said, this one will make you smarter, this one will make you dumber. Which one would you like? Are there any circumstances under which you would choose to be dumber? Well, let me ask you this. That's a very nuanced and interesting question. There's been books written about this, right? Now we'll return to the hard questions, the interesting questions, but let me ask about human happiness. Does intelligence lead to happiness? No. So, okay, so back to the pill then. So why, when would you take the pill? So you said IQ 80, 90, 100, 110, you start going through the quartiles, and is it obvious, isn't there diminishing returns and then it starts becoming negative? This is an empirical question. And so that I have advocated in many forums more research on enhancing the G factor. Right now there have been many claims about enhancing intelligence with, you mentioned the NBAC training, that was a big deal a few years ago, it doesn't work, data's very clear, it does not work. You know. Or doing like memory tests, like training and so on, yeah. Yeah, it may give you a better memory in the short run, but it doesn't impact your G factor. It was very popular a couple of decades ago that the idea that listening to Mozart could make you more intelligent. There was a paper published on this with somebody I knew published this paper. Intelligence researchers never believed it for a second, been hundreds of studies, all the meta-analyses, all the summaries and so on. So there's nothing to it, nothing to it at all. But wouldn't it be something, wouldn't it be world-shaking if you could take the normal distribution of intelligence, which we haven't really talked about yet, but IQ scores and the G factor is thought to be a normal distribution, and shift it to the right so that everybody is smarter? Even a half a standard deviation would be world-shaking because there are many social problems, many, many social problems that are exacerbated by people with lower ability to reason stuff out and navigate everyday life. I wonder if there's a threshold. So maybe I would push back and say universal shifting of the normal distribution may not be the optimal way of shifting. Maybe it's better to, whatever the asymmetric kind of distribution is, is like really pushing the lower up versus trying to make the people at the average more intelligent. So you're saying that if in fact there was some way to increase G, let's just call it metaphorically a pill, an IQ pill, we should only give it to people at the lower end. No, it's just intuitively, I can see that life becomes easier at the lower end if it's increased. It becomes less and less, it is an empirical scientific question, but it becomes less and less obvious to me that more intelligence is better. At the high end, not because it would make life easier, but it would make whatever problems you're working on more solvable. And if you are working on artificial intelligence, there's a tremendous potential for that to improve society. I understand, so at the whatever problems you're working on, yes, but there's also the problem of the human condition. There's love, there's fear, and all of those beautiful things that sometimes if you're good at solving problems, you're going to create more problems for yourself. I'm not exactly sure. So ignorance is bliss, is a thing. So there might be a place, there might be a sweet spot of intelligence given your environment, given your personality, all of those kinds of things, and that becomes less beautifully complicated the more and more intelligent you become. But that's a question for literature, not for science, perhaps. Well, imagine this. Imagine there was an IQ pill, and it was developed by a private company, and they are willing to sell it to you. And whatever price they put on it, you are willing to pay it because you would like to be smarter. But just before they give you a pill, they give you a disclaimer form to sign. Yes. You understand that this pill has no guarantee that your life is going to be better, and in fact, it could be worse. Well, yes, that's how lawyers work, but I would love for science to answer the question, to try to predict if your life is going to be better or worse when you become more or less intelligent. It's a fascinating question about what is the sweet spot for the human condition. Some of the things we see as bugs might be actually features, may be crucial to our overall happiness. Is there a limitation that might lead to more happiness than less? But again, more intelligence is better at the lower end. That's more, that's something that's less arguable and fascinating if possible to increase. But you know, there's virtually no research that's based on a neuroscience approach to solving that problem. All the solutions that have been proposed to solve that problem or to ameliorate that problem are essentially based on the blank slate assumption that enriching the environment, removing barriers, all good things, by the way. I'm not against any of those things. But there's no empirical evidence that they're going to improve the general reasoning ability or make people more employable. Have you read Flowers of Agadon? Yes. That's to the question of intelligence and happiness. There are many profound aspects of that story. It was a film that was very good. The film was called Charlie for the younger people who are listening to this. You might be able to stream it on Netflix or something. But it was a story about a person with very low IQ who underwent a surgical procedure in the brain and he slowly became a genius. And the tragedy of the story is the effect was temporary. It's a fascinating story, really. That goes in contrast to the basic human experience that each of us individually have, but it raises the question of the full range of people you might be able to be given different levels of intelligence. You've mentioned the normal distribution. So let's talk about it. There's a book called The Bell Curve written in 1994, written by psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray. Why was this book so controversial? This is a fascinating book. I know Charles Murray. I've had many conversations with him. Yeah, what is the book about? The book is about the importance of intelligence in everyday life. That's what the book is about. It's an empirical book. It has statistical analyses of very large databases that show that essentially IQ scores or their equivalent are correlated to all kinds of social problems and social benefits. And that in itself is not where the controversy about that book came. The controversy was about one chapter in that book. And that is a chapter about the average difference in mean scores between black Americans and white Americans. And these are the terms that were used in the book at the time and are still used to some extent. And historically, or really for decades, it has been observed that disadvantaged groups score on average lower than Caucasians on academic tests, tests of mental ability, and especially on IQ tests. And the difference is about a standard deviation, which is about 15 points, which is a substantial difference. In the book, Herrnstein and Murray in this one chapter assert clearly and unambiguously that whether this average difference is due to genetics or not, they are agnostic. They don't know. Moreover, they assert they don't care because you wouldn't treat anybody differently knowing if there was a genetic component or not, because that's a group average finding. Every individual has to be treated as an individual. You can't make any assumption about what that person's intellectual ability might be from the fact of a average group difference. They're very clear about this. Nonetheless, people took away I'm gonna choose my words carefully because I have a feeling that many critics didn't actually read the book. They took away that Herrnstein and Murray were saying that blacks are genetically inferior. That was the take-home message. And if they weren't saying it, they were implying it because they had a chapter that discussed this empirical observation of a difference. And isn't this a good thing? And isn't this horrible? And so the reaction to that book was incendiary. What do we know about, from that book and the research beyond, about race differences and intelligence? It's still the most incendiary topic in psychology. Nothing has changed that. Anybody who even discusses it is easily called a racist just for discussing it. It's become fashionable to find racism in any discussion like this. It's unfortunate. The short answer to your question is there's been very little actual research on this topic since 19- Since the bell curve. The bell curve, even before. This really became incendiary in 1969 with an article published by an educational psychologist named Arthur Jensen. Let's just take a minute and go back to that to see the bell curve in a little bit more historical perspective. Arthur Jensen was a educational psychologist at UC Berkeley. I knew him as well. And in 1969 or 68, the Harvard Educational Review asked him to do a review article on the early childhood education programs that were designed to raise the IQs of minority students. This was before the federally funded Head Start program. Head Start had not really gotten underway at the time Jensen undertook his review of what were a number of demonstration programs. And these demonstration programs were for young children who are on kindergarten age. And they were specially designed to be cognitively stimulating, to provide lunches, do all the things that people thought would minimize this average gap of intelligence tests. There was a strong belief among virtually all psychologists that the cause of the gap was unequal opportunity due to racism, due to all negative things in the society. And if you could compensate for this, the gap would go away. So early childhood education back then was called literally compensatory education. Jensen looked at these programs. He was an empirical guy. He understood psychometrics. And he wrote a, it was over a hundred page article detailing these programs and the flaws in their research design. Some of the programs reported IQ gains of on average five points, but a few reported 10, 20, and even 30 point gains. One was called the miracle in Milwaukee. That investigator went to jail ultimately for fabricating data. But the point is that Jensen wrote an article that said, look, the opening sentence of his article is classic. The opening sentence is, I may not quote it exactly right, but it's, we have tried compensatory education and it has failed. And he showed that these gains were essentially nothing. You couldn't really document empirically any gains at all from these really earnest efforts to increase IQ. But he went a step further, a fateful step further. He said, not only have these efforts failed, but because they have had essentially no impact, we have to re-examine our assumption that these differences are caused by environmental things that we can address with education. We need to consider a genetic influence, whether there's a genetic influence on this group difference. So you said that this is one of the more controversial works ever in science. I think it's the most infamous paper in all of psychology, I would go on to say. Because in 1969, the genetic data was very skimpy on this question, skimpy and controversial. It's always been controversial, but it was even skimpy and controversial. It's kind of a long story that I go into a little bit in more detail in the book, Neuroscience of Intelligence. But to say he was vilified is an understatement. I mean, he couldn't talk it at the American Psychological Association without bomb threats clearing the lecture hall. Campus security watched him all the time. They opened his mail. He had to retreat to a different address. This was one of the earliest kinds, this is before the internet and kind of internet social media mobs, but it was that intense. And I have written that overnight, after the publication of this article, all intelligence research became radioactive. Nobody wanted to talk about it. And then it didn't, nobody was doing more research. And then the bell curve came along and the Jensen controversy was dying down. I have stories that Jensen told me about his interaction with the Nixon White House on this issue. I mean, this was like a really big deal. It was some unbelievable stories, but he told me this, so I kind of believe these stories. Nonetheless- 25 years later. 25 years later. So all the silence basically saying, you know, this, nobody wants to do this kind of research. There's so much pressure, so much attack against this kind of research. And here's sort of a bold, stupid, crazy people that decide to dive right back in. I wonder how much discussion that was. Do we include this chapter or not? Murray has said they discussed it and they felt they should include it. And they were very careful in the way they wrote it, which did them no good. So as a matter of fact, when the bell curve came out, it was so controversial. I got a call from a television show called Nightline. It was with a broadcaster called Ted Koppel, who had this evening show, I think it was on late at night, talked about news. It was a straight up news thing. And a producer called and asked if I would be on it to talk about the bell curve. And I said, you know, she asked me what I thought about the bell curve as a book. And I said, look, it's a very good book. It talks about the role of intelligence in society. And she said, no, no. What do you think about the chapter on race? That's what we want you to talk about. I remember this conversation. I said, well, she said, what would you say if you were on TV? And I said, well, what I would say is that it's not at all clear if there's any genetic component to intelligence, any differences, but if there were a strong genetic component, that would be a good thing. And, you know, complete silence on the other end of the phone. And she said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, if it's the more genetic any difference is the more it's biological. And if it's biological, we can figure out how to fix it. I see. That's interesting. She said, would you say that on television? Yes. I said, no. And so that was the end of that. So that's for more like biology is within the reach of science and the environment is a public policy, social and all those kinds of things. From your perspective, whichever one you think is more amenable to solutions in the short term is the one that excites you. But you saying that is good, the truth of genetic differences no matter what between groups is a painful, harmful, potentially dangerous thing. Let me ask you to this question, whether it's bell curve or any research on race differences, can that be used to increase the amount of racism in the world? Can that be used to increase the amount of hate in the world? Do you think about this kind of stuff? I've thought about this a lot, not as a scientist, but as a person. And my sense is there is such enormous reservoirs of hate and racism that have nothing to do with scientific knowledge of the data that speak against that. That no, I don't wanna give racist groups a veto power over what scientists study. If you think that the differences, and by the way, virtually no one disagrees that there are differences in scores, it's all about what causes them and how to fix it. So if you think this is a cultural problem, then you must ask the problem, do you want to change anything about the culture? Or are you okay with the culture because you don't feel it's appropriate to change a particular culture? Or appropriate to change a person's culture? So are you okay with that? And the fact that that may lead to disadvantages in school achievement? It's a question. If you think it's environmental, what are the environmental parameters that can be fixed? I'll tell you one, lead from gasoline in the atmosphere, lead in paint, lead in water. That's an environmental toxin that society has the means to eliminate, and they should. Yeah, just to sort of, trying to find some insight and conclusion to this very difficult topic. Is there been research on environment versus genetics, nature versus nurture on this question of race differences? There is not, no one wants to do this research. First of all, it's hard research to do. Second of all, it's a minefield. No one wants to spend their career on it. Tenured people don't wanna do it, let alone students. The way I talk about it, well, before I tell you the way I talk about it, I wanna say one more thing about Jensen. He was once asked by a journalist straight out, are you a racist? His answer was very interesting. His answer was, I've thought about that a lot, and I've concluded it doesn't matter. Now, I know what he meant by this. The guts to say that, wow. He was a very unusual person. I think he had a touch of Asperger's syndrome, to tell you the truth, because I saw him in many circumstances. He would be canceled on Twitter immediately with that sentence. Yeah, but what he meant was, he had a hypothesis. And with respect to group differences, he called it the default hypothesis. He said, whatever factors affect individual intelligence are likely the same factors that affect group differences. It was the default. But it was a hypothesis. It should be tested. And if it turned out, empirical tests didn't support the hypothesis, he was happy to move on to something else. He was absolutely committed to that scientific ideal that it's an empirical question, we should look at it, and let's see what happens. The scientific method cannot be racist from his perspective. It doesn't matter what the scientists, if they follow the scientific method, it doesn't matter what they believe. And if they are biased, and they consciously or unconsciously bias the data, other people will come along to replicate it, they will fail, and the process over time will work. So let me push back on this idea. Because psychology to me is full of gray areas. And what I've observed about psychology, even replication crisis aside, is that something about the media, something about journalism, something about the virality of ideas in the public sphere, they misinterpret. They take up things from studies, willfully or from ignorance, misinterpret findings, and tell narratives around that. I personally believe, for me, I'm not saying that broadly about science, but for me, it's my responsibility to anticipate the ways in which findings will be misinterpreted. So I've thought about this a lot, because I publish papers on semi-autonomous vehicles, and those, you know, cars, people dying in cars. There's people that have written me letters saying, emails, nobody writes letters, I wish they did, that have blood on my hands, because of things that I would say, positive or negative, there's consequences. In the same way, when you're a researcher of intelligence, I'm sure you might get emails, or at least people might believe that a finding of your study is going to be used by a large number of people to increase the amount of hate in the world. I think there's some responsibility on scientists, but for me, I think there's a great responsibility to anticipate the ways things will be misinterpreted, and there, you have to, first of all, decide whether you want to say a thing at all, do the study at all, publish the study at all, and two, the words with which you explain it. I find this on Twitter a lot, actually, which is, when I write a tweet, and I'm usually just doing so innocently, I'll write it, it takes me five seconds to write it, or whatever, 30 seconds to write it, and then I'll think, all right, I close my eyes open and try to see how will the world interpret this? What are the ways in which this will be misinterpreted? And I'll sometimes adjust that tweet to see, yeah, so in my mind, it's clear, but that's because it's my mind from which this tweet came, but you have to think, in a fresh mind that sees this, and it's spread across a large number of other minds, how will the interpretation morph? I mean, for a tweet, that's a silly thing, it doesn't matter, but for a scientific paper and study and finding, I think it matters. So I don't know, I don't know what your thoughts about that, because maybe for Jensen, the data is there, what do you want me to do? This is a scientific process that's been carried out, if you think the data was polluted by bias, do other studies that reveal the bias, but the data's there. I'm not a poet, I'm not a literary writer, what do you want me to do? I'm just presenting you the data. What do you think on that spectrum? What's the role of a scientist? The reason I do podcasts, the reason I write books for the public is to explain what I think the data mean and what I think the data don't mean. I don't do very much on Twitter other than to retweet references to papers, I don't think it's my role to explain these, because they're complicated, they're nuanced, but when you decide not to do a scientific study, or not to publish a result because you're afraid the result could be harmful or insensitive, that's not an unreasonable thought, and people will make different conclusions and decisions about that. I wrote about this, I'm the editor of a journal called Intelligence, which publishes scientific papers. Sometimes we publish papers on group differences. Those papers sometimes are controversial. These papers are written for a scientific audience, they're not written for the Twitter audience, so I don't promote them very much on Twitter. But in a scientific paper, you have to now choose your words carefully also, because those papers are picked up by non-scientists, by writers of various kinds, and you have to be available to discuss what you're saying and what you're not saying. Sometimes you are successful at having a good conversation, like we are today, that doesn't start out pejorative. Other times I have been asked to participate in debates where my role would be to justify race science. Well, you can see, you start out, you know, that was a BBC request that I received. I have so much, it's a love-hate relationship, mostly hate, with these shallow journalism organizations. So they would want to use you as a kind of, in a debate setting, to communicate as to, like, there is race differences between groups, and make that into debate, and put you in a role of- Justifying racism. Justifying racism. That's what they're asking me to do. Versus, like, educating about this field of the science of intelligence, yeah. I wanna say one more thing before we get off the normal distribution. You also asked me, what is the science after the bell curve? And the short answer is, there's not much new work, but whatever work there is supports the idea that there still are group differences. It's arguable whether those differences have diminished at all or not. And there is still a major problem in underperformance for school achievement, for many disadvantaged and minority students, and there so far is no way to fix it. What do we do with this information? Is this now a task? Now, we'll talk about the future on the neuroscience and the biology side, but in terms of this information as a society, in the public policy, in the political space, in the social space, what do we do with this information? I've thought a lot about this. The first step is to have people interested in policy understand what the data actually show to pay attention to intelligence data. You can read policy papers about education and using your word processor, you can search for the word intelligence. You can search a 20,000 word document in a second and find out the word intelligence does not appear anywhere. In most discussions about what to do about achievement gaps, I'm not talking about test gaps, I'm talking about actual achievement gaps in schools, which everyone agrees is a problem. The word intelligence doesn't appear among educators. That's fascinating. As a matter of fact, in California, there has been tremendous controversy about recent attempts to revise the curriculum for math in high schools. And we had a Stanford professor of education who was running this review, assert there's no such thing as talent, mathematical talent. And she wanted to get rid of the advanced classes in math because not everyone could do that. Now, of course, this has been very controversial. They've retreated somewhat, but the idea that a university professor was in charge of this who believes that there's no talent, that it doesn't exist, this is rather shocking, let alone the complete absence of intelligence data. By the way, let me tell you something about what the intelligence data show. Let's take race out of it. Even though the origins of these studies were a long time ago, I'm blocking on the name of the report. The Coleman Report was a famous report about education. And they measured all kinds of variables about schools, about teachers, and they looked at academic achievement as an outcome. And they found the most predictive variables of education outcome were the variables the student brought with him or her into the school, essentially their ability. And that when you combine the school and the teacher variables together, the quality of the school, the funding of the school, the quality of the teachers, their education, you put all the teacher and school variables together, it barely accounted for 10% of the variance. And this has been replicated now. So the best research we have shows that school variables and teacher variables together account for about 10% of student academic achievement. Now, you wanna have some policy on improving academic achievement? How much money do you wanna put into teacher education? How much money do you wanna put into the quality of the school administration? You know who you can ask? You can ask the Gates Foundation, because they spent a tremendous amount of money doing that. And they, at the end of it, because they're measurement people, they wanna know the data, they found it had no impact at all. And they've kind of pulled out of that kind of program. So, oh boy. Let me ask you, this is me talking, but there's- Just the two of us. Just the two of us, but I'm gonna say some funny and ridiculous things, so you surely are not approving of it. But there's a movie called Clerks. I've seen it, I've seen it, yeah. There's a funny scene in there where a lovely couple are talking about the number of previous sexual partners they had. And the woman says that, I believe she just had a handful, like two or three or something like that, sexual partners, but then she also mentioned that she, what's that called? Fallatio, what's the scientific? But she went, you know, gave a blowjob to 37 guys, I believe it is. And so that has to do with the truth. So sometimes, knowing the truth can get in the way of a successful relationship or of love of some of the human flourishing. And that seems to me that's at the core here, that facing some kind of truth that's not able to be changed makes it difficult to sort of, is limiting as opposed to empowering. That's the concern. If you sort of test for intelligence and lay the data out, it feels like you will give up on certain people. You will sort of start bidding people, it's like, well, this person is like, let's focus on the average people, or let's focus on the very intelligent people. That's the concern. And there's a kind of intuition that if we just don't measure and we don't use that data, that we would treat everybody equal and give everybody equal opportunity. If we have the data in front of us, we're likely to misdistribute the amount of sort of attention we allocate, resources we allocate to people. That's probably the concern. It's a realistic concern, but I think it's a misplaced concern if you wanna fix the problem. If you wanna fix the problem, you have to know what the problem is. Now, let me tell you this. Let's go back to the bell curve, not the bell curve, but the normal distribution. 16% of the population on average has an IQ under 85, which means they're very hard, if you have an IQ under 85, it's very hard to find gainful employment at a salary that sustains you at least minimally in modern life. Okay, not impossible, but it's very difficult. 16% of the population of the United States is about 51 or 52 million people with IQs under 85. This is not a small issue. 14 million children have IQs under 85. Is this something we wanna ignore? Does this have any, what is the Venn diagram between, you know, when you have people with IQs under 85 and you have achievement in school or achievement in life? There's a lot of overlap there. This is why, to go back to the IQ pill, if there were a way to shift that curve toward the higher end, that would have a big impact. If I could maybe, before we talk about the impact on life and so on, some of the criticisms of the bell curve. So Stephen Jay Gould wrote that the bell curve rests on four incorrect assumptions. It would be just interesting to get your thoughts on the four assumptions, which are intelligence must be reducible to a single number, intelligence must be capable of rank ordering people in a linear order, intelligence must be primarily genetically based, and intelligence must be essentially immutable. Maybe not as criticisms, but as thoughts about intelligence. We could spend a lot of time on him. On Stephen Jay Gould? Yes. He wrote that in what, about 1985, 1984? His views were overtly political, not scientific. He was a scientist, but his views on this were overtly political, and I would encourage people listening to this, if they really wanna understand his criticisms, they should just Google what he had to say, and Google the scientific reviews of his book, The Mismeasure of Man, and they will take these statements apart. They were wrong, not only were they wrong, but when he asserted in his first book that there was no biological basis, essentially, to IQ, by the time the second edition came around, there were studies of MRIs showing that brain size, brain volume, were correlated to IQ scores, which he declined to put in his book. So, I'm learning a lot today. I didn't know, actually, the extent of his work. I was just using a few little snippets of criticism. That's interesting. So, there's a battle here. He wrote a book, Mismeasure of Man, that's missing a lot of the scientific grounding. His book is highly popular in colleges today. You can find it in any college bookstore under assigned reading. It's highly popular. The Mismeasure of Man? Yes, highly influential. Can you speak to the Mismeasure of Man? I'm undereducated about this. So, is this the book basically criticizing the ideas in the book? Yeah, yeah, where those four things came from. And it is really a book that was really taken apart point by point by a number of people who actually understood the data. And he didn't care. He didn't care. He didn't modify anything. Listen, because this is such a sensitive topic, like I said, I believe the impact of the work as it is misinterpreted has to be considered because it's not just going to be scientific discourse. It's going to be political discourse. There's going to be debates. There's going to be politically motivated people that will use messages in each direction. Make something like the bell curve the enemy or the support for one's racist beliefs. And so, I think you have to consider that, but it's difficult because Nietzsche was used by Hitler to justify a lot of his beliefs. And it's not exactly on Nietzsche to anticipate Hitler or how his ideas will be misinterpreted and used for evil. But there's a balance there. So, I understand. This is really interesting. I didn't know. Is there any criticism of the book you find compelling or interesting or challenging to use from a scientific perspective? There were factual criticisms about the nature of the statistics that were used, the statistical analyses. These were more technical criticisms. And they were addressed by Murray in a couple of articles where he took all the criticisms and spoke to them. And people listening to this podcast can certainly find all those online. And it's very interesting. But Murray went on to write some additional books, two in the last couple of years. One about human diversity, where he goes through the data refuting the idea that race is only a social construct with no biological meaning. He discusses the data. It's a very good discussion. You don't have to agree with it. But he presents data in a cogent way. And he talks about the critics of that. And he talks about their data in a cogent, non-personal way. It's a very informative discussion. The book is called Human Diversity. He talks about race and he talks about gender. Same thing, about sex differences. And more recently, he's written what might be his final say on this, a book called Facing Reality, where he talks about this again. So, he can certainly defend himself. He doesn't need me to do that. But I would urge people who have heard about him and the bell curve and who think they know what's in it, you are likely incorrect and you need to read it for yourself. But it is, scientifically, it's a serious subject. It's a difficult subject. Ethically, it's a difficult subject. Everything you said here calmly and thoughtfully is difficult. It's difficult for me to even consider that G factor exists. I don't mean from like, that somehow G factor is inherently racist or sexist or whatever. It's just, it's difficult in the way that considering the fact that we die one day is difficult. That we are limited by our biology is difficult. And it's, at least from an American perspective, you like to believe that everything is possible in this world. Well, that leads us to what I think we should do with this information. And what I think we should do with this information is unusual. Uh-oh. Because I think what we need to do is fund more neuroscience research on the molecular biology of learning and memory. Because one definition of intelligence is based on how much you can learn and how much you can remember. Yes. And if you accept that definition of intelligence, then there are molecular studies going on now, and Nobel prizes being won on molecular biology or molecular neurobiology of learning and memory. Now, the step those researchers, those scientists need to take when it comes to intelligence is to focus on the concept of individual differences. Intelligence research has individual differences as its heart, because it assumes that people differ on this variable, and those differences are meaningful and need understanding. Cognitive psychologists who have morphed into molecular biologists studying learning and memory hate the concept of individual differences historically. Some now are coming around to it. I once sat next to a Nobel Prize winner for his work on memory, and I asked him about individual differences, and he said, don't go there, it'll set us back 50 years. But I said, don't you think they're the key, though, to understand, why can some people remember more than others? He said, you don't wanna go there. I think the 21st century will be remembered by the technology and the science that goes to individual differences, because we have now data, we have now the tools to much, much better to start to measure, start to estimate, not just on the sort of through tests and IQ test type of things, sort of outside the body kind of things, but measuring all kinds of stuff about the body. So yeah, truly go into the molecular biology, to the neurobiology, to the neuroscience. Let me ask you about life. How does intelligence correlate with, or lead to, or has anything to do with career success? You've mentioned these kinds of things, and is there any data, you had an excellent conversation with Jordan Peterson, for example. Is there any data on what intelligent means for success in life? Success in life, there is a tremendous amount of validity data that looked at intelligence test scores and various measures of life success. Now, of course, life success is a pretty broad topic, and not everybody agrees on what success means, but there's general agreement on certain aspects of success that can be measured. And those- Including life expectancy, like you said. Life expectancy, now there's life success. You know, life expectancy, I mean, that is such an interesting finding, but IQ scores are also correlated to things like income. Now, okay, so who thinks income means you're successful? That's not the point. The point is that income is one empirical measure in this culture that says something about your level of success. Now, you can define success in ways that have nothing to do with income. You can define success based on your evolutionary natural selection success. But for variables, and even that, by the way, is correlated to IQ in some studies. So however you want to define success, IQ is important. It's not the only determinant. People get hung up on, well, what about personality? What about so-called emotional intelligence? Yes, all those things matter. The thing that matters empirically, the single thing that matters the most is your general ability, your general mental intellectual ability, your reasoning ability. And the more complex your vocation, the more complex your job, the more G matters. G doesn't matter in a lot of occupations don't require complex thinking. And there are occupations like that, and G doesn't matter. Within an occupation, the G might not matter so much. So that if you look at all the professors at MIT, and had a way to rank order them, you know, there's a ceiling effect is what I'm saying. That, you know. Also, when you get past a certain threshold, then there's impact on wealth, for example, or career success, however that's defined in each individual discipline. But after a certain point, it doesn't matter. Actually, it does matter in certain things. So for example, there is a very classic study that was started at Johns Hopkins when I was a graduate student there. I actually worked on this study at the very beginning. It's the study of mathematically and scientifically precocious youth. And they gave junior high school students, age 11 and 12, the standard SAT math exam. And they found a very large number of students scored very high on this exam. Not a large number. I mean, they found many students when they cast the net, they're all a Baltimore. They found a number of students who scored as high on the SAT math when they were 12 years old as incoming Hopkins freshmen. And they said, gee, now this is interesting. What shall we do now? And on a case by case basis, they got some of those kids into their local community college math programs. Many of those kids went on to be very successful. And now there's a 50 year followup of those kids. And it turns out, these kids were in the top 1%. So everybody in this study is in the top 1%. If you take that group, that rarified group and divide them into quartiles, so you have the top 25% of the top 1% and the bottom 25% of the top 1%, you can find on measurable variables of success, the top quartile does better than the bottom quartile in the top 1%. They have more patents, they have more publications, they have more tenure at universities. And this is based on, you're dividing them based on their score at age 12. I wonder how much interesting data is in the variability, in the differences. So but that's really, oh boy, that's very interesting, but it's also, I don't know, somehow painful. I don't know why it's so painful. That G-factor's so determinant of even in the nuanced top percent. Well, this is interesting that you find that painful. Do you find it painful that people with charisma can be very successful in life even though having no other attributes other than they're famous and people like them? Do you find that painful? Yes, if that charisma is untrainable. So one of the things, again, this is like I learned psychology from the Johnny Depp trial but one of the things the psychologist, the personality psychologist, you can maybe speak to this because you had interest in this for a time, is she was saying that personality, technically speaking, is the thing that doesn't change over a lifetime. It's the thing you're, I don't know if she was actually implying that you're born with it. Well, it's a trait. It's a trait that's stable. It's a trait that's relatively stable over time. I think that's generally correct. So to the degree your personality is stable over time, yes, that too is painful because what's not painful is the thing, if I'm fat and out of shape, I can exercise and become healthier in that way. If my diet is a giant mess and that's resulting in some kind of conditions that my body's experiencing, I can fix that by having a better diet. That's sort of my actions, my willed actions can make a change. If charisma is part of the personality that's, the part of the charisma that is part of the personality that is stable, yeah, yeah, that's painful too because it's like, oh shit, I'm stuck with this. I'm stuck with this. Well, I mean, and this pretty much generalizes to every aspect of your being. This is who you are. You've got to deal with it. And what it undermines of course is a realistic appreciation for this, undermines the fairly recent idea prevalent in this country that if you work hard, you can be anything you wanna be, which has morphed from the original idea that if you work hard, you can be successful. Those are two different things. Yeah. And now we have, if you work hard, you can be anything you wanna be. This is completely unrealistic. I'm sorry, it just is. Now you can work hard and be successful, there's no question. But you know what? I could work very hard and I am not going to be a successful theoretical physicist. I'm just not. That said, I mean, we should, because we had this conversation already, but it's good to repeat the fact that you're not going to be a theoretical physicist. It's not judgment on your basic humanity. Returning again to the all men, which means men and women are created equal. So again, some of the differences we're talking about in quote unquote success, wealth, number of whether you win a Nobel Prize or not, that doesn't put a measure on your basic humanity and basic value and even goodness of you as a human being. Because that, your basic role and value in society is largely within your control. It's some of these measures that we're talking about. It's good to remember this. One question about the Flynn effect. What is it? Are humans getting smarter over the years, over the decades, over the centuries? The Flynn effect is James Flynn, passed away about a year ago, published a set of analyses going back a couple of decades, when he first noticed this, that IQ scores, when you looked over the years, seemed to be drifting up. Now this was not unknown to the people who make the test, because they re-norm the test periodically, and they have to re-norm the test periodically, because what 10 items correct meant relative to other people 50 years ago is not the same as what 10 items mean relative today. People are getting more things correct. Now, the scores have been drifting up about three points, IQ scores have been drifting up about three points per decade. This is not a personal effect, this is a cohort effect. Well, it's not for an individual, but- The world, so what's the explanation? And this has presented intelligence researchers with a great mystery. Two questions. First, is it effect on the 50% of the variance that's the G factor, or on the other 50%, and there's evidence that it is a G factor effect. And second, what on earth causes this, and doesn't this mean intelligence and G factor cannot be genetic, because the scale of natural selection is much, much longer than a couple of decades ago. And so it's been used to try to undermine the idea that there can be a genetic influence on intelligence. But certainly, it can be, the Flynn effect can affect the non-genetic aspects of intelligence, because genes account for maybe 50% of the variance. Maybe higher, it could be as high as 80% for adults, but let's just say 50% for discussion. So the Flynn effect, it's still a mystery. It's still a mystery, that's interesting. It's still a mystery, although the evidence is coming out. I told you before I edited a journal on intelligence, and we're doing a special issue in honor of James Flynn. So I'm starting to see papers now on really the latest research on this. I think most people who specialize in this area of trying to understand the Flynn effect are coming to the view based on data that it has to do with advances in nutrition and healthcare. And there's also evidence that the effect is slowing down and possibly reversing. Oh boy. So how would nutrition, so nutrition would still be connected to the G factor. So nutrition as it relates to the G factor, so the biology that leads to the intelligence. Yes. That would be the claim, like the hypothesis being tested by the research. Yes, and there's some evidence from infants that nutrition has made a difference. And so it's not an unreasonable connection, but does it negate the idea that there's a genetic influence? Not logically at all. So, but it is very interesting. So that if you take an IQ test today, but you normal, but you take the score and use the tables that were available in 1940, you're gonna wind up with a much higher IQ number. So are we really smarter than a couple of generations ago? No, but we might be able to solve problems a little better and make use of our G because of things like Sesame Street and other curricula in school, more people are going to school. So there are a lot of factors here to disentangle. It's fascinating though, it's fascinating that there's not clear answers yet. That as a population, we're getting smarter. We just zoom out, that's what it looks like. As a population, we're getting smarter. It's interesting to see what the effects of that are. I mean, this raises the question, we've mentioned it many times, but haven't clearly addressed it, which is nature versus nurture question. So how much of intelligence is nature? How much of it is nurture? How much of it is determined by genetics versus environment? All of it. All of it is genetics. No, all of it is nature and nurture. Yeah, so yes, yes, okay. That's not as- But how much of the variance can you apportion to either? Yeah. Most of the people who work in this field say that the framing of that, if the question is framed that way, it can't be answered because nature and nurture are not two independent influences. They interact with each other. And understanding those interactions is so complex that many behavioral geneticists say it is today impossible and always will be impossible to disentangle that no matter what kind of advances there are in DNA technology and genomic informatics. But there's still, to push back on that, that same intuition from behavioral geneticists would lead me to believe that there cannot possibly be a stable G factor, because it's super complex. Many of them would assert that as a logical outcome, but because I believe there is a stable G factor from lots of sources of data, not just one study, but lots of sources of data over decades, I am more amenable to the idea that whatever interactions between genes and environment exist, they can be explicated, they can be studied, and that information can be used as a basis for molecular biology of intelligence. Yes, and we'll do this exact question, because doesn't the stability of the G factor give you at least a hint that there is a biological basis for intelligence? Yes, I think it's clear that the fact that an IQ score is correlated to things like thickness of your cortex, that it's correlated to glucose metabolic rate in your brain, that identical twins reared apart are highly similar in their IQ scores, these are all important observations that certainly more than, that indicate, not just suggest, but indicate that there's a biological basis, and does anyone believe intelligence has nothing to do with the brain? I mean, it's so obvious. Well, indirectly, it definitely has to do with it, but the question is, environment interacting with the brain, or is it the actual raw hardware of the brain? Well, some would say that the raw hardware of the brain, as it develops from conception through adulthood, or at least through the childhood, that that so-called hardware that you are assuming is mostly genetic, in fact, is not as deterministic as you might think, that it is probabilistic and what affects the probabilities are things like in uterine environment, and other factors like that, including chance, that chance affects the way the neurons are connecting during gestation. It's not, hey, it's pre-programmed. So there is pushback on the concept that genes provide a blueprint, that it's a lot more fluid. Well, but also, yeah, so there's a lot, a lot, a lot happens in the first few months of development. So in nine months, inside the mother's body, and in the few months afterwards, there's a lot of fascinating stuff, like including chance and luck, like you said, how things connect up. Yeah, the question is, afterwards, in your plasticity of the brain, how much adjustment there is relative to the environment, how much that affects the G factor, but that's where the whole conclusions of the studies that we've been talking about is, that seems to have less and less and less of an effect as pretty quickly. Yes, and I do think there is more of a genetic, my view, and I'm not an expert on this, I mean, genetics is a highly technical and complex subject. I am not a geneticist, not a behavioral geneticist, but my reading of this, my interpretation of this, is that there is a genetic blueprint, more or less, and that has a profound influence on your subsequent intellectual development, including the G factor. And that's not to say things can't happen to, I mean, if you think of that genes provide a potential, fine, and that various variables impact that potential. And every parent of a newborn, implicitly or explicitly, wants to maximize that potential. This is why you buy educational toys. This is why you pay attention to organic baby food. This is why you do all these things, because you want your baby to be as healthy and as smart as possible. And every parent will say that. Is there a case to be made, can you steelman the case, that genetics is a very tiny component of all of this, very tiny component of all of this, and the environment is essential? I don't think the data supports that genetics is a tiny component. I think the data support the idea that the genetics is a very important, and I don't say component, I say influence, a very important influence. And the environment is a lot less than people believe. Most people believe environment plays a big role. I'm not so sure. I guess what I'm asking you is, can you see where what you just said, it might be wrong? Can you imagine a world, and what kind of evidence would you need to see to say, you know what, the intuition, the study so far, like reversing the directions. So one of the cool things we have now more and more is we're getting more and more data, and the rate of the data is escalating because of the digital world. So when you start to look at a very large scale of data, both on the biology side and the social side, we might be discovering some very counterintuitive things about society. We might see the edge cases that reveal that if we actually scale those edge cases, and they become like the norm, that we'll have a complete shift in our, like you'll see G-factor be able to be modified throughout life, in the teens and in later life. So is it any case you can make, or for where your current intuitions are wrong? Yes, and it's a good question, because I think everyone should always be asked, what evidence would change your mind? It's certainly not only a fair question, it is really the key question for anybody working on any aspect of science. I think that if environment was very important, we would have seen it clearly by now. It would have been obvious that school interventions, compensatory education, early childhood education, all these things that have been earnestly tried and well-funded, well-designed studies would show some effect, and they don't. They don't. What if the school, the way we've tried school, compensatory school sucks, and we need to do better? That's what everybody said at the beginning. That's what everybody said to Jensen. He said, well, maybe we need to start earlier. Maybe we need not do pre-kindergarten, but pre-pre-kindergarten. It's always an infinite, well, maybe we didn't get it right. But after decades of trying, 50 years, 50 or 60 years of trying, surely something would have worked to the point where you could actually see a result and not need a probability level at.05 on some means. So that's the kind of evidence that would change my mind. Population level interventions like schooling that you would see, like this actually has an effect. Yes, and when you take adopted kids and they grow up in another family and you find out when those adopted kids are adults, their IQ scores don't correlate with the IQ scores of their adoptive parents, but they do correlate with their IQ scores of their biological parents whom they've never met. I mean, these are important. These are powerful observations. And it would be convincing to you if the reverse was true. Yes, that would be more. And there is some data on adoption that indicates the adopted children are moving a little bit more toward their adoptive parents. But it's, to me, the overwhelming, the weight, I have this concept called the weight of evidence where I don't interpret any one study too much. The weight of evidence tells me genes are important. But what does that mean? What does it mean that genes are important? Knowing that gene expression, genes don't express themselves in a vacuum. They express themselves in an environment. So the environment has to have something to do with it, especially if the best genetic estimates of the amount of variance are around 50 or even if it's as high as 80%, it still leaves 20% of non-genetic. Now, maybe that is all luck. Maybe that's all chance. I could believe that. I could easily believe that. So, but I do think after 50 years of trying various interventions and nothing works, including memory training, including listening to Mozart, including playing computer games, none of that has shown any impact on intelligence test scores. Is there data on the intelligence, the IQ of parents as it relates to the children? Yes, and there is some genetic evidence of an interaction between the parents' IQ and the environment. High IQ parents provide an enriched environment, which then can impact the child. In addition to the genes, it's that environment. So there are all these interactions that, you know, but it's not, you know, think about the number of books in a household. This was a variable that's correlated with IQ. And- It is. Yeah. Well, why? Especially if the kid never reads any of the books. It's because more intelligent people have more books in their house. And if you're more intelligent and there's a genetic component to that, the child will get those genes or some of those genes as well as the environment. But it's not the number of books in the house that actually directly impacts the child. So the two scenarios on this are, you find that, and this was used to get rid of the SAT test. Oh, the SAT score is highly correlated with the social economic status of the parents. So all you're really measuring is how rich the parents are. Okay, well, why are the parents rich? Yes. And so you could, the opposite kind of syllogism is that people who are very bright make more money. They can afford homes in better neighborhoods so their kids get better schools. Now the kids grow up bright. Where in that chain of events does that come from? Well, unless you have a genetically informative research design, where you look at siblings that have the same biological parents and so on, you can't really disentangle all that. Most studies of social economic status and intelligence do not have a genetically informed design. So any conclusions they make on that and the conclusions they make about the causality of the social economic status being the cause of the IQ is a stretch. And where you do find genetically informative designs, you find most of the variance in your outcome measures are due to the genetic component. And sometimes the SES adds a little, but the weight of evidence is it doesn't add very much variance to predict what's going on beyond the genetic variance. So when you actually look at it in some, and there aren't that many studies that have genetically informed designs, but when you do see those, the genes seem to have an advantage. Sorry for the strange questions, but is there a connection between fertility or the number of kids that you have and G factor? So you know, the kind of conventional wisdom is people of, maybe is it higher economic status or something like that are having fewer children? I just loosely hear these kinds of things. Is there data that you're aware of in one direction or another on this? Well, strange questions always get strange answers. Yes, all right. So do you have a strange answer for that strange question? The answer is there were some studies that indicated the more children in a family, the firstborn children would be more intelligent than the fourth or fifth or sixth. It's not clear that those studies hold up over time. And of course, what you see also is that families where there are multiple children, four, five, six, seven, you know, really big families, the social economic status of those families usually in the modern age is not that high. Maybe it used to be the aristocracy used to have a lot of kids, I'm not sure exactly. But there have been reports of correlations between IQ and fertility, but I'm not sure that the data are very strong that the firstborn child is always the smartest. It seems like there's some data to that, but I'm not current on that. How would that be explained? That would be a nurture. Well, it could be nurture, it could be in uterine environment. I mean, prior disentanglement. Boy, biology's complicated. And this is why, you know, like many areas of science, you said earlier that there are a lot of gray areas and no definitive answers. This is not uncommon in science that the closer you look at a problem, the more questions you get, not the fewer questions, because the universe is complicated. And the idea that we have people on this planet who can study the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, that's pretty amazing. And I've always said that if they can study the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang, we can certainly figure out something about intelligence that allows that. I'm not sure what's more complicated, the human mind or the physics of the universe. It's unclear to me. I think we overemphasize. Well, that's a very humbling statement. Maybe it's a very human-centric, egotistical statement that our mind is somehow super complicated, but biology is a tricky one, too. Unravel consciousness. What is that? That's a- Well, I've always believed that consciousness and intelligence are the two real fundamental problems of the human brain. And therefore, I think they must be related. Yeah, hard problems like walk together, holding hands kind of idea. You may not know this, but I did some of the early research on anesthetic drugs with brain imaging, trying to answer the question, what part of the brain is the last to turn off when someone loses consciousness? And is that the first part of the brain to turn on when consciousness is regained? And I was working with an anesthesiologist named Mike Alkire, who's really brilliant at this. These were really the first studies of brain imaging using positron emission tomography long before fMRI. And you would inject a radioactive sugar that labeled the brain, and the harder the brain was working, the more sugar it would take up. And then you could make a picture of glucose use in the brain. And he was amazing. He managed to do this. In normal volunteers, he brought in an anesthetized as if they were going into surgery. He managed all the human subjects requirements on this research. And he was brilliant at this. And what we did is we had these normal volunteers come in on three occasions. On one occasion, he gave them enough anesthetic drug so they were a little drowsy. And on another occasion, they came in and he fully anesthetized them. And he would say, Mike, can you hear me? And the person would say, ah, yeah. And then we would scan people and under no anesthetic condition. So same person. And we were looking to see if we could see the part of the brain turn off. He subsequently tried to do this with fMRI, which has a faster time resolution. And you could do it in real time as the person went under and then regain consciousness, where you couldn't do that with PET. You had to have three different occasions. And the results were absolutely fascinating. We did this with different anesthetic drugs and different drugs impacted different parts of the brain. So we were naturally looking for the common one. And it seemed to have something to do with the thalamus and consciousness. This was actual data on consciousness. Real, actual consciousness. What part of the brain turns on? What part of the brain turns off? It's not so clear. But maybe has something to do with the thalamus. The sequence of events seemed to have the thalamus in it. Boy. Now, here's the question. Are some people more conscious than others? Are there individual differences in consciousness? And I don't mean it in the psychedelic sense. I don't mean it in the political consciousness sense. I just mean it in everyday life. Do some people go through everyday life more conscious than others? And are those the people we might actually label more intelligent? So now, the other thing I was looking for is whether the parts of the brain we were seeing in the anesthesia studies were the same parts of the brain we were seeing in the intelligence studies. Now, this was very complicated, expensive research. We didn't really have funding to do this. We were trying to do it on the fly. I'm not sure anybody has pursued this. I'm retired now. He's gone on to other things. But I think it's an area of research that would be fascinating to see the parts. There are a lot more imaging studies now of consciousness. I'm just not up on them. But basically, the question is which imaging, so newer imaging studies to see in high-resolution, spatial and temporal way which part of the brain lights up when you're doing intelligence tasks and which parts of the brain lights up when you're doing consciousness tasks and see the interplay between them. Try to infer. That's the challenge of neuroscience. Without understanding deeply, looking from the outside, try to infer something about how the whole thing works. Well, imagine this. Here's a simple question. Does it take more anesthetic drug to have a person lose consciousness if their IQ is 140 than a person with an IQ of 70? That's an interesting way to study it, yeah. I mean, if the answer to that is a stable yes, that's very interesting. So I tried to find out. And I went to some anesthesiology textbooks about how you dose, and they dose by weight. And what I also learned, this is a little bit off subject, anesthesiologists are never sure how deep you are. And they usually tell by poking you with a needle. And if you don't jump, they tell the surgeon to go ahead. I'm not sure that's literally true, but it's... Well, it might be very difficult to know precisely how deep you are. It has to do with the same kind of measurements that you were doing with the consciousness. It's difficult to know. So I don't lose my train of thought. I couldn't find in the textbooks anything about dosing by intelligence. I asked my friend, the anesthesiologist, he said, no, he doesn't know. I said, can we do a chart review and look at people using their years of education as a proxy for IQ? Because if someone's gone to graduate school, that tells you something. You can make some inference as opposed to someone who didn't graduate high school. Can we do a chart review? And he says, no, they never really put down the exact dose. No, he said, no. So to this day, the simple question, does it take more anesthetic drug to put someone under if they have a high IQ or less, or less? It could go either way. Because by the way, our early PET scan studies of intelligence found the unexpected result of an inverse correlation between glucose metabolic rate and intelligence. It wasn't how much a brain area lit up. How much it lit up was negatively correlated to how well they did on the test, which led to the brain efficiency hypothesis, which is still being studied today. And there's more and more evidence that the efficiency of brain information processing is more related to intelligence than just more activity. Yeah, and it'll be interesting, again, it's a total hypothesis how much in the relationship between intelligence and consciousness, it's not obvious that those two, if there's correlation, they could be inversely correlated. Wouldn't that be funny? If you, the consciousness factor, the C factor plus the G factor equals one. It's a nice trade-off. You get a trade-off, how deeply you experience the world versus how deeply you're able to reason through the world. What a great hypothesis. Certainly somebody listening to this can do this study. Even if it's the aliens analyzing humans a few centuries from now. Let me ask you from an AI perspective. I don't know how much you've thought about machines, but there's the famous Turing test, test of intelligence for machines, which is a beautiful, almost like a cute formulation of intelligence that Alan Turing proposed. Basically conversation being if you can fool a human to think that a machine is a human that passes the test. I suppose you could do a similar thing for humans. If I can fool you that I'm intelligent, then that's a good test of intelligence. You're talking to two people and the test is saying who has a higher IQ. It's an interesting test because maybe charisma can be very useful there. You're only allowed to use conversation, which is the formulation of the Turing test. Anyway, all that to say is what are good tests of intelligence for machines? What do you think it takes to achieve human level intelligence for machines? Well, I have thought a little bit about this, but every time I think about these things, I rapidly reach the limits of my knowledge and imagination. So when Alexa first came out, and I think there was a competing one, well, there was Siri with Apple and Google had Alexa. No, no, Amazon had Alexa. Amazon had Alexa. Google has Google Home. Something. So I proposed to one of my colleagues that he buy one of these, one of each, and then ask it questions from the IQ test. Nice. But it became apparent that they all searched the internet so they all can find answers to questions like how far is it between Washington and Miami and repeat after me. Now, I don't know if you said to Alexa, I'm going to repeat these numbers backwards to me. I don't know what would happen. I've never done it. But so one answer to your question is, try, you're gonna try it right now. Let's try it. Let's try it. No, no, no. Ask Siri. So it would actually probably go to Google search and it will be all confusing kind of stuff. It would fail. Well, then I guess there's a test that it would fail. Well, but that's not, that has to do more with the language of communication versus the content. So if you did an IQ test to a person who doesn't speak English and the test was administered in English, that's not really the test of- Well, let's think about the computers that beat the Jeopardy champions. Yeah, so that, because I happen to know how those are programmed, those are very hard coded and there's definitely a lack of intelligence there. There's something like IQ tests. There's a guy, artificial intelligence researcher, Francois Chollet, he's at Google. He's one of the seminal people in machine learning. He also, as a fun aside thing, developed an IQ test for machines. Oh, I haven't heard that. I'd just like to know about that. I'll actually email you this because it'd be very interesting for you. It doesn't get much attention because people don't know what to do with it, but it deserves a lot of attention, which is it basically does a pattern type of tests where you have to do, you know, one standard one is, you're given three things and you have to do a fourth one, that kind of thing. So you have to understand the pattern here. And for that, it really simplifies to, so the interesting thing is, he's trying not to achieve high IQ. He's trying to achieve like pretty low bar for IQ, things that are kind of trivial for humans. And they're actually really tough for machines, which is seeing, playing with these concepts of symmetry, of counting. Like if I give you one object, two objects, three objects, you'll know that the last one is four objects. You can like count them. You can cluster objects together. It's both visually and conceptually. We could do all these things with our mind that we take for granted, the objectness of things. We can like figure out what spatially is an object and isn't, and we can play with those ideas. And machines really struggle with that. So he really cleanly formulated these IQ tests. I wonder what like that would equate to for humans with IQ, but it'd be a very low IQ, but that's exactly the kind of formulation like, okay, we wanna be able to solve this. How do we solve this? And he does this as a challenge, and nobody's been able to, it's similar to the Alexa Prize, which is Amazon is hosting a conversational challenge. Nobody's been able to do well on his, but that's an interesting, those kinds of tests are interesting, because we take for granted all the ability of the human mind to play with concepts and to formulate concepts out of novel things. So like things we've never seen before. We were able to use that. I mean, that's, I've talked to a few people that design IQ tests sort of online. They write IQ tests, and I was trying to get some questions from them, and they spoke to the fact that we can't really share questions with you, because part of the, like first of all, it's really hard work to come up with questions. It's really, really hard work. It takes a lot of research, but it also takes a lot, it's novelty generating. You're constantly coming up with really new things, and part of the point is that they're not supposed to be public. They're supposed to be new to you when you look at them. It's interesting that the novelty is fundamental to the hardness of the problem. At least a part of what makes the problem hard is you've never seen it before. Right, and that's called fluid intelligence, as opposed to what's called crystallized intelligence, which is your knowledge of facts. You know things, but can you use those things to solve a problem? Those are two different things. Do you think we'll be able to, because we spoke, I don't want to miss an opportunity to talk about this, we spoke about the neurobiology, about the molecular biology of intelligence. Do you think one day we'll be able to modify the biology of, or the genetics of a person to modify their intelligence, to increase their intelligence? We started this conversation by talking about a pill you could take. Do you think that such a pill would exist? Metaphorically, I do, and I am supremely confident that it's possible because I am supremely ignorant of the complexities of neurobiology. And so I have written. Ignorance is bliss. Well, I have written that the nightmares of neurobiologists, you know, understanding the complexities, this cascade of events that happens at the synaptic level, that these nightmares are what fuel some people to solve. So some people, you have to be undaunted. I mean, yeah, this is not easy. Look, we're still trying to figure out cancer. It was only recently that they figured out why aspirin works. You know, these are not easy problems, but I also have the perspective of the history of science, is the history of solving problems that are extraordinarily complex. And seem impossible at the time. And seem impossible at the time. And so one of the things you look at at companies like Neuralink, you have brain-computer interfaces, you start to delve into the human mind and start to talk about machines measuring, but also sending signals to the human mind, you start to wonder what that has, what impact that has on the G-factor. Modifying in small ways or in large ways, the functioning, the mechanical, electrical, chemical functioning of the brain. I look at everything about the brain. There are different levels of explanation. On one hand, you have a behavioral level, but then you have brain circuitry, and then you have neurons, and then you have dendrites, and then you have synapses, and then you have the neurotransmitters, and the presynaptic and the postsynaptic terminals. And then you have all the things that influence neurotransmitters. And then you have the individual differences among people. Yeah, it's complicated, but 51 million people in the United States have IQs under 85 and struggle with everyday life. Shouldn't that motivate people to take a look at this? Yeah, and to treat it seriously. Yeah, but I just want to linger one more time that we have to remember that the science of intelligence, the measure of intelligence is only a part of the human condition. The thing that makes life beautiful and the creation of beautiful things in this world is perhaps loosely correlated, but is not dependent entirely on intelligence. Absolutely, I certainly agree with that. So for anyone sort of listening, I'm still not convinced that sort of more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty in this world. I don't know. Well, I didn't say more intelligence is always better if you want to create beauty. I just said all things being equal, more is better than less. That's all I mean. Yeah, but that's sort of that I just want to sort of say, because to me, one of the things that makes life great is the opportunity to create beautiful things. And so I just want to sort of empower people to do that no matter what some IQ test says. At the population level, we do need to look at IQ tests to help people. And to also inspire us, yeah, to take on some of these extremely difficult scientific questions. Do you have advice for young people in high school, in college, whether they're thinking about career or they're thinking about a life they can be proud of? Is there advice you can give whether they're in the, they want to pursue psychology or biology or engineering, or they want to be artists and musicians and poets? I can't advise anybody on that level of what their passion is. But I can say if you're interested in psychology, if you're interested in science, and the science around the big questions of consciousness and intelligence and psychiatric illness, we haven't really talked about brain illnesses and what we might learn from, if you are trying to develop a drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, you are trying to develop a drug to impact learning and memory, which are core to intelligence. So it could well be that the so-called IQ pill will come from a pharmaceutical company trying to develop a drug for Alzheimer's disease. Because that's exactly what you're trying to do, right? Yeah, just like you said. What will that drug do in a college student that doesn't have Alzheimer's disease? So I would encourage people who are interested in psychology, who are interested in science, to pursue a scientific career and address the big questions. And the most important thing I can tell you, if you're gonna be in kind of a research environment, is you gotta follow the data where the data take you. You can't decide in advance where you want the data to go. And if the data take you to places that you don't have the technical expertise to follow, like I would like to understand more about molecular biology, but I'm not gonna become a molecular biologist now, but I know people who are. And my job is to get them interested to take their expertise into this direction. And it's not so easy, but... And if the data takes you to a place that's controversial, that's counterintuitive in this world, no, I would say it's probably a good idea to still push forward boldly, but to communicate the interpretation of the results with skill, with compassion, with a greater breadth of understanding of humanity, not just the science, of the impact of the results. One famous psychologist wrote about this issue, that somehow a balance has to be found between pursuing the science and communicating it with respect to people's sensitivities, the legitimate sensitivities. Somehow, he didn't say how. Somehow. Somehow, and this is- Every part of that sentence, somehow, and balance is left up to the interpretation of the reader. The reader. Let me ask you, you said big questions. The biggest, or one of the biggest. We already talked about consciousness and intelligence, one of the most fascinating, one of the biggest questions. But let's talk about the why. Why are we here? What's the meaning of life? Oh, I'm not gonna tell you. You know, but you're not gonna tell me? This is very... I'm gonna have to wait for your next book. The meaning of life. You know, we do the best we can to get through the day. And then there's just the finite number of the days. Are you afraid of the finiteness of it? You think about your death? I think about it more and more as I get older. Yeah, I do. And it's one of these human things, that it is finite, we all know it. Most of us deny it and don't wanna think about it. Sometimes you think about it in terms of estate planning, you try to do the rational thing. Sometimes it makes you work harder because you know your time is more and more limited and you wanna get things done. I don't know where I am on that. It is just one of those things that's always in the back of my mind. And I don't think that's uncommon. Well, it's just like G factor intelligence. It's a hard truth that's there. And sometimes you kinda walk past it and you don't wanna look at it, but it's still there. Yeah. Yes, you can't escape it. And think about the G factor in intelligence. Everybody knows this is true on a personal daily basis. Even if you think back to when you were in school, you know who the smart kids were. When you are on the phone talking to a customer service representative, that in response to your detailed question is reading a script back to you, and you get furious at this. And have you ever called this person a moron or wanted to call this person a moron? You're not listening to me. Everybody has had the experience of dealing with people who they think are not at their level. It's just common because that's the way human beings are. That's the way life is. But we also have a poor estimation of our own intelligence. We have a poor, and we're not always a great, our judgment of human character of other people is not as good as a battery of tests. That's where bias comes in. That's where our history, our emotions, all of that comes in. So people on the internet, there's such a thing as the internet. And people on the internet will call each other dumb all the time. And that's the worry here, is that we give up on people. We put them in a bin just because of one interaction or some small number of interactions as if that's it, they're hopeless. That's just in their genetics. But I think no matter what the science here says, once again, that does not mean we should not have compassion for our fellow man. That's exactly what the science does say. It's not opposite of what the science says. Everything I know about psychology, everything I've learned about intelligence, everything points to the inexorable conclusion that you have to treat people as individuals respectfully and with compassion. Because through no fault of their own, some people are not as capable as others. And you wanna turn a blind eye to it, you wanna come up with theories about why that might be true, fine. I would like to fix some of it as best I can. And everybody is deserving of love. Richard, this is a good way to end it, I think. I'm just getting warmed up here, wasn't I? I know. I know you can go for another many hours, but to respect your extremely valuable time, this was an amazing conversation. Thank you for the teaching company, the lectures you've given with the Neuroscience of Intelligence, just the work you're doing. It's a difficult topic. It's a topic that's controversial and sensitive to people, and to push forward boldly and in that nuanced way, just thank you for everything you do. And thank you for asking the big questions of intelligence, of consciousness. Well, thank you for asking me. I mean, there's nothing like good conversation on these topics. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Heyer. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. It is not that I'm so smart, but I stay with the questions much longer. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/hppbxV9C63g

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Demis Hassabis: DeepMind - AI, Superintelligence & the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #299

The following is a conversation with Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a company that has published and built some of the most incredible artificial intelligence systems in the history of computing, including AlphaZero that learned all by itself to play the game of Go better than any human in the world and AlphaFold2 that solved protein folding. Both tasks considered nearly impossible for a very long time. Demis is widely considered to be one of the most brilliant and impactful humans in the history of artificial intelligence and science and engineering in general. This was truly an honor and a pleasure for me to finally sit down with him for this conversation and I'm sure we will talk many times again in the future. This is the Lux Freedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Demis Hassabis. Let's start with a bit of a personal question. Am I an AI program you wrote to interview people until I get good enough to interview you? Well, I'd be impressed if you were. I'd be impressed with myself if you were. I don't think we're quite up to that yet but maybe you're from the future, Lex. If you did, would you tell me? Is that a good thing to tell a language model that's tasked with interviewing that it is in fact AI? Maybe we're in a kind of meta-Turing test. Probably it would be a good idea not to tell you so it doesn't change your behavior, right? This is a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle situation. If I told you, you'd behave differently. Maybe that's what's happening with us, of course. This is a benchmark from the future where they replay 2022 as a year before AIs were good enough yet and now we want to see, is it going to pass? Exactly. If I was such a program, would you be able to tell, do you think? So to the Turing test question, you've talked about the benchmark for solving intelligence. What would be the impressive thing? You've talked about winning a Nobel Prize and AI system winning a Nobel Prize but I still return to the Turing test as a compelling test. The spirit of the Turing test is a compelling test. Yeah, the Turing test of course it's been unbelievably influential and Turing's one of my all-time heroes but I think if you look back at the 1950 paper, his original paper and read the original, you'll see I don't think he meant it to be a rigorous formal test. I think it was more like a thought experiment, almost a bit of philosophy he was writing if you look at the style of the paper. You can see he didn't specify it very rigorously. For example, he didn't specify the knowledge that the expert or judge would have, how much time would they have to investigate this. So these are important parameters if you were going to make it a true sort of formal test. By some measures, people claim the Turing test passed several, you know, a decade ago. I remember someone claiming that with a kind of very bog standard normal logic model because they pretended it was a kid. So the judges thought that the machine, you know, was a child. So that would be very different from an expert AI person interrogating a machine and knowing how it was built and so on. So I think, you know, we should probably move away from that as a formal test and move more towards a general test where we test the AI capabilities on a range of tasks and see if it reaches human level or above performance on maybe thousands, perhaps even millions of tasks eventually, and cover the entire sort of cognitive space. So I think for its time, it was an amazing thought experiment. And also 1950s, obviously, it was barely the dawn of the computer age. So of course, he only thought about text. And now we have a lot more different inputs. So yeah, maybe the better thing to test is the generalizability. So across multiple tasks, multiple tasks, but I think it's also possible as systems like God will show that eventually that might map right back to language. So you might be able to demonstrate your ability to generalize across tasks by then communicating your ability to generalize across tasks, which is kind of what we do through conversation anyway, when we jump around. Ultimately, what's in there in that conversation is not just you moving around knowledge. It's you moving around like these entirely different modalities of understanding that ultimately map to your ability to operate successfully in all of these domains, which you can think of as tasks. Yeah, I think certainly we as humans use language as our main generalization communication tool. So I think we end up thinking in language and expressing our solutions in language. So it's going to be a very powerful mode in which to explain the system, to explain what it's doing. But I don't think it's the only modality that matters. So I think there's going to be a lot of, you know, there's a lot of different ways to express capabilities other than just language. Yeah, visual, robotics, body language. Yeah, actions, the interactive aspect of all that, that's all part of it. But what's interesting with GATO is that it's sort of pushing prediction to the maximum in terms of like, you know, mapping arbitrary sequences to other sequences and sort of just predicting what's going to happen next. So prediction seems to be fundamental to intelligence. And what you're predicting doesn't so much matter. Yeah, it seems like you can generalize that quite well. So obviously language models predict the next word. GATO predicts potentially any action or any token. And it's just the beginning, really. It's our most general agent, one could call it so far. But, you know, that itself can be scaled up massively more than we've done so far. And obviously, we're in the middle of doing that. But the big part of solving AGI is creating benchmarks that help us get closer and closer, sort of creating benchmarks that test the generalizability. And it's just still interesting that this fella, Alan Turing, was one of the first and probably still one of the only people that was trying, maybe philosophically, but was trying to formulate a benchmark that could be followed. It is, even though it's fuzzy, it's still sufficiently rigorous to where you can run that test. And I still think something like the Turing test will, at the end of the day, be the thing that truly impresses other humans. So that you can have a close friend who's in the AI system. For that friend to be a good friend, they're going to have to be able to play Starcraft and they're going to have to do all of these tasks. Get you a beer, so the robotics tasks, play games with you, use language, humor, all those kinds of things. But that ultimately can ultimately can boil down to language. It feels like, not in terms of the AI community, but in terms of the actual impact of general intelligence on the world, it feels like language will be the place where it truly shines. I think so, because it's such an important kind of input output for us. I think you're right. I think the Turing test, the kind of the philosophy behind it, which is the idea of can a machine mimic the behaviors of a human? And I would say wider than just language and text, then in terms of actions and everything else, creativity, all these things, then if it can sort of match or exceed human cognitive capabilities, then I think we have a true intelligence. So from that perspective, you're right. I think he did formulate the right kind of setup. I just, I think there'll be a kind of humor in the AI systems of the future, looking back to this conversation and thinking about the Turing test and also thinking about by that time, they would know which year they were finally able to sort of cross the threshold of human level intelligence and think how funny it is that we humans were still confused about this whole problem that has been long ago been solved. Well, hello to the AI agents of the future. Anyway, so going back to your journey, when did you fall in love with programming first? Well, it was pretty young age actually. So, you know, I started off, actually games was my first love. So starting to play chess when I was around four years old, and then it was actually with winnings from a chess competition that I managed to buy my first chess computer when I was about eight years old. It was a ZX Spectrum, which was hugely popular in the UK at the time. And it was an amazing machine because I think it trained a whole generation of programmers in the UK because it was so accessible. You know, you literally switched it on and there was the basic prompt and you could just get going. And my parents didn't really know anything about computers. So, but because it was my money from a chess competition, I could say I wanted to buy it. And then, you know, I just went to bookstores, got books on programming and started typing in, you know, the programming code. And then, of course, once you start doing that, you start adjusting it and then making your own games. And that's when I fell in love with computers and realized that they were a very magical device. In a way, I kind of, I wouldn't have been able to explain this at the time, but I felt that they were sort of almost a magical extension of your mind. I always had this feeling and I've always loved this about computers that you can set them off doing something, some task for you, you can go to sleep, come back the next day and it's solved. You know, that feels magical to me. So, I mean, all machines do that to some extent. They all enhance our natural capabilities. Obviously, cars make us allow us to move faster than we can run, but this was a machine to extend the mind. And then, of course, AI is the ultimate expression of what a machine may be able to do or learn. So, very naturally for me, that thought extended into AI quite quickly. Do you remember the programming language that was first started? Yeah. Was it special to the machine? No, it was just a basic. I think it was just basic on the ZX Spectrum. I don't know what specific form it was. And then later on, I got a Commodore Amiga, which was a fantastic machine. Now you're just showing off. So, yeah, well, lots of my friends had Atari STs and I managed to get Amigas. It was a bit more powerful and that was incredible. And used to do programming in Assembler and also Amos Basic, this specific form of basic. It was incredible, actually. So, I learned all my coding skills. And when did you fall in love with AI? So, when did you first start to gain an understanding that you can not just write programs that do some mathematical operations for you while you sleep, but something that's akin to bringing an entity to life, sort of a thing that can figure out something more complicated than a simple mathematical operation? Yeah. So, there was a few stages for me all while I was very young. So, first of all, as I was trying to improve at playing chess, I was captaining various England Junior chess teams. And at the time when I was about maybe 10, 11 years old, I was going to become a professional chess player. That was my first thought. So, that dream was there to try to get to the highest level. Yeah. So, when I was about 12 years old, I got to master standard and I was second highest rated player in the world to Judith Polger, who obviously ended up being an amazing chess player and a world women's champion. And when I was trying to improve at chess, what you do is you, obviously, first of all, you're trying to improve your own thinking processes. So, that leads you to thinking about thinking. How is your brain coming up with these ideas? Why is it making mistakes? How can you improve that thought process? But the second thing is that you, it was just the beginning. This was like in the early 80s, mid 80s of chess computers. If you remember, they were physical balls like the one we have in front of us and you press down the squares. I think Kasparov had a branded version of it that I got. They're not as strong as they are today, but they were pretty strong and you used to practice against them to try and improve your openings and other things. So, I remember, I think I probably got my first one when I was around 11 or 12. I remember thinking, this is amazing. How has someone programmed this chess ball to play chess? It was a very formative book I bought, which was called the Chess Computer Handbook by David Levy. It came out in 1984 or something. So, I must have got it when I was about 11 or 12. It explained fully how these chess programs are made. I remember my first AI program programming my Amiga. It wasn't powerful enough to play chess. I couldn't write a whole chess program, but I wrote a program for it to play Othello or Reversi. It's sometimes called, I think, in the US. It's a slightly simpler game than chess, but I used all of the principles that chess programs had. Alpha, beta, search, all of that. That was my first AI program. I remember that very well. I was around 12 years old. So, that brought me into AI. Then the second part was later on. I was around 16 or 17 and I was writing games professionally, designing games, writing a game called Theme Park, which had AI as a core gameplay component as part of the simulation. It sold millions of copies around the world. People loved the way that the AI, even though it was relatively simple by today's AI standards, was reacting to the way you as the player played it. It was called a sandbox game. It was one of the first types of games like that along with SimCity. It meant that every game you played was unique. Is there something you could say, just on a small tangent, about really impressive AI from a game design, human enjoyment perspective? Really impressive AI that you've seen in games and maybe what does it take to create AI system? How hard of a problem is that? A million questions just as a brief tangent. Well, look, I think games have been significant in my life for three reasons. First of all, I was playing them and training myself on games when I was a kid. Then I went through a phase of designing games and writing AI for games. All the games I professionally wrote had AI as a core component. That was mostly in the 90s. The reason I was doing that in the games industry was at the time, the games industry, I think, was the cutting edge of technology. Whether it was graphics with people like John Carmack and Quake and those kinds of things or AI, I think actually all the action was going on in games. We're still reaping the benefits of that even with things like GPUs, which I find ironic. It was obviously invented for graphics, computer graphics, but then turns out to be amazingly useful for AI. It just turns out everything's a matrix multiplication, it appears in the whole world. I think games at the time had the most cutting edge AI. A lot of the games, I was involved in writing. There was a game called Black and White, which was one game I was involved with in the early stages of, which I still think is the most impressive example of reinforcement learning in a computer game. In that game, you trained a little pet animal. It's a brilliant game. Yeah. It's learned from how you were treating it. If you treated it badly, then it became mean. It would be mean to your villagers and your population, the little tribe that you were running. If you were kind to it, then it would be kind. People were fascinated by how that was. So was I, to be honest, with the way it developed. Especially the mapping to good and evil. It made me realize that in the choices you make, you can define where you end up. That means all of us are capable of the good and evil. It all matters in the different choices along the trajectory to those places that you make. It's fascinating. Games can do that philosophically to you. It's rare. It seems rare. Yeah. Well, games are, I think, a unique medium because you as the player, you're not just passively consuming the entertainment, right? You're actually actively involved as an agent. So I think that's what makes it, in some ways, can be more visceral than other mediums like films and books. So that was designing AI in games. Then the third use we've used of AI is in DeepMind from the beginning, which is using games as a testing ground for proving out AI algorithms and developing AI algorithms. That was a core component of our vision at the start of DeepMind, was that we would use games very heavily as our main testing ground, certainly to begin with, because it's super efficient to use games. Also, it's very easy to have metrics to see how well your systems are improving and what direction your ideas are going in and whether you're making incremental improvements. And because those games are often rooted in something that humans did for a long time beforehand, there's already a strong set of rules. It's already a damn good benchmark. Yes. It's really good for so many reasons because you've got clear measures of how good humans can be at these things. In some cases, like Go, we've been playing it for thousands of years. Often they have scores or at least win conditions. So it's very easy for reward learning systems to get a reward. It's very easy to specify what that reward is. Also, at the end, it's easy to test externally how strong is your system by, of course, playing against the world's strongest players at those games. It's so good for so many reasons. It's also very efficient to run potentially millions of simulations in parallel on the cloud. I think there's a huge reason why we were so successful back in, you know, starting out 2010. How come we were able to progress so quickly? Because we've utilized games. At the beginning of DeepMind, we also hired some amazing game engineers who I knew from my previous lives in the games industry. That helped to bootstrap us very quickly. Plus, it's somehow super compelling, almost at a philosophical level of man versus machine over a chess board or a Go board. And especially given that the entire history of AI is defined by people saying it's going to be impossible to make a machine that beats a human being in chess. And then once that happened, people were certain when I was coming up in AI that Go is not a game that can be solved because of the combinatorial complexity. It's just too, it's, you know, no matter how much Moore's law you have, compute is just never going to be able to crack the game of Go. And so then there's something compelling about facing, sort of, taking on the impossibility of that task from the AI researcher perspective, engineer perspective. And then as a human being, just observing this whole thing, your beliefs about what you thought was impossible being broken apart, it's humbling to realize we're not as smart as we thought. It's humbling to realize that the things we think are impossible now perhaps will be done in the future. There's something really powerful about a game, AI system beating a human being in a game that drives that message home for like millions, billions of people, especially in the case of Go. Sure. Well, look, I think it's a, I mean, it has been a fascinating journey and especially as I think about it from, I can understand it from both sides, both as the AI, you know, creators of the AI, but also as a games player originally. So, you know, it was a really interesting, you know, I mean, it was a fantastic, but also somewhat bittersweet moment, the Alpha Go match for me, seeing that and being obviously heavily, heavily involved in that. But, you know, as you say, chess has been the, I mean, Kasparov, I think rightly called it the Drosophila of intelligence, right? So it's sort of, I love that phrase. And I think he's right, because chess has been hand in hand with AI from the beginning of the whole field, right? So I think every AI practitioner, starting with Turing and Claude Shannon and all those, the sort of forefathers of the field, tried their hand at writing a chess program. I've got an original edition of Claude Shannon's first chess program, I think it was 1949, the original sort of paper. And they all did that. And Turing famously wrote a chess program that, but all the computers around them were obviously too slow to run it. So he had to run, he had to be the computer, right? So he literally, I think, spent two or three days running his own program by hand with pencil and paper and playing, playing a friend of his with his chess program. So, of course, Deep Blue was a huge moment, beating Kasparov. But actually, when that happened, I remember that very, very vividly, of course, because it was, you know, chess and computers and AI, all the things I loved, and I was at college at the time. But I remember coming away from that being more impressed by Kasparov's mind than I was by Deep Blue. Because here was Kasparov with his human mind, not only could he play chess more or less to the same level as this brute of a calculation machine. But of course, Kasparov can do everything else humans can do, ride a bike, talk many languages, do politics, all the rest of the amazing things that Kasparov does. And so with the same brain, and yet Deep Blue, brilliant as it was at chess, it had been hand coded for chess, and actually had distilled the knowledge of chess grandmasters into a cool program. But it couldn't do anything else. Like, it couldn't even play a strictly simpler game like tic-tac-toe. So something to me was missing from intelligence from that system that we would regard as intelligence. And I think it was this idea of generality and also learning. So that's what we tried to do with AlphaGo. Yeah, with AlphaGo and AlphaZero and MuZero and then Gato and all the things that we'll get into some parts of. There's just a fascinating trajectory here. But let's just stick on chess briefly. On the human side of chess, you've proposed that from a game design perspective, the thing that makes chess compelling as a game is that there's a creative tension between a bishop and the knight. Can you explain this? First of all, it's really interesting to think about what makes a game compelling, it makes it stick across centuries. Yeah, I was sort of thinking about this. And actually, a lot of even amazing chess players don't think about it necessarily from a game designer point of view. So it's with my game design hat on that I was thinking about this. Why is chess so compelling? And I think a critical reason is the dynamicness of the different kind of chess positions you can have, whether they're closed or open and other things, comes from the bishop and the knight. So if you think about how different the capabilities of the bishop and knight are in terms of the way they move, and then somehow chess has evolved to balance those two capabilities more or less equally. So they're both roughly worth three points each. So you think that dynamics is always there, and then the rest of the rules are kind of trying to stabilize the game. Well, maybe. I mean, it's sort of, I don't know, it's chicken and egg situation, probably both came together. But the fact that it's got to this beautiful equilibrium, where you can have the bishop and knight, they're so different in power, but so equal in value across the set of the universe of all positions, right? Somehow they've been balanced by humanity over hundreds of years, I think gives the game the creative tension that you can swap the bishop and knight, or bishop for a knight, and they're more or less worth the same, but now you aim for a different type of position. If you have the knight, you want a closed position. If you have the bishop, you want an open position. So I think that creates a lot of the creative tension in chess. So some kind of controlled creative tension. From an AI perspective, do you think AI systems could eventually design games that are optimally compelling to humans? Well, that's an interesting question. Sometimes I get asked about AI and creativity, and the way I answer that is relevant to that question, which is that I think there are different levels of creativity, one could say. So I think if we define creativity as coming up with something original, right, that's useful for a purpose, then I think the kind of lowest level of creativity is like an interpolation, so an averaging of all the examples you see. So maybe a very basic AI system could say you could have that. So you show it millions of pictures of cats, and then you say, give me an average looking cat, right, generate me an average looking cat. I would call that interpolation. Then there's extrapolation, which something like AlphaGo showed. So AlphaGo played, you know, millions of games of Go against itself, and then it came up with brilliant new ideas like move 37 in game two, brilliant motif strategies in Go that no humans had ever thought of, even though we've played it for thousands of years and professionally for hundreds of years. So that, I call that extrapolation. But then that's still, there's still a level above that, which is, you know, you could call out of the box thinking or true innovation, which is, could you invent Go, right? Could you invent chess and not just come up with a brilliant chess move or brilliant Go move, but can you actually invent chess or something as good as chess or Go? And I think one day, AI could, but what's missing is how would you even specify that task to a program right now? And the way I would do it, if I was telling a human to do it or a games designer, a human games designer to do it is I would say something like Go, I would say, come up with a game that only takes five minutes to learn, which Go does, because it's got simple rules, but many lifetimes to master, right? Or impossible to master in one lifetime because it's so deep and so complex. And then it's aesthetically beautiful. And also it can be completed in three or four hours of gameplay time, which is, you know, useful for our, us, you know, in a human day. And so you might specify these sort of high level concepts like that. And then, you know, with that, and maybe a few other things one could imagine that Go satisfies those constraints. But the problem is, is that we're not able to specify abstract notions like that, high level abstract notions like that yet to our AI systems. And I think there's still something missing there in terms of high level concepts or abstractions that they truly understand and, you know, combinable and compositional. So for the moment, I think AI is capable of doing interpolation and extrapolation, but not true invention. So coming up with rule sets and optimizing with complicated objectives around those rule sets, we can't currently do, but you could take a specific rule set and then run a kind of self-play experiment to see how long, just observe how an AI system from scratch learns, how long is that journey of learning? And maybe if it satisfies some of those other things you mentioned in terms of quickness to learn and so on, and you could see a long journey to master for even an AI system, then you could say that this is a promising game. But it would be nice to do almost like alpha codes or programming rules. So generating rules that automate even that part of the generation of rules. John Williams So I have thought about systems actually, I think it'd be amazing for a games designer if you could have a system that takes your game, plays it tens of millions of times, maybe overnight, and then self-balances the rules better. So it tweaks the rules and maybe the equations and the parameters so that the game is more balanced, the units in the game or some of the rules could be tweaked. So it's a bit of like giving a base set and then allowing Monte Carlo tree search or something like that to sort of explore it. And I think that would be super powerful tool actually for balancing, auto balancing a game, which usually takes thousands of hours from hundreds of games, human games testers normally to balance some game like Starcraft, which is, Blizzard are amazing at balancing their games, but it takes them years and years and years. So one could imagine at some point when this stuff becomes efficient enough to, you might better do that like overnight. John Williams Do you think a game that is optimal designed by an AI system would look very much like a planet Earth? John Williams Maybe, maybe. It's only the sort of game I would love to make is, and I've tried, in my games career, the games design career, my first big game was designing a theme park, an amusement park. Then with games like Republic, I tried to have games where we designed whole cities and allowed you to play in. So, and of course, people like Will Wright have written games like Sim Earth, trying to simulate the whole of Earth, pretty tricky, but I think- Lex Lucas Sim Earth, I haven't actually played that one. So what is it? Does it incorporate evolution? John Williams Yeah, it has evolution and it sort of treats it as an entire biosphere, but from quite high level. Lex Lucas It'd be nice to be able to sort of zoom in, zoom out, and zoom in. John Williams Exactly. So obviously it couldn't do that. That was in the 90s. I think he wrote that in the 90s. So it couldn't, it wasn't able to do that. But that would be obviously the ultimate sandbox game, of course. Lex Lucas On that topic, do you think we're living in a simulation? John Williams Yes. Well, so, okay. Lex Lucas We're going to jump around from the absurdly philosophical to the technical. John Williams Sure, sure. Very, very happy to. So I think my answer to that question is a little bit complex because there is simulation theory, which obviously Nick Bostrom, I think, famously first proposed. And I don't quite believe it in that sense. So in the sense that are we in some sort of computer game or have our descendants somehow recreated Earth in the 21st century and for some kind of experimental reason. But I do think that the best way to understand physics and the universe is from a computational perspective. So understanding it as an information universe, and actually information being the most fundamental unit of reality, rather than matter or energy. So physicists would say, matter or energy, E equals mc squared, these are the things that are the fundamentals of the universe. I'd actually say information, which of course itself can be, can specify energy or matter, right? Matter is actually just, you know, we're just out the way our bodies and the molecules in our body are arranged as information. So I think information may be the most fundamental way to describe the universe. And therefore, you could say we're in some sort of simulation because of that. But I do, I'm not really a subscriber to the idea that, you know, these are sort of throwaway billions of simulations around. I think this is actually very critical and possibly unique, this simulation. LUIS So this particular one? ALI Yes. LUIS So, but, and you just mean treating the universe as a computer that's processing and modifying information is a good way to solve the problems of physics, of chemistry, of biology, and perhaps of humanity and so on. ALI Yes. I think understanding physics in terms of information theory might be the best way to really understand what's going on here. LUIS From our understanding of a universal Turing machine, from our understanding of a computer, do you think there's something outside of the capabilities of a computer that is present in our universe? You have a disagreement with Roger Penrose about the nature of consciousness. He thinks that consciousness is more than just a computation. Do you think all of it, the whole shebang, can be a computation? ALI Yeah, I've had many fascinating debates with Sir Roger Penrose and obviously he's famously, and I read, you know, Emperors of the New Mind and his books, his classical books, and they were pretty influential in the, you know, in the 90s. And he believes that there's something more, you know, something quantum that is needed to explain consciousness in the brain. I think about what we're doing actually at DeepMind and what my career is being. We're almost like Turing's champion. So we are pushing Turing machines or classical computation to the limits. What are the limits of what classical computing can do? Now, and at the same time, I've also studied neuroscience to see, and that's why I did my PhD in, was to see, also to look at, you know, is there anything quantum in the brain from a neuroscience or biological perspective? And so far, I think most neuroscientists and most mainstream biologists and neuroscientists would say there's no evidence of any quantum systems or effects in the brain. As far as we can see, it can be mostly explained by classical theories. So, and then, so there's sort of the search from the biology side. And then at the same time, there's the raising of the water, the bar, from what classical Turing machines can do and, you know, including our new AI systems. And as you alluded to earlier, you know, I think AI, especially in the last decade plus, has been a continual story now of surprising events and surprising successes, knocking over one theory after another of what was thought to be impossible, you know, from Go to protein folding and so on. And so I think I would be very hesitant to bet against how far the universal Turing machine and classical computation paradigm can go. And my betting would be that all of certainly what's going on in our brain can probably be mimicked or approximated on a classical machine, not requiring something metaphysical or quantum. And we'll get there with some of the work with AlphaFold, which I think begins the journey of modeling this beautiful and complex world of biology. So you think all the magic of the human mind comes from this, just a few pounds of mush, of biological computational mush that's akin to some of the neural networks, not directly, but in spirit that DeepMind has been working with? Well, look, I think it's, you say it's a few, you know, of course, it's, this is the, I think, the biggest miracle of the universe is that it's just a few pounds of mush in our skulls. And yet it's also our brains are the most complex objects in the, that we know of in the universe. So there's something profoundly beautiful and amazing about our brains. And I think that it's an incredibly, incredible efficient machine and, and, and it's, you know, a phenomenon basically. And I think that building AI, one of the reasons I want to build AI, and I've always wanted to is, I think by building an intelligent artifact like AI, and then comparing it to the human mind, that will help us unlock the uniqueness and the true secrets of the mind that we've always wondered about since the dawn of history, like consciousness, dreaming, creativity, emotions, what are all these things, right? We've, we've, we've wondered about them since, since the dawn of humanity. And I think one of the reasons, and you know, I love philosophy and philosophy of mind is we found it difficult is there haven't been the tools for us to really, other than introspection to from very clever people in history, very clever philosophers to really investigate this scientifically. But now suddenly we have a plethora of tools. Firstly, we have all of the neuroscience tools, fMRI machines, single cell recording, all of this stuff. But we also have the ability computers and AI to build intelligent systems. So I think that, you know, I think it is amazing what the human mind does. And, and, and I'm kind of in awe of it really. And, and I think it's amazing that without human minds, we're able to build things like computers, and actually even, you know, think and investigate about these questions. I think that's also a testament to the human mind. Yeah, the universe built the human mind that now is building computers that help us understand both the universe and our own human mind. That's right. That's exactly it. I mean, I think that's one, you know, one could say we are, maybe we're the mechanism by which the universe is going to try and understand itself. Yeah. It's beautiful. So let's, let's go to the basic building blocks of biology that I think is another angle at which you can start to understand the human mind, the human body, which is quite fascinating, which is from the basic building blocks, start to simulate, start to model how from those building blocks, you can construct bigger and bigger, more complex systems, maybe one day, the entirety of the human biology. So here's another problem that thought to be impossible to solve, which is protein folding and alpha fold or specific specific alpha fold to did just that. It's solved protein folding. I think it's one of the biggest breakthroughs, certainly in the history of structural biology, but in general, and in science, maybe from a high level, what is it and how does it work? And then we can ask some fascinating questions after. Sure. So maybe to explain it to people not familiar with protein folding is, you know, first of all, explain proteins, which is, you know, proteins are essential to all life. Every function in your body depends on proteins. Sometimes they're called the workhorses of biology. And if you look into them and I've, you know, obviously as part of alpha fold, I've been researching proteins and, and, and structural biology for the last few years. You know, they're amazing little bio nano machines, proteins, incredible. If you actually watch little videos of how they work, animations of how they work and proteins are specified by their genetic sequence called amino acid sequence. So you can think it with their genetic makeup and then in the body, in nature, they, when they, when they fold up into a 3d structure, so you can think of it as a string of beads and then they fold up into a ball. Now, the key thing is you want to know what that 3d structure is because the structure, the 3d structure of a protein is what helps to determine what does it do, the function it does in your body. And also if you're interested in drug drugs or disease, you need to understand that 3d structure because if you want to target something with a drug compound about to block something, the protein is doing, you need to understand where it's going to bind on the surface of the protein. So obviously in order to do that, you need to understand the 3d structure. So the structure is mapped to the function, the structure is mapped to the function and the structure is obviously somehow specified by the, by the amino acid sequence. And that's the, in essence, the protein folding problem is can you just from the amino acid sequence, the one dimensional string of letters, can you immediately computationally predict the 3d structure? And this has been a grand challenge in biology for over 50 years. So I think it was first articulated by Christian Anfiensen, a Nobel Prize winner in 1972, as part of his Nobel Prize winning lecture. And he just speculated this should be possible to go from the amino acid sequence to the 3d structure, but he didn't say how. So it was, you know, it's been described to me as equivalent to Fermat's last theorem, but for biology, right? You should, as somebody that very well might win the Nobel Prize in the future, but outside of that, you should do more of that kind of thing in the margin, just put random things that will take like 200 years to solve. Set people off for 200 years. It should be possible. Exactly. And just don't give any indications. Exactly. I think everyone should, exactly, should be, I'll have to remember that for future. So yeah, so he set off, you know, with this one throwaway remark, just like Fermat, you know, he, he set off this whole 50 year field really of computational biology and, and they had, you know, they got stuck. They hadn't really got very far with doing this. And, and until now, until AlphaFold came along, this is done experimentally, right? Very painstakingly. So the rule of thumb is, and you have to like crystallize the protein, which is really difficult. Some proteins can't be crystallized like membrane proteins. And then you have to use very expensive electron microscopes or x-ray crystallography machines, really painstaking work to get the 3D structure and visualize the 3D structure. So the rule of thumb in, in, in experimental biology is that it takes one PhD student, their entire PhD to do one protein. And with AlphaFold 2, we're able to predict the 3D structure in a matter of seconds. And so we were, you know, over Christmas, we did the whole human proteome, or every protein in the human body, all 20,000 proteins. So the human proteomes like the equivalent of the human genome, but on protein space and, and sort of revolutionized really what structural biologists can do, because now they don't have to worry about these painstaking experimental, you know, should they put all of that effort in or not? They can almost just look up the structure of their proteins, like a Google search. And so there's a data set on which it's trained and how to map this amino acid sequence. First of all, it's incredible that a protein, this little chemical computer is able to do that computation itself in some kind of distributed way and do it very quickly. That's a weird thing. And they evolved that way because, you know, in the beginning, I mean, that's a great invention, just the protein itself. Yes, I mean- And then there's, I think, probably a history of, like, they evolved to have many of these proteins and those proteins figure out how to be computers themselves in such a way that you can create structures that can interact in complex ways with each other in order to form high level functions. I mean, it's a weird system that they figured it out. Well, for sure. I mean, we, you know, maybe we should talk about the origins of life too, but proteins themselves, I think, are magical and incredible. As I said, little, little bio-nano machines. And actually, Leventhal, who is another scientist, a contemporary of Amundsen, he coined this Leventhal, what became known as Leventhal's paradox, which is exactly what you're saying. He calculated roughly an average protein, which is maybe 2000 amino acids bases long, can fold in maybe 10 to the power 300 different conformations. So there's 10 to the power 300 different ways that protein could fold up. And yet somehow in nature, physics solves this, solves this in a matter of milliseconds. So proteins fold up in your body in, you know, sometimes in fractions of a second. So physics is somehow solving that search problem. And just to be clear, in many of these cases, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, there's often a unique way for that sequence to form itself. So among that huge number of possibilities, it figures out a way how to stably, in some cases, there might be a misfunction, so on, which leads to a lot of the disorders and stuff like that. But most of the time, it's a unique mapping. And that unique mapping is not obvious. No, exactly. It's just what the problem is. No, exactly. So there's a unique mapping, usually, in a healthy, if it's healthy. And as you say, in disease, so for example, Alzheimer's, one conjecture is that it's because of misfolded protein, a protein that folds in the wrong way, amyloid beta protein. And then because it folds in the wrong way, it gets tangled up, right, in your neurons. So it's super important to understand both healthy functioning and also disease is to understand, you know, what these things are doing and how they're structuring. Of course, the next step is sometimes proteins change shape when they interact with something. So they're not just static necessarily in biology. Maybe you can give some interesting, sort of beautiful things to you about these early days of AlphaFold, of solving this problem, because unlike games, this is real physical systems that are less amenable to self-play type of mechanisms. The size of the data set is smaller than you might otherwise like, so you have to be very clever about certain things. Is there something you could speak to? What was very hard to solve and what are some beautiful aspects about the solution? Yeah, I would say AlphaFold is the most complex and also probably most meaningful system we've built so far. So it's been an amazing time actually in the last, you know, two, three years to see that come through because as we talked about earlier, you know, games is what we started on at building things like AlphaGo and AlphaZero, but really the ultimate goal was to not just to crack games, it was just to build, use them to bootstrap general learning systems we could then apply to real world challenges. Specifically, my passion is scientific challenges like protein folding. And then AlphaFold of course is our first big proof point of that. And so, you know, in terms of the data and the amount of innovations that had to go into it, you know, it was like more than 30 different component algorithms needed to be put together to crack the protein folding. I think some of the big innovations were the kind of building in some hard coded constraints around physics and evolutionary biology to constrain sort of things like the bond angles in the protein and things like that, but not to impact the learning system. So still allowing the system to be able to learn the physics itself from the examples that we had. And the examples, as you say, there are only about 150,000 proteins, even after 40 years of experimental biology, only around 150,000 proteins have been, the structures have been found out about. So that was our training set, which is much less than normally we would like to use, but using various tricks, things like self-distillation. So actually using AlphaFold predictions, some of the best predictions that it thought was highly confident in, we put them back into the training set, right, to make the training set bigger. That was critical to AlphaFold working. So there was actually a huge number of different innovations like that, that were required to ultimately crack the problem. AlphaFold 1, what it produced was a distogram. So a kind of a matrix of the pairwise distances between all of the molecules in the protein. And then there had to be a separate optimization process to create the 3D structure. And what we did for AlphaFold 2 is make it truly end to end. So we went straight from the amino acid sequence of bases to the 3D structure directly without going through this intermediate step. And in machine learning, what we've always found is that the more end to end you can make it, the better the system. And it's probably because in the end, the system's better at learning what the constraints are than we are as the human designers of specifying it. So anytime you can let it flow end to end and actually just generate what it is you're really looking for, in this case the 3D structure, you're better off than having this intermediate step, which you then have to handcraft the next step for. So it's better to let the gradients and the learning flow all the way through the system from the end point, the end output you want to the inputs. So that's a good way to start on a new problem. Handcraft a bunch of stuff, add a bunch of manual constraints with a small end to end learning piece or a small learning piece and grow that learning piece until it consumes the whole thing. That's right. And so you can also see, you know, this is a bit of a method we've developed over doing many sort of successful alpha, we call them AlphaX projects, right? And the easiest way to see that is the evolution of AlphaGo to AlphaZero. So AlphaGo was a learning system, but it was specifically trained to only play Go, right? So, and what we wanted to do with the first version of AlphaGo is just get to world champion performance, no matter how we did it, right? And then, of course, AlphaGo Zero, we removed the need to use human games as a starting point, right? So it could just play against itself from random starting point from the beginning. So that removed the need for human knowledge about Go. And then finally, AlphaZero then generalized it so that any things we had in there, the system, including things like symmetry of the Go board, were removed. So that AlphaZero could play from scratch any two player game. And then MuZero, which is the final, our latest version of that set of things, was then extending it so that you didn't even have to give it the rules of the game. It would learn that for itself. So it could also deal with computer games as well as board games. So that line of AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero, MuZero, that's the full trajectory of what you can take from imitation learning to full self-supervised learning. Yeah, exactly. And learning the entire structure of the environment you're put in from scratch, right? And bootstrapping it through self-play yourself. But the thing is, it would have been impossible, I think, or very hard for us to build AlphaZero or MuZero first out of the box. Even psychologically, because you have to believe in yourself for a very long time. You're constantly dealing with doubt because a lot of people say that it's impossible. Exactly. So it was hard enough just to do Go, as you were saying. Everyone thought that was impossible, or at least a decade away from when we did it back in 2015, 2016. And so, yes, it would have been psychologically probably very difficult, as well as the fact that, of course, we learn a lot by building AlphaGo first. So I think this is why I call AI an engineering science. It's one of the most fascinating science disciplines, but it's also an engineering science in the sense that, unlike natural sciences, the phenomenon you're studying doesn't exist out in nature. You have to build it first. So you have to build the artifact first, and then you can study and pull it apart and how it works. This is tough to ask you this question, because you probably will say it's everything, but let's try to think through this, because you're in a very interesting position, where DeepMind is a place of some of the most brilliant ideas in the history of AI, but it's also a place of brilliant engineering. So how much of solving intelligence, this big goal for DeepMind, how much of it is science? How much is engineering? So how much is the algorithms? How much is the data? How much is the hardware compute infrastructure? How much is it the software compute infrastructure? What else is there? How much is the human infrastructure? And just the humans interacting in certain kinds of ways in the space of all those ideas, and how much is maybe philosophy? What's the key? If you were to look back, if we go forward 200 years and look back, what was the key thing that solved intelligence? Is it the ideas or the engineering? I think it's a combination. First of all, of course, it's a combination of all those things, but the ratios of them changed over time. So even in the last 12 years, so we started DeepMind in 2010, which is hard to imagine now, because 2010, it's only 12 short years ago, but nobody was talking about AI. I don't know if you remember back to your MIT days, no one was talking about it. I did a postdoc at MIT back around then, and it was sort of thought of as, well, look, we know AI doesn't work. We tried this hard in the 90s at places like MIT, mostly using logic systems and old-fashioned sort of good old-fashioned AI, we would call it now. People like Minsky and Patrick Winston, and you know all these characters, right? And I used to debate a few of them, and they used to think I was mad thinking about that some new advance could be done with learning systems. And I was actually pleased to hear that, because at least you know you're on a unique track at that point, right? Even if all of your professors are telling you you're mad. And of course in industry, we couldn't get, you know, it was difficult to get two cents together, which is hard to imagine now as well, given that it's the biggest sort of buzzword in VCs and fundraising's easy and all these kind of things today. So back in 2010, it was very difficult. And the reason we started then, and Shane and I used to discuss what were the sort of founding tenets of DeepMind, and it was various things. One was algorithmic advances, so deep learning, you know, Geoff Hinton and co had just sort of invented that in academia, but no one in industry knew about it. We love reinforcement learning, we thought that could be scaled up. But also understanding about the human brain had advanced quite a lot in the decade prior with fMRI machines and other things. So we could get some good hints about architectures and algorithms and sort of representations maybe that the brain uses, so at a systems level, not at a implementation level. And then the other big things were compute and GPUs, right? So we could see a compute was going to be really useful and it got to a place where it become commoditized mostly through the games industry, and that could be taken advantage of. And then the final thing was also mathematical and theoretical definitions of intelligence. So things like AIXI, AIXE, which Shane worked on with his supervisor, Marcus Hutter, which is sort of theoretical proof, really, of universal intelligence, which is actually a reinforcement learning system. In the limit, I mean, it assumes infinite compute and infinite memory in the way, you know, like a Turing machine proves. But I was also waiting to see something like that too, to, you know, like Turing machines and computation theory that people like Turing and Shannon came up with underpins modern computer science. You know, I was waiting for a theory like that to sort of underpin AGI research. So when I, you know, met Shane and saw he was working on something like that, you know, that to me was a sort of final piece of the jigsaw. So in the early days, I would say that ideas were the most important, you know, for us it was deep reinforcement learning, scaling up deep learning. Of course, we've seen transformers. So huge leaps, I would say, you know, three or four from, if you think from 2010 till now, huge evolutions, things like AlphaGo. And maybe there's a few more still needed. But as we get closer to AI, AGI, I think engineering becomes more and more important and data, because scale and of course the recent, you know, results of GPT-3 and all the big language models and large models, including our ones, has shown that scale is, and large models are clearly going to be a necessary, but perhaps not sufficient part of an AGI solution. And throughout that, like you said, and I'd like to give you a big thank you. You're one of the pioneers in this, is sticking by ideas like reinforcement learning, that this can actually work, given actually limited success in the past. And also, which we still don't know, but proudly having the best researchers in the world and talking about solving intelligence. So talking about whatever you call it, AGI or something like this, that speaking of MIT, that's just something you wouldn't bring up. Maybe you did in like 40, 50 years ago, but that was, AI was a place where you do tinkering, very small scale, not very ambitious projects. And maybe the biggest ambitious projects were in the space of robotics and doing like the DARPA challenge. But the task of solving intelligence and believing you can, that's really, really powerful. So in order for engineering to do its work, to have great engineers build great systems, you have to have that belief that threads throughout the whole thing that you can actually solve some of these impossible challenges. Yeah, that's right. And back in 2010, our mission statement, and still is today, it was used to be a solving step one, solve intelligence, step two, use it to solve everything else. So if you can imagine pitching that to VC in 2010, the kind of looks we got, we managed to find a few kooky people to back us, but it was tricky. And I got to the point where we wouldn't mention it to any of our professors because they would just eye roll and think we committed career suicide. And so it was, there's a lot of things that we had to do, but we always believed it. And one reason, by the way, one reason I've always believed in reinforcement learning is that if you look at neuroscience, that is the way that the primate brain learns. One of the main mechanisms is the dopamine system implements some form of TD learning. It was a very famous result in the late nineties where they saw this in monkeys and as a propagating prediction error. So again, in the limit, this is what I think you can use neuroscience for is, in any, and mathematics, when you're doing something as ambitious as trying to solve intelligence and you're, you know, it's blue sky research, no one knows how to do it. You need to use any evidence or any source of information you can to help guide you in the right direction or give you confidence you're going in the right direction. So that was one reason we pushed so hard on that. And just going back to your earlier question about organization, the other big thing that I think we innovated with at DeepMind to encourage invention and innovation was the multidisciplinary organization we built and we still have today. So DeepMind originally was a confluence of the most cutting edge knowledge in neuroscience with machine learning, engineering, and mathematics, right? And gaming. And then since then we built that out even further. So we have philosophers here and, and, you know, ethicists, but also other types of scientists, physicists, and so on. And that's what brings together. I tried to build a sort of new type of Bell Labs, but in its golden era, right? And, and a new expression of that to try and foster this incredible sort of innovation machine. So talking about the humans in the machine, DeepMind itself is a learning machine with a lots of amazing human minds in it coming together to try and build these learning systems. If we return to the big ambitious dream of AlphaFold that may be the early steps on a very long journey in, in biology, do you think the same kind of approach can use to predict the structure and function of more complex biological systems? So multi-protein interaction, and then, I mean, you can go out from there. Just simulating bigger and bigger systems that eventually simulate something like the human brain or the human body. It's just the big mush, the mess of the beautiful, resilient mess of biology. Do you, do you see that as a long-term vision? I do. And I think, you know, if you think about what are the things, top things I wanted to apply AI to once we had powerful enough systems, biology and curing diseases and understanding biology was right up there, you know, top of my list. That's one of the reasons I personally pushed that myself and with AlphaFold. But I think AlphaFold, amazing as it is, is just the beginning. And, and, and I hope it's evidence of what could be done with computational methods. So, you know, AlphaFold solved this, this huge problem of, of the structure of proteins, but biology is dynamic. So really what I imagine from here, and we're working on all these things now, is protein-protein interaction, protein-licken binding, so reacting with molecules. Then you want to get build up to pathways and then eventually a virtual cell. That's my dream, maybe in the next 10 years. And I've been talking actually to a lot of biologists, friends of mine, Paul Nurse, who runs the Crick Institute, amazing biologist, Nobel Prize winning biologist. We've been discussing for 20 years now, virtual cells. Could you build a virtual simulation of a cell? And if you could, that would be incredible for biology and disease discovery, because you could do loads of experiments on the virtual cell and then only at the last stage validate it in the wet lab. So you could, you know, in terms of the search space of discovering new drugs, you know, it takes 10 years roughly to go from, to go from, you know, identifying a target to having a drug candidate. Maybe that could be shortened to, you know, by an order of magnitude with if you could do most of that, that, that work in silico. So in order to get to a virtual cell, we have to build up understanding of different parts of biology and the interactions. And, and so we, you know, we, every, every few years we talk about this with, I talked about this with Paul. And then finally last year after AlphaFold, I said, now's the time we can finally go for it. And, and AlphaFold is the first proof point that this might be possible. And he's very excited. And we have some collaborations with his, with his lab, but they're just across the road, actually from us. So it's, you know, wonderful being here in Kings Cross with the Crick Institute across the road. And, and I think the next steps, you know, I think there's going to be some amazing advances in biology built on top of things like AlphaFold. We're already seeing that with the community doing that after we've open sourced it and released it. And, you know, I often say that I think if you think of mathematics is the perfect description language for physics, I think AI might be, end up being the perfect description language for biology, because biology is so messy. It's so emergent, so dynamic and complex. I think, I find it very hard to believe we'll ever get to something as elegant as Newton's laws of motions to describe a cell, right? It's just too complicated. So I think AI is the right tool for this. You have to, you have to start at the basic building blocks and use AI to run the simulation for all those building blocks. So have a very strong way to do prediction of what, given these building blocks, what kind of biology, how the, the function and the evolution of that biological system. It's almost like a cellular automata. You have to run it. You can't analyze it from a high level. You have to take the basic ingredients, figure out the rules and let it run. But in this case, the rules are very difficult to figure out. You have to learn them. Yes, exactly. That's exactly it. So it's the biology too complicated to figure out the rules. It's, it's too emergent, too dynamic, say compared to a physics system, like the motion of a planet. Yeah. Right. And, and so you have to learn the rules and that's exactly the type of systems that we're building. So you, you mentioned you've open sourced AlphaFold and even the data involved. To me personally, also really happy and a big thank you for open sourcing Majoko, the physics simulation engine that's, that's often used for robotics research and so on. So I think that's a pretty gangster move. So what, what's the, what's, I mean, this, this, very few companies or people do that kind of thing. What's the philosophy behind that? You know, it's a case by case basis. And in both those cases, we felt that was the maximum benefit to humanity to do that. And, and the scientific community, in one case, the robotics physics community with Majoko. So we purchased it. We purchased it for, yes, we purchased it for the express principle to open source it. So, so, you know, I hope people appreciate that. It's great to hear that you do. And then the second thing was, and mostly we did it because the person building it is, was not able to cope with supporting it anymore because it was, it got too big for him, his amazing professor who built it in the first place. So we helped him out with that. And then with AlphaFold is even bigger, I would say. And I think in that case, we decided that there were so many downstream applications of AlphaFold that we couldn't possibly even imagine what they all were. So the best way to accelerate drug discovery and also fundamental research would be to, to give all that data away and, and, and the, and the, and the system itself. You know, it's been so gratifying to see what people have done that within just one year, which is a short amount of time in science. And it's being used by over 500,000 researchers have used it. We think that's almost every biologist in the world. I think there's roughly 500,000 biologists in the world, professional biologists have used it to, to look at their proteins of interest. We've seen amazing fundamental research done. So a couple of weeks ago, front cover, there was a whole special issue of science, including the front cover, which had the nuclear pore complex on it, which is one of the biggest proteins in the body. The nuclear pore complex is a protein that governs all the nutrients going in and out of your cell nucleus. So they're like little hall gateways that open and close to let things go in and out of your cell nucleus. So they're really important, but they're huge because they're massive donut ring shape things. And they've been looking to try and figure out that structure for decades. And they have lots of, you know, experimental data, but it's too low resolution. There's bits missing. And they were able to like a giant Lego jigsaw puzzle, use alpha fold predictions, plus experimental data and combined those two independent sources of information, actually four different groups around the world were able to put it together at the same, more or less simultaneously using alpha fold predictions. So that's been amazing to see. And pretty much every pharma company, every drug company executive I've spoken to has said that their teams are using alpha fold to accelerate whatever drugs they're trying to discover. So I think the knock-on effect has been enormous in terms of the impact that alpha fold has made. And it's probably bringing in, it's creating biologists, it's bringing more people into the field, both on the excitement and both on the technical skills involved. And it's almost like a gateway drug to biology. Yes, it is. You follow up computational people involved too, hopefully. And I think for us, you know, the next stage, as I said, you know, in future, we have to have other considerations too. We're building on top of alpha fold and these other ideas I discussed with you about protein, protein interactions and genomics and other things. And not everything will be open source. Some of it will, we'll do commercially, because that will be the best way to actually get the most resources and impact behind it. And other ways, some other projects we'll do non-profit style. And also we have to consider for future things as well, safety and ethics as well, like, you know, synthetic biology, there are, you know, there is dual use. And we have to think about that as well. With alpha fold, we, you know, we consulted with 30 different bioethicists and other people expert in this field to make sure it was safe before we released it. So there'll be other considerations in future. But for right now, you know, I think alpha fold is a kind of a gift from us to the scientific community. So I'm pretty sure that something like alpha fold would be part of Nobel prizes in the future. But us humans, of course, are horrible with credit assignment. So we'll of course give it to the humans. Do you think there will be a day when AI system can't be denied that it earned that Nobel prize? Do you think we will see that in 21st century? It depends what type of AI we end up building, right? Whether they're, you know, goal seeking agents who specifies the goals, who comes up with the hypotheses, who, you know, who determines which problems to tackle, right? So I think... And tweets about it, announcement of the results. Yes, it's announcement of the results, exactly, as part of it. So I think right now, of course, it's amazing human ingenuity that's behind these systems. And then the system, in my opinion, is just a tool, you know, it'd be a bit like saying with Galileo and his telescope, you know, the ingenuity, the credit should go to the telescope. I mean, it's clearly Galileo building the tool which he then uses. So I still see that in the same way today, even though these tools learn for themselves. I think of things like AlphaFold and the things we're building as the ultimate tools for science and for acquiring new knowledge to help us as scientists acquire new knowledge. I think one day there will come a point where an AI system may solve or come up with something like general relativity of its own bat, not just by averaging everything on the internet or averaging everything on PubMed. Although that would be interesting to see what that would come up with. So that to me is a bit like our earlier debate about creativity, you know, inventing Go rather than just coming up with a good Go move. And so I think solving, I think to, you know, if we wanted to give it the credit of like a Nobel type of thing, then it would need to invent Go and sort of invent that new conjecture out of the blue, rather than being specified by the human scientists or the human creators. So I think right now that's, it's definitely just a tool. Although it is interesting how far you get by averaging everything on the internet, like you said, because, you know, a lot of people do see science as you're always standing on the shoulders of giants. And the question is, how much are you and the question is, how much are you really reaching up above the shoulders of giants? Maybe it's just a simulating different kinds of results of the past with ultimately this new perspective that gives you this breakthrough idea. But that idea may not be novel in the way that it can't be already discovered on the internet. Maybe the Nobel prizes of the next hundred years are already all there on the internet to be discovered. They could be, they could be. I mean, I think, this is one of the big mysteries, I think, is that, first of all, I believe a lot of the big new breakthroughs that are going to come in the next few decades, and even in the last decade, are going to come at the intersection between different subject areas, where there'll be some new connection that's found between what seemingly were disparate areas. And one can even think of deep mind, as I said earlier, as a sort of interdisciplinary between neuroscience ideas and AI engineering ideas originally. And so I think there's that. And then one of the things we can't imagine today is, and one of the reasons I think people, we were so surprised by how well large models worked, is that actually, it's very hard for our human minds, our limited human minds to understand what it would be like to read the whole internet, right? I think we can do a thought experiment, and I used to do this, of like, well, what if I read the whole of Wikipedia? What would I know? And I think our minds can just about comprehend maybe what that would be like, but the whole internet is beyond comprehension. So I think we just don't understand what it would be like to be able to hold all of that in mind, potentially, right? And then active at once, and then maybe what are the connections that are available there? So I think no doubt there are huge things to be discovered just like that. But I do think there is this other type of creativity of true spark of new knowledge, new idea, never thought before about, can't be averaged from things that are known, that really, of course, everything comes, you know, nobody creates in a vacuum, so there must be clues somewhere. But just a unique way of putting those things together, I think some of the greatest scientists in history have displayed that, I would say. Although it's very hard to know, going back to their time, what was exactly known when they came up with those things. Although, you're making me really think, because just the thought experiment of deeply knowing 100 Wikipedia pages, I don't think I can, I've been really impressed by Wikipedia, for technical topics. So if you know 100 pages or 1,000 pages, I don't think we can truly comprehend what kind of intelligence that is. It's a pretty powerful intelligence. If you know how to use that and integrate that information correctly, I think you can go really far. You can probably construct thought experiments based on that, like simulate different ideas. So if this is true, let me run this thought experiment, then maybe this is true. It's not really invention, it's like just taking literally the knowledge and using it to construct a very basic simulation of the world. I mean, some argue it's romantic in part, but Einstein would do the same kind of things with a thought experiment, right? Yeah, one could imagine doing that systematically across millions of Wikipedia pages, plus PubMed, all these things. I think there are many, many things to be discovered like that that are hugely useful. You could imagine, and I want us to do some of these things in material science, like room temperature superconductors is something on my list one day that I'd like to have an AI system to help build better optimized batteries, all of these sort of mechanical things. I think a systematic sort of search could be guided by a model, could be extremely powerful. So speaking of which, you have a paper on nuclear fusion, magnetic control of talking about plasmas through deep reinforcement learning. So you're seeking to solve nuclear fusion with deep RL, so it's doing control of high temperature plasmas. Can you explain this work? And can AI eventually solve nuclear fusion? It's been very fun last year or two, and very productive because we've been taking off a lot of my dream projects, if you like, of things that I've collected over the years of areas of science that I would like to, I think could be very transformative if we helped accelerate, and are really interesting problems, scientific challenges in and of themselves. So this is energy. So energy, yes, exactly. So energy and climate. So we talked about disease and biology as being one of the biggest places I think AI can help with. I think energy and climate is another one, so maybe they would be my top two. And fusion is one area I think AI can help with. Now, fusion has many challenges, mostly physics and material science and engineering challenges as well to build these massive fusion reactors and contain the plasma. And what we try to do, and whenever we go into a new field to apply our systems is we look for, we talk to domain experts, we try and find the best people in the world to collaborate with. In this case, in fusion, we collaborated with EPFL in Switzerland, the Swiss Technical Institute, who are amazing. They have a test reactor. They were willing to let us use, which I double checked with the team we were going to use carefully and safely. I was impressed they managed to persuade them to let us use it. And it's an amazing test reactor they have there. And they try all sorts of pretty crazy experiments on it. And what we tend to look at is if we go into a new domain like fusion, what are all the bottleneck problems? It's like thinking from first principles, what are all the bottleneck problems that are still stopping fusion working today? And then we look at, we get a fusion expert to tell us, and then we look at those bottlenecks and we look at the ones, which ones are amenable to our AI methods today. And would be interesting from a research perspective, from our point of view, from an AI point of view. And that would address one of their bottlenecks. And in this case, plasma control was perfect. So the plasma, it's a million degrees Celsius, something like that. It's hotter than the sun. And there's obviously no material that can contain it. So they have to be containing these magnetic, very powerful, superconducting magnetic fields. But the problem is plasma is pretty unstable, as you imagine. You're kind of holding a mini sun, mini star in a reactor. So you kind of want to predict ahead of time what the plasma is going to do. So you can move the magnetic field within a few milliseconds, to basically contain what it's going to do next. So it seems like a perfect problem if you think of it for like a reinforcement learning prediction problem. So you got a controller, you're going to move the magnetic field. And until we came along, they were doing it with traditional operational research type of controllers, which are kind of handcrafted. And the problem is, of course, they can't react in the moment to something the plasma is doing, that they have to be hard coded. And again, knowing that that's normally our go to solution is we would like to learn that instead. And they also had a simulator of these plasma. So there were lots of criteria that matched what we like to use. So can AI eventually solve nuclear fusion? Well, so we with this problem, and we published it in the Nature paper last year, we held the fusion that we held the plasma in a specific shapes. So actually, it's almost like carving the plasma into different shapes and control and hold it there for a record amount of time. So that's one of the problems of fusion sort of solved. So have a controller that's able to no matter the shape, contain it, contain it, yeah, contain it and hold it in structure. And there's different shapes that are better for for the energy productions called droplets and, and so on. So, so that was huge. And now we're looking, we're talking to lots of fusion startups to see what's the next problem we can tackle in the fusion area. So another fascinating place in a paper titled pushing the frontiers of density functionals by solving the fractional electron problem. So you're taking on modeling and simulating the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons. Yes. So, can you explain this work and can AI model and simulate arbitrary quantum mechanical systems in the future? Yeah, so this is another problem I've had my eye on for, you know, a decade or more, which is sort of simulating the properties of electrons. If you can do that, you can basically describe how elements and materials and substances work. So it's kind of like fundamental if you want to advance material science. And, you know, we have Schrodinger's equation, and then we have approximations to that density functional theory. These things are, you know, famous, and people try and write approximations to these, to these functionals and, and kind of come up with descriptions of the electron clouds, where they're going to go, how they're going to interact when you put two elements together. And what we try to do is learn a simulation, learn a functional that will describe more chemistry types of chemistry. So until now, you know, you can run expensive simulations, but then you can only simulate very small molecules, very simple molecules, we would like to simulate large materials. And so today, there's no way of doing that. And we're building up towards building functionals that approximate Schrodinger's equation, and then allow you to describe what the electrons are doing. And all material sort of science and material properties are governed by the electrons and how they interact. So have a good summarization of the simulation through the functional, but one that is still close to what the actual simulation will come out with. So what, how difficult is that task? What's involved in that task? Is it running those, those complicated simulations, and learning the task of mapping from the initial conditions and the parameters of the simulation, learning what the functional would be? Yeah. So it's pretty tricky. And we've done it with, you know, the nice thing is we, there are, we can run a lot of the simulations, the molecular dynamic simulations on our compute clusters. And so that generates a lot of data. So in this case, the data is generated. So we like those sort of systems. And that's why we use games, simulator generated data. And we can kind of create as much of it as we want, really. And just let's leave some, you know, if any computers are free in the cloud, we just run, we run some of these calculations, right? Compute cluster calculations. I like how the free compute time is used up on quantum mechanics. Yeah, quantum mechanics, exactly. Simulations and protein simulations and other things. And so, and so, you know, when you're not searching on YouTube for video, cat videos, we're using those computers usefully and quantum chemistry, the idea. I buy that. And putting them to good use. And then, yeah, and then all of that computational data that's generated, we can then try and learn the functionals from that, which of course are way more efficient once we learn the functional than running those simulations would be. Do you think one day AI may allow us to do something like basically crack open physics? So do something like travel faster than the speed of light? My ultimate aim has always been with AI is the reason I am personally working on AI for my whole life. It was to build a tool to help us understand the universe. So I wanted to, and that means physics really, and the nature of reality. So I don't think we have systems that are capable of doing that yet, but when we get towards AGI, I think that's one of the first things I think we should apply AGI to. I would like to test the limits of physics and our knowledge of physics. There's so many things we don't know. This is one thing I find fascinating about science. And, you know, as a huge proponent of the scientific method as being one of the greatest ideas humanity's ever had and allowed us to progress with our knowledge. But I think as a true scientist, I think what you find is the more you find out, the more you realize we don't know. And I always think that it's surprising that more people aren't troubled. You know, every night I think about all these things we interact with all the time that we have no idea how they work. Time, consciousness, gravity, life. I mean, these are all the fundamental things of nature. I think the way we don't really know what they are. To live life, we pin certain assumptions on them and kind of treat our assumptions as if they're fact. That allows us to sort of box them off somehow. Yeah, box them off somehow. But the reality is when you think of time, you should remind yourself, you should take it off the shelf and realize like, no, we have a bunch of assumptions. There's still a lot of, there's even not a lot of debate. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly what is time. Is there an error of time? You know, there's a lot of fundamental questions that you can't just make assumptions about. And maybe AI allows you to not put anything on the shelf. Yeah. Not make any hard assumptions and really open it up and see what. Exactly. I think we should be truly open-minded about that. And exactly that, not be dogmatic to a particular theory. It'll also allow us to build better tools, experimental tools eventually, that can then test certain theories that may not be testable today. About things about like what we spoke about at the beginning about the computational nature of the universe, how one might, if that was true, how one might go about testing that, right. And how much, you know, there are people who've conjectured people like Scott Aaronson and others about, you know, how much information can a specific Planck unit of space and time contain, right. So one might be able to think about testing those ideas if you had AI helping you build some new exquisite experimental tools. This is what I imagine, you know, many decades from now we'll be able to do. And what kind of questions can be answered to running a simulation of them? So there's a bunch of physics simulations you can imagine that could be run in some kind of efficient way, much like you're doing in the quantum simulation work. And perhaps even the origin of life. So figuring out how going even back before the work of AlphaFold begins, of how this whole thing emerges from a rock, from a static thing. Do you think AI will allow us to, is that something you have your eye on, is trying to understand the origin of life? First of all, yourself, what do you think, how the heck did life originate on Earth? Yeah, well, maybe we'll come to that in a second, but I think the ultimate use of AI is to kind of use it to accelerate science to the maximum. So I think of it a little bit like the tree of all knowledge. If you imagine that's all the knowledge there is in the universe to attain. And we sort of barely scratched the surface of that so far, even though, you know, we've done pretty well since the enlightenment, right, as humanity. And I think AI will turbo charge all of that, like we've seen with AlphaFold. And I want to explore as much of that tree of knowledge as is possible to do. And I think that involves AI helping us with understanding or finding patterns, but also potentially designing and building new tools, experimental tools. So I think that's all, and also running simulations and learning simulations, all of that, we're already, we're sort of doing at a, you know, baby steps level here. But I can imagine that in the decades to come as, you know, what's the full flourishing of that line of thinking. It's going to be truly incredible, I would say. If I visualize this tree of knowledge, something tells me that that knowledge, tree of knowledge for humans is much smaller in the set of all possible trees of knowledge. It's actually quite small, given our cognitive limitations, limited cognitive capabilities, that even with the tools we build, we still won't be able to understand a lot of things. And that's perhaps what non-human systems might be able to reach farther, not just as tools, but in themselves understanding something that they can bring back. Yeah, it could well be. So, I mean, there's so many things that are sort of encapsulated in what you just said there. I think, first of all, there's two different things there. It's like, what do we understand today? What could the human mind understand? And what is the totality of what is there to be understood? Right? And so there's three concentric, you know, you can think of them as three larger and larger trees or exploring more branches of that tree. And I think with AI, we're going to explore that whole lot. Now, the question is, you know, if you think about what is the totality of what could be understood, there may be some fundamental physics reasons why certain things can't be understood, like what's outside a simulation or outside the universe. Maybe it's not understandable from within the universe. So there may be some hard constraints like that. You know, it could be smaller constraints, like we think of space-time as fundamental. Our human brains are really used to this idea of a three-dimensional world with time. Right. Maybe... But our tools could go beyond that. They wouldn't have that limitation necessarily. They could think in 11 dimensions, 12 dimensions, whatever is needed. But we could still maybe understand that in several different ways. The example I always give is when I, you know, play Garry Kasparov at speed chess, or we've talked about chess and these kinds of things. You know, if you're reasonably good at chess, you can't come up with the move Garry comes up with in his move, but he can explain it to you. And you can understand. And you can understand post hoc the reasoning. Yeah. So I think there's an even further level of like, well, maybe you couldn't have invented that thing, but using that, going back to using language again, perhaps you can understand and appreciate that. Same way that you can appreciate, you know, Vivaldi or Mozart or something without... You can appreciate the beauty of that without being able to construct it yourself, right? Invent the music yourself. So I think we see this in all forms of life. So it will be that times, you know, a million, but it would, you can imagine also one sign of intelligence is the ability to explain things clearly and simply, right? You know, people like Richard Feynman, another one of my old time heroes used to say that, right? If you can't, you know, if you can explain it something simply, then that's the best sign, a complex topic simply, then that's one of the best signs of you understanding it. Yeah. I can see myself talking trash in the AI system in that way. It gets frustrated how dumb I am in trying to explain something to me. I was like, well, that means you're not intelligent because if you were intelligent, you'd be able to explain it simply. Yeah. Of course, you know, there's also the other option, of course, we could enhance ourselves and with our devices, we are already sort of symbiotic with our compute devices, right? With our phones and other things. And, you know, there's stuff like Neuralink and Acceptra that could be, could advance that further. So I think there's lots of, lots of really amazing possibilities that I could foresee from here. Well, let me ask you some wild questions. So out there looking for friends, do you think there's a lot of alien civilizations out there? So I guess this also goes back to your origin of life question too, because I think that's key. My personal opinion, looking at all this and, you know, it's one of my hobbies, physics, I guess. So something I think about a lot and talk to a lot of experts on and read a lot of books on. And I think my feeling currently is that we are alone. I think that's the most likely scenario given what evidence we have. So, and the reasoning is, I think that, you know, we've tried since things like SETI program and I guess since the dawning of the space age, we've, you know, had telescopes, open radio telescopes and other things. And if you think about and try to detect signals. Now, if you think about the evolution of humans on earth, we could have easily been a million years ahead of our time now, or a million years behind, right? Easily with just some slightly different quirk thing happening hundreds of thousands of years ago. You know, things could have been slightly different if the meteor had hit the dinosaurs a million years earlier, maybe things would have evolved. We'd be a million years ahead of where we are now. So what that means is if you imagine where humanity will be in a few hundred years, let alone a million years, especially if we hopefully, you know, solve things like climate change and other things, and we continue to flourish and we build things like AI and we do space traveling and all of the stuff that humans have dreamed of forever, right? And sci-fi is talked about forever. We will be spreading across the stars, right? And Voigt Neumann famously calculated, you know, it would only take about a million years if you send out Voigt Neumann probes to the nearest, you know, the nearest other solar systems. And then all they did was build two more versions of themselves and sent those two out to the next nearest systems. You know, within a million years, I think you would have one of these probes in every system in the galaxy. So it's not actually in cosmological time, that's actually a very short amount of time. So, and you know, people like Dyson have thought about constructing Dyson spheres around stars to collect all the energy coming out of the star. You know, that there would be constructions like that would be visible across space, probably even across a galaxy. So, and then, you know, if you think about all of our radio, television emissions that have gone out since, since the, you know, 30s and 40s, imagine a million years of that. And now hundreds of civilizations doing that. When we opened our ears at the point we got technologically sophisticated enough in the space age, we should have heard a cacophony of voices. We should have joined that cacophony of voices. And what we did, we opened our ears and we heard nothing. And many people who argue that there are aliens would say, well, we haven't really done exhaustive search yet. And maybe we're looking in the wrong bands and, and we've got the wrong devices and we wouldn't notice what an alien form was like, because it'd be so different to what we're used to. But you know, I don't really buy that, that it shouldn't be as difficult as that. Like we, I think we've searched enough. There should be everywhere. If it was, it should be everywhere. We should see Dyson spheres being put up, suns blinking in and out, you know, there should be a lot of evidence for those things. And then there are other people who argue, well, the sort of safari view of like, well, we're a primitive species still because we're not space faring yet. And, and, and we, you know, there's some kind of globe, like universal rule not to interfere, you know, Star Trek rule, but like, look, look, we can't even coordinate humans to deal with climate change. And we're one species. What, what is the chance that of all of these different human civilization, you know, alien civilizations, they would have the same priorities and, and, and, and agree across the, you know, these kinds of matters. And even if that was true, and we were in some sort of safari for our own good, to me, that's not much different from the simulation hypothesis, because what does it mean the simulation hypothesis, I think in its most fundamental level, it means what we're seeing is not quite reality, right? It's something there's something more deeper underlying it, maybe computational. Now, if we were in a, if we were in a sort of safari park, and everything we were seeing was a hologram, and it was projected by the aliens or whatever, that to me is not much different than thinking we're inside of another universe, because we still can't see true reality. Right? I mean, there's, there's other explanations, it could be that the way they're communicating is just fundamentally different, that we're too dumb to understand the much better methods of communication they have. It could be, I mean, I mean, it's silly to say, but our own thoughts could be the methods by which they're communicating, like the place from which our ideas, writers talk about this, like the muse. Yeah. Like the, I mean, it sounds like very kind of wild, but it could be thoughts, it could be some interactions with our mind that we think are originating from us is actually something that is coming from other life forms elsewhere, consciousness itself might be that. It could be, but I don't see any sensible argument to the why, why would all of the alien species behave in this way? Yeah, some of them will be more primitive, they will be close to our level, you know, there should be a whole sort of normal distribution of these things, right? Some would be aggressive, some would be, you know, a curious, others would be very historical and philosophical, because, you know, maybe they're a million years older than us, but it's not, it shouldn't be like, I mean, one alien civilization might be like that, communicating thoughts and others, but I don't see why, you know, potentially the hundreds there should be, would be uniform in this way, right? It could be a violent dictatorship that the people, the alien civilizations that become successful, become, gain the ability to be destructive, an order of magnitude more destructive, but of course, the sad thought, well, either humans are very special, we took a lot of leaps that arrived at what it means to be human, there's a question there, which was the hardest, which was the most special, but also if others have reached this level, and maybe many others have reached this level, the great filter that's prevented them from going farther, to becoming a multi-planetary species, or reaching out into the stars, and those are really important questions for us, whether there's other alien civilizations out there or not, this is very useful for us to think about, if we destroy ourselves, how will we do it, and how easy is it to do? Yeah, well, you know, these are big questions, and I've thought about these a lot, but the interesting thing is that if we're alone, that's somewhat comforting from the great filter perspective, because it probably means the great filters are past us, and I'm pretty sure they are, so going back to your origin of life question, there are some incredible things that no one knows how happened, like obviously the first life form from chemical soup, that seems pretty hard, but I would guess the multicellular, I wouldn't be that surprised if we saw single cell sort of life forms elsewhere, bacteria type things, but multicellular life seems incredibly hard, that step of capturing mitochondria and then sort of using that as part of yourself, when you've just eaten it. Would you say that's the biggest, the most, like, if you had to choose one, sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one sentence summary of like, oh, those clever creatures did this, that would be the multicellular? I think that's probably the one that's the biggest. I mean, there's a great book called The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane, and he speculates on ten of these, you know, what could be great filters. I think that's one. I think the advent of intelligence and conscious intelligence and in order, you know, to us to be able to do science and things like that is huge as well. I mean, it's only evolved once as far as, you know, in Earth history. So that would be a later candidate, but there's certainly for the early candidates, I think multicellular life forms is huge. By the way, what it's interesting to ask you, if you can hypothesize about what is the origin of intelligence? Is it that we started cooking meat over fire? Is it that we somehow figured out that we could be very powerful when we start collaborating? So cooperation between our ancestors so that we can overthrow the alpha male? What is it, Richard? I talked to Richard Ranham, who thinks we're all just beta males who figured out how to collaborate to defeat the dictator, the authoritarian alpha male that control the tribe. Is there other explanation? Was there a 2001 Space Odyssey type of monolith that came down to Earth? Well, I think all of those things you suggested are good candidates, fire and cooking, right? So that's clearly important for energy efficiency, cooking our meat and then being able to be more efficient about eating it and consuming the energy. I think that's huge. And then utilizing fire and tools. I think you're right about the tribal cooperation aspects and probably language as part of that. Because probably that's what allowed us to outcompete Neanderthals and perhaps less cooperative species. So that may be the case. Tool making, spears, axes. I think that let us, I mean, I think it's pretty clear now that humans were responsible for a lot of the extinctions of megafauna, especially in the Americas when humans arrived. So you can imagine once you discover tool usage, how powerful that would have been and how scary for animals. So I think all of those could have been explanations for it. The interesting thing is that it's a bit like general intelligence too, is it's very costly to begin with, to have a brain and especially a general purpose brain rather than a special purpose one. Because the amount of energy our brains use, I think it's like 20% of the body's energy. And it's massive. And when you're thinking chess, one of the funny things that we used to say is it's as much as a racing driver uses for a whole Formula One race. Just playing a game of serious high level chess, which you wouldn't think, just sitting there, because the brain's using so much energy. So in order for an animal, an organism to justify that, there has to be a huge payoff. And the problem with half a brain or half intelligence, say an IQ of like a monkey brain, it's not clear you can justify that evolutionary until you get to the human level brain. And so how do you do that jump? It's very difficult, which is why I think it's only been done once from the sort of specialised brains that you see in animals to this sort of general purpose, cheering powerful brains that humans have, which allows us to invent the modern world. And it takes a lot to cross that barrier. And I think we've seen the same with AI systems, which is that maybe until very recently, it's always been easier to craft a specific solution to a problem like chess, than it has been to build a general learning system that can potentially do many things. Because initially, that system will be way worse than less efficient than the specialised system. So one of the interesting quirks of the human mind of this evolved system is that it appears to be conscious. This thing that we don't quite understand, but it seems very, very special, its ability to have a subjective experience that it feels like something to eat a cookie, the deliciousness of it or see a colour and that kind of stuff. Do you think in order to solve intelligence, we also need to solve consciousness along the way? Do you think AGI systems need to have consciousness in order to be truly intelligent? Yeah, we thought about this a lot actually. And I think that my guess is that consciousness and intelligence are double dissociable. So you can have one without the other both ways. And I think you can see that with consciousness in that I think some animals, pets, if you have a pet dog or something like that, you can see some of the higher animals and dolphins, things like that, have self-awareness and are very sociable, seem to dream. A lot of the traits one would regard as being kind of conscious and self-aware, but yet they're not that smart. So they're not that intelligent by IQ standards or something like that. Yeah, it's also possible that our understanding of intelligence is flawed, like putting an IQ to it. Sure. Maybe the thing that a dog can do is actually go on a very far along the path of intelligence. And we humans are just able to play chess and maybe write poems. Right. But if we go back to the idea of AGI and general intelligence, dogs are very specialized, right? Most animals are pretty specialized. They can be amazing at what they do, but they're like kind of elite sports people or something, right? So they do one thing extremely well because their entire brain is optimized. They have somehow convinced the entirety of the human population to feed them and service them. So in some way they're controlling. Yes, exactly. Well, we've co-evolved to some crazy degree, right? Including the way the dogs even wag their tails and twitch their noses, right? We find it inexorably cute. But I think you can also see intelligence on the other side. So systems like artificial systems that are amazingly smart at certain things, like maybe playing Go and chess and other things, but they don't feel at all in any shape or form conscious in the way that you do to me or I do to you. And I think actually building AI, these intelligent constructs, is one of the best ways to explore the mystery of consciousness, to break it down. Because we're going to have devices that are pretty smart at certain things or capable of certain things, but potentially won't have any semblance of self-awareness or other things. And in fact, I would advocate, if there's a choice, building systems in the first place, AI systems that are not conscious to begin with, just tools, until we understand them better and the capabilities better. So on that topic, just not as the CEO of DeepMind, just as a human being, let me ask you about this one particular anecdotal evidence of the Google engineer who made a comment or believed that there's some aspect of a language model, the Lambda language model, that exhibited sentience. So you said you believe there might be a responsibility to build systems that are not sentient. And this experience of a particular engineer, I think, I'd love to get your general opinion on this kind of thing, but I think it will happen more and more and more, which not when engineers, but when people out there that don't have an engineering background start interacting with increasingly intelligent systems, we anthropomorphize them. They start to have deep, impactful interactions with us in a way that we miss them when they're gone. And we sure as heck feel like they're living entities, self-aware entities, and maybe even we project sentience onto them. So what's your thought about this particular system? Have you ever met a language model that's sentient? No. No. What do you make of the case of when you kind of feel that there's some elements of sentience to this system? Yeah, so this is an interesting question and obviously a very fundamental one. So first thing to say is I think that none of the systems we have today, I would say, even have one iota of semblance of consciousness or sentience. That's my personal feeling interacting with them every day. So I think this way premature to be discussing what that engineer talked about. I think at the moment it's more of a projection of the way our own minds work, which is to see a sort of purpose and direction in almost anything that we, you know, our brains are trained to interpret agency basically in things, even in inanimate things sometimes. And of course with a language system, because language is so fundamental to intelligence, it's going to be easy for us to anthropomorphize that. I mean, back in the day, even the first, you know, the dumbest sort of template chatbots ever, Eliza and the ilk of the original chatbots back in the 60s, fooled some people under certain circumstances, right? Pretended to be a psychologist. So just basically rabbit back to you the same question you asked it back to you. And some people believe that. So I don't think we can, this is why I think the Turing test is a little bit flawed as a formal test, because it depends on the sophistication of the judge, whether or not they are qualified to make that distinction. So I think we should talk to, you know, the top philosophers about this, people like Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers and others who've obviously thought deeply about consciousness. Of course, consciousness itself hasn't been well, there's no agreed definition. If I was to, you know, speculate about that, you know, I kind of, the working definition I like is, it's the way information feels when, you know, it gets processed. I think maybe Max Tegmark came up with that. I like that idea. I don't know if it helps us get towards any more operational thing, but I think it's a nice way of viewing it. I think we can obviously see from neuroscience certain prerequisites that are required, like self-awareness, I think is necessary, but not sufficient component. This idea of a self and other and set of coherent preferences that are coherent over time. You know, these things, maybe memory, these things are probably needed for a sentient or conscious being. But the reason, the difficult thing I think for us when we get, and I think this is a really interesting philosophical debate, is when we get closer to AGI and, you know, and much more powerful systems than we have today, how are we going to make this judgment? And one way, which is the Turing test, is sort of a behavioral judgment. Is the system exhibiting all the behaviors that a human sentient or a sentient being would exhibit? Is it answering the right questions? Is it saying the right questions? Is it saying the right things? Is it indistinguishable from a human? And so on. But I think there's a second thing that makes us as humans regard each other as sentient, right? Why do we think this? And I debated this with Daniel Dennett. And I think there's a second reason that's often overlooked, which is that we're running on the same substrate, right? So if we're exhibiting the same behavior, more or less, as humans, and we're running on the same, you know, carbon-based biological substrate, the squishy, you know, few pounds of flesh in our skulls, then the most parsimonious, I think, explanation is that you're feeling the same thing as I'm feeling, right? But we will never have that second part, the substrate equivalence, with a machine, right? So we will have to only judge based on the behavior. And I think the substrate equivalence is a critical part of why we make assumptions that we're conscious. And in fact, even with animals, high-level animals, why we think they might be, because they're exhibiting some of the behaviors we would expect from a sentient animal. And we know they're made of the same things, biological neurons. So we're going to have to come up with explanations or models of the gap between substrate differences between machines and humans to get anywhere beyond the behavioral. But to me, the practical question is very interesting and very important. When you have millions, perhaps billions of people believing that you have a sentient AI, believing what that Google engineer believed, which I just see as an obvious, very near-term future thing, certainly on the path to AGI, how does that change the world? What's the responsibility of the AI system to help those millions of people? And also, what's the ethical thing? Because you can make a lot of people happy by creating a meaningful, deep experience with a system that's faking it before it makes it. And I don't, are we the right, who is to say what's the right thing to do? Should AI always be tools? Why are we constraining AI to always be tools as opposed to friends? Yeah, I think, well, I mean, these are fantastic questions and also critical ones. And we've been thinking about this since the start of DeepMind and before that, because we planned for success and however remote that looked like back in 2010. And we've always had sort of these ethical considerations as fundamental at DeepMind. And my current thinking on the language models and large models is they're not ready. We don't understand them well enough yet. And in terms of analysis tools and guardrails, what they can and can't do and so on to deploy them at scale. Because I think, there are big still ethical questions like should an AI system always announce that it is an AI system to begin with? Probably yes. What do you do about answering those philosophical questions about the feelings people may have about AI systems perhaps incorrectly attributed? So I think there's a whole bunch of research that needs to be done first to responsibly before you can responsibly deploy these systems at scale. That will be at least be my current position. Over time, I'm very confident we'll have those tools like interpretability questions and analysis questions. And then with the ethical quandary, I think there it's important to look beyond just science. That's why I think philosophy, social sciences, even theology, other things like that come into it. Where arts and humanities, what does it mean to be human and the spirit of being human and to enhance that and the human condition. And allow us to experience things we could never experience before and improve the overall human condition and humanity overall. Get radical abundance, solve many scientific problems, solve disease. So this is the era I think, this is the amazing era I think we're heading into if we do it right. But we've got to be careful. We've already seen with things like social media how dual use technologies can be misused by firstly, by bad actors or naive actors or crazy actors. So there's that set of just the common or garden misuse of existing dual use technology. And then of course, there's an additional thing that has to be overcome with AI that eventually it may have its own agency. So it could be good or bad in of itself. So I think these questions have to be approached very carefully using the scientific method, I would say, in terms of hypothesis generation, careful control testing, not live A B testing out in the world. Because with powerful technologies like AI, if something goes wrong, it may cause a lot of harm before you can fix it. It's not like an imaging app or game app where if something goes wrong, it's relatively easy to fix and the harm is relatively small. So I think it comes with the usual cliche of like with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. And I think that's the case here with things like AI given the enormous opportunity in front of us. And I think we need a lot of voices and as many inputs into things like the design of the systems and the values they should have and what goals should they be put to. I think as wide a group of voices as possible beyond just the technologists is needed to input into that and to have a say in that, especially when it comes to deployment of these systems, which is when the rubber really hits the road, it really affects the general person in the street, rather than fundamental research. And that's why I say, I think as a first step, it would be better if we have the choice to build these systems as tools to give. And I'm not saying that they should never go beyond tools because of course the potential is there for it to go way beyond just tools. But I think that would be a good first step in order for us to allow us to carefully experiment and understand what these things can do. So the leap between tool to sentient entity being is one we should take very care of. Let me ask a dark personal question. So you're one of the most brilliant people in the AI community. You're also one of the most kind and if I may say, sort of loved people in the community. That said, creation of a super intelligent AI system would be one of the most powerful things in the world, tools or otherwise. And again, as the old saying goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You are likely to be one of the people, I would say probably the most likely person to be in the control of such a system. Do you think about the corrupting nature of power when you talk about these kinds of systems? As all dictators and people have caused atrocities in the past always think they're doing good, but they don't do good because the power has polluted their mind about what is good and what is evil. Do you think about this stuff or are we just focused on language model? No, I think about them all the time and I think what are the defenses against that? I think one thing is to remain very grounded and sort of humble no matter what you do or achieve. And I try to do that. My best friends are still my set of friends from my undergraduate Cambridge days. My family and friends are very important. I think trying to be a multidisciplinary person, it helps to keep you humble because no matter how good you are at one topic, someone will be better than you at that. And always relearning a new topic again from scratch or new field is very humbling. So for me that's been biology over the last five years. Huge area topic and I just love doing that, but it helps to keep you grounded and keeps you open-minded. And then the other important thing is to have a really good amazing set of people around you at your company or your organization who are also very ethical and grounded themselves and help to keep you that way. And then ultimately just to answer your question, I hope we're going to be a big part of birthing AI and that being the greatest benefit to humanity of any tool or technology ever and getting us into a world of radical abundance and curing diseases and solving many of the big challenges we have in front of us. And then ultimately help the ultimate flourishing of humanity to travel the stars and find those aliens if they are there. And if they're not there, find out why they're not there, what is going on here in the universe. This is all to come and that's what I've always dreamed about. But I think AI is too big an idea. It's not going to be, there'll be a certain set of pioneers who get there first. I hope we're in the vanguard so we can influence how that goes. And I think it matters who builds, which cultures they come from and what values they have, the builders of AI systems. Because I think even though the AI system is going to learn for itself most of its knowledge, there'll be a residue in the system of the culture and the values of the creators of that system. And there's interesting questions to discuss about that geopolitically, different cultures as we're in a more fragmented world than ever. Unfortunately, I think in terms of global cooperation, we see that in things like climate where we can't seem to get our act together globally to cooperate on these pressing matters. I hope that will change over time. Perhaps if we get to an era of radical abundance, we don't have to be so competitive anymore. Maybe we can be more cooperative if resources aren't so scarce. It's true that in terms of power corrupting and leading to destructive things, it seems that some of the atrocities of the past happen when there's a significant constraint on resources. I think that's the first thing. I don't think that's enough. I think scarcity is one thing that's led to competition, zero-sum game thinking. I would like us to all be in a positive-sum world. And I think for that, you have to remove scarcity. I don't think that's enough, unfortunately, to get world peace because there's also other corrupting things like wanting power over people and this kind of stuff, which is not necessarily satisfied by just abundance. But I think it will help. But I think ultimately, AI is not going to be run by any one person or one organisation. I think it should belong to the world, belong to humanity. And I think there'll be many ways this will happen. And ultimately, everybody should have a say in that. Do you have advice for young people in high school and college, maybe if they're interested in AI or interested in having a big impact on the world, what they should do to have a career they can be proud of or to have a life they can be proud of? I love giving talks to the next generation. What I say to them is actually two things. I think the most important things to learn about and to find out about when you're young is what are your true passions, is first of all, as two things. One is find your true passions. And I think you can do that by, the way to do that is to explore as many things as possible when you're young and you have the time and you can take those risks. I would also encourage people to look at finding the connections between things in a unique way. I think that's a really great way to find a passion. Second thing I would say, advice is know yourself. So spend a lot of time understanding how you work best, like what are the optimal times to work? What are the optimal ways that you study? How do you deal with pressure? Test yourself in various scenarios and try and improve your weaknesses, but also find out what your unique skills and strengths are and then hone those. So then that's what will be your super value in the world later on. And if you can then combine those two things and find passions that you're genuinely excited about that intersect with what your unique strong skills are, then you're onto something incredible and I think you can make a huge difference in the world. So let me ask about know yourself. This is fun. This is fun. Quick questions about day in the life, the perfect day, the perfect productive day in the life of Demesis Hobbs. Maybe these days there's a lot involved. So maybe a slightly younger Demesis Hobbs where you could focus on a single project maybe. How early do you wake up? Are you a night owl? Do you wake up early in the morning? What are some interesting habits? How many dozens of cups of coffees do you drink a day? What's the computer that you use? What's the setup? How many screens? What kind of keyboard? Are we talking Emacs Vim or are we talking something more modern? So a bunch of those questions. So maybe a day in the life. What's the perfect day involved? Well, these days it's quite different from say 10, 20 years ago. Back 10, 20 years ago it would have been a whole day of research, individual research or programming, doing some experiment, neuroscience, computer science experiment, reading lots of research papers. And then perhaps at night time, reading science fiction books or playing some games. But lots of focus, so deep focused work on whether it's programming or reading research papers. Yes, yes. So that would be lots of deep focus work. These days for the last sort of, I guess, five to 10 years, I've actually got quite a structure that works very well for me now, which is that I'm a complete night owl, always have been. So I optimize for that. So I'll basically do a normal day's work, get into work about 11 o'clock and sort of do work to about seven in the office. And I will arrange back to back meetings for the entire time of that and with as many, meet as many people as possible. So that's my collaboration management part of the day. Then I go home, spend time with the family and friends, have dinner, relax a little bit. And then I start a second day of work. I call it my second day of work around 10 PM, 11 PM. And that's the time till about the small hours of the morning, four or five in the morning where I will do my thinking and reading research, writing research papers. Sadly, I don't have time to code anymore, but it's not efficient to do that these days, given the amount of time I have. But that's when I do, maybe do the long kind of stretches of thinking and planning. And then probably, using email or other things, I would fire off a lot of things to my team to deal with the next morning. But actually thinking about this overnight, we should go for this project or arrange this meeting the next day. When you think it through a problem, are you talking about a sheet of paper with a pen? Is there some structure? Yeah, I still like pencil and paper best for working out things. But these days, it's just so efficient to read research papers just on the screen. I still often print them out, actually. I still prefer to mark out things. And I find it goes into the brain quicker, better and sticks in the brain better when you're still using physical pen and pencil and paper. So you take notes? I have lots of notes, electronic ones, and also whole stacks of notebooks that I use at home. On some of these most challenging next steps, for example, stuff none of us know about that you're working on, you're thinking, there's some deep thinking required there, right? Like, what is the right problem? What is the right approach? Because you're going to have to invest a huge amount of time for the whole team. They're going to have to pursue this thing. What's the right way to do it? Is RL going to work here? What's the right thing to try? What's the right benchmark to use? Do we need to construct a benchmark from scratch? All those kinds of things. Yes. So I think all those kinds of things in the night time phase, but also much more. I've always found the quiet hours of the morning when everyone's asleep, it's super quiet outside. I love that time. It's the golden hours, like between one and three in the morning. Put some music on, some inspiring music on, and then think these deep thoughts. So that's when I would read my philosophy books and Spinoza is my recent favourite, Kant, all these things. And I read about a great scientist of history, how they did things, how they thought things. So that's when you do all your creative, that's when I do all my creative thinking. I think people recommend you do your creative thinking in one block. The way I organise the day, that way I don't get interrupted because obviously no one else is up at those times. So I can get super deep and super into flow. The other nice thing about doing it night time wise is if I'm really onto something or I've got really deep into something, I can choose to extend it. I'll go into six in the morning, whatever, and then I'll just pay for it the next day because I'll be a bit tired and I won't be my best, but that's fine. I can decide looking at my schedule the next day and given where I'm at with this particular thought or creative idea that I'm going to pay that cost the next day. So I think that's more flexible than morning people who do that. They get up at four in the morning. They can also do those golden hours then, but then their start of their scheduled day starts at breakfast, 8am, whatever, they have their first meeting. And then it's hard. You have to reschedule a day if you're in flow. Yeah, that could be a truly special thread of thoughts that you're too passionate about. This is where some of the greatest ideas could potentially come is when you just lose yourself late into the night. And for the meetings, I mean, you're loading in really hard problems in a very short amount of time. So you have to do some kind of first principles thinking here. It's like, what's the problem? What's the state of things? What's the right next step? Yes. You have to get really good at context switching, which is one of the hardest things, because especially as we do so many things, if you include all the scientific things we do, scientific fields we're working in, these are entire complex fields in themselves. And you have to keep abreast of that. But I enjoy it. I've always been a generalist in a way. And that's actually what happened in my games career after chess. One of the reasons I stopped playing chess was because I got into computers. But also I started realizing there were many other great games out there to play too. So I've always been that way, inclined, multidisciplinary. And there's too many interesting things in the world to spend all your time just on one thing. So you mentioned Spinoza. I got to ask the big, ridiculously big question about life. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we humans here? You've already mentioned that perhaps the universe created us. Is that why you think we're here? To understand how the universe works? Yeah, I think my answer to that would be, and at least the life I'm living, is to gain and understand knowledge, to gain knowledge and understand the universe. That's what I think. I can't see any higher purpose than that. If you think back to the classical Greeks, the virtue of gaining knowledge, I think it's one of the few true virtues is to understand the world around us and the context and humanity better. And I think if you do that, you become more compassionate and more understanding yourself and more tolerant. And I think all these other things may flow from that. And to me, understanding the nature of reality, that is the biggest question. What is going on here is sometimes the colloquial way I say. What is really going on here? It's so mysterious. I feel like we're in some huge puzzle. The universe seems to be structured in a way. Why is it structured in a way that science is even possible? The scientific method works. Things are repeatable. It feels like it's almost structured in a way to be conducive to gaining knowledge. Why should computers be even possible? Isn't that amazing that computational or electronic devices can be possible? And they're made of sand or most common element that we have, silicon on the Earth's crust. It could be made of diamond or something. Then we would have only had one computer. So a lot of things are slightly suspicious to me. This puzzle sure as heck sounds like something we talked about earlier, what it takes to design a game that's really fun to play for prolonged periods of time. And it does seem like this puzzle, like you mentioned, the more you learn about it, the more you realize how little you know. So it humbles you but excites you by the possibility of learning more. It's one heck of a puzzle we got going on here. So like I mentioned, of all the people in the world, you're very likely to be the one who creates the AGI system that achieves human level intelligence and goes beyond it. So if you got a chance in very, well, you could be the person that goes into the room with the system and have a conversation. Maybe you only get to ask one question. If you do, what question would you ask her? I would probably ask, what is the true nature of reality? I think that's the question. I don't know if I'd understand the answer because maybe it would be 42 or something like that. But that's the question I would ask. And then there'll be a deep sigh from the systems that go, and then there'll be a deep sigh from the systems like, all right, how do I explain to this human? Exactly. All right, let me, I don't have time to explain. Maybe I'll draw you a picture. I mean, how do you even begin to answer that question? Well, I think it would- What would you think the answer could possibly look like? I think it could start looking like more fundamental explanations of physics would be the beginning. More careful specification of that, taking you, walking us through by the hand as to what one would do to maybe prove those things out. Maybe giving you glimpses of what things you totally missed in the physics of today. Exactly. Just here's glimpses of, no, like there's a much more elaborate world or a much simpler world or something. A much deeper, maybe simpler explanation of things, right? Then the standard model of physics, which we know doesn't work, but we still keep adding to. That's how I think the beginning of an explanation would look. It would start encompassing many of the mysteries that we have wondered about for thousands of years, like consciousness, dreaming, life, and gravity, all of these things. Yeah, giving us glimpses of explanations for those things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Demis, you're one of the special human beings in this giant puzzle of ours. It's a huge honor that you would take a pause from the bigger puzzle to solve this small puzzle of a conversation with me today. It's truly an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much. Exactly. I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Demis Hassabis. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, let me leave you with some words from Edgar Dijkstra. Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

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Noam Chomsky: Putin, Ukraine, China, and Nuclear War | Lex Fridman Podcast #316

Will there be a war between US and China in the 21st century? If there is, we're finished. A war between the US and China would destroy the possibilities of organized life on Earth. The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky, his second time on the podcast. This episode is focused on the war in Ukraine. And it is a departure from the way I usually do this podcast in several ways. Noam is a strong and healthy 93-year-old, but this conversation is remote, so be cautious. It is brief, only one hour. It is more of an interview than a conversation due to the limitations of our audio and video connection. I decided it's best to get Noam's clear thoughts on this war and the complicated geopolitics of today and the rest of the 21st century that is unrolling before us, with our decisions and actions fully capable of either helping humanity flourish or unleashing global destruction and suffering. As a brief aside, perhaps you know this, but let me mention that I traveled to Ukraine and saw, heard, felt things that are haunting and gave me a lot to think about. Because of that, I've been really struggling to edit the videos I recorded. I hope to finish it soon. I'm sorry for these delays, and I'm especially sorry to the people there who gave me their time, their story, their heart. Please be patient with me. I hope you understand. This is the Lex Riedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Noam Chomsky. You have studied and criticized powerful leaders and nations in times of global conflict and struggles for power. So let me ask you, what do you think motivates Vladimir Putin? Is it power, legacy, fame, geopolitical influence, or the flourishing of a nation he loves and represents? I have no particular insight into Putin's mind. I can only watch the actions over the last 20, 25 years and read the statements. He took power about almost 25 years ago. He's held it since as prime minister or president. His first task was to try to overcome the chaos and disarray of the 1990s. During the 90s, Gorbachev had a proposal. He called for a cooperative enterprise with the West. They would share an effort to rebuild what he called a common European home in which there would be no military alliances, just Russia-Western-US accommodation with a move towards social democracy in former USSR and comparable moves in the United States. Well, that was quickly smashed. The United States had no interest in that. Clinton came along pretty soon, early 90s. Russia was induced to adopt what was called shock therapy, a harsh, quick market transformation which devastated the economy, created enormous social disarray, the rise of what are called oligarchs, kleptocrats, high mortality. Clinton started the policy of expanding NATO to the East in violation of firm, unambiguous promises to Gorbachev not to do so. Yeltsin, Putin's friend, opposed it. Other Russian leaders opposed it, but they didn't react. They accepted it. When Putin came in, he continued that policy. Meanwhile, he did reconstruct the Russian economy. Russian society became a viable, deeply authoritarian society. Under his tight control, he himself organized a major kleptocracy. With him in the middle, he apparently became very wealthy. On the international front, he pretty much continued the former policies. As US diplomats, practically every diplomat who had any contact with Russia had been dispatched there, knew about it, as they all warned from the 90s that what Clinton was doing, expanded by Bush, Bush too afterwards, was reckless and provocative, that Russia did have a clear red line before Putin, which he adhered to, namely no NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. This is pretty much how things went on through the 2000s. In 2014, 2008, George Bush, President Bush, did invite Ukraine to join NATO. It was vetoed by France and Germany, but under US pressure, it was kept on the agenda. The Russians continued to object to Western diplomats, including the present current head of the CIA and his predecessors, warned that this was reckless, provocative, shouldn't be done, continued. Putin didn't do much, he stayed with it until pretty recently. After 2014, the uprising that threw out the former president, who was pro-Russian, instituted anti-Russian laws, the United States and NATO began to, a policy of moving to effectively integrate Ukraine into the NATO command, joint military exercises, training, sending weapons and so on. Putin objected, other Russian leaders objected, they're unified on this, but didn't do much, continued with the proposals that Ukraine be excluded from NATO. And that there be some form of autonomy for the Donbass region. Meanwhile, in reaction to the uprising, the Maidan uprising, 2014, Russia moved in and took over Crimea, protecting its warm water base and major naval base. The US objected and recognized it, but things continued without notable conflict. I won't go through all the details. When Joe Biden came in, he expanded the program of what US military journals call de facto integration of Ukraine within NATO, proposed September 2021, proposed enhanced program of preparation for NATO admission, extended with a formal statement in November. We're now practically up to the invasion. Putin's position hardened. France, mainly France, to an extent Germany, did make some moves towards possible negotiations. Putin dismissed them, moved on to the direct invasion. That's what are his, to get back to your question, what motivates him? I presume what he's been saying all along, namely, establishing his legacy as a leader who overcame the extensive destruction of Russia, massive weakening over it, restored his position as a world power, prevented Ukraine from entering NATO. It may have further ambitions as to dominating and controlling Ukraine, very likely. There is a theory in the West that he suddenly became a total madman who wants to restore the great Russian empire. This is combined with gloating over the fact that the Russian military is a paper tiger that can't even conquer cities a couple of kilometers from the border, but defended not even by a regular army. But somehow along with this, he's planning to attack NATO powers, conquer Europe, who knows what. It's impossible to put all these concepts together. They're totally internally contradictory. So what's my judgment? I think what motivates him is what he's been demonstrating in his actions. Restore Russia as a great power, restore its economy, control it as a total dictatorship, enrich himself and his cronies, establish a legacy as a major figure in Russian history, make sure that Ukraine does not join NATO, and probably by now he's hardened the position, maintain Crimea and the southeastern corridor to Russia, and some ambiguous agreements about the Donbass region. That looks like his motivation. There's much speculation that goes beyond this, but it's very hard to reconcile with the assessment of the real world by the same people who are making the grandiose speculations. Putin has been in power for 22 years. Do you think power has corrupted him? I don't think anything's changed. It seems to me his policies are about the same as what they were. They've changed in response to changed circumstances. So very recently, right before the invasion, a few weeks before, for the first time, Putin announced recognition of the independence of the Donbass region. That's a stronger position than before, much stronger. Up till then, he had pretty much kept to the long-standing position of some kind of accommodation within a federal structure in which the Donbass region would have considerable autonomy. So that's a harshening of the position. So even the human mind of Vladimir Putin, the man? I can't read his mind. I can only see the policies that he's pursued and the statements that he's made. There are many people speculating about his mind. And as I say, these speculations are, first of all, not based on anything. He never said anything about trying to conquer NATO. But more importantly, they are totally inconsistent with the analyses of Russian power by the same people who are making the speculations. So we see the same individual speculating about Putin's grandiose plans to become Peter the Great and conquer, start attacking NATO powers. On the one hand, saying that, on the other hand, gloating over the fact that his military powers so minuscule, he can't even conquer towns a couple of miles from the border. It's impossible to make sense of that position. Why did Russia invade Ukraine on February 24th? Who do you think is to blame? Who do you place the blame on? Well, who's to blame? Any power that commits aggression is to blame. So I continue to say, as I have been for many months, that the invasion, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, is on a par with such acts of aggression as the US invasion of Iraq, the Stalin-Hitler invasion of Poland, other acts of supreme international crime under international law. Of course, he's to blame. The US committed 6.9 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Should US keep up with this support? There are two questions. One has to do with providing support for defense against the invasion, which is certainly legitimate. The other is seeking ways to end the crime before even worse disasters arise. Now, that second part is not discussed in the West, barely discussed. Anyone who dares to discuss it is immediately subjected to a flood of invective and hysterical condemnation. But if you're serious about Ukraine, there are two things you ask. One, what can we do to support Ukraine in defense against aggression? Second, how can we move to end the war before it leads to even worse destruction of Ukraine, more starvation worldwide, reversing the efforts, the limited efforts, to deal with global warming, possibly moving up an escalation ladder to war, the nuclear war. That's the second half of the, to borrow a phrase attributed to Winston Churchill, there's a lot of war, war, but no joy, joy, joy. And there ought to be joy, joy, if you care about Ukraine and the rest of the world. Can it be done? We don't know. Official US policy is to reject a diplomatic settlement, to move to weaken Russia severely so that it cannot carry out further aggression, but not do anything on the joy, joy side, not think of how to bring the crimes and atrocities to an end. That's the second part of the question. So, yes, the US should continue with the kind of calibrated support that's been given. The Pentagon wisely has vetoed initiatives to go well beyond support for defense up to attack on Russia. So far, the Pentagon, which seems to be the dovish component in the US administration, has vetoed plans which very likely would lead on to nuclear war, which would destroy everything. So calibrated provision of weapons to blunt the offensive, allow Ukraine to defend itself, if sensible, combined with efforts to see if something can be done to bring the crimes and atrocities to an end and avert the much worse consequences that are in store. That would be all instead the US only dealing with the first. And all of our discussions limit themselves to the first in the United States and in Britain, not in Europe. Do you worry about nuclear war in the 21st century? How do we avoid it? Anyone who doesn't worry about nuclear war doesn't have a grace they'll function. Of course, everyone is worried about nuclear war or should be. It's very easy to see how steps could be taken, even been recommended, that would lead to nuclear war. So you can read articles even by liberal commentators who say we should drop all the pretenses, just go to war against Russia. They have to be destroyed. You can see proposals coming from Congress, the leading figures saying we should establish a no-fly zone. Pentagon objects, they point out correctly that to establish a no-fly zone, you have to have control of the air, which means destroying Russian air defense systems, which happen to be inside Russia. We don't know that Russia won't react. Even the call, now almost universal, to ensure that Ukraine wins, drives out all the Russians, drives them out of the country, sounds nice on paper, but notice the assumption. The assumption is that Vladimir Putin, this madman who just seeks power and is out of control, will sit there quietly, accept defeat, slink away, not use the military means that, of course, he has to destroy Ukraine. One of the interesting comments that came out in today's long article, I think, Washington Post reviewing a lot of leaks from, actually not leaks, actually, presented by US intelligence and US leaders about the long build-up to the war. One of the points it made was surprised on the part of British and US leaders about Putin's strategy and his failure to adopt, to fight the war the way the US and Britain would, with real shock and awe, destruction of communication facilities, of energy facilities, and so on. They can't understand why he hasn't done all that. He could, if you want to make it very likely that that will happen, then insist on fighting until somehow Russia faces total defeat. Then it's a gamble, but if he's as crazy and insane as you claim, presumably will use weapons that he hasn't used yet to destroy Ukraine. So the West is taking an extraordinary gamble with the fate of Ukraine, gambling that the madman, lunatic, mad Vlad won't use the weapons he has to destroy Ukraine and set the stage for escalation of the latter, which might lead to nuclear war. It's quite a gamble. How much propaganda is there in the world today in Russia, in Ukraine, in the West? Extraordinary. In Russia, of course, it's total. Ukraine is a different story. They're at war. You'd expect propaganda. In the West, let me quote Graham Fuller, very highly placed in US intelligence, one of the top officials for decades, dealing mostly with Russia and Central Asia. He recently said that in all the years of the Cold War, he's never seen any extreme Russophobia to the extent that he sees today. That's pretty accurate. I mean, the US has even cancelled Russian outlets, which means if you want to find out what Sergey Lavrov, other Russian officials are saying, you can't look it up on their own outlets. You have to go through Al Jazeera, Indian state television, or some place where they still allow Russian positions to be expressed. And of course, the propaganda is just outlandish. I think Fuller is quite correct on this. In Russia, of course, you expect total propaganda. There's nothing. Any independent outlets, such as there were, have been crushed. If the media is a source of inaccuracies and even lies, then how do we find the truth? I don't regard the media as a source of inaccuracies and lies. They do exist. But by and large, media reporting is reasonably accurate. Reporters, the journalists themselves, in the past, do courageous, honest work. I've written about this for 50 years. My opinion hasn't changed. But they do pick certain things and not other things. There's selection. There's framing. There's ways of presenting things. All of that forms a kind of propaganda system, which you have to work your way through. But it's rarely a matter of straight, outright lying. So there's a difference between propaganda and lying. Of course. A propaganda system shapes and limits the material that's presented. It may tell the truth within that framework. So let me give you a concrete example, which I wrote about extensively. I have a book called Manufacturing Consent, jointly with Edward Herman. It's about his term, which I accepted as a propaganda model of the media. A large part of the book is defense of the media. Defense of the media against harsh attacks by Freedom House. Several volumes they published attacking the media, charging that the media were so adversarial and dishonest that they lost the war in Vietnam. Well, it took the trouble of reading through the two volumes. One volume is charges. The next volume is evidence. Turns out that all of the evidence is lies. They had no evidence. They were just lying. The media, in fact, the journalists were doing an honest, courageous work, but within a certain framework. A framework of assuming that the American cause was basically just, basically honorable, making mistakes, doing bad things. But the idea of questioning that the United States was engaged in a major war crime, that's off the record. So unfortunately, there was this crime and that crime, which harmed their effort to do good and so on. Well, that's not lying. It's propaganda. So how do we find the truth? How do we find the truth? That's what you have a brain for. It's not deep. It's quite shallow. It's not quantum physics. Put a little effort into it. Think about, look for other sources. Think a little about history. Look at the documentary record. It all pretty well falls together and you can get a reasonable understanding of what's happening. If you could sit down with Vladimir Putin and ask him a question or talk to him about an idea, what would you say? I would walk out of the room just as with almost any other leader. I know what he's going to say. I read the party line. I read his pronouncements. He doesn't want to hear from me. Am I going to say, why did you carry out a crime that's comparable to the US invasion of Iraq and the Stalin-Hitler invasion of Poland? Am I going to ask that question? If I met with John F. Kennedy, would I ask, why did you radically escalate the war in Vietnam, launch the US Air Force, start authorizing a bomb, drive launch programs to drive the villagers, who you know are supporting the National Liberation Front, drive them into concentration camps to separate them from the forces they're defending? Would I have asked him that? Of course not. Do you think the people who led us into the war in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war in Ukraine, are evil? I mean, it's very hard to be in a position of leadership of a violent, aggressive power without carrying out evil acts. Are the people evil? I'm not their moral advisors. I don't know anything about them. I look at their actions, their statements, their policies, evaluate those. Their families can evaluate their personalities. Will there be a war between US and China in the 21st century? If there is, we're finished. A war between the US and China would destroy the possibilities of organized life on Earth. In fact, we can put it differently. Unless the US and China reach an accommodation and work together and cooperatively, it's very unlikely that organized human society will survive. We are facing enormous problems. Problems, destruction of the environment, pandemics, threat of nuclear war. None of these decline of democratic functioning of an arena for rational discourse. None of these things have boundaries. We either work together to overcome them, which we can do, or we'll all sink together. That's the real question we should be asking. What the United States is doing is not helping. So, the current US policy, which is perfectly open, nothing secret about it, is to what's called encircle China, the official word, with sentinel states. South Korea, Japan, Australia, which will be heavily armed, provided by Biden with precision weapons aimed at China, backed by major naval operations, huge naval operations just took place in the Pacific. Many nations participating, RIMPAC, didn't get reported here as far as I know, but an enormous operation threatening China. All of this to encircle China, to continue with policies like that. Somebody like Pelosi, just to probably make her look more, I don't know what her motives are, taking a highly provocative, stupid act, opposed by the military, opposed by the White House. Yes, acts like that, which of course called for the response, highly dangerous. We don't have to do that. We don't have to increase the threat. I mean, right now, the last NATO summit, take a look at it. For the first time, it invited to attend countries that are in the sentinel states surrounding China, encircling China from the east. And it in fact extended the range of NATO to what's called the Indo-Pacific region. So all of us, by now, the North Atlantic includes the whole Indo-Pacific region to try to ensure that we can overcome the so-called China threat. We might ask exactly what the China threat is. It's done sometimes. So, former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, well-known international diplomat, had an article a while ago in the Australian press. That's right in the claws of the dragon, asking, going through what the China threat is. He ran through the various claims, finally concluded the China threat is that China exists. It exists. It does not follow US orders. It's not like Europe. Europe does what the United States tells it to do, even if it doesn't like it. China just ignores what the US says. There's a formal way of describing this. There are two versions of the international order. One version is the UN-based international order, which theoretically we subscribe to, but we don't accept. The UN-based international order is unacceptable to the United States because it bans US foreign policy. Literally, it explicitly bans the threat or use of force in international affairs, except under circumstances that almost never arise. Well, that's US foreign policy. Try to find a president who isn't engaged in the threat or use of force in international affairs. So obviously we can't accept the UN-based international system, even though under the Constitution, that's the supreme law of the land. It doesn't matter. So the United States has what's called a rule-based international order. That's acceptable because it's the United States that sets the rules. So we want a rule-based international order where the US sets the rules. In commentary in the United States, even in scholarship, almost 100% calling for a rule-based international order. Is that false? No, it's true. Is it propaganda? Of course it's propaganda, because of what's not said and because of what's presupposed. An answer to an earlier question. Well, China does not accept the rule-based international order. So when the US imposes demands, Europe may not like them, but they follow them. China ignores them. So take, for example, the US sanctions on Iran. The US has to punish Iran because the United States pulled out of the, unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreements. So in order to punish Iran for wrecking the agreements in violation of Security Council orders, we impose very harsh sanctions. Europe strongly opposes the sanctions, condemned them harshly, but it adheres to them. Because you don't disobey US orders. That's too dangerous. China ignores them. They're not keeping to the rule-based international order. Well, that's unacceptable. In fact, it's said pretty openly. You can hear the Secretary of State and others saying China is challenging our global hegemony. Yes, they are. They don't accept US global hegemony, especially in the waters off China. So that's a China threat. They do a lot of rotten things, China. I mean, internally, there's all kind of repression, violence, and so on. But first of all, it's not a threat to us. And second, the US doesn't care about it because it easily accepts and supports comparable crimes and atrocities internal to allies. So yes, we should protest it, but without hypocrisy. We have no standing to protest it. We support comparable things in all sorts of other places. Just take a look at the US foreign aid. The leading recipient of US foreign aid is Israel, which is engaged in constant terror, violence, and repression. Constant, almost daily. Second leading recipient is Egypt, under the worst dictatorship in Egypt's history. About 60,000 people in jail, political prisoners, tortured, and so on. Do we care? No. Second leading recipient. I mean, what are we talking about? That's why most of the world just laughs at us. There's a lot of failure to understand here about why the global South doesn't join us in our proxy war against Russia, fighting Russia until it's severely weakened. They don't join us. Here, the question is, what's wrong with them? They look into their minds to figure out what's wrong. They have a different attitude. They say, yes, we oppose the invasion of Ukraine. Terrible crime. But what are you talking about? This is what you do to us all the time. We don't care about crimes like this. That's most of the global South. We can't comprehend that, because we're so insulated that we are just obviously right, and everyone who doesn't go along must be wrong. Do you think the United States, as a global leader, as an empire, may collapse in this century? Why and how will it happen, and how can we avoid it? The United States can certainly harm itself severely. That's what we're doing right now. Right now, the greatest threat to the United States is internal. The country is tearing itself apart. I mean, I really don't have to run through it with you. Take a look at something as elementary as mortality. The United States is the only country, outside of war, life expectancy is declining, mortality is increasing. This doesn't happen anywhere. You take a look at health outcomes generally. They're among the worst among the developed societies, and health spending is about twice as high as in developed societies. You look at the charts, all of this starts around the late 1970s, early 80s. If you go back to that point, the United States was pretty much a normal developed country in terms of mortality, incarceration, health expenses, other measures. Since then, the United States has fallen off the chart. It's gone way off the chart. Well, that's the neoliberal assault of the last 40 years. It's had a major effect on the United States. It's left a lot of anger, resentment, violence. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has simply drifted off the spectrum. It's not a normal political party in any usual sense, not what it used to be. Its main policy is block anything in order to regain power. That's its policy. It's stated almost openly by McConnell, followed religiously by the entire Congress. That's not the act of a political party. Of course, democracy has declined, violence has increased. The judgments, the decisions of the Supreme Court, the Court is the most reactionary court in memory. If you go back to the 19th century, decision after decision is an effort to create a country of white supremacist Christian nationalists. I mean, scarcely hidden. If you read the opinions of Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and others. So yes, we can destroy ourselves within. And in fact, the ways we're doing it are almost astonishing. So it's well known, for example, everybody knows that US infrastructure, bridges, subways, and so on, is in terrible shape. Needs a lot of repair. The American Association of Engineers gives it a failing mark every year. All right, finally, Congress did pass a limited infrastructure bill. They rebuilt bridges and so on. It has to be called a China competition act. We can't rebuild their bridges because they're falling apart. We have to rebuild their bridges to beat China. It's pathological. And that's what's happening inside the country. Take Thomas's decision in the recent case in which he invalidated a New York law. This is last October, a couple of weeks ago. Invalidated a New York law going back to 1913 that required people to have some justification if they wanted to carry concealed weapons in public. He was through that with a very interesting decision. He said the United States, he said, is such a decaying, collapsing, hateful society that people just have to have guns. I mean, how can you expect somebody to go to the grocery store without a gun in a country as disgusting and hideous as this one? It's essentially what he said. Those weren't his words, but they were the import. What gives you hope about the United States, about the future of human civilization? Human civilization will not survive unless the United States takes a lead, a leading position in dealing with and overcoming the very severe crises that we face. The United States, the most powerful country, not only in the world, but in human history, is nothing to compare with. What the United States does has an overwhelming impact on what happens in the world. When the United States pulls out, alone, pulls out of the Paris agreements on dealing with climate change and insists on maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that provides some mitigation, when the United States does that, as it did under Trump, it's a blow to the future of civilization. When Republican states today, right now, say they're going to punish corporations that seek to take climate change into account in their investments, the US is telling the world, we want to destroy all of us. Again, not their words, but their import. That's what they mean. So as long as we have a political organization dedicated to gaining power at any cost, maximizing profit, no matter what the consequences, no future for human civilization. Noam, thank you for talking today. Thank you for talking once again. And thank you for fighting for the future of human civilization. Again, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noam Chomsky. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Voltaire. It is forbidden to kill. Therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Sean Carroll: Experimental Validation of Quantum Mechanics Interpretations and Emergent Spacetime

Even outside of quantum computers, some of the theories that we've been talking about, what's your hope, what's most promising to test these theories? What are kind of experiments we can conduct, whether in simulation or in the physical world, that would validate or disprove or expand these theories? Well, I think there's two parts of that question. One is many worlds, and the other one is sort of emergent space time. For many worlds, there are experiments ongoing to test whether or not wave functions spontaneously collapse. And if they do, then that rules out many worlds, and that would be falsified. What if there are hidden variables, there's a theorem that seems to indicate that the predictions will always be the same as many worlds. I'm a little skeptical of this theorem. I'm not completely, I haven't internalized it. I haven't made it in part of my intuitive view of the world yet. So there might be loopholes to that theorem. I'm not sure about that. Part of me thinks that there should be different experimental predictions if there are hidden variables, but I'm not sure. But otherwise, it's just quantum mechanics all the way down. And so there's this cottage industry in science journalism of writing breathless articles that say, quantum mechanics shown to be more astonishing than ever before thought. And really it's the same quantum mechanics we've been doing since 1926. Whereas with the emergent space time stuff, we know a lot less about what the theory is. It's in a very primitive state. We don't even really have a safely written down, respectable, honest theory yet. So there could very well be experimental predictions we just don't know about yet. That is one of the things that we're trying to figure out. But for emergent space time, you need really big stuff, right? Well, or really fast stuff, or really energetic stuff. We don't know. That's the thing. So there could be violations of the speed of light if you have emergent space time. Not going faster than the speed of light, but the speed of light could be different for light of different wavelengths, right? That would be a dramatic violation of physics as we know it, but it could be possible. Or not, I mean, it's not an absolute prediction. That's the problem. The theories are just not well-developed enough yet to say.

https://youtu.be/DUPZhVdRvQM

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I'm Most Proud of Trying - Eric Weinstein | AI Podcast Clips

Do you think about your own mortality? Death? Sure. Are you afraid of death? Well, I released a theory during something that can kill older people, sure. Oh, is there a little bit of a parallel there? Of course, of course. I don't want it to die with me. What do you hope your legacy is? Oh, I hope my legacy is accurate. I'd like to write on my accomplishments rather than how my community decided to ding me while I was alive. That would be great. What about if it was significantly exaggerated? I don't want it. You want it to be accurate. I've got some pretty terrific stuff, and whether it works out or doesn't, I would like it to reflect what I actually was. I'll settle for accurate. What would you say, what is the greatest element of Eric Weinstein accomplishment in life, in terms of being accurate? What are you most proud of? Trying. The idea that we were stalled out in the hardest field at the most difficult juncture, and that I didn't listen to that voice ever that said, stop. You're hurting yourself. You're hurting your family. You're hurting everybody. You're embarrassing yourself. You're screwing up. You can't do this. You're a failure. You're a fraud. Turn back. Save yourself. That voice, I didn't ultimately listen to it, and it was going for 35, 37 years. Very hard. I hope you never listen to that voice. That's why you're an inspiration. Thank you. I appreciate that.

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Karl Deisseroth: Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychiatry | Lex Fridman Podcast #274

Where are the darkest places you've ever gone in your life? The following is a conversation with Carl Deisseroth, professor of bioengineering, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. He's one of the greatest living psychiatrists and neuroscientists in the world. He's also just a fascinating human being. We discuss both the darkest and the most beautiful places that the human mind can take us. He explores this in his book called Projections, A Story of Human Emotions. I highly recommend it. It's written masterfully. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Carl Deisseroth. You open your book called Projections, A Story of Human Emotions with a few beautiful words to summarize all of humanity. The book draws insights about the human mind from modern psychiatry and neuroscience. So if it's okay, let me read a few sentences from the opening. You gotta give props to beautiful writing when I see it. Quote, in the art of weaving, warp threads are structural and strong and anchored at the origin, creating a frame for crossing fibers as the fabric is woven. Projecting across the advancing edge into free space, warp threads bridge the formed past to the ragged present, to the yet featureless future. Yet featureless future. Well done, well done, sir. The tapestry of the human story has its own warp threads, rooted deep in the gorges of East Africa, connecting the shifting textures of human life over millions of years. Spanning pictographs backdrop by crevice ice, by angulated forestry, by stone and steel, and by glowing rare earths. The inner workings of the mind give form to these threads, creating a framework within us upon which the story of each individual can come into being. Personal grain and color arise from the cross threads of our moments and experiences. The fine weft of life, embedding and obscuring the underlying scaffold with intricate and sometimes lovely detail. Here are stories of this fabric fraying in those who are ill. In the minds of people for whom the warp is exposed and raw and revealing. What have you learned about human beings, human nature, and the human mind from those who suffer from psychiatric maladies? For those for whom this fabric is warped. One thing we learn as biologists is that when something breaks, you see what the original unbroken part was for. And we see this in genetics, we see this in biochemistry. It's known that when you have a mutated gene, sometimes the gene is turned up in strength or turned down in strength. And that lets you see what it was originally for. You can infer true function from dysfunction. And this is a theme that I thought needed to be shared and needed to be made communicable to the lay public, to everybody. People who, which is, I think, almost all of us who think and care about the inner workings of our mind, but who also care for those who have been suffering, who have mental health disorders, who face challenges. But then more broadly, it's a very much larger story than the present. There's a story to be told where the protagonist really is the human mind. And that was one thing I wanted to share as well in projections is that broader story, but still anchored in the moment of patients, of people, of experiences of the moment. Is there a clear line between dysfunction and function, disorder and order? This is always debated in psychiatry, probably more so than any other medical specialty. I'm a psychiatrist. I treat patients still. I see acutely ill people who come to the emergency room where there's no doubt that this is not something that's working well, where the manifestation of disease is so powerful, where the person is suffering so greatly, where they cannot continue as they are. But of course it's a spectrum, and there are people who are closer to the realm of being able to work okay in their jobs, but suffer from some small dysfunction. And everywhere in between. In psychiatry, we're careful to say, we don't call it a disease or a disorder unless there's a disruption in social or occupational functioning. But of course, psychiatry has a long way to go in terms of developing quantitative tests. We don't have blood draws. We don't have imaging studies that we can use to diagnose. And so that line ultimately that you're asking about between order and disorder, function and dysfunction, it's operational at the moment. How are things working? Can we just like linger on the terms for a second? So this disease, dysfunction, how careful should we be using those words? Can we just, even in this conversation, from a sort of technical perspective, but also a human perspective, how quick should we be in saying that schizophrenia, depression, autism, as we kind of go down this, across the spectrum of different maladies, just to use the word dysfunction and disease. I would say to give ourselves license to capture the whole spectrum, let's say disorder, because that captures truly, I think, the essence of it, which is we need to talk about it when it's not working, when there's disorder. And that's the fairest and most inclusive term to use. So is it fair to assume that basically every member of the human species suffers from a large number of disorders then? Well, we just have to pick which ones are debilitating for each person. You know, if you look at the numbers, there are, if you look at how our mental health disorders are currently defined, you can look at population prevalence values for all these disorders, and you can come up with estimates that somebody will have a lifetime prevalence of having a psychiatric disorder that approaches 25% or so. And so that's, and in some studies it could be more, some studies it could be less. Now, what do we do with that number? What does that mean? And in some ways, that's the essence of what I was hoping to approach with the book, is to reflect on this spectrum that exists for all the disorders. There is, and taking nothing away from the severity and the suffering that comes at the extreme end of these illnesses, but nearly every one of them exists on a spectrum of severity, from nearly functional to completely dysfunctional, life-threatening, and even fatal. And so that number, 25%, more or less, it doesn't capture that spectrum of severity. To linger on that number, where do those numbers come from? Is it self-report? Is it people who show up and say, I need help? Is it somebody else that points out, that person needs help? Or is it like estimates that even go beyond that for people who don't ask for help, but are suffering quietly, alone? When you look at self-report numbers, then those numbers get even higher, beyond 25% or more. Those, the most rigorous studies are done with structured psychiatric interviews, where people who are trained in eliciting symptoms carefully do complete psychiatric inventories of individuals. And these are time-consuming, laborious studies that are not often repeated. When they're done, they're done well. But very often, you'll see a report or something in the news of a very high number for some disorder or symptom. And very often, if it's shockingly high, that's coming from a self-report of a person. And so that's another issue that we have. Again, take nothing away from the severity and reality and biological nature of these disorders, which are very genetic, very, you know, we understand that these are very biological. And yet, we lack right now the lab tests and the blood draws to make the diagnoses. But we'll talk about it, just how biological they are, because that too is a mystery. In terms of from a perspective of how to probe into the disease, how to understand it, how to help it. So some of it could be neurobiological, some of it could be just the dance of human emotion and interaction and it's like, is love when it works and is love when it breaks down biological or is it something else? So we're gonna talk about it. But let me just like to linger in terms of disorder. What about genius? You know, that sort of cliche saying, like the madness and genius that they kind of dance together. What about if the thing we see as disorder is actually genius, unheard or misunderstood? Well, here again, the numbers help us. And here's where being rigorous and quantitative actually really helps. If you look at disorders like autism and bipolar disorder and eating disorders, anorexia nervosa, for example, these, you know, particularly bipolar and anorexia, these can be fatal, they can cause immense suffering, but they are heavily genetic, all three of these. And what's very interesting is each one of these three is actually correlated positively, positively with measures of intelligence, of educational attainment and even of income. And so you look at this severe disorders in many cases causing quite immense morbidity and mortality and yet they are positively correlated at the population level with positive things. Can you say the three again, autism? Autism, anorexia and bipolar disorder. Bipolar, right. What's that book, forgot the book name, but is intelligence a burden? Well, you know, people can get into trouble when they think they're smarter than they are, I will say that. I don't know. Sometimes like in the deepest meaning of that statement, I think ignorance is bliss. I'm a big fan of Prince Mishkin from The Idiot and Alosha from Brother Karamazov. Optimism can be seen as naivety and dumbness, but I think it's a kind of deep intelligence. Maybe inability to reason sort of about the mechanics of the world, but instead kind of feel the world. It seems like that's one of the paths to happiness. There is. How much you think versus how much you feel, this comes up all the time. In medicine, we encounter this all the time. When you, day after day, you encounter this, you know, the abyss of suffering from patients. How much do you let yourself feel or how much do you make it abstract and objective and try to make it clinical? In that range, how you're able to move yourself on that spectrum is very important for survival as a physician. And the way you protect yourself and your feelings turns out to be very important. So you quote Finnegan's Wake, mad props for that James Joyce book. I took a class on James Joyce in college. I think I read parts of Finnegan's Wake. I might have been on drugs of some kind. I somehow got an A in that class, which probably refers to some kind of curve where nobody understood anything. The only thing I understood and really enjoyed is his short stories, The Dead. And then Ulysses, I kind of, I think read a few Cliff Notes that kind of got to the point and then Finnegan's Wake was just a hopeless pursuit. For people who haven't looked at it, maybe you can elucidate to me better, but I felt like I was reading things, words, and the words made sense, like standing next to each other, but when you kind of read for a while, you realize you didn't actually understand anything that was said. Right, but did you have a feeling though? That's one thing I found interesting about Finnegan's Wake. I never fully understood it, but the words caused feelings in me, which I found fascinating. And sometimes I couldn't predict it from the semantic black and white context of what I was seeing in front of me on the page, but the rhythm or the melody would make me feel certain ways. And that was what I always was intrigued by with Joyce. Of course, that was his, he existed on a spectrum too, and he wrote, as you say, more accessible works. I learned a lot about Irish history from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and there was just, he could be as objective as he wanted to be, but then when he let himself loose, he was in this realm where the words had their own purpose separate from semantic meaning, from their dry dictionary definition. You know, there's a funny story that was told, doesn't matter if it's true or not, but they said that James Joyce, when he was young, when he was in his teen years, would go around sort of Ireland drinking and so on and telling everybody that he's going to be one of, if not the greatest writers of the 20th century, and he turned out to be that. So I always think about that little story that somebody told me, because I have a lot of people come up to me, including myself, I'm a bit of a dreamer. You get into certain moods where you say, I'm going to be the greatest anything ever. You get people tell you this, especially young people, and it kind of, it makes me feel all kinds of ways, but that story reminds me that you just might be one of the greatest writers of the 21st century, for example, if somebody were to tell me that. And don't immediately disregard that, because one of the people that say that, that's almost like a precondition, that's like a requirement just to believe in yourself. Maybe it's not a full requirement, but it's an interesting story. I think when someone tells you that, then it creates, one sees an opportunity, and then it would be a tragedy if the opportunity weren't captured, right? And so then that creates some impetus, some motivation to do something good. I think the mind, it's like, I guess that's what books or whatever, I don't even know if it's a book, The Secret plugs into, they kind of make a whole industry out of it. But there is something about the mind believing something, making it a reality. It is just time and time again with Steve Jobs, your belief in yourself, your belief in an idea, sort of embracing the me versus the world, embracing the madness of this idea and making it a life pursuit, somehow morse reality for some tiny fraction of the population, for everybody else, you descend into all the beautiful ways that failure materializes in our lifetime. You know, you mentioned love earlier, I mean, that's a great example of how belief in something makes it real, right? It's not reasonable on the face of it, but because you believe it's reasonable, then it actually does become reasonable and then it is real. And so that's a good example. That doesn't happen. I'm also in a bioengineering department. We don't imagine that a bridge is soundly built and then it is soundly built. That's something that, it doesn't come up in too many realms of human existence, but love is one of them. And the ability to have a fixed idea and to say it's true and then it is true. A bridge is a kind of manifestation of love. So maybe it does work a little bit, but it can break down like Chernobyl did. You can't just say it's safe. You have to also prove it's safe. But on Finnegan's Wake, I think, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, you're using kind of Finnegan's Wake to give one perspective on what madness is, of what's going on in the mind. How much of that is that we're simply unable to communicate with the person on the other side of their mind? Like there's almost like a little person inside the brain and they have some circuitry that's used to communicate emotion, communicate ideas to the outside world. And there's something about that circuitry that makes it difficult to communicate with the little person on the other side. So if you look at what shows up in schizophrenia, with many cases, what we call thought disorders, what we call the individual speech symptoms of schizophrenia, Finnegan's Wake is loaded with them. And it's just full of them. We talk about clang associations in schizophrenia, where the word that is said echoes in some way the previous word. And we call that a clang association because there's no other reason than the similarity of the sound, like a clang of a garage door being hit. And it has a, and sometimes it's not even a word. And we call that a neologism, a new word being created. And of course, Finnegan's Wake is full of that. And then we also, in schizophrenia, where there's what we call loose associations or tangential thought processes, of course, full of that, where things just go off in directions that are not linear or logical. And you can't read Finnegan's Wake, I think, without, certainly as a psychiatrist, you can't read it without thinking about schizophrenia. And then when we look at the families of people with schizophrenia, and Joyce was no exception, there very often are people within the family who are on the spectrum. Some have it, some are able to see it from a distance, from a safe distance. There's an association between schizophrenia and what we call schizotypal personality disorder, where people are not quite in this severe state of schizophrenia, but have some magical thinking, have some unusual thought patterns. Very often, those are family members of people with schizophrenia. So this points to this, again, to this idea that there is a range, even along this very severe, very genetic biological illness, that human beings dwell on different spots along that spectrum. I should mention that we have my friend Sergei pulling up stuff, young Sergei or old Sergei, I don't know what to call you, but there's drafts of Finnegan's Wake. Yeah, I actually saw pictures of this from, I think it was on Instagram or something. These are early drafts of Finnegan's Wake. And it's so beautiful to see, for people who are just listening, there's just random paragraphs and writing all over the page with stuff crossed out. And it's great to see that Joyce himself was thinking in this kind of way as you're putting it together. How much do you think he was thinking about the schizophrenic mind? I think a lot. I think it's known that his daughter suffered from schizophrenia. And what's depicted here on the page is something that I'm sure he either felt himself and some level was able to access this non-linearity of processing or had seen enough in family that he knew what it was and was able to reflect it down in black and white on the paper. So what he was able to do was quite authentic in that sense. Of course, I don't wanna pigeonhole him. He was doing much more than that. It was much more than talking about altered human thought processes and thought disorders. But that was an aspect that he was so good at representing that it had to be intentional to some extent. And a tiny tangent, what does your own writing look like for this book? Because it's extremely well-written. How many edits? Did you just drink some whiskey and like imagine Hemingway style? What's the very different, the writing is very different. I mean, it's really, really well-written, which was like, I was reading it. It makes you realize, because I was expecting sort of a science kind of, which it is like elucidating something about the human mind kind of thing. But you could also probably write really strong novels. So maybe that's in the future. But anyway, what is your, how many edits? How many, what's your style? Does it look like that? Is it more structured, organized? Unfortunately, I use the laptop. So I didn't have this sort of a beautiful record. Typewriter, cigarette and whiskey. I did explore, I was, which was there a particular altered state that would help me to be most creative. And I found actually, I actually did the best while sober, but slightly disinhibited in the late hours of the night or early morning. Yeah, particularly late hours of the night there. I have a friend who would tell me that she thought that very early in the morning, her inner critic was still asleep and she could write more effectively before her inner critic woke up. And I actually found that outstanding advice for me that I often found that there was, I was looser and could write more in the morning. But the other interesting thing is each chapter, each story, it's about a different human being with a different class of psychiatric disorder. That's what each story, each chapter is anchored in. But I'm trying to use words that, and style of writing and diction that captures the feeling of the disorder. And so it's different in each story. In the story about mania, which is a very expansive, exuberant, at least briefly uplifting state where the words come out in a torrent and they're complex and pressured and elaborate. I try to capture that feeling with the words used in that chapter. And then in the schizophrenia or psychosis chapter where things slowly fragment over time and become looser and separated, I tried to capture that in the writing too. So for each, it wasn't as if there was a single mode I could be in for the whole book. For each chapter, I had to put myself into a different mode to capture that inner feeling of the disorder. When you put yourself in that mode, does that change you? Yeah, I couldn't turn it on and off right away. I had to, first I would start by thinking about the person or the people, one or two people based on real patients and the stories that are put forth. The symptom descriptions are real, they're from the patients. Of course, all details change to protect privacy, but the actual symptom descriptions are real. And I would sit with them and really try to inhabit the space of the mind of that person that I knew. And that's not instantaneous, it would take some time. I needed quiet, I needed to be still. That's another reason late at night is good. Sergei posted that drowsiness gives creativity boosts according to Andrew Huberman. Thank you, Andrew. He's not wrong, he's not wrong. Why projections? Is it, I mean, there's, instead of putting words into your mouth, because I can imagine a lot, I mean, to me, I will start putting words in your mouth despite what I just said. So, I mean, to me, projections, working on neural networks, for example, from an artificial neural networks, from a machine learning perspective, it's often, that's exactly what you're doing. You have an incredibly complex thing and you're trying to find simple representations in order for you to make sense of it. So I was kind of thinking about it in that way, which is like this incredibly complex neuronal network that is kind of projecting itself onto the world through this low bandwidth expression of emotion and speech and all that kind of stuff. And the way it's, we only have that window into your soul, the eyes and the speech and so on. So that, in that way, where when there's any kind of disorder, we get to only see that disorder through that narrow window, as opposed to the full complexity of its origins. The word projections definitely serves that purpose here, but it's got a few other really appropriate other connotations as well. So the first thing is a projection in terms of neuroscience is this long range connection that goes from one part of the brain to another. And so it's what binds two parts of our brain together. There are projections, long range connections of axons. These are the outgoing threads that connect one part of the brain to another part. There's a projection that links, for example, auditory cortex, where we hear things, to reward centers, where we can feel, where feelings of pleasure and reward are initiated. And it's been shown that if you have reduced connectivity along that dimension, you are less able to enjoy music. And so these connections, these projections matter. They define how effectively two parts of the brain can engage with each other and join together to form a joint representation of something. So that's one meaning. It's pure neuroscience. The word projection is used all the time, and it happens to be something that optogenetics, a technique that maybe we'll talk about a little later, works particularly well with. We can use light to turn on or off the activity along these projections from one spot of the brain to another. And this is particularly referring to the long range connections. It's particularly straightforward along these long range projections that connect different parts of the brain, but it works over a shorter range too. But then there's this other meaning of projections which you were bringing up, which is very relevant, which is at some point you can reduce something from one level of dimensionality to another, and you can project down into a lower dimensional space, for example. And then finally, there's a psychiatric term, projections, which comes up all the time, which is we very often will look at our internal states and to understand somebody else, we'll project them onto somebody else, we'll try to understand someone else's behavior and make sense of it by projecting our own inner feelings, our own sort of narrative onto them, and use that as a way to help us understand them better. And we'll do the reverse too. We'll take things we see in the outside world and we'll bring them into ourselves and see how well they map, how well they align. That's called introjection. So projections turns out to be a really rich word. And then finally, of course, there's the very common sense of it as a projector that illuminates by conveying information across space with light. So for English language, perfect word to use for this book. But what was funny is not every, there are a lot of international translations now, and all those rich connotations aren't captured in other languages. And so for some translations, connections is used instead of projections. In fact, even in England, the British version is connections instead of projections because apparently projections doesn't have the full connotation, I was told. You have to sacrifice some of the rich ambiguity of meaning of the connections, that's interesting. And words are so interesting. They have so many meanings. I love language and how much is lost in translation. I'm very fortunate enough to be able to speak. I'm not good at languages. I was just, I guess, forced to by life circumstance to learn two languages, Russian and English. And it's just so interesting to watch how much of culture, how much of people, how much of history is lost in translation. The poetry, the music, the history, the pain, the way the scientists actually express themselves, which is funny. I mean, just, it's so sad to see how much brilliant work that was written in Russian. There's a whole culture of science in the Soviet Union that is now lost. It makes me wonder in the modern day how much incredible science is going on in China that is lost in translation. And I'll never, I mean, that makes me very sad because I'll never learn Chinese in the same way that I've learned English and Russian. Maybe whenever I say stuff like that, people are like, well, there's still time. You know, yeah, that's actually fair that I think the 21st century, both China and US will have very important roles in the scientific development. And we should actually bridge the gap through language. And that doesn't just mean convincing Chinese to speak English. That means also learning Chinese. Well, we need these bridge people who can do both. Nabokov, for example, writing in English beautifully. One of my favorite poets, Borges, who I mentioned earlier, he wrote both in English and in Spanish, I think beautifully in both. We need those people who can serve as bridges across cultures who really can do both. You mentioned Borges. So you open your book with a few lines from a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, a love poem. I'm gonna read parts of it, because it's a damn good poem. It's called Two English Poems. I mean, I'd like to understand why you used it and the specific parts you used, which is interesting. But then when I read the full thing, so I think you used it as a sort of beautiful description of what it means to delve deep into understanding, offering yourself to the task of understanding another human being. But if you look at the full context of the poem, it's also a damn good description of being hit by love and overtaken by it and sort of, and trying to figure out how to make sense of the world now that you've been stricken by it. It says a bunch of things about chatting insignificantly with friends and all those kinds of things. And then the poem reads, the big wave brought you. I get this is the moment, I guess, of the universe where the two people, you fall in love. Maybe I'm totally misreading this poem, by the way. Doesn't matter, you can't misread a poem. So it goes on, words, any words, your laughter, and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words. The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street of my city. Your profile turned away. The sounds that go to make your name. The lilt of your laughter. These are the illustrious toys you have left me. So these little memories of these peculiar little details, he remembers. Those are the illustrious toys. I apologize to mix my own words with the poem, but you should definitely read it. I turn them over in the dawn. I lose them. I find them. I tell them to the few stray dogs and to the few stray stars of the dawn. Your dark, rich life. I must get at you somehow. I put away those illustrious toys you have left me. I want your hidden look, your real smile. That lonely, mocking smile your cool mirror knows. I want your hidden look, your real smile. So this is the first part of the poem, and then it goes on, which is some of the parts that you referenced. Second part is, what can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the jagged suburbs. I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at a lonely moon. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honored in bronze, my father's father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs, and so on, so on. I offer you whatever insights my books may hold, whatever manliness or humor my life. I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal. I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved somehow, the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, my joy, and adversities. And I think this is the part that you include in the book. I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born. I, damn, that's a good line. Okay. I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising news of yourself. I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart. I'm trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. That is a man who's in love and longing. If taken, but I just wanna go back to, maybe you could say why you wanted to include that poem, but also your dark rich life, I must get at you somehow. I put away those illustrious toys you have left me out. I want your hidden look, your real smile, that lonely mocking smile, your cool mirror nose. Well, sometimes I meet a stranger, and I just, it's like a double take. It's like, who are you? Have we met before somewhere? Who's that person behind there? And I wanna get at that, whatever that is. And of course, maybe that's what love is, because maybe that's the whole pursuit, like a lifelong pursuit of getting at that person. Maybe that's what that is. And that insatiable curiosity to keep getting, like, well, who's that person in your own private life? Yeah, so that, absolutely, I think that, it was a beautiful description of what you just said, when there's that first moment, and then you wanna dive deeper, you want to know what the hidden mysteries are. In a way, it's a love poem. As a scientist, though, it also, it's a bit of how a scientist can love science. And that wanting to dive deeper is, it's almost like, again, where the, it could be a love affair with investigating the human mind, for example. And that was one reason it spoke to me also. Again, thinking about the broader sweep of where the human mind came from, the steps it took to get where it is today, what was given up along the way, what compromises were made. And here's where the darkness of the poem starts to come in a little bit, too. It doesn't shy away from the negativity, from the confusion, from the danger. And then at the very end, the Bordas is offering up scenes from his life, parts of himself. And this is how we connect with people. We offer up parts of ourselves, just, here it is. And then we see, how well does that map onto what you have? And it's that offering up that I liked. And not the good stuff, or not only the good stuff. The yellow rose is nice, but he's offering up the bad stuff, too. And that, to me, was important for the book, because I'm offering up hard stuff, too, in fact, a lot of it. And also hard stuff from within me, from my own personal side, too. And that was, there's a lot of vulnerability that comes with that, but that comes with love, that comes with writing. You have to be open, you have to be vulnerable. And so, I thought that reflected what I was trying to do, and I thought it was, as an epigraph, it kind of made it clear how vulnerable I was in taking this step, but also what could come out of it. And also, in a meta way, because I was not familiar with this poem, it made me curious of the poem itself to pull at that thread of finding out more. So you picked a very particular part that kind of made you want to pull at that thread and see where did these few lines come from? Because I read it as a curiosity of a scientist, those lines alone, and also as a desperate human being, searching, like offering himself for an understanding or connection with another human being. And then, because I wasn't sure if it's a love poem or not, or if it's desperation or if it's curiosity, whatever it is, and then you see the love poem. I mean, I don't know, that's gonna stick with me for a while, your dark, rich life. And then a few lines in here are just, I mean, those are, I'm gonna just use them as pickup lines at a bar. I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at sunset years before you were born. Now that's a pickup line if I've ever heard one. Anyway, sorry. But this is universal. You see it in so many forms of art. We're in Texas now, you see this in country, country and Western songs. It's often a list of things. Like, here's how I describe myself. There's this and there's that, and there's the other thing, and here you are. These things matter to me, and I hope they matter to you too. It's a pretty universal form, but he did it in this very artful and very vulnerable way. It was both beautiful and you could feel the hurt coming from him too, and that was important. The dark stuff too. I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honored in bronze, and talking about two bullets through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a cow. My mother's grandfather, just 24, heading a charge of 300 men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses. So all of it, the whole history of it. Since it is a love poem, what do you think about love, Carl? What's the role of love in the human condition? We'll talk about the dark stuff. But maybe love is the dark stuff too. I mean, it's the most powerful connection we can form, and that's what makes it so important to us. It's the strongest and most stable connection that we can form with another person, and that matters immensely. It matters for the human family to have evolved to be something that could survive against the odds that we've faced over the years. That unreasonable bond that becomes reasonable by virtue of its own existence. And of course, that joy, the wild, raw joy of love is not a bad thing either. So you put these together, the strongest bridge we can form, and the reward and the joy that it brings, that's what love is to me. And from my perspective, this is something that, it can be hard to capture fairly because you wanna talk about the positive and the negative sides at once. They need to be wrapped up together for a full, honest description of what it is. And that's hard to do in a compact form. And so you have to take time to talk about love. You have to take time to do it justice. It takes a book or at least a poem. Or several thousands of them. I don't know, could you pull up, there's a video I saw, yeah, like right here. So can you pause for a second? So this is Marsha the penguins. So you always see penguins huddling together against, I mean, sorry if I see just metaphors and everything, but them huddling together against the harshness of the conditions around them. That's very kind of, that's like a metaphor for life, like finding this connection. That's kind of what love is. It's like it allows you to forget whatever the absurdity, whatever the suffering of life is, together you get to like huddle for warmth. And that's why I love the sort of just the honesty and the intensity of the way penguins just in the middle of like the cold do this. And then this video I saw, a lonely, this is misinformation. So the name of the video is Lonely Deranged Penguin. I don't know if he's deranged. So if you play it, so he left his pack and there's a nice like voiceover, you don't need to play it, but he, for some reason, left the pack and journeyed out into the mountains. And so the narrator says that he's deranged, he's lost his mind. Now I'd like to project the idea that he's actually, there's so many stories you could think of. He's returning to his homeland. He's an outsider thinking, journeying out into the unknown, thinking he may be able to discover something greater than the tribe. He might be looking for a lost love. Why is he deranged immediately? Why has he lost his mind? Anyway, but this, people should look up this video because to me, I might be the only one who romanticizes this, but it's such a nice kind of, it's both a picture of perhaps a mental disorder, which is what the video kind of describes, and it may be some deeper explanation that's not, that has to do with the motivation of a mind. Yeah, I don't know if you have a deeper analysis on this penguin. Well, I, like you, as a psychiatrist, I would want to sit down with a penguin and go through, I want to see the notes from his prior therapist. But this actually is relevant. Not knowing what was that penguin's motivation, we have very clear situations where there are, both within an individual, we go through periods of time when we stay in one place and we reap the benefits from what we've built, and then we go through periods of foraging, of wandering. Even if there may be resources where we are, we have periods of time in our lives where we wander, where we go in an exploratory mode, and different people express that trait in different ways. This is not a human-specific trait. If you go down to the tiny little nematode worm, C. elegans, with 302 nervous system cells, they go through these phases of foraging and rest, and different individuals have different propensity to forage or to rest and stay in one place. At the level of the species, that's really good that there's that diversity in their willingness to forage. Some stay where they are. The species is somewhat on a firm footing then. But some carry a burden, a risk for themselves, but it's good for the species that they are explorers and they will venture out. The migration patterns that different species blunder into and that turn out to be really good, they weren't logically derived. They most certainly started from something like this, an exploration. And humans do this too, you think? And we do it too. In fact, it's something we do extremely well. Let's talk about psychiatry a little bit. So in my book, you're a rockstar. First of all, for people who don't know, aside from sort of the neurological view of the brain and neuroscience view of the brain, you're also one of the great psychiatrists of our time. I've always, not always, but when I was younger, I dreamed about being a psychiatrist. So it's like getting to meet your heroes and also getting to meet the people who, the best at the top of the world at the thing you've failed to pursue. So I'm getting a free therapy session on top of that. Okay, so what big picture, what is the practice, the goal, the hope of modern psychiatry? If you could try to describe the discipline as you see it, maybe historically throughout the 20th century in contrasting to what it is today. Or maybe if you wanna describe to what you hope psychiatry becomes or longs to become in the 21st century. Yeah. It's been an interesting journey. Psychiatry started out pretty firmly grounded in neurology and pathology. Some of the initial founders effectively of the field were very well grounded in microscopy, looking at cells, working with patients, particularly on the neurological side and this certainly included Freud and some of his contemporaries. But they rapidly discovered that what they could work with at the level of cells and microscopy was so far from the realm of what they could get from a human being and what they were getting from the human being was so much more interesting and was so mysterious and so unknown that many of them just said, we're gonna inhabit this domain and we're gonna work with the people with their words and understand what we can based on verbal communication because that was the only tool that people really had. And that was a very important step for the field. I would say one of the interesting things that came from the early decades of psychiatry really was this distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind and paying particular attention to the unconscious mind as something that was worthy of consideration, that might be important in explaining people's actions and that perhaps even insight into that was valuable in its own right. And out of that psychoanalysis became a practice that was not always focused on cures or treatment but was more focused on insight. What does it mean? How can we help people understand why they're feeling something or thinking something or dreaming something? And that insight separate even from treatment was an interesting thing. As long as one was honest about that and said, we're going for understanding, we're going for insight. Maybe it's useful to just pause on that. If we look at the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, what do you make of the ideas that he had? So you mentioned taking the unconscious, the subconscious seriously. That's like step one, like that there could be worlds we do not have direct access for and we probe at them through conversation or is that too simplistic to call psychoanalysis conversation? That's not too simplistic, but that's right. And I think that was valuable. Where Freud ended up breaking from some of his contemporaries he was very focused on this unconscious as being so tightly linked to libido. And really, from his perspective, you couldn't really separate the operation of the unconscious mind from these aspects of the libidinous aspects. And that was one reason. What's the libidinous aspect? You know, sexual, sexually related drives. Carl Jung, who was his contemporary, that's one factor that led to them separating was Carl Jung felt there was a lot more to the unconscious than this libidinous aspect of it. And he saw it as a much more complete alternate representation of the conscious self, one that maybe reflected a whole range of different motivations and desires. And to properly treat it, one had to consider all of them rather than the ones that Freud was focused on. Carl Jung, your point. Thank you. Thank you for the high level of images that Sergei is pulling up. For people who are just listening, he pulled up a, as a quote from Sigmund Freud's meme, your mom quote, Freud. So the shadow, the Carl Jung shadow encompasses everything, not just the desire to have sex with your mother or sex, period. That's right, that's right. If you look at those two folks en masse, I mean, there's a kind of, it's almost like a technique for philosophical exploration of human mind, human motivations. So it's not even like necessarily, it also doubles as a methodology for helping people, but it's almost like a, it's a kind of philosophical method. Right. This is the fascinating thing about psychoanalysis, and even though it's, I would say, mostly not considered a treatment today, it persists for a couple reasons. One is it's thought that it gives people some insight, but second, there's been a huge influence on literature, on philosophy, on art, and the opening up of discussion about what was below our conscious mind was so fertile in the implications that it sort of reverberated and still does throughout all these different realms of human endeavor from different artistic, you know, experiences that people have, can be colored by this concept of the unconscious. Now, the other thing that was interesting is this distinction, you know, what are the parts of the unconscious? And so there were these id and ego and superego subdivisions that, you know, that Freud, for example, would talk about them, and the id was the primary, the primal drives that an infant would have, or that a very young child, just warmth and feeding, and then later the sexual or libidinous aspects. And for Freud, the later happened very quickly. That's the controversial thing about him, I think. I guess he thought like even children had sexual desires that they're like dealing with, contending with. So it's the full thing, hungry, wanting to eat, wanting to poop, wanting to have sex. Yeah, and he was extremely focused on that aspect. But then there was the superego, which brought on these later sort of moralistic sort of codes of conduct. And that, of course, was very often in tension, but all this could play out subconsciously. And then the ego, this third aspect was mediating, and Freud's conception mediated this tension between the different parts. Now, I think that's interesting. I will say that in some ways, it's maybe unnecessary from the perspective of modern neuroscience to divide things up that way from the moralistic drives and the primal gratification drives. In some ways, they're all drives, and maybe they're even all primal drives. The moralistic drives, they're taught, and they're taught in ways that ultimately relate back to survival and, you could even say, selfish aspects of health and life for the self and family. And so this is, I think it's maybe an artificial distinction. The concept of the unconscious is very valuable and very interesting, but these categorizations of id and superego may not map onto neurobiology in any particular way. If there's a town hall of competing drives and desires and they interrelate to each other, they involve different aspects of the brain and the history of the person, and actions and choices come out of the result of that overall shouting in the town hall. So in some sense, Carl Jung was a step into the direction of liberating yourself from such harsh categorizations. Do you think, I mean, you have Daniel Kahneman with system one and system two. There's just these very compelling categorizations of the human mind that seem to be sticky in the superego, no, in how we talk about these ideas and so on. Do you think those are helpful or do they get in the way? Is it some kind of balance in terms of deeper understanding of how the mind actually works? You know, from modern neuroscience, whenever we seem to get closer to addressing a question like this at the level of cells, it seems to get farther away. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by that. So one thing I'm doing in my laboratory and many people are doing is we are listening in on the activity of cells, neurons, in the brain of mice or rats or fish or monkeys. Individual cells. Individual cells, exactly, of which there are, you know, in our brain, many billions. And when we do and we try to predict what action will be taken by an animal, to address this question, where does the choice arise? Where does the impetus to make a particular selection of one action versus another action, where does that start in the brain? If you're recording, listening in on the activity of cells all across the brain, where's the earliest spot you can pick up a choice being made? Well. That's so awesome. Yeah, at one level you might think how excited would Jung have been to see this or Freud or the early psychoanalysts to see where this starts. But it's not so simple because an emerging theme in very recent neuroscience, literally over the last few years, is that things sort of all start together, all across the brain. And so you can be recording from the cortex, this rim of cells at the surface of the brain, or you can be recording deeper in a structure called the striatum, which is a little older, it's more tightly linked to action. And then structures called the thalamus, other parts of the brain. And if you record from these, these all sort of represent the action and the choice, more or less all at about the same time, very close. And so you can't point to a particular spot and say, here's where the choice or the action originates. It's a group. Is it sort of finding the free will neuron? It's relevant to that question. Nobody is close to being able to point to such a thing. Well, close is a relative term. And nobody, what I tweet today, all generalizations are wrong. So including this one. Let's actually talk about that. So the study of individual cells, if you could linger on your sense that as you get closer to that understanding, it feels like you're getting farther away. Why is that? Because that often is the feeling until you're actually there. So like, you know, see that's when I'm running and I know there's only a mile left. It just feels like that mile is just getting longer and longer, but eventually you finish. So maybe we're getting close to cracking open these like beginnings of a sense, like we'll talk about consciousness or these very difficult, big questions about the human mind. Where do they start? You're right to say we shouldn't generalize or make absolutist statements. But I would say right now, the reason things are looking even harder to crack than we had initially thought, we now have the data streams that we've wanted for so long in terms of activity patterns all across the brain at the level of cells. We can literally see what cells are doing. Immense data sets, you know, we get, these are time series of one individual cell with sub-second resolution and you can collect this from enormous numbers of cells across the brain. So very rich data sets that we've wanted for a long time and yet having these has not led to an understanding of truly where actions initiate in terms of regions or locations. I'm gonna ask you a few questions on that. Is the answer, high-level question by your intuition, is the answer within the data or do we need different kind of data? So we should also say that when you collect data about the brain, there's like the richness of information you're collecting but there's also a human doing stuff. And the information, so static information about the human and dynamic information about the human and you can get them to do different stuff and you can select different humans and that's part of the collection of data aspect. So like when you're collecting data about the brain, there's some truths that you can, you know, in machine learning, it's like annotations, like supervised learning. There's some true things you can hold on to before you look at the full, rich, mess, complexity of the human mind. So given the data you've looked at, do you think the answer for the origin of free will in the human mind can be found? Well, one amazing thing is that nobody's found it but we have these rich data sets and then there's a conundrum which is, is it in the data and we just don't know how to look at it? Maybe we don't know the right scale, the right projection to make of the data, the right way to interpret it. And here's where causal testing becomes very valuable because then instead of just passively observing, well, here are, here are the activity patterns and then here's the choice made by the animal as we've gotten more powerful at reaching in and causing things to happen in the brain, turning up or down the activity of certain types of cells or defined populations of cells and seeing how that affects actions, these causal perturbations have turned out to be very valuable. We're just now getting to the point where we can apply these in very wide swaths of the brain at cellular resolution and so we're gonna be able, hopefully to make some headway on this question with causality and those, that's the one thing that optogenetics provides us, this way of using light that we develop to control cells. This is an untapped, relatively untapped at this broad, brain-wide scale and hopefully we can get there in the near future. But I would say that the answer may be in the data but we don't know how to find it. Well, there's this interactive element like where you can cause stuff that's really powerful because you get to, I mean, as opposed to collecting data passively, you're collecting data actively. So can you maybe describe one of the many things you're known for, one of the big things is called optogenetics, what is it? Optogenetics is a way of causing things to happen. It's a way of determining what actually matters in terms of the activity of the brain for the amazing things it does, sensation, cognition, action. And what it does is it provides activity. It's a way of playing in, if you will, activity patterns into precisely defined cells. And the way we do it is pretty cool, I think. It's, you know, right away there's a problem if you think about how do we do this? How could we play in well-defined activity patterns and provide a stream of activity into this cell and that cell and that cell but not these other cells? But just for context, we're talking about the brains of mice, monkeys, humans, and then the goal is to try to control accurately the behavior of a single neuron and then to be able to monitor single collection of single neurons to then say, well, to draw some deeper insight about the origins, first of all, the function of different parts of the brain, different neurons, different kinds of neurons, but also the origins of the big things, the flap of the butterfly wing that leads to an actual behavioral thing. Yeah, so if you could, exactly, so if you could turn on or off the brain or parts of the brain or cell types or individual cells at the natural rate and rhythm and timing of normal brain activity, that would be immensely valuable because you could determine what actually mattered, what could cause complex things to happen and what could prevent complex things from happening in a specific way. But right away, you've got a problem if you wanna do this. And neuroscientists have wanted to do this for a long time. Francis Crick of Double Helix of DNA fame, he wrote a famous paper in 1999. He got interested in neuroscience later in life. And he said, what we need in neuroscience is a way that we could turn on or off the activity of individual types of neurons in a behaving animal. And he even said the ideal signal would be light because it would be fast, it could penetrate through the brain to some extent. And he had no idea how to do it. He said this would probably be very far-fetched, but it would be a good thing. And so that's what you're actually saying. If you wanna do this kind of thing, and then you imagine, how do I get inside the brain? It's pretty difficult. It's pretty difficult. And then even once you get in, it's hard because all brain cells are electrical, all neurons are electrically activated. And so if you wanted to use electricity as what you were putting in, you won't have any specificity at all. If you have an electrode, a wire, and you put it in the brain, and you send current through it, all the cells near the electrode will be stimulated. That's like trying to control fish by spraying them with water. Yeah, right, because there's already a lot of electricity going around anyway, and you're adding more. But there's no specificity, even among the different kinds of cells either, because all around the wire that you've put in, there are gonna be so many different cells doing totally different things, many of them in opposition to each other. We know that's one way the brain is set up. There are parts of the brain where neurons side by side are doing completely different things, and maybe even antagonistic to each other. So what do you do? How do you play in activity with any kind of specificity? Well, what you do is use, what we found is what you can do is make some cells responsive to light. Now, normally, no cells deep in the brain really respond to light. They're not built for that. There's no reason for them to respond to light in there, which is a great situation to start with, because any light sensitivity you can provide to some cells will be a huge signal above the noise. And so that's what we do with optogenetics. We take genes, bits of DNA from microbes, single-celled organisms, and these single-celled organisms like algae, they make little proteins that sit in the surface of their cells that receive light, capture a photon of light, and open up a little hole in the membrane of the cell and let charged particles, ions like sodium and potassium, flow across the membrane of the cell. And that, these algae and bacteria, they do this for their own reasons, because that helps them move, it helps them make and use energy. But that's a beautiful thing for neuroscience because movement of ions, charged particles across the membrane of the cell, is exactly the kind of electricity that neurons work with. So if we can take this bit of DNA that encodes this beautiful protein that turns light into electricity from algae, and if we can put it into some neurons, but not other neurons, which we can do using genetic tricks, then you've got a situation, then you can shine on the light, and only the cells that have the gene and that are expressing the gene will be the initial direct cells that are activated by the light. And so that's the essence of optogenetics, is the ability to do that. We get that initial specificity that you could never get with an electrode. First of all, let me say that this is, we recently got the Lasker Prize for this. It's a brilliant idea. So I talked to Andrew Huberman, who's a friend of yours, friend of mine, not to jinx things, but he believes that he deserves a Nobel Prize for this. So, I do too, but what my votes. Anyway, the thing is, it doesn't matter. Prizes will be all forgotten. All of us will be forgotten. When the cool idea is, cool idea is a cool idea. That's a really powerful idea. It's actually, the origins of it, you might be interested in, are even, are very deep. There was a botanist in St. Petersburg named Andrei Fomentsen. In 1866, he published a paper on the single-celled green algae. And he was the botanist who first noticed that they moved in response to light. These are tiny single-celled algae that have flagella, so they swim through the water. And he noticed this, he was a botanist, and he published this. It was a paper, he wrote in German, but he published it in a French journal, and he was doing it from St. Petersburg, so it was a very international effort. But you have to go back to 1866, and that, I like to highlight how far back that discovery goes, is back to Andrei Fomentsen. And this is a, it highlights the value of just pure basic science discovery. That always originates somewhere in the Eastern European bloc. But I don't think he expected the splicing of genetic material from the algae into the human brain. And one of the cool things we've been able to do now with modern methods is to really study these proteins. And so we've discovered some of these proteins, other groups have as well. We've dived deep into their structure, just like the double helix structure of DNA was uncovered with X-ray crystallography. We used the same method, X-ray crystallography, to see how these beautiful little proteins work. We've re-engineered them for all kinds of function. We can make them, instead of responding to blue light, we can make them respond to red light. We can speed them up, slow them down. We can make them, with genetic engineering, we can make them have different ions flow through them. And so it's this convergence, as you said, like the botanist in 1866 couldn't have predicted what we could do with this. And the fact that we've been able to discover how these beautiful proteins work, and then apply them to neuroscience is really a thrilling story. Is it possible to achieve scale, do you think, with this? Meaning, what is the progress of the next 50 years, 100 years looks like, in terms of the precision and the scale of control using light? It's going so fast, it's hard to predict. I'll give you a sense of it, though. First paper we published in 2005, that was just in cultured neurons, by 2007, so that was in a dish. By 2007, we had it working in behaving mice. By 2009, we had it pretty general, so we had methods to really make it a versatile method, could be applied to essentially any cell. By 2012, we could get to single-cell resolution. We used light guidance strategies to target individual cells in the brain of a living mouse. By 2019, we were able to control up to 20 to 50 individually specified single cells in the brain of a mouse, and in ways that specifically changed its behavior, that could bias its decisions one way or the other. In fact, we could take a mouse, and without any visual stimulus at all, we could make it act as if it had seen a particular visual stimulus by playing in, using the single-cell resolution optogenetics, a specific pattern of activity into 20 or 25 individually specified cells. That's 2019. To your question of scale, now in 2022, we're controlling hundreds of individually specified single cells over all the visual cortex of a mouse, all the part of the brain that is the initial direct target of the incoming information from the retina. Are you constrained to specific types of cells currently? Like you mentioned, long-range is a little easier. Is there constraints on which cells? Now, there really isn't. Now that we have this individual cell guidance, we can target any individual kind of cell very reliably. And so now, to your question of scale, how far can we go? Well, things are moving quickly. It's hard to say. We can access individual cells across the entire brain now. If you look 10, 20 years in the future, I think we'll surprise ourselves. But the fact that we're already able to cause specific perceptions to happen and specific actions means we're essentially where we wanna be. And now it's a matter of just more experiments, more discoveries. But the basic principles are clear now. The basic capability is there. Is there a pathway to doing the same for humans? Optogenetics is primarily, it's a discovery tool. It really is well-suited for use in mice and rats and monkeys because it involves putting in a gene and also delivering light. And those are two things that you can do in human beings, but you'd wanna do in a very careful way. Now, that said, there is, actually just less than a year ago, my friend, Botan Raska in Switzerland, he did the first human optogenetics therapy. And he published this in the journal Nature Medicine. So about 10, 12 years ago, he and I published a paper together where we gave him one of our optogenetic tools, one of these light-activated regulators of ion flow. These are called microbial opsins, by the way, opsins. And he put one of those into an extracted retina from a human being who had died. So it was a cadaveric retina. And he was able to show that optical control in this paper was able to turn on or off individual cells in the human retina. So that was a while back. He spent about 10 years of going through all the regulatory hoops and hurdles and going through primate studies. And finally, he was able to take a human being with a retinal degeneration syndrome, so someone who was blind in both eyes. And he gave one of these opsins into one eye of this human being who was blind and with the goal of conferring light sensitivity onto this retina that was not able to see light. And he was able to make this person see through that eye. So he took a blind person, and the blind person could see, could reach for objects selectively on a table. And he published this in Nature Medicine. And it was, you know, that's an amazing thing. Do you know the title of the paper? What's his name again? Roska, R-O-S-K-A. And you look up the Nature paper. Yeah, Nature Medicine. Nature Medicine. So that's sort of proof of principle. Now, the retina is very accessible. It's near the surface. You can use natural light, or you can use brighter natural light. I'm, myself, I see optogenetics as a discovery tool. It's a way to figure out the principles by which the brain works and how it operates. Partial recovery of visual function in a blind patient after optogenetic therapy. So he went through the full process of doing primates, studies, and then going, well, that's dedication, and that's really exciting to see. Yeah. As beautiful as that is, and I'm glad he did all that work, there are so many other ways that optogenetics could help with therapies. Once you know the principles, then any kind of therapy can become more powerful. Once you know the causal cells in a symptom, like in lack of motivation, or inability to enjoy things, or altered sleep, or altered energy, once you know the cells that are causal, then you can make medications that address those cells. You could address brain stimulation treatments that might address those cells. Also diagnosis. Diagnosis. A very effective, systematic way of diagnosing, or at least providing you rich data to some of these deep questions about schizophrenia, about bipolar, all of those kinds of things that are, the tools are low resolution currently for determining the degree to which you have a thing and whether you have a thing at all. Yeah, exactly. And so the hope is, this is a great example of how you can cure, or you can provide some relief for a symptom of a person who has a serious degenerative disease. But the principles are what we're after, and that's why I spend, even though I'm a psychiatrist, even though I still see patients, I'm not myself trying to drive any clinical trials in the lab. I'm trying to discover, and then any kind of therapy could result from that. What do you think about my friend Elon Musk and his efforts with Neuralink? So this is another, there's a lot of things to say here, because there's a lot of ideas under the umbrella of Neuralink. But one of them is to use electrical signals to stimulate, and then you also record, you collect electrical signals from the brain at a higher and higher resolution, and you go implant surgically the methods by which you do the stimulation and the data collection. So it's possible for the ideas of optogenetics to play well with this. And we can even zoom out outside of just Neuralink and just the whole idea of brain-computer interfaces. What are your thoughts? Well, I think the engineering that they've done is actually pretty cool. So I like the- Robots. Yeah, from the design perspective, and it was a design approach that wasn't being taken in academia. And it's great that they did it, and I think it's pretty cool. So I'll say that. Also, there are many ways that you can record from many thousands of neurons. That's not the only way. It's a very interesting way. We and others are using brain-penetrating electrodes that actually get quite deep. The whole structure of the brain is very interesting. There's the surface cortex, where it's the most recently emergent part of the brain in evolution. Mammals have it. Reptiles have something a little bit like it, but it's not really the full thing. This is a very recent thing. That's what we can access with some of these, like the Neuralink approach and with some of these short electrodes. This part of the brain, the cortex, is only a few millimeters thick. There's so much that's deep, though, that's so important. There's the striatum, there's the thalamus. There are the parts of the brain that drive motivation, that drive hunger and thirst and social interaction and parenting and flight and fear and anxiety. All these things are, there's so much that's deep that these surface approaches are not getting to. And so we and others are using these very long electrodes that help us get deep. And we can still record for many cells, many thousands of cells. We can have multiple of these at once in the same animal. And so there's a diversity of methods to get to this goal. I think it's great that people coming from outside academia will bring ideas that weren't being worked on, at least approaches. They may turn out to be synergistic. These things do work very well with optogenetics because all these electrical recording methods, that's one channel of information flow. Light delivery is a separate, more or less independent. There can be some artifacts that happen, but if you're careful, that's another independent pathway of information flow. And we've done really fun experiments in mice where we play in patterns of activity with light and we record activity from all across the brain of a mouse electrically. And so using optical and electrical together is extremely powerful. So like optoelectric brain computer interfaces. Which, by the way, there's efforts on the computing side to build optoelectric servers. So like where you have both electricity. So because optics is really interesting. Light is a very interesting method of communication that's, like you said, orthogonal in many ways. It doesn't have some of the constraints of bandwidth that electricity does going through wires, but you're able to, but less ability to control precisely at scale. So there's challenges and there's benefits and having those two interplays is really, really, really fascinating. Especially when, obviously, on the other side of your signal is a biological mesh, mush. Mushy mesh. Well, the mushy mesh is kind of interesting because we have, there are problems with light. Light scatters in the brain. So the photons don't just go linearly through. Whenever they hit an interface between fat and water, lipid and water, they bounce off in different directions. And so you can come in with all the resolution you want. You could play in an incredibly detailed, high resolution pattern of light, but the photons start scattering quite quickly. And by the time you've gone a couple of millimeters deep, you've lost almost all that fine spatial information. So, but we've developed workarounds. The longer wavelength light you use, if you get into the infrared, there's less scattering. You can use two photon methods or three photon methods where the photons have to arrive all together at the same time. You can put in fiber optics. We developed these fiber optic methods in 2007 where you can access these deep structures with fiber optic methods. And you can put many of these fiber optics at the same time in an animal. We've used holographic methods, 3D holograms to play in. Hundreds of individual cell-sized spots of light, and we can change those quickly. And so there are a lot of tricks, a lot of interesting optics engineering that has come together with neuroscience in a pretty exciting way. Well, but it's engineering too, which is super, super, super exciting. I should mention, because I remember I mentioned Elon. I recently got, for the first time ever, got COVID. How did I go so long without, finally, so I'm all vaccinated and everything like that. And so I got, because I think he mentioned it publicly so I can mention it, but I won't mention anybody else involved. But hanging out, we all got, Elon got COVID. And the interesting thing about, maybe you can comment about this. So I was only sick for like a half a day. I got a fever of like 104. I just went up and then crashed. And then I was, now, maybe I'm just seeing the silver lining of everything, but afterwards, I have a greater clarity about the world. You just think it's greater clarity. Maybe, maybe I just, it was so, maybe so intensely the mind fog kind of thing for such a short amount of time. But the people who were involved were also reporting this. It's kind of interesting, because I do know the immune system is involved with the brain in very interesting ways. So the human mind also incorporates all these other, it's not just the nervous system. And I just wonder, because everyone always says, no, not like, everyone always says COVID does all these bad things, or whatever the disease is, or whatever the virus. But I wonder, I hate to be a Steven Pinker on this, but I wonder what the benefits of certain disease are if you're able to recover. Like what, is there some, again, don't want to romanticize it, but if your system goes through some kind of hardship and you come out on the other end, I wonder sometimes if there's a greater, maybe killed off a bunch of neurons that I didn't need anyway, and they were actually getting in the way. There were the hater neurons. I don't know. Well, that was your inner critic that I was talking about earlier. You killed off your critic. Well, there are mechanisms for what, the potential mechanisms for what you're talking about. There's actually been a fair bit of research on post-COVID neurological function. Actually, my wife, Michelle Monge, who's at Stanford, she's done a lot of this work. Hiko Iwasaki at Yale has done a lot of this. But what they found is that there's a loss of myelin. This is the coating of those long-range projections that go from one part of the brain to another. Myelin is this sort of insulator that coats these long-range projections and makes the impulses go faster and more reliably. And there's altered function of the myelin-producing cells and altered myelin in the case of COVID. They've looked in both mouse and human brains. But of course, it could be very idiosyncratic. Many people have cognitive problems post-COVID. You're definitely aware of that. So many people report this persistent brain fog and inability to function. But it depends on where the inflammation was. Maybe the people who have dysfunction post-COVID, they had a global effect. Maybe you lost some of these projections that were restraining you in some way, and these plausibly exist. And it's known that there are cell populations in the prefrontal cortex that actively restrain deeper structures from expressing what they do. And it's theoretically possible that you had a lucky global. Somebody has to get lucky, right? Somebody has to get lucky, yeah. Why not me? All right, if we can actually go back to this idea of trying through optogenetics to find origins of when the wave first starts, origins of a decision, origin of idea, origin of maybe consciousness or the subjective experience, or origin of things in the mind. So one thing, Carl Jung, is there a God neuron? Is there a belief neuron? So through this methodology of optogenetics, can you start getting where a belief begins or an idea begins? And especially looking at the strongest of our beliefs, maybe beliefs of love and hate, but religious belief into something really grand, on the grandest of scale. Neuroscience and neurology point us a little bit. We don't have an answer to that, but a lot of these questions I'm gonna ask you, there's no good answer, but you're providing the tools that give us hope to find the answer one day. Yeah, and we have early clues. So for example, when patients with epilepsy have experiences of religiosity as part of their seizure or the aura before their seizure, very often those are in the temporal lobe, in these parts of the brain that are at the side. And so that's initial clue. There are also parts of the brain that are involved in the definition of the self and defining the borders or boundaries of the self. And we know this, this is some experiments that we did in my lab. There's a part of the brain where if there's a rhythm of a particular type, you can cause a separation of the sense of self from the sense of the body. What's normally bound up and unitary, we normally think of ourself and our body as pretty tightly bound up together. Those can be separated, it turns out. We can't take that for granted. And there are certain conditions, certain patterns of activity in one part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, where you can actually separate those two out. And so if you think about these very big questions, what is, where are the origins of religiosity? Where, how do we define the boundaries of who we are relative to others and to the world? How do we link our self to our body and how can that become separated? These are actually, believe it or not, now accessible and rigorously and quantitatively so. We did an experiment with optogenetics where we provided this abnormal rhythm to this particular part of the mouse brain. And we saw this separation of detection of a stimulus and caring about it. So that's like stimulating something about the mouse brain that affects these neurons that give the conception of self. So you're able to dissociate the experience from the impact of the experience onto you. That's right, exactly right. So like these are the goals of meditation. These are the goals whenever I get drunk, pretty much effective. I mean, that's not a scientific statement, just an experiential anecdotal one. Also psychedelics seek to this, to attain this kind of state. That's so interesting. Well, you mentioned psychedelics, you know, DMT and 5-MeO DMT, these create this religious experience, this connection, people describe them as a strong connection to God. In theory, these are accessible with modern methods. Now that we have these rich recording methods, we can explore what are the precise millisecond resolution, cellular resolution, brain-wide manifestations of these altered states. So like you could look at an altered state like on DMT, record it across many people, and then from there see where do these experiences originate in the brain in terms of single neurons, and then how do they propagate and interact with everything else, and if there's some kind of common signal. Like how do you narrow down the set of neurons that are responsible for a particular experience or for a particular behavioral effect? Yeah, here's where optogenetics is so useful because anytime you give an agent like, you know, an agent like ketamine or PCP, which we used for our dissociation experiments that I was mentioning, or you have a psychedelic, LSD or DMT for this altered perceptual state, if you give either of those, these change everything across the brain, okay? So just the fact that you maybe give them to a mouse, let's say, or eventually to a human, you won't know yet which cells to home in on as the causal players in all this just by recording the activity. But then what we found is that optogenetics providing a causal pattern of activity guided by what you see can let you test hypotheses. And we saw this rhythm with ketamine and PCP for dissociation, and then we said, okay, let's test what's causal. We came in and provided that rhythm. We tried a few different things, but only one of the causal tests we tried actually caused the behavioral dissociation. And so that's how we home in on what actually matters. And is it repeatable once you see the causality? So that's one definition of causality, is you try and it repeats across different mice and all that kind of stuff. And so you could do that for DMT. You could do that for the really fascinating mind-expanding, thank you. So the meme for people just listening, this is, again, another disagreement between Freud and Carl Jung, religion and spirituality. This is, I guess, the ring scene from Lord of the Rings. Religion and spirituality, Freud says, cast it into the fire, destroy it. Carl Jung says, no. So for people who don't know, Sergei is the Slavic lord of the meme. Thank you, I appreciate that. So what were we talking about? So there is, I mean, I think a connection between DMT and religious experiences or some of these psychedelics. Do you think it's possible to sort of stimulate religious experiences? So religious experiences are one of the most deep kind of experiences. And so here you could first understand where they originate, how they propagate to the brain, and then to stimulate them. And so this is, and these can happen in people who had no predisposition, you know, people who are as agnostic or atheistic as you'd like, they can have these, they can feel connected to God in these states. Now, to be clear, I'm not advocating these. We don't know what's safe in human beings, but we definitely- Not yet. Not yet. But we definitely can do these experiments in mice, and that was already very productive in understanding dissociation. So we can already imagine making headway on these methods. And then, you know, I had a, and this does map onto the non-psychedelic human experience. I had a patient who's actually described in the book, Projections. This was the patient that's in the mania chapter, the bipolar chapter. Here was a guy who had never had a psychiatric illness or symptom in his life. He was a retirement age gentleman, and nobody in his family either. So no family history, no personal history of any psychiatric illness, and he had never been religious particularly before either. Certainly no passionate, you know, type of religion. But he, not through any psychedelic or drug, he had a stressful experience, actually a post-9-11 change in how he was thinking, and he was pushed into a mania, a manic state, revealing that he had bipolar, never before known in this case, in this person. And his mania, his elevated state in bipolar included this profound religiosity, which he had never had before. And he was, you know, preaching in a elevated, you know, vigorous way to his family. And so this state can be created in people even late in life who had no predisposition for it, and no, even without a neurochemical. So there's, the causality of that is very interesting to explore, how did the manic state unleash this religiosity? But you see that in other realms of psychiatry too. OCD can manifest as religiosity also. You can take people who never really had a, a religion never played a powerful role in their life, but then when their obsessive compulsive symptoms become severe, they can manifest in this. I think I'm in that group, so I'm a bit OCD. We have, there's, I think there's subreddits, when there's oddly satisfying things. So there's certain things that are really satisfying to my OCD, in my mild OCD. I think it's pretty much a religious experience. So I understand that there's, if it's not direct, it's at least rhymes. So maybe can you speak to the, as Sergey's probably desperately scrambling to pull up oddly satisfying, thank you. People can check it out themselves. It is, as the subreddit promises, oddly satisfying. Can we talk about bipolar, and maybe depression? Well, let's talk about, I mean, I don't know if there's a nice way to discuss the differences in the full landscape of suffering that's here, but maybe what is depression? And what are the types of depression? What kind of depression have you seen, experienced, and researched, and how can people overcome it? How can humans overcome it, and deal with it, live with it, and overcome it? So this is my clinical specialty. I see patients in my outpatient clinical work with treatment-resistant depression, so very hard to treat, severe illness, where medications haven't been working. I also see patients with autism spectrum disorders. These are my two clinical focal areas. But then I do emergency room work as well. But the depression, why do I focus on that? It's so, one feels tantalizingly close to helping these people who are suffering so deeply. And that's why I focused on it, is these are people who, there may not even be anything situational that's difficult or challenging in their life. You can have people who seem to have everything that you would want. Every objective measure of their life is fine, and yet they can be just hit with this unstoppable hopelessness, an inability to see into the future, a discounting of the value of their own action. Anything they can imagine themselves doing seems worthless, or they are unable to enjoy things. We call this anhedonia. There's no reward, no pleasure, not in food, social interaction, movies, books, anything that they would enjoy, positivity gone. They can have a profound negative internal state, psychic pain, and these things can seem and in the severe cases are inescapable. So what is going on? Why is this state part of human existence? It's got a strong biological genetic link, we know that. It's been linked to certain genes, certain regions of the chromosome, and twin studies. There's a clear genetic link. Doesn't explain everything, but it's a big part of it. Genetics are a strong contributor. And although you can have depression without anything terrible going on in your life, the symptoms can be made worse by stressors, by trauma. And, but at a very deep level, there's nothing we can measure in a person objectively. So we don't have, there's not a known chemical, not a known structure that's different, not a known brain activity pattern that we can pick up with EEG. A lot of people are exploring this, but right now we have no objective measures. All we do is talk to people and we elicit these symptoms. We explore them, distinguish them from other possible causes. And then what do we do? Well, we have a range of treatments. We have medications that can help people, do help people, but not everybody. And if they don't work, then we can go to brain stimulation methods. We can do things even like electroconvulsive therapy, which is a very effective, but it's sort of the final thing we go to in the end. And so we have treatments, they work for some people, they don't do everything we'd like, but here's the problem is at a very deep level, we don't understand really what's going on in the brain. We don't have a physical interpretation of the problem. We have all these symptoms, but we can't yet point to a set of cells or a set of circuits or an activity pattern that is causing major depression, this disease state per se in human beings. Why do you think you can't yet from an optogenetics perspective? Is it because there's so many possible causes? Is it so many things involved? So I think the answer is there are many things involved and all these different symptoms that I've mentioned, those we can study and those we can fix, the individual symptoms. And we can do this in animals to be clear. So in a mouse, for example, we can instantaneously and precisely turn up or down the motivation of an animal to overcome a challenge. We can turn up or down its ability to be motivated by, or we think experience reward from situations or actions. We can increase its apparent energy level, its drive to meet challenges. We can turn up or down social interaction, all these individual features of depression, individual symptoms. We now can point to exact projections and cells that are causal in mediating these. But we don't know is why all these different symptoms show up together in major depression, in the human disease syndrome. And that's the mystery. It's sort of in other fields of medicine, someone with congestive heart failure who comes into the clinic, they have very different symptoms. They have shortness of breath and they have swollen feet. Couldn't be two more different across the body sets of symptoms. Neither one obviously related to the heart, but they're both happening because the heart is not working as a pump. And now thankfully in cardiology, we understand these disparate symptoms that seem totally unrelated can be completely understood because there's an altered pump action of the heart. That's what we are hoping for in psychiatry and in the study of depression or any disease. These different symptoms, the inability to enjoy things, the hopelessness. What's the unifying principle? Unifying. I mean, is there some truth to that, the Tolstoy quote that all happy families are alike and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? So basically, I mean, this is the human condition. And basically, the physicists long to find the theory of everything. Isn't understanding depression essentially require you to really have the big theory of everything for the human mind? I think it would certainly be nice to have a theory of everything. Don't get me wrong. I don't think we need a theory. The understatement of the century. It would be nice. It's also a good question if it's possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, that I have some thoughts on too. But to this specific question, I don't think we need a theory of everything. I think there will be unifying principles we can get to. But even shy of that, we can treat symptoms and that's a big step. And as you say, different unhappy families are different. Different unhappy people are different. If we have somebody who comes to the clinic and I see someone with a profound anhedonia as one of their main symptoms, inability to enjoy things, and if I know based on optogenetics work and animal work that a particular medication can treat anhedonia, even if it doesn't fix major depression in everybody, if I treat that one symptom in that one person, that's a good thing. And so we don't need the theory of everything and we don't even need the unifying principle to help people with insights that come from optogenetics. How much does talking help for diagnosis and for treatment, would you say, for depression? It's a big part of what we do. Every good psychiatrist should be pretty adept in these verbal communications and talk therapy as part of what they do. I give medications. I deliver brain stimulation treatments, but a big, big part of everything I do with every patient is talk therapy because it works so well together with these other modalities. Even alone, it can help people with moderate or mild depression by itself. People with severe depression, people with other psychiatric illnesses that are severe, you don't wanna do talk therapy alone. That's not gonna do it, but it still is crucial to do together with the others. And it's critical because it's part of how you reshape cognitions, complex activity patterns, and you won't get to that with a medication or a brain stimulation treatment. Do you have advice for people who suffer from mild forms of depression or feel as they might, both for those people, and do you have advice for people who love the people who suffer from depression and want to help? Yeah. One of the incredibly frustrating things about depression is the very nature of it makes it hard for the people who suffer to get treatment because they're hopeless, so they don't think treatment will help. They have low energy, so they're not motivated to participate in treatment in many cases. Sometimes they're actively suicidal. That certainly doesn't help. They have all these things that seem to prevent treatment from being effective, so the loved ones, that's where the loved ones are so important is helping them overcome these barriers to treatment, the motivation, the safety, and the insight. That's critical, and particularly for the severe cases. For the mild cases where people still have some insight and motivation and energy to get something done, there are many things you can do. Exercise is extremely important in mood, maintenance, regulation of sleep, and getting sufficient and regular enough sleep is very important. And talk therapy can be helpful in those mild or moderate cases, just looking at cognitions, looking at patterns of thought that people may have fallen into, where they catastrophize, where they spiral from small things into big things. A little bit of talk therapy, 10, 12 sessions, can help people identify those patterns they may have in themselves that are taking occasional negative thoughts, which everybody has, and magnifying those into more persistent negative states. Once you, if you work at this, and it's kind of like homework, this is what we call cognitive behavioral therapy, it's very structured, very organized, you work hard, it requires insight and motivation, and you have to be motivated, but if you are, then you can identify these triggers that send you down particular pathways and work to intercept them, and that is amazingly very effective in mild to moderate cases. So you're basically, have to train yourself to see the world as a collection of triggers, and you have to first understand, like collect the data, like basically see every experience as a thing that creates a follow-on emotion, a feeling. And like, I've learned this, you know, like on social media, where like early on, you know, like all of us, you know, I'll say something, I kind of respond to negativity with negativity, and then you observe the result of that. And then over time, you think, wait a minute, this thing that I've been doing where when somebody says, you suck, and you say, no, you suck, that never produces the result you thought it might. And so might not want to just, don't say you suck back. And I do this through a lot of things in life. I'm very fortunate to not suffer from depression, but I, first of all, I have had and have people in my life who do. And also, you know, all of us have depression, who don't suffer from depression, have depression out. Like it's always knocking on the door. Right, yeah. And so you have mild, I mean, if you're very careless with the triggers all around you, then you're just, I think all of us have the capacity to really suffer from that kind of chemical or psychological or philosophical existential crisis. But then it raises a question, why are we built this way? It seems like it doesn't make sense, right? And here's where some of this thinking about where we came from as the human family is kind of interesting. It doesn't make sense that somewhere on that spectrum that it's good to detect that there's an array of adverse forces out there in the world right now at this moment and to withdraw, to hunker down, to not fight, not strive, not try to meet the challenge and outweigh these negative forces that are present out there. And that makes a lot of sense. And all animals that have been studied in one form or another show this, even the worm that I mentioned earlier, C. elegans with 302 neurons, it can effectively give up in challenging situations. We've done this with zebrafish, tiny little transparent fish. You can give them a challenging situation and they will give up. But then if you stimulate a couple of very specific brain regions in particular ways, you can motivate them to overcome the challenge. And if you inhibit those regions, they give up much more easily than they would otherwise. You can do this in mice, you can do this in rats. So this is an ancestral conserved pattern to detect that things are pretty bad out there and to conserve energy, to hunker down, to wait out the storm. So as use, unfortunately, many of our maladies have useful roots in our, that contribute to our survival. So both depression and motivation have uses. And in the, sometimes it's nice to just shut the hell up and huddle with the penguins versus, for some unknown reason, venture out on your own into the mountains, like a David Goggins type character. So what's the difference to you between, you see patients, between sort of rigorous psychoanalysis. I don't know if you consider what you, like talk therapy and psychoanalysis, are they neighbors, are they overlapping? They're neighbors, psychoanalysis is, it's a, they're relatively, it's not nearly done as much as the talk therapy, like the cognitive behavioral therapy I mentioned. The behavioral, yeah. The psychoanalysis is a little more niche now and partly because it's not, data isn't, in terms of actual treatment, of actual therapeutic effects, data not as supportive as for cognitive behavioral therapy. But it's still interesting as, for insight, people, a lot of people still do it to gain insight into themselves. And in general, it's a good sort of conversation starter. Those methods, they're good for getting things out. We don't focus on dreams, typically these days in psychiatry, but they're great conversation starters. They're great ways to get things out if people have. And so we like to use those methods just to get the ball rolling sometimes, get people to open up a little bit. But the actual treatment tends not to involve these psychoanalytic approaches where you are really probing the unconscious mind and its manifestation through dreams, for example, as the goal. That's not the goal. Modern talk therapy, we're really focusing on treatment, how to get people to feel better. See, I use that as a conversation opener, the Freudian thing where I try to delve at a bar of the deep sexual desires in a person's subconscious, and I find that opens up possibilities very quickly. No, all right, what's, I mean, this is a silly sounding question, but what's the difference between cognitive behavioral therapy and conversation? So, because I personally, as a fan of conversations, as a fan of just, I like listening to podcasts versus like audio book. I like both, but they're very different. And I like conversation. I like, it makes me personally very anxious, so I like to be the listener, like a third wheel, like overhearing a conversation kind of thing. But it's a really powerful method for humans to explore each other's mind, just raw conversation. So do you think it can be more productive to be very systematic about it, or is conversation itself the art form of helping each other, understanding each other and helping each other? There are forms of talk therapy that are essentially conversational, or they much more approach pure conversation. There's a befriending therapy. There's interpersonal therapy. These are approaches that are purely talk therapy, but they're not as structured as cognitive behavioral therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, there are manuals, there are guidelines. You can almost go through it in a very cookbook-y way. There's homework that you get done. So in its fullest form, it's very different from these more conversational strategies. But what's interesting is sometimes people compare them, and so you'll see almost like randomized controlled studies comparing cognitive behavioral therapy with interpersonal therapy, for example. And they both can work. And actually, in some studies, they look comparable. So to your point, conversation and insights that come from conversation, if done well, if done artfully, can be as powerful. This reminds me of Robin Williams. I have to ask you several questions here on that. But one of my favorite movies is Good Will Hunting. I don't know if you've seen it with Robin Williams. So as a psychiatrist yourself, can you do a deep analysis of this other famous psychiatrist, which is the movie character played by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting? Is it just a caricature between a psychiatrist and patient relationship? Or is there something to you that was moving about his ability to connect to this obviously struggling young kid? I think you've hit on the key thing there, which is the depth of the connection. If there's a too powerful connection that can impair therapy, because it could impair open communication. If a patient sees the role, sees the relationship in a particular way, like in a friendly way, maybe or like a parental child type way, that can cause problems because then what they choose to share, what they choose to bring up is selected to be appropriate for that view of the relationship. And so I and many other talk therapists actually prefer not to let things get, not let the connection get that deep. You wanna have trust, you wanna have a therapeutic alliance, we sometimes call it, but it's got to be enough of a blank slate that the patient is not consciously or unconsciously constrained in what they choose to share. And so great movie, great actors, all good, no complaints except realistically, the relationship should be a little more arm's length than that. Let's pretend this is real life. Sometimes can't you leave a little bit of yourself in the interaction with the patient? Yeah. I mean, it's another human being. Yes, so there's a balance and actually you do need some of it because let's say this person is having challenges, interpersonal challenges in their life. The best way to notice what those are and to identify them and to work with them is if you can elicit some of those problems in the office, in the therapeutic interaction. And this is really powerful. As long as you're alert to it, aware of it, and you don't let it go out of hand, this transference, we call it, is when you transfer in between the current therapeutic relationship and external relationships that the patient may have had with others. And so if the therapist starts to feel an inner feeling like anger, let's say, so let's say you have a patient who is stirring frustration in you or even in extreme cases, anger, the best thing for the therapist to do in that case is to recognize it and to realize that's probably being stirred by other people in the patient's life and that could be the source of a lot of problems. And so instead of trying to wall it off and say, oh, I shouldn't be feeling that, I better be a better therapist, instead, recognize it and use it and help the patient that way. And so you've gotta be a human being, you've gotta be a person who feels, you've gotta be open. But be in control of it and be aware of it. If I may, I just wanna read, because it's one of my favorite scenes, probably one of the greatest scenes, one of the greatest scenes in movie history because Robin Williams does a single take. Is that right, I didn't know that. So this is a very interesting interaction between them. So, and I'm sure this is a common interaction, maybe with a therapist and a patient, maybe with a father and son, where Will, the young character, they're a young, brilliant mathematician, and Sean is the therapist, the older therapist, where Will looks at a painting that Sean painted and then does a deep, critical analysis of the painting that basically describes, pretending as if he can understand another human being completely by just looking at their painting. And then Sean gives this whole speech that contrasts sort of raw intelligence and the wisdom of experience. And Sean says, single take. He says, you've never been out of Boston, right? And Will says, nope. All this in a sexy Boston accent, by the way. And then Sean gives this speech. If I asked you about art, you'd probably give me this skinny and about every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the Pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling, seen that. If I asked you about women, you'll probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. The language here is just beautiful. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. If I asked you about war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? Probably not, but let's say. Once more into the breach, dear friends. But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's head on your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help. If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and be truly vulnerable. Known someone who can love you with their eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell and you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel. To have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer. And you wouldn't know about sleeping, sitting up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes the terms visiting hours don't apply to you. You don't know about real loss because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. I look at you. I don't see an intelligent, confident man. I see a cocky, scared, shitless kid. But you're a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one can possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine. You ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan, right? Do you think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been? How you feel, who you are? Because I read Oliver Twist. Does that encapsulate you? Personally, I don't give a shit about all that because you know what? I can't learn anything from you that I can't read in some fucking book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. And I'm fascinated, I'm in. But you don't want to do that, do you, sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief. Well done, sir. I know it's a movie. It's interesting, right? So some of that conversation is at some intellectual level, too. It's not just emotional. It's something, it's like, the reason I kind of connect with that is, that's a lot of work for a therapist. Like, to really understand another, because he's, I mean, from, okay, I know this is fictional, but just, there's calculation happening. He deeply cares to say the words that the other person needs to hear, but also a little bit loses himself in the pride, but then catches himself again, switches from anger to connection. Yeah. A lot is brought up there. You're right, there has to be some emotion in the therapist to care enough, to keep going, to keep probing, to open up as he's doing so, right? He revealed a lot about himself, his own vulnerabilities, but that gave him authenticity. He had to open himself up so that the kid would see the authenticity and open himself up in return. So how do you do that as a psychiatrist, as a therapist? You have to be careful. You don't wanna do too much, but opening up a little bit does help. It does create a chance. You're offering up something, and that helps the patient come back in return. And it gives you that believability and authenticity. Do you pay the price for that, for opening up? You can. You have a family, you have an incredibly difficult research. You're doing a lot of things in your world. I mean, it's a price you pay for like. Well, this is one of the terrifying things about writing the book was, I do open up in a little bit about my own personal life, my own personal challenges. And that was a considered decision because I could have done the patient work and the science work and the history of the human family work and tied it all together. But it wasn't, in an early draft, it was like that, but it wasn't real yet. It wasn't something that everybody could connect with. And I said, then I realized, look, if I'm gonna do this, I've gotta open up myself and then people can connect with me and see what I'm really saying. And so I did. And that was, it was not something that I'd gone in planning to do. In retrospect, I learned a lot about myself. It was actually really, I think, a good thing that I did, but it was scary. Where are the darkest places you've ever gone in your life? I had, things haven't always been easy personally or professionally. I had moments, I was effectively a single dad for a while, a number of years. And these came at probably the hardest also professional lifetimes for me too. The absolute hardest days of late medical school, internship, taking call, getting up at 3 a.m., surgery, medicine rounds, unforgiving environments. And then all the while, personal life stripped down to the bare. And these were low moments. And then I was hit particularly hard by just experiences on the clinical ward, connecting too deeply with patients, like a child with a brain tumor and feeling it too strongly. And those things, when you get down to those lowest of the low moments when everything is stripped away and there's only this raw core, well, that's pretty hard. That was probably the lowest moment. And you learn a lot about yourself in those moments, you know, what's left and then what are the roots out from there. And that can be powerful to see in yourself. Have you thought about killing yourself? I have not. I have not. Have you seen that thought in the distance? I am fortunate that that has not come to my mind. And I have not seen it even in the distance. And in some ways, I've wondered if that's made me, am I a less effective psychiatrist because of that? I've felt everything stripped away. I've been at the lowest of the low, and yet that- There's still hope. There's a light of hope still at the end of the tunnel. Right. So you never lost, even for brief moments, that... Never did. I don't know why. You don't know why. There was no reason to feel hope at that moment, honestly. So it was just a light without reason. Yeah, that's right. What wisdom do you draw from that time? So first of all, you said something funny, which is I wonder if it, that it's somehow not having thoughts of suicide limits your capacity to truly understand somebody who is having those thoughts. So how many demons must a psychiatrist have in order to be a good psychiatrist? You know, this is a really interesting question. I think everybody knows, and I can say this, that psychiatrists can be a little unusual. We think about ourselves, right? We think about our brains. That may be one reason why we become psychiatrists is we think, oh, that's interesting going on in there. What's that about? So a little introspective, a little introverted, maybe, and that's what can make us good when we're good. But also that may select for people who have some unusual aspects, but you don't have to have all of them. There's a lot that can go wrong in the psychiatric realm. I think having some of it, but not all of it is enough. You get to see how low things can get. You can get a, you get empathy from that, even if the symptoms are not the same. Just empathy for struggle, for suffering. That's right, that's right. Do you yourself have to practice observing triggers just as a human operating in this world? I've definitely, those skills that have come from therapy, I've found them useful. If I notice that, we've all been through experiences where we wonder, oh, I got really mad in that interaction. Why did I get that mad? Yeah, sure, maybe I could have been irritated, but man, why did I? And then thinking about it and realizing, okay, back up here, think about the broader context. Think about how that relates to prior events in my life. Okay, yeah, so this is a thing for me when something of this class happens, then it triggers me. So going forward, I'm gonna be aware of that. And I've definitely used that because you don't wanna be out of control of those emotions. You wanna identify them, you wanna know where they come from and you wanna have them off as a civilized human being living on this earth, trying to get along with other people. You wanna understand those moments. Let me return to Robin Williams for a second and looking at Robin Williams, the actor, sorry, the human. And because you mentioned for depression, you can have everything going well. And I think there's just famous cases of just public figures because a lot of people know them, where they suffer quietly. And it seems like from the outside perspective that they have everything going for them, that they're at the top of their career. Two people that come to mind are Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain. What insight do you have in why either of those taken, why Robin Williams, a comedian, one of sort of the most jolly humans? Obviously there's always the darkness that he was channeling in order to present the happiness. But it feels like that realness is only possible when you're deeply self-honest and analytical. And then if you're deeply self-honest, you're going to realize that there's a lot of beautiful things about life that you can discover. And if you do that, how can you possibly then take your own life? And you go through all of these thoughts. And I think a lot of people really loved Robin Williams, which is why it was really difficult to see, how can even him, how can even Robin Williams take his own life? So I don't know if there's something to be said about the nature of depression from just looking at his case. I think the action of suicide is not well understood. It doesn't always, although often is, correlated with depression. There are cases of suicide where there is not clear depression. That's in the minority. By the way, if I just, because you said it's so interesting, action of suicide, because there's also thoughts of suicide. And probably those, they're probably somewhat understood. But it's an interesting, because you can think of suicide, if you have suicidal ideation, you can think of that for so many reasons. That's right. Thoughts, sometimes, like painful thoughts, angry thoughts, or thoughts in general, can be very different. Like fantasies, for example. You can fantasize, like sexual fantasies. You can fantasize, I was just for humor's sake, wanted to mention stuff, but then people will think I'm serious. So I'm not gonna mention anything. But sexual fantasies, and then there's, I know there's people that have sexual fantasies and they don't wanna actually do that in real life. That that sexual fantasy serves some kind of purpose in imagination only. And in that same way, suicide might serve a purpose in imagination only, is very unlikely to lead to action. And yet there's other thoughts that maybe are more amorphous that do lead to action. And that leap, yeah, that, oh boy, that's a fascinating, and that's such a philosophically powerful thought to not exist. Like that question, that's this, is it Sarcher or Camus? Camus? Well, the mythicist, Camus, who says, like basic question of why live? Good question. Yeah, right. So that's a great question, actually. And there are other related questions. Some people may have the thought of suicide because there seems no point, there's no joy in life. That's one reason that some people can put forward. Sometimes there's an, it's not just the absence of joy, there's an active pain, an active psychic pain in some people. And that, the inescapability of that is enough to drive the thoughts of suicide. And then there are interpersonal and cultural reasons as well that can show up. But the act, this act of ending of the self is, in all these cases, there's no real way to study this in animals. No other animal, as far as we know, that we can study has this concept of, this is myself, the situation is not tolerable, therefore I will end the self. To our knowledge, this is not something that can be studied in other animals. So it remains this very poorly understood action. And in predicting it, so what do we do as psychiatrists? We have this challenge. People come to the emergency room, they say they're suicidal, or their friends say they're suicidal, or they've taken some action that didn't lead to death. What do we do? Well, there's a whole range of options. Was it a suicidal gesture in the sense of not intending death? Or was the intent death? And if it was the intent was death, what were the reasons? Are the reasons transient? Are they gone now? What's the probability that it'll be repeated? So we do all these things just to decide what sort of treatment should be carried out. But nowhere is there a deep understanding of the biology, of the cells and circuits and activity patterns that underlie the action to end the self. It's a very, it's this frustrating thing. It's so timely, it's so common, it shows up in veterans, it shows up in kids, it shows up in people at every stage of life. And yet we're very bad at understanding it, and we're relatively poor at predicting it, and our tools are not very powerful. We can put people in a locked unit, we can give them care therapy for a while. At some point we release them, and there's only so much we can do. It's one of the most frustrating things, the suffering that is linked to suicidality. But it is a decision, and it is an action. And if you look at optogenetics, you should be able to one day sort of understand the dynamics of such weighty decisions. The individual causes then, if someone is anhedonic, if there is no joy in life, that very likely is addressable by optogenetics. We know how to turn that dial very robustly in animals. The motivation to overcome challenges, that we have some hope of understanding. Psychic pain, internal negative states, we have actually a handle on that as well. There's a structure in the brain called the habenula, and some linked structures around it, that seems to generate this negative internal state. It's active when a state of acute disappointment, acute outcomes that go wrong, not as expected. Moments of unexpected pain. The habenula is there, it seems, it's active to report on internal negativity with its action. And so you could imagine strategies to target this brain structure that might have the effect of reducing psychic pain, reducing the negativity of internal states. That is a very concrete hope. It's precise, it's anatomical. Optogenetics has given us all the firm foundation we need to go after that question. So I think there is hope. If you look at the individual causes, the individual symptoms relating to suicide. And then it's like a puzzle, you put together the puzzle pieces. By the way, I do think my habenula is functioning very actively. And I wonder if it's like, because you can also learn to channel these things, right? Some of the things we suffer from, I mean, there's degrees of suffering, can be a source of progress and personal growth and development and all those kinds of things. I mean, what is it, Nietzsche suffered from stomach issues. I wonder if he's written some of those things, if his stomach was all great. I kind of think that a difficult life in some, you get to choose in some regard, in some you don't. The difficulties you have and the ones you do have, it's nice to use if possible. Sometimes it's nice to treat, sometimes it's nice to use. Well, the way you phrase it, I think you're using it. I could be wrong, but you phrased in this semi-humorous way about your habenula. It seems to me that you're using that to good effect. Now, but one never really knows what someone else's internal state is. As I look at you, I don't know the depths of what's going on and it's possible that it's a much harder situation in there. Yes, so I actually worry about this a lot. So I'm extremely self-critical, like in the privacy of my own mind, which is an interesting thing when you get to meet the internet and the internet will tell you you suck. But for now, now this is what I worry about and I'm very paying attention. For now, I just have this very negative voice, but that voice seems to be very useful for productivity. And so I channel it. I just put it on the table and let that voice talk to me. But I'm monitoring that voice because looking at Robin Williams, you get older, your brain changes, or like you're, and then that voice can now all of a sudden grow, right? And then where you can't control it as much, you have to be very careful with these kinds of things. You're very right about that. So my negativity, I have this, I never think I've done enough is sort of where my negativity comes from inside. I never think that I've met the potential of the moment. I haven't done, I haven't, you know, made the most of the opportunities that are available. Still early, I haven't, you know, progressed as far as I should. And exactly as you're saying, that works for a while, but then what happens as you get later in life and there's less runway to, you know, fix that. And then maybe then that negative voice is a problem. But also at that point, the negative voice starts having more and more of a point. That's when you're being very successful, it's easy to be like, no, okay, well. Like, but later in life, you're really, literally just sitting there on a rocking chair doing nothing and then it's, or maybe any kind of tragedy happens. Loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss or you get screwed over in some kind of way. I don't know. And then all of a sudden, the negative voice is just you and the negative voice for days and days and days. And so I don't know, to go back to your example of Robin Williams, I don't know what was going on inside him. I don't know the nature of his internal state. Was it active psychic pain that finally? May I mention, may I interrupt to just say that Sergei posted an examination of Robin Williams's brain tissue, suggested that he suffered from, quote, diffuse LEWY, Lewy body dementia, LBD. Depression is a symptom of LBD and it's not about psychology, it's rooted in urology. This is words from Sergei. His brain was falling apart. Yeah, Lewy body dementia, this is a very interesting neurological disorder where among other things, there's neuron death indeed. So you've got frank neuron loss. It's not just a matter of some longstanding psychic pain, but you've got a progressive loss. And so clearly you've got a situation where he could have finally reached a point where the balance that he'd worked out between negativity and positivity was disrupted due to loss. The wrong cells died, the wrong projections were cut by the Lewy body dementia. Certainly dopamine neurons die in Lewy body dementia. Those are neurons that give rise to much of the feelings of reward and pleasure that we experience among other roles. So clearly in his case, there could have been a very concrete cellular neurological issue that was progressive and pushed him to that point. But were you about to make a point about broader that if there is not a neurological degeneration? Yeah, so in his case, not knowing that, it could have been simply that let's say he had an internal psychic pain state and he was in sort of a compensated mode for much of his life, able to generate enough joy from his comedy and his social interactions. And then, but eventually later in life, those things drop away, the balance shifts. You get tired of fighting the pain for that long. And then, so you've got this time-dependent non-stationarity that happens. And then the same symptom becomes no longer tolerable in the end. What is autism? What do we know about autism? Human beings exist on a spectrum of how social we can be. And this is pretty interesting actually, scientifically, but also very important clinically. There are hyper-social states where people are almost too social. There are chromosomal deletion states where people have instant affinity and bonding and rich, deep seeming connections with people, very verbal. On the other end, people with autism spectrum disorder are not able to keep up with social interactions. And it's a spectrum. Some have mild to moderate difficulties. They may have inability to understand what the next thing to do in a social situation is, but may have perfectly good language abilities. And as you progress further along the spectrum, that gets more and more severe. So they can't make eye contact because it's too overwhelming to think about what has to be done next if a person looks in a particular way. And then as you go farther, then language and social communication themselves break down. So there's no reciprocity. There's no shared enjoyment. And this gets very hard then as you get to this far end of the spectrum where there's really an absence of social cognition at all and social bonding. So why does this exist? What is it? It's very genetic. As I mentioned, it's one of the top three or four most biological in the sense of most genetically determined of the psychiatric illnesses. It does have these interesting positive correlations, slight positive correlations with intelligence and education. And the reason for that is kind of interesting to think about. Is there something good about it? Just like, or at least with at least part of the spectrum, is there something good about it? Just as we were talking about for depression, as you could say for mania, as you could say for schizophrenia. And here it's kind of interesting to think about the underlying science of what it means to be good at a social interaction. Someone who's very good at a social interaction is incredibly good at dealing with unpredictable information is able to handle this torrent of information coming through rapidly changing model of the other person and of the interaction and their model of you, your model of them. With each word that changes, with each new bit of information that comes in through the conversation, each bit of body language, all this is rapidly changing. And some people are able to keep up with that fire hose information perfectly well. But that's a special brain state to be in. That's working with unpredictability. The only way that can be done is most likely by constantly running models of what the other person might be about to say. So you can't stop and think, oh, what did that word mean? What did that shift in eye contact mean? What do they mean together? There has to be some advanced work going on where you're predicting what's going on if you're to keep up with a rich and fast social interaction. Now, on the flip side, there are brain states that maybe don't have to work so fast but that are extremely important still. Dealing with something that's not moving or that's predictable, still complex, like mathematical proof or a very complex arrangement of geometrical shapes, a large number of individual non-moving things, there's possibly a way of being that's particularly good at dealing with these static, unmoving, or predictable situations, and less so with these rapidly changing social situations. And so the way I conceptualize autism is these are people whose brains are not so good with the high bit rate, unpredictable information, but may be quite good at, given enough time, given the grace to work with the system, to look at it from different angles, to take different perspectives with a confidence that it's not changing in between perspectives. That's a brain state that's valuable. It's something that has probably, has contributed to a lot of the success of the human family, being able to design something, being able to consider all the different contributions to a static, predictable system. So autism, in a sense, is a spectrum that has identifiable characteristics about the way people deal with dynamic information, often express itself as social dynamic information. But you critically, your use of the word often there is really, I think, smart, because it's not just social interaction that is a challenge in autism. And so many people conceptualize it purely as a social dysfunction disorder. But it's really any unpredictable information that's a problem, that's a challenge for people on the spectrum. They react very negatively to unexpected sounds, even if not social sounds, unexpected lights, unexpected touches. And so it's really unpredictable information that is, in my view, the core problem with the processing in autism, not just social. Social just shows up because it's so unpredictable. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I try to not to think about that stuff. I'm afraid of thinking about disorders and things like that, because just like I don't like economics or game theory, I wanna be careful with it, because whenever you have a category or a model, it's too easy to just, for everything, I mean, it's the OCD thing. I like models too much, I like categories too much. The moment you acknowledge to yourself, well, I have an eating disorder, for example, or something like that, as opposed to just being, well, I'll just leave it at that for my own critical understanding of myself. Let's just say I don't know how to moderate eating fruit. People make fun of me, they think all fruit is healthy. I know. I don't know how to moderate anything, but even fruit, apples and cherries, is a nightmare. Anyway, that's such a psychiatrist thing to say. Very interesting. Yeah. But there's characteristics, it's interesting to think about, like for example, I have trouble making eye contact, but actually, as you said it now, it's not that I'm shy at all in that sense. It's literally, I'm getting way too much information, it's distracting me. Like I need to just close my eyes so I can, like all the things that people seem to be able to do in parallel, it's just, you just asked me a question, for me to think about the answer to that question, I can't have all this cool, rich, visual information coming my way. That's literally, because I often close my eyes to think, it's not because I'm afraid of something, whatever, it's just like too much information happening here. Well, that's a beautiful description. It's amazing that that is how you experience the eye contact aspect. I think that's, I mean, you've articulated what, captures it for so many people, which is that it's overwhelming. There's just too much information just coming in through the eyes. And to keep up with it, to know you're gonna be expected to keep up with it, first of all, so there's that aspect. You know, you've learned socially that there's gonna be an expectation. If you're making eye contact, people are gonna think you're keeping up with it, and you don't want to, because you want to focus on other things and make progress in other dimensions. Yeah, and so then there's a strong desire to look away or to close the eyes, because it's overwhelming, it's a distraction, and it's gonna cause errors of understanding. And of course, our eyes, that's part, the way we use our eyes is part of the human communication, so you have to kind of be aware of that element of it. That element of it, so yeah, I mean, but it's fascinating. You should be aware of your own self and those little characteristics, whether it's classified on some aspect of the autism spectrum or just in general, whether it's eating, whether it's depression, whether it's even like schizophrenia, that I hope we get a chance to talk to a little bit. Yeah, but those things are all made up of different symptoms and characteristics, and use them as a superpower, I suppose, is the best we can hope for in mild cases, I guess. I do think both brain states can't coexist at the same time. The way of dealing with something unpredictable and dealing with something predictable, those are different ways of being, here's a huge opportunity for very creative model building in theoretical neuroscience and linking that to these data streams we're getting across the brain that we talked about earlier, these immense data sets of activity across the brain. Here's where I think there could be a real convergence of theoreticians and experimentalists to say, okay, given what we know about wiring of the brain, here is what the brain state is likely to be that deals well with unpredictable information, and here's the brain state that deals with predictable information. Here's why they're incompatible, at least at the same time. Here's why you've gotta be able to detect which state you should be in. Here's how you could switch between them. Here's the kind of cells that you would predict, almost like predicting the Higgs boson. Here's the kind of circuitry that I would predict should govern the switching, or might make one state too sticky, too hard to get out of, right? Yeah, that is a huge opportunity for an interaction from the theoretical and experimental side together. Make one state too sticky. Sort of measure the stickiness of the state and how to lessen the stickiness. Get some oil in the machine. Yes, yeah, we would predict the kind of oil that would work well. What, in your practice, is treatment or advice for people on the autism spectrum? So right now, there's no real medical treatment. There are behavioral treatments that are most effective early in life. They make sure people don't fall too far behind. If you're not interacting socially, you create this vicious cycle where you fall farther and farther behind because you're not interacting, and these therapies, which are applied early in life, therapists work with the kids, train them to deal with these things that otherwise would be aversive to them, teach them how to predict things and interact, and that has a big effect, but it's behavioral therapy. There's no medicine that works. There are ways of reducing individual symptoms, though, that sometimes come along with autism, and those do respond to medications. So you can, you know, one thing, very often, my patients with autism are very anxious because they live in a world that they have a really hard time predicting what's gonna happen, and so they find, and some of these are high-functioning, you know, Silicon Valley types who, you know, they may make great livings, but they're very unhappy because they're on the spectrum. They don't understand how social interactions really work. They're very anxiety-provoking because they don't know what to say, they don't have any clue how anybody else knows what to say. They're constantly worried they're gonna say something that's completely inappropriate, and so they're very anxious, and I can treat their anxiety. It doesn't touch the autism, per se, but I can help them with their anxiety. What I just talked about, eye contact, I am richly, even with the eyes closed and all those kinds of things, I'm richly experiencing the world, and it's not like you're afraid of the world or you're not able, I don't know what to do. No, I know everything. In fact, I know way too much. There's so many cool options. Like, at any one moment, there's all the stuff happening, and it's all beautiful, and at any one moment, you can do anything you want. You can take off your clothes, you can punch that guy over there, you can run away, you can go in for a hug, you can say something profound and deep, or you can say something generic, or you can do so many things you can say, and then it'll unravel in all these kinds of ways, and this moment could be completely life-changing, or it can be mundane and meaningless, and all of those options are before you at any one moment. And so it's like, it's amazing and overwhelming if you allow yourself to think about it, which, whatever, exactly. Well, unfortunately, with chess, you have a few set options. Two-dimensional, at least. Two-dimensional, there's constraints. There is unlimited possibilities, and unlimited beautiful things happening all around you. So I don't think there's a kind of sense that somehow you're limited in the places of, in the way you can see the world and how you can interact with that world. I am overwhelmed by the lack of limit that all of us should be. Have you looked around? You can do whatever the hell you want. Nobody will remember you anyway. All of us will be dead one day. You could do anything. You can, I don't know, you can get naked and run around the city as long as you're not hurting anybody and it doesn't matter. So- In Austin, anyway. Austin, yeah. Exactly. Seems like a to-do item for anybody living in Austin, for sure. But the spectrum is an interesting concept because that is, when I say, when I refer to the spectrum, I'm actually referring to, it's a precise clinical term, but you're right, it's been co-opted more broadly and it is widely used and it can be an unfair categorization of someone who's socially and occupationally very healthy. And that is critical because we don't define a disorder unless there's social or occupational dysfunction. It doesn't matter what the symptoms are. I've had patients who are pleasantly hallucinating. So frankly, psychotic, but doesn't affect their lives. So I don't give that person a diagnosis because there's not social or occupational dysfunction. Same with anything on this, any of the diverse symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. If someone has them, but they're successful socially and occupationally, we don't say that there's a disorder. But then you're right, the concept of the spectrum does become a useful, pigeonholing device, which is maybe not the best thing. Ha ha ha. Yeah, and eye contact is an interesting one. Is an interesting one. I'm torn on it. I'm torn about the usefulness of eye contact because people kind of make fun of it, but let me just say one thing about eye contact and about life in general. It's okay to be weird. Ha ha ha. But some people, when you have your eyes closed and there's that weird, what is happening to this creature? Like you see a weird creature on the side of the road. It's interesting. And you wanna, I mean, the weird stuff, I'm gonna go back to Robin Williams with the, that's the good stuff. Right, he has that whole speech about him and his wife and what he loves, all the little peculiarities, all the weird stuff. And that, like, let those flourish. Let those, like, celebrate those in yourself. And not in some kind of woke way, but in some, like, very human way. This is what makes us, this is the weirdness. Yeah, I am 100% on board with that. And I don't think, you know, people who are happy and who have people in their lives who are happy with them, these are, I think, let the weirdness flourish. Let the, all the different ways members of the human family can be different. Let's see them all. That's one of our, that's one of the joys of being alive, is seeing all the ways we can be human. And I think about it all the time. Why do we have all these ways of being human? And even within one individual, you go through phases of life where you express different sides of your way of being, which is also a pretty fun opportunity, right? You can go through phases where you're in one mode and phases when you're in another mode. And let that, you know, just let that flourish too. Let the ways that you can be you vary as well. I think that's important for people to explore. And I should, like, as if you can address the internet, but I would like to sort of ask the internet to celebrate the weirdness of people. Like, that's, it's the Robin Williams, people call these imperfections, but they're not. That's the good stuff. For any one individual person, find the weird stuff and celebrate it, as opposed to what the internet often does, which is find the weird stuff and criticize it. Because when you criticize the weird stuff, you're creating conformity, which is another human thing. But that conformity creates a boring world. You want the weird. You want the crazy. That's what fun is made of. That's the foundation of humor and all the ways in which we deal with the suffering in the world, with the injustices in the world, is this huge variety of weird. Yeah, I don't know. And that's what, at the depth of psychiatry, is you wanna acknowledge the weird, celebrate the weird, step around it to find the particular aspects of weird that are debilitating, like you said. They're somehow negatively affecting your ability to function in the world, as opposed to trying to shut it all down. That's right. Well, on that topic, I'd love to talk to you about schizophrenia. What is schizophrenia, from your research and from your general understanding, and what is the full landscape of suffering and wisdom that schizophrenia explores? Schizophrenia is a state where there is a break from reality, and so this can show up as we call them the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. These include hallucinations, hearing something or seeing something that's not there, usually auditory hallucinations, paranoia, people can have complex fears, delusions, which we call fixed false beliefs. People get an extremely unshakable but completely implausible idea about something, sometimes it relates to themself, sometimes to the world. These we call the positive symptoms, break from reality as we know it. Then there are the negative symptoms that come with it, and these are progressive, these are flattening of emotion, as we call it, so starting to express less and less positive emotion, ending more in a neutral or flat state. Thought disorder, inability to work with complex patterns of planning or thinking, so you can't make plans, you'd have poor working memory, you can't keep track of where you were in a conversation, in a sequence of actions. So poor and impaired working with the thoughts of oneself and then these positive symptoms of break from reality. Okay, now why do these come together? What's the neurobiology of it? Again, we don't know. Schizophrenia, extremely genetically determined, if you look at the numbers, could be upwards of 80%, genetically determined. 1% of the human population around the world, it's universal, okay, it's not confined to any one culture, not even really biased in one culture or another, about 1% around the world. And has this progressive quality to it, untreated, so it's very interesting, there's a break that happens, we call it first break, when someone experiences their first disruption of reality, they can have a completely typical life up until that point. So you might have a, and I've seen just heartbreaking cases of like this in the Stanford emergency room where a kid who's come there, who's been extremely high functioning in that sense of academic achievement and athletic and interpersonal and then comes to college. Usually in men, it's around 18, 19, when the first break happens. Some terrifying paranoia hits or some auditory hallucinations start, they're getting screamed at by a voice in their head, so devastating. With women, comes on also often a little later, sometimes in the 20s, and it can be progressive. If it's not treated, it just progresses and progresses, the voices become overwhelming, the delusions and paranoia extend and expand, the negative symptoms particularly become more and more severe, so one can't even maintain thoughts in any sort of ordered fashion. And then eventually, it can be fatal, it can lead to suicide, it can lead to erratic behavior that leads to accidents. Now, it can be treated, there are medications that help, fortunately, they have side effects, so they're not perfect, you can have movement problems and actually a whole host of different side effects that come from the medications, but we can help people now with schizophrenia very, very significantly. But the amazing thing, and this is emblematic of where psychiatry stands, we don't have the deep understanding, just like with depression, we don't have that heart as a pump level of understanding that we'd like to have with schizophrenia, despite it being so biological, so genetic in its nature. So is there a way once, a way to return to the other side of the first break? So when you have a break with reality, is there a way to kinda stitch it together? Yeah, so some people, that works, but we don't really know how. So medications, antipsychotic medications, we call them, they block a particular neurotransmitter receptor called the serotonin 2A receptor, and they modulate dopamine as well and other neurotransmitters. These can take someone who's actively hallucinating, actively paranoid, put them back in a completely normal state, and some people stay that way indefinitely. And so you can bring people back from that, back to the other side, have it stitched together. More typically, you'll end up in some intermediate state where symptoms are reduced powerfully, but there might be still something there, and you've got a drop down in functioning that may be persistent for a while. But concepts, what physically is going on? One idea is that it's communication within the brain. One part of the brain is not able to tell other parts of the brain what it's doing. And so the auditory hallucinations are very interesting in this regard. They often have this conversational inner monologue-like quality. As we're walking along the street, we may have an inner monologue, thoughts about what's going on. If we see somebody we don't like, we may have a thought, oh, I wish somebody would punch that guy, something like that, or maybe I should punch that guy. But these are so far below where we would ever act or even think of acting, but they're just things that come up. And in people with schizophrenia, those inner thoughts, that inner monologue, is not recognized as the inner monologue of the self, and so it's perceived as something coming from the outside or from inside, but from another entity, not the self. I thought you meant like another room inside the same building. Another room in the- Inside there, yeah. Yeah. And so that's, so it could be conceptualized as a communication within the brain problem, notifying another part of the brain what's going on. And there's some evidence consistent with that. I don't know if you can help with this, but I sometimes, so I've been talking to quite a few homeless folks recently. Just, that's what I do, is I hang out at night and talk to interesting people. And some of them, and I've known people in the past who suffer from schizophrenia, and some of them, like self, will describe that as something they suffer from. And they seem to understand something deeply about this world. I don't know if it's correlated or maybe it's another aspect of depression, all those things that I've encountered in my own life, is maybe just the struggle and the suffering has taken you through a life where you think deeply about life. Like there's like self-reflection that society forces on you because it's a disorder of some kind. It's interesting. I guess my only sort of anecdotal observation is people who suffer from schizophrenia seem to be very interesting and very thoughtful in a nonlinear way about the world. I've noticed that it's not always positive. The unusual ways they view the world, it was, but it's always interesting. That could be conspiratorial thinking too. But the theories they have about the way the world functions, it's often very well read, which is also interesting, because they're almost like looking for helpful answers from somewhere. And so they might be citing some very interesting literature and then using that to, there's a stickiness in their mind to different models of the world and trying to make sense of that world. And those models could include conspiracy theories. They're very attuned to complexity and they come up with unlikely explanations, which is one of the things that makes them, it makes it hard for them to function in the world is how unlikely their explanations are. But you're right, there's a depth of consideration of the complexity of the world and a concern about it and an impulse to work to understand it that is actually quite refreshing. But the first case in the medical literature, there was a classical schizophrenia. There was a patient named James Tilly Matthews who had this, he sketched out for his doctor the experiences he was sensing. And he drew himself as a cowering figure on the ground, controlled by a loom, a weaving device that was sending threads, long threads, projections across space from the loom to him, to his arms and to his body and controlling him from afar. And he called this the air loom, a loom in the air. And it was such an evocative thing because, this was the start of the industrial revolution or mid and it was where really industrial strength, looms and weaving devices were really kind of the emblematic of the most complex, powerful technological achievements of the time. And so that was the explanation available to him to explain how his body was seemingly moved without his volition. And these days, of course, people with schizophrenia will have more technology appropriate interpretations. They'll have delusions of satellite or alien control or beamed information, very, very common to have this delusion of a government agency, sending electromagnetic or radio frequency information to control their limbs. But it's the same thing, whether it's a thread from an industrial revolution loom or RF radiation, it's the same thing, just adapted to the moment, explaining, trying to explain the world they live in and their relationship to the world. But unconstrained by sort of the thing that's socially acceptable, which is both refreshing and dangerous. Yes. I wrote down a question, why do we cry? Are tears a window to some depths that we ourselves don't know? I almost wanna make fun of myself for that question, but you do talk seriously about crying in the book. In fact, the whole first chapter really, really tussles with crying as a, why do we do it? What does it mean? Why is it involuntary? It seems like a weakness, right? It's because it's so involuntary and it's reflecting something true and inside. At the level of the individual, that seems like a problem, right? Wouldn't it be better if we could control it? If we could not show that emotion when it's not useful, show it when it's useful, but it's not. It's largely involuntary. And so there's a value to it, I think, as an honest reporter of a need, of hope and frailty at the same time. I am a human being. There's a frailty to myself or my situation where I need social help. I need help from my community. I have hope that that is possible, but I'm not enough for myself. I need the community. That, I think, is what the social signal of crying is. Now, people have studied crying. It's an extreme, you can quantify the extent to which the presence of tears on a face triggers reactions in onlookers. And you can show the same face in the presence or absence of tears and show that to people under quantifiable and rigorous psychological conditions. And tears are much more powerful at stirring the desire to help in viewers than any other facial feature, which is pretty interesting that it's the honest one that's also the most powerful, right? It kind of indicates there's a certain logic to our design as social beings that we have an honest report. That's hard to control. But is it well understood how that connects to the internal state of emotion? Yeah, there are long range projections that come. So where is crying generated? This is the confusing thing about it. So that we have a little tear duct, the lacrimal gland that leads to the release of fluid. It ejects fluid and it comes out and those, of course, that whole system was designed to keep the eye clean, to wash out particulate irritants. So it's a long standing, as long as we've had eyes and have been out of the water in our evolution, we've needed this sort of thing. So longstanding biological structure, recently co-opted, it seems by our evolution as social primates. Now, how could that happen? Well, the lacrimal gland is controlled by structures in the pons, which is a structure deep in our, just above our neck, between our neck and our head. And reflecting its ancient origin, right? As you go farther down toward the spinal cord, these are the more basic early evolved structures. And in the pons, that's where breathing is controlled, tear, duct contraction. And what we found, and with optogenetics, we helped sort this out. There are long range projections from fear and anxiety regions in the forebrain that project all the way to the pons in and around those areas. The reason those are there, we think, is to regulate the respiratory rate changes, the breathing changes of fear and anxiety. So we know when we're in a state of fear and anxiety, we need, we cope better if we have elevated heart rate, elevated respiratory rate, more blood pumping around, more oxygenated blood, we're ready to meet the threat if it happens. All those cells are down there in the pons too, right next to the lacrimal duct, the tear gland neurons. And so almost certainly, this fear, anxiety induced crying arose from a very slightly misdirected long range projection that was there to regulate breathing. And a little twist, just a little misdirection, a little missing of one sign post to stop here, going on a little farther, getting to the lacrimal gland neurons gave us crying. And that's, and we just have it, that peculiar sort of structure, neuronal structure that resulted in that, that's what we're stuck with. And that ends up being, in terms of social interaction, one of the more important authentic involuntary displays of inner state. That's right. And social communication. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Is there other stuff like that? I mean, do you, yeah, I mean, the human face is fascinating as a display of emotion, as a display of truth and lying and all those kinds of things. I personally, I mean, we're all, I suppose, have different sensors that are sensitive to certain aspects of the human face, but to me it seems like the eyes are really important communication or something. You know, I've talked to a few sort of girls about like Botox and stuff like that. And it always bothers me when, I guess guys can do this too, but like when women speak negatively of, I guess you can call them wrinkles at the tips of an eye. But like to me, when you smile, when you, not wink, but like narrow the eyes, something is communicated and that stuff is really useful, the human face. And when it's gone, something is missing. And a lot of little stuff, it feels like can really, it's almost involuntary, I guess, but it's harder to describe as the presence or absence of tears. It's like something about this person, you can tell they're not bullshitting you. Yeah, yeah. And so that was what made, presumably, that tear recruitment so powerful is it just landed in this very high value real estate for social communication. If it had gone to, you know, there's a lot of neurons in the pons that control movement of large muscles, you know, elsewhere, that would have been much less effective as a social signal than something around the eye. So it was, however, that little misdirection happened, it landed in a great area for social communication. And because it was coming from the fear and anxiety circuits that regulate that necessary involuntary change in heart rate and respiratory rate, it also was involuntary and that became valuable as a truth signal as social beings. So very interesting when you think about the origins of the human family, the origins of social structures and our ability and need to call for help when there's hope, but need at the same time. What is consciousness? So you're actually using techniques, I mean, even putting psychiatry aside, just looking at optogenetics, you're trying to understand some of these deep aspects of the human mind. And maybe this is a good time to return to a question you mentioned you might have an opinion on, if there's such a thing as a theory of everything for the human mind. Because surely answering of what is consciousness is as, well, that's not sure, but it seems like it's a fundamental part of the human experience in the human mind and solving that question will result in solving the bigger thing about the human mind. The flip side could be consciousness is just the few neurons that are generating some useful thing that make us, it's like the sense of self that you talked about in the mice, maybe it's a subset of those cells that are just creating a richer sense of self and that's it. So this is a great question. All neuroscientists think about this and a lot of non-neuroscientists too. It's the reason a lot of people came to the study of the brain is to think about consciousness and not just being awake or alert, but really what's sometimes called the hard problem of consciousness, which is what is that nature of that inner subjective sense we have, not just information processing, but feeling something about the information. What is that inner state of subjectivity physically? What is it? And that's called the hard problem of consciousness. And it's not a extremely well-defined question. Everybody has sort of a sense of what it means, but it's such a hard problem because you run into paradoxes quite quickly the more you think about it. And that is exciting also because it makes us think, actually, there's some fundamental, there's a big thing that we're missing. The brain is not just a collection of little tricks. There is a big, big concept. So that's your sense of the big, because a flip side could be with optogenetics. There's an engineering question. Can you turn consciousness on and off like a light switch? Okay, so here's where exactly consciousness frames the problem extremely well. And it frames it the following way. So I told you earlier that we can stimulate 20 or 25 cells in the visual cortex of a mouse, and we can make it behave, and we can make its brain act as if it's seeing something that isn't there. We have that level of control now. We can pick out 25 neurons, play an activity in both behavior and in the brain. It's as if it's seeing something specific. Okay, now let's do a thought experiment, you know, a Gedanken experiment, and let's play this out. Let's say we could do the same thing for every single neuron in the brain of a human being. Let's say we had total control, and I could do something like, I could show you a rich, deep color red, and you could look at it, and you would be aware that it's red, but also you might have some feelings about it. Something would be stirred in you, some subjective sense as you looked at that rich color red. And then I would take away the visual stimulus, and I would, in this thought experiment, I would, using some hyperoptogenetics, I would play in exactly the same pattern of activity in every cell in your brain for as long as it was needed, whatever, 15 seconds, something like that, that exactly matched what was going on when you were feeling that inner subjective sense. Okay, so in that thought experiment, a question for you is, would you be feeling that same inner subjective sense? Stimulus is gone, every neuron's doing the same thing because I'm controlling it. There's a philosophical question there. If you ask me specifically, I would say yes. Okay, good. Most people would say that because it's hard to say no, right? It's very hard to say no. If every cell in your brain is doing what it was doing, what else could be different? How could? Well, most normal people would say yes. Of course, philosophers would then start saying no. They're the ones that say, I'm gonna sort of, to parallel, and sorry if it's a bit of an interruption, but if there's a robot that's conscious in front of you, if it appears conscious, then it's conscious. Like, to me, of course, philosophers, again, speak up and say, well, no, how do you know it's conscious? Well, how do you know anything is conscious? And sort of, as normal humans, we tend to lean on the experience versus some kind of philosophical concept. So, the great thing about what you just said, the Turing test, is it's very practical. If it acts conscious, it is conscious. But I think that's limiting. I like the thought experiment. I think it's actually more informative. And so, I'm halfway to the conclusion there. But let's take it as, your answer was yes, that you would be feeling the same thing. Okay, now here's where it gets fun. Now that every cell in your brain knows what it has to do, in the sense that we know it and we're providing it, your brain cells don't need to be in your head anymore at all, right? The only reason they're next to each other, the only reason they're wired together, is to affect each other, to stimulate or inhibit each other. But we don't need that anymore, because optogenetically, we're providing that activity pattern for as long as needed. We're providing the effect of the communication. They don't need to be connected anymore. They don't even need to be in your head. I could spread your neurons all over the continent, all over the galaxy, and I could still provide the same stimulus pattern over 10 or 15 seconds to all those neurons, and somewhere, Lex Friedman would have to be, even though no longer existing as a physical object anymore, would be feeling that subjective feeling. And it's inescapable, because it's exactly the same as the previous situation. All the neurons have to be spatially, like the locality constraint, they have to be spatially close to each other. And you talk about light, Opto, which is funny because light is the fastest traveling thing that we know of. Maybe let's not put them all over the universe, because we might get relativistic problems then. Let's just keep them, let's keep all your neurons, let's spread them over North America, okay? And let's play them out, same pattern of activity. And it seems absurd, right? There's no way that could be true. There's no way that Lex would be feeling that internal sense if his neurons were spread all over North America. And yet, it's exactly the same as the previous situation, where you said, sure. So we've got a paradox, and this is what makes people think. Maybe paradox, though, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Maybe paradox is the wrong word. We've got a problem. We've got a problem, because it reveals that there's something big about that internal subjective state that we're not explaining. And we don't really have a hope of explaining in the near future. But don't you think we would still have that? It's just the word internal loses meaning, but don't you think we still have that internal subjective state? If not, then where the heck is the magic coming from? Okay, well, I just think, I think one of the problems that I think we need to let go of is we tend to, outside of the experience of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, we tend to think that we individual humans are really special. Not the subjective experience, but the entirety of it, like the body that contains the thing. So the local, the constraint of all the stuff has to be together, and it's all mine. That's a very, I don't know if that has anything to do with the mechanisms that are creating this. So, and in fact, one really nice way to break through that is to either observe or create consciousness that spans multiple organisms. Sort of, like, let's say it's not, it's not an organism-dependent phenomena, that the phenomena can, that's just a peculiar way it has evolved on Earth, but it's a phenomena that doesn't have anything to do with a specific biological system. All right, so, and we have different parts of our brain exist and sometimes create complex awarenesses of things that involve different neurons that are distributed widely and that need to communicate with each other to form this joint representation, this state of consciousness. But indeed, why do they have to be in the same head? We don't know why that would be the case that they do. And so that's a huge unanswered question in the field is what is it that binds the activity of neurons together so they can form a joint representation? And actually, this comes back to the dissociation experiment we talked about before, where you can, your sense of self becomes separated from your body. Those things that were fused in a joint representation, the same concept, unitary, are now separate. And in late 2020, we published a paper in Nature showing how this could be. We used optogenetics to drive this rhythm that ketamine and PCP cause in retrosplenial cortex, and we got different parts of the brain to be out of sync and when they were active, never able to be active at the same time, never able to form a joint representation at the same time. And so we've got a toehold into these questions. We don't have the answers, but. And that mimics the dynamics of ketamine effects. Exactly, exactly. And you're able to find that kind of oscillation, the wow, wow, wow. So if you get even greater and greater control with more control of individual neurons and understanding, like if you think of certain neurons that having some role to play in the sense of self, you can play like an orchestra, that to create certain degrees of consciousness, degrees of subjectivity, and thereby understand what is consciousness by having a very complicated light switch, essentially. And here's the challenge, is the nice thing about the thought experiment is it kind of highlights that we're gonna hit a point where we're addressing some very, very fundamental questions. What allows the activity of two sets of neurons to become mutually relevant to each other? This is in some ways, maybe one of the deepest remaining questions in neuroscience is what allows activity patterns to become relevant to each other. Do they have to be in sync temporally? Do they need to be, is there some other quality that we don't know about that also needs to be present to allow cells to fuse together into a joint representation? Just so I understand, because it feels close to some very, very deep idea. So there's a bunch of semi-distributed signals going on in the brain. And you're saying there could be something like a theory of everything, if one to exist, is to understand why, how and why signals close to each other start becoming relevant to each other. That's right, that's right. As part of some very much bigger signal that they're producing. How they coordinate, essentially. Because it's very distributed. I mean, that's a kind of, within a distributed system, how is order achieved? And this is a very specific kind of distributed system that is one of the most intelligent that we're aware of in the known universe. And that will maybe be something, also an understanding of the full conscious experience, too. That this kind of coordination. How does the coordination between different neurons that are responsible for sense of self, how do they begin to form a big picture that we see as a human experience? That's really, really interesting. So uniting the small, and I mean, that's actually literally theory of everything. Uniting the small, the sort of the theory of the neuron. The function of the neuron with the big. Just the functioning of the entire mind. That's right. And I think keeping a toehold in both at the cellular level of resolution and the brain-wide resolution will be critical. If you lose touch with either, I think you'll miss the big insight. So that's what we're trying to do. Keeping grounded in the cellular resolution, trying to keep the broadest brain-wide perspective and meet in the middle. Do you think you'll see it in your lifetime? A major breakthrough in that dimension. I have hope, I have hope. It's very hard to predict what will happen with big things like this. If we don't get there, there'll be plenty of other exciting stuff, so it's okay. But the other aspect of this whole thing is that your life is pretty short. That's true. First of all, you can die any day. I tend to try to think about that, that it ends, it can end at any moment because it really, really can. And if not, it'll be soon anyway. Do you think about that? Do you think about your mortality? I do, yeah. It comes back to what we talked about earlier. I never think I've done enough, and it's relevant to that, for sure. There's a deadline. Do you think there's ever going to be a feeling where you sit back and you're really proud of yourself? I hope so. Like, I've done enough, I've done everything there is. Because the thing is, a warrior has some number of battles in them. And at a certain point, if you're deeply honest, it's like, well, that was a pretty good run. As far as runs goes, that was pretty good. And you can hang up your helmet and then go sort of drink some ale, listen to some music with the old lady, and say, I did pretty good. You think you'll get there? You know, with something, with nature always has surprises for us. We're always, the curious mind is always after more. But, yeah. True. But biology gives us other rewards, you know. Children and family, community. And one can feel good about those things. Biology is full of rewards. But do you think, about those rewards, what do you think is the why of those rewards? What's the meaning of life in this existence? What's the why of biology? What does it want from us? Why are all these cells very busy putting together an organism that seems to want to, just be in a hurry to do stuff and survive. But it also just doesn't, it's not happy being survived. Like you said, it's curious. It keeps wanting to get into more trouble. Why? Yeah, that, you know, we're clearly designed for that, right? This is, we're clearly designed to ask why and to answer. And that, I think, is, I don't know the meaning of all life. I think a meaning of our lives is that, and this is the Aristotelian happiness. This is, an organism is happy, an animal's happy if it's performing to its design, right? If it's doing what it was made for. Yeah. Well, you have to understand, what's the design? And, you know, who is the designer and what were they up to? And how hard is it? Do you have to build the whole universe? And does the design even know what the hell they're doing? Because, you know, maybe the designer built humans to find out about themselves. That's what I would do. Like, if I had the power to build clones, I would build a lot of clones and I would get them into different trouble to understand, like, what am I designed, what's this body designed to do? How far can I go that way? Exactly. And then I dissociate myself completely from having any way to know, like, that I know that person. That's good. I mean, I suppose you could do that in a single person's body by dissociation. You could, yeah. But I do wonder what, if you look at Earth as a collection of humans, as a collection of biological organisms, it seems that we're busy doing something. And it just seems too beautiful and too special to be a random experiment. It seems like it's an experiment that's cleverly designed by some forces of nature that are beyond our current understanding. And maybe that's part of our design, is to keep asking why. You said answer. I'm not sure that's part of the design, the answer. I think we're given just the sufficiently limited cognitive capability that we know how to long to find the answer, and we lack the ability to find the answer. That's basically a summary of your career. No, I'm just kidding. And then we give each other Nobel Prizes for having even an inkling of a good step towards the right direction. Carl, you're an incredible human being. I'm a huge fan of who you are as a person, who you are as a scientist, who you are as a writer. I just thank you so much. I'm so honored that you would sit down and talk to me today. It was amazing. It's been incredibly fun. Let's do it again sometime. Let's do it again. It's been really great. Your insights and wit and modesty are really quite rewarding. Thanks so much, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Carl Deisseroth. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung. Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/OaeYUm06in0

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Jack Barsky: KGB Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #301

something happened where they forced my hand. And this is the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens and there's this man in a black trench coat comes up to me from my right and he whispers into my ears, you gotta come back or else you're dead. The following is a conversation with Jack Barsky, a former KGB spy, author of Deep Undercover and the subject of an excellent podcast series called The Agent. There are very few people who have defected from the KGB and live to tell the story. It is one of the most powerful intelligence organizations in history. And this conversation gives a window into its operation, both from an ideological and psychological perspectives, but also it tells the story of a man who lived one heck of an incredible life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Jack Barsky. Let's start with a big basic question. What is the KGB? Komitet Gosudarstvennyy Bezopasnosti. Right, so that is the Committee of State Security. Yeah, Bezopasnosti, this is a, opasnost is a threat, right? Threat. Okay, and bs means? Without. Right. And I guess that directly translates to security, without threat. So, and don't exist anymore. It was disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart and the successor agencies are now the SVR and the FSB. FSB supposedly the equivalent to the FBI and SVR, the CIA, but the SVR is relatively weak, and the FSB has taken on a lot of espionage and active measures, and they're much bigger and stronger. But the most capable intelligence agency in Russia is the GRU, military intelligence. That nobody knows very much about. That's right. When I was in the KGB, I had no idea that there was military intelligence. Nobody ever mentioned anything like that. And by the way, I recently had the pleasure to give a talk at the DIA. When they reached out to me, I didn't know they existed either. Interesting. Yeah, that's always the question. If you want to be an intelligence agency, should the world know anything about you? Because in some sense, you want to create the legend in order to attract great, competent individuals to work for you, but at the same time, you want it to be shrouded in complete mystery. If nobody knows you exist, you might be able to operate well as an intelligence agency. That is fascinating, but FSB is the thing that carries the flag of KGB, KGB being probably one of, if not the most, infamous, famous, infamous, and powerful intelligence agencies ever. In history, yes. Absolutely, 100%. It was founded in 1954 after the death of Stalin. You've, in writing your book, looked back at the predecessors of the history. Is there some way in which the KGB is grounded in the culture, the spirit, the soul of its predecessors? Oh, absolutely. They just changed names, and they changed personnel rather frequently, and that had something to do with Stalin's paranoia. From between 1923, and I don't remember what, I think it may have been the NKVD at that time. It started as a Cheka, and then it became the GPU, the NKVD, yes. It's three or four letter words. But with those name changes, you also had changes at the top. Between 1923 and 1953, when Stalin died, that is 30 years, they had eight heads of intelligence, and of those eight, six were executed when they were replaced. So that's an indication that this was an organization that ate itself from the inside. The Soviet Union was the only dictatorship in history that did not rest its powers on the military. They rested its powers on the intelligence apparatus, and that thing was unstable. So you know where that leads. Eventually, if you rest your power on something that is made out of bricks that don't hold a lot of load, it will fall apart. On sand, why was it unstable, would you say? What of human nature? Oh, it's the paranoia. Stalin was always worried about the most powerful people coming after him. So he proactively killed off heads of the KGB, and he had this great purge where he got rid of a lot of his generals, really capable generals. And that cost him dearly when World War II started, because he started off with a force that wasn't as capable as it could have been. Was it paranoia at all levels? I believe so. I believe so. It comes from the top. And so if the top doesn't trust you, you always have to worry about your peers snitching on you. Yeah. Okay, and I think we have a very similar situation in Russia today, and in this kind of atmosphere, the truth will never get to the top. So no matter what moral rules the organization operates under, trust is fundamental to its competence. Oh, absolutely, and I wanna extend this to my own existence. And this is kind of strange. It's almost dichotomous, because I was running around lying to everybody, and I couldn't fundamentally be trusted, but the relationship that I had with the KGB was based on trust. If they don't trust me, they don't send me out. And if I don't trust them, I'm not going. And I eventually broke that trust, and they knew there was always that danger. They knew that because something about you, or just something about human beings. No, there were hints about how long my assignment would be, so 10 to 12 years. And you see, it makes sense. I was becoming an American, and over time, I would become more and more American, and there was always a chance that I liked it more here than there, that I was really successful in what I was supposed to do. And it sort of happened, but in my case, it happened because I fathered a child who I didn't want to leave when they wanted me back. Love always screws up your employment competence, yes. You're absolutely right. But they thought that I had an anchor at home because I had a wife and a son at home, which you've got to worry about them if you defect, because in the past, the KGB would go after family ruthlessly. Including perhaps violence. Yeah. This is a hard question about the KGB because it's one of the most ruthless organizations, but in general, are there lines, KGB agents, at every level of the hierarchy, that they would not cross? Political, legal, ethical, or does anything goes to achieve the goal? I was only in touch with two types of agents, as were the technical experts, the ones that taught me tradecraft, and they were like engineers, and they were in charge of the secret writing, and the Morse code, shortwave radio reception, decryption, encryption, and that kind of stuff. Those were just doing their job, all right? And the others, the ones that trained me, that prepared me for life in the United States, they were nice people. They were elegant people. I don't think, they would not fit into the stereotype of the ruthless, gun-carrying agent. Is it possible that you would not be aware of the parts of the KGB? I mean, it's very modular. Would you? Yeah. It's possible that you're not aware of the parts of the KGB that are the quote-unquote muscle? Oh, I didn't know. I would find out afterwards, after I retired and started doing some research. I had no clue. You're kind of operating in a bubble. Oh, very much so. I mean, this is what the KGB did really, really well, compartmentalization, and that was based on the communist movement while it was still underground. The cells were very small, so that maybe there were three, four members in one cell that knew one another, and then they had a liaison to another cell. So the bottom line is if you got, one of those folks were caught, they could maybe betray four people or three, something like that, and the KGB continued with that tradition. I have reason to believe that my handler, the person in Moscow that sort of directed me and made decisions what to do and where to go, never met me personally. There's no reason to. And this actually was a big advantage over other intelligence services because you look at what the CIA does, everybody blabs. There's a lot of leaks coming out of American intelligence. I don't think there's as many leaks coming out of the Mossad. Strong words from Jack Barsky, by the way. So that is a question I wanna ask a little more systematically. Is there something unique about the KGB compared to the other intelligence agencies? Let's talk British intelligence, MI6, Mossad, CIA. Is there unique cultures, spirits, souls of the different organizations that maybe somehow connect to the structures of government, connect maybe the values of the people, those kinds of things? I believe we were all pretty much strong believers in communism and the future of the world being. In KGB? Yes, I think that unified us to a large degree, even the technicians. So even, it wasn't something like, yeah, yeah, the parents believe this thing, but we know the truth. You really believe the story of communism. Absolutely did, and you need to look at the time frame. The Soviet Union, after World War II, made quite a bit of progress in influencing the Third World. I still remember when I was in middle school, we had a map, the map of the world, and it was color-coded. So red was communism, that was the Soviet Union and the Eastern states, and then blue was capitalism. And then we had green, which were the Third World countries, and the green slowly turned pink because a lot of Third World governments, like I'm looking at Angola, I'm looking at Vietnam, a lot of these countries were very sympathetic to the Soviet Union. And so we sort of knew that this would go on like that, and eventually we would take over, and pretty much overtake, that was the myth, overtake the United States, not only militarily, but also in terms of industrial production and so forth. That was a stupid pipe dream. The military, it was a standoff, as we know. Well, stupid pipe dream. Hitler had a stupid pipe dream that he executed exceptionally effectively on, if not for a handful of military mistakes the world could look very different today. Well, the biggest one being invading the Soviet Union, particularly at the time that he did it, because he ran into the same thing that Napoleon ran into, General Winter. Well, within, so Operation Barbarossa, within that he could have made different decisions. For example, attacking, skipping Kiev and attacking Moscow directly, overthrowing the government. So marching, I guess that would be learning lessons from Napoleon as opposed to a different kind of distribution of forces, and then getting bogged down in the winter. But the point is, these ambitions sometimes do, you know, the ambitions of empire sometimes do materialize in the growth and the building and the establishment to those empires, and those empires write the history books in such a way that we don't think of them as empires, or we certainly don't think of them as the bad guys. They write the history books, therefore they're the good guys. And right now, America has effectively written the book about the good guys. I happen to believe that book, but we should be humbled and open-minded to realize that that is in fact what is happening, is effective empires write the history books and tell us stories and tell us propaganda and tell us narratives that we believe because we are human beings and we love to get together and believe ideas. We love to dream of a beautiful world and try to build that beautiful world together. In the United States, that's a beautiful world, the freedom of respect of human rights, of all men are created equal, pursuit of happiness. You know, it always sounds good. If you look at what the dream of communism is, it sure as heck, in its words, on the surface, sounds good. Respect for the workers, the working class, the lower classes that have been trodden on, that have been stolen from by the powerful. They deserve to have the money, the power, the respect that they have earned through their hard work, sounds great. And everybody gets along and we just have to, you know, all men are wonderful people and if they go bad, it has something to do with the fact that they have been oppressed, right? And that dream just never worked out. And even it is, when you think about it, and I didn't think about it. When you're young, you know, you just, emotionally, you accept it. But when you think about it, somehow, that new, wonderful organization has to organize itself. Even though Lenin predicted that the state eventually would go away, well, how does that work? Then you have like anarchy, right? You have to have an organization. And the only way to really organize a large number of people is with a hierarchy. So, and who gets to the top? The ones that want to go to the top, the ones that believe in themselves, the ones that know better than everybody else. And once you have that hierarchy established, there is no guarantee that it won't go bad. And actually, when you look at history, every such hierarchy has gone bad. You know, you look at Cuba, for instance. I believe Fidel Castro was an honest revolutionary. I do believe that. And so what did Cuba turn into? Yeah, there's something about, and you speak about Vladimir Putin in this way, but let's step away from that for a second. Is there something about being an honest revolutionary that wants to do good for their country, and you start to believe that you know better than everyone else how to do good on the contrary. And you very well might at first, but then somehow that grows into a distortion field where you keep believing you know what's right, and all the people who disagree with you, you stop seeing them as having a point. You instead see them as like evil manipulators of the truth that are actually trying to hurt people for their own greed, for their own power, and you will protect the people because you know what's good. In the case of Stalin, I mean, I don't know, but it seems like he really believed that communism would bring about a much better world. I mean, there was a sense, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet. Right. This idea that sacrifice is necessary to bring about a greater world. And then the other aspect is sort of ruling by terror, creating terror as a justified political mechanism to achieve a better world. So it wasn't, I mean, perhaps he had to do that to be able to sleep at night with the atrocities he's committing. I think he believed he will bring about a better world. And by the way, the terror didn't start with Stalin. It started right after the Bolsheviks took over when Lenin told Mr. Jezinski, Comrade Jezinski to build the Chekhov and then execute the, this is what he called it, the Red Terror. So at the birth of the Soviet Union, there was already terror and it was deliberate. And it also was, it wasn't just focused on the enemies. It was focused on whoever you didn't like. There was no rule of law. There was no court cases. People were just pulled out of their apartments and shot on sight. And this was done by revolutionaries who were convinced that eventually, these sacrifices had to be made and eventually that would lead to a much better planet. And the populace believed this too, that those sacrifices, in part. I mean, this is such a dark thing about dictatorships is you believe it, but you're also too afraid to question your beliefs. Like, you're not directly afraid, but almost like a, I don't know what that is. It's almost like a subconscious fear. Like, don't, there's a dark room with a locked door. Don't look in that door. Don't check that door. And there's something about the United States that says, especially modern culture, is like, go to that door first. And sort of question everything, kind of, that's the power of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, but you can get, almost become too critical and too cynical of your own culture in that way. So there's a balance to strike, of course, but man, if communism is not a lesson of human nature, I don't know what is, but you believed, without thinking too much about it, you believed in the story of communism. What did you see, just, you know, I came from the Soviet Union. What did you maybe feel that's right and good about communism, about the vision of communism? Could you remember, like? I think the biggest impetus in me believing in communism was that the communists, when just before Hitler took over, the communists were the only force in Germany that fought the Nazis in the streets. And that's a historic truth. Yes. And communists were hunted down by the Nazis, killed, put in concentration camps. And so what we knew, when what we were taught, and I think that was a huge unforced error by the Western countries, particularly the United States, that there were ex-Nazis in the government in West Germany. Yeah. And the most famous one was Reinhard Galen, who was in charge, was the general in charge of the intelligence on the Eastern front under Hitler. And when the Allied won the war, it was decided that Galen was too important, with his knowledge of the, his and his organization was too important to not use. So he was co-opted by the CIA and eventually wound up being the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the CIA of West Germany. That gave us, us, when I say us, you know, the East German party, a huge propaganda victory. I wanted to, because his, the emotional aspect of this was as follows. When we were in, juniors in high school, and in those days, when you, you were only allowed to go to high school if you were in the top 10% of students, okay? So this was going to be the next set of ruling elite in the country. We were sent, we were required to visit a concentration camp. And if you know what we, as 17 year olds, were made to look at, it was gut-wrenching. How can men do something like that to men? Piles of corpses, lampshades made out of human skin because that skin had tattoos on them and a shrunken head, so heads like the size of my fist. I mean, the girls all cried. And it made a huge impression. And that was the Nazis. And the communists defeated the Nazis. The communists were the Nazi fighters. They were the good guys. Of course, you know, in hindsight, if the communists had come to power, it would have been just the other way around, as we know, given the example of Stalin and Mao, right? So, but we didn't know that, right? From the Russian, Soviet perspective, the communist regime banded together to win the great patriotic war. And that was the second one, you know, the big brother, the Soviet Union. I mean, when I was approached by the KGB, that was like, oh, I felt so honored. So we should say that we're talking about East Germany, that you're from East Germany. Can you describe, you were born four years in, what is it? Yeah, four years. 10 days? Yeah, very good. After Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II. So what is East Germany? What is West Germany? What is East and West Germany? What is that? What's the difference? What's the historical context here? What is World War II again? And then, let's do. We don't have to go to World War I, which the result of which actually ceded World War II in some respect. Yes, there's a long history, yes. But let's start with World War II. So when Hitler came to power, he and his leadership decided that the Germans needed more what they call Lebensraum. That means room to live. And they would start expanding. They went into France. They took Belgium, the Netherlands. They annexed Austria and got a piece of Czechoslovakia. And then they decided to march into the Soviet Union after they took Poland. Cut up Poland together with the Soviet Union. Yes. They were friends. Yes. There was a non-aggression pact that was signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov, right? I think both parties knew that eventually they would fall apart, but at the time, it gave the Soviet Union a little more, a piece of Poland, and a little more time to prepare what they thought might happen down the road. And the Germans had the time and the ability to pretty much conquer all of Western Europe. Do you think Stalin really knew that it's gonna fall apart? Why would somebody like Stalin trust somebody like Hitler? But why did he blunder so bad not to read the intelligence that was coming his way? Oh, he doesn't. The troops are amassing on the border of the Soviet Union. He didn't trust his own intelligence apparatus. Here's one example. There was a German communist who went underground when Hitler took over, and he went to Japan as a journalist. His name is Richard Sorge. Richard Sorge had really, really good intel about what the Japanese would do and not do. I forgot exactly what it was, but it came to Moscow and Stalin totally ignored it. And when Sorge was captured by the Japanese, the Soviet Union denied that he was one of theirs, so he was executed. The paranoia, again, does a lot of damage. When you don't believe your own intelligence apparatus, why bother having one? Yeah, I mean, but I'm sure there's contradictory information coming in from the intelligence apparatus, so it's difficult. I mean, first of all, nobody likes to be disagreed with, especially when you become more and more powerful. And the intelligence apparatus is probably giving you information you don't like. It's often negative information about, basically, information that says that the decisions you made in the past are not great decisions, and that's a difficult truth to deal with. So in the modern times, if we hop around briefly, is Vladimir Putin has been not happy with the intelligence of the FSB, thereby, at least if you read the news, choosing to put more priority to the GRU for the intelligence in Ukraine. But I guess I suppose the same story happens there, as it does throughout history, is paranoia. I give you an example that comes from a very reliable source, and that my best German friend worked as a chemist in the Stasi, East German intelligence. And he eventually, he rose to the rank of major and was in charge of the forgery department. It's very likely that he made passports that I used to travel. He was aware that there was intelligence that was collected. The Stasi was really good. They had about 1,000 people in West Germany, undercover agents, some of them in government. And the central committee of the party, the decision makers, ignored it because it didn't quite fit in their worldview, it didn't quite fit into their plans. And one delicious thing that I just wanna add on to this, when Gorbachev wrote his book about Perestroika and Glasnost, the East German rulers did not like it, they were much more orthodox. So they had to print the books in translation. Guess where they wound up? They were piled up in the hallways of the Stasi. They bought the entire print run. It's fascinating. But let's backtrack, so Operation Barbarossa, invasion of Hitler to the Soviet Union, and then hopefully that leads us all the way to East Germany, West Germany after the end of the war. So what happened was the Soviet Union rolled into the eastern part of Germany and the Western allies took a larger chunk, which was eventually, it was occupied by the three allies, the French, the English, and the Americans. And the eastern part was occupied by Soviet troops. And the Soviet troops actually conquered Berlin. But in a contract, they decided that Berlin would be ruled by the four allies and they all had free access to that city. I was born in the East German part, which very quickly became ruled by communists, slash socialists, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party united, but the leaders of that new party were all communists. It's nevertheless called democratic. Yes, German Democratic Republic, which was formed a couple of months after I was born. I was born into a remote southeastern corner of East Germany. And interestingly enough, genetically, I'm only half German. What's the other half? The other half is Czech and Polish. Nice. Because where I grew up, I could walk to the Neisse River, which was the border with Poland, and it was only about an hour by bus to get to the Czech border. So that's why I'm a mix. So, okay, so East Germany after the war was communist, socialist, and then the West Germany was representing the Western world with democracy. And what the United States did, this was really, really very forward-looking, very strategic, the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy in the West, as compared to what the Soviet Union did. Whatever they hadn't destroyed on the way in, they took with them on the way out for reparations because they had every right to do that. But it was not a good idea because East Germany was always behind in economic development to their Western counterpart. So when you were young, as today, but when you were young, you were clearly an exceptional student. You're a brilliant academic superstar. Let's go to your childhood. What's a fond memory from childhood that you have in being woken up to the beauty of this world and sort of being curious about all the mysteries around you that I think ultimately lead to academic success? Or was it? The fondest memory that comes to mind is my first kiss. How's that? Do you wanna go to the details of that? What'd you make of that kiss? What'd that teach you about yourself and human nature and all that? It taught me only in hindsight. At the time, I was just like, my God, I was head over heels in love. I was 16 years old. And I knew in those days, I admired girls. I knew that girls were like sort of magical beings. They were not capable of doing evil things. They were beautiful and they had to be adored. And one of them actually loved me too. She came after me initially. And that too was magical for you. Oh my God, yeah. And I literally, I dedicated, that's when I started studying. Up until that point, I just did whatever I had to do to be in A-minus students. And that's when I started studying. And every A that I got, I dedicated to her sometimes explicitly because I knew I was gonna take care of her as I grew up. So you're gonna have to work hard in this world to be somebody that could be adored by those you love. Yes, you're right. You know that kiss, the next day I was running around in school with a grin on my face. And maybe that, in some way, that grin never fades. So what about the heartbreak that followed? Well, the heartbreak surely followed. But just to expand on this a little more, because that passion that I had was an indication that eventually love would play a big role in my life. I wasn't aware of it. I was just directed at this one girl. But you understood that that feeling that taught you something, like that you're somebody that can feel those things. Absolutely. And that's a strong part of who you are, and therefore it will also be a part of directing your life trajectory. Yeah, so we were an item for two years. I lost my virginity. Congratulations. She was not a virgin at the time. My competitor was... There always is a competitor. Isn't that how it works? He studied medicine in college already. In which ways was he better than you? He wasn't, he was older and he was more experienced. And he was gonna be a doctor. But I was there and he was not. Presence wins. Yeah, but you still had big dreams. You wanted to be a tenure professor. Yes, yes. So you still want to outdo that guy. Oh yeah, and she eventually told me that he was not in the picture anymore. So it was back and forth, back and forth. And our senior year, we were an item and I was just dreaming of the future. But sort of, we didn't figure out that, in those days, if she went to college in Berlin and I went to college in Jena, and the distance between the two cities was too much for a weekend visit. Public transportation was very slow and nobody had cars. So the circumstance of life, you drifted apart. Yeah, and so we interacted with a couple of letters and then I got the goodbye letter. Oh my God. Did that hurt? I can still feel it. You know when- That's a good thing, that you could feel the pain. That's still part of love. That the pain of loss is still part of love. And then you kinda change that, you shape it, and you give that love in deeper, more profound ways to future people. It's very well put. But at the time, it emptied me out. If I had a tendency to have suicidal thoughts, I might have killed myself. Would you say that was one of the darker moments of your life? Um, let me see. As a single moment, yes. So I still remember, we had a mail slot in the front door. And I was expecting a letter any day, and there was the letter. I go upstairs into my bedroom and I open it and I read it. And it was just like, the life went out of me. You're just there alone, and you have to experience this pain alone. So, but. And now you're deeply alone in this world. Yes, because I didn't have a, there was no emotional relationship with my parents. I literally had nobody. So this love you have in you had no place to go. It was choked off, all right? So, but I, what I did was I, I wanted to go on, right? And so I threw myself into the study of chemistry. I outworked all of my fellow students in a big way. I just like, I worked my ass off, and since I was pretty smart too, I just aced practically everything. And for the first two years in college, and look, we go to college, there are all these pretty girls, and there's dances and everything. We had this great student club where, I didn't look at any girls. I, eventually I knew I was going to, you know, wanna have female companionship, but love, uh-uh, no more, that hurts. There's a song that goes, love hurts. Yeah, yeah, I know that one. That's true, there's actually many songs that have a similar message, yes. So during that time, during your excellence, just being an exceptional student of chemistry, let's go to your story. So in your book, Deep Undercover, My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America, and in the really, really excellent podcast series that I've been listening to, people should definitely listen to it, it's called The Agent, you document your time as a KGB spy before, during, and after. Can you tell the story of when you first were contacted by the KGB, those, how you were invited, the offer to join was made? Well, it was a big surprise, and I never thought of myself as a potential agent. You know, I was gonna be a tenured professor and join the ruling elite, because in Europe, tenured professors are few. It's not like in the United States, you know, anybody who teaches at colleges has a title of professor. Easy now. It's true, it's not a criticism. It's 100%. So we should also clarify that tenured professor or not, it is a very prestigious position throughout history of Europe. Yeah, yeah. I would say, especially communists, I don't actually know the full landscape of the respect, but at least in the Soviet Union where I grew up, it's a prestigious position. Absolutely was. And the town of Yenna had about 100,000 people live there, and I would, it's a wild guess, but maybe 30 tenured professors, and they were part of the ruling elite. I was trying to do as much as I can to live the good life, right? You know, have access to things that are nice. Yeah, but I think the powerful thing about being a professor in that context of East Germany is the prestige. And the feeling of superiority. You know, I was full of myself. You know, when you are the best of the best, and in my third year I received a scholarship, the Karl Marx scholarship, that was limited to 100 concurrent recipients in the country. So my God, I was full of myself. I believed in myself, hook, line, and sinker. And I was also, I got a lot of accolades from teachers and fellow students. They were feeding the ego, the old, I mean. Yeah. You have to believe in yourself often when you're young to truly, to excel. And you sure as heck did. But you know, as a balance, you need a mentor, somebody who puts things in perspective, and I didn't have one. My father was a non-entity and nobody else. They all looked up to me. Yeah. I was an up-and-coming guy, right? So there's no father figure that put you in your place. Not at all. And I give you one extreme example. It was down the road when I fathered a child out of wedlock. That was in my fifth year, I believe. The Communist Party in East Germany was very moralistic. If you did that, they would have a talk with you and give you whatever, severe reprimand. Nobody even mentioned a word about this. So yeah, so this is how this ego gets nurtured. But anyway, getting back to how the KGB came in contact. So they most likely got knowledge of me by looking at Stasi records. What's Stasi? Oh, that was East German secret police. Staatssicherheit, security for the state. There's that word security again. And they pretty much kept a record on everybody in the country. And so when you look through this, and this is what the KGB was looking for. They were looking for candidates, particularly for this kind of job that they had in mind for me, for candidates who were not, you know, in their mid-20s, who were not fully developed yet, but mature enough to get there. And still young enough, right? Because at that level of maturity, you can test whether they can handle this kind of job. Yes, absolutely right. So and one day I got a knock on my door and my dorm room door was on a Saturday. And they knew that I was by myself. How did they know it? We had a, I pieced this together. We had an exchange student from the Soviet Union and he was next door to me. And he, you know, he befriended me. So he got to know me a little bit. And the pattern was that my roommate would always go home for the weekend. And of course they also knew which door to knock on, even though there were no nameplates, right? So somebody knocks and I knew it was a stranger because if it had been a student, the pattern was that we would knock on the door and then go in. We wouldn't wait for somebody to let us in. So I didn't, I waited for 10 seconds and he didn't come in. I knew that it was a stranger. I said, come on in. And in came a person who spoke fluent German. So that was not a KGB guy. That was a collaborator. And so he started making a bunch of small talk. He introduced himself as the, as a representative of Kaltseiss Jena, which was the optics company that made, that was made really, really good optical instruments. Was one of the best in the world. So it's like the, you know, the super prestigious company in that place. Right, and he said, you know, that he was a representative of that company and he would just want to find out what my plans were after graduating from college. And at that point I knew he wasn't from Kaltseiss Jena because in those days there was no recruitment. You, when you were done, if you were in the top 10% of the graduates, you would most likely pick to stay and get a doctorate, right? And the rest of them were assigned, you know, wherever, you had no choice. So that guy was an idiot. He didn't know the basics about. You interviewed him a little bit to understand like. Oh sure, you know, I started. Like feel out, is this guy full of shit? Because yeah, he's a stranger showing up to your dorm room. I knew that, at that point I knew he was Stasi, which is wrong, but it doesn't matter because he was German and I had no idea that the KGB would be involved. So sorry to pause briefly. Did you have a sense, did people know that there's a Stasi type of organization, that there's a large number of people doing this kind of work in East Germany? In order for you to make that guess. Yeah, we knew that the Stasi existed. We even had our James Bond, you know, we had a series called the Invisible Visor where a Stasi employee in East Germany would go into West Germany and hunt down Nazis. So yes, the Stasi was known to be there. And admired in part or feared or both? I thought they were necessary and I admired them. James Bond. Yes, the reason I did so, because I had no information to the contrary. I never knew anybody personally or even, you know, somewhat removed who was followed by the Stasi, was, you know, put in jail. I had no clue. I had no clue that they did a lot of damage and that they were like doing a lot of surveillance of the East German population, the same way the KGB did for the Soviet Union. So for me to be talking to somebody from the Stasi, it raised my interest. I was curious what comes next because I sort of knew something interesting would be coming at me. And I had no other thoughts about that at that point. So when he was finally, when he went for the kill by reversing himself, he said, you know, I gotta tell you that I really, I really am not from Karl Zeiss, you know, I'm from the government. Okay, thank you for pointing that out. And then he asked this question, he says, can you imagine to one day work for the government? And so I gave a pretty clever answer. I said, yes, but not as a chemist. So I answered the question that he didn't ask. I helped him out. So we made an arrangement to meet for lunch, which in Germany is the main meal at the number one restaurant in Jena. I still remember what I ate. What was that? Rump steak with butter on top and French fries. Oh, those were my favorite. Anyway, so when I get to the restaurant, I saw this fellow sitting in the back there at the table and there was another person at the table. So I was a little bit hesitant because in those days, it was not unusual for perfect strangers to share a table because there weren't enough tables and chairs and so forth. So I didn't know if I could approach him, but he got up and came to me and he took me to the table and he said, I want to introduce Herman. We work with our Soviet comrades. Aha, KGB. And then he disappeared. He says, I got something else to do. I never knew his name. He just handed me over to the KGB. What was the relationship between the KGB and the Stasi? As collaborators, close collaborators, or just distant associates? They were pretty close collaborators. As I told you, they bought forged documents that the Germans made because the Germans were better at forgery. They also exchanged information, but they didn't trust each other 100%. And I tell you why I know that. So they recruited me to send me to West Germany. As I already said, East Germany had a thousand agents over there. Why would they want to have their own? Yeah. Yeah, okay. This is a fascinating internal and external dynamic of distrust. Yeah. Okay, so there you are. Welcomed by the KGB. When did the offer, the invite come? Well, that took a while. So Herman and I had an unofficial relationship for about a year and a half. I would meet him once a week, once every two weeks, initially in his car, but then he took me to a conspirational flat. It was an apartment that was occupied by a party member, a lady, single lady. When we came in, she would leave. She left us tea and cookies, and then we could freely talk. He also, at that time, gave me some West German literature magazines to read, which was of course forbidden. So already I'm starting to feel somewhat special. And as we were talking about what they had in mind for me in general, I knew that I was gonna be even more special because I would be above the law. I would operate outside the law of the countries I would go to, as well as East Germany, because the magazines, and eventually when I joined up, they told me I better watch West German television, which was also not explicitly prohibited, but it was something that could get you in trouble. So on many levels, you're super special. You're the James Bond. Yes, yes. So what was that recruitment testing process like? Testing whether you have what it takes to be a KGB agent. First of all, we had very in-depth talks, Herman and I, about life. And I still am very honest and sharing my feelings. Philosophical or personal? Personal. Personal. I even told him that I was shy around the girls. He was giving you relationship advice or what? How old was he? So what was the dynamic? Can you tell me, was it a father, son? No, older brother. Older brother. Yeah, he was maybe in his early to mid 30s, and I was maybe 10 years younger. And what languages did he speak? He spoke German pretty well. But he's originally from Russia? Yeah, with a Russian accent. So I got in trouble one time with him when I asked him, is your real name German? He didn't like that. He didn't like it. Was he good with girls? No, no, I remember what he told me. He says, you know, you gotta understand one thing. They're looking for guys too. That's all. You know. Oh, girls are looking for guys too. Yeah, it's a competitive game. Yeah, don't worry about it. You know, don't be so shy. So that little flame of love that we talked about in all the shapes that it takes in our life, did he talk to you about that, that that could be taken advantage of, that that could be used, or was it implied? Yeah, but it was not very focused, not in great detail. So we talked about personal stuff, and you know, likes, dislikes. He gave me tasks. For instance, when my friend and I hitchhiked from East Germany all the way down to Bulgaria, he told me to write a report about it, what I saw. So fundamentally, he wanted to see how well I can write, and how well I can report, how well I observe. He also asked me to write some profiles about fellow students. I don't believe that was for them to give him to the Stasi. It was just like, how well do I characterize people? That's important when you're talking about, when I was in the US, active in the US, I operated as a spotter, so I did exactly that. I wrote profiles about people. He also gave me some tasks to do that were rather unpleasant. He would give me an address and a name of the people who lived at the address, and he told me to go there, ring the doorbell, and find out something about a relative who lived in West Germany. That is undercover exploration, right? So you go, you make up a story, and somehow win the confidence of your target to tell you something that you wanna know. Did that come naturally to you? No, no, I hated it. The charisma involved? Which part did you hate? Yeah, charisma, I think, I didn't know that I had it. It took you some time to discover it. Because I always was, and I still am, to some degree, a bit shy. I lost a lot of the shyness after moving to the South, because here in the United States, because you don't have to be shy, you know? You can let your love shine. That's exactly right. But anyway, I hated doing that, but I did it well. I still remember, so in those days, I had a beard, and I rang the bell. Tall, handsome fella. Yeah, and I looked the part. I said, I'm a sociology student, and I'm doing a survey, and I asked a whole bunch of questions, would you like to answer the questions? No problem. And then I directed the conversation to the lady's private life, and she actually gave me information, she volunteered information that I wanted to know. Beautiful. I did well, and the other one that I didn't like, but I also did well, when Herman drove me around the city, and showed me a building, and he said, find out what organization is in there, what they do, maybe get to know some people, and I did that pretty well also. You know, you have to be inventive, you know, to come up with a cover story, and I've always been quite inventive. You know, I'm a storyteller at heart, and I didn't know it then, but you know. But there was still something unpleasant about it. Yes, yes. Which part was unpleasant? Well, the shyness, and then, you know, I wasn't very comfortable lying. I became comfortable down the road, but you know, I was brutally honest, and never hid anything of me. But you know, over time, you lose that uncomfortable feeling, and you rationalize that you gotta do it. There's only one way, right? And you're serving a good cause. So you were talking to Herman for a year and a half? A year and a half. And then, how did that progress? Yes, so he finally, I guess he sent a report to headquarters in Berlin, and then he sent me on a three-week, quote-unquote, practice trip to Berlin. This was the first time when I had a, like a conspiratorial meeting, where I had an address and a time, and a code phrase, and I met another agent. His name was Boris. These names were meaningless. They were all like cover names, right? So what was the code, and the meeting? What was then, can you give a little more detail? That code I don't remember. Not the code, but like, what do you mean by code? So what was? I tell you the code we used when I met, while I was active. I would approach the other person who I thought may be the person I wanna meet. We both had something with us, or on us, to make us more likely to be the right person. So, and I would ask him the following questions. Excuse me, I'm looking for Susan Green. And he would answer, yes, you must be David. Stupid. If I ask a stranger, and they would look at me, how could I help you? So, no, it's the wrong guy. Yeah, it's just a low probability that the right thing would be said. Oh, absolutely. So it's a nice handshake. And it seems like a safe statement, if it's not the right person. Exactly right. It would just come off absurd or crazy or whatever. You would have made a good secret agent. You know exactly. No, I'm not. This is, we'll discuss this. I'm dressed like one. Actually, yeah, were there any dress code? No, just fit in. Fit in, no matter what. And then be creative. Yeah. Figure out ways to fit in. So anyways, he gave me some tasks, and we, and he, since I had rented a room in a house, he gave me Western literature to read. And we spent time together. And there was a practice run to West Germany. Actually, there were two. And that was very important. In hindsight, I figured that out. So I traveled to West Germany, no, not to West Berlin, with an East German passport that was stamped that that individual was allowed to go to the West. And there was a part of the border that was only guarded by Soviet troops. And that's where they smuggled me into West Germany. I got on the subway, and then appeared in West Berlin. No Americans, no Brits, no French knew that I had entered. Forged documents or not? No, no, this was an East German passport. It was real. Okay. Okay. And the first trip, all they wanted me to do is just walk around, smell the air, have a beer or whatever, and eat a sausage, and then come back. The second trip, I had a task, very similar to the one that I had back in Jena, to ring the doorbell someplace and talk to some people. And that worked very well also. I should mention that you talk about that, you know, eat a sausage, drink some beer. I suppose that's a good test too, to see how you behave under Western, like when first introduced to the Western culture. Like, this is why I might not make a good agent, is when I first came to the United States in the supermarket I like bananas, as many bananas as I wanna eat. That, I think that would break me. It's a shock. Just, it's a shock to have access to Western culture. You're getting very close to the reason they actually made me do these two practice trips. When I first emerged on West Berlin territory, I felt highly uncomfortable. That was the enemy, right? And I saw the cops everywhere, and even those cops had like light blue uniforms, not the, they weren't standouts. So I was wondering, you know, if they knew that, you know, I had like KGB on my forehead. So you were paranoid that they would know, they would see. I was scared, but I overcame that. So that's, can we just linger on that? Because I suppose that's a natural, like if I give anybody on the street the mission to do the mission you had to do, is they would be paranoid. That's a natural human feeling, is am I being watched? Do they know? Like if you try to steal something from a store, there's going to be a feeling like, are they watching me? Are the cameras watching? Are the people watching me? They all know, that kind of stuff. So you have to overcome, or you have to be somehow rugged and robust to that kind of feeling and overcome it. Yes, exactly. So, and something very interesting happened while I was being trained in Berlin. I met a classmate of mine from high school, and he confided to me that he was recruited by the Stasi to become a spy, go as a spy to West Germany. And he also had this practice trip, and he peed in his pants. He went back and told him, I can't do that. Just from the terror, the- Yes. That paranoia. Now, this guy's career was over. He had an engineering degree. He was a pretty smart guy. He was just for the rest of his life, and he's still alive, I believe, floating around and trading in model railroads and stuff like that. You mean, do you think that experience broke him? Or- They wouldn't let him back in. Oh, I see. They, oh. Yeah. So it's a test that if you fail, you pay the price. I had no idea that something bad would happen if I failed that test, but I didn't. Yeah. I didn't fail. So, and this led then to the offer, all right? And after, you know, Boris was happy with me, and he told his boss, who was most likely the head of the KGB in East Berlin, and I had an appointment to meet- In East Germany. Yes, in East Germany. Yeah, all of East Germany. Yes. That's right. An appointment to meet with him, and as we walk into the room, there was this huge desk and a little guy sitting behind it. Very, very, just like little and unimpressive. Nice. A lot of paraphernalia, like, you know, had a bust of Dzerzhinsky on his desk and some paintings, Lenin and so forth. But when the guy opened his mouth, he was like, whoa. A huge psychological energy. He spoke only Russian. Now, and initially he would, you know, start to bat with five minutes worth of propaganda, why we're doing what we're doing. I didn't need that. I understood most of it, but when I didn't understand, I'd ask Boris to translate. And then he sprung it on me, and I was not prepared. He said, so what, are you in or not? And I was, no, I hadn't made up my mind. I wasn't expecting that would come. So I said to him, I'm not really trained. You know, there's a lot of things I need to learn. And I came up with a couple of really stupid things. One, not so stupid, but the other one was, I don't know why I said that. I said, for instance, I need to learn how to drive a car and to type with a typewriter. And he got really annoyed and he said, don't worry about it, we'll train you. But I gotta tell you, we need people who are decisive. So you got until tomorrow noon to give Boris your decision. That made for a sleepless night. So what was going through your mind? Well, I had, this was almost 50-50. I knew I was gonna have a huge career, a good career. I was on my way because I was already employed by the university as an assistant professor. So that career would be to become a professor, become a 10-year professor, be a world-class. Yes, Jena had become my hometown. I really loved the place. It was my oyster. And my family was my basketball team. I was- You love playing basketball. Oh, absolutely. So that's what you mean. Yeah, so this is home, this is home. This is where your love is. This was home. Did you understand that the choice involved leaving the home behind? Yes, and the one thing I didn't have, the two things I didn't have, an emotional relationship with my mother, and I didn't have a steady girlfriend at the time. I think Freud would have a lot to say about that, but yeah, go ahead. But the connection between those two, but yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. By the way, my friend Guntante, the one who worked for the Stasi, was also, the Stasi tried to recruit him as an agent, but he had a love relationship at the time, and he said politely, no, I won't, I can't. So you didn't have, that's the one thing that really could- Would have held me. Would have held you to this place, is love. So you got the career on the one hand, my basketball team, the town that I would be part of the ruling elite of, and then we had this great adventure, and the ability to contribute to the victory, the worldwide victory of communism, and stick it to the Nazis, and of course the feeling that you're really special. Yeah, James Bond. Yeah. What's, the question, do I wanna be a tenure professor or James Bond? Yes, and- As funny as that sounds, that was probably a difficult decision. It was a difficult decision, but fundamentally it wasn't, and it wasn't my zeal to help the revolution. It was my, what they called, what the Stasi was looking for, the KGB was looking for in a character that they would send over, a well-controlled inclination to adventure, okay? Yeah. Yeah, James Bond, what are you gonna say? And the love of women, yeah. I was, yes, I gotta put this in right here, because I'm telling people I have two things in common with James Bond. These are my initials, JB, and I got the girl too, three times. Yeah, I mean, and that's adventure. Yeah, and the ability to travel to the West, because the West was closed off to us. We could go to foreign countries, but they all had to be communist countries. You know, I wanted to see Paris, because I had fallen in love with Honoré Balzac, who wrote a phenomenal set of novels that I just ate up. And so when I eventually did go to Paris, I knew all the places already, because he described them all. But anyway, so that one, it was 51-49, but eventually, you know, when you do the side-by-side intellectual comparison, that doesn't work. It becomes a tie, and then, you know, you just go with your gut, and I say, hey, I'm in. So now that you successfully passed the test, and you were sitting with this unimpressive man, and had the invite, and had to sleep on it, and have made the decision to join, what was next? I was just told, you know, that I was being recruited by the State Department of East Germany. I was going to become a diplomat. I must have had some paper, but I forgot, because just by saying so, that wouldn't have worked. There's some kind of document that says you came here, and that was the only entanglement you had to that place. No love, no, just the basketball. Basketball, giving up basketball was huge for me. I loved playing that game. I started playing basketball when I was 18. That's a little late. Are you better offensive, defensive? What do you like more? Do you like to shoot from a distance? Do you like to play? I was a runner. I was very quick on my feet, and I was a good jumper, too. I typically played the four position, you know. What's that? Forward. Oh, the forward position. Forward position, but anyway, so that was the hardest for me to give up. But the other thing that I remember I had to do to hand in my party document to the party secretary of the university, and he made a comment. Yeah, we probably won't hear much about you, but we know that you're gonna do something very important. So he sort of had an inkling that I'm gonna go someplace undercover or something like that. And then I packed my bags and got on a train to Berlin for another one of those secret meetings with my new handler, Nikolai. And here came another test that would have been quite easy to fail. So, all right. I had lived in Jena for six years in a dorm, even when I became an employee of the university. They didn't have apartments. I was still living in a dorm in a single room with a bed, a chair, and a table, and a toilet down the hallway. So I figured, you know, Berlin KGB, I'm gonna get a nice apartment, right? And so Nikolai took me into his car, we started talking a little bit, and then he said, I have a task for you already. Your first task is to find yourself a place to live. I mean, I don't think I showed it in my face, but you know, my heart dropped like down into my pants. I knew this was nearly impossible, because there was a severe shortage of housing in everywhere in Germany, East Germany, and all the apartments and homes were controlled by the government. You know, there were long waiting lists. I knew couples that were promised maybe to get an apartment five years down the road. So, and then they would postpone the decision to have a child. Anyway, this was impossible. Well, you know, but this was a test. I'm gonna, and so we can, because I had to be inventive now. I had to figure out how to get out of an impossible situation. I didn't realize it then at all. I just went with the flow, you know, what do I do? So what I did, I went, I took the train, the city train to the very last stop, a little town called Aachen, and I wandered around in that town and knocked on doors and asked people if they knew where somebody might have a place to live. And after a couple of hours, somebody said, there's this lady that, and she gave me, they gave me the address. And I talked to the lady and she said, I happen to have a place that you might, where you might be able to stay. It was an outbuilding. I don't know what it served. It was not a garage. It was concrete. And it had a bed and a chair, and running cold water, and a stove, a cold stove. That was my, was going to be my. Pretty basic, pretty basic. Pretty basic, are you kidding me? That's the. Toilet across the yard, of course. Yeah, well, all the essentials. What are you complaining about? So you were right, you had to run the, James Bond had to run a special operation out of the house. To my credit, and I think that established part of my reputation, I didn't complain at all to Nikolai. That was part of the test, probably. Yeah, I just told him, I found something. And so for six months, I would get up in the morning, get on the train, and walk around in the city, did some operational stuff, operational training. I went to the library, did a lot of reading in the library, and then I found a basketball team that I could join, so at least I could take a shower twice a week. And apparently, it took about six months that I was still on probation, because after six months, Nikolai, one day, we were still meeting in his car. He said, he handed me a key, and he said, I'm gonna take you to your new apartment. And I didn't know this, now I was really in, okay? Imagine the hurdles you have to jump over, and how many times you can fail, but you know. But not complaining, not asking questions. Yes. I mean, that was something you've written about, I think you wrote that bosses do not like to hear complaints or problems, they prefer solutions. That's right. So what was your interaction like with the bosses? Does that essentially represent the way it went forward as well? No complaints, get to solve the problem. No complaints, no arguments, no, I know this better. I was taking it all in. Now, the technical guys, they taught me something I didn't know that made sense. What Nikolai, some of the stuff that he taught me was somewhat questionable. He was a generalist, and there's some things he didn't know really well. So I could have like asked and probed a little bit, but I didn't. So I just played along. So this new apartment was a studio, it had a kitchen with running cold water, and the bathroom was just one flight down the toilet, not a bathroom, one flight down the stairs. It was an upgrade. It was a big upgrade. And he gave me, I think he gave me 1,000 mark to buy furniture. And in that place, actually I also bought a TV and started watching West German television. So I finally had a decent place to stay. And my training in Berlin took about two years. What was the training, what were the interesting aspects to the training? What were sort of, if you do an overview systematic of what was the training process, what was difficult, what are some insights that generalize to the training process of what it takes to be a KGB spy? Right. So let me start with the tradecraft. So I was taught Morse code. That took a while. I was instructed in how to use a shortwave radio and to receive the shortwave transmissions with Morse code. I was taught an encryption and decryption algorithm, manual algorithm. Yep. You might be interested that eventually I figured out at least one of the patterns. The algorithm was such that, and this was all about digits, like, and the algorithm was such that in the end, the digits that were used to decipher other digits that were handed, that were sent to me by a shortwave radio, there were, let's say if there were 100 digits, there were an equal number of ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, and sevens, up until zero. And I was told that these algorithms, these manual algorithms were good for about 300 uses. After that, they could still be deciphered. I'm assuming nowadays that wouldn't take as much. Yeah, with computers for sure. But there's probably, they're probably designed in a way that you can manually, sort of, it's efficient and convenient to use them manually. Well, it's not to optimize cryptographic security, it's to optimize, it's like to balance security and like humans being able to actually. Yeah, no, I gotta disagree. It was neither efficient nor convenient. It took a long time. So it wasn't deciphered. When what was significantly easier to do, but that would require you to have spy paraphernalia with you. This is what's called a one-time pad. So you have the set of numbers on a sheet of paper that had to be developed. I had to use iodine to make those numbers visible. Those are known to be unbreakable unless they are used multiple times, the same sheet of paper. Because the person who encrypts has the same set of numbers as the person who decrypts. And one-time use, you cannot figure out what the message is. Oh, interesting. But this is a quick way to communicate from one person to another one time. Well, one time, but I had a pad with multiple sheets of paper, right? And the reason that they gave me a manual one is because I literally, I had only, when I wound up in the United States, I had only one thing with me that only a spy can have. And that was a writing pad where the first 10 pages or so were impregnated with a trace of a chemical that was used for secret writing. But you really would have to know what you're looking for to, you know, you see this pad, it was bought at Walmart. Can you explain a little further? What is the chemical here that, what are we talking about? So how, I don't understand how it's possible to have a physical pad that does the encryption without any computing. How does it encrypt? All right, so, no, no, it doesn't do any work. So, the communication, the encrypted communication was a set of groups of five, five digits and another five, and there's always a gap in between. And so let's say if I get this radio transmission, I write them all down and then I use my, develop my algorithm and then I do mathematics, either addition or subtraction. The resulting set of digits then had a one-to-one correlation to letters. And this is an easy way to then do the correlation. Yes, yes. Oh, that's cool. And you're saying the algorithm was not efficient. It was not. Oh, the manual took a long time, and you can't make an error. Right. Would you know where, can you, is it easy to debug? No, you know. No, you do it twice. You do it twice and that's how you check. If it's identical, then you know. But like, if it's not. If it's not, then one is right and the other is wrong. You gotta do it again. So you just don't make mistakes. No, that's right. I really didn't. But anyway, so I was learning that. I was also told that I was required to become proficient in another language. And they gave me a choice, and I picked English. That's. What was the other one? Oh no, they gave me, pick one, French. You know, whatever is spoken in the West. Got it. What would be second to you? Would you think French because of Paris? What would you? Why English? English was a no-brainer because I was a straight A student in English without studying. It came so easily to me. So that's why I chose it, right? So that was that. Then I was taught the basics of counter surveillance. You know, some trickery and surveillance detection routes where you wander around in a city for three hours and determine whether you're being followed or not. That requires you to plan the route very well. I give you one example that will illustrate that. As my favorite spot, when I was in Moscow, I did a lot of that also. And my favorite spot was, it was a not well-traveled road. It went down the hill and curved. And at the bottom of the hill, there was a telephone booth. And when you open the door and pick up the telephone, you have to look back. So it wasn't like this, right? It wasn't a giveaway. This was normal. It was natural. So I could see if somebody would come walking after me. You know, these kinds of things. Or you would use public transportation, big buildings where you needed to use an elevator and see who's, because surveillance, the object of surveillance is to never lose sight of the individual who you're surveilling because at that point, you may miss the window where he does something that you're looking for. So somebody always has to come close, right? Did you have to also study surveillance? No, only counter surveillance. And what helped me in all my training, you know, I would have a competition with the folks that were coming, that were following me and me. And I beat them every time. They were at a disadvantage because one of them always had to be close and if you saw the same face twice, you knew that you were being followed. And I had a very, very good memory for faces. So basically figure out a fixed route and then a fixed route that allows you to survey the area and then record the faces you've seen inside your mind. And if you see multiple times a single face, that's a bad sign. And they could use different clothes. What they didn't have was face masks. The CIA does nowadays. They can give you a different face within seconds. Yeah. So how, I mean, again, you talk about paranoia. Paranoia, is that a big part of the job? Counter surveillance, like being constantly paranoid that you're being watched? Yeah, I was supposed to. Isn't that quite stressful? So is that one of the, is that actually an effective way to operate? No, but it sort of becomes a routine. I was told to do it while in the US once a month. Okay, it's like a cleaning out. Oh, not every day, no, no, no, no, no. Once a month or before I would, say, mail a letter with secret writing. So I was sure that nobody saw me put an envelope into a post box. So this is one of the tools in your toolbox. So there's Morse code, there's the decryption, and the encryption, there's the counter surveillance. Photography. Making micro dots. You know what a micro dot is? Well, that's, you use, you take a photograph, and you use a microscope in reverse, and make that photograph really small. So small that it's like the head of a pin that can be used to hide under a postage stamp. In reality, I knew how to make them, but in reality, they never asked me to make use of that technique. It's sort of an encryption mechanism for photographs. Yeah, so what we do nowadays, embed code in PDFs and stuff like that, right? Yeah, beautiful, okay, all right. So that was a learning, a training process, both in the physical space and sort of algorithmically. Is there other things? Oh, you bet. Interestingly enough, I was, the first book I was given to read was the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Oh, so understand, that's interesting, because you said you had to read Western literature. Yeah, that too. How much reading, so history, how much history, politics, geopolitics, culture? Not much more, but they made me read that document. Other than that, I wasn't supposed to study the Soviet Union. I wasn't supposed, and that was not, and I didn't, when they sent me to Moscow, it wasn't to learn Russian, right? It was to learn English. The second document they gave me was the Constitution of West Germany, and then I got lots of magazines and stuff like that. As I told you, I was also told to watch West German television, which I embraced with a vengeance, because it was better than East German. So I would get up in the morning and have a little breakfast and watch the German version of Sesame Street. And that helps you get an understanding of the culture, because you have to do any kind of interaction, any kind of spying, then you have to be able to effectively integrate yourself. Well, you also have to know, and that would have been easier if they had sent me to West Germany, all the soccer teams, stuff that everybody knows. When I came to the US, I knew very little stuff that everybody knows. That's why I had to be very cautious and take it in over time. Anyway, and the last thing I wanna mention is I was strongly encouraged to expand my cultural education. In other words, go to visit museums, go to the theater, not so much movies, opera, read books from all kinds of authors. That was important to them. And once a month I had to write a report, what I did. But the interesting thing, there was no curriculum, there was no agenda, there were no check marks. It was all ad hoc, now you do this and then you do that. And a lot of this also, they relied on my initiative. Again. I mean, that's part of the evaluation too. You bet. Are you able to have creative, it's interesting that they're developing a James Bond type of character here, which is, what's the reason to go to the opera? As you become cultured in a certain kind of way where perhaps that makes you more charming, more charismatic in terms of your ability to integrate yourself in different situations. You're absolutely right. When I came to the US after about two years roughly, I was cultured enough to not make a bad impression at a diplomatic soiree in Washington, DC. I mingled freely. Yes. All right? And so the whole idea was for me to sort of reach into the upper realms of society where the targets would be juicier than the worker bees. And how did you end up in Moscow? Why, how? What is that journey? Well, so I told you, I started studying English. So I started back from scratch. I went, they paid for a tutor and I went from like English 101. And then I went through that in a couple of months and then I got another guy with whom we, I expanded this, we had conversations rather than working from a textbook. And I worked like a maniac. I threw myself into the study of English like you wouldn't believe. And my inspiration came from Vladimir Lenin. I had read somewhere in a book that when Lenin was in exile, he studied German and he learned 100 German words every day, new German words. So I started reading newspapers and every word that I didn't know, I wrote down on an index card, German, English, and I piled them up. And so I really learned 100 new English words every day. I know this because I counted them and I had a system how to do this. So you take your index card and you have five categories. There's a really good way to learn rote by rote. So you got category one, that's the new ones. And you got category five. So you start with five. Five you already had right four times. If you have it right again, it goes into the archive. Oh, like long-term cold archive, yeah. Four, if you get it right, it goes to five. If you get it wrong, it gets relegated to three. And so you go through this. And occasionally I would throw the archived things back into one. So I really acquired a phenomenal vocabulary. When I was done with my English, my vocabulary was significantly higher than the average American because I didn't discriminate. Whatever word I didn't know, I learned, which is not necessarily the best way because English has a lot of synonyms, right? Yeah. And one synonym is usually the preferable one. And when I first interacted with people, I very often used the one that wasn't as good. And people found that I have an interesting way of talking. They didn't know what that meant, but. Yeah, so it builds a good foundation for a language. It's getting a large vocabulary. It's really interesting. There's something I do which is called space repetition, which is a programmatic way of doing this kind of system that you've developed yourself, which is if you successfully remember a thing, it's going to be a longer time before it brings it up to you again. Now, that requires a computer to keep track of the information. If you have cars, that's a really interesting pile system. One, two, three, four, five, you upgrade it. One, two, three, four, five. Maybe I wouldn't go to the archive and go to pile one right away. Maybe I would go to like, I don't know, pile five perhaps is probably the right place to put it because you have to go through that full step again. But that is a really powerful way to learn, definitely language, but also facts. Like people that go to medical school. Disconnected fact. Yeah. And you pretty much, when you're done, you know what you know. Yeah. But then again, to use it, to integrate it into the music of language, that's more difficult. That's what you're talking about. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. There's a charm. I mean, maybe it's not good for spy craft, but there's a charm to this kind of, to having an accent and using words incorrectly but confidently. Because language isn't a simple formula. Language is the play of words. So actually using the incorrect synonym, you know, as, you know, instead of saying I'm cold, saying I'm chilled or something. Like using offbeat words can actually be part of the charm. So it's interesting. If you can learn how to use that correctly, because I know a bunch of people with a Russian accent and I feel like they get away with saying a lot of ridiculous shit. Because they're able to sort of leverage the charm of the non sequiturs. And by the way, just one thing, you talked about using a computer. When I had my first personal computer, I actually wrote a program that does that. It does that. By the way, when was that? Because you were a world class programmer for a time. You were a very good programmer. When did the birth? My first PC was probably 1984. 1984. When did you fall in love with programming? When I went to college in the US. And part of the core curriculum was that you were required to take a course in computer. And it was mostly just, you know, talk. But we also had to learn a language. We had to write some programs in Fortran, which was what, five at the time. It was a dumbed down Fortran. But listen, so I see the ability. I see what you can do with this. I programmed a sine curve, and then I divided the sine curve into really, really small rectangles. And then ran the program, and it came up with the right area. Wow, this is great. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's so powerful. You're creating a little helper that helps you understand the world, to help you analyze the world, and so on. We'll return to that, because it's interesting. You have so many interesting aspects to your life. But Moscow, so. Yeah, no, let me, how I was sent to Moscow. Okay, so one day I had a visitor from Moscow, and he came to visit me in my apartment together with Nikolai. And we talked, and then he said, so how's your English? I said, I pulled a book from the shelf, and it says I can read that without the help of a dictionary. Oh, that's interesting. And he said, you know what, we're gonna send you a tape recorder, and you just talk, say something, you know, for 20 minutes, whatever you wanna talk about. They sent this thing, and two weeks later I was on a plane to Moscow. Because I also spoke English, sort of the British variety of English, with not a strong German accent, because I've always had the ability to imitate others and sounds. There was an innate ability. I would, you know, when we were in a lab, and as students, I would very often do monologues, imitating East German comedians. You know, I just. Like impressions. Yes, yes. I'm not good enough to make a living out of it, but that raised some interest, some interest. And so they sent me to Moscow. That was the first time on a plane, by the way. And I had a conversation with two ladies who spoke English. One was a Russian professor at Lomonosov University, she was obviously KGB, that was her cover. And the other one was an American-born lady. By the way, she was an actual professor, and you're using that as the cover, or is it just a story? No, she said she was a professor. She may have taught there, too. That's an interesting distinction. Yeah. One is like a story you tell people, and one is like you legit are doing the thing, but are also as a cover. Anyway, that's an interesting aspect of how to be a good liar. You might as well live the lie. Yeah, exactly right. So the other one was a middle-aged, the Russian was pretty young, the other one was middle-aged American. And so we talked for maybe a couple of hours, and then they withdrew and I was left alone. Eventually, my liaison, he came back in and he said, it was close, but the American thinks you can actually become, you get close enough to becoming a native speaker of American English. And he said the Russian was very doubtful. So I think wishful, it was a tie, literally. Wishful thinking prevailed. So within a couple of weeks, I was moving to Moscow. And what was the task in Moscow? How long were you in Moscow? Two years. And what was the task there? Is it training or is it espionage? No, it was training. So it was, the American born became my tutor. I met with her twice a week. I also listened to a lot of BBC, shortwave BBC Worldwide. I read more English books. So a lot of that was about the language and the culture of English, American. And I did phonetics exercises every night. I had a tape that was about a half hour long and they would say a word and I would repeat the word, say a word, repeat the word. And it was mostly about the vowels, by the way. Most of the accent, particularly, let's say, coming from German into English, but also Russian. It's the vowels. Are we talking about the, so you would have a single word, a word, apple, and you would just say apple. Yes. And American English or British English? No, American English. And I give you one example that almost nobody gets right. The difference between hot and hut. You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, hot and hut. And German speakers, it's very tough. You know which one, for everyone it's different. For example, I could say this on a podcast, something that my brother struggles with, I struggle with too when I first came to this country learning English, is there's differences, there's embarrassing differences, like beach and bitch. Right? And you get so, as a young kid, also you get so nervous, I don't wanna say the wrong thing. I can also say that, this is almost a jokey thing, but there's a famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and you can guess which other word is very similar to that. So there's a nervousness about, what is that, that's interesting. I mean, and Germans probably have a different tension of what is hard to learn, the difference between the pronunciation of the vowels or the control of the vowels. Yeah, it's interesting. So you had to really master this daily exercise. And you know, and this was my discipline, I did this every night, routine, boring as hell. So English was the focus. And I also had interaction with some agents who had operated in the United States as diplomats under diplomatic cover. They would come and talk to me a little bit and tell me, and sort of prepare me what was ahead of me. And then I did a whole lot of operational training, particularly surveillance detection, that was big. They also taught me how to drive a car in Moscow. Finally, the one skill you needed. What's surveillance detection? Okay, so this is when you find out whether you're being followed. Ah, got it, got it, got it. So it's the antis, yeah, gotcha. The abbreviation that's used in, Congress, yes, in intelligence circles is SDR, surveillance detection route. When they say that, you know what that is. And that was it. And a few other things, you know, one-offs, for instance. I was once taught to read silhouettes of ships. When you see a ship from a distance, what kind of a ship it might be. They thought this would come in handy, actually. There was, in 1982, Andropov started a campaign, it was, now I forget the name, Operation Something Something, where everybody who was in the West was supposed to look for signs that the West was getting ready for a war. And I had an, everybody had an object to pay attention to. I had a harbor, a military harbor in New Jersey, near Red Bank, it was called Earl Weapon Station. And the code name for that was early, so they asked me to just wander by there to see if there was something unusual going on. Because the Soviet Union were, at that point, it was Ronald Reagan, were really afraid that Reagan was gonna start a war. They were absolutely, 100% afraid of him. Is there something memorable to you on a personal level, on a philosophical level, about your time in Moscow? Something that kinda stays with you, outside of the training stuff, maybe? Like the details of the training. You'll love the answer. You will love the answer. I was. I was given tickets to two performances by Americans. There was a theater troupe that played Our Town. And then there was this, I forget the name of the guy, but you may not be old enough, have you ever watched Hee Haw? Maybe. It was a country music show, real kitschy, but the star of Hee Haw was giving a concert in Moscow. And I guarantee you, at least half the audience were KGB. Oh, man. And at the other end, the opposite of a highlight was my visit to the mausoleum where Lenin is still today. There was nothing. He was my hero, but he looked like a wax figure. And you walk by there, there was nothing inspirational. It was not a religious experience, nothing. It was a big old nothing. Did your faith and belief in communism start to crumble at some point here? No. That was still pretty strong. No. What I did notice that the standard of living in Moscow was significantly lower than in East Germany. In the supermarkets, you could expect with reliability that you can find canned fish and mineral water. Everything else was whatever. And if you saw a line at a store, you just line up. You don't even ask what they have, because if you don't like it, somebody else will. It was not poverty, but it was close to poverty. There were a lot of drunken men in the streets. This is the 80s? No, this is the late 70s. Mid to late 70s. And also they had these high-rise apartment buildings that looked pretty good from the front, but you went into the backyard, ouch. You're describing my childhood here. Okay. Sorry. But it's interesting, even with the professor, even with everything else, it's interesting, because I think the standard of living was much lower, even in Moscow. Yeah, absolutely was. The one thing that they always had, at least in my days, in those two years, there was always fresh bread in the bulletinaires. Yeah. Always. Yeah, that's probably one of the memories I have of childhood. Well, you're hungry a lot, but when you eat, it's bread. Yeah, and the bread was good. It was good. I actually wonder how good it was, but I remember it being incredibly good. To me, it was really good. And you had it from white to very dark and all the varieties. The other thing that was good was, if you knew where to get it, Stolichnaya was four rubles. Not only is it good vodka, but it's cheap vodka. I like it. Yeah, but you had to know where, this would be like holes in the wall someplace. Well, I think a lot of the way they operate, I wonder if East Germany is this way, but a lot of the ways that Moscow operated, you had to know. Yes. There's a very kind of, if you make the right friends, if you give money to the right guy, the guy, the friend of the friend of the friend is going to hook you up. There's a culture that this is how you work around a very big bureaucracy. Underground economy. Yeah, underground economy. Yeah, which is, boy, such a stark contrast between that and the United States, the capitalist system. Yeah, that was a very big culture shock to me to understand the fundamentally different way of life. But the interesting thing is, human nature pervades both systems and there's something about the Russian system that reveals human nature more intensely because of the underground nature of it, because you get to deal with greed and trust and all those kinds of things. In the United States, there's much more power to the rule of law, so there's rules and people follow those rules. You have to break the rules nonstop. Well, in East Germany and Russia, I believe theft, if you could get away with it, was part of your economic activity. Yeah. I have a friend who I went to school with up until my fourth year, and we reconnected, and he told me how he survived. He would just steal stuff and then sell it or trade it. Yeah, theft, I mean, it's a relative concept. You know, taking stuff. Bribery, all those kinds of things. People, you know, corruption, you know, it's a relative term. No, I'm just kidding. I mean, it is. You have to work around the giant bureaucracy about the giant corruption. Corruption builds on top of corruption, and then it just becomes this giant system that's unstable, as you talked about. One last word. Yes. The two years in Moscow taught me how to be alone. I had no social interaction. Not with friends, not with women, not with... No. The only interaction I had was with the folks that trained me. So I was alone. That was a lonely two years. For a person who loves love, was that difficult? Yes, but that prepared me for my first year, and first and second year in the United States, because I could not interact socially without giving away that something was wrong with me. I had to learn how to be an American. They didn't teach me in Moscow. They couldn't. So the first two years in America, you had to kind of listen more than talk. Oh, you bet. The very first year, I couldn't even work because I had to acquire the documents, a Social Security card, and a driver's license to get a job. And then when I had the job, I worked as a bike messenger. That gave me a good opportunity to listen, because these people, they weren't very curious about me. What was your name in East Germany? What was your name in Moscow? What was your name in America? Okay, so the name I was given at birth is Albrecht Dittrich. It's so sexy when you speak in German, the German accent. I hated that name, the Albrecht. I didn't like it. It was very rarely used. My mother named me after a famous German painter, Albrecht de Dürer. My cover name in Moscow was known as Dieter. And in the United States, I became Jack Barsky. In between, I used a whole bunch of other names that were associated with false passports that I used. One of the names I remember is William Dyson, because that is the name that was on the Canadian passport I used to enter the United States. So how did you enter the United States? Can we take the journey from Moscow to the United States? What was the assignment? What was that leap? Just one thing in between. I had a three-month practice trip to Canada. That was a good idea. And I got to tell you this one thing that happened there. Okay. Because, you know, the one thing that I like to tell people nowadays is one of the secrets to happiness is the ability to make fun of the worst situations that you're in. You see the humor. So here comes something quite humorous, in hindsight at least. One of the tasks that I had in Canada was to acquire a birth certificate. The name was Henry Van Randel, who was born someplace in California, and I was supposed to write a little letter saying, I'm Henry Van Randel, please send me a copy of my birth certificate. The fee is enclosed. And I lived in a small hotel, so the return address, it wasn't visible that it was a hotel. That was important. And it took like three weeks, and I get nothing. Four weeks, I get nothing. Eventually, I got annoyed, and I mustered the courage to call them up for my pay, for when I called up the office, registrar, whatever they were called in this town in California, and I yelled at them. I says, you got my money. Where's my birth certificate? Well, a couple of weeks later, it came. So I see the envelope. It says, Henry Van Randel, yes. I had prepared the caretakers of the hotel that I'm expecting a letter from my friend. So I went up to my room. I opened it, and I was like, yes, yes, this is a success. And I opened this thing, and it was a copy of a birth certificate, but it was stamped with big letters, a cross in red, deceased. Now, think about it. Oh, here's a dead person who's asking for his birth certificate. I had the presence of mind to leave. Okay? I went to a couple of other cities. I should have left the country. But I know that the Royal Mounted Police was following me. I was given that information by the FBI later on. You were able to at least suspect that at the time through the truth? I knew that there was trouble. So my counter surveillance route didn't discover anything. So I kept on going. I was supposed to visit two more cities, and they were always one step behind. What is interesting to me is that they didn't catch me on the way out. You have to show your passport to the airline. I was known by name because I had to give that to the hotel, right? And I escaped by air. They would have to keep you on a list, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. It requires a good computerized updated system to track that. This was Swiss air, so. Well, you got lucky. Yeah. Part of life is luck. You bet. Other than that, the trip to Canada was a big success because it gave me the culture shock that I needed to not be blown out of the water when I get to the United States. So you hopped a few places in Canada and then Swiss air. I even had a relationship with a young lady. Canadian, French Canadian, regular Canadian? French Canadian, and she gave me a book, Winnie the Pooh, because we went to see the movie. And then she wrote a dedication, she says, to the nicest German I've ever met. Was she lying? No. Or you don't know. Speaking of Spike Craft, and that led to heartbreak too? No. That was sexual. I was not at that point. Ready for love? No. Ready to return to that old. Well, I was already married in Germany. That's the woman I loved. We should return to this. Yeah. So Swiss air, where did you land in the United States? When I came, where did I land? American Airlines, a flight from Mexico City to Toronto, but they made me deplane in Chicago. I have no idea. I think it was overengineering. That didn't make any sense to me. Why can't a Canadian just take a flight from Mexico City? With this stopover, this kind of nonsense. Yeah, but okay. But nevertheless, that was it, and then you landed in Chicago. Right. And tell me the story in America. What was the day-to-day life? Now, this is, now you're a spy. No, I got to tell you another funny story. Yes. There's two things that happened that could have ended my career as a spy right then and there. So I'm arriving in Chicago in the evening. It's already dark. I had no idea what kind of a hotel to take, and I picked one out of Yellow Pages and got a taxi. When I gave him the address, he looked at me like a little funny. Whatever, what do I know? Just keep on going. I need to get sleep because I was extremely tense, having gone through customs and border control. So we are going in the southern direction, and I noticed that the neighborhoods became less and less inviting. Didn't know what that meant either. I get into the hotel. It was a five-story brownstone, and something else looked funny. So the reception desk was protected by plexiglass. Not having enough background, I didn't know that this was unusual. All I knew is that there was a lot of crime in the United States, so I thought maybe every hotel was like that. So I go up into my room and drink a half a bottle of Johnny Walker Red because I've been- As one does. Because I was so damn tense, I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to get into a coma, which I did. And the next day I woke up with a head that was twice as big, felt twice as big, but I was prepared. I had aspirin with me, so I killed the headache and went outside to see if I can get something to eat. So I was right smack in the middle of the south side of Chicago. I didn't know that the south side of Chicago existed. I found out later where I was. So it was time to go very quickly. I go up there, and at that point I decided I would register at the next hotel under Jack Barsky. So I went to the bathroom, and I tried to kill off Mr. Dyson by burning his passport. Unfortunately, I was not trained in how to train passport, how to destroy passports. So I tried to burn it, and these things are flame retardant. It created a cloud of smoke, and I'm looking up there, and there's a smoke detector. Yeah. Oh, no. Okay, so presence of mind, I threw this thing in the toilet, and then took out a pair of scissors and cut it into small pieces and flushed it down. If that smoke alarm goes off, I'm busted. If some criminal steals, I had $6,000 on me in cash, steals either my passport or my money or both, I don't know what to do. Yeah, you can't go to the authorities, you can't do anything. There weren't any Russian Soviets in Chicago. Do you have any contacts inside the American? There was no plan B for Chicago at all. That's an oversight. I shouldn't have gone to Chicago. They could have shipped me into San Francisco or Washington, D.C. because both of them had Soviets. My end goal was to go to New York. Fine. I would have been a really, really dangerous agent if I had gone back and worked with the KGB, because I could have told them all the things, how to do it right. So, in that sense, there is some, given the scale of the KGB, there is some incompetence in the system. Some? A lot of incompetence. With regard to preparing me to be an American, it was almost total incompetence. Do you think that's representative of the way they operate? There is an incompetence to the logistics, to the strategies involved, all that kind of stuff? None of these guys had operated as illegals. They were outsiders to American society. They had interaction with Americans, but they all lived in New York. They lived in a compound in northern Manhattan, where they all lived together with their families. Most of the time, they spent interacting with themselves, with their own people at work. So, they really didn't integrate well? They did not know what it's like to be an American, to have a job, to live like an American. They didn't know it. It's interesting that KGB didn't put a high value to that kind of integration. They didn't know what they didn't know. By the way, this was mutual. Do you think the CIA had good knowledge of the Russian culture? Uh-uh. Same thing. There was a lot of lack of understanding, because good intelligence could have possibly avoided some of the high tension situations that we had when, in the 80s, we got close to nuclear war. So, good intelligence would be integrating yourself in society much, much deeper. Yes, and understanding that Ronald Reagan was not a warmonger, but he was talking about the end times because he was a Christian. But then that kind of integration can be dangerous, because you start to question the propaganda, the narratives on which the KGB is built, on which the CIA is built. Oh, yes. And then they always had the option of ignoring the intelligence that they're getting, right? Well, let me ask you this question, sort of to jump around. There's a lot of conspiracy theories in this current climate, I mean, throughout history, but now especially. And some of the conspiracy theories put a lot of power in the hands of the intelligence agencies, like CIA, FSB, Mossad, MI6. Basically, the conspiracy theories go that they control the powerful people in this world, and are able to thereby manipulate those powerful people and manipulate the populace in order to deliver different kinds of messages and so on. Given your experience with this kind of tension between competence and malevolence, would you say there's some truth to those conspiracy theories? Not one way. I think there is collusion, there's collaboration. But I would think that, like for instance, some folks in the CIA and the FBI are being used by the ones that are really in power. Power is money, power is wealth. I know power is not... It can go both directions. You can acquire wealth first, which leads you to power, or you can acquire power first. Yeah, power is also knowledge, I understand, and a position in society, in the military or in intelligence. But I don't think it's a straight one way that all the intelligence agencies control the powerful people in their country. You see what's happening in Russia. I mean, Putin dominates his intelligence agencies, right? Well, so the question is which way the direction goes, but you're saying that it's not one way flow of power. I would think so. And I also believe it exists, but it's not as prevalent as, you know, not every conspiracy theory pans out, and most of them don't. They're just damn rumors, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I guarantee you that they exist. There's collusion, there's people getting together. And not necessarily preparing a specific action, but more sort of a plan to go forward and maintain the position or even, you know, strengthen the position that they already have. So KGB, but we can generalize this, FSB, CIA, do you think a KGB agent would kill someone against international law if they were ordered to do so? So we talked about... They did. They did. And there's a famous case of one, I think it's Vasily Kuklov, who defected. He was a killer. He was a trained killer, and he had done assassinations in other countries. He was sent to West Germany to kill a defector, a KGB defector, and he decided not to do it. He talked to the guy, and he said, I'm supposed to kill you, I'm not. And then he eventually wound up in the United States. I have a connection to this fellow, because the KGB once asked me to go to California and see if the guy still lives and works there. And we... I found him, and we looked at each other. So it was an active KGB agent looking at a man that he didn't know was a KGB defector, looking at each other. Neither one knew who the other one was. I found out later. But he was able to survive. Yes. And, you know, there have been assassinations, not a lot, and you know that... That we know of. Good point. This is very difficult. The question is, how many lines are intelligence agencies willing to cross to attain... to achieve the goal? I think none of these agencies have the ultimate line. I think eventually the last line will be crossed if they believe it's necessary. Well, I think you can justify a lot of things, especially in this modern world with nuclear weapons, that you can justify that you're saving the world, actually. Let me ask a few difficult questions, and we'll jump back to your time in America, but... Vladimir Putin has been accused of ordering the poisoning and assassination of several people, including Alexander Litvinenko early on, all the way to Alexei Navalny. Do you think these accusations are grounded in truth? And we will return to a couple more questions, maybe, about Vladimir Putin's early days in the KGB, which would be interesting. Yeah, there's a phrase that I like to say in response. It's called plausible deniability. I don't think Putin gave a direct command to say, do that. He would just maybe muse. It would be nice if something were to happen. And then somebody picks it up and does it. Can you still man the case that Putin did not have direct or indirect involvement with this? Who would know? Well, the international reputation, perhaps catalyzed by Putin himself, is that he is the kind of person that would directly or indirectly make those orders. Perhaps the case there is he's somebody to be feared, and thereby you want that narrative out there. Yeah, sure. But the act itself, the poisoning of Litvinenko, and the assassination of the Bulgarian Markov with the umbrella, they all directly trace back to Russian Soviet intelligence. And so that's enough to be feared, right? My answer that I gave you is an educated guess. I can't pretend to know this for sure. It's frustrating to me because there's a lot of people listening to this would say, would even sort of chuckle at the naive nature of the question. But if you actually keep an open mind, you have to understand what is the way that intelligence agencies function? Is it possible to the head of an intelligence agency not to make direct orders of that kind? Where there's a distributed... No, the head of the intelligence agency would most likely give the order. Even though it's compartmentalized. Yeah, but not the head of state. Maybe not the head of state. Although in the case, this is the case in the United States as well, but certainly is the case in Russia, there are close relationships between the head of the FSB and the GRU, and personal relationships, not just even... The head of the FSB was now in jail? There's interesting details, especially coming out recently around the war in Ukraine. So let me actually ask about the war in Ukraine. All right. What is your analysis of the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the full-on invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, in February 2022? There's many questions we could ask. One is, what are the sins of the governments involved? What are the sins of Russia, Ukraine, America, China? Are those sins comparable? Who are the good guys and the bad guys? That was more than one question. Let me just give you the basics about this. Savvy observers saw this coming. They were a very small minority, because Vladimir Putin was pretty open about what he told the world his mission was, was the reestablishment of a strong Russia, the reestablishment of something like the Russian Empire, to unite all the Russian-speaking people in one country, and the world ignored him. I mean, he was open. It was at a conference in France, I believe, when he said this out in the open. And then what we had in the United States, we had wishful thinking. Obama had this reset with Russia. We all get friendly. And then when Putin invaded Crimea, we did nothing. And it just escalated slowly, but surely it was pretty clear. And they said, I think two years ago, there was an essay published by Putin. Whether he wrote it or not doesn't matter, but that was also out in public, where he was, again, quite clear what he was going to do. Now, how do you do this? With force. And the sins committed by the American government was that we ignored it, we were engaged in wishful thinking, and we didn't stop it with sanctions before the shooting started. To push back, I don't think you're fully describing, you are describing the sins of the Russian government and Putin. I don't think you're fully describing the sins of the American government here. Because not only did you describe the miscalculation, so not only did they not pressure correctly with sanctions and so on, and clearly respond to the actual statements in the essays and the words spoken. I know where you're going, but keep on speaking. Yes, but they also, at the same time, pressured Russia. And they also, as Putin himself said, there's a rat, and they pushed the rat towards the corner by expanding NATO. And arming Ukraine. And the military-industrial complex is a machine that led us. I think a lot of younger people... I mean, when I came to this country, and this is the country I love, I lived through 9-11. I lived through the full rollercoaster of emotion. I'm a... at that time, before that, and after, was a proud American. I went through the whole rollercoaster of being sold, I would say, a lie about the reason to invade Iraq and even Afghanistan. And I got to live through understanding of this military-industrial complex that leads to the expansion of empires, of the delusion that we have in the populace, in the government, that convinces us that we are the good guys, and somehow, with military force, we can instill our values, instill happiness, the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal, these ideas, into other lands. And we can do so with drones, and we can do so with weapons, and we can do so without significant cost from our own pockets. And so, this idea, this machine, doesn't just apply to Afghanistan and Iraq, doesn't just apply to Yemen and Syria, it doesn't just apply to China, it also applies to Ukraine, it also applies to Russia. Agreed. Two thoughts, if I may. First of all, one does not hear the term military-industrial complex in the public discourse these days. Eisenhower warned about it. Eisenhower was a capitalist. He was the President of the United States. So, it exists, and it is very powerful. The more weapons you can sell, the more you have to replace them, or send over, you have to replace them. So, yes. The other thing is, there's also a messianic streak that powers American foreign policy. We want to make the world just like us. Why don't they get it? Because they don't want to. It's almost like, it's not communism, but it's a very similar romantic idea that we can make the world, fashion the world the way we are. And that's the romantic side and the sort of honest side, but it doesn't work. It failed every time, right? Afghanistan is a royal mess and would never become a functioning democracy. I don't know if Ukraine can become a functioning democracy. Well, I don't know if American weapons can help Ukraine become a functional democracy. Yeah, absolutely right. But there's a huge amount of interest in seeing the world in black and white and selling the story of the world as black and white, that Ukraine is the symbol of democracy in this Eastern European world, and Russia is the symbol of authoritarian dictatorship. And the story is not so simple as many indices show. Ukraine and Russia are the number one and the number two most corrupt countries in Europe. There are two peas in a pod. One is bigger and one is, in this case, the aggressor. Now, two peas, the aggressor is still ultimately responsible. The person that throws the first punch, now there's a lot of people going to disagree where the punch came from. But there is magnitude. Yes. And the struggle by Ukraine for its sovereignty stretches back to the beginning of the 20th century. It stretches back even further than that. But there's been the Ukrainian people are proud people, and they've been in many cases tortured by those that sit in the Kremlin throughout the 20th century. The famine in the early 30s. And it's always, it's never the middle class and upper class that suffer. It's always the lower classes, the peasants in that time. This history stretches back far, and this is yet another manifestation of that. And there's a lot of interest at play. China watches closely. Russia, America watches closely. And there's an extra caveat here that there's nuclear weapons at play as well. Exactly. And this is the situation that is as dangerous as I have lived through in my entire life, I believe. And because it's not necessarily at the highest point of escalation, but it will be, in my view, a protracted crisis. And the longer that crisis lasts, the more of a chance there is of an accident. Yeah. One rocket. Yeah. There seems to be a strong incentive to prolong, to do siege tactics, to prolong this conflict over perhaps many years, which is terrifying to think about. And over that, a single rocket can lead to, given that there's leaders that might be losing their mind, and Ukraine is not part of NATO, the thing I'm really afraid of is that somebody might think it's a good idea for Russia, so Putin might think it's a good idea for Russia to send a message by launching a nuke against Ukraine, because they're not part of NATO. So surely the West is not going to respond. What is the West going to do if Russia nukes Ukraine to send a message? I don't know if anyone knows the answer to that question, but it's a terrifying question. And I don't know the exact protocol that needs to be followed to launch a nuclear strike from NATO's end, because we have several countries in NATO that have nuclear weapons. So let's say for France to fire a nuke, does the United States have to agree? I don't know how that works. I don't know if anyone knows how that works. I worry, now we have different, very kind of anecdotal perspectives on these things, but the people I've interacted with in the DOD, Department of Defense, in the military, there is a compartmentalization. There is a bureaucracy, and within that giant bureaucracy, there's incompetence. We'd like to think that there is really well organized, for really important things, there's going to be the best of the best in the world that's going to execute on the correct decisions, both geopolitically, militarily, all that kind of stuff. And I've seen enough to know that competence at any level of government, at any level of the military is not guaranteed. Let's go back to the law of hierarchy. The government is the biggest hierarchy there is, and so invariably politicians find their way to the top. And once you have politics dictating substantive decisions, they're going to be weak or wrong. I don't know how this could work any other way. Right now we have some functional idiots in the central United States government. Well, let me, because you said that, I think elsewhere you said that Putin was not a good KGB agent. That's right. A mediocre one, but is an excellent politician. Yeah, and a good organizer. He was known as a really, really good organizer. When Yeltsin hired him as prime minister, he cleaned up the mess because Yeltsin, under Yeltsin Russia deteriorated tremendously and it became sort of a mix of an oligarchy and a criminal enterprise and chaotic. So he had skills that made him a good executive. Absolutely. Now let's go back to him as a KGB agent. He was a KGB agent, I mean, you know, according to him once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent, but 16 years, let's say, something like this. What do you think about from your experience, now you're maybe the same age as him, approximately the same age as him. He's a little younger. A little younger. Yeah. What do you think about the KGB experience he had made him the man he is? What aspect of that, from your own experience, how much does that define you, who you are, how you think about the world, how you analyze the geopolitics of the world, how you analyze human nature? Now I got to tell you one thing, he had a different type of training than I did. Mine was one-on-one and he went to school, so to speak. Classroom training. Right. But fundamentally he was not a top agent. This is very simple, there's only one thing you need to know. He knows German pretty well. So where was he deployed? In East Germany. Not in West Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Austria. That's where they sent the best, right? One would think, generally. We're learning here. Right. So this is your classification of where they sent the best. You know, people classify all kinds of stuff, like what is the best university in the world, what is the best football team in the world, and you start to get a sense. The good guys get sent, the best athletes get sent to, well, we can disagree on this, but the football team is. But you have a sense. And you're saying that the best agents would have been sent to West Germany. One would think so. Now this is not a forcing argument, but I also have it from a word from the horse's mouth. Which horse? I mean, what kind of horse? Oleg Kalugin. You know who Oleg Kalugin is. He's still alive. He was at one point the head of counterintelligence for the first directorate espionage, right? And Putin was in the first directorate and reported to Kalugin for a while. And Oleg told me to my face that Oleg was not an impressive agent trainee or agent. That Vladimir Putin was not impressive. Not impressive at all. Now he's biased, given his current situation. Well, yeah, he could still make it up because he had this big ruckus when he was in parliament and called Putin a war criminal about the war in Serbia. Not only could he make it up, I wouldn't trust his analysis. I mean, I have to, you know, when people, I've been working very hard even before this war to try to understand objective analysis of all the parties involved. You have to really keep an open mind here to see clearly, to understand. If you are to try to help in some way make a better world, in this case, stop this war. Or have all the countries involved flourish, bring out the best of the people, remove the corruption and the greed and the destructive aspects of the governments and let the people flourish. For all that, you have to put all the biases aside, all the political bickering, all the, I don't know, all the biased analysis. And there's a lot of propaganda that says that, in fact, Putin was a good agent. How else would he rise to the ranks, right? Because he was a good politician and he made a lot of good connections within the KGB. Allow me to say something. You just taught me a lesson. And the lesson I should have figured out myself because I keep on telling people that in the intelligence world, you never know the truth 100%. So when you said, oh, I could make that up, of course you could have. But you get to a point where you're forced to make a decision or have an opinion and then you use your best educated guess. So I'm going to take the certainty of the statement that I made back because it's quite possible that you're right. What I've noticed about Vladimir Putin, and this is true about, for example, Donald Trump and all those kinds of divisive figures, that for some reason people's opinion on the details of those people are very sticky. Once you decide this is a bad guy, there's like a black hole and people are not able to think one act at a time. You don't have to, like, that doesn't somehow justify this, that somehow doesn't remove all the evil things that are done, but you can analyze clearly each of the actions. And to me, it is interesting to see how did this man rise through the ranks. Now you're saying that to be a KGB agent, there's a lot of skills involved. And perhaps raw technical skill of spycraft is perhaps not related to the skill of rising through the ranks. And you're saying as a politician he was good at rising through the ranks. But lying and influencing, that is something that is significant, is a significant talent and ability that an agent must have. That helps you as a politician. Continuing the kind of thread of the role of KGB in defining the heart, soul, and mind of Vladimir Putin. Let me return to Yuri Bezmenov, who was a Soviet KGB agent that wrote a four-step framework for ideological subversion on a national scale, as practiced by the Soviet Union. So the four steps are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. He had a lot of other kind of systematic ways of describing this kind of stuff. So can you speak to some of these ideas about the systematic large-scale ideological subversion goals of the KGB? Is there truth to that kind of those ideas? Yes, but I think I already sort of mentioned that I think Bezmenov was a fraud. And I have, again... Can you elaborate? Good arguments, let's put it this way. First of all, we know that the KGB was involved in active measures, which is, you know, you can call it fake news. Seeding fake news into the countries that are your adversaries. And the Russians have been doing this lately by meddling in our election and focusing on the left and the right fringe and influencing them to become more left and more right. And Vassily Mitrokhin has in one of his books, he has a whole chapter about active measures. Okay, so what he has to say about the department, and I forgot what department it was, was the one department that was the least desirable for KGB agents. Because these were desk jobs for people who had to come up with fake stories in countries where they didn't quite know too much about the country. Now, there were some successes, like one of the two most famous successes that I'm aware of is that the canard that the AIDS virus was concocted in a CIA lab. And a lot of people around the world believed that. And the other one was that J. Edgar Hoover was a secret cross-dresser. That is still known by a lot of Americans who are of a certain age that this was the truth. But Mitrokhin actually traces it back to a story that was placed in a sort of left wing but close to mainstream French magazine, and it was then taken up by more larger newspapers and well-established papers. So they had some successes, but this kind of a massive, well-thought-out campaign to destabilize the United States, I don't believe that KGB was capable of doing that. Mitrokhin seems to agree with me. I was trained, I would think, I was one of the crown jewels of the agents. One would think that they used the best that they had to help me how to become an American, and they didn't have a clue. So if you don't know how a country operates, how do you come up with this kind of a very detailed, long-term plan that's also timed, two years this and one year that and all that? Yes, so we should actually just clarify. So he has this whole idea that there's 15 to 20 years that are needed for demoralization, where you're basically infiltrating a country or people from a young age, manipulating their mind, you're destabilizing them, that's the second step that takes two to five years. You target the country's foreign relations, defense, and economy, you create a crisis artificially, and then you normalize it as if it always was this way. So it's basically saying that the KGB is capable of, at scale, over many years, manipulate an entire population of people. And this is kind of, there's a lot of people that believe in conspiracy theories that are amenable to this kind of idea. Now, my own experience is that there is, in fact, just a giant amount of incompetence, and that this is something that's actually very difficult to pull off. Because it's incredibly difficult to achieve this kind of manipulation. I think it would require, first of all, not much bureaucracy, not much slowing down. You have to have incredible, in the modern world, digital systems that are able to do surveillance, manipulation. There has to be a strategy that is carried out in secrecy across a huge number of people effectively, that also requires you hire the best people in the world. I think it's difficult to execute on this kind of thing if you compartmentalize, because there has to be great collaboration. There has to be a great, what is it, a unified vision. Coordination. And coordination across multiple groups. There has to be, I mean, it's very difficult to do. Now, nevertheless, especially with technology, this becomes easier and easier. So the bar becomes lower and lower to achieve mass surveillance becomes easier and easier and easier. Mass manipulation through platforms, because we're now digitally connected, you can now do that kind of manipulation. So it becomes more and more realistic that you could do this kind of thing. But you're saying that, no, intelligence, first of all, intelligence is hard. And to do it at scale, and to do it well, and to do it in a way that it's also not just collecting information about the populace, but manipulating the populace is very, very difficult. Right. Now, let me give you another argument why I think that Besminov was a fraud. I mean, I already have Mitrokhin on my side, and my personal observation of the incompetence that I witnessed. I mean, they really, really didn't know what they didn't know. So now Besminov was KGB. Where was he stationed? In India. He was a low-level agent in India. And I told you, the one thing that the KGB was really good at was compartmentalization. How does Besminov in India find out about this massive plan that should have been super secret, right? He made it up. Sorry. And you know why he got away with it? Because Americans eat that up. Because it's not our fault. It's like the damn Russians that are doing all that bad stuff. Speaking of the damn Russians doing all that bad stuff, you know about the Internet Research Agency. They have been doing quite a bit of damage. And I'm now familiar with the world of enhanced artificial persons. These are the avatars on Facebook and Twitter and so forth that look like real people. And there are quite a few of them. And I have a good friend who operates in that realm. And he uses, for instance, facial recognition when he thinks that there's a suspicious character, say, on LinkedIn or on Facebook. And very often he finds out that that person exists, but it's not the person who it pretends to be. So basically detecting the artificial, the enhanced artificial. Yes, but he can also make them. You think the United States doesn't do it? We do it too, but... Well, this is to push back against your pushback, right? Yeah, Besminov might be a fraud. But is it possible, especially in the modern age, to purchase these kind of large-scale systematic operations? Wouldn't you, as a government... More so....that's investing billions of dollars into military equipment, in a world that's more and more clearly going to be defined by cyber war versus hot war, you start to have serious meetings, large amounts of hires that are working at, how do we manipulate the information flow? How do we manipulate the minds of the populace? How do we sell them a narrative? So even though he might have been making up a story because people eat it up, could it speak to some deep truth that's actually different than the truth you came up in as a KGB agent? I agree with you 100%. It's much easier. All you need is an army of nerds who also know... No offense. No offense to the nerds. That's a term of endearment, I guess. Yes, of love. I love nerds. I used to be one myself. Once a nerd, always a nerd. So what I was going to say here is... All you need is an army of nerds. And also experts in the culture of the target country. And nowadays, the world is different. There's a whole lot more fluidity. There's a whole lot more people that, like say Russians for instance, study in the United States. Chinese, an army of Chinese studying in the United States. They have a lot more knowledge of how we function than the KGB did. And it's vice versa. Not as many Americans in Russia, but we have some. But the Chinese and the Russians have an advantage here. Can I ask you a question based on your experience? So I have been talking to a lot of powerful people. And some of which have very close connections in this particular conflict, Ukraine and Russia, but in other places as well. I don't believe I've ever been contacted by or interacted with an intelligence agency. CIA, FSB, MI6, Assad. I don't think I have... Well, let me say explicitly, I haven't had an official conversation, which is what I assume I would have because I have nothing to hide. So I think there's no reason for people to be secretive. But why is that? Would I know? Am I interesting at all? How are people determined if they're a person of interest or not? And I guess the question... Some of it I ask in a bit of a humorous way, but also perhaps there's truth in some of the humor. Would I know if I have ever interacted with an intelligence agency spy? Well, you don't know that you haven't been contacted. But certainly not... I think you never had a conversation that related to intelligence in any way, shape, or form, right? Right, like where another person introduced themselves. Yeah, introduced themselves or becomes... Sort of wants to be your friend and then talks about these types of topics, right? Yeah, but... There's people because of whom I'm interacting with, I mean, even with Elon Musk. If you think about Elon Musk, there's a lot of people that are part of the conversations that happen. How do I know they're all trustworthy? They all present themselves as trustworthy. Now, again, I have nothing... So this is for the intelligence agencies. I have nothing to hide. I am the same person privately as publicly. Well-intentioned, real, no controlled, no weird sexual stuff where you can manipulate me. What else? No drug use? No drug use, no skeletons in the closet, none of that kind of stuff. But I don't know... I mean, just even having these conversations, I tend to trust people as a default. Me too. And you start when you think, well... Especially with some of the people I've been talking with and some of the traveling I'm doing, I'm realizing there's hard men in this world. There's military, there's serious suffering, and there's war, and there's serious people that are doing serious harm. And so you have to be careful of thinking who to trust. When the person approaches you with a smile and asks you a question, my natural inclination is that person is a cool person, I'll answer the question, I'll become a friend. But it becomes difficult when you realize that there's things like intelligence agencies with thousands of employees, there's people that are doing major military actions that involve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soldiers. This is serious stuff. And so how do you know how to operate in this world? The folks that you're interacting with have a responsibility not to tell you what they shouldn't tell you, right? And most of them probably won't. And I'm guessing occasionally they will say, well, I can't go there, right? So what you are aware of is sort of public. And what you're doing is you're collecting it and you're editing it to some extent. You're not changing the verbiage. You just repeat what they say. So from that angle, you're not privy to any real secrets. What you have possibly that could be of use is you learn to get to know the person. So I'm thinking there's a good possibility if you get the interviews in the East that somebody may actually approach you and ask you what's your opinion. I just hope they approach me and introduce themselves properly. I just, there's a kind of, I mean, would you know? Like how many Russian spies are there in the United States? How many American spies are there in Russia? Do you have a sense? Is it just like with the GRU? No idea. Is it possible there's like tens of thousands? Or like thousands? Not thousands like I used to operate. We are too hard to train and we weren't that successful to begin with. But particularly Russians and Chinese, you know, both governments know who is going abroad. And I guarantee you there's a lot of amateur spies. They're being asked, you know, help us out, you know, do something for the motherland. Crowd source spying. Yeah, sort of. Not serious training, but yeah. And yeah, for instance, this lady, I forgot her first name, Butina, she was a rank amateur. She used social media to communicate with Moscow. She had no training, but she was reasonably successful. I mean, she got, and the difference between, let's say the current Russian intelligence and the KGB, Vladimir Putin and his henchmen are okay with people being caught. Because, and every time I go and talk and give a talk someplace, I'm always asked this question, how many Russian spies do you think we have here? Because that scares the people, right? And Putin likes to scare people. The KGB was very solicitous of the agents. They didn't want anyone of them caught, right? So that's a big difference. So for the FSB, getting caught sends a strong signal to the world that there's agents everywhere. Yeah, there could be many more. And there probably are. Because the world, again, there's a whole lot more travel going on, a whole lot more interaction, studying abroad, doing business. And there will be attempts at espionage probably every minute in this country. That doesn't mean they will be successful, no. But there is a cottage industry now that is doing quite well that teaches companies how to fortify themselves against industrial espionage or also foreign actors spying. It's all over the place. Yeah, as it becomes easier and easier with digital, with cyber, that becomes a serious, very serious threat. We might wind up in a world where nobody knows anymore what's up and what's down. If I was to have a conversation with Vladimir Putin and or Vladimir Zelensky, is there something you would ask about the time in the KGB, the time in its past? We are, all of us, men and women, are creations of the experiences we have throughout life, early on in life and through the formative experiences, successes and failures. Yeah, you just said the key words. I would ask, without giving away anything, just being high level, your biggest success and your biggest failure? As a politician or as a KGB agent? We're talking in the realm of KGB. When the wall came down and he was in an office, a KGB office in the city of Dresden, East Germans were besieging Stasi offices and they also dropped by the KGB office. It was pretty threatening. It looked like they would actually storm the office and get the documents and stuff like that. Eventually, the first demonstration was told that if they come any closer, weapons would be used. So they disappeared and then they came back. I don't know, somebody in that office called Berlin and said, what are we going to do? Are we allowed to use force? And the answer came back that Gorbachev said, absolutely not. This is where Putin, all of a sudden, he was at one point a member of the greatest, the most powerful intelligence organization in the world and all of a sudden he was powerless and he had to watch how, this was a defeat, big one. It's supposedly a powerful intelligence agency cowering, crawling back into a position of weakness. And he probably promised himself never again. Russia needs to be great again. The KGB, FSB, Russia, the Russian Empire, needs to rise again. And that there's a feeling for him that that's, as he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union being a great tragedy, there's a feeling like that was, that was like never again. Yeah, and I believe that he has a strong conviction that, I don't know if he's religious, he carries a cross now, but I don't know what that means, but somehow it's the destiny of the Russian nation to be great. And that is sort of, whether it's determined by God or some higher power, that is very important for him. Of course that nationalist idea is one that Americans share as well. It could help a nation flourish, so by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It's how it manifests itself is the question. One other thing, if I were to get a chat with the Ukrainian president, I would ask him how many lives, what is the equation between giving up some land and how many lives are worth this land? And it's a good way to phrase the question. Of course that question gets you killed in Ukraine. But because there's another part of that equation, which is it's not just land versus lives. It's the sovereignty, the knowledge that you're free and you're self-determined. And it's not about fighting for the particular land. It's saying we are messed up, corrupt, we have problems. It's a messy world, but it's our world. I think Stephen Crane has a poem about a man eating his own heart. And he was asked how does it taste? And he said it's bitter, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. And that there's a sense of like I want this is not just about land, this is our nation. The same love of nation that Putin has for Russia, the greater Russia, this vision of this great empire, I believe Ukraine does as well. There's levels to this game. And Ukrainian people are some of the proudest people throughout the history of the 20th century, throughout the history of Earth. The Polish people are proud people. You can just see in World War II, the people who said, fuck you. You're not having this, we will die to the last man. There's different cultures that kind of really hold their ground, and Ukrainian people are that. I have to admit in that respect I'm a bit of a coward. I could not do what Zelensky has been doing. I would sort of try to find a way to carve out something that I can live with. However, if that force, that evil force, gets to my family. Right. There's lines. Yes. That's right. You become the world's bravest man if somebody crosses that line. Oh, yeah. You mentioned something about you've not been to Moscow back, and that it might not be safe for you to travel there. Yes. Can you speak to the nature of that? As somebody that successfully got out of the KGB, how are you still alive? A number of reasons. First of all, when my story became public, that was six years ago, I was pretty old. And so the folks that may have a personal interest or may have had a personal interest in doing me harm, most of them don't live anymore. That's number one. Number two, I did not, I was a hired hand, a German. I did not betray the motherland. That's a crime that is punished by death. You betray the motherland. And the other thing is, if there is a, you know that these kinds of operations to assassination in another country are very difficult to plan and implement, and if there's a list of people that they don't like, I may not be at the very top. Having said that, if I wind up, say, in Moscow, or even in countries like Turkey, where there's a lot of lawlessness, accidents can easily be arranged, and that's just sending another message. You know, it's like, you know, we can do a lot of things. You're powerful. Yes. Do you think it's safe for me to travel in Russia and Ukraine? I think you know very well how to communicate in both countries. You know, you've shown this in this interaction, that you have a lot of empathy for the people you'll be talking with, and empathy means good understanding where they're coming from, and that there are lines that you can't cross. Yeah. Like the question that I was going to ask Zelensky, you're not going to ask. Good for you. Yeah. Isn't that the funny thing about this world? There's lines. There's lines everywhere, even in love, even in personal relationships. There's lines you should not cross. Yeah. How did you finally get caught? I resigned in 1988. Let's actually talk about that. Okay. You resigned. There's warning signs. Yeah. There's yet another choice, yet another crossroads. Yes. Okay. What was the calculation? What was the choice to be made? To give a little background, it was 1988, and I thought my time in the U.S. would soon end because I thought 10 to 12 years, it was already past 10 years. There was no indication that they indicated that they said, you're done. But in December of 1988, I got this one thing that I never wanted to see. So we had a system of signals that either one of those diplomat agents could set at a spot that I passed by every day, or I could set where they would pass by, like on their way from where they lived to the United Nations, for instance, who would just drive. And mine was the signal spot for me was on a support beam for the elevated atrium in Queens. And it was morning in December that I walked by there and routinely looked at it and I never expected anything. And there was this red dot. It was about the size of my fist with a red paint. And since you have done it already, I think I can curse in this moment because it's the only way I can really indicate how I felt. I said, oh shit, because that was the danger signal. It was like, you are in severe danger and you need to get out of the country as soon as possible. There was a protocol that I was supposed to follow. I wasn't even supposed to go home. I just needed to, was supposed to get my reserve documents that I had hidden in a park in the Bronx and make a beeline to the Canadian border. I wasn't ready. So I just like ignored this thing. I mean, I couldn't ignore it, but I went on to work. Got on the A train, went to work, and then went to my cubicle and stared at the computer screen all day because I couldn't think. I could think only about what to do, what to do, what to do. The reason for this indecisiveness was that I was a father at the time. My little girl by the name of Chelsea was 18 months old, and I was there when she was born. I took her to her dorm. I watched her grow up. I watched her take the first steps and always look at me with these big eyes, lovingly look at me. That is when I started my reentry into the human race because I just fell in love with this girl. That's when love came back, and it was completely unexpected. There's a lot of fathers who understand, particularly fathers of girls, who understand what happened there. I still thought I need to go back because there was probably some danger, but I hadn't figured out how to take care of the girl. I'd leave her, but maybe she needs to have a good life and grow up and have a chance. Her mother was from South America. She had a fourth-grade education. That would have not worked very well. So I played for time. Obviously, I could be sick. I could be in a hospital. There was a precedent where I was sick, where I couldn't communicate for about three weeks. So I just did nothing. That was on a Monday. On a Thursday was my regular shortwave transmission. I listened, and they explained a little in a few sentences, we have reason to believe that the FBI is on your case. You need to execute the emergency procedure. Come home right away. I still had some time because the radio could be broken or the transmission was bad, or I still could be in a hospital. I gave myself some more time, and then something happened where they forced my hand. It was the only time that a Soviet agent was anywhere near me on the territory of the United States. So I'm waiting for the A train on a dark morning still in Queens, and there's this man, this short man in a black trench coat, comes up to me from my right, and he whispers into my ears, you got to come back or else you're dead. I can't imitate the Russian accent. It was a Russian accent. It was a pretty strong accent. The you're dead phrase can have two meanings. An American would have said, or else you're busted, or else you get arrested, or else you're dead is very strong. Now you have to take it seriously to some degree because I knew that they had a history of assassinating or at least trying to assassinate defectors. That obviously raised the stakes a little bit, but I just talked myself into believing this was just bad phrasing. But at this point, I knew and they knew that we both knew, right? So there was no more guessing. He found me, he talked to me, I know. So now I had to act. In the next radiogram, I was asked to execute a dead drop operation where they would give me money and a passport. That was in a park on Staten Island. It was a location that I found and I described. I was always praised for my ability to describe spots that are easy to find. So that was a given. The only thing that was different for this operation, they scheduled it for the dark. But it was still no problem because it was in a park about 100 yards in by next to a fallen tree. It would be hard to miss. So I go to Staten Island and I read the signal that said I put the container in the drop. That was the protocol. There's a signal that the person who hands over something puts at a spot not too far from the spot itself. That means I would go in and just pick it up. The reason I actually went to pick up this container because there was money in it. So I didn't have to make a decision yet. I could throw away the passport. It was like I was still trying to figure out what to do, what to do, what to do. So I get to the spot, I get to the tree and I had a flashlight with me. There was nowhere in the park. Even during the day, this park was not... It was more almost like a little forest. And I don't see the container. It was supposed to be a crushed oil can. Pretty sizable, hard to miss. And I do a double take and I look again and I look around. I look around a little more, see if they misplaced it. I can't find it. It's the only one that one of those operations failed. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense. So as I'm walking away from this, sort of numb emotionally, I said to myself, I'm staying. Yeah. Some kind of signal, some kind of muse just spoke to you. That decision was made for me. Now you know that I'm a Christian now and I think it was like God told me this. But it was certain there. It was right there. That was it. That was it. That was it. So what I did to, well first of all, divine intervention helped me to find a good explanation. I sent them my last letter with secret writing. I communicated to them. I said I wish I could come but I can't because I have contracted HIV AIDS. That was the best lie ever because nobody wanted to have AIDS in their country. Those days it was a death sentence, right? And I knew, we had conversations when I was back in Moscow, how they were snickering about what's going on in the United States, you know, that depraved culture and you see they're killing each other. And the depraved culture took over your being and how you're saying. And I was convincing enough, I even traced it back to a girlfriend I had once that I actually reported on that she, you know, I interacted with this lady who had a boyfriend at one point who was a drug addict and she was infected and she infected me. So they believed it. They sent, and I asked them to give my dollar savings to my German family. They gave them some but they told my family that I already passed away, that I'm dead. They believed it, 100%. And I guess the agent who took the money took half of it for himself. So that was it and the next three months I made sure that I wasn't reliably at the same spot in the same time frame. So I went to work in different paths at different times just to, you know, just as a safety measure, so to speak. And not huge, but, you know, it kept me, allowed me to keep my sanity. And obviously after I sent the letter, I threw the shortwave radio in the Hudson River, destroyed the one-time pads that I still had. So I was now ready to... For a new life. For a new life and live out my life as an American, undiscovered, but, you know, starting to work on my version of the American dream. And the first action was telling my wife, the mother of this child, you know, she always wanted to have a house and said, you know what, we should buy a house. And a year later we moved into the suburbs and then I said we should have another child and we had another child. So, and I had a career, I did pretty well. I moved a couple of times, wound up in a McMansion. But before that, my second house was actually in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. And this is where I was discovered by the FBI. And how did they know about me? If it hadn't been for this defector, Vasily Mitrokhin, who was an archivist in the KGB archives, he was actually pretty high level. He was in charge of the relocation of the archive from Ljubljana to Yasenovo. And he really hated, he had reason to believe he hated the Soviet system. I think I remember that his son was quite ill and he could have gotten treatment in England and he was not allowed to travel to England with his son. So, his hatred, he tried to figure out what to do and how to do damage to that system. So, he started copying notes, little slips of paper, handwritten, that he smuggled out in his underwear and his socks over the years. And then he transcribed them with a typewriter and then put the pieces of paper into some kind of a container and buried this in a stash. It was, I believe, in 1992 when he showed up. That was already, the Soviet Union was gone. So, he showed up at the US embassy in Moscow and told them what he had. It was on a weekend and apparently there was a junior person in charge and he said, you know what, what you got we are not interested in, it's really old. That's a career limiting move, right? Because Vasily Mitrokhin then made his way to one of the Baltic republics and contacted MI6. And they said, come on in old fellow, we'll have a cup of tea. And so, they managed to get this stuff out of the dacha and get it to England. And eventually, MI6 shared it with the FBI and there wasn't a whole lot of information about me. It was very, very little. It was like there's a person by the name of Jack Barsky who is an illegal operating in the northeast of the United States. Now, if it was Jim Miller, they wouldn't have found me. Jack Barsky was easy to find. So, they checked social security and Jack Barsky had gotten his social security card at the age of 33. Bingo, okay. All they knew though was that I wasn't illegal, that I was still living there. They didn't know whether I was active, inactive. And the other thing that they knew, that I was a really, really well trained agent because I was still there, right? So, they took, I think, almost three years to investigate me, watch me from a distance because if I was still active, I would have found out that somebody is investigating me. So, you started being less and less active in terms of? Oh, I stopped completely. What I mean is? Oh, surveillance detection. Yes, surveillance detection. After three months, I stopped altogether. Okay. Yeah, good point. And FBI is still very careful. They were very careful. They pretty much watched me and at one point, I had a house in the country with one neighbor. At one point, that house was for sale, so the FBI bought it. And they put a couple of agents there and just didn't keep a closer eye on me. There was no indication that I was still active, but they were still cautious. But at one point, they were able to plant a bug in my kitchen, a listening device. And my wife and I didn't get along very well. There was a lot of friction and she was constantly complaining about things and I got sick and tired of it. And one day, we had an argument in the kitchen and I chose to deploy the nuclear option. And that is telling her what I sacrificed to be with her so she would understand that I am there on her side. I'm supporting her. If something doesn't quite fit, it is not because I don't love the both of them, Chelsea and Penelope. When I said that, the listening device was active so the FBI was hearing my confession. I was once a KGB agent, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I quit and stayed here because of you and Chelsea. And that also made it clear to the FBI that I wasn't active anymore. They had both of that. Now, they knew an attempt to turn me would have been useless because you turn somebody who's active. But they figured there was enough reason to treat me nicely because they figured I had a lot of information that was as aged as it was, but it was still important for the FBI to get to know. And so one day, it was a Friday evening, I'm driving back home from the office and I'm being stopped by a state police. As I'm going through the toll, it's a bridge over the Hudson and they had to pay a toll. And he got me right where I stopped and he said, could you please move over here? It's a routine traffic stop. I thought nothing of it. I had forgotten at that point that I once was a spy. It was gone. And then he said, could you please step out of the car? That should have aroused my suspicion. That's unusual, right? Routine traffic stop. Yeah, I did it, no problem. And then again, somebody came from the right, came into my view and he flipped his ID and he said, FBI, we would like to have a talk with you. Now this is my now friend Joe Riley, who actually is the godfather of Trinity, my last child. But anyway, he told me later that when I heard that phrase, all the blood left my face. I became totally white. But I recovered very quickly and he said it himself. So, you know, they took me to a vehicle and there was another agent in the vehicle and he had a gun strapped to his ankle. So it was pretty real. First question I had, so am I under arrest? And the answer was no. And then my instinct kicked in and my ability to operate very well under high pressure situations. And I asked him, so what took you so long? You know, the intent of that was to defuse any kind of tension. And I saw a smile. Instant friends. Yeah, I knew that I had to make them like me. And I think by now I know I'm a pretty likable person. I would say so. So when they took me to a motel, which they had rented, there was two wings at a right angle. They bought all the rooms in one wing and they had a guard at each end of that wing and they took me in the middle. And there were some props there, some binders with labels and I immediately thought, this is pretty silly because what I noticed that the labels all referred back to my early years. I knew that they didn't know much else. So I told Joe that afterwards and that was not a great idea. But anyway, but I volunteered, I made the following statement before we even started the interview. I said, I know there's only one way for me to and my family to have a chance to get through here without much damages if I'm completely 100% cooperative and it's my intent to do exactly that. All right, so we spent about two hours in the interview. They allowed me to call my wife, tell her that I'm going to be late. That indicated to me already that they would let me go. And after two hours, they let me go. But they had the area covered with a whole bunch of people and the head of that team talked to me and he said, if you think of running, we got every intersection in this area covered. You can't. I didn't say anything, but I had no thought of running. So and that was the beginning of another phase of my life where I was cooperating with the FBI for quite a while and living still undercover for several years until I had real good documentation and became an American citizen seven years ago. Today's seven years ago, so recently. Yeah, quite recent. The bureaucracy took a long time to figure out how to make me real and also not put me in these witness protection programs to keep my name and then just make everything official. So for instance, I had to change my birth year simply because if I, Jack Barsky was born in 1944, if I kept 1944, the FBI would have helped me commit a crime because I would have collected Social Security four years sooner. So anyway. Details of that. Yes, it took quite a while and when I finally got the call from the Office of Homeland Security, the lady says, this is Agent so and so from Homeland Security. Can you come to the office tomorrow? And I said, let me look at my calendar and then I said, wait a minute, what am I talking about? What time do you want me to be there? Because I had waited for that moment for a long time and I was sworn in right then and there. It was a good feeling to walk out of there because I had a country again. And I love this country just as much as you said you love it with all its warts and its problems that we're going through right now. And then the last thing that changed my life again, and I don't want to get into details because it's a little complicated story. I never wanted to be a public person. And then I was discovered through a number of dots that were unlikely to be connected. It had to do with a relative, with a half brother of my wife who lives in Germany. Was taken to Germany by his mother who came to visit somebody, not us, but that somebody that he came to visit lived 50 miles from our house. And that my wife and this half brother never met in person before. They knew about each other through social media. And when he found out my background, he was a conductor of the German railroad at the time. He said, oh, this is a big story. That's going to be big, big, big. Well, he happened to know this one person who happened to know one of the star reporters of Der Spiegel. And after she did some research and determined that I was real, she was on my case. And she happened to know Steve Kroft, the guy from 60 Minutes. Did you see all these connections? I had nothing to do with it. That's how life works. Dots get connected somehow, sometimes. For most of us it doesn't. Stuff happens. You get lucky. You don't know what's happening. You've gotten lucky a few times in your life. Yeah, I think I must be part Irish too. Yeah, so it's been an interesting ride. I'm just still shaking my head about all the stuff that happened. It's been a fun one. You wrote, because I'm allowed to leave behind a documented legacy of my unusual life, I'm praying that the legacy will be described by a single word, love. So, let us return to the thing we started the conversation with, which is love. What role does love play in this human condition, in your life and in our life here together? I give you an answer by telling you what happened one day. I gave a presentation at Microsoft headquarters. That's a strange beginning of a love story, but yes. No, that's not a love story. There's this beautiful young lady sitting in the back, and she's paying a lot of attention. Found out later that her job at Microsoft, her job title was storyteller. It's soft marketing, right? Yeah, you could say that. Yeah, but if you can't afford somebody like that, that's good. Anyway, she, question and answer, she raised her hand and she asked me, all the things that you have done and you have experienced, what's the number one lesson you've taken away from your life? That was a new question for me. I've never been asked that question. And I thought about it for 20 seconds, and then I came up with this phrase that we all know, love conquers all. Because in my life it did, in the end. And it's the strongest human emotion, and that is what makes us human, really. And you spoke about the, I mean, offline, as I've spoken with you, it's clear to me how transformative, how powerful the life of your children are, your daughters, and your life, and who you are, and why you think life is beautiful, and why you think this country is beautiful. Now that I'm pretty mature, to put it mildly, I'm also more loving towards many more people. You know, these things like random acts of kindness for strangers, I do them, I'm looking for them now. And you know what? It's good for me. Well, welcome to Texas, because this random acts of kindness to strangers seems to be a way of life. Which is one of the reasons I love it here. It just reminds me why I love human beings, is that there's just this warmth, this connection. Yeah, and Georgia is the same thing. Amen. Do you have any regrets? Looking back at life, do you wish you'd done something different? Well, I could have, but then I would have had a different regret. I betrayed the wife, the German wife that I loved. I really did love her. And I betrayed her. But if I don't betray her, then I betray the child. That is a source of so much love for you now. So maybe life is a kind of, you get to choose your regrets. You don't get to avoid them. It's a little bit of a strange way of putting it, but there's no other choice. I tell you what I don't regret, and that may be, you probably understand it now because you have enough background about me. I don't regret having lied to my mother. Because I had no really strong emotional relationship with her. She took care of me. She was proud of me, but we didn't hug. We didn't interact emotionally whatsoever. So you don't feel like you betrayed that love that... Well I did, I know that she was looking for me until the day she died. She wrote a letter to President Gorbachev asking him for help to locate me. She checked with the Stasi. She just was hell-bent on finding me and couldn't find me, so she passed away without knowing what happened to me. Now there was this rumor that was flying around, and she possibly may have bought into that rumor because my cover for when I went to the United States was that I changed careers again and I joined an institution in Kazakhstan that did space research. Intercosmos something something, and I had a piece of paper that invited me to start there, and it was a forgery. Intercosmos never existed. But people knew that in Kazakhstan there were super secret facilities. One of my classmates, old classmates from high school, started the rumor that I died in a rocket accident. And everybody knew that. So when I came back to Germany, went back to Germany, I found the telephone number of this girl that had dumped me. I called her and I said, so guess who this is. Maybe you hold on to your chair. She says yes. I said, this is Albrecht. It's a good payback. No, we actually met. So there's two elderly people in their 60s who meet each other after so many years, and the one that ended the relationship started the conversation by saying, you know what, I made a really bad mistake. And the tears came down her cheeks. I wasn't asking for that. I wasn't happy about it, but it did feel good. Now, a while later, I knew why she said she made a mistake. I met her husband. Yeah, I mean, there's a, Tom Waits has a song called Martha, where he made, where an older gentleman calls somebody he used to love and they have a conversation. They're both married now. And it's, sometimes you can meet people from your past and it gives you a glimpse of a possible different life you could have had. Oh yeah. And you know, I was actually, when she said I made a mistake, and I was thinking to myself, no, you didn't. There was none. There was nothing left. There was nothing left. And also the person that she became, personality-wise, wasn't as attractive as I remembered her. You know, it's puppy love. But it's still love. Oh, it was. It was passionate love for sure. And I would have thrown myself under the bus if I could save her. It was that strong. And it's just as strong as the love for my two girls. Yeah. Life is full of moments and periods like that of love, and that's what makes life so freaking awesome. But it does come to an end. And so does this conversation, I guess. This goes on for many more hours. But yes, do you think about your own death? Huh? Do you think about death? Do you think about your own death? Yes. Are you afraid of it? Yes. Even though I'm a Christian. As a Christian, do you have a sense of what's coming after? Or is it full of uncertainty? I have a hope. I have a hope. You know, there's a lot of Christianity which is quite logical. A lot of Christianity which is also, you know, the life of Christ has a lot of proof. But, you know, I became a Christian starting with a head. And I was already quite old. And, you know, when you don't get this faith very early, it's tougher to buy into everything. You know, there are some things that are difficult for me to understand and believe. But there's many, many other things that I can't explain only with the existence of a God. But whether He lets us go again for an eternity, I just hope. I won't convince somebody else at this point, which doesn't make me a really, really good Christian because I'm supposed to evangelize. But there's still a fear. Yeah. There's a fear and a hope. On the other hand, I know that... You see, this is how I approach the last years of my life. I will not mentally or physically get decrepit. I will do everything I can do to be alert and fit. I still run. I run four or five times a week. And I'm going to start lifting weights again. Good. So you stay physically and mentally sharp. Yes. Go out with guns blazing. And I once read a book written by a medical doctor. He said most people, when they're becoming mature, the rest of their life is a slow downward move. Not for you. No, the last years are pretty bad. He said, you got to do this. Boom. That's pretty good advice from a doctor. And if nothing else from Christianity, whichever parts you take on, one of the big ones is love. Yes. That's something you've lived from the very beginning before God was part of your life, before anything was part of your life. It seemed that love was part of your life and has been a consistent thread throughout. Yes, sir. And there's a short sentence in the Bible that says, God is love. And the other thing I want to say, the Christian morality is, I can sign that with my blood. God is love. Amen. Jack, you're an incredible person, lived an incredible life. Thank you for talking today. Thank you for telling your story. Thank you for being who you are. And thank you for being all about love. This is a beautiful conversation. It was an honor. Yeah, and I appreciate the tough questions that you asked. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Barsky. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Edward Snowden. You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time, they will. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/dSVLjAdo8UA

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Deep Learning: Advice on Getting Started with fast.ai - Jeremy Howard | AI Podcast Clips

So what advice do you have for someone who wants to get started in deep learning? Train lots of models. That's how you learn it. So like, so I would, you know, I think, it's not just me, I think our course is very good, but also lots of people independently. It's very good, it recently won the COGX award for AI courses as being the best in the world. I'd say come to our course, course.fast.ai. And the thing I keep on harping on in my lessons is train models, print out the inputs to the models, print out the outputs to the models, like study, you know, change the inputs a bit, look at how the outputs vary, just run lots of experiments to get a, you know, an intuitive understanding of what's going on. To get hooked, do you think, you mentioned training, do you think just running the models inference? Like, if we talk about getting started. No, you've got to fine tune the models. So that's, that's, that's the critical thing. Because at that point, you now have a model that's in your domain area. So there's, there's, there's no point running somebody else's model because it's not your model. It only takes five minutes to fine tune a model for the data you care about. And in lesson two of the course, we teach you how to create your own dataset from scratch by scripting Google image search. So, and we show you how to actually create a web application running online. So I create one in the course that differentiates between a teddy bear, a grizzly bear, and a brown bear. And it does it with basically a hundred percent accuracy. Took me about four minutes to scrape the images from Google search in the script. There's a little graphical widgets we have in the notebook that help you clean up the dataset. There's other widgets that help you study the results to see where the errors are happening. And so now we've got over a thousand replies in our share your work here thread of students saying here's the thing I built. And so there's people who like, and a lot of them are state of the art. Like somebody said, Oh, I tried looking at Devan Gari characters and I couldn't believe it. That one was more accurate than the best academic paper after lesson one. And then there's others, which are just more kind of fun. Like somebody who's doing Trinidad and Tobago hummingbirds. She said that's kind of their national bird. And Susie's got something that can now classify Trinidad and Tobago hummingbirds. So yeah, train models, fine tune models with your dataset and then study their inputs and outputs. How much is Fast.ai courses? Free. Everything we do is free. We have no revenue sources of any kind. It's just a service to the community. You're a saint. Okay. Once a person understands the basics, trains a bunch of models. If we look at the scale of years, what advice do you have for someone wanting to eventually become an expert? Train lots of models. Specifically train lots of models in your domain area. So an expert what? We don't need more expert like create slightly evolutionary research in areas that everybody's studying. We need experts at using deep learning to diagnose malaria. Or we need experts at using deep learning to analyze language to study media bias. Or we need experts in analyzing fisheries to identify problem areas in the ocean. That's what we need. So become the expert in your passion area. And this is a tool which you can use for just about anything. And you'll be able to do that thing better than other people, particularly by combining it with your passion and domain expertise. So that's really interesting. Even if you do want to innovate on transfer learning or active learning, your thought is, I mean, it's one I certainly share, is you also need to find a domain or a data set that you actually really care for. If you're not working on a real problem that you understand, how do you know if you're doing it any good? You know, how do you know if your results are good? How do you know if you're getting bad results? Why are you getting bad results? Is it a problem with the data? How do you know you're doing anything useful? Yeah, to me, the only really interesting research is, not the only, but the vast majority of interesting research is like, try and solve an actual problem and solve it really well.

https://youtu.be/4CTDdxfSXF0

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Rick Rubin: Legendary Music Producer | Lex Fridman Podcast #275

There are no right answers for anything involved in art. We're all trying experiments to find a way. And even for the things that I work on, I don't have a set way that I do anything. Every, I come to every project blank. Maybe you're just a meat vehicle and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else. I believe we know close to nothing, close to nothing about anything. If we embrace that not knowing, we'll have a healthier experience going through life. The following is a conversation with Rick Rubin, one of the greatest music producers of all time, known for bringing the best out of anyone he works with, no matter the genre of music or even the medium of art, or just the medium of creating something beautiful in this world. And the list of musicians he produced includes many, many, many of the greats over the past 40 years, including the Beastie Boys, Eminem, Metallica, LL Cool J, Kanye West, Slayer, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Dixie Chicks, Aerosmith, Adele, Danzig, Red Hot Chili Peppers, System of a Down, Jay-Z, Black Sabbath, I can keep going for a very long time here. Most importantly, Rick is just an amazing human being. We became fast friends, which is surreal to say, and is just an incredible honor. I felt truly heard as a person when I spent the day with him eating some delicious Texas barbecue, talking about life, about music, about art, about beauty. This was a conversation and experience I'll never forget. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rick Rubin. Are you nervous? I'm not shaky, but I would say I feel uneasy. And I feel like the sooner we start talking, the more relaxed we'll get. Yeah. Well, maybe we should sit in this moment and enjoy the nervousness of it. Let me start with Nietzsche. He said, without music, life would be a mistake. What do you think he means by that? Let's talk some philosophy. Let's try to analyze Friedrich Nietzsche from a century ago. It seems like music has the ability to bring us so much depth in our soul that's hard to access any other way. And without it, there would be a loss beyond the pleasure of it. It feels like it's a window into something else. Something that no other medium can express quite the same way. I would say not as automatically. Something about music can do it automatically. Maybe poetry or maybe certain abstract forms can get us there. But there's something about music that really can get us there quickly. But it's also the time, the place, the history. There's something about, like a lot of my family's still in Philly. There's something about driving through Jersey and listening to Bruce Springsteen. And then it just, I'll get like emotional. Like listening to like, I'm on fire. That like, one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, there's a haunting kind of feeling that there's a haunting kind of strumming to it. It's not a strumming, it's actually picked as a country feel to it, almost like a Johnny Cash feel actually. And it, I don't know, it makes me feel, so for people who don't know, I'm on fire. That song is, I guess, a love song to a woman that you can't have because she's married or she's with somebody else, I guess is quite a lot of love songs. But there's something about the haunting nature of the guitar and then it has to be driving through Jersey. And I feel like everyone has fallen in love with a Jersey girl at one point in their life. I don't know if that's true for everybody. But I feel like that. I haven't either, but I just feel like that. There's something about Bruce Springsteen is like, yeah, I've been there. And that just takes you to a place of emotion that you just, that captures love, that captures longing, that captures the heartbreak of just the way time flows in life. And the fact that it's finite and just all of that in a single simple song. What else can capture that? Yeah, I don't know. But it's true that there's a connection both between time and place and music. And certain music growing up on the East Coast didn't really resonate with me until I spent time on the West Coast. Eagles being an example. When I lived in New York, the Eagles didn't really speak to me. ZZ Top didn't really speak to me. And then when I started spending time in California and driving through Laurel Canyon, all of a sudden the music of the Eagles felt appropriate somehow. And I started listening to it more. Got it, so not until you went out West can you understand the sounds of the West. So it's really like New York has a sound. What other places have a sound in the United States? I think every place does. And that said, sometimes we can get an experience through music of a place. Like we can resonate with the music and not understand why. And then maybe when we go to the place where it was created, it's almost like we have a knowingness of that place. It's not a strange place anymore. Yeah, Stevie Ray Vaughan with blues and Texas blues. You can just listen to Texas Flood and just, again, there's like a woman you're missing, a broken heart, and somehow that connects to the place. The Eagles, what song of the Eagles connects with you? Are we talking about like Take It Easy or are we talking more like Hotel California? I'm thinking Take It Easy, but both are great. Yeah, there's certain songs when I started learning guitar when I was young that's like, I would like to be the kind of person that not only knows how to play this song, but understands this song. And like have that song be something I played 20 years ago. And I've lived with that song for a while. Like Hotel California is an example. Obviously there's the solo, but there's also the soulfulness of the lyrics, which I still don't understand. And it could be about anything. And as you get older, I feel like the meaning of the song could be anything. Yeah, I think that's true. I think that's the beauty of them. I think when the person wrote them, they may have had one interpretation, but it's not contingent on us getting that interpretation to like it or resonate with it or feel it. In some ways, the best art is open enough where the artist gets to have their experience when they make it, and then the audience gets to have their experience when they listen and they don't have to be the same. And then it connects thousands or millions of people together. There's a togetherness of music when you share that music, when you're listening to stuff together, like in a car. First of all, the car is a sacred place. So I work in part on autonomous vehicles. And you start to think, well, what are the things you lose when the car stops being the central part of American life? And then you get to the car ownership. It just feels like the car when you're alone, it's like a therapist thing, session, because you get angry at other humans, and then you get to like sit in your own anger and emotion. You get to listen to the song on a long road trip and remember, like run through your memories, the heartbreak, I don't know, the one that got away, but also like the beautiful moments, all of it. Yeah. And all of that in the car. Yeah, driving also serves another purpose. And it's one of the things that we can do that we have to pay attention enough not to crash, but typically can essentially run on autopilot enough where we could be thinking about something else or concentrating on something else. And the difference between concentrating on something or trying to solve a problem when you're solely trying to solve a problem versus when you have some little task that's keeping you occupied, I find if I have something slight to take care of, it frees a more creative side of my mind to better solve problems. You know, I'm kind of jealous of people that found that in painting, for example. They'll be drawing or painting and listening to, so that's the small task you do. You're coloring in the lines. It's like this gentle, peaceful, slow process that requires just a small fraction of your mind and then you can listen. Some people listen to podcasts that way. Some people listen to music that way. Yeah. Yeah. How do you do it? How do you free your mind? Running is one of them. There's a process. So most freeing of the mind for me has to go through a process of a bit of pain for a bit. So doing something difficult, it's just like a airplane taking off or something. So that's, like for example, running. The first few miles would just be just, first of all, the physical aspect, which is like, ah, you're so fat, you're out of shape, you're, this is getting old, this, that. Okay, that slowly dissipates. And then the demons come in who are like, you should be getting this and that and this done. You haven't gotten it done. You're like breaking promises, all those kinds of voices coming in. And after that, maybe mile four, it's like, fuck it. You just run. Run with the wind at a very slow pace, but with the wind. And then you could think. So it's the footsteps, the physical activity, then you can deeply think about stuff, ideas, sort of design, whether it's programming design stuff or like high level life decisions, all those kinds of things, I would say running. I used to build bridges from toothpicks. I used to be a thing. It's an engineering, I guess some people like glue together airplanes and stuff like that. But the bridges, it's such deeply honest work because at the end of it, you're gonna have to test that bridge and you're gonna see how good your work was. The little details, but also the big picture. Do you use glue or no? Yeah, I use glue. So it's not pure physics. It's materials engineering too. Because the way you want to do it is you actually split the wood as thin as possible and then glue it back together because the glue is really strong, except for the arches and things like that. So you're building arch bridges, which is a whole nother skill because you have to bend the wood. And it's so cool because the thing can hold thousands of times its weight. And then you get to watch it explode at a certain point from the pressure. And when you do a really good job, it doesn't explode in a kind of some weak point that you didn't anticipate, just kind of starts cracking. Everything cracks, everything explodes. It's just pieces fly everywhere. And it's literally hundreds of hours of work just explode in front of you. And that's a metaphor for life maybe. And it's all for nothing, except for the journey that you took to get there. And no one understands. Speaking of which, back to Nietzsche. These questions are ridiculous. So you're gonna have to try to figure out what the heck I'm trying to do here. So Nietzsche also said, a line I love, which is, and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. Do you, Rick Rubin, ever feel crazy? Or maybe you're the one who's sane and everybody else is crazy. You know that the dancing, the joy of the music, of just feeling the music and everybody else just doesn't understand. And this doesn't have to be literally about music. This is about art, about creation. I would say I feel different. And it's hard to say, it's like, which side of the equation is crazy, you know? Did you ever find a group of people that you get, that get you? Yes. Is that what producing is essentially? Is you try to find the moments when you just get each other? No. I would say they're definitely, certain artists with certain temperaments, when you're around them, it feels like you can finish each other's sentences, you know, just see the world the same way. Comedians as well. And that's not essential for the two of you together creating something special. No, no. So it could be attention too? It could be anything, it could be any, there's no rules. It'd be like, think of it like a coach. A coach could bring what they have to bring to any talented individual and help them find their way. And sometimes it's the right, the right coach for the right athlete really works. And other times there's a mismatch. Have you seen the movie Whiplash? I did, I saw it when it came out, so I don't really remember it well, but I did see it. So there's a coach type of figure. Yes. Who is pushing a drummer to create, to grow as a musician, but also to create something special. I don't know if it's even special music skill wise, it's a special moment. I don't know what he's trying to create. From one perspective, it's just an abusive, a person who selfishly gets off on being abusive to those he's with. But from another perspective, the way I saw that movie, it's just the two right humans finding each other at the right moment in life and risking destroying each other in the process, but maybe something beautiful will come of it. Do you think that's a toxic relationship? Or is there, does some of that movie resonate with you as that sometimes is required to create art? That kind of suffering. Yeah, it doesn't. Well, there's suffering involved, but not that kind of suffering. Not for me. There are some people who that's their process and that's whatever works. There's no right answers for anything involved in art. We're all trying experiments to find a way. And even for the things that I work on, I don't have a set way that I do anything. Every, I come to every project blank and see, I really listen to what the artist plays and says. And through what they explain they wanna do, help find the best way to get there. Was it implicit in the movie that the mean teacher liked being a mean teacher? You said the way you described it was that he got off on treating people this way. Do we know that to be the case? I don't remember that in the movie. But we sometimes project that onto people, people who are really rough on students. You start to think, well, maybe, maybe that is fundamentally who they are. And if it's fundamentally who they are, that there must be some pleasure in it or it's an addiction of some sort. But it could be also a deliberate choice made by the teacher. It also could be a lineage. Like, in the Zen tradition, there are sort of the mean Roshis who if you do something wrong, take a physical action. And it's just in the lineage, it's considered that's how you teach. And I didn't come from that lineage. So I'm much more of a, I feel like it's more of a collaboration between people working together to make the best thing. It's not a boss-slave relationship at all. It's much more of a, let's find our way. And we agree at the beginning of the process that if either of us or any of us don't like what's happening, we say it. And the goal is to keep working until we get to a point where we're all really happy with it. It's like if we make something that an artist likes and I don't like, or that I like and they don't like, we haven't gone far enough. In terms of lineage, the ones that seek destruction and the ones that seek happiness all come from the same lineage. We all came from fish. So somewhere in you, deep down, there's the other stuff too. It's just that you haven't been yet, by the way, because you said every new project, including maybe starting today, is an opportunity to channel, to plug into something that was always there and you haven't gotten a chance to plug into. You mentioned listening. How do you listen to a person? How do you hear a person? When you first come in, like we just met, what's the analysis happening? But I mean, with me is one thing. I'm an artist of sorts. I program and I'm just, I'm human, I guess. So we're all creating art. How do you see, like, how do I bring out? So for people who don't know, I mean, obviously everyone knows that you've produced some of the greatest records ever, but the way I see that is you just brought out the best in a lot of interesting artists. And so in order to bring out the best in them, you have to understand them. You have to hear the music of their soul. Hopefully I'm not being too romantic here, but just like, is there something you can say of how difficult that is? If there's a process, if there's tricks, if it's luck? I think it starts with this, again, coming in blank, like not having any preconceived ideas, being open and really listening, listening and not thinking about what you're gonna say next or what your opinion is or any, basically being a recorder and just hearing what comes in. And then once you hear what comes in, processing that information and trying our best to do that without any of the beliefs that we might have to impact what that is. If I ask you a question, I don't wanna hear what, I don't wanna listen to you and have any reaction happening when you're speaking. I wanna be as neutral as possible. For me, my goal is not to form an opinion, it's to understand. So if anything, I would draw you out further and just ask questions to really understand. And if you say, or if you say something that I, that somehow triggers me in a way that that's a, I wonder how he came to that, I would ask, I wouldn't challenge you, I would ask, like, how did you find that? How did you get to that place? Form a place of curiosity. You would try to figure out- Yeah, I wanna understand who the person is and through questioning we can usually get there or through just spending time together, you find out who the person is. What about finding out and figuring out how to then take the next steps of bringing out the best in them? Like, is it just trial and error? Like, let's try this. It's definitely trial and error. It's always trial and error. Are you afraid of making a mistake? Like, let's add this instrument, let's remove this instrument. Let's try. Let's add this line, let's remove this line. Let's try. And let's be open. So one of the, we don't really have rules, but one of the agreements in the studio is any idea that anyone has, we'll always demonstrate it, we'll always try it because I can describe to you an idea and you can think, that's a terrible idea, let's not do that. And then I can play you the idea and then you can say, oh, that's really good. And it's completely different because when we're told something, we have to imagine what that is. And the way you see something and imagine it and the way I see something and imagine it are completely different. So you say a thing and now there's two humans that play that thing in their mind differently, in their imagination, and then there's a cool creative step and when you actually do it to see how it differs in the imagination. And then the difference or the commonality will be like an exciting little discovery together. Well, so many groups of people making things together in a room, one person will suggest something and someone else in the room say, that doesn't sound like a good idea, let's not do that and then they move on. The testing of every idea is really important and that's how you get to see, oh, that's not at all what I thought it was gonna be. Happens to me all the time, I know, because someone will suggest, why don't we do it like this? And I'll think, that sounds bad and then I'll think, okay, let's try it. And then we hear it and then, you know, eight times out of 10, it's nothing like I imagined and great. And you try not to have an ego about the fact that you thought it was not a good idea in your head. There can't be any ego in this, it doesn't... If everyone's there with the purpose of making the best thing we can, there's nothing else, you know, there can't be any boundaries to that. So there's a moment I saw with, I know you don't love talking about previous things you've done, but it's cool to dive in there every once in a while. I'm fine to talk about anything. To sample it, anything? I have this pain, I gotta talk now. I'll think of something ridiculous that would make you change your mind. You mentioned, I saw a video of you with Jay-Z working on 99 Problems where you suggested acapella, opening the song with acapella, just no instruments, just voice. That to me, I mean, that's one of the characteristics of the things, of the ways you've brought out the best in an artist is doing less, sort of the tending towards simplicity in some kind of way. So that choice of acapella is really interesting because I could see a lot of people think that that's a bad idea, but it turned out to be a really powerful idea. Can you maybe talk about the simplicity, how to find simplicity, why you find simplicity is beautiful? It does appear to be beautiful. What is that? Yeah, I don't know where it comes from. It has been with me from the beginning of my work. The very first album I ever produced, the credit I took was reduced by me instead of produced by me for that reason. Like I like the idea of getting to the essential and I have a better idea now that I've done it for a while, but at the time it was purely an instinctual thing. And part of it is a sonic, there's a sonic benefit, which is the less elements you have, you can hear each of the ones that are there and they can sound better. And the less there are, the more space they could have around them and the more you can hear their personality. If you were to record 10 people playing the same guitar part and you listen to it, it would sound like guitar. And if you record one person playing a guitar part, it sounds like a person playing the guitar. It's different than just guitar. And often in the studio, the idea of building upon things and adding layers to thicken, to make it sound bigger, sometimes the more things you add, the smaller it gets. So a lot of it is counterintuitive until you just in practice see what works. Try it, to try removing stuff until it's just right. It's the Einstein thing, make it as simple as possible, but not simpler. That's such a, like finding a stopping place, just keep chopping away and chopping away. Yeah, there's something we also like to do called the ruthless edit, which is, let's say you're at a point where it can work for anything, but I'll give you the example with an album. We've recorded 25 songs. We think the album is gonna have 10. Instead of picking our favorite 10, we limit it to what are the five or six that we can't live without? So going past even the goal to get to the real like heart of it, and then see, okay, we have these five or six that we can't live without. Now, what would we add to that that makes it better and not worse? It's just, it puts you in a different frame when you start with building instead of removing. And you might find that there's nothing you need to add. Sometimes. Sometimes something happens when you get to the real essence. Then when you start adding things back, it becomes clear that it was just supposed to be this tight little thing. Can I ask you like a therapy session question? So you mentioned somewhere that one way to kind of think about music, to get into music, is to look at the top like 100 albums of all time and just go down the list and like, just take it all in like one piece of artwork. So I was doing that for a while. It's a cool experiment, because unfortunately I have to admit, I've gotten lazy and stopped taking in albums as albums. And I looked at one interesting top 100 list, top 500 actually, which is put together by Rolling Stone. And they put, this is the therapy session part, and this has to do with simplicity too. They put Marvin Gaye's What's Going On at number one. Spoiler alert. So I'd like to maybe get your opinion on that choice. The reason Marvin Gaye is really interesting, and it'd actually be cool to play What's Going On in a second, but when you just listen to his acapella, just listen to his voice, it is really good. It makes me wonder if it's possible to pull off most of his songs with no instruments. In many parts, there's so much soul in just Mercy Mercy Me, What's Going On. There's so many songs that you could just be like, I wonder if you could just go raw, or maybe in parts, or maybe do what you do with Jay-Z, just open up with nothing. Anyway, there's something so powerful to a great soulful voice. Do you mind if I play it real quick? No, please. What's going on? This is probably one of my favorite songs. I mean, it's up there. Hey, what's up now? What's up? This is a big party, man. Let's go. That voice. Oh. There's some just very subtle backing vocals. Oh. Ha ha ha. This one hurts. Father, father, we don't need to escalate. I wonder who the father he's talking about is. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, so for people who don't know, his own father ended up killing Marvin Gaye. I mean, that one is really painful. I mean, for a lot of people, your relationship with your father, your mother, I mean, there's different dynamics, but it's almost like part of life is resolving some kind of complex puzzle you have with the people you love, the people close to you, or the people who are not there, all those kinds of things. That's so much pain in that, we don't need to escalate, father, father. I never thought if it's, I always thought it's his father directly. Yeah, I don't get that. It could be, but I don't, I feel like it's a more masculine spirituality. Like a father figure, or just broadly some kind of spirituality? Could be like God. Father God, mother God, you know, like could be, I don't know. But there's so much, it's like both hope and melancholy. You're saying war's not the answer. It's like you don't tell your father war's not, your blood father war's not the answer. It's a strange conversation. It's a bigger conversation than a personal. Don't you think it feels like war when it's personal? What's the difference between, war is personal too. It's only leaders think about war in a geopolitical sense. When people that fight wars, you lose your brothers. You lose, I mean, death is just right there. So it might feel just like that. But yeah, there is a dance between like the personal and like talking to the entirety of the society. It's like John Lennon, Imagine. Also a song where, is that hopeful? Is that cynical? Is it like melancholy? Like heartbroken? Like you hope, you wish things would be a certain way and they're not. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if John Lennon is giving up on the world in Imagine. Yeah, I don't know. No, it's an interesting question. There's another John Lennon lyric in, let me think of what it is, take me a second. Different songs keep coming into my head, not the one that I'm looking for. And you keep pressing next. Across the universe, nothing's gonna change my world. And when I hear that, I hear it as hopeless. But I don't think, I don't believe that that's, well, it may be how he meant it, but I don't think that's how it's normally taken. And it's also the taker is important. I'm generally optimistic and hopeful, so I always look for the hope. And actually, the harshest love heartbreak songs are always somehow hopeful to me. That's a love song. To me, a song about losing love is a song about the great capacity for love in the human heart. That's what I hear. So to me, losing love is exciting. Because it's like, that means you really cared. That means you felt something, you feel something, you can sit in that pain, and that pain is a reminder what it means to be human. When you're that, what is it? We're just listening, the only man who could ever reach me was the son of a preacher man. So it's like that early love or something, or partially sexual or whatever. That's not as interesting to me. It's fun, it's great. But it's that heartbreak, that's the reminder that it can go deep. Although that's a damn good song. Have you ever heard the Detroit mix of the Marvin Gaye album? No. Call it up. By far better. Mind-blowing, I just heard it recently, it blew my mind. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] Oh wow, reverb. Distant. Interesting. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] Feels like it's all around the room more. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] More voices, more voices. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] My father. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] He's layering his own vocals. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] Ha ha ha. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] Feels like there's multiple people singing. ["Distant, Distant, Distant"] That's beautiful. Seems to have more energy. If you listen to the whole album, even though you just said you don't listen to albums anymore, the Detroit mix of the whole album changes the album a lot. I mean, that felt... So that's the opposite of a cappella, I would say. Yes. Because it's... There's layers, there's... And maybe, I don't know if you remember, but if memory serves me correct here, he produces this own album here, Marvin Gaye, was the producer on this, I believe. I believe so. And this one sounds more like it's a get-together. And the whole album sounds more like a get-together, where it's a group of people in a room playing music together, whereas the album version sounds more like a recording. This sounds less like a recording and a little more like a party. Now, you had a series of conversations with Paul McCartney, which is amazing, that people should watch. But is there... This is continuing our therapy session. Is there a case to be made that what's going on is the number one album above The Beatles, White Album, or Abbey Road, above Pet Sounds? Can you see a managed case? There's always a case. I mean, there's always a case. Every... There's no... In reality, in art, there is no metric that makes sense. So you could put numbers on things, but it's like, is this apple better than this peach? Like, it's not really a fair comparison. But if you just had to keep one to represent the human species, that's the way I think to the aliens. So I think it's a very personal decision. I think you can make your choice to represent the human species, and I'll make mine, you know? Well, I would pick The Beatles over Beach Boys, so that's my... If I became dictator of the world, I was talking to the aliens. But I don't know the full historical context to the impact of the music. I don't know if that's something to consider, like this kind of thought experiment of imagining what it was like back then to create, to go into the studio, to do such interesting work in the studio, as opposed to listening to just as a pop song, almost. Because I've never been able to understand Beach Boys, God Only Knows. The song God Only Knows? But all of it, the album, the Pat Sounds... In My Room? In My Room? That song. What's your favorite on the album? On the Pat Sounds album? Pat Sounds. The opening track. Do you mind if I play it? Please. It's too fun. That's part of their trip, though. You open the heart with the fun? It's possible. Original mono and stereo mix versions. What's the opening song? Wouldn't It Be Nice? Yeah, that's the song. The best part is the ending, yeah. And then back to fun. We could say goodnight and stay together. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be nice to wake up together? But we're not. There's heartbreak in this one, too. Still, to me, George Harris, like, is that the way about the album? While My Guitar Gently Weeps? I mean, that, the Beatles, it's so hard to, depending on the day, I'll say a very different song that's my favorite song, but I often return to While My Guitar Gently Weeps as my favorite song. Spectacular. Anything George Harrison, honestly. Something in the way she moves. What would you classify that? There's, like, several Beatles songs, categories of Beatles songs. So that's, like, the melancholy love songs or ballads or something like that. Yesterday, Let It Be. Do you have favorites? So from your, like, how have you changed as a man, as a human being, as a musician and music producer, ever having done that lengthy interaction with McCartney? Hmm. Any time you're around someone who's such a hero and you spend time with them and they're a human being, it helps put perspective on everything. Oh, so they're just human? Well, obviously. I mean, everyone's just human. But I remember the first time I got to see Paul McCartney play live, it was in a stadium of 70,000 people, and he started playing and I started crying. And I couldn't believe I was in, even with 70,000 people, I couldn't believe that this man walks the earth and that I'm in the same place as him, and he's the person who wrote that and played that, and now he's here playing it for us. It's mind-blowing. That's the voice. It's overwhelming. Is it inspiring or is it, like, because sometimes when you have, and I've gotten a chance to meet, I mean, I love people in general. Every person is fascinating to me. But, yeah, when you've been a fan for a long time and you meet a person, sort of, I'll just remove present company, it's like, oh, they're just human. So it's both inspiring that just a simple human can achieve such beautiful things, but it's also like almost wishing there were gods moving around us. It's somehow peaceful. It's more comforting to know that there's bigger fish. I'm just a small fish, and then there's bigger fish, and they will take care of the ocean for us. I think we're all capable of being big fish. I don't think that there are special people. I don't think it's like that. I would make a case, so the variety of artists that you worked with and brought the best out of, it does seem that you're out of this world. So do you think you would know, like, if you're the same kind of species? Maybe you're just a meat vehicle, and you're channeling ideas from somewhere else. I feel like I'm channeling ideas from somewhere else, 100%. Have you asked questions about where from? I believe we all are, though. I believe we're vehicles for information that when it's ready to come through, it comes through, and the people who have good antennas pick up the signal. But I'm sure you've had an experience in your life where you've had an idea for something, and you've not acted on it, and eventually someone else does it. And it's not because they're doing it because you had the idea and they stole your idea. It's because the time has come for that idea, and if you don't do it, someone else is going to do it. It's being broadcast by whatever the source is. Whatever the source is. Yeah, I tend to see humans as not quite special in that way. It's different kinds of antennas walking around, listening to ideas. And ideas that are—I like the notion of Richard Dawkins of memes. It's kind of the ideas of the organisms, and they're just using our brains to multiply, to select, to compete, to evolve. And humans, we really want to hold on to the specialness of our body, of our mind, but it's really the ideas. So if Rick Rubin was born two centuries ago, you wouldn't be a music producer. You'd be—I mean, maybe, but you have an antenna. And if no signal's coming in, you'd be hearing potentially a different signal. Is there— I think we all have our own antenna for whatever it is that we— maybe not everyone has tuned into their antenna to see what it is that their strength in bringing through is. I'm lucky in that it found me because I didn't even know this was a job. I sometimes wonder—I mean, a lot of young people, a lot of people wonder, what's the purpose and the specs of my antenna? What am I put on this earth to do? I can live a thousand lives. There's so many trajectories. And imagine the greatest possible trajectory that reveals the most beautiful thing I can possibly create in this world, live the most beautiful way. What is that? I feel like that's a good exercise to think about because it's also liberating to think that you can do anything. I mean, that—more and more, I suppose that's kind of life. It's like society is pushing conformity on you. I thought I had my own flavor of conformity. I thought I was supposed to be following. And then early on, I would say in the late 20s, you realize, wait a minute, you don't have to do what teachers tell you to do, what parents tell you to do, what society tells you to do. I would never wear a suit if I listened to my colleagues in the community who think a suit is the symbol of—what is it? A symbol of conformity, actually, which is hilarious. But it's actually a kind of rebellion and everything else of that nature, doing these silly podcasts. I have a question I have to ask because you brought up the suit. Do you wear the suit? Is this your daily uniform outside of podcasting? For the longest time, it was some kind of suit. And then recently, coinciding with going to Texas, I'm such a loner. I'm an introvert, and there's a bit of a hiding from the world when I wear other stuff. I really want to not make fame, recognition, money, all of those things a motivation at all. And the world kind of wants you to make those motivations. Not the world, but I would say maybe the Western world, maybe America, maybe a capitalist system does. That's a choice to buy into that or not. Right. It takes a brave person, a person of character, to not buy in. I'm like a baby deer trying to find its legs. You don't have to buy in. I love people, and I think I'm kind of an idiot, and so when other people say, do this and do that, there is a pressure there. It's actually very difficult to not listen necessarily to the advice of others, and yet keep yourself fragile and open to the world. It's easy to be like, I'm always right, just kind of sticking your ground. If you want to be vulnerable, if you want to connect with people and just wear your heart on your sleeve, then you're going to listen to them. I mean, that's the double-edged sword of it. But then again, that pain, if you don't let it destroy you, you can grow from that. Has fame affected you at all? Did you unplug from the system at some point? Same. I've always been sort of removed. I don't feel like I'm part of any system. Do you feel famous? I'm aware that when I go out, people say nice things to me, which is great. But that's about it. That's about as far as it goes. But it doesn't affect your art, about your creativity, or your thoughts. Like when you're sitting alone and thinking about the world. It can't. It can't. It's a destructive force. The reason that you're who you are, and the reason that you're finding the success you're finding, is because you've been true to yourself to get to that stage. So to start changing that, to either conform to someone else's idea of what you should be doing, it just seems like it doesn't make sense. Do you have a sense of who you are? Because I don't necessarily have a... I don't know. I know that I really like making good things. And I know that I'm crazy about it, in that it's like an obsession. And I want things to be as good as they could be, whatever it is. And if I finish a music project, and I have a window of time where I'm not working on music, I might be moving the furniture around in the house. I'm always looking for a creative outlet to find a way to make something better. Or there was a period of time where I was in a weird corporate situation that didn't allow me to flourish. And I focused the creativity in on myself, and I lost a bunch of weight and changed my life. So that was the kind of art, like you've gone through a whole process of losing weight, getting in shape, getting healthy. That was a kind of creative act. It certainly was. It wasn't an intentional creative act, but I had a lot of energy. And I just... a series of events happened. I read a book. At the time, that was my heaviest. I weighed about 318 pounds. And I'd never been... I'd been sedentary my whole life, basically laying on a couch working on music. So I've never been physically active in my life. And I read a book about a guy named Stu Middleman, a runner, who ran a thousand miles in 11 days. And I thought, wow, I get out of breath walking to the corner, and another human being can run a thousand miles in 11 days. I feel like I have bad information. Clearly I'm doing something wrong. And I reached out to a person that Stu mentioned in the book, Phil Maffetone. Who's a legend. I really appreciate him as well. He's Math180Method2. He's such an interesting... I think he focuses on... Heart rate training. And he was the first person to talk about essentially a... Low-carb stuff. Paleo-keto diet. For a person who's healthy. 40 years ago. For a person who's going to be healthy, who can exercise and actually perform at an early level. He's the first person when I talked about heart rate training, him and other endurance athletes he influenced, he gave me permission to run slower. Yeah. It was the first time I realized, oh, I can run long distance as if I just run slower and then take that seriously. And I actually fell in love with running very much so. Because for me, everyone's different, but for me the love of running happens in the longer distances. Did you read Born to Run? Great book. Amazing book. There is something special about running. And everybody has their own journey with it. And even ultra-marathon running, those kinds of things. It is like many journeys, one that can pull you in. Like you won't be the same person after. And I try to be deliberate about making choices after which you'll not be the same person. So I'm nervous about the ultra-marathon running world. I have to talk to you about Johnny Cash. I mean, when people ask me what my favorite musical thing is of all time, you know, it's a very difficult question to answer, of course, but I'm pretty quick, if I'm not allowed to pick anything by Tom Waits, I'm pretty quick to say Hurt by Johnny Cash, the performance, whatever you call it, whatever the heck that is. Because that's not just a song covered by an artist. That's a human being at the end of their life. The rawness of that. I mean, there's also a music video, which for a lot of people adds a lot to it. For me, just the music alone is... I mean, the guitar, every choice on that. The few things I've heard about it, it seemed like almost accidental. I mean, like little subtle choices here and there. Can you maybe comment on that to the degree... I think you had a huge role in sort of bringing Johnny Cash back from a different part of his life. It's like bringing something out that wasn't there before. And it was incredible. It was a celebration of a really special musician. And that's a totally new kind of celebration. Now, Hurt is just one of the songs that's an amazing celebration of Johnny Cash. But Hurt is like at the peak of that. So what was that like putting that song together? Maybe it might be nice to listen to it, because I freaking love that song. The guitarist, just the simplicity of it. It seems like every choice contributes to the greatness of the song. It's simple, it's crisp, but it's dark too. It's one of the greatest opening lines of any song. The shape. That's that. Yeah, the see if I still feel. Yeah, I'm talking about the lyrics. I don't even mean the performance. The words are... But those words out of Trent Reznor are not the same. They have a different meaning coming out of Johnny Cash's mouth. They have a different meaning coming out of Johnny Cash's mouth. What have I become? Written probably for a young man. I think he was 20 when he wrote it. I'm still awake in the air, and you could have it all, my empire of dirt. Anger, regret, pain. I will let you down. I will make you hurt. The way the guitarist played, the choice of instrument, the layers there, the freedom to give him, to use the voice that's fading. It's not fading, it's changing. Maybe he's losing some aspects of his voice. It's almost like shaking a little bit, and it's a little bit out of tune. How much of that was deliberate? How do you give Johnny Cash the freedom to do that? How do you find that together? Is there any insights you can give? I think it's a case almost of pairing the right role with the right actor, you could say. The song lyrics are the same. The reason we chose the song was because of the lyrics, purely about the lyrics. And at that point in time, both Johnny and I would send each other songs of possible ideas to record. And that was one that I sent him, and he didn't respond to initially. I would send him, at that time we would burn CDs, and I would send him like a CD of 20 songs or 25 songs. And he would send them to me, and I would say, You'd burn a CD for Johnny Cash and you'd send him of different songs? Of songs to consider recording. And we would send these back and forth. And then I had hurt on one of the ones that I sent him, and he didn't respond. And usually if he didn't respond, we didn't go back to it. And that one, I remember I sent it again, and I put it first on the next CD. And when we spoke about when he listened to the CD again, he didn't respond. I said, Check out that first song, and I really feel like that one could be good. What did you see in that song? It's the lyrics. It's the lyrics. Because I feel like there's very few people in the world that would see these lyrics in Johnny Cash's mouth and think this is a good idea, including for a resonant. Yeah. I know that Trent had trepidations in the beginning. But if you listen to the words, if you forget the music, and if you forget what Nine Inch Nails sounds like, and you just read it like a poem, and then you imagine a 70-year-old man reading these lyrics, it'll be profound. It's profound. So that was based on the lyrics that started the journey. And then at this point in time, Johnny was not in great health. And sometimes I would go to Nashville and record with him at his house. Sometimes he would come to California, but he was coming to California less regularly. And because there were so many songs we wanted to try, he would start sometimes recording just a straight acoustic version. Like, he would have someone play guitar, he would sing, and they would send those to me, and we would discuss, like, is this one to build on? And that was when we said, I don't want to record this one until we're together. I feel like we should do this one together. So on the next trip to California, we recorded it at my old house. And I mean, all the songs we recorded felt special, so I can't say this one felt special. But lyrically, it's more the lyrics have such a profound sense of regret. What have I become? Yeah, and to hear, when you're 20 years old, talking about regret, it's heartbreaking, but it's heartbreaking in a different way, because you have your whole life to figure it out. When you're looking back over your life at the end of your life with regret, it's brutal. It's brutal. So that was the initial spark of doing it. And then when we recorded it, I believe it was two guitar players, if I remember correctly, maybe even three, Smokey Hormel, Matt Sweeney, and Mike Campbell, I believe. And Ben Montench was playing the piano in my living room as we were doing it. And we cut the basic track with Johnny singing, and then Johnny probably sang over that basic track a few more times, and then we comped his vocal, and then built up the drama. And you didn't get to the part, but at the end of the song, it gets very loud. The music gets very loud. It's subtle, because it's not anything that takes your ear, and the vocal is so powerful that you don't really think about what's going on. But it's building the whole time, musically. It's building, and it even gets distorted at the end. It gets really overpowering, and that's part of the emotion of it. Yeah. It's a... I will let you down. I hear almost the anger and frustration. And it just brings out the clean vocal. I mean, it's so simple, so incredible. And it's interesting to have a young man's lyrics in an old Johnny Cash voice and heart and mind. I had... Are you a fan of Tom Waits? Of course. Tom Waits, when he was younger, had his song called Martha. But there's a bunch of songs he's written when he was young. It's like, how does a young man have that melancholy wisdom? The song Martha is about an older man calling a woman he used to love, that she's now married, and he's married. And they're having that conversation. They haven't spoken for 30 years, and they realize that there's still love there, and it could have been a different life, a different world, where they could have been together. It's like a 23-year-old Tom Waits writing so beautifully about something that's very... I've had a lot of people tell me how real that, as an older person, looking back at that love that you had and realizing it wasn't... It was really... It's still there. Inklings of that love are still there. I think there's a... When a young person writes a sad song, they almost seem more willing to go to a more hopeless place, because they have a long journey ahead. And older artists tend to want to look at the bright side of things, which also, I think, comes from the wisdom of aging. It's a more realistic position. So it's not uncommon for younger people to write... I think even in The Beatles, you'll see their very heavy lyrics, middle-to-late-era Beatles, which is still... They're in their early 20s, I guess. Wow, that's hard to think about. So much accomplished. Unbelievable. And they went through the full journey from fun to darkness in the span of a few years. You mentioned lyrics. So you've obviously produced albums with incredible lyrics. I think you've mentioned the interesting characteristics of hip-hop, of rap, is that you're writing poetry to rhythm versus writing poetry to melody. So that's one way to think about it. And I'm a fan, I mean, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, I'm a fan of poetry, period. Is there something about highlighting the poetry of it, the power of words, as you did with Hurt? If I have to put it... A Tom Waits song that's less than a minute long, that I always go back to, it's one I really love, and it has just a few lines. It's called I Want You. And all it is is him saying, I want you. ♪♪ I want you, you, you This is a 22-year-old Tom Waits. All I want is you, you, you All I want is you Give you stars above Sun on the brightest day Give you all my love If only you would say That I want you, you, you All I want is you, you, you And then he hums for 20 more seconds. Beautiful. So simple. Man, that young man, like, for people who don't know Tom Waits, you should definitely listen to him. His voice sounds very different now, and it's interesting to see the evolution of a human voice, the artist over time, because that's a young, like, boy-like voice, hopeful, less clever, less witty, more simple. That simplicity is there. And he's not, I mean, that takes guts to be so simple, I would say, lyrically and musically. Is there a, sort of laying that out on the table, is there ways that you like to highlight the voice, the lyrics, or is there no one rule? So, to you, what is the thing that makes music special? Is it the rhythm, the melody, the, or is ultimately the lyrics are always there, or the idea? You just asked me five different questions. I don't care, I'll just get back to it. It's not about you, or me. You don't want the answers. I don't want the answers. I'll listen. I look forward to your comments, the internet. Okay. You have the greatest producer of all time in front of you, and he can't shut the hell up. That's right, friends. But you do value lyrics. Is there a way to celebrate lyrics? I value lyrics if the lyrics are important. I'm not a lyric person. I'm very much whatever the thing that makes the thing good is the thing that I'm drawn to, for me. For a long time, lyrics meant very little. I would say from the- Wait, really? Yes. In the beginning? Yes. From the earliest days- Fight for your right to party, Beastie Boys? Yeah, it was fun. I thought they were good lyrics, but it wasn't what was important. I mean, it was in almost a novelty way, not in a serious way. Early in my career, I was much more focused on the rhythm, first the rhythm. And if the lyrics weren't good enough, I would be aware of it, but it wasn't the driving force for me. And eventually over time, then melody became an important piece, which it wasn't in the beginning. And then lyrics became more important over time. But it's always been a- always changing what draws me in. And one of the things I found as it relates to lyrics that can give a lyric a different power has to do with rhythm, where if there's no drum, the lyrics tend to mean more. So earlier what you were saying about if it was just acapella, you felt Marvin Gaye in a different way hearing the acapella. Can you comment on, I mean, in terms of one of the greatest albums ever? ♪♪♪ Why does it sound so raw, her voice? She's just a great singer. But this is the- you're not doing anything else. You're doing the- there's strumming, and then there's just a single beat. And then it builds. ♪♪♪ This gets simpler, but it feels like it's a giant orchestra. ♪♪♪ There's backing vocals. ♪♪♪ The anger. I love it. ♪♪♪ It just- there's something about such a powerful voice and the instruments not getting in the way. I mean, the same with Hurt and Johnny Cash. Is there- why does it sound so, like, raw? It's the same as Hurt. It feels like you're in the room with them. It feels like they're not even singing. They're literally freshly mad and angry. I think those are the things that make great singers sound like great singers. It's not anything that's happening in the studio. I mean, I would say the only thing that us in the studio can do is kind of get out of the way and not ruin it. You know, it's like that's what comes through of these people. I should also- before I forget, there is a lot of song choices on that CD. I would love to see the full options on the CD that you sent to Johnny Cash that I love. So, Solitary Man is one of my favorite choices made there. Is that a Neil Diamond song? It's funny you talk about them as songs, because I tend to- I tend to listen more to albums than songs. That's what you're doing in your head? You're pulling up the album, essentially? No, I'm going to that song, but I don't know- I've never listened to that song. But I know that when that song comes up in the sequence of the album, it has a really powerful effect in me. Let's see what it does if you just start it. [♪ Music playing ♪ Oh, so interesting. Wow. [♪ Music playing ♪ That's beautiful. Such a beautiful choice. Beautiful melody. Such a beautiful melody in haunting words. It's sung so simply. I have to- I mean, so I was born in the Soviet Union. When you're growing up, there's a few bands that kind of- I mean, they're probably forbidden still, but they seep in. And you get like bootlegged, and they somehow take over the culture of the young folks, such as myself. So on the metal side, it was Metallica and Iron Maiden. And on the- I don't know what you call them, but Beastie Boys, I remember hearing Fight For Your Right, and it was just like- for some reason that stuck, as it did for a lot of people in Russia. It's like, wow, America is when you get to say fuck you to the man. The rebellion, the freedom. I probably heard it a few years after it was released, because it kind of dissipates to the culture. You get the bootleg. I mean, it's hard to get your hands on. But I just remember- I mean, I want to kind of bring that up, because it was such a personally important song to me. And yet, probably you didn't even think of that. You probably thought of it as its role in the culture here in the United States, like in terms of musically. I was, you know, 20, 21 years old, and we just- Well, you were that kid, too, right? Yeah, we were just making fun songs for our friends. There was no expectation. So that's just a fun song. Yeah, no one thought- we never imagined anybody would like any of it. One of the greatest albums ever. Yeah! ♪♪ I have to- I love this so much. I just remember- This is America. ♪♪ I didn't even know- I didn't even understand the lyrics, to be honest. ♪♪ And the lyrics are ridiculous. Ridiculous. ♪♪ But hearing that, and hearing Metallica, Master of Puppets, I was like, I knew I'm gonna have to end up in America one day. I mean, maybe now that I'm more mature, or maybe a little bit more mature, I realize that was kind of the longing for freedom. It felt like, at least at the time, if this is allowed, then anything is allowed. Yeah. And I think that the rebellion of it, the- I guess it's also fun. I just loved it. If you look back to that, because you're a- I mean, you were that person, not just the producer. It feels like- Well, yes and no. Even to us then, it was still satirical. It was. Oh, absolutely. But isn't music in part, like you're dancing in the line, it's part satirical, part serious, in the sense, like you're losing yourself in the satire? Anytime you go over the top, isn't that part of the- Or is it explicitly satirical? I mean, the girls, there's a lot of ridiculous songs in that album. I don't know. I just think it was definitely to make each other laugh. We were trying to make each other laugh. We weren't trying to make a point. We were trying to make each other laugh. But that person, how's that person different than the person today in you? The person that produced that record? I wouldn't say so different. It really is that I like things that make me laugh. I like ridiculous things. It's the same person still. I think so. Is it strange just how many incredible- I don't think I would make that today, but I understand why we made it when we did. It's in the vocabulary of ridiculous that would make sense to do. For the right artist today could make something ridiculous and gives you that feeling. I mean, there's just a sense when you make so many different albums and you look back at that creation, it can feel like a different person created that. But you're making it seem like if you travel back in time and maybe do a memory replay, you'd be able to hang out with a teenage and a 20s recruitment. I don't think I was so different, honestly. That's hilarious. It's funny, I ran into someone recently in Costa Rica, who I hadn't seen in a long time and who I knew from the New York days when those days. And we spent a couple of hours talking and she said, you're exactly the same person that you were then. So I have a short, a recent confirmation that that's the case. That's beautiful. Tim Ferriss asked you about who's the most successful person you know. That's the definition of success, I would say. You're exactly the same person. You haven't lost yourself. Or rather you found yourself early on. I would say there are aspects of me that have changed for sure. But I can't say that it's necessarily better. It's different. I would say at that time I was more confident than I am now. And I'm very confident now. But then I had an unrealistic confidence and I think now it's a little more based in reality. At that point in time I had never been depressed. And then once you go through a depression, well some people, I know in my case, when I went through a depression afterwards I was a different person than I was before. And I feel more grounded now than I did then. And I probably relate to the artists who, so many of the artists I work with suffer. So many artists suffer because that's part of what makes an artist great is their level of sensitivity. The same thing that makes an artist uncomfortable other people don't feel at all. The time you were depressed, what was the darkest moments of your life? What took you there? How did you get out? It was triggered by a person making a comment about something to do with work that didn't matter. It was like to anyone else they would hear that and it would just be like, okay we'll deal with it next week, whatever. But for some reason I took it in a way that I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. Even beyond the rational part of it, of understanding, even after the problem that came up was solved, it somehow undermined something in me and made me feel very vulnerable in a way that I hadn't felt before. And it spiraled. How did you get out? I did a lot of different kinds of therapy. I did, starting with alternative therapies, I was seeing, I would say, between seven and eight doctors and or therapists a week. Acupuncture, talk therapy, herbs, any possible modality. Tried everything for a long time and nothing seemed to have an impact. And then finally, I'm wary of taking any Western medicine. I'm not a drug taker or drinker or partier in any way. And I found a psychopharmacologist who was a psychic. But because she was a psychic, I was okay to see her. Because I'll listen to a psychic, but I'm not going to listen to a psychopharmacologist. But the fact that she had the psychic, that made her fit into my worldview. And she recommended an antidepressant, which went terribly wrong in the first night that I took it. And then that set me on a journey of looking for the right antidepressant, which was a long and painful process. That's a heck of a journey. Every one that I took made me sick, every one. And then finally, I don't know, five months later, six months later, I found the magic one that worked for me. And it shifted me out of the depression. I took it for, my camera was six months or a year, and then weaned off and was okay. And then I had another event some years later. I think I took it again for a short period of time and got out of it. And I've not needed it since. Were you able to kind of introspect the triggers that led to the events? Or is it random events of life? I think it's more that because of the way that I grew up, I never had to deal with much controversy. And when I was challenged, I didn't have any ability to deal with it. It's like Jonathan Haidt talks about, it's like that. So you've actually also mentioned like business sometimes gives you stress. So this was business-related stuff. Yeah, it was a business-related thing. It just made me feel bad. One of the sadder things about art and music is that it's often interleaved with business folk. I suppose that's the way of the world if you have a capitalist system. It makes that business folks rubbing up against artists can sometimes destroy a fragile mind and soul. To me, one of the best representations of an artist, honestly, is Johnny Ive, the designer from Apple. And he's just so fragile with his ideas. And you talked about when he has ideas, he really wouldn't show it to Steve Jobs or anybody except for the small design team because he was so nervous that it would break. But give it a chance. Let it give it a chance to grow. And it seems like the outside world, business people, PR people, people that kind of have not lost themselves in the passion of creating, but instead are kind of representing or like making deals, all that kind of stuff. They can kind of trample on those little ideas. And it's sad to see. It's really heartbreaking to see because you know how much trampling there's going on. It's one of the main jobs, my jobs as a record producer, is to keep the voices away from the artist, from all the people who are really on their side but don't know. You know, like whether it be people, anyone on the business side who doesn't make things, they're excited to do their part. You know, they're excited. If when you deliver the thing, the art that you make to me, then we can start the project. But there's nothing to sell if the art doesn't happen in the right way and it has to be protected and it can't happen on the same kind of a timetable that business can. It's just a different thing. Art doesn't come in a quarterly way. And that doesn't apply just to music or it applies to art, it applies to all creative pursuits. Like this is generally the case, again, at MIT. It's just there's the administration and then there is the professors and students. The professors and students are the creative folk. They create stuff, they dream, they have wild ideas that go on tangents and so on. They have hopes and they go with those and they get on these weird passionate pursuits. And then the administration can often just trample on that. And they set up bars in all kinds of ways that you think you're not actually hurting, but you really are. And I won't mention why, because this happens to everybody. And I have a large amount of leverage at MIT now, but even I get a little bit of pressure in such stupid ways to like, be careful. Be careful, Lex. We really want your career to succeed. Be careful. And that little pressure to an artist, do you want to go acapella? Do you want to go, do you want to do a country record? Like be careful. Like you're already a superstar. Be careful. And then in that way, you kind of push people like flock of fish into one fish tank where they're all the same. And it's sad to see. And obviously in the modern world, there's nice mechanism to protect, to let artists flourish a little bit more, because they get to put themselves to the world and get a little bit more confidence. Maybe different funding mechanisms, all that kind of stuff. Tremendous problem. The voices that don't understand interfering with the process is huge. The other side of it is, in success, there can be a lack of reality where all of the people around the successful person just tell them everything they do is great, and then they don't have anything to bump up against anymore, or have a realistic sense of how things work or how things measure. So both sides are really important. Both avoiding the voices getting in the way and having a trusted group of, a sangha, a group of people who can say, you know, I don't know if that's as good. And you can still say, I don't care what you think, that's fine. But it helps to hear it. It helps to have, if someone who you respect tells you something isn't good enough, it's helpful. When you know it comes from a place of love, when it comes from a place of wisdom. 100%. And not from a place of fear, not from a place of, oh, this doesn't sound like it's going to do as well as your last thing. That's not the point. The point is on this quest for greatness, are you living up to your ability? By the way, is there something interesting to say about your worldview? Because you mentioned psychic and sort of the ways we can be healthy, the ways we can grow and how much maybe medicine or science has the answers. Is there some interesting way to describe that worldview? I would just say I'm open-minded. I believe anything's possible. And if I was going to trust in any practical information, it would be something thousands of years old. There's wisdom in that history. Yeah. Well, it's more tested. It's not always right, but at least it's been somewhat tested. Science is also tested. The thing I'm a little bit skeptical of sometimes is just the hubris that often comes with the modern, with the latest, the newest, this feeling like you figured it all out. Everything that's been done in the past has no wisdom. And we basically solved every problem. There's nothing else to be solved. I mean, that's a defining characteristic of any age. It's like we've solved all the problems there are, we have the final answers, and our parents are all stupid. That kind of energy. Yeah, you have to be extremely, extremely careful with that. When you think about something as complex as the human body or the human mind, you have to be very, very careful. I believe we know close to nothing. Yeah, exactly. Close to nothing. About anything. About anything. That place of humility is a good place to start to figure it all out. In the end, we'll still know almost nothing. Yeah, I don't think we need to know. It's like we need to see what works, and we need to see what works for us. It's interesting to know. I know on the art side, knowing how it works isn't what makes it work. The magic of it isn't how it works. The magic is the magic. And the magic happens in a way that's intuitive and accidental at times, or incidental where you're trying many things, and all of a sudden something works, and you don't know why. It's okay not to know why. It doesn't really matter why, as long as it does the thing that you want it to do, whatever that is. Yeah, that's so weird. When you know the components, you still, yeah, the magic. What's the magic? Where is the magic? We know the components for stuff I care about, artificial intelligence. We know the components of a powerful computing machinery. Where does consciousness come from? What is that? Where does the brilliant moments of insight come from? What's that? Even in simple games of chess, where do those breakthrough ideas of taking the big risk that doesn't make any sense, and then all of a sudden it becomes something beautiful? Yeah, we don't need to understand why. It just happens. It just happens. And often the things that end up breaking through don't break through in the way we thought, or turn out to be a third iteration of something that we thought was an entirely different thing. We don't know. And I think if we embrace that not knowing, we'll have a healthier experience going through life. You've made a lot, it's not just music, everything, rearranging the chairs, the furniture as well. You've done, like I said, the documentary, I guess you would say, with Paul McCartney. And you've done a podcast yourself, a broken record podcast, and you've done conversation too. So what have you learned from that process about the art of conversation? And also maybe what advice would you give to this, to me, about what to do with conversation? Like what is interesting to you about conversation? One of the things that I like is to not feel like there's any stakes, or that it's actually, almost that it's not happening. Like the fact that when I came in, you were setting up cameras, made it less good for me. I knew that that would impact the conversation in a negative way. The best version of it would be if we didn't see the cameras, and we didn't see any technology, and we were just sitting at this table having a conversation. Maybe even if we were mic'd beforehand, it would be okay if it was necessary. But then we were just sitting here having a conversation, no people in the room, nothing, and feeling like we're just having a conversation. I feel like it would get closer to the relaxed feeling. Same thing we do in the studios. Like you've heard of red light fever, when artists get nervous when they play a song great, and then the tape starts rolling and they can't play it. And we're all to some degree like that. When you were with Paul McCartney, were you cognizant of cameras? We had the room black. Everybody who was working there was dressed in black. Everything was invisible. We were lit in a way where even though there were probably 20 people, between 12 and 20 people working in the room, within three minutes of starting the conversation, Paul and I were alone in the room. That was the feeling. On occasion you'd hear a noise and it would be weird. Nobody was allowed to wear shoes because we were trying to create this intimate space. And I know in the recording studio, when we're recording, if even one person is there that's just watching and not working, I'm usually there and an engineer is there technically making it happen. If anyone else is in the room, it's different because then it goes from this moment where the person's doing a performance to the sense where the person is feeling something internally and we're capturing it, to the other version is they're performing for someone. It's so interesting. To push back on the alternatives here, one about the third person, not to make people self-conscious, but I find that I'm so torn on that because sometimes when that person, Evan is in the room here. He's been in the room before. He's a huge fan of yours, by the way. So he'll nod. Yeah, yeah, he'll get excited. And you can see that nodding. And for some reason for me, it's like, yeah, you get it. Yeah, you get excited together. I mean, that third person can be like a really special. So having an audience when it's a friend or somebody that has that love in them. It depends on the performer. It's all a policy. Yeah, some people really thrive in front of an audience. And you're saying you like that simple intimacy of everything dissipates. Well, I like the reality of it not being. I want it to be as far from a performance as possible. Got it. And if someone, I'll tell you a story, a story that just happened, and it was viewed as kind of a, it seemed uncool in the moment to the person that it happened to. It wasn't at all. We were recording the new Chili Peppers album, which is coming out, I think, any day now. I don't know what today's date is, but within the next, maybe by the time this airs, it will be out. The band was playing in the studio, and it was ripping because they're incredible. And one of the members walked through the control room after a particularly great performance. And the engineer said, wow, that solo was really great. And the person who heard this said, please don't say that, and walked away. It's like it was not, it just changed this feeling of we're in this place where we're doing this thing, and there is no outside world. We're doing this for us. We're going as deep as we can for us. And as soon as there's an acknowledgment to someone else, in a way, it breaks the concentration of being inside of it. That's so well told. But something about saying, wow, that solo was great, it reminds you that there's an outside world. But I feel like there's a way to enter the inside world as an audience. So you just have to do that. So it matters what you say. It matters how you look. It matters. So there's these generic compliments, not generic, but they sound in the way an outside world would interact, as opposed to in that creative thing where you're dancing around the fire together or something. There's actually, I can tell you, there's another interesting one that happened to me, and I didn't know this until I saw the film of it, which was a strange one. We were recording with the Avett brothers, and the song was called No Hard Feelings. And it was this recording of No Hard Feelings. Let's me free. Well, I'll be ready. When my feet won't walk another mile. Such a great voice. So beautiful. Kiss goodbye. My hands be steady. When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts. The rings on my fingers and the keys to my house. With no hard feelings. When the sun hangs low in the west, and the light in my chest won't be kept held a day any longer. When the jealousy fades away. So bright, so hopeful, so lighthearted. For cash and lust. And it's just hallelujah. And love in thought, love in the words, love in the songs they sing in the church. And no hard feelings. Lord knows they haven't done much good for anyone. Kept me afraid and cold. With so much to have and more. Mm-mm-mm. When my body won't hold anymore. And if I'm weak, let's be free. Where will I go? Does he sound as good as good, yeah? Yes, every bit. But the straight winds take me south. Ooh. Through Georgia rain, a tropical rain. A snow from the heavens. Will I join with the ocean blue? Or run into a savior true? And shake hands laughing. And walk through the night, straight to the light. Holding the love I've known in my life. And no hard feelings. Lord knows they haven't done much good for anyone. Kept me afraid and cold. With so much to have and more. I'm up above the sky. I'm finally learning why. What matters for me and you? To say it and mean it too. The life that it's all we miss. It's building and building and building. Oh, it's all we miss. What has it meant to me? I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. I have no enemies. Wow. He's got the power of like Jeff Buckley with more like, so much more sort of flavor to the voice. He can go so many different places. It's cool when it's like acapella just mostly him. He could do like Hallelujah, the Jeff Buckley way I can tell. It's incredible. That's an incredible song. Is this a new record? This was, I don't know, four or five years ago, something like that. But what happened with this, that happened. And I mean, they're great and it's always good. But that performance in that moment felt like the sky opened. It was unbelievable. This was a single take? This was a single take. Oh, wow. That was just like. That was incredible. Yeah, that was perfect. That was perfect, yeah. When it ended, I said, great, what do you want to do next? And they said, we just need a few minutes. They walked out. And that's all I know. It's like, okay, I'm laying down, wait until they're ready to start again. And in the film, there was a film made of the sessions of this. They went out and they're like, what was that like? Like, didn't he get what just happened? Like, because it was so heavy. Yeah. And it was just as heavy for me. And in the spirit of we're here to make the most great stuff we can, we're not going to like open champagne. It's like, great, what do you want to do next? It's like, let's not revel in this. But they took it as like, this guy just doesn't even understand what we're doing. But I had no idea until I saw the film. That's funny. Whoa, that was the reaction. Yeah. But I think your response is the right risk to take, right? Because it's the celebration at the end of a, you want to keep like, people celebrate too early. Yes, great. And now let's use that momentum. We're in the zone. What's next? Yeah. But you, yourself in conversation. So you said that you want to create this, would you use the word intimacy? Like, is it to create, or just the most real? Like there's no cameras, there's no mics. I would say a place where you're comfortable to be naked. You know, a place where you can be your most vulnerable without questioning it. You want to really be able to let your guard down. And to, you know, if you want to start crying when you're singing, whatever it is, whatever it is. And it's hard to get to that place. And again, just the idea of someone, you know, like, hey, that was good. That could take you right out of that going in, you know, going in. It's so interesting to think about how to achieve that and still have mics. Yeah. That. It's hard, it's harder, it's harder. Some of it is space, some of it is raw conversational skill. Like there's something about certain, well, some of that is also just like, you have that, as I'm sure you are, there's a legend to Rick Rubin. And there's like my now friend Joe Rogan, there's a legend to him. And when you show up into Joe Rogan's studio, the legend creates an aura. And he, I think, subconsciously or consciously uses it. So like this is somehow, it's nervous, nervous, nervous. And then you realize, oh, he's just human or something. There's a relief. And then, yeah, you could be yourself. So that nervousness, nervousness, nervousness. And it's like, oh, it's not that. This legend is just a human. And it's just, it's normal. So I don't know how that's done. But it's so interesting to think about how that's. Because I forget recording. I just enjoy it when it's real. Like this microphone gives us an excuse to connect on a human level and forget that nobody's listening. It doesn't matter. I would say I felt maybe in the last 15 minutes, I was less aware of anybody else being in the room or any equipment here. Yeah. But it took that long. That's so interesting. I didn't have that at all. All I had, I mean, the wind calmed down outside. But there was a wind before. And there's something about the wind. You can think of it from an audio engineering perspective. Like, oh, I wonder if the wind creates sound or whatever that you hear. But I was thinking, like, none of this matters. Like the wind, it's like nature will be here before us, after us, and all of this will be dead and forgotten. That's what the wind was reminding me of. It's almost like laughing at the fact that we could even consider ourself important enough to put on clothes and talk. But you love it. You love talking. You love the podcast and just that. Why did you dive into that? Like why? It was a strange occurrence. My friend Malcolm said he wanted to start doing a podcast about music and asked if I would do it with him. I was like, I like Malcolm, and I thought it would be more like his podcast, which is not an interview podcast. I thought it was going to be telling stories in the music world using audio stories. And then it just started being interviews. Again, it wasn't intentional. It just started that way and ended up being that. But I love it. And I love both because I get to talk to people that I don't know, but also when I get to talk to people that I know and ask them about things that we would never talk about ever. I don't know the origin stories of any of the people, any of my friends. So to get to hear their perspective, another like relating to Chili Peppers, because their album's coming out now, I interviewed all four members of the band individually. I interviewed John and midway through Anthony came in, and then I interviewed Flea separately, and I interviewed Chad separately. And it was fascinating. I'd known them for 30 years, and I learned a tremendous amount because you don't ask people about themselves when you're just workmates or friends. I do this sometimes. I'll just set up microphones, and I'll record a thing for private consumption with friends or loved ones. It's fascinating. Good idea. Yeah, those ridiculous questions. First of all, about life, about the future, about the past, about little fears and the things you miss. Yeah, there's something that people just reveal. First loves, all those kinds of things. Your view on love, your view on— Those things don't come up in regular conversations. It's so nice that there's something about— See, that's the pushback. There's something about this microphone, or maybe it's just the deliberate nature of sitting down, and let's just talk. There is something about the microphone that, for me, thinks the same with the suit. I'm going to take this moment seriously. I've long forgotten that anyone is listening. I'm going to try to really listen to another human, first of all, and to also ask the questions that are really interesting. I feel like when I talk to normal people out on the street, I'm not allowed to ask anything. I'm allowed to ask only the more generic things. I think you can ask anything. I'm starting to think that. I think you're allowed to ask anything. I think you're allowed to basically do anything, especially in Texas. Yeah, I think it's okay to ask people, and I think people like it when you ask them. People like to be seen and like to show who they are. As the wind blows again, do you have advice for young people? You have a fascinating life journey. Is there advice you can give to people in high school and college about how to have a life like yours in whatever pursuit, in terms of—success is such a silly word, but just find success or maybe happiness in career or just in life in general? Yeah, the only advice I would have would be to not listen to anyone and to do what you love and to make things that you love, whatever it is. Make your favorite things. You be the audience. Make the thing for you, the audience. It doesn't really matter what anyone else thinks, and if you have to get a job to support yourself so that you can make your art, that's fine. You can't make art with someone else in mind, I don't believe. I don't believe it can be good. What does success feel like? Are you grateful? Are you proud of the work you've done in the past? Or is there some engine of constant dissatisfaction, like self-criticism of, I could have done better? No, I'm pleased with the work that we did, excited to keep working. It's fun. I don't know what else I would do with myself because I like making things. It's fun. I feel like it's my reason to be on the planet, so I just keep doing it. Whatever ideas are actually coming from elsewhere and are using your mind as a temporary vehicle, that's their purpose to be on this planet. Your purpose is to procreate and not die and eat regularly enough such that the brain is alive. It's a biological purpose. Anything I can do to keep the channel open to allow what wants to come through to come through, I'm a willing channel. It's so interesting because I'm extremely self-critical, so you don't have that self-criticism, harsh, like, this could have been better, this… If it could have been better, I would keep working on it. If it could be better, it's not done. If the one is done, it's done. Well, it's the best it can be. I've done everything I can to make it the best it can be, and I can't do more than that, so there's nothing to be critical of. I did my very… If you always give all of yourself and do your best, which you're capable of doing, I'm not suggesting that you're capable of doing more than you can do, but whatever it is that you can do, if you've given all of yourself to it, you've done your best, where could there be regret? Yeah. There could be… You re-listen to an album, you re-listen to anything you've created and think, oh, there's so many interesting ideas missed. It's fine, though, but that was that moment. It's like everything is like a… It's almost like a diary entry. Everything we make is a reflection of a moment in time, a window in time. It could be a day, it could be a year, it could be whatever window you decide that it is. But if you give it all of yourself, and you know if you're not interested in working on it anymore, it's done. Now, you may decide it's not good enough to share with people, and that's fine, but if it's good enough to share with people, there's no regret looking back. That's funny, because think of it as a diary entry. It's hard to look back at a diary entry and say, you know… I did it wrong. I did it wrong. It's impossible. Yeah, and even if it's read by a hundred people, a thousand people, a million people, it's just a diary entry. It doesn't matter. Speaking of doesn't matter, this life is finite. All of us, even Rikubu, will be forgotten one day. Do you think about your mortality? Tomorrow. Tomorrow, yes. Do you think about the finiteness of this thing? Do you think about mortality, about your mortality? Does it make any sense to you? Do you think about death? Are you afraid of death? I don't think about it very much. Are you afraid? I don't think I'm afraid. I mean, I don't want to die, but I know that that's in the cards, and when it happens, it happens. Your nature of not wanting to die is kind of like you don't want to go to a shitty restaurant. You'd like to go to a nicer one. So it's just a preference thing. Well, I want to keep living because I want to do what I like to do. So whatever, now who knows, whatever comes next may be even better. Maybe we're, you know, I don't know. I can't, I can't, I haven't experienced it yet, so who knows. What do you think happens after we die? I believe we go on in some capacity. I don't know what that means, but in the same way that everything recycles, you know, everything comes around. I don't know why we would be different. In some way. In some way. I don't know what that way is, and I don't know that it's in the same being, you know, or in the same grouping of information, whatever that is. But the thing that makes us us, that information, I imagine, goes on. Yes, it does seem like our world here, at least on Earth, is like a memory, and just like history, it kind of rhymes. It brings back creations of the past and riffs on them, improvises on top of them, and in that way, humanity propagates. I mean, you see it with garbage. You see the, like, mountains of garbage. It's like it doesn't really go anywhere, even when it breaks up. It disintegrates, but it's never really gone. Same. Is there anything in this world you're afraid of? A lot of things. But not death. I don't know. I don't know. What are you afraid of? Death is more of a question mark. Again, I'm not in any hurry for that to happen, but it will happen, and when it does, we get to experience what that is. Okay, then the big question mark, what's the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life, Rekrubin? Putting my name on it makes it harder to answer. It's just a diary entry, like we said. It's true, and you will get a different answer tomorrow. Let's see, what's the meaning of life today? And later today. It could be, so for people who don't know, we were maybe thinking of maybe meeting in Austin, have some barbecue, and now we're in the middle of nowhere in beautiful West Texas, and this is basically a glorified delivery of barbecue, of my favorite barbecue, maybe one of your top favorite barbecues, to one of my favorite humans. So we get to eat some barbecue today. Maybe that's the meaning. Do you have something bigger than barbecue? Barbecue is pretty big. Where does your love for barbecue come from, by the way? Well, I was a vegan for 20-something years, and once I found my way back into eating meat, I think barbecue is my favorite of any of the things that I didn't eat for so long. I have to ask you, I almost forgot, so there's an SNL skit with Will Ferrell that he wrote about Don't Fear the Reaper, where Bruce Dickinson is the producer. I always think about you when I see that skit. I don't know why. People should definitely watch it. And he demands more cowbell into the mix. And the whole band, this is how I imagine people interact with you, the whole band is really impressed, like, we get to work with the great Bruce Dickinson. And then it's played by Christopher Walken, and he says, like, fellas, fellas, I put on my pants one leg at a time, just like the rest of you, but once my pants are on, I make gold records. And I just – and then the whole skit continues, and he wants to add more and more cowbell. And Will Ferrell said he wrote that skit because he always heard the song Don't Fear the Reaper, and there's a distant cowbell. It's very light in the mix. And he's like, I wonder what the story of that cowbell is. Like, if we just look at that one layer, who's that guy that was in there? So is that basically exactly how your life is, is Bruce Dickinson from the cowbell? I don't know if you've seen that skit. I don't think it's like that. It's not? Okay. All right. I'm just going to pretend then. Rick, this is a huge honor that you sit with me. I mean, what can I say about how incredible of a human you are? You truly are out of this world, and thank you so much for talking today. I'm a great fan. I'm so happy that you agreed to do this with me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rick Rubin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Albert Einstein. Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/H_szemxPcTI

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Douglas Murray: Racism, Marxism, and the War on the West | Lex Fridman Podcast #296

I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past in order to say there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to, no one you should revere, you've got no heroes, the whole thing comes down, who's left standing? Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism. And no, no, you will not have the entire landscape deracinated. And then the worst ideas tried again. The following is a conversation with Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race and Identity, and his most recent book, The War in the West, How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason. He's a brilliant, fearless and often controversial thinker who points out and pushes back against what he sees as the madness of our modern world. I should note that the use of the word Marxism and the West in this conversation refers primarily to cultural Marxism and the cultural values of Western civilization, respectively. This is in contrast to my previous conversation with Richard Wolff, where we focused on Marxism as primarily a critique of capitalism and thus looking at it through the lens of economics and not culture. Nevertheless, these two episodes stand opposite of each other with very different perspectives on how we build a flourishing civilization together. I leave it to you, the listener, to think and to decide which is the better way. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Douglas Murray. You recently wrote the book titled The War on the West, which in part says that the values, ideas and history of Western civilization are under attack. So let's start with the basics. Historically and today, what are the ideas that represent Western civilization? The good, the bad, the ugly. I actually don't get stuck on definitions precisely because, as you know, once you get stuck on definitions, there's a possibility you'll never get off. Yes. I'd say a few things. Firstly, obviously, the Western tradition is a specific tradition, a specific tradition of ideas, culture, well known to be perhaps easily defined by the combination of Athens and Jerusalem, the world of the Bible and the world of ancient Greece and indeed Rome. Effectively, it creates European civilization, which itself spawns the rest of the Western civilizations, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others. But these are the main countries that we still refer to as the West. So there's a specific tradition and all the things that come from it. My shorthand cheat on this answer is to say, you know, when you're not in it. So if you've ever been to Beijing, Shanghai, you know, you're not in the West somewhere else. You know, you're not in the West when you're in Tokyo. You're somewhere extraordinary, but you know you're not in the West. Obviously, there are, let's say, borderline questions like, is Russia in the West? Which I sort of leave open as a question. Possibly. If you were placed into Moscow blindfolded and you woke up and you couldn't hear the language or maybe you didn't know what the language sounded like, would you would you guess you were in the West or not? I think I was somewhere near it. Getting closer. I mean, you know, it's also asked the question, doesn't it, whether it's European? And I think the answer to that is not really, although massively influenced by Europe, but and times wanting to reach towards it at times wanting to stay away. But but a part of the West, possibly, yes. But anyway, it's a very specific tradition. It's one of a number of major traditions in the world. And because it's hard to define doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Are there certain characteristics and qualities about the values and the ideas that define it? Is the type of rule, the type of governmental structure? Yes. I mean, the rule of law, property-owning democracies and much more. I mean, these are, of course, things that ended up being developed in America and then given back to much of the rest of the West. I say there are other perhaps more controversial attributes I would give to the West. One is a ravenous interest in the rest of the world, which is not shared, of course, by every other culture. The late philosopher George Steiner said he could never get out of his head the haunting fact that the boats only seem to go out from Europe. The explorers, the scholars, the linguists, the people who wanted to discover other civilizations, and indeed even resurrect ancient civilizations and lost civilizations. These were scholars that were always coming from the West to discover this elsewhere. By contrast, there were never boats coming from Egypt to help the Anglo-Saxons discover the origins of their language and so on. So I think there is a sort of ravenous interest in the rest of the world which can be said to be a Western attribute, although it, of course, also has, I should immediately preface it, some downsides and many criticisms that can be made of some of the consequences of that interest. Because, of course, it's not entirely lacking in self-interest. So it's not just the scholars, it's also... The armies. The armies, and they're looking to gain access and control over resources elsewhere. Markets. And hence the imperial imperative. Exactly. To conquer, to expand. Although that itself, of course, is a universal thing. I mean, no civilization I think that we know of doesn't try to gain ground from its neighbors where it can. The Western ability to go further, faster, certainly gave an advantage in that regard. Do some civilizations get a bit more excited by that kind of idea than others? Possible. It's possible. Because you could say it's the Western civilization because the technological innovation was more efficient at doing that kind of thing. Yes, absolutely. But maybe it wanted it more, too. Well, the Ottomans wanted it an awful lot and did terribly well for many centuries. One shouldn't forget that. As did others. I'd also say, by the way, and again, it's a very broad one, but it's worth throwing out there, I think self-criticism. Is an important attribute of the Western mind. One that, as you know, is not common everywhere. Not all societies allow even their most vociferous critics to become rich. So, you know, criticism is a negative sounding word. It could be self-introspection, self-analysis, self-reflection. And it can be what you need. And in the Western system, I'd argue that one of the advantages of the system of representative governance is that where there are problems in the system, you can attempt to sort them out by peaceable means. We listen to arguments, most famously in America in the late 20th century. The civil rights movement achieved its aims by force of moral argument and persuaded the rest of the country that it had been wrong. That's not common in every society by any means. So, I think there are certain attributes of the Western mind that you could say are not entirely unique, but they are not as commonplace as well. What about the emergence in hierarchies of asymmetry of power, most visible, most drastic in the form of slavery, for example? Well, I mean, everyone in the world is slavery, so I don't regard it as being a unique Western sin. It's rather hard to think of a civilization in history that didn't have slavery of some kind. One of the oddities of the Western ignorance of our day is that people seem to imagine that our societies in the West were the only ones who ever engaged in any vices. Alas, this isn't true. It's a sort of Rousseauian mistake or at least one that's blossomed since Rousseau that everybody else in the world was born into sort of Edenic innocence and only we in the West had this sort of evil in us that caused us to do bad things to other people. Slavery was engaged by everyone in the ancient world, of course, and through most of the modern world as well. Of course, there are 40 million slaves in the world today, so it's clearly not something that the species as a whole has a problem with. That's more slaves, of course, than there were in the 19th century. And I'd say on top of that that, you know, the interesting thing about the Western mind as regards to slavery is that we were the civilization that did away with it. And by the way, the founding fathers of America who today are lambasted routinely for being acquiescent in the slave trade, engaging in it, owning slaves. There's not people almost don't even bother now to recognize the facts that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington all wanted to see this trade done away with, couldn't hold the country together at the origins if they'd have made such an effort and believed and hoped that it would be something that would be dealt with after their time. So the founding ideas had within them the notion that we should as a people get rid of this. The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence set up the conditions under which slavery will be impossible. All men are created equal. Once you've put that, that's like a time bomb under the whole concept of slavery. That's ticking away. Okay. And sure enough, it detonated in the next century. If we just step back and look at the human species, what does slavery teach you about human nature? The fact that slavery has appeared as a function of society throughout human history. There are two possibilities. One is it's what people think they can do when God's not watching. Another is it's what they can do if they think that God allows it. Really, really well put. And the fact that they want to do this kind of subjugation, what does that mean? Well, I mean, it's pretty straightforward in a way. There are people who get to work for free. It's economic in nature in some sense. Yes. In order to do it, I mean, almost always there are some examples in the ancient world where this wasn't the case. But almost always it had to be a subjugated people or people regarded as different. One of the things actually I've tried to sort of inject into the discussion through this book, among other things, is a recognition that there were very major questions still going on in the 18th and early 19th century that were unresolved, which were one of the reasons why slavery was not as morally repugnant to people then as it is to us now. And that's the question of polygenesis and monogenesis. At the time of Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers were thinking and working. They didn't know, because nobody knew, whether the human races were related or not. There were arguments, the monogenesis argument, that we were all indeed from the same racial stock. Polygenesis argument was that we weren't. Black Africans, Ethiopians, they're often referred to at the time, because they provided some of the first slaves, were different from white Europeans, simply not related in any way. And that makes it easier, of course. That makes it easier to enslave people if you think they're not your brother. Am I my brother's keeper? No, he's not your brother. And it was a very troubling argument in the 18th and 19th century, also because there was a biblical question. It threw up a theological question, which was, I mean, people were literally debating this at the time. Was there also a black Adam and Eve? Was there an Indian Adam and Eve, a Native American Adam and Eve? I mean, this was a serious theological debate because they didn't know the answer. And people say that Darwin solved this. It wasn't just Darwin, of course. But by the late 19th century, the argument that we were not all related as human beings had suffered so many blows that you had to really be very, very ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant to ignore it by then. So it no longer was, after Darwin, a theological question. It became a moral question. It was already a moral question, but it clarified. Darwin clarifies it definitely. And then you're in this, as I say, in this situation of you're not subjugating some other people, you're subjugating your own kin. And that becomes morally unsustainable. So given that slavery in America is part of its history, how do we incorporate into the calculus of policy today, social discourse, what we learn in school? We can look at slavery in America, we can look at maybe more recent things like in Europe, the other atrocities, the Holocaust. How do we incorporate that in terms of how we create policy, how we treat each other, all those kinds of things? What is the calculus of integrating the atrocities, the injustices of the past into the way we are today? That's a very complex question because it's a moral question at this point, and a moral question long after the fact. I say at one point in the war in the West that the argument, for instance, on reparations now that goes on, and it's not a fringe argument anymore. Some people say, oh, you're pulling up this fringe argument. It really isn't. I mean, every contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2020 was willing to talk about the possibility of reparations. Some very eager that this country, America, goes through that entirely self-destructive exercise. I say that there's a lot of problems with this, but if I could refine it out of one thing, I'd say this. It's no longer about a wealth transfer from one group of people who did something wrong to another group of people who were wronged. It would have been that 200 years ago. Today, it's not even the descendants of people who did something wrong giving money to people who were the descendants of people who were wronged. It's a wealth transfer from people who look like people who did a wrong thing in the past to another group of people who resemble people who were wronged. That's impossible to do. I'm completely clear about this. There is no way in which you could organize such a wealth transfer on moral or practical reasons. America is filled with people who have the same skin color as us, for instance, who have no connection to the slave trade and should not be made to pay money to people who have some connection. Then, the country is also filled with ethnic minorities who have come after slavery who would not be due for any reimbursement, as it were. The problem with this is that I'm perfectly open to the possibility that there are residual inequities that exist in American life and that the consequences of slavery could be one of the factors that result from this. The thing is I don't think it's a single issue answer. I think it's a multidimensional issue, something like black underachievement in America. It's obviously a multidimensional issue. Much of the left and others wish to say it's not. It's only about racism. They can't answer why Asians who've arrived more recently don't, for instance, get held down by white supremacy. I say white supremacy in quotes, obviously, but don't get held back by it, but actually flourish to the extent that Asian Americans have higher household earnings and higher household mean equity than white Americans. I don't think that on the merits, the evidence is there that racism is the explanation for black ongoing, black underachievement in some sections of the black community in America. It's obviously a part of it. Could you say that even those things like fatherlessness and similar family breakdown issues are a long-term consequence of it? Possibly, but it's being awfully generous to people's ability to make bad decisions. For instance, how many generations after the Holocaust would you allow people to claim that everything that went wrong in the Jewish community was as a result of the Holocaust? Is there some kind of term limit on this? I would have thought so. I think most people probably think that's over. I think the details matter there, but it's very difficult. You're in deep waters here. I enjoy swimming out in the ocean, although I'm terrified of what's lurking underneath in the darkness. You're right. You're right to be. Okay, it's really complicated calculus with the Holocaust and with slavery. The argument in America is that there's deep institutional racism against African Americans that's rooted in slavery. However that calculus turns out, that calculation, it still persists in the culture, in the institutions, in the allocation of resources, in the way that we communicate in subtle ways, in major ways, all that kind of stuff. How is it possible to win or lose that argument of how much institutional racism there is that's rooted in slavery? Is it a winnable? It's an unquantifiable argument. I'd like to apply some shortcuts to some of this. The following. Are, for instance, all, let's take the one that's most often cited. If a white person is walking down a street in America and they see a group of young black men coming towards them and it's late at night and they cross the road, is it because of slavery? Is it because of institutional racism? No, it's because they've made a calculus based not entirely on unfounded beliefs that given crime rates, it's possible that this group of people might be a group of people they don't want to meet late at night. That's an ugly fact, but crime statistics in American cities, African American cities bear out. It's not an entirely unreasonable one. It's not reasonable every time, obviously, obviously. But is it attributable to slavery? That's a stretch. If you're in a city like Chicago where the homicide rates shot up in the last two years, albeit again, as always has to be remembered, mainly black on black gun violence and knife violence. Nevertheless, if you're in a city like Chicago and you make that calculus I've just suggested, the cliched one, the street late at night, there are other factors other than a memory of slavery that kick in. I'm afraid it's something which people don't want to particularly acknowledge in America for obvious reasons because it's the ugliest damn debate in the world, but I was actually just writing in my column in New York Post today about a very interesting case, a sort of similar, which is the question of obesity in the US. As you know, America is the most overweight country in the world. America has, I think, 40% of the population is obese in medical ways, and the nearest next country is a long way down. That's New Zealand, 30% of the population. So America is a long way ahead. Why during the coronavirus era when we know that obesity is the one clearest factor that's likely to lead to your hospitalization if you also get the virus? Why did almost no public health information in America focus on obesity? 80% of the people who ended up hospitalized in America with coronavirus were obese. We locked the schools when there was no evidence that the coronavirus was deadly for children. We all wore cloth masks when there was very little evidence that this was much use in stopping the spread of the virus. We had massive evidence about obesity being a problem, and we never addressed it. Why? Is it just because we worried about fat people? No, it's actually because about fat shaming as it were. No, it's also because to a great extent it's a racial issue in America as well. And actually I quoted this new publication from the University of Chicago as it happens, which makes that claim explicit. It says, the reasons why people have views that are negative about obesity is because of racism and slavery. This is what everything is drawn back to in America. Anything you want to stop, you say it's because of racism, it's because of slavery. How about it's actually because you mind the hospitals getting clogged up, you mind people dying, you mind ethnic minorities disproportionately dying, and you like to say something about it. Once again, as in everything in America, it's cut off by some poorly educated academic saying it's about slavery. So we're really not, I mean, this requires a kind of form of brain surgery to perform it on a society, probably one that's not possible without killing the patient. And it's being done by people who are wearing like mittens. So I'm sure that there's a few folks listening to this that are rolling their eyes and saying, here we go again, two white guys talking about the lack of institutional racism in America. First of all, what's your, what would you like to tell them? So our African American friends who are looking at this, and I've gotten a chance to talk to a bunch of them on Clubhouse recently. Clubhouse is the social app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I really enjoy it. It's an absolute zoo of an app as far as I can see it. I personally love it. You like it? Because you get to talk to, as somebody who's an introvert and doesn't socialize much, I enjoy talking to people from all walks of life. So it gave me a chance to first of all practice Russian and Ukrainian, so I get the chance to do that. Then you get a chance to talk about Israel and Palestine with people who are from that part of the world. And you get to hear raw emotion of people from the ground where they start screaming, they start crying, they start being calm and collected and thoughtful. And this is as if you walked into a bar with custom-picked regular folks, in quotes, regular folks. Just people that have, quote unquote, lived experiences. Real pain, real hope, real emotions, biases. And you get to listen to them go at it with no, because it's an audio app, you're not allowed to start getting into physical fist fight. So even though it really sounds like people want to. Sounds like it's happening, yeah. Yeah, and so you get to really listen to that feeling. And for example, it allows a white guy like me from another part of the world, coming from the former Soviet Union, to go into a room with a few hundred African Americans screaming about Joe Rogan using the N-word. And I get to really listen. And there's very different perspectives on that in the African American community. And it's fascinating to listen. So I don't get access to that by excellent books and articles written and so on. You get that real raw emotion. And I'm just saying, there's a few of those folks listening to this with that real raw emotion. And one argument they say is you, Douglas Murray, and you, Lex Freeman, don't have the right to talk about race and racism in America. It is our struggle. You are from a privileged class of people that don't know what it's like to be a black man or woman in America walking down the street. Can you steel man that case? First of all, fuck that. Okay. I think we need to define steel manning. Okay. Can you at least try it? I know what steel manning is. I really resent that form of argumentation. I really resent it. I have the right to talk about whatever the hell I want. And no one's going to stop me or try to intimidate me or tell me that I can't simply because of my skin color. And I think that if I said to somebody else the other way around, it would be equally reprehensible. If I said, shut up, you have no right to criticize anything that Douglas Murray says because you've not got my skin color. Okay. It's not an exact comparison. But seriously, is that a reasonable form of argument? You haven't been through everything I've been through in my life, therefore you can't comment. No. In that case, nobody can talk about anything. We might as well pack up, go home, and isolate ourselves. Strong words. But can you try to steel man the case, not in this particular situation, but there's people that have lived through something that can comment in a very specific way. Like, for example, Holocaust survivors. Yes. There is a sense in which maybe a basic sense of civility when a Holocaust survivor is speaking about their experience of the Holocaust, then an intellectual from a very different part of the world is simply writing about nuanced geopolitics of World War II just should not interrupt the Holocaust survivor. We would physically interrupt them if they're telling their story. Is there a sense with logic and reason that the experience of the Holocaust survivor somehow fundamentally has a deeper understanding of the humanity and the injustice of that? Well, first of all, again, we're in even deeper waters now, but in terms of wanting to listen to another person who has experienced something, yes. Yes. But not endlessly. Not endlessly. I mean, there are some people who've written about the Holocaust who didn't experience the Holocaust and have written about it better than people who did. It's not this idea that the lived experience, to use this terrible modern jargon as if there's another time, this idea that the lived experience has to triumph over everything else is not always correct. It can be correct in some circumstances. If you are sitting in a room with a Holocaust survivor and somebody who'd never heard about the Holocaust and wanted to kind of shoot out their views on it. Yeah, one of those people should be heard more than the other, obviously. Obviously, if there's somebody who's experienced racism firsthand and there's somebody else who has never experienced it, then obviously you'd want to hear from the person who has experienced it firsthand. If that is the discussion underway, I don't think that it's the case that that is endlessly the case. I'm also highly reluctant to concede that there are groups of people who, by dint of their skin color or anything else, get to dominate the microphone. Of course, we're literally both speaking to microphones at the moment, so there's an irony to this, but let's skate over the irony. What I mean is people saying you don't have the right to speak. I have the right to take the microphone from you and speak because I know best. Fine. If you know best, we'll argue it out and someone will win long or short term. But the the the almost aggressive tone in which this is now leveled, I don't like the sound of. Nobody's experience is completely understandable by another human being. Nobody's. And what many people are asking us to do at the moment, us collectively is to fall for that thing. I think it was Camille Foster who said it first, but I've adopted in recent years is to say you must spend an inordinate amount of your life trying to understand me personally, my lived experience, everything about me. You should dedicate your life to trying to do that. Simultaneously, you'll never understand me. This is not an attractive invitation. This is this is an unwinnable game. So somebody if somebody has a legitimate. And an important point to make, they should make it and they will win through whatever their character is, whatever their race. And by the way, there are plenty of white people who experience racism as well. There are plenty of white people who do and have done, and increasingly so, which is one of the things I write about in the war in the West. I mean, I would argue that today in America, the only group you're actually allowed to be consistently vilely racist against the white people. If you say disgusting things about black people in America in twenty twenty two, you will be over. You will be over if you decide to talk about people's white tears, their white female tears, their white guilt, their white privilege, their white rage and all these other pseudo pathologizing terms. You'll be just fine. You can be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You can lecture at Yale University. Absolutely fine. And the white people have to suck that up as if that's fine because there was racism in another direction in the past. So white people can have racism as well. Does that mean that I think that I have a right or other white people have a right to dominate the discourse by talking about their feelings of having been the victim, the victims of racism? No, not particularly, because what does that get us? It gets us into an endless cycle of competitive victimhood. Am I saying that white people who've experienced violence have experienced historically anything like the violence that was perpetrated against black people in America historically? Obviously not. But, you know, what kind of competition do we want to enter here? And this is very, very important terrain now in America, because there's one other thing I have to throw in there, which is how do you work out the sincerity of the claim? How do you work out the sincerity of the claim being made? At one point in my book, in this latest book, I referred to a very useful bit in Nietzsche on the genealogy of morals. Where, as you know, Nietzsche always has to be treated carefully, you know, when people say, I love Nietzsche, you have to say, which bits? What exactly do you love about him? But a lot can be learned from the answer. But there are moments in genealogy of morals that were very useful for this book. One of them was the moment when Nietzsche uses a phrase that I've now stolen from myself, appropriated, you might say, where he refers to people who tear at wounds long since closed and then cry about the pain they feel. Now, how do you know? How do you know whether the pain is real? How do you know? I'm not saying you can never know. But it's hard. So when somebody says, I feel that my life hasn't gone that well, and it's because of something that was done to my ancestors 200 years ago. Maybe they do feel that. Maybe they're right to feel that. Maybe they're making it up. Maybe they're using it as their reason for failure in life. Maybe they're using it as their reason to not even try. Maybe they're using it as their reason to smoke weed all day. I don't know. And who does know? How can you work that out? And that's why I come back to this thing of, who are we to constantly judge in this society other people who we don't know and attribute motives to them based on racial or other characteristics? And as you write in this part, I like your cultural appropriation of Nietzsche and at the same time cancelling Nietzsche in the same set of sentences. But you write in this part about evil. No, I didn't cancel Nietzsche. I can't cancel Nietzsche. I was saying, treat him carefully. Treat him carefully. Fair enough. We can judge a man's character by which parts of Nietzsche he quotes. Fair enough. I think when you meet people who do Man and Superman a bit too much. Now you're pulling in even deeper water referencing Hitler here. Okay, so you write in this part of the book about evil. Quote, what is it that drives evil? Many things without doubt, but one of them is identified by several of the great philosophers is resentment. That sentiment is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy. Colon, blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserve more. And you're saying this kind of resentment, we don't know as it surfaces whether it's genuine or if it's used to sort of play games of power to evil ends. Can you speak to this? Because it's such a fascinating idea that one of the biggest drivers of evil in the world is resentment. Because if you look at, boy, if you look at human history, if you look at Hitler, so much of the propaganda, so much of the narrative was about resentment. So is that surface or is it level or is that deep? It can be any of the above. First of all, everybody has resentment. I use the term resentment which is thought very similar to resentment, but less thick with resentment. So we don't sound too pretentious. Let me give you a quick example of somebody in our own day who has a form of resentment, Vladimir Putin. Did you see Navalny's documentary, Putin's Palace? Yes. You remember the stuff about Putin as a young KGB officer in Germany? Remember the stuff about Putin and his first wife's resentment of one of his KGB colleagues who had an apartment that was a few meters bigger than the Putin's apartment? Yeah. It's very interesting. And by the way, I'm not saying that Vladimir Putin became the man he has become and invaded Ukraine because he didn't have an apartment he liked in Berlin or Munich or wherever he was. But it's a distinct possibility. My point is that resentment is a factor in all human lives and we all feel it in our lives and it's something that has to be struggled against. Resentment is, in political terms, can be a deadly, I mean, it's an incredibly deep thing to draw upon. I mean, you mentioned Hitler. Obviously, one of the things that Hitler played on was resentment, obviously. Almost every revolution does. I mean, the French revolutionaries did as well, and not without cause. There's a good reason to feel that Versailles was not listening to Paris in the 1780s and feel resentment for Marie Antoinette in her palace within the palace, ignoring the bread shortages in Paris. So resentment is a very understandable thing and sometimes it's justifiable and it's also deadly to the person as it is to the society. It's an incredibly deep sentiment. Somebody else has got something that you should have. And the problem about it is that it has a potential to be endless. You can do it your whole life. And one of the ways I've sort of found myself explaining this to people is to say it's also important to recognize that resentment is something that can cross absolutely every boundary. So, for instance, it crosses all racial boundaries, obviously, it goes without saying. More interesting is it crosses all class boundaries and socioeconomic boundaries. And if I was to sort of simplify this thought, I would say, I guess you and I and everybody watching knows or has known somebody in their lives who has almost nothing in worldly terms and is a generous person, a kindly person, a giving person, a happy person, even a cheerful person. And I think we probably have also, or many of us would have met people who seem to have everything and who are filled with resentment, filled with resentment. Somebody else has held them back from something. Their sister once did something. She shouldn't. She got this. I should have got that. And on and on and on. It's a human trait. And one of the things that suggests to me is that we therefore have a choice in our lives about this. This is something which we can do something about, not limitlessly. But, for instance, I mean, there are very good reasons that some people in their lives might feel resentment. Let's say you're involved in a car crash and a friend fell asleep at the wheel and that's why you are spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair. It's a pertinent example of this in American politics at the moment. You would be justified in feeling resentment. And at some point you have to make a decision, which is, am I going to be that person or a different person? But even in that case, you're saying at the individual level and at societal level is destructive to the mind. Even when you're, quote unquote, justified. It rots you because the best you can do is to eke out your days unfulfilled. So the antidote, as you describe, is gratitude. Yes. Gratitude is the antidote to evil in a sense. Gratitude at the individual level and at the societal level. Gratitude is certainly the answer to resentment. I quote in The War in the West, when I read it the first time a few years ago, it was absolutely floored by The Brothers Karamazov. Not everything in it, by the way, I won't get into it, but I have some very big structural criticisms of the novel. Now you're just sweet talking to me because I'm a Dostoevsky fan, but I appreciate this. Okay. Well, we could get into what I see as the structural flaws in The Brothers Karamazov. Now I'm offended and triggered. Yeah, no, I mean this is coming out of Macbeth and saying, I didn't think it was much good. Yeah, there's structural flaws. Yeah, the ending stank. The middle wasn't very good. No, when I read that novel, I was floored by a couple of things. One is, of course, the moment where we realize the devil appears. The moment that Ivan says to his brother, you know he visits me, and you realize that he's talking about the devil. The whole novel goes into this totally different space. It's even more than you've already realized the novel's about. And then when the conversation occurs between Ivan and the devil, I think he describes him as dressed in the French style. Of the early part of the 19th century. Very strange that the devil would be dressed like that. And if you remember, he's sort of crossed legs and a rather urbane figure. But the devil mentions in passing to Ivan that, he says, I don't know why, gratitude is not an instinct that's been given to me. And, you know, you're not allowed, this is not, given the role of being the devil, this is not one of the things. And you think, and of course, only a genius of Dostoevsky's stature could, I mean, a lesser genius would have made a whole novel out of that insight. Only Dostoevsky can just throw it away, because there's such an abundance of riches that he still has to get through. Structural problems aside. But the passive aggressive, the microaggression in this conversation is palpable. A little knife fight. But the reason I mention this is because, of course, when I saw it, I thought, this is such a brilliant insight by Dostoevsky. Because why would gratitude not be a sentiment the devil was capable of? The answer is, of course, that if the devil was capable of gratitude, he wouldn't be the devil. He'd be somebody else. He has to be incapable of gratitude. Do you think, for Dostoevsky, that was as strong of an insight as it is for you? Because I think that's a really powerful idea. That with gratitude, you don't get the resentment that rots you from the core. Yes, I think it was one of the just endless things that he saw in us. And the way I put it is that, I mean, I also think of it in terms of the era of deconstruction, which is one of the things I'd like us to call the era that's now ending. The era of deconstruction was the era that started, let's say, from the 60s onwards. And was originally an academic game that then spilled out into the wider culture, which was, let's take everything apart. Let's pull it all apart. There are lots of problems with it. One is it's quite boring. You don't get an awful lot from it. You also have the problem of what children find when they try to do this with bicycles, which is they can take it apart quite easily, but they can't put it back together. And the era of taking things apart as a game is one we've lived through, and it's been highly destructive. But you can do it for quite a long time. I'm going to look at this society, and I'm going to take it apart by showing systemic problems. I'm going to, at the end of that, what have you got? What have you done? What have you achieved? We need to interrogate this. OK, interrogate. By all means, ask questions, but interrogate as a deliberate hostility to this. I'm going to interrogate this thing and take it apart, and again, at the end of it, what have you got? Whether you're interrogating a text or a piece of music or an idea or a society, fine. Question, endlessly question. Yes, interrogate assumes it's all a criminal in a cell, and it's guilty, and therefore it must be taken apart. And that's what we've been doing for decades in the West. And that's resentment. That's one byproduct of resentment. You can't build the thing, but you know how to take it apart. Is a little bit of resentment good? So you have, you know, that I love Tom Waits, and he has a song where, I like my Tom with a little drop of poison. Is it good to do that? Is it good to have a little bit of poison in your drink? Depends what the poison is, and it depends if you know not to have another drink. It might be the case you find out, as some alcoholics do, that one was too many and ten is not enough. So there's a natural, in this case, this kind of deconstruction is a slippery slope. It becomes an addiction, becomes a drug, and you just can't stop. You'd have to wean yourself off it and try to start creating again. You'd have to start trying to put things together again. Something, I think, might be in the throes of starting as it happens. Well, speaking of taking things apart and not putting them together again, the idea of critical race theory. Can you, to me, explain? So I'm an engineer and have not been actually paying attention much, unfortunately, to these things. None of the people in your field were until it comes along and smacks you in the face. I've had that line of thinking from MIT. I said, well, surely whatever you folks are busy about yelling at each other for is a thing at Harvard and Yale. It's not going to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. People in the STEM subjects thought it's not coming for us. It can't come to us and bang. Well, it hasn't quite been bang. Engineering is more safe than others. Yeah. So let's draw a line now between engineering and science. So I think engineering is, I'm sitting in a castle in the tallest tower with my pinky out drinking my martini saying, surely the peasants below with their biology and their humanities will figure it all out. No, I'm just kidding. There's no pinky out. I drink vodka and I hang with the peasants. Okay, where is this? This metaphor has gone too far. Can you explain to this engineer what critical race theory is? Is it a term that's definable? Is there a tradition? Is there a history? What is good about it? What is bad about it? It is a tradition. It is a history. It's a school of thought. It started in the law, roughly in the 1970s in some of the American Academy. It's built out. It always aimed to be an activist philosophy. People deny that now. But as I say, in the war in the West, the foundational texts say as much. This is an activist academic study. We're not just looking at the law. We seek to change the law. And it's built out into all of the other disciplines. I think there's a reason for that, by the way, which is it happened at the time that the humanities and others in America were increasingly weak and didn't know what to do. And they needed more games to play or new games to play. The psychologists got bored. Yeah, I mean, well, they needed tenure. They needed something to do. And I mean, it's not an original observation. Plenty of people have made this. But I mean, Neil Ferguson said it some time ago, for instance, that in the last 50 years in American academia, certainly in humanities departments, when somebody dies out as a great scholar and something, that's just not replaced by somebody of equal stature. They're replaced by somebody who does theory or critical race theory. They're replaced by somebody who does the modern games. Somebody dies out who's a great historian of, say, I don't know, it's one that's on my mind, Russian history or Russian literature. And they're not replaced by a similar scholar. In his observation and in yours, is this a recent development? It's happened in the last few decades, for sure. And it's sped up. Is it because we've gotten to the bottom of some of the biggest questions of history? No, it's because we're willing to forget the big questions. Because it's more fun to... Big questions are as fun? No, partly it's... No, I should stress that partly this isn't the reason, but partly it's a result of hyper-specialization in academia. You know, if you said you'd like to write your dissertation on Hobbes... If you wanted to... If you... Something central to Kant's thought or Hegel or something. I mean, that's not popular. What's popular is to take somebody way down the line from that, because there's a feeling that that's all been done. So you take something way, way, way down the line from that, that's much less important, and then you sort of play with that. And I think most people, anyone who's watching who's been in a philosophy department or anything else in recent years will know that tendency. By the way, there's a very practical consequence of this. I saw this at the end of my friend Roger Scruton's life, when he would occasionally... He didn't get tenure at universities, but he would occasionally be flown in, even by his enemies, to teach courses in various universities in basics of philosophy, because there was no one in the department able to do it. He would go in and teach for a semester, you know, Hegel and Kant and Schopenhauer and others, because there was no one to do it, because they were all playing with things way, way, way down the road from this. So that had already happened. And people were searching for new games to play, and the critical race theory stuff forced its way in, partly in the way that all of this that's now known as anti-racism does, which is in a sort of bullying tone, of saying if you don't follow this. It's the same way that all the things that are called studies, I think everything called studies in the humanities should be shut down. Because of the activist element. They're all activist, gay studies and queer studies, nothing good has ever come from it. Nothing good. To push back, is it obvious that activism is a sign of a flaw in a discipline? So isn't it... It's a sign of the death of the discipline. It's a sign the discipline's over. But isn't it a good goal to have for discipline to enact change, positive change in the world, or is that for politicians to do with the findings of science, not... I mean, why create an ideology and then set out to find disciplines that are weakly put together to try to back up your political ideology? So ideology should not be part of science or of... No, I mean... Humanities. Why would you... I mean, anyone could do it. You could decide to go in and be wildly right-wing about something and only do things that prove your right-wing ideas. Be fantastically anti-academic, fantastically anti-science. It's an absurd way to mix up activism and academia. And it's absolutely right, and critical race theory is one of the ones that completely polluted the academy. Yeah, and there's been dark moments throughout history, both for during World War II with both communism and Nazism, fascism, that infiltrated science and then corrupted it. Yes. I mean, for instance, also, let's face it, in science, as in everything else, there are dark, difficult things. It's much better we know about them, face up to them and try to find a way socially to deal with them, than that you leave them in the hands of some activist who wants to do stuff with them. Some of my best friends are activists. I'm just kidding. Okay. None of my best friends are activists. That's how it should be. Well, I was kidding because I don't have any friends. But okay. Sure, that's not true. I'm trying to gain some pity points. Okay. You have your clubhouse friends, screaming away like deranged maniacs. I'm anti-clubhouse, by the way, because the only time I heard it was that Brett Weinstein one when he did that. I don't know if you heard that, but early in clubhouse. I was invited to clubhouse with various people. He said, oh, this is a really great civilized way to hang out and talk with interesting people. I downloaded the app and I got on one night because Brett Weinstein said, I'm doing this conversation. I listened and it was the maddest damn discussion I've ever heard. Was it something about biology? Something about COVID times? At some point, Brett said, I'm an evolutionary biologist. And somebody else started saying, you're a eugenicist. And he said, no, I'm an evenly evenly, even if I only say that's the same thing. And it just went on like that. And Brett desperately tried to explain. That's not the same thing as being eugenicist. And he lost the clubhouse room. They thought that was the same thing. He'd come. It horribly reminded me of a time some years ago in a British newspaper, ran a sort of realizing that the only thing you can unite people on in sexual ethics is revulsion against pedophilia. Ran an anti-pedo campaign. And shortly after, pediatricians offices were torched in north of England by a mob who hadn't read the whole sign. Yeah. Well, to me, like I said, a little bit of poison is good for the town. So anyhow, sorry, I interrupted you with flattering you with people on clubhouse. I have many. I have multiples of friends. Yes. We didn't get to some of the ideas of critical race theory. What what exactly is it? I'm actually in part asking this question quite genuinely. Yeah, it's it's an attempt to look at everything among other things through the lens of race and to add race into things where it may not be as a way of adding. I'm trying to give the most generous estimation to add race in as a conversation in a place where it may not have been in the conversation. And that means history to the history of racism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All history. And to look at it through these particular lenses. I mean, there's a certain like all these things, there's a certain logic in it, like like with feminist studies or something. I mean, is there a utility in looking back through undoubtedly male dominated histories and asking where the more silent female voice was? Yes. Very interesting. Not endlessly interesting and can't be put exactly on the same par as but it has a utility. It's that endlessly sorry to interrupt that endlessly part that seems to get us into trouble. Yes. Well, because of this thing of where do you stop? And that's that's that's always a I looked at this in my last book in the manners of crowds. It's one of the big conundrums in activist movements and particularly in activist academia. Where would you stop? It's not clear because you've got a job in it. You've got a pension in it. You've got. Your only esteem in society is in keeping this gig going. What I mean, is it any likelihood? Have you ever? There's the old academic joke that, you know, the end of every conference, the only thing everyone agrees on is that we must have another conference like this one. So one thing they always agree on this conference is so great. We must have another one. But that's a criticism you could apply to a lot of disciplines. Of course, civil engineering, bridge building. It's at a certain point. Do we need any more bridges? Can we just fly everywhere? You know, so at the very least, you need to keep the bridges up. Sure. And they would critical race theory folks would probably make the same argument that the very least we need to keep the racism out. That makes sure we don't descend into the racism. It assumes all the time that we are living on the cusp of the return of the KKK. Right. Which is totally wrong. I mean, it's a massive. You say that now until the KKK armies march in. We don't always we can't always predict the future. We can't always predict the future. And you can always say you should be careful. But you've also got to be careful of people who've got their timing like totally, totally wrong or their estimation of society. You mean like most of society before in the 1930s when Hitler was I mean, so many people got Hitler wrong. Sure they did. Most people. So maybe it was nice to have the alarmist thinking there. Well, beware of the man with the mustache. If only it was that easy. It's not always about facial hair. I always say that. I mean, it very often is. These two clean shaven chaps both say one of the problems of everybody knowing a little bit about Nazism is that they think that they know where evil comes from and that it comes from like a German with a small mustache getting people to goose step, for instance. And that's not correct. A much better understanding of it is it can come from all number of directions and keep your antennae as good as you can. But once you end up in this society, which I would argue, certainly parts of America, where you're always in 1938, that's not healthy for a society either. Where people are so primed and think they're so well trained because they spent a term in school learning about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Think they're so well trained in Hitler spotting that they can do it all the time. Look at all these phrases we now have in our society like dog whistle. You know, as I always say, if you hear the whistle, you're the dog. But people say that's a dog whistle as if they're highly trained anti-Nazis. I mean, you know, there should be some humility in it. We should be careful. We should be wary for sure. And we should also be slightly humble in our inability to spot everything. If not significantly humble. Right. So if we can, there's something funny if not dark about the activity of Hitler spotting. If I just may take it aside. But so critical race theory, how much racism, what is racism? How much of it is in our world today? If we were thinking about this activity of Hitler spotting, how and trying to steel man the case of if not critical race theory, but people who look for racism in our world. How much would you say? Well, it's a good thing to try to define. I'd say that racism is the belief that other people are inferior to you. You could say you could see a form where you thought people were superior to you. That could also happen. But more commonly, you see a group of people as being inferior to you simply by dint of the fact that they have a different racial background. And that's sort of the easiest way to define racism. As I say, I mean, there are types of racism, mainly anti-Semitism, actually, perhaps it's the only one which weirdly relies on a hatred of people who a certain type of person thinks thinks are better than them. And that's a particular peculiarity. One of the peculiarities of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism somehow does both. Right. Yes. Well, one of the eternal fascinating things about anti-Semitism is it can do it does everything at the same time. It's like a quantum racism. Yes. Both superior and inferior. You know that, do you know Varsity Grossman's Life and Fate? So in the middle of Life and Fate, which a Persian friend of mine always said was one of only two great novels of the 20th century. She was very harsh, literally critic. What was the other one? Oh, The Leopard, obviously. The Leopard? The Leopard of Giuseppe de Lampedusa. Yeah. Okay. She's definitely right on that one. Life and Fate is a... I'm learning so much today. Life and Fate is an extraordinary book, mainly about, we know Grossman was a Jewish himself, but he saw almost everything that he could have done in the Second World War. He saw Stalingrad, who was a journalist, and he wrote firsthand accounts of Stalingrad. He was also the first journalist into Treblinka, and his account, which you can read in one of the collections of his journalism, his account of walking into Treblinka is just one of the most devastating, haunting pieces of journalism or prose you can read. Anyhow, I mention him because Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate, which is about a 900-page novel, in the middle of it, which is about the dark axis around Stalingrad, where at one point, amazingly, he sort of goes into the minds of both Hitler and Stalin. He says Stalin, in his study, feels his counterpart in Berlin, and he says he feels very close to him at this moment. Wow. Around Stalingrad, like leading up to the battle? After Stalingrad, when the Germans have lost, he says he feels the closeness of Hitler. But Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate, slap bang at the worst hours of the 20th century, suddenly dedicates a chapter to anti-Semitism. And, obviously, anti-Semitism is something I've always been very interested in, because I've always had an instinctive, utter revulsion of it. Also, partly because I haven't seen bits of it in the Middle East and elsewhere. But I mention this because Grossman, in the middle of Life and Fate, takes time out and does this three-page explanation, three-page description of anti-Semitism. And it's extraordinary. The only thing I can think of that's equally good is Gregor von Redsori, who wrote a luridly titled but brilliant set of novellas called The Confessions of an Anti-Semite, about pre-First World War anti-Semitism in Eastern and Central Europe. Anyway, Grossman says, in the middle of Life and Fate, that one of the extraordinary things about anti-Semitism is that it does everything at the same time. That Jews get condemned in one place for being rich and in another for being poor. Condemned in one place for assimilating and in another for not assimilating. For assimilating too much and assimilating too little. For being too successful, for not being successful enough. So I think it's the only racism that includes within it a detestation, for the real anti-Semite, a detestation of people that the person may perceive to be better than them, correctly or otherwise. By the way, I'm embarrassed to say I have not read this one of two greatest novels of the 20th century, Life and Fate, The Zhizni Sedba. And just to read off of Wikipedia, Vasiliy Grossman, a Ukrainian Jew, became a correspondent for the Soviet military paper, Krasna Zvezda. Having volunteered and been rejected from military service, he spent a thousand days in the front lines. Roughly three of the four years of the conflict between the Germans and Soviets. And the main themes covered in, how does it go, Life and Fate, I keep thinking Zhizni Sedba, is a theme on Jewish identity in the Holocaust, Grossman's idea of humanity and the human goodness, Stalin's distortion of reality and values, and science that goes on in reality of war. It's interesting, I need to definitely read it. I think you'll really get a lot from it. One of the other things, sorry to go on a riff on it, but one of the other things he does is, he has this extraordinary ability to talk about the absolute highest levels of the conflict, and the zoom in, it's rather like the camera work they use in things like Lord of the Rings, where he zooms down and gets one person in the midst of all this, and you get on that. What puts you in the study too. So I personally have read and re-read the William Shires' The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, who is another journalist who was there, but he does not do it. Interestingly enough, given such a large novel, kind of the definitive work, the definitive original work that goes to source materials on Hitler, he doesn't touch anti-Semitism really. Big thing to miss out. Well, he just says it very calmly and objectively as he does for most of the work, that this was the fact of life. There's a lot of cruelty throughout, but he doesn't get to... Well, one of the things is, of course, he lost the war because of anti-Semitism. That's one important way to view it. Andrew Roberts, another historian, said, in the end, the Nazis lost the war because they were Nazis. It sounds almost too neat, but it's worth remembering that at the end of the war, when the Germans need to be transporting troops, and they need to be transporting very basic supplies, Eichmann makes sure he gets the trains to transport the Jews right up to the end. Well, that's certainly a dark possibility. Anyhow, but to go back to racism in general, racism in general, apart from anti-Semitism, relies on the perception that another group of people, a racial group, other than your own, are inferior to you. That's what I'd say is the easiest shorthand of racism. Of course, it's one of the stupidest things that our species is capable of. I mean, one of the stupidest, that you can look at a person and guess them, in their entirety, in fact, because of their skin color. I mean, it's like, what a stupid idea that is, as well as being an evil one. I would say that one of the, I think it's a dangerous thing in our era that there are bits of it coming back. That's why I say we do need sort of, we need our antennae working. We just don't need them to be overactive or underactive, you know. Now, the book is War in the West, but speaking of racism, racism towards different groups based on their skin color, you've said that there's a war on white people in the West. Would you say that's the case? Would you say that there is significant racism towards white people in the United States? I'd say that white people in the United States are the only people who are told that they have hereditary sin. That's a big one, just to start with. Based strictly on their skin color. I mean, I would find it so repugnant if, and I hope everybody would join me in feeling this, I would feel so repugnant if there were any school of thought in America today that had any grasp on the public attention that said that black people were born into evil because of something their ancestors had done. Like they had the mark of Cain upon them. I mean, I think it would be such a vicious way to try to demoralize a group of people and to tell them that the things they would be able to achieve in their lives are much lessened because they should spend significant portions of their lives trying to atone for something they didn't do. Is there a difference? And the following point, the obvious point left unsaid, but let's say it. Nobody in the public square says that. I mean, they're the maniacs of the far fringes, but nobody in the mainstream would dare to say that or I think even think that about any group of people other than white people. And does this mean that white people are more disadvantaged than black people? No, and again, let's not make this a competition, but let's not get into, I just desperately urge people not to get into the idea of hereditary sin according to racial background. Is there something to be said about the feature aspect, to sort of play devil's advocate, about the asymmetry of sort of accusations towards the majority? Yes, of course, it's much easier to attack a majority. It is much easier, but is there something to be said about that being a useful function of society that you always attack, that the minority has disproportionate power to attack the majority so that you can always keep the majority in check? Well, it's a dangerous game to play, isn't it? I think that's a good summary of entirety of human civilization. Oh yeah, everything is dangerous, but it's a very dangerous game to play that. I wrote about this a bit in the Madness of Crowds when I was saying to like gay rights people, the ones that still exist, the ones who don't have homes to go to, who want to beat up on straight people in a way, or want to make straight people feel like they're kind of unremarkable, uncool, boring straights. So boring. So not like the magical pixie fairy dust gays. That's a bad idea to push that one. That's a bad idea, and some gays push that. Highly unwise, given the fact that about 2-3% of the population are actually gay, although now there's like an additional 20% who think they're like two-spirit or something, and all that bullshit, but they're just attention seekers, so let's not spend too much time on that. But equally, as I said in the Madness of Crowds, with the feminist movement, very unwise for half of the species to say that the other half of the species isn't needed. And there were always third and fourth wave feminists willing to make that nuts argument. Not first wave feminists. You didn't hear it in first wave feminists. Because suffragettes tended not to say, we'd like the vote, and men are scum. It would have been hard to have won everyone over to their side, not least the men they needed to win over to their side. But you do get third and fourth wave feminists who say, do we need men, or men are all X. Again, it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea tactically. What if men, Richard Wrangham, somebody from Harvard, describes that men are the originators of violence, physical violence in society, and he argues that actually the world would be better off. No, just a very cold calculus. If you get rid of men, there would be a lot less violence in society, is his claim. But who says you need to get rid of violence in society? But shouldn't that at least be a discussion? The pros and cons have a debate, a panel discussion, violence, pros and cons. Well, that's the sort of thing, if I can say so, that some weak-ass academic decides to do, because he thinks that his area of Boston would be nicer, or whatever. He might decide it's useful, if he was living in Kiev today, to have violent men. I mean, it might, if New York was invaded right now, I'd need some violent men around here. But it wouldn't be invaded, if there's no violent men, as the argument goes. At least there's some level of threat that you ought to exude that puts people off. I'm very glad that the men and women of Ukraine are capable of, and more than capable of, fighting for their country, and for their neighbours, and their families, and much more. But it's better that, that there was violence ready to unleash, when violence was unleashed upon them, than that the whole society had been told that they should identify as non-binary. But at least it's a conversation to have. Isn't there an aspect to the feminist movement that is correct, in challenging the... Some forms of violence, domestic violence, for instance. Although women are capable of that as well. I'm learning about this. We're all learning about this at the moment. I can't help but watch the entirety of it go down in this beautiful mess that is human relations. Okay. But just to finish up that thought, it's very unwise for women to war against men, as it would be for men to war against women. It's highly, highly unwise to war on a majority population. And in America, Britain, and other Western countries, white people are still a majority. And so, why would you tell the majority that they're evil by dint of their skin colour? And think that that would be a good way to keep them in check? I mean, I'm not guilty of anything because of my skin colour. I'm not guilty of anything. My ancestors didn't do anything wrong. And even if they had, why would I be held responsible for it? So, to go back to Nietzsche, is there some aspect to where, if we try to explain the forces at play here, is it the will to power playing itself out from individual human nature, from group behaviour nature? Is there some elements to this, which is the game we play as human beings, is always when we have less power, we try to find ways to gain more power? That's certainly one. The desire to grab is, let me see if I can find a quote for you on that. The desire to grab that which we think we're owed, we do it often in the guise of justice. I mean, justice is one of the great terms of our age, and one of the very great bogus terms of our age. People forever talk about their search for justice, and it's amazing how violent they can often be in their search for justice, and how many rules they're willing to break so long as they can say they're after justice, and how many norms they can trample so long as they can say it's in the name of justice. You can burn down buildings in the name of justice. Well, the majority groups throughout history, including those with white skin colour, have done the same in the name of justice. We come up with all kinds of sexy terms in our propaganda machines to sell whatever atrocities we'd like to commit. One of the quotes from Nietzsche that I liked, and I quoted in this. Careful, I'm judging you harshly. Yeah, of course. Nietzsche says that one of the dangers of men of resentment is they'll achieve their ultimate form of revenge, which is to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves, to shove their misery in the faces of the happy so that in due course the happy, and this is quoting Nietzsche, start to be ashamed of their happiness, and perhaps say to one another, it's a disgrace to be happy. There is too much misery. This is something to be averted. For the sick, says Nietzsche, must not make the healthy sick too, make the healthy confuse themselves with the sick. Well, I think that again, there's a lot of that going on. How could I be happy when there is unhappiness in the world? Why should I not join the ranks of the unhappy? I think Dostoevsky has a book about that as well. Sure. Notes from Underground. Okay. This has been very Russian, Russian focus. I'm very pleased with the number of times both Dostoevsky and Grossman and others have come in. I wasn't doing this as a sort of... Yeah, well, it's always good to plug the greats and good to know they're still relevant. Do you speak Russian, by the way, at all? Which I did. I'm told it's a 10-year language basically to learn from scratch. My friends who have done it. Well, there's the language and then there's the personality behind the language and the personality I feel like you already have. So you just need to know the surface details. Okay. In fact, the silence to be silent in the Russian language is something that's already important. If we had a moment, I'd tell you my story about Stalin's birthplace. Should I tell you that? No. I once went to Gori where Stalin was born. Have you been? No. I was there just after the Georgia War. I went to the nomads' land in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And I said, I've really got to go to Gori or something because a shell had landed in Gori rather weirdly from the Russian side and Gori is where Stalin was born. And of course, Gori is in Georgia. And anyhow, the museum of Stalin's birthplace, they've been trying to change for some years because it had been unadulteratedly pro-Stalin for years. And the Georgian authorities, this is in Chakashvili's time, were trying to make it into a museum of Stalinism. And it was really tough. The only place I've seen which is similar is the house in Mexico City where Trotsky was killed. That also is that they're not quite sure what to do. They don't want to say he's a bad guy because they think that people won't come anyhow. Stalin's house in Gori had changed from a museum of Stalin to a museum of Stalinism. There was this large Georgian woman with a pink pencil who had clearly been doing the tour for 50 years and just pointed all the facts. She did that classic thing I've also saw once in North Korea where that sort of communist thing where they say, here is this is 147 feet high by 13 feet deep. It gives you lots of facts. I don't care. Why does it matter? It will give you facts. This is Stalin's suitcase. It is 13 inches wide. Anyhow, this woman did all of this. It was all just wildly pro- not pro-Stalin. It just explained Stalin's life. It was just a great local boy done good. They didn't mention the fact he killed more Georgians per capita than anyone else. Local boy done good. We get to the end. Before being taken to the gift shop where they sell red wine with Stalin's face on it, among other things, and a lighter with Stalin on it, they took you to a little room under the stairs and they said, this is a replica of interrogation cell to show- represent horror of what happened in Stalin time. Now, gift shop. There's no- I took the woman aside at the end. I was scared what she'd said to other journalists and visited before. I took her aside and said, what do you think about comrade Stalin? She said, she'd obviously done this during communist times. She said, it's not my place to judge. That sort of thing. Which is an interesting comment in itself. I said, yeah, but he killed more Georgians than anyone. All that sort of thing. She said, it's not my place to judge or to give my views. That sort of thing. Eventually I said, what do you feel about it? And she said, it was like a hurricane. It happened. That's interesting because if I may mention Clubhouse once again, I got a chance to talk to a few people from Mongolia. There's a woman from Mongolia and they talked about the fact that they deeply admire Stalin. They love- She sounded, if I may, hopefully that's not crossing the line. I think I'm representing her correctly in saying she admired him and just loved him. The way people love Jesus, a holy figure. Isn't that still the case in large parts of Russia? Stalin keeps on winning greatest Russian of all time. And that's perhaps, maybe there's a dip, but if we were to think about the long arc of history, perhaps that's going to go up and up and up and up. There's something about human memory that you forget the details of the atrocities of the past and remember the- I mean, think of the number of people we talk about as historical heroes. Napoleon. I mean, British people don't talk about Napoleon as a hero, but the French. Now you're- You did the thing, the Dostoyevsky, now again- Now you're on tricky ground. But the French, they admire Napoleon and they had many admiral aspects. He was also an unbelievable brute and killed many people unnecessarily. And there are lots of figures from history that we sort of cover that over with. Yeah, yeah. Can we mention Churchill briefly? Because he is one of the- You can make a case for him being one of the great representers or great figures historically of Western civilization. Yes. And then there's a lot of people from- Not a lot. I have like three friends and one of them happens to be from London and they say that he's not a good person. Why? So listen, this friend, we did not discuss- This is an opinion poll of the three friends, but I do know that there's quite a bit- There's a backhash going on at the moment. At the moment and in general, there's a spirit reflecting on the darker sides of some of these historical figures, like challenging history through- It's not just critical race theory. It's challenging history through, well, are the people we think of as heroes, what are their flaws? And are they in fact villains that are convenient, sort of were there at the right time to accidentally do the right thing? Accidentally. I hope this isn't the representative fair summation of your friend in London's view. No, she's going to be quite mad at this, but I didn't say the name, so it could be any friend. It could be- But we know it's a she. It's like my girlfriend in Canada. Well, see, I- You've given that away. Well, that's- Of course I would not. I made that up completely. It's all just like my girlfriend in Canada. She's completely a figment of my imagination. Nevertheless, Winston Churchill is somebody, I mean, just looking at reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich, is an incredible figure that to me, so much of World War II is marked, leading up to the war, is marked by stunning amounts of cowardice by political leaders. Yes. And it's fascinating to watch here, this person clearly with the drinking and a smoking problem. I don't understand why that's a negative. No, I didn't say. You see- Yeah, you throw it in as if it is. No, well, it's called humor. I'll explain it to you one day what that means. Yeah, I'll explain dry humor. He stood up. He stood up to what we now see as evil, when at the time it was not so obvious to see. So that's just a fascinating figure of Western civilization. I'd love to get your comments. The real criticisms, I mean, smoking and drinking, the real criticisms of Churchill are quite easy to sum up, and I do so in the War on the West, actually. I say these are the things that they now use against him. Didn't do enough to avert the Bengal famine in 1943, for instance. That's been shot down by numerous historians, including Indian historians. In the middle of the war, in the middle of a world war, Churchill did what he could to get grain supplies diverted from Australia to Bengal. The famine was appalling. It was caused by a typhoon. It was not caused by Winston Churchill. And the idea that some, basically Indian nationalist historians, have pumped out in recent years, and just anti-Churchill figures, that he actually wanted Indians to die is just total calumny. And when people claim, some people claim that, I mean there was a few very ignorant scholars, nevertheless with some credentials, who claim that Churchill wanted the Indian population to basically be genocided. And it's complete nonsense, not least by the fact that during the period which in question the Indian population boomed. So that's one of the main ones. Another one is that he had some views that we now regard as racist. He definitely regarded racists as being of different characters, and that there were superior races, and as it were the white European was a superior culture. He was born in Victorian England, so he had some Victorian attitudes. These are things in the negative side of the ledger, and as with all history you should have a negative and a positive side of the ledger. Positive side of the ledger includes he almost certainly did more than any one human being to save the world from Nazism. So that should count as something. And one of the reasons I talk about Churchill in this regard is to stress that, if you get, I'm not trying to stop anyone doing history at all. I don't think the revisionism of recent years about Churchill, or the founding fathers of America, or anyone else is anything I want to stop. I find it interesting, not least because it's so sloppy on occasions, but I find it interesting and it's important, and we should be able to see people in the round. But that includes recognizing the positive side of the ledger, and if you can't recognize that side, you're doing something else. You're doing something else. It's not history. It's some form of politicking of a very particular kind. And I think it's the same thing with the founding fathers. There are some people, for instance, certainly since the 90s, who have pushed the Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson story to show that Thomas Jefferson was some kind of brute. As a result, you know, we see Jefferson's statue being removed from the council chamber in the city we're sitting in last November by council members who said that Thomas Jefferson no longer represents our values. If you can't recognize greatness of Thomas Jefferson and that he had flaws, I mean, that's not a grown-up debate. And weigh them, and weigh them in the context of the time. But let me sort of throw a curveball at you then. What about recognizing the positive and the negative of a fellow with nice facial hair called Karl Marx? Sure. I mean, I have a section in The War in the West, as you know, where I go for Karl Marx with some glee. So he seems to have gotten some popularity in the West recently. Not just recently, yeah. I mean, he's had a resurgence recently. Yes, a resurgence. Well, that's because whenever things are seen to go wrong, people reach for other options. And when, for instance, it's very hard for people to accumulate capital, it's not obvious that they're going to become capitalists. And so one thing that happens is people say, let's look at the Marxism thing again, see if that's a viable goer. And my argument would simply be, point me to one place that's worked. Well, the argument from the Marxist or the Marxian economists is that we've only really tried it once, the Soviets tried it, and then there's a few people that kind of tried the Soviet thing. Cuba tried it? Well, they basically, it's an offshoot of the Soviet. They tried it, yeah. Yes, they've tried it. They tried it in Venezuela. Yes, yes, yes. So let's just quickly say, how did all these experiments go? They did not, well, they failed in fascinating ways. They did, but they failed. Yes, they failed. And we should stress, so grossly failed, so grossly failed that they threw millions and millions of people into completely thwarted lives that were much shorter than they should have been. Yes, so the lesson to learn there, you can learn several lessons. One is that anything that smells like Marxism is going to lead to a lot of problems. Another lesson could be, well, what is the fundamental idea that Marx had? He was criticizing capitalism and the flaws of capitalism. So is it possible to do better than capitalism? And if you take that spirit, you start to wonder. That might actually become relevant in, I don't know, 20, 30, 50 years when the machines start doing more and more of the labor, all those kinds of things, you start to ask questions. You finally might get to Marx's dream of what the average day would look like. Yes. Well, there's going to be an awful lot of literary criticism then. If you remember, that's what Marx said that we would be doing in the evenings, the laborer in the evening. Well, he didn't know Twitter was a thing, or Netflix, so he would change. Are there things we could learn from Marx, plausibly, possibly? I can't think of anything myself offhand. But to have a critique of capitalism isn't by any means a bad thing in this society. I'd rather that it was a critique of capitalism that showed how you improve capitalism, a critique of the free market that showed how people could get better access to the free market, how you could ensure, for instance, that young people get onto the property ladder, things like that. Those are constructive things. The people who say we must have Marxism, I mean, don't know what the hell they're talking about because that never leads to any of those things. Haven't learned in the past. It's never learned in the past. And at some point, you've got to try to work out how many attempts you make at this damn philosophy before you realize that every attempt always leads to the same thing. I would say we could pretend that fascism has never been properly tried and that it was unfortunate what happened in Nazi Germany, but that wasn't real fascism. In Mussolini's fascism, it didn't go all that well, but it was a bit better and maybe we could try a bit more Franco fascism. Nobody would have any time for this crap, nor should they. The people who try that are reviled and quite rightly. So why do we tolerate it with the Marxism thing? It's a great mystery to me the way that people do tolerate it, always, always in this stupid way of saying we haven't done it yet. If you keep trying the same recipe and every time it comes out as shit, it's that the recipe is shit. Well, sort of, I'm trying to practice here by playing devil's advocate practice, the same idea that you mentioned, which is when you say the word Marxism, should you throw out everything or should you ask a question, is there good ideas here? And the same, it's the good, it's weighing the good and the bad and be able to do so calmly and thoughtfully. Sure. Do you know the famous George Orwell comment on the Stalinist? Do you know? No. That's one of my favorite quotes. George Orwell in the early 40s gets into an argument with a Stalinist, who's also a Marxist. And this is after the show trial, it's 37. This is when it's very clear what Marxism in the Russian form is. And Orwell is in the discussion with this Marxist and it goes on and on. And eventually Orwell says, well, you know, what about the show trials? And what about what's happened in Ukraine? And the famines and much more, and the purges and the purges and the purges. And eventually the Stalinist says to Orwell what Orwell knows he's going to say all along, which is he says you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. And Orwell says, where's the omelet? Oh, yeah. That's a good, that's a really good. Look at this by this stage, okay? Where's my damn omelet? How many just messy, big, bloody, eggy piles have the Marxists created by now in country after country? Always next time they're going to produce the great omelet. But they never have and they never will because the whole thing is rotten from the start. But let me just also say one thing about, because of course Marx isn't as nice as he sounds. And that's one of the things that I try to highlight in the book is if we're going to do this reductive thing of people in history and saying, well, they had views that were of their time and we must therefore condemn them for them. Say, fine, let's do the same thing with Marx. And there are things I quote in this book from Marxist letters, not least letters to Engels. And indeed in his published writings, in pieces he was writing for the American press in the 1850s. He has horrible views on slavery and colonialism and much more. But the main thing is, I mean, the horrible things he says about black people and the constant use of the N-word. In fact, when I was doing the audio book for the Wall of Words, I had to decide, will I read out the quotes from Marx or not? If I had read them out, I'd have been cancelled because people would have just said, you've been using the N-word so much in this passage. And I slightly thought of doing it so that I could say I was only quoting Marx to try to hit the point home. In the end, of course, I was sensible and decided not to. But Marxist letters are disgusting on these terms. Since I highlighted this in this book and some of the media picked it up and have popularized this thing I'm trying to put into the system, which is if you're going to accuse Churchill of racism, if you're going to accuse Jefferson of racism, Washington of racism and so on, what about Marx? The two things that Marxists have said since this came out has been, first of all, why are you saying this about Marx? He was a man of his time. Like everyone else. And the second thing they say is, we don't go to Marx for his horrible, abhorrent views on race. They're talking about mixed race people as guerrillas and so on. We don't go to him for that. We go to him for his economic theories. I say, OK, well, we don't go to Thomas Jefferson for his views on slaves. We don't go to Churchill for his the precise language he used the points in the 1910s about Indians or his health advice or his health advice. I do get him for that. But I explain so much. But let's have some standards on this. And that's why I'm very suspicious of the fact that the people don't do this with Marx, because I think what they're trying to what some people are trying to do. And this isn't this may sound conspiratorial, but I really don't think it is. I think that some people are deliberately trying to completely clear the cultural landscape of our past in order to say there's nothing good, nothing you can hold on to. No one you should revere. You've got no heroes. The whole thing comes down. Who's left standing? Oh, we've also got this idea from the 20th century still about Marxism or the 19th and 20th centuries. And no, no, you will not have the entire landscape de-racinated and then the worst ideas tried again. So basically destroy all of history and the lessons learned from history and then start from scratch. And then then it's completely any idea can work and you could just take whatever. Well, and the thing is, there are always some people with pre-prepared ideas. And I mentioned this also with the post-colonialists. The post-colonialists were really interesting because when the European powers were moving, were moving from Africa and the Far East, post-colonial movements had one obvious move they could have done, which was to say since the European powers have left, we will return to a pre-colonial life, which in some of the places would mean returning to slave markets and slave ownership and slave selling and much more. But put that aside for a second. They could have said we have an indigenous culture, which we will return to. Almost uniformly in the post-colonial era, you had figures like France Fanon, you had European intellectuals like Sartre, who said the Western powers are retreating from these countries and therefore we should institute in these countries what but Western Marxism. Well, it's not obvious to me that the bad ideas would be the ones that emerge, but it's more likely that the bad ideas would emerge in this kind of context when you erase history, when you erase tradition. When you erase history and you leave some ideas deliberately uninterrogated. I mean, as I say, find me one in a hundred American students who've heard of any of the communist despots of the 20th century. I mean, name recognition in, there was a poll done a few years ago in the UK, and like name recognition among children, school children for Stalin, let alone Mao. I mean, Mao who kills more people than anyone, 65 million Chinese perhaps. How many students in America know what Mao was, who he was, where he was? Nothing. Or the atrocities committed. Where the atrocities were committed. I worry about that because it means that we might have learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. We think we've learned one of the two lessons of the 20th century. We actually haven't learned that lesson. We've learned a little bit of it, and we've not learned the other one at all. Because that's why we still have people in American politics and elsewhere actually talking about collectivization and things. As if there's no problem with that, and as if it's perfectly obvious, and they could run it, and they'd know exactly where to start. What are the two lessons of the 20th century? Fascism and communism. Yeah, I mean I'm not exactly sure what exactly the lessons are. No, it's not clear. If the lessons were very clear, we'd be better at it. Well, one is your book broadly applied of madness of crowds. That's one lesson. How so? Meaning like large crowds can display herd-like behavior. Yes, be very suspicious of crowds. Yeah, in general. I mean you apply it in different more to modern application in a sense, but that's rooted in history. When humans get together, they can do some quite radically silly things. Elias Kennetty is very good on that, crowds and power. And Eric Hoffer, who is a sort of self-taught amazing, not the autodidactic writer, the true believer and so on. He was extremely good on that. But the reason I mention the two things, no, I mean we should have realized the two nightmares of the 20th century, fascism and communism. That we should know how they came about. And we're interested in learning how one of them came about, fascism. And we know some of the lessons like don't treat other people as less than you because of their race. That's one lesson. But we've done some good at learning that. But the second one, not to do communism again, not to do socialism. I think we're way away from knowing because we don't know how it happened. And the little temptations are still there always. Look at the people saying I'm going to expropriate your property. People do things they don't like, they will get, we can't wait to take your property. Well there's a sense, there's an appealing sense. Okay, every ideology has an appealing narrative behind it that sells the ideology. So for socialism, for communism, it seems unfair that the working class does all of this work. And gets only a fraction of the output. It just seems unfair. If they do get a fraction of the output, yes. Yes, and so it seems to be more fair if we increase that. If the workers own all of the value of their output. And things that are more fair seems to be a good thing. I'd say, well yeah, I mean fairness is, I like fairness as a term. No, I much prefer fairness because it's a much easier thing to try to work out. It's quite amorphous itself as a concept but everyone can recognize it. So for instance, should the boss of the company earn a million times that of the lowest paid employee? It doesn't seem fair. Should they earn maybe five or ten times the salary of the lowest paid employee? Yeah, possibly. That could be fair. There are certain sort of multiples which are within the bounds of reasonableness. I think actually that's the much bigger problem in capitalism at the moment as I see it. Is the not untrue perception that a tiny number of people get a lot of the, accrue a lot of the benefits. And that the bit in the middle has become increasingly squeezed. And is danger always a falling all the way down to the bottom? I mean I think in the snakes and ladders of American capitalism for instance. It's a correct perception to say that the snakes go down awfully far. If you tread on the snake you can plummet an awfully long way in America. And the deal in the game was that the ladders took you high. And there's a perception and again it's not entirely wrong that the ladders system on the board is kind of broken. So what you're saying is you're a Marxist? I'm not saying I'm a Marxist. You heard that here first in the out of context blog post you're going to write about this. I get back to this point. The way to critique capitalism if it's gone bad is to get better capital. Free markets where they're not fair should be made fair. Never decide that the answer is the thing that has never produced any human flourishing i.e. Marxism. So as you describe in the madness of crowds the herd like behavior of humans that gets us into trouble. You as an individual thinker and others listening to this how can you, because all of us are amidst crowds, we're influenced by the society that's around us, by the people that's around us. How can we think independently? How can we, if you're in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century, if you're in Nazi Germany at the end of the 30s and 40s, how can you think independently? Given first of all that it's hard to think independently just intellectually speaking, but also that it just becomes more and more dangerous. So the incentive to think independently under the uncertainty that's usually involved with thinking is, I mean it's a silly thing to say but on Twitter there's a cost to be paid for going against the crowd on any silly thing. We can even talk about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. There's a crowd that believes that that was unjustified. I forget what the crowd decided. Crowd split on that one. It's safe to have one opinion either way. Okay it is, right. But there is, you put it very nicely, that there's clearly a calculus here and that you can measure on Twitter in particular you can measure kind of the crowd, a sense of where the crowd lays. Michael Jackson. Well, oh boy. I don't want to, this is not a legal discussion. I don't have my lawyer present. I don't even have a lawyer. The man in question is dead. But I think most people who are not just diehard fans would concede that Michael Jackson had a strange relationship with children and was almost certainly a pedophile. Did the crowd agree on that? No, the crowd hasn't agreed because he's too famous and we all love Thriller. Yeah, we do. So you said people who are not fans, I just don't... No, I'm a fan of Michael Jackson, but I think he was almost certainly a pedophile. But nobody wants to give up dancing to bad at weddings. So they just kind of added in. It's fine. Seriously, it's... But see, your law does not apply to Bill Cosby. Well, he was, of course, one of the most famous people in America, but maybe he wasn't regarded as talented. Oh, wow. There's depth to this calculation. Oh, yeah. There's a genius opt-out in all cultures. There's a genius opt-out in all cultures. Look at Lord Byron. Lord Byron shagged his sister. Doesn't affect his reputation. In fact, if anything, it kind of adds to it. But then again, this kind of war against the West, genius actually makes you more likely or no to get cancelled. So if you look at the genius of Thomas Jefferson or... Well, yes, because if you haven't done anything remarkable, nobody will come looking for you. So a genius can get you in trouble eventually. Sidle through life with nobody noticing, be totally harmless, and then die and hope you haven't used any carbon. But you were asking about how to survive the era of social media, as it were, and the crowds. And there's a very simple answer to that. Don't overrate the significance of the unreal world. Oh, come on. But this is still human psychology. Because you want to fit in. Why? Because you like people. Why not just like a small number of people and ignore the rest? Yeah, that's... That's what I do. Well, I mean, I actually like most people. This isn't a general thing. I don't have detestation for most people at all. Most people I enjoy speaking with and being with. But in terms of storing your sense of self-worth in absolute strangers, big mistake. Yeah, well, me, that's... this is now turning into a therapy session. Because for me, and I think I represent some number of population, is I'm pretty self-critical. I'm looking for myself in the world. And there is a depth of connection with people on the Internet. I mean, I have some... I think there's a shallowness of it. It's shallow connection. Interesting. I... Put it this way. If you became very ill tomorrow, would any of them help? On the Internet? No. No? Good. That's a good test. Yeah, that's a good test. But then at the end of the day, yeah, you're right. Your very close friends would help. Family would help. Yeah. Yeah. And perhaps that's the only thing... You can't store significant amounts of trust or faith or belief or self-worth in places which will not return it to you. Okay. So let's talk about the more extreme case, the harsher case. When you talk about the things you talk about in the war on the West and madness of crowds, I mean, you're getting a lot of blowback, I'm sure. As for the listener, you just shrugged lightly with a Zen-like look on your face. So you don't... All you need is Sam Harris to say that you're brilliant and you're happy. No, I'm very... I love Sam. Yeah. I'm deeply pleased when he flatters me, but I mean, I'm... And he's nice about me, but no, I don't just rely on Sam. No, I mean, I... Why would I mind? I mean, maybe it's self-selecting. If I didn't have the view I had about that or whatever armory it is that I have on that, I wouldn't do what I did, maybe. I mean, have you been to some dark places psychologically because of the challenging ideas you explore? Like significant self-doubt, just kind of... I can't say I've been unaffected by everything in my life. By any means, that would make me an automaton of some kind. There's definitely times I've got things wrong and regretted that. There's times I've... There was a period around the time I wrote my book, The Strange Death of Europe, which was a very, very dark time. And it wasn't because I was having a dark time in my life, but because of the book I was writing. Oh, because of the places you had to go in order to write the book. And, well, I was contemplating the end of a civilization. Occasionally, now, I have maybe slightly too pat at this stage, but sometimes readers come up to me in the street or whatever and say, you know, The Strange Death of Europe, and will say, you know, very depressing book to read, however. I would say, well, you should have tried writing it. But it was because, I mean, it has chunks of it which I'm very proud of, in particular, about the death of religion, the death of God, the loss of meaning and the void. And that's difficult stuff to write about and to grapple with. And there is a sort of... I haven't re-read that book since it came out, but I think there are passages in it which reveal what I was thinking very clearly in the poetry of it, as it were, as well as the detail. But, yeah, I can't say... I'm used to saying what I think and what I see. And if there's any pushback I've got from that, I'm completely consoled that I'm saying what I see with my own eyes. That's your source of strength, is that you're always seeking the truth as best you see it. Well, I can't agree to go along with a lie if I've seen something with my own eyes. Do you ever... So, speaking of Sam Harris, and I mentioned to you offline, a lot of people... I talk to a lot of smart people in my private life on this podcast, and a lot of them will reference you as their example of a very smart person. So, given that compliment, do you ever worry that your ego grows to a level where you're not... what you think is the truth is no longer the truth? Is this kind of... it blinds you? And also, on top of that, the fact that you stand against the crowd often, that there's part of it that appeals to you, that you like to point out the emperor has no clothes. I get a certain thrill from the friction. Yeah, that sometimes both your ego and the thrill of friction will get you to deviate from the truth and instead just look for the friction. Could do. Could do, for sure. I try to keep alive to that. I mean, I try... early in my career, I realized that, for instance, I didn't want to make enemies unnecessarily, any more than strictly necessary, because there was a very large number of already necessary enemies. And I remember once, I won't get into the details, but I already had one sort of thing I'd done that week, and then another thing came out, and I just thought, I can't do that. And I remember thinking, don't be the sort of person who's forever creating storms. And I tried to make sure I wasn't, and I think I pretty much stuck to that. But to answer your question, well, the first thing is I'm as confident as I can be that I wouldn't fall into the trap you described for two reasons. I mean, one is that I don't think of myself as a wildly intelligent person, partly because I'm very, very aware of things I know nothing about. I mean, for instance, I have almost no knowledge of the details of finance or economic theory. I mean, the real details, I don't mean the big picture of the kind that we were just discussing earlier, but I have, if you put the periodic table in front of me, I would struggle to do more than a handful. I am very conscious of huge gaps in my knowledge, and where I have gaps or chasms, I tend to find I have a disproportionate admiration for the people who know that stuff. Like I'm wildly impressed by people who understand money, really understand it. You know, they think, how the hell do you do that? And the same thing with biologists, medics, stuff I just know very little about. And that's a source of humility for you, just knowing that? Yes, I mean, I think, well, I'm okay on that stuff, but, oh, Jesus, if you got me on the general knowledge, I would say that thing, some years ago, there's a thing in the UK called University Challenge, I don't know if it's, and I was asked some years ago on to, there's a sort of like celebrity, one of former students of the universities or colleges, asked to go back for the Christmas special. And I was asked to be one of the people from my old college to go back and compete in the sort of celebrity alumni one. And the only reason I actually wanted to do it was because I discovered that Louis Theroux had been to my college before my time, and he was on, he'd agreed to be on the team. And I thought, I'd love to meet Louis Theroux, that'd be great fun. And anyhow, and I said, well, I really don't want to do it. And they said, come on, you'd be great. I said, I wouldn't, I'd show myself up, I'd be a total asshole and ignoramus. And as it was, I sat down my flat and I watched some past episodes of University Challenge. I just sat in mute for the whole hour. I just couldn't, the first question was about physics and the second one was about, as it was, I watched the one. And I could answer the first two or three questions of the one that actually went out because they made it a bit simpler. But I mean, I'm terribly conscious of the, and I said to the producers, I said, I can't go on because I mean, I just couldn't answer the questions. These unbelievably smart students seem to be able to answer on a whole range of things. So I'm perfectly aware of my limitations. And you contemplate your limitations. Yeah. They're forever before me, you know, not hard to find in every day. And then on top of that, I suppose it's, in a way, you know that line from Rudyard Kipling's alternately brilliant and slightly nauseating poem, If. You just enjoy a good poem, can't you? Well, no, it's not. I can enjoy a great poem. Yes. But I mean, a good poem. This is slightly off. But this goes to your criticism of Dostoevsky. Take Douglas' criticism with a grain of salt. Maybe I've read it too many memorial services and things. Sure. But that line is a good piece of advice. If you can learn to meet triumph and disaster and meet these, greet these two imposters just the same. That's a good line. It's a good line, as is Kipping often done, an amazing turn of line. But I do think that it's a very sensible thing to try to greet triumph and disaster and regard them as imposters and greet them just the same. And actually, anyone who knows me knows that I never, partly it's because I have a sort of belief in the old gods and that the moment that I thought that I was at the moment of triumph, the fates would hitch up their skirts and run at me at a million miles an hour. But it's also because anyone who knows me knows I never have a moment when I say, that's just great. I feel totally fulfilled and victorious. I mean, it happened to me recently when the War on the West went straight to number one in the bestseller list. How long did that last in terms of your self-satisfaction? It didn't happen. Not even for a brief moment? No. When I first saw that it was selling, I had that moment of elation. I thought, good, I've done it, it's out. And I did have a moment of elation then, definitely. But it doesn't last, partly because I tell myself it mustn't last. Because as you said, fate hitches up its skirt. Is that skirts? You brits with your poetry, even when it's nauseating. As of 2022, this year, what's your final analysis of the political leadership and the human mind and the human being of Donald Trump? I sort of avoided this for years. Just talking about Trump? I tried to avoid talking about Trump for years. Same reason I tried to avoid writing about Brexit. Just sorry on a small tangent, do you think the Trump story is over or are we just done with volume one? I have no idea. The people I know who know him say that he's running. And I think that in general, Republicans have to do have a choice in front of them. One friend put it to me recently, he said, you've got to go in with your toughest fighter. And I understand that instinct. And I also think it's very dangerous instinct. Because what is your toughest fighter is also your biggest liability. What's the best way to get out the Democrat vote in 2024 than to have Donald Trump running? The people that are doing the war in the West are pretty tough fighters. They are. And I'm cautious about this because I know every way I tread is dangerous. But let me just be frank. Tread gracefully. I'll tread as gracefully as I can in my Wellington boots. In my galoshes. Here's the thing. I think everybody knows what Trump is. I think we all knew for years. And I feel sorry for the conservatives who had to pretend that he was something he wasn't. I felt sorry for the ones who had to pretend that, for instance, he was some devout Christian or a man of faith or a man of great integrity or all of these sorts of things. Because in the public eye for years, it would be obvious that wasn't the case. But he has something extraordinary. One thing is a method of communication that you've just got to say is was unbelievable. In one fundamental way that you can't look away for some reason. Can't look away. Watching him clear everyone out of the way in 2016 was thrilling because those people needed clearing away. It's just horrifying. America is going to give us another Bush? What's so great about this family? America is going to give us another Clinton? We're going to get to choose between a Clinton and a Bush? Mark Stein said, we'll just wait for the day the Clintons and the Bushes intermarry and then we can really have a monarchy again. So I was very pleased to see him clear them away. I was very pleased to see him sort of raise some of the issues that needed raising. I thought it was a sort of breath of fresh air and I wished it wasn't him doing it. And then there was a question of him governing and it was just perfectly clear he didn't know how to govern. What he did have, however, what he does have is an incredible ability to fight. And some of the forces he was arraigned against were arraigned against him. My gosh, they would have taken down anyone else. I mean, if they'd have probably done some similar BS against Ted Cruz if he, you know, or Marco Rubio, you know, they'd have said some people admitted they'd have accused all these people of racism and misogyny and everything else as well. Just like they did Mitt Romney, just like they did John McCain. But Trump was the one ugly enough and bruisey enough to fight. And also a willingness or a lack of willingness to play sort of the civil game of politics, you know, at a party when politeness gets you in trouble. You show up and everybody's polite and you just out of momentum want to be polite and all of a sudden you're on an island with Jeffrey Epstein and it gets you into a huge amount of trouble. So Trump has these sort of extraordinary qualities, but I just, you know, look, he screwed up during his time in office because he didn't achieve as much as he should have done. And you could say that about every president, but I refuse to acknowledge that two years when he had both houses in the beginning, he just didn't know what levers to pull. You know, I mean, he was sitting in the office behind the Oval Office tweeting, watching the news. I'm sorry, that's not a president. And he couldn't fill and didn't fill positions because people knew, I mean, people who were very loyal to him, he would just, you know, he'd get them to do something loyal and then destroy them. And I think, and then we get onto the thing about, and here we get onto the, you know, what of course is very, very fractious terrain. But, you know, I covered the 2020 election and I was traveling all around the states and I went to Trump rally and all sorts of stuff. And I was in DC on election night and it got very ugly at one point in so-called Black Lives Matter Plaza, when it looked like Trump might win, when Florida came in. It got really, I could feel the air, it got very, very heated and some Antifa people started getting into Black Glock and this sort of stuff. And I thought, this town is going to burn, you know, if Trump wins. And in the aftermath of the vote, I was willing to hang around in Washington for a bit and then I saw what it was going to drag on. And I saw some of his people and others and people told me they had great evidence of vote rigging and all this sort of thing. And I'm afraid I'm one of those people who doesn't believe that the evidence that they presented is good enough to justify the claim that he won the election. And people say, have you seen 2000 mules and have you seen this? Look, the evidence isn't there, that the election was won by Donald Trump. And I think that what he did on January the 6th was unbelievably dangerous. And, you know, here it is possible for us to hold two ideas in our head at the same time. January the 6th was not nothing, nor was it an insurrection and an attempt to stage a coup. And there's a vanishing number of people in the US. Or as Eric Weinstein said, this is the roof that you have to walk along and the sides are very steep if you fall off either side. Is there some sense, given the forces that are waging war in the West, you said this feeling, perhaps because of Antifa or something else, that this town is going to burn. And maybe a continued feeling that this town is going to burn with the January 6th events. Are you worried about the future of the United States in the coming years because of the feeling of escalation? Is that just a war of Twitter or is there a real brewing of something? Oh, it's real. And how, well let me then respond to that. What is the hopeful, if you 10 years from now look back at the United States and say we turned it around, what would be the reason? What would be the ways, the mechanisms that we do so? Well, since I wrote this book, there are two things in particular that I've been really pleased that a specific type of specialist has approached me on to say that things I've written about actually have more application than I realized. One is the gratitude issue. A number of people have approached me who have gone through AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. They sometimes say, have you ever been to AA? And that's a bit personal question. But they say, but the reason they ask it is because they say, well, because if you go to drug rehabilitation or alcohol anonymous, Norm Macdonald said, doesn't sound very anonymous. You stand up in a room, you say your name and you tell everyone the worst things you've ever done. That's the opposite of anonymous. Anyhow, but they say, look, because if you go to these things, apparently you're asked to as part of your recovery, say what you're grateful for, like list what you're grateful for. I didn't know that, by the way, until the book was out. And so it turned out to have more application than I knew. The other thing, though, is that I say that it's absolutely crucial in America that we try to find things that we agree on. And a couple of times since the book came out, I've been approached by people who marriage counselors, but we've also said we've been through marriage counseling again. That's a very personal question. No, but they say, well, why? Well, because this is this is one of the things that we do in couples therapy is trying to find things you agree on. And I think this is very important in America. And it's made much harder by the fact. And I said this many times, but forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but it's made much harder by the fact that having different opinions is very last century. Now, we all have different facts or at least the two sides have different facts. One half of the country, roughly, or let's say 40 percent, 30 percent, whatever you want to put it with a tired minority in the middle. One segment of the country believes that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election and that the Russians interfered and got Donald Trump in power. Another half of the country believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. If you can't agree on who wins elections, it's very hard to see who you what you agree on as a country. That's one of the reasons I mind the war on American history and Western history is one of the things you have to agree on is at least some attitude towards your past. You don't have to go and everything like the public square has to have public heroes who are agreed to be heroes to some extent. What's it all? If you don't have that, if actually you think for like half country thinks founding fathers were pretty good. The other half thinks they were absolutely rotten, racist and so on. If half the country basically thinks it would have been better if Columbus had taken a different turn, never found America, gone back home and said, I don't know, nothing out there, that would have been better. And the other half is pretty glad in the end that we've got America. You know, you've got to agree on something. And I just see in America, so I do think we've got to try to find things to agree on like a reasonable attitude towards the past. That's why that matters. And again, I stress, I'm not trying to say that everything in the American past was good. God knows that wouldn't stand up for a second scrutiny or self scrutiny, but nor was it all bad. This wasn't a country formed in sin and in an eradicable sin. It wasn't founded in 1619 in order to make the country wicked and incapable of escaping that wickedness. You know, these are things that will matter enormously in the years ahead, because if you can't agree on anything, including who your heroes are. Like the whole thing is just one massive division, and we'll see what I think we're already seeing, which is people basically going to states where it's more like the life they want to live. And some people say to me, well, that's OK. And the genius of the founding is that it allows for that. That's possible, but it's also it eradicates part of what has been American public life, which is the ability to look at each other and discuss face to face. And I see things like this bomb placed on America the other week with the Supreme Court leak, the draft leak as being just a further example of that. I'm very, very worried about it in America. And because if America screws up everything, everything else in the world goes. Yeah, there is the degree to which America is still the beacon of these ideas on which the country was founded and has been able to live out in better and better forms, sort of live out the actual ideals of the founding principles. And with the desire to improve. Yeah, constantly. An imperfect union. Yeah. Well, I generally have hope that people want to sort of, in terms of gratitude, people are aware of how good it feels to be grateful. It's a better life psychologically. The resentment is a thing that destroys you from within. So I just feel that people will long for that and will find that. That's the American way. Some of the division that we reveal now has to do with new technologies like social media. That kind of is a small kind of deviation from the path we're on because it's a new, we've got a new toy, just like nuclear weapons. Yeah, which is relatively new. But we need to find reasonable attitudes towards these things. And that's why I say like it matters how you imbibe feedback on social media, because we're all going through it to some extent. Because we're learning. And we're learning. And we've got to learn how to do this without going mad. I say this as my minimalist call to friends in this era was the main job is not to go insane. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, like walk towards sanity. Because, you know, I'm sure there's a Hunter S. Thompson quote in there. Like insanity on the weekends can be at least fun. Okay. Do you have advice for young people? They just put down their TikTok and are listening to this podcast in high school and college about how to have a career, how to have a life they can be part of. It's a very broad question, but of course, I mean, I can give specific advice for people who want to be writers and so on. But that's a bit niche maybe. Well, writers will be very interesting. Sorry to interrupt. Also how to put your ideas down on paper and think that the ideas develop them and have the guts to go to a large audience. Especially when the ideas are sort of controversial or dangerous or difficult. The main thing to do is to read. When I was a schoolboy, I would ever have a book in my pocket, side pocket of my jacket or in my side pocket and would read. And that wasn't just because I was swattish in some way, but because I discovered probably at some point in my early teens, I discovered something I read about this once. I discovered that books were dangerous. Which was a thrilling discovery. I discovered they could contain anything. And also people didn't know what you were reading. I remember I got far too young in age. I read the doors of perception of Aldous Huxley and I didn't make head or tail of it, probably. But I knew that it was about something really interesting and dangerous. And I thought constantly when I read poetry or read history, I was just constantly thrilled and wanted to know more. And if you want to become a writer, you have to be a reader. You have to read the best stuff. And obviously people disagree or agree on what that is and you'll find the people that really impress you. But I know I just came across certain writers who just knocked me off my feet. And when you find those people, read everything and cling on to them and find other people like that, find other writers like that, people who are connected by history or scholarship or circles or whatever. For you, was it fiction or non-fiction? Is there a particular book that you just remember or just give you pause? Well, I remember that the first book that absolutely threw me was The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Which used to be a signed text and everyone's a bit snotty about because it's so popular. But I was thrown because I think it was the first adult book I read in that I had been used to the world of children's literature. Everything ends up fine in the end. The lost will get found. This was the first book I read where that's not the case. The world turns out differently. And I remember for days afterwards, I was just in a state of shock. I couldn't believe what I just discovered. And partly because I sort of intuited it must be true. And of course, that is not to say that The Lord of the Flies has lots of scholarship on what children do in the situation of being on the island and when they do congregate. But yes, that was a sort of introduction to the adult world. And it was shocking and thrilling and I wanted more of it. It was dangerous. And it was dangerous. And then of course, when I became interested in sex, let alone when I was gay, I read books were a very, very good way to learn about what I was. And that was even more dangerous in a way. And I thought, nobody knows what I know. You discovered sex? That was an invention in books? No, what I mean is that one of the things that gay people have when they're growing up is that you have this terribly big secret and you don't think the world will ever know. You hope the world will never know. And it's been called by one psychologist, the little boy with a big secret. And so if you discover that other people have the same secret, there's a sort of, thank God for that. But I mean, that's just a version of what everybody gets in reading in a way, which is the thrill of discovery that somebody else thought something you thought only you'd thought. I mean, one of the greatest thrills in all of literature is when a voice comes from across the centuries and seems to leave a handprint. It makes you feel a little bit less alone because somebody else feels, sees the world the same way, is the same way. That's what C.S. Lewis said. We read to know we're not alone. But we don't only read to know we're not alone. We read to become other people. I mean, I think I saw in books a version of the life I wanted to live, and then I decided to live it. And I'm fortunate enough to have done so. I wanted to live in the world of ideas and books and debate. I wanted to live in the debates of my time. And I remember when, like a lot of people, I read Auden when I was young. And, you know, certain lines obviously stuck with me. But that poem of his, which everybody knows and which he hated, September 1st, 1939, I remember certain lines in that just whacked me. Was that when you're sitting on a dive for a second to create a little loan at the end of a low, dishonest decade? Of course, there's a problem with that line, which is you kind of want to be living at the end of a low, dishonest decade as well. It sounds sort of cool in a way. You know, you're the only person who sees it. But so, yeah, anyhow, that's a diversion. But the point is, if you want to be a writer, you've got to be a reader. And apart from anything else, you discover the lilt of language and the things you can do. And I've read people who, and I still do, who I think, my God, I didn't know. How did you do that? In fact, books for me now and articles and other things fall into two categories. One is I know how you did that. And the other is I don't know how you did that. And the best feeling as a writer is when you do the second one. And it happens occasionally in my writing life. Well, you almost like return to something you've written or like right after you write it. No, the moment you write it. You wonder, how did I do that? Yes. That's the most, I've never said that before, that's the happiest thing in writing. Yeah. Very occasionally, it sounds, but I mean, I've occasionally finished something. Funny enough, it happened some years ago in a long piece I wrote about the artist Basquiat. I finished the piece and I gasped. I didn't know, because that's also a thing with writing is you, it's not, sometimes people say you need to write in order to know what you think. That's not quite true. Sometimes that's a very bad piece of advice for some writers who don't know what they think. And it's not going to become clearer if they just start typing. But sometimes it is true that you, there's a thought that's just waiting there and a clarity that comes across and suddenly the sentence emerges in your brain. And by the time you typed it, you just go, yes. That's the greatest feeling as a writer. Almost like it came from somewhere else. That's what Bakunin says about, you know, what's the moment. It's Tom Stoppard's favorite quote about, you know, Bakunin saying what happens in the moment where the writer's pen, when he pauses, where does he go in that moment? Yeah. That's so interesting. Because I think the answer to that question will help us explain consciousness and all those other weird things about the human mind. Yeah. So that was advice for writers. I didn't really give any advice for people in general. Is that, you want to give health advice to channel Churchill? No, I don't want to give health advice. Clearly. Because you implied that Churchill was one of your early guides in that aspect. So when you discovered your sexuality, let me ask about love. Far too personal of a question to ask a Brit. But what was that like, and broadly speaking, what's the role of love in the human condition? Sex and love. And for you personally, discovering that you were, and maybe telling the world that you were gay. I'm very perilously personal. I do actually have a sort of rule that I don't talk about in my personal life. Rules are meant to be broken. Okay, I'll break it a little bit. One of the ways in which growing up and realizing you're gay differs from growing up and being straight is that it's almost inevitable that your first passions will be unrequited. Oh wow, I never thought about that. Yeah. Now, that's not to say, I mean, you know, there's plenty of unrequited love among young men for young women, young women for young men. We know that. But it's almost inevitable if you're gay that your first passions will be totally unrequited. Because the odds are that the person in question will not be gay. So the experience of love is mostly heartbreak. It's heartbreak. And disappointment. Heartbreak can be beautiful too. Formative. Well, again, it comes back to the thing of if you're a writer or something, because you can always do something with it. That's why all writers are sort of not to be trusted. I didn't trust you the moment you walked in here. No, I mean, it's a famous problem with writers because you always think, well, I could use that. It's dangerous. It's a dangerous thing and all writers should be aware of it. It's almost like a drug, right? No, it's not like a drug. It's the fear that all things, even the greatest suffering, could be material. What's the danger in that exactly? That seeing the material in the human experience, you don't experience it fully? You don't experience it fully and you might be using it. I had a friend who wrote a poem about a friend who died in a motorcycle accident in Sydney in the 60s. And he said he knew the moment he was told that his friend was dead, a tiny bit of him thought, I could use this for a poem. And he did, and the poem was wonderful. But there's always that slight guilt for writers of, am I going to use that? Anyhow, that's a divergence. Life is full of guilty pleasures, and I think that's one of them. Because if you feel that guilt, really what you're doing is you're capturing that moment. And you're going to impact the lives of many, many people by writing about that moment. Because it's going to stimulate something that resonates with those people because they had similar kinds of memories about a loss and a passion towards somebody that they had to lose. So, don't, you know, guilt there is a good sign, perhaps. More obvious, perhaps, problem is reporting from war zones or bad places and wanting to find bad stories because it's useful. And there is a definite guilt you get from that sort of thing. It's like the worse the situation, the more useful. Anyhow, no, so that's sort of the only difference that happens from growing up being gay. And it means that most, certainly in my generation, most gay men came to sexual or romantic maturity later. And there's lots of explanations of that maybe being one of the reasons for perceived or otherwise promiscuity among gay men. Which is, I think, more easily persuaded by the fact that gay men behave like men would if women were men. That's one explanation. But it's both a feature and a bug that you come to sexual flourishing later in life. That could be seen as a, in the trajectory of human life, that could be a positive or a negative. But what's, broadly speaking, is the role of love in the human condition, Douglas? Well, it's the nearest thing we have to finding the point. What is the point? What's the meaning of life? Let's go there. So what's the meaning is a hard one, of course. Where is the meaning is slightly easier. And I'd say that everyone can find that. You gravitate towards the places you find meaning. Now, there's a conservative answer to this, which is quite useful. And it's certainly more useful than any others because the conservative answer is find meaning where people have found it before. Which is a very, very good answer. If your ancestors have found meaning in a place of worship or a particular canon of work, go there. Because it's been proven by time to be able to give you the goods. Much more sensible than saying, hey, I don't know, discover new ways of meaning. But love is, love is probably the nearest thing we can have to the divine on Earth. And of course, the problem of what exactly, what type of love we mean is an issue. Well, that goes to the fact that you don't like definitions anyway. I do like definitions, I just think they need to be pinned down. But let's not go there at the moment because it's... That's not pinned down love at the moment? Well, no, because as you know, I mean, because of the different varieties of love and the fact that we have one word for it in our culture. That means an awful lot of things and we don't delineate it well. But let's say human love with the greatest fulfillment in sexual love with another person. Is probably the greatest intimation you can have of what might otherwise only be superseded by divine love. And it's the sense that all young lovers have, which is that they've just walked through the low door in the garden and found themselves in bliss. And that this is... There's a beautiful, beautiful poem of... Can I read it to you? Yes, please. I'll try to find it. There's a beautiful poem of Philip Larkin's, which slightly says what I'm... I'm trying not to duck your question by referring to other people, but... Maybe that's the best way to answer the question. Could be. Is to read a poem. So there's a poem by Philip Larkin called High Windows, which is remarkable because he came to sexual... He had a rather unhappy sex life, but he came to sexual fruition in the 40s and 50s and all the hell that involved. And he took what I regard as being a really remarkable and important view on the sexual revolution in the 60s, which is that most people of his generation, most older people, resented the young. They resented the freedom they had, and actually they pretended the freedom was terrible, and it was always getting lightly done. And Philip Larkin, rather surprisingly, he was a very conservative person, took a different view. And he says it in his poem. And the opening of the poem is, he says, when I see a couple of kids and guess he's fucking her and she's taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise. Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives. Bonds and gestures pushed to one side like an outdated combine harvester and everyone young going down the long slide to happiness endlessly. I wonder if anyone looked at me 40 years back and thought that will be the life, no God anymore, or sweating in the dark about hell and that, or having to hide what you think of the priest. He and his lot will all go down the long slide like free bloody birds. And immediately, rather than words, comes the thought of high windows, the sun comprehending glass and beyond it the deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless. The divine. He found it. He found it in seeing a couple of young kids and knowing that one of them was wearing a diaphragm. Do you see it? First of all, it's very counterintuitive. But secondly, this is the point that sex had been so tied up with misery. I mean, people don't remember this now when they talk about the past. I mean, that's one of my favorite books, Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, including descriptions of what it was like trying to have sex in pre First World War Vienna. You know, all the men ended up going to female prostitutes. You know, so many of them got syphilis, and this was their first experience of sex. It was so goddamn awful, and they were stuck with it all their lives. And so there's lots of stuff that's gone better in our last century, and that's one of them. But you ask about love. Yes, I do think that love is basically the thing that gives us the best glimpse of the divine. And by the way, sex, liberating sex, doesn't buy you love. No. I mean, it throws in an entirely, it threw in another set of problems. If there's any meaning on top of all that is we like to find problems and solve that as a human species, and sometimes we even create problems. Douglas, thank you for highlighting all the problems of human civilization and giving us a glimmer of hope for the future. This is an incredible conversation. Thank you for talking today. It's a huge honor. Thank you. It was very kind of you to say that. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Douglas Murray. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Murray himself. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative and repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/EG7I6Bt_NZY

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Shannon Curry: Johnny Depp & Amber Heard Trial, Marriage, Dating & Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #366

So contempt is criticism on steroids. This is what John Gottman calls sulfuric acid for love. Nothing will erode a relationship quicker than contempt. Contempt is when you are looking at your partner from a superior position. So you are eye-rolling, you are name-calling, there's a mockery, mocking, even physical mockery, imitating them, imitating their voice. Contempt is meant to just take the legs out from your partner, make them feel pathetic, ridiculous. And it can be abusive. But most people have engaged in contempt at some point in their relationship. Lower level would be sort of the eye-rolling, but that is the biggest predictor of a split. The following is a conversation with Shannon Curry, a clinical and forensic psychologist who conducts research, therapy, and psychological evaluations pertaining to trauma, violence, and relationships. She received worldwide attention in April of last year by giving a lengthy televised testimony on her psychological evaluation of Amber Heard during the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial. I found her testimony to be an eloquent description of complex psychological concepts and evaluations procedures. So I reached out for a chat. In person, she was brilliant, funny, thoughtful, and truly kind. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Shannon Curry. Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that burns away with the first daylight of reality. I love that quote. Do you think romantic love fades away in this way? Bukowski. Does it have to fade? The truth is that you have all of these chemicals pumping through your body. You're essentially high on heroin in the beginning of a romance. And you're going to have these rose colored glasses on. Everything your partner does is magical. But really, it's the novelty. It's just like going on a vacation. You're fully present. You're just attuned to the magic of another human being moment to moment. And then on top of that, you're just flooded with dopamine. So you're high on drugs. And we can't go on like that. You will die if you are using these kinds of chemicals all the time, all day long. So eventually, our bodies are sort of made to dial it down. We've made it. I mean, we're evolutionary beings. We are doing the same thing we did 200,000 years ago to find a mate, procreate, spend enough time with each other that we have sex a whole bunch of times and make babies. Now we've changed the rules of the game. We're living almost till we're 100 years old in some cases. We're making these marriage commitments that last half a century. And we're expecting it to be all because of love. And we're signing these contracts based on how we feel when we're high on these drugs. So the reality is we know based on the reason. And I'm also talking about certain Western civilizations here because as you know, there are range marriages. And a lot of times, those marriages, if we're looking at longevity, are actually way more satisfied than people who are marrying for love, which logically makes sense. If you're making a decision based on a feeling that is basically based on endorphins and dopamine and oxytocin, I wouldn't sign a contract just because of a feeling necessarily for 50 years. Whereas an arranged marriage, if you have your elders deciding for you that this partner has a bunch of traits that you're going to appreciate more and more over time, I think there's some wisdom there. So you don't think that feeling could be a foundation for a 50-year relationship? Well, I don't think that specific feeling you're having based on drugs is going to be the same feeling you have 20, 30, 40 years down the line. If you're going to wake up and turn to your partner when you're 70 and think, oh my god, I'm so glad you're hot. You are so hot. Then sure, marry for hotness. But if you've been through life a little bit, and I think most people who are on a second marriage know, shit happens in life. It is hard. You're going to have maybe a kid with special needs or your dad gets dementia or you get diagnosed with cancer. Who are you going to want to come home to? Who is going to hold you when you are sobbing on the floor and tell you we're going to get through it together? Who's going to know the names of your kid's special ed teacher and the process for getting a 504 plan? Or is it going to be you on your own? I think those things matter. But doesn't that hotness, don't those drugs kind of solidify into a deeper appreciation of the other person, into something you call beauty? Yes. They can. But isn't that the same thing? When you notice the beauty of another human being, aren't you high on drugs still? You're making it sound like there's a brief rock star period of going on heroin and then it's over. But can't you be on heroin your whole life? I have some good news. I have some good news. That was something, I think one of the reasons I got into studying relationships was because I wanted that. So I'm a scientist, but I also love art and I love writing and I love literature. I wanted to know that true love could be real. But as a scientist, I am cynical. I just need some data. So I practice a type of therapy called the Gottman Method. And I love that because it tends to be, well, it is one of the most evidence-based therapies we have based on John and Julie Gottman, two psychologists who have been researching relationships for now about 50 years. And this therapy happens to be for couples. They found that you absolutely can make longevity work in a relationship. You can build. You are not just settling for companionship, but you can have passion and intimacy and growing love and appreciation. But there is a blueprint, a set of skills that we were never given. We're not taught it in school. We changed the rules of the game and we haven't learned the rules yet. And the Gottman Method for couples therapy kind of gives you a few guidelines, the rules for longevity in a relationship. Yeah, they did a beautiful job at taking these findings they had through decades of research, quantifying it, and then codifying it into a therapy method. It's really skills-based. I tell couples when they're starting out with me that they're essentially going to be starting a class. So what's the five to one golden rule? What I read is this is the kind of balance you can achieve of how many interactions you have in a relationship that are positive versus negative. And I think that's what the five to one means. But basically there should be kind of an empirical, like if you just look back over a month, how many of the interactions were positive, how many were negative? Or the day. Look at the day. So the idea of this ratio, well, it's not an idea. It was a finding. It is a research finding that the Gottmans got after looking at thousands of couples and codifying these interactions that they were observing. Couples that tend to be satisfied in their relationships, that are happier, they have better health, et cetera, they are having approximately five positive interactions to each negative. And I want to be clear about what I'm defining as positive and negative here. So this doesn't necessarily mean that you're, these don't need to be big sweeping romantic gestures, buying flowers, having sex. These are things like paying attention to what we call your partner's bids. We make these bids for affection, for connection all the time in our relationships, not just with our partners, but with our friends, our coworkers. And we may not even know what our style of bid is, but if you see them on a sheet, you can pretty quickly identify them. Bids could be wanting to show your partner or tell your partner something and have them be proud of you. It could be wanting to go buy groceries with your partner, doing things together. Hey, you want to come with me? It could be telling a joke and hoping that your wife looks up from her email on the computer and acknowledges it. If she laughs, then you've got a positive. But if I don't even look up, that's a negative, right? So it's not necessarily that I'm calling my husband an asshole. It's just, am I connecting with him? Am I meeting those bids for connection and vice versa? But do those also give you a guide of how you should behave? Well, I think what's really important is actually asking your partner or paying attention to what your partner's bids are, because what matters to Ty, my husband, may not matter to you. For instance, I mean, Ty's bar is so low with me. I thank God for him. In terms of what defines a positive interaction? Right. He just wants me to ask him if he wants a water when I get up to get myself one. Just be a basic, decent, considerate person is all he asks of me. Whereas mine might be sort of like, stay up later with me, watch a show, go to bed at the same time as me, or know about the people in my life, that sort of a thing. I should highlight this, and I hope hopefully it's okay, that you were running a little bit late, and you sent me this text, which people do really rarely, and there's a subtle act of kindness within that text. So the text you sent was that I just decreased the amount of stress in your life or something like this by saying it's cool. But that means that you're signaling that you were stressed because you care enough to be there on time. And that made me feel really special. I was like, oh, people don't always do that, because that makes you vulnerable. I actually thought that after I sent it, but I feel that most of the day. And he interacts, and like, oh, God, I just exposed myself. But absolutely, I was excited to be here, and I didn't want you to think that I didn't care. I think being a therapist has shown me that it's so lucky to be in that position, because you meet people that you would have thought are cooler than you or smarter than you or just somehow impervious to life, and you realize that we are all in it together. We all want to be cared about and liked. We all would want to be liked as a baseline. Some people will say they don't care, but everybody does. It's human. And I have gotten much better being a therapist, much more comfortable showing caring, showing love, and genuineness and vulnerability than I think I ever would have been otherwise. And that kind of vulnerability is what's required to do a positive interaction in a relationship? I think so. And people have different levels of comfort, right? But as long as it's working for both partners, and typically you have to communicate to figure out what your partner, what makes your partner feel cared about. However, you might be working, for instance, with an older couple, and I have a couple that's perfectly happy, and they sort of have a system. It works for them. If there's some sort of a rupture, if they get in some sort of a disagreement, they don't talk it out. She might go to the store, run an errand, do a little shopping. He'll work in the wood shop, and then they'll come back. And there is a repair attempt, though, but it's maybe she'll say, hey, do you want to have dinner? I made your favorite dinner. Or he'll say, hey, I recorded your favorite show. You want to watch it tonight? So they don't need to process it, but there is an understanding between them that we're still in this together. We care about each other, and there's a repair attempt. Most people need to be able to process it verbally and talk about what happened, but not all. So for most people, if there's a conflict, you should talk about it and resolve it and repair it versus just put it behind you? I don't want to say should. I guess it depends on the couple. Everybody processes emotions differently. Everybody handles emotional expression differently. I mean, I have couples where I have one person in the partnership who has autism and the other doesn't. And so they're obviously going to have different ways of communicating or processing what happened. We all have different perspectives. It really depends on what makes a person feel like it's been repaired. What makes a person feel understood? Does that need to be verbal? Or in the case of that older couple I have where they know they understand one another because there's a gentleness toward one another after. What are some common ways relationships fail that you've observed in all the therapy you've done? Well, the Gommons identified what they call the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Okay, what are the four horsemen? I mean, I could just keep it simple and go off their research. So those are four different behaviors that they identify in couples or that you can identify in couples that are really highly predictive of a divorce. Some more than others, but I'll start with the lower ones. So one thing that we, by the way, actually, we all do these things. These would be in that five to one ratio. You'd want to stay away from some of these. These are the ones. So as they pile up, now that ratio is going to get imbalanced and then you are headed for a split. Okay, so the first is criticism. So criticism is when we have a complaint. Complaints are normal, but instead of owning our own problems, our own feelings, we assume that our perspective is the only valid, accurate perspective. And so we take it upon ourselves to tell our partner what is wrong with them. Okay, so there's essentially no real belief that they might have a valid perspective too. So this could look like you never helped me out in that with the house or even you're so lazy, can't I just get you for five seconds to help with the kids or something like that. And then what happens is horseman number two, defensiveness. So not everybody is defensive just because they were criticized. Some people just are more prone to defensiveness than others. None of us really like admitting our faults. So it's pretty natural, but defensiveness is essentially making excuses or worse, turning it around on your partner, not accepting any responsibility and definitely not validating what they're feeling. Now, if you get criticized enough or if you get really flooded, the flooding is what happens when our heart rate goes up kind of around a hundred beats per minute. Our frontal lobe shuts down. That's our thoughtful brain, our logical brain, and our reptilian kind of hind brain takes over our thinking. And we just go into fight or flight in a way. We just want to annihilate our partner instead of say anything that would be helpful to the relationship. So if you're getting flooded, you could do a couple of things. You could get super critical. You could get contemptuous, which I'll talk about in a second. It's the last horseman or you do the third horseman, which is stonewalling. And in their research, the Gottmans found that men are actually more likely to stonewall. I also am someone who stonewalls, but it's where you just sort of disconnect from the conversation. You shut down, you turn away. You can physically even turn away, kind of arms crossed, but you're just, you're shut off. And stonewalling happens usually because you get flooded. You feel like you can't win. You don't know what to do to make the situation better. It feels pretty hopeless and talking feels unproductive. So you can see how in a typical heterosexual relationship, the gender dynamic, we know that women tend to use criticism more often because they're the ones that typically raise issues verbally. And then if men are feeling more criticized, that they tend to stonewall and it becomes this vicious cycle of then more criticism, but the criticism is really just a plea to be loved and get your partner to show you they care. And then the man tends to feel like he can't do anything right. This isn't even productive. If I say anything, I'm just going to make it worse. And they don't have any real, you haven't given them a specific need, a solution, something they can do to shine for you. So they turn away. And where does the contempt come in? All right. So contempt is criticism on steroids. This is what John Gottman calls sulfuric acid for love. Nothing will erode a relationship quicker than contempt. Contempt is when you are looking at your partner from a superior position. So you are eye rolling, you are name calling. There's a mockery, mocking, even physical mockery, imitating them, imitating their voice. Contempt is meant to just take the legs out from your partner, make them feel pathetic, ridiculous. And it can be abusive, but most people have engaged in contempt at some point in their relationship. Lower level would be sort of the eye rolling, but that is the biggest predictor of a split. If you allow yourself to think, yeah, that mockery or contempt just a little bit, it's like this weird, slippery slope. Sure is. And the opposite is true, where I just look at a person and think, wow, isn't that the most wonderful creature I've ever seen in my life? Just think that. And you notice the little details about who they are. That's why I just observe them the way you observe a weird peacock that is at a zoo or something like that. Intention is powerful, isn't it? Yeah. And it changes. You start to notice beautiful things and then let the things that annoy you- Yes. You're exactly right. You're touching on some really important things. So in relationships, we actually know that wearing rose colored glasses is important. It's healthy. We need it. And it's a choice you're making, right? So there is a saying that getting married is just choosing one person's faults over another. And the reality is that we may become infatuated with somebody else as human beings. Love is an emotion. Attraction is an emotion. And as you go through life, even if you're in a committed relationship, you might see beauty in another. And that person who is novel might seem attractive to you. But if you can remember that they too have a set of problems that you would be marrying, it really helps you to see the beauty in your partner again and recognize all of their incredible strengths and all the ways we meld with a person and become our own family. Almost become... I mean, our lives intertwine and we grow those oak trees. So to you, by the way, there's a line I read somewhere that when you're wearing rose colored glasses, all the red flags look just like flags. I think it's a good line. I love that. I love that. So you think that humans are fundamentally... All of us are fundamentally flawed or have flaws. They're unique flaws. And basically relationships is just a way to figure out how the two can fit together. Right. And we're different. So no matter what, we're going to have differences. We are raised differently than our partner. We have different stories, different experiences that shaped our value systems, especially when it comes to the big ones like parenting, love, money, these principles that are based in our history. We're going to have differences. So is this a set of differences you can accept from somebody and work with? Do the benefits and their strengths, do they make it worth it? Or are they deal breaker differences? A tricky question. But in the couples you've worked with, is there the feminine and the masculine, is there different dynamics that come into play, like dominant, submissive? Is it like a dance where it just changes from minute to minute? Is there dynamics that you observe that both limit and enable successful relationships? Yes. So there are, if we're talking about masculine feminine, then how also are we could get into, are we talking about actual gender, identified gender, or are we just talking about these traits? Because like I said, I stonewall, which is typically in couples, something that is more associated with straight men. But that's my style of coping when I get overwhelmed. That is not tied to any sort of success or non-success of a relationship. But what we do know is that gay couples, so lesbians and gay men, tend to be gentler with one another when they are having conflict discussions. So that's actually been identified in the research, and it's something I've witnessed, and it's just fascinating. So with my straight couples, I'll be going through one of these, if we're processing a conflict that occurred, I'll be going through the sheet. And it's very, very structured because you don't want couples doing more damage when they're there with you. You want them practicing skills that protect them from criticism, that protect them from contempt. And when I'm working with a straight couple, I am like a referee or sometimes I'll relate it to being like a ski coach and keeping people on a bunny hill. And you let them make like two turns, and then you stop them and you meet up again because you don't want them to veer off. With straight couples, you are doing very short turns before you need to kind of intervene and rescaffold. I had a lesbian couple recently, and they were so lovely with each other. They skipped like seven steps to the advanced final portion where they were already coming up with solutions and suggesting things that they might be able to do differently next time to make it better for their partner. They were asking each other questions about how their partner felt with no agenda, no attempt to sort of be like, well, do you think you're feeling that way because, which straight couples do all the time, you just see this humility and openness. It's lovely. Yeah, it's lovely. But I wonder if maybe watching too many Hollywood films, if some of the drama, some of the tension is required for a passionate lifelong romance. No, it's not. And that's great news. So we actually know that the closer you feel to your partner, so if, I mean, you've talked a lot about beauty and you can ignite that beauty, that interest, right? So when you're falling in love, it's usually that a person is sort of a mystery to you and you're uncovering these layers that you find really appealing. There are continual layers that you can uncover with your partner over time. I don't think we realize that. I think we get complacent and we think we've had every conversation imaginable. What well are they going to do to surprise me? But we don't know the questions to be asking. One of my favorite questions, I like turning these conversations kind of into a quiz because I get bored easily. So rather than just asking an open-ended question, there's a way you can do this with your partner where it's sort of like the dating game. Like, what is my as of yet fondest but unrealized life dream? And see if your partner knows. You might not even know. They might know you better than you know yourself. That in and of itself is a beautiful reminder of the relationship and how special it is. But then also when they say it or when you realize or have to think critically, like, what is my husband's as of yet unrealized but fondest life dream? And then you can talk about it. You just, I don't know, you just kind of transcend into this new area and you feel tight again. You feel like, you feel close. Well, you really talk to each other. Like, I've recorded and without intending to publish podcasts like this with microphones, with friends, with people close to me. Because it's literally that. You get to ask questions like as if it's an interview. And we don't do that with each other. That's exactly it. The way you're talking with me. Sit down with your partner, have that conversation. Like, years later. Right. Show interest. Actually be curious. See what they surprise you with. And actually what you learn is you don't know the answers to most of these questions. 100%. Exactly. What's your favorite movie from the 80s? You might not know the answer to that. It's like those first date questions or whatever. Or what's your favorite movie this year and why? And why. Yeah. It's fascinating. It is. It's hard to do that because I think that you'll probably be offended at first how little the other person knows. So I think you have to work through that. You know, I actually find that there's this rekindling because partners are shocked that their partner does know so much about them. Especially if they've been feeling dissatisfied or disconnected. It's a reminder of all the good that's still there. What, I know we've said some of those things, but what's on the opposite side? What's the key to a successful relationship? What's like, what are the things you see time and time again that you designate that they're on a good path? Yeah. There's a real attunement, honestly. Just it's sort of an us against the world feeling. Nobody, neither partner is going to talk shit on them. The other, there's a loyalty. They handle each other in the relationship with care. You can tell that they've worked some things. To me, it usually indicates that these are some people who have figured they've had to work some things out. They know that this is delicate. They know that you're on thin ice. You take a wrong step and you can be back in a tough place in your relationship. Or you treat it with care and it can be amazing. So they're careful with one another. They give each other compliments. They are considerate. So you'll see, he'll bring the car around for her because it's raining or she'll bring him home some takeout. She'll order for him too at the restaurant. They keep each other in each other's minds. But that us against the world thing, that definitely is there. 100%. You've seen that, right? Yeah, you've seen it. And you've seen it like, I like it when couples have been together for a long time and when one is talking, the other one looks at them. If you don't do that, that's not a bad sign, but it's a good sign when you do that. Yes. Because, and I think it's actually a really good exercise to do because I enjoy when I see in others, it's a way to show that you don't take him for granted and that you still find them like this mysterious, wonderful creature to observe. I think too often, we have that with our parents, we have that with people close to us. You think, yeah, I've heard what they're about to say. I know, I know you can complete their sentences. Yeah, take him for granted. And then if you just look at them and say, wow, this is the most brilliant person I've ever seen in my life. I can't just appreciate every word that comes out of them and look at them in that way. You actually begin to believe it and you actually begin to see the beauty of what they're saying. You are exactly right. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And they give it- And it's caring. Yeah, it's very caring. So that's, I mean, that's, I think, the beauty of what the Gottman research showed us, taught us, provided us is that we can do these things that become cyclic and just keep growing this relationship, making it stronger, more powerful, more loving. You would never want to cut it down. Well, you were talking about the sheet for conflict processing. What are we talking about? So like a couple of comments say like there was this conflict and you put it on the table and then what does it mean to process it? So in that Gottman method of therapy, there are all these different, I mean, hundreds of different interventions and based on what the issue is in that session, you can decide the most appropriate intervention. And so this is a specific intervention for if it is a conflict that occurred and there are different types of conflicts. So this would be more like an incident. It's not a perpetual recurring problem, which has actually a different intervention where you kind of look at the underlying belief systems, values, and there's the goal is not to solve that problem. The goal in that situation is to actually just get a better understanding of each other and your positions. And just you stop seeing your partner as the adversary and you start seeing them as a person who makes sense. But if there's been a specific event, a specific fight, that's just sort of situational, but it's left bad blood. Things were said or you didn't feel understood. This intervention I was talking about is one that you would go through a series of steps where first you identify the emotions that you were feeling. Then you describe play by play your movie, your perspective. If your partner were looking through your eyes, this is what they heard, saw, thought, then they saw this, then they heard this. So you're not saying, yeah, then you came in and were yelling and acting crazy. You're saying, so then I saw you come in, I heard you say, and I thought to myself, well, great, now everything's ruined. So you're showing them your movie, then they have to summarize the movie for you, and then vice versa. And then there's this step where each person validates some part that they can understand. Like based on what you saw, heard, I can't understand, you saw, heard, I can't actually understand how you felt one of those feelings that you said. Then my favorite part is you rewind sort of the movie from that day back through into childhood, and you land on a time, a memory when you felt a similar set of feelings. And this is like the most beautiful part ever because let's say the feeling was I felt misunderstood, I felt misjudged, uncared about, unloved, like you didn't even like me. And I'll say, when did you feel that way? Land on a time, and they're like, my whole childhood. My mom was always accusing me of doing things I wasn't doing, and it would set me up, and my dad would come home, he'd hear about it, he would just believe her. And then you have a partner climbing up on the couch, gives their partner a hug while they're sharing the story, it's beautiful, and it changes the way you interact in future disagreements. So you have those moments. Yeah, you can't unlearn, now you know this about your partner, you know what they're sensitive to. Yeah, and again, you kind of see the beauty in the flaws then. Right. It all makes sense, right? It all kind of makes sense. Yeah, so you maybe were in this dumpster dive in your head of how your partner sucks, and all the things that are wrong with them, and it's so hopeless, and then you get this light shining through, and you realize, oh my God, of course they would be sensitive to that. And suddenly, it's not about all the ways your partner is wrong and proving that they're wrong, it's just, how can I in the future make sure they do not feel this again? I would never want this person I love to misunderstand me and feel so unloved. The early days of that, what do you think about the whole dating, modern dating process? How do you find a partner that you can stay with for the rest of your life? So, we are absolutely doing it wrong, but there is a way you can do it, and I am such a fan of the psychologist Tai Tashiro, I adore him, he's brilliant, he's lovely, he's also very humble, just a wonderful salt of the earth guy. I'm going to tell you a very true story here, okay? Let's go. I was in a bad relationship, and I was at a psychology conference with my partner at the time. We were both at this conference, and we were sitting in a lecture hall there for Tai Tashiro to do his talk that day on his phenomenal research on relationship satisfaction and dating. And I was sitting next to him, and it was just always unpleasant on trips, there were always fights, and we're sitting there and Tai Tashiro starts talking about his research and how he found that most people are signing this agreement, getting married, and doing it based on the love endorphins, and really only about 35% of anybody who's married is actually happy. And he said, so then, you know – It's a pretty low number. Exactly. But here's what I love about Tai Tashiro, is he didn't stop there, he wanted to know what those people who were happy had in common. And then same thing with the people who were unhappy, he found a couple fascinating patterns. So the couples who were happy tended to rate their partners higher in three different traits. And I love talking about this because if you are somebody who can follow instructions, you can find this, I mean, very easily. Those three traits tend to be conscientiousness, okay, and I love the word conscientiousness because it's not just kindness. Kindness is a good way to think of it, but you can be kind and kind of be a pushover, and that's not attractive. Conscientiousness is smart, attentive, it's somebody who reads into a text message and thinks, wow, she was making herself very vulnerable there. That's conscientiousness. I like how you're just doing a compliment. I appreciate it. It's true. It's a certain intelligence, awareness, and attunement. And then on top of that, conscientiousness is motivated. So you can't be on your ass all day and be conscientious because then you can't meet the needs that you anticipate about the person. So conscientious is that guy who drives the car around in the rainstorm so his wife's hair doesn't get met. It's my husband who checks my alarm for me every morning because he knows I'm terrible at time management and he makes sure that I set it a reasonable amount of time before my first meeting and not the 20 minutes I think I need. And then he'll come wake me up with a cup of coffee. That is ultimate conscientiousness. And it is true. I mean, I will tell you, as somebody who's with a conscientious partner, your love increases over time as you continue to feel grateful and admiring of that person. The second one, you want somebody who is low in a big five personality trait called neuroticism. You want somebody emotionally stable in a way. Now, this doesn't mean you can't have somebody who doesn't get the blues or struggle with mental health issues. Trust me, Ty is with somebody who, you know, I get I'm all over the place. But you want somebody who kind of owns their shit and isn't going to just be emotionally unstable all over. You know, you want somebody who is generally happy and has some life satisfaction. Having a partner who has serious, not mental health issues, but unmitigated emotional distress and instability is really hard on the partner. And it's really hard on other family members, including children, if you have children. So it's just a predictor of happiness. It's just a predictor of happiness. So there's a certain threshold of chaos that if you exceed it is going to be destructive to a long-term relationship. That is a perfect description. But then again- About chaos. Not the mystery chaos you love with your little poet brain. I'm talking more like just somebody who there's just no peace. There's no peace. There's a problem with everything. Everything becomes more difficult. Going to a party is a chore. You don't know if they're going to have a meltdown at the party or how many complaints about your friends or everything is a problem. So you want somebody who has just some resiliency, I think is a good term for it. Some flexibility. Some spice is okay, but not too much. Right. Flexibility, resiliency, easygoing. Yeah. Okay. The third is really interesting, I think. So he found that having a partner with sort of moderate adventurousness, not high adventurousness, actually leads to greater satisfaction. And the reason for that is high adventurousness equals novelty seeking. Wow. Shiny new things. And so if you're in a monogamous relationship, if that is what's important to you, it's going to be very hard for a partner who is novelty seeking to be faithful. So that will cause a lot of pain. But also, novelty seeking people tend to always have new projects, new interesting things, and so their attention is drawn away from the relationship. And so you can just feel pretty neglected or unimportant. By a little bit. But you want a little bit of adventurousness. So you want your person to be sort of self-motivated, individuated, have their own interests, not completely dependent on you. But also, I mean, low adventurousness is not a bad thing. Ultimately, what you're getting with low to moderate adventurousness is that rock, that feeling of stability, that home. And I made some references earlier, like when you're 70 and you turn to your partner, do you want him to be hot? Or, you know, for instance, my dad has dementia right now. And my husband turned to me on the plane, we were all coming back from a trip, and where we really saw how severe it's getting. And he just turned to me, he knew how much pain I was in, even though I was in a wheelchair. Even though I wasn't showing it. And he said, I want you to know that if it comes to a point where we need to take care of your dad, he needs to live with us, you don't even need to ask. It is, I am 100% on board and will help. And those are the things that matter, that home feeling. And technically, that's a trait that's usually, that's sort of a, my husband caring so much about family and home and taking care of things that matter. Those are things that tend to be associated with that low to moderate adventurousness. Somebody who really cares about simple things and family. I wonder if those things, those three things are something you can work on. You know, conscientiousness, you can probably- You can. Proactively observe yourself and, you know, do it more regularly. Right. Neuroticism might be the hardest one, probably, to control. I think so. Well, I mean, I was pretty neurotic in my early 20s. And when you wake up to it, maybe you, if you're self-aware about it, maybe you'll be able to control it. Yeah, I think self-awareness is key. I think that's why I love therapy so much. I think life is about growth and our potential for growth and to make our own lives better, to make the lives of others better, to serve others, to heal. All of us are this collective healing. And I think we're all capable of growth. And the same with adventurousness, you can, I'm somebody that's pretty low on adventure, but I keep throwing myself out there just for the extra adventure so you can grow in that way. Yes, and I am high in adventurousness, and I was not really ready to settle down. I was married earlier in my 20s, but I would say that I am much more prepared to be in a committed long-term relationship now in my 40s than I was when I was younger. But in that same way for me, I like to connect myself to high adventure people so that it like brings me out. It's like they're a horse and I get to ride them. Yeah, and that's the thing. So high adventure people are attractive, they're interesting, exciting, but it can be a world of heartbreak because you're only under that spotlight for a few minutes and then they're on to the next shiny thing. Yeah, but heartbreak is part of love. But that might be the drug thing that you were talking about. Speaking of adventurousness, what about sex? Oh, sex is important. Sex, playing a successful relationship. Well, okay, so I'm saying it's important, but I want to qualify that. Everybody has different levels of sex that are satisfying to them. Sex can definitely bond you to your partner. Orgasms are amazing. They de-stress us. They're healthy. You can have an orgasm and have a lower level of stress for 48 hours. I think that's pretty incredible. If you have, I mean, just that kind of physical contact with your partner, even a 20-second hug with your partner has similar benefits to an orgasm. You're going to have a lower stress level. You're going to feel immediately close to your partner. You're going to get a rush of oxytocin, which is going to make you feel happier, more grounded throughout the day. So that's a 20-second hug. You extrapolate that to sex and things are going to be great. So it's just physiological. But I wonder, this probably goes back to the question of, what's the best way to have sex? There's probably metrics about how often you have sex, how that correlates to successful relationships and so on. Well, there are, but it really has more to do, it's sort of like, remember I was talking about processing conflict and what matters is, do people feel like it's been resolved? Do they feel like there's been a repair? Not necessarily how they go about doing it. Same with sex. Does each partner feel sexually satisfying? So that could be once a month for one couple. It could be five times a week for another couple. It could be never for other couples, truly. I mean, so sex has a ton of benefits, but its absence isn't necessarily detrimental, I guess, would be the qualifier, depending on who you are. And I know couples that use sex as part of the conflict resolution process. It's hugely effective for that, if it works for both parties. All parties, not just both, all. That's true. So what do you think about infidelity? What's the cause of infidelity? Why do men and women cheat? It's different for everybody, but I mean, even earlier I was saying with adventurousness, like if monogamy is something you're doing. In my own practice, I've seen the entire range of couples who are open about having sexual relationships with other people and fine with it. Couples who want to be fine with it, but find out they're not. Couples who aren't just couples, couples with multiple people, but you know, multiple romantic relationships. I've had couples where affairs are tolerated and not talked about. They're not enjoyed, but they are not the type of betrayal that will destroy the relationship. A sort of a understanding and keep it out of my face. And then also we won't talk about it. So an affair that happened without getting permission first, and as long as you don't talk about it, it's not going to do a damage to the relationship. Right, but we can't even talk about it like that, right? So nobody's going to admit that the affair is happening. There can't be any evidence of it. It's sort of a just look the other way type of a situation. But the partner who is not having the affair, right? They typically know, they certainly know that their partner is capable of that. They just kind of know, but they don't want it in their face. It would become a problem if it was in their face. As long as certain needs are met and everything else is okay at home, it's just one of those things where don't ask, don't tell. Well, that's an interesting point because I've had a bunch of arguments with people. I tend to hang out with, especially in the tech sector, people who really value like honesty and radical honesty. And I keep arguing with people about this because to me, it's not that simple. Like that's an example right there that honesty can be really destructive. Honesty is also a really complicated thing to get to the bottom of because what is really honest? Yes. And you know, like how do I look in this dress? Like there's a million ways to answer that. It's perspective. It can be assessable in my mind. If I'm in a bad place or my partner and I haven't been, like if Ty and I haven't been connected lately, my honesty of what I actually think about him would be horrifically damaging and completely unfounded also. And it can change on a dime. But that's also not actual honesty to the big picture of how you feel about him. I have interacted with a few folks who talk about their previous sexual partners, for example, on the numbers of sexual partners they've had. And they feel like that kind of honesty is actually empowering and enriching to the relationship because all the sexual experiences you've had in the past make you a better sexual partner, better partner in the present. And to me, from the culture I've come from, that's like anti-romantic. Yep. Yep. Like you kind of throw the past kind of away. You don't really talk about it. It's kind of there in this amorphous shape, but it's almost as if you've met together for the first time and this is a beautiful new thing. Like you're creatures that have woken up from a long slumber. Right. You're starting anew. Starting anew. Right. And you went to mystery there. Right. I think the mystery, and you have to figure that out about each other. So I'm not exactly sure that honesty is always- Stigma for everyone. Stigma for everyone. And then also is honesty harmful or helpful at certain points too? Yeah. So you're talking about sort of like disclosing prior sexual history. I thought you were going to go to, so if you've had an affair, do you hold, do you keep that under your hat? Oh yeah. That's a really tough question. Or are you obligated to disclose it? It's a really, that's a really nice- It is a very tough question. Very tough. Well, what do you think is the right answer? I have my own personal beliefs. I also then like, I have my therapeutic beliefs. I think, frankly, and this is just me as a human being, not Shannon the psychologist. I believe that if you have fucked up, and I, again, I'm coming from a framework right now of monogamy. If you are committed to somebody you love and you have fucked up, you don't get to shed your guilt onto them. You need to carry that burden. It's not necessarily, I think it's simplistic and unsophisticated to be like, but then you're being dishonest. I think it's actually selfish to unload it on somebody else and give them the trauma of imagining what we do know about infidelity is that it can create an actual post-traumatic stress-like experience for the betrayed partner, where they are having intrusive thoughts about it. Those are unwanted thoughts and it's uncontrolled. It comes in at multiple times a day. They'll have depressed mood. They'll have nightmares about it. Their entire sense of security, safety, self-esteem gets shattered because of your actions. I think it's kind of yet moralistic and naive to think, well, they deserve to know the truth if you actually know the harm that that sort of betrayal does, especially if you truly mean to stop it, right? So if it was a one and done, or if it happened and you've stopped it and you do not intend to do it again, frankly, I think you live with that burden. You live with that discomfort. Thank you for saying that because I totally agree, but it's like logically, it doesn't quite make sense to give that advice, but psychologically it makes complete sense because you really are destroying another person's mind, their faith and love in relationships, their trust, everything, and then you're imprisoning them to be stuck with you for months or years if you're trying to work through it, through that torture. So you should be carrying that burden and working through it, I think. Why do you say that that's your personal opinion versus your therapeutic? Well, I think everybody has different values. So I think that's a value-based decision because to me, the hierarchy is kindness and do no further harm over, in that case, over truth, right? Whereas other people, my husband, for instance, he is like truth above all else. You don't get to decide what I know, or you don't get to decide whether or not I can handle that knowledge, so he would even see my determination of that I should carry the burden sort of arrogant. Like, well, why don't you let your partner decide whether or not they – why do you get to choose? I don't know. I think there's value to both arguments. I absolutely see his point. It's fascinating. I absolutely see his point, and his, I think, is like a very humble sort of option. You don't get to choose what's better. You just need to give them the information, and they can choose. But I think, I don't know, I think it's kinder to hold – I think it's going to cause your conscience more discomfort to hold it, and I think there's sort of a cleansing we do when we share that information. I think in real life, most people disclose it because they can't stand the secret anymore themselves. That, to me, is a selfish act. I have unemployment applications and so on, and just with friends, would ask people, what do you care more about, truth or loyalty, just to get to see how they think about those different questions. And yeah, I was surprised how much variance there is on that. And also, conceptually, I bet – conceptually, I don't think we actually know where we stand until we're faced with a situation like that. Yeah, I think people, a lot of people, especially when they're younger, say – especially if they're kind of intellectual, they'll say truth above all else. Yeah, yeah. It's like, all right. You're exactly right. All right. It's a platitude. Until you get to hear a truth that truly breaks you, that truly hurts you, or causes suffering to you, and then you realize – or a truth you give to somebody else will cause them suffering, and then you get to see that suffering destroy their life and maybe your relationship and so on, and then you're like, oh. Or yeah, like, should I sit my dad down right now and be like, dad, you have dementia again today. I'm going to tell you, dad, you're not making sense. No, it's not going to be discussed. We're going to make him uncomfortable. And I mean, yeah, I think truth can be a little bit of a platitude sometimes. Some of those complexities are all the things involved in the challenges of what makes a relationship work, right? What do you think about open relationships in general? My worldview is such that I see the beauty and value in monogamous relationships, just for me, but I'm also open to the possibility of what works for other people. Have you done any kind of work with people in open relationships? As clients or research? As clients. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is there some interesting differences between open relationships and monogamous relationships? You know, I think that may have been actually what was behind my question about the satisfaction with them being on the extremes. My hypothesis essentially was, is it because if you are really all in, you've worked out some of the kinks? I think I've seen couples who are trying it out, like for the first time, it tends to get a little haywire. There's some excitement in the beginning. Everybody's really excited about it. I think the philosophy makes sense to a lot of people. The science of it makes sense to a lot of people. But we have been raised in a society that is pretty monogamous, so there isn't a lot of scaffolding around it. There's a lot of inner conflict, I think, for people to go away from the values that they've been taught since they were kids. So jealousy arises a lot. Also, it's very difficult to be, I think, as truthful and direct as you need to be, which you're describing in these polyamorous situations where everybody is laid out on the table. So I think that's something that may be practiced. In my own work with clients, I've just noticed that the partners who are happier in these situations who I've worked with, they are more experienced at it. They seem to have it down. You testified in the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. Based on your role as a clinical and forensic psychologist, it was watched by, I don't know how many people, maybe tens, maybe hundreds of millions of people. What was that experience like? Thank God I didn't know that at the time. Were you scared? Oh, yeah. Given the size of the platform, how many people are watching? Well, scared typically isn't the word when I testify. I'm always excited and a little trepidatious before I testify because the stakes are so high for everybody's life in that room. This was different. I – anxiety isn't usually my brand. And I just skipped anxiety that morning and went straight to terror. And I was mad. I was mad at the legal – it was funny. Like I was having all these strong emotions. I couldn't find my bobby pins. I almost started crying because I couldn't find them. I was pretty unhinged that morning and in a way that was really unfamiliar to me. And it was right when I cried because I couldn't find my bobby pins that I realized I needed to get a grip and that I was a professional and that my hair didn't matter even though it ended up mattering. People noticed that it was crazy. But I got a grip and I went in and I just did my job. So the terror in the end helped you focus and do your job well. I think it does. And it's a little scary though because I know what fear does cognitively. And there is a sweet spot where you want some stress and then you can be really acutely focused and attuned. But then if you go over this threshold, you get sort of that frontal lobe shutdown where you're not thinking clearly. And everybody knows that experience from taking a really stressful test at some point like in high school. And then they're going over the answers with the teacher in class later and they're like, how did I miss that question? I know that. You're just in a different state. That's when you have too much stress. I think this day I actually was bordering on too much stress if not clearly in that threshold. But once you're sitting there for a little bit and you're asked the questions, you can kind of go into a routine of just wanting to talk about your work. So what is the work, the job of a forensic psychologist in that context? In the DEP HURD trial, I was serving as an expert witness based on a psychological evaluation of one of the parties. So forensic psychologists can serve the court or in legal matters in a number of ways. They can act as a confidential consultant for an attorney on a case or they can even assist with jury selection. They might testify without doing an evaluation if they're just coming to testify about sort of a subject matter. And then they wouldn't be answering specific questions to either of the parties, but just talking more hypothetically about a field area. In this case, because I was ordered to conduct an evaluation, I evaluated one of the parties and then you provide a report to the court with your findings and then you testify as to what your findings were. But from my perspective, just watching you, you seem to have held it together really well. So what do you attribute that to? So you said like it calmed down after you were able to ask the questions. So to me, if I were just to put myself in your place, it seems like the internet and the world would be very nitpicky about individual words. You're speaking from a place of scientific rigor, so you have to be very precise with the wording. Precise. I would feel like so much pressure about each single word I choose. Did you feel that pressure that you had to be extremely precise with the words? Always. The pressure is so high going into testifying. I think that's where I feel the most pressure is preparing and literally the moment until I start having to answer. And then I don't even have the luxury of thinking about myself because it is so important that that answer be clarified and understandable to the court that that becomes my focus. And that's the godsend. Is that I can stop thinking about how scary it all is because I need to pay attention to explaining something. So if it's okay, I would love to talk to you about the personality assessment test because I think it's actually super fascinating. The personality assessment inventory or the MMPI-2? You're probably referring to the MMPI-2, which is one I talked a lot about. MMPI-2, yeah. So maybe can you explain the MMPI-2? It seems fascinating. It is. It has like its output, the results, has some basic scales, has code types. It's just reading through the different- It's so complex. It's the thing of beauty. Because the human mind is really complicated. Even depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, all of these things are really complicated. There's like many of them we don't understand well. There seems to be a huge amount of variance. And yet you have to be able to stitch together a bunch of characteristics that give you intuition about the unique aspects of each person. You want to be able to have tests that get you closer to identifying the peculiar flaws or beauties of a particular mind. So this seems to do a good job. Just reading through the different descriptions of the code types. Can I borrow that until I testify? That was the best description. I don't know. I'm being poetic. I apologize. No, that was a beautiful description. You have to be in part poetic about the human mind. It's not math. It's psychology. Okay. So what is the MMPI-2? Like what are we talking about here? Like it's a questionnaire? Yes, that's a great start. So it is a questionnaire. Yet 567 yes, no questions. I'm going to tell you what's most beautiful about this test. So they used an empirical keying method to develop it. What that means is that they didn't have a bunch of psychologists get together and say, let's ask them, let's make sure that we identify people who have somatic complaints or physical complaints by asking them questions about like numbness in their hands, nothing like that. What they did instead was they threw, you know, like take a thousand questions at a group of people who they know had a certain mental illness and a group of people who didn't have that mental illness, and then they looked for patterns in what the people with the mental illness endorsed as yes and no of those random questions. So it would be, for instance, there's a bronze light fixture right there. One of the questions out of the thousand might be, I like light fixtures that are bronze, true or false. And they looked for correlations in the way people would answer to these completely innocuous, just boring questions. So there was no real way that a test taker could foresee the point of answering. And so because they can't foresee, it's very difficult to cheat to get to a conclusion. Very difficult. And not only that, but you can imagine using that approach, you can then look for patterns for almost any type of response style, for any type of personality trait, any type of mental illness. You just get a comparison group, and then a group who's using that specific strategy or has that specific mental illness or has that personality trait, and you just look for patterns. And there's a scale output of different kinds. So I think- And there's code types. Yep, so you've got validity scales, and those are just fascinating and often one of the most useful parts of this test in forensic context, because they show you how a person is approaching the test, how they're answering questions about themselves. So for instance, you can see if they are tired. You can see if they're kind of responding randomly. You can see if they are in an unsophisticated manner trying to make themselves look perfect, but not very nuanced. You can see if they may be deceiving themselves and truly believe that they are perfect, whereas others don't see it that way. You can see if they're exaggerating. You can see if they're exaggerating because they're truly- it's a cry for help. They are in extreme distress, but they feel as though they need to really punctuate it to get people to notice, or you can see if they're exaggerating in a way that is driven for a specific outcome or gain. It's just fascinating, and it's the most well-developed assessment we have for a person's approach to answering questions about themselves. So it gives you the context of- How honest they're being. The state of the person as they're answering them. Yeah, yeah, their honesty, how forthcoming they're being and how accurate they're being. And then the result of the classification based on the test are these code types. Right. Well, so you have these clinical scales as well. You have 10 clinical scales that look for different kind of primary clinical pathology issues. This test doesn't tell you anything good about yourself. At best, it just tells you that you're not responding in a way that is dishonest and that you are not hugely problematic. But it's not looking for strength. So you have these 10 clinical scales that look for variations above the mean of the population in certain areas, anywhere from depressive symptoms, manic symptoms, physical complaints, anxiety, nervousness, aggression, social engagement, a whole scope of human experience. And then there are much more nuanced scales from those, so little subscales. And then the real power, though, of the MMPI-2 is in, as you said, these code types. And these code types are additional patterns that have been detected that really can be more defining of a personality. So you look for peaks. There can be either two extreme peaks or three, typically, that make a code type. And those peaks are higher scores on these personality traits. And specific code types can give you a very nuanced picture of a person's general approach to life and their personal relationships, just their personality. So you can build on top of those code types an understanding, yeah, how that person's going to deal with different kinds of situations. And then there's, by the way, a lot of code types. There are a lot of code types. I was looking at them. They're pretty interesting. It is truly fascinating. I want to take this test. I wanted to see which one I would— I have given it to some people in my life. It's just phenomenal. How hard is it on your side of the table to give the test? Oh, it's easy. You just proctor it. You just make sure that somebody— there's no distraction, that they're well-rested, they are sitting there, and they can just take it in front of you. So I guess the question is because the questions are well-designed in that it's hard to mess with them. You just give the— It's very hard to beat it. You just hand it to them. And it's yes and no. It's yes and no. Okay. But I should also add to this that this test, as much as I love it, and it is the most researched and widely used personality assessment in the world, it is not in and of itself definitive. So you use it like you already have sort of a hypothesis, and you use this for clarification. And it has a ton of value for showing somebody's response or their approach, how forthcoming they're being. But other than that, you really need to consider it as a piece of the puzzle. You had said stitch together earlier, and that was just one of those points you made that was perfect for describing this. There's probably no one perfect test, right, for personality? No. I wonder, especially with advancements of AI, there could be more and more sophisticated ways of measuring, of collecting data about your behavior. Absolutely, there could be. And being able to measure some kind of more productive kind of, especially not in a forensic context, but more in trying to figure out how to improve your lifestyle, improve your relationships, all that kind of stuff. So the result of the test with Amber Heard, if you can speak to the public stuff, you said that the results of Ms. Heard's evaluation supported two diagnoses, borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder. Can you speak to each one of those? What are they? What are the basic characteristics of borderline personality disorder? Sure. Well, so right now, the DSM-5, which is sort of the Bible for mental disorders, it's what we go to our diagnostic test for, is the DSM-5. We go to our diagnostic manual. It classifies personality disorders according to clusters. And cluster B is one that involves the emotionally erratic, interpersonally erratic emotional disorders. And those include histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder. Eventually, there's been some research on this and a lot of support for us eventually moving into a more spectrum-type approach to considering personality disorders, where you'd essentially be looking at dysfunction in different domains of somebody's functioning that has persisted over time. And again, the really important part is it seems to be a stable trait, part of their personality that, you know, it's in their interpersonal relationships. It's in how they handle their own life, their own functioning, their mood. And it's not just situation-based. It seems to be all areas. I don't love the title histrionic personality disorder. I think its history is pretty controversial, and there's some misogyny in it. But that all being said, as a servant to the court and somebody who is there to just provide the science as it exists today, my job is to relay, and in this specific case I was ordered to provide my diagnostic impressions, a diagnosis. And I don't get to decide which diagnosis, whether I like a certain diagnosis or not. Ultimately, if the criteria are met, that diagnosis is given. So as we have it right now with the current personality disorder categories, histrionic personality disorder is probably the most controversial. Some people believe that it is narcissistic personality disorder lite, so sort of a less obvious, a less malicious version of narcissistic personality disorder. And I think that will probably get sussed out if we do move to a more spectrum-based approach, because then you would be describing sort of a personality disorder, and then you would add the traits to it. So with issues in interpersonal functioning and et cetera. So you could be a little bit more specific rather than having to just put somebody in a category. So that's where things are moving, you're saying. That's where things are moving. From a cluster-based view of NPD, antisocial personality disorder. To more of a spectrum. With personality dysfunction, then you list the traits that are there. And I think that'll be more accurate, especially there's so much on the table. There's so much overlap between these personality disorders right now, especially cluster B. It is not uncommon for people to have two or three personality disorders to meet criteria for two or three at the same time. So speaking about borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder can best be thought of as a disorder of instability and impulsiveness, emotional instability, instability in a person's self-identity, sense of self, instability in a person's relationships, and then underlying all of this is an intense fear of abandonment. Histrionic personality disorder is more of a disorder of emotionality, dramatics, and attention-seeking. This histrionic disorder typically is known for the dramatics, and people who are observing or interacting with somebody with this disorder may even feel themselves almost kind of wanting to turn away. There's a sense of play acting as the person is speaking or engaging with you. Something just feels a little bit disingenuous. And a lot of attention-seeking, similar to borderline personality disorder, you might see with histrionic personality disorder, attempts to manipulate. However, the motivation with histrionic personality disorder is that attention, whereas with borderline personality disorder, the underlying motivation for almost everything is to avoid abandonment. So you'll see frantic attempts to avoid abandonment, frantic attempts to keep people close. And those frantic attempts can be really harmful to the person and to others. To the person themselves. Mm-hmm. So the fear of abandonment can result in the very thing you're afraid of. Right. And there has been some research also to suggest that borderline personality disorder has different types as well. And I think this is really important because in my own work, I have encountered many people with borderline personality disorder in my own life. Right. And there are different types, right? I'm thinking specifically of a girl I really love who I've worked with for years who is so self-aware about this and endearing and she owns her shit. I can forgive almost anything if somebody just owns their shit. She might lose her temper. She might lash out. She can be erratic, but she will come back and apologize, own it, and accept full responsibility. And not only that, but identify it and make changes. She doesn't want to be harmful. I adore that about her. I think it's an admirable quality more of us could have. That's very different than when you think about it, there are nine different symptoms and you only need five to meet criteria. So depending on which symptoms you have, you might be far more calculated, conniving, manipulative, or you may just be more of the impulsive, kind of messy, emotionally erratic type. And so there's some new research also coming out that's even suggested that among women, those that score higher in some of these more calculated traits of the disorder may actually be, it may be a certain presentation of female psychopathy. Yeah. Are some of these personality disorders, again, probably impossible question to answer, but how much of it is nature, how much of it is nurture? Or how much of it is in the genetics and you just can't do much with? Maybe another question, a different way to ask that is, how much can you help that? How much can you become better? That is a tough question. So there's been a ton of change in the way we've thought about the etiology of these personality disorders specific to borderline personality disorder. I think in general, the view is that most people believe that it was associated with neglect or trauma in childhood. While there is a correlation there, there's a correlation between that and many mental health issues, not just borderline personality disorder. We also, there is evidence to support a genetic basis for this personality disorder. And there are people who have borderline personality disorders that report no childhood trauma or difficulty. And I have seen, you know, sometimes things just happen. So I think it's a mix. I think we need to think of it as bio-psycho-social, which is generally the answer to most things when you're talking about how a mental health issue comes to be. I certainly think that in most cases, and here's just me speaking personally again, I think in my own work, in most cases, what I see is that somebody may have some sort of predisposition. Then they go through certain life events and learn patterns of behaving that may serve them well as a child in a dysfunctional situation, but end up being very problematic later on. Or they just have enough hardship that that gene, whatever it was, lying dormant, that little borderline personality disorder gene, expresses itself. And you'll see that with things like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders. There tend to be certain ages where you'll just see that expression happen. All right, for the record, it got cold in here, so we upgraded with a blanket. You look cozy. Just as a question, for me, just observing the trial, it was interesting that, first of all, it was a really raw and honest exploration of an intimate relationship between two people. Oh, yeah. It was interesting to watch. I suppose I haven't watched that kind of thing. It made me think about what makes for a good relationship. All the many things we already talked about in this conversation, it was useful for that. But also, there was raw recordings of two humans' interaction. What did you think about that, that there's recordings? It's kind of interesting. The act of recording your partner? Yeah. Not the ethics of that or so on, but the fact that you have this data. It made me wonder, if I recorded myself, how would I sound? Well, you do record yourself. No, but here with microphones, but when you're in private, you wonder. I had a bit of a fight with a friend last week, and I wondered which one of us was the asshole. I would love to hear the recording, because I think we were a little bit rude to each other, and I wonder how it went wrong. I love that you asked yourself that question. That's so useful. We made up the next day, and I think we both agreed to not ever talk about it. But I want the data. Just bury it deep. I record my couple sessions, and one of the primary purposes of that is so that if they start to get nasty with each other in the session, I can stop it, and I can say, what was that? And most of the time, what you're describing is so useful, because we don't see ourselves. We have no idea that we just came off as critical. We think we're being completely reasonable and thoughtful. Whenever somebody is retelling an argument they got, and they said, and then I was just caring and just asked. I mean, why? Is there a reason you did something like that? If they can actually see themselves, they realize, no, their jaw was clenched, their voice was raised, they actually called a name. Sometimes they're shocked. So just a quick, just to linger on it, you labeled Amber Heard as a 3-6 code type, going back to our discussion, which can mean that, quote, she's heavily concerned with image, prone to treating others with cruelty, unable to admit responsibility for wrongdoing, and prone to externalizing blame. And then I also went into the MMPI-2 list, 3-6 includes anxiety, tension, rigidity, fear of criticism, suppressed hostility, merging impassive or episodic aggression, suspiciousness, egocentricity, what else, projection. What can you say about that code that is not captured in the different personality disorders? What are we supposed to do? What are we supposed to do that from a forensic psychology perspective? And what are we supposed to do that in general, forget the 3-6, in general, these kinds of code types in that context, in the context of a trial? If I'm understanding you correctly, it's sort of what's the point of these code types? Yeah, thank you for asking the question better. I don't know what I'm doing. I just actually honestly really find MMPI-2 fascinating. I love that you do. I love that you get it because I just, to me, it's almost unbelievable that humans created it. But I think that goes back to that empirical key method of creating something that enabled it to be as robust as it is and something that is very difficult to beat, if not impossible. But the code types really, so it depends on, in any forensic case, what really matters is the legal, psycho-legal questions. So what is the legal question? And then what is the psychologist's responsibility in assisting with whatever question they're being asked? And there's some questions we can't answer, some that we can. You don't always need to provide a diagnosis when you're asked to provide a report. It depends on the jurisdiction. It depends on the statute. Some jurisdictions actually require a diagnosis. In this case, I was asked to provide a diagnosis. So when I'm considering a diagnosis, you're integrating multiple different sources of information. You're integrating an examinee's self-report. You are adding collateral data. Usually, I wasn't able to obtain collateral interviews in this case, and that was a decision of the court. They said no collateral interviews. But typically, that would be something that you would add. You're looking at records, ideally, from birth up until the date that the alleged injury occurred. And I'm speaking now specifically to a personal injury evaluation or something where somebody is claiming that they were harmed psychologically. But you want as many records as possible to show how a person functioned before that event occurred and how they functioned after. And you want it to show financial functioning, physical functioning, academic functioning. Basically, where is there evidence that something in their life changed? Where is there evidence that harm occurred other than from what they're telling you? And in addition to all of those records that you're reviewing, in addition to their self-report, then you're also going to give some of these tests like the MMPI. So the code types are really that strength of the MMPI, too. It gives you really nuanced information about a person's personality. Now, again, you're not going to use MMPI-2 or any other test by itself to diagnose someone or decide that the person is telling the truth, not telling the truth. It is just another piece of data. And when it's working the way it's supposed to, it lines up really nicely with all of the other data you're getting, including what you've observed from the person during your interview with them, the information they're giving you, or inconsistencies with the information they're giving you, the consistency or inconsistency of their self-report from the records, what the records themselves say, et cetera, et cetera. So it's adding, it's helping you clarify and clarify and clarify the picture you have of the person. Yep, just dialing it down more and more. You're just making sure that it is as accurate as possible. Okay, so given how huge this trial was, given how eloquent you were, I know you don't think of it that way, but from a public perspective, you were like the star because of how well you did. That's insane. I mean, you know. I'm pretty sure Camille's the star. Camille's also incredible. I've gotten a chance to interact with her. She's somebody that really inspires me by how good she is at her job, how much she loves her job, and how much the fame, the money, whatever has not affected the basic core integrity of who she is. Right. As a human being. So she's also incredible. Okay, what's the takeaway for you personally from the trial? How has it made you a better person? How has it changed or solidified who you are as a psychologist, as a forensic psychologist, clinical psychologist, and so on? Wow. I mean, a lot happened in my life around that trial, leading up to the trial, after the trial. So let's tackle forensic psychologists first. Sure. Okay. So in terms of forensic psychology, I am grateful to that trial for really strengthening my abilities. The stakes were so high that I took, you know, I was retained about two years prior to the trial. So I really delved deep into the academic side of forensic psychology and making sure that I was adhering as closely as possible to standard practices, best practice recommendations for this specific type of an examination. It was intellectually awesome and challenging. I felt like my brain was on fire for a full year leading up to the trial, and that can be really, really fun. It was just challenging, but I am really proud of the work I did. I think the stakes were really high. It's serious work. It's important that it's done well and accurately, and I felt really good about it. So have some of those lessons carried through to your practice now, to both research and some of the things you're doing in terms of helping couples? No, I mean, I just, you know, my practice hasn't changed that much. This was more just something that was more, it demanded so much more of my time than my typical forensic work does. And personal injury cases, or cases where there is an allegation of trauma or psychological harm, tend to be super labor intensive. This, given the magnitude and how long it had been going on in the back and forth, required a ton of work before the trial as well. So it pulled me away from the practice. I think it's been nice to go back a bit. Okay, so now personally, I've learned some things. I've learned that I need to slow down a little bit. So this took a lot from you? It took a lot, but it was really the culmination. I feel like there are these hoops we jump through again and again, you know, academic challenges that we continue to meet, and then there's a next one and a next one and a next one. And in the beginning, like when you're getting into college or applying to grad schools, you don't really realize this is going to be a never-ending thing, especially if I continue with research or forensic work. I love it because it is so academic. You know, you're writing these 75-page reports and with citations, and you have to be accurate. It feels like I'm doing giant board exams again and again and again. It never ends, but that feeling, I think you and I were talking about how it's fun to doubt yourself because it pushes you to do better work. But so if you keep having high stakes, you're going to work all the time, work yourself in the ground, constantly be thinking about, oh, this question, I'm not sure if I fully know the answer and all the research behind that, so I should go there. And again, super fun, but I don't just do forensic psychology all day. I also own a clinic. I provide therapy. I've been providing therapy for 15 years. So what happens is you have clients who maybe you've stopped seeing, but when they have a crisis in their lives, they reach out to you again, even if it's seven years later. So you've accumulated hundreds of clients who at any given time are going to reach out when they're in crisis, whether or not you're working on a federal case or in Virginia for this. And that is never going to be something easy to grapple with because I feel that I am letting somebody down. I know I am because these are people I genuinely care about and they care about me and they trust me. And I want to be able to be there for them. I know that it's disappointing if I can't be. And it's also very difficult to separate out the professional therapy relationship from loving someone who you've seen through some of the most difficult parts of their lives. And I can explain that to people all day long, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be easy for someone to accept when I can't talk to them and they just found out their husband was leading a double life or their son was in a car accident. Their sister just died and I can't even get on a call because I'm getting maybe 15 messages like that a day and have to testify and have to run my practice. So I think that was why I needed to slow down. This case, I was doing all of that. And then the academic load or the work involved was just tremendous. And some stuff happened. My dad, he started having his cognitive decline. I got a medical diagnosis that was stress-induced. I really thought I was getting away with it. I really believed that people who talk a lot about self-care were kind of full of shit and just didn't know how to push themselves. I still believe in pushing ourselves. But I think I kind of traversed into an area without realizing it where I was no longer pushing myself to challenge myself or see what I was capable of. I was almost pushing myself as a necessity because I didn't know what else to do anymore. Just an obligation. It wasn't even, I wasn't pushing myself to do, the Deb Heard case reminded me of that feeling of pushing myself to do something I wasn't sure I was capable of and overcoming that challenge. That was rewarding. But when you're piling that on with running a business and all these other things and trying to be perfect at all of them, that just starts to become like a feeling of necessity and it's not healthy. That said, you somehow manage to hold it all together to put forward a masterful performance and like you said, still take care of all these clients because you're the most important person in their lives for many of them. Is there a secret to that? Is there any hacks? Is there a- I don't sleep a lot. I don't get a lot. No, and honestly, it's not 100%, it's not, it's a work in progress, right? I don't have an answer for, I wouldn't want my life to be any other way. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work on this case if I hadn't established my practice and had outreach. So I can't figure out like which piece you take it out without it all crumbling, but I would love to have a little more downtime. So it all kind of works together and there's passion is the fuel that's behind all of it. Probably, that's probably the reason you haven't lost your mind quite yet. Maybe, yeah, maybe, unless, I mean, it depends who you ask. What about the stress of just being in the public eye? Has that been difficult for you? That's a lovely question. Thank you for asking it because it is nice to talk to you about this because I feel like you probably understand it a little bit. That was something I was absolutely unprepared for. Like I said, I had no idea how many people were watching when I testified. I had no idea and I got off the stand. I kind of staggered to the back room and truly thought about lying down on the floor because I was so exhausted. I'd been up studying all my stuff, terrified that I was going to forget some statistic about the MMPI-2. It's going to be so great. It's great for me. It's going to be great for people to hear this, that you're human. You're two flaws. That's extremely stressful for many, many hours. I wondered how you could sit there for so many hours and stay so focused and listen so well. It's so difficult. Well, I mean, I could talk about that too. The moment I came to almost like came back to my body and realized where I was and just wanted it to stop and felt like I was burning alive. I just was thinking, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. Is this going to stop? And then another question came and I just had to get back to it. But so after I testified the first time I went in that back room, I might have laid down on the ground. It's kind of a blur. I mean, I might have. I do remember that Wayne Dennison, one of the senior managing partners at Brown Rudnick who is a phenomenal guy and absolutely brilliant. I will be indebted to him for life because I trusted him. I trusted him and that made all the difference in probably how I testified. But he came in the back and he was looking at his phone. He said, you're on the cover of Time, something on Apple News. And I thought, I mean, I really, I thought he was messing with me. I thought it was his joke way of saying like I did great. You've worked with veterans. Mm-hmm. What is PTSD in that context? What's the landscape of psychological suffering that veterans, soldiers go through? Well, if we're talking about combat exposure, you're seeing things you're not meant to see. You're seeing the worst of humanity, people harming other people. It's not natural for others to intend to harm us. It's not natural for us to harm others. And this dehumanization can occur that's so troubling and disturbing that people have a hard time living with it later. Or they just feel this ongoing anger. It's, it depends. It depends on the trauma they're exposed to. It depends on whether their convoy was ambushed by weapons that were purchased from money that was given to this village from the US government. It depends on whether they did something that they have a hard time reconciling outside of war now that they're back home in civilization. Depends on whether they lost a lot of their comrades and feel that guilt of being a survivor. And again, not everybody develops PTSD. It really, it's a mental disorder. It's serious. We talk so much about trauma and PTSD gets thrown around lightly when actually it's very difficult to meet the full criteria for that diagnosis. And many people experience severe trauma in their lives. And only about 14% are likely to actually develop PTSD. It's an exception, not the norm. Traumatic stress is absolutely normal. After something traumatic happens, you'll likely have nightmares, you'll likely have anxiety, you'll feel depressed because you're a human being and something abnormal happened. But PTSD is a longer standing condition that is significantly impairing. And a person's life, and I think we've lost that in some of the sort of narrative in society. It just, everybody has PTSD. But no, you can have traumatic stress, you can be distressed, you can be affected by trauma and not have that particular diagnosis. PTSD significantly impairs people's lives. How do veterans, how do soldiers who suffer from PTSD or close to that kind of diagnosis begin to heal? What's the path for healing? What's the path for healing? Well, I will hand it to the military because I think in terms of working with their active duty service members, they really invest heavily in mental health. The US Department of Defense was one of the first to bring animal assisted therapy into any type of treatment in the early 1900s with bringing farming into certain hospitals and letting veterans help with the farms and brush the horses, which is so advanced because now we have all this research on animal assisted therapy and how beneficial it is. And just looking in the eyes of a dog can increase your pain threshold and speed healing after a cardiac arrest, help people with dementia to ambulate more freely. It's incredible stuff, simple. And the military was ahead of the game on that. And I don't think that's changed. I did my training at a military hospital in Hawaii, Tripler Army Medical Center. It was phenomenal training. And our psych department, there was so much interesting research going on. And it was so integrated. So you might not imagine that the military would be doing this, but we had an acupuncture department. We had a chiropractic department. We had a yoga section. We were doing yoga sessions there. I mean, anything that has evidence to support its efficacy was being utilized. And I think that's pretty cool about our government. They have a lot of funding, so I'm glad they're using it on that. The real challenge, I think, comes with the large scale need of the veteran population. And they slipped through the cracks. I know that the DOD had a campaign going where they were doing outreach to anybody who was served, for instance, in the Vietnam War. The problem is they were trying to get all of these people assessed for PTSD. And it was great. Like, they were getting phone calls, mail. It was sort of saying, hey, we know that you serve. Come on in, or let's schedule you an exam with a psychologist and just see if you're owed benefits. The idea of it's great. The problem is that they outsource to this third-party company. They're paying really low rates for a one-hour meeting with a vet. And you don't need to be specifically trained in assessing PTSD. And so you're getting these variations and opinions that are coming through. And I've had clients who, to me, who I've worked with for years who have clear combat related PTSD, according to gold standard measures, according to my knowing them and observing their symptoms and how impaired they are. And it is clearly associated with combat, the content of their intrusive thoughts, their nightmares, et cetera. And they are having a one-hour meeting, sometimes by phone, with one of these psychologists who's been contracted by this third-party organization. That's not even enough for me to get through the first few symptom questions on the CAPS 5 assessment for PTSD. But in that hour, the psychologist is saying definitively, no PTSD. And it's been a travesty for some people, especially for those who need an advocate the most. It tends to happen to my veterans who are maybe a little bit less sophisticated in presenting or advocating for themselves, more humble, less, you know, the guys who deserve it the most, right? They're just getting passed over. And it's a maze. I'm not quite sure what the solution is, though, before. I mean, I've worked for government agencies. They're dealing, it's a massive population. I love that the outreach is even happening and trying to get these guys in for assessment. I think we can criticize any system. I'm glad that system is even happening, but it still needs to be better. So I've got a chance to interact with a lot of soldiers that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now a lot of soldiers from all different kinds of nations in Ukraine went to the front. There's a bond between soldiers unlike any other. I don't know if you can speak to why do you think that is. On the opposite side of PTSD, there's a deep human connection. There's like a love for each other. What is that? What is that about war and combat that creates that kind of bond? Well, you're seeing, we talked earlier about that vulnerability, right? So I believe that combat, I believe that most survival situations strip away all ego. And I mean, there are a couple of different layers to this, but I have not served in war. So I want to be cautious here. But from what I know just about psychology and also from my own experience of survival type experiences, when you're with a group of people and all the ego stripped away, nothing else matters. The focus is on the here and now and a specific mission or your day to day. You can get really close. You're very, very vulnerable. And also, in my experience, the guys I work with who have served, there aren't a lot of people who understand what they've been through. Not only some of the unspeakable things they've been through in combat, but some of the things that they feel are unspeakable about returning, especially if they are experiencing trauma. A lot of them, some of the things that service members with PTSD are the most reluctant to disclose is the feeling like they may not know if they love their children anymore or their wife, that they don't even know if they can love anymore, that they feel emotionally numb, that they want to kill someone, that they have a whole lot of racist beliefs and thoughts. There are a lot of things that can be associated with PTSD that aren't as clear or expected. And these guys don't have many people who understand it or they don't think they would, but a lot of their fellow service members do. And so I'm going back to Ukraine and boy, nothing makes, nothing makes reveals the human condition in a more pure form than war. Especially the kind of war you get in that part of the world, especially the war in Ukraine, which is a very 20th century kind of war. Brutal. Well, like I mentioned in a few different ways, you're exceptionally successful by I think the best definition of success. You're doing what you love and you're one of the best people in the world that are doing it. Thank you. And so what advice would you give to young people that look up to you, that saw you in the trial, which is your most public facing thing, and are just looking, young people that are looking to find what they want to do with their life career-wise? I love that question. What would you tell them? I'm going to tell them something my dad told me. He said to me, Shani, just pick anything. Pick anything. If you like it at all, studying it, just pick it. He was like, look, don't worry about the job. You don't even know all the jobs that exist. Pick something you like. You will make it your own. And that is exactly what happened. I like psychology. I was reading some self-help books. It's not like I had this calling where I, you know, looking back, I can actually create that story because I think now it makes a lot of sense that I do what I do. But I was lost and scared. I started studying psychology. I met a professor who was really inspiring, who wasn't even a psychology professor, but he was public policy. I stayed in touch with that professor. He is a dear friend still to this day. That was 20 years ago. We do research together in Mexico, integrative research with public policy officials and environmental engineers, and I get to be the psychologist on the trip. I never, ever dreamed that that sort of stuff could happen. I didn't know about forensic psychology. I also want to warn anybody who's interested in forensic psychology that it's not like you're like solving crimes all day and getting calls by the FBI. You are going to be sitting alone in your home office with your husband bringing you like bowls of cereal and reminding you to go to the bathroom because you haven't gotten up in like 24 hours from the computer. You're going to have papers all around you, and you're just going to write 75 dense pages with citations of like science. It's brutal. It's academic. But you're going to love it. But it's fulfilling. My friend Frannie posted a meme of one of the girls from Glears crying and saying like, I'm the happiest I've ever been. And she said it reminds her of when I try to convince her to do forensic psych because I think her mind is perfect for it. You have to be strategic and thorough, but it's a slog. But it's wonderful. It's wonderful. The image of your husband bringing you cereal while you work on the 75 pages is maybe the most romantic thing I've ever heard. Maybe the most romantic thing I've ever heard. We started on love. Let me ask one last question about the same topic. What's the role of love in this whole thing, in the human condition, in this whole experiment we've got going on on Earth? I think it's all there is, like that Jules song. How does that go? I don't sing it. Don't sing it. Don't get it in my head. Please don't sing it. So there have been some profound moments in my life where I feel like I am closest to kind of the truth of life or what it's all about. And usually there's this resonating sense of love and ease and love for myself, love for other people, sort of like it's all okay. We're all okay. We're going to get through this. I liked what you said about the harm caused by the misinformation or negative things being said about you, because you're right. It harms that bigger picture. I think it holds us back, takes us back from that truth. That there's a love that connects all of us. And that if you remember about that love, it's all going to be okay. I really hope it's going to be okay. Me too. I believe it will. I believe it will be. Thank you so much for talking today, Shannon. You're an incredible person. Thank you for everything you do and for everything you stand for. And from everything from your text message to just who you are and for this amazing conversation. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Shannon Curry. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some more words from Charles Bukowski. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it. But you laugh inside, remembering all the times you felt that way. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

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Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #294

It wasn't just a one-on-one, it could be Steve against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iPhone, and we're going to do this. And we're like, God, you know, and so we did it. And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details, but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably, but man, it's really putting us in risk. And we laid out the risks for him. And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks. The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell, engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest thermostat. And he's the author of the new book, Build, an unorthodox guide to making things worth making. More than almost any human ever, he knows what it takes to create technology ideas, designs, products, and companies that revolutionize life for huge numbers of people. So it truly is an honor and pleasure to sit down with Tony for a time and look back at one heck of an amazing life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadell. When did you first fall in love with computers, or let's say computer engineering and design? I first fell in love with computers and programming was in a summer school class in fifth grade in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. It was a simple basic programming class, but the basic programming class was not like you might think it was. It was bubble cards. So literally it was, you know, the card game. You know, the stack of cards, and you would use a number two pencil, and you would put in your program line by line, and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked and no errors and what have you. And you'd take that set of cards, and you'd put it on this reader, and it would go off to an IBM microcomputer somewhere in the, back then, the cloud. And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal, and it would just, literally, I was just, I could write things, and I could program this machine to do stuff. And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sexy. There was no graphics, right? Oregon Trail was all in text, right? The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong or out of order, or a disaster, or you dropped one card, it would all fall apart. So just doing that, you know, print F, or what was it? I can't even remember what it was. It was, you know, what the basic commands were, but. Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming? Programming language. Okay. Basic programming. So you're writing basic programming language on paper? On paper. And you're calling it programming, though. It's called programming. Yeah, you're programming this computer in, you know, in a remote location, and it came back. So it was truly cloud computing in a way. It was really terminal-based computing. And the input and the program are separate? So the input to the program, or they go together? Like, or there's no input to the program? It just runs, and it gives you output? Yeah, it goes in and it says ready, and then you can say run, and then it would run. But to program it, you didn't type it, because it was a printer terminal. You would make the stack of cards. You would make the stack of cards, and that would get it into the computer's memory. Okay, so where was the magic? The magic was that you could create, you had a language, and you could create what you wanted to create, right? You could create a world or what have you, and have this interaction. And you could compute things. You could, you know, do numbers. You could, I was playing Oregon Trail, right? So you were less like- So you can play video games? Well, video, that's- Right, without the video. You could play text games and then imagine them in your brain, right? Oregon Trail, there's this meme I saw recently, if you want to feel bad about yourself as a programmer, realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon. I think that's the name of the game. It's this cool little builder game. One person wrote it in assembly. So from, like, from scratch, and for people who don't know, it kind of looks like a SimCity type game. It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads. And there's a nice graphics, it's three-dimensional, all that kind of stuff. All the things, all the rich, colorful things you would imagine for a three-dimensional video game, all written in assembly, meaning the lowest level code next to binary, which is fascinating. And that's the, you had to notice the magic at that low level at that time. You didn't have all the graphics. You didn't have all the, like, APIs and all the sample codes, no stack overflow, no internet, none of that. You just had, you had to know registers, you had to know the op codes, and you had to imagine the world in your brain of the memory structures and everything. There's no visualization. You visualized it all yourself, right? And so that was magic. But then the next part of the magic of where I got hooked even further was like, I'm doing these little things. And then Electronic Arts came out for the Apple II. So I got an Apple II, and Electronic Arts came out, and I was programming and doing basic and making my own games. But then there were two games that really blew my mind. One was pinball construction set, and the other one was music construction set. And these were both places where I could create pinball games, and I could create musical scores, because I love music, and I could then play them, right? And so when you had that, you were like, oh, there's something very different. So I could create myself, but then there was others that create tools so you could create at a visual level. And then you would read the backstories, because Electronic Arts back in the day, it was one programmer who would program those things, each of those things. And you could read their backstories. It was literally like a musician or someone else. Like you could read Rick Rubin's, like here's the thing. They tell you all that stuff. And there was one guy who wrote music construction set. He wrote it all in assembly, and he was 16 years old. Wow. And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this and had published, right, and this amazing tool was created, I'm like, what could I do? And so then it just kept building off of that. But really it was those seminal things, first the introduction, and then the power through programming and turning these things into what you wanted to turn it into. And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old and have PhDs. And then I was like, okay, this is really cool. I wish we did that with programmers where we treated them like artists. We would know the backstory these days, today. Not just programmers, engineers. Engineers, designers. Yeah, like all the things about a product that I think we love are the little details. And there's probably a human being behind each of those details that had their little inkling of genius that they put in. I wish we knew those stories. That's always sad to me when I, because obviously I love engineering and I interact with companies and they, autonomous vehicles, something I'm really interested about. And I see that companies generally, and we'll probably talk about this, but they seem to want to hide their engineers. Like engineers hold the secrets. Like the great secret, we do not speak of the great secret. But then the result of that is you don't, you don't get to hear their stories. The passion that is there behind the engineers, and also the genius, the little, there's a difference between the stuff that's patented, like the kernel of the idea and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea. And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects a little bit more. But, so sorry for the distraction. So what, you mentioned Apple II. What was the first computer you fell in love with? Like the product, the thing before you that was a personal computer? It was the Apple II. So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over. You know, it was, I think it was at the time, it was the, you know, the person of the year. Maybe it was that year, I don't remember what, but. Well, Apple II was the person of the year? Yeah, for Time Magazine back in, I don't remember when, but it was around that same time. I was so young, but I had, there was the Apple II and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools because my grandfather taught me all about tools and creating things, right? And I saw this thing and I had the, you know, that IBM experience, that terminal experience. And I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right? And so I need to have that at home. And the only thing that was really talked about in our circles was the Apple II. And I was just like, that's it. So I went, jumped up and down. It was very expensive. I have to have this. My parents were like, what? You know, it was $2,500 back then. In 1981, it was like crazy, right? So I was like, I'm gonna make as much money as I can this summer. And my grandfather said, because he helped me learn all about tools and build things together. I will match whatever you make so you can get this computer. So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy, cadding actually for the, you know, the families at the country clubs in the town where we lived. And did whatever I could. And that end of that summer, we got my Apple II. And you couldn't tear it away from me. It was my friend. It was everything. From a product perspective, what do you remember that was brilliant? The design choices, the ideas behind it, or is it just that it exists? Or the very idea of a personal computer is the brilliant design choice? Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool in my house and I could use it anytime I wanted. I could program it any ways. There was no, you know, there was no internet connection. There was no, it was all just you. You either loaded software that you got from someone, right? Or you created it yourself. And then there was the whole other thing which was started happening, which we were doing, and this was kind of like MP3s and stuff. We were sharing software, right? So you built this community of sharing software. You would go and pirate, that was what it was called, pirate all this software. You'd never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like, I'm gonna get all this other stuff and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it and see behind the scenes. So you really had a sense this was your world and you owned it, right? And you could like literally go into every register. We didn't have all those security layers like we do now. Like you could really touch bits and you could poke bits and you can make this light turn on. And you know, and the geek assignment just lit up. Now you get, there's, it's so abstract. You know, people don't even understand, like usually, you know, some programs don't even understand memory. They just think it's unlimited, right? Yeah, and security. It's like, now there's all this security that you should have, but it's like the adults all showed up to the party and now you can't have all the fun, right? It's like, no, no. You know, this was the thing where if you, if the power went out, you lost your whole program. You might've worked a whole day on it. And if you didn't press save at every other line and you were to save, save, save, and it would like, grr, grr, the word, the disk drive or the tape drive, grr, grr, grr. Like every single step was contemplated because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work. So a lot of the magic was in the software. The fact that you could have software, the fact that you could share software, and the community around the software, it wasn't necessarily the hardware. Well, that was the first step. The second step around the hardware was I got things like the mocking board, which the mocking board paired with the music instruction set, you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes. And it was a synthesizer in the Apple II. So you would plug in this card and you go, oh my God, look at this. And it would, you could start generating cool sounds. You're like, it was a Moog, like a Moog in a way, early Moog. What year are we talking about? This is 82, I think, 81, 82. And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds that are very cool in the 80s. Yeah, the 8-bit chip tunes, right? Chip tune, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And then when you wanted to add a joystick, you had to pull a chip out and you had to plug in a dip socket to put in a joystick. And then I was like, oh, and then I had to get more memory. How do we do that? And I wanted to speed up product. So then that turned into a company actually from that, but it was, and a hardware software went at that. But it was all about modifying this thing in every way. First was software. And then you started gaining confidence. And then I got a little bit more money and stuff. And then you could get into the hardware and wire things. And then the Apple II came with all the schematics, right? So in the back, in the early Apple IIs, you could open up and all the schematics were there. So you purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it. Yeah, it came with it. That's an interesting choice. That's an interesting choice from a company perspective. Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing. Right. I wonder what they, so that was intentional. Like this is- Absolutely intentional. This is for the cutting edge folks too, or especially- It was only the cutting edge. It was geeks for geeks. So we were like, oh, how did they make it? And then we got to learn through that. Apple I did the same thing, right? It just, Apple II became more packaged up and had a little bit better software, right? Came with basic and then, you know. So it was really, it was what we might think of as a raspberry pie today or something like that, but not with so much software. It was literally, and all the chips were out there. So you could inspect the buses and the, right? Cause everything was just broken out. So I guess that's the idea behind stable, big projects in open source, like on GitHub. That you have the schematics there and it's kind of a product, but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing. Like we're going to release this to a small set of people, self-selected perhaps, that are kind of the makers, the cutting edge folks, the builders, the at-home engineers. Like in some way, what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self-driving is kind of like that. It's like selecting a group of people, but that has to do more with you, how safe of a driver you are versus how much of a tinkerer you are. Because you don't get to tinker. I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do for really cutting edge technologies? Especially you're interested in like hardware stuff. Is that crazy? Why don't more companies do that kind of thing, you think? I think back then it was about a community and serving that community of builders. Now this is about people who want to get the experience and want it really simple and easy. And they're like, and so there's the idea that the audience, or they believe the audience is small, who would value those other things that we're just talking about. But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi and all of these other little boards, there's a whole world more than I've seen. It's amazing what you can do now with these little kits and the software that's created. And so there's a whole nother, I think another batch of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks. And if we look at YouTube channels and stuff, they take these little boards, they hack them, then they print out parts on their 3D printer, assemble them, and they create robots and what have you. So I think it's happening. It's just not as raw as it used to be. But it's there and it's really expanding around the world. And that's really nice to see because it's a whole new generation who are empowered. I think there's a semi-dormant genius amongst millions. So like Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit. It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised if it's several million Raspberry Pis that have been sold and shipped. And it's kind of this quiet storm of genius brewing of engineers. We don't get to hear it because they're not organized. I mean, we get to hear it through inklings here and there. Like you said, YouTube, there's little communities that are local and so on. But if they were organized, if a leader would emerge, no. Okay, so when did you first start to dream about building your own things, designing your own products, designing your own systems and software and hardware? Well, in high school, there was a company that a friend of mine founded, and I was the second employee. It was called Quality Computers. And it was a major company and it was a mail order, mail order, because there's no e-commerce then. There was no internet again. You either mailed in your little coupon and you said, this is what I wanted to order, or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you. Turnaround time and this stuff was like, from the time you wanted to the time you bought it, it was maybe eight to 12 weeks. That was just the normal way of getting things. So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple II. And it was software and all kinds of accessories. So hardware accessories, so hardware, plug-in cards, joysticks, all this stuff. And what we noticed was there were accelerators or memory cards. And to be able to use those cards, you had to actually go and change the software you use to access this new memory. So you literally have to go and you took the program that you had, let's say it was Apple Works, which was like an early Microsoft Office or something like that. And you had to literally change the code and you would install these patches to then take advantage of the hardware. So what we started creating was software on top of it to do the automatic installation of all of these patches. So we made it much easier to take new hardware and the existing software you have and expand it into this new world. So it was creating tools and the really great customer support. And we started getting a lot of orders because we had the software make it easier to install to give them the superpower. And at the same time, they would be able to change their software and have a new world that wasn't existing from the companies that were creating the initial products. And so it was more of that. And then that happened with hard drives. So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II to like read, because you could get really fragmented. So I wrote that piece of software and we sold that through the company along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties. So that all happened in 12th grade, freshman year of college. So you wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade. Yeah, between 12th and freshman year. What programming language? Do you remember, is it assemblies? Yeah, there were certain inner loops were assembly and other loops, actually, there were really early Pascal, no, C compilers. What was the motivation behind these? Is it to make people's lives easier? Is it to create a thing experience that is simpler and simpler and simpler, thereby more accessible to a larger number of people? Or did you just like to tinker? No, no, no, it was two things really. Because one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software. So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user. And then the other thing was, because I was also manning the customer support line, people would call and go, this doesn't work. And I'm like, oh, I got to go fix the hardware and software. Or I got to fix the software to make the hardware and the installation process better. So my whole world was out-of-box experience from when I was in high school. Because I had to man the customer support line, pack the boxes and write some of the code while we were doing, while Joe, Joe Gleason, who was the founder of Quality Computers, he was off doing the mark, the ads, placing the ads for the mail order, making sure we were running the credit cards. It was two of us and then it turned into a third, and then we hired another person from high school to pack boxes so I could stay on the customer support line or doing the software. And it was all in his parents' basement. Yeah. Right? As you were scaling exponentially. Scaling, right, exactly, bootstrapping. So we'll jump around a little bit, but what were the, you said you love music, what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod if we jump forward? And how far back do those ideas stretch? If you look at the history of technology, there's, I mean, not just the product, but the idea is truly revolutionary. Maybe its time has come, but just if you look at the arc of history, sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity, and to be able to put that in your pocket, make it truly portable, it's fascinating in a way that's truly portable. So it's digital as opposed to sort of like a Walkman or something like that. So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod? I was in love with music since I was a kid. Just loved music from, I think, second grade when I got my first albums and stuff like that. What kind of music are we talking about? So this was Led Zeppelin. This was The Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Styx, Ted Nugent, just the real American and British rock and roll. There's a bunch of people listening right now. Who's that? Led Zeppelin, what is that? Is that some kind? Oh yeah. It drove my parents crazy. You just blast it loud and clear. Yeah, you just blast it loud. Loud, just for her. And this was second, third grade, fourth grade. I just, I fell in love. And then we moved back to Detroit and I loved listening to the radio station because there was all kinds of crazy music because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk and R&B. And I loved to listen at night. So I had a clock radio. But if I had the clock radio on, parents would go, go to sleep, stop that, turn that stuff off. So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it. Nice. Right, so I said, oh, okay. And then I could listen to it all night and no one could hear me, right? And I could just sit there and, you know. Just huddling around the radio. Groove out. Just listening to Zeppelin, stairway to heaven. What would you say is the greatest rock, classic rock song of all time? Greatest classic rock song of all time? What pops into mind? Well, no, you know what? I mean, this has to be objectively number one. Dude, this is so hard. This is a serious journalistic interview. You're not going to back down from these kinds of questions. Oh my God. No, I don't know. What a challenge. Yeah, it's hard to pick. But to me, stairway to heaven is a safe fall. It's like, it's so often considered to be one of the greatest songs of all time that you almost don't want to pick it. Right, exactly. But you return to it time and time again. And it's like, yeah, this is something pretty special. This is a rock opera of sorts. Well, the rock opera that really blew me away and still continues to blow me away is all of Dark Side of the Moon. Like that. I love Zeppelin. I can't say which one's better. But Dark Side of the Moon for me was, it was a audio experience, right? The whole thing from soup to nuts, plus all the synthesizers, all of those things. Okay, so back to the iPod. So that's, from the early age, you loved music. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. And always was just around it. It was always playing. I played it so loud that I actually hurt the earring in my right ear. And I still suffer from that today. And then... No regrets. No regrets whatsoever. Going to concerts in downtown Detroit and all that crazy stuff. So moving forward. So in college, I was a DJ. So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love and whatever for the crowd. And then I continued to do that in Silicon Valley when I moved right after school. And so I was belugging all of these CDs around with me. A thousand CDs to write. And at the same time, and so those were heavy. And at the same time, I was doing the Phillips Nino. And Velo. Those are Windows CE-based mobile computing products. The Nino was the first device to actually put Audible books on tape. So I worked with Audible. We met in a conference. And they were like, we don't want to do hardware. We just want to do content. I was like, well, we have this device. Let's get it together. And we got Audible on that. And this was in 96 or 97. First Audible books. And it, you know, as I was, oh my God. That's audio. Well, what if we put music on it? Right? And so I, and the memory was very small at the time. Right? There was almost, there was almost no flash. It was all DRAM. When you did Audible, you stored it in DRAM. Right? Which is okay, probably. Cause how much books do you need is the idea. By the way, brilliant. I mean, just putting books. I know it's probably not the sexiest of things, but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step. I don't know. You sometimes can't measure how much human progress occurred because of an invention. Like there's the sexy big products, but you never know. Like maybe like Wikipedia is one of those things that doesn't get enough, I think, credit for the transformational effects it has. It's not seen as the sexiest of products, but maybe it is. When you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably is one of the big things that basically unlocked human knowledge. Human knowledge and human editing and human, you know, just the human nature of building something together. Yeah. So it's fascinating. Sometimes you can't measure those things, maybe until many, many decades later. Anyway, sorry. So that was, that was, you know, that was, that was there. And then there was Audible. You put books, why not put movies? Why not put music? Music, and I'm carrying around the music for the DJ gigs, and you're like, wait a second, two and two together, right? Like, let's get rid of this. And so, and then MP3s show up. The actual like encoded? The format, the format. MP3s showed up around 97, 98. So MP3s is compressed so you can have, like the storage is reduced significantly. Right, so you could go from a, you know, a large full, full lossless, you know, digital track into something that can be stored in four to eight megabytes, something like that for the audio. Now, you know, that's a reduced quality, but you could get it down there. And you're like, oh, okay. And now if we have enough flash or DRAM, we can put 10, 15, what have you, all in that same memory. And it starts to replicate a CD. And then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive, you could start to put, you know, thousands of songs. Yeah, that's, that's also another brilliant invention. But like people don't realize, I think people would be surprised how big, in terms of storage, raw audio is. And the fact that you can compress it, like, I don't know what the compression is, but it's like 10X, it's very significant compression. And still it sounds almost lossless. Much to the chagrin of Neil Young, who does not like that. But even Neil Young, even the stuff he talks about is still tiny files relative to the raw. So he wants us to increase it just a little bit more, a little bit more. But it's still, that's an invention. That's a thing that unlocks your ability to carry around a device like a Nino and listen to music. Because without that, there's no way you can carry it on a gigantic hard drive. Right, exactly. And so, so then that, so it was MP3s, the Nino and my, you know, my hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff that then spawned, you know, fuse and then ultimately, you know, became a lot of that, the ideas and things of that nature were, and my passions were born into then the iPod. You know, it was too, Apple needed something and I wanted to fix something. And it all kind of, you know, came together at this right, right place, right time, plus the right technology came at this. It was just like the stars aligned. So how did it come to life? The details of the stars aligning, but the actual design, the actual engineering of getting a device to be small, the storage of the, you know, the interface, how it looks. Sure. The storage, the details of the software, all that kind of stuff. What are some interesting memories from that design process? What are some wisdoms you can, you can impart from that process? Well, you know, how long do you want to go? Because I have, I can go deep. So let's go at least 20 hours. Let's go. This is one of the lengthy documentaries. We're gonna turn it into episodic, you know, binge listening. On Netflix. Yeah, Game of Thrones. So let's just start with, you know, after I was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together. So I already had knowledge of, you know, the space and the technology and all that stuff, but I had to very quickly, and a lot of the suppliers, because of what I was doing at Fuse, trying to create that thing. So as a contractor, I was like, okay, what is the first thing you need to do? So after I showed a, you know, different architectures and what three different products could be to Steve about options for storage options, battery options, form factor options, there was three options. And as I was told, given very good advice, give the two options you really do not like, but they're options, and give the best option last, because Steve will shoot all those down and give the best option last, and then you could talk about that. And so that was the one that had a 1.8 inch hard drive and a small screen, like the screen you know it, on the original iPod, classic iPod. And then I had enough of the idea of the three or four different CPUs and processor suppliers and kind of systems that were out there that I had gone and found and put together, power supplies, disk drive interfaces, firewire interface, all that stuff. So I put together all of those schematics, or block diagrams, they weren't schematics yet, because it was just me. And coming up with a bill of materials, coming up with what it could look like, what would be the input output, how we could make a better headphone jack, that was also on there. Screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators, so got calculators and all kinds of electronics to get the right size, different sizes of small LCDs. So I got all kinds of different battery types. I got different types of, you know, and different battery sizes, AA's, AAA's, working through all the different, and there was lithium ion, nickel, metal, hydride. So I took all the battery types, I took all of the memory types, processing types, LCD types, and connectivity and all that stuff, not wireless, but wired, and laid out these things as Lego blocks. So literally had all of these things as just, and so I made them so I could like, you know, put them together and figure out what the compact form factor would be. Oh, like how do we shove them together? What's the smallest possible box you can get? So the questions was on storage, so the hard drive, batteries, AA, AAA, screens, so screen size, and then for that, you're tearing apart calculators. Calculators, digital cameras, whatever, and getting little things, right? So you can make it physical, right? If you can make the intangible tangible, like, and so I can say, look, we can make this, and I brought this whole bag of goods, and it's like, right? And like, here's this, here's this. This is why AA's won't work, and because it makes it too fat and everything. So just educate everybody through, here's the parts that we can use. You should not cheat a paper, it's physical. You're playing in the physical space. Oh, I would go back and forth. So truth be told, because there weren't a good enough graphical tools on the Mac, I was using a PC with Vizio and some 3D tools, and I was doing 3D design at the same time I was taking all these physical parts and going, okay, what feels right? Because you have to go from the details and then the rough, and you go back and forth, and you iterate, right? And so it was just a lot of fun, and then I ultimately ended up with a styrofoam model and printouts that came from Vizio that I glued together and put my grandfather's fishing weights in, because I also modeled the weights, right? So I said, oh, this is this many ounces, this is this many ounces in grams, and then I went and got all that and weighted these styrofoam models to then match that. So when you picked it up, it felt more or less form factor right, and it also, you felt how much, you know, was it gonna be dense enough? Is it gonna feel solid and rigid in your hand, right? Why does it need to feel rigid? Because it has to feel substantial. It has to feel like I have like a bar of gold in my hand, right? You know, maybe you know this. When you open and close a car door, you know that thunk and you go bam, and you go, that feels solid, that feels real. And then you get this tinny car that's like ding, and you're like, does this feel safe? Does this feel like a value? And so when you have a device like that and you wanna make sure that there's not too much air in it, you distributed the density of the masses in the right way, so it feels like it's the right thing. So you have to model battery life, costs, you know, mass, sizes of different things. And then you have to also think about what the UI is gonna look like, right? So you have all of these constraints you're working, variables you're working with, and you have to kind of, you know, you can't get the perfect of everything. What's the best, you know, local maximum of all of these components that come together to provide an experience? Local maximums, it's always trade-offs. What about buttons? Buttons, well, there was also the buttons too, right? Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles fought inside your mind, or is it with other people? Is it with Steve? Is it lower, like what? This was all independent. This was me before being able to present to Steve because I had to feel really confident that if I was gonna put this in front of him, that it could be made, right? So I had to convince myself and go work through all the details, through like the very, very rough mechanical design, electrical design, software things, because I didn't wanna present something that was gonna be fictional, right? My credibility would be like trashed, right? So you mentioned convince yourself. You're painting this beautiful picture of a driven engineer, designer, futurist. How much doubt were you plagued by through that? Like this is even doable because it's not obvious that this is even doable. Like to do this at scale, to do this kind of thing, to make it sexy, to shovel the screen, the batteries, the storage, to make the interface, the hardware and the software interface work, all of that. I mean, I don't know. I would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that because so many things have to work, plus the supply chain. Like at that point, I wasn't getting into any of those details or anything. There's the basic stuff that you have to put together. And then you have to, through my learnings at General Magic and my learnings at Phillips and delivering multiple large-scale programs in manufacturing, you kind of get a rule of thumb and you know what to focus on at the beginning and what not to worry about over time. Like when I was early in my career, I worried about everything on the engineering details so much so that I would be a nervous wreck. Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out and figure out what to prioritize. And so 10 years later, I was able to do a much better job of filtering out the things of like, we'll get to that in weeks to come. But right now we gotta solve the very important things, which is, could this actually be something real and that you could deliver enough battery life, enough of an interface, the right cost and the right price point. So you were sitting on a track record of successes and failures in your own mind where you had sort of already a confidence, a calmness, but still, was there a doubt that you can get this done? Always, always. How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence to a level where you could present it to Steve and actually believe that this is doable? Like, do you remember when you felt- Yeah, that moment? Yeah. I think it was after I triple checked, but I couldn't bring anyone in, right? I couldn't let anyone in on this. So it was just me. Are they gonna trample on it, that kind of thing? No, no, no, no, because I couldn't bring any, when I mean bring anyone in on this, one, it was a highly confidential program inside of Apple. There was like four people who knew about it, right? And so I couldn't bring anyone from Apple because I was a contractor. I couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world. I'm working for Apple and I'm under this crazy NDA, right, in this contract. So it was just, so I'm doing this. Oh, and at the same time, I'm also buying every competitive product, MP3 player, and tearing them all apart, right? Tore them all apart and looking at them and trying to learn from those as well. So it was all of this stuff in six weeks. So I didn't sleep, right? Yeah, yeah. But I was like, because I was trying to make this, I was envisioning this since the Nino, right? And I was like, oh my God, right? But there was another doubt that I had. And it wasn't just, could you make the product? But could Apple actually have the balls to make it? Because Apple was not the same company that you know of today in 2001. Really, it was cautious, conservative, careful? No, no, no, it was barely break-even. It was worth four or five billion dollar company. Oh, so the guts required there is not necessarily in the innovation. It's like, this is gonna cost a lot of money and we're gonna potentially lose all of it because it'll be a flop. Well, there's not just that, but there was only the Mac. And the Mac wasn't doing very well. It was about a 1% only in the US market share for the Mac, right? The company was in debt. Bill Gates had to give him a loan, right? Michael Dell at the time was saying, shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders. So this is not the company that, you know, that people go, oh my God, the iPhone came out. It's a very different level of confidence and financial situation that the company was in versus the iPod. So given that, what was the conversation when you finally presented to Steve? What was that conversation like? The conversation was, well, we went through it, the presentation and all that stuff happened. And he was just like, and you know, he never, he would flip through it real quick, throw the presentation aside and said, okay, let's talk about this, right? And so we went through it all. And one was a big conversation about Sony. And Sony was the number one in all audio categories, home, portable, whatever, in the world, okay? I had been already gone through 10 years of failure and I was like, wait a second, how are we gonna compete with Sony? And I was always worried that Sony was gonna come out with whatever it was that they were gonna come out with, their MP3 player, and that was it, game over, right? And so I was like, Steve, and this is why it took me four weeks to finally sign on to join Apple after he green-lighted the iPod program in that meeting, was because I had built other things in the past at Philips, the Nino and Velo, but they didn't know how to sell it or market it. They didn't know how to retail it, right? So I was like, we could build this. And I was like, Steve, I'm pretty sure I can build this. I've done this before, but how are we gonna sell it? You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac. And he looked at me and he goes, you build this with a team and our team and Apple and just me, right? And I dedicate that we will make sure that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars will only go to this product and nothing else. Wow. Right? Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company. So Steve saw something special here. Exactly. And he said, I'm going to commit all the marketing dollars. If you can deliver the experience that we're all talking about, if we can do that. And that was Jeff Robbin as well, because iPod would have never happened without iTunes. You know, people don't understand that was a bundle. You couldn't do one without the other and vice versa. So Jeff and I were, you know, if Jeff and you can present and bring that experience to life, I will put all the marketing dollars behind it. When did the marriage of iPod and iTunes, sort of, what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes? iTunes existed before the iPod. Okay. And so Jeff Robbin had his company, oh man, I can't remember the name of it, but it was bought. He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac. Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps like Winamp and other things that were on the PC, real player. And Steve saw that going on and saw that Jeff and his small team had this, I can't remember, Sound something. Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis of iTunes and then Jeff ran all of iTunes. And so what happened specifically there was they were starting to hook up to all these third-party MP3 players. Because there's a lot of Korean, the MP man, like Walkman, but MP man, all these, and they were trying to hook them up. And they were like, these are horrible experiences. And through that, and they said, iTunes was something that was gonna help grow the Mac base because we were trying to get more people on the Mac. So this program would be a great new thing you could add to the Mac. And there was also internet connectivity at the time for the iMac. And so they did that, and then they're trying to do these hookups. They weren't going well. And that's when they said, we need to build our own. Or Steve said, we need to build our own since these are such horrible experiences. People don't wanna just burn CDs from iTunes. We need to get that music on the go. But in an Apple fashion, that's when I was called to come in to do that, the iPod thing. After the six weeks, then he already envisioned, I'm sure he had it envisioned because they were trying to do this thing. Okay, now that's it. iTunes, what, you know, it wasn't called iPod yet. You know, what would become the iPod. That is gonna be the thing that then propels Apple into this new thing because you're bringing all these music lovers in that are gonna need their next generation or Sony Walkman version 2.0. So when you look at, again, apologies to linger on iPod, but it's one of the great inventions in tech history. What wisdom do you draw from that whole process about spotting an idea? This is something you talk about in your book, Build. How do you know that an idea is brilliant? At which stage? When did you know it was a good idea? And maybe is there like some phase shifts? First, you complete out, then maybe, hmm. And then maybe it becomes more than a hmm and becomes like a little more confidence, that kind of stuff. And also wisdom about who to talk to. Right. So they don't trample the idea in the early stages, that kind of stuff. Any thoughts about this? We could go on. Again, how long do you wanna go? 20, this is a Netflix series, I told you. Multi-season. So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure and success. But the first thing it starts with, there's a whole chapter called Great Ideas Chase You. And so it kind of goes into in Build. And it goes through kind of chapter and verse about all of those, how Nest became into being. But let's talk about it specifically for iPod, right? So for me, I always had pain, the pain of carrying these CDs everywhere, right? And I had the joy of music, right? If you could say all of a sudden, I could get the music I love all the time in a portable package, and I can have all the music I love all the time, I was solving a pain, which was, for me, it was thousands of CDs. Other people might be 10 or 15 CDs, right? And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted. That was taking the pain, making a painkiller for it. And then at the end was a superpower, an emotional superpower that said, oh my, this is something different. So when you can actually focus on a pain, and get a painkiller for it, not a vitamin. So the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin is very clear. One, you need. I gotta get rid of this pain. A vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, maybe somebody needs it, maybe not. It's all marketing story, right? So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller, and hopefully, if you can do it in the right way, you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower. That is always, and that's the way to know that you're hitting on something that's really powerful. The pain and the joy. Exactly. Are you always aware of the pain? So it seems like a lot of great products, it's like we do a lot of painful things, and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed to be. Like with much autonomous vehicles, we all assume we're supposed to be driving. And it doesn't, you don't think of it as a pain. Right. Well, you've habituated it away. Yeah. You've habituated it away. For me, when I go to other places, living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever, and I'm not driving, I'm walking or I'm using a scooter or what have you, different thing, and you go, oh my God, when you left that environment, because everyone else is driving all the time, you're like, that's what you do. And you find out there's other ways of living and there's freedom when you get rid of that, you're like, oh my God, I didn't know that this was so much better. So there's something in the book that's called out, and I deemed it the virus of doubt. And what the virus of doubt is, is when there's pain and it's been habituated away, you use the right marketing messages to bring people back to that initial experience they had or the initial experience that they had of that pain. Do you remember when the first time you did blah and it felt like this? Right. And then you reawaken that habituated pain. And people, and it becomes visceral, and then they're like, oh, yes, I hate that. And then you go, now I have the painkiller and the joy for you. That's when it all comes together and it goes. Let me, on this, on the pain and the joy, that's brilliantly put, you mentioned selling and marketing, right, marketing dollars. So I have a love-hate relationship with marketing, like with a lot of things that require artistic genius. To me, the best marketing, I suppose, is the product itself and then word of mouth. So like create a thing that people love. Oh, absolutely, that's fundamental. Yeah, but so any other marketing requires genius to be any extra thing. Because to me, I don't, yeah, maybe you can, by way of question, because you're, I'm just speaking off the top of my head as a consumer. What is great marketing? What does it take to reveal the pain and the joy of a thing? Okay, it all starts at the beginning. And let me give you, I'm gonna give you a couple of different ways of looking at it, okay? And again, we might go a little long here. So just stay tuned in. So the first thing is. Start at the beginning. Let's start at the beginning. In the early part of my career, like General Magic and Phillips and what have you, and especially when I was a teenager, when I was making my own chips and stuff like that, I really worried about just putting cool things together. I'm like, when I put those two cool things together as an engineer, you go, that's cool. And then I would talk to the other friends who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that's cool. Because we knew the bits, so we put them together and that's a new way of doing it. And you're like, wow, that's all what? It's not why. Why are you doing this? We know what we're doing, but we don't know why we're doing it because we're not articulating it for ourselves because it's just something we're like putting it together and we're like, yeah, that's cool because we think we're solving some problem we have, but we're not really articulating it. So what normally happens, and this happens because we invest in so many companies around the world, you have these brilliant engineers, designers, scientists, researchers, they put together these what's. And then they develop it, develop it, develop it, and then at the end, they call in marketing and say, now tell a story about this and let's get it out to the world, okay? What happens then is marketing's like, well, why do people need this? Tell us why people need it. And so they create a story around this product, but the product was born out of what's, not whys. And so they start telling, marketing starts telling a story and it turns out to be a fictional story usually. They say, oh, this is going to do these things. The product comes and is delivered and it falls flat on its face because the marketing doesn't match the product because they weren't both created at the beginning together, right? There are what's when you create a product, but there's a lot more whys, and the whys help inform the what's, and the whys also inform the marketing. So that's what you mean deeply, we should start at the beginning. So the designer should be also the marketer, the engineer should be the marketer. Exactly, stop impressing the geek next to you. What is the superpower you're bringing or the pain you're killing for the end customer, right? Now let's contrast that. Think about a movie. A movie starts with a treatment. It has an audience that says the audience, here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot, here's the arc of the story, right? It pulls that all out. Then there's a script that's written. And that script is then produced, and then you add all the flourishes and what have you, music and graphics and what have you, right? And then it comes out, and then there's the marketing of the movie, and that story was created at the beginning. What you need to do if you're gonna do a great product is create that treatment for your product. And I call that the press release. Do the press release. Like the treatment, who's the audience? What features do you have? What pains are you solving for people? To have the virus of doubt there to remind them what pains they have and why you're solving them. The price, all of those things. And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick for what you do during development. Because what happens along the route, you know this, oh, we're not gonna be able to get that feature done in time. Throw that one overboard, we have to hit the date. Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet. Add another feature. Add another feature creep, right? If you don't have that story you know you're gonna tell at the beginning, you don't have that bar, right? And then at the end, you don't know when you're done if you don't have that story. So you can actually look at that press release. You change it over time, that draft. But then when you're done, you know the what's and the why's. You have all the things, the audience and everything, and then you can give that to marketing and say, well, and marketing's been along the way, let's be clear. But then everybody's in sync. And that's when you can tell a cohesive, non-fictional story about, and the product delivers on that story, or hopefully over-delivers on that story. So in the drafting from the beginning to the end of the press release, what does a successful team look like? Who's part of the draft? Is it engineers, designers? What's the purpose of a marketing department in a company, small, let's say, small company, but more than two people? Okay, so from where does the why come from? Should it always come from the designer, or should there be a marketing person that, yeah, steps in and asks the question? So I'll just keep asking random questions. I know these are great questions. So, because you're just like, I'm like, I can't wait to tell you the answer. So it's in the book as well. But you have to separate out the various functions of marketing. When, that's what I thought. I was like, marketing's marketing, you know, when I was, and it's really not. There's so many disciplines, just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical, software, and even software, it's, you know, cloud services, firmware, applications. Marketing has that much diversity as well, okay? And you have to honor that. And so there is marketing communications, like PR, press, press. There is social marketing. There is a marketing creative, right? There's marketing activation. But there's another thing that also comes out, and people confuse it with marketing, which is called product marketing or product management. And product management or product marketing is the voice of the customer. They're the person who sits there and listens to what's going on in the competition, in the marketplace, understanding the needs and those pains of the customer. And they're representing them in every single meeting so things don't get off track, right? So that, and they're creating the messages, not the marketing. What happens is there's messages that product marketing creates. Like, those are the deep messages. Like, we need to save 20% of energy, let's say, right? And then marketing turns that into something that's with creative and everything and brings that message across. Maybe it doesn't say that, but it comes maybe visually or some other way. So product management does that and holds that press release along the route and making sure that we're tracking. And then also marketing is tracking with that press release to make sure they're not telling a fictional story, right? Because they can also add extra adjectives or something, and then the product can't deliver that. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Keeps everybody in check. It has to be grounded to the press release, to the raw sort of ideas. Right, to the customer needs, right? Because they're always representing the customer. So you have to have a product manager. Typically, that's the founder, right, in the beginning. And then over time, you hire a product management team to then really watch over this the whole way. And they are talking to customer support. They're talking to engineering. They're talking to design. They're talking to sales and marketing. And they are always in the mix. And it's the hardest thing to hire for. Ooh, yeah, so they have this very important job of developing and maintaining the why. Exactly. Why is it the hardest to hire for? Because you have to understand, first, nobody reports to you. You're alone. So you're alone, and you have to build great ties with all of these different functions. You have to understand what they do, be empathetic with what they do, and you have to project the customer's empathy or empathy for the customer to them and tell them why and why this customer needs this, why this doesn't work, and so that they learn more. They're not just doing, but they learn about the customer's point of view and stand in their shoes to be able to then make better decisions on the engineering details or the operational details, customer support details, so they understand. If they're not the customer that it's intended for, they start to live through their eyes and see through their eyes of that customer, so they make better decisions. And there's probably fascinating, beautiful tensions between that and the engineers, oh, that's cool, sort of the developing the what. Exactly. Which makes it an extra hard job, I'm sure. Exactly. Can I ask a little bit of a personal question? One subfield of marketing, you mentioned comms and PR. How do I ask this? I can hear your struggle in your sigh. Why or do the comms and PR folks sometimes kill the heart and soul of the magic that makes a company? Or is that wrong to say? Give me an example. I will say the spirit of the example, which is it feels like often the jobs of communications is to provide caution. It almost works together with legal to say. A shield. Yeah, we probably should not say this. Let's be careful, let's be careful. Now, that makes sense except in this modern world, authenticity is extremely valuable. And revealing the beauty that is in the engineering, the beauty of the ideas, the chaos of the ideas, I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree. I agree. And I just find that, boy, I mean, it's really, so to push back on myself, I think it's an extremely difficult job because people hold you responsible if you're doing communications when you take risks. Right. And especially when they fail. So it's like, it's a difficult job. So I understand why people become cautious. But to me, communications is about taking big risks and throwing caution to the wind at its best. Because your job is to communicate in the long term, communicate the genius, the joy, the genius of the product. Right. And that sometimes is a tension with caution. Sorry, so because I've gotten the chance to meet a lot of very interesting people and interesting engineering teams and so on, I look at what they're doing and I look at what's being communicated and it's just, there's a mismatch because the communication is a lot more boring. It's like, there's something very, like just straight up boring about the way they're communicating because of caution. Okay. And you have just teed me up or another diatribe, okay? I'm gonna get on my podium here. Yes, please. So it all comes out of the leader. If the leader doesn't know how to storytell or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling, then you get even more conservatism from the PR and communications folks. Because they're always, so if you have a, not a bold leader, they're always going to be a filter. Right, they're always gonna try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges and try, so they're gonna be even more, if you have a conservative messaging leader, you're gonna have even a more conservative communications department. Why? Because they wanna keep their jobs. Okay, it's really simple. Yes. They gotta keep their jobs. If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it. So if you have very conservative leader, they're going to be even more conservative. If you have a bold leader, they will be, oh, they'll always take a little more conservative bend, but you're still gonna have bold communications. Yeah, that's brilliant. Okay. So it starts with the leader. Now, that said, when you think about the messages and the joy and revealing things, right, many of these leaders don't tell great stories. So what we do at FutureShape, our investment firm, is we take those scientists, all of, and the great minds and everything, and what do we surround them with? Marketing and communication people and storytellers to give them the confidence to tell a much broader story about the impacts of what they're creating and how big the global change can be with those technologies because usually they don't, those leaders who created those technologies, they don't really know how to communicate really well and they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak. Yeah, so it's interesting because stories, I'm a huge fan of stories. Have you ever read the book, Story? No. By Robert McKee? Mm-mm. You should read this, and this is what I read when I was 26. Story by Robert McKee, and it's a book all about the ways to do script writing, the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy, and how it's been shown over millennia how these stories are done. It's a fascinating thing, and it gives you an insight to, and it's written for obviously Hollywood and movies and things like that, but it's incredibly useful for what we do as designers and engineers and technology, you know, leaders. There's some aspect in this modern day where this podcast and so on, what I love is the humans behind the story too. So some part of the story is the human beings. So humor, drama, heartbreak, hope. Emotions. Emotions. That's not just about painting a beautiful story that's flawless. It's a- Vulnerability. Yep. It's being a dreamer, like over-promising, and then failing, so changing your mind, realizing sort of just the whole of it, and then also being like, depending, of course, where your personality is, embracing the full richness and the complexity of the personality of the leader or the different people involved. I mean, that's all part of it. Like you can't just present this beautiful, always Pleasantville view of a product. There has to be this humanity that's part of it, the full rollercoaster of the humanity, which I think has been very difficult for companies to embrace. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just an old-school way of doing things that people think that we present a facade, and we generate the story, and we tell the story, as opposed to sort of- Well, we learn, especially in the technical world, we present the story as it's faster, it's smaller, it's longer battery life, it's bits and numbers and metrics. That resonates, sure, with other geeks. What resonates with the planet? It's all emotions, right? And if you can bring a great emotional story, but with a great rational story at the same time, why you should do this, and it's like, oh my God, you bring that superpower, that joy, then it all hangs. And there's personal drama too, like the human. Right. Here's the pain I had. Remember that thing? And I mean, just, you're obviously this extremely well-known human being that's behind a lot of these great inventions of the technology world, but you're also just a human being. You have a clearly distinct personality that comes through. Like your eyes light up. Just the way you communicate is you. Some people are more stoic. Some people are, like Elon is all over the place, the chaos, Steve Jobs. I mean, it's hard to put into words. I can be poetic and so on, but there's a very distinct, comes on stage, that personality right there. That's not just the product. That's something else too. Correct. And you have to reveal that a little bit and allow people to reveal that a little bit and just let them be themselves. Well, look, why do I think your podcast is so amazing? Because you are yourself. You talk about yourself. You bring your emotions into it and you don't modulate it. You're you, right? It comes through. It's true. It feels right. You are you. You dress the way you wanna dress. You say, this is me and this is all of me and you become vulnerable, right? Much easier to do a podcast like that than run a very large company where a lot of people would feel the pain if you make, if you say something stupid. So it's much more easy to be afraid and be careful. But nevertheless, the same applies. Authenticity and risk-taking is the only way, unfortunately, to be successful in the long term. Let me, just because we're jumping all over the place, I just linger on the iPod. One of the great designs, broadly speaking in the word design of all time, what does it take to design a great product? If you look, we can jump around, we can look at Nest, we can look at iPod, we can look at iPhone and many of the great things you design, but just looking at that one transformational thing, what can you say about what it takes to do a great design or maybe what makes a great design? Well, we talked about a painkiller and we talked about that joy that comes from it. But then there's the behind the scenes, there's the team, there's everyone who brings it to life, brings that story to life. If you have a great story and you know the why, then you can communicate it to those people who are working on it. And then they bring their own thing into it. It becomes emotional for them too. It's not just a job, it's a mission. And so many of the details that are born out of these early prototypes, these things that you still haven't given full form to, there may be 80% done or maybe even 60% done, but you can see enough in there. Then you take those great ideas and you give the whys to the team. And so that they feel it, they can understand it. Then they bring their best and their ideas to the table and then you can select from those and you can then start to, it could be just a pixel change. It could be a slight change on how you do the audio for the feedback or maybe a curve on the mechanics or something like that of how it feels. Because everybody brings themselves trying to feel this thing. They're not just doing something that someone told them to do. If you can instill that mission and that why into that team, it doesn't have to be big, you get, I feel, a 10X. Everyone comes together in a special way and the magic is created. You put the love into it, the customer feels the love on the other side. So the, making the team, like taking them in onto the vision, onto the why, now they feel, all the little details we think of, the original iPod and all the many generations after, all those little details are, in them is the emotion of the engineers and the designers. It's their baby. Working nights, struggling, this isn't right. Like you said, changing little pixels here and there, changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things, like the materials, I don't know, just everything on the software and the part of the packaging. The words on the packaging. Just everything. The words on the website. And always jumping from the very specific detail problem to the big picture, how the thing feels, the overall. Always jumping back and forth. What does it look like to the customer? How are we gonna implement it in the most efficient way? Because a lot of the stuff you don't know is some of that stuff is hacked in. Maybe hacked in at the end. It may not be the most beautiful architecture that a geek would look at and go, oh my God, that's so beautiful. Because we can look at and visualize this incredible software stack or hardware stack. Some of it could just be hacked in. You make it better over time. But it was that brilliant thing and we gotta get that in. Because that's the way you do it now. And we'll make it more efficient later. Maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction between design and engineering. And does such a distinction even exist? Are these distinct disciplines or no? I don't think they're distinct. I think they're different types of design. I think there's always this idea of this, oh, I'm the mount designer. And it all comes down and it all flows down like some magic. There are electrical designers. There's AI designers. There is data scientist designers. Everybody has design. And there's a chapter in the book all about that, actually. That it's not just you go to the mount and it comes down and you're enlightened. It's each person brings their form of design and their craft. Because if they're really good, they're artists in their own right. They're not just engineers. They're not just designers. They're artists. They're empathetic. They really wanna bring their best. A lot of the best engineers I have are not the technical, or that I've worked with, are not the technical gotta get it exactly right. They're the artists. They came from music or they came from other things. And they see that. When you work with very rigid engineers, this is the way, the only way, la la la, those are not the engineers I wanna work with. They're all a bit artists at heart. Right, they understand the practicalness. They don't have to have the rigidity of, this is the way it's done. Like, mm-mm. If you're building something new, all new and revolutionary, none of us are experts at it. And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me, and I can give you a story. I should probably give you that story. About that, if you come with the expert and I'm the expert, when you're doing something no one's ever done before, I don't want you on the team. Because we all are learning about something that has never been in existence before. And we have to bring that level of vulnerability and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things throughout the team. So you want people that are able to have beginner's mind or whatever. Beginner's mind. Don't come in as an expert. What's the story? Okay, that's a story. You're not allowed to, okay. No, I can tell it. All right. So you ask what were these risks, like on the early iPod. And there was a few big risks. Like one, and this doesn't go in the story, but like putting rotating media in your pocket and it could drop at any time. What happens there? And like you can damage, because the heads and the hard drive media are so close. It smacks, it's dead, right? So that was one big one. Like, holy shit, right? So that was something, and we had to design special tests and everything and special software on that. But then there was another one, which was at the early days, the way the first generations of iPods, I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drives. So I was like, okay, what we're gonna use is we're gonna use this chip for hard drive, hard drive, to make a hard drive, you had to have a chip that did firewire to a hard drive. Okay, and then that would become a portable hard drive. Well, then we had the MP3 player and the user interface and everything. So there was times when it was just this hard drive and there was times when it was a MP3 player. And I had to hot switch between what the hard drive thinks it was talking to, right? So designed this thing, tore it apart, did all this stuff. And I was like, maybe I'm gonna screw up IDE and there's something, there's some holes I'm gonna see. So I go, who's the expert at Apple who understands IDE and everything? So this person comes over, the mass storage specialist comes over and I put on the whiteboard and say, here's how we're gonna do this thing and here's the commands and da-da, and this is how it hot switches and everything. He's like, that's never gonna work. Yeah. I was like, what? It was never gonna work. I said, well, let me go over here and show you this right here. I have it prototyped and it's been working for days. I just wanna see if you're gonna have it find any holes in the thing. Didn't even, and he just stormed out of the room and never even, right? That's hilarious. I've had a lot of experience like this with experts. Like for example, this ridiculous room. I had a person and there's many people like this that I showed them, here's the situation. For acoustics or something? For acoustics, yeah. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, this is horrible. This is not gonna work. The reflection, the curtains are not gonna stop. There's a bunch of terminology they're telling me. It's a similar kind of situation as the ID, which I was like, no, listen. I just need to see is there major issues and they're like a low hanging fruit that are fixable and major holes I should be aware of, not like let's- $100,000 to upgrade. To upgrade for what exact purpose? What, not why. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The why, the focusing on the story, on the content, on the why, the why, the why. And that actually, I've experienced that, unfortunately, in the artistic realms too, which is like photography and videography, cinematography. It's interesting, I talked to photographers that are quote unquote experts. And it's always about, so much of the focus is on the equipment, the equipment behind the sensors and the lighting. And it's like, all right, all right. But what about the feeling of the story you create visually? The difference between a movie that's really well told and it doesn't have all the effects and everything versus maybe some of the superhero movies we see all the time, which is, good luck if there's a story, but man, there's a lot of action and CGI. Well, that's right. And there's also value to those, right? CGI, superhero. Can tell a better story, but you have to have a good story to begin with. Sure, exactly. But if you're focused on the story, I guess you need to start with a story. You need to start with a story. And if you bring in experts, they can often be detrimental, I guess, to the why. They're too good at doing the what. Well, you can bring in experts for why. There's lots of experts for why. Too many times we get experts for what. Yes. And then they only focus on the what. And so they come with the specs and feeds and the numbers and all the other stuff. But what you're really asking for is, I need somebody about the why and understanding what we're trying to get done here and fitting the what's into that why, right? That's why I do think that one of the qualities that I really enjoy for people to work with is humility for a particular problem when you approach it. Basically, I don't know how to solve this, but we're going to figure it out, as opposed to, oh, I've solved this thing many, many times before I know exactly what to do. Humility before the chaos. So having an open mind that this is going to require, a totally new way of doing things is a really nice quality to see. You're one of the fascinating humans in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve is another one of those. So those two humans came together for a time to work together. What was it like working with Steve Jobs? What aspect of his behavior and personality, let's say, brought out the best in you? Pushing you, really pushing you, relentless on the details, challenging you for the right reasons. It wasn't bullying, it wasn't demeaning. He would critique the work, not judge the person, at least not in front of them, or in front of a group or anything like that. No, it was really that attention to detail. And when he would make a decision, there are, when you make the first version of anything, something revolutionary, there are a lot of opinion-based decisions. And there's only one or two people, three people, who hold those opinion-based decisions and what they should be. And when you have those opinions, and you're trying to work with a team to implement those decisions, you have to really tell the why of those decisions. Just don't go do it, but why it's there. So you can feel part of that decision. You can understand what were the trade-offs of the different other answers to that opinion, right? And say, this is the reason why we picked the robot we picked, because it's this for the customer, or this for the whole overall story, what have you, so that you felt really good. Because a lot of times, most people want a data-driven decision. But with V1s, you don't get data. Maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit, because you can talk to customers, but you can't do that with a consumer product. V1, version one, B2B, business to business, versus what's the alternative? Business to consumer, V1. Okay, we're just defining some terms. Yes, sure, absolutely. And when you say data-driven decisions versus what? Opinion-based decisions. So like gut, you have to use, you don't have any... You can't fall back on any data or any previous history to kind of inform you of what's going on, right? And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations and new products, it's because they're trying to turn, and this is what I saw at Philips, they're trying to turn opinion-based decisions into data-driven decisions, so they don't lose their jobs. So if you look at management consulting, management consulting is all about taking those opinion-based decisions, giving them to someone else to turn into data that comes back to them and says, they can blame the management consultants when something goes wrong, as opposed to, it wasn't me. When you need to have to tell that story, you have to understand that, especially with V1, you need to be able to articulate those opinion-based decisions and you need to own them. And if you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right, you then own them and fix them and move on, right? Version one of the iPod wasn't perfect. Version one of the iPhone wasn't perfect. We got a lot of opinion-based decisions wrong. But as you go through, because you got more data, because V2, you had data on those original opinions, and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right? And you still have new opinions because those are differentiators, that we call differentiators, the things that move the product forward in its evolution. But at the revolution stage, opinions, opinions, opinions, no data. And so you have this discussion, you and Steve, and the whole team. In a stage, and the whole team, with opinions. And there, you have to be harsh. I wouldn't say harsh, but you have to be very determined, right? You know, there are two real opinion-based decisions that happened on the iPhone. One was the keyboard. Should we have a hardboard keyboard, or should we have a virtual keyboard? The BlackBerry was the number one productivity messaging device of its time. It was called a CrackBerry for a reason, because people loved it, because it was easy to type, and they could get their work done. But when you're saying, we're gonna move from that, everyone's talking about that in the market, and you say, we're gonna move to a virtual keyboard, and it's not gonna work as well as the hardware keyboard, that's an opinion-based decision, right? Because the data is telling you, all the best sales are over here. God, that takes guts. It takes guts, but you have to look at it from a different point of view. And this is how I learned to come to understand this, because I had been building virtual keyboards before, and I knew the goodness and the badness in them, right? But he was like, look, those are productivity devices. Ours is born out of an entertainment device and productivity, right? We need to show full-screen videos. We are gonna have apps, they're not apps, but our apps, the Apple apps, because there were no App Store yet, are gonna take over the whole screen. You want a full-screen web browser. You don't want one that's like half of the device is just a keyboard. Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance. So we want that part of the screen to change based on the tool you may need at the time. And maybe it's just full view, right? So you have to go and understand it's a different type of device, just because that's that, and it's successful for that reason, the crackberry for the keyboard, that's not the only thing you're gonna do with this device, because people only did messaging and maybe a few phone calls, right? This was gonna be so much more. It was gonna be an entertainment web browsing device. So you wanted those tools to go away, but it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard. So that's an opinion. Well, let me give you another opinion-based decision that got turned around before it shipped. Steve said, no SIM slot. I don't want any slots. We're gonna make it very pure. Johnny was like, of course, no slots. Johnny, yeah. And we all looked around and go, that doesn't work. You can't do that. Well, why does Verizon, and then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve, like when you said, no, that doesn't work, you'd go, well, why does Verizon not have any SIM slots? Right? They showed that you can do a mobile phone with those SIM slots, and you're like, okay, here we go. And so a few days later, we come back with, and so product marketing, voice of the customer, engineering, we all come back with all the data showing how many data networks and mobile networks required SIM cards versus did not, and what the trends were. And so we showed the data, and that killed the, or excuse me, brought back the SIM slot on the original iPhone, because we're like, because he was just like, we're gonna tell AT&T to not use a SIM, right? We're gonna just tell them to do it differently, right? But we were like, if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world, you wanna put that friction in. People are gonna move from place to place. You know, they have different SIMs because of the prices and all that stuff. We had to show all of that data, and then that opinion-based decision got turned into a data-driven decision, and the SIM slot obviously showed up. So those are two, at the very same time, right? Opinion can hold, and so can data overrule opinion when data does exist for a V1. But at the end of the day, you don't know what the right answer is. So doing no SIM card slot may have been the right decision. May have been the right decision. We won't know, because maybe if that was the decision, then like many times throughout Apple's history, you basically change the tide of how technology is done. Absolutely. You never know. Apple started Wi-Fi. People don't understand, Wi-Fi came out of it. There was no Wi-Fi in 2001. Apple started Wi-Fi, and then everyone else got on board. If you look at now where we're going, we're going to phones without SIM slots, because we have eSIMs, right? And now the SIM slot's becoming legacy, legacy. It's a legacy port. That legacy port will probably be gone by six, maybe 10 years. It'll be gone. I'm pretty sure of that, because it's so much easier for carriers. They don't have to have physical things to go out, right? So right now it's just the early days. But it will happen, and it will go its way. It'll fall away, but it will take time. We just couldn't do it back then. So timing is essential here, but at the end of the day, it's opinions, and that's where the genius is. Sometimes the data tells you one thing, but the data at the end of the day does represent the past. And the future may be different than the past. Sometimes there's wisdom in the past, and sometimes it's actually representative of something that should be overcome, and progress looks like leaving that stuff behind. Like the headphone jack. Right. I mean, that, when different folks were getting rid of the headphone jack, boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall of those discussions. We had that, oh. That was a discussion that happened almost every year. That was an every year, should we get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod, right? When are wireless headsets gonna happen, right? And it took years to build all the right protocols, the chips, all those things, to make the experience that is the AirPods today, right? To say, have the confidence, because Bluetooth was good, but it wasn't Apple-like. So now it's like, we gotta make our own chips, we gotta make our own software stacks. Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack, and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone that you were just paying because of the headphone jack. Now we've grown our revenue, we've given a new experience to the user, right? And ta-da, you know, and it's just, it's magic. And now the world's transformed to everyone, you know, moving to that, right? But it took years to understand the problem, develop the technology, and not just rush it to market, to get a half experience, but to get it right and refine it, then ship it. And only then, after, it was probably four or five years in development. Just like the M1 processor, right? That was a work from 2008, right? Grinding away, grinding away, grinding away, then saying, okay, now we have the confidence we're doing our own silicon for all the iPhones and iPods, iPads and such. Now we're gonna turn to the Mac and make sure we have the best processor, right? Not just that we have the best integrated design team. And then saying we're gonna, you know, and then besting everyone, making sure the software and the hardware is designed at the same time, making sure the kernels, all those things are gonna use the best efficiency. And then popping it out. And then it feels seamless. It's magic. There were no, as far as I could tell, unless you were in real esoteric drivers or something like that, it just worked. It was magic. Like the transit, it was not even a speed bump. It was not even a crack in the road. So perhaps famously, Steve had a bit of a temper. Steve Jobs. Would you say his particular personality in this aspect was constructive or destructive in the process of shaping these opinion-based ideas? So in Build, I write a chapter called Assholes. Yes, and you lay out beautifully the types of assholes and maybe you could speak to the constructive and the destructive types of assholes. Okay, so there's really two delineations that I have found of, you know, real fundamental ones. And that is, again, the why. Why do I feel this person is an asshole? Okay, they might not be. I feel this is a person who's an asshole. Are they motivated by their ego? Or are they motivated by their mission? Something they're trying to do that's, and doing in service of something else, right? Sometimes those lines can be blurry, but it's usually pretty clear. When it's ego-motivated, it's clear they're just trying to get up in the ranks, push people down, shove people aside. I think we saw a president do that on a stage once. You know, I'm me and I'm the, you know, I'm the guy, right? And I'm gonna prove it by pushing everyone away and being nefarious or what have you, either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive. What they're doing about themselves. There's another one, which is someone who's so attentive to detail and unrelenting. That they're trying to get the right things for the customer or in service of their mission, and they wanna make sure we fulfill those things, right? And they really care. They don't micromanage all the details, but they micromanage the details where the customer, it touches the customer in some way. People who work with those types of people who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset, a lot of times it's a knee jerk reaction to go, they are an asshole. Get off my back, you're an, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And you're protecting your ego because what's happening is that person is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries. They see something that we can do or you can do that you're just either not wanting to do for whatever reason, you're not confident in that, you're like, I don't wanna take the extra time, and saying, no, we need to get that done and pushing you. Okay? And so when we came to those areas, it wasn't just a one-on-one, but could be Steve against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iPhone, and we're going to do this. And we're like, God, you know? And so we did it. And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details, but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably, but man, it's really putting us at risk. And we laid out the risks for him. And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks. We'll do that. We're like, we might be three months late. He's like, this is so important. We need to stay on time. But it would be all the time, push, push, push. It reminds me of kids growing up, and me growing up, when your parents push you to make you grow beyond your boundaries, your personal boundaries. And you're like, God damn it, I'm sorry. But they do it for the right reasons. Now, let's see, it's not bullying. It's not about bullying. It's not about demeaning. It's about either pushing you to another part of the mission that needs to get done, or it's about critiquing your work, but not judging you. Yes. Well, there's a lot to say there. So one, it's fascinating. It really is fascinating. And you laid out a very nice picture, but it does feel like there's sometimes gray areas, which is why it makes all of this very complicated. So one question I have for you in terms of glass on the iPhone. How important is it that, like Steve in that case, is right? Because I could argue each side. It seems like, in one sense, just having a strong vision and opinion is already going to make everybody grow, even if it turns out to be the wrong. As long as you are sort of standing your ground, you know, Napoleon invading Russia or something in the winter like it's just not gonna be a good idea. It's not a good idea, but I'm gonna hold to that. And then once you decide, you go all in. And then from that, even if the whole team knows it's the wrong decision, just sticking by it, powering through, you will learn through the pain of it. Everybody will learn. So that's one side. The other is maybe the asshole, the vision-driven asshole, gets to be more and more of an asshole if they have a track record of, through that process, having built people up, having made the correct decisions. They can't, they're not allowed to be an asshole. They're in rare air and no one can challenge them. Right, right. Steve was never that. That's the great thing. He was never unchallengeable. You could challenge him. Now, the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this. So at the beginning of the project, well before we were going, we had always had these things about plastic front iPods, these kinds of things, you have scratches and all that stuff. So we said, oh, we're gonna have a glass or a plastic cover for the display, because the display was glass underneath it. We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic, and then we all landed together on plastic. Okay, the original decision was plastic. And the reasons were, okay, we don't wanna make a mistake. Glass can break. People drop them all the time. So we don't wanna have a fragile device, because you're gonna be using even more than a music player, right? And you're gonna be holding your head and putting it in your pocket and misses and all that stuff. So we went down the road with plastic. When it was shown, when the product was shown at Macworld in 2007, the first time, that was plastic. We had just enough of them in the field at the time. We started to start seeing light scratches on the plastic. Reviewers who didn't have the device yet, because it was behind glass. If you remember 2007, the Jesus phone comes up, and no one could even touch them. You could just look at it in this beautiful museum-quality box. Like it came from the future or whatever, the past. And it was like, oh. And you just looked, and that was all you got. But then people said, well, what screen is, what covers on that? Reviewers who knew better. It's plastic. And they were like, really? And so there was enough of a doubt there. And then when we started to do it, and then Steve changed the frame of reference of the question, or of the result of what the customer would think. And he was like, if we designed it with plastic, and it's in their pocket all the time, and it gets scratched by coins, lightly scratched, or by keys, or something like that, that is a design problem. We need to fix the problem. That was our bad. If they go off and drop it, or even slightly drop it, and it cracks, it's the customer's fault. And they have much lower, they have less likelihood to complain. Yes, they'll complain, but they're part of that, of that failure. Yes, oh, that's fascinating. And then- There's truth to that. Right? Because then they were part of why it failed, whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong. It was just sitting in their pocket, and it's scratching, and that's normal use. Abnormal use is a bad drop. And we're like, oh, now we get it. And so we all moved to that mindset when you framed the problem and the solution in that way, versus the original framing where we all landed on plastic. So, and then he was unrelenting on that, but we all had moved. And we have moved mindset, and we understood the why, and we marshaled together. And then by the end of June, and it was crazy, the mechanical product design teams, sourcing, all of us, the partner corning, pulled together to make that happen, because it was the right reason, right? So this, you look at these stories, and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways, but that's not usually how it all happened, of like one leader was, ah, that's not how Steve was. Now, I've seen leaders who are just pounding, and just had no real empathy for the team, and understanding the why, and it's just, it is the way I want it, right? I am the supreme leader. That wasn't like that. He just had a very strong opinion. Very strong opinion. But it was challengeable. It was challengeable, and if you came with the right thing, you know, you could modulate that, but you had to come with a team. It couldn't just be you, and you had to come with a team, and data, to overcome, because it was a very strong opinion. And there's personal quirks of character, like you said. Bad days and good days. Bad days and good days. So there's also the three options you said. You notice that the third option is always going to be the one that's picked. Sure. Those kinds of- Idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncrasies. And that, so that brings up another thing. You said challenge the idea, not the person. I'm somebody who has a, you know, I have a temper. I use colorful language and so on. When I'm on teams, I work. In my private life, I'm much calmer and so on. But I get, when I get really passionate with engineering teams- Sure. I've been called an asshole. And you get, I mean, I am distinctly aware that you cross lines often. There's like levels, right? Sure. You know, you could, it has to do with language and how language is heard. So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me. You could swear. You could say stuff that sounds personal, like, like, I don't know, Lex, sometimes I think you're the dumbest human on the face of the earth or something, I don't know. This sounds very personal, right? But I'm not gonna take that personally. I understand what's being said. And then I also noticed that there's other people that take stuff more personally. This has to do with teams and figuring out like, okay, who's going to take certain words personally and not? And you have to know, that's what makes a great coach, a great leader, a mentor. You have to like factor all that in. But it just, there's something about just being an asshole and being passionate and really driven that sometimes you do cross lines. And that's, I don't know what to do with that because it feels like it comes with the territory. Like you have, it seems like you can't just have a perfectly optimized. No, no, absolutely not. We're humans. Yeah. We're humans. We don't have a program. Everyone's programmed the same way to react the same way to given stimulus, right? Yeah. So, you know, you said, I don't know if this was a real example, but you said, oh, you're the dumbest human on earth or whatever. I would never say that. Absolutely never. And if someone said that to me, or I saw someone else say that to another person on the team, absolutely not. That is not allowed because that's judging someone. You may be heated and you can get heated and you can say it in your intonation, but to then try to put a label on it and put a label on a person, that is not allowed. So if you let that kind of culture happen and it becomes somewhat, you know, sometimes it's in jest. You know, it has to be very much in jest and those two people have to have a really good working relationship. But other than that, I'm sorry, it's gonna be a lot more, you could say aseptic in that way that you're not gonna add that stuff in, but you can do it with all other types of ways without saying that because then people who do react to that kind of language and don't have those shields because they might not have that same confidence level that you do and you can just brush it off, that can be very cancerous in a team because people then mean that and then they see, oh, that's the right way to be. You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that change or that model that you wanna show the team. Yes, it's true. Even if it doesn't affect me, it's going to affect a significant enough fraction of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture. Exactly, and other people see that happen and then, oh, I guess that's acceptable. Just like politics in the workplace, is that acceptable or not? I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone because it's just another ego-driven thing. You have to set the tone as a leader for what you want your organization to be and how it gets reflected in the world and you have to uphold that. Sure, you can have an excursion outside of that, but you have to go back and say, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, you go back. You have to go and apologize, heal, and say, I was not the person I wanted to be that day. I'm really sorry. Yeah. And even in front of the team and have that humility and say, we're all human here and just because I'm the leader doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. So have the self-awareness, apologize. Exactly. And that's also part of the culture. Oh, yeah. How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer? So you've spoken about sort of what made you strong, which is he was able to challenge, he was able to push you to bring out the best. Well, I come from the technical angle, right? Deep technology, software, hardware, systems thinking, implementation, all that stuff. So I have a different bent. He wanted to be an engineer, started, but really he was much better at all the other things, the storytelling, the interfacing, and being the voice of the customer and being that product marketer in a way, right? That we talked about. I grew into being the product marketing, the marketing. He came really out the other way, right? And never got really deep technically. So that's two different mindsets. One's not better or worse, it's just, that's how it is. And it takes all kinds to, and all kinds can do great designs. Did it manifest itself differently? Just the fact that you came from those different places? Absolutely. So like the discussion about glass on the iPhone has probably had a different flavor to it. Sure, when you started getting into the technical details, enough so you're getting the third order technical details and he can't argue with that anymore. Then with someone he's like, okay. At some point he's like, I can't win this war. And he learned that very early on because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh board, the PCB was laid out. He wanted it to be beautiful on the outside and on the inside. He's like, why are all these wires running this way? Why doesn't it have all this symmetry and we have to make it beautiful on the inside. And even the traces on the boards have to look a certain way. So the teams made the board they knew that would work. And then they made the board that the way Steve wanted it. And that didn't work. And then Steve instantly figured out like at some point, don't micromanage every single detail. There's some things he doesn't know enough about. And so he would get out of that. But that was one of those instances where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion. So they said, okay, we're gonna make it a data driven decision and we're gonna make both. I'm gonna show you the results. And then from there, he didn't get into those details. So from that, you could have a great challenge. Cause then you could get those data and say, we can't do that and let me show you why. Or we can do that. And then Steve would go, you can't do that. And you're like, oh, we can do that. Let me show you. So there's certain times when you were like bringing something to reality that he didn't think could exist. So it was always that creative tension, that interaction that was so successful. I think, but there was one other fundamental thing that was different and that it graded on the team and that I made sure and I learned from to not do. And I maybe overdo now in the opposite direction, which is when there's a great idea that comes from the team, acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea. As the leader, the opinion driven, that's a great idea. Let's build on that. Let's see if that can do that. Or it's a great idea, but not for now, put it aside. But call out when people have great ideas because it's infectious. And that means maybe not ideas that come bubble up to the customer level, but inside the organization. People like they get rewarded for their ideas and say, that's a great one. Steve was always like, you give an idea and he would go, hmm, okay. I don't know. The next day, 24 hours later, it would come back with slight modifications. I've had this genius idea. And sooner or later, we'd look around the table and we'd roll our eyes and go, here we go again. So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit. Well, we got used to it, but later on in the team, it doesn't wanna bring the best, right? Because if you're always like, the reaction is never, that's a genius idea. It was always like, it was either negative or neutral. Right? Then it doesn't have that same emotional effect that you want you to bring your best. Yeah, sometimes it's fun when people get excited by ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of build on top excitement. But coupled with sort of harshness when the idea is bad and you call out the bad ideas too. So it's the good and the bad. Oh, you could say, you don't have to say bad ideas. Say, maybe not now. Let's table that for later. Let's discuss it. Or say, that's a decent idea, but did you think about that idea this way? Not just no or yes, but let's talk about why that might not be applicable in this case so that they can learn. So the next time they bring the next idea, they can modulate and understand and start seeing through the opinion-based decision makers or the databases they're bringing and bring better formatted arguments or ideas so that you have better chance of success the next time. Yeah. Right? You gotta train through those moments. You gotta teach those are teaching moments. Yeah, teaching moments. I aspire to be that kind of person. I'll usually say that that idea is shit. I remember that this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea. So I remember to make sure the next time they give a good idea, I really compliment that good idea. Exactly. But I personally, I mean, it's emotion, but I call out the really shitty ideas. But you should call out the really great ones. Yeah. If you let the pendulum swing both ways, then everybody goes, he's balanced. Yeah, exactly. If it's always one way, why bring any idea? I'm all about the pendulum. Right. You gotta have both, the joy and the pain. Don't just give me pain all the time. The yang and the yang. So you mentioned the glass and the iPhone. So you wanted to, not just the iPod, not just Nest. You were one of the key figures in the creation of the iPhone. What's the interesting aspects? What's the good, the bad and the ugly of the origin story of the iPhone? Again, this is a Netflix series that spans multiple seasons. But what- Change my flight, please. Yeah. What wisdom, what interesting memories you have from the finding? So the pain and the joy that was foundational to the iPod, all the CDs you had to lug around. What was the pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone in your mind and the mind of the team, in Steve's mind and so on? Well, there's multiple pains. You have to also look, there's not just customer pain, but there's business pain. So Apple now is getting out of that place where it was in 2001. Now people are starting to pay attention. Apple's starting to get in the culture again. It's becoming relevant. Cash is starting to flow. iPod is 60% of the total revenue of Apple, 85% market share. You're starting to get a wind at your back. You got confidence. Apple had been beaten down since probably the first time the Mac was, since the Mac? It was a beaten company ever since the Mac. So we're talking 15 years at that point, right? This is the first time you're seeing, and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said, today I can tell you all of the employees, we are now out of debt. We paid off our debt. It was a joyous moment for him, right? And then ultimately for our team because no more debt, wonderful, right? So now what you have is you have this successful thing changing the face of Apple and you hear these heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry, boom. And it's the feature phones at that time. They're adding cameras, they're adding color displays. They're seeing the success of the iPod and going, that's just music. We have some storage. We can load music on our phones and we can do what the iPod does plus more. Boom, boom, boom. Right, and you're like, and how many hundreds of millions of them are being sold at that point? It wasn't billions yet, but it was still, you know, 100 million, 200 million a year. iPod hadn't gotten there. It was 20, 40, 50 million, something like that. So now you're like, okay, what are we gonna do about this, you know, Goliath who wants to take our lunch, right? The schoolyard bully. And so there was one, let's partner with them. So iTunes music store was there. All of these phones are gonna need music. So they can come to the iTunes music store and get that music for those phones. Cause it wasn't just about the hardware player at that point. It was about the software that you need on the desktop and the content that you needed to download. So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool as Steve would always refer to it. So now the mobile phone industry, okay, we're gonna work with them. They are going to make an iPod shuffle basically inside of a phone, can have 99 songs total. And they're gonna come to our store and you're gonna, it's like, okay, great. It's all gonna be well and good. And that became the Motorola Rocker Project. It was Apple and Motorola getting together. There's gonna be software on this smartphone or not smartphone, but feature phone to cook to iTunes to get your music. It wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything. Cause that wasn't available yet. There wasn't, it had duty data networks yet. It was a disaster from the beginning. Two different cultures, two different types of leadership styles, not necessarily the most competent engineers on the other side. And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster. I watched the pains, cause I luckily I didn't have to be part of it. I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face each time we would meet. And he would be like, these guys are just, like really, do we have to do this, Steve? And he's like, we're contractually obligated. And when he came out on stage and Steve showed it, it was maybe a one minute, Steve loves those extended, like drawn up. It might've been a one minute, two minute kind of thing. And he literally threw that phone out of his hand as fast as he could. Cause it was horrible. So there was the pain of, we're not gonna partner. So if we can't partner with these guys, we have to become one of them to actually compete, to save the thing that is bringing Apple from that 15 years of malaise. So then from that, we were made a prototype of an iPod plus phone, a classic with, it was an iPod, but it had a phone inside with all the music and all the other stuff. And you use your headset, wired headset to do the audio. There was another project at the same time, cause we were doing videos in the iTunes music store, iTunes video store for music videos and movies. And it would be a full screen iPod. So instead of the classic, the way you know it, it would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel. It'd have a virtual like single touch touchscreen that you could scroll. Think of maybe an iPhone like you knew it. And then there was a third project going on, not in, those two were going on in my team, but the third project going on was the multi-touchscreen technology to drive a Mac tablet. And so that Mac tablet, that touchscreen technology, there was just way too much you had to change on the software and everything to be able to use a tablet, right? We see this all the time, like people are like, there's not enough tablet apps today that are modified for tablet. They're just phone apps that are grown up, right? So then they would just be Mac touch stuff. So you'd have to have a whole developer community. That probably wasn't the best place to take that technology first. So you take that technology, marry it with the full screen iPod and the phone stuff we were working cause the iPod phone with a rotary dial was just like a rotary phone. We couldn't make that interface work well for data input. So you put those three together and now's where those, those three things that then created the form or the technology and the form inside what would become the iPhone, married with a bunch of low level software from the iPod and manufacturer software and drivers and communication stuff combined with a very reduced Frankenstein Mac OS. And I mean that in the best way. It means it wasn't Mac OS just changed a little. It was totally, things were hacked out and changed and new code was inserted. And it really was a whole set of things from all different places to make that first iPhone OS. And then there was another team working on the apps and then another team working on the design of how it looked overall between all that stuff. So all of those things came together to create what we know as the first generation iPhone. And those are all probably fascinating. Engineering challenges. Correct. And great teams like creating the Frankenstein OS. That's fascinating. Cause you're simplifying, simplifying but then you're just pulling different stuff from and you're basically inventing. I mean, they're probably not thinking of it that way but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer. It really is Frankenstein. Right. And you didn't have to run Mac software. If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time like windows and stuff, they were like we need to make sure it runs Excel and it runs word or something like that in some reduced thing. This was like, no, no, no, no. This was born out of entertainment. So we didn't have to go and take all the same application. You know, all those other ones was about compatibility. This was about a whole new way of being. What did you think about the Steve Jobs presentation of the iPhone, the first iPhone. Internet communicator and iPod in your pocket. They are going to sort of present, announcing three new products kind of thing and then saying that it's all in one. Just, this is a good example. One of the sort of historic presentations of a product. Clearly there's like some showmanship that works. Some reason it works. It doesn't always work. It often doesn't work, but it did in this case and often did for Steve. How did that feel? What part of the actually, the design process was that presentation? You know what I mean? Like from the early, because you said, so consider the why, the press release at the very beginning. Steve was doing that the entire time. He was working on that story from day one. He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this. And then he would look at our faces because you wouldn't, most people wouldn't, at least if you're working for him, wouldn't tell him what you really thought of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces. And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidants outside of the organization and see what they thought. And they could give him feedback on it and they could really challenge him, but he would also look at their faces and go, hmm. And so when you see that, hmm, then he would modulate it and change it slightly and change it. So he was working during all of that time on the story and the storytelling, right? And the whys. While we're working on that and helping us refine it, just like the switch from plastic to glass, right? All the time working on that. So when he comes out on stage, he does something that every marketer is told not to do. Say, these three things are now combined in one. That is like the, they say that that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing, right? Yeah. Right? But it was the best one because it was all those pains. It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications and I want my internet browsing because I want it on the go so I can look up things, because it was information. And when you were on the road, you had a laptop, you had an iPod, and you had a phone that, and you had to carry all of these things with you at once. Now we're gonna solve that pain for you and put it all together. So he was just showing you the pain and beating that virus of doubt and going, it's now in this one magical thing. And he could come up and masterfully tell that story because he told it almost every day to all of these people inside very quietly. And then it was just, right? It was like a Tony award-winning play that had been worked on for 10 years. But also the human came through, the timing. It was all that. It was all that. And of course he was dramatic at certain points and he would raise his voice and a wry smile or whatever. Right, that wry smile. It was all those touches. He was an actor as well as a storyteller. Yeah, and that. But it was the truth, right? The truth came through. It was a nonfiction story. And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it to dramatic effect. It's amazing. So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Ave. You both are brilliant designers, great human beings. There were some battles fought in the distant past between the two of you. Looking back, what is the positive characteristics of Johnny that made you a better person and designer having worked with him? What is the positive characteristic of Johnny that made you a better person? Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led. I don't know where, because that was over years. I didn't see all of those things. But watching the design process of really, because it was really a team that was about materials. It was about form. It was about colors. It was about these physical characteristics. When we talked about this earlier, was design, what is design? Design's everywhere. So what they were really focused on was form, how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics, the physical aesthetics. And watching, going through that process, I learned so much in that process about how to do colors, how to do materials, how to think deeply about curves and shadows, right? And how it would look not just in your hand, but how it would look in the photograph you were gonna take for marketing, right? So how it would look, how you would feel, all of it. It was all of those physical things around that and watching the process to get there. And that was enlightening for me, right? It opened my mind to go, oh, okay. Just like there's a process for all these other things, it wasn't just magic and you say, ha ha, there it is. It was really a process of refinement, of opening the funnel at the beginning and refining down over time to get to that final, the final mile and selecting and doing the selection. And certain types you could, certain times there were opinion-based design details. But a lot of data-driven designs of what can we deliver in volume? What can we do different things? So you always had these constraints that you had to work with under. And sometimes they and the team, not just I, would say, we need this. And we're like, we can't deliver that. But maybe we were able to work together to find different design characteristics and different implementation characteristics that could get to that point without what they were describing. And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, let's find some other way to solve the problem together. Yeah, and I've seen this in several companies I've more closely interacted with, like Tesla is an example. Sometimes, talking about curves, sometimes it's very painful on the engineering side to deliver a very specific kind of thing. And one question that comes up in my mind is like, well, how far should we go to try to deliver a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature, or in like whatever the form factor is, or in a color of the material, when the cost is like 10X to deliver, not financially, but just like in effort, like how many problems to have to solve. I don't know if you can say any wisdom to that, because when you're thinking about curves, you're designing in the space of ideas, you're like platonic forms kind of thing, not always grounded to like how much this is, how much pain is gonna be involved in delivering this, but that's as you should, perhaps, because then if you're always thinking about the pain required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative, you wouldn't do the wild ideas. Right, exactly, but you have to understand, again, the why behind it. And at Nest, when we had limited resources, putting a screwdriver in the box, a custom-designed screwdriver in the box, was born out of those experiences I had at Apple, and seeing how you can create something that's emotional, it's part of marketing, and it's part of the product experience overall, even though it seems extraneous. I went back and made the design team, and the mechanical team changed some curves on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CO detector we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it. And I said, they said it's cost more, I said, it doesn't look right. But they're like, oh, well, we had, I said, no, you're gonna go back, and you're gonna make that change. I told you we needed to do it. We had a better-looking model, that is gonna get done. I know it's gonna be a terrible cost to you, but we already had this discussion, and that's the way it's gonna have to be. And I'm sorry, but it is what it is. Because it's better for the customer, and it looks better in the pictures and all the other stuff. And then we did it, and it was great. And everyone agreed it was great at the end, but it was a pain to get there. Those are where, those little details are where the magic comes out, right? And if you don't do, if you don't take those pains and put in the love, the customer's gonna feel, they're either gonna feel the pain or they're gonna feel the love if you put it in, right? So it depends on how much time and effort you wanna put into something and what really matters to you, and so how you communicate what you do. We're human beings, after all. Is there something you've learned from sort of the tensions that are natural or that happen in teams when they're passionate and they're trying to solve these problems? Is that the way of life? And there's the human drama. Is that just, is that always gonna, is that, it is what it is? Does that make you better, actually, the drama, the tension between personalities and all that kind of stuff? Look, a rollercoaster ride without ups and downs is no fun. It's the journey. It's the journey that brings out the best in everyone. We're forged, we're tempered by those experiences, not all the ups, but also the downs, and that's when you get the humanity and the connection, and we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face and smile every time because we did something together that each of us couldn't do apart, but when it comes together, that's where all the emotions happen, and that's where, if it's born out of the right reasons and the right story and the right way, that's where the magic happens, not just for the customer, but for how it transforms each person who is working on it, and they will never forget those experiences in their life, positively and negatively, that happened at the time, but they look back, and it's only positive because they did something that mattered. Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life is Nest, Nest Thermostat, and the big umbrella of Nest. Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three, what was the most memorable, the most painful, the most insight-laden challenge you had to overcome to bring Nest to life? Well, the first thing for me was making someone care about their thermostat. No one considers it. They never had any customer choice. They didn't install it. They usually don't even use it because it's so complicated or what have you. They just, they bitch at it. They hide it in a corner, and then they just pay the bill of whatever it is. It's totally unloved, unconsidered, right? So how do you wake up, like I said, the virus of doubt, how do you wake that up and get people going, you know, remember every day when you go in, and it's like, you're just frustrated, and then you get the bill and you pay the bill, so you have to do that, so that was one thing. I think the other big one was not delivering, you know, all of it was hard, right? It was constrained. We had only so much stuff. We were bootstrapped. We didn't have massive funding. We didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars. But we did it for the right reasons, but I think the other big part of it was not just building a disruptive product, because a lot of the people on the team had done that. We knew what we were doing, and that was, if we got the design right, we could deliver it with enough time. It was getting the disruptive go-to-market. In other words, how to take that product from the end of the production line and get it into the customer's hands, because there was no retail or customer choice in thermostats. No one even, it was never considered purchase. They never thought they had choice. Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack, told them, looked around, looked at their house, and said, this looks like somebody who's got as well to do. This thermostat is now gonna cost you $350, thank you very much. And you're like, I'll take whatever you give me, right? And then, and it goes into another house, it's worth $100, it's the same damn thing, right? So there was no price transparency, there was no choice. You just got what you were given. So how do you go, and this was an entrenched industry, that's why there was no innovation in it, because it was doing just fine, because every house needed them. All the installers were programmed by the product deliverers, by bonuses, and bonuses to say, you're gonna only carry our product, and if you sell this many, you're gonna get a free trip to Hawaii, right? And for these guys who install, I get a free trip to Hawaii, that's dream for them, right? So this whole channel was fully controlled by the product guys, and it was almost monopolistic in a way. So how do you go around that? So creating a disruptive go-to-market channel, one was direct to consumer, right? And all the marketing that was necessary to get that message across. Another one was getting the installation right. No one was self-installing thermostats. So how do we get enough people who are early adopters to be able to self-install them confidently, so they didn't still have to call the guy to come and install it, because then he would say, this is a crap product. No, I got the must-better product, right? So you had to get rid of that friction. And then ultimately, how do you get the people who were not just early adopters, but people who needed to see it and touch it before they bought it, how do you get that into retail when the large brands of the time of thermostats and Home Depot and Lowe's had contracts that they couldn't bring in any other brands? They were owning the channel all the way to where there was any sort of slight customer choice. And it was really contractor choice more than it was, and consumer choice. So all of that had to be innovated along with the product. And so to me, that was a huge challenge and something I had never done, most of us had never done, and we had to create, that was as much as a project as actually delivering the product itself. So it turned out to be a giant hit. And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. As a founder and leader, just out of curiosity, in these cases of acquisition, is it always a good thing? Is there any part of you and the team that considers saying no? Oh, we considered saying no all the way along the process, right? We had all been in big companies before. We knew what it was like, and the politics and all the other stuff. And what I came to learn, especially from Philips, because Philips was a very, it was 375,000 people, it was a big, it was a massive company, right? And tons of politics. And I was like, do we wanna go back into that world? Because I had so many negative experiences from that. But then going to Apple, which was, you know, not big, but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics. But then when you saw a leader rise up and get rid of those dynamics or not allow many of them to flourish, then you're like, oh, with the right leadership, this can be a beautiful marriage, right? And so for four months, we were working together with them, with Google, to make sure that we had the right leadership and we were gonna be in the right environment that it felt right. So that happened. It absolutely happened. We worked on all the details. We didn't even talk about price. We were talking about how's the brand gonna work? Who's the team gonna work with? How are we gonna get IP? How are we gonna do exchanges? How are we gonna get budgets and all that stuff done? So we worked through all of that before we actually sealed any kind of deal, because they were already an investor in the company. So we already knew, you know, they knew relatively where the, you know, the endpoint was for the price. So working through all of those prerequisites, I knew that as a individual product company that was trying to create a platform, no investors were gonna invest in a platform that could take three, four years and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars to build without all kinds of new products at the same time. And products that we were having, which were successes, but they weren't even break even yet, right? We were still developing them. So how are we gonna get more people to fund all of these things and this platform that I really wanna create? Because my worry, and I had seen this many times in Silicon Valley, is these small startups have bravado, and they said, I'm gonna take on the big guys, right? With a platform. But when those platform guys show up and Apple says they're gonna get in the, at the time, nobody cared. They were curiously, you guys are curious, what's next? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Apple wasn't in the market. Google wasn't in the market yet. Amazon wasn't there. Microsoft, Samsung, they were not, they were all just, that's curious, right? And I had watched, if you said, I'm gonna go challenge them and I'm gonna build a platform, and then they all of a sudden, one by one, go, oh, well, we're building a platform now. We're building a platform. They fudded you to death, fear, uncertainty, doubt, and the developers run away, and you can't make that platform. So I'm like, before the landscape gets changed on us, because we've attracted so much attention, they announced something, we need to change the landscape on them. Let's go to the best place where we can build out the platform, have the right leadership behind us, to help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be. And that's what we believed we were doing with the Google acquisition. Is it possible to take on the platforms? So you said there's a lot of startups with bravado and all that kind of stuff. Right. I mean, James Joyce, when he was 20, said, I'm gonna be the greatest writer of the 20th century before he wrote anything of value. One of them might be actually right. Yeah. Yeah, in this modern world, when you, so first of all, people should definitely get your book, Build, it has just this giant number of advice on this exact question of how to build cool things, how to build a startup, how to all the different stages of that team and hiring. It's mostly human nature. It's not technical, it's mostly human nature behind it. And it turns out it's, you know, turtles all the way down this human at the bottom. Yes, so is it possible to build startups that take on the big guys, whatever that is, of the modern era? So for now, it's these platforms of Apple, Google, Twitter, I don't even know, Meta, I guess, called now. Sure. Is it possible to take them on? Absolutely. But you don't take them on on their same turf. You take them on on the turf they're gonna want to have in the future, right? Spotify is a platform. It started as an application, is now a platform, right? Think of WeChat, think of all the super apps out there that are now wallets and delivery services and travel services and transportation services all within an app. Yeah. They've innovated in a different level, in a different space that the platform companies weren't, right? Or they, you know, Google was an app company. It was solving search. And then it became a platform company. Apple was solving personal computing, and then it, or iPhone was doing, you know, solving internet browsing, all that stuff. And then it became a platform company when the App Store was added. If you look it up, there's no such thing as building a platform company. You build a great app first, and then you can expand it and have the right to become a platform. Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people. But let me ask- And older people. Well, everyone is young at heart. If you're not, you should be. So what, in terms of picking a career, you have advice on this point, what advice would you give to a person on how to pick a career? What is it you want to learn? And who is it you want to learn from? Just like you pick a university. You're like, I wanna go here for this expertise. I've heard about these programs, especially graduate, graduate studies. You go for a certain program with a certain set of people. Why don't you do that when it comes to a job? You just don't go, or in a career, you just don't go and say, I just wanna go work at Google, or I just wanna work at Apple. You wanna go to a certain team with a certain set of people and work with them on something that you're really curious about and you wanna learn about. That's such, I just wanted to comment that it's such a, it's a subtle but a brilliant framing of just ask the question, what do I want to learn? And then see what career path is going to maximize that. That's so interesting. It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me. When I say I'm gonna bring somebody on the team, first question is, what do you wanna learn? I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier, says, I'm the expert in this. You're gonna hire me as the expert. We're doing something new. You're not an expert, because we're not an expert either. What is it you wanna learn? And on the topic of learning, what is the best way to learn? What starting, you go into this new place, into this new world, into maybe V1, you said you're building V1. I mean, the whole world is late, is full of V1s or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along. Zero to one. Zero to one. What's the process of that look like? What's the process of learning? How do you learn? Well, let me put a framing and then we'll talk about that last piece. I have now looking back, especially writing this book, I have a version one of myself, a version two, a version three, a version four. I had a lot of opinions about myself and what I wanted to do. Sometimes those opinions, for certain people, those opinions are formed and they get the data from their parents and they go do what their parents told them to do or their surroundings. My opinions was like, I wanna go and learn this. I'm curious about that. I made the zero to one move. And then over time, by doing, I was refining those things and learning what I was really curious about and what I was really good about, because I was getting data. And then I was like, then I had another set of opinions to create version two of me. And then I would go and do it. So it was learning by doing. Starting with the opinion, you're not gonna get any facts. Most people are like, where do I make the most money for my position? They're trying to start with data. Start with the why. What's your curiosity? What do you wanna learn? And then follow that. I took the lowest job on the totem pole at General Magic, because I wanted to get in there to work with the right team. I didn't even know what they were doing. But I thought that it felt right. I was barely living above the poverty line working there, working 80 hours a week, because it was so amazing to learn, just like a college student. That's what I was doing. And then I learned more from that and then changed those opinions into data. And then I found other opinions. So it's the same thing. But it was by doing. The way you find out what you wanna do in life is by figuring out what you don't wanna do. And the only way you find that out is by doing a bunch of stuff and refining it. That's hilarious. Yeah, that's brilliant. So in terms of the career path of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup, what does it take to successfully found a startup, to have a chance to succeed? And maybe how do you decide to take that leap? Is there sort of having founded, having been part of many V1s, many of some of the most successful V1s ever, what's it take to take that leap? Maybe leave your job, cushy job at a company and do the startup. What does it take? It takes belief in yourself. That's the first thing. Belief that you can do it. Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around you or coaches around you to make sure you know you're not crazy. It's a crazy smart idea, but you're not crazy and you're just working on something as a lone mad man or woman. You have a great idea. And like I said, great ideas chase you. In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement. I used to be like that. I would like, oh my God, I have this idea, this idea. And you try to do all of them. But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on. And you shut out all those other things and you bring them other ideas into the thing you're trying to do. So I try to run away from a great idea. And then it stalks me. It hunts you down because you're like, ah, that's gonna have this problem. I'm gonna put it aside. And then all of a sudden, a few days later, oh, I think I know how to solve that problem. Or I talk to somebody and you're just always kind of niggling around the edges of it. And then at some point it's like, it just becomes like this black hole that just sucks you and you're like, I can't think about anything else but this. It's almost like a relationship in the world, right? You know, when you have it with a, you find your partner. You know, you're like, hmm, hmm, Wade, hmm, something. And then you're trying to like, and then all of a sudden it just, it comes together, right? It's kind of like that. Ultimately it's you focus, see, I'm different. I just dive right in. I used to do that too. I used to dive right in. Yeah. But I learned that you need time. It's more effective to run away from it. Run away from it and so it chases you because it makes you think harder about that story. This is not dating advice. We're talking about stardom. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But ultimately, so you have a chief focus on it. But you also said to believe in yourself. So it's not necessarily even the idea. It's the human that believe in the human being. You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have because if you don't have that belief, then you can't project that to other people to say, join the team. Let me ask you, because you mentioned mentors and you've talked about having had incredible mentors in your life, you're also a mentor to a very large number of people. What does it take to find a mentor? How do you find a great mentor? Usually, they also find you. Is it like with the ideas? No, no, no, no, no. No, what happens is you're in the right, you have a community around you, okay? And because you've been building a network, because you can't do it alone. So you have to create this network around you and of relationships that don't, not transactions, but relationships over time that you really cherish and people you talk to, okay? And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with or crazy opinions with, and then you argue them through. But you start to see resonate. And it's not about age. It's just about this connection, right? I have mentors, obviously when I was young, all my mentors were older, and as I get older, I have mentors who are younger than me or the same age, right, they're not all just older, right? And so it's about that connection. It's about being on that same wavelength. But they also, they can counterbalance you. They complement you in some way. Like my best mentors had nothing to do with technology. They didn't know anything about technology, right? The way we know it. They were all about human nature, and they could reflect that and help me get more human-focused and more empathetic because I was so detailed in the technology, I needed to see from other perspectives. But then they wanted to learn more about the technology, right, or they thought that this idea was so great that it should exist. Now let's work together on that. So it's really, they have to find you and you have to find them, and that's by sharing. You just don't go and look it up on the internet and say who are the best mentors in the world. It just doesn't work that way. So form a network of people and see where, I mean, it's like finding relationships, finding love, all that kind of friendship. Human natures. Venture capitalists, money. Do VCs help or hurt a business in general? So like in those early stages in the chase of developing a V1, just what's the constructive and destructive power of money in the development of a brilliant idea and the deployment of a brilliant idea? I have seen brilliant venture capitalists. I have seen horrible ones. Ones that care about their LPs more than they care about the entrepreneurs. Of course, everyone's in it, you know, at the end of the day, especially venture capital, they have to give a return to their limited partners, the people who invest in money that they, you know, that they have to shepherd that money and make sure it's watched over properly. But when there's not a balance, a pushback, in a venture capitalists between what the LP needs and what the entrepreneur needs, and that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard, but if they don't see, the VC doesn't see, the exit's gonna happen in two years and they just leave them hanging. When it's, there's no, the value exchange is only money and not mentorship or ideas or other things. When there's not a relationship, but really a transaction. That's when money is toxic. Because you can get money everywhere. Maybe it's a little harder today, you know, over the last month, but you can still find people with money who are on that, who wanna enable your mission and can be mentors. Not always, not all of them, but some of them can be mentors but they're on your side, then it's incredibly powerful because it's not just one plus one equals two, right? It's something bigger than that. Because then they can bring their networks of people and their networks of companies and other people they worked with that might wanna join your mission, right? That's the kind of venture capitalist and smart money that's out there, right? But you have to build a relationship. People go, oh, look at that valuation. Oh, it's the brand name of the VC that's investing in me. No, it boils down to who's that partner and how experienced are they? Don't just give me the brand, give me the person because that's the person I'm gonna be interacting with. I have to, man, this is a million questions I wanna ask you, but we're on season five already. But let me ask you, it seems like, out of all the brilliant things you write about, it seems like not an important question, but it's a fascinating one to me is lawyers. You write about this. So does a company need lawyers and why? And what kind? So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess. It's a game. It's a legal game. Why do we need lawyers? You sound exasperated by lawyers. I don't have a good question, I guess. Well, because- The why of lawyers is what you're asking. The why of lawyers, yes, exactly. Okay, the why of lawyers. Thank you. You even do the question. You have the question. We just have to put why in front of everything you ask and then we'll be there. Lawyers, why? Why? Because even mafiosos had lawyers, okay? You know, Tony Soprano, you know, Scarface, all of them had lawyers, right? Why? Because there are things in this world that you don't always consider in the government, in laws, in competitors, because you're so focused on what you're doing, they have to watch out for you, right? Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones who try to work with you to enable what you're doing and see gray areas. Law is not black or white, it's how it's interpreted, right? And so they can help interpret things a certain way or help push on things a certain way to get change to happen or allow change to happen, because if you have lawyers who are always, just like you were talking about PR people, if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything, because their job is to really say no or maybe, they'll never say yes. And you also say their job is to say no and bill you by the hour. Exactly, exactly. Depressing. Right? Yeah. If you don't wanna know, don't ask them, because you're gonna get a no, maybe a maybe. And you'll get charged for it. And you'll get charged for it anyways, right? So to have a partner, to have them on your team, to help you see maybe some of the things you don't see, some consequences, they help to rein that in or change your language. Like, are you gonna get sued for this ad? Just change this one word and it helps, right? So you need to have a partner. Most of the times, especially engineers or designers, they see lawyers as only stifling. Lawyers can actually, if you do it right and you have the right type, they can actually open up a whole new world for you because of the interpretation in how we go about doing things. So. And they help you not get bogged down in the pain of little mistakes that didn't mean anything. Exactly, you shot yourself in the foot and you didn't even know it. You didn't even know you were carrying the gun. Just to jump around, Charles Bukowski once wrote, find what you love and let it kill you. So the question is about work-life balance. That's like finding an idea and let it chase you. Yes, but a little more aggressive. So what does work-life balance look like that maximizes success and or happiness? Is there such a thing as work-life balance? Can you speak to this? When your work is your life, and I mean that in the positive sense. When you're on a mission that really matters and you know that you can really affect not just yourself but other people's lives, and then that is very rewarding, right? That's not work. That's, like I said, a mission, right? You adopt that. But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself. At General Magic, wonderful documentary. If no one's seen it, you gotta see that. It's amazing. I was physically and mentally unhealthy, socially unhealthy as well, because I put every waking minute into this thing, every ounce of me into it. And when it was a spectacular disaster, we were making the iPhone 15 years too early, the bottom fell out. I had nothing left. I had to get healthy socially, emotionally, physically after that trauma. I let everything go. I learned from that that you have to, even though you might put everything into your work, you need to find balance outside of it. Now, that doesn't mean you're always, it's three days a week working and four days a week or whatever it was. You're still working as hard as ever, but what you're doing is you're making sure when your thinking time is during work, that you're not ruminating at three in the morning. You use the tools that you have to put those ideas into databases or on pages or somewhere else so you can go back and look at them. So you're not always having to remember, because what happens is most people don't write this stuff down. So they just sit there and I gotta remember this, I gotta remember this, I gotta remember this. If you just put it into the tools and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh. A lot of the time is about ruminating about what I need to get done and remembering everything instead of doing the work. That's fascinating. So if you just put it down on paper, you can actually escape it. Right. Escape it for a time, to have peace for a time. You mentioned general magic. Let me ask you the Russian question. The Russian question. What's been the darkest moments of your life? Where are some of the darkest places you've gone in your mind? You've talked about if you're doing these kinds of things with startups, you're gonna have to face a crisis. Right, absolutely. If you're doing it right, you're gonna face it. So for you personally, where were some of the tougher moments in your life? Growing up, I went to 12 schools in 15 years. I was always the new kid. Put yourself in those shoes, right? You picked on? What were you picked on? Well, absolutely, but even more so, I was the geek with the computer. Remember the nerds in the 80s? You probably don't know this, but believe me, we were made fun of. What were these computers? What were these things? You're off in a hole. They're all off partying or going, whatever it was, and I'm sitting there like, duh. And they're like, this guy is just this alien, right? Who's this new guy who just showed up? And then you would ask the smart questions, and you couldn't be the smartest, because then you'd get picked on too. And you're the new kid. So you're in this environment that's ever-changing. You don't fit in, and you are just asking questions because you think they're the right questions to answer, but then they're like, you're making us look bad. Don't ask these smart questions, because you're gonna make us do more work. So right there, it's pretty tough. And I'm moving cities, right? And I didn't have the internet to stay connected to people. There was no internet. Phone calls were $2 a minute. So it was lonely too. It was lonely, right? Right? I was a latchkey kid, right? I had my brother, but he was a skateboarder, and he had a different social way of working. He loved to do that stuff and be outside. I loved the computer. So even in the computer, you were alone in the family. With the computer in the family, you were alone. I was absolutely alone. That was just me. But then you could find the other geeks, right? But there were just a few of us, and we made this little thing. But then when you moved away, then I had to use a BBS, a bulletin board system, and a dial-up modem. And then I started hacking the phone system to get free codes on MCI and Sprint back in the day to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends, the geeks on the other side, right? Or to dial into a BBS cheaply that was in another part of the world. So this was this subculture, and that was not accepted in any way, and not the heroes that you see today that are on the richest people in the world and everything. So that was the first set of trauma. And then the next one really was general magic, the end of that, like I described before, and pulling yourself out and going just, because I got so insular in that world of geeking out and building stuff that I just tore all the social ties, right? Because it was just, it was a drug. I was hooked on the drug. I was a junkie. I had to get clean. Yeah. And that made you who you are. Tempered, tempered. So Steve Jobs is no longer with us. One day you also will no longer be with us. That's the thing about this life, it ends. Yeah. So no matter how many incredible things you brought to this world, no matter how many inventions you built, you too shall perish. Do you think about this? Are you afraid of your death? I am not afraid of my death. I am an atheist. And I think about the soul. Because I do, even though I'm an atheist, I think about the soul. And the soul is the thing that you instill in others when you go that lives on. It's not this thing that's magically in space. It's the thing that you've imparted onto people that you worked with and those relationships you've had. And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell, right? And through Build, I'm hopeful that those stories stay relevant because they're human nature. They're not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is or the next iPod thing is. The stuff that I have been able, the privilege to make and work with people, those are all ephemeral. The iPod's gone now, right? This week it was announced, iPod's dead after 21 years. It is that, those human connections, it's that growth that you've helped someone just like they helped me. Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs is gone, but they made me be better. That's the soul that I believe in. That's fascinating that you say that. Yeah, so many of these products, I mean, to push back a little bit, so even though the iPod is an end of an era. Using it every day. I think that, I mean, the number of people that impact it, it's just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people. Exactly. Sometimes the products you create is the sort of the transport mechanism. It's the vessel. And they felt the love and they felt that love and it transformed them, even if they don't have the vessel anymore. Yeah, and in that way, the soul lives on. Just like the body is the vessel. That's beautifully put. Why do you think we're here? What's the meaning of life, Tony? Jesus, man, death, we're going all around. Meaning of life? Why, why? Because you said it's important to have a press release. I did. Okay. Humanity, life on Earth, if this thing, the consciousness, the falling in love and building bridges and iPods and rockets and trying to extend out into the cosmos, why? Why do you think we're doing it? Is there any meaning to it? We are naturally curious. We are naturally curious individuals. And we are always looking for meaning. We're always trying to ascribe meaning to something or understanding of something, right? And through that, it's just like evolution, right? Darwinism, it's just that thing that's baked into our being at the most fundamental level. Driven by curiosity. Driven by curiosity. And creating some pretty cool things along the way. Tony, you, and speaking of cool things, you've created some of the coolest things ever. And on top of that, you're just an amazing human being. It's a huge honor that you would sit and talk to me today. This is fun. Lex, this is great. I didn't know where we was going, and I'm, let's talk, I'm looking for season seven, eight, nine. Six, seven, yes. Let's go hang out and have dinner and just rap about all kinds of crazy, I'd love to continue this. I would too. Thank you so much, Tony. Be careful. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fidel. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Tony Fidel himself. The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you're walking side by side with other people. You're all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time. Some people will see things you can't, and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else. So don't think doing the work just means locking yourself into a room. A huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together or finding a new destination and bringing the team with you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/4oDZyOf6CW4

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C Programming Language | Brian Kernighan and Lex Fridman

So what's to you, so you wrote a book, C Programming Language, and C is probably one of the most important languages in the history of programming languages, if you kind of look at impact. What do you think is the most elegant or powerful part of C? Why did it survive? Why did it have such a long-lasting impact? I think it found a sweet spot of expressiveness, that you could really write things in a pretty natural way, and efficiency, which was particularly important when computers were not nearly as powerful as they are today. You've got to put yourself back 50 years, almost, in terms of what computers could do, and that's roughly four or five generations, decades, or more is law, right? So expressiveness and efficiency, and I don't know, perhaps the environment that it came with as well, which was Unix. So it meant if you wrote a program, it could be used on all those computers that ran Unix, and that was all of those computers, because they were all written in C, and that way, Unix, the operating system itself, was portable, as were all the tools. So it all worked together, again, in one of these things where things fed on each other in a positive cycle. What did it take to write sort of a definitive book, probably definitive book on all of programs, like it's more definitive to a particular language than any other book on any other language, and did two really powerful things, which is popularized the language, at least from my perspective, maybe you can correct me, and second is created a standard of how this language is supposed to be used and applied. So what did it take, did you have those kinds of ambitions in mind when working on that? Is this some kind of joke? No, of course not. So it's an accident of timing, skill, and just luck. A lot of it is, clearly, timing was good. Now, Dennis and I wrote the book in 1977. Dennis Ritchie. Yeah, right, and at that point, Unix was starting to spread. I don't know how many there were, but it would be dozens to hundreds of Unix systems, and C was also available on other kinds of computers that had nothing to do with Unix, and so the language had some potential. And there were no other books on C, and Bell Labs was really the only source for it, and Dennis, of course, was authoritative because it was his language, and he had written the reference manual, which is a marvelous example of how to write a reference manual. Really, really, very, very well done. So I twisted his arm until he agreed to write a book, and then we wrote a book. And the virtue, or advantage, at least, I guess, of going first is that then other people have to follow you if they're gonna do anything. And I think it worked well because Dennis was a superb writer. I mean, he really, really did, and the reference manual in that book is his, period. I had nothing to do with that at all. So just crystal clear prose, very, very well expressed. And then he and I, I wrote most of the expository material, and then he and I sort of did the usual ping-ponging back and forth, refining it. But I spent a lot of time trying to find examples that would sort of hang together and that would tell people what they might need to know at about the right time that they should be thinking about needing it. And I'm not sure it completely succeeded, but it mostly worked out. Mostly worked out fairly well. What do you think is the power of example? I mean, you're the creator, at least one of the first people to do the Hello World program, which is like the example. If aliens discover our civilization hundreds of years from now, it'll probably be Hello World programs. Just like a half-broken robot communicating with them with a Hello World. So what, and that's a representative example, so what do you find powerful about examples? I think a good example will tell you how to do something and it will be representative of, you might not want to do exactly that, but you will want to do something that's at least in that same general vein. And so a lot of the examples in the C book were picked for these very, very simple, straightforward text processing problems that were typical of Unix. I want to read input and write it out again. There's a copy command. I want to read input and do something to it and write it out again. There's a grab. And so that kind of find things that are representative of what people want to do and spell those out so that they can then take those and see the core parts and modify them to their taste. And I think that a lot of programming books that I don't look at programming books a tremendous amount these days, but when I do, a lot of them don't do that. They don't give you examples that are both realistic and something you might want to do. Some of them are pure syntax. Here's how you add three numbers. Well, come on, I could figure that out. Tell me how I would get those three numbers into the computer and how we would do something useful with them and then how I put them back out again, neatly formatted. And especially if you follow that example, there's something magical of doing something that feels useful. Yeah, right. And I think it's the attempt, and it's absolutely not perfect, but the attempt in all cases was to get something that was going to be either directly useful or would be very representative of useful things that a programmer might want to do. But within that vein of fundamentally text processing, reading text, doing something, writing text.

https://youtu.be/G1-wse8nsxY

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GPT-3 vs Human Brain

The human brain is at least 100 trillion synapses, and it could be as high as 1,000 trillion. And a synapse is a channel connected to neurons through which an electrical or chemical signal is transferred, and is the loose inspiration for the synapses, weights, parameters of an artificial neural network. GPT-3, the recently released language model from OpenAI that has been captivating people's imagination with zero-shot or few-shot learning, has 175 billion synapses or parameters. As mentioned in the OpenAI paper, the amount of compute that was used to train the final version of this network was 3.14 times 10 to the 23rd flops. And if we use reasonable cost estimates based on Lambda's test of U100 cloud instance, the cost of training this neural network is 4.6 million dollars. Now the natural question I had is, if the model with 175 billion parameters does very well, how well will a model do that has the same number of parameters as our human brain? Setting aside the fact that both our estimate of the number of synapses and the intricate structure of the brain might require a much, much larger neural network to approximate the brain, but it's very possible that even just this 100 trillion synapse number will allow us to see some magical performance from these systems. And one way of asking the question of how far away are we, is how much does it approximately cost to train a model with 100 trillion parameters? So GPT-3 is 175 billion parameters and 4.6 million dollars in 2020. Let's call it GPT-4 Hb with 100 trillion parameters. Assuming linear scaling of compute requirements with respect to number of parameters, the cost in 2020 for training this neural network is 2.6 billion dollars. Now another interesting OpenAI paper that I've talked about in the past, titled Measuring the Algorithmic Efficiency of Neural Networks, indicates that for the past seven years the neural network training efficiency has been doubling every 16 months. So if this trend continues, then in 2024 the cost of training this GPT-Hb network would be 325 million, decreasing to 40 million in 2028, and in 2032 coming down to approximately the same price as the GPT-3 network today at 5 million. Now it's important to note as the paper indicates that as the size of the network and the compute increases, the improvement of the performance of the network follows a power law. Still, given some of the impressive Turing test passing performances of GPT-3, it's fascinating to think what a language model with 100 trillion parameters might be able to accomplish. I might make a few short videos like these focusing on a single simple idea on the basics of GPT-3 including technical, even philosophical implications, along with highlighting how others are using it. So if you enjoy this kind of thing, subscribe, and remember, try to learn something new every day.

https://youtu.be/kpiY_LemaTc

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Michael Malice: Christmas Special | Lex Fridman Podcast #347

The following is a conversation with Michael Malice. This is a special holiday episode, and it is made extra special because it's announcing the release of Michael's new book called The White Pill, A Tale of Good and Evil. Michael and I disagree on a lot of ideas in politics and philosophy, and we have a lot of fun disagreeing. But there's no question that he has a deep love for humanity and puts his heart and soul into his work, especially into this heart-wrenching, deeply personal book. So I ask that you support him by buying it at whitepillbook.com that should hopefully forward to the Amazon page. As always, we each dressed up in a ridiculous outfit without coordinating for the chaos that makes life so damn interesting. This episode is full of humor, darkness, and love, which is the best way to celebrate the holidays. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Malice. We probably should have coordinated this better, shouldn't we? Yeah. I think so. Have you, since this is a Christmas special, a holiday special, have you been a good or a bad boy, Michael, this year? Well, that's interesting. One of the people in the book, Grandal Hicks, his autobiography starts with, I was a good boy and he wasn't a very good boy. On a scale of one to 10? I'm trying to think of what bad things I've done. Oh, okay. There's that. Okay, wait. That's not, that was, that was not a bad thing. No, no, that's all right. I would say nine. Nine? Yeah. I try to do the right thing. Okay. What about you? Is it going to be a one or a zero? Yeah, no, I'm extremely self-critical. I push the zero. Okay. I reach for the zero. Well, mission accomplished. So this episode is announcing the release of The White Pill, a book you wrote, which is, I've gotten the honor, the privilege, the pleasure of being one of the first people to read it. You're the first. So I'm really, I don't know if nervous is the word, but you are the first person who has read it that I am speaking to about it. My first, my last, my everything. Yes. I'm not going to read it to all the girls, but I'll take it. All the fembots. All the fembots. But yeah, it was a truly incredible book. It's basically a story of evil in the 20th century, and throughout it, you reveal a thread that gives us hope. And that's the idea of The White Pill. So there's the blue pill and the red pill. There's the black pill, which is a kind of deeply cynical, maybe apathetic, just giving up on the world, given that you see behind the curtain, and given that you don't like what you see, given that there's so much suffering in the world, you give up. That's the black pill. And the white pill, I suppose, is even though you acknowledge that there's evil in the world, you don't give up. Yes. So if you're listening to this and you're a fan of this podcast- You go to whitepillbook.com, it'll go to it. Whitepillbook.com. And if you don't know how to spell, we'll probably have a link that you can click on. So for people who also don't know, Michael Malice is not just a troll, not just a hilarious, comedic genius who hosts his own podcast, but he is an incredible, brilliant author. Dear Reader, the unauthorized autobiography, Kim Jong-il. So that's a story of North Korea. The New Right, A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics. That's the story of the extremes of the United States political movements. And then the anarchist handbook that's talking about the ideologies, the different flavors of ideologies of anarchism. But on top of that, you're now going in, going into the darkest aspects of the 20th century with the Soviet Union and the communism with the white pill. So let me ask you, let's start at the beginning. At the end of the 19th century, as you write, the terms socialist, communist, and anarchist were used somewhat loosely and interchangeably because the prophecy Marxist society was one in which the state had famously withered away. There was a great disagreement about what a socialist system would look like in practice, but two things were clear. First that socialism was both inevitable and scientific, the way of the future. And second, that the capitalist ruling class were not going down without a fight. So what are the key points of disagreement between the socialist, the anarchist, the communist at that time? At the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the possibility of the century laid before us that eventually led to the first and the second World War. The idea when the industrial revolution came and Marx was very much a product of industrial revolution era thinking was, okay, now that we have technology, now that we have science, we can scientifically manage society. We saw this very much with Woodrow Wilson and this kind of idea of progressivism that we could use technology and kind of not capitalism in their view, unfettered capitalism was wasteful. You're making too much stuff. You have surpluses, you have shortages. If we produce just exactly what we need and you have these people, engineers, they're engineering society, then everyone will be happy and you won't have to have any suffering or waste. So socialism at that time was used as a broad umbrella. It's not used in the term that it means today of necessarily state socialism. It just meant the idea of having society scientifically run. So you had a huge argument, there are different wings, you even had it from the beginning with Marx versus Bakunin because Marx was for obviously state socialism, the absolute state running everything. So even with Marx and Engels, it was a means to an end. After man is remade in his very nature, then the state withers away and everyone's equal and you have this kind of heaven on earth situation. Bakunin was the opposite. He regarded the state as inherently immoral and wanted to have kind of like workers' collectives and things like that and ultra localized control. So the end was always stateless. It's just that some people viewed the state as a convenient, effective intermediate state. I think at least Marx and Bakunin, there were plenty of others who just regarded it, have the state owners, have the workers control the production via the state. By the way, how does my hat look? It looks great, festive. It's good? Yeah, yeah. Is this side better than the other side? I think you want it on this side so people can see you. Oh no, no, no. I want it, you know like when you have like hair over your head? Peekaboo hair, it's called. Veronica Lake, I think was her name. And then I just glance flirtatiously towards the camera sometimes. I got to stay, don't go. Sure. I put on gloves. Oh, no glove, no love. The bad aspect of white gloves is the blood stains them. So you have to get new ones every time. And now I glance flirtatiously after that. I'm sorry. Okay, Bakunin and Marx, go ahead. So there were other socialists who did not regard this kind of end times where the state would do it the way at all. And there were various strains in between where you'd have some capitalism and some socialism. The concept of a safety net came out of socialist thinking and the Labour Party came out of the Fabian socialists in Great Britain. Their logo was a wolf in sheep's clothing. And then when that was too on the nose, they changed it to a tortoise, meaning we're going to get to socialism slowly in the sense of either gradualism or boiling a frog. And also the big part of this thinking at the time, this is again the late 19th century, is the idea that there's going to be a worldwide workers' revolution. It wasn't going to be that in one country it was going to happen and then all the other countries would be capitalists. The idea was, all right, the workers in Germany have more in common with the workers in America than the workers in Germany have with the capitalists in Germany. So the idea is, all right, the working class all over the world at one point, they're going to be like, we're being exploited. It's getting worse and worse for us. We can't feed our families. We're getting injured and so on and so forth. And there's no compensation for this. We're just going to overthrow our chains and we're going to run everything ourselves. We're the ones running it already anyway. And this was a- Doing all the work. And we're doing all the work. So why shouldn't we be getting all the benefit? What's the role of violence in all of this? So this was a big source of contention. So the Fabians, for example, in Britain, who are all socialists, they were very heavily of the idea that we can do this through the ballot box. We can advocate and agitate and get the people to be voting for their own self-interest and furthering the state at the expense of the capitalist class. Then there were the people who were the hardcore anarchists who were like, if voting changed anything, they wouldn't let us do it. And the only way to have a revolution is to have a revolution, to kill, to overthrow, to seize these factories. And this was a big argument. And it also fed into the idea of where does free speech end? Is it legal to be giving speeches advocating for violence and revolution? Is it legal? And John Post, who I discuss in the book and in the Anarchist Handbook, he published a book in the 1800s about how to build dynamite and how to build bombs. And this is a big free speech concern at the time because now anyone in their own house can make a bomb and kill lots of people. And this is something that was happening with enormous frequency at the time. And people tend to think, because we have these kind of prejudices or we only remember what's happening now. But this was, I mean, World War II, excuse me, World War I got started with the assassination of Arthur Franz Ferdinand. There were lots of people, McKinley's another one who I discuss in the book, his assassination. There was lots of violence happening very regularly. And with the creation of dynamite, it kind of exponentially became more dangerous and threatening. Even now on Wall Street, there was a bomb that went off, I think, in the 1920s. The shards of shrapnel are still in the JP Morgan building, I believe. Do you ever think if you were alive during that time, what you would be doing? You think of yourself as an anarchist? Would you be, where would you be? Would you be a socialist, a communist? Which parties would you attend figuratively and literally? Well, the thing that was so interesting back then is there was a woman named Mabel Dodge Lujan and she ended her days in Taos, New Mexico. She founded an artist colony. And she had an apartment on 9th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan, a chateau salon. And everyone got together and talked. And you'd have Emma Goldman, who's an anarchist, Margaret Sanger, who invented Planned Parenthood and advocated for birth control. And you'd have the people from the Wobblies, the hardcore labor unions. And everyone kind of, Ed Sheeran McKinley didn't attend, but he was friends with them all. So there was this very weird, with the birth of modernism in art and in kind of modernist thinking, there was this idea of like, all right, this was the first time where you could be intellectual as a class, where there really was this space for people who are thinkers. And they just sat around being like, all right, what are we going to do with ourselves? And you had it in modern art, you had it in literature, you had it in politics. So it was a very exciting time where people were like, all right, everything is now on the table. What are we going to do with this? And they very much were aware that this was a break with the pre-industrial revolution kind of farmer labor era. Do you see, do you think for you violence would be compelling? No. First of all, I'm just too small. But second, I just- Dynamite doesn't care about your size. Yeah, but I mean, retribution does. And I think, I don't know, but to me, violence is the kind of thing where you think you're running it, but it's running you. Once you cross that line, violence sings its own song. So whenever I hear even contemporary times where people are advocating for violent actions, it's like, when you start a fire, you're not like, I'm just going to burn down this house. And there's many cases over and over of people who are building bombs or trying to assassinate someone or things like that. And it ended up literally, literally, literally blowing up in their own face. And violence doesn't really work necessarily because if you have an assassination, you're not assassinating the presidency. If you take out a president, there's another president instantly there. So what have you accomplished? Someone's husband, dad is gone. You replace them with someone who now is in a position to crack down and retaliate with even more violence. So the calculus for me isn't there. Would I be advocating for then? Who knows? But I mean, I don't know if I'd be able to have the space to be, I certainly wouldn't have the space to be a podcaster or like a media personality. That wasn't really a thing. To some extent it was in the 1920s with the Algonquin Roundtable and all the people from the New Yorker magazine. But they were all drunks. It was very much a weird kind of situation to be a thinker. What would you think you'd do? Work at a carnival? You look good in lipstick, so. Thank you. I look good in anything. What would I, I don't know. I mean, you're not building robots. I mean, you could have been a Tesla, right? Okay. I didn't mean a car. I meant the person. I understand. Oh, thank you for explaining the witty comments to me. It wasn't witty at all. Because you wouldn't do an Einstein because he was an immigrant. So I wouldn't work with an immigrant? What does that even mean? No, you wouldn't have been a Tesla-like figure. There's already a Tesla, so you wouldn't literally be Tesla. That's why you said a Tesla. Oh, a Tesla. Okay, so, all right. Thank you for the explanation. See, Michael doesn't only make funny things, he also explains them for you. It wasn't funny. Mansplains them. It wasn't funny at all. That I agree with. Okay. Okay, so yes, when you achieve- See, this is why Kanye didn't like you. It's this. All right. I'm downgrading you from a nine down to an eight. If you keep talking like this, a five is a real possibility. All right, so the kind of vacuum that's created with violence is usually filled with a harsher figure. So you don't think violent revolution ultimately leads to positive progress in the short term? Well, sometimes it does. The American Revolution, I think, was a positive example. And overthrowing the czar, which was done peacefully, was a positive example. But again, when violence happens, people get scared and they want the violence stopped immediately. And that's a call for authoritarianism. And you see it time and time again. And they also want retribution. They were like, bring this back to normal. And they don't really worry about things like civil liberties or things like that. And then it also creates this space for invasion from foreign sources or demagogues. You know, like, oh look, they're killing us in the streets. Now you got to support me. It's a very deadly game, obviously. I remember somebody told me that, I forget where it was, but they told me that from the very beginning it was obvious that communism is an evil system, or a system that leads to evil. And to me, at least, that's not, if I had to put myself in the beginning of the 20th century or at the end of the 19th century, that's totally not obvious. They are trying to elevate humanity, the basic worth of a human being, of a hardworking human being, of the working class, of the people that are doing the work and are striving and just really trying to build up society with their own hands. It just seems like a beautiful ideal. So I guess the question is, can you see yourself believing in the ideas of socialism and communism? Yeah, let's say if you were living in Russia. Oh yeah, easily. So first of all, I don't think anything is obvious in politics. It's not obvious that humans have rights. It's not obvious that liberty is better or the markets either. Whether you're for a welfare state or you're for more free markets, neither of those is obvious. It's going to involve an enormous amount of thought and background information. So when someone says something is obvious in politics, they really mean something is apparent. Well, it's not apparent on its face that if we all get together and promote a society based on equality and we all chip in, that it's going to really be good for everyone. I mean, that to me is the promise of communism. And it was also very appealing to many people because it was new. So the idea was, all right, we've tried it these other ways. There's all these negative consequences. You have all these slums. You have people getting fired and then they have no recourse. You have women with 10 kids and they can't feed their kids. Infant mortality. You don't have sanitation. You don't have food. Everyone's illiterate and uneducated. And then you're saying, look, if we all chip in together, everyone will have clothes. Everyone will have food. Everyone will be educated. Everyone will do their part. It's going to be rough in the short period. That's a very compelling case to be made for communism. It's really easy in many ways when something hasn't been tried to make it sound compelling because you just talk about how great it's going to be and then no one, you know, people are always arguing about how like Venezuela and Sweden, like, oh, you know, you want democratic socialism to be like Sweden. You don't want it to be like Venezuela. The Venezuelans didn't vote for Venezuela. They voted for Sweden. They ended up with Venezuela. So it's, I think, and the thing with the communism, especially at that era, it was very much a correlated with people who are too smart for their own good because they had the idea that if we're just put in charge instead of these like business for people or these heirs to great estates, if the people who are smart and get it like us, I don't mean you and me, like the people at the time who were advocating for it, once we're in charge, since we're good people and we want what's best for everyone, we're going to make sure everyone's taken care of. And, you know, they always talked about how much they cared about the little guy. And so I'm sure some of them meant it a lot. And they're like, look, if the guy in charge is very much concerned with the little guy, he's not going to slip between the cracks and it's just going to be absolutely great. And we don't have to worry about, you know, you know, the capitalist class just basically exploiting people and having these huge estates while these people can't even feed their own families. Since we have a little bit of momentum, can you steelman the case for socialism at that time and even today? I don't know if it's, I don't know if there's a rhyme and a similarity to those, to socialism as implemented at that time and what could possibly be implemented today, but maybe you can dance between the two. The steelman argument for socialism is if you have everything up to private industry, you do not have a guarantee that someone won't fall between the cracks. And the other concern is in any other context, if someone is, let's suppose, mentally ill, right? Through no fault of their own and they are, or someone's handicapped, you know, they can't feed themselves or mentally disabled or something like that. If you have everything up to charity, some, if you see this with like endangered species, right? The species that are cute, it's easy to raise money for them or protect them. Some weird kind of frog somewhere that no one cares about, you can't raise money for it. There's people's interests are to what they find interesting. So if someone is, someone who's like not socially appealing in some way, whatever capacity, they're going to fall between the cracks and they're screwed. Under socialism, if you have a government taking care of everything, no one is left behind. You are guaranteed that the lowest of the low and the worst of the worst are still going to make sure that they're not starving the street or just left behind. So that is a big moral case to be made for having the state running everything. In terms of economics, it's a lot harder. But the argument there would be it's why it's not fair, a term which in my view does not actually have a good meaning, but it's not fair that because you were born a Rockefeller and I was born in Poland that you never have to worry about food for the rest of your life. Whereas I have to worry about, you know, paying for a doctor for my kid. Like you just, you won this lottery when you're born and now I have to be screwed and I have to respect all your property. Why? So that is another strong argument to be made for socialism. And the other argument is if you have a media apparatus that is operated under profit seeking principles, it is going to feed into people's worst qualities, most basic animal like qualities and sensationalist qualities and will be used as a mechanism for capitalist control. Whereas if the government, which represents all of us, is running things, then everyone will have a right to have their voice heard and won't be manipulated. That's the argument. What about the reaching towards the stateless version? Sort of because you espouse the ideas of anarchism, it kind of has the same conclusion, which is reaching towards the removal of the state to where we, I guess, have some distributed reallocation of resources that are quote unquote fair. But the thing is the Marxist vision of the state withering away and becoming anarchism, it's really kind of like the underpants gnomes because it's like- Tell me more. I will. Step one, you have Marxist- Tell me slowly. I'm sorry. You have full communism, the state's running everything, including education. Step two, question mark. Step three, anarchism. So their idea was that after enough time, the nature of man himself was going to change. And then the government would be superfluous because we would all be equal and we would all naturally or socially, whatever term they would use, want to act the part that we would need to do. And in fact, Reagan had a great joke about this where there were two commissars, I think, in Moscow, and one of them, they're walking around, they're going, is this it? Have we done it? Have we reached full communism? The other goes, oh no, it's going to get a hell of a lot worse. So that's kind of the counter argument to that. Do you think culture, society can change the nature of man? No. So no matter, you don't think this idea that, for example, America has been founded on that all men are created equal, that that idea can't permeate the culture and thereby change how we see each other, how we think of the basic worth of a human being, and thereby change our nature? That's epigenetic. I don't think that changes the nature of man. I think, for example, if I say someone, which I agree with, that someone is innocent until proven guilty, they're not literally innocent. They're regarded in a legal context as innocent, but that person is or is not a murderer, a thief, or so on and so forth. So we can legally and ethically regard everyone as equal, but as Thomas Sowell pointed out, a human being isn't even equal to himself over the course of a day. Twins who are genetic clones are not equal to one another. So it is an important thing legally, and it's a good yardstick, but it's not literally true. But don't you think that law becomes ethics? So that idea of justice starts to, we start to internalize it, that we just, the way we behave, the way we think about the world? No, I think it's a complete red herring because no one is- No, you're a red herring. Okay. See what I did there? Seletka. Because people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers, or their in-group to out-group. So in terms of if you're going to have equality, that means it's going to not matter to you whether someone is your mom or someone is someone down the street, and I don't see how that will ever become the case. Do you think it would be possible if you were an intellectual like you are at the beginning of the 20th century, would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century? No, I don't think at all. I think there was so many out of nowhere turns that no one would have seen them coming. And as an example, Lenin seizing power and making the Bolshevik Revolution a reality was regarded as utopian and insane. The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous, and it was quite literally unprecedented. The fact that, so that's a very big one. Which aspect of it, sorry to interrupt, which aspect was hard to predict? That a singular figure with just some ideas would be able to take so much power? And maintain that power and remake that society so drastically so quickly, despite such opposition. Also not just a set of temporary protests by hooligans that lead to turmoil in the short term but then stabilizes, but literally changes the entirety of the society. Yeah, Ludendorff, who was the German general, he's like, alright, we got to get the Russians out of World War I. He's the one who's like, alright, let's get this lunatic Lenin who already tried and failed to have a revolution in Russia. Let's send him back there and he's just going to cause problems to everybody and it's going to be great because it's going to weaken Russia and then our Eastern Front isn't going to have to be a problem. And then to his surprise and everyone else's, including anarchists and communists worldwide, they pulled off this October Revolution. And then for a while it's like, alright, I mean, I think my understanding is even people at the time in St. Petersburg and in Moscow were like, what does this even mean? No one took it seriously. And then very quickly you had the Cheka and the secret police and all these other kind of implementations of the communist state and people like, oh, they're not messing around. But they're like, alright, this is not going to last for long. And the USA, the US and A, we didn't even recognize the Soviet Union's legitimacy for very long time. There were no diplomatic relations. And after a certain point, it's like, if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government, who's the government of Russia or the Soviet Union? Is it the Tsar? Like, you have to recognize it. It's just, they're not going anywhere. So that was something that was not, I think, very predictable. The Great Depression, in retrospect, there were certain things that were predictable, but it was not at all the case that it needed to last as long as it did in the States as FDR made it do. So there's all sorts of things. I mean, if they fought Germany's re-militarization, World War II could have been prevented. If you didn't have the Treaty of Versailles, would you have the hyperinflation? Would you have Hitler? These are all, I think, choose your own adventure moments where things could have gone in other directions. I don't believe this kind of idea, this very Marxist idea that history is inevitable and once you start with certain premises, the contradictions kind of unfold. I think that's ridiculous. I feel like there's power in the Santa Claus outfit. Yeah? I mean, it's a fundamentally communist idea, right? How? Santa Claus. Arbitrary redistribution of wealth. It's not redistribution. Well, at least I decide who's good and bad. I mean, I know this and I mean, I am somehow getting funding from somewhere, right? No. Okay, listen, I have so much to teach you, little Michael. You have a workshop. Workshop? Yeah. And how many people do you think are employed in this workshop? They're slaves. Yes. I don't know how many elves are in the workshop. I think the rest of you are going to have to look into it. No, anyway, and the red colors and everything. Is that the biggest holiday of all time, Christmas? Like just in terms of the intensity of the festivities? No, I think Christmas is a very recent phenomenon. I think historically it was not a big deal. No, I know. Historically it has not been, but in terms of how much it captivates, how intense it is, I guess from a capitalist perspective, like how much is going on, how visual it is, how intense it is, how it grabs a whole population. I think it's because the idea of Christmas is probably one of the most powerful holiday ideas. Easter is probably up there. Easter is obviously up there because you have Christ dying, his resurrection. So that's kind of a big one. But Christmas is this symbol of brotherhood and kindness and magnanimity. You know, one of the things I despise about our culture is this glorification, something I'm fighting very heavily with this book, or at least attempting to, is this glorification of cynicism. This kind of like, oh, you like this song? That's cute. It's stupid. Whereas Christmas is the one time of year where you could be happy and joyous and kind and people don't get to roll their eyes at you. They get to stop being too cool for school and they get to be like, you know, I enjoy your friendship. You're my sister, my brother, my dad, my mom, whatever. And it was Ayn Rand's favorite holiday. I adore it, especially Christmas in New York. And it's just this idea of like, even though we're cold and it's dark outside, you know, it's still this kind of like, it's still cozy. And you and the next, let's hope the next year is, because with Russians, Ded Moroz Santa comes on New Year's. So it's kind of like, let's make this next year an even better one. So it's very much the holiday of hope and joy. And like love for family, for friends, for friendship. And kindness and benevolence. Yeah. And it's just the whole, that whole rat race of chasing material possessions and all that gets put on hold for a brief moment. It just all goes quiet. But it's also about giving people material possessions. Like here, like I value you. This is something that brings you joy. Yeah. Yeah, you write in the book, which by the way, people should go get, buy it right now. If you support this podcast or if you support the ridiculous outfits that Michael wears, the more books you buy, the more outfits he is going to wear. I've got two, my next two appearances in the show, assuming I don't burn this bridge. I've got some good ones. This bridge has been burning for a long time. We've been going across the road by canoe at this point. Next time we're going to be swimming. How the hell are you going to swim? You're made out of lead. Yeah, that's true. Sink to the bottom, get dragged across by rope. Okay. You write in the book, cynics like to lie and call themselves realists, hoping for positive outcomes can thus be dismissed as being naive or utopian. Can you elaborate on this point? Just like you said right now. I mean, it seems like a, I don't know if it's a fundamental characteristic of our society today or just societies throughout history, but there is a cynicism. You write in the Soviet Union, it was a really, there's a deep cynicism. That was good at the end, yeah. But there is a cynicism today as well, at least in public discourse. Why does it happen and how can we fight it? I think it is easy to be like, everything sucks. My friend Lux, she was a blogger and she was an author. She had this great line because we worked in media and she's like, if you're at a party and someone starts talking about a new app or website and you don't know anything about it, just say, oh, I was on that for a while, it sucked. That's all you need to say. I'm like, Lux, that's a great line. But I think it is, and especially, I'm sure you had to, you experienced this as well with your family. I certainly did with mine. There's this idea, especially in Russian culture, but in American culture to some extent as well, where if you have aspirations, I remember there was this show called Russian Dolls. It was, oh, I just got it, like the Matryoshka. Okay, I just got it. That's the name. Okay. The show is called Russian Dolls. It was about Brighton Beach, which is the Russian Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was supposed to be their version of Jersey Shore. It was on Lifetime and it had no ratings. I remember the last four episodes, they had to burn them. So they just ran it through like 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. one day. And there was this one scene where one of the girls, I forget her name, probably Natalia, and she'd been in college and she had been wondering what she wanted to major in. This story was so perfect, I'm sure I've told it before. And she took an aptitude test and she went with her mom to get like Manny Pettys or something. And she goes, mom, you know, I've had like 80 majors. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And she goes, I took this aptitude test. It really made sense to me. I am going to go to law school. I want to be a lawyer. This is something I enjoy. And the first thing out of her mom's mouth is how are you going to pay for it? And the girl, and I really related, because if you didn't have this Russian upbringing, you watched it, you would think her reaction was completely insane. She just lost it, just screaming. She's like, people pay for law school all the time. I'll figure out a way. Why is your first reaction to look for a problem? Why is your first response to be like, oh, are you sure you've thought this through? I have been struggling with one problem for years, what I wanted to do for a living. And now like, as soon as I solve this one big problem of identity, your first reaction is like, let's find a new problem. Why is that your, instead of let's figure out how we're going to pay for it. And that kind of approach is so deadly and it gnaws at you. And I always, I don't like giving people advice because who the hell am I? And also if I don't know the context of the problem, I'm not informed enough to give advice. But this is piece of advice that I do for Comfort Giving. If you are someone who has around you people who as soon as you have any accomplishment or any hope that their first reaction is to be like, well, what about this? You have to get rid of them or sit them down, maybe give them a chance because that is something that is such so demoralizing and it drains you. And it's like, you know, the example I've used all the time, all the time, all the time. I say, if you want to be an author, right, you can go to any bookstore and look at all the shitty, shitty books like the White Pill. And you could say to yourself, I could be the shitty author. You don't have to be Hemingway. So people should buy your book just to know that it doesn't take much. It really does not take much. What shitty writing is all about and boring. Yeah. You could just pick a random, random period in history and just write a bunch of crap about it and put a pretty stamp on the cover and just go. It was pretty. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like for you, right? Like not, you don't, I don't mean you, let's- I was raised by the wolves. The wolf bots. There's lots of standup comedians who aren't Jerry Seinfeld, right? If you want to be a podcaster, you don't have to be Joe Rogan. You could be someone who's got a medium audience and are enjoying it. So like the idea that like something has to be, you have to be a massive superstar or your failure is also ridiculous, but that's cynicism. I mean, you can even be a failed comedian like Dave Smith. Yeah, I don't, this is a generic name I came up with as an example. I think he has like a podcast of some kind. I like it. Yeah. Not very funny. I don't know why he would call himself a comedian, but you- He's being ironic. Don't you think? Yeah. So even then you could do something special. I remember what you did with me in the movie theater. What's that? I don't, oh, you continue. Can you explain the jokes? Because I can't. No, I'm not explaining jokes. I'm wearing lipstick. It's not enough. Now I remember what you did to me in a movie theater and you wore lipstick that night too. Not when I was done. People for sure will think, this feels like a gay porn. Like a very long intro. Because we're not wearing pants? Yes. There's many reasons why this feels like this and the outfits and just everything about this. How would you know? I am my friend. I have stories. I thought I don't have friends. They're all suspiciously named either Lex or Lux or some variation. Like you lack complete creativity. Just like in the writing of your book. Or Lux, yeah. It's like you didn't even use a thesaurus for your book. The same words over and over and over. The sad thing about the cynicism is like, I don't think it's just a Russian thing. I think the people- Let me interrupt you because I didn't finish what you were saying earlier. In America, it's not just a Russian thing. In American culture, if you have like a sitcom or a musical, it's regarded as less legitimate than a drama. Like if something's got to be about someone struggling or someone suffering, whereas this is like a joyous, happy story. Like maybe something like Pixar, right? Sure, they have conflict and they're going for something, but overall, the background the universe is taking in is very joyous and happy. That is regarded artistically as less legitimate than something which is dark and the background is despair. That very subtly sends a very, to me, pernicious message that what's real is despair and happiness is the aberration. I think if you have that as your mindset, you're setting yourself up for maybe not failure but certainly not happiness. Yeah, but that's in the figures, the ideas that the culture elevates, but at the local personal life of parents and teachers, that still happens a lot. In Russia and here, just my whole life, especially because I'm a weirdo, I've been kind of told to basically be less weird. There's a kind of sense in where there's a certain path you're supposed to take in life and every time you have a little bit of success on those very specifically defined paths, you're pushed to do more and more and more on those paths, as opposed to celebrating the full complexity of the weirdo that each one of us is, and I certainly am. Just teachers, even friends, and certainly family, have constantly been very cynical about my aspirations, my dreams, and so on. I think that actually created a deeply self-critical engine in my brain that I think ultimately was productive because it was also balanced by just an internal, maybe through genetics, thing I have of optimism about the world, of just seeing the beauty in the world. It is weird looking back how much people that love me were trying to bring me down. It's so strange. It's also very hurtful for me because when I graduated college, it was important for me to be self-made and not take money from my family. I remember my grandma, this was a huge argument, an ongoing argument, and one time as she was leaving my house, she slipped money in under the door and I threw it out and it made me so angry, where one year for my birthday she gave me, I think, $500, which was a lot of money when you're 22 or 23. I was so pissed because that told me that they didn't believe that I'd be able to feed myself or make it on my own. I understand their mindset, but I was never hungry. I remember I'd have to wait on the subway because I couldn't afford a cab, but that was a sacrifice I had to make. I had to wait that half hour. It was a huge source and remains a source of enormous tension and contention. I think also, I'm sure speaking to your upbringing, in their minds, unless you're going into an office you can't pay the rent. It doesn't make sense. There's just like you said, forget the office, forget all that. No matter what, whatever you accomplish in life, you're always negative about your current position. You always come up with another problem, just like you said. It's like a self-generating problem box. Yeah, I remember I didn't speak to my dad for a few years, then I'm like, let me give this guy another chance. In that time period, Harvey Pekar, the author of Subject of American Splendor, the movie and author of the series of comic books, he and I became friends and he was writing a graphic novel about me. When I met with my dad, I'm like, oh, someone's writing a book about me. He goes, I know, so? It was one of those moments where I'm like, wow, you're an asshole and not the kind of asshole I am. You're just not a good person. I don't know or really at this point care what the motivation or if there was no motivation with the visceral emotional reasoning for that, but that kind of thing is something I, much later now in life, have absolutely no tolerance for. In my own private life, I try to forgive and love those people, but there have been a few in my life like this. I think they are incredible people if you allow yourself to see it, but they're flawed. I try to forgive them. That said, it is true that the people that are close to you, especially family, have a disproportionate psychological effect on you. You have to be very careful having them in your life too much. One thing is to love them and the other is to actually allow yourself to flourish. Surround yourself with people that help you flourish. Like you said, the advice there is really powerful, especially early on to have people that believe in you in whatever crazy big dreams you have that pat you on the back and say you got this kid. And so valuable. And here's the other thing. If you try and you don't make it to that Rogan level, it's okay. I have several books that I've written that are on my hard drive that have not been published and there were a lot of work and it was really disappointing when they went out and no publishers were interested in it. I'm not a publisher and maybe I won't. Point being, it's fine. I tried. Is it a romance novel? One is. Gay romance novel? Does it have a guy in a Santa outfit? Can you please stop asking me to send you gay pornography? He's calling me up all hours of the night. I need more gay porn. I need some ones. I only have zeros. Yeah. Never enough. Never enough. This one almost got a book deal, this would have been 16 years ago. It was a ladlet novel. What kind of novel? Ladlet. It's like Nick Hornby. What? Nick Hornby about a boy. So there was a little mini genre of these books about young men trying to struggle their way through. There's a whole little series of them. Fight Club is adjacent to that. It's not literally ladlet. I feel like you would write a great Fight Club type novel. You know, Fight Club is much, and Chuck Palahniuk is my understanding admitted this, Fight Club is one of the few things where the movie is better than the book. Oh, that's interesting. But the movie is so iconic. Yeah, for sure. But still, isn't there a deeply philosophical, it's kind of like David Foster Wallace novels, doesn't Fight Club capture some moment in time that's very kind of- I was hanging out with Kurt Metzger a couple weeks ago, comedian, very failed- Name drop. Yeah. Hey, Kurt. He had this great story. He was hanging out with Patrice O'Neill, the late comedian- Name drop. With the great comics of all time. And Patrice goes, Kurt was talking about how much he liked the book or the movie Fight Club, and Patrice is like, that is the whitest book on earth. He goes, your problem in life is you don't have enough violence. Your problem in life, you need someone to beat you up. That's not a problem for me. Yeah, well, I mean, but still, it is a very white book, but it still captures a kind of anger and an angst and a certain subculture in society. Yes, yes. That's really powerful. That probably led to, in some part, to the thing you wrote about in the new right. Oh, for sure. When the internet came about. I mean, it was this kind of, there's that line in the movie where Edward Norton says, I'm a 30 year old boy. This kind of question of what is it, sorry to be Matt Walsh, but what does it mean to be a man, right? What does masculinity mean? Why are so many men at such a young age feeling so lost? This idea that if I fill my house with nice furniture, that's still not going to be fulfilling to anyone. Matt Walsh is- He's from the Daily Wire. He just did a documentary called What is a Woman. Can you explain? I don't know who he is. So Matt Walsh is someone who works for the Daily Wire. Yes. And he just recently did a documentary called What is a Woman, I think it was called. And he went out to lots of people working in gender theory and all that thing. And he asked them to define, and he went to the Maasai in Africa, the tribe, and to talk to people about transgenderism, non-binary, which is a word I know you hate. And the documentary was surprisingly well done. Is that like a passive aggressive compliment? Surprisingly well done. Well, because Matt is very aggressive on Twitter. We follow each other. And there was a lot of opportunities in this film for him to really be like, blah, blah, blah, blah. And instead, to his credit, he let the people speak. And it's possible it was edited a certain way, of course. It was obviously edited. But when he just asked them, can you just define a woman for me and playing dumb, we're not playing dumb, just saying, what's your opinion? A lot of the people he was speaking to were getting extremely agitated. So it worked in that kind of context as well. It was not his usual style. Speaking of which, do you ever regret your behavior on Twitter? There were a couple of times, but very rarely. Can you describe the big strategy before we dive back into the October revolution? My strategy... Do you have a strategy or is it... does it come from the heart or does it come from the brain? It comes from, I want to have fun. That's literally what it comes down to. It's like, this is... Girls just want to have fun. Are you drunk? What is in there? I'm very cheeky. I have the holiday spirit, even though it's not the holidays. That's eggnog in there. I'm delirious. I did not sleep much last night. I've been, which is, I think the second time we talked or the third time, the second time, I stayed up almost all night. Oh, I know. I keep track of when you come and go. Yeah. So my door camera points at your garage. So I know when you're leaving or coming home. My camera points at your bedroom from the inside, but I shouldn't have told you that now. Let me ask you this, because this is something that's been bothering me. There was a chair that you threw out. Yep. It was broken. And I was looking at my camera and I'm like, let me see when he threw this out. And then one time you went to the garbage and you adjusted it to make it stick out of the garbage even more. What were you doing there? Was I... Oh, to make sure that people know there's a chair in there. Is that really what you... Well, like the garbage person, so they'd notice the chair, so they don't get... I always think I don't want them to get hurt or whatever. Oh, okay. Like they open the thing, it's like, ah, chair. I don't know what I was thinking. Okay. It was really odd. I didn't know how to get rid of a chair. It was broken. It was cracked and it was a problem. So Twitter for me, my point is to have fun. It's also fun to kind of smack down people who I regard as bad actors. And also kind of to promote news that I find interesting that maybe isn't as prominently part of the culture as it might otherwise be. Do you think sometimes you draw too broadly the category of people that are bad actors and then thereby sort of adding to the mockery and the cynicism in the world? I don't think mockery and cynicism are at all synonymous. I think cynicism means everyone sucks. I don't think everyone sucks. I think it is undeniable that a lot of people suck. What if I told you most people don't suck? Could you steal me on the case that most people don't suck? Sure. I can do it in a cynical way, honestly. It's a quasi-cynical way. But I think most people are neither here nor there. Most people just kind of go with the flow. They're amiable. Human beings are social creatures. They want to get along. They don't want to cause problems. They don't have the capacity to be the target of a problem. So most people – I mean if most people sucked, then going anywhere would be an excruciating ordeal, right? Like literally – the airport is annoying but if most people sucked, it would really be annoying. Going to the supermarket would be really annoying. So I don't think most people suck. But I do think that in public discourse, there are lots of people who are dishonest about their agenda. For example, if I'm – I could be someone who has – promoting a certain ideology but I'm in the payroll of a candidate or my think tank needs this to happen or I'm being paid for something like that. So that sort of thing I think happens all the time. There's the line I have in the book, Upton Sinclair. I forgot how he – he wore it exactly but it's very hard to convince someone of something if his payroll depends on him not being convinced of it, right? So I think things like that are – the thing I'm really excited about with what Elon is doing with Twitter and I'm just ecstatic about this is to have the context now. So you'll have a politician making a claim and they're going to word it in certain ways. My favorite example is when people are like, if you look at the years 2002 to 2020, terrorism in America, it's like, did anything happen in 2001? Is there a reason you just coincidentally started in 2002? Things like that. So when people are manipulating things to force an outcome that they want and to promote an idea that they want disingenuously, to have that underneath that in Twitter now where the audience provides context I think is something extremely useful and it's a great way to nip propaganda in the bud. And propaganda pervades the entire political spectrum of course. The interesting thing about Twitter is also the discussion about free speech and so on. I think it's interesting to discuss free speech and the freedom of the press from the context of the Soviet Union. Let's return to the October Revolution and Lenin. What was the October Revolution? Who was Lenin? What are some interesting aspects of this human being and also this moment in history that stand out to you that are important to understand? I think the interesting thing about Lenin is he was a zealot and he was a visionary and he really kind of meant it. I'm skipping ahead a little bit but Lenin also was someone who was strategic. So at a certain point when they were trying to advance communism throughout the Soviet Union and the costs were outweighing the benefits, he did a strategic retreat. He did the new economic policy. You had a rise of kind of these small capitalists coming back. You could hire people again. And for the hardcore people in the Soviet Union, the hardcore communists, this was a huge betrayal. He had to step back. He didn't do it because he was some kind of crypto-capitalist. He did it because he's like, all right, we know where we got to get to but we have to go at a certain pace and we have to adjust as we go along. So to have someone who is that much of an ideologue and that much of a visionary but still to have any element of pragmatism to him is, I think, a very rare combination. And that pragmatism, do you think that's ultimately where things go wrong, sort of that's where you sacrifice the ideas? Pragmatism in this case was good because by taking a step back, he kind of gave himself some breathing room to allow the revolution to continue, to win the Civil War. There was a big moment where Germany, it's just there's lots of funny anecdotes that I learned while researching this book. So Germany and Russia, they were negotiating a ceasefire because Germany wanted Russia out of the war. And basically, Germany was like, all right, we'll let you leave but you have to sign this treaty and basically hand over all this land that we're currently occupying. It was just parts of Ukraine, parts of Poland. And Lenin tells Trotsky to stall. He's just run the clock because he was of the belief that now that they've taken power in Russia, you're going to have a worldwide workers' revolution. So he's like, just stall them. And he stalled, he stalled. And at a certain point, Germany's like, all right, you're signing this tomorrow or we're invading. And Trotsky basically said, yeah, so we're leaving the war, but we're not signing anything. And the Germans are like, what? And he's like, yeah, well, that's what we're doing. So hey. And basically, eventually he had to sign the treaty and cede huge parts of the land and a lot of money. And this was a very precarious moment for him to maintain control of Russia. And people were telling him like, you've lost huge amounts of territory. You've blown it. You should be in jail. And he's like, watch your mouth. Because if you look forward to the future, it'll be clear which one of us is more likely to be the one ending up in jail. And he was absolutely right. This was Trotsky or Lenin saying this? This was Lenin saying this to Karl Radick. So who are these figures here? Who's Trotsky? Who's Lenin? Who's Stalin? What are some interesting aspects of all of this? What are sort of just to linger on it, the personalities, the ideas that were important? Well Trotsky came late to Bolshevism. He was really the brains in many ways of the October Revolution. He was an amazing strategist. He never forgot that he was an amazing strategist, had a very high opinion of himself. And by the way, the October Revolution, 1917, that's a key moment. Of course, the Russian Revolution lasted a long time, but this was a key moment of a phase shift towards success of the Bolsheviks. Well, that was the moment. That was like, all right, we are the government now. And now we have to make it. Like Thomas Jefferson said, I think it was Thomas Jefferson, no, it's Ben Franklin, a republic, if you can keep it. It's like, all right, we've made our own kind of government if we can keep it. Because that was the big question. You had an international blockade. You had the white armies, the czarist forces who want to restore czarism, or at least the parliament from right before Lenin took over. So this was a big kind of, no one's, you know, in some ways it was like the 2016 election. It's like, all right, we vote in Trump. Well what's this going to look like? Like no one, no one had any idea of what a Trump presidency was going to look like. All we knew was this guy's on Twitter running his mouth. He's insulting people and he's had all these views. Some are over here, some over there. And the funny thing is the Russians hacked both elections. That's true. It was Putin and the gremlin. So Trotsky was, you know, Lenin's right hand man. And he was, you know, enormous. And to this day, he remains this kind of figure who is supposedly a less authoritarian, anti-Stalinist version of communism that people can endorse. And Stalin of course was Lenin's successor. At first there was a triumvirate running Russia as Lenin was recuperating from strokes. Then very quickly, not very quickly, but gradually and then suddenly Stalin became an absolute dictator and he had a series of purges and so on and so forth, which solidified his control over the country. And of course for Stalin, Trotsky later, but throughout, as you write, seemed to almost take on a supernatural character wherein everything that went wrong in the USSR was due not just to his views, but to his direct orders from abroad. And of course, George Orwell brilliantly, in probably my favorite book of his, which is Animal Farm, and also in 1984, portrayed Trotsky as Snowball in Animal Farm and Immanuel Goldstein in 1984, is this embodiment of this evil that we always have to be fighting. And you need that in order to hold onto power. You always have to have that enemy. Right. So that's something I talk about in The White Pill as well. When things start going wrong, they always have to have scapegoats, right? And there's this Russian anecdote, what the Russians like to do is you can't say things out loud, but if you make jokes, you can say unspeakable truths. And there's this one anecdote where there's a Russian leader and things are going bad and he looks in his drawer and there were two letters from his predecessor. And he opens the first letter in a panic and the letter says, for advice, and the letter says blame everything on me. So he goes out there and he's like, oh, my predecessor sucked. He was terrible, blah, blah, it's his fault. And everyone's like, okay. And then there's a calamity again. And he's like, oh crap. So he goes back at his desk and he reads the second one and it says, sit down and write two letters. So when things start going wrong, as they constantly did throughout the history of the Soviet Union or any totalitarian authoritarian country, it's someone has to be the blame. Since we know that our ideology is true and scientifically true, if it's not working in reality given the perfection of the ideology, someone must be intentionally undermining it and causing the disconnect between thought and reality. And in the Soviet Union, there was the Kulaks at one point, then it was the wreckers, the doctors, it was just different. There was always someone, and Trotsky was called a fascist and was accused of plotting with Hitler and all this other stuff. And you also write, the problem with communism is that eventually you've run out of possible scape boat. Scape boats. Scape boats. You've run out of boats. You do run out of boats. Who's gonna carry them? Eventually you run out of possible scape goats. It's my second language, this English thing. I'm a failed podcaster. I'm a failure. Eventually you run out of possible scape goats for failure, at which point acknowledging or even noticing that something was wrong itself becomes a form of treason. Yeah. So I saw that in North Korea, right? Wherever you went in North Korea, something was wrong. So if you have four buttons for the elevator, one will be mismatched. Every wall had a crack. Every floor had a stain. The bathroom would be rusted through when you wanted to flush the urinal. But if you are someone who points this out, you're a troublemaker. And you're, oh, you're saying something's wrong. You're criticizing the operation. First of all, you're threatening the person who's in charge because now they're incompetent and now that's a big red flag for them. But second, if you're just going around saying this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, even if it's objectively true, you're a troublemaker and you're counter-revolutionary. So at a certain point, everyone just has to put on blinders and pretend that everything is fine. One example I use in the book, an extreme example, was there was a photography professor and he pointed out to his class, and he was an older man, that before the revolution, the quality of photographic paper was better. And he was, I think, executed for this heresy. So yeah, you have to pretend. I'm reading a book right now about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and there was an academic, I forget his name, Hu Shi, I think, and he points out that in these countries, not only do you not have freedom of speech, you don't have freedom of silence. You can't just sit there quietly. You have to say how great things are and how much you're enjoying and how wonderful they are instead of just keeping quiet because if you keep quiet, that's suspicious. They're always singing those songs about how happy they are and how great everything is. And if everyone else is singing, who are you to not sing? Yeah, those pictures, especially when it's Stalin giving speeches and everyone is applauding any dictator. You don't want to be the first person that stops applauding. Stalin had to have a button, is my understanding, at a certain point to tell people to stop applauding because like you said, if you're the first one to stop clapping, people are going to notice. And why'd you stop clapping? You don't like Stalin? Just imagine being one of those people clapping. That's the thing. They always had a sword over their head, but they all had a lot of blood on their hands too. It's a very, very precarious life. But there's also, I mean, 1984 does a good job of this. What is that, like two minutes of hate or something like this? You lose yourself in the hysteria of it. There's some level of which at first you're sacrificing your basic individualistic ability to think, but then you get lost in this kind of wave of emotion and you give into it. You allow yourself, it's like a mix of fear and then anger, and then you direct that anger towards Snowball or Trotsky or whoever. What is that? You're losing yourself in the crowd. Yeah, you're losing. Because you're like, it's not just I'm angry, everyone I know, we're all angry together. So you really are becoming a part of something bigger than yourself and having this kind of communal, very primal emotional experience. It's like the opposite of Christmas, right? Christmas, we're all together. Everyone's sharing their joy. Everyone's sharing their love. This is the opposite, literally the opposite. Everyone's together sharing their hate and anger and rage, but you're all kind of having a mind meld. But I wonder what it's like to be an independent thinker in those moments. Allow yourself to think. We know, because there were a lot of them and they were all punished enormously. So they can be noticed. You can notice them. Oh yeah. You even notice it in America. America's a free country, but when people start asking too many questions, it's like, where are you going with this? If you're in an office even, in a corporate setting, you're a troublemaker. You're making problems for everyone. Why can't you be normal? Why can't you be just like everybody else? So people do not like having to be made to think, and they certainly despise having to be made to justify themselves because that's a threat to their status and to their power. And this applies in totalitarianism or applies to Dunder Mifflin. I still can't believe you're wearing lipstick. I'm not. It goes to show you can pull lipstick on a pig. It's like a snowball. I think you've just been on a bender. That's what I think. It's been rough. It's been rough. It's been rough. I feel like I can be myself in this outfit. I honestly feel like I could just go around in this outfit and just be weird because everyone will accept you if you're wearing a Santa outfit. You can say anything in a Santa outfit, right? Have you seen Bad Santa? Yeah, Bad Santa, exactly. My favorite comedy. You can't say anything. My fuck stick. How did Stalin come to power? If we return back to those early days, post-October Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin, how did he come to power? What Stalin did very cleverly, Stalin was, he worked the system, but he was very much in the background. And what he did better than Trotsky is he was much more of a politician. He was a glad hander. He made friends within the party. He made people feel respected and appreciated. And Lenin trusted him. After Lenin's stroke, Stalin was basically the one who was keeping track of him. Lenin asked Stalin at one point to kill him because after the strokes he was incapacitated. Stalin talked him out of it. But at the same time, Lenin was like, if I need someone killed, this is who I need to talk to. Stalin, if you look at photos of him when he was young, he was a stud. He was a gangster. He was a bank robber. He basically worked the system and you had the Trotskyites on one hand who were much more to the left. Stalin's big, I would guess, I would call it a heresy, was he put forth the idea of socialism in one country. Whereas we're just going to make it work here in what became the Soviet Union. The Trotsky idea, and this is really kind of the Marxist idea, is that the workers' revolution has to be worldwide. This is just a worldwide kind of new era of humanity where Stalin's like, no, no, we're just going to make it here and then later behind what became the Iron Curtain. But this was, sure, this was an ideological division between the two. But what happens in totalitarian countries, it happens in any kind of like, you know, when you have intermingling of like religion and government, things that are like ideological disputes, like the Aryan heresy. The Aryan heresy in Christianity is that Christ is subordinate to God the Father, right? Whereas the contemporary Orthodox version, it's one God and three persons, excuse me. So they're all co-equal aspects of God and heaven. But that was an excuse to be like, you guys are evil, you're on the side of the devil, we're going to kill you. So these little disputes about ideas are often a convenient cover for people to have a power struggle in the guise of being like, it's not that I'm about wanting to be more powerful, I'm just on the side of the truth and you're speaking lies and that's dangerous to the revolution or to the true faith. So he squeezed Trotsky, but the thing is Trotsky had the seeds of his own defeat because per Trotsky, the party is always right. You cannot be right against the party, right? So if you have this kind of party structure and the party is saying you're wrong, as an individual you are wrong because the collective is what makes decisions, the collective, the workers are who have the knowledge and the information. And it is important for you to kind of subordinate your selfishness, your individualism to this greater good. So he kind of set himself up in many ways. Is it clear to you why Trotsky lost that power struggle? So you just explained that he set himself up, but you can see how different ideologies can be used to achieve different ends. Is there another alternative possible trajectory where Trotsky could have been the head of the Soviet Union? It would be very hard because he was Jewish. So when they were seizing power, Trotsky explicitly said, I can't be in charge, I'm Jewish. So the Soviet Union remained extremely anti-Semitic. One of the reasons so many Jews became communists in the Soviet Union because the promise was once the communists took over, we're not going to have pogroms anymore. Pogroms was you had these Jewish ghettos and under the permission or encouragement of the czar, just gangs of people go through killing, raping, robbing, stealing, rioting for days and just a complete massacre. And the idea is like under communism, everyone's going to be equal. We're not going to have this anymore. They still had it, but to a lesser extent. But since Trotsky was Jewish, his real name is Lev Bronstein, it was almost impossible to have a scenario where he was going to be in charge. And Stalin fed into that to some extent. Also this kind of idea of Jewish internationalism, it's like, okay, he doesn't really have loyalty to Russia. And many of the people who were Jewish, who were high up in Stalin's government administration, they very much had to prove their loyalty to communism as opposed to Judaism. Throughout the 20th century, what was the relationship between communism and Jews in the Soviet Union? What in terms of antisemitism, the ups and downs of antisemitism, it seems like it lessened, it was lesser and greater in different parts of the 20th century. Well, it's the kind of thing where if something was bad, there's this Russian rhyme, like yesli netu vodav krenne, kto yo vypil sody, like if there's no water in the sink, who drank it all, the Jews. So if something goes wrong, there's just a convenient historical scapegoat, it's the Jews' fault. So this is something that's towards the end of his life very much, and this was after World War II, Stalin was getting ready for another kind of series of pogroms. All these Jews were getting kicked out of their jobs, Jewish doctors were getting sent to the Far East instead of being in cities. The newspapers started talking about rootless cosmopolitans, which was a term the Nazis also used to kind of regard Jews as others or as aliens. And this was going to be, and they were very clever about it. In Pravda, and I talk about this in the White Pill, in Pravda there were articles, letters to the editor, they were like, you know, things are getting so antisemitic, we really should round up all the Jews and send them elsewhere for their own safety. So they were kind of setting the ground rules or the basis to have this sort of pogrom come back, but spoiler alert, Stalin dies, and immediately all of this gets reversed and the new administration rehabilitates the doctors who were accused of trying to hurt him and all this other sort of thing. What is it about the scapegoats in society? Are we always going to be looking for scapegoats? What do you learn from human nature that this seems to keep happening? I think there's a book called The Nurture Assumption, and I discuss this in The New Right, and what the author learned is that humans define themselves by opposition. So if you have a group of people and it's kids and adults, the kids will see themselves as kids because we're as opposed to adults. If the adults leave, the kids see themselves as boys and girls because I'm not a girl, I'm a boy, I'm not a boy, I'm a girl. So they divide. So this idea, which is a very lefty idea, that human beings naturally all get along is not accurate. And the best example of this is look after 9-11, look where there's a war. Nothing unites a populace. It's not like when times are thriving that everyone's all working together. When things are bad and there's an enemy, you know, it's the Japanese or Pearl Harbor, it's Al-Qaeda. That's when everyone really comes together because now we have someone to be against. So there will always be someone has to be the outgroup and we have to be the ingroup as opposed to them. But there's a viciousness to the actions you take towards the outgroup that varies throughout history. Yes. Some, like the degree of viciousness can cross the line towards atrocities, towards genocide. Right. I guess that's the question of why does this sometimes do that? Why does it sometimes cross into genocide? I understand it's a useful thing to have the other to blame in this world, especially when times are rough. But why does that sometimes lead to sort of action that says I'm going to murder, I'm going to torture the other? Well, I think the question really is why sometimes it doesn't. Right. One of the things I learned when I was doing the New Right is a lot of the Nazis, using that term loosely speaking, neo-Nazis, they make the point that like, oh, when the Holocaust happened, it really wasn't that big of a deal. And that only became a big deal in the decades later. And this just shows the power of Jewish influence. And I'm like, this to me is a great thing. It's a great thing that we sat down pretty recently, historically, and we're like, wait a minute. I think when we have a war or we have conquest, you don't have to just start killing everyone. Like, this is something that's bad and wrong. And certainly in the last 60 years, 70 years, this is something that people have come to take for granted. But that wasn't the case before. It would always be, or not always, but often if you conquer, you just go wild and just start slaughtering massive people. Who's the guy from Harvard? And he- Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker. I'm sorry, I forgot his name. So he just talks about like, you know, we know this is one of the reasons also why there was so much skepticism when the Holocaust started, because this was regarded as something that was barbaric. This is from the middle ages, from the biblical times. We don't do this anymore. We're civilized now. So genocide is historically the norm. I think it's also harder to pull it off emotionally when you have the visuals and when you have the audio and when you have the voices of the people being slaughtered. We don't know, you know, if this was 2000 years ago and people in the Bible, like, go kill this group, go kill that group. We don't have their names. We don't have the visuals. We don't have anything. But when you see someone being like, you know, there's a book about, I think the Rwandan genocide and the title is, We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Executed with All of Our Families, like a telegram. And like when you get a telegram like this, it's very different than reading some history book about the Assyrians killed the Phoenicians. It's like, I don't know who this is and I don't know who that is. So I think this is something that has changed very recently. There was this kind of interesting moment just that speaks to the way technology has liberated people from violence. Kristallnacht, which was a moment in the lead up to the Holocaust, where basically, you know, with Hitler's blessing, you had a nationwide burning of Jewish businesses, synagogues burnt down and Kaiser Wilhelm, you know, the Kaiser, he said for the first time in my life, I'm embarrassed to be a German. But that was a moment where worldwide, even plenty of people who did not think very highly of Jewish people were like, this is a wrap. This is a complete nightmare. But 200 years ago, 100 years ago, maybe not literally a Kristallnacht, but there's an outgroup and we hate them and we're going to kill them and it's fine. And you think it's even more difficult now with the internet, that kind of thing. Yes. Now, more difficult doesn't mean it doesn't happen or it can't happen. I'm not saying that at all. But I'm saying that we know a lot about what's going on in North Korea, you know, probably the most secretive country on earth. There's a lot of atrocities in Eritrea, which is kind of known. So I think it's also like, if you think about it, if you're how many years ago, 300 years ago, you only know the people in your village and they're all probably going to look like you so on and so forth. Whereas now, if I'm on social media and there's someone from any country and maybe their picture looks a little different, they use the same anime picture as somebody else, but they're putting forth their ideas. You do see the humanity in them and you do see a sense of familiarity and a familial bond with them. And when you hear about these things, you know, when I, again, like I did when I did Dear Reader, no one, I was on Al Qaeda and I was on Alex Jones, no one pushed back about like, oh, the North Koreans, they were all like, this is horrible. If I had a magic wand, I'd give them food. I wouldn't have them live in fear. And this is something that I don't think was the case a couple of hundred years ago. As I said, I'd love to get your thoughts about what's going on in Iran, the protests. It seems like the regime there is able to crack down on violence. My thoughts about Iran, let me just, there's something else about Iran which I think is interesting. This whole idea of care for what you wish for. Because people have this, and something I kind of, one of the reasons I have the white pill is Americans really are very naive about the nature of evil, right? They really think that a dictator has a weird mustache and he's banging the table and he's, you know, like a crazy person. And it's often not the case. But they also think if something is bad, therefore the alternative is going to be better. So you had the Shah of Iran and he was kind of authoritarian and no, he's not a good guy. So in 1979, there were a lot of people like, this guy's horrible. He's oppressing the Iranian people. Let's get him the F out of there. He's so bad that whatever comes after it has to be an improvement. And it's like, no, that's, if you think, I mean, this drives me crazy when conservatives are like, you know, Joe Biden's the worst president we ever had. Like, this is destroying America. I'm like, you have no idea how bad things can get. The fact that you are in a position to complain means we got our ways to go. Yeah. Every time you say that Donald Trump or Joe Biden is the worst president ever, that warms my heart because you're allowed to say that. Yes. It's like, I just let it, it's like music. You're allowed to be pretty, in response to a president's tweet, you can write that. Yeah. Yeah. And it still lives there and nobody arrests you. Yeah. Which is a rare thing in human history. Yes. And still rare thing in the world. I mean, it does seem that Iran, the current regime is able to crack down on communication channels. It's still, it's surprising to me how much power a government can have. Like they could use violence to control the population. Right. And nobody's going to do anything about it. Well, I just- The rest of the world just watches. But here's the thing, right? Because if the rest of the world starts doing too much, then they have a justification to crack down even more. This regime, this protests are not legitimate. These are, this happened constantly in the Soviet Union. These are foreign provocateurs. This is meddling in our country, curfew, lockdown, mandatory searches. Everyone's a spy. So that narrative is a very convenient one for people who are authoritarian. I know a lot of people who are Persian, as I'm sure you do as well. Very hardworking, very bright, great people. And all you could do is hope for a peaceful liberalization of it. People don't realize how liberal Iran used to be. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol used to be friends with the Shah. And if you read his diaries, he talks about how he knew things weren't going well for the Shah because they had less caviar at the table. But like this is, he was really kind of, there's I think a poor understanding in America, and I'm not sure why, of what these liberal Muslim countries are like. I gave a talk in Bodrum in Turkey, which is like a resort town in Turkey. And I had thought previous to that, or I had suspected if push comes to shove and they have to choose people in Turkey between the West and like Al-Qaeda, not Al-Qaeda, but like, you know, hardcore Islam, they're going to choose hardcore Islam. You go there and you're like, oh, this is like Los Angeles. And these people are so liberal, so, and they are the first to be killed. They're the first targets. So that people like that in Iran are who my thoughts are. And with the, I got to tell you, like nothing makes me more of a feminist than seeing the women in countries like this fight for the right to education, the right to dress as they please. Maybe we don't need them driving, but you know, that's okay. There he is with that characteristic, brilliant humor that you're so loved for. I should probably be banned for on Twitter. I'm doing my best. Every time you tweet, I just report, report, report. Please stop this man. You don't have like a script to just. Exactly. Well, funny enough I do. But I don't, I don't abuse my power. I wear the ring like Frodo and I respect the power. But you look like Gollum. That's not what your mom said last night. She said you're hung like Gollum. I'm not going down that road with you. I'm not holding hands one another time. I learned my, fool me once. Okay. My close childhood friend is from Iran. Oh, wow. Okay. I talked to him a lot. I wanted to go to Iran. But it's so far away. I can see it from my house, my friend. I would love to take that trip even now. It's just culturally. So all the different little pockets of local cultures that make up Iran. I just heard so many amazing things. Yeah. My friend Paul went there. He had an amazing time. He just absolutely loved it. He thought the people were awesome. It was so interesting, very developed. Just like Tehran is, I mean, the history in Tehran is insane. Yeah. I would really love to visit. Now we return back. I don't know how we ended up in Iran. But let us stroll back to Stalin taking power. What role did the suppression of speech, the censorship, the suppression of the freedom of the press have in Stalin taking hold, taking power? In Lenin, in Trotsky, in Stalin having power? Well, it was a very useful mechanism to direct public opinion and inform public perspectives and everything. So first of all, there was a lot of news about how great things were. You have a bumper crop here. Grains never better. There's another anecdote where President Kalinin is talking about how on Karl Marx Street in Kharkiv there's all sorts of new skyscrapers being built and it's just absolutely amazing. Some of the audience gets up and goes, comrade, I work on Karl Marx Street. I walk there every day. There's none of these skyscrapers. He goes, see, that's your problem. You're trusting your eyes instead of reading something and learning what's in the papers. So there was this kind of disconnect between, I forget, you probably know the joke, like pravda, nepravda, izvestia, neizvestia. Like pravda means truth, but there's no truth to be had and pravda is like kind of the Russian line. The point is it very much, and the other thing, this is, my mom wasn't particularly politically motivated, but she talked about how you didn't have to be smart to realize how dishonest it was because one day someone is the great hero of the Soviet people and the next week he's been a traitor and a class enemy and the worst. And then sometimes they reverted and it's like, okay, like they couldn't even keep their story straight. And in fact, at a certain point when they, you know, Gorbachev liberalized, they had to cancel tests because the history books had to be rewritten so quickly. So, and the thing that also with these newspapers is there was a lot of, it was very monotonous because you know, you had the same message over and over. A lot of these papers were about kind of speaking to the lowest common denominator. Stalin's great, everything's great, overseas bad. So it very much was about not informing but creating a certain perspective in the public at large. And also you were educated as a citizen on what you're supposed to think and say. So you have, a lot of this was this kind of private truths, public lies situation. So you could read the paper and at your factory you could be like, oh my God, this guy, Karl Radek's great. He's like, oh my God, yeah, he's amazing. You knew what to talk about and you knew how to look at it as well. And then when you get home, you could just kind of be more honest with family. But the question is, to which degree does this propaganda and this ideology infiltrate your actual thinking? You give examples of this like scientists infiltrated science. Oh yeah. So basically, you know, Lysenko is the textbook example, Lysenkoism in biology. So because Marxism is materialist, they didn't like the idea that genes pass on, you know, from one generation to the next. So Lysenkoism kind of was a rejection of Mendel and that kind of genetics. And if you reject genes, you're really going in a bad direction in terms of biology. The Soviet Union's biological program became an international laughingstock. At one point Lysenko claimed he crossed a tomato and a potato. You had things where they said they had nuclear, which is, wait, we have fission, but they said they invented fusion or hard or heavy water or hard water. The point being, in cultures like this, your way to achieve status wasn't necessarily about your accomplishments, but about your loyalty to orthodoxy. So if you were saying things that got to a result that was congruent with the broader ideology as a whole, that was much better as a means of furthering yourself in the arts or in the sciences than if you had something that was innovative, because if you're innovative, it's like, well, how do I fit this in with the broader ruling ideology? The problem with totalitarianism, one of the many problems, is everything, literally everything, has to be perceived through the lens of ideology. And that is, you know, there were scientists who were arrested or at least fired because of their theories about sunspot developments, because it was regarded as un-Marxist. There was an epidemic and all these horses got sick, and because the vaccine didn't work on the horses, the bacteriologists were arrested, because they were regarded as wreckers. It's like, we gave you a job, you didn't do it, you're undermining the socialist state. So it's kind of a backward series of incentives, and it's designed to maintain at all costs the ruling ideological superstructure. But you draw a small distinction between the ideology and the ideological superstructure and the propaganda. Aren't those kind of intermixed together? Well, the ideological is like, in the sciences, and what's true in genetics or what's true in astronomy, that doesn't really percolate out to the masses, right? So the Pravda is maybe covering this scientist is great, or these discoveries are great, but it's not necessarily the same as day-to-day or glorifying political leaders. But Pravda is a manifestation of the idea that truth can be conjured up. Yes. It can be constructed, and it can be altered quickly. And then I just, I wonder, so 1984 caricatures that I wonder to what degree it really could control the way you think. That like how many people it affected. I can give you an example, a very easy one. So again, with regarding North Korea, Kim, the great leader Kim Il-sung, who was the founder of North Korea, had a tumor on the back of his neck, and it was too close to the skull, the spinal column, so they couldn't operate on it. And throughout his life, it got bigger and bigger. And I got mixed messages in my research about whether North Koreans knew about it, because they always photographed him from this angle. And I met a refugee, and I asked her, I'm like, did you know that he had this tumor? She goes, yeah, yeah. When people played him in the movies, they would, you'd make up there. And she goes, it was an old war injury. And I go, why would a war injury get bigger throughout your life? And she just stood there, and she was like, holy, but she never questioned it. But it was the kind of thing where they put the idea in her head, and since there was no reason to question it, she just kind of went with it her entire life until I talked to her, Audrey, his name. Hi, Audrey. Hi, Audrey. I wonder what percent of the population is like that. Here's the thing. If there is a cost to me questioning Lysenko as a great scientist, and there was no benefit, why wouldn't I just go with what's going to keep me and my family safe? But I also mean just the psychological. There might be a very local psychological cost. So not a cost you're going to jail, but a cost like you're gonna kind of ruin the conversation by bringing it up. Kind of like, yeah, I'm just trying to- It's like Debbie Downer, right? Yeah. Yeah. But there's also the whole metaphor of like there's two fish in the river. One says, man, the water's really great today, and the other one goes, what's water? Like a friend of mine, Adriana, her mom came to the West and they went to a supermarket, and the mom just in front of all the Fanta, just crying. And she's like, what's going on? She goes, they told us we had more food than you. And when something is, you can understand, this guy's an enemy of the people, he was just a hero. He just offended someone. This is bullshit. It's almost impossible psychologically to think I'm living in the Truman Show and that everything in the media is not just wrong, but a carefully constructed narrative and a lie. Like what, they're never going to tell the truth? And how, you know, like what? And even if you do understand that, how would you even read between the lines to deduce what the truth is? Yeah. It must've been a strange experience. There's stories of soldiers, the Red Army soldiers throughout World War II, as they go to different countries, even Romania, but in Europe, just to understand that people live much better than they did, than the soldiers did back in the Soviet Union. And that's why a lot of times when they went back, Stalin had them killed because they saw too much, or sent to the camps. So just to linger on this idea of free speech. So there's constant discussion about free speech in this modern debate about social media and all that kind of stuff. What's your take on it? Grounding it, not in some kind of shallow discussion of free speech we have today, but more in the context of Pravda and the suppression of speech in Stalinist Russia. I hate the term free speech because it's used in many different contexts. I agree with entirely some, I disagree with at all. I don't think everyone has something to say or something to add to the conversation. And I have my locals community, and it used to be, I think the boilerplate language is, come support free speech and free discourse. And I changed that because I don't like that term. Because people will tell you with some reason that, oh, if you block me on Twitter, you're voiding my free speech. So I don't like that term as a whole. But one of the points of the white pill, and something I see enormous parallels with today, if you have one news outlet or three news outlets with identical ideology, you're not going to be able to get to any kind of truth or any kind of useful information. It's all going to be pre-filtered for you. It's like a baby bird, and you're eating the mother bird's vomit. But if you have what we have increasingly now with technology, if you have a world where everyone has a camera on their phone, if you have a world where anyone can put their ideas out there, maybe they're banned from certain outlets, but they're not literally vanished like they were in the USSR, that is very healthy. That is something I'm enormously supportive of, because back in the day, if you only had the TV crews with cameras, you could only see what they're capturing, and they could edit it. Whereas now, we saw this recently during COVID, right? You had these reporters with masks on, and they're talking, but the cameraman wasn't wearing a mask. So you'd have the people on the street being like, look, they don't believe it. Or as soon as they would start filming, the guy took the mask off, and they'd film them. They'd go, you are lying. You don't believe this. You're putting this on for some purpose, whether you're leaving the efficacy of masks or not. That person clearly does not, is only putting on for show. So that's, or crimes. People are anti-police. They say, okay, the cop said this. Did he draw the gun in the sky necessarily, so on and so forth. It is so much better when everyone has access to as much of the information as possible and can make that informed decision themselves. Now there certainly is space for informed people to be like, no, no, no, no, this isn't what it looks like. If you look here, if you look there, it's cropped here, so on and so forth. But that's still much more useful than just having that 20 second clip that someone has decided to edit for you. So like truth has a way of, because everything is so interconnected, truth, no matter what, has a way of finding its way to the populace. But also there's a big asymmetry in terms of trust. So if I tell you a hundred truths and one lie, that lie is equal, I'm screwed. Because once you catch me in a, you don't have to kill someone every day to be a murderer, right? You only have to do it once. So if you catch me in a brazen lie, you're going to look at everything I say after that with an enormous grain of salt. So that is another big asymmetry in favor of truth. If someone trusts you, you have to be honest all the time and you're going to make mistakes. You can own those mistakes and be like, hey, this is why I made the mistake. This is why I said such and such. Okay. But the flip side of that, which has been disheartening to me, is that people on the conspiracy side, conspiracy theory side of things, I've noticed how easy it is to just call something a lie. Yes. And then that becomes viral. For some reason, there's a desire for people. Yeah, for anyone who points out that the emperor is not wearing a clothes, even when the emperor is fully clothed. So I don't know what that is, but that really seems to mess with this truth mechanism. So when it becomes viral to call people a liar, whether they're a liar or not, it's like you feel like on unstable ground. Because to me, that idea of revealing a lie that somebody told is a really powerful mechanism to keep people honest. And when you're misusing it, crying wolf too much, it seems to break the system. It makes me nervous. Because there's also like a... If someone is a liar, that doesn't mean literally everything they say is a lie. No, but what is a lie and what isn't. I just noticed that there's money to be made in calling out something as a lie. It's just the conspiracy theories, straight up. The first thing, some traumatic event happened, give an explanation that's not the mainstream explanation. No matter what, whether it's true or a lie, there's a lot of virality and money to be made in that. And that makes me nervous. Because it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It becomes... Anti-establishment ideas are viral, whether they are true or not. Sure, but I think establishment ideas are powerful whether they're true or not. So I think... On the whole, I think you're right. On the whole, it's good to test the power centers. But it just makes me nervous in our attention economy that the sexy thing seems to be the anti-establishment message. And then it feels like that becomes a drug where you... Anything the establishment says, anything institutions say, anything the mainstream says must be wrong because it comes from the mainstream. I have that line that you're supposed to take one red pill, not the whole bottle. I am certainly one of those people who is of the idea that they are dishonest by more often than they're honest. That said, there are people who are of the belief, to use an extreme example, that Trump is still the shadow president. And there's going to be these QAnon mass arrests. I thought this was something that the Daily Beast made up to make fun of MAGA, but I was just on the phone with my buddy last night and he was like, no, no, if you go to Truth Central, they're all over there. And if you disagree with them, they call you a controlled opposition or a grifter or so on and so forth. Is it on 4chan or where? Truth Central, Trump's social media outlet. Oh, Truth Central. No, Truth Central. Yeah, but he forgot the name of it himself. So he's like, that's why I had to create it. You got to explain the jokes. You got to explain the jokes. You do like the way Twitter puts that context. You got to do the joke and then pause and like turn to the camera and explain. And have a laugh track. Yeah, so people know where the jokes are. That's real humor. Yeah. And then we just clap. And then everybody clapped. I think for the last two years, especially vis-a-vis COVID, the overwhelming message was the experts know what they're talking about. And if you are questioning this, you're a Vax denier and you basically should be read out of polite society. And one obvious counterexample to this was social distancing. If social distancing was efficacious, why were there no attempts ever to bring it back, right? When you had different waves. And if it wasn't efficacious, why was it so insistent that we do it, all do it at the very beginning? In fact, in many places you'll still see the signs on the floor where it's six feet apart. So there's an incongruity there. And I think we are forgetting as a people, the intensity with, and understandably to some extent, if you have this worldwide deadly plague, like it's going to be, go where the leakiest hole is. So you really got to kind of get everyone on board. But to the vehemence with which we're told we know what we're doing, this is the way to solve it. If you don't do it, you're causing mass death. That I think fed in very heavily to people's enormous sense of skepticism toward establishment sources. Speaking of the plague, you opened the book with a- Oh, yeah, that quote from Camus. It's a strong, strong quote. Camus brings me to tears. And it's funny because I reread The Myth of Sisyphus, which I had been recommending to people. I'm like, this book is not good. But he's got, his ethos is my favorite of all the philosophers. It sounds like The Myth of Sisyphus was a myth. He says- Cute. All I maintain is that on this earth, there are plagues and there are victims. And it's up to us so far as possible not to join forces with the plagues. And why I have that as the introductory quote to the book is I think morality and ethics are very, very complicated subjects. There's lots of gray areas where you don't know which way to choose. But at a base level, he has another quote that's ascribed to him. He never actually said. But something about, you know, is the duty of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. If you are, we should do whatever we can not to have blood on our hands, not to be murderers, not to want death. And that in and of itself is a big pill for a lot of people to swallow. We're all brought up, taught that war is a last resort. And yet when it comes to international affairs, it's always often a first priority and people are champing at the bit to start going in and killing people. And what war means isn't good guy soldiers versus bad guy soldiers. My concern is always with the civilians, with the kids who become orphans, with the wives who become widows and things like that. And then communities which are, you know, ruined forever. So I love that quote of his. I think he's, I mean, the book started, it was going to be a recontextualization of Camus' thought. I was gonna rip off my old buddy Ryan Holiday, what he did with the Stoics and do about Camus. And then when I started rereading Camus, I'm like, oh, I've read more into him than is really there. And then it went a whole other direction. So you wanted to do almost like an existentialist manifesto. So like, one must imagine Sisyphus happy? Well, more like Camus for today and what his philosophy can teach us, like Ryan did with his many books about the Stoics. Yeah. And it was gonna be called The Point of Tears. Live to the Point of Tears? Yes, but the title was gonna be The Point of Tears. No, I know, but from that line. What man must live to the point of tears? That's a good line, right? Yeah, he has so many good lines. Maybe it's not about how- Probably shitty in bed though, right? Well, no, he was a big Lothario. He was probably pretty good. What's Lothario mean? He got around. What percent of the audience of humans on earth do you think know the word Lothario? What percent of them have a computer? Look it up. Lothario. It's not some weird term. Lothario. L-O-T-H-A-R-I-O, Lothario. Lothario. A man who behaves selfishly in response to being in sexual relationships with women, they're seduced by a handsome, in quotes, they're seduced by a handsome Lothario who gains control of their financial affairs. Oh, I didn't think, I always thought of it more as just someone who's like a stud. Like a player, but no. Yeah, a player, yeah. There's a malevolent- Oh, I didn't realize that, okay. Well then he's- Selfishly. Okay, that's not him. Irresponsibly. And a man too. Although Ayn Rand would be proud, selfishly. What's wrong with selfishly? She wouldn't like that kind of selfishness. That's exploitative. Behaves, a man who behaves selfishly and irresponsibly in his sexual relationships with women, huh, yeah. Yeah, okay, so he was just a player. Maybe a stud, I don't think he was promiscuous particularly. Nietzsche didn't get, he never got laid, right? He had syphilis, he died of syphilis. It was from prostitutes. Was it? Okay, possibly, yeah. You're asking me like I knew the guy. I heard it's from, he never had a deep, loving, fulfilling relationship. He had a very skewed understanding on the way he wrote about women. Although somebody wrote to me and said that's a mischaracterization, that he was actually very respectful of women. Yeah, but he had that line, if you're going before a woman, bring a whip. Wasn't that him or was that Schopenhauer? If I were to quote you from your Twitter, I think I could make a very convincing argument that you're sexist, racist, and probably a Nazi. Well I do own like some of Hitler's stuff. Exactly. I got the- I rest my case. I feel like I'm a Nuremberg. I'm going to be hung by his own tie. This isn't a tie, it's a noose. You should have thought about that when you were saying all those things. Okay, what do you think of the leak of the Twitter files? I was so happy that Elon gave the information to Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss, who are both, by any metric, lefties, who are both professional journalists of longstanding with great resumes. Overnight now they're doing PR for the world's, whatever the party line was. The fact that you had all these corporate journalists now having to play catch up and not having control of the microphone, to me, was just absolutely amazing. I think transparency is what brought down in many aspects the Soviet Union and what will bring down what negative aspects of the regime we have here. When you see the machinations behind the scenes and then when you see the rationalizations after the fact, you realize, oh, these people are not acting in good faith. The fact that, for example, the New York Post article about the Hunter Biden laptop and how the New York Times covered it as well, they didn't mention any kind of dick pics. Twitter made it so I couldn't even DM you the link to the New York Post article, which was a tool they had previously used only to prevent child pornography. That shows to what extent they were willing to put their thumb on the scale, but it also shows that for any layman, when they're looking at this, to realize what you are perceiving as news or information is very much sculpted, edited, and guided by powerful people who have a vested interest in maintaining their power. I think to me the important lesson is this is not a left or right thing. Oh, not at all. It's power versus powerless, yes. And also the important lesson there, I think at least in the case of Twitter, in our society, it's a slippery slope. You don't get there overnight. You start using those tools a little bit, a little bit to slow down misinformation, just a little bit. You start sending emails to each other a little bit, and it becomes more and more, you start forming justifications, you start getting a little more and more comfortable kind of talking about this stuff. I think there are several ways to fight that. One is having hardcore integrity up front. So don't even open the door. But I think realistically human nature is what it is, and so I think the only way is through transparency. This is why the nice, I hate the fact that it got politicized. I really hate that the right have run with it, like look, the left is planning the rigged elections and so on. To me, it shouldn't be left or right, it shouldn't be about politics. That transparency is good. Other companies should do the same. Facebook should do the same. And in fact, that transparency will protect Facebook. It will protect Google. Look, this is our situation, tell us what to do, and we'll do our best. I remember when I was writing The New Right, Twitter's line was, we're not going to tell you guys what the metrics are by which we ban or censor people because then bad actors are going to navigate around them. And it's like, what are you doing? Like just tell people in any establishment what are the rules for which behavior is permissible. If I go to a store, if I return the sweater, is it cash back, no refunds, or if I get store credit, you know what I mean? So that they were having this place which was presented as a huge international space for public discourse, and they're not telling you ahead of time, this is what we will tolerate, this is what we'll warn you about, this is what will kick you out overnight. That to me was crazy and outrageous. And I'm really pleased with to what extent Elon is being open with their policies. And what I'm really want to commend him about is, now I'm triggered, because one of the things that he took over, he's like, our first priority is getting rid of child pornography and child exploitation. Right? That was, he's like, racial slurs, homophobic slurs, antisemitic slurs. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Kids getting harmed is number one. And he fired the old task force because they weren't doing their job. Eliza Blue, who you know, she had been on this for a long time, but people who were victims of child pornography, child exploitation, were emailing Twitter being like, these are my images, get them off. And they're like, too bad, porn is allowed on Twitter. He starts trying to crack down on it. This is a very hard problem because these bad actors have mechanisms to evade being banned. They want to get their, for lack of a better term, product out there. Forbes magazine, who is an agent of the devil, had a tweet and they tweeted this nine times. You know, now that Elon's here, Twitter's child porn nightmare has gotten much worse. They tweeted this nine times. I looked up, anyone listening can look up, look at Forbes and do a search. They never mentioned this problem before. So now that Elon is doing something about it, now it's a problem for you. No, it's a problem. Elon's the problem. It's not the child porn that you guys had a problem with. And that to me is like, yeah, I understand that you think that Elon is a bad guy because he's upset your Apple cart. This isn't a political issue. This isn't a gotcha moment. This is, all right, here are some tips. We talked to 10 experts, digital experts, and here are some techniques, Mr. Musk, that you might want to take from us free of charge that will help you solve this. That would be a great article. And I just want to use this opportunity to say quite clearly and strongly that even though Twitter and other parts of the internet are interpreting some of my statements to mean I'm right, in this case, meaning leaning right, right wing, and in other cases, leaning left, left wing, I'm not. I'm apolitical, or at least I try to be in my thinking. Take one issue at a time. I do take an opinion on each issue at a time, but I hate camps. I try to avoid political camps in general. It just, it sucks that promoting transparency in this case, or celebrating transparency, is somehow connected to being right wing. No, it's being made into a supposed euphemism for being right wing. It sucks. It sucks, even though I'm wearing a red suit, and this is a very red-themed conversation. Well, I mean, the revolution was the color of blood. I'm just gonna let it sit on that for a second. Okay, you mentioned New York Times Best Seller list. You chose to self-publish. Yes. Can we just linger on that decision? What are the pros and cons of self-publishing? The cons are it is acceptable in our current business climate or cultural climate for corporate media outlets to pretend the book doesn't exist. So basically, and there's reason for it. I can make the case to them pretty easily. If someone's doing it themselves, who is this guy? Some crackpot writing crazy stuff from his basement, right? It's a little different, I think, for me, because I'm an established author. C-SPAN gave me an hour on Book TV. Still crackpot, but yeah, established. Still crackpot for Dear Reader. I think I was the first one to get an hour on Book TV for a book that I did myself. So there is space for that. It didn't go through a vetting process the way a book going through a corporate publisher did. So those are the minuses. The pros are I can drop it and publish it immediately. If you go through a corporate publisher, you have to wait a year. You can have the book you want instead of getting past the editor. Some editors are very, very good, and there's a whole spectrum. Some of them, not so good. Some are good, some are not so good. I know the best, the real killers. All right, there's good people on both sides. Yeah, there's plenty of good people on both sides. I don't mean the white nationalists who I condemn totally. But the thing is, in terms of money, you get six times as much profit when you self-publish than when you go through a corporate publisher. The buck stops here. In one of my books that I co-authored, I won't even mention the name, there is a typo, and they don't care. They didn't fix it for the paperback edition. Here, since I'm going through Amazon, if there's a typo, I can fix it live and it updates. Oh yeah? Yep. You can just update it. Yeah. So that's very useful. You can do like a Fight Club thing where you can insert a dick pic in one of the pages. Why do you keep texting me to send you dick pics? I didn't know. Talk about North Pole. Just suggesting you, all right, all right. That's why I'm not the editor. I get it, North Pole, I get it. The other advantage, just socially, is I think people are, like I found this with the Kickstarter I did for Dear Reader, people are much more excited to buy it and promote it and talk about it when they know you're doing it yourself instead of you're getting a big check from St. Martin's, HarperCollins, Penguin, whatever. Are you also trying to use some kind of service to get it distributed to bookstores or are you just going to do Amazon? Nope. No, just Amazon, yeah. And that's probably where most sales happen anyway. The vast majority, yeah. So it's not going to be in bookstores. So how difficult is the process of getting it on Amazon? So I'll tell you a funny story about how Amazon works. I always plan for, because everyone, people's, here's another piece of advice I will give people. It's going to be a lot easier if you realize that the majority of people in every industry are bad at their jobs. Like, once you have that realization, everything else makes sense and your life will be a lot easier, right? So when I did the Anarchist Handbook, which was a collection of essays from various anarchists throughout history, when I submitted it to Amazon, there was a lot of copyright issues because they're like, do you have the rights to this essay? Do you have the rights to this essay? I had to go back and forth with them a lot to make sure I had copyright where everything was public domain. And the thing is you forward it, you update it, you give them the information, three days, there's another problem, it's not three days, so it's weeks. The other thing with their CreateSpace program is the paperback and the ebook, the Kindle, are approved independently. So just because it's approved for one, it's not approved for the other. After I published Anarchist Handbook and it was a big success, they unleashed, enrolled, excuse me, a hardcover edition program. So I'm like, oh, great, I'll put in hardcover. They're like, sorry, this is too similar to Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of State, which is a pamphlet or short book that Murray Rothbard wrote. I go, well, wait, I have the entirety of Anatomy of State in here. I have permission from the Mises Institute in writing, which I'm giving to you to reprint it, and you guys already have it been published for a year as a paperback and ebook. And they're like, too bad, blocked. So it's not available as a hardcover on Amazon, even though it's available, maybe now it's going to be pulled as paperback and ebook. So with this book, I was anticipating, all right, there's going to be some whatever. The thing with how it works is you have to upload it and hit publish, and then you got to wait for the approval. I'm like, okay, this is going to be who knows. I just wanted to get as fast as possible. 4am, less than 24 hours, I get a notification, congratulations, your book's available for sale and have to run downstairs and pull it from publication because otherwise it was out and I didn't finish editing it. So that's the situation there. Oh, that's fascinating. But that's powerful. It's all in your hands. It's all on you. Yes. And I think the program is great. It charts just like any other book. The quality of the books is great. I am very happy with, I have no contact with them. My buddy Tucker Max, he had a company that did this and they basically help people sell publish their own book. They did Dave Goggins book. I think you've talked to him, haven't you? Yeah. Or yeah, maybe they emailed me or something. And he said, I have done dozens, maybe hundreds of books with them. I have never been able to get someone on the phone. So I don't know what's going on over there, but guys, if you want to reach out to me, please call me. It's Michael at Lex Friedman.com. Friedman is spelled wrong. Yeah. If you ever have any complaints, please just at me at Twitter about Michael. Now, why do you think so few established authors self-publish? I mean, it seems like it makes perfect sense in this modern society to be able to, when you finish the book, to publish it within a few days, a few weeks. I think I talked to Jordan Peterson about this at length and Michaela, his daughter, who I'm also good friends with. She's actually named after Gorbachev, who's the big hero of this book. Also a friend? Michaela Gorbachev. You know, I was in talks to interview Gorbachev and then COVID hit. And that's one of the big regrets of my life that I didn't get. I think if I met him, I would be on my knees, literally kissing his feet, crying because of... I mean, one of the big points of The White Pill is there were so many moments when they were calling him up, sending the tanks, we want another Tiananmen Square. And he's like, fuck you. So when you have anyone who has the capacity to murder thousands of people and chooses to withhold that power, like all I could do is applaud. He resisted the cynicism. Yes. Wait, so why the authors, why don't they publish self-published books? I think they're still in the... You know how there's this whole idea of how if you're a movie actor, you don't go on TV because that kind of ruins your brand. And that's kind of going away. There's a lot of shows where the lead is now a former movie actor and this is kind of a big thing. Like Matthew McConaughey, he had a TV show on HBO, I believe. So I think there's this kind of like, wait a minute. What's that? I said, all right. Is it all right? All right. All right. All right. Matthew McConaughey, all right, all right. I don't know what that is. Sorry. Just I'll explain it. Look at the context below. Okay. So I think for them, it might be A, a loss of credibility to some extent, but B, their agent whose job is to sell them and get a big advance wouldn't be encouraged to self-publish because they're... I don't think it's percolated to powerful people yet how feasible this is and how profitable it is and how they'll still be able to reach their audience. And I feel if Anarchist Handbook wasn't such a gigantic success, I would be much more nervous about The White Pill. But the fact that it was and that I saw it from start to finish and I know the ins and outs, now I'm like, what are you guys bringing to the table? Besides taking a year of my time and introducing edits that I would not otherwise agree with. I think for some people, a book is a sort of beacon of reputation. So it's really important to not... There's somehow not as much reputation associated with a self-published book unless it's successful. And then its success outshines the actual however it was published. I guess David Goggins self-published his book. Because it used to be you self-published when you can't get a book deal. So it's like an admission of failure. Yeah. So you would recommend it as something for authors? No, I would recommend it as something for authors of a certain stature, for lack of better term. Because it is still... In terms of your resume and your experience, it's better to get a crappy advance and have a book with St. Martin's that goes nowhere than a self-published book that goes nowhere. So the other thing is you have to make sure you have enough of an audience that you can move some copies. What about OnlyFans? Would you recommend authors? How much money do you think you and I could make if we did bathtub scenes in OnlyFans? No, just chilling, just reading, like reading Animal Farm, just like while sitting in the bathtub. Bestiality. I don't know. Okay, snowflake. Snowball. Sorry, snowball. Okay, snowball. All right. What was his name? Snowball. No, the horse. Boxer. I'm hung like a boxer. I will work harder. That guy, I think about that guy a lot. Boxer? Yeah. His motto was I will work harder. Anything that happens, like the pigs would take advantage and his response to everything. He was inspiring to me because he never gave in to the cynicism. Right, and they killed him. Yeah. Spoiler, sorry. But that's a good way to die, never giving in. Well yeah, there's a lot of that in this book about the people who are like, you're not gonna break me, like I am bigger than this. Did you ever believe in Santa? I remember the day I woke up on New Year's and there was a present under my pillow and it was like, holy shit. Because Dead Maroz left it. That's the whole thing, he leaves your present under your pillow. Right, so you believed, but what, I thought the story was gonna be when you first realized he's not real. I don't remember when I realized he wasn't real, but that story was, I did think it was real. I was like, oh my God. Okay, there's this, because I did too, and I remember, I don't think I can put myself in the mindset of the kind of person that believed he was real. Because what did I think, what was my worldview that allowed a giant person in a red suit to be real? Although I do remember, I think the first time that Santa Claus showed up to our, like lived in this very small apartment, and when he first showed up to our apartment, I just remember, because he was really drunk and smelled, it was like a party, it was like a New Year's party or whatever, so one of the people dressed up as Santa Claus, I just remember this, wow, this gotten real fast. Of course, I remember thinking, of course, of course it would be, what was I thinking? What was I thinking? There's gonna be some perfect, like, perfect being, better than the best of humanity. He was just a regular dude, kind of fat, but not sexy fat. It was like, not really that jolly, and kind of exhausted, and I really have not showered in a while, but also funny. I remember, I love telling this story, how old I was, and I must've been five or six, and it was just that age where you distinguish between what's real and what's not. So like, Vikings and knights and ninjas are real, and dragons and mermaids and elves are fake, and I was on the corner of Shore Parkway, right before the park in Benzenhurst in Brooklyn, and around the corner, wearing a denim vest, was a little person, a dwarf, and I saw him, and I was like, all right, back to the drawing board. Like, I don't know what's real or not anymore, because I just saw a dwarf, so I don't know what's going on. And since then, given your relationship with Alex Jones, you've continued the journey of not knowing what's real or not. That's correct. All right, let's talk about the next steps. After Stalin took power, he started to actually, implementing some of the economic, some of the policies, and this idea of collectivization. Yeah. What's the story of that in the 20s, leading into the 30s? What was this idea? What was the relationship between the regime, the ideology, and the farmers? Well, there's always been, and obviously, very much to this day, an enormous amount of enmity, for lack of a better term, hatred, between Ukraine and Russia. I mean, this is centuries in the making, if not more. And the Ukraine, or Ukraine now, but at the time, I'm speaking of the region, is, and still is, the breadbasket of Europe. It was very fertile lands. This is where the food comes from. And this was a issue also for Lenin, as I discuss in the book, because when you had famines there, you have famines throughout what later became the Soviet Union. And the problem is, this happened in North Korea as well, in the 90s, when they don't have food, if you let in foreigners and feed your people, all of a sudden, you as the government are either superfluous or downright deleterious to their well-being, and that's a threat to your power. So Lenin let in an American organization, the early 20s, which was actually headed by Herbert Hoover, of all people. And after a while, Hoover left, because he found that the Bolsheviks were just taking the grain that the Americans were giving to feed the people and selling it for export while the people suffered. And one of the people who grew up in these starvation times was a young Mikhail Gorbachev, where he had, I think it was like a quarter or a third of his village starved to death during one of these periodic famines. Stalin's idea, this was a good mechanism for him to break the idea of Ukraine being an independent nation within its own identity. And he had this kind of liquidation of the kulaks, very famously, which thankfully is much more discussed now than it was maybe when you and I were kids. And a kulak, the real meaning, or the literal meaning, is kind of this wealthy landowner, right? But very quickly, it's kind of like, it becomes outgroup. So, there was a big incentive to call someone you didn't like a kulak and then good luck to you, because now the eyes of the state are on you and you have to prove that you didn't hire people, you didn't have four cows, or how many acres or so and so forth. They took a huge percentage of the population, the kulaks, and they just deported them. These are lands that they had for generations and they just spread them throughout broader Russia. Many of them never made it, many of them were killed. This was by design. And the dark thing about the kulaks, like you said, when it becomes abused, when it becomes the outgroup, is the kulak is supposed to be wealthier than sort of the general farmer peasant. And so, basically, it gives you a mechanism of resentment. Anybody that's better off must be better off because they're a kulak, let's get rid of them. And it has, just from an economics perspective, even leaving ethics aside, it basically completely de-incentivizes productivity. It wants you to fail, because if you succeed, you're a kulak and you're going to be tortured, you're gonna be deported, you're going to be derided, all that. And also, you're poor because he's rich. Like, that's a big part of it. So, while this was going on and food was becoming a problem because you had poor weather conditions, there was a campaign about, oh, the reason you're hungry is because the kulaks are hoarding all the grain. And if you're somewhere else in the Soviet Union, how are you supposed to know any better? Because you're being told every year, the crops are bumper crop, bumper crop, bumper crop, and now there's no food, there's no bread. And so, see, we produced all this bread, it's not getting to you because the kulaks are hoarding the grain. So, they came in what became known as the Haldimor, and Ann Applebaum, who's a great historian, who, unfortunately, I disagree with a lot in contemporary politics, but who's done so much great work about the Soviet Union that I pretty much give her a blank check on whatever she wants to say nowadays, she wrote a great book about this called Red Famine, and these activists descended on these villages like locusts, and their job was to requisition as much food as possible, and they would come back at all hours of the night to make sure you weren't hiding food, and this is what was so pernicious about it, your own body would betray you. They could look at you and see that you're not losing weight, you've got those chubby cheeks, that means you have food, and that's the government's food. That is the food of the people. And if you are keeping food for yourself, you are stealing from the people. You're an enemy of the people, and you deserve whatever comes to you. And it got to a point where they're eating, they didn't have grain to plant for the next harvest. And what was even sicker is, one of the big criticisms of communists, of the czar was his internal passport system, that I can't go where I want within Russia, the Russian Empire, without permission. Stalin reintroduced this. So if your village was targeted, you can't leave. Now, some people got away, they tried to get to the cities and so on and so forth, but you get to the city and you're starving, you have no clothes, you're a kulak. I'm hungry because of you, and now you're too lazy to work, get the F out of there. And there were stories, I have them in the white pill, of this starving teenage girl, and she's begging for food, and the guy knocks, the shopkeep knocks the food out of her hand, and she dies on the spot. And everyone in that line knew not to give her any food or any sympathy, because she's a kulak sympathizer. And very quickly, if you're a kulak sympathizer, all that has to happen is someone has to call, I think it was the NKVD at the time, you know, the different names, the Cheka, the secret police, and they have to be like, you see, whatever her name was, Zhenya, she was a kulak sympathizer. We saw a kulak who was trying to shake us down for food because too lazy to work, and she felt so bad for them. So you might want to check in on Zhenya, so yeah. But in 32 and 33, Holodomor, it wasn't just small injustice here and there. It was mass starvation. Yes. And suffering. Yes, millions starved to death in the Ukraine alone, and by design. So you mentioned Anne Applebaum's book, Red Famine, Stalin's War in Ukraine, but another excellent book on the topic, and by the way, thank you for recommending that to me, so it was. Her work's amazing. Yeah, it's a really, really powerful book about, not just about Holodomor, but like the context of Ukraine, basically the history of Ukraine that's relevant for today. Yeah. To understand, understand the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. But another great book is Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. I don't know, I think you also recommended that to me at some point, or maybe not. I haven't, but I'm familiar with that, I haven't read it. So he does quite a bit of, it's brief, but extremely well-researched writing about cannibalism there. Oh, God. And that it was not uncommon during the Stalin-imposed famine in the Soviet Ukraine for parents to cook and eat their children. He writes, quote, survival was a moral as well as a physical struggle. A woman doctor wrote to a friend in June 1933 that she had not yet become a cannibal, but was not sure that I shall not be one by the time my letter reaches you. In quotes. The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. And there's stories in there about, yeah, cooking, cooking your children. The other thing about cannibalism, about famine in general, that stood out to me, unlike a lot of atrocities, is the people that are starving are exhausted. They're basically unable to think. So they don't even have the energy to protest. It's a strange kind of way to kill thinking in the populace. I suppose it was obvious, but there's something fundamental about starvation where it slowly removes your humanity. Yeah, there was a scene in the book where a lot of times people literally go crazy. And there's a scene where a mom, it's some nursing, a train station was nursing her kid, and she was going mad from hunger, and she starts beating the crap out of her baby and kicking it, and then she just reverts to normal like nothing had happened. Yeah, madness. Like you lose, yeah, you lose your mind. Yeah, and I mean, I don't know what the physiological cause of this. I think it's, you know, if someone has dealt with a glycogen depletion, it affects their mood, things like that. So taken to an extreme, who knows what happens when parts of the brain start functioning and start imploding. But yeah, it's, what just happened, this is something that's really cool regarding the Holodomor. So there was one Western journalist, Gareth Jones, who was like, all right, something's not adding up here. So he was supposed to take a train through Ukraine, and he got out early and decided to start walking through the countryside to go from village to village. And I'll get to his story in a minute. Right before we started recording, I got this book in the mail. I ordered it on November 28th from Great Britain. It was the only copy available on the whole internet. It's called Experiences in Russia, 1931. It is anonymous, and it's, Gareth Jones wrote the introduction. It was published by the Elton Press in Pittsburgh. It was self-published. And see, it just says forward, it just says by the author. So it was the author who went alongside Gareth Jones was someone by the name of Henry John Hines, who was heir to the Hines fortune. And you only know that if you start looking at the internet, because his name's not anywhere in this book. Well, I opened this book up right when I got it, right before we're taping, and it's signed by him. And it took me a second, I'm like, wait a minute, who is this signed by? And it's H.J. Hines, because his name was Jack Hines, but it was Henry John Hines. So this is, I'm very excited that I had this little miracle in the mail. But- Christmas miracle. It's a Christmas miracle. They traveled together? They traveled together. So this book's a diary of their travels. Why do you think so few journalists was able to do what he did? So there were several reasons. First of all, if you were a Western journalist in the Soviet Union, you were under very strict circumstances. First of all, you could be deported at any time. You had no, there was no pretense that you have a right to be a journalist in, as especially as a representative of a capitalist, by which they meant Western paper. Second, it was a complete nightmare getting your articles filed, because you had a censor that you had to go through, and the censor's job, whose life depended on it, was to make sure that your story was advantageous to the Soviet Union, or at least neutral. And they had all sorts of techniques. You know, they could spy, they spied on you all the time. They followed you around, because you know, you're a foreigner. But also, that censor had to answer to somebody. So all the censor has to do is be like, look, I'm having trouble with my supervisor. And the reporter could be like, well, can I talk to the supervisor? It's like, well, I'm sorry, that's not possible. And he's on deadline, but it's too bad. Bureaucracy doesn't recognize the needs of deadlines. So there was a big pressure, a lot of pressure on Western journalists to have to get through this net. And that's literally constant. You know, every story, it's gonna be a fight. So at a certain point, you're just gonna be like, all right, and you're gonna pre-censor yourself. You know, if you know, all right, if I include this, it's not gonna get through, what are you supposed to do? I think human beings are naturally, and also a lot of these journalists were pro-Soviet. They thought this is the society of the future. At least everyone's trying to make it a better country for everyone, not like back home with a poor slip between the cracks. We gotta do what we can to make this work. And, you know, there was a lot of, I don't wanna say conspiracy, but within the industry, there was a consensus that the Stalin was the good guy and we were, if not the bad guys, certainly not as good in certain regards. So when this news of the famine started percolating, all the other Western journalists, besides Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, were saying this isn't true. It's nothing that they haven't seen before. The paper that took the lead in this was the New York Times with their guy, Walter Durante, who had previously won a Pulitzer and had interviewed Stalin, which is an enormously rare honor for a Westerner. And he, because he has so much experience covering Russia and the Soviet Union, he basically took the lead and other people followed his lead. You know, he was kind of the dean of the press corps in Russia. And he made a point, and the thing, there's so many quotes I have from him where he's not only denying that this mass starvation is happening, he's also going after journalists who are questioning the narrative. And he, you know, he says things like, look, this is nothing that the Russians haven't experienced before. They're simply tightening their belts. And it's like, you only have to tighten your belt when you don't have enough food. It's not like they started a new exercise regimen and now their body fat's dropping. That's, why would someone tighten their belt? So that was one. And the New York Times had a 13-page article, big headline, Russians Hungry, Not Starving. And he went after Jones. He went after Muggeridge, I believe. Although he did go after Muggeridge, but the point being that this is just propaganda from people who want the Soviet Union to fail. You know, they don't understand what they're building here. You know, he had so many excuses like, oh, you know, the reason all these Russians are supposedly leaving their villages to go to the cities isn't because there's no food. It's because they're nomadic. It's tradition. They go from town to town looking for new experiences. And it's just, you know, at a certain point, and I think it was 1941, where he was eventually like, or 51 rather, I don't remember. He was like, oh, well, I guess I was kind of wrong. And it's like, he's like, any journalist worth his salt can admit when he's wrong. And it's like, well, were you worth your salt? Because you sure, he explicitly said, there's no point in sending out journalists to look for themselves. I've been through the countryside and everyone's fine. And it's just that the loudest people are making noise, whereas everyone else is doing the work. And, you know, trying, and this isn't about famine, but it's about Western skeptical about collectivization, which is just simply a new way of farming. And yeah, it was a new way of farming. And the results were by design and also accidentally absolutely catastrophic. How hard was it to see the truth at that time, do you think? Do you think that was a mistake that's understandable to make as a journalist? If my job as a journalist, I have two bosses. If I'm in Moscow, I've got my reporter in New York or London or whatever, but I've got my censor here. And he is making sure I have a house, that apartment. He makes sure I have food. He makes sure I have access to dignitaries. He's my lifeline. If I piss him off, I'm on the next plane out of town. So- Is that enough to slowly suffocate the integrity of a journalist? I don't think it was slow at all. And it was clearly enough. And because what are they gonna do? I disagree with that. I think the failure of integrity has to come from New York on the American side, that it's just the flock of fish or whatever that all move in the same narrative. Right. I think journalists would like to be the kind of people that have integrity. So if they are conscious of sacrificing their own integrity, they wouldn't do it. If they're conscious of an act that's doing it, they wouldn't do it. So it has to happen like a lobster slowly boiling. No, I think it happens when everyone else is, it's a Greek chorus, right? Right, right, it's a chorus. But that's exactly, that's right. So it's not about the act, but they will, I mean, I've talked to journalists where I get the sense that they will sell their soul for access. Because that's their job. Is it though? Because what they do, what journalists do, I've seen American journalists, they take a huge amount of pride for having gotten the interview, whatever that is, the Putin interview. And first of all, they're glowing with pride. It seems like they're always showing off to the other journalists back in America. So they're glowing, showing off like, look, I got the access, you didn't. And second thing they're doing when they show up to that interview is they ask all the questions that signal to the other journalists that we're on the same side. They ask the most generic, aggressive questions to which they know the answers. They just, they want to basically get the access and ask the quote unquote hard-hitting questions that they know will not be answered. And this is the entire machinery of it. That's not, that's modern journalism. And I suppose at that time. It was worse. It was worse. They weren't even doing the hard-hitting, the display of hard-hitting questions. Right. It was PR pieces. Think about what high status that is if I'm an American journalist in Moscow. I'm allowed in this secretive country. I'm the guy who's very privileged to have access to live in Moscow and tell Americans, which are all fascinated about this new society, the future, what it's like. And as soon as I kind of start questioning the narrative, I'm going to get kicked out and humiliated very publicly. I thought you were in Moscow. What am I supposed to say? So, they, Eugene Lyons was, he's one of the heroes in the book. He was a young communist and I think it was United Press he was working for, they sent him there. And when he went there, he's like, oh, this is not what I thought it was going to be like. This is horrible. And he turned very heavily against it. But he talks about how they would write one thing and say another thing and then think another thing. And each of those steps was just more and more like kind of lying in terms of maintaining your sanity and maintaining your narrative. So, you reference Ann Appelbaum and say that, quote, "'Starvation was not simply a consequence, "'it was the goal and it was the law. "'Stalin intended to break the Ukrainians once and for all. "'It thus became common for villagers to spy "'and inform on one another. "'Turning in a neighbor for having a sack of grain "'might be the easiest and safest way "'to procure food for one's family.'" Yeah. To what degree was this the intention? To what degree did Stalin anticipate this kind of suffering as a consequence of the collectivization policy? I don't know that he intended the suffering to be a consequence of the collectivization, but it was quite apparent, and I think there's a pretty heavy consensus nowadays, that his goal was very much, because Ukraine, again, resented the czar and had this kind of very contentious relationship with Russia, which obviously very clearly remains today. I mean, the hatred of Ukrainians for Russians preceded Putin's war. I mean, this is, even when I was a kid, I obviously don't remember it, but my parents just told me the hatred that they had, and understandably, I mean, they were basically under foreign occupation, what they regarded as foreign occupation for- So your parents talked about a hatred by Ukrainians towards Russians? Oh, yes, oh, yes. I mean, I, you know, I, certainly having visited there this year, because of the most recent invasion in February, that hatred is nationwide and very intense, but I don't know, I think the feeling, the emotions were much more complex before. But at the same time, at least, they were under occupation before, right? And they couldn't speak Ukrainian, they had to speak Russian, so this was a thing. But because of the forced intermixing, it's a more complex story. Okay, but I mean, they weren't certainly fans. Yeah, but there's people that came from Russia that are living there, they're marrying, they're falling in love, they're working with each other, so like, there is the bigger atrocity of the genocide of it, but there's also the reality of intermixing of peoples. Well, sure, I mean- There's the atrocity of slavery in the United States, but then there's also a reality that there's now an intermixing of peoples, and now they fall in love, and they live after slavery's abolished. That's just the reality. After the genocide, proceeds a kind of generational integration that still remembers, like the suffering reverberates, but there's still, it's a different culture that's created. And now, I think, I mean, I have complex story, most of my family's from Ukraine, and my understanding is grounded in Soviet Ukraine, but there is something in the last 30 years that's different where now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there's a true, maybe renewed fight for independence, and that's a different thing. But there's also a difference, like if I go to North Korea as an American, they're very friendly now, right? They don't perceive me as part of the yank devils. They're like, okay, you're an American, but you come from America. So yeah, there's gonna be intermarriage, but that's a big difference between the perception of Russia as an entity, as opposed to some individual Russians. I just, that wasn't the experience I've had talking to a lot of friends and family in Ukraine until the war started. Really, so they really didn't have this kind of low-key animosity toward Russians? No, there was a lot of factional conflict inside Ukraine. Okay. Now, the whole country is united. I think there's a clarity now, the war gave a clarity that wasn't there before. No, this is, I was saying earlier how humans define themselves by opposition. So now that there's a war, it's like, okay, all this little stuff doesn't matter. We are all united because we have a common enemy. But there's also, as you know, there's regions and there's just groups of different people. And then one of the big divides, of course, is the city versus rural. And then in the case of Ukraine, it's Eastern Ukraine and Western Ukraine. It's very difficult to know what the truth is, because my personal experience is sampled. I don't know how many Ukrainians I know, maybe like 30 or 40, before this trip, like 30 or 40. And then I'm close with just a handful. But then it's hard to know, because you get a lot of Western press perspective and you get the Russian perspective and you get other perspectives. And it's very hard to know how much hate there is outside of this conflict. So my primary question is, and this is what I ask a lot of people when I visit Ukraine is, will you ever be able to forgive the Russians? And a lot of people said, never, never. So this isn't just about, assuming we win, they would say. Assuming we win, we still would not ever forgive. Never, never forgive. And they said it in a way where like, not only us, but our children will never forgive. And it wasn't just, you know what? It wasn't just about Russia or the Russian leadership, it was about the Russian people. But a lot of people also said that this is our feeling currently, we understand. Like you're lost in the rage of war. Yeah. Because you lose so much. I mean, if you asked Americans, would you ever be friends with Germany or Japan? It'd be like, are you kidding? After Pearl Harbor? Yeah. But of course, most Americans didn't feel Pearl Harbor is different, it's a good point when it's your own land. But when, imagine it wasn't just Pearl Harbor, but it was New York and Chicago and Dallas and all these cities being bombed. Yeah, yeah. It's just a linger on this war in Ukraine currently. Does it break your heart to see what's going on there now, that it's on the same land as the same cities, the same stories are now brought back to the surface, like the generational pain as it was in the time that you're writing about? Do you think it's a fundamentally different country, different war, different situation, or do you hear echoes of the same? I don't think it's the same because I think there is no one, or I mean, there is no one who is like, I'm glad this is happening to the Ukrainian people, right? So even the people who are for Putin and for the invasion and whatever justification they might have for his war, no one is like, yeah, let's get those darn Ukrainians. I think there was that sense in America after 9-11 when we invade Afghanistan and Iraq and there was like, F those Iraqis, F those Afghan people. Whereas now I think it's completely the opposite. I also think a lot of Russians, I'm sure if I ask them, they're not thinking like, let's wipe the Ukrainian people off the map. I think whatever reasons they have, it's not kind of going after this. Even if you have to kind of rile up people against the citizenry, it's not to that level of the hatred of the kulaks, hatred of those villages. There's still a belief though amongst the soldiers outside of the big cities, their belief that the Ukrainian people, who the Russian soldiers believe are their brothers and sisters, are occupied by an evil regime. Okay. So you need to save them from the evil regime. That's also very different from the Holodomor. And also there is dispute in the press about the causes, the consequences, the victims, the villains of Putin's war. But when it came to this, no one is denying that the war is happening. The New York Times isn't saying everything is fine and the only reason people are saying it's a problem is because they hate Putin or they hate Zelensky. That's not a thing. And the fact that we have so much footage of what's happening in Ukraine. And it takes two seconds to go on Google and you have a map of Russian advancement, what parts are they occupying, what parts are not under their control. I did a little live stream, I raised money for Ukrainian refugees to feed them because that's my concern, just keeping people fed. There was none of that. And the two people who kind of spoke the truth, Gareth Jones was shot, I think, the day before his 30th birthday while he was uncovering news, I think it was in Mongolia. Malcolm Uggeridge had problem finding work when he exposed this. And I think, like we was talking about earlier, the ubiquity of things like cell phones and camera phones would make something like this, I don't know, I wouldn't say an impossibility, they could still do it, but it would be really hard to cover it up. Well, sort of to push back on that, if you just look at Iran, I would draw a difference, so I agree with you mostly, but I would also draw a different distinction when the atrocity is happening to your own people versus there's a war. Ukraine is a sovereign, independent nation, there's not a war between two nations. It feels like it's easier for journalists to somehow reveal the truth in that. When the atrocity is happening within the Soviet Union, for some reason, that's easier to hide. That's easier for journalists to deceive themselves and easier for the authoritarian leader to hide the information. I agree with you. And so that's the dark, I mean, that's why people, maybe you can educate me on this, but this is why I think people don't talk about Holodomor and other atrocities, the Great Leap Forward, because it's inside the country, versus the Holocaust, that's part of a war. Why is that that we, that we're too almost like, afraid, too polite? What is it that we don't wanna cover the atrocities because it's inside the country? Like it's their business, so we don't want to touch it. What is it? I think it's that what we refer to as the news is in the business of selling narratives, right? And the narrative of the Holocaust is a very powerful one, which is if you let hatred of a subgroup in a population get out of control, this is the ultimate consequence, and this is something that we all have to be scared of and do everything in our power to avoid in the future for any outgroup. Whereas what's the narrative of the Holodomor? Sometimes governments kill their own citizens. There's nothing you could do about it. There's nothing we, I mean, they wouldn't have let us send food. They wouldn't acknowledge, like the newspapers, even Russia weren't acknowledging it. Like what's the, like this is some of the issues I had with regard to trying to advocate for the North Korean people. The reporters would be like, well, what can I do as an American? It's a very natural question. And I'm like, I don't know. I like, all I know is how to speak to what is happening, but in terms of next steps, I don't have a good answer for you. So that is where the news kind of does break down if there isn't a story or a call to action, the kind of, you're kind of almost like having a movie with a cliffhanger and there's no sequel. It's like, what am I supposed to do here? Like, this is not scratching that itch, which for me, as a consumer of news, you know, layman is like, okay, here's the story. There was a bad guy and the cops shot him or they took him to jail. And now the bad guy's caught, beginning, middle end. Here it's just like, Mao did this. A lot of people were executed and starved. Isn't that awful? Well, and Mao's still in power. Now Richard Nixon is raising a toast to him. Like that story is just like, how am I supposed to feel about this? Yeah, it feels like when there's tanks and there's war and there's military conflict, then it's more actionable. You can cover it. Yeah. I mean, it did seem like Nazi Germany, I don't know if the Holocaust was the thing that made it most coverable. I think it was that this is a threat to the entire civilization. Well, yeah, we were at war with them, yeah. That's what makes it coverable. And if the Holocaust was happening just inside a country, inside of Germany, or even if it didn't expand beyond Poland. Yeah, it would be like a footnote. It was in many ways a footnote. Like many of the early steps toward it was like, they didn't cover it. It's just like, all right, they're being oppressive toward their own people, okay. Especially given some of the, maybe if you negotiate certain peace treaties with the Soviet Union and with Germany, like you're too, the basic, the pacifist imperative. Oh boy. Yeah. Sorry, Santa. So we say every time you masturbate, no, after you're done, you know, sorry. All right. Now, see, I hate it when you don't yes and, because it leaves me in a hole I dug for myself. And I sit there in a hole, in my sadness. How long have you been writing this book? I mean, how long? Two years. Mentally, it was like two years, since you spend time with it. No, almost three, two and a half, yeah. And I suppose it stays with you much longer, like you said, your family. So in many ways, this is a book you've been writing your whole life. I think that's fair that all my work's been leading to this, yeah. It's certainly the most, in my opinion, the most important thing I've done. What stands out to you about Haldemar? What moments? What aspects of human nature stand out to you? I don't know. I think that story is, I don't wanna say story, but I meant like that incident is, I mean, I was familiar with it before, you know what I mean? So I kinda knew about it, you know, in part, thanks to kind of the North Korean work and coming from Ukraine. The thing that was also kind of insane about it is that they were taking all this grain and not using it even to feed the Russian people. They were selling it for export for hard currency. I think what the takeaway there, and I think, again, this is something Westerners and especially Americans don't appreciate. They think that evil often has like a logic to it, right? And it's like, why would, like, because it makes no sense to them, like why would they kill their own people? Therefore, it probably didn't happen, right? There's that thing. They really think like, okay, they can understand, you know, country A conquers country B, and it slaughters a bunch of people country B as a means of conquest. Like that kind of makes sense to them. They know that thing, but like, why are you starving all these people? Like, what are you gaining out of it? That doesn't make sense to them. And because it doesn't make sense, there's kind of like, well, it's probably more of the story that I'm hearing. And a lot of times there's not, it's just like evil for the sake of power. And we don't really have that, certainly anywhere near that scale and never have certainly, you know, since America has been a thing. I mean, it's, and the fact that this is like the thirties, you know what I mean? This isn't that long ago, but I think also the narrative in some ways is how, you know, technology is also something that kind of people have mixed feelings about. Like I said this before, and this is something I really believe very strongly, the ability of information to be captured and spread easily is such an effective tool in exposing humanity at its worst. Because it's one thing if I sit here and tell you what I saw in these villages, it's another thing if I sat you down and showed you a YouTube, and you and I don't know what it's like to look in the eyes of someone who's thinking about eating their own kids. I mean, and you see that face and you know it's not some CGI, it will haunt you forever. Just looking at the different mechanisms that made all of this happen. So this is not just one guy, Stalin, having a policy. There's a whole system. I mean, one of it is just a system of fear. But how do you implement that system of fear? There's a giant bureaucracy of fear. Yeah, so what he implemented with the Great Terror is. That's in the late 30s. It's throughout the 30s, but yeah, like it starts in the mid to late 30s. Basically, you know, communism was based on the common good and the public good. And anything private, which was bourgeois, was a problem. When they were started, you know, when the revolution came, the October Revolution, they wanted to recreate society entirely. And that included like, okay, let's make it so everyone eats in like cafeterias, so they're not eating by themselves. Let's design buildings so everyone has to share bathrooms. Like their whole plan was to have, eliminate any kind of concept of privacy at all. They also had this bizarre kind of radical idea of like attacking shame. So many of these, you know, before the 1917, people were also very involved with like free love. Cause the idea of like having this private bond between husband and wife was also bourgeois and old fashioned and you know, we're the society of the future. That changed relatively quickly. But they were talking about things like raising kids communally and so on and so forth. So for Stalin, if you and I are friends, we have a bond that's a threat to him. The family's a threat. The, any kind of organization is a threat cause it's a power center that is not between, a relationship between you and him. Now you have a relationship with somebody else. So he systemically went through that whole society and you know, it became, there were certain things that became a crime. Then it became a crime to be a spouse of the enemy of the people. Now, right away, I as a child become an orphan cause my dad was an enemy of the people. My mom is married to an enemy of the people. Now I don't have parents. They get arrested or executed or whatever. But now I have nowhere to go, but I can't go to my friend's house because their family doesn't want to take in a child at the enemy of the people. You had this culture where everyone was very much encouraged to turn people in. And if you turn, if you're arrested, you know, and tortured, you're like, okay, who are your accomplices? And now you just got to name names, people you knew. And then it becomes this whole chain. And it's like, how am I going to protest my innocence if Lex just said, you know, I worked with Michael and we were working with Trotskyists and we were plotting to overthrow Stalin. Lex testified to this. He signed a confession. What am I supposed to do now, right? So it worked its way in a most viral fashion through the whole society. There was this amazing moment where these poor people, peasants, cause obviously the powerless are often going to be caught in the web. They were going to jail for being Trotskyites and they had to ask themselves, what's a tractorist? Like they didn't even know who Trotsky was. And the thing, other thing is ethnicity was a problem, right? If you were an ethnicity, you have more power with other members of that ethnicity than you have with this kind of broader Soviet culture. So he would just deport entire populations from their ancestral lands to other parts, A, to spread the population around, but also to break that link between the peoples and their lands. There was this 1937 NKVD order against Polish people where it's just like, if you had come from Poland or had been, just this whole list and basically people were being arrested cause they had Polish last names. And I think it was a million people were killed, like some astronomical number. So there was this, anything that was a bond was a threat to him. And it went systemically. So after he had all these kind of executions of people who were like Lenin's people, the old Bolsheviks, then he went after, he started arresting the secret police. You know, he arrested all the cops, he arrested all the judges and all these prisoners got to see the judges who yelled at them for being counter-revolutionaries and spies. Now they were in the jails. If you were a foreigner, if there was a huge push from the Soviet Union toward African-Americans, right? Cause they're like, look, you were living in a racist country, here we have no racial inequality, come live here. A bunch of them went and they were all banished. You know, anyone who knew information about the outside world, if you were a foreigner, Andre Babel, I forget his first name, he had a French writer he was friends with. He was arrested and shot cause he's a spy cause you're friends with Melrose. And if that means if you're not a foreigner, you're a spy. Speaking Esperanto became a crime. Having a pen pal, literally anything that was some kind of chain between yourself and someone else was a threat and was grounds for arrest. It was, the Russians would joke about how relieved they would be if someone knocked on your door in the middle of the night to tell you your house was on fire cause it wasn't the NKVD coming to arrest you. And of course, most of the accusations probably were completely false. So not only cause you not do all of those things, you were also a victim of just- Being late to work became a felony. And also not doing your job became a felony cause now you're taking food or product away from the people and you're supposed to be there working for the people. There's this one story which I was doing the audio book and this is like, I still trying to get through without crying. This was 1920, they were a bunch of kids in Moscow who were pickpockets between ages 11 and 15. They rounded them up and they're like, all right, point out your accomplices. And they would take them in the trams and you have to point out people. Then they would take them back to the cellar, beat the crap out of these children and then they take them out again. And if they didn't point out to anybody, they beat them, they're like, all right. So they just start pointing at random. And the thing that was really sick about this story, if that wasn't sick enough, is that the screams that the other criminals, the adult hardened criminals had to hear from these children as they realized they were being taken back to the cellar. It was just horrifying. And so they tortured people. They tortured confessions out of people. Yes. At scale. Oh, yes. I mean, and the dark aspect of this is it's all, it's like this weird, it's a bureaucracy of torture. Yes. So it's not like that there's, what is it? The torturer is afraid of, like does it so that he doesn't become the prisoner. Right, because then it's like, oh, you couldn't get a confession out of him? Are you an enemy of the people now as well? And the thing that was even crazier is that a lot of these interrogators were frustrated because they're like, look, we both know you're innocent. Just sign this confession and make my life easier. They knew it was crap. Stalin joked about, Stalin joked about this. This is one of his little jokes. There was a kid who was arrested and he was said, oh, was forced to say, you wrote Eugene Onegin, which is a play. He goes, that play was by Pushkin. And they tortured him and they tortured and tortured him. And then his parents are walking down the street and they run into a secret police and they go, congratulations. And they go, for what? They go, your son wrote Eugene Onegin. Like he admitted to it last night. Like, it's just like, they could get you to say anything. And what else was really, really sick, which they understood is they lowered the death penalty for kids, I think to either 14 or 12. I don't remember off the top of my head. And what Stalin's head of the secret police did is when you were interrogating someone, you either had to have some of your family members, of that family members' possessions on the desk or a copy of the decree that's saying that they can go after your family. And the amount of people who would confess to anything when they saw their family was in danger and they knew this wasn't a bluff was astronomical. Then it becomes a chain. Because if you confess and I have your confession, how hard is it to get your neighbor? What do you make of the, for most of the time, the NKVD was about the head of NKVD, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria. No, Beria, yeah. I have a death warrant signed by him hanging in my kitchen that I acquired. He was one of the most evil people who ever lived. The thing that Americans don't appreciate is how clever some of the sadism is. So there was one actress, I think he took her back to his house and he asked her to, he tried to get her to sleep with him. And he promised her that if she did, her father and either her husband or her grandfather, I don't remember which one it was, is gonna be released from jail. Well, they were already dead at that point. He had them executed. They're still finding the bodies of the women he murdered in the grounds of his dacha, it's an embassy now. And the thing is, Stalin knew, because at one point, there's a picture of Stalin's daughter in his lap, and she was at his house one day and Stalin calls up, he goes, get out of there immediately. So he, like a good bureaucrat, he kept a list of all of his sexual partners. It's still sealed, but both him and his bodyguard had this list. So just to clarify, he headed the operation that did this whole giant mechanism of forced confessions. Yes. He was part of expanding the Gulags, so he wasn't the head of the Gulags, but he was part of this giant machine. And his famous quote was, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. Yeah. But on top of that, what you're describing is he was also, related or not, was also just a mass rapist. Yes, and there's some dispute about whether he went after kids with his rapes, but there's plenty of adult women that were targets for this. There was also another little joke about him about how Stalin is looking for his pipe and he can't find it and he calls Beria. And he's like, okay, I can't find this pipe. And in the afternoon he calls Beria again. He's like, oh, I found the pipe. He goes, but Comrade Stalin, we've got four people to confess to steal already. So you have to laugh, but then you think about the nature of how it operates. Well, and also the fact that this kind of person was allowed to run, I mean, I suppose it's all different kinds of evil and rape was just a part of the story. His own personal willingness to oversee torture and commit torture himself and rape. But it's also what happens when you're in a country where it has no rights of any kind. And by the way, I should mention that people should get your book and audio, when is your audio book coming out? It's in a couple of weeks. So it'll be out shortly, yeah. You gave me the great honor of voicing this man. That's for the promo. Yeah, for the promo. Yeah, excellent. I appreciate that. For a moment, I actually, it was really difficult. Really? Yeah. It was just a sentence. I understand, I understand. Cause it takes you to that place. Oh yeah, cause he told her, scream if you want, doesn't matter. Yeah. And he was right. Like that's the thing, he wasn't bluffing. You could scream, these women could scream their head off. No one's gonna come help him. He would drive around Moscow at night in his limo looking for victims. But somehow me saying those words was tough. I'm sure. It was tough. Because this is where we came from. Do you know what I mean? This isn't just like some kind of Tolkien villain. But it also was tough cause I could see myself being somewhere in that machine somewhere. Like somehow that put me right there. Like any cog in that machine is committing evil. Yes. That's the dark thing. I think the higher you are to the top, the closer you are to the top, the more ability you have to stop it. But the less, the more freedom you have to stop it, I suppose. To a point, yeah. But like the little things. So Beria had the freedom to commit rape or not to. And so he chooses to sort of increase the amount of evil he's putting out into the world. But then you have to counterbalance that as dark as calculus is. After Stalin dies, like that week, they start making the gulag shrink. They start pulling back on the labor camps. So I mean, so that is a big plus in his side. Like you start liberating, having this mass amnesty and freeing people from work camps. That's not minor thing. So it's crazy. Like it's like, I'm not saying Peter, right? I don't know. I'm not saying he's a good person, but it's kind of insane that someone can do things that everyone listening to this would regard as pure evil. And at the same time, this guy also, when the time came, saved tens of thousands of lives. So in some sense, Stalin is the kind of cancer that permeates all the Soviet minds. And once it's gone, you almost like wake up, wait a minute, what the fuck was I a part of? And Khrushchev in, it was a 56 when he gave a secret speech, behind closed doors. And he's just like, all this criticism of Stalin was true. This is complete, I'm more Marxist. He tried to salvage the system. This is not what Marxism is about. We can't have a personality cult. Stalin killed all these top generals. And when Hitler turned, betrayed the pact and invaded, Stalin didn't believe his buddy Hitler was gonna do this. And as a result of this, we lost a lot of territory and lives. This is not a military genius. This was Stalin being an idiot or a moron, whatever term you wanna be. So, yeah, but the thing is, Khrushchev also was a butcher. He had a lot of blood on his hands. You don't become, take Stalin's seat without having overlooked a lot of murder and chaos. So it's such a, that's why it's called, subtitled the book's a tale of good and evil. There's so much malevolence to go around. What do you think was going through Stalin's mind in the 20s and the 30s? Like, did he directly, like, allow himself to acknowledge the reality of the suffering he was causing? Like, what does it take to be that human? I'm almost interested to extract lessons from that for leaders of today. Like, how hard is it? Is it that Stalin is evil, or can you just delude yourself gradually into where you don't have a sense of the effect of your policies on the populace? Well, you're not deluding yourself because you have around you an entire government of people telling you 24-7 how great you are, how thankful they are for you, how awesome you are, you're the best. So that certainly gonna play into it. I've asked myself that question as well. Like, do these people believe their own bullshit? And I think the receipts are, when Elena Ceausescu, who's one of the four women on the cover, when she's being taken away to be executed in 1989, she's yelling at the soldiers, "'How could you? I raised you like a mother.'" So she at least believed her own bullshit. With Stalin, he was obviously extremely intelligent. I think it's kind of easy for us to kind of psychologize and say he's a sociopath, he's a narcissist, he's this, he's that. But at a certain point, like if you're surrounded by a culture dedicated to glorifying you, and everyone you meet is so happy to see you, and oh my God, all your pronouncements are so good, and you know what? If you make a decision that's wrong, the people around you, it's their job to tell you why it's not your fault. It's the fault of the wreckers, or it's the fault of Hitler, or whoever it is, the kulaks. At a certain point, the human mind wants to believe how great it is, especially someone in that vaunted position. But he had his love, there was this one funny, I'm using the word loosely, quote, when Hitler invades Russia, and he couldn't believe it, and he's just missing in action for days, because how could Hitler betray me? We had a deal, birds of a feather. And he had this quote about, we've taken Lenin's legacy and shitted out our asses. I think he was very aware, that's no question that he was aware, that in terms of being a philosopher or a thinker, he wasn't on Lenin's level. So that was, I'm sure, played a lot into his psychology. That he never quite lived up to everything he tried. I mean, there's some sense that the collectivization, that this idea was a failure, the way he responds to the economic policy being a failure, is to lean in, and basically torture anyone who says it's a failure, and double down on the policy. Like that says something about- But it wasn't a failure, it broke the Ukrainians. You don't think he believed early on, that's what it turned into, but you don't think in the very early days, there was a thought that collectivization is the right mechanism by which to enact communism in the nation. But I think his goal was to break their spirit, and getting them fed was secondary, right? And given the fact that they stopped complaining, because they're dead, he got what he wanted. He got a compliant population. I mean, that's really interesting. I wonder how much disagreement there is about, because if that was the goal from the beginning, that's a different level of evil. I think that was clearly the goal. So his, like I said earlier, he broke with Lenin because he wanted socialism in one country, right? That was his vision, right? And he was also very aware that what became the Soviet Union was extremely diverse, first of all, it's a gigantic country, it's a big country on Earth. It's not always gigantic. You had all these peoples, these nationalities within it that have had historical enmity, and they're not gonna have loyalty to Moscow. He's a Georgian himself, this was always a big problem. So that was what he wanted to do as well, is to homogenize and have them be standardized. And I don't see how you do that without either massive re-education, which is only gonna go so far, or really just crushing people's spirits. So like a forced homogeneity. Yeah. And the other big thing, a big element of Soviet culture and the Soviet mythology, I mean, he called, his name was, he changed his name to Stalin, I can't even pronounce his Georgian name, Djokas Vili or something like that. It means man of steel. So a large part of the, and this still remains in Russian culture to this day, I see in my family too, and like other Russians I know, there is this pride in ruthlessness and this kind of like, I'm so tough, nothing's gonna affect me. Like, yeah, we're gonna suffer, but it's for a greater good or for the long-term and not to be kind of sentimental or squeamish about things. Like that was a big part of it. Don't take that away from me too, Michael. What do you mean? You've taken everything. Am I wrong? I admire, not Stoicism, but that kind of hardness. I look forward to myself, that has nothing to do with Stalin. But not to the extent that like, if some, like for example, like if you see someone suffering and that's being used as a mechanism to get you to change your opinion, you're like, they're not gonna get to me. Like that is very much part of that Russian psychology. Right. At least at that time. Yes. I think still largely no. I'm not gonna be manipulated by someone else's suffering or weakness, that kind of thing. I think that's really part of it to this day. I don't know. I don't know how much of it is character, how much of it is reality. Sure, sure. I remember, I knew of someone who was, him and his fiance were Russian and they had this big fight. She took off the ring, right? And he's like, that's it? And just like the way he told the story to me, she's like, what do you want me to say? Oh, don't leave me, baby. I can't live without you. Like that nasty cruelty. Which I don't know, man. I know you're, I don't know if there's a Russian thing. That's just a people thing. I don't think that's an American thing. I think there's all kinds of flavors and they're different by region of the way that people are cruel to each other. Sure, I'm not arguing that. In America, New Jersey is different than Texas, is different than California. You don't think Americans are higher trust, more kind society than Russia, even today? Higher trust, listen, I'm not going to, so first of all, I have very complex feelings about Russia today. I'm talking about, let's talk about January before the war. I'm talking about nowadays. I think it's a complex psychological dynamic of what trusting means. I think Russians are generally less friendly but have more intimate friendships. Yes, I think that's true. So it's just a different. It's not different, it's just one is more trusting. Which is more trusting? Americans. But then that's what define trusting different because. Okay, I'll give you an example. If someone's having a party in America and people come over. Yeah. Okay, that's fine, everyone's welcome. If it's in Russia, it's like, who's that? Who'd you bring? And there's much more of a like, let me be sure that's okay, this person's here. I don't know, maybe. You don't have parties. I have never been at a party. And you don't come to mine. Ben Askin was very sad. Well, I love Ben, I love Ben. Well, you should have showed it by showing up. Man, I hide from the world and I'm afraid of social interaction. And I just lay on the ground instead and feel sorry for myself. It's not bad Santa, it's sad Santa. Well, I conserve my emotional energy towards this one day of the year. Okay. Intensely spread my joy. All right, speaking of which, you tell a Christmas story in the book. Are you spoiling that chapter? It's called Die Hard. All right, well, I'm not gonna spoil it. It's really good. I was very proud of that chapter. Why? Because the ending, that's a Christmas story, it's just like, I know everyone reading it's gonna go Google it, be like, these can't be real, but it was real. That it was on Christmas, yeah, sure. I mean, this has to do with the bigger picture. We don't have to do the big reveal, but the bigger picture of there was an iron curtain and it was coming down in complex ways. How would you define the iron curtain? There's a set of ideologies, a set of countries united by an ideology and a set of countries united by a different ideology. And there's a curtain that divided them and it eventually came down. So how would you describe how it came down? I hate that I can never remember, ever, ever remember if this was Hemingway. No, it was Hemingway. It was Mark Twain. No, it came down two ways, gradually then suddenly. The thing with the iron curtain and the Warsaw Pact, these were a bunch of nations run under communism, but they were all, almost all, under the sway of Moscow. So if they were going to make big changes, Moscow had to prove it. It was in the 50s when Hungary decided to rebel or not rebel, liberalize. And they even were thinking of leaving the Warsaw Pact and the Russians send in the tanks. And you had the development of what was called the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the idea that it is the duty of all the Warsaw Pact nations, if another country tries to, and this was also in 68 in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, if a nation wants to leave socialism, it is incumbent on those socialist nations to do whatever is necessary to make sure there isn't a counter-revolution. So they were very much under Moscow's thumb. And one of the big ways it changed was one man, and that was Mikhail Gorbachev. And he was the first Russian leader to be born after the October Revolution. He grew up and his grandfather was arrested for being a Trotskyite, and the other one was arrested for this or that. He saw his village starve as a result of Stalin. So even though he was a very committed communist, he also was very and increasingly skeptical of authoritarianism. And in Poland, for example, you had the Solidarity Movement, and this was a labor union movement, and the government didn't know what to do. They were getting a lot of support from the peoples. They had strikes, and the Gdansk shipyard was where one of them started. And basically, Moscow told them, either you crack down or we're cracking down on you. And they're like, all right. And they declared martial law, and the rest of the leaders put them away. But then when Gorbachev was in charge, there wasn't a gun to their back. And it was the communist leaders themselves who were like, you know what? There was this really funny moment where Lech Walesa is meeting with Margaret Thatcher, and he's telling her what solidarity the movement wants. And she had been meeting with the Polish government as well. And she's like, look, tell them what, because they had, you tried, they wanted, the government wanted her to tell them that we want to negotiate and work things out. She goes, all right, tell the government what it is that you're asking for. And he just points to the ceiling. She goes, he's like, oh yeah, our meetings are bugged anyway. But they then had the freedom because they knew that Gorbachev wasn't forcing them to drive solidarity underground. So they had the idea of like, let's work together with these people. And as a result of this, Poland liberalized and freed itself fairly easily, and with a minimum of bloodshed in 89. And there was this whole argument for the Vietnam War was something called domino theory, which is if you lose Vietnam, then you're going to lose Laos, then you lose Cambodia. One by one, the country's going to turn communist to the dominoes. But people didn't realize the reverse was true. Because after Poland liberalized, then you have Hungary, then you have Czechoslovakia, then you had East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. So it's a great thing because as this is happening, the people are looking around and they're like, wait, like that's it? Like, this has got to be a trick. And it wasn't a trick. So one of my favorite books, which was a big inspiration for this one, was by my favorite historian. I apologize to David Petrusia and Arthur Herman, my second and third, they're tied. But Victor Sebastian wrote a book called Revolution 1989. And he just talked about that year and how all these countries, one after another liberalized. And it's just such a, and none of them thought this was possible. My, one of my favorite, favorite moments in this book is Helmut Kohl, who was the head of West Germany, is in Warsaw with Lech Walesa discussing the Berlin Wall. And Lech Walesa's like, I don't think it's gonna be around for like another few years. And Helmut Kohl laughs in his face. And he goes, look, you're young. This isn't how things work. Like, this is gonna take some doing. It fell the next day. And Helmut Kohl literally says, I'm at the wrong party. And he got in a plane and got out of Warsaw. So there are, why this book has a broader message than the actual stories of these incidents is that as these wonderful things are happening, the universal consensus at the time is it's never gonna happen. Or if it does gonna happen, it's gonna happen only through an enormous amount of carnage and blood. And when it doesn't, then everyone's like, oh, it was inevitable. You didn't say it was inevitable at the time. You only said it was inevitable after the fact. And the other thing that was really brought me a lot of joy is there are so many moments of men with guns saying, we're not shooting anyone. Cause they wanted several Tiananmen squares. They wanted it in East Berlin. They wanted it in Romania. They wanted it in Moscow. And these strong, tough, trained men with guns were like, no, we're not shooting the civilians. And then everything else was history. Yeah, just as surprising as the mass violence committed by like police and the army on its own citizenry, equally surprising is when they choose not to somehow. Yeah. And what is that? How do you explain 1989? How do you explain this progress that happened so suddenly? How do you explain that at the beginning of the 20th century so much revolution happened that created communism? And how do you explain then the collapse of that across so many nations at the same time? I think a large part of it had to do with the closer interconnections between people like Gorbachev and Thatcher and Gorbachev and Reagan, because both of them visited Red Square. And in the years before, these are enemies. They wanna invade, they wanna kill us. The Americans thought this about the Russians. The Russians thought this about the Americans, obviously not so much the British. And they got on really well. When Gorbachev came to Chequers, which is the prime minister's countryside estate, Thatcher sat him down and she's lecturing him about human rights and she's lecturing him about economics and she's lecturing him about this and that. And then she's lecturing him about why he's in a meeting while he's yelling at her. And he goes, Mrs. Thatcher, I know you have a lot of strong opinions. I do too. I haven't been sent here to recruit you to the Communist Party. And she just started laughing, but right away there was such a sense in the air of we can do better. We're spending all this money on missiles. We're spending all this money on the military. It's expensive. And for what? We don't have to be looking at each other as enemies. We can try to work together to kind of, at the very least, lower the volume and the heat. How much credit do you give to Gorbachev the man? So meaning, how much power does a single individual have? I could not give him more credit. I had a tweet last year where I said, who do you think is the greatest person alive right now? And my answer by far would be Gorbachev. Then he died. I don't know who it is right now. But- It's just funny because Gorbachev also had a tweet. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. But it was, it was my thing. And he said, oh sure. That would be a good, now I wish I interviewed Gorbachev and asked him the famous question of what would you like best about Michael Malice? Look, the transition after the Soviet Union fell to Russia and Yeltsin was not a smooth one by any means. As I say at the end of the book, it's not like they lived happily ever after. But my point, broader point is you take the wins when you can get them. People now had access to passports. They don't have to have, they can leave the country. They have food. They have access to information. It's somewhat censored, but it's certainly nothing like it was under the Soviet Union. And they didn't have to live in this kind of constant fear. And they had opportunities and it's such a step forward. And there was this one great moment and I'm good. There's a super, Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia. He's also mayor of Moscow at one point or the equivalent of mayor. And he came here to visit NASA in the capacity of one or the other. And while he was there, he went to visit a supermarket. It was a Randalls then, I think it's a food town now. It still exists. I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna start bawling. And as he's looking around, like he had never seen so much food. And this is food that like even wealthy people in Russia don't have access to. And there's pictures of him just like this, like what? And the scene that really was poignant to me is on his flight back, he's sitting there on the plane like this. And he's like, they had to lie to the people because if they knew, they wouldn't have been able to get away with it. And that's the moment where it's just like, oh, this wasn't like skewed propaganda. This was like, they knew and it was a lie from A to Z. And he was just like, holy crap. And you can just imagine him on that plane, his brain reprogramming. Because if you're taught since you're a kid, and he was an older man, he was no dummy. You think, okay, the Americans are starving and poor and they're lynching people every day. And then you go to a supermarket, the most banal place on earth. And you see, I think one of the articles said like, they couldn't believe how big the onions were or something like that. And you're seeing this and you're seeing these like janitors, school teachers, these aren't dignitaries. And they're regular people just picking whatever they want. And you're just like, it's like the equivalent of having a stroke. Yeah, I do think that that's one of the most powerful things is the grocery store. In terms of drawing a distinction between the two systems. Yeah. Because you can show off technology and so on, but you can kind of sign right off technology as like, okay, that's the mechanism of the devil. But when you look at just fruit and veggies and like very big fruit and veggies and like, yeah, and fruit in particular, like certain kinds of fruit that are just not available in Russia. I mean, yeah, that really shows, wait a minute. Yeah. It's interesting, like when you're older and you have to face the reality that what you believe to be true, that your whole life has been based on a set of lies. And you're right, not mistakes, not like a little bit, like blatant lies from top to bottom, start to finish. I don't know what that's like. How much, you start the book, I think you start the book with Ayn Rand. Yes. Yes. Yes. As one does. So before the revolution, she was born in Russia and she witnessed the revolution and moved to the United States in the 20- 26, 1926. 1926, I remember like it was yesterday. Anyway, you write that she spent a lot of her life trying to convince Americans in the world that the negative effects of totalitarian government, just maybe using her as an example, but also this question, can we draw a distinction between authoritarian regimes and communism? Is it possible to still man the case that not all implementations of socialism and communism would lead to the atrocities we've seen in the Soviet Union and in China under Mao? Like when you, in studying all of this, how much blame do you put on the ideologies, on the Marxist ideologies versus the particular leaders and dictators? Well, you have to blame the leaders a lot because they had different leaders in different countries were different from each other. Dubček, who took over Czechoslovakia and he tried to introduce socialism with a human face in the Prague Spring of 1968, he was like, all right, we got to do away with this authoritarianism. We got to have more free speech. He was thinking of introducing elements of democracy. Now then the Russians sent in the tanks, but the point is he certainly was someone who was like, all right, this has got to stop. This is just absolutely crazy. Khrushchev and Stalin were not the same animal at all. So I think the problem with communism in the Marxist sense is that you're going to have an introduce an element of authoritarianism simply because you can't have economic planning. If I don't have a price mechanism, I don't know how price is what is me knowing as a consumer or a producer, what should be produced or what there's a shortage of. As prices increase, that's a signal that we have a shortage here. As prices decrease, that means that there's a surplus here. But if I'm setting the price, I don't really know how much weed I need to produce if I'm compared to corn, as compared to shoes, as compared to Santa costumes. So that is a big problem. The other issue is if you have one agency, the government, having a monopoly on, let's suppose the news, like you were talking about earlier with Twitter, it's going to be really hard to have any kind of objective discourse because everyone is going to be working for the same organization. That is going to cause a problem in terms of having a feedback mechanism, even in the best scenario, in terms of this is a problem, this isn't a problem. And when you have a monopoly, which is what a government is, I think people are very familiar with what the problems happen with monopoly. There's lack of accountability, bureaucracies are faceless and then no one's to blame, but, and yet everyone kind of suffers as a consequence. So it doesn't necessarily have to be as authoritarian as Stalinism, but you can't have a government, which is authority by its nature, be this pervasive without a strong amount of oppression. Same thing with, even if you just have like, let's say a socialized healthcare, you're going to have to make it illegal for doctors to practice privately. You're going to have to have rationing, so on and so forth. Now that might be a price that people are willing to pay because you can't have infinite spending on healthcare. So something's going to have to give somewhere. So there is an element of authoritarianism there and people are comfortable with that and I can wrap my head around it. But if you're going to have one organization running literally everything in society, I don't see how you do that and have any measure of liberalism. Why do you think Ayn Rand had so much trouble telling people the danger of Soviet Stalinism? Well, I think a more pertinent question is why did Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman have so much problems? So they were hardcore- These are anarchists. Yeah, Emma Goldman's on the cover. They were deported from the US. J. Edgar Hoover saw them off at Ellis Island. They were sent to Russia. They were bloodthirsty revolutionaries. They had no shortage advocating violence when necessary. And when they went there, they were just like, this is a complete nightmare. They both individually had meetings with Lenin complaining about political prisoners, complaining about lack of free speech. He told them, you know, this is a revolutionary time. You could do that later. And when they both left, she wrote her memoir was split into two books, My Disillusionment in Russia and My Third Disillusionment in Russia. He wrote The Bolshevik Myth and she was in England and she gave a speech. And she's just like, if you guys think this is for the workers, this is the biggest lie I've ever heard. Like they're oppressing the workers like no capitalist has ever imagined. And, you know, as she described it, like people were just shifting their seats, they were interrupting her. And when she opened her talk, she had a standing ovation. And when she was done, you could hear a pin drop. So they didn't want to hear it because this was this kind of- And Eugene Lyons talks about it later. This was like the guinea pig theory of the Russian people. Like we're going to experiment on them over there. If it works, great, we're right. If it's wrong, it's their problem. And sure, these animals squeal, but they're beneath us. And of course they're going to make some noise, but you know, this is a noble experiment, but they're experimenting on a country, several countries. So I think an ideology like this, which appeals to intellectuals, because, you know, if it works or if it's implemented, they're the ones who are gods in effect in a society, like their status cannot be higher. They really want this to work. Like they want a society where they are the new aristocracy, the most important people. And their criticisms of America, if they had a binary worldview, if America's bad and this is the opposite of America, then by definition, it's good. And the other binary that they bought into is, you know, the Nazis and the fascists hate the communists. And the communists, it's true, up to a point, hated the fascists and the Nazis. Okay, well, Hitler is evil. So this guy's against Hitler, we're with him. So that's an argument that's still made in schools growing up, when you talk about World War II, where they're like, we team up with Stalin, and they don't really talk about Stalin being a bad guy, but it's like, you know, we worked with him to fight Hitler because Hitler was a unique evil. Now that is certainly true that Hitler's a unique evil, but that doesn't mean or even imply that Stalin is somehow an angel or a saint. Do you think some of the lessons of history are forgotten here in our modern political discourse that are important to remember? I was so triggered, because I was in the supermarket and there was like a company that's selling Russian ice cream, because it meets these high level Soviet standards. And I'm just like, you think this is some kind of joke? You think this is some kind of kitschy punchline that you had decades of people who were taught in school to turn their parents into the police if they were hoarding grain, even if it cost them their own lives, where it was a crime to be married to someone who was an enemy of the state, where you had torture being the norm, where people were institutionalized because they were politically disadvantageous and they were called insane. Like this isn't just like, oh, this hammer and sickles, this cool, wacky symbol. Like the amount of blood under this symbol was just enormous. And so yeah, I think the lesson has very much been forgotten. How did the ice cream taste? It was fine. I'm a Baskin-Robbins guy, to be honest, but Van Leeuwen's does some great work. Baskin-Robbins doesn't have any Soviet flavors? No. Those dark jokes, dark jokes. I'm gonna self-publish a book of jokes. Coming out. In a grocery store near you. Okay. What was the hardest part about writing this book? Spent two years writing it. So when I write books for celebrities and I was co-authoring them, I did it kind of like method acting. I tried to get into their head as much as possible to kind of speak in their voice. And when you're dealing with children being tortured, harmed, starved, and you're trying to empathize with the characters, it's hard to take. The other big part I had, like I was saying earlier, is just I was just very, very concerned that I told this story and that it did it justice. Because I think this is something that is, I still don't understand, and I'm kind of angry about it, that it's fallen on me to tell this story. This isn't some minor incident that happened in some random town in pick a state. This is half the world for 70, 80 years. And the fact that it's, this is the 80s. This isn't, I mean, you and I are old enough to remember the 80s. There's a show, I remember the 80s. The fact that all these things have just kind of, we have this collective amnesia. And even amnesia, I think a lot of this stuff, even I was not known even at the time or it was kind of obscured. But this is, I remember I was at the Blaze, which is a network run by Glenn Beck, and they're conservatives, and I have a lot of fun there. And I'm just sitting there and, you know, sometimes they veer off. They're like, oh, Biden's a communist. I'm like, okay, okay, Biden's a communist. But I'm like, we talk so much about slavery and the Civil War, the atrocities. We talk about World War II and the Holocaust. I'm like, how is no one talking about this? And this was, can very easily be portrayed as like conservatism's big victory because Reagan and Thatcher were so instrumental in guiding this to a safe landing. And I'm like, how is no one telling the story? And then one day my brain is like, you know, you write books for a living. This is kind of your job. And I'm like, all right, but I still don't, I still, I gotta tell you, I'm kind of confused that I'm the one who has to do this because this should be, you know, this should be 30 books like this. And this is a model to follow. Yeah, and it's also that it's such recent history. Yeah. But it also kind of makes you realize that there might be other fights for progress going on right now. Oh, yes. In a world that we don't know about. So you wrote about North Korea. I don't know to what degree there's, could possibly be fights there for progress, but there could be, they could be boiling up. In China, there could be boiling up battles for progress. In other parts of the world, Russia, there could be. And in America. And in America. And these are all different kind of battles for progress. And they're all, sometimes, sometimes I, you know, we sometimes tend to criticize these battles for progress. Like if it's on the left, we'll call it like wokeism or whatever. And we'll pick extreme elements of it and show how silly and ridiculous it is, not realizing it, not acknowledging that there's a more civil battle going on underneath for actual, for respecting human dignity from all, for people for all walks of life. And the same, we tend to call anybody who questions mainstream narratives, conspiracy theories, we dismiss them immediately. And they're ultimately fighting for progress. So people who criticize Falchi and everybody else, I don't know if they're, I think they want institutions that serve the public. They're fighting for progress too. And we tend to dismiss them. Like each side tends to caricature the other. But the battle for progress is happening. And I guess that's what you're, that's the hopeful message with the white pill, right? Is that there's progress being made. Somehow we're all making progress here. I think more the hopeful message is that it's not possible that we have to lose. Like if someone tells you the straight face, you can't win, the enemy is too impressive and strong. I'm like, what are you talking about? I mean, look, this was the Soviet Union and it happened relatively quickly and relatively peacefully. I mean, again, and it wasn't because Honecker in East Germany was like, oh, I'm just gonna vacate my seat. He was like sending the tanks and the military guy said no. So they wanted blood. There were plenty of people who wanted blood and would have been happy to have it. So to you, the, maybe if not the fall of the Soviet Union then the fall of the Iron Curtain is a great leap of progress in the 20th century. I don't see how anyone can argue against that point with a straight face. So that gives you hope that we, that we humanity were able to do that. Yes, and at the same time, we were told at the time, give it up, be realistic. It's utopian to think this is going anywhere, maybe in a hundred years. Look, there's a reason Chekhov was on Star Trek because the idea is even the far future, you're gonna have America and you're gonna have the Soviet Union. Like this is the reality. It was called real politic. We're gonna have detente because it's this permanent stalemate. We had the Vietnam War. We got our asses kicked. Russia's not going anywhere. America's not going anywhere. We gotta learn to live with each other, blah, blah, blah. And Reagan said, you know what I hear my strategy for the Cold War? Some people might say it's simple or even simplistic. Here it is. We win, they lose. And the people who won were the Russian people and the Ukrainian people and the Lithuanian people and the Polish people and the Romanian people especially and the Hungarian people. And it's just, there's so many moments of great joy that just tears coming down my face because you're like in Prague when Dubcek, again, who tried to liberalize in 1968. And then when they send the tanks, they deport him to Slovakia somewhere to do some forestry job. Like he appears in their big squares just waving from the balcony, like this ghost from 20 years prior being like, look, the spirit of 68 is still alive here in Czechoslovakia. And it was like a matter of weeks, the entire government resigned and then they liberalized. It's just so many things about just overnight, just change for the profound better. And people are so committed to making sure you don't have hope. And if things get better, oh, it doesn't really matter because the broader picture never gets better. And there's lots of data to the contrary where that's happened before. And this isn't some magical faraway place. This is the opposite of magical faraway place. It's Eastern Europe. And to me, I think one such narrative that people assume will always be true or just to a degree will always be true like in American politics is the extreme levels of division. And it seems to me like that too we can overcome. So the division in American politics that seems to be counterproductive, I think that can be overcome. And I think the division in geopolitics currently with Russia, China, and the United States, particularly China and the United States can be overcome. And I think that requires great leadership that galvanizes the populace to the better angels of their nature. Like I have hope for that. People have become really cynical on social media and elsewhere in the way they talk. The liberals are destroying this country. The conservatives are destroying this country. This kind of language is becoming more and more popular. I think that's, I have hope that that's temporary. At least that's my white pill. I don't know if you have that kind of hope for, like what does hope look like for you in American politics? Forget American politics, American, the nation, the country, the people. My hope, which I don't think is an unrealistic one, is that the next generation has a better life than you and I have had in this country. And I think anyone who thinks that America is over, or is one president away from being destroyed, cannot in good conscience call themselves a patriot. Because if you think America is so weak that it takes a Biden or a Trump or an Obama to irrevocably destroy it, then it's already a wrap. And I think that's just absolutely ridiculous. If you look what this country has survived, Great Depression, World War II, the Civil War, I mean, my God. So we've been through worse before. It wasn't always easy, certainly not. But it's so hard for me as someone who's a hopeful person, not by my nature, I'm not Michael Kindness, who does work for Random House, or at least he did last time I talked to him. I look at even like, the thing is when you speak positively, it sounds corny. That's how screwed up our cynical culture is. Have you seen my Twitter? Oh, you're verified now. So that's good. But even like something like Etsy. Like you can go on Etsy. I paid $8 for that verification. Did you? I earned it. It's an opportunity for independent artists to create something special and cool. And I've bought a lot of stuff from them. That in and of itself is something that's pretty awesome. There's so much, I'm into shaving soaps, right? Of course you are. The point is, there's like dozens of artisans. Every day when you have a shave, it brings you some joy. So there's just so many things that are wonderful. And I know there's people listening to this, rolling their eyes. How can you talk about shaving soaps when my daughter, or when my wife, or when blah, blah, blah, and I'm not disparaging or dismissing what you're regarding as a problem. My point is, hope means the belief that it's not at all a certainty that this problem will be insurmountable. That's all it means. What do you look forward to in 2023? Since this is a holiday special. Honestly, I look forward to a lot of young people realizing that they still have lots of opportunity in this country and taking control of their own selves and realizing they can be a better person tomorrow than they are today. That the entirety of their identity is not a function of a culture, which may they may not identify, or government which they may not identify with, or like, or think is deplorable, and realize, you know what, I have it in me to improve and find joy and happiness. And also that fact that that is so compelling and contagious. That is what I would want in 2023. And also for New York to get nuked. So those two things could be accomplished. Can I go back and switch the order? Because I think New York won. Oh, the jokes, the jokes. And one day, friends, if you work hard enough and believe in yourself. You too can nuke New York. No, you too can spend your days dressing up. Grown men dressing up in a Santa outfit and putting on lipstick and having hours upon hours of conversation with each other and loving every second. Thank you for writing this really, really important book. Please buy the white pill. I love you, brother. I love you too. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael Malice. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Shel Silverstein. Listen to the muscles, child, listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me. Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/NUkXluf3OYA

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Andrew Huberman: Focus, Stress, Relationships, and Friendship | Lex Fridman Podcast #277

If you get into the sauna the way I just described, not the two hours a day, but 30 minutes, twice a week or three times per week, you reduce the likelihood of dying of a cardiovascular event by 27%. If you do it four or more times per week, you reduce the probability of dying by 50%. Is there any scientific evidence that being naked is beneficial in the sauna? Well, in certain contexts, it leads to childbirth. Okay, well, I'll have to read up on that. I think Dorothy Parker said, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There's no cure for curiosity. The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, his third time on this podcast. He's a brilliant neuroscientist at Stanford University and the host of one of the best, the best, if you ask me, health and science podcast in the world called Huberman Lab Podcast. Check him out on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Most importantly, Andrew is a great human being and has quickly become a great friend. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Huberman. We meet again, my friend. We should talk on each other's podcast once a year. I think we should make a deal. I was just talking to the guys. There's a show called Louie. I don't know if you know it. Louie CK? Yeah, with Louie CK. And there's this thing called Bang Bang, which people that are probably watching know exactly what I'm talking about. It's this worst possible thing you can do in terms of meals, which is you go to a restaurant, do a full meal, and then you go to another restaurant and do a full meal. And you pack. Oh. You. That sounds brutal. So they go Mexican, Italian, sushi, pizza, barbecue, IHOP, that one is disgusting. This kind of thing reminds me of the joy of food. Last time we were hanging out, we went to see Joe do comedy, and then we went to eat Russian food. And it was a particularly fun experience to go to a Russian restaurant. I was the only person there that didn't speak Russian and eat Russian food with you. Because I felt walking in, they trusted you. They didn't trust me. Yeah, the funny thing about the people there, they were talking to you in Russian, and then they refused to sort of switch to English, even though they understood you speak no Russian. This is Russian House in Austin, by the way. Anyway, by way of question, what's the worst, or the best, depending on your perspective, cheap meal? Let's call it a pigging out meal. But it could be a cheap meal that you've ever had or you want to have that's on the bucket list or something that's in the past, where you did something like a bang bang, which is like, you're talking about multiple thousands of calories that you just feel horrible about yourself, but you still keep eating because it's delicious, but also great company. Something about the atmosphere is just right. Screw the diet, screw all the things you know, or just like you should be doing, but just throw it all out the window. I've done that. Several times. Yeah, I don't do this anymore, but the entire time I was a postdoc, so five years, and the entire time I was a pretenured professor, so five years, I basically followed the Tim Ferriss slow carb diet, which is, you know, people can look it up, but it worked really well. It was basically some, you know, like good animal proteins, you know, fish and meat and things like that. Why slow carb? Because slow carb is like low glycemic stuff. It's mostly lentils and beans and things and vegetables. No dairy, no, anyway. But then one day- Is there pasta in there? Sorry to interrupt. No, no pasta. So it wasn't low carb, but it was low glycemic carb, and I did that and it worked terrifically well just for energy levels, because I want to be able to train and work, and then one day a week, you're supposed to go full cheat day, and so I would do what used to be 12 hours, but then it became 24. You know, you start to redefine what the day is, and I would, and that was when Costello was pretty young, and we would do it together. So I would get pizzas and croissants and donuts, and I would just do the full thing, and by the end of the day, you don't want to look at an item of food. You're just repulsed by food. The only modification I made was the next day, I would fast completely, just to avoid the gastric distress of eating anything. And so I would do them on Sundays, and then Mondays I'd fast all day, and then by Tuesday, I felt pretty good again. But Sunday and Monday, or you just feel like you're sliding down the slope of just blood sugar disaster. Is that a terrible idea or a good idea? You know, at the time, I enjoyed it. I love donuts, croissants, all that kind of stuff. What's interesting is after stopping that whole protocol, now I just try and eat well each day. Protocol. Yeah, it's really a protocol. Now I basically, I do a pseudo-intermittent fasting. I'm not really strict, but I'll start eating around 11, eat my first meal around 11. I usually train in the morning. Eat my last bite of food somewhere around eight or nine, and I'm not super strict. I might have some berries or something late at night. Three meals, two meals? Two meals, and then maybe a little bit of snacking on some nuts or something in the middle. Ever fast, 24 hours? Never done a long fast, except when I was doing the cheat days. And actually, there are a couple of different ways to do cheat days that were fun. Like if you were in a new city, you could try all the restaurants that you wanted. Yeah, and I think Tim and our mutual friend, John Romaniello, did a, I think it was like a cheat day marathon where they did, you know, a marathon's 26.3 miles. They went to 26.3 different locations in New York. They put it on a map. And I never took it to that extreme, but- Wait, wait, wait, and over how many days? One day, that was their cheat day. What? Just because they were, you know- Just a little bit of something at each place? Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are things that guys do in their 30s that you just shouldn't do in your 40s. I can say that because I'm in my 40s. And now I just try and eat well most days. And what's interesting is about 12 to 14 months ago, I completely lost all appetite for sweets. I don't know what happened. I still love savory foods, so meat and butter and cheese. And I love vegetables too. I love fruit also, but lost all appetite. So if you put a donut in front of me or ice cream or something, I just, it's almost aversive to me. And I don't know what happened. I don't know what changed. It's probably a scientific explanation. Sure. It has to do maybe with habit. Neuron loss, dementia. Yeah. The sugar, the desire for that rush maybe is gone from your soul. What was the most delicious thing? Is it croissant, donuts? Is there a thing that- There's a place in Portland, I don't know if it's still open, called Little T's Bakery. And they have croissants that easily rival the croissants in Paris. People make a lot of the pastry in Paris, but it's really the bread in Paris that's amazing. We lived there when I was a kid and we did a sabbatical there. And there they do the baguette morning bake and afternoon bake. And there's nothing like the bread in Paris or the people. But if you're in the Pacific Northwest, you can find amazing croissants there. What do you do with the croissant? What do you do with the bread? Butter or is it just- I actually used to, I don't eat them anymore. I don't have much of an appetite for them, even though they're not a sweet food. But I'm always putting butter on the croissant. Butter on the butter croissant. No jam. I would never adulterate my croissant. I have to actually be honest about this because people talk about steak and they talk about bread with the butter. I feel like butter is cheating. I feel like you're disrespecting the fundamental food by adding butter. Because butter, it's like a elite version of ketchup. There we diverge because for me, bread is just a vehicle for butter. A cracker is just a vehicle for cheese. Oh, so that's just the cracker and the bread is just texture. It's just that people look at you funny if you just eat the butter straight, which occasionally I do. I got it. So I put a little piece of bread underneath it, not because I'm low carb, strictly low carb, but just because otherwise you get some funny looks. That's like pasta is a vehicle for pasta sauce. It's interesting, but like Indian non-bread, you have the bread. I've had a lot of soul searching on which part of Indian brings me so much joy. Is it the bread or is it all the sauces that come with the bread? Well, there we diverge again, because for whatever reason, no disrespect to anyone, but Indian food doesn't appeal to me. Well, you're a lucky man because the number of calories in that food, it sneaks like non-bread. I don't know how non-bread is made, but I think it's just soaked in oil and it just very intensely, like the density of calories is very, very high. For me, barbecue, I would say is probably the- That's good. Anytime I'm in Austin, I start thinking about barbecue. I do love meat. My dad's Argentine. I mean, I love steak. I love meat. I mean, Argentina chorizo sausage is an appetizer before you have steak. It's meat on top of meat. And it's not just the men, right? You see women, sometimes very petite women, eating steaks that are bigger than their skull size. Slowly, they eat very slowly there. And they all eat dessert too, which is interesting. And they generally do this sort of one meal per day. They do that kind of real flexibly. That's how I think about it, because I often eat one meal a day, especially when I'm traveling. It feels like a cheap meal because it allows, it gives you a bit of more freedom to just lose yourself in the quantity of the food. I did the three-day fast and I ate chicken breast, like literally chicken breast with nothing else, just grilled. And it was the most delicious piece of meat I've ever eaten. And that gives you, the problem is when you fast for three days, you really can't pig out. You really shouldn't. Boy, your stomach will shrink in size already. Your gut microbiome is almost completely depleted by fasting. A lot of people think, oh, cleanses and fasts are great for the microbiome. They quash your microbiome. However, when you start eating again, the microbiome comes back better than it was before your fast. For people who don't know, Sergey and Todd are on the call. They're kind of pulling stuff up. They just pulled up- Oh, there's Phelps. Phelps with, I forget how many calories, just eating 10,000. You know what's interesting? There's some cool physiology around this. The reason he needed to eat so much is not that he was burning that many calories in pure movement. It's that when you do exercise in water, even if it's warm water, the heat transfer in water is greater. So you burn far more calories. And again, here, I'm admittedly lifting that from knowledge that was passed on to me by Tim Ferriss. So, but I checked it out and it's absolutely true. So if you exercise in water, even if it's not really cold water, your caloric needs go way up, which is why you get out of the pool and you're often really hungry. And for fans of the Human Lab podcast, and if you're not a fan, what are you doing with your life? You would probably chuckle at the fact that Andrew just cited his sources, even on that statement. Because you're so good at, I don't know how your memory works, but the only person whose memory is better than Joe Rogan's is yours. But my colleagues joke, PubMed sort of scrolls through my mind. Also in science, as you know, attribution is so baked into what we do. And I think that it's interesting because now spending a lot of time on social media, attribution is not as common. But in academia, you learn really early on that if you give a talk about your data and you cite all these amazing sources, all it does is make you look better, right? Whereas in social media and elsewhere in the business sector, it's almost like citing other people, people feel as if it's gonna take away some of the credit. All it does is place you in the company of people that do really nice work. So I have, and I have genuine and tremendous respect for Tim. He's been about 10 years ahead on a huge number of health-related things and other things, an extremely kind person, very thoughtful person. So it's also just a pleasure to shine light on other people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I actually, to push back, I know there's a culture of if you write a paper, standing on the shoulders of giants is a powerful thing, but there's also a culture of not giving credit to the strongest idea in your paper and instead say it's kind of, or imply that it's original. There is a culture of kind of not celebrating others. I think people get most competitive in all walks of life, but especially in science, when they're, the closer they get in the exact thing they work on. And so there's this dance, you know, there's a few researchers in each of the individual little things that you work on. If you're studying a particular kind of ant, you know that other asshole that also is studying that particular ant, and then you're not going to often give credit for the brilliant ideas that that other researcher is doing. And I think one of the things you've discovered and just as part of your nature, which is why it's really great that you have an audience and you inspire others to do the same, is you celebrate that other ant studier. It's great, and everybody wins. It raises all boats. But that initial instinct to be like, what is it in Borat? Like my neighbor gets a toaster, I get a bigger toaster. Yeah, that mindset to, you know, it's not that I'm not competitive in certain domains, but yeah, I get great pleasure from sharing things that I find. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, you're as strong as your community and you can build a wonderful community just by pointing out things that you love. Like these are all just loves. I see a paper and I love it. Only rarely do I think, oh, I wish we had done that. I usually think, fantastic, now I can just focus on something else because they checked off that box. And by the way, you mentioned PubMed and barbecue. I should mention that I got a chance to hang out with Rick Rubin, thanks to you. He's a friend of yours and you made the connection. That was a huge gift to my spirit, I guess. He's a truly, truly special human being. And there's a lot I could say about why he's a special human being. I'd love to learn how you met him, but I should also just mention on the PubMed thing, it was so interesting talking to him about music and both on the podcast and privately and just listening to music together. Because when you mention a song, he does this thing where he like closes his eyes and he finds that song in the album that we're talking about and he steps through the album. You could see the brain like stepping through individual songs to find that song in the album. And there's that kind of lookup process. And then he puts himself mentally in that space of like, okay, this is, you know, whatever the album is and not just the ones he produced, but all of these in encyclopedia of music. And it's so interesting. It also, the thing I really love about him is something like a calmness that radiates from him. That it's okay to close your eyes and place yourself in the place where that album was recorded, in the feeling of that album, and like that silence, let's go there. Let's go there together. It's like Alice in Wonderland and we'll go there together. You do a good Rick Rubin, minus the beard. Minus the beard. His beard is epic, right? You can't fake a beard like that, you know? How'd you guys meet? Yeah, well, Rick, I'm very blessed to consider a close friend. Rick and I got introduced through a common friend during the pandemic. And we started doing some FaceTime together and just talking about things related to science and health. And I'm not a musician. I have no musical ability or talent. I have a good ability to memorize lyrics and I love lyrics and I love poetry. So I asked him a lot of questions about musicians that I happen to love that he's worked with and knows. And so he would give me stories about musicians and I would talk to him about health. And then eventually we formed a friendship where we would talk about any number of different topics in life. And then we started spending time together in person when he was in town or nearby. And as you now know, you know, Rick, in addition to all his incredible accomplishments, has an incredible understanding of how to get the brain and body into state, right? And as you pointed out, he's willing to do the things that allow him to help these incredible artists get into the best state to do their craft. And so if he needs to sit there and be quiet with his eyes closed for a minute or two or more, he'll do that. He has routines to allow himself to get into state. And it's really inspired me to think about states of mind as something that, you know, we'd all love to just flip the switch and say, we're focused or we're creative, but to actually ratchet through the challenging steps in order to do that and to figure out what one needs to do on a regular basis to get into a proper state. It's not just gonna come from a cup of coffee, you know, a lamp of a particular wavelength or something. It's gonna be those things, but it's also going to be really teaching oneself how to get into proper state. Yeah, you did an episode on hypnosis. Do you think it's a kind of self-hypnosis? Yes, I do. Because hypnosis is a, you limit the context, you're very alert and you're very calm. And he has a number of these different practices. And so we would talk about those. And then we also have enjoyed a lot of discussions about deep neuroscience. In fact, I introduced Rick to a friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist and they've become friendly. You know, Rick is one of these people that he sort of defies definition, incredibly kind, incredibly private person too. So, you know, I'm being respectful of that. But, and then of course he's a fan of your podcast. And so when I learned that, I just made natural sense to introduce you. And I know he really enjoyed meeting you. And we talk about you a lot. And of course in a positive light, you know, I think his dedication to getting into these states of mind and his willingness to do that has completely transformed my routines around life. Like for instance, before doing a very long podcast recording, the solo ones, which often take me several hours or more, six hours to record, sometimes more, sometimes less. I realized that there's a certain brain state associated with that. So I have to really limit the kind of interactions I have for the two hours before. I actually walk and talk out loud through my neighborhood. People think I'm crazy, but I live in a neighborhood where there are a lot of crazy creatives anyway. So- You're saying you're not crazy? Well, at least not institutionally defined as crazy yet. But, you know, getting into state of mind is something that we'd all just imagine we'd flip the switch. But Rick really convinced me, you have to do the work to do the work. Can you maybe linger on that, elucidate a little bit more your process of how you get in that space? That's really interesting. As I have to admit, I do everything last minute before a podcast. I don't know, like there's a lot of anxiety because like whatever, if I have to pack, if I have to set up stuff, you were luckily a few minutes, you showed up a few minutes later. Which for an academic is right on time. It's right on time. But the stress is immense. And on top of that, you look at like a situation with Rick Rubin, I had to set up microphones in front of him. And just that stress, the anxiety. He knows a lot about microphones. What'd he say, which I really loved. He's like, how close do you like the microphone to be? It's like- That's a very Rick Rubin kind of thing, right? That the details really matter. The details really matter, right down to your relationship to the microphone, right? Distance and whether or not it brings out the timbre in your voice. But of course, that's what he does. He produces music. But he also said like, he is the professional. He said, how close do you like it to be? And he said it with a gentleness where I had like an existential crisis where I don't know. He gave me so much like, wow. Like he made me feel like an artist. Like that the microphone distance is a decision you're supposed to make. Well, I have to say, and this has actually come up in some of our conversations about you. I mean, you are an artist. And actually Joe Rogan, once I heard him talking about podcasting and the fact that he's always trying to get better at it, and he described podcasting at one moment as an art, right? And it is, it's a certain medium of communication and there's a cadence and a rhythm that when it's working, it really can facilitate the transfer of information. When it's not, it doesn't. I mean, obviously Joe, just being himself has tapped into that cadence that allows, and it's made so many people excited to hear him talk. Well, in his case and in general, I think part of the art is refusing the world as you get a bigger audience, change who you are. There's one quote that I've seen out there where he says, you know, I'm like the, talking about himself, he says, you know, I'm like the fish that got through the net. There's no stage version of me, right? How he is in person is how he is, you know, out in the world. And of course there's nuance to his life, right? And his different relationships, of course, but it's true. I mean, we've had the, you know, the great fortune of spending time with him out away from the microphones, so to speak. Joe is Joe. So can you speak to your, that process? You mentioned the walking and the talking to yourself, because that's fascinating. Yeah, I try and do a couple of things. First of all, when I was a kid, I had a little bit of a grunting tick. When I was five or six, I would feel this buildup of tension in my throat and I would do this grunting tick. If I get very tired, I start to do it still. We actually know that this is related to these basal ganglia circuits for go, no go. You've got an accelerator and a brake basically in your neural circuitry and kids with Tourette's and OCD, the brake doesn't work quite as well. And so one thing that happens is if I wake up in the morning and I'm, especially if I'm well-rested, well, if I'm not well-rested, I do a hypnosis or yoga nidra in order to recover my sleep. That works really well. But then once I'm into the process of preparing the podcast, I've already gone through my notes. I know what I want to say more or less in a kind of general contour. And then I take a walk and I try to, so no phone with me. And I try to assess whether or not my energy is too high or too low for podcasting. Because when you podcast, as you know, you have to punch out a lot of material, but then there's times when you really need to slow down and emphasize and articulate. And so what I do, this is, I don't, I've never revealed this. What I do actually is I will recite the lyrics of songs for about 10 minutes, songs I love, while I walk out loud. It calms you and focuses you, what does it do for you? I think it gets my vocal cords warmed up. And it also- Do you sing or speak them? I often sing them. And unfortunately nobody hears. And as I do this, I start to evaluate whether or not I'm straining to get the words out or whether or not I'm straining to make them slow enough so that I can articulate them. So there are days when I have so much energy that I'm trying to speak faster than I should in order to articulate properly. There are other days when I'm tired and I can't sort of keep up with my thoughts. And so what I try and do is assess that and then adjust the transmission, the RPM, so to speak. For instance, I can speak very quickly and then I can slow down. So I can change the cadence of my voice. And when you teach in the classroom, you learn, as you know, because you're an excellent teacher, I've watched your lectures in the classroom. As you teach in the classroom, when you want to slow down, every teacher knows you turn to the whiteboard or chalkboard and you start writing, right? It gives you a break. And then you turn around and you fire back the kind of machine gun fire of information. And then you slow down or you underline something. When you podcast, you don't have that opportunity, right? There are no visuals in my podcast. So what I try and do is always get my voice warmed up and make sure that I'm thinking and speaking at approximately the same rate. And then I also do this thing of, I put my vision into panoramic vision when I walk, which is very calming. And then I actually start to remind myself of the purpose of podcasting. This sounds very mission statement-y, but you asked what I do. I remind myself first and foremost that what I want to communicate, what I want to come through is the beauty and utility of biology. And I only feel comfortable saying the word beauty publicly now about science things thanks to you, because I think- Love and beauty. Yeah, love and beauty. Love and beauty. Dr. Andrew Humerman. Love and beauty, but also darkness and hatred. And if you're talking about the Lex Friedman podcast, you have to address the shadow also, the shadow side. But I think about the, I want to communicate the beauty and utility of biology. And then I check my emotional state. I want to make sure that I'm not angry about anything. And certainly if I am, that I'm going to set it aside for the podcast, because that's not a place for whatever I might be dealing with. I also really start to feel into the parts of the research and the papers I found that I really love, because that's the part of me that I like the most, frankly. And on the podcast, if there's a paper, like for instance, we have a paper, excuse me, a podcast coming out soon about heat as a tool, you know, sauna, but some other things. And in researching this, I learned so much about these heat shock proteins and the use of sauna in Finland for increasing growth hormone but also for the treatment of mental illness. And I realized I fell in love with this literature. It's just a beautiful literature. These people are true pioneers for doing this work. Now everyone's into sauna, but this was 20 years ago. The way the experiments were done were amazing with all these Finnish people with thermocouples up their rectum to measure temperature, swimming in pools. It's hilarious and great. And so I start to think about it and I think, you know, I just start to really access my love of the work. And then when we finally sit down, meaning my producer Rob and I and record, I just sort of want to just bask in sharing it. Just like the little version of me when I was six or seven, I used to spend all weekend reading the encyclopedia, Guinness Book of World Records, making my mother drive me places to introduce me to, I had this obsession with trapping animals when I was a kid, meet these people. And then on Monday, I would insist on giving a lecture in class, just as a little kid. So that's basically what it is. I just try and access that childlike energy. And so I want to be clear. The goal is always to make the information interesting, clear, and actionable. And if it's also surprising, then that's a bonus. But that's basically the process. But yeah, I'm singing and talking and getting into state. And I used to feel very sheepish about sharing any of this. It's the first time I've ever shared it out loud, but Rick was the one who encouraged me to find a process that works and continue to develop that process and not let anything get near that process. People in my personal life know this. And when it's time, it's like, I don't care what else is going on. I'm moving into that brain state. And there's probably a process like that for anything that you do in life that you take seriously. So the people that have perfected this is athletes. Like if Olympic level athletes, they have to have a process like this. You know what, I think Tiger Woods actually was taught self-hypnosis quite young and used self-hypnosis often during his tournaments, sometimes to great success and other times less so. Is there other places in life that you use kind of a protocol, like a mental protocol to get ready? Many of the best areas of life are their own form of hypnosis, right? True. You know that you're in hypnosis if, for instance, you're in a movie and something happens and you feel the emotional lift without being self-conscious about it. Yes, I think that one thing that we've tried to do in our house is around meal times to try and set a state that food isn't just something that we just throw down on our throats. And I'm fortunate that my partner cooks really well. And so I try and give her the space to do that. And that's a whole thing of her getting into state. And then- For the cooking. For the cooking. The preparation of all the- I can just see it. I just see the way she approaches the whole thing and the pleasure in serving it. And I'm an eater, not a cooker. But- Both are important roles. You could be a very good eater. Like there's something about, is there anything better in this world than that feeling, especially if it's a family, getting around a table, just the warmth of that. I don't know. It's like the cold outside of the cruel world cannot touch you in this place that you've returned to. And if, I mean- Did you grow up eating meals as a family? Yeah, yeah. I mean- You didn't sit down, no television. No, well, I didn't really have television period outside of meals. So most of my time was spent, like a stray cat outdoors, just running around, playing soccer. I imagine you in this like dirt or concrete lot between two very high rise buildings playing soccer in like athletic gear that you only see in Eastern Europe. You know how like you come to the States and people wear their athletic gear. You go to Europe and you see, maybe it's the soccer culture, but you see athletic gear that you just don't see anywhere else. That's interesting. I mean, I grew up pretty poor. So first of all, I was always wearing my brother's, who's an older brother, brother's clothes. And they were like old, like my favorite things were American things that I didn't understand. It would be like a Pepsi shirt or something. And it was just, that was the gear. And it was like too large for me, but I thought I was the coolest person ever just wearing this fancy, like Kanye type of fashion. Yeah, there's something about, I feel like in Eastern Europe, they wear athletic gear where like the guys like zip up their collars. No, that's like fancy stuff. That's if you like, those are the cool kids. I see. Like the cool soccer players, football players that like they were in a league of some kind. So they would get uniforms or like, or they somehow, I always thought anyone who had anything nice had to do something really bad to get it. That was my way, view of the world. Because like, I guess I didn't understand how it's possible to be rich. Because most of us were surrounded by people who are poor and that life was beautiful and simple. And it's like, why do you escape that life? But you still admire the cool, like when we got McDonald's, it was like, what kind of world does this place come from? Like who invented this? This is a fascinating view from a child's perspective of like of capitalism. Yeah, but the fact that you ate dinner together is really interesting. My parents divorced when I was an adolescent. So then there was a total fracture of any family structure. But prior to that, we ate dinner together every night. I was expected to know how to use my knife and fork. And it was like a very structured thing. I don't know if kids do that now. If I ever have kids, they're gonna do that. And certainly, actually on the way over here, I was thinking, I was like, I really want a lot of kids. I want like a whole litter. And I was saying, if Lex has kids and I have kids, then we can pit them against each other with jujitsu. This is my chance at redemption. You know? It's the long game. Right? They'll all want to be engineers or physicists. They won't want to be biologists. But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day that our kids play together. Yeah, I think there's something. So the family dinner, the ritual of the family dinner, but also the special occasion dinners, like where there's a little bit more preparation, a little bit more cooking, whether it's on the weekend or for some holiday. In Russia, it was a thing that actually I find completely missing for the most part. In America is there was neighbors. There was a, you broke the walls between families much more commonly. Like there would be kind of regular characters, like a sitcom almost. You know, if you watch a sitcom, it's never just the family. There's always like other characters that- Just bursting in the door. Bursting in the door. I'm gonna start doing that here, just to make you feel at home. Just start showing up in your studio. I know where you live. I think people want to respect, like Michael Malice lives next door to me. And I think people want to respect each other's privacy or something like that. And I think we all get super busy and, you know, it's kind of work to do this dinner together. Or, you know, if you see it as a thing that needs to be scheduled, it's work. We'll get busy. There's a lot of stuff going on. But if it's part of a ritual or part of the culture, that all of those walls get broken down. And then you realize like that's like later looking back, those are the things you miss. Like that's what life is about. Like all the stupid stuff you're doing in terms of career or whatever, all the busy thing, those don't matter. What matters is the people. Yeah, in academia, you know, this changed in the last few years, of course, but one of the great joys was professors will stop by your office or your lab. Nobody set up an appointment. There's a guy when I was a professor in San Diego, a guy named Harvey Cartney, he's a member of the National Academies. The truly the world's expert in the evolution of vision and evolution of brains generally. And he would show up in my lab and he would just start talking to the students in postdocs. And I mean, in a pure encyclopedia. And then at some point you'd say, hey, Harvey, I got to go. And you'd kick him out, right? Or this guy, he's a physicist, David Kleinfeld, who's same way. Actually, David Kleinfeld is interesting when he, a student of his went on to create the Beavis and Butthead cartoon. And one of them is David. He's a physics professor. Now people can look him up. And David's one of those guys who just walk into your office. He just sit down and he just start talking to you. And so there's a kind of a family feel. It's like Cheers or Seinfeld, or one of those shows where somebody just walks in. And yeah, I think you and I both share a love of the community around things. And podcasting is a little bit more isolated. I should say for the guest episodes, the preparation is completely different because it's more conversational. And so there I don't do any of this business of putting myself into state. I just try and make sure that the guest is taken care of. And I do list out the questions I'm gonna ask before, but those, I actually really like the interview episodes far more than I like doing the solo ones. Just psychologically, you mean? I just like learning from someone directly. Because you asking an expert about something, like sitting here with you when we recorded the podcast where you were a guest on the Huberman Lab podcast. And for the first time, and finally, someone was explaining to me the difference between machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all these other things. You know, and I've finally forgiven you for making me cry about Costello on camera, because it helped me move through it. But in all seriousness, the interview ones are a sheer pleasure. The solo ones I really enjoy, but their work, sometimes I think, like I'm gonna sweat a little blood prepping for that. Well, it's interesting, because I do think prepping for interviews, having a similar process might be also very valuable. Like I have to think about that, because I think when you do a conversation for several hours, especially when it's a high stakes one, so it's not like you and I know, it's more like it's just chatting and so on. The world order isn't gonna shift according to it. Although you never know. Knowing you, we'll probably be into some pretty controversial topics in a few minutes. You like to ride the edge more than I do. There are a number of topics that I just completely avoid. And my response to those is always that I have a lot of opinions about that, but not a lot to say. But whereas you've become far braver in terms of the topics you'll encounter. And some of your guests have been a bit controversial. Some of them are people that a lot of people don't like. And you've been willing to just sit down and maybe it's the jujitsu thing. I don't know, it is tricky. One of my goals for this year is to talk to people that a lot of people really don't like. Are you gonna share with us? And here I am. What people that are in prison, major political leaders, I've been thinking a lot about how to talk to really difficult, controversial figures, but find together something with them that's deeply honest about their nature, about the ideas they have about the world, like reveal something real. And some people, you have to be very careful. Some people are very good at hiding the real inside them, even from themselves. That's something I think about a lot. I think about dictators of the past and I put myself in the mindset, well, how do you reveal something real about this person to themselves? I think that to me, and you kind of spoke to that, but a great conversation is one where both of you discover something new. Like it's not just, so I love that too. That's my favorite thing, what you mentioned, which is allowing your curiosity and ask all kinds of questions and get excited to learn from an expert, but also to push them to discover something about themselves, about their ideas together. And then that discovery, and sometimes it's like we don't see it in the moment, but the audience hears it. It's weird to say, like I would compare it to when you're a musician and you're playing with other musicians, you lose yourself in the moment. Yeah, it's all, it's like, it's working right. It's working, but you don't really see the big picture impact of what it's working right actually feels like. And that's where the audience can see that. Like if you talk to somebody evil, for me as an interviewer, I have to empathize with that person. If I want to understand, I have to put myself in that mind space. And to put yourself in that mindset, you really have to become that, you have to understand the evil inside of you. Like you can't just think if somebody's in power and has used that power to abuse others, you can't just be, I personally, a person who seeks to understand, you can't just be a journalist asking generic questions. You have to put yourself in a place where you're somebody who's given a lot of power and slowly you start to abuse that power. And what does that person become? Who are you? I have to plug myself into those moments in my life in the past where I've been angry at something and where I've been cruel because I was angry in little ways, but then you magnify them at scale and I have to go there and that's very human. And then I have to look at another person from across the table for me and understand, well, you're there too. And then you had more opportunity to do truly cruel things. And then where I have to plug myself into places where I've been, I can imagine I can go where I was cruel to others and was unaware of it. So I was in a mind space where I was thinking that I'm doing good and I was doing not good. Again, I've never gotten the opportunity to do any of those things at a large scale, but all of us have done it at a small scale. And I plug myself into that and then we're here. We're too, if it's somebody who's in prison, if it's somebody who's a dictator, we're in that space where evil is, all of us have the capacity to do that evil. And I have to imagine myself being able to do that evil. And then we're here together in that dark, dark place. And then if it's just right, something real can actually come. Something from that person's childhood, I may be awakening to a realization that I thought it was a good person and I'm not. And that only happens when you truly empathize. Those moments of discovery are beautiful, but they also happen in science. When you just have a conversation and you realize, I feel like talking to Stephen Wolfram, I feel like we constantly realize beautiful things together. On this element of evil and sociopathy, that Jung had this notion that we have all things inside us and that we all have the capacity to be good or evil, et cetera. But I have the good fortune of working with somebody who has deep understanding of psychiatry, but also psychoanalysis and Jungian theory. And he said to me recently, he said, whether or not all people have all things inside them is still debated in the psychology community and in the neuroscience community. And as a matter of philosophy, but there are certain people, not many, but there are certain people for whom they've actually lived out many versions of their possible selves in the first person. And so those are unique individuals. Then even if they tapped into these things, as you mentioned, at a more minor level, as opposed to impacting people negatively at scale. So being able to access those different parts of oneself is key and you've been willing to step into that. My podcast is not one in which we get down to those matters. But you never know, we might do an episode on narcissism and sociopathy. The other thing that I took away from a conversation with a friend who did a lot of years in special operations in the intelligence community, he said, if you look at somebody's past, at some point you will come to understand some pretty good reasons as to why they became who they are. But you have to draw the, his words, the red line someplace. And what he was referring to was the fact that certain people, at least in the eyes of certain communities, deserve to be eliminated as a consequence of their actions, right? Regardless of what drove them to those actions. So it gets right down to the line between nature, nurture, neuroscience, and the law and justice. Complicated, complicated themes. I can think of a number of people that I would love to hear you interview. And here I'm not revealing the reasons why, but except for the fact that I think you would be uniquely suited to bring out the important components of the conversation that other people have not been able to do. Which, for instance, Liz Holmes. This is one of the most mysterious and yet disliked people on the planet. She's sort of synonymous with deception. I don't know if there have been any real interviews of her since the whole thing. I haven't followed that case. I listened to the book and I followed it a little bit because it was happening in my hometown, right? Theranos was right up the road. The building's still there. It's interesting, it's some of the most premier real estate in Silicon Valley, but nobody wants it. It's sort of like, it's very hard to sell a home where somebody committed suicide or committed a murder, even if it's a beautiful home. They sort of feel like the Theranos building is that building. So that would be a really interesting interview. I would love to hear that interview. One of the most interesting dark human beings in science. Yeah, and then there'll even be people that say, you know, was it even science, right? It might've all been deception. It might've been one part deception, one part goal setting mixed in with. Clearly there were so many factors impacting what happened. I think the big difference between Theranos and that story and some of the other stories about Silicon Valley where people promised a lot more than they could deliver is they were promising things that were directly related to health and healthcare. People were taking blood tests with the understanding that the data they were getting was important information about sexually transmitted diseases and other diseases and making real world decisions on the basis of that. Whereas if you remember when the iPhone first came out and Steve Jobs was still alive and the phones were dropping calls if you held it in a particular way. And his response was a little flip. He said, hey folks, it's a phone as if like, don't get so worked up. But people held them understandably to a very high standard. You know, she would sort of, it seemed, and I don't know, because I certainly wasn't there, seemed like she sort of adopted this idea that you could get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right, except if the allegations are true. And I think she was found guilty, I believe, on a number of counts. That a number of the things that they were doing were impacting real world decision-making. So Steve's point about the phone, it's just a phone. Well, it depends on the call. If you're calling 911, then it's not just a phone, right? But in the case of blood tests and disease, you know, that's serious. I think that the Theranos case was super interesting to me because of the number of people from major universities and from government that both trusted her and the number of people who did not trust her and yet either didn't speak up or no one listened to them. It was only in the forensic version of it that everyone said, oh yeah, I knew that she was lying, et cetera, et cetera. They were lying. There were multiple people involved in those lies, apparently. But I have a deep interest in the neuroscience of narcissism, sociopathy, and some of the darker aspects of the mind. So yeah, maybe someday. Maybe we'll do a podcast together. It can be like in the kind of early 90s version of talk shows where we darken the lights and we do it together. You can use your voice because your voice is much more sinister sounding than mine. Good cop, bad cop. Well, it'd be interesting from a scientific perspective of somebody who is a sociopath or a psychopath how to reveal something real about them. I think that requires not just, well, I don't know what that requires. That requires the same skill that it takes to be a good therapist. Right, and some therapists won't work with sociopaths because they don't feel any progress can be made. Some therapists will work with sociopaths because for the wealthy ones, they often, they want their money. I think most therapists are good and benevolent, but there's some that will do it just the same way lawyers will work with criminals knowing they're criminals, right? Oftentimes because they're criminals. There are certain domains of psychiatry that are more tractable than others, right? Borderlines are interesting, I should just mention, because they have this phenomenon of splitting. So in the world of psychology, the idea is that being neurotic is actually the goal. The idea that you could be, you know, feel something and then work a lot to overcome it or have some sort of defense mechanism in place, but that's not destructive. That's actually a pretty healthy state to be in. It's provided it's not destructive. Psychotic is truly delusional thinking about reality. And the idea is that borderline split, intermittently split between psychotic and neurotic. That's why it was called, there's beautiful work by Melanie Klein that describes this, which I'm just now kind of delving into. But, you know, so the borderline is the person who is like, I love you, I love you, I love you. And then truly feels as if they hate you and you become the bad object. Borderlines are challenging for psychologists because of the splitting, right? Schizophrenics are challenging because of the detachment from reality. And narcissists are challenging because they're often so charming that even the therapists are charmed. I believe you mentioned Karl Deisseroth. We'll talk about him. He was definitely not a narcissist. He's one of the more humble people, but he is brilliant. Thanks again to you. You've connected us. I had the pleasure of having a conversation with him. You had a conversation with him. I really enjoyed it on the podcast. You guys come from the same science, from the same place, maybe different journeys, fascinating. And levels. We were postdocs together. Karl is truly the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky. Five children, amazing marriage to it. Also an amazing scientist. His wife, Michelle Monge, is in our neurology department at Stanford. Incredible thinker, writer, very kind person, humble. Speaking of getting into state, sorry, Karl, I'm gonna out you on this, but Karl, despite being at the highest levels of science and engineering and a practicing psychiatrist, his office is literally a coat closet with a small table lamp. When you meet with Karl, if you manage to meet with him, because he's very hard to get to, you walk in, you sit down as if you're going through some interrogation and some spy novel, and he'll ask you, what are you most excited about lately? And I've got 11 minutes or something. And that's a meeting with Karl, because he's that busy. But he doesn't have the office with the pictures of the kids and the thing and all that. All that is kept elsewhere. So in order to get, I asked him why he worked in this office, right? You work on light and channels of light, things related to light of all things. Here you are in this dark room. And he said, well, this is what gets me into the state of mind to be able to do what I want to do. Very Rick Rubin-ish, not at all the same person, but very similar in that he's figured out the physical space he needs in order to get into the optimal state to do the work that he needs to do in this lifetime. And it's very unusual, right? If I don't have a window, I kind of freak out. I can do it here for a while. We're in this black cube here floating in space, of course. But I find that amazing that these people that are operating at this super high level are willing to actually deprive themselves of a lot of conditions. They're not sitting there with the secretary coming in, offering them espresso every five minutes and things like, no, no, no, that's New York neuroscience. I'm picking, the New York neuroscience mafia is kind of famous for having all the tickets to the opera and this and that, and they enjoy lifestyle a lot. The New York neuroscience mafia. Oh, there is one. There definitely is one. They know who they are. They know who they are. People don't know, Andrew Huberman is from the West Coast and now he's just starting wars with the neuroscience mafia. Well, they do amazing science. They think, they love their lifestyle and that's wonderful, but the culture is very different. Yeah. Carl and I think Silicon Valley in general kind of prides itself on this kind of monk-like asceticism, right? But at the individual scale, be deliberate about controlling the environment. I think about that with the conversations too. I haven't been deliberate about that either in terms of controlling the space you're in. Visually, yes, black curtains, all those kinds of things. There is nothing like the Lex Friedman podcast studio. First of all, when you do them remotely, I always feel like I'm in a witness relocation program. You only get the coordinates at the last moment and you always get the sense that there are people behind the walls that are recording things. Well, there's something about creating a feeling. I have a sense that there's a robot over there. There's several throughout this place. And I think part of that, part of creating a feeling would be having the robots constantly moving around and having a mind of their own. Because that would most closely put guests and other humans that they interact with into a place that's closest to my mind. Because it's such an engineering mind and one where when things come to life, it's a beautiful place to be. And whatever that is, that could be like art, but to me, robots are art. And so I'm thinking about that both for me and for guests. And I'm also thinking about the difficult guests, just to return to, you said Elizabeth Holmes, the one person, maybe a couple of things I wanna say. So one person I think I would like to talk to is Ghislaine Maxwell. I always get afraid right before you reveal these kinds of things. And now I know why I get afraid. Yeah, I mean, again, assuming that she did the things that people claim she did, they're despicable, right? I mean, these were underage children, right? There's just no version of the story where she did the things she was accused of doing and is still a quote unquote good person. There's just, in my mind, right? And yet I think there is tremendous interest in understanding what led her to do all that, at least for some people. Let me say a couple of things. So one is at a high level, let me say that she believes or her current story is that she's the victim. Of who? Of Jeffrey Epstein. Oh my. I think I'll just leave that there as is. So these are ideas that you're facing. The nature of truth and the nature of the human mind is what it is. And this is, imagine folks, if you went into a room with a person that says that, what do you do next? Let me also say that I never or rarely, let me not say never, I rarely mention names that I'm interested in talking to without having made significant progress in already securing that interview. So people sometimes ask me about Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin. I do not bring them up lightly in terms of there being a path in an actual conversation. That said, something I regret, but I'm not sure I know what to do with it. But in the case of all the people I just mentioned, I haven't been preparing for those conversations. I only start really preparing seriously when it's confirmed because it's such a heavy burden. And one of the things I regret in having mentioned a conversation with Vladimir Putin before the war in Ukraine broke out in the past few years is that I would mention it very loosely, very casually, and without having really deeply put myself into a place that I'm ready to talk to him. And that's a tricky thing because then the internet, the audience in general, and just me, when I listen back to my dumb self, think, well, why are you speaking so lightly about these topics? Well, I know you've had a longstanding interest in talking to him. I think now, well, I don't understand how I would sit down and have a conversation with somebody like that, but that's not in the range of my skill sets, right? Or like maybe not in the range of things that you're drawn to somehow. Not so much. I mean, I would watch that episode with great interest. Well, you did an episode recently with this guy who was a former cyber criminal turned stateside, right? I think he works for the government now. And there was a segment in there, remind me his name? Brett Johnson. Brett Johnson. And there was a segment in there where he talked about stealing a lifetime's worth of collected coins from some elderly woman. And this was everything she had. And then he openly admitted that he felt no remorse, which is the way he described it, it was purely sociopathic. And then of course, we learned that he grew up in a family where criminal behavior was very common. It was kind of embedded into his notions of what typical behaviors were. And I found myself somewhat conflicted, but also hung up on this idea that, I mean, he had behaved as a sociopath or in a sociopathic way. And it created an internal conflict because he's quite charming guest and his stories are terrific. Especially I really enjoyed his discussions about how he would go out and do all these things out of a desire to please his girlfriend. So he was in service to other people, despite being a sociopath. He could say he was in service to them as a way to extract. Gets very complicated. I think is the reason I went into science is that at some level, it's more about facts than it is opinions and judgments. And I don't know that I have the ability to suspend judgment away from the kind of top level contours of my initial reaction to like, if it's true, like the Galean Maxwell's and the Liz Holmes and the other sociopaths is one of just kind of revulsion and repulsion. But that could also reflect the fact that I'm not as, you know, neurologically sophisticated as somebody that can spin all the plates of empathy, forgiveness, but also holding people accountable at the same time. That's work. That takes, if you think about it, that's three, four brain circuits having to work in parallel. That's the difference between chess or a game of Go and a game of checkers. I guess I'm playing checkers and you're playing chess. No, so one is actually holding in your mind and two is the raw skill of conversation. You're very, just having listened to your interviews, you're very good at conversation. But the skill of conversation is really tricky. I'm not being self-deprecating. I'm being just objective. I'm not good at conversation. I'm working very hard at getting better at it. I'm speaking not about just podcasting. I'm speaking just normal life. I have anxiety from social interaction. Do you really? A huge amount, yeah. So this is interesting because I never detect that in you, ever. And I think there are people that we both know that have said to me that they too feel anxious and yet your voice is steady. I don't see any perspiration. Oh yeah. You appear incredibly calm all the time. I was scared shitless with Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin is, when you first meet him, is intimidatingly calm. But as you get to know him a bit, you realize that the kindness and the generosity that you sense is real. But yeah, I would never in a million years have guessed that you get anxious in conversation. Can I just make another quick comment? This may come off entertaining to you, Andrew. Maybe you've already gotten the same. But having mentioned Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky, Gilead Maxwell, there is a natural question. How does Lex have access to these people? Who does he work for? Like how does he- Or who works for him. Who works for him. What does he have on others? I ask myself, when I look in the mirror, just somebody who kind of enjoys conspiracy theories, I wanna ask the same question. Well, I usually ask in the following way, how the fuck am I so lucky? Am I a robot being controlled by somebody else? How is this my life right now? What is happening? It really does feel like a simulation. So let me just speak to several things. First of all, I have no boss. I know of nor am I controlled by any intelligence agencies of any nation. We're gonna get you a dog, Lex. So that I could talk to. I'm scared of getting a dog because I would fall in love so deeply, I think. Next time I'm bringing a puppy. I'm just gonna bring a puppy and I'm gonna leave it here. And then you'll never see me again. I mean, I love dogs so much. But I was also surprised and maybe, I have never talked to an intelligence agency, which is very interesting to me. That you're aware of. Because they're very good at communicating with people. But I've been very suspicious on this exact point. That's the downside of kind of being an introvert, having anxiety about social interaction, but then having so much love thrown your way because connect over podcast. Podcasts have a powerful way of connecting people. So people come with you with love that I really love, I appreciate, but I wonder exactly this question. Why is this person with a Russian accent talking to me and showing me so much love? Well, because, sorry to interrupt you again, but it's what we do. And it's a sign of interest, by the way. Sometimes, yeah, I have a colleague at Stanford and she said, you know, interruption, 75% of the time is a sign of real interest in what the person is saying, if nothing else. Well, you're very lovable. I mean, I learned about Hedgehog in the Fog from you. When I learned, you're very lovable. People love you because you're lovable. I love love, okay, so 100%. And I mean, especially here in Austin, Texas, people are so amazing. I go just hugs and just, I love people. But- Do you want a family? Are you eventually- 100%. I mean, I take what you said as a challenge in terms of having a family with kids and they do jiu-jitsu and obviously defeat you and make you miserable for your failures as a father because you couldn't- You're gonna be a great dad. Build up an army of good jiu-jitsu people. But yes, I would love a family. I would love to have children. But I just wanna finish that point because I'm nervous about it. I'm nervous about the way people perceive, what you're seeing is a Forrest Gump type character. Like who I am, I seem to be, and this is how the world seems to work, is you just try to be yourself. Like you try to find yourself, that's maybe the better way to say it, and just be that. Be kind to people. Work your ass off. And say F you to anybody that wants to control you or to tell you what to do. Just be free. And then put love out there in the world. And doors open. This karma thing seems to work. How the hell did, how the hell, my friends, as you know, how the hell did I get a chance to eat barbecue with Rick Rubin, right? Like doors- You guys had a barbecue. Yeah, I had a barbecue. He, right, of course I- He's from New York. Any New Yorker that I know has very high standards for food because bad restaurants don't last long in New York. And barbecue counts as- Oh yeah. Oh yeah, Texas barbecue. Well, you know, I would also add that you, whether or not you realize or not, you took tremendous risk. I mean, we come from the same original community, which is academic science, right? And to be at MIT and to start posting lectures online is risky, right? To, you know, I was third or fourth man in in terms of podcasting as an academic, because you had gone on Rogen many times, David Sinclair had gone on there. You know, especially before the pandemic, you just didn't see many academics and scientists talking in a public facing way. So you took tremendous risk, right? You took tremendous risk, always wearing that jacket and tie, right? The only time I haven't seen you in that truly is when we rolled jujitsu, which is, and I hear I'm being generous to myself saying I rolled jujitsu, and basically you choked me out in front of hundreds of thousands. That was really risky. It was great fun. And I- Thank you for doing that. To have a beginner's mind is a beautiful thing. I have, admittedly, I have not been taking the classes, but I'm going to, I truly am. Especially, there's a small chance I might find myself in Austin a bit more often in the near future. But the- Well, if you're out in San Francisco, you should train with Mark Zuckerberg. He just started, so. Oh yeah? You guys could- Interesting. Yeah, sure. I mean, he's actually, people listen to an episode, perhaps, he's a fascinating human being too. I listen to it, it's great. You took tremendous risk as an academic to do what you did. So I do believe that when one takes intelligent risk, because you can die, you can crash your career, you can do all sorts of self-destructive or destructive things when taking risks. You took risks and they paid off, right? And you take different risks at different stages, but I don't throw around the word admiration lightly. I mean, I admire that you were in this classroom at MIT, and you're like, I'm going to film this and put it online. One of your early interviews is with Ido Portal, who's very hard to get to. I've communicated with Ido a few times. You should definitely talk to him. I can't wait to talk to him. I'm dying to talk to him. I was supposed to do some course teaching with him right before the pandemic hit, and then it got canceled because he couldn't travel. But getting to him is exceedingly challenging. So you do have this incredible ability to get to people and for them to trust you and know you. And I think it's through your authenticity. And I think it's the fact that you're willing to go places where people haven't been before. You know, this is, what's the saying about pioneers? How do you spot the pioneers? They're the people with the arrows in their backs. You know, so that's the, you know, yeah. And that's actually a quote that I lifted from Terry Signalsky, who's a- There you go, exciting sources again. Terry's a, you should talk to Terry. He's a computational neuroscientist down at the Salk Institute, Howard Hughes investigator, et cetera. But so, you know, taking risks that other people have not taken is, that's a real thing. And to do it with integrity and rigor, that's a real thing. And so, yeah, I'm complimenting you and I hope it lands and lands deeply. But I also hope that people will hear that and understand that it's one thing to do what other people are already doing boldly. It's a whole other thing to launch an entire art form or venue, and you did that. And you didn't write a book, hopefully you will someday, but you didn't go write a book. A lot of academics have written books. You went online. Jordan Peterson, another controversial character, he did it too, all those lectures that he filmed. And then it's led to this other thing. So, you know, there's karma, and then there's also having the spine to just put it all on the line and do something for which there is no prior example to hold onto while you go through those headwinds. The really fascinating thing, and actually a lot of people tell me about you, Andrew Kuberman, like the reach of a podcast is really fascinating. It's not the numbers of people that listen. I don't know if that's important at all. What's important is the depth of connection you have with certain people. It really moves them. And they really get you. So there's a lot of big Andrew Kuberman fans that really get you. It's not just the science. It's the stuff between the lines. It's Costello. It's the whole picture of a scientist that finds beauty in biology and reveals it. And they love you for it. You know, because it was on television at the time, I followed that Amanda Knox story pretty carefully. And I don't watch television, but whenever I would travel, if there was a TV on the airplane, I would find myself getting wrapped into things like locked up abroad. And these things where they, which would make you terrified to travel anywhere, let alone commit a crime overseas. The scenes of some of these prisons are so dramatic. And, you know, I mean, her case got a ton of interest. And then, you know, she went and then was a student at the University of Washington and has talked quite openly about, you know, how she was treated and how people assume guilt. And, you know, and eventually, you know, she was exonerated and, you know, we can only go by what we know, what the law determined. But, you know, these are people that the world is fascinated by. I would, I'm guessing about a third of people have already decided this person is despicable. Why would you ever give them an audience? About a third of people I think are open to, or at least interested in learning more about them. And then I think the remaining third, kind of the third that, the category that I put myself in, which is what can I learn about people and myself, even in my revulsion, right? What can I learn? Yeah, what can I learn about myself from listening to this conversation with somebody that I like to think, I'm not talking about Amanda here, I'm talking about the other people that you were talking about, that I don't, I can't relate to, right? Talking, hearing conversations with and about people that you cannot relate to is informative. Otherwise, your whole mind literally becomes insular, right? Well, there's an interesting thing I also had to, ever since the war in Ukraine broke out, one of the questions I was asking myself, and this is not to be dramatic, it's just a very simple, honest question, that I think a lot of journalists that operate in the war zone, or documentary filmmakers that I've recently got a chance to meet, have to be honest with themselves. Are you willing to put at risk your life for things you do? What are you willing to die for? Yeah, what are you willing to die for? It sounds very dramatic. But whenever risk goes up, I mean, I don't know, you asked that if you wanna take a trip out to space on a commercial space flight. Do you have to, are you willing to die for this journey? Now, the odds there are really small. I just watched Apollo 13 again. Yeah. Great movie. Yeah, great movie. I'm not going to space. I'm not going to space. Afraid of heights? No, I'm not afraid of heights. I just, it feels like a terrible place to die. Yeah. Well, first of all, death anywhere is not great. Yeah, although, you know, I have a song teed up in my phone. If the plane starts to go down, I'm gonna spend the last few. It's a rare song, nobody knows it. It's a song off a beat track of my favorite band, which is Rancid, it's a song called The Sentence. And nobody, and I love it, and I listen to it almost every day. Rancid, The Sentence, it's called The Sentence? The band is called Rancid, they're a famous band. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I absolutely love those guys, love their music. And the song is The Sentence. You can only find it on a B-Side or Outtake. And it's, if you don't know how to decipher Tim Armstrong's voice, then you probably won't understand the lyrics, but because it's sung very, very fast. But if the plane ever goes, anytime there's turbulence, I put that thing in, I put the headphones in, I'm like, well, you know, if it's time, it's time. I'm gonna go out like this. I don't want to drift off into the galaxy, just slowly asphyxiating and freezing to death. That sounds horrible. Just like I wouldn't want to drown or burn. But on a plane is okay? Well, on a plane, I mean, like if the thing starts going down and there's truly nothing you can do, you might as well at least listen to your favorite song. Yeah, true, true. I'll probably go with the Pixies, Where's My Mind, like from Fight Club. And just the calmness, just sit back, like the musicians playing at the Titanic. I didn't know you were a Pixies fan, I'm gonna have to. Not so much a Pixies fan, actually, I should say that I just, that was the, Where's My Mind, it was the chosen song for Fight Club. At the end, when the buildings are coming down or something like that. So there's certain songs that just fit just right for the collapse of human civilization. And you're calmly appreciating, like, that that's just it. This is how absurd this life is. At any moment, it can end and this is it. This is, this is. I love how we both have Death and Demise soundtracks. It's just a question, when you're an academic, doesn't come up often. Right, well. That's all, that's, I just. Yeah, there are some academics that are bold and brave. It's not a phenotype. Being bold and brave in the physical world is not a common phenotype of academics. I mean, the great neurologist, one of my, I don't have many heroes, but Oliver Sacks is a true hero. I mean, people think of him as a writer, but he was foremost a neurologist and he took tremendous pushback from the neurology community for doing his books and his articles. He has a great biography called On the Move. There's a wonderful documentary that just came out about him. He died in 2015. I'm actually kind of a collector of his things, but he had tremendous, but he was accused of horrible things until the movie Awakenings came out with De Niro and Robin Williams. Amazing movie, by the way. People don't, they seem to not say great things about the movie. I love that movie. Amazing, and it was only once he became famous from that movie that his more academic work started to receive any kind of attention, and he was invited back to Columbia and NYU. Yeah, the New York neuroscience mafia is a real thing, and yes, you know who you are, and some of them are actually coming on the podcast. They are- I think we talked offline about this. We should start a mafia to fight off whatever's going on in the East Coast, although I'm still at MIT, so I don't know how that works, but Boston is different than New York. Yeah, so I have tremendous respect for science done in New York. Don't get me wrong. They are excellent scientists. It's just a very different culture than on the West Coast, and the personalities- The personalities- Tremendous respect for the mob. Well, and the personalities are a bit more grandiose. However, because of some of the shift in science culture in the last few years, things around scandals and things of that sort, they've been forced to tamp down some of their personality, or at least their outspoken personality, and I actually think it's revealed something really important and useful in science, which is it used to be the case you could really inject your personality into what you do. Richard Feynman's a good example. If he did today what he did then, bongo drumming on the roof of Caltech naked, working out theorems in strip clubs and things like that, he would have lost his job in moments, right? So that kind of behavior isn't celebrated anymore. It's actually punished, and I'm only half kidding about this New York neuroscience mafia, but because I now exist in multiple realms, I can say these sorts of things, and again, admiration and respect, but I will say that I think it's important that people in science and kids that are curious about science understand that you can have any personality, provided that you're ethical and respectful in science, and do well, right? There are true bench scientists that just want to be at the bench. There are people that just want to be in their office. There are people that really enjoy public speaking, and there are people that love meetings, and there are people that hate crowds, and so there's a place for everybody, truly a place for everybody in science. I would like to be able to shine light on the fact that you can have a shy personality, an outgoing personality, and all of those can have excellent careers in science, but you have to find the community and place that's right for you. One reason I like Stanford is that Stanford is very much about the future. We have Nobel Prize winners, we have field medal winners and all that stuff, and their names are on walls, and we acknowledge their great works, but most of what you hear about in the halls of Stanford is about what's happening now and what could happen next. It's really about the future, whereas when I've spent time at other institutions not to be named, you hear that, but there's a lot of kind of recycling and regurgitation of how wonderful people are based on things they did previously. And the students at Stanford, because of Silicon Valley, sure, they have respect for Nobel Prizes, they're delighted to be learning from and surrounded by all these great minds, but they're mostly interested in what they're gonna create. And so I kind of, not kind of, I really like the shift toward possibility as opposed to things that are steeped in tradition. You know, I've never been to high table dinner at Oxford. I'm sure it's a wonderful experience. I'm also not sure what purpose it serves for the world, but I've never been, and so I don't know what the conversations are, and so maybe I'm, you know, speaking out of line here. And now I'm definitely not getting invited. No. You're definitely getting invited. But yeah, I'm with you. The culture's picked the right ones for you. That's why I like MIT, the spirit of it. To me, it's not about the past or the future. It's about just tinkering and having fun, building cool stuff. Like the big ambitious projects, it's there. I mean, maybe more in the biology and the health side, but like the engineering side, it doesn't matter if this has any impact. Let us build the coolest thing the world has ever built. Well, there, whenever I'm in Kendall Square, I've seen, they have those buildings there that actually tilt toward the ground. These are these, the architecture of MIT is also really impressive. Yeah, this, he pulled up, Sergey just pulled up Yilmaz's tweet. I'm inspired by curiosity. That is what drives me. So let us expand the scope and scale of consciousness so that we may aspire to understand the universe. Those are like three tweets in one, but curiosity, yeah, yeah, curiosity for its own sake. What's that saying? I think Dorothy Parker said, the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. And you need to celebrate. So let me just briefly mention to my lovely friends at MIT to celebrate different weirdness, to celebrate the weird characters. I've, I sometimes get loving pressure from my lovely friends at MIT to tone down the weirdness a bit. Really, even from MIT? I'm very fortunate to have a lot of leverage to where I have completely resist the pressure, but I'm very sure that there's young faculty that with that subtle pressure would- Dissolve them into a puddle of tears. Not, no, no. Are they from Boston, excuse me. From Boston, that's right. They're tougher than that. That's right, but it's a slight nudging towards conformity that I think ultimately destroys or at least lessens the power of the kind of science that you can do when you encourage diversity, diversity in all of its forms, including the weirdness of ideas, the out-of-the-box thinkers, including the flamboyant behavior online, how you choose to educate, how you choose to inspire. You know, people talk about freedom of speech, but it's not just like freedom of speech to say controversial things. It's also freedom of speech to be weird. Like if you're for some reason fascinated in, like you look at Elon Musk, he talks about sex a lot. Let the guy put sex memes up. Who cares? I mean, I feel like Elon can do basically whatever he wants. Right, there's no pressure, but there's a bunch of Elons in the academic world. There's a bunch of El- No, actually, sorry, let me backtrack because the man deserves props. Right, he's unparalleled. He's a CEO of major companies. You better believe there's pressure to behave more like a CEO as opposed to a giggling schoolboy who's posting memes throughout the night, but that is him and that freedom, that's what freedom looks like. I talked to a lot of CEOs and a lot of them feel like caged birds who have long ago forgotten how to sing, quite honestly. Like there's like shareholders and they come up with excuses for themselves. Here's why I have to be this way. You have to understand, so on. There's PR, there's marketing people, there's lawyers, there's all that kind of stuff. But the final result is the authenticity suffocated. The beautiful weirdness of a CEO, of a leader, of a creator, of a scientist, all that, that's all gone. Well, Steve Jobs wouldn't have kept his job and acting the way he did in his 20s and 30s in today's climate, but he probably would have updated his protocols, so to speak. A little bit, but maybe- You know, he's screaming at employees. I mean, these are anecdotes, right? I call them anic-data because people treat them as data, but they're really just anecdotes. We don't know, I wasn't there. But I like the idea of authenticity without oversharing. Right, you're very authentic, but there are aspects to your life that I'm aware of that your audiences will never be aware of, and there are aspects of your life that I'll never be aware of. And so you're still authentic, but- Yeah, which, wait, which ones are you aware of? People are gonna wonder, like, what is- You think I'm gonna trip- Is he at a sex dungeon? What is this? No, no, no. But interesting choice of examples. No, but I think that, you know, people lose the careers on the basis of the movement of their thumbs, right? I mean, the chair of psychiatry at Columbia recently lost his position based on a response to a tweet. People can look that up. This is one of the most famous psychiatry departments in the world. And he put something out there that was very insensitive, frankly. And everyone that I talked to about it was like, gosh, that was very, very insensitive, not thoughtful at all, and he lost his job, right? Or at least had to step down. I don't know the specifics. So, you know, I think I read someplace that more than half of the job loss due to online behavior is because people were trying to be funny, right? I mean, not everyone can pull off what Tim Dillon... Oh, and by the way, congratulations. I heard that you and Tim just got married. Yeah, I saw that. No, no, we didn't just get married. Engaged. He proposed. Got it, got it, got it. And I said yes. Right, so some people can get away. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Sergey, has that ready to go. See those 13.3 thousand likes? One of those is mine. So for people who are not aware, one of the days in April tweeted that Tim Dillon asked me to get married, and I said yes. I think Tim said, the wedding will be on 6th Street in Austin. Bring all of your weapons, which of course is totally inappropriate. This is... This is... I was funny. He's a comedian. I was like PG funny, and he's goes rated R funny right away. But that said, I mean, if there's anyone I would like to get married with, it's that guy. And we would do it in Austin, and it would be epic. It would be like the wedding from November Rain. One of the... Mr. and Mrs. Oh, wow. Oh, Mr. and Mr., I apologize. Wow, yeah, and you broke tradition with the jacket color. So it sounds to me that you are a free speech absolutist. I think freedom is really important, and that includes letting people who are hateful, letting people who are controversial have a voice on platforms. But it becomes... I'm not sure what exactly to think, because I also treasure the quiet voices in the back of the room. And sometimes the assholes silence those voices, meaning by being loud and obnoxious and so on, it pushes away the thoughtful people. So I'm also a fan of creating communities. Like you should be able to let people kind of build a community that's positive, that's loving, or that's constantly trolling, or that's super hateful. All those communities should have a place in the world. But the thing I've noticed is that hate can destroy, a community full of hate can destroy a community full of love easier than a community full of love can overtake one with hate. And so you have to kind of, I don't know exactly how, but create digital mechanisms that discourage the collision of these communities. They should all have a platform and ability to speak to a large audience. But you have to be careful to protect that little flame of connection that people have. Yeah, that's the goodness, it sounds like. I mean, yeah, I think in any great city, like New York, which I love, by the way, you want to have a symphony and an opera house and you want some punk rock shows happening on the Lower East Side. You want all of that. You just don't necessarily want them to overlap. In terms of social media, and then podcasts and engagement, one thing that I decided very early on is was to encourage comments and feedback, et cetera. But I have in my mind what I call classroom rules. You've taught in the university and then you teach in the university and you establish a certain etiquette within the classroom of the kinds of questions that you'll tolerate, right? So there's always the student that's gonna ask a question, which is basically a 10-minute monologue about their experience that really isn't a question that pertains to a lot of people. So you politely discourage that kind of question and you encourage the kinds of questions that are likely to be in the minds of many other students. It's just more efficient that way. Or not politely, which is more. You know, I try and respond to comments and I try and respond, but also, you know, there's this also this really interesting question now. If you block people or restrict people, people think that you're somehow afraid of the information that they're posting, but that's often not the case. I'm not in the habit of blocking or restricting too many people. Occasionally we've had to do it only because of how other people are being treated in the comment section. What I can take and what I think other people deserve to take are two completely different things. David Gollians, right, who we both know well, I don't know if he still does this, but a few years ago he posted something like, if people ask him, when do you sleep, he would just block them. Because it wasn't consistent with what he was trying to say. Of course he sleeps, but it's, you know, he's trying to get a particular message out. I think people should just understand that everybody's page is their own to moderate, right? Just like in a classroom, there are certain rules of course of institution, but then you establish the etiquette within the context of the kind of class, you know, a class about personality psychology or the psychology of love, you're going to have a very different range of conversations than a class on membrane physiology. So I think social media is a great place for conversation, but it's not necessarily a great place for every kind of conversation. Yeah, and I also should say that people that do get blocked, I never, this is something I do very deliberately, blocked or ignored, I never think poorly of them. I actually explicitly think, if there's somebody that's saying hateful things about me or whatever, I always think positive thoughts. It's not some kind of weird guru thing, but just actually found that as a hack. I think well of them, and that allows me to never think of them again. Like I send them my love, and like I think this is a fascinating human being with a fascinating story. I would love to have time to actually learn about their story, but there's not enough time in the world. And I just think well of them, and then I move on and enjoy a delicious meal with people that are close to me and I love and so on. And I just, I move on. And never adding to the negativity of like, just even in the privacy of my own mind, thinking a hateful thought towards them. It serves no purpose whatsoever. Yeah, I love that about you. And I know that what you just said to be true. One of the, I think more toxic things in life is what's called, you know, evacutive projection. When people feel something and they try and evacuate it and project it onto somebody else. Projection is fascinating, right? What you essentially just said is that you don't accept projections, in fact, you transmute them to put in the language of the Buddhists, you know, you transmute it into positivity. And in that way, you truly neutralize it and transmute it. I think that if people were better understood when they were experiencing or observing evacutive projection, the world would be a much healthier and happier place. But it requires a certain stable internal rudder. And, you know, when we're tired or sick or angry, you know, we are hungry, excessively hungry, all of us are less good at it. I've been positively struck by the nature of most of the interactions, not just feedback, but my favorite thing as an educator in the classroom, but also on social media, my absolute favorite thing is when the comments about other people's comments are positively reinforcing. So you see people having conversations within the comments and you realize this is like, as an educator, again, you know, it's fun to teach and it's fun to talk to the students, but the real pleasure is in walking by a small group of students on campus and hearing them talking about the material. That just fills me with joy. And because what it means is that the ideas are reverberating in their nervous systems and will eventually wick out to others. So it's not just about feedback, it's about a venue for parsing information. So you actually posted that we're gonna talk on Instagram and I collected a bunch of the questions, which reminds me of, I have to mention Mike Jones and a question he asked, but also a gift he gave quite a while ago, if it's okay. But first, quick bathroom break. Yes. We're looking at Instagram page of Mike Jones, knife and tool, you should check it out. Andrew gave me a gift from him that is a badass butcher knife, yours is the earth, dot, dot, dot. It's from if by a Russia Kipling. Yeah, the story of this knife is kind of interesting perhaps to people where it was, I was coming out here to Austin to meet with Lex and it was his birthday. I wanna get him a gift, but I didn't know what to get him. And I contacted this guy, Mike Jones, that I learned about through Joe Rogan, because the first, remember in the old days of Joe Rogan, when you go on the episode afterwards, you take a picture with an object. So it was like Elon with a flamethrower, people would have the ax. I picked up this Bushwhacker hatchet thing. And I was like, I love this thing. And Joe said, oh yeah, you should check out Mike Jones's work, he does these beautiful knives. And so then I heard your episode with Joe and you recited a poem at the end. It was right after your grandmother died. And there's a line in that poem from If that Mike engraved on that knife for you. So he makes these by hand. I love, there it is, the old days of Joe Rogan. Before the podcast and all that. That's his first appearance. That was the first time on there. And it was a lot of fun in the old studio in Los Angeles. And yeah, Mike makes these beautiful knives. And I have this, I just have great admiration for crafts people. So do you use it? Do you cut your one meal a day steaks with it? I feel. Are you taking it with you on your travels? Exactly. I actually used to keep it on the table, but I thought it really intimidates guests. A little bit. But like. You can put it on their side. Yeah. Right. It's like oops. It's trust, right? What's the story? I mean, yeah. But it's because it's not, it's quite badass, if I may say. So the craftsmanship is obvious, but also it is a knife. It's got some like Dexter-like qualities to it. Yeah. It looks like it's designed to cleave through a limb. If I had like a family or something where people, there's nothing about this place that softens your kind of sense that this person might not murder me. Let's put it differently. This place could use a woman's touch. That's one way to put it. If it's okay, let me, because it is a poem I go to often, actually. You mentioned reciting some lyrics, and I'm actually gonna go back to that at some point to get a few songs that touch you. But this is one of the things I go to often. I'll read it to remind myself. It's advice from a father to son, and it's a kind of mantra that it's just nice to live by. So if it's okay, let me just use this opportunity one more time, read If by Roger Kipling. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too, if you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about, don't deal in lies, or being hated, don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise, if you can dream and not make dreams your master, if you can think and not make thoughts your aim, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same, if you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken, and stoop and build them up with worn out tools, if you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it all on one turn of pitch and toss, and lose and start again at your beginnings, and never breathe a word about your loss, if you can force your heart to nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they're gone, and so hold on when there's nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, I like this one, and walk with kings nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you but none too much, if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and which is more, you'll be a man, my son. Thank you, Andrew, thank you, thank you, Mike, for the knife, it's a, I don't know. It's an important call. It's beautiful, and engraved in it, yeah, it's yours. Yours is the earth and everything that's in it. We toiled over what to engrave, and then finally I just said, Mike, just pick something that speaks to you, you're the craftsman, and so he selected that. There's certain ways to pull yourself in that book. Actually, Carl Dyseroth, he wrote the book Projections. One of my favorites, first of all, just as you said, incredible writer. Just, I mean, if you wrote fiction, if you wrote those kinds of things, I'm curious to see where he goes with his writing. It's very interesting. I think that book took him 10 years to write, which is vindication for me and for you, because we're both supposed to write books, and we haven't done it. Yeah, I mean, in some sense, your first book will have decades in it, right? Even if you just take half a year to write it. It's like the first book, like the first album for a musician, I mean, it's a journey. But he uses poems and quotes in there really well. It's a beautiful book. It's a dreamy book. I think when people hear that it's a book about neuroscience, they think they're gonna get a textbook or a protocols book or something. It's nothing like that, but it really is a deep dive into the mind of the psychiatrist and the researcher, and so much feeling and compassion. I love that you love poetry. I mean, I didn't know that until I saw you on Rogan Read If, and I'm not a very rabid consumer of poetry, but I'm a big Wendell Berry fan, and I try and read a poem once every few days. Also, I think If is a tough act to follow. Oh, yeah. You know? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the richness, and I mean, you said every third line in there is something that you'd consider your life well-lived if you said that, right? What about the preparation for the solo podcast? You said you listen to certain songs, you sing or recite the lyrics to certain songs. Is there ones that kinda come to mind that are interesting? Yeah, I've always been very lyrics-driven, and I don't understand music. I've talked to Rick about this. I think I've talked to you about this a little bit. I don't really understand. I mean, I can hear music and like it, but I don't really understand the structure of it, but lyrics make a lot of sense to me. But does it touch your soul, music, or is it the lyrics? It's the lyrics. It's not the instrumentals. So I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan, and I'm gonna lose punk points for saying this, but I'm not a Clash fan. Oh, okay. So he obviously is best known for the Clash. Most Clash songs start off great, and then after about 30 seconds, at least in my mind, just kind of disintegrate into a bunch of mush. Whereas Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, which is what he did as an adult, later, and some of his solo work, he actually, Rick produced some work that he did with Johnny Cash. Rick pulled Johnny Cash out of, essentially out of retirement and had him do his albums before he died. And so anything that Strummer did, there's a favorite song of mine by Strummer. It's called Burning Lights. You can find it, there is an album now where you can find it, or Tennessee Rain, or some of these things that he did, which are a little bit more folky, so not really punk. So I love that song. Bunch of songs by Rancid that I love. And then if I listen to instrumentals, I do, I'll listen to classical piano. Some dreams are made for children. But it's not gonna sound good as a poem. They can play the, people can play the song. Play the song, okay. Yeah, so I'll, I mean, cause it has to be sung, Joe's voice is what makes the song. Got it. Joe's voice is what makes the song. But yeah, that song, Burning Lights, from I Hired a Contract Killer. I don't know, the lyrics are pretty good. They're pretty good. I mean, Joe is an amazing writer, right? I'm a, you know, I'm also a big Bob Dylan fan. Glenn Gould for classical piano. He was at Asperger's, you know, and actually I think you can hear him grunting. He had a Tourette's-like tick. And I learned about Glenn Gould from Oliver Sacks. So I'll listen to any number of things. It depends on my mood. If I'm feeling a little more tired and I need to be amped up, I'll listen to something that's a little louder and faster. If I'm feeling kind of keyed up and I need to bring the cadence down a little bit, then I'll listen to something a little mellower, poppier. I love bands like, yeah, I'm a big fan of this British pop band called James. There's like 20 bands named James, but this one, you know, and again, I lose punk points for saying that, but they're amazing. And Best Live- I think you've accumulated enough points where you can afford to lose a few. Yeah. But in any case, yeah, music and poetry are, they're the subconscious, right? I mean, if you think about a Bob Dylan song or a really good Strummer song or a poem, that the words don't mean anything when read linearly, but they make you feel something, they're tapping into the subconscious. That's really what they're doing. They're pulling on neural threads of emotion based on either timbre or cadence or something that's independent of the word structure. And that to me is the beauty of music and poetry. I often say Johnny Cash's version of Hurt. That I say would be my favorite song ever. Well, he did a Nine Inch Nails song. He did, he covered- I think Rick produced that. He produced that. Pretty sure he produced that. Yeah, he produced it. I mean, he did, like Rick produced the, he pulled Johnny Cash out from a dark place to produce something that, I mean, when you look back is one of the great things ever in music, which are these like haunting covers of certain songs and originals. Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer did a version of Redemption Song together that Rick produced, which is on loop in my house sometimes, for hours and hours. That song is fascinating. Bob Marley's song. Sung by Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer. Sometimes I think what it would be to be a fly on the wall when these guys were doing this stuff. These songs of freedom. There's certain songs where you're like, it elicit an emotion that's unlike anything else. I mean, I was trying to figure that out with Rick too. Like there's certain songs that make you want to pull out over to the side of the road and just weep or just get inspired to just get shit done or all of those kinds of things. Remember your family, the people you've lost, all that kind of stuff. And you hurt, I hurt myself today to see if I still feel. There's certain songs that I've loved so much that I actually won't play them during a relationship until the relationship passes a certain duration. Because if you start sharing in those experiences with somebody and it starts to become associated with the relationship, you braiding it in with the dopamine of love and that relationship ends, the song is forever tainted. There are certain songs that I will never play in the company of anybody else. They're mine. It's too risky to give those up. I love it. And I think that- There's like levels. There are levels, right. Exactly. We'll leave it at that. Yeah, and the interesting thing about this kind of preparing for the solo episode, just interacting with Rick about that process of preparation. Because you mentioned with interviews, by the way, are you do solo, solo? Are you the only one in the room? No, well, it used to be Rob, my producer, who I should say, he's really the person behind the podcast. I mean, first of all, we're equal partners. You're just a pretty face. We're just, and I'm aging, man. Not to, I actually really- It's fading. I like aging. It's weird. A lot of people, like friends with David Sinclair, and it's all about not aging. I don't want to live past 90, 95. I'm just trying to get as much done as I can in this short life and do it right and with integrity and heart and accuracy. And you like the stages. Oh yeah. If you read Erickson's stages of development, you realize that every stage of life is a set of neural circuits trying to resolve a problem. And if you're going to try and avoid that progression, sure, you might live longer, but it's sort of like saying, do you want to go win the high school jujitsu championship? No, you graduated high school a long time ago, right? So I actually look forward to the future, even if it means that I'm starting to shift. I think that my biology will shift. I'll fight that. I try and take good care of myself, but I don't want to get sick. I don't want to suffer. Who does? But I'm embracing this whole developmental arc. I mean, we're not children and then adults. Our entire life is one long developmental arc. And if you fail to embrace that, you fail to extract the richness of what it is to be a human being. So in any event, I record, Rob is in the room. I'll sometimes stop and ask him for feedback if I feel like something's not landing right. So he gives, if it's clear, he'll let me know. If it's not clear, he'll let me know, excuse me. And then Costello used to be in the room. The early days of the podcast, which weren't that long ago, he's snoring at my feet and farting and smelling up the room. And we're all just kind of like gasping for air. He's a bulldog. That's what they do. With him gone, it changed. The whole thing changed. There will be another dog soon. And as you know, I've been moving through that grief process but having him there gave me a levity that I miss. But in my mind, he's still there. Yeah, he's still there. Yeah, he's still there. So, and in time there'll be another dog and who knows, maybe there'll be a dog and a couple of infants running around, but that would be more distracting. But there's no podcast that exists just because of the podcaster. This is true for Joe, this is true for your podcast, for me, it's not just a staff of people to post stuff. That's just the top level contour. There's the constant feedback and iteration of what you want it to become and trying to hold on to something that's essential along the way. Because everything has to evolve, but you can't lose the essence of something. Anytime a company or brand or a course or a scientist has done that, it just ends up terrible. It just is a, you know, it becomes like a cenotaph version of itself. So to Rick, the power of the people in the room is great to inspire and to destroy. So you have to be extremely careful with the selection of people that are in the room. To me, I never really thought of it that way. I thought only positive things could happen. Oh, by adding people in the room. By adding people in the room. Oh, I think if there were an audience in the room, well, you know what, someday I'd love to do a live podcast with you. I saw you doing like a couple of live things, which is great that you're paving the way there to- Well, we did one. I went up to University of British Columbia and did a lecture on a college campus. And one of the more gratifying things that happens, this kid, he's in his early 20s, I think, stood up and said, you know, I've never been on a college campus. I didn't think I could go onto a college campus. And that still rings in my mind. Whoever you are out there, that meant so much to me. Cause I was like, yes. There was something about that to me. I was like, okay, this, it made sense to come all the way up here and do this in person. Cause you can get out to a lot more people online. Public speaking events, it's not like it's that lucrative or anything. I mean, unless you're, whatever, you're a famous celebrity or politician or something. I'm sure there are people that do well with it, but that's not what it's about for us. It's really about being able to connect with people in a different venue and for interactions like that. I don't know how many of them we will do, but I'm curious to see how it goes. But I'd love to do a podcast with you. Is it energizing? My fear is the fear of the introvert, is that I don't know if I can handle so much love and fascinating people all around. It's like, I don't know. Well, we'll invite a few haters too. Well, yes, but I love the haters too. But I don't know. It makes me nervous. Cause Jordan Peterson's currently on tour. I got a chance to hang out with him when he was here. He does a lot of live speaking. Yeah, he's now on tour where he does every other day. But he doesn't have any small kids at home anymore. So you can do that. So yeah, you should do it before you have a family. That's also exhausting. I mean, I'm just speaking from an athlete perspective. If you're Mick Jagger with the Rolling Stones, it's just physically, I mean, you have to speak potentially for two hours, then off stage, like hanging out with people. It's a lot of hours. It's a lot of hours to stay focused, to keep finding your place of like calmness and excitement. Well, and you're staying in hotels, your circadian rhythm's disrupted. You're not getting your like cold and sauna and your workout every day. Your food isn't optimal. I think done in patches, I could enjoy it. Cause it's fun to meet people from different places. I'm doing a public lecture in Copenhagen for the Lundbeck Foundation in June, June 3rd. And that one is particularly gratifying for me because the Lundbeck Foundation is an academic foundation. So the fact that, and then, so when they invited, I asked, do you want me to talk about what my lab does or do you want me to talk about the stuff on the podcast? They're like, no, no, not your lab. We want to hear about this like health stuff and the stuff that we cover on the podcast. So that was amusing to me and tells me that, things are changing now. I think 2020 and 2021 revealed a lot of things about people to ourselves. But one thing that it made very clear is that there's an enormous appetite for tools for mental and physical health, but also understanding about science and how science is done. So thanks to you, again, I'm not saying this to flatter you, it's true gratitude. There's now a runway for scientists to talk to people. I mean, you had the, I always forget this guy's name, the virus guy from Columbia. Vincenzo Racaniello. Yeah, amazing, right? I mean, forgetting the controversy around all the stuff of 2020, 2021. I mean, he is an encyclopedia of all things virology. Yeah, people should listen to his podcast this week in virology. He's also an incredible lecturer and educator. It's fascinating. It's fascinating when people take, again, that leap of putting all that education online. That's non-controversial at all. It's like everybody, people should go listen to him for the most part in terms of, at his best, at least, there's no politics in it. There's none of that. No, he's a virus jockey. He likes playing around with bacteria and viruses and- But that said, we all say- Molecular biology. We all say stuff carelessly all the time. So he gets in a bit of trouble on some of the things he's said about dismissing lab leak theory. Like, there's no way. He dismisses that? Yeah, but he's not making, like, folks, there's a difference when you say stuff like off the cuff and when you say stuff that's like core to your principles and you've thought about it for a very long time. You're talking for hundreds of hours and you can just say stuff. You can just say your opinions. Will Smith slapped me. I was wondering, okay, wait, how long have we been recording? I was wondering how long it was gonna take us before someone brought up- We talked about Ukraine. No, no, Will Smith. I was wondering whether or not we'd make it the, I had it planned. I was literally in the back of my mind. I had it planned that at the end, if we didn't talk about the Will Smith, Chris Rock thing, that I was gonna say, it's amazing. This is the first conversation to happen in a long time where it wasn't mentioned. Oh, no. I'm thinking. No, not pulling. We don't need to see. We don't need to see. Here we go. It revealed some interesting things about human beings' impulse control and lack thereof. But, you know, oh my goodness. Chris Rock has material for the rest of his career. Yeah, I think he's not short on material. But I do, see, if I knew what I, I wanted to tweet, if I knew you're allowed to just slouch comedians, my conversation with Tim Dillon would have gone very differently. People just being humans. There's so much fascinating human nature on display there. It's also, in terms of it becoming a topic that a lot of people are talking about versus the war in Ukraine, for example, is also fascinating to watch. Like, just these kind of news cycles moving through. I think, if I may, I'm sorry to interrupt, but, you know, anytime we observe something very limbic, very emotional, you know, we generally can empathize somewhat, right? We all know what it's like to feel angry. We all know what it's like to feel ashamed. We all know what it's like to feel shocked. Images of war are, for most people, very hard to relate to. We see it, it's, you know, they're these images and they're very traumatic and challenging to look at at times, and yet, most people have no idea what it feels like to be shot at or what it feels like to have your home destroyed or what it feels like to be an aggressor in that way. So it's very, so I think that people naturally orient towards things that feel familiar to them, even though the circumstances are different. And people also forget, they look at these celebrities, it's just like looking at criticism of Will Smith. You forget that they're human, too. That's one of the most surprising things for me, having done this podcast and met celebrities and stuff like that. They're human, they're all human. And that's inspiring to me, like some of these great folks that have won Nobel Prizes and built some cool things, they're just human, like the rest of us. Well, and if you look at actors and actresses, I mean, there's some amazing ones, right? And who also do well in their outside life, but their careers were built on the business of pretending to be other people. And that's got to distort, maybe positively, but also just, let's be honest, what it is that the neuroplasticity there, the changes in the areas of the brain that represent personality, have to be quite different for somebody who pretends to be lots of different personalities and gets paid for it. You're working the reward system into the system of self-identity. And you have to imagine that that can really contort somebody's neurology in ways that maybe they are not as, maybe they are not in touch with reality in the same way that we are. Remember earlier, we're talking about neurotic versus psychotic. They may be more borderline in their kind of ground state than we think. And so I'm actually impressed anytime there's a celebrity who doesn't have a messed up life. I'm like, oh, wow, finally somebody who's managed to maintain some semblance, at least from the outside, of normalcy. So first of all, I can empathize with the actions that Will Smith did, right? They're not, I think they're kind of, not kind of, they're just shitty. You should probably talk privately, man to man. Not, because otherwise it's like a dramatic display. It's almost like you are a fake, you're acting. Well, there are all these questions, right? I mean, obviously it was aggressive at some level. There's this question of whether or not it was impulsive. I think most people feel yes. There's a question, there was the protective nature of it because he was doing it to, you know, in it apparently to in defense. But then there's also the context. He lost touch with the context, right? Whereas Chris Rock basically gets, there's the possible critique that he went too far. That's gonna be in the eye of the beholder. But then, and depending on how you view comedy and jokes, but then there's also the fact that he took that slap and then just snapped right back, so much so that people thought maybe it was fake. He also waited with his hands behind his back. That's just natural. He likes to stand like that. I mean, I gotta tell a little bit of a story here to connect to what Chris Rock did. Like I wish, what Chris Rock did in terms of just taking a slap and keep going, first of all, just props for somebody that's able to maintain cool in that situation for the most part. I think I'd like watched it once. You only have to be alive on this planet to see it. You can't avoid seeing it. I wish at that afterwards, he would sort of say something loving and kind to Will Smith and his wife and then hit him real hard. Lean into the joke. But I think in hockey, they call it taking a number. I have a friend who plays hockey, and there's this idea that if someone checks you really badly in one game, you don't go and check them again. You don't get into a fight. But three games later, you blade them in the shin. The ability to defer and to handle it in whatever fashion one feels is appropriate. They're probably also friends and all those kinds of things that they respect each other, so he probably didn't. But there's a comedian instinct. I saw this, I was at an open mic here in Texas. I won't say where. There's many open mics in Austin. We've gone to a few of these. These are pretty fun. No, so there is more sort of rougher kind of. Yeah, you've been hanging out in like West Texas. Yeah, exactly. Austin's too tame for Lex, so he's like head to West Texas. Exactly. I put on a cowboy hat and instantly I became a cowboy. I've been talking like a cowboy. I mean, I belong out there in the desert. He's gone from eating meat and athletic greens to rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes, right. No, there was a open mic. It was late at night, and I was one of the only people in the audience. There's a couple of drunk folks, a few drunk folks. One of them was a couple, like bikers, with helmets and so on, a guy and a girl. And then the comedian, the open mic comedian, did a joke about people who wear helmets. I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but he did the joke. And then the guy about women who wear helmets. And the guy, it's this exact same situation. The guy stood up, walked up to him. There was no slap. It's so interesting, because this happened before the Will Smith thing. So he walked up to the comedian and said, I think he pointed his finger down and told him to stop or something like that, and then sat down. This is an audience of like six people. At midnight around then, there's nobody, no security, nothing. In Texas. In Texas. Which implies. Oh, then this guy was the energy, drunk but also a biker, and what he felt, his lady was now attacked by the comedian, right, with his words. And this, and the comedian was a kind of out of shape, small guy, so he's not threatening at all, and probably in trouble. And the comedian, after he sat down, he looked a little bit scared. He paced back and forth. And then he did the joke again. Wow. And I was sitting, and I started, I leaned back and I just did this, like. Because that is comedy. And the guy was getting angrier and angrier, and he just sat there. And the comedian went on for a couple more minutes and then did another bad joke, but another joke about him. It's just like he leaned into it. If you go to a small comedy club, open a mic or otherwise, you're in the shooting gallery. Like you're basically there, teed up as a pin to get it. We went and saw Andrew Scholls in San Francisco. In San Francisco? Yeah, it was hilarious. It was amazing. I mean, he's just masterful in his ability to command an audience. But I felt for the people up front, but no sympathy either, because you buy tickets to sit up front at a Scholls show, you're gonna get it. But he was very loving. Yeah, and funny, first of all, funny. The funniness really helps you, but the ethic of the comedian is that fearlessness. What I really liked is the danger, there's risk to comedy, and there's also consequences. Have you watched that show, what is it, the Marvelous Miss Maisel show? It's really good. I watched a few of them, guilty pleasure there. She plays a comic in the, I think it's the mid-1960s in New York, and there's a character that somewhat resembles Lenny Bruce. It's sort of meant to be Lenny Bruce. And they're always getting arrested, and this kind of thing. I think I learned about it from Joe. Anyway, the writing's great, it's very funny. But yeah, comedy's designed to push boundaries, right? And to say the thing that other people aren't, feel they can't say. Not something in science, right? Science, you're supposed to, etiquette is a big part of how you communicate ideas. It's about constraining communication. This is something, I mean, I confess on the podcast, in the goals of making it clear, interesting, surprising, and actionable, you have to constrain the amount and the style of information. Otherwise, it becomes something else altogether, right? I saw Sander Parchai, Google's CEO, said that he likes the thing you mentioned. Not the Yoga Nidra, but the NSDR, Non-Sleep Deep Rest podcast, over meditation. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah, I saw that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why, what do you think that is? What do you think the difference is? Yeah, so Non-Sleep Deep Rest, NSDR, is an acronym that I coined because it encompasses a lot of practices that are not meditation per se, but that bring the brain and body into a state of relaxation and focus. So hypnosis is one variant of NSDR. There are other variants of NSDR. You can just look these up and you'll find them. And I think that they've caught on, and that the CEO of Google is an avid practitioner of NSDR because it has this amazing ability to reset your energy levels and focus, whereas with meditation, many people find meditation hard. And part of the reason they find it hard is that it requires focus. NSDR is a state which is very calm and relaxing. You don't have to work too hard. You're just listening to a script, whereas most forms of meditation, not all, but most forms of meditation involve cranking up the activity in your prefrontal cortex and trying to see your thoughts as opposed to thinking your thoughts, or focus on your breath, but then third-personing yourself in some respect. And that's work. And so many people who meditate quite intensely feel more exhausted. Now, that doesn't mean that meditation doesn't have any utility, but it's distinctly different than NSDR. And I think that people are working, certainly the CEO of Google, I have to imagine, is working very hard and using his forebrain. If he's gonna have 20 or 30 minutes to take a break, he should, and I think this is what he's doing, he should go out for a jog and not listen to anything and just kind of let his mind wander, or sit there in a chair and just zone out, or do NSDR. The problem is people are not that good at shifting states. We are all actually pretty good at, even people with severe ADHD, we had an episode about this, can become hyper-focused on things that they actually enjoy because dope and most of the drugs designed to treat ADHD are drugs that increase the levels of dopamine. So when you like something, there's dopamine release and you can focus. It's when you don't like something that's hard to focus, shifting states is hard. I'm sure you've experienced this if you've ever been in deep research or podcasting, podcasting, and then all of a sudden you go for a run, you probably spend the first third of that run thinking. And then in the middle third, you're kind of, that thinking is fractured a bit. And then in the final third is where you finally get to relax because the brain doesn't shift states very quickly. We can go from sleep to wakefulness quickly. We can go from wakefulness to sleep quickly, but we don't shift between different states of consciousness like a step function, except in rare cases, right? Fear is one. All of a sudden we hear an explosion right now, it's a step function. We're in fear or we're in alertness, right? Heightened state of alertness. But NSDR is terrific at allowing people to learn to shift their state. And I actually would venture to argue that part of the value of meditation and exercise is the actual state that you get into in deep meditation or exercise. But just as valuable is the transition that you have to take yourself through from one state of mind to the other and then back again. When I look, David Goggins, he always seems to come up, but he, because he represents so many important things, drive, determination, override of emotional state, going from being a 300 pound plus person to a fit person through, he's never revealed anything substantial about what he ate or what he didn't eat. He's basically says like, listen, run a lot, eat less. But what's remarkable is so much of what he says is about those transitions, about taking oneself from a state of, I don't want to, to scruffing oneself and like, you're gonna do it anyway. And then being able to carry that into regular life, so to speak. So I think that NSDR is immensely powerful. It's zero cost. And one of the reasons I'm such a fan of people doing it is that most people don't stick to a meditation practice. There are also been a few cases, you might find this interesting. There's a book by Scott Carney. I forget what it's called. I think it's called the Transcendence Trap or something. I'm gonna have that title wrong. But there have been a fair number of cases of people that go and do very extensive meditation, silent meditation retreats, who then return to normal life and end up killing themselves. There are states of mind inside of extended meditations or silent meditations that are very beneficial. And I'm certainly not suggesting people don't meditate, but I know at least one person who came back from one of these long extended meditation retreats and wasn't able to shift their state back into one that was functional in regular life. And that book includes a very dramatic story. I don't want to give it away in case people check out the book. But Scott told the story to me directly once, where someone feels they've reached enlightenment and then commits suicide. So these very unusual brain states are potentially hazardous if people can't return from them. So it's nice to focus not on those brains states, but instead on the shifting. Right. I do, this morning I woke up a little bit earlier than I would have liked. I use this Reverie app that's research backed, reveri.com. There's a free version of it and, or you can try it for free. So I feel comfortable. That's for hypnosis? For hypnosis. And I do a self hypnosis to put me back into sleep. And if I can't sleep, just put me into a state of deep relaxation. I would put hypnosis under the category of NSDR, yoga nidra under the category of NSDR. There are now some NSDR scripts online. If you just go to YouTube that are, you can just listen to and. Do you like those? I do. Yeah, I think the one from Made For is quite good. I have an affiliation with them, but it's free. So I feel comfortable mentioning it. I do, I really like the Reverie app. I can very, and as the more you do them, the more quickly you can shift your brain into a state of deep relaxation. I will sometimes stop mid podcast. If it's, sometimes our recordings go seven, eight hours and I'll stop and I'll do a one minute hypnosis. They have one minute hypnosis inside Reverie. You're only going to, you're only going to find that one minute hypnosis is effective if you are routinely doing 10 and 15 minute hypnosis in addition to that. Meaning I do it every other day or so, 10 or 15. So there's a, is there a YouTube one minute hypnosis or is this for the- There are, but inside of Reverie as well, you can find them online. A really good- Pull it up, sorry, please. Yeah, so Reverie is good. And then Michael Sealy, S-E-A-L-E-Y. He has some long hypnosis scripts, but again, these are all free. And you know, there's a lot of good research now on the neural networks and it shifts your so-called default network, default mode network. It shifts how much of your forebrain you're using. And it also is very, very good. If you, I get so many questions about, hey, I'm really upset. I found out about my girlfriend's sexual past, or hey, I'm so upset. I found out that my boyfriend was cheating, or oh, so-and-so died. How do I get over these emotions? How do I deal with them? And hypnosis has shown to be very useful for people to learn to bring themselves into a state of deep relaxation, to literally project in their mind's eye these very intense things that they don't like. And then for people to associate with other emotions in their body, to learn to be calm while feeling your feelings, to dissociate the mind-body communication to some extent. Just observe the feelings. Observe them and start to associate them with positive experiences. You're an Android guy, so soon it should be available on Android. And then it doesn't exist for me. Yeah, I know. It's only, you know, I don't get. Android is the device of the people, all you elitist people with your iPhones. Okay, but tell me this about Android. Now you want to, this is the one thing that gets me. Because I'm very close to someone who uses an Android phone. I feel like that. So you have great people in your life. That's good to know. No, their messages always look green to me, but I answer yours, despite that. But they, I feel like the Android phones are very trigger happy. Like anything I touch does something. Whereas the Apple phone is kind of built for like a macaque monkey to be able to operate, which is great for me because I'm more of a macaque monkey and you're a more sophisticated ape. Oh, I see, I see. I think like you have to be quite a bit. They're more sensitive. Yeah, you have to have, you know, I mean, I've got fat fingers, you know. I've got clumsy fingers. And the Android is too, well, maybe you need to soften your touch. What I would do is go into the most, sort by most popular, because there's some older ones that I really like and it generally scales with that. So I'll do the, this one, the hypnosis for clearing subconscious negativity. That's an hour long one. The sleep and anxiety one, 40 minutes. But those you listen to as you fall asleep. As you fall asleep. Oh, we're going to do this now? Yeah, yeah, let's listen to it. And I have created this hypnosis recording for you to help you. And this is the voice. How often does the voice pop up? And at the same time. You don't watch it. You just listen to it. You just listen to your anxiety. Now, one of the most important things to remember at the outset of any self hypnosis experience is to know and understand that hypnosis. People really should know that stage hypnosis is about the hypnotist getting you to do things you wouldn't normally do. Self hypnosis, which is what we're talking about here, reverie in this, is about you getting your brain into the state that you want. And again, I mean, there's a ton of neuroimaging data and work on trauma and pain relief. And our labs are working on this with David Spiegel's lab. I really encourage people to explore NSDR. And if this feels a little too wacky and out there, then I would just put in NSDR into YouTube and there's some good NSDR scripts. Yeah, by the way, Sander is a fan of your podcast. No, it's okay. We don't need to play. Yeah, so I don't know him, but I get a lot of media outlets picked up on his love of NSDR. And I have to imagine running Google involves a lot of, juggling a lot of- He's one of the great CEOs because everybody loves him. Everybody loves him. Have you interviewed him? No, but we'll do the interview eventually. So it's this annoying thing about me being a stickler for three hours, CEOs don't seem to understand, like, not understand, but it's scheduling. So what happens is Sander said, yes, definitely, let's do it. I'm a fan of podcasts, he's a fan of yours. And then it goes to his executive assistant, like, oh, let's find a slot. And then they immediately think, all right, well, one hour is good. 45 minutes. 90 minutes. By Zoom. 90 minutes. Yeah, right. They know in person, I'm a stickler on that. But it's like, no, we need more. And it's so hard to- Do you still travel to do your podcast or generally? No, most people come down here. Most people, but for certain situations, obviously, like if you're in prison. Right. Or you're ahead of- Imagine if you get out on work for a little bit, people have anklets so that they can go to an Alex Friedman podcast. It'll probably happen. Have you ever been in a prison? No. Either a visitation or on the inside. From my hike, I can see San Quentin. It's really weird that San Quentin and Alcatraz, Bay Area, beautiful, everyone thinks, like there's the Bay and there's Alcatraz and San Quentin sitting right there. How does that make you feel? It's amazing how easy it is to overlook that they're there and forget that they're there. But when I drive by San Quentin, I think about it. I also think about the people who are in there who might be innocent. I've seen some of those episodes on Rogan and elsewhere. And Amanda Knox talks a lot about this, right? Whether or not you believe her story or not, I happen to believe her story, personally based on what I know. I'm sure there are people who disagree with me. I think to myself, what it must be like to be in a cell and know in your heart's heart you didn't do it. I mean, I can't think of many things worse. I can't think of many things worse. That's so clearly unjust, but life is full of unjust things like this. Cruel things happen all the time. You lose a loved one for no good reason. You lose your job. You lose your home. Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of refugees now and the war in Ukraine has really focused my mind to how much suffering there is in the world. And so just cruel things happen all the time. And people kind of, there's this suffering and you kind of go on. You stick to the people really close to you. There's still love all around you. Traumatic events kind of focus your mind on the very practical, like, okay, how do we solve the problem? How do we escape? Let's solve like survival, food, shelter, focus. Remember that book, All's Quiet on the Western Front by World War I. There's this line in there. I forget what it is about how war is like the smell of a skunk, like a little bit is actually a little bit is slightly, there's something slightly delicious of it is what it says in the book. I happen to like the smell of like ferrets and skunks and things. I had a pet ferret when I was a kid and I like that musky scent. People, most people just, it's repulsive to them. It's actually a gene, believe it or not. Some people have the gene that makes that the musky scent repulsive. Some people love it. Let me ask you this. There's another gene. This is a fun one. Microwave popcorn smells good, neutral, or disgusting to you? Good, very good. There are people who have a gene that leads them to the perception that the smell of microwave popcorn that you find is good, it smells like putrid vomit to them. It's a particular gene variant and they can smell certain elements within the microwave popcorn. It's pretty, it's prominent in France. The, this gene and so in laboratories where you have a lot of French people, it's often said like you're not allowed to make microwave popcorn. It smells putrid, disgusting, you know. So a lot of it's in the perception of the beholder, right? But okay, before I leave the NSDR, focus in general, as you said, it's for shifting mind states. Is there advice you have for how to achieve focus on a task? Yes. First of all, we have to distinguish between modulators and mediators. And I'll do this very briefly. There are a lot of things that will modulate your state of focus, but they don't directly mediate your sense of focus. So for instance, if right now a fire alarm went off in this building, it would modulate our attention. We would get up and leave. It would be very hard to do what we're doing with that banging in the background, at least at first. So it's modulating focus, but it's not really involved in the mechanisms of focus, right? In the same way, being well-rested when you sleep, your autonomic nervous system that adjusts states of alertness and focus and calm works better than when you're sleep deprived. So if you're sleeping better, you're gonna focus better. So I always answer this way to a question like this because the best thing that anyone can do for their mental health, physical health and performance in athletic or cognitive endeavors or creative endeavors is to make sure that you're getting enough quality sleep, enough of the time for you. And that's gonna differ. We could talk about what that means. Now, in terms of things that mediate focus without getting into the description of mechanisms, because we have podcasts about that, it's very clear that mental focus follows visual focus, provided that you're a sighted person. Much of the training that's being done now in China to teach kids to focus better literally has them stare at a target, blinking every so often, but really training themselves to breathe calmly and maintain a tight visual aperture. When you read, you have to maintain a tight visual aperture. You're literally scrolling like a highlighter in your mind's eye, right? It's kind of obvious once you hear it. So for people that have problems focusing sleep well, learn to dilate and contract your visual field consciously. This can be done if you practice it a little bit. And then, as I said before, it is very hard to get into a state of focus like a step function immediately, like snapping your fingers. What you can do is you can pick any object, but ideally an object at roughly the same distance, placed at roughly the same distance to which you're going to do that work, and stare at it. You're allowed to blink. And as your mind starts to drift every once in a while to understand that's normal, but try and narrow your visual aperture and bring that into your visual field so that that's the most prominent thing, kind of like portrait mode in your phone. This would look very different in portrait mode than it would in just a standard photograph mode. And then after doing that for 30 to 60 seconds, moving into the work that you're about to do and really encourage yourself to do that. If you're somebody who's low vision or no vision, you're going to use your ears to do this. Braille readers have trouble focusing sometimes because they feel other stuff and they hear other stuff. So you learn to adjust that aperture consciously. And then of course, the pharmacologic tools. Just enough caffeine, but not too much, right? We've talked about white noise, brown noise, music or no music, really varies, but it's very clear that binaural beats of 40 Hertz can shift the brain into a heightened state of focus and cognition. So if you're going to use binaural beats, which should definitely be used with headphones, and there are a number of free apps out there and sources, 40 Hertz seems to be the frequency that best supports the brain shifting into a particular mode of focus. Sorry, can you give us some binaural beats? Yeah, so you're going to look for, you'd want to find an app that offers 40 Hertz. I think Brainwave allows you to slide bar up to the particular frequency that you want. And I should say that there are other frequencies that are interesting, but 40 Hertz binaural beat seems to be the one that there's the most quality research on. So it's like a beat. Yeah. But you're saying there's a lot of mixed science on the white noise and brown noise. You really should be doing this with headphones because binaural beats are best accomplished by feeding two different frequencies to the two ears. And then you have what's called this brainstem area that reads out what are called interaural time differences. And then it extracts the Delta, essentially. Turn it up. And then in other things that can enhance focus. So, you know, the pharmacology around this is pretty interesting. Things that tickle the dopamine pathway and the acetylcholine pathway, they work. There's your Ritalin, your Adderalls, your Modafinils, which are prescription. And there's a lot of non-prescription use of those prescription drugs. Not so much in my generation, but in people 35 and younger. You know, I hear all the time from day traders and programmers and stuff and kids that play video games, a lot of Ritalin Adderall use. I think that unless it's prescribed by a doctor for a specific purpose of ADHD, I don't think people should go that route, frankly. Hits the dopamine system way too hard. Also has a number of negative effects on sexual side effects, all sorts of things that you just wouldn't want. There are a few compounds like Alpha-GPC, 300 milligrams to 600 milligrams of Alpha-GPC with a cup of espresso. If you're well-rested, you're like a laser for 90 minutes, maybe two hours, but then it's going to taper off and you have to just recognize that. And then there's this whole world of nootropics now and people trying to figure out the racetams, paracetams, and phenolethylamine combined with this. And, you know, it's not quite in the place where you'd like it to be. There are a few companies that are doing this better than others. We talked about some of these on the podcast, but I would always start with behavioral tools and then consider pharmacology. And then I suppose the other thing for focus is, there are these, this is a little more esoteric, but we cover this in an episode on workplace optimization. Where you place your screen is important. Staring down at a screen is not going to be as effective as placing it at eye level or above you. When the eyes are up, literally, or when your eyes are directed forward or up, the brainstem centers for alertness are activated. When your eyes are down, it's actually, you're sort of, it's like being pulled underwater a little bit in the autonomic arousal sense. It's, you're closing your eyes is one, it reflects the brainstem centers that are active becoming less, or for alertness, excuse me, becoming less active. But there's a really cool effect that's active in this room right now, which is that there've been some really interesting studies that when people work in small, compact spaces, or wear a hoodie or a hat, that can also improve focus, like blinders on a horse, for obvious reasons now, based on what I said before, but also analytic work, or the kind of work where there's a correct answer that you're seeking, is best supported by these kind of low ceiling environments. Whereas there's something called the cathedral effect, which is when you work in an outdoor environment or a high ceiling environment, it lends itself to kind of, pun intended, kind of loftier ideas and more creativity. And that probably has to do with the fact that there's a natural tendency, a reflex to expand your visual field in these high ceiling environments. Expansion of the visual field changes the way the brain works in the time domain. Your engineering and biology oriented listeners will understand this, and music. For those that don't, the best way to think about it is when you have a narrow focus, portrait mode on your phone, or you're very alert, you are fine slicing life in time. It's like a, think of it as a high frame rate, like you're shooting in slow motion. When you have a, when you dilate your view, you're taking bigger time bins. And that one way to just let this hopefully land home is that if you've ever had a really exciting day or podcast interview or experience of any kind, your system is flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine, alertness and motivation, all this excitement. It seems like it goes by very, very fast. And yet when you think back to that, it seems like a lot happened. This happened and that happened. Now think about waiting in the doctor's office in a blank waiting room with no interesting art on the walls. It feels like it goes by very, very slow. Dopamine and norepinephrine are at all time low. And yet when you think back on that experience, it's as if nothing happened because you were parsing time differently. So those are the, roughly the tools and the neurochemicals around time perception and the time domain. There's a wonderful book, I'm forgetting the title. So wonderful I forget the title, by Dean Buodomano from UCLA. I think it's called, The Brain is a Time Machine, that talks about this expansion and contraction of the time domain and what you can do to leverage it for work and creativity focus. Yeah, it's fascinating that I think one way to define focus for me is to the experience, the feeling of focus is losing track of time. Is getting to a place where you're no longer operating in time. Well, and you mentioned being, kind of cramming for something, where you'll release a lot of adrenaline. And it is true, you can get a lot done under pressure because of the way that you're slicing time. You don't actually have more time. It's that you're finally in a brain state that lends itself well to parsing information really quickly. Now, if we ramp up your level of stress enough, it's definitely, it's a more or less normal distribution. We get you stressed enough, it's hard to remember anything, you're not parsing time well. But in that middle range, almost every study shows that the higher levels of autonomic arousal, meaning norepinephrine, adrenaline in your system, the more effective you are at things. And we always hear stress and adrenaline, it's just bad, bad, bad. But my colleague, Ali Crum at Stanford has done these beautiful studies where if you just educate people on how adrenaline makes them sharper thinkers, they become sharper thinkers. If you educate them on the fact that stress makes your cognition worse, their cognition gets worse. This is why I don't wear a sleep tracker. If you tell people they slept poorly, your recovery score sucks, they naturally perform less well the next day than if you tell them your recovery score is high. And so I don't have anything against those companies, but I, in fact, we use some of their technology, can be very useful in certain contexts. But you want to determine your mindset around these things. And if you tell yourself, hey, deadlines make me sharp, pressure makes me sharp, you will perform better. So stress and anxiety, what is that? And can it be leveraged for good? Absolutely, stress and anxiety, look, whether or not you get into a cold ice bath or a hot sauna so hot you want to get out, or you get hit square in the face with something over text that you really didn't want to hear or see, it's adrenaline, it's just adrenaline. And so your subjective readout of that and what it means is really important. And you can just channel that. Well, you can, if you agree with the following statement, which I do, and many people do, because the data support it, which is Ali Crum's statement, not mine, which is she directs the MindBody Lab at Stanford. She's brilliant, by the way, brilliant Harvard trained, Yale trained, trained licensed clinical psychologist, also tenured professor at Stanford. She's a Olympian, no, excuse me, a division one athlete in gymnastics and martial arts. And her dad is a long-time martial arts trainer, he's done work with special forces and he's an amazing human being and very humble, very kind, lovely woman and professor, scientist. She says, anything that you do and experience, but especially stress is the consequence of that thing and what you believe about that thing. And so if you consume a lot of information about the powers of stressful states to bring out your best, you will perform better. If you consume a lot of information about the power of stress to cripple you, you will perform worse. There's absolutely no question, the data are striking. And this is not growth mindset. This is just simply what sorts of, what do you believe about stress based on the dominant knowledge that you're consuming about it? So that's why it's fun to watch David Goggins, here we go again, David, or Jocko or Joe, or someone put, or Cam Haines, put out this information about, or Ryan Hall who ran for Stanford and then now is like into the power lifting thing and running, you know, and there are others too, of course. When you start to consume a lot of that information, it's not just inspiring, it actually changes your perception of what your own stressful states mean. You can actually get better from stress if you're in the ocean of knowledge that stress grows you. If you're in the ocean of, living in the ocean of knowledge, I was seeing like a pool in the summer, you got the kiddie pool, the kids all peeing in it, presumably. You got the diving thing, you got the high dive and all that, if you believe that the experience of belly flopping off the high dive is gonna make you a better diver, in some sense, at least in this analogy, it will. Whereas if you feel that it's just the most embarrassing thing ever and it's gonna cripple your ability to get out in the dive in front of anybody ever again, well, you're right about that too. Yeah, we actually talked with Carl about depression, all those kinds of things that there could be these, what are commonly seen as negative journeys, they could be, when reframed, can be used. You know, one of the reasons I enjoy our friendship so much is that you bring this Russian thing, you know, which I don't really understand it at a deep level, how could I, I'm not Russian, but this mindset like that there's pain in life. When I watched that Hedgehog in the Fog cartoon, I thought, no wonder Russians go the way they do. This is the most, it's so sad, it's beautiful and sad, but it's so sad. Whereas out here, it's like Sesame Street and my mother would not let me watch Sesame Street when I was a kid. She thought it was too chaotic. Too chaotic. Too chaotic, she was like, it's too chaotic. Too many things going on. Captain Kangaroo, we were allowed, and then Mr. Rogers, we were allowed. I never really liked shows. I like doing things outside in the yard. I was trying to trap all the animals. I didn't wanna watch stuff on TV. But, you know, Hedgehog in the Fog is enough to turn any kid into a thinker and a philosopher and a poet. Here we go. I fell in love with this when you showed, look, it even walks with its arms behind its back. So for people who don't know, and we're watching little clips here to get into it, and it's a hedgehog that is wandering about in this fog at night and- Can't even see a lamp. The fog is so dense. There's a feeling of searching. And then there's a horse that speaks from a distance, words of wisdom. Some people actually told me that they believe that's God. That's supposed to represent God. I always thought it was a motherly voice or a voice. A voice of conformity that wants you to return to safety. And here's the hedgehog is searching for something that's in him for the unknown, to explore the unknown. And ultimately, as the cartoon unrolls, he discovers a friend in a bear, and he also discovers a lifetime passion for looking up at the stars and the curiosity of exploring what is up there. And I see that as science, as exploring the mystery. And also I see that as brave to explore the mystery given all the uncertainty all around you. But there is a melancholy, the whole sound of it, the feel of it, the look of it. It just captures both the melancholy and the wonder of childhood, which is like there's a loneliness to it. Like nobody understands me. That's there that children can feel because you're trying to figure out- That's my favorite character right there. I love the owl. I love the owl. The owl shows up every once in a while. I love the owl. Sorry, I interrupted you. Again. There's non-sequitur. It means you're interested 70% of the time. The other 30%, you're just an asshole. So you have to figure out which is the- So I'm told. There's non-sequitur parts in this cartoon. Its vote is one of the greatest cartoons of all time. Short little films, documentary filmmakers. It is, in the Soviet Union, in a lot of sort of authoritarian regimes, there's channels to communicate difficult ideas to people and you figure out those channels. And in the Soviet Union, one of those channels was children's cartoons. So you're actually there very much for adults. Yeah, I like that in some countries, not so much in the US, children are treated with more respect for their intelligence. You know, and not constantly getting this drivel of just kind of moronic explosions and whistles and bells and the voices that just kind of, children, obviously, are children and need to be, their brains are young and plastic and need to be treated and nurtured as such. But they have an intelligence. And I think that you treat them like morons and they're gonna behave like morons. You treat them as people who can consume information and make sense of it in their own way. And that's what they're gonna do. They have a seriousness of looking at the world. I love people that talk with children like they're adults. Like, here's if you're talking to a mini Einstein. Because you're like really, they're asking some big questions. And I think, I mean, people sometimes speak of me in this way, like how dumb is this childlike person? But like, no, there's intelligence in these dumb, simple questions that a child asks. And I always loved those questions, the simplicity but also the depth of those questions. Why? The reason I started watching your podcast was you did an episode early on with Ray Dalio. Yeah. And the first, maybe the first, but a question that you definitely asked him was you just said, what is money? And his answer was fantastic. It's a superb question and he gave a superb answer. And I never would have thought to ask that question. But it's the question. And it was the question to tee things off with. So simple questions that get right to the heart of the matter. And kids aren't often putting the same cultural filters and kids generally aren't concerned about getting canceled either. So they'll ask the question that no one else is willing to ask. And they're not concerned about how dumb the question sounds. I find the most fascinating questions is just really, really simple. And it is a bit embarrassing to ask those simple questions of what, like what is anything. Well, you're asking them for all of us, so please ask them. I think that question, what is money, is crucial. And I think the simple questions are the most, obviously the most interesting. I'd ask you about, you had awesome podcasts. I mean, I can ask you questions about basically all your podcasts. People should definitely listen to the Huberman Lab, but with Andy Gap and the conversation, you talked about strength and muscle building, all that kind of stuff. He's an encyclopedia. Yeah. And he also works with a lot of UFC fighters and he works with, he has a lab that includes a gym. And so he works on endurance and powerlifting and also hypertrophy training, et cetera. But he also does muscle biopsy. So he runs the full spectrum and he's a full tenured professor and he does all this stuff. So he's a really unique person in this whole fitness landscape. Because there are a lot of PTs out there. There are a lot of kinesiologists. There are a lot of people studying nutrition and sports training. But he, I think he has the, among the people out there, he's at least in the top five, probably within the top three of people that really have their arms around the full extent of what's possible with training. And he works with the UFC Performance Center. Well, I mean, he just said a very systematic way of describing things that was really nice. You know, skill, speed, power, strength, hypertrophy. So muscle mass, right? Endurance, all kinds of, and then the philosophical of like adaptation, how to overload stuff, all that very, is there stuff? I'll ask you about Ace Bath and sauna, which was surprising to me there. Is there stuff you took away from that conversation, like principles about how to get strong, how to build muscle mass, that like broaden and deepen your understanding of that task? Definitely, and I'll do these in bullet points because if people want the logic behind them and the mechanism, they can listen to that episode. It's a really good episode. I'll start with heat and cold really quickly and just say that avoid cold immersion. So ice baths and being in cold water up to the neck, uncomfortably cold, within the four hours after a training session that's designed to evoke an adaptation, either endurance, hypertrophy or strength, because the inflammation that you experience from a hard endurance workout or from a hard strength or a hard hypertrophy workout is the stimulus that you're going to adapt to. The cold water immersion reduces inflammation and can short circuit some of that. After four hours, you're probably okay, but if you can do it a different day or you can do it before those sessions, that's better. Heat, however, can be done immediately after training and it's probably beneficial because of the way that it dilates the vascular system and perfuses the muscles and ligaments, et cetera, with more nutrients. And I should just mention, that was a crucial piece of information. It's a little bit surprising. Was it surprising to you? Absolutely, because I actually, the way I posed the question to him about cold was I hear that getting into an ice bath or a cold water immersion after training can reduce hypertrophy, but I'm guessing it's not that big of a deal. And he said, no, it is a big deal. It will short circuit your progress. Now, for people that are only interested in performance who are doing a lot of workouts and trying to recover, but not trying to grow muscle, get stronger, or build endurance, then it makes sense to do cold. Because- Like skill development or something. Skill development or you're an athlete in season. So you have to, what's so great about Andy is he really points out the specific ways to train, given your specific goals. So for getting swole, stay out of the ice bath after a workout. There you go. Lex is always making fun of the meatheads. I love it. I put myself in the meathead category only because I don't do a real sport now. I work out and I run, which is- I'm an aspiring meathead, okay, so. One of these days I'm going to get back to Jiu-Jitsu, or I'm going to get to Jiu-Jitsu. Now, in terms of training, he has this beautiful three by five concept for strength. Pick three exercises, compound exercises, multi-joint movements. Do them for, do three to five exercises for three to five repetitions per set. Rest three to five minutes and do that three to five times per week. And for details, you can again, look to the episode, it's timestamped. But what's interesting about this is three to five times a week is a lot for a muscle group. Squatting five times a week for five reps, meaning you're working pretty heavy, meaning you're close to failure, but not failure for strength generally. What Andy taught me is that people who are training mostly for strength can do these low rep type regimens frequently because most of the adaptation is neural. And because you're not pushing to failure in most cases, you don't get that sore. And so it's the motor neurons getting the muscle fibers to contract more intensely or with more efficiency in other ways, that's leading to these strength gains. And this is why power lifters can train every day or five days a week or four days a week. For hypertrophy, I learned from Andy that the repetition range can be pretty broad. You're thinking anywhere from six to 30 repetitions. You should do 10 sets per muscle group per week, maybe even a bit more. So high volume. High volume, but you have to go to failure or beyond in order to stimulate growth. Why does it work at such a great range of repetitions? Well, there apparently are three ways that you stimulate hypertrophy and maybe more. One is tissue micro damage to the tissue. The other is through some sort of tension based changes in the molecular gene programs of cells that lead to protein synthesis that are distinct from damage. And the other are metabolic effects of like high repetition work of superfusion of the muscle with blood. We know that third category exists because people are now doing this blood restriction training where they cuff off a muscle and they'll use a really lightweight. I've done these before. You can use a five pound weight and do curls with this and you are in pain and the muscles are swelling up with blood. It does lead to hypertrophy, but in general, you're not sore. You're not doing tissue damage. And by the way, don't just turn to get off a muscle because you have to use the proper cuffs because you need the blood still to flow in one direction. You can't just cinch it off or you'll potentially kill yourself if you get a clot or you do it wrong. So get the appropriate cuffs, they're out there. And then for endurance, I learned something really cool. So I work out basically, I go to the gym every other day on average, three or four days a week I do that, but generally not two days in a row. It's workout, next day I'll do cardio, next day. And the cardio for me is always a 30 to 45 minute jog, kind of zone two cardio. Andy informed me that to build endurance while building strength and maintaining some muscle size or even building muscle size, I would be wise to take one day a week and add to that all out max heart rate work for 90 seconds at least. So do 90 seconds, then rest, and then maybe do another 90 second all out sprint. I almost missed my flight going from Los Angeles to Austin. I did that all out sprint in the airport yesterday. So I actually think it's done for me. So there was a sprinting Dr. Huberman throughout. With three backs. That's awesome. Because I travel, generally I'll travel with too much stuff. I love how you were probably running late for a flight and used that as an opportunity to explain. Well, as I was doing it, I was thinking to myself, okay, Andy, that's a 90 second sprint. Cause I got to the security line. I finally got TSC. But that's for better, that's for extending endurance? That's for, yeah, it actually has some carryover effects on endurance if you're doing the other stuff. And then he also said one day a week to do this workout and I haven't done it yet. Maybe we do it tomorrow, it'd be fun. Which is you run a mile, you ask yourself, how long did that take? Let's say it took eight minutes. Then you walk or rest for eight minutes. Then you run another mile as fast as you can. And then you rest for the equivalent period. And you do that one to three times once per week. And so as an all around fitness program, you could collapse this into something where you say, okay, you're gonna work out with the weights for about an hour every other day. Maybe take two days off every once in a while, maybe not. You're going to do six to 15 repetitions. You're gonna push to failure on some of those, not all, because some of those are designed to build more strength. You're not going to failure and heavier. Some are designed for hypertrophy, higher rep and going to failure. And then on off days, you're gonna jog for 30 to 45 minutes. But for two days a week, you're either at the end of your jog or whatever, you're gonna do some all out sprints for 90 seconds and then rest and repeat. And for another day, you're going to do these mile repeats. That's a pretty large chunk of exercise movement. But if you kind of thread through the middle of all that, what you end up with is some decent strength, building protocols, some decent hypertrophy, some cardiovascular training that establishes the so-called A base or a so-called base. So you're not gonna get really good at anything. You're not gonna become a marathoner this way, an optimizing marathon. You're not gonna optimize power lifting. You're not gonna optimize hypertrophy. But for the typical person, 75% of people, 75% of the time, they want some muscle, they want some strength, they want some endurance, and they want the capacity of sprint to the security gate without leaving a lung in the terminal. So it's like functional stuff, like your life going up the stairs is easier, moving about, all that kind of just regular life. Yeah, and I should mention that cold showers after training don't seem to short circuit the training effect to the same extent that immersion in cold water does. And that really speaks to the fact that cold showers, even though they can provide some of the adrenaline for the mental effects of like, oh, I have a lot of adrenaline in my system from a cold shower and I can remain calm, there's utility to that. It's not going to have the same metabolic effects or other positive effects that cold water exposure has been shown to have. And that's unfortunate because most people have access to cold showers. Not everyone has access to a cold dunk or an ice dunk. But here in Austin, you have this place, and no, they don't pay me to say this, but I always like going to this place whenever I'm telling this place, Kuya. And they've got a sauna and a couple of ice baths, and they even have those salt tanks that you can float on the surface. They have ice baths there? They have cold water immersion. It's pretty cold. Still haven't done an ice bath. Really? I need to, yeah. I need to. You're Russian, you'll probably get in and you won't even know. Yeah, what is this? What's the big deal here? Exactly, or people pay for this? I did a post, right, of you as a baby. Yeah. You know, I had to go deep to get that photo of Lex in a bassinet in the snow, because in Russia they actually did this for a long time. They thought that it would, and indeed it does build the immune system to expose babies to the cold. I still don't know where you got that photo. I knew you were able to find exactly the right, it was great. It's great research. You didn't have a tie-on, but you had all the look and seriousness that you do now. So it's clearly nature nurture, clearly you were born with that. What about sauna? He does say that it's good to do heat. So there are three ways you can do sauna that I can just toss out as like brief things. If you want to get a really big growth hormone release for sake of metabolism, fat loss, you're training really, really hard in jujitsu and you want to recover, you don't want to sauna too often. Because the study that identified this massive 16-fold increase in growth hormone, they had people do this, it's crazy. They got into, okay, temperatures are 80 to 100 degrees centigrade. So that's 176 degrees Fahrenheit to 212 degrees Fahrenheit for five to 30 minutes is the typical ranges that people work in in these research studies. For maximum growth hormone release, don't do sauna more than once a week, but get into the sauna for 30 minutes, as hot as you can safely tolerate. So probably for you, that'll be 210 because I suspect you'll be on the high end of things. Then get out for five to 10 minutes, no cold exposure, get back in the sauna for 30 minutes. Then they had them do it again, out for five minutes, back for 30 minutes, out for five minutes, back for three minutes. They had them do two hours of sauna exposure to get that growth hormone release. Now for the reduction in likelihood of dying of a cardiovascular event, stroke or otherwise, the more often you do sauna, the better. So if you look at all-cause mortality or death due to cardiovascular events, and you look at sauna use frequencies using the same parameters, 80 to 100 degrees centigrade, one to seven times per week, basically the more often you get into the sauna for 30 minutes across the week, so 30 minutes a day is better than four times a week. Four times a week is better than two times a week, and two times a week is better than one. And the reductions in mortality are really impressive. 27, if you get into the sauna the way I just described, not the two hours a day, but 30 minutes twice a week, or three times per week, you reduce the likelihood of dying of a cardiovascular event by 27%. If you do it four or more times per week, you reduce the probability of dying by 50% of a cardiovascular event. And in these studies, they rule out other things that people are doing, smoking, they even ask them, do you live in an apartment? Are you in a happy relationship? Like they evaluate other potentially confounding variables. Now, for people that don't have access to a sauna, a hot water bath or hot tub is gonna be your next best bet. And if you don't have access to that, do like the wrestlers do, which is put on two sets of sweats and a hoodie and a stocking cap and wrap yourself in plastics underneath all that and go for a run. But don't, please, nobody die of hyperthermia. I mean, you can die of warming up too much. Is this experience pleasant or stressful in the way, so is it as stressful as an ice bath, for example? Great question. People always ask how cold to make the ice bath or the cold water or the shower. You want it to be uncomfortably cold, meaning you want to feel like I really wanna get out, but you can safely stay in. And that's gonna vary by person and experience with it. With the sauna, it's the same thing. How hot to make it? Well, don't kill yourself, obviously. Be smart. If you're pregnant, you shouldn't be doing this anyway. But it's very clear that what you need is the release of something called dynorphin. We have endorphin, which makes us feel good. It binds to these mu opioid receptors in the body. You have dynorphin, which is the terrible feeling that you get when you're in really hot temperatures. It's also the terrible effect that alcoholics feel when they are in withdrawal. You feel agitated, you wanna get out, it's really unpleasant. It's dynorphin binding to the so-called kappa opioid receptor. That's what you're trying to trigger. When you do that, a number of things happen. You set off heat shock proteins that go repair broken proteins and misfolded proteins. It also makes it so that later, endorphin binds its receptor more strongly. So when you have this uncomfortable experience in the heat, you literally feel better in real life when pleasurable events come on, when you experience them. In the same way, I like to say this, that when you get into a cold ice bath or cold shower, the increase in epinephrine and dopamine is two to 300%. These are huge increases and they last many hours. This is shown, because lately I've been getting a little bit of pushback on Twitter, which is an interesting place. People say, well, that's just in mice. No, all the studies I just referred to are all done in humans, men and women, fairly broad age ranges. So you want to be uncomfortable in the cold. You wanna be uncomfortable in the heat. This is why I'm not a big fan of infrared saunas because they only go up to about 160, 170 degrees. Infrared light and far red light of all kinds has been shown to be beneficial for wound healing, acne, skin, eyes. There are even guys now putting on their testicles because it can increase testosterone and sperm production. Yeah, hormone release. Hormone release. But in terms of the sauna, you want that strong heat stimulus. Yeah, and that's when you crawl up to the 200 mark and so on. Whenever I'm in New York, and there's also one in San Francisco, although the one in San Francisco is clothing optional, just to warn people. There's a place called Archimedes Banya. Is there any scientific evidence that being naked is beneficial in the sauna? Well, in certain contexts, it leads to childbirth. Okay, well, I'll have to read up on that. I read that somewhere. But I suppose it's not required, right, for childbirth. But in all seriousness, in New York, I'll go to a place called Spa 88. And actually, Khabib's picture is on the wall. He goes there. And that one, it's clothing. They require clothing. I only just say that because it can be a little bit of a shock to people sometimes if they kind of walk in there, a bunch of naked people, the one in San Francisco. If I go, I'm clothed. Mostly because I run into coworkers or things like that. I'm sort of more old-fashioned in that way, I suppose. Do you like to wear clothes around coworkers? Yes. Yeah, in general. Yeah, I mean, to me, it just seems like, just be aware. But nonetheless, the banyas have very hot saunas because they're Russian-owned. And in New York, there's one on the Lower East Side, but the Spa 88 place, they have some saunas that the moment I get into those, I have a hard time catching a full breath. It burns. They've got a cold dunk that's like a shock. And then they've got a sauna, a wet sauna steam room that's a little mellower. So the nice thing about a banya is you can kind of find your place. And then they do the plaza where they take the eucalyptus leaves and you can pay someone. And you basically, you cover your groin and then they beat you with the leaves. And it's supposed to bring the vasculature to the surface. I've only done it once. And frankly, I found it to be a little bit unnerving. I didn't really like the experience. But I'll try and get into a sauna as often as I possibly can, which is once or three times per week. And I try and do the cold exposure shower or immersion, but early in the day, because it really wakes you up. One of my favorite things I've listened to, I wish there was a video, is listening to a bunch of stuff with Rick Rubin. And he did a thing with Tim Ferriss, the Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't know if you've ever heard it, but he forced him to do, they did the podcast in a sauna. And I don't think at the time, Tim Ferriss was adapted. Yeah, if you're not heat adapted, it can be pretty stressful. And I mean, obviously, the whole experience is stressful as somebody with microphones, like what is happening? But I just love that Tim was vulnerable enough to kind of give themself over to whatever the hell this experience is. And I'm just so happy that Rick pushed that kind of idea and just let's do it. That's a very Rick Rubin kind of thing to do. And we must, we must do this. This has to be done. A podcast that was done from a sauna continuously would be really interesting. Like you could call it the pressure cooker or something. Oh, you mean like a regular podcast? Yeah, like you have to sit with your guests in the sauna, or they have to sit in the sauna with you. That was one of the interesting things is, it was a sad thing because I believe there's no video of that podcast, but you could tell there was a kind of, there was suffering, especially on Tim's part. It was like a degradation. He started over time not being able to put words together correctly, which he's very eloquent. And so you could see there's like, there's a struggle. Heat and cold pull you down from the inside. You have to, I mean, there's a reason why the screening process for make, you know, seal, seal, they call it seal training, but it's really screening and training involves cold waters. Cause you know, if you're in the heat too long, you'll die or damage tissue. In cold, you can do it quite extensively before you die or damage tissue, but it is stressful. I was going to say one thing that I sometimes enjoy seeing these social media posts where people will get into the ice bath and they'll look really stoic, like they're really tough, but actually that's the wimpy way to go through it. When you get into cold water, if you stay very still, you develop a thermal sheath around you that you're warming yourself. The really bold way is to get in and continue to sift your arms and legs. And it ends up feeling miserably colder. And then- There's no sheath. Cause you're breaking up that thermal layer. And then when you get out, you'll notice a lot of people huddle or they'll put, or they'll grab the towel. In general, that's me. I'll get back, I'll get into the sauna. But if you really want to stimulate the big increases in metabolism, you stand out there and you dry off with arms extended in open air. And as that water evaporates off you, it is really cold, but your body is forced to activate a number of the warming programs related to metabolism. This is the beautiful work of a woman named Susanna Soberg, who's Scandinavian. She published this paper last year in Cell Reports Medicine. And so I call this the Soberg principle, which is if you're doing ice and heat for whatever reason, doesn't matter if you end on heat or cold, but if you're using cold specifically to stimulate an increase in metabolism, end with cold. That's the Soberg principle. And with cold, if you're alternating, and then if you want to do it the tough way, you let the shivering, so you just stand out and let the water evaporate. Yeah, I mean, if you ever waded into a cold ocean, everybody's kind of like holding themselves. If you really just, if you let yourself extend your limbs and move them around a bit, so you break up that thermal layer, that's the tough way to do it. So when I see people on social media getting in and they're like really tough and trying to look hard. Yeah, you want to be moving around. Yeah, smiling, talking, moving around is way, way colder. Are you able to talk? Can you do, so you suggest a podcast in the sauna. How about this? I proposed this since I got choked. You want to do the next podcast? I'll get two. So the folks from The Plunge, maybe you could bring Lex a plunge. He certainly deserves one. And we can go side by side coffin style or we can face one another and we can do it. Well, we said we should do each other's podcast. So maybe next human and lab podcast. Well, I can't wait to have you back on. I mean, we only scratched the surface. Well, let's do at least part of the next human and lab podcast either. I have a sauna and a cold plunge, so we could do. Yeah. Yeah, we could do. We do a sauna and a cold plunge version. I wonder how the recording works. If they're recording. A bit of an echo in the sauna, but I'm sure we can take out the reverb. So Sergey wants to ask you about sex performance. Very journalistic, very hardcore hitting questions that we have here on The Plunge. Generally or a specific experience? No, he has a certain problem he needs help with. No, generally. You haven't done an episode on sex. Well, we did an episode early on on sexual development. Yes. We've done them on optimizing testosterone and estrogen. And we touched a little bit on libido and somewhat on sex performance, but not much. We did an episode on relationships, love and desire, where we touched on libido specifically. So just as a quick mention of something, a lot of people take SSRIs or antidepressants that can disrupt sexual function. There are a few compounds like maka root and tonga ali and things like that, that at least in a few studies in humans have been shown to offset some of the sexual side effects. Now in terms of sexual, and then the, sorry, the episode on sexual development was about how the brain and body become organized in certain ways, how the brain becomes organized if you have X chromosomes or Y chromosomes or et cetera. So early, early development. Early development mainly. And the effects of hormones later on that template. We will be doing a, I'm actually putting together a series on sexual health. Everything from the menstrual cycle, which both men and women should understand, of course, understanding arousal, understanding, for instance, a lot of people don't realize this, but that orgasm is actually the consequence of activity in the sympathetic, meaning the stress arm of the autonomic nervous system. Whereas arousal is the consequence of the activity of the parasympathetic, the calming aspect of the autonomic nervous system. It's counterintuitive, right? It's counterintuitive and it kind of works like a seesaw. I mean, there's arousal, then there's relaxation, then there's arousal, but the, and then immediately after orgasm and in male's ejaculation, what ends up happening is there's a rebounding of the parasympathetic nervous system, which it leads to oftentimes people feeling very relaxed or falling asleep. So I'm gonna do a short series on sexual health that will include stuff about sexual performance, but also some, I'm working on getting an expert guest who can talk about some of the neurologic changes that happen as a consequence of sexual activity. And we did an episode with a guy from UT Austin here, David Buss, who's an evolutionary psychologist, talking about, it went pretty deep into some of the typical and unusual dynamics of mating relation, whether or not people have kids or not and what impacts it. But we're gonna do an episode on menopause, andropause. What's very surprising is I get a lot of questions about sexual health from the young male audience, which tells me that, well, here's what I think it reflects. I think that women, because of their menstrual cycles, early on start to talk to one another about changes in physiology and psychology as a function of this 28 day cycle that they all experience sooner or later. Males, there's less of a conversation and it usually arrives in code. People will say, hey, what should I take to increase my testosterone? And I'll say, well, maybe nothing. What are you specifically concerned about? And then over time, if you pull on those threads a little bit, you get your answer. Sometimes I'll just get a direct question. But I think that the psychology of all this and in terms of jealousy and in terms of notions of roles and relationships is very dynamic right now. And I'm fascinated by this. So we're gonna do a four episode series. What about sexual fantasy? What, to get Freudian for a second, what role does sexual fantasy have in the human condition? There's a book called The Erotic Imagination. It's a very psychoanalytic book written by a psychoanalyst that talks about how, well, here's the uncomfortable reality. Freud was at least right about one thing, which is that the brain circuitry that you used to develop attachments to your caregivers, mother and father or other caregivers, do not disappear when you hit puberty. They are repurposed for romantic and sexual relations. And so this is why the whole notion of anxious attached and secure attached, stems from childhood attachment patterns, but it carries over to romantic relationships. So that the relationship with your mother has- And father. And father has a, and probably other close people to you in your young age, has a secondary tertiary, some kind of ripple effect on how your sexuality developed, like what fantasies you might have, all that. Oh, without question. And of course, early experiences too, and traumatic or positive or neutral. The thing that's really important to remember though, in this transfer of circuitry from one role to another, is that, and it's certainly consistent with psychoanalysis, that gender is interchangeable, sex is interchangeable. So for instance, let's say you had a wonderful relationship. Let's say this, let's take a hypothetical person, okay? I'm truly not referring to myself. Let's take a young woman who has a wonderful relationship to her father, and a just absolutely terrible abusive relationship to her mother, just for sake of example. She then goes into adulthood, and she is drawn to very abusive men. Not always, but let's just use in this example. And the dynamic is exactly the same as the dynamic she had with her mother. That's actually a common occurrence. Even though in this context, she's heterosexual, she's romantically attracted to men. What is seen over and over again, is that the dynamic with one parent can be transferred onto a romantic dynamic, but it doesn't have to be, you know, that if it was with the mother, then it only has to do with relationships to women. So gender is interchangeable because these circuitries are pre-sexual. They're laid down in our brain before the brain has any concept of sexual interactions. It's pre-verbal, excuse me. And so there are a lot of interesting examples and data to support this. The book, Attached, is a pretty interesting book by two psychologists. One I think is at Columbia University, that talks about how childhood dynamics carry over to adult romantic attachment. So as you can tell, I get pretty alert in response to these questions. I get a lot of them relate in this domain. They have a lot of impact on people and they're wondering about, they want to learn. And no one knows what other people are doing or what's normal. We kind of know deviancy, we know perversion, we know the extremes. We know the rules. Hopefully people know the rules, but you know, let's just be, there are a lot of people in the academic community, in particular at certain East Coast schools not to be named, that are in open relationships. This is more common now. It's not very common, but it's more common. And, you know, obviously that's a way of bypassing some of these more primitive emotions about jealousy, et cetera, and leveraging them towards maybe even ongoing relationships. I'm not passing judgment one way or the other. I always say four conditions have to be met for any discussion about sex and sexuality or sexual health. Age appropriate, context appropriate, consensual, and species appropriate. Well, that's weird because the thing I'm trying to figure out is why my sexual fantasy is to go to furry orgies and have sex with others dressed as squirrels and me, other animals. So that could be, I'll see a therapist about that one. Can I ask you? I'm not gonna respond to that except to say that as long as those four conditions are met, consensual, age appropriate, context appropriate, species appropriate. So there's a bunch of questions on Instagram. One of them on this topic, on relationships, somebody suggested to do a part three of why Lex is single. There's a running joke about this. But I can answer it in part, right? Because, well, partially because you're very busy, partially because you've decided that until it's time, you're gonna wait until it's time, it's time, right? I mean, until it's time, you're waiting. And then, I mean, you're not saving yourself for marriage, I don't think. But in some sense, yeah, your future wife is out there. Oh, yeah, yeah, she's being programmed. No, I mean, I definitely believe that. I mean, first of all, I just love people and I fall in love very easily with people, with objects, with things, with life, with every moment. And that way you're like Oliver Sacks, he would fall in love with minerals and concepts and things like that. And so, like to me, this kind of, so relationship is more like a commitment to one particular kind of object of your love. Like it's almost like a, it's like a journey that you take on together because also, the interesting thing about humans is they're moment by moment a different person. Day by day, week by week, month by month, they change, they evolve. There's an ups and downs and stuff like that. So what you're doing is you're saying, well, I'm going to explore all the ways that this human gets morphed and changed and what makes them cry, what makes them excited, what makes them lonely, like the habits, the habits, like when they form certain habits, how they feel when those habits are broken. Like the stupid, minute things that make everyday life, you're gonna be on that journey together, figuring that out, just the way we're trying to figure ourselves out when we're like optimizing these things about diet and health and so on. You're kind of doing this computation together because neither person really understands themselves at all and you're together, both confused about each other. And you get to almost like a relationship is a chance to understand yourself and to understand another person, like together. That process is some call it, some iterative. You know the dynamics, right? I mean, you're merging two nervous systems. This was once described to me very well by an ex-girlfriend who's truly brilliant. She's really brilliant. She said, you know, there's four arrows. This is maybe to an engineer or like a, this will make sense. There's how you feel towards the other person. There's how they feel towards you. But then there's an arrow that comes back to you, which is how you feel about how they feel. And then they have an arrow of how they feel about how you feel, right? This is why if someone else is moody or somebody else is upset, there's one version of ourselves where we respond to that or they respond to us. But there's another version where we respond to that, but it's also, there's a processing of what it means for us that they're behaving that way or feeling that way. And this again, leads us back to that early attachment circuitry because if a parent was stressed, the child's role is not to soothe the parent. In fact, healthy models of parenting say that children shouldn't actually know how their parents feel for like the first eight years of their life. They're not supposed to be in that mindset of empathizing for the parent. This is often not the case, but maybe the cutoff isn't exactly eight, but you get the idea. So the dynamics of relationship are where the learning is because we learn how we react to other people reacting. It's not just a two arrow system. It's at least this four arrow thing. But there's also the element of nurturing, right? I mean, I think that going through life with somebody is so much better than going through it alone. And I never thought I'd make that statement. So it wasn't always obvious to you. No, it wasn't always obvious to me. And I've really enjoyed wonderful relationships and some have been hard and there's certainly been a lot of growth. I'm on good terms with almost all my former girlfriends and close with some enough that I know their spouses and I'm close with their families. And, but no, it wasn't. And I think that when people say relationship is hard, the only really hard part of a good relationship is just dealing with oneself and making sure that you're staying in that mode of caretaking. Because I do believe that if one is mainly focused on taking good care of the other person, provided they're also focused on taking good care of you, to some extent, and we're good at taking care of ourselves, everybody flourishes, everything gets better. But no, I don't think I experienced that until fairly recently. What do you think is the secret to a successful relationship? There isn't just one, but at least in the top five is master or at least be good at autonomic self-regulation. Know how to calm yourself down. Don't expect the, like looking to anything external to soothe yourself is it puts you in a terrible position to be a caretaker of yourself and other people, right? So learn how to self-soothe, right? Learn how to calm your mind, steady your action, steady your voice. There are tools to do that. We talk about on the podcast, but elsewhere, have that in place. I also think that if your main focus is on, you want to have good boundaries, et cetera, but on tending to the relationship, doing a little bit more than you think you ought to do, if everyone does that, it goes great. I mean, I'm sometimes so positively struck by how supported I feel, because for many years I was just kind of doing everything on my own. So any little thing I'm like, oh my goodness, this feels huge. And also I think the dynamics have to be right. Let's be really honest. This is a little bit of a tricky topic, but there is a power dynamic in relationships. Sometimes, not all, but in some relationships, it works much better if one person leads and the other person follows. In other relationships, it's more mutuality, works best. People need to know what they need. And so knowing what you need and what you crave is really important. And then once you do that, you can create the relationship you want. I've seen that over and over again, and people are different. But I think that ultimately, I mean, right, there's the dopamine phase of a relationship, and then there's the serotonin phase, the kind of more mutuality, coziness, and sweetness. There's a great book about how to make sure that the dopamine component and the serotonin component, so to speak, go on forever. And it has to do with, you know, when you first meet someone and you're attracted to them, you're essentially objectifying them, meaning, not in the way people might think, you are not dependent on them for emotional stability or survival. As you get close to somebody, you really come to depend on them, and then you tend to objectify them less. And so this book, the book is, the name is kind of corny, but it's written by an analyst, again. It's called, Can Love Last? And it's a book about how really good, strong relationships are the consequence of people constantly moving through this dependency objectification dynamic. And I use those words in the true, in the psychological sense, not in the way they're typically thrown around nowadays. So, you know, in some cultures, men and women will only touch for two weeks out of the month. And then for the other two weeks, the excitement and the sensuality and all, and the sexuality is very heightened. And then they go back to this kind of distancing. Now, I don't think that's feasible for most people, but if you look statistically, those relationships tend to last a very long time with at least reported mutual feelings of intense attraction for many, many, many decades. So human beings need to learn how to at least understand and control these dynamics. And there's a lot of divorce, there's a lot of cheating, there's a lot of stuff out there. It'd be great if people could resolve some of this stuff inside of the relationship, in my opinion. Yeah, and this kind of intense attraction, there's actually one of the poems that Karl Deisseroth introduced me to, I think it's Two English Poems is the name. But one of the things I find myself for prolonged periods being attracted to is you notice some kind of magic and you keep wanting to dig to the depths of that magic. I'm trying to figure it out. You need to really know that person. To really know a person deeply, yeah. You notice something early on. Sure. I don't know what that is, but you just notice something special and you wanna keep pulling at that thread, and you never really do. Well, you also have to be careful. I get a lot of questions from guys. You have to be careful the questions you ask in a relationship too. You have to make sure you really want that information. And it's not just about people's past, right? If you ask somebody how they really feel about something about you and they tell you, that may be soothing. It may be intensely stressful. You have to be, here's one thing I know for sure. For a relationship to work, you have to be brave. You can't go in there fully protected. And yet you also can't go in there with no boundaries because you'll end up beat up. What's that quote, if you wanna be a warrior, prepare to get hurt. If you wanna be an explorer, prepare to get lost. And if you wanna be both, and if you become a lover, prepare to be both or something. Something like that. I forget what, this is one of these Instagram type things that you see passing by and you go, oh, that's pretty true. Love's scary because it takes us back to that primitive circuitry that is as primitive and basic as hunger, thirst, the desire for heat when we're cold, the desire for cold when we're overly warm. It's dynorphin. I mean, when somebody leaves, like when somebody you are attached to leaves by death or by decision or you're forced apart, the dynorphin release is a massive, it is true discomfort. People feel anxiety and discomfort. And moving through that is a hell of a process. I mean, if I knew how to best break up at a neurological level, or if you could just plug yourself into a wall and reset, I mean, I do that episode tomorrow, but we don't have that knowledge. Now, come on, I think we've covered this before and it's even been memefied. I think losing love is part of the magic of love. It means you've felt something. I agree, but at some point, like if you've done it enough times, life is finite. It is beautiful to see these couples that seem very much in love despite many years, despite having been together many years. Yeah, the way they look at each other. Yeah, they'll say- They still see the magic. Yeah, and they'll say, we got lucky, or it's been hard, or this and that. I think external conditions being a little tougher is helpful for a couple. Hardship. I do, I do, because I think that you rally, and you bond with people. Obviously, you want to survive those conditions, but yeah, I do. I think that it helps. Bonnie and Clyde. So, and you- Well, they were a little- A little too much. Well, a little too much. They were sociopaths. But the, well, when two sociopaths find- Love can make you do crazy things. Well, normally, it's interesting. Normally, sociopaths don't team up because they manipulate each other. Sociopaths, sadly, are usually only interested in manipulating the highly pliable or unsuspecting. But when romantic attraction is woven in, then it gets really diabolical. Any advice on finding the love of your life, of my life? This is why Lex is single response. Any advice? Yeah, actually, this comes from a friend of mine who's in a really excellent marriage with great kids and family and high-demand life. It's a decision. Like, at some point, you just prioritize it as, okay, I'm going to make this happen one way or another. And you don't force the discovery of that person. But I mean, I've occasionally said, hey, I think you should meet this person or that person. And well, it wasn't maybe, my judgment might've been off, but the timing wasn't right or something. But I think that, yeah, it's a decision. And it also has to do with life structure. I mean, there were years, so when I was in graduate school, I didn't want a girlfriend. I just wanted to be in lab. And sure, I had romantic dating interests, but I wasn't going to meet them through a committed, you know, live together situation. It wasn't where I was at. And as a postdoc, things are a little different, et cetera, et cetera. But at some point it's sort of like, what do I want my daily routine to look like? Because ultimately a relationship, however one structures it, is going to be part of your daily routine. So at the point where you're like, you know, I'd really love to wake up next to somebody and do blank and blank together. And then I'd love to work. And then we meet for dinner and then we, you know, take the dog for a walk or take kids out or whatever it happens to be, take a trip or do it. You have to be, one has to be in the mindset of wanting to do couple like things, people. And a lot of people don't think about it that way. They either fall into something or they don't see the benefits of coupling up. I think that the pandemic tuned people's awareness to the fact that some things are indeed easier on your own. It depends on finances, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of things are made better done with other people. 100%, but I also, so I was very deliberately, it's an interesting way to put it, but what do you want your day to look like? I think what do you want your day to look like? What do you want your life to be? I was very deliberately always, first of all, happy to be alone, like a conscious thinking. I know a lot of friends who are just unable to be alone. I'm able to be alone, but I'm much happier with another person. Like I'm able to share joy with other humans. I look forward to the day that our kids are rolling jujitsu and my kids are hanging out with your kids. And if that notion sounds even remotely interesting and fun, then it's sort of like you kind of backpedal from that and you go, well, it has to happen. How do you get to that? How do you get to that? It's a repetition. And think from first principles about love. Andrew, thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being an amazing human being who's so inspiring to so many people for constantly. I told this to Carl, like one of the things that was really refreshing about you is that when I tell you an idea, when I tell you a thought, when I tell you something, you don't shut it down as a first step. I was saying that that's common in scientific community. That's common in people around you. You're seeing what's the goal there. You get excited, you get excited together. And that's how you can really have a great friendship and a great stuff together. So I'm deeply grateful for that. And just for connecting so many interesting people together. You're doing an amazing job, man. And thank you for existing. Thank you for being you. Thank you for talking today. And next time I'll see you in the sauna. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to say several things. First of all, thank you for having me on again. It's an honor and a pleasure. I don't say that formally. I really truly mean it. I only, the Huberman Lab podcast, as I always say, only exists because you gave me the suggestion and I'm so grateful that you did. So thank you. And for doing what you do, like you are brave and you were first man in and you're just continue to do it. Just what, as my postdoc advisor used to say, whatever you're doing, just keep going. And then in terms of our friendship, I mean, I think you know, and if you don't, I'm going to just keep telling you anyway, by texting in person, you're an amazing friend. There's deep trust. There's immense respect. And I love you, brother. I love you too, man. We did it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is one of the blessings of old friends. You can afford to be stupid with them. I look forward to doing just that in the many years to come of friendship and fun conversations with Andrew. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/lvh3g7eszVQ

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Chris Tarbell: FBI Agent Who Took Down Silk Road | Lex Fridman Podcast #340

You could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could host things, drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Hacking tools, you could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire. The following is a conversation with Chris Tarbell, a former FBI special agent and cyber crime specialist who tracked down and arrested Russ Ulbricht, the leader of Silk Road, the billion dollar drug marketplace. And he tracked down and arrested Hector Monsegur, aka Sabu, of LulzSec and Anonymous, which are some of the most influential hacker groups in history. He is co-founder of Naxo, a complex cyber crime investigation firm, and is a co-host of a podcast called The Hacker and the Fed. This conversation gives the perspective of the FBI cyber crime investigator, both the technical and the human story. I would also like to interview people on the other side, the cyber criminals who have been caught, and perhaps the cyber criminals who have not been caught and are still out there. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Tarbell. You are one of the most successful cybersecurity law enforcement agents of all time. You tracked and brought down Russ Ulbricht, aka Dread Pirate Roberts, who ran Silk Road, and Sabu of LulzSec and Anonymous, who was one of the most influential hackers in the world. So first, can you tell me the story of tracking down Russ Ulbricht and Silk Road? Let's start from the very beginning. And maybe let's start by explaining what is the Silk Road. It was really the first dark market website. You literally could buy anything there. Well, I'll take that back. There's two things you couldn't buy there. You couldn't buy guns, because that was a different website, and you couldn't buy fake degrees. So no one could become a doctor, but you could buy literally whatever else you wanted. You could- Drugs. Drugs. You could buy heroin right from Afghanistan, the good stuff. Hacking tools, you could hack for hire. You could buy murders for hire, if you wanted someone killed. Now, so when I was an FBI agent, I had to kind of sell some of these cases, and this was a big drug case. That's the way people saw Silk Road. So internally to the FBI, how I had to sell it, I had to find the worst thing on there that I could possibly find. And I think one time I saw a posting for baby parts. So let's say that you had a young child and that needed a liver. You could literally go on there and ask for a six-month-old liver, if you wanted to. For like surgical operations versus something darker. Yeah, I never saw anything that dark as far as people wanted to e-body parts. I did interview a cannibal once when I was in the FBI. That's another crazy story, but that one actually weirded me out. So I just watched Jeffrey Dahmer, a document on Netflix, and it just changed the way I see human beings because it's a portrayal of a normal looking person doing really dark things and doing so not out of a place of insanity, seemingly, but just because he has almost like a fetish for that kind of thing. It's disturbing that people like that are out there. So people like that would then be using Silk Road, not like that necessarily, but people of different walks of life would be using Silk Road to primarily, what was the primary thing, drugs? It was primarily drugs. And that's where it started. It started off with Ross Ulbricht growing mushrooms out in the wilderness of California and selling them. But really his was more of a libertarian viewpoint. I mean, it was like, you choose what you wanna do for yourself and do it. And the way Silk Road kind of had the anonymity is it used what's called Tor, the Onion Router, which is an anonymizing function on the deep web. It was actually invented by the US Navy back in the mid 90s or so, but it also used cryptocurrency. So it was the first time that we saw this birth on the internet of mixing cryptocurrency and an IP blocking software. So in cyber crime, you go after one, the IP address and trace it through the network, or two, you go after the cash. And this one kind of blocked both. Cash meaning the flow of money, physical or digital. And then IP is some kind of identifying thing of the computer. It's your telephone number on your computer. So yeah, all computers have a unique four octet numbers. So 123.123.123.123. And the computer uses DNS or domain name services to render that name. So if you were looking for CNN.com, your computer then translates that to that IP address or that telephone number where it can find that information. Didn't Silk Road used to have guns in the beginning? Or was that considered to have guns? Or did it naturally emerge and then Russ realized like, this is not good? It went back and forth. I think there were guns on there and he tried to police it. He told himself that they're the captain of the boat. So he had to follow his rules. So I think he took off those posts eventually and moved guns elsewhere. What was the system of censorship that he used of selecting what is okay and not okay? I mean- Him alone, he's the captain of the boat. Do you know by chance if there was a lot of debates and criticisms internally amongst the criminals of what is and isn't allowed? I mean, it's interesting to see a totally different moral code emerge that's outside the legal code of society. We did get the server and was able to read all of the chat logs that happened. I mean, all the records were there. I don't remember big debates. I mean, there was a clear leadership and that was the final decision. That was the CEO of Silk Road. And so primarily it was drugs and primarily out of an ideology of freedom, which is if you want to use drugs, you should be able to use drugs. You should put into your body what you wanna put in your body. And when you were presenting a case of why this should be investigated, you're trying to find, as you mentioned, the worst possible things on there. Is that what you were saying? So we had arrested a guy named Jeremy Hammond and he hit himself. He was a hacker and this would be arrested. It was the second time he had been arrested for hacking. He used TOR. And so that kind of brought us to a point. The FBI has a computer system where you look up things. You look up anything. I could look up your name or whatever if you're associated with my case. And we were finding at the time a lot of things in, you look it up, a case would end. Be like, oh, this is TOR. It just stopped. Like we couldn't get any further. So we had just had this big arrest of Sabu and took down Anonymous. And sometimes in the FBI, the way it used, the old school FBI, when you had a big case and you're working seven days a week and 14 hours, 15 hours a day, you sort of take a break. The boss kind of said, yeah, I'll see you in a few months. Go get to know your family a little bit and come back. But the group of guys I was with was like, let's find the next big challenge. And that's when we were finding case closed, it was TOR. Case closed, it was TOR. So said, let's take a look at TOR and let's see what we can do. Maybe we'll take a different approach. And Silk Road was being looked at by other law enforcement, but it was taking like a drug approach where I'm going to find a drug buyer who got the drug sent to them in the mail and let's arrest up, let's go up the chain. But the buyers didn't know their dealers. They never met them. And so you were taking a cyber security approach. Yeah, we said, let's try to look at this from a cyber approach and see if we can gleam anything out of it. So I'm actually indirectly connected. Oh. To, I'm sure I'm not admitting anything that's not already on my FBI file. Oh, I can already tell you what you're gonna tell me though. What's that? That when you were at college, you wrote a paper and you're connected to the person that started. You son of a bitch. You clever son of a bitch. I'm an FBI agent or a former FBI agent. How would I not have already known that? No, but I could have told you other stuff. No, that's exactly what you were about to tell me. I was looking up his name because I forgot it. So one of my advisors for my PhD was Rachel Greenstadt and she is married to Roger Dingle Dine, which is the co-founder of the Tor Project. And I actually reached out to him last night to do a podcast together. I don't know. Is, have. Have. Have. Have. Have. Have. No, it was a good party trick. I mean, it's cool that you know this and the timing of it, it was just like beautiful. But just to linger on the Tor Project. So we understand. So Tor is this black box that people disappear in, in terms of like the, when you were tracking people. Can you paint a picture of what Tor is used in general? Are there, it's like when you talk about Bitcoin, for example, cryptocurrency, especially today, much more people use it for legal activity versus illegal activity. What about Tor? Tor was originally invented by the US Navy. So that like spies inside countries could talk to spies and no one could find them. There was no way of tracing them. And then they released that information free to the world. So Tor has two different versions of, versions, two different ways it can be utilized. There's.onionsites, which is like a normal website, a.com, but it's only found within the Tor browser. You can only get there if you know the whole address and get there. The other way Tor is used is to go through the internet and then come out the other side if you want a different IP address. If you're trying to hide your identity. So if you were doing like, say cyber crime, I would have the victim computer and I would trace it back out to a Tor relay. And then because you don't have an active connection or what's called a circuit at the time, I wouldn't be able to trace it back. But even if you had an active circuit, I would have to go to each machine physically live and try to rebuild that, which is literally impossible. So what do you feel about Tor, ethically, philosophically, as a human being on this world that spent quite a few years of your life and still trying to protect people? So part of my time in the FBI was working on child exploitation, kiddie porn, as they call it. That really changed my life in a way. And so anything that helps facilitate the exploitation of children fucking pisses me off. And that sort of jaded my opinion towards Tor, because that, because it helps facilitate those sites. So this ideal of freedom that Russell Albrecht, for example, tried to embody is something that you don't connect with anymore because of what you've seen that ideal being used for. I mean, the child exploitation is a specific example for it. You know, and it's easy for me to sit here and say child exploitation, child porn, because no one listening to this is ever going to say that I'm wrong and that we should allow child porn. Should, because some people utilize it in a bad way, should it go away? No, I mean, I'm a technologist. I want technology to move forward. People are gonna do bad things and they're going to use technology to help them do bad things. Well, let me ask you then, we'll jump around a little bit, but the things you were able to do in tracking down information, and we'll get to it, there is some suspicion that this was only possible with mass surveillance, like with NSA, for example. First of all, is there any truth to that? And second of all, what do you feel are the pros and cons of mass surveillance? There is no truth to that. And then my feelings on mass surveillance. If there was, would you tell me? Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. I love this conversation so much. But what do you feel about the, given that you said child porn, what are the pros and cons of surveillance at a society level? I mean, nobody wants to give up their privacy. I say that, I say no one wants to give up their privacy, but I mean, I used to have to get a search warrant to look inside your house, or I can just log onto your Facebook and you've got pictures of all inside your house and what's going on. I mean, it's not, you know, so people like the idea of not giving up their privacy, but they do it anyways. They're giving away their freedoms all the time. They're carrying watches that gives out their heartbeat to a weight of companies that are storing that. I mean, what's more personal than your heartbeat? So I think people on mass really want to protect their privacy and I would say most people don't really need to protect their privacy. But the case against mass surveillance is that if you want to criticize the government in a very difficult time, you should be able to do it. So when you need the freedom, you should have it. So when you wake up one day and realize there's something going wrong with the country I love, I want to be able to help. And one of the great things about the United States of America is there's that individual revolutionary spirit, like so that the government doesn't become too powerful. You can always protest. There's always the best of the ideal of freedom of speech. You can always say fuck you to the man. And I think there's a concern of direct or indirect suppression of that through mass surveillance. You might not, is that that little subtle fear that grows with time that, why bother criticizing the government? It's gonna be a headache. I'm gonna get a ticket every time I say something bad, that kind of thing. So it can get out of hand. The bureaucracy grows and the freedoms slip away. That's the criticism. I completely see your point and I agree with it. But on the other side, people criticize the government of these freedoms, but tech companies talk about destroying your privacy and controlling what you can say. I realize they're private platforms and they can decide what's on their platform, but they're taking away your freedoms of what you can say. And we've heard some things where maybe government officials were in line with tech companies to take away some of that freedom. And I agree with you, that gets scary. Yeah, there's something about government that feels, maybe because of the history of human civilization, maybe because tech companies are a new thing, but just knowing the history of abuses of government, there's something about government that enables the corrupting nature of power to take hold at scale more than tech companies, at least what we've seen so far. Yeah, I agree, I agree. But I mean, we haven't had a voice like we've had until recently. I mean, anyone that has a Twitter account now can speak and become a news article. My parents didn't have that voice. If they wanted to speak out against the government or do something, they had to go to a protest or organize a protest or do something along those lines. So we have more of a place to put our voice out now. Yeah, it's incredible, but that's why it hurts and that's why you notice it when certain voices get removed. The president of the United States of America was removed from one such or all such platforms. And that hurts. Yeah, that's crazy to me. That's insane. That's insane that we took that away. Let's return to Silk Road and Russ Albrecht. So how did your path with this very difficult, very fascinating case cross? We were looking to open a case against Tor because it was a problem. All the cases were closing because Tor. So we went on Tor and we came up with 26 web, different onion, dotting onions that we targeted. We were looking for nexuses to hacking because I was on a squad called CY2 and we were like the premier squad in New York that was working criminal cyber intrusions. And so, any website that was offering hackers for hire or hacking tools for free or paid services, now we're seeing ransomware as a paid service and phishing as a paid service, anything that offered that. So we opened this case on, I think we called it, so you have to name cases. One of the fun thing in the FBI is when you start a case, you get to name it. You would not believe how much time is spent in coming up with the name. Casey goes, I think we called this Onion Peeler because of the, yeah. So a little bit of humor, a little bit of wit and some profundity to the language, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I- Because you're gonna have to work with us for quite a lot, so. Yeah, this one had the potential of being a big one because I think Silk Road was like the sixth on the list for that case, but we all knew that was sort of the golden ring. If you could make the splash that that onion site was going down, then it would probably get some publicity. And that's part of law enforcement is getting some publicity out of it that makes others think not to do it. I wish to say that Tor is the name of the project, the browser. What is the onion technology behind Tor? Let's say you wanna go to a.onion site. You'll put in the.onion you wanna go to and your computer will build communications with a Tor relay, which are all publicly available out there but you'll encrypt it. You'll put a package around your data and so it's encrypted and so can't read it. It goes to that first relay. That first relay knows about you and then knows about the next relay down the chain. And so it takes your data and then encrypts that on the outside and sends it to the relay number two. Now, relay number two only knows about relay number one. It doesn't know who you are asking for this. And it goes through there, adding those layers on top, layers of encryption till it gets to where it is. And then even the onion service doesn't know except for the relay it came from, who it's talking to. And so it peels back that, gives the information, puts another layer back on. And so it's layers like you're peeling an onion back of the different relays and that encryption protects who the sender is and what information they're sending. The more layers there are, the more exponentially difficult it is to decrypt it. I mean, you get to a place where you don't have to have so many layers because it doesn't matter anymore. It's mathematically impossible to decrypt it. But the more relays you have, the slower it is. I mean, that's one of the big drawbacks on Tor is how slow it operates. So how do you peel the onion? So what are the different methodologies for trying to get some information from a cybersecurity perspective on these operations like the Silk Road? It's very difficult. People have come up with different techniques. There's been techniques to put out in the news media about how they do it, running massive amounts of relays and you're controlling those relays. I think I've seen somebody tried that once. So there's a technical solution. And what about social engineering? What about trying to infiltrate the actual humans that are using the Silk Road and trying to get in that way? Yeah, I mean, I definitely could see the way of doing that. And in this case, in our takedown, we used that. There was one of my partners, Jared Darragon, he was an HSI investigator, and he had worked his way up to be a system admin on the site. So that did gleam quite a bit of information because he was inside and talking to, at that time, we only know it as DPR or Dread Pirate Roberts. We didn't know who that was yet, but we had that open communication. And one of the things, the technical aspects on that is there was a Jabber server. There was, that's a type of communication server that was being used. And we knew that Ross had his Jabber set to Pacific time. So we had a pretty good idea what part of the country he was in. I mean, isn't that, from DPR's perspective, from Russ's perspective, isn't that clumsy? He wasn't a big computer guy. Do you notice that aspect of the technical savvy of some of these guys doesn't seem to be quite, why weren't they good at this? Well, the real techie savvy ones, we don't arrest. We don't get to them, we don't find them. You don't get to them. Shout out to the techie criminals. They're probably watching this. I mean, yeah, I mean, you were getting the low-hanging fruit. I mean, you were getting the ones that can be caught. I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it, but the anonymous case, there was a guy named AV Unit. He's still, I lose sleep over him because we didn't catch him. We caught everybody else, we didn't catch him. He's good, though. He pops up, too, once in a while on the internet, and it pisses me off. Yeah, what's his name again? AV Unit, that's all I know, is his AV Unit. AV Unit. Yeah, I got a funny story about him and who people think he is. Can I actually, can we go on that brief tangent? Sure, I love tangents. Well, let me ask you, since he's probably he or she, do we know it's a he? We have no idea. Okay. There's another funny story about hackers, the he-she issue. What's the funny story there? Well, one of the guys in LULSEC was a she, was a 17-year-old girl. And my source in the case, the guy, Sabu, that I arrested and part of, we sat side by side for nine months and then took down the case and all that. He was convinced she was a girl, and he was in love with her almost at one point. It turns out to be a 35-year-old guy living in England. Oh, so he was convinced it was a... Yes, he was absolutely convinced. Based on what exactly? By linguistic, like human-based linguistic analysis or what? She, he, whatever, Kayla is who he went, ended up being a modification of his sister's name, the real guy's sister's name, was so good at building the backstory. All these guys, and it's funny, these guys are part of a hacking crew. They social engineer the shit out of each other just to build, if one of them ever gets caught, they'll convince the everybody else that they're a Brazilian ISP owner or something like that, and that's how I'm so powerful. Well, yeah, that social engineering aspect is part of living a life of cybercrime or cybersecurity on the offensive or defensive. So AV unit, can I ask you also just a tangent of a tangent first? That's my favorite tangent. Okay. Is it possible for me to have a podcast conversation with somebody who hasn't been caught yet, and because they have the conversation, they still won't be caught? And is that a good idea? Meaning, is there a safe way for a criminal to talk to me on a podcast? I would think so. I would think that someone could, I mean, someone who has been living a double life for long enough where you think they're not a criminal. No, no, no, they would have to admit, that they would say, I am AV unit. Oh, you would wanna have a conversation with AV unit? Yes. I'm just speaking from an FBI perspective, technically speaking, because I, so let me explain my motivation. I think I would like to be able to talk to people from all walks of life, and understanding criminals, understanding their mind, I think is very important. And I think there's fundamentally something different between a criminal who's still active versus one that's been caught. The mind, just from observing it, changes completely once you're caught. You have a big shift in your understanding of the world. I mean, I do have a question about the ethics of having such conversations, but first, technically, is it possible? If I was technically advising you, I would say, first off, don't ask me questions. Don't advertise it. The fewer people that you're gonna tell that you're having this conversation with, the better. And yeah, you could, are you doing it in person? Are you doing it in- In person would be amazing, yeah, but their face would not be shown. Face would not be shown, yeah. I mean, you couldn't publish the show for a while. They'd have to put a lot of trust in you, that you are not going to, you're gonna have to alter those tapes. I say tapes, because it's old school. Exactly, I'm sure a lot of people just said that, like, oh shit, this old guy just said tape. I heard of VHS, it was in the 1800s, I think. But yeah, yeah, you could do it. They'd have to have complete faith and trust in you, that you destroy the originals after you've altered it. What about if they don't have faith? Is there a way for them to attain security? So, like, for me to go through some kind of process where I meet them somewhere where- I mean, you're not gonna do it without a bag over your head. I don't know if that's the life you wanna live. I'm fine with a bag over my head. That's gonna get taken out of context. But I just, I think it's a worthy effort. It's worthy to go through the hardship of that to understand the mind of somebody. I think fundamentally, conversations are a different thing than the operation of law enforcement. Understanding the mind of a criminal, I think, is really important. I don't know if you're gonna have the honest conversation that you're looking for. I mean, it may sound honest, but it may not be the truth. I found most times when I was talking to criminals, it's lies mixed with half-truths. And you kinda, if they're good, they can keep that story going for long enough. If they're not, you kind of see the relief in them when you finally break that wall down. That's the job of an interviewer. If the interviewer is good, then perhaps not directly, but through the gaps, seeps out the truth of the human being. So not necessarily the details of how they do the operations and so on, but just who they are as a human being, what their motivations are, what their ethics are, how they see the world, what is good, what is evil, do they see themselves as good, what do they see their motivation as, do they have resentment, what do they think about love for the people within their small community, do they have resentment for the government or for other nations or for other people, do they have childhood issues that led to a different view of the world than others perhaps have, do they have certain fetishes like sexual and otherwise that led to the construction of the world, they might be able to reveal some deep flaws to the cybersecurity infrastructure of our world, not in detail, but like philosophically speaking. They might have, I know you might say it's just a narrative, but they might have a kind of ethical concern for the well-being of the world that they're essentially attacking the weakness of the cybersecurity infrastructure because they believe ultimately that will lead to a safer world. So the attacks will reveal the weaknesses and if they're stealing a bunch of money, that's okay because that's gonna enforce you to invest a lot more money in defending, yeah, defending things that actually matter, you know, nuclear warheads and all those kinds of things. I mean, I could see, you know, it's fascinating to explore the mind of a human being like that because I think it will help people understand. Now, of course, it's still a person that's creating a lot of suffering in the world, which is a problem. So do you think ethically it's a good thing to do? I don't, I mean, I feel like I have a fairly high ethical bar that I have to put myself on and I don't think I have a problem with it. I would love to listen to it. Okay, great. I mean, not that I'm your ethical coach or anything. Well, that's interesting. I mean, so, because I thought you would have become jaded and exhausted by the criminal mind. It's funny. You know, I'm, you know, fast forward in our story, I'm very good friends with Hector Monserrate, the Sabu, the guy I arrested, and he tells stories of what he did in his past. And I'm like, oh, I'm that Hector, you know? But then I listened to your episode with Brett Johnson and I was like, ah, this guy's stealing money from the US government and welfare fraud and all this sort of things. It just pissed me off. And I don't know why I have that differentiation in my head. I don't know why I think one's just, oh, Hector will be Hector. And then this guy just pissed me off. Well, you didn't feel that way about Hector until you probably met him. Well, I didn't know Hector. I knew Sabu. So I hunted down Sabu and I learned about Hector over those nine months. We'll talk about it later. Let's finish with, let's return tangent to, back to the tangent. Oh, one tangent up, who's AV unit? I don't know. Interesting. So he's at the core of Anonymous. He's one of the critical people in Anonymous. What is known about him? There's what's known in public and what was known because I sat with Hector and he was sort of like the set things up guy. So if, LulzSec had like their hackers, which was Sabu and Kayla, and they had their media guy, this guy Topiary. He lived up in the Northern end of England and they had a few other guys, but AV unit was the guy that set up infrastructure. So if you need a VPN in Brazil or something like that to pop through, one of the first things Hector told me after we arrested him is that AV unit was a secret service agent. And I was like, oh shit. Just because he kind of lived that lifestyle. He'd be around for a bunch of days and then all of a sudden gone for three weeks. And I tried to get more out of Hector early on in that relationship. I'm sure he was a little bit guarded and maybe trying to social engineer me. Maybe he wanted that, oh shit, there's law enforcement involved in this. And not to say, I mean, I was in over my head with that case just the amount of work that was going on. So to track them all down, plus the 350 hacks that came in about just military institutions, it was swimming in the deep end. So it was just at the end of the case, I looked back and I was like, AV unit, I could have had them all. Maybe that's the perfectionist in me. Oh man, well, reach out somehow. I won't say how, right? We'll have to figure out. Would you have him on? Yeah. Oh my gosh, just let me know. Just talk shit about you the whole time. That's perfect. He probably doesn't even care about me. Well, now he will. Yeah. Because there's a certain pleasure of a guy who's extremely good at his job not catching another guy who's extremely good at his job. Obviously better, he got away. Better, there you go, he's still eating at you. I love it. You or she. If I could meet that guy one day, he or she, that'd be great. I mean, I have no power. So yes, so Crow, can you speak to the scale of this thing? Just for people who are not familiar, how big was it? And any other interesting things you understand about its operation when it was active? So it was when we finally got looking through the books and the numbers came out, it was about $1.2 billion in sales. It's kind of hard with the fluctuation value of Bitcoin at the time to come up with a real number. So you kind of pick a daily average and go across. So most of the operation was done in Bitcoin. It was all done in Bitcoin. You couldn't, you had escrow accounts on, you came in and you put money in an escrow account and the transaction wasn't done until the client got the drugs or whatever they had bought. And then the drug dealers had sent it in. There was some talk at the time that the cartel was starting to sell on there. So that started getting a little hairy there at the end. What was the understanding of the relationship between organized crime like the cartels and this kind of more ad hoc new age market that is the Silk Road? I mean, it was all just chatter. It was just, you know, cause like I said, Jared was in the inside. So we saw some of it from the admin sides and Ross had a lot of private conversations with the different people that he had advised him, but no one knew each other. And I mean, the only thing that they knew were the admins had to send an ID to Ross, had to send a picture of their driver's license or passport, which I always found very strange because if you are an admin on a site that sells fake IDs, why would you send your real ID? And then why would the guy running the site who profits from selling fake IDs believe that it was? But fast forward, they were all real IDs. All the IDs that we found on Ross's computer as the admins were the real people's IDs. What do you make of that? Just other clumsiness? Yeah, low hanging fruit, I guess. I guess that's what it is. I mean, I would have bought, I mean, even Ross bought fake IDs off the site. He had federal agents knock on his door, you know, and then he got a little cocky about it. The landscape, the dynamics of trust is fascinating here. So you trust certain ideas are, like who do you trust in that kind of market? What was your understanding of the network of trust? I don't think anyone trusts anybody, you know? I mean, I think Ross had his advisors of trust, but outside of that, I mean, he required people to send their ID for their trust. People stole from him. There's open cases of that. It's a criminal world. You can't trust anybody. What was his life like, you think? Lonely. Can you imagine being trapped in something like that where the whole world focused on that and you can't tell people what you do all day? Could he have walked away? Like someone else take over or the site just shut down? Either one. Just you putting yourself in his shoes, the loneliness, the anxiety, the just the growing immensity of it. So walk away with some kind of financial stability. I couldn't have made it past two days. I don't like loneliness. I mean, if my wife's away, I probably call her 10, 12 times a day. We just talk about things. You know, something crossed my mind. I wanna talk about it. I'm sure she- And you'd like to talk to her honestly about everything. So if you were running so crowded, you wouldn't be able to like- Hopefully I'd have a little protection. I'd only mention to her when we were in bed to have that marital connection. But who knows? She's gonna question why the Ferrari is outside and things like that. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you can come up with something. Why didn't he walk away? It's another question. Why don't criminals walk away in these situations? Well, I mean, I don't know every criminal mind and some do. I mean, A.V. Unit walked away. I mean, not to go back to that son of a bitch, but- There's a theme to this. But you know, Ross started counting his dollars. I mean, he really kept track of how much money he was making and it started getting exponentially growth. I mean, if he would have stayed at it, he would have probably been one of the richest people in the world. And do you think he liked the actual money or the fact of the number growing? I mean, have you ever held a Bitcoin? Yeah. Oh, you have? Well, he never did. What do you mean held a Bitcoin? You can't hold it. It's not real. It's not like I can give you a briefcase of Bitcoin or something like that. He liked the idea of it growing. He liked the idea. I mean, I think it started off as sharing this idea, but then he really did turn to, like, I am the captain of this ship and that's what goes. And he was making a lot of money. And again, my interaction with Ross was about maybe five or six hours over a two-day period. I knew DPR because I read his words and all that. I didn't really know Ross. There was a journal found on his computer. And so it sort of kind of gave me a little insight. So I don't like to do a playbook for criminals, but I'll tell you right now, don't write things down. There was a big fad about people, like, remember kids going around shooting people with paintballs and filming it? I don't know why you would do that. Why would you videotape yourself committing crime and then publish it? Like, if there's one thing I've taught my children, don't record yourself doing bad things. It never goes well. So- And you actually give advice in the other end of logs being very useful for the defense perspective for, you know, if information is useful for being able to figure out what the attacks were all about. Logs are the only reason I found Hector Monsegor. I mean, the one time his VPN dropped during a Fox hack, and he says he didn't, he wasn't even hacking. He just was sent a link and he clicked on it. And in 10 million lines of logs, there was one IP address that stuck out. This is fascinating. We'll explore several angles of that. So what was the process of bringing down Ross and the Silk Road? All right, so that's a long story. You want the whole thing or you want to break it up? Let's start at the beginning. Once we had the information of the chat logs and all that from the server, we found- What's the server? What's the chat log? So the dot onion was running, the website, the Silk Road, was running on a server in Iceland. How did you figure that out? That was one of the claims that the NSA- Yeah, that's the one that we said that, yeah, I wouldn't tell you if it was. It's on the internet. I mean, the internet has their conspiracy theories and all that, so. But you figure out, that's the part of the thing you do. It's puzzle pieces and you have to put them together and look for different pieces of information and figure out, okay, so you figure out the server is in Iceland. We get a copy of it, and so we start getting clues off of that. Was it a physical copy of the server? Yeah, you fly over there, so you go. If you've been to Iceland, if you've never been, you should definitely go to Iceland. Is it beautiful? I love it, I love it. It was, so I'll tell you this. So, sorry, tangents, right? Yeah, I love this, yeah. So I went to Iceland for the anonymous case, then I went to Iceland for the Silk Road case, and I was like, oh shit, all cybercrime goes through Iceland. It was just my sort of thing. And I was over there for like the third time, and I said, if I ever can bring my family here. Like, so there's a place called Thingavar, and I'm sure I'm fucking up the name. The Icelandics are pissed right now. But it's where the North American continental plate and the European continental plate are pulling apart, and it's being filled in with volcanic material in the middle. And it's so cool. Like, I was like, one day I'll be able to afford to bring my family here. And once I left- Just like the humbling and the beauty of nature. Just everything, man, it was a different world. It was insane how great Iceland is. And so we went back, and we rented a van, and we took friends, and we drove around the entire country. Absolutely, like a beautiful place. Like, Reykjavik's nice, but get out of Reykjavik as quick as you can and see the countryside. How is this place even real? Well, it's so new. I mean, that's, so, you know, our rivers have been going through here for millions of years and flattened everything out and all that. These are new, this is new land being carved by these rivers. You can walk behind a waterfall in one place. It's the most beautiful place I've ever been. You understand why this is a place where a lot of hacking is being done? Because the energy is free, and it's cool. So you have a lot of servers going on there. Server farms, you know, the energy has come up from the ground, geothermal. And then it keeps all the servers nice and cool. So why not keep your computers there at a cheap rate? Tangents. I'll definitely visit for several reasons, including to talk to AV Unit. Yeah, he'll want you there. Well, the servers are there, but they don't probably live there. I mean, that's interesting. I mean, the Pacific, the PST, the time zones, there's so many fascinating things to explore here. But so you got- Sorry, to add to that, I mean, the European internet cable goes through there. So, you know, across the Greenland, then down through Canada and all that. So they have backbone access with cheap energy and free cold weather, you know. And beautiful. Oh, and beautiful, yes. So chat logs on that server. What was in the chat logs? Everything. He kept them all. That's another issue. If you're running a criminal enterprise, please don't keep all, again, I'm not making a guidebook of how to commit the perfect crime, but, you know, every chat he ever had, and everyone's chat, it was like going into Facebook of criminal activity. Yeah, just looking at texts with Elon Musk, being part of the conversations. I don't know if you're familiar, but they've been made public for the court cases going through, was going through, is going through, was going through with Twitter. I don't know where it is. But it made me realize that, oh, okay. I'm generally, that's my philosophy on life, is like anything I text or email or say, publicly or privately, I should be proud of. So I tried to kind of do that, because you basically, you say, don't keep chat logs, but it's very difficult to erase chat logs from this world. I guess if you're a criminal, that should be, like you have to be exceptionally competent at that kind of thing. To erase your footprints is very, very difficult. Can't make one mistake. All it takes is one mistake of keeping it. But yeah, I mean, not only do you have to be, whatever you put in a chat log or whatever you put in an email it has to hold up and you have to stand behind it publicly when it comes out. But if it comes out 10 years from now, you have to stand behind it. I mean, we're seeing that now in today's society. Yeah, but that's a responsibility you have to take really, really seriously. If I was a parent and advising teens, you kind of have to teach them that. I know there's a sense like, no, we'll become more accustomed to that kind of thing, but in reality, no, I think in the future we'll still be held responsible for the weird shit we do. Yeah, a friend of mine, his daughter got kicked out of college because of something she posted in high school. And the shittiest thing for him, but great for my kids, great lesson. Look over there and you don't want that to happen to you. Yeah, okay, so in the chat logs was useful information, like breadcrumbs of what, of information that you can then pull out. Yeah, great evidence and stuff, you know, I mean, obviously. Oh, evidence too. Yeah, a lot of evidence. I mean, here's a sale of this much heroin because Ross ended up getting charged with a czar status on certain things. And it's a certain weight in each type of drug that you had, like, I think it's four or five employees of your empire and that you made more than $10 million. And so it's just like the narco traffickers get charged with or, you know, anybody out of Columbia, you know, so. And that was primarily what he was charged with during when he was arrested is the drug. Yeah, and he got charged with some of the hacking tools too. Okay, because he's in prison, what, for life? Two life sentences plus 40 years. And no possibility of parole? In the federal system, there's no possibility of parole when you have life. The only way you get out is if the president pardons you. There's always a chance. There is, I think it was close. I heard rumors it was close. Well, right, so it depends. Given, it's fascinating, but given the political, the ideological ideas that he represented and espoused, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Yeah, I mean, I've been asked before, who, you know, does he get out of prison first or does Snowden come back into America? And I don't know, I have no idea. Snowden just became a Russian citizen. I saw that, and I've heard a lot of good, weird theories about that one. Well, actually, on another tangent, let me ask you, do you think Snowden is a good or a bad person? A bad person. Can you make the case that he's a bad person? There's ways of being a whistleblower, and there's rules set up on how to do that. He didn't follow those rules. I mean, they, you know, I'm red, white, and blue, so I'm pretty, you know, I give myself a- So you think his actions were anti-American? I think the results of his actions were anti-American. I don't know if his actions were anti-American. Do you think he could have anticipated the negative consequences of his action? Yes. Should we judge him by the consequences or the ideals of the intent of his actions? I think we all get to judge him based on our own beliefs, but I believe what he did was wrong. Can you steelman the case that he's actually a good person and good for this country, for the United States of America, as a flag bearer for the whistleblowers, the check on the power of government? Yeah, I mean, I'm not big government type guy, you know, so, you know, even that sounds weird coming from a government guy for so many years, but there's rules in place for a reason. I mean, he put, you know, some of our best capabilities, he made them publicly available. They really kind of set us back in the, and this isn't my world at all, but the offensive side of cybersecurity. All right, so he revealed stuff that he didn't need to reveal in order to make the point. Correct. So if you can imagine a world where he leaked stuff that revealed the mass surveillance efforts and not reveal other stuff. Yeah. Like is the mass surveillance, I mean, that's the thing that, of course, there's in the interpretation of that, there's fear mongering, but at the core, that was a real shock to people that it's possible for a government to collect data at scale. It's surprising to me that people are that shocked by it. Well, there's conspiracies, and then there's like actual evidence that that is happening. I mean, it's a real, there's a lot of reality that people ignore, but when it hits you in the face, you realize, holy shit, we're living in a new world. This is the new reality, and we have to deal with that reality. Just like you work in cybersecurity, I think it really hasn't hit most people how fucked we all are in terms of cybersecurity. Okay, let me rephrase that. How many dangers there are in a digital world, how much under attack we all are, and how more intense the attacks are getting, and how difficult the defense is, and how important it is, and how much we should value it, and all the different things we should do at the small and large scale to defend. Like most people really haven't woken up. They think about privacy from tech companies. They don't think about attacks, cyber attacks. People don't think they're a target, and that message definitely has to get out there. I mean, if you have a voice, you're a target. If the place you work, you might be a target. See, your husband might work at some place, because now people are working from home, so they're gonna target you to get access to his network in order to get in. Well, in that same way, the idea that the US government or any government could be doing mass surveillance on its citizens is one that was a wake-up call, because you could imagine the ways in which that could be, like you could abuse the power of that to control the citizenry for political reasons and purposes. Absolutely, you know, you could abuse it. I think during the part of the Snowden League we saw the two NSA guys were monitoring their girlfriends, and there's rules in place for that. Those people should be punished for abusing that. But how else are we going to hear about terrorists that are in the country talking about birthday cakes? And that was a case where that was the trip word, that we're gonna go bomb New York City's subway. Yeah, it's complicated, but it just feels like there should be some balance of transparency. There should be a check in that power, like in the name of the war on terror, you can sort of sacrifice, there is a trade-off between security and freedom, but it just feels like there's a giant slippery slope on the sacrificing of freedom in the name of security. I hear you, and we live in a world where, well, I live in a world where I had to tell you exactly when I arrested someone, I had to write a 50-page document of how I arrested you, and all the probable cause I have against you and all that. Well, bad guys are reading that. They're reading how I caught you, and they're changing the way they're doing things. They're changing their MO. They're doing it to be more secure. If we tell people how we're monitoring, what we're surveilling, we're gonna lose that. I mean, the terrorists are just gonna go a different way. And I'm not trying to, again, I'm not big government. I'm not trying to say that it's cool that we're monitoring, the US government's monitoring everything, big tech's monitoring everything. They're just monetizing it versus possibly using it against you. But there is a balance, and those 50 pages, they have a lot of value. They make your job harder, but they prevent you from abusing the power of the job. Yeah. There's a balance. That's a tricky balance. So the chat logs in Iceland give you evidence of the heroin and all the large-scale czar-level drug trading. What else did it give you in terms of how to catch? It gave us infrastructure. So the Onion name was actually running on a server in France. So if you, and it only communicated through a back channel, a VPN, to connect to the Iceland server. There was a Bitcoin vault server that was also in Iceland. And I think that was so that the admins couldn't get into the Bitcoins, the other admins that were hired to work on the site. So you could get into the site, but you couldn't touch the money. Only Ross had access to that. And then another big mistake on Ross's part is he had the backups for everything at a data center in Philadelphia. Don't put your infrastructure in the United States. I mean, again, let's not make a playbook, but you know. Well, I think these are low-hanging fruit that people of competence would know already. I agree. But it's interesting that he wasn't competent enough to make, so he was incompetent in certain ways. Yeah, I don't think he was a mastermind of setting up an infrastructure that would protect his online business because keeping chat logs, keeping a diary, putting infrastructure where it shouldn't be, bad decisions. How did you figure out that he's in San Francisco? So we had that part with Jared that he was on the West Coast. And then- Who again is Jared? Jared Day-Egan, he was a partner. And he was a DHS agent, worked for HSI, Homeland Security Investigations in Chicago. He started his Silk Road investigation because he was working at O'Hare and a weird package came in, couldn't find out. He traced it back to Silk Road. So he started working at a Silk Road investigation long before I started my case. And he made his way up undercover all the way to be an admin on Silk Road. So he was talking to Ross on a Jabra server, a private Jabra server, private chat communication server. And we noticed that Ross's time zone on that Jabra server was set to the West Coast. So we had Pacific time on there. So we had a region, 1 24th of the world was covered of where we thought he might be. And from there, how do you get to San Francisco? There was another guy, an IRS agent that was part of the team. And he used a powerful tool to find his clue. He used the world of Google. He simply just went back and Googled around for Silk Road at the time it was coming up and found some posts on like some help forums that this guy was starting an Onion website and wanted some cryptocurrency help. And if you could help him, please reach out to ross.albrecht at gmail.com in my world. That's a clue. Okay, so that's as simple as that. Yeah, and the name he used on that post was Frosty. Yeah, so you had to connect Frosty and other uses in Frosty and here's a Gmail and the Gmail has the name. The Gmail posted that I need help under the name Frosty on this forum. So what's the connection of Frosty elsewhere? The person logging into the Philadelphia backup server, the name of the computer was Frosty. Another clue in my world. And that's it. The name is there, the connection to the Philadelphia server and then to Iceland is there. And so the rest is small details in terms of, or is there interesting details? No, I mean, there's some electronic surveillance that find Ross Albrecht living in a house and is there, you know, is a computer at his house attaching to, you know, does it have tour traffic at the same time that DPR is on? Another big clue. Matching up timeframes. Again, just putting your email out there, putting your name out there like that. Like what I see from that, just at the scale of that market, what I see, it just makes me wonder how many criminals are out there that are not making these low-hanging fruit mistakes and are still successfully operating. To me, it seems like you could be a criminal, it's much easier to be a criminal on the internet. What else to you is interesting to understand about that case of Ross and Silk Road and just the history of it from your own relationship with it from a cybersecurity perspective, from an ethical perspective, all that kind of stuff. Like when you look back, what's interesting to you about that case? I think my views on the case have changed over time. I mean, it was my job back then. So I just looked at it as of, you know, I'm going after this. I sort of made a name for myself in the Bureau for the anonymous case. And then this one was just, I mean, this was a bigger deal. I mean, they flew me down to DC to meet with the director about this case. The president of the United States was gonna announce this case, the arrest. Unfortunately, the government shut down two days before. So it was just us. And that's really the only reason I had any publicity out of it is because the government shut down and the only thing that went public was that affidavit with my signature at the end. Otherwise it would have just been the attorney general and the president announcing the rest of this big thing. And you wouldn't have seen me. Did you understand that this was a big case? Yeah, I knew at the time. Was it because of the scale of it or what it stood for? I just knew that the public was gonna react in a big way. Like the media was not, did I think that it was gonna be on the front page of every newspaper and the day after the arrest? No, but I could sense it. Like I went like three or four days without sleep. When I was out in San Francisco to arrest Ross, I had sent three guys to Iceland to... So it was a three-prong approach for the takedown. It was get Ross, get the Bitcoins and seize the site. Like we didn't want someone else taking control of the site. And we wanted that big splash of that banner. Like, look, the government found this site. Like you might not wanna think about doing this again. So- And you were able to pull off all three? Maybe that's my superpower. I'm really good about putting smarter people than I am together and on the right things. I've done- It's the only way to do it. In the business I formed, that's what I did. I hired only smarter people than me. And I'm not that smart, but smart enough to know who the smart people are. The team was able to do all three? Yeah, we were able to get all three done. Yeah, and the one guy, one of the guys, the main guys I sent to Iceland, I mean, he was so smart. I sent another guy from the FBI to France to get that part, and he couldn't do it. So the guy in Iceland did it from Iceland. They had to pull some stuff out of memory on a computer. You know, it's live process stuff. I'm sure you've done that before, but. I'm sure you did. Look what you're doing. You're, this is like a multi-layer interrogation going on. So, was there a concern that somebody else would step in and control the site? Absolutely. We didn't have insight on who exactly had control. So it turns out that Russ had like dictatorial control. So it wasn't easy to delegate to somebody else. He hadn't. I think he had some sort of ideas. I mean, his diary talked about walking away and giving it to somebody else, but he couldn't give up that control on anybody, apparently. Which makes you think that power corrupts and his ideals were not as strong as he espoused about. Because if it was about the freedom of being able to buy drugs, if you want to, then he surely should have found ways to delegate that power. We changed over time. You could see it in his writings that he changed. Like, so people argue back and forth that there was never murders on Silk Road. When we were doing the investigation, to us, there were six murders. So there was, the way we saw him at the time was Ross ordered people to be murdered. People stole from him and all that. It was sort of an evolution from, oh man, I can't deal with this, I can't do it, it's too much, to the last one was like, the guy said, well, he's got three roommates. It's like, oh, we'll kill them too. Was that ever proven in court? No. The murders never went forward because there was some stuff, problems in that case. So there was a separate case in Baltimore that they had been working on for a lot longer. And so, during the investigation, that caused a bunch of problems because now we have multiple federal agencies case against the same thing. How do you decide not to push forward the murder investigations? So there was a de-confliction meeting that happened in DC. I didn't happen to go to that meeting, but Jared went, this is before I ever knew Jared, and we have like televisions where we can just sit in a room and sit in on the meeting, but it's all secured network and all that. So we can talk openly about secure things. And we sat in on the meeting and people just kept saying the term sweat equity. I've got sweat equity, meaning that they had worked on the case for so long that they deserve to take them down. And by this time, no one knew about us, but we told them at the meeting that we had found the server and we have a copy of it and we have the infrastructure. And these guys had just had communications under covers. They didn't really know what was going on. And this wasn't my first de-confliction meeting. We had a huge de-confliction meeting during the anonymous case. What's a de-confliction meeting? Agents within your agency or other federal agencies have an open investigation that if you expose your case or took down your case would hurt their case or the other way. Oh, so you kind of have a, it's like the rival gangs meet at the table in a smoke filled room and- Less bullets at the end, but yes. Boy, with the sweat equity. Yeah. I mean, there's careers at stake, right? Yeah. You hate that idea. Yeah. I mean, why is that a stake? Just because you've worked on it long enough, longer than I have, that means you did better? Yeah. That's insane to me. That's rewarding bad behavior. And so that one of the part of the sweat equity discussion was about murder and this was, here's a chance to actually bust them given the data you have from Iceland and all that kind of stuff. So why? They wanted us just to turn the data over to them. To them. Yeah. Thanks for getting us this far. Here it is. I mean, it came to the point where they sent us, like they had a picture of what they thought Ross was and it was an internet meme. It really was a meme. It was a photo that we could look up. Like it was insane. All right. So there's different degrees of competence all across the world between different people. Yes. Okay. Does part of you regret because you pushed forward the heroin and the drug trade, we never got to the murder discussion? I mean, the only regret is that the internet doesn't seem to understand. Like they just kind of blow that part off that he literally paid people to have people murdered. It didn't result in a murder. And I think God knowing resulted in a murder. But that's where his mind was. His mind and where he wrote in his diary was that I had people killed and here's the money. He paid it. He paid a large amount of Bitcoins for that murder. So he didn't just even think about it. He actually took action, but the murders never happened. He took action by paying the money. Correct. And the people came back with results. He thought they were murdered. That said, can you understand the stigma on the case for the drug trade on Silk Road? Like can you make the case that it's a net positive for society? So there was a time period of when we found out the infrastructure and when we built the case against Ross. I don't remember exactly. Six weeks, a month, two months, I don't know, somewhere in there. But then at Ross's sentencing, there was a father that stood up and talked about his son dying. And I went back and kind of did the math and it was between those time periods of when we knew we could shut it down, we could have pulled the plug on the server and gone. And when Ross was arrested, his son died from buying drugs on Silk Road. And I still think about that father a lot. But if we look at the scale at the war on drugs, let's just even outside of Silk Road, do you think the war on drugs by the United States has alleviated more suffering or caused more suffering in the world? That might be above my pay scale. I mean, I understand the other side of the argument. I mean, people said that I don't have to go down to the corner to buy drugs. I'm not gonna get shot on the corner buying drugs or something, I can just have them sent to my house. People are gonna do drugs anyways. I understand that argument. From my personal standpoint, if I made it more difficult for my children to get drugs, then I'm satisfied. So your personal philosophy is that if we legalize all drugs, including heroin and cocaine, that that would not make for a better world? I don't, no, personally, I don't believe legalizing all drugs would make for a better world. Can you imagine that it would? Do you understand that argument? Sure, I mean, as I've gotten older, I've started to, I like to see both sides of an argument. And when I can't see the other side, that's when I really like to dive into it. And I can see the other side. I can see why people would say that. But I don't wanna be, my race children in a world where drugs are just free for use. Well, and then the other side of it is, with Silk Road, did, you know, taking down Silk Road, did that increase or decrease the number of drug trading criminals in the world? It's unclear. Online, I think it increased. I think, you know, that is one of the things I think about a lot with Silk Road, was that no one really knew. I mean, there was, you know, thousands of users. But then after that, it was on the front page of the paper, and there was millions of people that knew about Tor and Onion Sites. It was an advertisement. You know, I would have thought, I thought crypto was gonna crash right after that. Like, I don't know, what people now see, that bad people are doing bad things with crypto. That'll crash. Well, I'm obviously wrong on that one. And I thought, you know, Ross was sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years. No one's gonna start up these. Dark markets exploded after that. You know, some of them started as, you know, opportunistic. I'm gonna, you know, take those escrow accounts, and I'm gonna steal all the money that came in. You know, they were for that. But, you know, but there were a lot of dark markets that popped up after that. Now we put the playbook out there. Yeah, yeah. But, and also there's a case for, do you ever think about not taking down, if you have not taken down Silk Road, you could use it because it's a market. It itself is not necessarily the primary criminal organization. It's a market for criminals. So it could be used to track down criminals in the physical world. So if you don't take it down, given that it was, you know, the central, how centralized it was, it could be used as a place to find criminals, right? As opposed to- So the dealers, the drug dealers? Take down the drug dealers? Yeah. So if you have the cartel, get the cartels, start getting involved, you go after the dealers. It would have been very difficult. Because of TOR and all that. Because of all the protections, anonymity. De-cloaking all that would have been drastically more difficult. And a lot of people in upper management of the FBI didn't have the appetite of running something like that. That would have been the FBI running a drug market. How many kids, how many fathers would have had to come in and said, my kid bought while the FBI was running a site, a drug site, my kid died. So I didn't know anybody in the FBI in management that would have the appetite to let us run what was happening on Silk Road. Because remember at that time, we're still believing six people are dead. We're still investigating, you know, where are all these bodies? That's pretty much why we took down Ross when we did. I mean, we had to jump on it fast. What else can you say about this complicated world that has grown of the dark web? I don't understand it. Like, it would have been something for me, I thought it was gonna collapse. But I mean, it's just gotten bigger in what's going on out there. Now, I'm really surprised that it hasn't grown into other networks, or people haven't developed other networks, but TOR's. You mean like instead of TOR? Yeah, TOR's still the main one out there. I mean, there's a few others, and I'm not gonna put an advertisement out for them. But you know, I thought that market would have grown. Yeah, my sense was when I interacted with TOR, it was that there's huge usability issues. But that's for like legal activity. Because like if you care about privacy, it's just not as good of a browser. To look at stuff. No, it's way too slow. It's way too slow. But I mean, you can't even, like, I know some people would use it to like view movies, like Netflix, you can only view certain movies in certain countries. You can use it for that, but it's too slow even for that. Were you ever able to hold in your mind the landscape of the dark web? Like what's going on out there? To me as a human being, it's just difficult to understand the digital world. Like these anonymous usernames. Like doing anonymous activity. It's just, it's hard to, what am I trying to say? It's hard to visualize it in the way I can visualize, like I've been reading a lot about Hitler. I can visualize meetings between people, military strategy, deciding on certain evil atrocities, all that kind of stuff. I can visualize the people, there's agreements, handshakes, stuff signed, groups built. Like in the digital space, like with bots, with anonymity, any one human can be multiple people. It's just, yeah, it's all lies. It's all lies. Like, yeah, it feels like I can't trust anything. No, you can't, you honestly can't. And like, you can talk to two different people and it's the same person. Like there's so many different, you know, Hector had so many different identities online, the, you know, of things that, you know, the lies to each other. I mean, he lied to people inside his group just to use another name to spy on, make sure what they were talking shit behind his back or weren't doing anything. It's all lies and people that can keep all those lies straight. It's unbelievable to me. Ross Albrecht represents the very early days of that. That's why the competence wasn't there. Just imagine how good the people are now. The kids that grow up. Oh, they've learned from his mistakes. Just the extreme competence. You just see how good people are at video games, like the level of play in terms of video games. Like I used to think I sucked. And now I'm not even like, I'm not even in the like, consideration of calling myself shitty at video games. I'm not even, I'm like non-existent. I'm like the mold. Yeah, I stopped playing because it's so embarrassing. It's embarrassing. It's like wrestling with your kid and he finally beats you. And he's like, well, fuck that. I'm not wrestling with my kid ever again. And in some sense, hacking at its best and its worst is a kind of game. And you can get exceptionally good at that kind of game. And you get the accolades of it. I mean, there's power that comes along if you have success. Look at the kid that was hacking into Uber and Rockstar Games. He put it out there that he was doing it. I mean, he used the name, whatever hacked into Uber was his screen name. He was very proud of it. I mean, one building evidence against himself. But he wanted that slap on the back. Like, look at what a great hacker you are. Yeah. What do you think is in the mind of that guy? What do you think is in the mind of Ross? Do you think they see themselves as good people? Do you think they acknowledge the bad they're doing onto the world? So that Uber hacker, I think that's just youth. Not realizing what consequences are, I mean, based on his actions. Ross was a little bit older. I think Ross truly is a libertarian. He truly had his beliefs that he could provide the gateway for other people to live that libertarian lifestyle and put in their body what they want. I don't think that was a front or a lie. What's the difference between DPR and Ross? You said, like, I have never met Ross until, I have only had those two days worth of interaction. Yeah. It's just interesting, given how long you've chased him and then having met him, what was the difference to you as a human being? He was a human being. He was an actual person. He was nervous when we arrested him. So one of the things that I learned through my law enforcement career is, if I'm gonna be the case agent, I'm gonna be the one in charge of dealing with this person, I'm not putting handcuffs on him. Somebody else is gonna do that. Like, I'm gonna be there to help him. I'm your conduit to help. And so, right after someone's arrested, you obviously have had them down for weapons to make sure for everybody's safety, but then I just put my hand on their chest. Just feel their heart, feel their breathing. I'm sure it's the scariest day, but then to have that human contact kind of settles people down. And you can kind of like, let's start thinking about this. I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be open and honest with you. There's a lot of cops out there and federal agents, cops, that just go to the hard-ass tactic. You don't get very far with that. You don't get very far being a mean asshole to somebody. Be compassionate, be human, and it's gonna go a lot further. So given everything he's done, you were still able to have compassion for him. Yeah, we took him to the jail. So it was after hours, so he didn't get to see a judge that day. So we stuck him in the San Francisco jail. I hadn't slept for about four days because I was dealing with people in Iceland, bosses in DC, bosses in New York. So, and I was in San Francisco, so timeframe. Like the Iceland people were calling me when I was supposed to be sleeping. It was insane. But I still went out that night while Ross sat in jail and bought him breakfast. I said, what do you want for breakfast? I'll have a nice breakfast for you. Because we picked him up in the morning and took him over to the FBI to do the FBI booking, the fingerprints and all that. And I got him breakfast. I mean, and you don't get paid back for that sort of thing. I'm not looking, but out of my own- Did he make special requests for breakfast? Yeah, he asked for certain things. Well, can you mention, is that top secret FBI? No, it's not top secret. I think he wanted some granola bars. Like, and you know, but I mean, he already had lawyered up. So we, you know, which is his right, he can do that. So I knew we weren't gonna work together, you know, like I did with Hector. But I mean, this is the last day. Most of the conversations have to be then with lawyers. From that point on, I can't question him when he asked for a lawyer, or if I did, it couldn't be used against him. So we just had conversation where I talked to him. You know, he could say things to me, but then I would remind him that he asked for a lawyer and he'd have to waive that and all that. But we didn't talk about his case so much. We just talked about like human beings. Did he, with his eyes, with his words, reveal any kind of regret, or did you see a human being changing, understanding something about themselves in the process of being caught? No, I don't think that. I mean, he did offer me $20 million to let him go when we were driving to the jail. Oh no. And I asked him what I was gonna, we were gonna do with the agent that sat in the front seat. The money really broke him, huh? I think so. I think he kind of got caught up in how much money it was and how, you know, when crypto started, it was pennies. And by the time he got arrested, it was 120 bucks. And you know, 177,000 Bitcoins, even today. You know, that's a lot of Bitcoins. So you really could have been, if you continued to be one of the richest people in the world. I possibly could have been, if I took that 20 million then. I could have been living, we could have this conversation in Venezuela. In a castle, in a palace. Yeah, until it runs out and then the government storms the castle. Yeah. Have you talked to Russ since? No, no. I'd be open to it. I don't think he probably wants to hear from me. And do you know where and which prison he is? I think he's somewhere out in Arizona. I know he was in the one next to Supermax for a little while, like the high security one that's like shares the fence with Supermax. But I don't think he's there anymore. I think he's out in Arizona. I haven't seen in a while. I wonder if you can do interviews in prison. That'd be nice. Some people are allowed to. So I've not seen an interview with him. I know people have wanted to interview him about books and that sort of thing. Right, because the story really blew up. Did it surprise you how much the story and many elements of it blew up? Movies? It did surprise me. Like my wife's uncle, who I didn't, I've been married to my wife for 22 years now. I don't think he knew my name. And he was excited about that. He reached out when Silk Road came out. So that was surprising to see. Did you think the movie on the topic was good? I didn't have anything to do with that movie. I've watched it once. It was kind of cool that Jimmy Simpson was my name in the movie. But outside of that, I thought it sort of missed the mark on some things. On Hollywood, I don't think they understand what's interesting about these kinds of stories. And there's a lot of things that are interesting and they missed all of them. So for example, I recently talked to John Carmack, who's a world-class developer and so on. So Hollywood would think that the interesting thing about John Carmack is some kind of shitty a parody of a hacker or something like that. They would show really crappy emulation of some kind of Linux terminal thing. The reality is the technical details for five hours with him, for 10 hours with him, is what people actually wanna see. Even people that don't program. They want to see a brilliant mind. The details, that they're not, even if they don't understand all the details, they want to have an inkling of the genius there. There's just one way, I'm saying, that you wanna reveal the genius, the complexity of that world in interesting ways. And to make a Hollywood, almost parody caricature of it, it just destroys the spirit of the thing. So one, the Operation FBI is fascinating. Just tracking down these people on the cyber security front is fascinating. The other is just how you run TOR, how you run this kind of organization, the trust issues of the different criminal entities involved, the anonymity, the low-hanging fruit, the being shitty at certain parts on the technical front. All of those are fascinating things. That's what a movie should reveal. Should probably be a series, honestly, a Netflix series than a movie. Yeah, an FX show or something like that, because they're kind of gritty. Yeah, gritty, exactly, gritty. I mean, shows like Chernobyl from HBO made me realize, okay, you can do a good job of a difficult story and reveal the human side, but also reveal the technical side and have some deep, profound understanding on that case, on the bureaucracy of a Soviet regime. In this case, you could reveal the bureaucracy, the chaos of a criminal organization, of a law enforcement organization. I mean, there's so much to explore. It's fascinating, I don't know. Yeah, I like Chernobyl. When I rewatch it, I can't watch episode three, though, the animal scene, the episode, they go around shooting all the dogs and all that. I gotta skip that part. You're a big softie, aren't you? I really am. I'm sure I'll probably cry at some point. I love it, I love it. Don't get me talking about that episode you made about your grandmother. Oh my God, that was rough. Just to linger on this ethical versus legal question, what do you think about people like Aaron Schwartz? I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he was somebody who broke the law in the name of an ethical ideal. He downloaded and released academic publications that were behind a paywall, and he was arrested for that and then committed suicide. And a lot of people see him, certainly in the MIT community, but throughout the world as a hero, because you look at the way knowledge, scientific knowledge is being put behind paywalls, it does seem somehow unethical. Somehow unethical, and he basically broke the law to do the ethical thing. Now you could challenge it, maybe it is unethical, but there's a gray area, and to me at least, it is ethical. To me at least, he is a hero, because I'm familiar with the paywall created by the institutions that hold these publications. They're adding very little value. So it is basically holding hostage the work of millions of brilliant scientists for some kind of, honestly, a crappy capitalist institution. Like they're not actually making that much money. It doesn't make any sense to me. It should, to me, it should all be open public access. There's no reason it shouldn't be, all publications should be. So he stood for that ideal, and was punished harshly for it. That's the other criticism, it was too harshly. And of course, deeply unfortunately, that also led to his suicide, because he was also tormented on many levels. I mean, are you familiar with him? What do you think about that line between what is legal and what is ethical? So it's a tough case. I mean, the outcome was tragic, obviously. Unfortunately, when you're in law enforcement, you have to, your job is to enforce the laws. I mean, it's not, if you're told that you have to do a certain case, and there is a violation of, at the time, 18 U.S.C. 1030, computer hacking, you have to press forward with that. I mean, you have to charge, you bring the case to the U.S. Attorney's Office, and whether they're gonna press charges or not. You can't really pick and choose what you press and don't press forward. I never felt that, at least that flexibility, not in the FBI. I mean, maybe when you're a street cop and you pull somebody over, you can let them go with a warning. So in the FBI, you're sitting in a room, but you're also a human being. You have compassion. You arrested Ross, the hand on the chest. I mean, that's a human thing. Yeah. So there's a- But I can't be the jury for whether it was a good hack or a bad hack. It's all, someone, a victim has come forward and said, we're the victim of this. And I agree with you, because again, the basis of the internet was to share academic thought. I mean, that's where the internet was born. But it's not up to you. So the role of the FBI is to enforce the law. Correct. And there's a limited number of tools on our Batman belt that we can use. Not to get into all the aspects of the Trump case and Mar-a-Lago and the documents there. I mean, the FBI has so many tools they can use and a search warrant is the only way they could get in there. I mean, that's it. There's no other legal document or legal way to enter and get those documents. What do you think about the FBI and Mar-a-Lago and the FBI taking the documents for Donald Trump? It's a tough spot. It's a really tough spot. The FBI has gotten a lot of black eyes recently. And I don't know if it's the same FBI that I remember when I was there. Do you think they deserve it in part? Was it done clumsily? Their rating of the former president's residence? It's tough. Because again, they're only limited to what they're legally allowed to do. And a search warrant is the only legal way of doing it. I have my personal and political views on certain things. I think it might be surprising to some where those political points stand. But- You told me offline that you're a hardcore communist. That was very surprising to me. Well, that's only you tried to bring me into the Communist Party. Exactly, I was trying to recruit you. Giving you all kinds of flyers. Yeah, okay. But you said people in the FBI are just following the law, but there's a chain of command and so on. What do you think about the conspiracy theories that people, some small number of people inside the FBI conspired to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump? If you would have asked me when I was inside and before all this happened, I would say it could never happen. I don't believe in conspiracies. There's too many people involved. Somebody's gonna come out with some sort of information. But I mean, the more the stuff that comes out, it's surprising that agents are being fired because of certain actions that are taken inside and being dismissed because of politically motivated actions. So do you think it's explicit or just pressure? Do you think there could exist just pressure at the higher ups that has a political leaning and you kinda maybe don't explicitly order any kind of thing, but just kinda pressure people to lean one way or the other and then create a culture that leans one way or the other based on political leanings? You would really, really hope not. But I mean, that seems to be the narrative that's being written. But when you were operating, you didn't feel that pressure. Man, I was such a low level. I'd had no aspirations of being a boss. I wanted to be a case agent my entire life. So you love the puzzle of it, the chase. I love solving things, yeah. To be in management and manage people and all that, like no desire whatsoever. What do you think about Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan's podcast saying that the FBI warned Facebook about potential foreign interference? And then Facebook inferred from that that they're talking about Hunter Biden laptop story and thereby censored it. What do you think about that whole story? Again, you asked me when I was in the FBI, I wouldn't believed it from being on the inside. I wouldn't believe these things, but there's a certain narrative being written that is surprising to me that the FBI is involved in these stories. So, but the interesting thing there is the FBI is saying that they didn't really make that implication. They're saying that there's interference activity happening. Just watch out. And it's a weird relationship between FBI and Facebook. You could see from the best possible interpretation that the FBI just wants Facebook to be aware because it is a powerful platform, a platform for viral spread of misinformation. So in the best possible interpretation of it, it makes sense for FBI to send some information saying like we were seeing some shady activity. Absolutely. But it seems like all of that somehow escalated to a political interpretation. I mean, yeah, it sounded like there was a wink-wink with it. I don't know if Mark meant for that to be that way. I was like, again, are we being social engineered or was that a true expression that Mark had? And I wonder if the wink-wink is direct or it's just culture. Maybe certain people responsible on the Facebook side have a certain political lean and then certain people on the FBI side have a political lean when they're interacting together. And it's like literally has nothing to do with a giant conspiracy theory, but just with a culture that has a particular political lean during a particular time in history. And so like maybe it could be Hunter Biden laptop one time and then it could be whoever, Donald Trump Jr's laptop another time. It's a tough job. I mean, if you're the liaison, if you're the FBI's liaison to Facebook, there are certain people that I'm sure they were offered a position at some point. It seems there's FBI agents that go, I know of a couple that's gone to Facebook. This is a really good agent that now leads up their child exploitation stuff. Another squad mate runs their internal investigations, both great investigators. So there's good money, especially when you're an FBI agent that's capped out at a 1310 or whatever pay scale you're capped out at. It's alluring to be, maybe want to please them and be asked to join them. Yeah, and over time that corrupts. I think there has to be an introspection in tech companies about the culture that they develop, about the political ideology, the bubble. It's interesting to see that bubble. I've asked myself a lot of questions. I've interviewed the Pfizer CEO, which seems not a long time ago. And I've gotten a lot of criticism, positive comments, but also criticism from that conversation. And I did a lot of soul searching about the kind of bubbles we have in this world. And it makes me wonder, pharmaceutical companies, they all believe they're doing good. And I wonder, because the ideal they have is to create drugs that help people and do so at scale. And it's hard to know at which point that can be corrupted. It's hard to know when it was corrupted and if it was corrupted and where, which drugs and which companies and so on. And I don't know. I don't know that complicated. It seems like inside a bubble, you can convince yourself if anything is good. People inside the Third Reich regime were able to convince themselves. I'm sure many just, Bloodlands is another book I've been recently reading about it. And the ability of humans to convince they're doing good when they're clearly murdering and torturing people in front of their eyes is fascinating. They're able to convince themselves they're doing good. It's crazy. Like there's not even a inkling of doubt. Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. So it has taught me to be a little bit more careful when I enter into different bubbles to be skeptical about what's taken as an assumption of truth. Like you always have to be skeptical about like what's assumed is true. Is it possible it's not true? You know, if you're talking about America, it's assumed that in certain places that surveillance is good. Well, let's question that assumption. Yeah, and also it inspired me to question my own assumptions that I hold as true constantly. Constantly, it's tough. But you don't grow. I mean, do you wanna be just static and not grow? You have to question yourself on some of these things if you wanna grow as a person. Yeah, for sure. Now, one of the tough things actually of being a public personality when you speak publicly is you get attacked all along the way as you're growing. In part, a big softy as well, if I may say. And those hurt, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. Do you pay attention to it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very hard. Like I have two choices. One, you can shut yourself off from the world and ignore it. I never found that compelling, this kind of idea of like haters gonna hate. This idea that anyone with a big platform or anyone's ever done anything was always gotten hate. Okay, maybe. But I still wanna be vulnerable, wear my heart on my sleeve, really show myself, open myself to the world, really listen to people. And that means every once in a while somebody will say something that touches me in a way that's like, what if they're right? Do you let that hate influence you? I mean, can you be bullied into a different opinion than you think you really are just because of that hate? No, no, I believe not. But it hurts in a way that's hard to explain. Yeah, it gets to like, it shakes your faith in humanity actually is probably why it hurts, like people that call me a Putin apologist or a Zelensky apologist, which I'm currently getting almost an equal amount of, but it hurts. It hurts because I, it hurts because it damages slightly my faith in humanity to be able to see the love that connects us and then to see that I'm trying to find that and that I'm doing my best in the limited capabilities I have to find that. And so to call me something like a bad actor, essentially, from whatever perspective, it just makes me realize, well, people don't have empathy and compassion for each other. And it makes me question that for a brief moment. And that's like a crack and it hurts. How many people do this to your face? Very few. It's online e-muscles, man. They're just flexing. I have to be honest, that, it happens. Because I've hung around with Rogan enough, when your platform grows, there's people that will come up to Joe and say stuff to his face that they forget. They still, they forget he's an actual real human being. They'll make accusations about him. So does that cause him to wall himself off more? No, he's pretty gangster on that. But yeah, it still hurts. If you're human, if you really feel others, I think that's also the difference with Joe and me. He has a family that he deeply loves and that's an escape from the world for him. There's a loneliness in me that I'm always longing to connect with people and with regular people, just to learn their stories and so on. And so if you open yourself up that way, the things they tell you can really hurt in every way. Like just having me go into Ukraine, just seeing so much loss and death, some of it is like, is I mean, unforgettably haunting. Not in some kind of political way, activist way, or who's right, who's wrong way, but just like, man, like so much pain. You see it and it just stays with you. When you see a human being bad to another human, you can't get rid of that in your head. You can't imagine that we can treat each other like that. That's the hard part, I think. I mean, for me it is. When I saw parents, like when I did the child exploitation stuff, when they rented their children out, they literally rented infant children out to others for sexual gratification. Like, I don't know how a human being could do that to another human being. And that sounds like the kind of thing you're going through. I mean, I went through a huge funk when I did those cases afterwards. I should have talked to somebody, but in the FBI, you have to keep that machismo up or they're gonna take your gun away from you. Well, I think that's examples of evil that that's like the worst of human nature. But just because I have- War is just as bad, I mean. Somehow war, it's somehow understandable given all the very intense propaganda that's happening. So you can understand that there is love in the heart of the soldiers on each side, given the information they're given. There's a lot of people on the Russian side believe they're saving these Ukrainian cities from Nazi occupation. Now, there is stories, there is a lot of evidence of people for fun murdering civilians. Now that is closer to the things you've experienced of like evil embodied. And I haven't interacted with that directly with people who for fun murdered civilians. But you know it's there in the world. I mean, you're not naive to it. Yes, but if you experience that directly, if somebody shot somebody for fun in front of me, that would probably break me. Like seeing it yourself, knowing that it exists is different than seeing it yourself. Now I've interacted with the victims of that. And they tell me stories, and you see their homes destroyed, destroyed for no good military reason. It's civilians with civilian homes being destroyed. That really lingers with you. But yeah, the people that are capable of that. That goes with the propaganda. I mean, if you were to build a story, you have to have on the other side, the homes are gonna be destroyed, the non-military targets are gonna be destroyed. To put it in perspective, I'm not sure a lot of people understand the deep human side, or even the military strategy side of this war. There's a lot of experts outside of the situation that are commenting on it with certainty. And that kind of hurts me, because I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. There's so much propaganda, it's very difficult to know what is true. Yeah, so my whole hope was to travel to Ukraine, to travel to Russia, to talk to soldiers, to talk to leaders, to talk to real people that have lost homes, that have lost family members, that who this war has divided, who this war changed completely how they see the world. Whether they have love or hate in their heart to understand their stories. I've learned a lot on the human side of things by having talked to a lot of people there. But it has been on the Ukrainian side for me currently. Traveling to the Russian side is more difficult. Let me ask you about your now friend. Can we go as far as to say his friend in Sabu, Hector Masegur. What's the story? What's your long story with him? Can you tell me about what is Lossack, who is Sabu, and who's anonymous? What is anonymous? Where's the right place to start that story? Probably anonymous. Anonymous was a, it still is, I guess, a decentralized organization. They call themselves Headless, but once you look into them a little ways, they're not really headless. The power struggle comes with whoever has a hacking ability. That might be you're a good hacker or you have a giant botnet used for DDoS. So you're gonna wield more power if you can control where it goes. Anonymous started doing their hacktivism stuff in 2010 or so. The word hack was in the media all the time then. And then right around then, there was a federal contractor named HB Gary Federal. Their CEO was Aaron Barr. And Aaron Barr said he was gonna come out and de-anonymize Anonymous. He's gonna come out and talk at Black Hat or Defcon or one of those and say who they are. He figured it out. So he figured it out by based on when people were online, when people were in IRC, when tweets came out. There was no scientific proof behind it or anything. So he was just gonna falsely name people that were in Anonymous. So Anonymous went on the attack. They went and hacked in HB Gary Federal and they turned his life upside down. They took over his Twitter account and all that stuff pretty quickly. I have very mixed feelings about all of this. Okay. Yet, a part of me admires the positive side of the hacktivism. Okay. Is there no room for admiration there of the fuck you to the man? Not at the time. Again, it was a violation. The 18 USC 1030. So it was my job. It's what I, you know. So at the time, no. In retrospect, sure. But what was the philosophy of the hacktivism? Was it, philosophically, were they at least expressing it for the good of humanity or no? They outwardly said that they were gonna go after people that they thought were corrupt. So they were judge and jury on corruption. They were gonna go after it. Once you get inside and realize what they were doing, they were going after people that they had an opportunity to go after. So maybe someone had a zero day and then they searched for servers running that zero day and then from there, let's find a target. I mean, one time they went after a toilet paper company. I still don't understand what that toilet paper company did, but it was an opportunity to make a splash. Is there some way for the joke, for the lulls? It developed into that. So I think the hacktivism and the anonymous stuff wasn't so much for the lulls, but from that HP Gary Federal hack, then there were six guys that worked well together and they formed a crew, a hacking crew, and they kind of split off into their own private channels. And that was lull sack or laughing at your security was their motto. So that's L-U-L-Z-S-E-C, lulls sack. Of course it is. Lulls sack. And who founded that organization? So Kayla and Sabu were the hackers of the group. And so they really did all the work on HP Gary. So they're- And these are code names. Yeah, these are online names. They're Nicks. And so that's all they knew each other as. They talked as those names. And they worked well together. And so they formed a hacking crew and that's when they started the, at first they didn't name it, this was the 50 days of lulls where they would just release major, major breaches. And it stirred up the media. I mean, it put hacking in the media every day. They had 400 or 500,000 Twitter followers, you know, and it was kind of interesting, but then they started swinging at the beehive and they took out some FBI affiliated sites and then they started fuck FBI Fridays where every Friday they would release something. And we waited it with bated breath. I mean, they had us hook, line, and sinker pissed. We were waiting to see what was gonna be dropped every Friday. It was, it's a little embarrassing looking back on it now. And this is in the early 2010s. Yeah, this was 2010, 2011, around there. So actually linger on anonymous. What, do we still understand what the heck is anonymous? It's just a place where you hang out. I mean, it's just, it started on 4chan, went to 8chan, and then it's really just anyone, you can be an anonymous right now if you wanted to. Just you're in there hanging out in the channel. Now, you're probably not gonna get much cred until you work your way up and prove who you are, someone vouches for you, but anybody can be an anonymous. Anybody can leave anonymous. What's the leadership of anonymous? Do you have a sense that there is a leadership? There's a power play. Now, is that someone that says, this is what we're doing, all we're doing? I love the philosophical and the technical aspect of all of this. But I think there is a slippery slope to where for the lulz, you can actually really hurt people. That's the terrifying thing. When you're attached, I'm actually really terrified of the power of the lulz. The fun thing somehow becomes a slippery slope. I haven't quite understood the dynamics of that, but even in myself, if you just have fun with a thing, you lose track of the ethical grounding of the thing. And so it feels like hacking for fun can just literally lead to nuclear war, like literally destabilize nations. Yeah, yada, yada, yada, nuclear war, I could see it, yeah. And so I've been more careful with the lulz. Yeah, I've been more careful about that. And I wonder about it because in internet speak, somehow ethics can be put aside through the slippery slope of language. I don't know, everything becomes a joke. If everything's a joke, then everything's allowed and everything's allowed. Then you don't have a sense of what is right and wrong. You lose sense of what is right and wrong. You still have victims. I mean, you're laughing at someone. Someone's the butt of this joke. Whether it's major corporations or the individuals, I mean, some of the stuff they did was just releasing people's PII, their personal identifying information and stuff like that. I mean, is it a big deal? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But if you could choose to not have your information put out there, probably wouldn't. We do have a sense of what anonymous is today. Has it ever been one stable organization or is it a collection of hackers that kind of emerge for particular tasks, for particular like hacktivism tasks and that kind of stuff? It's a collection of people that has some hackers in it. There's not a lot of big hackers in it. I mean, there's some that'll come bounce in and bounce out. Even back then, there was probably just as many reporters in it, people in the media in it, with the hackers at the time, just trying to get the inside scoop on things. You know, some giving the inside scoop. You know, we arrested a reporter that gave over the username and password to his newspaper and, you know, just so he could break the story. He trusted him. Speaking of trust, reporters, boy, there's good ones. There's good ones. There are. There are. But boy, do I have a complicated relationship with them. How many stories about you are completely true? You can just make stuff up on the internet. And one of the things that, I mean, there's so many fascinating psychological, sociological elements of the internet to me. One of them is that you can say that Lex is a lizard, right? And if it's not funny, so lizard is kind of funny, what should we say? Lex has admitted to being an agent of the FBI, okay? You can just say that, right? And then the response that the internet would be like, oh, is that true? I didn't realize that. They won't go like, provide evidence, please, right? They'll just say like, oh, that's weird. I didn't, I kind of thought he might be kind of weird. And then it piles on. It's like, hey, hey, hey, guys. Like, here's a random dude on the internet just said a random thing. You can't just like pile up as, and then. Yeah, Johnny6969 is now a source that says. And then like, the thing is, I'm a tiny guy, but when it grows, if you're like have a big platform, I feel like newspapers will pick that up and then they'll like start to build on a story and you never know where that story really started. It's so cool. I mean, to me, actually, honestly, it's kind of cool that there's a viral nature of the internet that can just fabricate truth completely. I think we have to accept that new reality and try to deal with it somehow. You can't just like complain that Johnny69 can start a random thing. But I think in the best possible world, it is the role of the journalist to be the adult in the room and put a stop to it versus look for the sexiest story so that there could be clickbait that can generate money. Journalism should be about sort of slowing things down, thinking deeply through what is true or not and showing that to the world. I think there's a lot of hunger for that. And I think that would actually get the most clicks in the end. I mean, it's that same pressure I think we're talking about with the FBI and with the tech companies about Controllers. I mean, the editors have to please and get those clicks. I mean, they're measured by those clicks. So, I'm sure the journalists, the true journalists, the good ones out there want that, but they wanna stay employed too. Can I actually ask you really as another tangent, the Jared and others, they're doing undercover. In terms of the tools you have for catching cybersecurity criminals, how much of it is undercover? Undercover is a high bar to jump over. You have to do a lot to start an undercover in the FBI. There's a lot of thresholds. So, it's not your first investigative tool step. You have to identify a problem and then show that the lower steps can't get you there. But I mean, I think we had an undercover going on in the squad about all times. When one was being shut down or taken down, we were spinning up another one. So, it's a good tool to have and utilize. They're a lot of work. I don't think if you run one, you'll never run another one in your life. Oh, so it's like psychologically, there's a lot of work just technically, but also psychologically, like you have to really- It's 24 seven, you're inside that world. Like you have to know what's going on and what's happening. You're taking on, you have to remember who you are when you're, because you're a criminal online. You have to go to a special school for it too. Was that ever something compelling to you? I went through the school, but I'm a pretty open and honest guy. And so, it's tough for me to build that wall of lies. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to keep all the lies straight. Yeah, but a guy who's good at building up a wall of lies would say that exact same thing. Exactly. It's so annoying the way truth works in this world. It's like, people have told me, because I'm trying to be honest and transparent, that's exactly what an agent would do, right? But I feel like an agent would not wear a suit and tie. I wore a suit and tie every day. I was a suit and tie guy. You were? Yeah, every day. I remember one time I wore shorts in and the SAC came in. And this was when I was a rockstar at the time in the bureau and I had shorts in and I said, sorry, ma'am, I apologize for my attire. And she goes, you could wear bike shorts in here. I wouldn't care. I was like, oh shit, that sounds nice. I never wore the bike shorts, but. Yeah. But see, I don't see a suit and tie as constraining. I think it's liberating in sorts. It's like, shows that you're taking the moment seriously. Well, not just that, people wanted it. I mean, people expected when you're not, you are dressed like a perfect FBI agent. When someone knocks on their door, that's what they wanna see. They wanna see what Hollywood built up is what an FBI agent is. You show up like my friend, Il-Won. He was dressed always in t-shirts and shorts. People aren't gonna take him serious. They're not gonna give him what they want. I wonder how many police that can just show up and say I'm from the FBI and start interrogating them. Like at a bar. Probably. Like how good. Oh, definitely, if they've had a few drinks, you can definitely. Well, but people are gonna recognize you. That's the only problem. That's another thing. You start taking out big cases. You can't work cases anymore in the FBI. Your face gets out there. Your name too. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, let me ask you about that before we return to our friend, Sabu. Okay. You've tracked and worked on some of the most dangerous people in this world. Have you ever feared for your life? So I had to make a really, really shitty phone call one time. I was sitting in the bureau, and this was right after Silk Road, and Jared called me. He was back in Chicago. And he called me and said, hey, your name and your kid's name are on a website for an assassination. They're paying to have you guys killed. Now, these things happen on the black market. They come up, you know, and people debate whether they're real or not. But we have to take it serious. Someone's paying to have me killed. So I had to call my wife, and we had a word in that if I said this word, and we only said it one time to each other, if I said this word, this is serious. Drop what you're doing and get to the kids. And so I had to drop the word to her. And I could feel the breath come out of her because she thought her kids were in danger at the time they were. I wasn't in a state of mind to drive myself. So an agent on the squad, a girl named Evelina, she drove me, lights and sirens, all the way to my kid's school. And we had locked, I called the school. We were in a lockdown. Nobody should get in or out, especially someone with a gun. The first thing they did was lock me in. The second thing they did was let me in the building with a gun. So I was a little disappointed with that. My kids were, I think, kindergarten and fifth grade or somewhere around there, maybe the closer second, I'm not sure where, but all hell broke loose. And we had to, from there, go move into a safe house. I live in New York City. NYPD surrounded my house. The FBI put cameras outside my house. You couldn't drive into my neighborhood without your license plate being read. Hey, why is this person here? Why is that person there? I got to watch my house on an iPad while I sat at my desk. But again, I put my family through that and it scared the shit out of them. And that's, to be honest, I think that's sort of my mother-in-law's words were, I thought you did cybercrime. And because during Silk Road, I didn't tell my family what I was working on. I'll talk about that. I wanna escape that. I don't wanna be there. I remember that, like, so when I was in the FBI, driving in, I used to go in at 4.30 every morning because I like to go to the gym before I go to the desk. So I'd be at the desk at seven, so in the gym at five, a couple hours, and then go. The best time I had was that drive in in the morning where I could just be myself. I listened to a sports podcast out of DC. And we talked about sports and the Nationals and whatever it was, the Capitals. It was great to not think about Silk Road for 10 minutes. But that was my best time. But yeah, again, so yeah. I've had that move into the safe house. I left my MP5 at home. That's the Bureau's machine gun. Showed my wife to just pull and spray. But how often did you live or work and live with fear in your heart? It was only that time. I mean, for actual physical security, then, I mean, after the anonymous stuff, I really tightened down to my cybersecurity. I don't have social media. I don't have pictures of me and my kids online. I don't really, if I go to a wedding or something, I say, I don't take my picture with my kids, if you're gonna post it someplace or something like that. So that sort of security I have. But just like everybody, you start to relax a little bit and security breaks down, because it's not convenient. But it's also part of your job. So you're much better at, I mean, your job now and your job before. So you're probably much better taking care of the low-hanging fruit, at least. I understand the threat. And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand, is understanding what the threat against them is. So I'm aware of that and what possibly, and I think about it, you know, I think about things. I do remember, so you tripped a memory in my mind. I remember a lot of times, and I had a gun on my hip, I still carry a gun to this day, opening my front door and being concerned what was on the other side, walking out of the house, because I couldn't see it. I remember those four o'clocks, heading to the car. I was literally scared. Yeah. I mean, having seen some of the things you've seen, it makes you perhaps question how much evil there is out there in the world, how many dangerous people there are out there, crazy people even. There's a lot of crazy, there's a lot of evil. Most people, I think, get into cybercrime or just opportunistic, not necessarily evil. They don't really know, maybe think about the victim. They just do it as a crime of opportunity. I don't label that as evil. And one of the things about America that I'm also very happy about is that rule of law, despite everything we talk about, there is, it's tough to be a criminal in the United States. So if you walk outside your house, you're much safer than you are in most other places in the world. You're safer, and the system's tougher. I mean, LulzSec, six guys, one guy in the United States, five guys other places. Hector was facing 125 years. Those guys got slaps on the wrist and went back to college. Different laws, different places. So who's Hector? Tell me the story of Hector. So this LulzSec organization was started, so Hector was before that in, he was in part anonymous. He was doing all kinds of hacking stuff, but then he launched LulzSec. He's an old school hacker. I mean, he learned how to hack, and I don't wanna tell his story, but he learned to hack because he grew up in the Lower East Side of New York and picked up some NYPD computers that were left on the sidewalk for trash. Taught himself how to. He doesn't exactly look like a hacker. For people who don't know, he looks, I don't know exactly what he looks like, but not like a technical, not what you would imagine. But perhaps that's a Hollywood portrayal. Yeah, I think you get in trouble these days saying what a hacker looks like. I don't know if they have a traditional look. Just like I said, Hollywood has an idea of what an FBI looks like. I don't think you can do that anymore. I don't think you can say that anymore. Well, he certainly has a big personality and charisma and all that kind of stuff. That's Sabu. I can see him selling me anything. That's Sabu. That's the convincing me of anything. You know, they're two different people. There's Sabu and there's Hector. Hector is a sweet guy. He likes to have intellectual conversations and that's just his thing. He'd rather just sit there and have a one-on-one conversation with you. But Sabu, that's a ruthless motherfucker. And you first met Sabu? I was tracking Sabu. That's all I knew was Sabu. I didn't know Hector. So when did your paths cross in terms of tracking? When did you first take on the case? The spring of 11. So it was through Anonymous? Through Anonymous. Well, really kind of LULSIC. LULSIC was a big thing and it was pushed out to all the cyber, 56 field offices in the FBI. Most of them have cyber squads or cyber units. And so, you know, it was being pushed out there and it was in the news every day, but it really wasn't ours. So we didn't have a lot of victims in our AOR area of responsibility. And so we just kind of pay attention to it. Then I got a tip that a local hacker in New York had broken into AOL. And so Olivia Olsen and I, she's another agent who she's still in, she's a supervisor on LA, she's a great agent. We went all around New York looking for this kid just to see what we can find and ended up out in Staten Island at his grandmother's house. She didn't know where he was, obviously, why would she? But I left my card. He gave me a call that night and started talking to me. And I said, let's just meet up tomorrow at the McDonald's across from 26th and he came in and three of us sat there and talked and gave me a stuff. He started telling me about the felonies he was committing those days, including that break in AOL. And then he finally says, I can give you Sabu. Sabu to us was the Kaiser Solstice of Hagen. He was our guy. He was the guy that was in the news that was pissing us off. So- So he was part of the FBI Fridays? Sabu was, yeah. Oh, he led it. Yeah, he was the leader of fuck FBI Fridays. So yeah. What was one of the more memorable FFFs? I said, how do you get, why, how and why do you go after the beehive? That's kind of intense. You get you on the news, it gets you, it's the lulls. It's funnier to go after the big ones. You know, and they weren't getting like real FBI. They weren't breaking into FBI mainframes or anything, but they, you know, they were, you know, affiliate sites or anything that had to do, a lot of law enforcement stuff was coming out. So, but, you know, we looked back. And so if this kid knew that Sabu, maybe there was a chance we use him to lure Sabu out. But we also said, well, maybe this kid knows Sabu in real life. And so we went and looked through the IPs and 10 million IPs, we find one and it belonged to him. And so that day Sabu, someone had doxxed Sabu and we were a little afraid he was gonna be on the run. We had a surveillance team and FBI surveillance teams are awesome. Like you cannot even tell their FBI agents. It's, they are really that good. I mean, there's baby strollers and all, whatever you wouldn't expect an FBI agent to have. So that's a little like the movies. A little bit, yeah. I mean, it is true, but they fit into the area. So now they're on the Lower East Side, which is, you know, a baby stroller might not fit in there as well as, you know, somebody just laying on the ground or something like that. They really get, play the character and get into it. So now I can never trust a baby stroller again. Yeah, well, probably shouldn't. Every baby, I'm just like, look at, stare at them suspiciously. Especially if the mom's wearing cargo pants while she pushes it, so. Yeah, so if it's like a very stereotypical mom, a stereotypical baby, I'm gonna be very suspicious. I'm gonna question the baby. That baby's wired, be careful. You know, we raced out there and like our squad's not even full, there's only a few guys there. And like I said, I was a suit guy, but that day I had shorts and a t-shirt on, I had a white t-shirt on. And I only bring it up because Sabu makes fun of me to this day. So I had a bulletproof vest and a white t-shirt on and that was it. I had shorts too and all that, but raced over to there. We didn't have any equipment. We brought our boss's boss's boss. He stopped off at NYPD, got us like a ballistic shield and a battery ram if we needed it. And then we get to Hector's house, Sabu's house, and he's on the sixth floor. And so normally, you know, we're the cyber dork squad. We'll hop in the elevator, six floors is a long ways to go up in bulletproof vest and a ballistic shield. But we had been caught in an elevator before on a search. So we didn't, took the stairs. We get to the top, a tad winded, but knocking the door and this big towering guy opens the door just slightly. And he sees the green vest with big yellow letters FBI and he steps outside. Can I help you? You know, tries to social engineer us. But eventually we get our way inside the house. You know, I noticed a few things that are kind of out of place. There's a laptop charger and a flashing modem. And I said, well, do you have a computer here? And he said, no, there's no computer here. So we knew the truce and then the half lies and all that sort of thing. So it took us about another two hours and finally he gave up that he was Sabu. He was the guy we were looking for. So we sat there and we kind of showed him sort of the evidence we had against him. And, you know, from his words, we sat there and talked, talked like two grown adults and, you know, I gave him the options and he said, well, let's talk about working together. So he chose to become an informant. I don't think he chose that night, but that's where it kind of went to. So then we brought him down to the FBI that night, which was, it was a funny trip because I'm sitting in the back seat of the car with him. And I was getting calls from all over the US from different FBI agents saying that we arrested the wrong guy. I was like, I don't think so. And they're like, why do you think so? I was like, because he says it's him. And they still said, no, it's the wrong guy. So I said, well, we'll see how it plays out. That's so interesting, because it's such a strange world. Such a strange world, because it's tough to, because you still have to prove it's the same guy, right? Because the anonymity. Yeah, I mean, we had his laptop by that point. Yeah, I know. Him saying, that helped. I gave him a clue in my world. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, if he would have fought it, I mean, that definitely would have come in as evidence that other FBI agents are saying it's not him. You have to disclose that stuff. So you had a lot of stuff on him. What was he facing if- He was facing 125 years. 125 years in prison. That's, now that's if you took every charge we had against him and put him consecutively. No, no one ever gets charged that, but yeah, essentially it would have been 125 years. Fast forward to the end, he got thanked by the judge for his service after nine months. And he walked out of the court a free man. But that's while being an informant. Yes. Well, so the word informant here really isn't that good. It's not fitting that technically, I guess that's what he was, but he didn't know the other people. It was all anon, he knew Nix and all that. He really gave us the insight of what was happening in the hacker world. Like I said, he was an old school hacker. He was back when hackers didn't work together with Anonymous. He was down, Cult of Dead Cow and those type guys, like way back. He was around for that. He's like an encyclopedia of hacking. But we just- So I guess Prime was in the 90s. For terror hack, but yeah, he kind of came back when Anonymous started going after MasterCard and PayPal and all that, do the WikiLeaks stuff. But even that little interaction, being an informant, he probably made a lot of enemies. How do you protect a guy like that? He made enemies after it was revealed? Yeah. How does the FBI protect him? Good luck. Perhaps I'll talk to him one day, but is that guy afraid for his life? I, again, I think- It doesn't seem like it. He has very good security for himself, cybersecurity. But, you know, yeah, he doesn't like the negative things said about him online. I don't think anybody does. But, you know, I think it's so many years of the internet kind of bitching at you and all that, you get calloused to it's just internet bitching. And also the hacking world moves on very quickly. He has kind of, they have their own wars to fight now, and he's not part of those wars anymore. There's still people out there that bitch and moan about him, but yeah, I think it's less. I think, you know, and he has a good message out there of, you know, trying to keep kids from making the same mistakes he made. He tries to really preach that. How do people get into this line of work? Is there all kinds of ways being, not your line of work, his line of work, just all the stories you've seen of people that are in anonymous and LulzSec and Silk Road and all the cyber criminals you've interacted with. What's the profile of a cyber criminal? I don't think there's a profile anymore. You know, I used to be able to say, you know, the kid in your mom's basement or something like that, but it's not true anymore. You know, it's wide. It's like, I've arrested people that you wouldn't expect would be cyber criminals. And it's in the United States, it's international, it's everything? Oh, it's international. I mean, we're seeing a lot of the big hackers now. The big arrests for hackers in England, surprisingly, you know, there's, you know, you're not gonna see there's a lot of good hackers like down in Brazil, but I don't think Brazil law enforcement is as good at hunting them down. So you're not gonna see the big arrests. How much state-sponsored cyber attacks are there, do you think? More than you can imagine. And what do you wanna say an attack? You had a successful attack or just a probing? Probing for information, just like feeling, you know, testing that there's where the attack factors are, trying to collect all the possible attack factors. Put a Windows 7 machine on the internet forward-facing and put a packet sniffer on there and look at where the driver comes from. I mean, in 24 hours, you were gonna fill up a hard drive with packets just coming at it. Yeah. I mean, it's not hard to know. I mean, it's just constantly probing for entry points into things, you know? You could go mad putting up honeypot, draws in intrusions, try to see what methodologies- Just to see what's out there. Yeah, and it doesn't go anywhere. It maybe has fake information and stuff like that. You know, it's kind of to see what's going on and judge what's happening on the internet. Get a, you know, lick your finger and test the wind of what's happening these days. The funny thing about, like, because I'm at MIT, that attracted even more attention for the, not for the laws, but for the technical challenge. It seems like people enjoy hacking MIT. Just the amount of traffic MIT was getting for that, in terms of just the sheer number of attacks from different places, it's crazy. Yeah, like, just like that, putting up a machine, seeing what comes. NASA used to be the golden ring. Now everybody got NASA. That was like the early 90s. If you could hack NASA, that was the, now, yeah, MIT is a big one. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to see. Respect. Because I think in that case, it comes from a somewhat good place, because, you know, they're not getting any money from MIT. It's more for the challenge. Let me ask you about that, about this world of cybersecurity. How big of a threat are cyber attacks for companies and for individuals? Like, let's lay out, where are we in this world? What's out there? It's the wild, wild west. And it's, I mean, people want the idea of security, but it's inconvenient, so they don't, they push back on it. And there are a lot of opportunistic nation state, financially motivated hackers, hackers for the lulz. You got three different tiers there. And they're on the prowl. They have tools. They have really good tools that are being used against us. And at what scale? So when you're thinking of, I don't know what's, let's talk about companies first. So say you're talking to a mid-tier. I wonder what the most interesting business is. So Google, we can look at large tech companies, or we can look at medium-sized tech companies. And like, you are sitting in a room with a CTO, with a CEO, and the question is, how fucked are we? And what should we do? What's the low-hanging fruit? What are the different strategies and those companies should consider? I mean, the problem is they want a push button. They want an out-of-the-box solution that, I'm secure, you know, they want to tell people they're secure, but- And that's very challenging to have. It's impossible. But if I could, if someone had it, they'd be a billionaire. They'd be beyond a billionaire, you know, because that's what everybody wants. So it's, you know, you can buy all the tools you want. It's configuring them the proper way. And there's, if anyone's trying to tell you that there's one solution that fits all, there's stakeholder salesmen. And there's a lot of people in cybersecurity that are stakeholder salesmen. Yeah, and I feel like there's tools, if they're not configured correctly, they just introduce, they don't increase security significantly, and they introduce a lot of pain for the people. They decrease efficiency of the actual work you have to do. So like, we had, I was at Google for a time, and I think mostly I want to give props to their security efforts. But user data, so like data that belongs to users, is like the holy, like, the amount of security they have around that is incredible. So most, any time I had to work with anything even resembling user data, so I never got a chance to work with actual user data, anything resembling that, first of all, you have no access to the internet. It's impossible to even come close to the access to the internet. And there's so much pain to actually, like, interact with that data. I mean, it was extremely inefficient. In places where I thought it didn't have to be that inefficient, the security was too much. But I have to give respect to that, because in that case, you want to err on the side of security. But that's Google. They were doing a good job of this. The reputational harm, if it got out. I mean, Google, you know, why is Google drive-free, you know, because they want your data. They want you to park your data there. So, you know, if they got hacked or leaked information, the reputational harm would be tremendous. But, you know, for a company that's not, it's really hard to do that, right? And the company's not as big as Google or not as tech-savvy as Google, might have a lot of trouble doing that kind of stuff. Instead, instead of increasing security, they'll just decrease the efficiency. Well, yeah, so there's a big difference between IT and security. And unfortunately, these mid-side companies, they try to stack security into their IT department. Your IT department is about business continuity. They're about trying to move business forward. They want your users to get the data they need to do their job so the company can grow. Security is not that. They don't want you to get the data. But there's fine-tuning you can do to ensure that. I mean, as simple as like having good onboarding procedures for employees, like you come into my company, you don't need access to everything. Maybe you need access to something for one day. Turn the access on, don't leave it on. I mean, I was the victim of the OPM hack, the Office of Personnel Management, because old credentials from a third-party vendor were sitting there inactive. And the Chinese government found those credentials and were able to log in and steal all my information. So a lot could be helped if you just control the credentials, the access, the access control, how long they last. And people who need access to a certain thing only get access to that thing and nothing else. And then it just gets refreshed like that. Access control, like we said, setting up people, leaving the company, get rid of their, they don't need control. Two-factor authentication, that's a big thing. I mean, I sound like a broken record because this isn't anything new. This isn't rocket science. The problem is we're not implementing it. If we are, we're not doing it correctly because these guys are taking us. Well, two-factor authentication is a good example of something that I just was annoyed by for the longest time because, yes, it's very good, but it seems that it's pretty easy to implement horribly to where it's not convenient at all for the legitimate user to use. It should be trivial to do, like to authenticate yourself twice should be super easy. If security, if it's slightly inconvenient for you, it's think about how inconvenient it is for a hacker and how they're just gonna move on to the next person. Yes, yes, in theory, when implemented extremely well. Yeah. But I just don't think so. I think actually if it's inconvenient, it shows that system hasn't been thought through a lot. Do you know why we need two-factor authentication? People using the same password across the same site. So when one site is compromised, people just take that username and password, it's called credential stuffing, and just stuff it across the internet. So if 10 years ago when we told everybody, don't use the same fucking password across the internet, across vulnerable sites, maybe two-factor wouldn't be needed. Yeah, so you wouldn't need two-factor if everyone did a good job with passwords. Yeah. Right, but I'm saying like the two-factor authentication, it should be super easy to authenticate myself with some other device really quickly. Like it should be frictionless. Like you just hit okay? Okay, and anything that belongs to me, yeah. And it should, very importantly, be easy to set up what belongs to me. I don't know the full complexity of the cyber attacks these platforms are under. They're probably under insane amount of attacks. Yeah, you've got it right there. People have no idea, these large companies, how often they're attacked, on a per second basis. And they have to fight all that off and pick out the good traffic in there. So yeah, there's no way I'd wanna run a large tech company. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what about protecting individuals, for individuals? What's good advice to try to protect yourself from this increasingly dangerous world of cyber attacks? Again, educate yourself that you understand that there is a threat. First, you have to realize that. Then you're gonna step up and you're gonna do stuff a little bit more. Sometimes, I guess, I think I take that to a little bit extreme. I remember one time my mom called me and she was screaming that, I woke up this morning and I just clicked on a link and now my phone is making weird noises. And I was like, throw your phone in a glass of water. Just put it in a glass of water right now. And I made my mom cry. It was not a pleasant thing. So sometimes I go to a little extremes on those ones. But understanding there's a risk and making it a little bit more difficult to become a victim. I mean, just understanding certain things. Simple things like, as we add more internet of things to people's houses, I mean, how many wifi networks do people have? It's normally just one. And you're bumping your phones and giving your password to people who come to visit. Set up a guest network. Set up something you can change every 30 days. Simple little things like that. I hate to remind you, but change your passwords. I mean, I feel like I'm a broken record again. But just make it more difficult for others to victimize you. And then don't use the same password everywhere. Yes. I mean. I still know people that do that. I mean, ask.fm.got popped last week, two weeks ago. And that's 350 million username and passwords with connected Twitter accounts, Google accounts, all the different social media accounts. That is a treasure trove for the next two and a half, three years of just using those credentials everywhere. Even if it's not the right password, you learn people's password styles. Bad guys are making portfolios out of people. We're figuring out how people generate their passwords and kind of figuring, and then it's easier to crack their password. We're making a dossier on each person. It's 350 million dossiers just in that one hack. Yahoo, there was half a billion. So the thing a hacker would do with that is try to find all the low-hanging fruit, like have some kind of program that, yeah, evaluates the strength of the passwords, and then finds the weak ones. And that means that this person is probably the kind of person that would use the same password across multiple. Or even just write a program into that. Remember the Ring hack a couple of years ago? That's all it was, it was credential stuffing. So Ring, the security system, by default, had two-factor but didn't turn it on. And they also had a don't try unlimited tries to log into my account. You can lock it out after 10. By default, not turned on, because it's not convenient for people. You know, Ring, you know, it was like, I want people to stick these little things up and have security in their house. But, you know, cybersecurity, don't make it inconvenient, then people won't buy our product. That's how they got hacked. They wanted to say that it's insecure and got hacked into, reputational harm right there for Ring, but they didn't. It was just credential stuffing. People bought username and passwords on the black market and just wrote a bot that just went through Ring and used every one of them to maybe 1% hit, but that's a big hit to the number of Ring users. You know, you can use also password managers to make the changing of the passwords easier. And to make, you can charge the difficulty, the number of special characters, the length of it and all that. My favorite thing is on websites, yell at you for your password being too long or having too many special characters, or like, or yeah, you're not allowed to have this special character or something. Use these three special characters. Do you understand how password cracking works? If you specifically tell me which password, what special characters I can use? I honestly just want to have a one-on-one meeting, like late at night with the engineer that programmed that, because that's like an intern. I just want to have a sit down meeting. Yeah, I made my parents switch banks once because the security was so poor. I was like, you just, you can't have money here. But then there's also like the zero day tax, like I mentioned before the QNAP NAS that got hacked. Luckily I didn't have anything private on there, but it really woke me up to like, okay, so like if you take everything extremely seriously. Unfortunately for the end users, there's nothing you can do about zero day. It's, you know, there's this, you have no control over that. I mean, it's the engineers that made the software don't even know about it. Now let's talk about one days. So there's a patch now out there for the security. So if you're not updating your systems for these security patches, if it's just not on you, my father-in-law has such an old iPhone, you can't security patch it anymore. So, you know, and I tell him, I said, you know, this is what you're missing out on. This is what you're exposing yourself to, because, you know, we talked about that powerful tool that how we found Ross Ulbrich at gmail.com. Well, bad guys are using that too. It's called, you know, it used to be called Google dorking. Now it's, I think it's named kind of Google hacking, by the community. You can go and, you know, and find a vulnerability, read about the white paper, what's wrong with that software. And then you can go on the internet and find all of the computers that are running that outdated software. And there's your list, there's your target list. Yeah. I know the vulnerabilities that are running. Again, not making a playbook here, but, you know, that's how easy it is to find your targets. And that's what the bad guys are doing. Then the reverse is tough. It's much tougher, but it's still doable, which is like first find the target. If you have specific targets, to, you know, hack into a Twitter account, for example. Much harder. That's probably social engineering, right? That's probably the best way. Probably, if you want something specific to that. I mean, if you really want to go far, you know, if you're targeting a specific person, you know, how hard is it to get into their office and put a, you know, a little device, USB device in line with their mouse, who checks how their mouse is plugged in. And you can, for 40 bucks on the black market, you can buy a key logger that just USB, then the mouse plugs right into it. It looks like an extension on the mouse. If you can even find it. You can buy the stuff with a mouse inside of it and just plug it into somebody's computer. And there's a key logger that lives in there and calls home and sends everything you want. So, I mean, and it's cheap. Yeah. In grad school, I programmed and built a bunch of key loggers. It was fascinating. A tracking mouse just for, I was doing as part of the research. I was doing to see if by the dynamics of how you type and how you move the mouse, you can tell who the person is. Oh, wow. That's like, it's called the active authentication, or like, it's basically biometrics that's not using bio to see how identifiable that is. So, it's fascinating to study that, but it's also fascinating how damn easy it is to install key loggers. So, I think it's natural what happens is you realize how many vulnerabilities there are in this world. You do that when you understand bacteria and viruses, you realize they're everywhere. And the same way with, I'm talking about biological ones, and then you realize that all the vulnerabilities that are out there. One of the things I've noticed quite a lot is how many people don't log out of their computers. Just how easy physical access to systems actually is. Like, in a lot of places in this world, and I'm not talking about private homes, I'm talking about companies, especially large companies. It seems quite trivial in certain places that I've been to, to walk in and have physical access to a system. And that's depressing to me. It is. It just, I laugh because one of my partners at Naxo that I work at now, he worked at a big company. Like, you would know the name as soon as I told you, I'm not gonna say it. But the guy who owned the company, and the company has his name on it, didn't want to ever log into a computer. It just annoyed the shit out of him. So they hired a person that stands next to his computer when he's not there, and that's his physical security. You see, that's good. That's pretty good, actually. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you could afford to do that. At least you're taking your security seriously. I feel like there's a lot of people in that case would just not have a login. No, the security team there had to really work around to make that work, noncompliant with company policy. But that's interesting, the key log. There's a lot of, there's just a lot of threats. There's a lot of ways to get in. Yeah, I mean, so you can't sit around and worry about someone physically gaining access to your computer with key log and stuff like that. If you're traveling to a foreign country and you work for the FBI, then yeah, you do. You pick little, sometimes some countries, you would bring a fake laptop just to see if they stole it or accessed it. I really want, especially in this modern day, to just create a lot of clones of myself. They generate Lex sounding things and just put so much information out there. I actually dox myself all across the world. And then you're not a target, I guess. Just put it out there. I've always said that though. We do these searches in FBI houses and stuff like that. If someone just got a box load of 10 terabyte drives and just encrypted them, oh my God, do you know how long the FBI would spin their wheels trying to get that data off there? It'd be insane. So just give them. You don't even know which one you're looking for. Yeah, that's true, that's true. So it's like me printing a treasure map to a random location, just get people to go on goose chases. Yeah, what about operating system? What have you found, what's the most secure and what's the least secure operating system? Windows, Linux? Is there no universal? There's no universal security. I mean, it changed. People used to think Macs were the most secure just because they just weren't out there. But now kids have had access to them. So I know you're a Linux guy. I like Linux too. But it's tough to run a business on Linux. People wanna move more towards the Microsofts and the Googles just because it's easier to communicate with other people that maybe aren't computer guys. So you have to just take what's best, what's easiest, and secure the shit out of it as much as you can and just think about it. What are you doing these days at Nexo? So we just started Nexo. So I left the government and went to a couple of consultancies. And I started working, really all the people I worked good in the government with, I brought them out with me. And now- You used to work for the man and now you're the man. Exactly, but now we formed a partnership and it's a new cybersecurity firm. Our launch party is actually on Thursday. So it's gonna be exciting. Do you wanna give more details about the party so that somebody can hack into it? No, I don't think I can tell you where it is. You can come if you want, but don't bring the hackers. Hector will be there. I can't believe you invited me because you also say insider threat is the biggest threat. By the way, can you explain what the insider threat is? The biggest insider threat in my life is my children. My son's big into Minecraft and will download executables mindlessly and just run them on the network. So he is- Do you recommend against marriage and family and kids? Nope, nope. From a security perspective. From a security perspective, absolutely. But no, I just segmentation. I mean, we do it in all businesses for years. Started segmenting networks, different networks. I just do it at home. My kid's on his own network. It makes it a little bit easier to see what they're doing too. You can monitor traffic and then also throttle bandwidth if your Netflix isn't playing fast enough or buffers or something. So you can obviously change that a little too. You know they're gonna listen to this, right? They're gonna get your tricks. Yeah, that's true. They'll definitely will listen. But there's nothing more humbling than your family. You think you've done something big and you go on a big podcast and talk to Les Freeman and they don't fucking care. Unless you're on TikTok or- You'll show up on a YouTube feed or something like that. And they'll be like, oh, yeah. Whatever, this guy's boring. My son does a podcast for his school and I still can't get him to tell. So Hector and I just started a podcast talking about cybersecurity. We do a podcast called Hacker in the Fed. It just came out yesterday. So first episode. So yeah, we got 1,300 downloads the first day. We were at the top of Hacker News, which is a big website in our world. So it's called Hacker in the Fed? Hacker in the Fed's the name of it. Go download and listen to Hacker in the Fed. I can't wait to see what, because I don't think I've seen a video of you two together so I can't wait to see what the chemistry is like. It's not weird that you guys used to be enemies and now you're friends? So yeah, I mean, we just did a trailer and all that. And our producer, we have a great producer guy named Phineas and he kind of pulls things out of me. And I said, okay, I got one. My relationship with Hector, we're very close friends now. And I was like, oh, I arrested one of my closest friends, which is a very strange relationship. Yeah, it's weird. But he says that I changed his life. I mean, he was going down a very dark path and I gave him an option that one night and he made the right choice. I mean, he now does penetration testing. He does a lot of good work and he's turned his life around. Do you worry about cyber war in the 21st century? Absolutely. If there is a global war, it'll start with cyber, if it's not already started. Do you feel like there's a boiling, like the drums of war are beating? What's happening in Ukraine with Russia? It feels like the United States becoming more and more involved in the conflict in that part of the world. And China is watching very closely. It's starting to get involved geopolitically and probably in terms of cyber. Do you worry about this kind of thing happening in the next decade or two, like where it really escalates? You know, people in the 1920s were completely terrible at predicting the World War II. Do you think we're at the precipice of war potentially? I think we could be. I mean, I would hate to just be, you know, just fear mongering out there. You know, COVID's over, so the next big thing in the media is war and all that. But I mean, there's some flags going up that are very strange to me. Is there ways to avoid this? I hope so. I hope smarter people than I are figuring it out. I hope people are playing their parts and talking to the right people because war is the last thing I want. Well, there's two things to be concerned about on the cyber side. One is the actual defense on the technical side of cyber, and the other one is the panic that might happen when something like some dramatic event happened because of cyber, some major hack that becomes public. I'm honestly more concerned about the panic because I feel like if people don't think about this stuff, the panic can hit harder. Like if they're not conscious about the fact that we're constantly under attack, I feel like it'll come like a much harder surprise. Yeah, I think people will be really shocked on things. I mean, so we talked about LULSIC today, and LULSIC was 2011. They had access into the water supply system of a major US city. They didn't do anything with it. They were sitting on it in case someone got arrested and they were gonna maybe just expose that it's insecure. Maybe they were gonna do something to fuck with it. I don't know. But that's 2011. I don't think it's gotten a lot better since then. And there's probably nation states or major organizations that are sitting secretly on hacks like this. 100%, 100% they are sitting secretly waiting to expose things. I mean, again, I don't wanna scare the shit out of people, but people have to understand the cyber threat. I mean, there are thousands of nation state hackers in some countries. I mean, we have them too. We have offensive hackers. You know, the terrorist attacks of 9-11, there's planes that actually hit actual buildings and it was visibly clear, and you can trace the information. With cyber attacks, say something that would result in a major explosion in New York City, how the hell do you trace that? Like, if it's well done, it's going to be extremely difficult. The problem is, there's so many problems. One of which the US government in that case has complete freedom to blame anybody they want. True. And then to go start war with anybody, anybody that actually see, that's, sorry, that's one cynical take on it, of course. No, but you're going down the right path. I mean, the guys that flew the planes in the buildings wanted attribution. They took credit for it. When we see the cyber attack, I doubt we're gonna see attribution. Maybe the victim side, the US government on this side might come out and try to blame somebody. But, you know, like you've brought up, they could blame anybody they want. There's not really a good way of verifying that. Can I just ask for your advice? So in my personal case, am I being tracked? How do I know? How do I protect myself? Should I care? You are being tracked. I wouldn't say you're being tracked by the government. You're definitely being tracked by big tech. No, I mean, me personally, Lex, an escalated level. So like, like you mentioned, there's an FBI file on people. Sure. I'd love to see what's in that file. Who did I have the argument for? Oh, let me ask you, FBI. Yeah. How's the cafeteria food in FBI? At the Academy, it's bad. Yeah. What about like? At headquarters? Headquarters. Headquarters is a little bit better, because that's where the director, I mean, he eats up on the seventh floor. Have you been like at Google? Have you been at the Silicon Valley, those cafeterias? I've been at the Google in Silicon Valley. I've been to the Google in New York. Yeah, the food is incredible. It is great. So FBI is worse. Well, when you're going through the Academy, they don't let you outside of the building, so you have to eat it. And I think that's the only reason people eat it. Okay. It's pretty bad. I got it. Okay. But there's also a bar inside the FBI Academy. People don't know that. Alcohol bar? Yes, alcohol bar. And as long as you've passed your PT and going well, you're allowed to go to the bar. Nice. It feels like if I was a hacker, I would be going after like celebrities, because they're a little bit easier, like celebrity celebrities, like Hollywood. The Hollywood nudes were a big thing there for a long time. But now, yeah, I guess nudes- That's what they went after. I mean, all those guys, they socialize. They social engineered Apple to get backups, to get the recoveries for backups. And then they just pulled all their nudes. And I mean, whole websites were dedicated to that. Yeah. See, I wouldn't do that kind of stuff. It's very creepy. I would go, if I was a hacker, I would go after like major, like powerful people, and like tweet something from their account, and like something that, like positive, like loving. But like for the walls, the obvious that it's a troll. God, you get busted so quick. By a bad hacker. Really? But why? Because hackers never put things out about love. Oh, you mean like, this is clearly- Yeah, this is clearly Lex. What the fuck? He talks about love in every podcast he does. I would just be like, no, oh, goddammit, now somebody's gonna do it. You'll blame me. It wasn't me. Looking back at your life, is there something you- I'm only 44 years old, I'm already looking back. Is there stuff that you regret? EV unit. Yeah, I got away. It's always the one that got away. Yeah, I mean, it took me a while into my law enforcement career to learn about like the compassionate side, and it took Hector Monsiger to make me realize that criminals aren't really criminals, they're human beings. That really humanized the whole thing for me, sitting with him for nine months. I think that's maybe why I had a lot more compassion when I arrested Ross. Probably wouldn't have been so compassionate if it was before Hector, but yeah, he changed my life and showed me that humanity side of things. So would it be fair to say that all the criminals, or most criminals are just people that took a wrong turn at some point? They all have the capacity for good and for evil in them? I'd say 99% of the criminals that I've interacted with, yes, the people with the child exploitation, no, I don't have any place in my heart for them. What advice would you give to people in college, people in high school, trying to figure out what they wanna do with their life? How to have a life they can be proud of, how to have a career they can be proud of, all that kind of stuff. In the US budget that was just put forward, there's $18 billion for cybersecurity. We're about a million people short of where we really should be in the industry, if not more. If you have, want job security and want to work and see exciting stuff, head towards cybersecurity. It's a good career. And one thing I dislike about cybersecurity right now is they expect you to come out of college and have 10 years experience in protecting and knowing every different Python script out there and everything available. The industry needs to change and let the lower people in in order to broaden and get those billion jobs filled. But as far as their personal security, just remember, it's all gonna follow you. I mean, there's laws out there now that you have to turn over your social media accounts in order to have certain things. They just changed that in New York State. If you wanna carry a gun, you have to turn over your social media to figure if you're a good social character. So hopefully you didn't say something strange in the last few years and it's gonna follow you forever. I bet Ross Albrecht would tell you the same thing when he not don't put rossalbrecht at gmail.com on things cause it's gonna last forever. Yeah, people sometimes, for some reason, they interact on social media as if they're talking to a couple of buddies, like just shooting shit and mocking and like, you know, what is that? Busting each other's chops, like making fun of yourself, like being, especially gaming culture, like people who stream. Thank God that's not recorded. Oh my God, the things people say on those streams. Yeah, but a lot of them are recorded. That's just, there's a whole Twitch thing where people stream for many hours a day. And I mean, just outside of the very offensive things they say, they just swear a lot. They're not the kind of person that I would wanna hire, I wanna work with. Now I understand that some of us might be that way privately, I guess, when you're shooting shit with friends, like playing a video game and talking shit to each other, maybe, but like that's all out there. You have to be conscious of the fact that that's all out there. And it's just not, it's not a good look. It's not like you're, you should, it's complicated because I'm like against hiding who you are. If you're an asshole, you should hide some of it. Yeah, but like, I just feel like it's going to be misinterpreted. When you talk shit to your friends while you're playing video games, it doesn't mean you're an asshole. Because you're an asshole to your friend, but that's how a lot of friends show love. Yeah, an outside person can't judge how I'm friends with you. But if I wanna be, this is our relationship. If that person can say that I'm an asshole to them, then that's fine, I'll take it. But you can't tell me I'm an asshole to them just because you saw my interaction. I agree with that. They'll take those words out of context and that's considered who you are is dangerous. And people take that very nonchalantly. People treat their behavior on the internet very, very carelessly. That's definitely something that you need to learn and take extremely seriously. Also, I think that taking that seriously will help you figure out who you, what you really stand for. If you use your language carelessly, you'd never really ask, what do I stand for? I feel like it's a good opportunity when you're young to ask what are the things that are okay to say? What are the things, what are the ideas I stand behind? Especially if they're controversial and I'm willing to say them because I believe in them versus just saying random shit for the lols. Because for the random shit for the lols, keep that off the internet. That said, man, I was an idiot for most of my life and I'm constantly learning and growing. I'd hate to be responsible for the kind of person I was in my teens, in my 20s. I didn't do anything offensive, but it just, it changed as a person. Like I used to, I guess I probably still do, but I used to read so much existential literature. That was a phase. There's like phases. Yeah, you grow and evolve as a person that changes you in the future. Yeah, thank God there wasn't social media when I was in high school. Thank God. Oh my God, I would never have gotten the FBI. Would you recommend that people consider a career at a place like the FBI? I loved the FBI. I never thought I would go anyplace else, but the FBI, I thought I was gonna retire with the gold watch and everything from the FBI. That was my plan. You get a gold watch? No, but you know what it is, it's a, oh, it's an expression of idealism. You get a gold badge. You actually get your badge in Lucite and your creds and they put it in Lucite and all that. So does it, does it, by the way, just on a tangent since we like those, does it hurt you that the FBI by certain people is distrusted or even hated? 100%, it kills me. I like, I've never until recently not, sometimes be embarrassed about the FBI sometimes, which is really, really hard for me to say because I love that place. I love the people in it. I love the brotherhood that you have with, you know, all the guys in your squad, guys and girls, I just use guys, you know, we, I developed a real drinking problem there because we were so social of going out after work and, you know, continuing on. It really was a family, you know, so I do miss that. But yeah, I mean, if someone can become an FBI agent, I mean, it's pretty fucking cool, man. The day you graduate and walk out of the academy with a gun and a badge and, you know, the power to charge someone with a misdemeanor for flying on the United States flag at night, that's awesome. So there is a part of like representing and loving your country and especially if you're doing cybersecurity. So there's a lot of technical savvy in different places in the FBI. Yeah, I mean, there's different pieces. Sometimes, you know, you'll see an older agent that's done, you know, not cybercrime, come over to cybercrime at the end so he can get a job once he goes out. But there's also some guys that came in, you know, I won't name his name, but there was a guy, I mean, I think he was a hacker when he was a kid and now he's been an agent, now he's way up in management. Great guy, I love this guy and he knows who he is if he's listening. You know, that, you know, he had some skills. But we also lost a bunch of guys that had some skills because we had one guy in the squad that he had to leave the FBI because his wife became a doctor and she got a residency down in Houston and she couldn't move. He wasn't allowed to transfer so he decided to keep his family versus the FBI. So there's some stringent rules in the FBI that need to be relaxed a little bit. Yeah, I love hackers turned like leaders. Like one of my quickly becoming good friends is Mudge. He was a big hack in the 90s and then now was recently Twitter Chief Security Officer, CSO, but he had a bunch of different leadership positions including being my boss at Google. But originally a hacker. It's cool to see like hackers become like leaders. I just wonder what would cause him to stop doing it. Why he would then take like a managerial route for high tech companies versus- I think a lot of those guys, so this is like the 90s, they really were about like the freedom. There's like a philosophy to it. And when I think the hacking culture evolved over the years and I think when it leaves you behind, you start to realize like, oh, actually what I wanna do is I wanna help the world and I can do that in legitimate routes and so on. But that's the story that, and yeah, I would love to talk to him one day. But I wonder how common that is too. Like young hackers turn good. You're saying it like pulls you in. It's if you're not careful, it can really pull you in. Yeah, you're good at it. You become powerful. You become, everyone's slapping you on the back and say, what a good job and all that, at a very young age. Yeah. So yeah, I would love to get into my buddy's mind on why he stopped hacking and moved on. Oh, that's gonna be a good conversation. In his case, maybe it's always about a great woman involved, a family and so on that grounds you because like we have, there is a danger to hacking that once you're in a relationship, once you have family, maybe you're not willing to partake in. What's your story? What, from childhood, what are some fond memories you have? Fond memories? Where did you grow up? Well, I don't give away that information. In the United States? Yeah, yeah, yeah, in Virginia. In Virginia. What are some rough moments? What are some beautiful moments that you remember? I had a very good family growing up. The like rough moment, and I'll tell you a story that just happened to me two days ago and it fucked me up, man. It really did. And you'll be the first, I've never told it. I tried to tell my wife this two nights ago and I couldn't get it out. So my father, he's a disabled veteran, or he was a disabled veteran. He was in the army and got hurt and was in a wheelchair his whole life. All my growing up. He was my biggest fan. He just wanted to know everything about what was going on in the FBI, my stories. I was a local cop before the FBI and I got into a high-speed car chase, foot chase and all that and kicking doors in. He wanted to hear all those stories. And at some points I was kind of too cool for school and, ah, dad, I just want a break and all that and things going on. We lost my dad during COVID. Not because of COVID, but it was around that time. But it was right when COVID was kicking off. And so he died in the hospital by himself and I didn't get to see him then. And then my mom had some people visiting her the other night, Tom and Karen Roggeberg. And I'll say they're my second biggest fans, right behind my dad. They always asking about me and my career and read the books and seen the movie. They'll even tell you that Silk Road movie was good. They'll hide the end on that. And so they came over and I helped them with something. And my mom called me back a couple of days later and she said, I appreciate you helping them. I know fixing someone's Apple phone over the phone really isn't what you do for a living. It's kind of beneath you and all that, but I appreciate it. And she said, oh, they loved hearing the stories about Silk Road and all those things. And she goes, your dad, he loved those stories. I just wish he could have heard them. He even would tell me, he would say, maybe Chris will come home and I'll get him drunk and he'll tell me the stories. But, and then she goes, maybe one day in heaven you can tell them those stories. And I fucking lost it. I literally stood in my shower sobbing like a child. Just thinking about all my dad wanted was those stories. And now I'm on a fucking podcast telling the stories to the world and I did tell him. Yeah, so. Did you ever have like a long heart to heart with him about like, about such stories? He was in the hospital one time and I went through and I want to know about his history, like his life, what he did. And I think he may be sensationalized some of it, but that's what you want. Your dad's a hero, so you want to hear those things. Is he a good storyteller? Yeah, again, I don't know what was true and not true, but you know, some of it was really good. And it was just good to hear his life, but you know, we lost him and now those stories are gone. You miss him? Yeah. What did he teach you about what it means to be a man? So my dad, he was an engineer. And so part of his job, we worked for Vermont Power and Electric or whatever it was. I mean, when he first got married to my mom and all that, like he flew around in a helicopter, checking out like power lines and dams. He used to swim inside to scuba into dams to check to make sure like they were functioning properly and all that. Pretty cool shit. And then he couldn't walk anymore. I probably would have killed myself if my life switched like that so bad. And my dad probably went through some dark points, but he had that from me maybe. And so to get through that struggle, to teach me like, you know, you press on, you have a family, people count on you, you do what you gotta do. That was big. Yeah. I'm sure you make him proud, man. I'm sure I do, but I don't think he knew that, that I knew that. Yeah. Well, you get to pass on that love to your kids now. I try, I try, but I can't impress them as much as my dad impressed me. I can try all I want, but. Well, what do you think is the role of love? Because you gave me some grief, you busted my balls a little bit for talking about love a lot. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition? I think it's the greatest thing. I think everyone should be searching for it. If you don't have it, find it, get it as soon as you can. I love my wife, I really do. I had no idea what love was until my kids were born. My son came out and, this is a funny story, he came out and I just wanted him to be safe and be healthy and all that. And I said to the doctor, I said, 10 and 10, doc, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everything good. And he goes, eh, nine and nine. I was like, what the fuck? He's like, oh, this is gonna suck. Okay, we'll deal with it and all that. He was talking about the apnecard, or some score about breathing and color and all that. And I was like, oh shit, but no one told me this. But so I'm just sobbing. I couldn't even cut the umbilical cord. Just fell in love with my kids when I saw them. And that to me really is what love is, just for them, man. And I see that through your career, that love developed, which is awesome. Being able to see the humanity in people. I didn't when I was young, the foolishness of youth. I needed to learn that lesson hard. I mean, when I was young in my career, it was just about career goals and arresting people became stats. You arrest someone, you get a good stat, you get an atta boy, maybe the boss likes it and you get a better job or you move up the chain. It took a real change in my life to see that humanity. And I can't wait to listen to you talk, which is probably hilarious and insightful given the life, the two you lived and given how much you've changed each other's lives. I can't wait to listen, brother. Thank you so much. This is a huge honor. You're an amazing person with an amazing life. This was an awesome conversation. Dude, huge fan. I love the podcast. Glad I could be here. Thanks for the invite. So exercise in the brain too. It was great. Great conversation. And the heart too, right? Oh yeah, yeah. You got some tears there at the end. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Tarbell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Benjamin Franklin. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Abbas Amanat: Iran Protests, Mahsa Amini, History, CIA & Nuclear Weapons | Lex Fridman Podcast #334

This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime. Clear signs of fascism, clear signs of the state's control and pay any price to stay in power. So even violence. Extreme violence. The following is a conversation with Abbas Aminat, a historian at Yale University specializing in the modern history of Iran. My love and my heart goes out to the Iranian people in their current struggle for freedom. I hope that this conversation helps folks who listen understand the nature and the importance of this struggle. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Abbas Aminat. Let's start with the current situation in Iran. On September 16th, protests broke out in Tehran and quickly spread over the death of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. Eyewitnesses saw her beaten to death by the morality police. This is a heavy topic, but it's a really important topic. Can you explain what happened? The protests are now in their sixth week. The death of that young woman, a Kurd, who was visiting Tehran as a tourist, sparked something very deep that particularly concerned the younger generations. That is what you would call the equivalent of the Z generation in this country. They call themselves Dahey-e Hashdadi in Persian because Iran follows the solar calendar of its own. It's an ancient solar calendar. And the time that they were born, they were in the 1380s. That's what they called themselves, Hashdadi. Eighties, Hashdad for the eighties. And well, the circumstances that surrounds the unfortunate death of this young, beautiful Kurdish woman is really tragic. She was arrested by what is referred to as the morality police, morality patrol, called the Gashd-e-Ershad, a guidance police, that is. Presumably, there were two women, fully clad, that is, officers serving on that force, and two men. And nobody exactly knows what had happened. She had been beaten up, and apparently there was no sign of any wrongdoing on her side. She was fully covered. It seems that there was some altercation in the process. And the outcome was that she was unconscious, not necessarily when she was arrested, but in the course of the detention, when they take them to a center, presumably to re-educate them. And she apparently collapsed. And maybe my sense is that she must have had some kind of a problem because of the skull being broken or something had happened. And she died in the hospital the next day. And that, through the social media, was widely spread throughout Iran. And almost the next day, surprisingly, you could see this outburst of sympathy for her. People are in the streets weeping because she was seen as such an innocent young woman, 22 years old. And the family, the mother and the father, also mourning for her. And being a Kurd visiting Tehran, this all added up to really turn her into some kind of a martyr of this cause. And that's what it is. And her picture, graphics that were artistically produced based on her portrait, has now dominated, basically, as the symbol of this protest movement. And the protest movement goes on. Everybody was thinking, or at least the authorities were thinking, that it's going to die out in a matter of a few days. But it became more intense, first in the streets of Tehran by young women, mostly probably between, I would say, 17, 18 teenagers to 22, 23, or thereabouts. And then to university campuses all around the country, and then even to high schools. And that also made it a very remarkable protest movement because, first of all, it involves the youth and not necessarily the older generations. You see them around, but not as many. Also, you see men and women together, young, girls and boys. And they are adamant, they are desperate in the sense of the tone of their protest. And they are extremely courageous because they stand against the security forces that were immediately were sent off to the streets. So, and in full gear, that is. So what are the currents of pain, emotion? What is this turmoil that rose to the surface that resulted in these big protests? What are the different feelings, ideas that came to the surface here that resulted in such quick scaling of this protest? Well, if you listen to the main slogan, which is the message of this movement, it's called Women, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zindagi, Azadi. Which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent, which is close to Persian being in the European language. And it's apparently initiated first in the Syrian Kurdistan, where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces because they were attacking the Yazidis there and the women being enslaved. But the message, as it moved, or historians are interested in this kind of trends. So it has moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan now being the message of this movement, reflects pretty much, sums up what this movement is all about. Women in the forefront, because of all the, one might say, discriminations, the treatment, the humiliation, that this younger generation feels, well, not only the younger generations, but most of the Iranian secular middle classes since 1979, basically, for the past 43 years. And they would think that these all basically symbolized or represented by the wearing, the mandatory wearing of the hijab, which is at the core of this protest. You see the young women, if you look at many of these clips that comes through in the past six weeks, women in streets take off their mandatory scarves, which is a young shawl, or some kind of a head covering, that's all. And they throw it into the bonfire in the middle of the street, and they dance around it, and slogans. So there is a sense of complete rejection of what this regime for 42 years, 43 years, have been imposing on women. It's not, as it's sometimes been portrayed, a movement against hijab through and through, but it basically says, you know, there has to be a choice for those who want to wear hijab and those who want to remain without hijab. Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper. Much deeper. And actually, before we get into that, it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations we see in the university campuses or in the streets, you see women with hijab, young women with hijab, or next to those have to remove their hijab and they're together basically protesting. That's the most interesting feature of these demonstrations. And then men and women together against the segregation that the regime has imposed upon them all these years. Now, in terms of what it represents, as I pointed out, one is the question of the whole series of what might say civil and legal discriminations against women. You are considered as a kind of a second-class citizen. You depend on your men. There's a kind of a patriarchy that has been institutionalized in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion. And that means that probably in matters of divorce, marriage and divorce, in matters of custody of your children, in matter of inheritance, in matter of freedom of movement, you depend on your husband, your father, your brother, a male member of your family, your child even, your son. Could be the case. And because of that, obviously a younger generation who is so well-informed through social media knows about the world as much as an American does, American kid does, probably sometimes more. They're very, very curious. It's from what I hear, or sometimes that I met a few of them outside Iran. You'll see that Hadi, this new generation is completely different from what the Islamic Republic wanted to create in its social engineering. It's basically the failure of 43 years of the Islamic Republic's act of imposition of a certain so-called Islamic values on women. Then it's a matter of education. You would see that there is segregation in the schools. One of the issues that now, right now, is at the heart of this demonstration is that self-services in many of the campuses of Iranian universities are segregated, male and female, to different rooms, to different halls. Now they're breaking through the walls virtually everywhere and sit together in order to basically resist the authorities who wants to impose segregation. In matters of appearance in the public, of course it may seem to us as kind of trivial and secondary, but appearance is important. Clothing is important. How you would imagine yourself is important. They don't want to be seen in the way that the authorities would like to impose upon them as this kind of an idea of a chaste Islamic woman who is fully covered and is fully protected. The idea of a male member of the family protects the female. That is what you would see at the heart of this rebellion. And of course, that goes with everything. There's the second part of this message, the idea of life basically means, if you like, to use the American equivalent of this, the pursuit of the happiness. That's what they want. They want fun. They want music. They want dancing. They want to be free in the street. They want to have girlfriends and live freely and don't be constantly looked by the big brother to tell them what to do and not to do or not to do. So that is, that they share virtually with the entire Iranian society as a whole. Although the older generations, that's a big puzzle. What you would see that the older generation don't, so far at least, don't take part as extensively as one might imagine, and this is a variety of reasons. Perhaps we can get to that later on, if you like. But as far as this younger generation, they don't care. They don't listen even as much to their parents as the older generations did. So one might say even the nature of the relationship between the parents and the youth has changed. It's not the concept of, again, a patriarchy that a father or even a mother would tell the daughter or son what to do. That's basically, they have to negotiate. It's fundamentally a rejection of the power of authority. Parents, government, it's that every person can decide their own fate, and there's no lessening of value of the wisdom of old age and old institutions. Precisely, that's what it is. And they are surprisingly aware that where they are as a generation, so it's a sense of pride as we are different from the older generation. From your parents who compromised and lived with the restrictions that the Islamic regime put on you, your grandfather, your grandparents, who was the generation that actually involved in the revolution of 79, the parents, which were the middle generation, and these are the third generation after the revolution of 1979. And therefore, they differentiate themselves in terms of their identity from the older generation. So that's the life part of it. One can go more and more, they want to access, and they see on social media what happens in the rest of the world. They're well aware. They're much better digitally skilled than my generation, for instance. And they know about all the personalities. They know about all the celebrities. They know about all the trends that goes on outside Iran. So that's a second part of this message. And then, of course, the third part is the word azadi, meaning freedom or liberty, which is this long-standing demand of the Iranians, I would say, for the whole century, ever since the constitutional revolution of 1906. Iran has witnessed this problem of authorities that usually emerge at the end of a revolution to basically impose its own image on the population, on the youth, and create authoritarian regimes, of which, over the course of time, I would say that the Islamic Republic is the worst, in the sense that its intrusion is not only in the political sense, in, for instance, banning the freedom of speech, meddling with the elections, banning political parties, all kinds of that things which are the political or civil freedoms, but its intrusion into the personal life of the individual, which is the worst kind, in a sense, as you would see that there is always an authority that basically dominates their life or monitors their life. So, and they do it in a kind of a very consistent fashion, which makes this idea of freedom so important as part of the message of this new movement. You would see that in today's Iran, there are no independent political parties. There is very little, probably, freedom of the press. I wouldn't say that it's entirely gone, but it's fairly limited. There's enormous amount of propaganda machine which dominates the entire radio and TV system in Iran. It's completely in the hands of the government. And, of course, you would see this variety of other tools for trying to indoctrinate Iranian population across the board. So that's another sign of this kind of a sense of being totally left out. You're not belonging to what's going on in terms of power, empowerment, and disempowerment. So that's the situation as far as the idea of a freedom is concerned. And the three, somewhat miraculously, and perhaps unintentionally, the three parts of this message complement each other. Because perhaps for the first time, we see that women are in the forefront of a movement. I hesitate to say revolution, because I'm not particularly happy with revolutions. Revolutions worldwide in Iran have always been so miserable in terms of their outcome that we have to be careful not to use the word revolution again. So that's where it stands now. And the regime was thinking that, well, these are kids. They're going to go away. And then, of course, they're completely conspiratorial in their thinking. They constantly think that these are all the instigations and provocations of foreign powers. These are the great Satan, the United States. This is Israel. Or these are the, actually, the Supreme Leader says in so many words. His only response so far that he had in the past six weeks with regard to these demonstrations is that these are the children of the sabak. Sabak being the security forces of the Shah's time. That's 43 years later, he claims that the children, 16, 17 years, 20 years old, kids in the street, are the grandchildren or children of some imaginary survival of the Shah's security force. So there's, the idea is that these protests are internal and external saboteurs, so people trying to sabotage the government. Yes, and they are misled. Misled. That's as far as they can go. And then there's the great Satan, United States, and other places are controlling, sort of, either controlling the narrative, feeding propaganda, or literally sending people to instigate. I don't think that they have, I don't think even they have that kind of imagination, precise to say what you have said. That they would say that they're controlling the narrative. They basically say, no, these are agents of the foreign powers. And their families are all sold out, and they are basically lost their loyalties to the great Islamic Republic, and therefore, they can be treated so brutally. They can be suppressed so brutally. Which I haven't actually said what they are doing, because I thought perhaps first we should talk about who these kids are in the streets, before we move on about the response of the government. But one major factor which seems to add to the anxiety of, well, the regime is extremely anxious now, because they are in a position, this shows that they don't have the lack of confidence, in a sense, that they would see them reacting in a very forceful way. Because basically, they don't seem to have that kind of confidence to allow this message or the movement to air, to be aired. But the one element which corresponds to that is that there is a expatriate population of Iranians worldwide. There are probably now, according to some estimates, close to four million, even more, Iranians abroad. And they're all over the world, from Australia and New Zealand, Japan, Western Europe, Turkey, and United States and Canada. So just to give you one example, last Saturday, there was a mass demonstrations in Berlin by the Iranians from Germany and all over Europe, Western Europe. And it was at least, I think probably, the conservative estimate was about 100,000. So 100,000 Iranians showed up in Berlin demonstrating against the treatment of the women in Iran, or the movement in Iran. The government thinks, obviously, this must have been some instigation by foreign powers, and they want to destroy the Islamic Republic. And not only that, but their propaganda is kind of ridiculous. Because I listened, actually, to how they portrayed it in the newspapers. I listened to the Iranian news, that is officially controlled, government-controlled news. And in the papers, much of the papers that are in the control of the government. One of them, or actually, the major news program, portrayed the demonstrations that 10,000 people showed up in Berlin and protested against the rising prices, or rising rates for gas and oil in Germany. So that's how they mislead. In a very rather stupid fashion, because probably 95%, if not 100% of the Iranians are listening to Persian-speaking media outside Iran. So there's a BBC Persian, there is Iran International, there are at least five or six of them. That's probably really important to highlight, that Iran is a very modern and tech-savvy nation. Not just the young people. Probably more than I feel sometimes when I compare myself to what they are doing. It's this 1979, the earlier years, for a decade or two, they tried in a very crude fashion to restrict access to media outside Iran. Because this is all through dishes, okay? And satellite dishes are everywhere. If you look at the buildings, small towns and villages in Iran, there's always a dish. And they watch all kinds of things through this, and particularly because of what's happening now, they listen to all the news broadcasts from all this media, and they're extremely active. There are probably, some of them, even 24 hours, or close, very extensive coverage of every clip that comes through. So what the government is doing now, the Islamic Republic, is that they restrict the entire internet. They shut down the internet. They shut down the internet, but they cannot afford shutting down the internet because much of the business, much of the everyday life, much of the government affairs depends on the internet, like everywhere else. And Iran is extremely, if I hear from many of the colleagues and friends, it's like, in certain respects, it's like Sweden. Where you go there, there's no more currency, and for a very good reason, because there's so much inflation, that the banknotes are worthless, in a sense. So everything is through sweeping your card. And that entire system is in a standstill because people cannot buy food. You go to the supermarket, that's how you would do it. You order food to come to your house, which Iranians, at least the middle classes, the more prosperous middle classes, doing all the time. So they deliver everything. And because of the COVID, it became even more. And they have to pay all through this system. So what happens is that now they're estimating that every day, $50 million, the Iranian government, or the Iranian economy is losing because of slowing the internet. Plus the frustration is growing because you can't order food. Among other things. I mean, they are in touch with, I mean, WhatsApp, every Iranian, virtually every Iranian, that has education, and education in the sense that has gone through the high schools and universities, knows how to use the WhatsApp. So there's the big middle class, like you said, the secular middle class in Iran. And there, there's a lot of, at least, capacity for, if not revolution, then political, ideological turmoil. And a huge amount of hatred. So the hatred has grown. Yes, hatred of the policies of the regime, of isolation. That's a huge point that you hear a great deal about. We don't want to be isolated. We don't want to be humiliated. Iran is not about this miserable regime that is ruling over us. We have a great culture. So there's a sense of pride in their own culture. Some of it, you know, Islamic, some of it pre-Islamic. So there's a huge sense of pride in that. And they see that they cannot communicate with the outside world. They want to travel abroad, which they do. I mean, for one thing, the Iranian regime never actually, for majority of the population, never puts restrictions. It's not like, what is it, Soviet Union, where you have to have a, you used to have a permission to move from one place to another. And then, of course, the Islamic regime, since 1979, basically chased away or destroyed the old middle class. That's my generation, basically, or my parents' generation. These are the secular middle class of the Pahlavi era, in the hope that they can do this social engineering and create this Islamic society of their own. The bad news for them was that that didn't happen, and that memory persisted, and the middle class that was created since past 40 years is much larger in size than what it was, because there was, of course, the demographic revolution. That's the very foundation of it, is the demographic revolution. Population in Iran, I've written an article about it, actually, population in Iran, since the turn of the century, last century, the 20th century, population of Iran was about nine million or so. It's now 83 million. And that is, since 1979, the population was 35 million. Between the past 40 years, it's basically doubled. So it's 83 million. Although, one of the great successes, I don't want to bore you with the details about the demography, but it's important. Please, demographics is not boring. You can see that the birth rate was very high. Otherwise, you wouldn't have doubled your population in a matter of four decades. But Iranians, because of the urban shift to an urban population, because of the growth of the middle class, because of the education, they basically, the pattern of the, of growth, population growth, changed. Iran used to be 2.8 or 3% birth rate in around 1980s, I would say, 1970s, 1980s. Now, it is 1.1. And it's probably the most successful country in the Middle East in terms of the population control. Despite the government's consistent attempt to try to encourage people to have more kids, middle class refuses to do that. And this is middle class, not only anymore in the capital, but this is, when it's smaller towns and cities, places that used to be villages. Now you look at them, they have a decent population, 50,000, 100,000, and they live an urban life, and they don't want to be subjected to that old pattern of agrarian society when you had 10 children or eight children. And of course, it's much more advanced in terms of health and medicine. So you don't lose children as they used to. The antibiotics, there's always kids to survive. And therefore, if you have 10 kids, you stick with 10 kids. You don't end up with four as it used to be in the past. Six of them would have died up to the age of five, actually. But now, because of that, you see that this urban population in the cities have completely different demands. And of course, the education is important. That's another area of how the social engineering of the Islamic Republic went away, because they were thinking that the growth of the population, the growth of the educated, higher educated middle classes in their benefit, or they could not even control it, in a sense. Now, Iran in my time probably had, in the 1970s, probably by the time of the revolution, had 10, 12 universities. Now it has 56 universities all across the country. And there is something referred to as the free university, Azad, which has campuses all over the country. It has 321 campuses all around Iran. What does that mean? In many respects, this youth that are brought up in these families, even in small towns in very traditional families, in families that belong to that kind of a more religious, loyal to the clergy or to the clerical classes, their children can now move on, which particularly women, because in my times, it would have been unheard of that you would have a young woman of 18 or 17, 18, 19, from a traditional city such as, for instance, Yazd, or in Southeastern Iran, to move on elsewhere for education, as you do in this country. Now it's completely accepted that a woman wears hijab because he's forced to wear hijab to go to a university completely on the other side of the country. And this movement of the population, not only because of the universities, but in general, if you now visit Iran, you hear accents, local accents, provincial accents, all over the country. That is a Azerbaijani, Turkish accent from the northwest of the country. You can hear it in the first province in the south and vice versa. So, and Kurdish, for instance, or even more marginal regions such as Sistan province in the southeast of Iran, which has been the subject of this recent massacre when they actually attacked the population when demonstrating and killed a fair number of at least 60 people. So this movement of the population, this creation of a larger middle class, the better educated middle class, much better educated. Iran has 86% literacy, which I think probably, I haven't checked that, but probably is better than Turkey even. Is probably better than anywhere else in the Middle East. And it sounds like that's quickly increasing. So because of the movement, because of the growth of the education system, that's- Precisely. Iran has one million school teachers, which may not seem as much if you're in the United States, but it's a fairly big number, actually. Can you linger on the massacre? What happened there? Well, the Sistan province is a Baluch ethnicity, of Baluch ethnicity. Baluch is a particular ethnic group in southern Iran, which is Sunni rather than Shi'i, majority. And we should say that most of Iran- Is Shi'i. Is Shi'i, and that's a branch of Islam. Shi'ism, yes. Let's maybe just briefly linger, Shi'ism and Sunni, what- What? Just, let's not get into it. Yeah, I don't want to. Let's do a one-sentence summary, and that maybe, which is what most of Iran is. Majority of the population of the Muslim world are Sunnis. That is a mainstream, if you like to call it. Actually, Sunna means that kind of a mainstream. Can you actually linger on the Sunni, Sunna, Shi'a? Shi'a means a party, means those that belongs to a party of Ali, which goes back to the early Islamic history of seventh century. I mean, I'm almost lingering to the silly notion of pronunciation and stuff like that. So, ah, ah means part, like what, what does the extra I at the end do? Shi'i means belonging to the Shi'i community. Shi'a means a person, of a Shi'a. That belongs to that community. If you say, are you a Shi'a? Yes, I am a Shi'a. Yeah, and Shi'i is the community. Community, and in English, when it was Anglicized, it becomes Shi'ite. So, if you say Shi'ite in today, it's perfectly acceptable. And of course, I myself, in my writings, I always switch between one and the other. One of my books is always Shi'ite, the other book's always Shi'. And that hasn't been settled. But the Shi'i population is the smaller compared to the Sunni population in the world. In the world. In the world. But in Iran, it's the opposite. The Iran and Iraq, and possibly now Lebanon, are the three countries who barely, Iraq and Lebanon have barely majority Shi'i population. Whereas Iran is a large Shi'i population due to its history of conversion to Shi'ism, that by itself is another story. But in the sense that, the way that historically it evolved, the center became more Shi'i, and the peripheries remained Sunni. So you have communities of the Baluch in the Southeast, you have the Kurds, a large portion of the Kurds are Sunnis, they have Shi'is as well, then they have the indigenous religion of their own, what's called Ahlul Haqq, which is the religion of indigenous to Kurdistan. There are Turkmens in the northeast of Iran, who are also Sunnis. There are other communities in Khorasan region, in the peripheries of Afghanistan, they are also Sunnis. And you have some Arab population, Arab-speaking population in the Khuzestan province, in the southwest of Iran, which is also, or across the Persian Gulf. Is there a lot of conflict between these regions? And also, if I blindfolded you, and dropped you off in one of the regions, would you quickly recognize the region? Like by the food, by the music, by the accents, by so on? Yeah, the answer to your lovely question, which I think, I hope it would have happened to me, is that yes, you would see different cultures. Yes. But different food, most important, different accents. Yeah. Or different languages, since they have dialects. There's Baluch, different language altogether. But, or so for that matter, Kurdish, which is closer to Persian, because they're all Indo-European languages. But Turkish, Azeri Turkish, which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey, Republic of Turkey, or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north. They are the same, basically. Actually, if you would have looked, that's a fascinating picture, if you have looked at the, let's say even 19th century, early 20th century, linguistic map of Iran, you would have been amazed in the number of dialects, in the number of languages that have survived. This is an ancient country, it's an ancient land. And it's a lot of mountains all around it, or big deserts. So there's a sense of isolation. So you would say, here and there, you see a different community that speaks differently. All ancient traditions and languages. Yeah, and because of the great number of invasions that Iran witnessed over more than two and a half millennia, of course, all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran. There are all ethnicities were introduced to Iran, mostly coming from the northeast of Iran, from the lowlands of Central Asia and beyond, and continued into Iran proper. So, but now, what has happened, that's my point that I wanted to make. Century of modernity, or modernization, has produced a national culture of great strength, in a sense, I would say. I ended my book, the book on Iran, Iran in Modern History, basically saying that despite everything else that has created so much trouble for today's Iran, there is a sense of a cultural identity that is very strong. And I think I can say with some confidence that despite this regional identities that are still there and they're great and they should be celebrated, today, if you go to Kurdistan, or if you go to Cistan, they all can speak Persian. They all have an education in Persian. So they all basically are becoming part of whether they like the regime in power or not. They have a sense of belonging to a culture and an identity with the center. And of course, the idea of a center versus periphery in Iran is very old. It goes back to ancient times, because even the name of the country was the guarded domains of Iran. This is the official name, Mamalik-e Mahruseh-e Iran. Namely, that it was recognized that this is not just one entity, but it's a collection of entities. Like the United States of America. Exactly, exactly. But the United States of America, in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful, well, it remains to be seen how successful. To be continued. That was basically invented, created, that you would have this sense of it. In the case of an old nation, which has been on the map of the world for 3,000 years, 2,500 years, this is not an exaggeration, I am not a nationalist per se, but I mean, if you look Persia on the map of the world in ancient times, it is still there as it is today. Very few countries in the world are like that. That they would have that kind of a continuity over a course of time. And that's not without a reason, because there was this sense of a center versus periphery that had found, there's a huge amount of tension, but there is also a sense of belonging to something. And state is very much at the center of it. I mean, that's why the concept of a state matters for the creation, for the shaping of this culture. What happened is therefore, you can see that today in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded, is that you would be surprised to see how much people share. And in terms of, I just give you one anecdote. In 1968, I believe, must have been, I traveled to Azerbaijan. I used to travel and actually photograph. Not blindfolded. No. Mostly. Well, yeah, not blindfolded. No, no, not blindfolded. So I went to a bazaar in the city of Khoy, which is in the northwestern Iran, on the border with what is today the Republic of Turkey. And I went to the bazaar, and I was interested in the kind of a leather work that they produce. So I tried to buy some stuff, and I was surprised to see that how few people knew Persian. So they could not communicate in Persian with you. Either they have to ask somebody from some other store to come and translate for you. This is 1968. 1968. So even though it's the official language. Was Persian. Of the country, there's still. Yeah. So what are they teaching school? So it doesn't matter. It was Persian. But this guy. He doesn't go to school. He hasn't been to the school, or he was not fully exposed to it. And bazaars usually are very conservative places. So it stuck in my mind. Now, recently in 2004, I was traveling to the same area. Not to the same city, but to the same area. And I was amazed to see how the youth, as soon as they would know that you were coming from somewhere else, opening conversation with you, talking about the latest movies that was produced in the West. And it's not only Hollywood. Of course, there's a huge amount of fascination with Hollywood and Western cinema. Cinema is a major thing. Filmmaking is a major thing. Yeah. So these kids in the city of Ahar were asking me, we were having lunch. They're asking me, okay, what do you think about this producer, not producer, this director, or that actor? American. American, European as well, but mostly American. Were they speaking Persian? It was a complete Persian that I would converse with them. Do they speak English too? Interesting. Yes. Actually, you would be surprised to see what percentage of the Iranian youth, at least in big cities, are fascinated with learning language. And for a reason. Because they think that's the way to get access either on social media or eventually leave Iran, unfortunately. And because they don't see a future for themselves in the country, either you have to be part of this regime, or if you hate them and you don't like the way of their life, you look up outside. I was having drivers to drive me around the country in the cities around Tehran. And the guy was young, extremely well-educated, well-dressed, and we would have looked at him, we could have found him in any street, in any country in the Western world. And his major concern, knowing that I'm from outside, major concern is, well, tell me which would be a better place for me to go. What's wrong with the place that you're in right now? You are in your own country, you speak your own language. No, this is no good. I have to have a better future. This has no future for me. Well, it's really interesting because the thing I feel about the protests right now is there's a large number of people that instead of giving in to cynicism about, this government is no good, they're actually getting this energy, this desire for revolution in a sort of non-violent, in the democratic sense of that. Let's actually find the ideas, let's build a great nation here. This is a great nation, this is my nation, let's build something great here. Well, I think that, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm hoping for. I share your aspiration, but I'm fearing that, I hope it's not a wishful thinking. Certainly that's what they want. Certainly that's what they want to create. But the historian always tells you from where they start to where they finish, there is going to be a huge kind of a change. And in this particular case, I wouldn't be, I would very much hope that it's not going to be a revolution like 1979, Islamic revolution. And I have my hopes in that. For one thing, this is a revolution that doesn't have a leader, okay? And it seems that they're comfortable with that, at least so far, because we are, well, the sixth week of this movement. And I hope it's not going to be actually a revolution, as I pointed out before. I hope it's going to be more of a sense of trying to come to some compromise and gradually move toward change rather than a collapse of this regime and replacement with what? So the anxiety of the regime, you hope will turn into a kind of realization that you have to modernize, you have to make progress, you actually have to make certain compromises. Yes. Or constitutional changes, all those kinds of stuff. So the basic process of government and lawmaking. The problem is that they say we have it all, you know? We have our parliament, we have our constitution, we have our elections, which has all been, of course, fake. But they claim they have all of that. But the problem for them is that they try to superimpose a certain ideology, like all other ideological autocracies, or autarchies, as in this case, that tend to dominate all these institution buildings that they have, and they constantly claim we have this, we have that. And of course, it's a generational thing. The upper echelons of this regime are mostly older people, turbaned, they are the clergy, that are afraid of the fact that they may lose their control over their whole system, that it is a sophisticated, huge system of government. And they rely on certain tools of control, which is the revolutionary guards and other institutions that are loyal to the state. And they spend enormous amount of funds that is available to them, at least before the sanctions. But even during the sanctions, they still have enough funds to do so. And in order to remain in power. And they are extremely ruthless in that regard. This is not a nice Islamic fatherly regime. This is a regime that I would see easily in it, clear signs of fascism, clear signs of the state's control and pay any price to stay in power. So even violence. Extreme violence. To return to the massacre, what were the uses of violence to suppress protests? Well, yes, it was actually quite remarkable to see that from the first or the second day of the protest, you see out in the streets this riot police, okay? Which comes out in large numbers, fully geared up. Their appearance are rather terrifying, like any other riot police. Probably more than any other riot police. They are violent. And they stand in the streets when the students are demonstrating, even in smaller number. Because before I go to that, I should point this out to you as well. That these demonstrations are not large ones in one place. You don't see 100,000 people in one place. But you see in every neighborhood, couple of thousand of kids are demonstrating. All over Iran. All over Iran. Now all over the world in different parts. Yes, yes, yes. Actually, during the demonstrations three weeks ago, as I said, they had people in Sydney, Australia, New Zealand, Tokyo, all over the world. All protesting high gas prices, it's funny. Everywhere. Everywhere. To the extent that they could be ignored. Yeah. Nothing but if they could not be ignored. And it's actually quite remarkable that this is very embarrassing to them. But somehow they think that this propaganda machine of them is working. So you think they don't have a good even sense. I mean, so there's an incompetence within the propaganda machine. Yes, it is. There's an incompetence across the board. I mean, despite all of this massive government administration or whatever you would call it, all these various components of it, there is a sense of, there is a sense of inefficiency and incompetence that is associated with every action that you see. Even in their suppression of this street movement. But in answer to that question, you would see that they're, this riot police, very, it's quite obvious that they were trained for the purpose. So their appearance, everything, these are not just regular army forces or soldiers, conscripts, they are professional forces. And they come not only on foot number, but they come on motorbikes. So there are, you would see in any of these demonstrations, there are 10, 12, 15, 20 motorbikes with two passengers. One in front riding, one in the back, fully equipped with a baton, with paint guns, with pellet guns, and with bullets. So they are very fully equipped. And they are terrifying. They go through the demonstrations and hit and beat people. And then they arrest. And then you see behind the first line of these riot police, you would see all this latest models of these special armored trucks for moving to the demonstrations and arresting people, throwing them into this. And then behind that, water cannons, you see. And I was looking at that, I was saying, okay, this is Tehran, probably. They have this. But then you look at the smallest cities, they still have the same thing. So all over the country, one thing that they had managed to produce extensively, irrespective of the fact that whether they are effective or not, but you see them everywhere. So this just shows that how afraid this regime is. But that also shows that there's an infrastructure that can implement violence at scale. Yes, very much so. And it's probably part and parcel of this regime from day one, the number of prisons that they have, according to perhaps an exaggerated version, they said that about 12,000 or so arrested that are in jails today, since past six weeks. They were 230 or 40 people were killed, including children. I under 18. They are, they beat up women in the street, which is extremely actually disturbing when you see these scenes of. So there's a lot of this is on video too, right? Everything is on video. Everybody has a camera. And everybody sends to major news outlets outside Iran. And they immediately show every night, if you look at BBC Persian or Iran International, or a few, I think it's six of them actually. All over the, in England, they are in Deutsche Welle in Germany, which has a particular interest in the Iranian. BBC World Service and so forth in London. And Voice of America Persian here in this country. There is another one, Radio Fado, which is also funded by the American government, also fully covers all of these events. So there is no way that these people can, that Iran can miss what's going on in the streets of these demonstrations. And the scenes of beating up women, which in Iranian culture, as I presume in most cultures in the world, there is a certain sanctity that you don't attack women. But they do, and this is an Islamic regime that supposedly have to have a certain sense of concern and protection. Well, like a protection, like a deep respect for women, women grounded in a tradition of protecting them, but instead this kind of idea that was instilled in law has turned into a deep disrespect of women. Exactly, or fear that these women are not any longer the girls that we thought we are bringing up in this society. The source of you losing your power will be these women. That's the fear. Yeah, and you see, of course, this government do have a support base. I mean, it would be totally wrong to think that the Islamic Republic has not created its own power base. It does, but it's probably, if there's no way, there are no statistics that you can, or I'm not aware of, any statistics that I can give you in numbers, what's the percentage of support for the regime in Iran. But quite frankly, I don't think it's more than probably 10% of the population. Be very generous. I would be surprised if it's that low. I would say, so if my understanding, because I've been very deeply paying attention to the war in Ukraine, to Ukraine, to Russia, and to support in Russia for Putin, I think without knowing the details, without even considering the effects of propaganda and stuff like that, is there's probably a large number of people in Iran that don't see this as a battle of human rights, but see it as a battle of conservatism, like tradition versus modernization, and they value tradition. That what they fear from the throwing away of the hijab is not the loss of power and the women getting human rights. What they fear is the same stuff you fear when you're sitting on a porch and saying, kids these days have no respect. Basically, there's a large number of Iranians that probably value tradition and the beauty of the culture. And they fear that kids with their internet and their videos and their revolution will throw away everything that made this country hold together for millennia, right? Yes, I know, I would agree with you in the sense that probably like everywhere else in the world, this is a generational thing. Every generation thinks differently about the younger generation, no doubt. And in Iran, it's the same. But there is another factor here is involved. Those that we would consider them as traditional no longer seem to have their loyalties to this regime. That's powerful. Meaning that they consider it as a brutal regime that is prepared to kill children in the streets and does a lot of things wrong. Of course, it tries to take care of its own power base. It is a very strong sense of, if we start here, there's a very strong sense in this regime that there are people that is theirs and there are others which are not theirs. There's a word for it in Persian. They call it khodi, one of us, okay? Oh, so it's a, well, that's very fascistic. It's like- Yes, yes, all for that matter, I suppose Soviet Union, if you were a member of the party and your children would have received a special kind of treatment, yourself as well, this sense of us versus them, for a while worked because the younger people coming from the countryside to the cities, certain sector of them would have found protection and support from the government. They wanted to belong to something and the mosques and the mourning associations in the neighborhoods and so forth would have given them. There's actually a term for it. It's called bahsiji. Those have been recruited by the state and this is the youth kind of vigilante, if you like, that you can see them also in these demonstrations. Sometimes thugs, they're called the civil cloth. So the people that comes to these demonstrations that start beating up these young people and they are not in security police uniforms, but they are just regular cloth. And these people, yes, they still support and they still benefit because they get jobs, they get privileges and these are very important for a state that basically monopolizes most of the resources. You see, even during the sanction, let alone before the sanction, the oil revenue of Iran, which is the major source of the state government, was the monopoly of the state. It was monopoly of the state during the Pahlavi era, from the start, basically. So what does that mean? That means that the regime in power is no longer particularly accountable to the majority population because it extracts wealth from underground and it uses it for its own purposes in order to make it more powerful, in order to make it more repressive than what it is the regime today. So it feeds a small, or I wouldn't say, but a fair number of its own supporters. I mean, the Revolutionary Guards in Iran is probably about 350,000 or something like that. It's a very big force. And this is not the regular army. The Revolutionary Guards are independent from the army. The Revolutionary Guard is armed forces controlled by the state. Yes, the same as the army. But these are more ideologically tied up with the state. And they're also in-facing, internal-facing. What's their stated, what's the stated purpose of the Revolutionary Guard? Well, from day one, when the revolution succeeded, the regime in power, the Islamic regime in power, was vulnerable to all kinds of forces of opposition within Iran itself. Prevent further revolution. Yeah, that's the Revolutionary Guards. And their job was to try to make sure that the regime stays in power. And of course, over the course of 40 years, they became more powerful, more organized, better funded, better trained. Well, at least we think they're better trained, but we don't know, because the level of incompetence, perhaps it can be seen through their rank and file as well. But, you know, they developed their own military industry. I mean, those drones that you see now, Putin's regime are throwing on Ukrainians, poor Ukrainians. Those are all built by the Revolutionary Guards, by the military industry under the control of the Revolutionary Guards. And like similar regimes in the Middle East, at least, these are military industrial complexes. You can find them in Egypt, of course, which is very powerful, very traditional, has been in power and still is in power. You find them in Pakistan, which is extremely powerful, and they can change the prime ministers as they did in the case of the last one. You can find them probably in Myanmar, is the same phenomenon. And I can, if you look around, you can find quite a number of them. And the Revolutionary Guards is equivalent of that. This is a powerful establishment force, which militarily is powerful, industrially is powerful. And since the start of the revolution, they have been given projects. So you want to build dams, which they did a major disaster, environmental disaster. They built 100 and something dams all across the country. This is the Revolutionary Guard who does it. So they have all kinds of tentacles all around the country controlling various things. And because it's their job and they have power, they have prestige, there's a huge incentive to- Join them. To join them and to stay, so like they, you know, when they're having dinner at home with their families, there's not an incentive to join the protests, sort of. Well, that is the point. I think, the Revolutionary Guards may be an extreme, but many of the people who depend on the state for their support, now the younger generation are telling their parents, you are wrong. You don't provide for us, this society, this state does not provide what we want. So there is a dissent within the family, it seems to me. I hope it's not a wishful thinking. You know, there is a kind of a joke going around. You see this, a terrible guy is the clergy, bearded, traditional clerical appearance. When you see them talking about women, they are very, of course, politically incorrect. They are very looking down towards women. As I said, they have to be inside, they have to be protected, they have not to be seen, and so forth, but if they have a young person, a young daughter in their family, you see that their discourse changes. They no longer seem to be referring to women as second-class citizens. So that's very important, that's precisely that point, that when you have this younger generation, no matter how privileged they are, and many of them are privileged, you know, and there is also, the regime has created its own privilege class that are not necessarily directly paid by the regime, but they benefit from contractors, certain professions that benefit from what the state provides for them. And Iran is, I mean, the past 40 years, you can see Iran has developed, in terms of material culture, remarkably. Iran has good communication, has roads all over the place. It's not like, it's more like, I don't know whether you have ever visited Turkey, for instance. In certain respects, even more advanced than Turkey, but it's closer to that, rather than if you travel, I don't want to bring particular names, in North Africa, or parts of the Middle East, or other parts of the Islamic world, it's much, much different. So in this respect, you would see certain contrast or paradoxes here. On the certain respect, there's the growth, there is urbanization, there is modern economy. On the other hand, you see this superimposed ideological doctrinal aspect that has driven the regime over all these years, and they cannot get rid of it. They cannot, in this respect, they cannot modernize themselves. They think that they are already perfect in ideological sense, this is the best solution for the world, not only for Iran, but for the Muslim world and for the world as a whole. We are anti-imperialist, we have managed to survive either under sanctions, this is all part of the rhetoric. But of course, at a huge expense, the huge expense for their own population. And the point that you have raised is the fact that we now witness there is not only a generation gap between the youth and their parents, but there is a break, in a sense, from the older generations. And they are very distinctly the youth that has a different view of the world. And it does not want to compromise. Whether they would be able to succeed or not remains to be seen. Whether this regime is going to suppress it, maybe. But it actually brought to surface many of aspects of the weaknesses of this regime in power. Well, I hear from a lot of people that are in these protests now, and so my love goes to them, and stay strong. Because it's inspiring to see people fighting for those things, the women, life, and freedom, especially freedom. Because that can only lead to a good thing in the long term, at least. And if possible, to avoid a violent revolution. Of course, that is something that we all want to see. Before we return to the present, let's jump around. Let's go to the past. We mentioned 1979. What happened in 1979 in Iran? Well, in 1979, there was a revolution that eventually came to be known as the Islamic Revolution. And even up to this day, many of the observers or those who have strong views would not like to refer to it as an Islamic Revolution, or even a revolution. Because the nature of it in the earlier stages of it started really probably around 1977, it took two years, was much more all-embracing. It was not Islamic in a particular fashion, or at all, in a sense. It started with a kind of a very liberal, Democrat agenda, which required, which demanded mostly by people who were the veterans of the older generations of Iranian liberal nationalists that were left out in the Pahlavi period. It's a period of the Shah became increasingly authoritarian, increasingly suppressive, and therefore basically leaving no space, no political space open for any kind of a give and take, any kind of a conversation or participation. That was in the 70s. 70s, 70s, particularly in the 70s. Can we actually even just do a whirlwind review from 1906 to 1979? Yes, okay, sure. In 1906, there was a period, actually, as you might know, the first decade or so of the 20th century witnessed numerous what we refer to as constitutional revolutions, including Russia in 1905, the first revolution, including the Chinese Revolution in 19, constitutional revolution in 1910, the Young Turks Revolution in 1908, and the Iranian Revolution in 1906. Do we understand why the synchronicity of all of it, why in so many different places, very different cultures, very different governments? Very different cultures, but all of them, in a sense, were coming out of regimes that became progressively powerful without having any kind of a legal system that would protect the individual vis-a-vis the state. So the idea of law and the constitution according to which there should be a certain protection, a certain civil society, became very common. Yeah, but I wonder where that, because that's been that way for a very, very long time. And so I wonder, you know, it's funny, certain ideas, just their time comes. Exactly, it's like 1848, when you would see that there's a whole range of revolutions across Europe. Yeah. Or you would see, for instance, the Arab Spring. You see all these revolutions in the Arab world, which unfortunately, nearly all of them failed. So yes, these are very contagious ideas that moves across frontiers from one culture to another. And I presume we can add to that there are two elements which one can say there was a greater communication, there is a greater sense of a world economy. And the turn of the century witnessed, the first decade of the century, witnessed a period of volatility, particularly in currency. So many of the countries of the world, particularly non-West, suffered, and particularly the businesses suffered. And not surprisingly, the business class were in the forefront of many of these constitutional movements, requiring the state to give the kind of a, create the right kind of institutions to listen to their voices, to their concerns, and the creation of a democratic system, parliamentary system in which there would be representation, popular representation, proper elections and so forth, and constitutions. And this very much is a kind of a French idea of the constitution going back all the way, perhaps to 1789 revolution, Montesquieu, all this kind of philosophes were greatly appreciated, particularly the French system. So what were the ideas in the 1906 Iranian constitution? They, precisely the same, they were demanding a creation of a legal system with division of power between the three, executive, legislative, and the judiciary. Not unlike the American system. And they requested basically a certain public space to be created between the two sources of power. The state, which had this kind of a control over the, if you like, the secular aspect of life in the society, and the religious establishment that had a full control over the religious aspects. And both of them, from the perspective of the constitution, this is considered as repressive, and therefore, there has to be a new space open between these two. And that was the idea of a constitutional revolution. By its very nature, it was an idea of modernity. They wanted a modern society. They wanted a better material life. They wanted more representation and so forth. The constitutional revolution, as I always would say, is much more of an innocent revolution. It's a revolution that did not particularly have much violence in it, contrary to many other revolutions. It did not have a centralized leadership, per se. That's why, actually, I'm getting, I mean, besides the practices, I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews to compare what's happening now with the revolution of 1906, 1909. Are there any echoes? Yes, yes, there are, there are. Because that was a movement that started without a centralized leadership, but actually, various voices that emerged in various, among the merchants or the businessmen in the economic community, among the representatives who came to the first parliament, the press, the new generation of the privileged aristocracy who were educated and believed in the constitutional values. All of these voices emerged at the same time. And somehow, they managed to coexist in the first and the second parliaments that were created between 1906 and 1910 or 1911. But they all faced huge problems, in the sense that Iran was in a dire economic situation. This is before the days of the discovery of oil, which actually coincides. There are two important coincidences. One is that the oil was discovered in the South in 1909, during the course of the Constitutional Revolution. Second is that in 1907, the two great powers of the time, the Russian Empire and the British Empire, who always honored Iran as being a buffer state between them, because they didn't want to get too close to one another, basically came to an agreement facing the fear of the rise of the German Empire. So this is the period of Entente, as you might know in European history, whereby the French, the British, and the Russians all create an alliance that ultimately leads to the First World War against Germany. And at the same time, the discovery of oil, that the oil industry being a very powerful, defining factor of the 20th century for Iran. Exactly. Source of a lot of money. Lot of money, but not all of it in the hands of the Iranians, only one fifth of it, by way of royalties, came to Iran. Much of it went to the Anglo-Persian oil company, which they actually discovered the oil in the province, Khuzestan province in the southwest of Iran, where the major oil industry is today, right now. And this was an extremely profitable enterprise for that company and for the British government. It actually purchased by the British government. Churchill purchased Anglo-Iranian oil company for the British government. So it was not anymore a private company. It was a British interest, as a matter of fact. And in the course of the 20th century, although it helped the modernization in Iran, but it also helped the creation of a more authoritative, a more strong state, if you like to call it. That 19th century Iran never had that kind of a power, never had that kind of resources. Is it 20th century? Even that one fifth of the income that reached the Iranian state gave it a greater power. That's another coincidence. So yes, yes, you could say the oil was one of the catalysts for absolute power. But the 20th century saw quite a few countries have dictators with power unlike anything else in human history. Yes. That's weird, too. Precisely. And you know, you can name them from the beginning of the century with people like, I don't know, Lenin, Stalin, of course Hitler. Even Mao, of course, you can name them. And probably, as I would say, it's the last of the miscommunity in that century that you would see these strong men with a sense of either artificial or real, or a sense of so-called charisma, and with this total power over the regime that they create. Some of them do, Nasser, he didn't have much of an oil resources in Egypt, but he was also one of these strong men, okay, in the 20th century, loved by some, hated by others. So it necessarily does not tie up to economic resources on the ground. But in the Iranian case, unfortunately it did. And it was a, it was more than, it created more than one issue for Iran. It's created a strong state, which is the Pahlavi state, from 1921 onward. Because in 1921, at the end of the First World War, Iran was in almost a state of total bankruptcy. And the British had a desire to try to bring Iran to the system that they created in the Middle East in the post-war era, the mandate system. Palestine, Iraq, and then of course, French mandate of Lebanon and Syria, all of this. And Iran was separate because Iran was an independent country, it wasn't part of the Ottoman Empire that collapsed. So they had to somehow handle it. And what they tried to do didn't work. As a result, partly domestic, partly international issues, brought about a regime which is headed by the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Shah. Okay, a first military officer called Reza Khan, actually a military officer of the Cossack forces. And the Cossack forces was the force that was created in the 19th century model of the Russian Cossacks. When the ruler in the 19th century visited Russia as in a royal tour, and the desire showed the great Cossack forces, he said, I like this. And he created one for himself with Russian officers, actually. So Russian officers served in Iran from around 1880s up to the revolution of 1917, the collapse of the Cossack regime. So many revolutions. So many revolutions. And Reza Shah was an officer in that, Reza Khan, was an officer in that force. And he created a new monarchy for reasons that we need not to go to it. And it's called the Pahlavi regime. Pahlavi regime was a modernizing regime, okay? That brought, in effect, fulfilled many of the ambitions of the Constitution, many of the aspirations of the Constitutional Revolution. Better communication, secular education, centralized state, centralized army, better contact with the outside world, greater urbanization. That's what a modern state is all about. And in that regard, in a sense, for the first 20 years up to the Second World War, was successful. Despite, and more significant of all, it managed to keep the European powers, which was always interfering in the local affairs of Iran, in an arm's length. So they were there in an arm's length, but they were also respecting the power of the state, power of the Pahlavi state. During the Second World War, the same phenomenon as earlier interference led to the occupation of Iran by the Allied forces. The British from the south, the Russians from the north. The Red Army. They took over Iran, and of course they said kind of. The Second World War. Yes, from 1941 up to 1945. And of course, when the Red Army refused to withdraw from Iranian Azerbaijan, and with some thought of possible annexation of that province, there was a big issue in the post-war Iran. So after 1945. Yes, 1945 to 1946, there was a big. Soviet Union getting greedy. Yes, but eventually they agreed. Eventually Stalin agreed to leave the Azerbaijan province in the hope that it would get some concessions from Iran, which in the oil of the Caspian area, which didn't work, and it's a different story altogether. But what happened is that in the post-war era, between 1944, 45, and 1953, is a period of greater democratization. Was that Reza Shah's dictatorship basically disappeared. And this is where you would see political parties, free press, a lot of chaotic really, as democracies often are. So something like, was it officially a democracy? Yes, it was a democracy. Was there elections? There were elections, yes, of course. Yes, of course. And there were very diverse political tendencies came to the picture, including the Tudeh Party of Iran, which is Communist Party of Iran. This Communist Party of Iran is probably the biggest Communist Party of the whole of the Middle East, and one of the biggest in the world actually, at that time. Did the Soviet Union have a significant influence on the? Of course. They were basically following orders from the Soviets, although they denied it, but in reality, that's the case. But what happened, they were seen by the Americans during the Cold War as a threat, and Iran was going through a period of demanding nationalization of its oil resources. That's a very important episode with Mossadegh, whom you might have heard about his name. Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh was the prime minister and the national charismatic leader from 1951 to 1953. Prior to that, he was a famous parliamentarian, but this period, he was the prime minister of Iran, and he nationalized the Iranian oil industry, and the British didn't like it at all, and eventually resulted in a famous coup, which at least partly was supported by the funding and by the moral support of the British and the Americans, particularly by the Americans. It was always seen as one of the earliest and the most successful CIA operations during the Cold War. So CIA had something to do with it? Yes, of course, that's one of the earliest operations of the CIA. Wait a minute, what was, yes, of course, what was the CIA doing? CIA, this is the time at the post-war era. In the 50s. In the 50s, 40s and 50s. The British Empire, which was really the major superpower of the region after the collapse of the Tzarist Empire, gradually took the second seat to the Americans, who were the newcomers and the great power and the victors of the Second World War, and the Americans viewed Iran as an important country, since it has the largest common borders with the Soviet Union, and it was, and in the south was the Persian Gulf, which at the time was the greatest supplier of oil to the outside world, and therefore the Americans had a particular interest in Iran, and in the earlier stages, their interest was in the interest of the Iranian government because they wanted to get rid of both the Soviet Union, which made a return in the post-war era, and of course the British that were gradually withdrawing from Iran, but they had a full control over the Anglo-Iranian oil company. They changed the name to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. When the name of the country officially changed from Persia to Iran, in the west, the name of the company changed, and they got into a huge dispute with the other government that eventually led to the coup of 1953, which eventually created a very, a very distressful memory in the minds of many of the Iranian nationalists, that this was the betrayal of the great powers, the British and Americans. Yes, CIA played a part because CIA feared, contrary to the British, that they were afraid of their own oil in Iran, the CIA was afraid of the Soviet penetration in the south, and particularly because there was a very powerful, a very powerful Communist Party in Iran, the Tudeh Party of Iran. So, they gradually shifted between the Truman administration and Eisenhower administration, these are early days of the CIA, and then they actually did participate to send their agents. There's a long story to that, and it eventually resulted in a successful coup that removed Mossadegh from power. What's the United States' interest here? Why are they using CIA? Are they trying to make sure there's not too much centralization of power in this region? They were afraid of the fact that the, that of the Soviet Union, and during the Cold War, that was their concern, the only concern. They actually almost want to protect Iran and its own sovereign processes from influence of the Soviets. Yes, because they were afraid of the fact if Iran, or at least this is part of the, I'm simplifying a very complex picture, but the Americans basically were thinking that if Iran is going to be lost to Soviet influence, then eventually, basically, all the oil resources in the Persian Gulf are going to be threatened. Yeah. And this would basically is the national security of the United States and all of the Western allies, European allies. So in a sense, this was the long arm of the CIA to try to make sure that that's not going to happen. And then, of course, they were persuaded by the British. British were the old hand, which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century. They always had relations with Iran and so forth. So they gradually replaced, and of course, I don't want to give them this kind of a satanic view that the Americans was a bad influence, because they had also some very good influences in Iran. But this particular episode somehow shed a dark light on the American presence and was used and abused time and again, particularly the revolution in 1979, which was this great Satan idea that Khomeini created. Basically, it was based on the fact is 1953, you were responsible for the downfall of a national government in Iran, which as a matter of fact, he had no respect for it. Khomeini had no respect for the secular, nationally liberals, including Mohammad Mossadegh. But he was using it as a rhetorical tool for his own purposes. But what happened is that after 1953, we see again the rise of authoritarian Mohammad Reza Shah's power. And that he's, that's the Shah? That's the Shah, that we know as Shah. He's the son of Reza Shah. And technically, what is Shah? Is it? Well, Shah is an old term in Persian that comes from a pre-Islamic Persian of ancient times. So in the context of democracy, should it be seen as like a supreme leader, king? Is the head of the executive power, according to the Constitution of 1906. Oh, that's in the Constitution, the actual term Shah. Yeah, of course, he has a place in the Constitution. But the actual term Shah, okay, interesting. But the Shah is a very old term. Yeah, it's almost like a monarchic term, like a king. Yeah, it is actually is a term peculiar to Iran. I've written about it somewhere. But because the term that the Western world in the ancient times has been Rex, for royalty and the king. In the Eastern world, in India, is Raj, is the same origin, the same root. Iran never shared that. They had the idea of, because Rex and Raj, I don't want to get into too much of etymology, but this is an interesting one. Rex and Raj both means the one that opens the road for basically enforcer of religion, okay? Enforcer of the right religion. Because Rex and Raj both have the, of the etymological origin of right, you see? And right means the right religion, basically. By the way, there's so much beautiful language here. I'm just looking at the Persian Constitution in 1906, and it says it's the constitution of the sublime state of Persia. Qajar Iran. I mean, just the extra adjectives on top of this stuff is beautiful. Yeah, because that was actually the change that came about. I don't want to go too much into it. But it was called, as I pointed out before, the guarded domains of Iran. Yes. They changed that to the sublime state of Iran during the constitutional revolution. Because they wanted to give a greater sense of centrality of this state. Yeah. And sublime was the term was used. But also, what permeates all of this is a poetic, I mean, there is a history of poetry. Of course, very strong. To the culture. Very strong. Which is fascinating. So I mean, it's, of course I don't speak the language, but even in Russian, there's also a music to the soul of the people that represents itself, that presents itself in the form of poetry and literature in the way that it doesn't in the English-speaking world. I don't know what that is. There's a... Yes, there's a romantic side. Romantic side. To all my... Romantic side, that's right. Yeah, I agree with you. In Iran, of course, you know, there's a time of the constitutional revolution, is a time of great poetry. This kind of a patriotic sentiments that comes through poetry plays a very important part. Of course, these days, poetry has kind of declined. And instead, you see the visual image that is at the center. That's why cinema is so important. Kids these days with their TikTok. Yeah, let me finish this about this period of Muhammad Reza Shah. He built up, because he received a greater income from the oil revenue, and he built up a very strong state with a strong security force, a strong security apparatus, which is the SAVAK, which is an acronym for the security force in security organization. And he, of course, unfortunately, in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in 1970s, basically suppressed the voices of, or the possibility of any kind of a mass participation in the political process. It became very much an authoritarian regime with its own technocrats, very much a modernist vision of Iran's future, and almost kind of messianic, that he was hoping that Iran, in a decade, would become the fifth most powerful state in the world, and the riches, as he would have said, the gates of the great civilization, very much in the mind, had this image of ancient Iran of the Achaemenid Empire. And we want to go back to that greatness of the Achaemenid Empire, somewhat rather naive and very nationalistic in a crude fashion. And what happened is that, as a result, there was built up some kind of a resistance from the intellectuals, from the left, eventually resulting in a kind of a protest movement, as I said, by 1977, 1978. Then, of course, the question that comes to mind, and that probably you would like to know about, is the fact that why it becomes religious, why it becomes Islamic, if it's the popular nationalist, liberal tendency of opening up the political space and allowing greater participation, going back to the Constitution of 1906, 1907, why it's all of a sudden, it becomes Khomeini, where does he come from? The reason for that, at least in a concise fashion, is the fact that on one area that, after the greater suppression of all the other voices, remained open was religion. Mosques, the mullahs on the pulpit, and the message that gradually shifted from all the traditional message of the sharia of Islam, I mean, all the rules and regulations of how one has to live, into something very political. And not only political, but also radical political. So, in the whole period from the Constitutional Revolution to the Revolution of 1979, basically the religious establishment gradually was pushed to the opposition. They were not originally very conservative supporters of the state, as the Catholic Church, for instance, was supportive of majority of the authoritarian governments around the world. But the politicization was the result of isolation, because they were left out of the system. And while in isolation, they were not successful in trying to reform themselves, to try to find answers to many of the questions of modern times. What happens to women? What happens to civil rights? What happens to a civil society? How modern law and individual freedoms have to be defined in Islamic terms? How to separate religion and state? Or how to separate religion and state. These issues were never addressed. What happened is that there was this bypass through political Islam and revolutionary Islam, as gradually they learned, you know, that this is the bypass, bypass to power, basically. To become again a voice in the society and eventually a prominent voice and eventually a monolithic voice in the society. That's the process that led into the revolution of 1979. Basically, this period, greater attention was paid to religion, even among the secular middle classes, who were alienated for a very long time because of this extensive modernization of the Pahlavi period. They didn't have a sense of that old mullahs with their turbans. But they had a kind of aura in this period. Yes, they are those who remained not corrupted. They are the people who basically went against the suppression of the Pahlavi regime. And Khomeini became a leader, a symbol of that. Nobody ever thought in the earlier stages. Among this very excited multitudes that came to the streets of the Iranian cities in 1979, or 1978 actually, thought that this old mullah in the 70s, that all of a sudden has appeared from the Najaf through Paris to Tehran, is going to take over and create an autocracy, a religious autocracy. We have to back up for just a second. Who is Khomeini? You just mentioned a few disparate facts about the man. Yes. He was the person that took power in 1979, the supreme leader of Iran. Yes. You mentioned something about Paris, something about being in the 70s. Yes. What should we know about the guy? Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually was known as Imam Khomeini, he was kind of promoted to an even more sublime position. Okay, can we, just a million tangents. Ayatollah, Imam, what do these terms mean? Well, Ayatollah means the sign of God. In the course of the 19th century, or early 20th century, as the religious establishment gradually lost its greater presence in the society and its prominent places in society, they had some kind of an inflation in titles. So they gave themselves more grand titles. Yeah, more adjectives. More adjectives, more grand titles, such as Ayatollah, that became a kind of a highest rank of the religious hierarchy. But it's not- Society was in an unofficial hierarchy. It was not like Catholic Church, that you have bishops and, you know, further off. It was very unofficial model. And he was an Ayatollah. Was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah. He wasn't the first Ayatollah? No, no, no, not at all. The Ayatollahs were before him, ever since the beginning of the century. But he was eventually recognized as an Ayatollah. And if I want to start it this way, Ayatollah Khomeini was born in 1900. And in a sense, all this tremendous change that Iran witnessed in the course of the 20th century, was in a sense materializing this person. He become a mullah of a lower rank, went to the traditional madrasas, to the traditional centers for the education of the seminarians. Never had a secular education. Had a very complex Islamic education on this one hand, jurisprudence, on the other hand, probably a little bit of Islamic philosophy and mysticism, which is unusual for the jurists, for the faqih, as they call them, these religious scholars or legal scholars of Islam. And then he, in the 1960s, when he was residing in Tehran and gradually becoming more important, he became a voice of opposition against the Shah. And the reason for opposition in the early 1960s was the fact that the Shah carried through a series of extensive modernization policies, of which the most important was the land reform. So in effect, the land distribution that took place in the early 60s removed or weakened greatly that class of landowners from the 19th century. And he, Khomeini, saw himself as a voice of that old class that felt, that actually declared that this land redistribution is un-Islamic, according to the Islamic law. Property is honored, and you cannot just, no matter how much and how large are these estates that the landowning class has, the government has no right to redistribute it, even among the peasants, among the people who are tilling the land. So that was a major issue. Shah also gave the right of vote to women, and that also he objected, he said women should not have a right. Can we just linger on the Islamic law? How firm and clear is the Islamic law that he was representing and embodying? Is this- Codified? Codified, yes, that's a good term. Yeah, that's another issue. Not only the hierarchy was unofficial and informal, but also Islamic law, particularly Shia law, did not have any codified system, because these religious authorities always resisted becoming under an umbrella of a more codified system of Islamic law, because they were outside the state in a sense. Civil law was in the hand of the religious establishment. They had their own courts independent of the state. But other matters, legal matters, was in the hand of the government. There was a kind of de facto division between these two institutions, state versus the religious establishment. Therefore, it was not codified. So he could declare that this is unofficial, or sorry, illegal, according to the Islamic law, that you would distribute land to the peasants. And another mujtahid, or another religious authority, would say no, no, it is perfectly fine, because he would have a different reading of the law. So that being in mind, that adds to the complexity of the picture. He, in the 1963, there was a period of uprising of the supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini. That was a turning point in a sense, to try to politicize the religious supporters of Ayatollah, who were loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini. And in a sense, all the community of more religiously orientated, against the secular policies of the Shah, and against, of course, the dictatorship of the Shah. So that's where the religious movement became a political party. Became, in 1963 is the first moment, it's a huge uprising, and the government suppressed it. But then, suppression would start to build. Of course, and he was sent to exile. He went to Najaf, which is this great center in southern. So became a martyr on top of this. At the martyr, he was probably even forgotten to some extent. But not, he was forgotten for the secular middle class. But not to those supporters of his, who were paying him their dues. Because in Islam, you would pay dues to religious leaders. You know, there's religious dues and alms that you would pay to the clerical authorities. And they redistribute them among their own students, and so forth. So they built, actually, a network of loyalty based on these donations. And these donations, that's received by Atullah Khomeini, was very effectively, through his network, was distributed, even if he was in exile at Sa'dira. So, the 1977, 1978, when the situation changed, and there was a little bit of opening in the political climate, then you saw that Atullah Khomeini started sending cassette messages. That was his mean of communication. Was sending cassettes, and cassettes were sent through the country by his network. So, or declarations, and saying first that we would like to see a greater democratization, and the Shah has to abide by the Constitution of 1907. This is a constitution, this is a democratic system, and so forth. Was he charismatic? Well, it depends who would call, what you call charismatic. He had a long beard, he was kind of a man in turban and the gown, which was a very unusual leadership for people who were much more accustomed to the civilian clothing, or to the equipments of the Shah's military uniforms that he used to wear. But I also mean, he's a man that was able to take power, to become popular, sufficiently popular. So, I would like, is it the ideas, is it an accident, or is it the man himself, the charisma, or something about the man that led to this particular person basically changing the tide of history in this part of the world, in a way that was unexpected? All the above that you mentioned. Or was it just the beard? No, I think, no, it's beyond the appearance. The appearance greatly helps, as you know. Yeah. In the 20th century, appearance is helpful. Yeah, pictures for propaganda, for messaging. That's an important factor. And he was kind of adamant and very severe in his own positions. He could appear very uncompromising. And he had a sense of confidence, self-confidence, that virtually everybody else lacked. And he was a man of opportunity. As soon as he would see that a chance, an opportunity would open up, he would jump on it. And that's what he did, basically. As more the political space opened, the weaknesses of the Shah's government became more evident. His indecision became more evident. His lack of confidence became more evident. Khomeini managed to move further into the center of the movement because he was the only authority that had this network of support through the mosques, through the people who paid homage to him, who followed him, because there's a sense of following of the religious leader in Shi'ism. You are a follower of this authority, you're a follower of that authority. And he's basically created an environment in which people looked upon him as a kind of a messianic figure that came to save Iran from what they considered at the time the problems of dictatorship under the Shah. So there's not a suspicion about Islamic law being the primary law of the land? Not at all. People had very little sense that what Islamic law is all about, because the secular education has left that into the old religious schools. This is not something that ordinary educated Iranian who goes to the universities is going to learn. Therefore, there is a sense of idealization that there is something great there. And there were quite a number of intellectuals who also viewed this kind of an idea of they would refer to as West's toxication, that is this civilization of the West that has brought with it all the modernity that we see around ourselves, has enormous sinister features into it. And it has taken away from us our authenticity. That was the thing, that there is something authentic that should be protected. And therefore, a man in that kind of a garb and appearance seemed as a source for return to this originality of their own culture, authenticity of their own culture. And he perfectly took advantage of that, that is Khomeini, took advantage of it and the secularity at the expense of everybody else, which he managed in the course of 1979 to 1989, which he passed away, he died in the 10 years during this period, managed to basically transform the Iranian society to create institutions of the Islamic Republic and to acquire himself the position of the guardian jurist. That was something completely new, it didn't ever exist before. As a matter of fact, as you might know, the model of government that a religious establishment takes over the states is unprecedented throughout the course of Iranian history, throughout the course of the Islamic history, I would say. This is the first example, and probably the only example of a regime that the religious establishment that has always, in the course of Iranian history, ever since I would say probably at this 16th century, if not earlier, has been always separate from the state and always kind of collaborating with the state with certain tensions in between the two of them. There were two, basically as they would call themselves, the two pillars of stability in the society. That situation changed. For the first time, the religious establishment took over the power of the state. And that's at the core of what we see today as a major issue for Iranian society. Because these are basically that old balance between the religion and the state, which was kind of a de facto separation of the authorities of the two, has been violated. And now you have in power a theocracy in effect, which of course only in its appearance is theocracy. Deep down, in my opinion, is a brutal fascist regime that stays in power. But it has the appearance of religion into it. So this is really the story of the revolution. And as a result of that, the Iranian middle class has greatly suffered. It's not without a reason that you see four million Iranians abroad. Because basically the emergence of this new power gradually isolated or marginalized the secular middle class, who could not survive under that regime. And gradually moved out in the course of perhaps 30, 40 years, up to now. Iran has the largest, I think I'm right to say so, has the largest brain drain in any country in the world, according to its population. So fascinating that, how much of a weird quirk of history is it that religion would take hold in a country? Like does it have to do with the individual? It seems like if we re-ran the 20th century a thousand times will we get the 79 revolution resulting in Islamic law like less than 1% of the time, it feels like. Or no, which percentage would you put on it? Well I think it has something to do with the very complex nature of how Iran evolved over a long period of time. Since the 16th century, that's why if I would for a moment talk about what I have written. I've written a book that's called Iran, a Modern History. And it does not start in the 20th century. It starts in the 16th century. Because that's what I've argued, that this complex process that at the end of the day resulted in what we see around us today, is something that was in making for a very long time. And religion was a big part of it. Shi'i and the Messiah complex. Exactly. The longing for this great vision of a great nation that somehow is the sublime nation that can only be fully sublime through religion. Or at the time it was thought that it's through religion. Ever since then, it's disillusionment with that image. Or at least a process of disillusionment. The outcome of it is what we see today. Basically that process of 40 years is a process of readjusting to the realities of the world. That that great moment of romantic success of a revolution, like most revolutions of course, that is going to change Iran and bring this kind of a moment of greatness led into this great disappointment. So it's a movement of the great disappointment in a sense. Like most Messianic movements, by the way. Messianic movements in general are always leading into great disappointments. But what I have here that perhaps should be added to it, that yes, it was a peculiarity of Iran as a society that had to experience this eventual encounter between religion and state. That's something to do with the nature of Shi'ism. That's just one point that should be pointed out. Most of Sunni Islam don't have that kind of, I say most because there is something there. But Sunni Islam in general does not have that kind of an aspiration for the coming of a Messianic leader. Shi'ism does. Shi'ism in its very shaping, particularly the way that it was set up in Iran, was a religion that has always this element of expectation to it for the coming of this Messianic leader. Of course, I mean, between parentheses, all societies look for Messianic leaders. I mean, just look around us. But some societies more than others. There's certain culture, it might have to do with the romantic poetry that we mentioned earlier. Yeah. I mean, surely, I mean, not to draw to me parallels, but with the Soviet Union, there was romanticism too. I don't know. I mean, I don't know, it does, maybe idealism. A sense of a savior. Yeah. Who would bring you out of the misery that you're in. And always looking for a third party to solve your issues. That's why probably this movement has a particular significance, because it probably doesn't look for a Messiah. Although, I was talking to my brother, who is a historian also, and he was saying, perhaps the Messiah of this movement is that Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old girl that was killed. It's a martyred Messiah who is now leading a movement which no longer has that charismatic leadership with it. But yes, I would say that Iran has been the birthplace, if I might say that, of Messianic aspirations, going back to ancient Zoroastrianism, which is really the whole system that you see in major religions, at least so-called Western religions, so Abrahamic religions, is parallel, or perhaps influenced, by Zoroastrianism, in which there is an idea of this world and the other world is hereafter. There is an idea of a judgment at the end of the time. And there is a concept that there is a moment of justice that is going to come with the rise of a religious or a charismatic figure. So it's a very old phenomenon in Iran, very old. And it's time and again repeated itself in the course of its history, but never as powerfully as it happened in 1979, and never in the form of authority from within the religious establishment. It was always the dissent movements that were kind of antinomian. They were against the authority of the religious establishment. That changed in the 20th century. But the revolution in 1979, that change is still with us today. Can we just linger on, are there some practical games of power that occurred, you know, in the way that Stalin took power and held power in the early days? Is there something like this in terms of the establishment of the Revolutionary Guard and all those kinds of stuff? Yes, yes. So the messianic figure has some support from the people, but does he have to crush his enemies in competition? It certainly did. Probably not, certainly not as brutal in terms of the victims as you would see in Soviet Union under Stalin, who the bloodshed or the destruction of the population was far greater than what you would find in Iran of the Islamic Republic. It's uncomparable. Perhaps I would find a greater parallel with Mao Zedong, and particularly because China has a very strong messianic tradition since the ancient times so they have something, and Mao appeared as a kind of a messianic figure. There I can see there is a parallel, but also you can see with any other authoritarian regime with a messianic figure at the head of it that it destroys all the other forces. So during the course of the first 10 years of the Islamic Revolution, it destroyed the liberal nationalist secular, it destroyed the guerrilla movements, some of them Islamic, some of them Marxist, who turned into political parties or tendencies in the course of the post-revolution 1979. They were completely destroyed and in a very brutal fashion. And their opposition even within the religious establishment because it wasn't uniform, there were many different tendencies, those that were opposed to the authority of Ayatollah Khomeini or now Imam Khomeini, meaning almost a sacred religious figure above the level of a religious authority. He's a saint kind of a figure. He says Shi'ism has this idea of Imams. There were 11 of them, the 12th is hidden and would come back at the end of the time. This is a messianic figure. So the title that was always used for them only in Shi'ism, never used for any other person. He is the first person in the revolution of 1979, first referred to as deputy of Imam, but the term deputy gradually disappeared and he became Imam Khomeini. That's his official title. I love human beings so much. It's so beautiful. These titles that we give each other, it's marvelous to observe. You love it because you haven't been under that system. No, I love it in a very dark, dark fashion, yes. Kind of way it caricatures itself. It's almost funny in its absurdity, if not for the evil that it has led to in human history. But also the fact that it's a man, it's in fact fulfillment in a kind of completely unintended fashion. It's a fulfillment of that idea of a Messiah that they've been faithing for. This Imam which is in a hidden for a thousand years is here and not here. And therefore Khomeini would have, in a sense, fulfilled those anticipations. But beyond that, I just give you one example. I know that you may have other concerns. But when I say elimination, at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, by the direct order of Ayatollah Khomeini, a fatwa that he wrote, a group of prisoners who belonged to a variety of political parties, the left, religious left, majority of them, the left, the Marxist left and the religious left, in a matter of a few weeks, or perhaps a few months, I'm not actually quite sure about the time span, in a series of, these were people who have already been tried and they were given sentences. They were brought back before the summary trials of three judges, or more, three, four of them. One of them is now the new president of the Islamic Republic, Raisi. And they were given quick summary sentences which meant execution. So something between probably six to 8,000 were executed in a matter of a month or two months, something like that. Mostly in Tehran, but also in provinces. And that remained an extraordinary trauma for the families, for those who had these kids, they're all young, all young. So this remains very much kind of original sin of the Islamic Republic that cannot get rid of. And it's in people's memories, they didn't allow them, even the families, to go and mourn their dead in an official cemetery which they created for them. Now the latest thing is that they put a huge concrete wall around it so nobody would be able to get into it. So these all part of this extraordinary level of atrocity, brutality, that you see that the regime who claimed that it comes with the morality of religion and Islam to bring back the justice and be more, in a sense, kind to people, ended up with what it is in the memory of many of the people in Iran. So developing these fascistic tendencies. Very much so. Destroying minorities, Baha'is, one of them. Hundreds of Baha'is were, without any reason, without any involvement, were picked up and executed. Their properties were taken over. Their rights were taken away from them, even up to this day. It's the largest, by the way, religious minority in Iran. So you would see that in many areas this acts very much as a beyond authority. It's a kind of really a fascistic regime. So Khamenei held power for 10 years and then took power the next supreme leader, who is still the leader today for over 30 years. Who is he? Well, he was one of the, this is Ali Khamenei. Ayatollah. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Imam one day, perhaps? No, well, they hesitated to use the term Imam for him. But in any other respect, he was given all of that adulation that they did to Khamenei. He is the guardian jurist. That's what's important. Because the guardian jurist in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic is an authority that is above the state. He is not elected, quote unquote, because this is a divine authority, although he's been designated by the group of determined mullahs like himself. And he has the full power over all institutions of the state, the army, the media, the economy, every aspect of it. He acts like a Shah. He acts like this authoritarian authority. Did that gradually develop, or was that very early on? Well, that's part of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. The first Constitution, the first draft of the Constitution did not have the authority of the guardian jurist. But then it was added by Khamenei and his supporters. Are there actually in the Constitution any limits to his power? Yes, there is a council of the experts, so to say, that would remove him from power, I think theoretically. But there is so much restrictions to that that I don't think it would have ever happened in reality, in his case, at least. But in terms of executive, to make decisions and all that kind of stuff, does he need to check with anybody? No. He does check with his own advisors, but he doesn't have any constitutional obligation to check on the decisions that he's making. So that's the supreme leader, but there's been presidents. Yes. And what's the role of the president? The president, in a sense, is the executive power under the Islamic Republic. There are three heads of powers. There is the president, that presumably has the executive power. There is the head of the judiciary. And there is the head of the, the speaker of the parliament, majlis, Islamic majlis, which is the legislative. So there's the legislative, judiciary, and executive. Raisi, who is not a president, is the head of the executive. Above them is the supreme leader, or the guardian jurist. Can you give me some insight? Because I, especially, I'm not exactly sure why, but the president, Ahmadinejad, is somebody I'm, as an American, really familiar with. Why is that exactly? But why was the president the public-facing person to the world versus the supreme leader? Is that just an accident of a particular human involved, or is this by design? No, because the supreme leader tries to keep himself out of issues of everyday politics, supposedly. But therefore, he is not coming to the United Nations to give a speech during the session. But Mr. Ahmadinejad, who at the time was the president, would come and make outrageous statements. That's why you probably know something about him. So all of them make public statements, but he had a proclivity for outrageous statements. He does all kinds of things. He makes all kinds of statements. But he is somewhat above the everyday politics, in theory. But of course, he's pulling all the strings, without doubt, in every respect. And it seems that you were asking, I thought you were going to ask me this question, almost without an exception, since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979, up to the last of the presidents of the Islamic Republic, Rouhani, before the guy that is, last year, or a year and a half ago, was in a phony election, got into the position of the president, all of them, and it's a long list, all of them eventually fell out with the regime. So there is no president, except perhaps to some extent Rouhani, but we'll wait and see what's going to happen to him. But prior to him, all of them, including Ahmadinejad, fell out with the regime, with the current regime in Iran. Who's Rouhani? He was officially president for eight years. Yeah, prior to Raisi. Ibrahim Raisi, the 221, what you're saying is a phony election. Yes, it's a phony election. What happened? What's interesting? Because the process of actually candidacy for presidency is completely controlled by a council that is under the control of the supreme leader. So they have to approve who is going to be the candidate. So not everybody can enter and say, I would like to be a candidate. So did Rouhani fall out of favor? You're saying there's some... Well, he is kind of out of favor now, because he was more moderate than this most recent regime. But the point is that if you look, this is something almost institutional, constitutional to the regime. This is a regime that rejects all of the executive powers, because the division between the supreme authority, as the place of a supreme authority, versus the presidency, is problematic. It is as if there would be a supreme leader in the United States above all the three sources of power. That's the kind of view that you can see in today's Iran. And of course, he is at the focus of all the criticism that he receives from the demonstrators in today's Iran. So on top of all this, recently and throughout the last several years, US and Iran are in the midst of nuclear deal negotiations. This is another part of the story of Iran, is the development of nuclear weapons, the nuclear program. They're looking to restore the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA. What is the history, the present, and the future of these negotiations over nuclear weapons? What is interesting to you in this full context from the 16th century of the messianic journey? What's interesting to you here? You can argue that for a long time, even under the Shah, but much more expressively and decisively under the Islamic Republic, there was a determination to have a nuclear power or nuclear weapon, in a sense. I think the bottom line of all the negotiations, everything else, is that Iran, of the Islamic Republic, had the tendency of having its own nuclear weapon. The reason for that is that Iran was subject of nearly nine years, eight and a half years, of Iran-Iraq war, when not only Iran faced an aggressor, not only Iran faced an aggressor, Iraq, that actually attacked Iran at a very critical time, at the very beginning of the Iranian Revolution, but the fact that Iran felt kind of helpless in the course of this war and has to make great sacrifices, actually, which supported the Islamic regime and consolidated the Islamic regime because of this war. And most of the time, their support of the United States was behind Iraq vis-a-vis Iran. And Iran felt that it's been isolated and has to protect itself. So there is some argument for having a nuclear capabilities, but in reality, this has resulted in a completely mindless, crazy, wasteful attempt on the side of the Iranian regime to try to develop a nuclear power. And therefore, the rest of the world, particularly in this region, were very worried that if Iran would get access to a nuclear weapon, then the entire region of the Persian Gulf might, particularly Saudi Arabia, possibly Turkey, possibly Egypt, all of them may require, may demand to have also nuclear weapon, given the fact that Pakistan and India has already have it. So there was a determined attempt, as you might know, on the side of the Western communities or now gradually world communities to try to, as much as possible, to control Iran from getting access to a nuclear capability, or actually limit Iran's nuclear capabilities to what was defined usually in a euphemism as a peaceful fashion, okay? That being said, there was also Israel, which viewed the Islamic Republic as a arch enemy. And some of it might be due to the Israelis' own exaggeration of Iran's threat. And some of it is because Iran has developed a fairly strong military, as we see today. And as such, this attempt to try to prevent Iran from ever getting access to a nuclear weapon, which resulted, as you might know, in these massive sanctions that were imposed upon Iran ever since the beginning of the revolution in 1979, and of course more intensively since 2015, 2016, even prior to that, probably a little bit earlier. This agreement, the nuclear agreement, was supposed to control or monitor Iranian nuclear industry or nuclear setup in exchange for removing the sanctions. But this never worked, as a matter of fact, in a very successful, satisfactory way for the Iranians or for the Americans, particularly under Trump administration, which I think foolishly decided to scrap the agreement that was reached under President Obama, like many other policies that was implemented under Trump administration. This created a major problem, that is how to, under Biden, how to try to come up with a new nuclear agreement with Iran. In this process, since 2016, where the United States withdrew from the agreement, Iran felt comfortable to try to go and do whatever they want without any kind of monitor, being monitored by the international community. And that's the situation now. We don't know whether Iran is really sincere under the present regime to negotiate a deal. We don't know that the United States is willing to do so. And it seems that now what is happening in terms of the protests in the Iranian streets makes it even harder in public eye to try to negotiate a deal with Iran, because that means in the minds of many, and with some justification, that if the nuclear agreement would result in the removal of many of these sanctions, millions, billions, as the result of the removal of the sanctions and Iran's ability to sell its oil in the international market without any restrictions, means that the Iranian government is going to become even more powerful, more financially secure in order to suppress its own people. So that's the agreement that goes against coming to terms with Iran. But the problem is that there is no clear alternative, even I'm not particularly personally favorable for this agreement to be ratified. But the alternative is very difficult. There's no way to try to see what can be done. Geopolitics where every alternative is terrible. Let me ask you about one of the most complex geopolitical situations in history. One aspect of it is the Cold War between Iran and Israel. The bigger picture of it is sometimes referred to as Israel-Palestine conflict. What are all the parties, nations involved? What are the interests that are involved? What's the rhetoric? Can you understand, make the case for each side of this conflict? You're opening a new can of worms that it takes another three hours of conversation. Just three hours? At least. What I can tell you is this. Iran, prior to 1979, viewed itself under the Shah as a kind of a, if not supporter of Israel, was in very good terms with Israel. They had an embassy in Iran, or unofficial embassy in Iran. They had certain projects that's helping with the agriculture and so forth in Iran. But since 1979, that completely reversed. Part of it is that the issue of the Palestinian plight remained very much at the heart of the revolutionary Iranians, who would see that part of the United States is to support, part of the United States' guilt, sin, is to support Israel vis-a-vis its very suppressive, very oppressive treatment of the Palestinians, completely illegal taking over of the territories which is not theirs since 1967. And therefore, it is upon the Iranian regime, Iranian Islamic Republic, to support the cause of the Palestinians. This came about at a time when the rest of the support for the Palestinians, including Arab nationalism, basically reached a stage of bankruptcy. I mean, much of the regimes of the Arab world either are now coming to terms with Israel, or in one way or another, because of their own contingencies, because of their own concerns and interests, are willy-nilly accepting Israel in the region. Now, that old task of rhetorically supporting the Palestinians falls upon the Islamic Republic, that sees itself as a champion of the Palestinians now. Without, as a matter of fact, having either the support of the Iranian people behind him. If you ask, if tomorrow there would be a poll or a referendum, I would doubt that 80% of the Iranian people would approve of the policies of the Islamic Republic vis-a-vis the issue of Palestine. Nor the Palestinians themselves, because the Islamic Republic's only supporting those factions within the Palestinian movement, which are Islamic, quote-unquote. And even within that, there is problems with Hamas, for instance. But nevertheless, it's for the Islamic Republic some kind of a propaganda tool to be able to use it for its own sake, and claim that we are the champions of the Palestinian people. Whether they have a solution, if you look at the rhetoric, if you listen to the rhetoric, it's the destruction of the state of Israel. And that, it seems to me, creates a certain anxiety in the minds of the Israelis, Israeli population, and Israeli government. Particularly those who are now in power. Netanyahu, the Likud, and more kind of a right-wing politics of, polity of today's Israel. That being said, I think also the Israelis try to get an extra mileage out of threat of Iran, quote-unquote. In order to present themselves a rightful to, for terms of security and whatever else. The way that they're treating the Palestinians, which I think is extremely unjust. I think it's extremely unwise for Israel to carry on with these policies as they did since 1967 at least. And not to try to come to terms with it. Of course there's a huge amount of, I'm not denying that at all, the huge amount of failures, mistakes, and stupidity on the side of the Palestinian leadership in various stages. Not to try to make a deal, or try to come to terms in some fashion. But it's a very complex picture, and it's rather unfair to the Palestinians to accuse them for not coming to terms with Israel under a very uneven circumstances. When they are not in a position to try to make a fair deal in terms of the territories, or in terms of their security in future vis-a-vis Israel. So I think there's, as you probably know, quite a lot of people that would have a different perspective than you just stated in terms of taking the perspective of Israel and characterizing the situation. Can you steelman their side? Can you steelman Israel's side? That they're trying to be a sovereign nation, trying to protect themselves against threats, ultimately wanting to create a place of safety, a place where people can pursue all the things that you want to pursue in life, including foremost, happiness. I tend to agree with you, and I have all the respect for the fact that Israel would like to create security and happiness for its own people. But there are two arguments. One is a moral argument. To my mind as a historian, Jews across, around the world, for all through their history suffered. And this is a history of suffering. It's a history, memory of suffering. And I find it enormously difficult to believe that a nation that's the product of so much sacrifice, suffering, loss of life, and variety of Holocaust above all, would find itself in a position not to give the proper justice to a people who could be their neighbors. And that is a moral argument which I cannot believe under any circumstances can be accepted. Second, in real terms, what do you want to, you want to commit a genocide? You have a population there that you have to come to terms with it. And you cannot just postpone as they did. Since 67, they are postponing and hoping that it goes away somehow. I don't think it's going to go away. And it's going to get worse rather than better. It's a long nuanced discussion and I look forward to having it. So we'll just leave it there for the moment. But it is a stressful place in the world where the rhetoric is existential, where Iran makes claims that it wants to wipe a country off the face of the earth. It's just the level of intensity of rhetoric is unlike anywhere else in the world. And extremely dangerous. And in both directions. So one, the real danger of the rhetoric actually being acted upon, and then the extreme political parties using the rhetoric to justify even a greater escalation. So if Iran is saying that this is, saying that they're wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, that justifies any response. On the other side. On the other side. Of course, I tend to agree with you fully. And unfortunately, this is a very critical situation that this region is facing, Iran in particular. I would say that I hope that in the minds of the people of Israel, there is enough or common sense to realize that probably escalation on the Israeli side is not in the favor of anybody. And try to let the Iranians to go on with their empty rhetoric as they do so far. But at the same time, I cannot deny the fact that there is a danger on the side of this regime and what it says. It cannot be denied. Nobody can justify that. Particularly because the Iranian population is not behind this regime. Certainly in the case of the Palestinians. Or for that matter, it's not Palestine. It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Lebanon with Hezbollah. It's the Islamic Republic's involvement in Syria with Bashar Assad. It's involvement in other parts of the world, perhaps even Yemen. That all of them creates extra territorial responsibilities or interventions, unnecessary interventions that ultimately is not in favor of best interest of the Iranian people or Iran as a country. Iran has never been involved in this kind of politics before of the Islamic Republic. So in a sense, the Iranian regime, it seems to me, by going to the extreme, tried to create for itself a space that it did not have or did not deserve to have within the politics of the region. So in other words, that has become part of the tool, a kind of an instrument for, if you like to call it, some kind of an expansionism of the regime in parts of the world where it can see there is a possibility for its presence, for its expansion. Of course, historically speaking, Iran, ever since 15th century, I think that's the earliest example I can see, in early modern times, has always a tendency of moving in the direction of not only what is today the state of Iraq, but further into the eastern coast of Mediterranean. So that's a long-term ambition that has been in the cards as far as Iran as a strategic unit is concerned. But by no means justified and by no means could be a reasonable, could be a sane policy of a nation-state as today's Iran. But the second point is that also regimes are always victims of their own rhetoric. So it's, once you keep repeating something, then you become more and more committed to it. And it cannot remain anymore in the level of a rhetoric. You have to do something about it. So it's a compelling pressure to try to materialize what you've been saying in your rhetoric. And that is even extremely more dangerous as far as Iran is concerned. And it brings it to some unholy alliances that today we are witnessing Iran is getting involved. Even more dangerous than this rhetoric in terms of the vis-a-vis Israel is its involvement with Russia and to some extent with China, which we can talk about. What do you think about the meeting between Khamenei and Vladimir Putin in July? What's that alliance? What's that partnership? Is it surface-level geopolitics or is there a deep, growing connection? I cannot see the difference between geopolitics and these deep connections. I see this one and the same. Why? Because I think the experience of 40 years of distancing from the West in terms of the Islamic Republic and the fact that there is a shelf life to imperial presence for any empire anywhere in the world. So after the terrible experience of the United States in Iraq and in Afghanistan, pretty much like the British Empire, that after the Suez experience in 56, decided to withdraw from east of Suez, maybe there is a moment here that we are witnessing, or it may come, that a great power like the United States sees in its benefit not to get too much involved into nitty-gritty things in other parts of the world, that it's not its immediate concern. And I think that is part of the reason, not the entire reason, part of the reason why we see the emergence of a new geopolitical environment in this part of the world, of which China, Russia, possibly Iran, possibly Turkey, possibly both of them, are going to be part. Perhaps Saudis also, but I doubt that the Saudis, under the present circumstances, although we've witnessed some remarkable issue in the course of the past few weeks, where the Saudis giving assurances to American administration and then shifting and getting along with Putin, in terms of the oil production, I think it's more than that even. And it's not only them, but also the Emirates are doing the same thing. So what does that tell us? And that's another many-hour conversation about the oil industry in Iran and the whole region. In emerging this kind of a world, which was perhaps even 10 years ago unimaginable, that you see now a great power, China, that it's going to remain from what we see around us as a great power, and Russia, adventurous, foolish, but nevertheless would remain criminal, I would say, as far as its behavior in Ukraine. But actually, it's a rogue nation that attracts another rogue nation. So Iran finds itself now in a greater place of security in alliance with Russia, in the hope that this would give Iran a greater security in this part of the world. Whether this is realistic or an illusion, I think remains to be seen. I think Iran-China relation makes more sense. Although, if you ask ordinary Iranians, they don't like it. They would tell, why should we be tied up with China as the only trade party with America because of the foolish isolations that you have created for us, because of all the sanctions that you have created for us, the Islamic Republic. So in a sense, it's a very difficult question to answer. Probably Iranians also like to be more on the other camp. But what happens is that in real term, what surprises me most is not this alliance with China, but it's kind of becoming a lackey or subservient to Putin's regime in Russia. Since if you look at it, Iran ever since at least the 19th century, not going further back, the beginning of the 19th century, always viewed Russia as the greatest threat strategically because it was sitting right at the top of Iran. It was infinitely more powerful than Iran has ever been. And Iran fought two rounds of war at the beginning of the century, lost the entire Caucasus to Russia, and learned its lesson, that you have to be mindful of Russia, and you have to keep it as an arm's length. And that's what was Iran's policy throughout the course of the 20th century, 19th and 20th century, up through what we see now around us, which is a very strange situation. Whether the balance has changed in terms of if Russia is purchasing weapons from Iran, which was unheard of, it means that there is a new balance is emerging, a new relationship is emerging. Perhaps remains to be seen, but if you look at the historical precedence, it would have been enormously unwise to be an ally of Russia, given its long history of aggression in Iran. See, Russians, part of the reason why actually Iran allied itself with British Empire was the fact that it was so much afraid of the Russian expansion. And as such, I don't know what's going to be the future of this relationship. There is a big disconnect between governments and the people. And I think ultimately, I have faith that there's a love across the different cultures, across the different religions, amongst the people. And the governments are the source of the division and the conflict and the wars and all the geopolitics that is in part grounded in the battle for resources and all that kind of stuff. Nevertheless, this is the world we live in. So you looked at the modern history of Iran the past few centuries, if you look into the future of this region, now you kind of implied that a historian has a bit of a cynical view of protests and things like this that are fueled, at least in the minds of young people, with hope. If you were to just for a while have a bit of hope in your heart and your mind, what is a hopeful future for the next 10, 20, 30 years of Iran? I'm not cynical. Yes. I'm trying to be realistic. And I actually may be critical, but I have great hopes in Iran's future for a variety of reasons. I actually did write an article, only the last version of it is going to go out today, in which the title of it is The Time of Fear and Women of Hope, which in a sense is this whole coverage about what this movement means that we see today. It may fizzle in a few weeks' time, or it may just go on and create new dynamics in Iranian society that would hopefully result in a peaceful process of greater accommodation and a greater tolerance within the Iranian society and with the outside world. And I think majority of the Iranian people don't want tension, don't want confrontation, don't want crisis. They, if 40 years they have suffered from a regime that have dictated an ideology that it's regressive and impractical, they want to go back to a life in which they don't really create trouble for their neighbors or for the world. And therefore, I would see a better future for Iran. That's for one reason. Strategically or geopolitically, maybe in Iran's advantage in a peaceful fashion to negotiate as it's the fate of all the nations rather than commit itself or sworn to a particular course of policy. So there's a give and take as the nature of politics is art of possible, as it's been said. So probably Iran is going to be hopefully moving that direction. I think there is a generational thing. That's the third reason. No matter how much the Islamic Republic tried to Islamize the Iranian society in its own image of kind of radical, ideological indoctrination, it has failed. It has failed up to what we see today in the Iranian streets. And the Iranian population said no to it. And I think if there would have been, and I very much hope there will be, a possibility for a more open environment, more open space where they would be able to speak their views out, Iranians are not on the side of moving in the extreme directions. They are in the side of greater accommodation and the greater interest in the outside world. And if you look at every aspect of today's, beside the government, every aspect of life in today's Iran, you can see that. From the way that people dress, to the way that they try to live their lives, to the way that they're educating themselves or educated in the institutions, do you see a desire, an intention to move forward? And I'm optimistic. Well, in that struggle for freedom, like I told you offline, one of my close childhood friends is Iranian, just a beautiful person, his family is a wonderful family. On a personal level, it is one of the deeper windows into the Iranian spirit and soul that I've gotten a chance to witness, so I really appreciate it. But in the recent times, I've gotten to hear from a lot of people that are currently living in Iran that currently have that burning hope for the future of the country. And so my love goes out to them in the struggle for freedom. I have to say. That's so nice of you to say so. And I very much hope so. There are moments of despair, and there are moments that you would think that there is no hope, and... But then again, something triggers, and you see 100,000 people in the streets of Berlin that are hoping for a better future for Iran. And I very much hope it eventually emerges, even I'm hoping at the same time there's not going to be a very strong leadership, as it was the case in the past. We started with hope, we ended with hope. This was a real honor. This is an incredible conversation. Thank you for giving such a deep and wide story of this great nation, one of the great nations in history. Well, that's very kind of you to say so. Thank you for sitting down today. This was amazing. Well, a history that, as I've said in the start of my book, I say it's the history of a nation which has learned a huge amount from the outside world by force of its geography. It was always located somewhere that people would invade, or come for trade, or something happened to it that this diffused culture continued to, and they were not afraid of learning or adopting, as they do right now today. This is a very different society. Never a boring moment in its history, as you write about. Thank you so much. This was awesome. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Abba Samanat. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with a few words from Martin Luther King, Jr. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/OYsYgzzsdT0

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John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets | Lex Fridman Podcast #309

I remember the reaction where he had drawn these characters and he was slowly moving around and like people had no experience with 3D navigation. It was all still keyboard. We didn't even have mice set up at that time, but slowly moving, going up, picked up a key, go to a wall, the wall disappears in a little animation and there's a monster like right there and he practically fell out of his chair. It was just like, ah, and games just didn't do that. You know, the games were the God's eye view. You were a little invested in your little guy. You can be like, you know, happy or sad when things happen, but you just did not get that kind of startle reaction. You weren't inside your game. Something in the back of your brain, some reptile brain thing is just going, oh shit, something just happened. And that was one of those early points where it's like, yeah, this is going to make a difference. This is going to be powerful and it's going to matter. The following is a conversation with John Carmack, widely considered to be one of the greatest programmers ever. He was the co-founder of id Software and the lead programmer on several games that revolutionized the technology, the experience and the role of gaming in our society, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. He spent many years as the CTO of Oculus VR, helping to create portals into virtual worlds and to define the technological path to the metaverse and meta. And now he has been shifting some of his attention to the problem of artificial general intelligence. This was the longest conversation on this podcast at over five hours. And still I could talk to John many, many more times. And we hope to do just that. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's John Carmack. What was the first program you've ever written? Do you remember? Yeah, I do. So I remember being in a radio shack, going up to the TRS-80 computers and learning just enough to be able to do 10 print John Carmack. And it's kind of interesting how, of course, I've, you know, Carnegan and Ritchie kind of standardized Hello World as the first thing that you do in every computer programming language and every computer, but not having any interaction with the cultures of Unix or any other standardized things. It was just like, well, what am I going to say? I'm going to say my name. And then you learn how to do go to 10 and have it scroll all off the screen. And that was definitely the first thing that I wound up doing on a computer. Can I ask you programming advice? I was always told in the beginning that you're not allowed to use go to statements. That's really bad programming. Is this correct or not? Jumping around code. Can we look at the philosophy and the technical aspects of the go to statement that seems so convenient, but it's supposed to be bad programming? Well, certainly back in the day in basic programming languages, you didn't have proper loops. You didn't have for whiles and repeats. You know, that was the land of Pascal for people that kind of generally had access to it back then. So you had no choice but to use go tos. And as you made what were big programs back then, which were a thousand line basic program is a really big program, they did tend to sort of degenerate into madness. You didn't have good editors or code exploration tools. So you would wind up fixing things in one place, add a little patch. And there's reasons why structured programming generally helps understanding. But go tos aren't poisonous. Sometimes they're the right thing to do. Usually it's because there's a language feature missing, like nested breaks or something where it can sometimes be better to do a go to cleanup or go to error rather than having multiple flags, multiple if statements littered throughout things. But it is rare. If you grep through all of my code right now, I don't think any of my current code bases would actually have a go to. But deep within sort of the technical underpinnings of a major game engine, you're going to have some go tos in a couple of places probably. Yeah, the infrastructure on top of like the closer you get to the machine code, the more go tos you're going to see, the more of these like hacks you're going to see because the set of features available to you in low level programming languages is not, is limited. So print John Carmack, when is the first time, if we could talk about love, that you fell in love with programming? You said like this, this is really something special. It really was something that was one of those love at first sight things where just really from the time that I understood what a computer was, even, I mean, I remember looking through old encyclopedias at the black and white photos of the IBM mainframes at the reel to reel tape decks. And for people nowadays, it can be a little hard to understand what the world was like then from information gathering where I would go to the libraries and there would be a couple books on the shelf about computers and they would be very out of date even at that point, just not a lot of information, but I would grab everything that I could find and devour everything. Whenever Time or Newsweek had some article about computers, I would cut it out with scissors and put it somewhere. It felt like this magical thing to me, this idea that the computer would just do exactly what you told it to. I mean, and there's a little bit of the genie monkey's paw sort of issues there where you'd better be really, really careful with what you're telling it to do, but it wasn't going to backtalk you. It wasn't going to have a different point of view. It was going to carry out what you told it to do. And if you had the right commands, you could make it do these pretty magical things. And so what kind of programs did you write at first? So beyond the print John Carmack? So I can remember as going through the learning process where you find at the start, you're just learning how to do the most basic possible things. And I can remember stuff like a Superman comic that Radio Shack commissioned to have. It's like Superman had lost some of his super brain and kids had to use Radio Shack TRS-80 computers to do calculations to help him kind of complete his heroics. And I'd find little things like that and then get a few basic books to be able to kind of work my way up. And again, it was so precious back then. I had a couple books that would teach me important things about it. I had one book that I could start to learn a little bit of assembly language from, and I'd have a few books on basic and some things that I could get from the libraries. But my goals in the early days was almost always making games of various kinds. I loved the arcade games and the early Atari 2600 games, and being able to do some of those things myself on the computers was very much what I aspired to. And it was a whole journey where if you learn normal basic, you can't do any kind of an action game. You can write an adventure game. You can write things where you say, what do you do here? I get sword attack troll, that type of thing. And that can be done in the context of basic. But to do things that had moving graphics, there were only the most limited things you could possibly do. You could maybe do breakout or pong or that sort of thing in low resolution graphics. And in fact, one of my first sort of major technical hacks that I was kind of fond of was on the Apple II computers, they had a mode called low resolution graphics where, of course, all graphics were low resolution back then. But regular low resolution graphics, it was a grid of 40 by 40 pixels normally, but they could have 16 different colors. And I wanted to make a game kind of like the arcade game Vanguard, just a scrolling game. And I wanted to just kind of have it scroll vertically up. And I could move a little ship around. You could manage to do that in basic, but there's no way you could redraw the whole screen. And I remember at the time just coming up with what felt like a brainstorm to me where I knew enough about the way the hardware was controlled, where the text screen and the low resolution graphics screen were basically the same thing. And all those computers could scroll their text screen reasonably. You could do a listing and it would scroll things up. And I figured out that I could kind of tweak just a couple things that I barely understood to put it into a graphics mode. And I could draw graphics. And then I could just do a line feed at the very bottom of the screen. And then the system would scroll it all up using an assembly language routine that I didn't know how to write back then. So that was like this first great hack that sort of had analogs later on in my career for a lot of different things. So I found out that I could draw a screen. I could do a line feed at the bottom. It would scroll it up once. I could draw a couple more lines of stuff at the bottom. And that was my first way to kind of scroll the screen, which was interesting in that that played a big part later on in the id software days as well. So do efficient drawing where you don't have to draw the whole screen, but you draw from the bottom using the thing that was designed in the hardware for text output. Yeah. Where so much of, until recently, game design was limited by what you could actually get the computer to do. Where it's easy to say like, okay, I want to scroll the screen. You just redraw the entire screen at a slight offset. And nowadays that works just fine. Computers are ludicrously fast. But up until a decade ago or so, there were all these things everybody wanted to do. But if they knew enough programming to be able to make it happen, it would happen too slow to be a good experience. Either just ridiculously slow or just slow enough that it wasn't fun to experience it like that. So so much of the first couple decades of the programming work that I did was largely figuring out how to do something that everybody knows how they want it to happen. It just has to happen two to ten times faster than the straightforward way of doing things would make it happen. And it's different now because at this point, lots of things you can just do in the most naive possible way and it still works out. You don't have nearly the creative limitations or the incentives for optimizing on that level. And there's a lot of pros and cons to that. But I do generally, you know, I'm not going to do the the angry old man shaking my fist at the clouds bit where back in my day programmers had to do real programming. You know, it's it's amazing that you can just kind of pick an idea and go do it right now. And you don't have to be some assembly language wizard or deep GPU arcanist to be able to figure out how to make your wishes happen. Well, there's still see, that's true. But let me put on my old man with a fist hat and say that probably the thing that will define the future still requires you to operate at the limits of the current system. So we'll probably talk about this. But if you talk about building the metaverse and building a VR experience that's compelling, it probably requires you to not to go to assembly or maybe not literally, but sort of spiritually to go to the limits of what the system is capable of. And that really was why virtual reality was specifically interesting to me, where it had all the ties to you could say that even back in the early days, I have some old magazine articles that's talking about doom as a virtual reality experience back when just seeing anything in 3D. So you could say that we've been trying to build those virtual experiences from the very beginning and in the modern era of virtual reality, especially on the mobile side of things when it's standalone, you're basically using a cell phone chip to be able to produce these very immersive experiences. It does require work. It's not at the level of what an old school console game programmer would have operated at where you're looking at hardware registers and you're scheduling all the DNA DMA accesses. But it is still definitely a different level than what a web developer or even a PC Steam game developer usually has to work at. And again, it's great. There's opportunities for people that want to operate at either end of that spectrum there and still provide a lot of value to the world. Let me ask you a sort of a big question about preference. What would you say is the best programming language? Your favorite, but also the best you've seen throughout your career, you're considered by many to be the greatest programmer ever. I mean, it's so difficult to place that label on anyone, but if you put it on anyone, it's you. So let me ask you these kind of ridiculous questions of what's the best band of all time. But in your case, what's the best programming language? Everything has all the caveats about it. So what I use, so nowadays I do program a reasonable amount of Python for AI ML sorts of work. I'm not a native Python programmer. It's something I came to very late in my career. I understand what it's good for. You don't dream in Python. I do not. And it has some of those things where there's some amazing stats when you say, if you just start, if you make a loop, you know, a triply nested loop and start doing operations in Python, you can be thousands to potentially a million times slower than a proper GPU tensor operation. And these are staggering numbers. You know, you can be as much slower as we've almost gotten faster in our, you know, our pace of progress and all this other miraculous stuff. So your intuition's about inefficiencies within the Python sort of. It keeps hitting me upside the face where it just, it's gotten to the point now I understand it's like, okay, you just can't do a loop if you care about performance in Python. You have to figure out how you can reformat this into some big vector operation or something that's going to be done completely within a C++ library. But the other hand is it's, it's amazingly convenient and you just see stuff that people are able to cobble together by you just import a few different things and you can do stuff that nobody on earth could do 10 years ago. And you can do it in a little cookbook thing that you copy pasted out of a website. So that is really great. When I'm sitting down to do what I consider kind of serious programming, it's still in C++ and it's really kind of a C flavored C++ at that where I'm not big into the modern template meta programming sorts of things. I see a lot of train wrecks coming from some of that over abstraction. I spent a few years really going kind of deep into the kind of the historical Lisp work and Haskell and some of the functional programming sides of things. And there's, there is a lot of value there in the way you think about things. And I changed a lot of the way I write my C and C++ code based on what I learned about the value that comes out of not having this random mutable state that you kind of lose track of. Because something that many people don't really appreciate until they've been at it for a long time is that it's not the writing of the program initially, it's the whole lifespan of the program. And that's when it's not necessarily just how fast you wrote it or how fast it operates, but it's how can it bend and adapt as situations change. And then the thing that I've really been learning in my time at Meta with the Oculus and VR work is it's also how well it hands off between a continuous kind of revolving door of programmers taking over maintenance and different things and how you get people up to speed in different areas and there's all these other different aspects of it. So C++ is a good language for handover between engineers? Probably not the best. And there's some really interesting aspects to this where in some cases, languages that are not generally thought well of for many reasons, like C is derided pretty broadly that yes, obviously all of these security flaws that happen with the memory and unsafeness and buffer overruns and the things that you've got there. But there is this underappreciated aspect to the language is so simple, anyone can go and if you know C, you can generally jump in someplace and not have to learn what paradigms they're using because there just aren't that many available. I think there's some really, really well written C code. I find it great that if I'm messing around with something in OpenBSD, say, I can be walking around in the kernel and I'm like, I understand everything that's going on here. It's not hard for me to figure out what I need to do to make whatever change that I need to. While you can have more significant languages, it's a downside of Lisp where I don't regret the time that I spent with Lisp. I think that it did help my thinking about programming in some ways. But the people that are the biggest defenders of Lisp are saying how malleable of a language it is that if you write a huge Lisp program, you've basically invented your own kind of language and structure because it's not the primitives of the language you're using very much. It's all of the things you've built on top of that. And then a language like Racket, kind of one of the more modern Lisp versions, it's essentially touted as a language for building other languages. And I understand the value of that for a tiny little project, but the idea of that for one of these long-term supported by lots of people kind of horrifies me, where all of those abstractions that you're like, okay, you can't touch this code till you educate yourself on all of these things that we've built on top of that. And it was interesting to see how when Google made Go, a lot of the criticisms of that are like, wow, this is not a state-of-the-art language. This language is just so simple and almost crude. And you could see the programming language people just looking down at it. But it does seem to be quite popular as basically saying this is the good things about C. Everybody can just jump right in and use it. You don't need to restructure your brain to write good code in it. So I wish that I had more opportunity for doing some work in Go. Rust is the other modern language that everybody talks about. But I'm not fit to pass judgment on. I've done a little bit beyond Hello World. I wrote some video decompression work in Rust just as an exercise. But that was a few years ago, and I haven't really used it since. The best programming language is the one that works generally that you're currently using. Because that's another trap is in almost every case I've seen when people mixed languages on a project, that's a mistake. I would rather stay just in one language so that everybody can work across the entire thing. And we have, like at Meta, we have a lot of projects that use kind of React frameworks. So you've got JavaScript here, and then you have C++ for real work. And then you may have Java interfacing with some other part of the Android system. And those are all kind of horrible things. And that was one thing that I remember talking with Boz at Facebook about it, where like, man, I wish we could have just said we're only hiring C++ programmers. And he just thought from the Facebook Meta perspective, well, we just wouldn't be able to find enough. With the thousands of programmers they've got there, it is not necessarily a dying breed, but you can sure find a lot more Java or JavaScript programmers. And I kind of mentioned that to Elon one time, and he was kind of flabbergasted about that. It's like, well, you just go out and you find those programmers, and you don't hire the other programmers that don't do the languages that you want to use. But right now, I guess, yeah, they're using JavaScript on a bunch of the SpaceX work for the UI side of things. When you go find UI programmers, they're JavaScript programmers. I wonder if that's because there's a lot of JavaScript programmers. Because I do think that great programmers are rare. That it's not, you know, if you just look at statistics of how many people are using different programming languages, that doesn't tell you the story of what the great programmers are using. And so you have to really look at what you were speaking to, which is the fundamentals of a language. What does it encourage you? How does it encourage you to think? What kind of systems does it encourage you to build? There is something about C++ that has elements of creativity, but forces you to be an adult about your programming. Well, it expects you to be an adult. It does not force you to. And so it brings out people that are willing to be creative in terms of building large systems and coming up with interesting solutions, but at the same time have the sort of the good software engineering practices that amend themselves to real world systems. Let me ask you about this other language, JavaScript. So if we, you know, aliens visit in thousands of years and humans are long gone, something tells me that most of the systems they find will be running JavaScript. I kind of think that if we're living in a simulation, it's written in JavaScript. You know, for the longest time, even still, JavaScript didn't get any respect, and yet it runs so much of the world, in an increasing number of the world. Is it possible that all, everything will be written in JavaScript one day? So the engineering under JavaScript is really pretty phenomenal. The systems that make JavaScript run as fast as it does right now are kind of miracles of modern engineering in many ways. It does feel like it is not an optimal language for all the things that it's being used for, for an optimal distribution system to build huge apps in something like this, without type systems and so on. But I think for a lot of people, it does reasonably the necessary things. It's still a C-flavored language. It's still a braces and semicolon language. It's not hard for people to be trained in JavaScript and then understand the roots of where it came from. I think garbage collection is unequivocally a good thing for most programs to be written in. It's funny that I still, just this morning, I was on, I was seeing a Twitter thread of a bunch of really senior game dev people arguing about the virtues and costs of garbage collection. You will run into some people that are top-notch programmers that just say, no, this is literally not a good thing. Oh, because it makes you lazy? Yes, that it makes you not think about things. And I do disagree. I think that there is so much objective data on the vulnerabilities that have happened in C and C++ programs, sometimes written by the best programmers in the world. It's like nobody is good enough to avoid ever shooting themselves in the foot with that. You write enough C code, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. And garbage collection is a very great thing for the vast majority of programs. It's only when you get into the tightest of real-time things that you start saying, it's like, no, the garbage collection has more costs than it has benefits for me there. But that's not 99 plus percent of all the software in the world. So JavaScript is not terrible in those ways. And so much of programming is not the language itself. It's the infrastructure around everyone that surrounds it, all the libraries that you can get and the different stuff that you can, ways you can deploy it, the portability that it gives you. And JavaScript is really strong on a lot of those things where for a long time, and it still does if I look at it, the web stack about everything that has to go when you do something really trivial in JavaScript and it shows up on a web browser to kind of x-ray through that and see everything that has to happen for your one little JavaScript statement to turn into something visible in your web browser. It's very, very disquieting, just the depth of that stack and the fact that so few people can even comprehend all of the levels that are going on there. But it's again, I have to caution myself to not be the in the good old days old man about it because clearly there's enormous value here. The world does run on JavaScript to a pretty good approximation there, and it's not falling apart. It's just scary stuff where you look at console logs and you just see all of these bad things that are happening, but it's still kind of limping along and nobody really notices. But so much of my systems design and systems analysis goes around, you should understand what the speed of light is, like what would be the best you could possibly do here. And it sounds horrible, but in a lot of cases, you can be a thousand times off your speed of light velocity for something and it still be okay. And in fact, it can even sometimes still be the optimal thing in a larger system standpoint where there's a lot of things that you don't want to have to parachute in someone like me to go in and say, make this web page run a thousand times faster. Make this web app into a hardcore native application that starts up in 37 milliseconds and everything responds in less than one frame latency. That's just not necessary. And if somebody wants to go pay me millions of dollars to do software like that, when they can take somebody right out of a bootcamp and say, spin up an application for this, often being efficient is not really the best metric. That's like, that applies in a lot of areas where it's kind of interesting how a lot of our appliances and everything are all built around energy efficiency, sometimes at the expense of robustness in some other ways or higher costs in other ways where there's interesting things where energy or electricity could become much cheaper in a future world. And that could change our engineering trade-offs for the way we build certain things where you could throw away efficiency and actually get more benefits that actually matter. I mean, that's one of my, one of the directions I was considering swerving into was nuclear energy when I was kind of like, what do I want to do next? It was either going to be cost-effective nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And one of my pet ideas there is like, you know, people don't understand how cheap nuclear fuel is. And there would be ways that you could be a quarter the efficiency or less, but if it wound up making your plant 10 times cheaper, that could be a radical innovation in something like that. So there's like some of these thoughts around like direct fission energy conversion, fission fragment conversion that, you know, maybe you build something that doesn't require all the steam turbines and everything, even if it winds up being less efficient. So that applies a lot in programming where there's always, it's always good to know what you could do if you really sat down and took it far, because sometimes there's discontinuities like around user reaction times. There are some points where the difference between operating in one second and 750 milliseconds, not that huge. You'll see it in web page statistics, but most of the usability stuff, not that great. But if you get down to 50 milliseconds, then all of a sudden this just feels amazing. You know, it's just like doing your bidding instantly rather than you're giving it a command, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for it to respond. So sometimes it's important to really crunch hard to get over some threshold, but there are broad basins in the value metric for lots of work where it just doesn't pay to even go that extra mile. And there are craftsmen that, you know, they just don't want to buy that and more power to them. You know, if somebody just wants to say, no, I'm going to be, my pride is in my work. I'm never going to do something that's not as good as I could possibly make it. I respect that. And sometimes I am that person, but I try to focus more on the larger value picture when you do pick your battles and you deploy your resources in the play, that's going to give you sort of the best user value in the end. Well, if you look at the evolution of life on earth as a kind of programming effort, it seems like efficiency isn't the thing that's being optimized for. Like natural selection is very inefficient, but it kind of adapts and through the process of adaptations, building more and more complex systems that are more and more intelligent, the final result is kind of pretty interesting. And so I think of JavaScript the same way. It's like this giant mess that, you know, things naturally die off if they don't work. And if they're become useful to people, they kind of naturally live. And then you build this community, large community of people that are jettering code and some code is sticky, some is not. Nobody knows the inefficiencies or the efficiencies or the breaking points, like how reliable this code is. And you kind of just run it, assume it works and then get unpleasantly surprised. And then that's very kind of the evolutionary process. So that's a really good analogy. And we can go a lot of places with that, where in the earliest days of programming, when you had finite, you could count the bytes that you had to work on this. You had all the kind of hackers playing code golf to be one less instruction than the other person's multiply routine to kind of get through. And it was so perfectly crafted. It was a crystal piece of artwork when you had a program because there just were not that many. You couldn't afford to be lazy in different ways. And in many ways, I see that as akin to the symbolic AI work, where again, if you did not have the resources to just say, well, we're going to do billions and billions of programmable weights here, you have to turn it down into something that is symbolic and crafted like that. But that's definitely not the way DNA and life and biological evolution and things work. On the one hand, it's almost humbling how little programming code is in our bodies. We've got a couple billion base pairs. It's like this all fits on a thumb drive for years now. And then our brains are even a smaller section of that. You've got maybe 50 megabytes. And this is not like Shannon limit perfectly information dense conveyances here. It's like these are messy codes. They're broken up into amino acids. A lot of them don't do important things or they do things in very awkward ways. But it is this process of just accumulation on top of things. And you need scale. Both you need scale for the population for that to work out. And in the early days, in the 50s and 60s, the kind of ancient era of computers where you could count when they say like when the internet started, even in the 70s, there were like 18 hosts or something on it. It was this small finite number. And you were still optimizing everything to be as good as you possibly could be. But now it's billions and billions of devices and everything going on. And you can have this very much natural evolution going on where lots of things are tried, lots of things are blowing up. Venture capitalists lose their money when a startup invested in the wrong tech stack and things completely failed or failed to scale. But good things do come out of it. And it's interesting to see the mimetic evolution of the way different things happen. Like mentioning Hello World at the beginning. It's funny how some little thing like that where every programmer knows Hello World now. And that was a completely arbitrary sort of decision that just came out of the dominance of Unix and C and early examples of things like that. So millions of experiments are going on all the time. But some things do kind of rise to the top and win the fitness war for whether it's Mindspace or programming techniques or anything. Like there's a site on Stack Exchange called Code Golf where people compete to write the shortest possible program for a particular task in all the different kinds of languages. And it's really interesting to see folks kind of, they're masters of their craft really play with the limits of programming languages. It's really beautiful to see. And across all the different programming languages you get to see some of these weird programming languages and mainstream ones. Difference between Python 2 and 3. You get to see the difference between C and C++ and Java. You get to see JavaScript. All of that. It's kind of inspiring to see how much depth of possibility there is within programming languages that Code Golf kind of tasks reveal. Most of us, if you do any kind of programming, you kind of do boring kind of very vanilla type of code. That's the way to build large systems. But it's nice to see that the possibility of creative genius is still within those languages. It's laden within those languages. So given that you are, once again, one of the greatest programmers ever, what do you think makes a good programmer? Maybe a good modern programmer. So I just gave a long rant slash lecture at Meta to the TPM organization. And my biggest point was everything that we're doing really should flow from user value. All the good things that we're doing. It's like we're not technical people. It's like you shouldn't be taking pride just in the specific thing. Like Code Golf is the sort of thing, it's a fun puzzle game, but that really should not be a major motivator for you. It's like we're solving problems for people or we're providing entertainment to people. We're doing something of value to people that's displacing something else in their life. So we want to be providing a net value over what they could be doing, but instead they're choosing to use our products. And that's where, I mean it sounds trite or corny, but I fundamentally do think that's how you make the world a better place. If you have given more value to people than it took you and your team to create, then the world's a better place. People have, they've gone from something of lesser value, chosen to use your product, and their life feels better for that. And if you've produced that economically, that's a really good thing. On the other hand, if you spent ridiculous amounts of money, you've just kind of shoveled a lot of cash into a wood chipper there, and you should maybe not feel so good about what you're doing. So being proud about a specific architecture or a specific technology or a specific code sequence that you've done, it's great to get a little smile, like a tiny little dopamine hit for that, but the top level metric should be that you're building things of value. Now you can get into the argument about how you, what is user value, how do you actually quantify that? And there can be big arguments about that, but it's easy to be able to say, okay, this pissed off user there is not getting value from what you're doing. This user over there with the big smile on their face, the moment of delight when something happened, there's a value that's happened there. I mean, if you, you have to at least accept that there is a concept of user value, even if you have trouble exactly quantifying it, you can usually make relative arguments about it. Well, this was better than this. We've improved things. So being a servant to the user is your job when you're a developer. You want to be producing something that other people are going to find valuable. And if you are technically inclined, then finding the right levers to be able to pull, to be able to make a design that's going to produce the most value for the least amount of effort. And it always has to be kind of divide. There's a ratio there where you, it's a problem at the big tech companies, whether it's, you know, MetaGoogle, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, companies that have almost infinite money. I mean, I know their CFO will complain that it's not infinite money, but from most developer standpoints, it really does feel like it. And it's almost counterintuitive that if you're working hard as a developer on something, there's always this thought, if only I had more resources, more people, more RAM, more megahertz, then my product will be better. In that sense that at certain points, it's certainly true that if you are really hamstrung by this, removing an obstacle will make a better product, make more value. But if you're not making your core design decisions in this fiercely competitive way where you're saying feature A or feature B, you can't just say, let's do both. Because then you're not making a value judgment about them. You're just saying, well, they both seem good. I don't want to necessarily have to pick out which one is better or how much better and tell team B that, sorry, we're not going to do this because A is more important. But that notion of always having to really critically value what you're doing, your time, the resources you expend, even the opportunity cost of doing something else, that's super important. Well, let me ask you about this, the big debates that you're mentioning of how to measure value. Is it possible to measure it kind of numerically or can you do the sort of Johnny Ive, the designer route of imagining sort of somebody using a thing and imagining a smile on their face, imagining the experience of love and joy that you have when you use the thing. That's from a design perspective. Or if you're building more like a lower level thing for like Linux, you imagine a developer that might come across this and use it and become happy and better off because of it. So where do you land on those things? Is it measurable? So I imagine like Meta and Google will probably try to measure the thing. They'll try to, it's like you try to optimize engagement or something. Let's measure engagement. And then I think there is a kind of, I mean, I admire the designer ethic of like, think of a future that's immeasurable and you try to make somebody in that future that's different from today happy. So I do usually favor if you can get any kind of a metric that's good, by all means, listen to the data. But you can go too far there where we've had problems where it's like, hey, we had a performance regression because our fancy new telemetry system is doing a bazillion file writes. I had to kind of archive this stuff because we needed to collect information to determine if we were doing, you know, if our plans were good. So when information is available, you should never ignore it. I mean, all the actual users using the thing, human beings using the thing, large number of human beings, and you get to see sort of at large numbers. So there's the zero to one problem of when you're doing something really new, you do kind of have to make a guess. But one of the points that I've been making at Meta is we have more than enough users now that anything somebody wants to try in VR, we have users that will be interested in that. You do not get to make a completely greenfield blue sky pitch and say, I'm going to do this because I think it might be interesting. I challenge everyone. There are going to be people, whether it's, you know, working in VR on your, like on your desktop replacement or communicating with people in different ways or playing the games. There are going to be probably millions of people, or at least if you pick some tiny niche that we're not in right now, there's still going to be thousands of people out there that have the headsets that would be your target market. And I tell people, pay attention to them. Don't invent fictional users. Don't make an Alice Bob Charlie that fits whatever matrix of tendencies that you want to break the market down to, because it's a mistake to think about imaginary users when you've got real users that you could be working with. But on the other hand, there is value to having a kind of wholeness of vision for a product. And companies like Meta have, you know, they understand the tradeoffs where you can have a company like SpaceX or Apple in the Steve Jobs era where you have a very powerful leading personality that, you know, they can micromanage at a very low level and can say it's like, no, that handle needs to be different or that icon needs to change the tint there. And they clearly get a lot of value out of it. They also burn through a lot of employees that have horror stories to tell about working there afterwards. My position is that you're at your best when you've got a leader that is at their limit of what they can kind of comprehend of everything below them, and they can have an informed opinion about everything that's going on. And you take somebody, you've got to believe that somebody that has 30, 40 years of experience, you would hope that they've got wisdom that the just out of boot camp person contributing doesn't have, and that if they're like, well, that's wrong there, you probably shouldn't do it that way or even just don't do it that way, do it another way. So there's value there, but it can't go beyond a certain level. I have Steve Jobs stories of him saying things that are just wrong right in front of me about technical things because he was not operating at that level. But when it does work and you do get that kind of passionate leader that's thinking about the entire product and just really deeply cares about not letting anything slip through the cracks, I think that's got a lot of value. But the other side of that is the people saying that, well, we want to have these independent teams that are bubbling up the ideas because it's almost anti-capitalist or anti-free market to say it's like, I want my great leader to go ahead and dictate all these points there where clearly free markets bring up things that you don't expect. In VR, we saw a bunch of things. It didn't turn out at all the way the early people thought were going to be the key applications and things that would not have been approved by the dark cabal making the decisions about what gets into the store turned out to in some cases be extremely successful. So yeah, I definitely kind of wanted to be there was a point where I did make a pitch. It's like, hey, make me VR dictator and I'll go in and get shit done. And that's just it's not in the culture at Meta. They understand the tradeoffs. And that's just not the way that's not the company that they want, the team that they that they want to do. It's fascinating because VR, and we'll talk about it more. It's still it's still unclear to me in what way VR will change the world because it does seem clear that VR will somehow fundamentally transform this world. And it's unclear to me how. Yeah. Yeah. And it's let me know when you want to get into that. Well, hold on a second. So in the stick to the the you being the best programmer ever. Okay. In the early days when you didn't have when you didn't have adult responsibilities of leading teams and all that kind of stuff, and you can focus on just being a programmer. What did the productive day in the life of John Carmack look like? How many hours of the keyboard? How much sleep? What was the source of calories that fueled the brain? What was it like? What times you wake up? So I was able to be remarkably consistent about what was good working conditions for me for a very long time. I was never one of the programmers that I that would do all nighters going through work for 20 hours straight. It's like my brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so. But the hard work is really important. And I would work for decades. I would work 60 hours a week. I would work a 10 hour day, six days a week and try to be productive at that. Now my schedule shifted around a fair amount when I was young without any kids. I am any other responsibilities. I was on one of those cycling schedules where I'd kind of get in an hour later each day and roll around through the entire time. And I'd wind up kind of pulling in at two or three in the afternoon sometimes and then working again past midnight or two in the morning. And that was when it was just me trying to make things happen. And I was usually isolated off in my office. People generally didn't bother me much at in and I could get a lot of programming work done that way. I did settle into a more normal schedule when I was taking kids to school and things like that. So kids were the forcing function that got you to wake up at the same time. It's not clear to me that there was much of a difference in the productivity with that where I kind of feel if I just get up when I feel like it, it's usually a little later each day. But I just recently made the focusing decision to try to push my schedule back a little bit earlier to getting up at eight in the morning and trying to shift things around. I'm often doing experiments with myself about what should I be doing to be more productive. And one of the things that I did realize was happening in recent months where I would go for a walk or a run. I cover like four miles a day and I would usually do that just as the sun's going down at here in Texas now and it's still really damn hot, but I'd go out at 830 or something and cover the time there and then the showering. And it was putting a hole in my day where I would have still a couple hours after that. And sometimes my best hours were at night when nobody else is around, nobody's bothering me. But that hole in the day was a problem. So just a couple of weeks ago, I made the change to go ahead and say, all right, I'm going to get up a little earlier. I'm going to do a walk or get out there first so I can have more uninterrupted time. So I'm still playing with factors like this as I kind of optimize my work efforts. But it's always been, it was 60 hours a week for a very long time. To some degree, I had a little thing in the back of my head where I was almost jealous of some of the programmers that would do these marathon sessions. And I had like Dave Taylor, one of the guys that he had, he would be one of those people that would fall asleep under his desk sometimes and all the kind of classic hacker tropes about things. And a part of me was like always a little bothered that that wasn't me, that I wouldn't go program 20 hours straight because I'm just, I'm falling apart and not being very effective after 12 hours. I mean, yeah, 12-hour programming, that's fine when you're doing that, but it never, you're not doing smart work much after, at least I'm not. But there's a range of people. I mean, that's something that a lot of people don't really get in their gut where there are people that work on four hours of sleep and are smart and can continue to do good work. And there's a lot of people that just fall apart. So I do tell people that I always try to get eight hours of sleep. It's not this, you know, push yourself harder, get up earlier. I just do worse work where, you know, there's, you can work a hundred hours a week and still get eight hours of sleep if you just kind of prioritize things correctly. But I do believe in working hard, working a lot. There was a comment that a game dev made that, that I know there's a backlash against really hard work in a lot of cases. And I get into online arguments about this all the time, but it was basically saying, yeah, 40 hours a week, that's kind of a part-time job. And if you are really in it, you're doing what you think is important, what you're passionate about, working more gets more done. And I, it's just really not possible to argue with that if you've been around the people that, that work with that level of intensity and just say, it's like, no, they should just stop. And I had, I kind of came back around to that a couple of years ago where I was using the fictional example of, all right, some people say, they'll say with a straight face, they think, no, you are less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week. And they're generally misinterpreting things where your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours is less than in one of your peak hours, but you're not literally getting less done. There is a point where you start breaking things and getting worse, worse behavior and everything out of it where you're literally going backwards, but it's not at eight or 10 or 12 hours. And the fictional example I would use was, imagine there's an asteroid coming to impact, you know, to, to crash into earth, destroy all of human life. Do you want Elon Musk or the people working at SpaceX that are building the interceptor that's going to, to deflect the asteroid? Do you want them to clock out at five because dammit, they're just going to go do worse work if they work another couple hours. And you know, it seems absurd and that's a hypothetical though, and everyone can dismiss that. But then when coronavirus was hitting and you have all of these medical personnel that are clearly pushing themselves really, really hard. And I'd say it's like, okay, do you want all of these scientists working on treatments and vaccines and caring for all of these people? Are they really screwing everything up by working more than eight hours a day? And of course people say, I'm just an asshole to say something like that, but it's, I know it's the truth. Working longer gets more done. Well, so that's kind of a layer one, but I'd like to also say that at least I believe, depending on the person, depending on the task, working more and harder will make you better for the, for the next week in those peak hours. So there's something about a deep dedication to a thing that kind of gets deep in you. So the hard work isn't just about the raw hours of productivity. It's the, it's the thing it does to you in the, in the weeks and months after too. You're tempering yourself in some ways. And I think, you know, it's like your zero dreams of sushi. If you really dedicate yourself completely to making the sushi, like to really putting in the long hours day after day after day, you become a true craftsman of the thing you're doing. Now there's of course discussions about, are you sacrificing a lot of personal relationships? Are you sacrificing a lot of other possible things you could do with that time? But if you're talking about purely being a master or a craftsman of your art, that more hours isn't just about doing more. It's about becoming better at the thing you're doing. Yeah. And I don't gainsay anybody that wants to work the minimum amount. They've got other priorities in their life. My only argument that I'm making, it's not that everybody should work hard. It's that if you want to accomplish something, working longer and harder is the path to getting it accomplished. Well, let me ask you about this then. The mythical work-life balance. Because for an engineer, it seems like that's one of the professions for a programmer where working hard does lead to greater productivity in it. But it also raises the question of sort of personal relationships and all that kind of stuff, family. How are you able to find work-life balance? Is there advice you can give maybe even outside of yourself? Have you been able to arrive at any wisdom on this part in your years of life? I do think that there's a wide range of people where different people have different needs. It's not a one size fits all. I am certainly what works for me. I can tell enough that I'm different than a typical average person in the way things impact me, the things that I want to do, my goals are different and sort of the levers to impact things are different where I have literally never felt burnout. I know there's lots of brilliant smart people that do world-leading work that get burned out and it's never hit me. I've never been at a point where I'm like, I just don't care about this. I don't want to do this anymore. But I've always had the flexibility to work on lots of interesting things. I can always just turn my gaze to something else and have a great time working on that. So much of the ability to actually work hard is the ability to have multiple things to choose from and to use your time on the most appropriate thing. There are time periods where it's the best time for me to read a new research paper that I need to really be thinking hard about it. Then there's a time that maybe I should just scan and organize my old notes because I'm just not on top of things. Then there's the time that, all right, let's go bang out a few hundred lines of code for something. So switching between them has been real valuable. So you always have kind of joy in your heart for all the things you're doing and that is the kind of work-life balance as a first sort of step. Yeah, I do. So you're always happy. I do. Well, happy, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's like a lot of people would say that often I look like kind of a grim person with just sitting there with a neutral expression or even like knitted brows and a frown on my face as I'm staring at something. That's what happiness looks like for you. It's kind of true. It's like, okay, I'm pushing through this. I'm making progress here. I know that doesn't work for everyone. I know it doesn't work for most people. But what I am always trying to do in those cases is I don't want to let somebody that might be a person like that be told by someone else that, no, don't even try that out as an option where I, you know, work-life balance versus kind of your life's work where there's a small subset of the people that can be very happy being obsessive about things. And you know, obsession can often get things done that just practical, prudent, pedestrian work won't or at least won't for a very long time. There's legends of your nutritional intake in the early days. What can you say about sort of as a, you know, being a programmer is a kind of athlete. So what was the nutrition that fueled? I have never been that great on really paying attention to it where I'm good enough that I don't eat a lot. You know, I've never been like a big heavy guy. But it was interesting where one of the things that I can remember being an unhappy teenager, not having enough money. And like one of the things that bothered me about not having enough money is I couldn't buy pizza whenever I wanted to. So I got rich and then I bought a whole lot of pizza. That was defining, like, that's what being rich felt like. A lot of little things like I could buy all the pizza and comic books and video games that I wanted to. And it really didn't take that much. But the pizza was one of those things. And it's absolutely true that for a long time it did software. I had a pizza delivered every single day. You know, the delivery guy knew me by name. And I didn't find out until years later that apparently I was such a good customer that they just never raised the price on me. And I was using this six year old price for the pizzas that they were still kind of sending my way every day. So you were doing eating once a day or were you? It would be spread out. You know, you have a few pieces of pizza, you have some more later on. And I'd maybe have something at home. It was one of the nice things that Facebook Meta is they do. They feed you quite well. You get a different, I guess now it's DoorDash sorts of things delivered. But they take care of making sure that everybody does get well fed. I probably had better food those six years that I was working in the Meta office there than I used to before. But it's worked out okay for me. My health has always been good. I get a pretty good amount of exercise and I don't eat to excess. And I avoid a lot of other kind of not so good for you things. So I'm still doing quite well at my age. Did you have a kind of, I don't know, spiritual experience with food or coffee or any of that kind of stuff? I mean, you know, the programming experience, you know, with music or like I listen to Brown Noise on a program or like creating an environment and the things you take into your body, just everything you construct can become a kind of ritual that empowers the whole process of the program. Did you have that relationship with pizza or? It would really be with Diet Coke. I mean, there still is that sense of, you know, drop the can down, crack open the can of Diet Coke. All right, now I mean business. We're getting to work here. Still to this day, Diet Coke is still part of it. Yeah, probably eight or nine a day. Nice. Okay. What about your setup? How many screens? What kind of keyboard? Is there something interesting? What kind of IDE, Emacs, Vim or something modern? Linux? And operating system laptop or any interesting thing that brings you joy? So I kind of migrated cultures where early on through all of game dev, there was sort of one culture there, which was really quite distinct from the more the Silicon Valley venture, you know, culture for things. It's they're different groups and they have pretty different mores and the way they think about things where and I still do think a lot of the big companies can learn, can learn things from the hardcore game development side of things where it still boggles my mind how I am, how hostile to debuggers and IDEs that so much of the kind of big money get billions of dollars. Silicon Valley venture backed funds are. Oh, that's interesting. Sorry. So you're saying like, like big companies like Google and Meta are hostile to... They are not big on debuggers and IDEs like so much of it is like Emacs, Vim for things. And we just assume that debuggers don't work most of the time. I have for the systems and a lot of this comes from a sort of Linux bias on a lot of things where I did come up through the personal computers and then the DOS and then I am Windows and it was Borland tools and then Visual Studio and... You appreciate the buggers? Very much so. I mean, a debugger is how you get a view into a system that's too complicated to understand. I mean, anybody that thinks just read the code and think about it, that's an insane statement in the... You can't even read all the code on a big system. You have to do experiments on the system. And doing that by adding log statements, recompiling and rerunning it is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. I mean, yes, you can always get things done, even if you're working with stone knives and bearskins. That is the mark of a good programmer is that given any tools, you will figure out a way to get it done. But it's amazing what you can do with sometimes much, much better tools where instead of just going through this iterative compile run debug cycle, you have the old Lisp direction of like you've got a REPL and you're working interactively and doing amazing things there. But in many cases, a debugger as a very powerful user interface that can stop, examine all the different things in your program, set all of these different breakpoints. And of course, you can do that with GDB or whatever there. But this is one of the user interface fundamental principles where when something is complicated to do, you won't use it very often. There's people that will break out GDB when they're at their wits end and they just have beat their head against a problem for so long. But for somebody that kind of grew up in game dev, it's like they were running into the debugger anyways before they even knew there was a problem. And you would just stop and see what was happening. And sometimes you could fix things even before you did one compile cycle. You could be in the debugger and you'd say, well, I'm just going to change this right here. And yep, that did the job and fix it and go on. And for people who don't know, GDB is a sort of popular, I guess, Linux debugger primarily for C++? They handle most of the languages, but it's based on C as the original kind of Unix heritage. And it's kind of like command line. It's not user friendly. It doesn't allow for clean visualizations. And you're exactly right. So you're using this kind of debugger usually when you're at wits end and there's a problem that you can't figure out why by just looking at the codes, you have to find it. That's how I guess normal programmers use it. But you're saying there should be tools that kind of visualize and help you as part of the programming process, just the normal programming process to understand the code deeper. When I'm working on my C C++ code, I'm always running it from the debugger. I type in the code. I run it. Many times, the first thing I do after writing code is set a breakpoint and step through the function. Now, other people will say, it's like, oh, I do that in my head. Well, your head is a faulty interpreter of all those things there. And I've written brand new code. I want to step in there and I'm going to single step through that, examine lots of things and see if it's actually doing what I expected it to. It is a kind of companion, the debugger. You're now coding in an interactive way with another being. The debugger is a kind of dumb being, but it's a reliable being. That is an interesting question of what role does AI play in that kind of, with codecs and this kind of ability to generate code. You might start having tools that understand the code in interesting, deep ways that can work with you. I mean, there's a whole spectrum there from static code analyzers and various kind of dynamic tools there up to AI that can conceivably grok these programs that literally no human can understand. They're too big, too intertwined, and too interconnected. But it's not beyond the possibility of understanding. It's just beyond what we can hold in our heads as kind of mutable state while we're working on things. And I'm a big proponent, again, of things like static analyzers and some of that stuff where you'll find some people that don't like being scolded by a program for how they've written something where it's like, oh, I know better. And sometimes you do, but that was something that I was, it was very, very valuable for me when, and not too many people get an opportunity like this to have. This is almost one of those spiritual experiences as a programmer, an awakening to, the id software code bases were a couple million lines of code. And at one point I had used a few of the different analysis tools, but I made a point to really go through and scrub the code base using every tool that I could find. And it was eye opening where we had a reputation for having some of the most robust, strongest code, where there were some great things that I remember hearing from Microsoft telling us about crashes on Xbox. And we had this tiny number that they said were probably literally hardware errors. And then you have other significant titles that just have millions of faults that are getting recorded all the time. So I was proud of our code on a lot of levels, but when I took this code analysis squeegee through everything, it was shocking how many errors there were in there. Things that you can say, okay, this was a copy paste, not changing something right here. Lots of things that were, the most common problem was something in a printf format string that was the wrong data type that could cause crashes there. And you really want the warnings for things like that. Then the next most common was missing a check for null that could actually happen, that could blow things up. And those are obviously like top C, C++ things. Everybody has those problems. But the long tail of all of the different little things that could go wrong there, and we had good programmers and my own code, stuff that I'd be looking at. It's like, oh, I wrote that code. That's definitely wrong. We've been using this for a year, and it's this submarine, this mine sitting there waiting for us to step on. And it was humbling. It was, and I reached the conclusion that anything that can be syntactically allowed in your language, if it's going to show up eventually in a large enough code base, you're not going to, good intentions aren't going to keep it from happening. You need automated tools and guardrails for things. And those start with things like static types or even type hints in the more dynamic languages. But the people that rebel against that, that basically say, that slows me down doing that, there's something to that. I get that. I've written, I've cobbled things together in a notebook. I'm like, wow, this is great that it just happened. But yeah, that's kind of sketchy, but it's working fine. I don't care. It does come back to that value analysis where sometimes it's right to not care. But when you do care, if it's going to be something that's going to live for years and it's going to have other people working on it, and it's going to be deployed to millions of people, then you want to use all of these tools. You want to be told, it's like, no, you've screwed up here, here, and here. And that does require kind of an ego check about things where you have to be open to the fact that everything that you're doing is just littered with flaws. It's not that, oh, you occasionally have a bad day. It's just whatever stream of code you output, there is going to be a statistical regularity of things that you just make mistakes on. And I do think there's the whole argument about test-driven design and unit testing versus kind of analysis and different things. I am more in favor of the analysis and the stuff that just like you can't run your program until you fix this rather than you can run it and hopefully a unit test will catch it in some way. Yeah, in my private code, I have asserts everywhere. Just there's something pleasant to me, pleasurable to me about sort of the dictatorial rule of like this should be true at this point. And too many times I've made mistakes that shouldn't have been made. And I would assume I wouldn't be the kind of person that would make that mistake, but I keep making that mistake. Therefore, an assert really catches me, really helps all the time. So my code, I would say like 10 to 20% of my private code just for personal use is probably asserts. And they're active comments. And one of those things that in theory, they don't make any difference to the program. And if it was all operating the way you expected it would be, then they will never fire. But even if you have it right and you wrote the code right initially, then circumstances change. And your program changes. And in fact, that's one of the things where I'm kind of fond in a lot of cases of static array size declarations where I went through this period where it's like, okay, now we have general collection classes. We should just make everything variable. Because I had this history of in the early days, you get Doom, which had some fixed limits on it. Then everybody started making crazier and crazier things. And they kept bumping up the different limits, this many lines, this many sectors. And it seemed like a good idea, well, we should just make this completely generic. It can go up to whatever. And there's cases where that's the right thing to do. But it also, the other aspect of the world changing around you is it's good to be informed when the world has changed more than you thought it would. And if you've got a continuously growing collection, you're never going to find out. You might have this quadratic slowdown on something where you thought, oh, I'm only ever going to have a handful of these. But something changes and there's a new design style and all of a sudden you've got 10,000 of them. So, I kind of like in many cases, picking a number, some nice brown power of two number, and setting it up in there and having an assert saying, it's like, hey, you hit this limit. You should probably think are the choices that you've made around all of this still relevant if somebody's using 10 times more than you thought they would. Yeah, this code was originally written with this kind of worldview, with this kind of set of constraints. You were thinking of the world in this way. If something breaks, that means you got to rethink the initial stuff. And it's nice for it to do that. Is there any stuff like a keyboard or monitors? I'm fairly pedestrian on a lot of that where I did move to triple monitors like in the last several years ago. I had been dual monitor for a very long time. And it was one of those things where probably years later than I should have, I'm just like, well, the video cards now generally have three output ports. I should just put the third monitor up there. That's been a pure win. I've been very happy with that. But no, I don't have fancy keyboard or mouse or anything really. The key thing is an IDE that has helpful debuggers, has helpful tools. So, it's not the Emacs, VimRoute and Diacook. Yeah. I spent one of my week-long retreats where I'm like, okay, I'm going to make myself use – it was actually classic VI, which I know people will say you should never have done that. You should have just used Vim directly. But I gave it the good try. It's like, okay, I'm being in kind of classic Unix developer mode here. And I worked for a week on it. I used Anki to teach myself the different little key combinations for things like that. And in the end, it was just like, all right, this was kind of like my Civil War reenactment phase. It's like I'm going out there doing it like they used to in the old days. And it was kind of fun in that regard. So many people right now, they're screaming as they're listening to this. So, again, the out is that this was not modern Vim, but still, yes, I was very happy to get back to my visual studio at the end. Yeah. I'm actually – I struggle with this a lot because – so, I use a Kinesis keyboard and I use Emacs primarily. And I feel like I can – exactly as you said, I can understand the code, I can navigate the code. There's a lot of stuff you can build within Emacs using Lisp. You can customize a lot of things for yourself to help you introspect the code, like to help you understand the code and visualize different aspects of the code. You can even run debuggers. But it's work. And the world moves past you. And the better and better ideas are constantly being built. And that puts a kind of – I need to take the same kind of retreat as you're talking about, but now I'm still fighting the civil war. I need to kind of move into the 21st century. And it does seem like the world is – or a large chunk of the world is moving towards visual studio code, which is kind of interesting to me. Again, it's the JavaScript ecosystem on the one hand. And IDs are one of those things that you want to be infinitely fast. You want them to just kind of immediately respond. And like, I mean, heck, I've got – there's someone I know, an old school game dev guy that still uses Visual Studio 6. And on a modern computer, everything is just absolutely instant on something like that. Because it was made to work on a computer that's 10,000 or 100,000 times slower. So just everything happens immediately. And all the modern systems just feel – they feel so crufty when it's like, oh, why is this refreshing the screen and moving around and updating over here and something blinks down there and you should update this. And there's – there are things that we've lost with that incredible flexibility. But lots of people get tons of value from it. And I am super happy that that seems to be winning over even a lot of the old Vim and Emacs people. That they're kind of like, hey, Visual Studio code's maybe not so bad. That may be the final peacekeeping solution where everybody is reasonably happy with something like that. So, can you explain what a.plan file is and what role that played in your life? Does it still continue to play a role? Back in the early, early days of id Software, one of our big things that was unique with what we did is I had adopted Nextstations or kind of Nextstep systems from Steve Jobs's out in the – out in the woods away from Apple company. And they were basically – it was kind of interesting because I did not really have a background with the Unix system. So many of the people, they get immersed in that in college. And I – and that's – that sets a lot of cultural expectations for them. And I didn't have any of that, but I knew that my background was – I was a huge Apple II fanboy. I was always a little suspicious of the Mac. I was not really what kind of I wanted to go with. But when Steve Jobs left Apple and started Next, this computer did just seem like one of those amazing things from the future where it had all of this cool stuff in it. And we were still, back in those days, working on DOS. Everything blew up. You had reset buttons because your computer would just freeze. If you're doing development work, literally dozens of times a day, your computer was just rebooting constantly. And so this idea of, yes, any of the Unix workstations would have given a stable development platform where you don't crash and reboot all the time. But Next also had this really amazing graphical interface, and it was great for building tools. And it used Objective-C as the kind of an interesting – Oh, wow. Yeah, it did it for things like that. So Next was Unix-based. It said Objective-C. So it had a lot of the elements – That became Mac. I mean, the kind of reverse acquisition of Apple by Next where that took over and became what the modern Mac system is. And defined some of the developer – like, the tools and the whole community. Yeah, you've still got – if you're programming on Apple stuff now, there's still all these NS somethings, which was originally Next Step objects of different kinds of things. But one of the aspects of those Unix systems was they had this notion of a.plan file where – you know, a.file is an invisible file, usually in your home directory or something. And there was a trivial server running on most Unix systems at the time that when somebody ran a trivial little command called finger, you could do finger and then somebody's address. It could be anywhere on the internet if you were connected correctly. Then all that server would do was read the.plan file in that user's home directory and then just spit it out to you. And originally the idea was that could be whether you're on vacation, what your current project was. It's supposed to be like the plan of what you're doing. And people would use it for, you know, various purposes. But all it did was dump that file over to the terminal of whoever issued the finger command. And, you know, at one point I started just keeping a list of what I was doing in there, which would be what I was working on in the day. And I would have this little syntax I kind of got to myself about, here's something that I'm working on. I put a star when I finish it. I could have a few other little bits of punctuation. And at the time it started off as being just like my to-do list, and it would be these trivial, obscure little things like I, you know, fixed something with collision detection code, made imp fireball do something different, and just little one-liners that people that were following the games could kind of decipher. But I did wind up starting to write much more in-depth things. I would have little notes of thoughts and insights, and then I would eventually start having little essays. I would sometimes dump into the dot plan files interspersed with the work logs of things that I was doing. So in some ways it was like a super early proto-blog where I was just kind of dumping out what I was working on. But it was interesting enough that there were a lot of people that were interested in this. So most of the people didn't have Unix workstations, so there were the websites back in the day that would follow the Doom and Quake development that would basically make a little service that would go grab all the changes and then people could just get it with a web browser. And there was a period where like all of the little kind of Dallas gaming diaspora of people that were at all in that orbit, there were a couple dozen plan files going on, which was – and this was some years before blogging really became kind of a thing. And it was kind of a premonition of sort of the way things would go. And there was – it's all been collected. It's available online in different places and it's kind of fun to go back and look through what I was thinking, what I was doing in the different areas. Have you had a chance to look back? Is there some interesting, very low-level specific to-do items, maybe things you've never completed, all that kind of stuff? And high-level philosophical essay type of stuff that stands out? Yeah, there's some good stuff on both where a lot of it was low-level nitpicky details about game dev and I've learned enough things where there's no project that I worked on that I couldn't go back and do a better job on now. I mean, you just – you learn things. Hopefully if you're doing it right, you learn things as you get older and you should be able to do a better job at all of the early things. There's stuff in Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake that's like, oh, clearly I could go back and do a better job at this, whether it's something in the rendering engine side or how I implemented the monster behaviors or managed resources or anything like that. Do you see the flaws in your thinking now? Yeah. Like looking back? Yeah, I do. I mean, sometimes I'll get the – I'll look at it and say, yeah, I had a pretty clear view of I was doing good work there and I haven't really hit the point where – there was another programmer, Graham Devine, who was – he had worked at Id and Seventh Guest and he made some comment one time where he said he looked back at some of his old notes and he was like, wow, I was really smart back then. I don't hit that so much where – I mean, I look at it and I always know that, yeah, there's all the – with aging, you get certain changes in how you're able to work problems, but all of the problems that I've worked, I'm sure that I could do a better job on all of them. Oh, wow. So you can still step right in. If you could travel back in time and talk to that guy, you would teach him a few things. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. What about the high-level philosophical stuff? Is there some insights that stand out that you remember? There's things that I was understanding about development and the industry and so on that were in a more primitive stage where I definitely learned a lot more in the later years about business and organization and team structure. There were – I mean, there were definitely things that I was not the best person or even a very good person about managing, like how a team should operate internally, how people should work together. I was just – I just get out of my way and let me work on the code and do this. And more and more, I've learned how in the larger scheme of things, how sometimes relatively unimportant some of those things are, where it is this user value generation that's the overarching importance for all of that. I didn't necessarily have my eye on that ball correctly through a lot of my earlier years and there's things that I could have gotten more out of people handling things in different ways. I could have made in some ways more successful products by following things in different ways. There's mistakes that we made that we couldn't really have known how things would have worked out but it was interesting to see in later years companies like Activision showing that, hey, you really can just do the same game, make it better every year. You can look at that from a negative standpoint and say it's like, oh, that's just being derivative and all that. But if you step back again and say it's like, no, are the people buying it still enjoying it? Are they enjoying it more than what they might have bought otherwise? You can say, no, that's actually a great value creation engine to do that if you're in a position where you can. Don't be forced into reinventing everything just because you think that you need to. Lots of things about business and team stuff that could be done better but the technical work, the kind of technical visionary type stuff that I laid out, I still feel pretty good about. There are some classic old ones about my defending of OpenGL versus D3D which turned out to be one of the more probably important momentous things there where it was always a rearguard action on Windows where Microsoft was just not going to let that win. But when I look back on it now, that fight to keep OpenGL relevant for a number of years there meant that OpenGL was there when mobile started happening and OpenGL ES was the thing that drove all of the acceleration of the mobile industry. And it's really only in the last few years as Apple's moved to metal and some of the other companies have moved to Vulcan that that's moved away. But really stepping back and looking at it, it's like, yeah, I sold tens of millions of games for different things but billions and billions of devices wound up with an appropriate capable graphics API due in no small part to me thinking that that was really important that we not just give up and use Microsoft's at that time really terrible API. The thing about Microsoft is the APIs don't stay terrible. They were terrible at the start but a few versions on they were actually quite good and there was a completely fair argument to be made that by the time DX9 was out, it was probably a better programming environment than OpenGL. But it was still a wonderful good thing that we had an open standard that could show up on Linux and Android and iOS and eventually WebGL still to this day. So that was one that would be on my greatest hits list of things that I kind of pushed with. Impact it had on billions of devices. Yes. So let's talk about it. Can you tell the origin story of id Software? Again one of the greatest game developer companies ever. He created Wolfenstein 3D games that define my life also in many ways as a thing that made me realize what computers are capable of in terms of graphics in terms of performance. It just unlocks something deep in me and understanding what these machines are all about. Those games can do that. So Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake and just all the incredible engineering innovation that went into that. So how did it all start? So I'll caveat up front that I usually don't consider myself the historian of the software side of things. I usually do kind of point people at John Romero for stories about the early days where I you know I've never been like I've commented that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person in some ways where I don't really spend a lot of time unless I'm explicitly prodded to go back and think about the early days of things. And I didn't necessarily make the effort to archive everything exactly in my brain. And the more that I work on machine learning and AI and the aspects of memory and how when you go back and polish certain things it's not necessarily exactly the way it happened. But you know having said all of that from my view the way everything happened that led up to that was after I was an adult and kind of taking a few college classes deciding to drop out I was doing I was hardscrabble contract programming work really struggling to kind of keep groceries and pay my rent and things. And the company that I was doing the most work for was a company called Softdisk Publishing which had the sounds bizarre now business model of monthly subscription software. You know before there was an internet that people could connect to and get software you would pay you know a certain amount and every month they would send you a disk that had some random software on it and people that were into computers thought this was kind of cool and they had different ones for the Apple II, the 2GS, the PC, the Mac, the Amiga, lots of different things here. So quirky little business but I was doing a lot of contract programming for them where I'd write tiny little games and sell them for $300, $500. And one of the things that I was doing again to keep my head above water here was I decided that I could make one program and I could port it to multiple systems. So I would write a game like Dark Designs or Catacombs and I would develop it on the Apple II, the 2GS, and the IBM PC which apparently was the thing that really kind of peaked the attention of the people working down there like Jay Wilber was my primary editor and Tom Hall was a secondary editor. And they kept asking me, it's like, hey, you should come down and work for us here. And I pushed it off a couple times because I was really enjoying my freedom of kind of being off on my own even if I was barely getting by. I loved it. I was doing nothing but programming all day. But I did have enough close scrapes with like, damn, I'm just really out of money that maybe I should get an actual job rather than contracting these kind of one at a time things. And Jay Wilber was great. He was like FedExing me the checks when I would need them to kind of get over whatever hump I was at. So I finally took them up on their offer to come down to Shreveport, Louisiana. I was in Kansas City at the time. Drove down through the Ozarks and everything down to Louisiana and saw the Softdisk offices, went through, talked to a bunch of people, met the people I had been working with remotely at that time. But the most important thing for me was I met two programmers there, John Romero and Lane Roth, that for the first time ever I had met programmers that knew more cool stuff than I did where the world was just different back then. I was in Kansas City. It was one of those smartest kid in the school, does all the computer stuff. The teachers don't have anything to teach him. But all I had to learn from was these few books at the library. It was not much at all. And there were some aspects of programming that were kind of black magic to me. Like, oh, he knows how to format a track on a low-level drive programming interface. And this was – I was still not at all sure I was going to take the job, but I met these awesome programmers that were doing cool stuff. Romero had worked at Origin Systems and he had done so many different games ahead of time that I did kind of quickly decide, yeah, I'll go take the job down there. And I settled down there, moved in, and started working on more little projects. And the first kind of big change that happened down there was the company wanted to make a gaming-focused – a PC gaming-focused subscription. Just like all their others, the same formula that they used for everything. Pay a monthly fee and you'll get a disc with one or two games just every month. And no choice in what you get, but we think it'll be fun. And that was the model they were comfortable with and said, all right, we're going to start this gamers-edge department. And all of us that were interested in that, like me, Romero, Tom Hall was kind of helping us from his side of things, Jay would peek in, and we had a few other programmers working with us at the time. And we were going to just start making games, just the same model. And we dived in and it was fantastic. You have to make new games. Every month. Every month. Yeah. And in retrospect, looking back at it, that sense that I had done all this contract programming and John Romero had done like far more of this where he had done – one of his teaching himself efforts was he made a game for every letter of the alphabet. That sense of like, I'm just going to go make 26 different games, give them a different theme. And you learn so much when you go through and you crank these things out like on a bi-weekly, monthly basis, something like that. From start to finish. Yeah. It's not just an idea, it's not just from the very beginning to the very end. It's done. It has to be done. There's no delaying. It's done. And you've got deadlines. And that kind of rapid iteration, pressure cooker environment was super important for all of us developing the skills that brought us to where we eventually went to. I mean, people would say like in the history of the Beatles, like it wasn't them being the Beatles, it was them playing all of these other early works that that opportunity to craft all of their skills before they were famous that was very critical to their later successes. And I think there's a lot of that here where we did these games that nobody remembers, lots of little things that contributed to building up the skill set for the things that eventually did make us famous. And Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler, I had to write it in a month just to make money. And nobody remembers that probably, because he had to figure out, because it's literally, he didn't have enough time to write it fast enough. So he had to come up with hacks to actually literally write it fast enough in a month. It again comes down to that point where pressure and limitation of resources is surprisingly important. Yeah. And it's counterintuitive in a lot of ways where you just think that if you've got all the time in the world and you've got all the resources in the world, of course you're going to get something better. But sometimes it really does work out that the innovations, mother necessity, and you know, where you can, or resource constraints and you have to do things when you don't have a choice. It's surprising what you can do. Is there any good games written in that time? Would you say? Some of them are still fun to go back and play where you get the, they were all about kind of the more modern term is game feel about how just the exact feel that things, it's not the grand strategy of the design, but how running and jumping and shooting and those things I feel in the, in the moment. And some of those are still, if you sat down out on me, you kind of go, it's a little bit different. It doesn't have the same movement feel, but you move over and you're like, bang, jump, bang. It's like, Hey, that's kind of cool still. So you can get lost in the rhythm of the game. Like the, the, is that what you mean by feel? It's like, there's something about it that pulls you in. Nowadays, again, people talk about compulsion loops and things where it's that, I am that sense of exactly what you're doing, what your fingers are doing on the keyboard, what your eyes are seeing. And there are going to be these sequences of things, grab the loot, shoot the monster, jump over the obstacle, get to the end of the level. These are eternal aspects of game design in a lot of ways, but there are better and worse ways to do all of them. And we did so many of these games that it was, we got a lot of practice with it. So one of the kind of weird things that was happening at this time is John Romero was getting some, some strange fan mail. And back in the days, this is before email. So we literally got letters sometimes and telling him, it's like, Oh, I want to talk to you about your games. I want to reach out different things. And I eventually, it turned out that these were all coming from Scott Miller at Apogee software and he was reaching out through, he didn't think he could contact John directly that he would get intercepted. So he was trying to get him to contact him through like back channel fan mail, because he basically was saying, Hey, I'm making all this money on shareware games. I want you to make shareware games because he had seen some of the games that Romero had done. And you know, we looked at Scott Miller's games and we didn't think they were very good. We looked at him, we're like, that can't be making the kind of money that he's saying he's making 10 grand or something off of this game. We really thought that he was full of shit, that it was a lie trying to get him into this. But so that was kind of going on at one level. He was, and it was funny the moment when Romero realized that he had some of these letters pinned up on his wall, like all of his fans. And then we noticed that they all had the same return address with different names on them, which was a little bit of a two edged sword there. Trying to figure out the puzzle laid out before him. Yeah. What happened after I kind of coincident with that was I was working on a lot of the new technologies where I was now full on the IBM PC for the first time where I was really a long holdout on Apple II forever. And I, you know, I loved my Apple II. It was the computer I always wished I had when I was growing up. And when I finally did have one, I was, I was kind of clinging onto that well past it sort of good use by the best computer ever made. Would you say? I wouldn't make judgments like that about it, but it was positioned in such a way, especially in the school systems that it impacted a whole lot of American programmers, at least where there was programs that the Apple IIs got into the schools and they had enough capability that lots of interesting things happened with them. You know, in Europe it was different. You had your Amigas and Ataris and, you know, I'm acorns in the UK and things that that had different things. But in the United States, it was probably the Apple II made the most impact for a lot of programmers of my generation. But so I was really digging into the IBM and this was even more so with the total focus because I had moved to another city where I didn't know anybody that I wasn't working with. I had a little apartment and then at Softdisk, again, the things that that drew me to it, I had a couple programmers that knew more than I did and they had a library. They had a set of books and a set of magazines. They had a couple years of magazines, the old Dr. Dobbs journal and all of these magazines that had information about things. And so I was just in total immersion mode. It was eat, breathe, sleep, computer programming, particularly the IBM for everything that I was doing. And I was digging into a lot of these low level hardware details that people weren't usually paying attention to the way that the IBM EGA cards worked, which was fun for me. I hadn't had experience with things at that level. And back then, you could get hardware documentation just down at the register levels. This is where the CRTC register is. This is how the color registers work and how the different things are applied. And they were designed for a certain reason. They were designed for an application. They had an intended use in mind. But I was starting to look at other ways that they could perhaps be exploited that they weren't initially intended for. Could you comment on like, first of all, what operating system was there? What instructions set was it? What are we talking about? So this was DOS and x86. So 16 bit 8086. The 286s were there and 386s existed. They were rare. We had a couple for our development systems. But we were still targeting the more broad. It was all DOS 16 bit. None of this was kind of DOS extenders and things. How different is it from the systems of today? It's kind of a precursor that's similar. Very little. If you open up command.exe on or com on Windows, you see some of the remnants of all of that. But it was a different world. It was the 640k is enough world. And nothing was protected. It crashed all the time. You had TSRs or terminate and stay resident hacks on top of things that would cause configuration problems. All the hardware was manually configured in your auto exec. So it was a very different world. But the code is still the same similar. You would still write it. My earliest code there was written in Pascal. That was what I had learned. I am kind of an earlier point. So between basic and C++, there was Pascal. So when basic assembly language and some of my stuff, my intermediate stuff was, well, you had to for performance. Basic was just too slow. So most of the work that I was doing as a contract programmer in my teenage years was assembly language. Wait, you wrote games in assembly? Yeah. Complete games in assembly language. And it's thousands and thousands of lines of three letter acronyms for the instructions. You don't earn the once again greatest programmer ever label without being able to write a game in assembly. Okay. But that's again, everybody serious wrote their games in assembly language. It was kind of a- Everybody serious. See what he said? Yeah. Everybody serious. Yeah. It was an outlier to use Pascal a little bit where there was one famous program called Wizardry. It was like one of the great early role playing games that was written in Pascal, but it was almost nothing used Pascal there. But I did learn Pascal and I remember doing all of my, like to this day, I sketch in data structures when I'm thinking about something. I'll open up a file and I'll start writing struct definitions for how data is going to be laid out. And Pascal was kind of formative to that because I remember designing my RPGs in Pascal record structures and things like that. And so I had gotten the Pascal compiler for the Apple IIgs that I could work on. And the first IBM game that I developed, I did in Pascal. And that's actually kind of an interesting story. Again, talking about the constraints and resources where I had an Apple IIgs, I didn't have an IBM PC. I wanted to port my applications to IBM because I thought I could make more money on it. So what I wound up doing is I rented a PC for a week and bought a copy of Turbo Pascal. And so I had a hard one week and this was cutting into what minimal profit margin I had there. But I had this computer for a week. I had to get my program ported before I had to return the PC. And that was kind of what the first thing that I had done on the IBM PC and what led me to taking the job at Softdisk. And Turbo Pascal, how's that different from regular Pascal? Is it a different compiler or something like that? So it was a product of Borland, which before Microsoft kind of killed them, they were the hot stuff developer tools company. You had Borland, Turbo Pascal, and Turbo C, and Turbo Prolog. I mean, all the different things. But what they did was they took a supremely pragmatic approach of making something useful. It was one of these great examples where Pascal was an academic language and you had things like the UCSDP system that Wizardry was actually written in that they did manage to make a game with that. But it was not a super practical system. While Turbo Pascal was called Turbo because it was blazingly fast to compile. I mean, really ridiculously 10 to 20 times faster than most other compilers at the time. But it also had very pragmatic access to, look, you can just poke at the hardware in these different ways. And we have libraries that let you do things. And it was a perfectly good way to write games. And this is one of those things where people have talked about different paths that computer development could have taken, where C took over the world for reasons that came out of Unix and eventually Linux. And that was not a foregone conclusion at all. And people can make real reasoned rational arguments that the world might have been better if it had gone a Pascal route. I'm somewhat agnostic on that, where I do know from experience it was perfectly good enough to do that. And it had some fundamental improvements, like it had range-checked arrays as an option there, which could avoid many of C's real hazards that happened in a security space. But C1, they were basically operating at about the same level of abstraction. It was a systems programming language. But you said Pascal had more emphasis on data structures. Actually, in the tree of languages, did Pascal come before C? They were pretty contemporaneous. So Pascal's lineage went to Modula 2 and eventually Oberon, which was another Nicholas word, kind of experimental language. But they were all good enough at that level. Now some of the classic academic-oriented Pascals were just missing fundamental things like, oh, you can't access this core system thing because we're just using it to teach students. But Turbo Pascal showed that only modest changes to it really did make it a completely capable language, and it had some reasons why you could implement it as a single-pass compiler. So it could be way, way faster, although less scope for optimizations if you do it that way. And it did have some range-checking options. It had a little bit better typing capability. You'd have properly typed enums, sorts of things, and other stuff that C lacked. But C was also clearly good enough, and it wound up with a huge inertia from the Unix ecosystem and everything that came with that. And Pascal didn't have garbage collection? No, it was not garbage collected. It was the same kind of thing as C. Yeah, same manual. So you could still have your use-after-freeze and all those other problems. But just getting rid of array overruns, at least if you were compiled with that debugging option, certainly would have avoided a lot of problems and could have a lot of benefits. So anyways, that was the next thing. I had to learn C because C was where it seemed like most of the things were going. So I abandoned Pascal and I started working in C. I started hacking on these hardware things dealing with the graphics controllers and the EGA systems. And what we most wanted to do – so at that time, we were sitting in our darkened office playing all the different console video games. We were figuring out what games do we want to make for our gamers edge product there. And so we had one of the first Super Nintendos sitting there, and we had an older Nintendo. We were looking at all those games. And the core thing that those consoles did that you just didn't get on the PC games was this ability to have a massive scrolling world where most of the games that you would make on the PC and earlier personal computers would be a static screen. You move little things around on it, and you interact like that. Maybe you go to additional screens as you move. But arcade games and consoles had this wonderful ability to just have a big world that you're slowly moving your window through. And that was for those types of games, that kind of action exploration adventure games, that was a super, super important thing. And PC games just didn't do that. And what I had come across was a couple different techniques for implementing that on the PC. And they're not hard, complicated things. When I explain them now, they're pretty straightforward, but just nobody was doing it. You sound like Einstein describing his five papers. It's pretty straightforward. I understand. But they're nevertheless revolutions. The side scrolling is a game changer. Yeah. It's a genius invention. It's a genius invention. It's either side or vertical. And some of the consoles had different limitations about you could do one but not the other. And there were similar things going on as advancements, even in the console space where you'd have like the original Mario game was just horizontal scrolling. And then later Mario games added vertical aspects to it and different things that you were doing to explore, expand the capabilities there. And so much of the early game design for decades was removing limitations, letting you do things that you envisioned as a designer, you wanted the player to experience, but the hardware just couldn't really, or you didn't know how to make it happen. It felt impossible. You can imagine that you want to create like this big world through which you can side scroll, like through which you can walk. And then you ask yourself a question, how do I actually build that in a way that's like the latency is low enough, the hardware can actually deliver that in such a way that it's a compelling experience. Yeah. And we knew what we wanted to do because we were playing all of these console games, playing all these Nintendo games and arcade games. Clearly there was a whole world of awesome things there that we just couldn't do on the PC, at least initially. Because every programmer can tell, it's like if you want to scroll, you can just redraw the whole screen. But then it turns out, well, you're going five frames per second. That's not an interactive, fun experience. You want to be going 30 or 60 frames per second or something. And it just didn't feel like that was possible. It felt like the PCs had to get five times faster for you to make a playable game there. And interestingly, I wound up with two completely different solutions for the scrolling problem. And this is a theme that runs through everything, where all of these big technical advancements, it turns out there's always a couple different ways of doing them. And it's not like you found the one true way of doing it. And we'll see this as we go into 3D games and things later. But so the scrolling, the first set of scrolling tricks that I got was, there was, the hardware had this ability to, you could shift like inside the window of memory. So the EGA cards at the time had 256 kilobytes of memory. And it was awkwardly set up in this planar format where instead of having 256 or 24 million colors, you had 16 colors, which is four bits. So you had four bit planes, 64K a piece. Of course, 64K is a nice round number for 16-bit addressing. So your graphics card had a 16-bit window that you could look at. And you could tell it to start the video scan out anywhere inside there. So there were a couple games that had taken this approach. If you could make a 2x2 screen or a 1x4 screen, and you could do scrolling really easily like that. You could just lay it all out and just pan around there. But you just couldn't make it any bigger, because that's all the memory that was there. The first insight to the scrolling that I had was, well, if we make a screen that's just one tile larger, you know, and we usually had tiles that were 16 pixels by 16 pixels, the little classic Mario block that you run into. Lots of art gets drawn that way. And your screen is a certain number of tiles. But if you had one little buffer region outside of that, you could easily pan around inside that 16-pixel region. That could be perfectly smooth. But then what happens if you get to the edge and you want to keep going? The first way we did scrolling was what I call the adaptive tile refresh, which was really just a matter of you get to the edge, and then you go back to the original point, and then only change the tiles that are different between where it was. In most of the games at the time, if you think about sort of your classic Super Mario Brothers game, you've got big fields of blue sky, long rows of the same brick texture. And there's a lot of commonality. It's kind of like a data compression thing. If you take the screen and you set it down on top of each other, in general, only about 10% of the tiles were actually different there. So this was a way to go ahead and say, well, I'm going to move it back, and then I'm only going to change those 10%, 20%, whatever percent tiles there. And that meant that it was essentially five times faster than if you were redrawing all of the tiles. And that worked well enough for us to do a bunch of these games for Gamer's Edge. We had a lot of these scrolling games like Slordax and Shadow Knights and things like that that we were cranking out at this high rate that had this scrolling effect on it. And it worked well enough. There were design challenges there where if you made, the worst case, if you made a checkerboard over the entire screen, you scroll over one and every single tile changes, and your frame rate's now five frames per second because it had to redraw everything. So the designers had a little bit that they had to worry about. They had to make these relatively plain-looking levels. But it was still pretty magical. It was something that we hadn't seen before. And the first thing that we wound up doing with that was I had just gotten this working, and Tom Hall was sitting there with me, and we were looking over at our Super Nintendo on the side there with Super Mario 3 running. And we had the technology, we had the tools set up there, and we stayed up all night, and we basically cloned the first level of Super Mario Brothers. Performance-wise as well? Yeah. And we had our little character running and jumping in there. It was close to pixel accurate as far as all the backgrounds and everything, but the gaming was just stuff that we cobbled together from previous games that I had written. I just kind of like really kit-bashed the whole thing together to make this demo. And that was one of the rare cases when I said, I don't usually do these all-night programming things. There's probably only two memorable ones that I can think about. One was the all-nighter to go ahead and get our Dangerous Dave and Copyright Infringement is how we titled it. Because we had a game called Dangerous Dave, which was running around with a shotgun shooting things, and we were just taking our most beloved game at the time there, the Super Mario 3, and sort of sticking Dave inside that with this new scrolling technology that was going perfectly smooth for as it ran. And Tom and I just kind of blearily the next morning kind of left, and we left a disk on the desk for John Romero and Jay Wilbur to see and just said, run this. And we eventually made it back in later in the day, and it was like they grabbed us and pulled us into the room. And that was the point where they were like, we got to do something with this. We're going to make a company. We're going to go make our own games, where this was something that we were able to just kind of hit them with a hammer of an experience. Like, wow, this is just so much cooler than what we thought was possible there. And initially, we tried to get Nintendo to let us make Super Mario 3 on the PC. That's really what we wanted to do. We're like, hey, we can finish this. It's line of sight for this will be great. And we sent something to Nintendo, and we heard that it did get looked at in Japan, and they just weren't interested in that. But that's another one of those life could have gone a very different way, where we could have been like Nintendo's house PC team at that point. And define the direction of Wolfenstein, and Doom and Quake could have been a Nintendo creation. Yeah. So at the same time that we were just doing our first scrolling demos, we reached out to Scott Miller at Apogee and said, it's like, hey, we do want to make some games. These things that you think you want, those are nothing. What do you see what we can actually do now? This is going to be amazing. And he just popped right up and sent a check to us, where at that point, we still thought he might be a fraud, that he was just lying about all of this. But he was totally correct on how much money he was making with his shareware titles. And this was his real brainstorm about this, where shareware was this idea that software doesn't have a fixed price. If you use it, you send, out of the goodness of your heart, some money to the creator. And there were a couple utilities that did make some significant success like that. But for the most part, it didn't really work. There wasn't much software in a pure shareware model that was successful. The Apogee innovation was to take something, call it shareware, split it into three pieces. You always made a trilogy. And you would put the first piece out, but then you buy the whole trilogy for some shareware amount, which in reality, it meant that the first part was a demo, where you kind of like the demo went everywhere for free, and you paid money to get the whole set. But it was still played as shareware, and we were happy to have the first one go everywhere. And it wasn't a crippled demo, where the first episode of all of these trilogies, it was a real complete game. And probably 20 times as many people played that part of it, thought they had a great game, had fond memories of it, but never paid us a dime. But enough people were happy with that, where it was really quite successful. And these early games that we didn't think very much of compared to commercial quality games, but they were doing really good business. Some fairly crude things, and people, it was good business. People enjoyed it, and it wasn't like you were taking a crap shoot on what you were getting. You just played a third of the experience, and you loved it enough to handwrite out a check and put it in an envelope, and address it, and send it out to Apogee to get the rest of them. So it was a really pretty feel-good business prospect there, because everybody was happy. They knew what they were getting when they sent it in, and they would send in fan mail. If you're going to the trouble of addressing a letter and filling out an envelope, you write something in it, and there were just the literal bags of fan mail for the shareware games, so people loved them. I should mention that for you, the definition of wealth is being able to have pizza whenever you want. For me, there was a dream, because I would play shareware games over and over, the part that's free, over and over, and it was a very deeply fulfilling experience, but I dreamed of a time when I could actually afford the full experience, and this is kind of this dreamland beyond the horizon, where you could find out what else is there. In some sense, even just playing the shareware was the limitation of that. Life is limited, eventually we all die. In that way, shareware was somehow really fulfilling to have this kind of mysterious thing beyond what's free, always there. Maybe it's because a part of my childhood is playing shareware games. That was a really fulfilling experience. It's so interesting how that model still brought joy to so many people, the 20x people that played it. Yeah, I felt very good about that. I would run into people that would say, oh, I loved that game that you had early on, Commander Keen, whatever. They meant just the first episode that they got to see everywhere. That's me, I played the crap out of Commander Keen. That was all good. We were in this position where Scott Miller was just fronting us cash, saying, yeah, make a game. But we did not properly pull the trigger and say, all right, we're quitting our jobs. We were like, we're going to do both. We're going to keep working at Softdisk, working on this, and then we're going to go ahead and make a new game for Apogee at the same time. This eventually did lead to some legal problems, and we had trouble. It all got worked out in the end, but it was not a good call at the time there. And your legal mind at the time was not stellar. You were not thinking in legal terms. No, I definitely wasn't. None of us were. And in hindsight, yeah, it's like, how did we think we were going to get away with even using our work computers to write software for our breakaway new company? It was not a good plan. How did Commander Keen come to be? So the design process, we would start from we had some idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to do a Mario-like game. It was going to be a side scroller. It was going to use the technology. We had some sense of what it would have to look like because of the limitations of this adaptive tile refresh technology. It had to have fields of relatively constant tiles. You couldn't just paint up a background and then move that around. The early design or all the design for Commander Keen really came from Tom Hall, where he was kind of the main creative mind for the early id software stuff, where we had an interesting division of things, where Tom was all creative and design. I was all programming. John Romero was an interesting bridge, where he was both a very good programmer and also a very good designer and artist and kind of straddled between the areas. But Commander Keen was very much Tom Hall's baby. He came up with all the design and backstory for the different things of kind of a mad scientist little kid with building a rocket ship and a zap gun and visiting alien worlds and doing all of this, the background that we lay the game inside of. There's not a whole lot to any of these things. Design for us was always just what we needed to do to make the game that was going to be so much fun to play. And we laid out our first trilogy of games, the shareware formula. It was going to be three pieces. We make Commander Keen 1, 2, and 3. And we just really started busting on all that work. And it went together really quickly. It was like three months or something that while we were still making games every month for Gamers Edge, we were sharing technology between that. I'd write a bunch of code for this, and we'd just kind of use it for both. Again, not a particularly good idea there that had consequences for us. But in three months, we got our first game out. And all of a sudden, it was three times as successful as the most successful thing Apogee had had before. And we were making like $30,000 a month immediately from the Commander Keen stuff. And that was, again, a surprise to us. It was more than we thought that was going to make. And we said, well, we're going to certainly roll into another set of titles from this. And in that three months, I had come up with a much better way of doing the scrolling technology that was not the adaptive tile refresh, which in some ways was even simpler. And these things, so many of the great ideas of technology are things that are back of the envelope designs. I make this comment about modern machine learning, where all the things that are really important practically in the last decade are, each of them fits on the back of an envelope. There are these simple little things. They're not super dense, hard to understand technologies. And so the second scrolling trick was just a matter of, OK, we know we've got this 64K window. And the question was always, well, you could make a 2 by 2, but you can't go off the edge. But I finally asked, well, what actually happens if you just go off the edge? If you take your start and you say, it's like, OK, I can move over. I'm scrolling. I can move over. I can move down. I'm scrolling. I get to what should be the bottom of the memory window. It's like, well, what if I just keep going? And I say, I'm going to start at, what happens if I start at FFFE at the very end of the 64K block? And it turns out, it just wraps back around to the top of the block. And I'm like, oh, well, this makes everything easy. You can just scroll the screen everywhere. And all you have to draw is just one new line of tiles, whichever thing you expose. It might be unaligned off various parts of the screen memory, but it just works. That no longer had the problem of you had to have fields of the similar colors, because it doesn't matter what you're doing. You could be having a completely unique world, and you're just drawing the new strip as it comes on. But it might be, like you said, unaligned. So it can be all over the place. Yes, and it turns out it doesn't matter. I would have two page-flipped screens. As long as they didn't overlap, they moved in series through this two-dimensional window of graphics. And that was one of those, like, well, this is so simple. This just works. It's faster. And it seemed like there was no downside. Funny thing was, it turned out, after we shipped titles with this, there were what they called super VGA cards, the cards that would allow higher resolutions and different features that the standard ones didn't. And on some of those cards, this was a weird compatibility quirk, again, because nobody thought this was not what it was designed to do. And some of those cards had more memory. They had more than just 256K in four planes. They had 512K or a megabyte. And on some of those cards, I scroll my window down, and then it goes into uninitialized memory that actually exists there, rather than wrapping back around to the top. And then I was in the tough position of, do I have to track every single one of these? And it was a madhouse back then with there were 20 different video card vendors with all slightly different implementations of their nonstandard functionality. So either I needed to natively program all of the VGA cards there to map in that memory and keep scrolling down through all of that, or I kind of punted and took the easy solution of when you finally did run to the edge of the screen, I accepted a hitch and just copied the whole screen up there. So on some of those cards, it was a compatibility mode. In the normal ones, when it all worked fine, everything was just beautifully smooth. But if you had one of those cards where it did not wrap the way I wanted it to, you'd be scrolling around, scrolling around, and then eventually you'd have a little hitch where 200 milliseconds or something that was not super smooth. Yeah, it froze a little bit. And this was the binary thing. Is it one of the standard screens or is it one of the weird ones, the super VGA ones? Yeah. So we would default to, and I think that was one of those that changed over the course of deployment, where early on we would have a normal mode and then you would enable the compatibility flag if your screen did this crazy flickery thing when you got to a certain point in the game. And then later, I think it probably got enabled by default as just more and more of the cards did not do exactly the right thing. And that's the two-edged sword of doing unconventional things with technology, where you can find something that nobody thought about doing that kind of scrolling trick when they set up those cards. But the fact that nobody thought that was the primary reason when I was relying on that, then I wound up being broken on some of the later cards. Let me take a bit of a tangent, but ask about the hacker ethic, because you mentioned shareware. It's an interesting world, the world of people that make money, the business, and the people that build systems, the engineers. And what is the hacker ethic? You've been a man of the people, and you've embodied at least a part of that ethic. What does it mean? What did it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you today? So Stephen Levy's book, Hackers, was a really formative book for me as a teenager. I mean, I read it several times, and there was all of the great lore of the early MIT era of hackers, and ending up at the end with – it kind of went through the early MIT hackers and the Silicon Valley hardware hackers, and then the game hackers in part three. And at that time as a teenager, I really was kind of bitter in some ways. I thought I was born too late. I thought I missed the window there, and I really thought I belonged in that third section of that book with the game hackers. And they were talking about the Williams at Sierra and origin systems with Richard Garriott. And it's like, I really wanted to be there. And I knew that was now a few years in the past. It was not to be. But the early days, especially the early MIT hacker days, talking a lot about this sense of the hacker ethic, that there was this sense that it was about sharing information, being interested, not keeping it to yourself, and that it's not a zero-sum game, that you can share something with another programmer, and it doesn't take it away from you. You then have somebody else doing something. And I also think that there's an aspect of it where it's this ability to take joy in other people's accomplishments, where it's not the cutthroat bit of, like, I have to be first. I have to be recognized as the one that did this in some way. But being able to see somebody else do something and say, holy shit, that's amazing, and just taking joy in the ability of something amazing that somebody else does. And the big thing that I was able to do through id Software was this ability to eventually release the source code for most of our, like, all of our really seminal game titles. And that was a stepping stone process where we were kind of surprised early on where people were able to hack the existing games. And of course, I had experience with that. I remember hacking my copies of Ultima, so I'd give myself, you know, 999 gold and raise my levels and, you know, break out the sector editor. And so I was familiar with all of that. So it was just, it was with a smile when I started to see people doing that to our games. I am, you know, making level editors for Commander Keen or hacking up Wolfenstein 3D. But I made the pitch internally that we should actually release our own tools for, like, what we did, what we used to create the games. And that was, you know, that was a little bit debatable about, well, you know, will this let other, will it give people a leg up? It's always like, what's that going to mean for the competition? But the really hard pitch was to actually release the full source code for the games. And it was a balancing act with the other people inside the company where it's interesting how the programmers generally did get, certainly the people that I worked closely with, they did kind of get that hacker ethic bit where you wanted to share your code, you were proud of it, you wanted other people to take it and do cool things with it. But interestingly, the broader game industry is a little more hesitant to embrace that than, like, the group of people that we happen to have at id Software where it was always a little interesting to me seeing how a lot of people in the game modding community were very possessive of their code. They did not want to share their code. They wanted it to be theirs. It was their claim to fame. And that was much more like what we tended to see with artists where the artists understand something about credit and wanting it to be known as their work. And a lot of the game programmers felt a little bit more like artists than like hacker programmers in that it was about building something that maybe felt more like art to them than the more tool-based and exploration-based kind of hacking culture side of things. Yeah, it's so interesting that this kind of fear that credit will not be sufficiently attributed to you. And that's one of the things that I do bump into a lot because I try not to go – I mean, it's easy for me to say because so much credit is heaped on me for the id Software side of things. But when people come up and they want to pick a fight and say, no, it's like that wasn't where first-person gaming came from. And you can point to some of like things on obscure titles that I was never aware of or like the old Play-Doh systems or each personal computer had something that was 3D-ish and moving around. And I'm happy to say it's like, no, I mean, I saw Battlezone and Star Wars in the arcades. I had seen 3D graphics. I had seen all these things. I'm standing on the shoulders of lots of other people. But sometimes these examples they pull out, it's like, no, I didn't know that existed. I mean, I had never heard of that before then. That didn't contribute to what I made. But there's plenty of stuff that did. And I think there's good cases to be made that obviously Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein were formative examples for everything that came after that. But I don't feel the need to go fight and say claim primacy or initial invention of anything like that. But a lot of people do want to. I think when you fight for the credit in that way, and it does go against the hacker ethic, you destroy something fundamental about the culture, about the community that builds cool stuff. I think credit ultimately... So I had this sort of... there's a famous wrestler in freestyle wrestling called Buvaisar Setia. And he always preached that you should just focus on the art of the wrestling and let people write your story however they want. The highest form of the art is just focusing on the art. And that is something about the hacker ethic is just focus on building cool stuff, sharing it with other cool people, and credit will get assigned correctly in the long arc of history. Yeah. And I generally think that's true. And you've got... There's some things, there's a graphics technique that got labeled CarMax reverse. I am literally named... And it turned out that I wasn't the first person to figure that out. Like most scientific things or mathematical things, you wind up, it's like, oh, this other person had actually done that somewhat before. And then there's things that get attributed to me, like the inverse square root hack that I actually didn't do. I flat out, that wasn't me. And it's weird how the mimetic power of the internet, I cannot convince people of that. You're like the Mark Twain of programming. Everything just gets attributed to you now, even though you've never sought the credit of things. But part of the fact of the humility behind that is what attracts the attributions. Let's talk about a game, I mean, one of the greatest games ever made. I know you could talk about doing Quake and so on, but to me, Wolfenstein 3D was like, whoa, it blew my mind that a world like this could exist. So how did Wolfenstein 3D come to be in terms of the programming, in terms of the design, in terms of some of the memorable technical challenges, and also actually just something you haven't mentioned is, how did these ideas come to be inside your mind, the adaptive side-scrolling, the solutions to these technical challenges? So I usually can introspectively pull back pretty detailed accounts of how technology solutions and design choices on my part came to be, where technically we had done two games, 3D games like that before, where Hover Tank was the first one which had flat shaded walls, but did have the scaled enemies inside it. And then Catacombs 3D, which had textured walls, scaled enemies, and some more functionality like the disappearing walls and some other stuff. But what's really interesting from a game development standpoint is those games, Catacombs 3D, Hover Tank, and Wolfenstein, they literally used the same code for a lot of the character behavior that a 2D game that I had made earlier called Catacombs did, where it was an overhead view game, kind of like Gauntlet. You're running around and you can open up doors, pick up items, basic game stuff. And the thought was that this exact same game experience just presented in a different perspective. It could be literally the same game, just with a different view into it, would have a dramatically different impact on the players. So it wasn't a true 3D? You're saying that you could kind of fake it, you can scale enemies, meaning things that are farther away, you can make them smaller. So from the game was a 2D map. Like all of our games use the same tool for creation. We use the same map editor for creating Keen as Wolfenstein and Hover Tank and Catacombs and all this stuff. So the game was a 2D grid made out of blocks. And you could say, well, these are walls, these are where the enemies start, then they start moving around. And these early games like Catacombs, you played it strictly in a 2D view. It was a scrolling 2D view, and that was kind of using an adaptive tile refresh at the time to be able to do something like that. And then the thought that these early games, all it did was take the same basic enemy logic, but instead of seeing it from the God's eye view on top, you were inside it and turning from side to side, yawing your view and moving forwards and backwards and side to side. And it's a striking thing where you always talk about wanting to isolate and factor changes in values. And this was one of those most pure cases there where the rest of the game changed very little. You could still kind of change the colors on something and draw a different picture for it, but it's kind of the same thing. But the perspective changed in a really fundamental way. And it was dramatically different. I can remember the reactions where the artist, Adrian, that had been drawing the pictures for it, we had a cool big troll thing in Catacombs 3D. And we had these walls that you could get a key and you could make the blocks disappear. Really simple stuff. Blocks could either be there or not there. So our idea of a door was being able to make a set of blocks just disappear. And I remember the reaction where he had drawn these characters and he was slowly moving around. And people had no experience with 3D navigation. It was all still keyboard. We didn't even have mice set up at that time. But slowly moving, going up, picked up a key, go to a wall. The wall disappears in a little animation and there's a monster right there. And he practically fell out of his chair. It was just like, ah! And games just didn't do that. The games were the God's eye view. You were a little invested in your little guy. You can be like, you know, happy or sad when things happen. But you just did not get that kind of startle reaction. You weren't inside the game. Something in your face, something in the back of your brain, some reptile brain thing is just going, oh shit, something just happened. And that was one of those early points where it's like, yeah, this is going to make a difference. This is going to be powerful and it's going to matter. Were you able to imagine that in the idea stage or no? So, not that exact thing. So again, we had cases like the arcade games Battlezone and Star Wars that you could kind of see a 3D world and things coming at you and you get some sense of it. But nothing had done the kind of worlds that we were doing and the sort of action based things. 3D at the time was really largely about the simulation thoughts. And this is something that really might have trended differently if not for the id software approach in the games where there were flight simulators, there were driving simulators, you had like hard drive in and Microsoft flight simulator. And these were doing 3D and general purpose 3D in ways that were more flexible than what we were doing with our games. But they were looked at as simulations. They weren't trying to necessarily be fast or responsive or letting you do kind of exciting maneuvers because they were trying to simulate reality and they were taking their cues from the big systems, the Evans and Sutherlands and the Silicon Graphics that were doing things. But we were taking our cues from the console and arcade games. We wanted things that were sort of quarter eaters that were doing fast paced things that could smack you around rather than just smoothly gliding you from place to place. So- Quarter eaters. Yeah. And you know, the funny thing is so much that that built into us that Wolfenstein still had lives and you had like one of the biggest power ups in all these games like was an extra life because you started off with three lives and you lose your lives and then it's game over and there weren't save games in most of this stuff. It was, it sounds almost crazy to say this, but it was an innovation in Doom to not have lives. You know, you could just play Doom as long as you wanted. You just restart at the start of the level. And why not? This is like, we aren't trying to take people's quarters. They've already paid for the entire game. We want them to have a good time. And you would have some, you know, some old timer purist that might think that there's something to the epic journey of making it to the end, having to restart all the way from the beginning after a certain number of tries. But now more fun is had when you just let people kind of keep trying when they're stuck rather than having to go all the way back and, and learn different things. So you've recommended the book Game Engine Black Book, Wolfenstein 3D for technical exploration of the game. So looking back 30 years, what are some memorable technical innovations that made this perspective shift into this world that's so immersive that scares you when a monster appears or some things you have to solve? So one of the interesting things that come back to the theme of deadlines and resource constraints, the game Catacombs 3D, we shipped, we were supposed to be shipping this for Gamers Edge on a monthly cadence and I had slipped. I was actually late. It slipped like six weeks because this was texture mapped walls doing stuff that I hadn't done before. And at the six week point, it was still kind of glitchy and buggy. There were things that I knew that if you had a wall that was like almost edge on, you could slide over to it and you could see some things freak out or vanish or not work. And I hated that. But I was up against the wall. We had to ship the game. It was still a lot of fun to play. It was novel. Nobody had seen it. It gave you that startle reflex reaction. So it was worth shipping, but it had these things that I knew were kind of flaky and janky and not what I was really proud of. So one of the things that I did very differently in Wolfenstein was I went, Catacombs used almost a conventional thing where you had segments that were one dimensional polygons basically that were clipped and back faced and done kind of like a very crude 3D engine from the professionals. But I wasn't getting it done right. I was not doing a good enough job. I didn't really have line of sight to fix it right. There's stuff that of course I look back, it's like, oh, it's obvious how to do this, do the math right, do your clipping right, check all of this, how you handle the precision. But I did not know how to do that at that time. Was that the first 3D engine you wrote, Catacombs 3D? Yeah, Hover Tank had been a little bit before that, but that had the flat shaded walls. So the texture mapping on the walls was what was bringing in some of these challenges that was hard for me. And I couldn't solve it right at the time. Can you describe what flat shading is and texture mapping? So in the walls were solid color, one of 16 colors in Hover Tank. So that's easy, it's fast, you just draw the solid color for everything. Texture mapping is what we all see today, where you have an image that is stretched and distorted onto the walls or the surfaces that you're working with. And it was a long time for me to just figure out how to do that without it distorting in the wrong ways. And I did not get it all exactly right in Catacombs, and I had these flaws. So that was important enough to me that rather than continuing to bang my head on that, when I wasn't positive I was going to get it, I went with a completely different approach for drawing, for figuring out where the walls were, which was a ray casting approach, which I had done in Catacombs 3D. I had a bunch of C code trying to make this work right, and it wasn't working right. In Wolfenstein, I wound up going to a very small amount of assembly code. So in some ways, this should be a slower way of doing it, but by making it a smaller amount of work that I could more tightly optimize, it worked out. And Wolfenstein 3D was just absolutely rock solid. It was nothing glitched in there. The game just was pretty much flawless through all of that, and I was super proud of that. But eventually, like in the later games, I went back to the more span-based things where I could get more total efficiency once I really did figure out how to do it. So there were two sort of key technical things to Wolfenstein. One was this ray casting approach, which you still, to this day, you see people go and say, let's write a ray casting engine, because it's an understandable way of doing things that lets you make games very much like that. So you see ray casters in JavaScript, ray casters in Python, people that are basically going and re-implementing that approach to taking a tiled world and casting out into it. It works pretty well, but it's not the fastest way of doing it. Can you describe what ray casting is? So you start off and you've got your screen, which is 320 pixels across at the time if you haven't sized down the window for greater speed. And at every pixel, there's going to be an angle from you've got your position in the world and you're going to just run along that angle and keep going until you hit a block. So up to 320 times across there, it's going to throw a cast array out into the world from wherever your origin is until it runs into a wall, and then it can figure out exactly where on the wall it hits. The performance challenge of that is as it's going out, every block it's crossing, it checks, is this a solid wall? So that means that in like the early Wolfenstein levels, you're in a small jail cell going out into a small hallway. It's super efficient for that because you're only stepping across three or four blocks. But then if somebody makes a room that covers, our maps were limited to 64 by 64 blocks. If you made one room that was nothing but walls at the far space, it would go pretty slow because it would be stepping across 80 tile tests or something along the way. By the way, the physics of our universe seems to be competing this very thing. So this maps nicely to the actual physics of our world. Yeah, you get... Intuitively. I've seen a little bit of something like Stephen Wolfram's work on interconnected network information states of that. It's beyond what I can have an informed opinion on, but it's interesting that people are considering things like that and have things that can back it up. There's whole different sets of interesting stuff there. So Wolfenstein 3D had ray casting. Ray casting. The other key aspect was what I called compiled scalers, where the idea of... You saw this in the earlier classic arcade games like Space Harrier and stuff, where you would take a picture, which is normally drawn directly on the screen. And then if you have the ability to make it bigger or smaller, big chunky pixels or fizzily small drop sampled pixels, that's the fundamental aspect of what our characters were doing in these 3D games. You would have... it's just like you might have drawn a tiny little character, but now we can make them really big and make them really small and move it around. That was the limited kind of 3D that we had for characters. To make them turn, there were literally eight different views of them. You didn't actually have a 3D model that would rotate. You just had these cardboard cutouts. But that was good enough for that startle fight reaction, and it was kind of what we had to deal with there. So a straightforward approach to do that, you could just write out your doubly nested loop of you've got your stretch factor, and it's like you've got a point, you stretch by a little bit, it might be on the same pixel, it might be on the next pixel, might have skipped a pixel. You can write that out, but it's not going to be fast enough, where especially you get a character for that right in your face, monster covering almost the entire screen. Doing that with a general purpose scaling routine would have just been much too slow. It would have worked when they're small characters, but then it would get slower and slower as they got closer to you until right at the time when you most care about having a fast reaction time, the game would be chunking down. So the fastest possible way to draw pixels at that time was to, instead of saying I've got a general purpose version that can handle any scale, I made, I used a program to make essentially 100 or more separate little programs that was optimized for I will take an image and I will draw it 12 pixels tall. I'll take an image, I'll draw it 14 pixels tall, up by every two pixels even for that. So you would have the most optimized code so that in the normal case where most of the world is fairly large, like the pixels are big, we did not have a lot of memory. So in most cases, that meant that you would load a pixel color and then you would store it multiple times. So that was faster than even copying an image in a normal conventional case, because most of the time the image is expanded. So instead of doing one read, one write for a simple copy, you might be doing one read and three or four writes as it got really big. And that had the beneficial aspect of just when you needed the performance most, when things are covering the screen, it was giving you the most acceleration for that. By the way, were you able to understand this through thinking about it or were you testing like the right speed? This again comes back to, I can find the antecedents for things like this. Back in the Apple II days, the graphics were essentially single bits at a time. And if you wanted to make your little spaceship, if you wanted to make it smoothly go across the world, if you just took the image and you drew it out at the next location, you would move by seven pixels at a time. So it would go chunk, chunk, chunk. If you wanted to make it move smoothly, you actually had to make seven versions of the ship that were pre-shifted. You could write a program that would shift it dynamically, but on a one megahertz processor, that's not going anywhere fast. So if you wanted to do a smooth moving, fast action game, you made separate versions of each of these sprites. Now there were a few more tricks you could pull that if it still wasn't fast enough, you could make a compiled shape where instead of this program that normally copies an image and says, get this byte from here, store it here, get this byte, store this byte, if you've got a memory space, you could say, I'm going to write the program that does nothing but draw this shape. It's going to be like, I'm going to load the immediate value 25, which is some bit pattern, and then I'm going to store that at this location. Rather than loading something from memory that involved indexing registers and this other slow stuff, you could go ahead and say, no, I'm going to hard code the exact values of all of the image right into the program. This was always a horrible trade off there, but you didn't have much memory and you didn't have much speed. But if you had something that you wanted to go really fast, you could turn it into a program. And that was, you know, knowing about that technique is what made me think about some of these unwinding it for the PC, where people that didn't come from that background were less likely to think about that. I mean, there's some deep parallels probably to human cognition as well. There's something about optimizing and compressing the processing of a new information that requires you to predict the possible ways in which the game or the world might unroll. And you have something like compiled scalars always there. You have like, you have a prediction of how the world will unroll and you have some kind of optimized data structure for that prediction. And then you can modify if the world turns out to be different, you can modify it a slight way. And as far as building out techniques, so much of the brain is about the associative context. You know, they're just, when you learn something, it's in the context of something else and you can have faint, tiny little hints of things. And I do think there are some deep things around like sparse distributed memories and boosting that's like, if you can just be slightly above the noise floor of having some hint of something, you can have things refined into pulling the memory back up. So having a, being a programmer and having a toolbox of like all of these things that, things that I did in all of these previous lives of programming tasks, that still matters to me about how I'm able to pull up some of these things. Like in that case, it was something I did on the Apple II then being relevant for the PC. And I have still cases when I would, when I would work on mobile development then be like, okay, I did something like this back in the doom days. But now it's a different environment, but I still had that tie. I can bring it in and I can transform it into what the world needs right now. And I do think that's actually one of the very core things with human cognition and brain like, you know, brain like functioning is finding these ways about, you've got, your brain is kind of everything, everywhere, all at once. You know, it's, it is just a set of all of this stuff that is just fetched back by these queries that go into it. And they can just be slightly above the noise floor with a random noise in your neurons and synapses that are affecting exactly what gets pulled up. So you're saying some of these very specific solutions for different games, you find that there's a kernel of a deep idea that's generalizable to other, to other things. Yeah. You can't predict what it's going to be, but that idea of like, I called out that compiled shaders in the forward that I wrote for that, the game engine black book as, you know, this is, it's kind of an end point of unrolling code, but that's one of those things that thinking about that and having that in your mind. And I'm sure there are some programmers that, you know, hear about that, think about it a little bit. It's kind of the mind blown moment. It's like, oh, you can just turn all of that data into code. And nowadays, you know, you have instruction cache issues and that's not necessarily the best idea, but there are different, it's an idea that has power and has probably relevance in some other areas. Maybe it's in a hardware point of view that there's a way you approach building hardware that has that same. You don't even have to think about iterating, you just bake everything all the way into it in one place. What is the story of how you came to program doom? What are some memorable technical challenges or innovations within that game? So the path that we went after, after Wolfenstein got out and we were on this crazy arc where keen one through three, more success than we thought keen four through six, even more success Wolfenstein, even more success. So we were on this, this crazy trajectory for things. So actually our first box commercial project was a commander keen game, but then Wolfenstein was going to have a game called a spear of destiny, which was a commercial version, 60 new levels. So the rest of the team took the game engine pretty much as it was and started working on that. We got new monsters, but it's basically re-skins of the things there. And there's a really interesting aspect about that, that I didn't appreciate until much, much later about how Wolfenstein clearly did tap out its limit about what you want to play all the levels and a couple of our licensed things. There was a hard creative wall that you did not really benefit much by continuing to beat on it. But a game like doom and other more modern games like Minecraft or something, there's kind of a Turing completeness level of design freedom that you get in games that Wolfenstein clearly sat on one side of. You know, all the creative people in the world could not go and do a masterpiece just with the technology that Wolfenstein had. Wolfenstein could do Wolfenstein, but you really couldn't do something crazy and different. But it didn't take that much more capability to get to Wolfenstein with the freeform lines and a little bit more artistic freedom to get to the point where people still announce new doom levels today, all these years after without having completely tapped out the creativity. How did you put it? Turing complete? Turing complete design space. Design space. Where it's like, you know, we have the kind of computational universality on a lot of things and how different substrates work. For creativity. But yeah, there's things where a box can be too small, but above a certain point, you kind of are at the point where you really have almost unbounded creative ability there. And doom is the first time you cross that line. Yeah, where there were thousands of doom levels created and some of them still have something new and interesting to say to the world about it. Is that line, can you introspect what that line was? Is it in the design space? Is it something about the programming capabilities that you were able to add to the game? So the graphics fidelity was a necessary part because the block limitations in Wolfenstein, what we had right there was not enough. The full scale blocks, although Minecraft really did show that perhaps blocks stacked in 3D and at one quarter the scale of that, one eighth in volume, is then sufficient to have all of that. But the wall-sized blocks that we had in Wolfenstein was too much of a creative limitation. We licensed the technology to a few other teams. None of them made too much of a dent with that. It just wasn't enough creative ability. But a little bit more, whether it was the variable floors and ceilings and arbitrary angles in Doom or the smaller voxel blocks in Minecraft is then enough to open it up to just worlds and worlds of new capabilities. What is binary space partitioning? So the- Which is one of the technologies- Yeah, so jump around a little bit on the story path there. So while the team was working on Spirit Destiny for Wolfenstein, we had met another development team, Raven Software, while we were in Wisconsin. And they were doing- they had RPG background, and I still kind of love that. And I offered to do a game engine for them, to let them do a 3D rendered RPG instead of the- like most RPG games were kind of hand-drawn. They made it look kind of 3D, but it was done just all with artist work rather than a real engine. And after Wolfenstein, this was still a tile-based world, but I added floors and ceilings and some lighting and the ability to have some sloped floors in different areas. And that was my intermediate step for a game called Shadowcaster. And it had slowed down enough, it was not fast enough to do our type of action things. So they had the screen cropped down a little bit, so you couldn't go the full screen width like we would try to do in Wolfenstein. But I learned a lot. I got the floors and ceilings and lightings, and it looked great. They were great artists up there, and it was an inspiration for us to look at some of that stuff. But I had learned enough from that that I had the plan for- I knew faster ways to do the lighting and shadowing, and I wanted to do this freeform geometry. I wanted to break out of this tile-based, 90-degree world limitations. So we had- that was when we got our next stations, and we were working with these higher-powered systems. And we built an editor that let us draw kind of arbitrary line segments, and I was working hard to try to make something that could render this fast enough. I was pushing myself pretty hard, and we were at a point where we could see some things that looked amazingly cool, but it wasn't really fast enough for the way I was doing it. For this flexibility, it was no longer- I couldn't just raycast into it, and I had these very complex sets of lines. And simple little worlds were okay, but the cool things that we wanted to do just weren't quite fast enough. And I wound up taking a break at that point, and I did the port- I did two ports of our games, Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo. It was a crazy difficult thing to do, which was an even slower processor. It was like a couple megahertz processor. And it had been this whole thing where we had farmed out the work, and it wasn't going well. And we had to take over, and trying to make it go fast on there, where it really did not have much processing power. The pixels were stretched up hugely, and it was pretty ugly when you looked at it, but in the end, it did come out fast enough to play and still be kind of fun from that. But that was where I started using BSP trees, or binary space partitioning trees. It was one of those things I had to make it faster there. It was a stepping stone where it was reasonably easy to understand in the grid world of Wolfenstein, where it was all still 90 degree angles. BSP trees were- I eased myself into it with that, and it was a big success. Then when I came back to working on Doom, I had this new tool in my toolbox. It was going to be a lot harder with the arbitrary angles of Doom. This was where I really started grappling with epsilon problems, and just- up until that point, I hadn't really had to deal with the fact that so many numeric things- this almost felt like a betrayal to me, where people had told me that I had mathematicians up on a bit of a pedestal, where I was- people think I'm a math wizard, and I'm not. Everything that I did was really done with a solid high school math understanding. Algebra 2, trigonometry, and that was what got me all the way through Doom and Quake and all of that, of just understanding basics of matrices and knowing it well enough to do something with it. What's the epsilon problems you ran into? When you wind up taking a sloped line, and you say, I'm going to intersect it with another sloped line, then you wind up with something that's not going to be on these nice grid boundaries. With the Wolfenstein tile maps, all you've got is horizontal and vertical lines looking at it from above, and if you cut one of them, it's just obvious the other one gets cut exactly at that point. But when you have angled lines, you're doing a slope intercept problem, and you wind up with rational numbers there, where things that are not going to evenly land on an integer or even on any fixed point value that you've got. So everything winds up having to snap to some fixed point value, so the lines slightly change their angle. You wind up, if you cut something here, this one's going to bend a little this way, and it's not going to be completely straight. And then you come down to all these questions of, well, this one is a point on an angled line. You can't answer that in finite precision unless you're doing something with actual rational numbers. And later on, I did waste far too much time chasing things like that. How do you do precise arithmetic with rational numbers? And it always blows up eventually, exponentially as you do it. So these kind of things are impossible with computers. They're possible. Again, there are paths to doing it, but you can't fit them conveniently in any of the numbers. You need to start using big nums and different factor trackings and different things. So you have to, if you have any elements of OCD and you want to do something perfectly, you're screwed if you're working with floating point. So you had to deal with this for the first time. And there were lots of challenges there about like, okay, they build this cool thing. And the way the BSP trees work is it basically takes the walls and it carves other walls by those walls in this clever way that you can then take all of these fragments. And then you can for sure, from any given point, get an ordering of everything in the world. And you can say this goes in front of this, goes in front of this, all the way back to the last thing. And that's super valuable for graphics, where kind of a classic graphics algorithm would be painter's algorithm. You paint the furthest thing first, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. And then it comes up and it's all perfect for you. That's slow because you don't want to have to have drawn everything like that. But you can also flip it around and draw the closest thing to you. And then if you're clever about it, you can figure out what you need to draw that's visible beyond that. And that's what BSP trees allow you to do. Yeah. So it's combined with a bunch of other things, but it gives you that ordering. It's a clever way of doing things. And I remember I had learned this from one of my graphics Bible at the time, a book called Folian Van Damme. And again, it was a different world back there. There was a small integer number of books. And this book- Yeah. This book, it was a big fat college textbook that I had read through many times. I didn't understand everything in it. Some of it wasn't useful to me, but they had the little thing about finite orderings of you draw a little T-shaped thing and you can make a fixed ahead of time order from this and you can generalize this with the BSP trees. And I got a little bit more information about that. And it was kind of fun later while I was working on Quake, I got to meet Bruce Naylor, who was one of the original researchers that developed those technologies for academic literature. And that was kind of fun. But I was very much just finding a tool that can help me solve what I was doing. And I was using it in this very crude way in a two-dimensional fashion rather than the general 3D. The epsilon problems got much worse in Quake and three-dimensionals when things angle in every way. But eventually I did sort out how to do it reliably on Doom. There were still a few edge cases in Doom that were not absolutely perfect where they even got terminologies in the communities. Like when you got to something where it was messed up, it was a hall of mirrors effect because you'd sweep by and it wouldn't draw something there and you would just wind up with the leftover remnants as you flipped between the two pages. But BSP trees were important for it. But it's again worth noting that after we did Doom, our major competition came from Ben Silverman and his build engine, which was used for Duke Nukem 3D and some of the other games for 3D Realms. And he used a completely different technology, nothing to do with BSP trees. So there's not just a one true way of doing things. There were critical things about to make any of those games fast. You had to separate your drawing into you drew vertical lines and you drew horizontal lines just kind of changing exactly what you would draw with them. That was critical for the technologies at that time. And like all the games that were kind of like that wound up doing something similar. But there were still a bunch of other decisions that could be made. And we made good enough decisions on everything on Doom. We brought in multiplayer significantly. And it was our first game that was designed to be modified by the user community where we had this whole setup of our WAD files and PWADs and things that people could build with tools that we released to them and they eventually rewrote to be better than what we released. But they could build things and you could add it to your game without destructively modifying it, which is what you had to do in all the early games. You literally hacked the data files or the executable before while Doom was set up in this flexible way so that you could just say, run the normal game with this added on on top and it would overlay just the things that you wanted to there. Would you say that Doom was kind of the first true 3D game that you created? So no, it's still, Doom would usually be called a two and a half D game where it had three dimensional points on it. And this is another one of these kind of pedantic things that people love to argue about, about what was the first 3D game. I still like, every month probably I hear from somebody about, well, was Doom really a 3D game or something? And I give the point where characters had three coordinates. So you had like an X, Y, and Z, the cacodemon could be coming in very high and come down towards you. The walls had three coordinates on them. So on some sense it's a 3D game engine, but it was not a fully general 3D game engine. You could not build a pyramid in Doom because you couldn't make a sloped wall, which was slightly different where in that previous Shadowcaster game, I could have vertexes and have a sloped floor there. But the changes that I made for Doom to get higher speed and a different set of flexibility traded away that ability, but you literally couldn't make that. You could make different heights of passages, but you could not make a bridge over another area. You could not go over and above it. So it still had some 2D limitations to it. That's more about the building versus the actual experience because the experience is- It felt like things would come at you, but again, you couldn't look up either. You could only pitch. It was four degrees of freedom rather than six degrees of freedom. You did not have the ability to tilt your head this way or pitch up and down. So that takes us to Quake. What was the leap there? What was some fascinating technical challenges, and there were a lot, or not challenges, but innovations that you've come up with? So Quake was kind of the first thing where I did have to kind of come face to face with my limitations, where it was the first thing where I really did kind of give it my all and still come up a little bit short in terms of what and when I wanted to get it done. And the company had some serious stresses through the whole project, and we bit off a lot. So the things that we set out to do was it was going to be really a true 3D engine where it could do six degree of freedom. You could have all the viewpoints. You could model anything. It had a really remarkable new lighting model with the surface caching and things. That was one of those where it was starting to do some things that they weren't doing even on the very high end systems. And it was going to be completely programmable in the modding standpoint, where the thing that you couldn't do in Doom, you could replace almost all of the media, but you couldn't really change the game. There were still some people that were doing the hex editing of the executable, the de-hacked things where you could change a few things about rules, and people made some early capture the flag type things by hacking the executable, but it wasn't really set out to do that. Quake was going to have its own programming language that the game was going to be implemented in, and that would be able to be overwritten just like any of the media. Code was going to be data for that, and you would be able to have expansion packs that changed fundamental things and mods and so on. And the multiplayer was going to be playable over the internet. It was going to support client server rather than peer-to-peer. So we had the possibility of supporting larger numbers of players in disparate locations with this full flexibility of the programming overrides, with full six degree of freedom modeling and viewing, and with this fancy new light mapped kind of surface caching side. It was a lot. And this was one of those things that if I could go back and tell younger me to do something differently, it would have been to split those innovations up into two phases, in two separate games. Will be phase one and phase two. So it probably would have been taking the Doom rendering engine and bringing in the TCP IP client server- Focusing on the multiplayer. And the Quake C, or would have been Doom C programming language there. So I would have split that into programming language and networking with the same Doom engine rather than forcing everybody to go towards the Quake engine, which really meant getting a Pentium. You know, while it ran on a 486, it was not a great experience there. We could have made more people happier and gotten two games done in 50% more time. So speaking of people happier, our mutual friend Joe Rogan, it seems like the most important moment of his life is centered around Quake. So it was a definitive part of his life. So would he agree with your thinking that they should split? So he is a person who loves Quake and played Quake a lot. Would he agree that you should have done the Doom engine and focus on the multiplayer for phase one? Or in your looking back, is the 3D world that Quake created was also fundamental to the enriching experience? You know, I would say that what would have happened is you would have had a Doom looking but Quake feeling game eight months earlier and then maybe six months after Quake actually shipped, then there would have been the full running on a Pentium, six degree of freedom graphics engine type things there. So it's not that it wouldn't have been there. It would have been something amazingly cool earlier and then something even cooler somewhat later where I would much rather have gone and done two one year development efforts. I cycled them through. I be a little more pragmatic about that rather than killing ourselves on the whole Quake development. But I would say it's obviously things worked out well in the end, but looking back and saying how would I optimize and do things differently, that did seem to be a clear case where going ahead and we had enormous momentum on Doom. We did Doom 2 as the kind of commercial boxed version after our shareware success with the original, but we could have just made another Doom game adding those new features in. It would have been huge. We would have learned all the same lessons but faster and it would have given six degree of freedom and Pentium class systems a little bit more time to get mainstream because we did cut out a lot of people with the hardware requirements for Quake. Was there any dark moments for you personally, psychologically in having such harsh deadlines and having to solve some really difficult technical challenges? So I've never really had really dark black places. I mean, I can't necessarily put myself in anyone else's shoes, but I understand a lot of people have significant challenges with kind of their mental health and well-being and I've been super stressed. I've been unhappy as a teenager in various ways, but I've never really gone to a very dark place. I just seem to be largely immune to what really wrecks people. I mean, I've had plenty of time when I'm very unhappy and miserable about something, but it's never hit me like I believe it winds up hitting some other people. I've borne up well under whatever stresses have kind of fallen on me and I've always coped best on that when all I need to do is usually just kind of bear down on my work. I pull myself out of whatever hole I might be slipping into by actually making progress. I mean, maybe if I was in a position where I was never able to make that progress, I could have slid down further, but I've always been in a place where, okay, a little bit more work, maybe I'm in a tough spot here, but I always know if I just keep pushing, eventually I break through and I make progress, I feel good about what I'm doing and that's been enough for me so far in my life. Have you seen in the distance, like, you know, ideas of depression or contemplating suicide, have you seen those things far? So what was interesting when I was a teenager, I was, you know, I was probably on some level a troubled youth. I was unhappy most of my teenage, you know, years. I, you know, I really, I wanted to be on my own doing programming all the time. I, you know, as soon as I was 18, 19, even though I was poor, I was doing exactly what I wanted and I was very happy, but high school was not a great time for me and I had a conversation with like the school counselor and they're kind of running their script. It's like, okay, it's kind of a weird kid here. Let's carefully probe around. It's like, you know, do you ever think about ending it all? I'm like, no, of course not. Never. Not at all. I, this is temporary. Things are going to be better. I'm, and, and that's always been kind of the case for me. And obviously that's not that way for everyone and other people do react differently. And what was your, what was your escape from the troubled youth? Like you know, music, video games, books. How did you escape from a world that's full of cruelty and suffering and that's absurd? Yeah, I mean, I was not, you know, I was not a victim of cruelty and suffering. It's like I was an unhappy, somewhat petulant youth and, you know, in my point where I, you know, I'm not putting myself up with anybody else's suffering, but I was unhappy objectively. And I, the things that I did that very much characterized my childhood were I had books, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons, arcade games, video games. Like some of my, my fondest childhood memories are the convenience stores, the 7-11s and quick trips because they had a spinner rack of comic books and they had a little side room with two or three video games and arcade games in it. And that was, that was very much my happy place. You know, if I could, I get my comic books and if I could go to a library and, you know, go through those, the little zero, zero, zero section where computer books were supposed to be and there were a few sad little books there, but still just being able to sit down and go through that. And I read, you know, I read a ridiculous number of books, both fiction and nonfiction as a teenager. And I, you know, as I, my rebelling in high school was just sitting there with my nose in a book, ignoring the class through lots of it. And teachers had a range of reactions to that, some more, more accepting of it than others. I'm with you on that. So let us return to Quake for a bit with the technical challenges. What, what, um, everything together from the, from the networking to the graphics, what are some things you remember that were, that were innovations you had to come up with in order to make it all happen? Yeah. So there were a bunch of things on Quake where on the one hand, the idea that I built my own programming language to implement the game in, looking back and I try to tell people it's like every, every high level programmer sometime in their career goes through and they invent their own language. It just seems to be a thing that's pretty broadly done. People will be like, I'm going to go write a computer programming language. And I, you know, I don't regret having done it, but after that I switched from Quake C, my quirky little, I am pseudo object oriented or entity oriented language there. Quake 2 went back to using DLLs with C and then Quake 3, I implemented my own C interpreter or compiler, which was a much smarter thing to do that I should have done originally for Quake. But building my own language was an experience. I learned a lot from that. And then there was a generation of game programmers that learned programming with Quake C, which I feel kind of bad about because, you know, I mean, we give JavaScript a lot of crap, but I'm, Quake C was nothing to write home about there. But it was, it allowed people to do magical things. You get into programming, not because you love the BNF syntax of a language, it's because the language lets you do something that you cared about. And here's very much, you could do something in a whole beautiful three-dimensional world. And the idea and the fact that the code for the game was out there, you could say, I like the shotgun, but I want it to be more badass. You go in there and say, okay, now it does 200 points damage. And then you go around with a big grin on your face, blowing up monsters all over the game. So yeah, it's, you know, it is not what I would do today going back with that language, but that was a big part of it. Learning about the networking stuff, because it's interesting where I learned these things by reading books. So I would get a book on networking and find something I read all about and learn, okay, packets, they can be, you know, out of order, lost, or duplicated. These are all the things that can theoretically happen to packets. So I wind up spending all this time thinking about how do we deal about all of that. And it turns out, of course, in the real world, those are things that yes, theoretically can happen with multiple routes, but they really aren't things that your 99.999% of your packets have to deal with. So there was learning experiences about lots of that, like why, when TCP is appropriate versus UDP and how if you do things in UDP, you wind up reinventing TCP badly in almost all cases. So there's good arguments for using both for different game technology, different parts of the game process, transitioning from level to level and all. But the graphics were the showcase of what Quake was all about. It was this graphics technology that nobody had seen there. And it was a while before there were competitive things out there. And it went a long time internally really not working, where we were even building levels where the game just was not at all shippable with large fractions of the world disappearing, not being there, or being really slow in various parts of it. And it was this act of faith. It's like, I think I'm going to be able to fix this. I think I'm going to be able to make this work. And lots of stuff changed where the level designers would build something and then have to throw it away as something fundamental. And the kind of graphics or level technology changed. And so there were two big things that contributed to making it possible at that time frame, two new things. There was certainly hardcore optimized low-level assembly language. This was where I had hired Michael Abrash away from Microsoft. And he had been one of my early inspirations where that back in the soft disk days, the library of magazines that they had, some of my most treasured ones were Michael Abrash's articles in Dr. Dobbs' journal. And it was amazing after all of our success in Doom, we were able to kind of hit him up and say, hey, we'd like you to come work at id Software. And he was in this senior technical role at Microsoft. And he was on track for it. This was right when Microsoft was starting to take off. And I did eventually convince him that what we were doing was going to be really amazing with Quake. It was going to be something nobody had seen before. It had these aspects of what we were talking about. We had metaverse talk back then. We had read Snow Crash and we knew about this. And Michael was big into the science fiction. And we would talk about all that and kind of spin this tale. And it was some of the same conversations that we have today about the metaverse, about how you could have different areas linked together by portals, and you could have user generated content and changing out all of these things. So you really were creating the metaverse with Quake. We talked about things like, Duke used to be advertised as a virtual reality experience. That was the first wave of virtual reality was in the late 80s and early 90s. You had like the Lawnmower Man movie and you had Time and Newsweek talking about the early VPL headsets. And of course, that cratered so hard that people didn't want to look at virtual reality for decades afterwards where it was just, it was smoke and mirrors. It was not real in the sense that you could actually do something real and valuable with it. But still, we had that kind of common set of talking points. And we were talking about what these games could become and how you'd like to see people building all of these creative things. Because we were seeing an explosion of work with Doom at that time where people were doing amazingly cool things. Like we saw cooler levels that we had built coming out of the user community and then people finding ways to change the characters in different ways. And it was great. And we knew what we were doing in Quake was removing those last things. There was some quirky things with a couple of the data types that didn't work right for overriding and then the core thing about the programming model. And I was definitely going to hit all of those in Quake. But the graphics side of it was still, I knew what I wanted to do. And it was one of these hubris things where it's like, well, so far I've been able to kind of kick everything that I set out to go do. But Quake was definitely a little bit more than could be comfortably chewed at that point. But Michael was one of the strongest programmers and graphics programmers that I knew. And he was one of the people that I trusted to write assembly code better than I could. And there's a few people that I can point to about things like this where I'm a world class optimizer. I mean, I make things go fast, but I recognize there's a number of people that can write tighter assembly code, tighter SIMD code, or tighter CUDA code than I can write. My best strengths are a little bit more at the system level. I mean, I'm good at all of that, but the most leverage comes from making the decisions that are a little bit higher up, where you figure out how to change your large scale problems so that these lower level problems are easier to do, or it makes it possible to do them in a uniquely fast way. So most of my big wins in a lot of ways, from all the way from the early games through VR and the aerospace work that I'm doing, or did, and hopefully the AI work that I'm working on now, is finding an angle on something that means you trade off something that you maybe think you need, but it turns out you don't need. And by making a sacrifice in one place, you can get big advantages in another place. Is it clear at which level of the system those big advantages can be gained? It's not always clear. And that's why the thing that I try to make one of my core values, and I proselytize to a lot of people, is trying to know the entire stack, trying to see through everything that happens. And it's almost impossible on the web browser level of things, where there's so many levels to it, but you should at least understand what they all are, even if you can't understand all the performance characteristics at each level. But it goes all the way down to literally the hardware. So what is this chip capable of, and what is this software that you're writing capable of, and then what is this architecture you put on top of that, and the ecosystem around it, all the people that are working on it? So there are all these decisions, and they're never made in a globally optimal way. But sometimes you can drive a thread of global optimality through it. You can't look at everything, it's too complicated. But sometimes you can step back up and make a different decision. And we kind of went through this on the graphics side on Quake, where in some ways it was kind of bad, where Michael would spend his time writing. I'd rough out the basic routines, like, OK, here's our span rasterizer. And he would spend a month writing this beautiful cycle-optimized piece of assembly language that does what I asked it to do, and he did it faster than my original code would do, or probably what I would be able to do even if I had spent that month on it. But then we'd have some cases when I'd be like, OK, well, I figured out at this higher level instead of drawing these in a painter's order here, I do a span buffer, and it cuts out 30% or 40% of all of these pixels. But it means you need to rewrite kind of this interface of all of that. And I could tell that wore on him a little bit. But in the end, it was the right thing to do, where we wound up changing that rasterization approach and we wound up with a super-optimized assembly language core loop, and then a good system around it, which minimized how much that had to be called. And so in order to be able to do this kind of system-level thinking, whether we're talking about game development, aerospace, nuclear energy, AI, VR, you have to be able to understand the hardware, the low-level software, the high-level software, the design decisions, the whole thing, the full stack of it. Yeah. And that's where a lot of these things become possible. When you're bringing the future forward, I mean, there's a pace that everything just kind of glides towards, where we have a lot of progress that's happening at such a different – so many different ways you kind of slide towards progress just left to your own. Programs just get faster. For a while, it wasn't clear if they were going to get fatter more than they get, quicker than they get, faster, and it cancels out. But it is clear now in retrospect. Now, programs just get faster and have gotten faster for a long time. But if you want to do something like back at that original talking about scrolling games, say what, this needs to be five times faster. Well, we can wait six years and just – it'll naturally get that much faster at that time, or you come up with some really clever way of doing it. So there are those opportunities like that in a whole bunch of different areas. Now, most programmers don't need to be thinking about that. There's not that many – there's a lot of opportunities for this, but it's not everyone's workaday type stuff. So everyone doesn't have to know how all these things work. They don't have to know how their compiler works, how the processor chip manages cache eviction and all these low-level things. But sometimes there are powerful opportunities that you can look at and say, we can bring the future five years faster. We can do something that – wouldn't it be great if we could do this? Well, we can do it today if we make a certain set of decisions. And it is in some ways smoke and mirrors where you say it's like – Doom was a lot of smoke and mirrors where people thought it was more capable than it actually was, but we picked the right smoke and mirrors to deploy in the game where by doing this, people will think that it's more general. We are going to amaze them with what they've got here, and they won't notice that it doesn't do these other things. So smart decision-making at that point, that's where that kind of global, holistic, top-down view can work. And I'm really a strong believer that technology should be sitting at that table having those discussions because you do have cases where you say, well, you want to be the Jonathan Ivey or whatever, where it's a pure design solution. And that's – in some cases now where you truly have almost infinite resources, like if you're trying to do a scrolling game on the PC now, you don't even have to talk to a technology person. You can just have – any intern can make that go run as fast as it needs to there, and it can be completely design-based. But if you're trying to do something that's hard, either that can't be done for resources like VR on a mobile chipset or that we don't even know how to do yet, like artificial general intelligence, it's probably going to be a matter of coming at it from an angle. I mean, for AGI, we have some of the Hutter principles about how you can – there are theoretical ways that you can say this is the optimal learning algorithm that can solve everything, but it's completely impractical. You just can't do that. So clearly, you have to make some concessions for general intelligence, and nobody knows what the right ones are yet. So people are taking different angles of attack. I hope I've got something clever to come up with in that space. It's been surprising to me, and I think perhaps it is a principle of progress that smoke and mirrors somehow is the way you build the future. You kind of fake it till you make it, and you almost always make it, and I think that's going to be the way we achieve AGI. That's going to be the way we build consciousness into our machines. There's philosophers' debate about the Turing test is essentially about faking it till you make it. You start by faking it, and I think that always leads to making it because if you look at history – Most of the philosophers' arguments, as soon as people start talking about qualia and consciousness and Chinese rooms and things, it's like, I just check out. I just don't think there's any value in those conversations. It's just like, go ahead, tell me it's not going to work. I'm going to do my best to try to make it work anyways. I don't know if you work with legged robots. There's a bunch of these. They sure as heck make me feel like they're cautious in a certain way that's not here today, but you could see the kernel, it's like the flame, the beginnings of a flame. We don't have line of sight, but there's glimmerings of light in the distance for all of these things. Yeah, I'm hearing murmuring in a distant room. Well, let me ask you a human question here. You've, in the game design space, you've done a lot of incredible work throughout, but in terms of game design, you have changed the world and there's a few people around you that did the same. So famously, there's some animosity, there's much love, but there's some animosity between you and John Romero. What is at the core of that animosity and human tension? So there really hasn't been, for a long time, and even at the beginning, it's like, I did push Romero out of the company. And this is one of the things that I look back, if I could go back telling my younger self some advice about things, the original founding corporate structure of id Software really led to a bunch of problems. We started off with us as equal partners and we had a buy-sell agreement because we didn't want outsiders to be telling us what to do inside the company. And that did lead to a bunch of the problems where I was sitting here going, it's like, all right, I'm working harder than anyone. I'm doing these technologies nobody's done before, but we're all equal partners. And then I see somebody that's not working as hard and I, and it's, I mean, I can't say I was the most mature about that. I was 20 something years old and I am, and it did bother me when I'm like, everybody, okay, we need all pull together and we've done it before everybody. We know we can do this if we get together and we grind it all out, but not everybody wanted to do that for, for all time, you know, and I was the youngest one of the crowd there. I had different sets of kind of backgrounds and motivations and left at that point where it was, I'm all right, either everybody has to be contributing like up to this level or they need to get pushed out was not, I am, that was not a great situation. And I look back on it and know that we pushed people out of the company that could have contributed if there was a different framework for them. And the modern kind of Silicon Valley, like let your stock vest over a time period and maybe it's non-voting stock and all those different things. We knew nothing about any of that. I mean, we, we didn't know what we were doing in terms of corporate structure or anything. So if you think the framework was different, some of the human tension could have been a little bit, almost certainly would have. I am. I mean, I look back at that and, and it's like even trying to summon up in my mind. It's like, I know I was really, really angry about, I am, you know, like Romero not working as hard as I wanted him to work or not carrying his load on the design for quake and coming up with things there. But you know, he was definitely doing things. He made some of the best levels there. He was working with our, some of our external teams like Raven on the licensing side of things. But I am, you know, but there were differences of opinion about it, but he landed right on his feet. He went and he got $20 million from Eidos to go do Ion Storm and he got to do things his way and spun up three teams simultaneously because that was always one of the, one of the challenging things in it, id where we were doing these single string, one project after another. And I think some of them, you know, wanted to grow the company more. And I didn't because I knew people that were saying that, Oh, companies turned to shit when you got 50 employees. It's just a different world there. And I loved our little dozen people working on the projects, but you can look at it and say, well, business realities matter. It's like you're super successful here and we could, we could take a swing and a miss on something, but you do it a couple of times and you're out of luck. There's, there's a reason companies try to have multiple teams running at one time. And so I was in the end, something I didn't really appreciate back then. So if you look past all that, you did create some amazing things together. What did you love about John Romero? What did you respect and appreciate about him? What did you admire about him? What did you learn from him? When I met him, he was the coolest programmer I had ever met. I, you know, he had done all of this stuff. He had, he had made all of these games he had worked at. I, you know, one of the companies that I thought was the coolest at origin systems and he knew all this stuff. He made things happen fast and he could, it was also kind of a polymath about this where he could do, he made his own, he drew his own art. He made his own levels as well as, you know, he worked on sound design systems on top of actually being a really good programmer. And we had, you know, we went through a little, it was kind of fun where one of the early things that we did where there was kind of the young buck bit going in where I was, you know, the new guy and he was the kind of the, he was the top man programmer at the soft disk area. And eventually we had sort of a challenge over the weekend that we were going to like race to implement this game to port one of our PC games back down to the Apple too. And that was where we finally kind of became clear. It's like, okay, Carmack stands a little bit apart on the programming side of things. And but Romero then very gracefully moved into, well, he'll work on the tools, he'll work on the systems, do some of the game design stuff as well as contributing on starting to lead the design aspects of a lot of things. So he was enormously valuable in the early stuff and so much of Doom and even Quake have his stamp on it in a lot of ways. But I am, you know, he wasn't at the same level of focus that I brought to the work that we were doing there. And he really did, I, we hit such a degree of success that it was all in the press about that the rockstar game programmers. Yeah. I mean, it's the Beatles problem. Yeah. I mean, you know, he ate it up and he did personify, there was the whole game developers with, you know, with Ferraris that we had there. And I thought that, you know, that led to some, some challenges there. But so much of the, you know, the stuff that was great in the games did come from him. And I would certainly not take that away from him. And even after, after we parted ways and he took his swing with, with Eidos, in some ways he was like, he was ahead of the curve with mobile gaming as well, where one of his companies after Eidos was working on feature phone game development. And I wound up doing some of that just before the iPhone, crossing over into the iPhone phase there. And that was something that clearly did turn out to be a huge thing, although he was, he was too early for what he was working on at that time. You know, we've had pretty cordial relationships where I was happy to talk with him anytime I'd run into him at, at a conference. I haven't actually had some other people just say, it's like, oh, you shouldn't, you know, you shouldn't go over there and give him the time of day or felt that Masters of Doom was, I like portrayed, played things up in a way that I shouldn't be too happy with. But I'm, I'm okay with all of that. So you've still got love in your heart. Yeah. I mean, I just talked with him by like last year, I guess it was even this year about mentioning that I'm going off doing this AI stuff. I'm going big into artificial intelligence. And he had a bunch of ideas for how AI is going to play into gaming and, you know, asked if I was interested in collaborating. And it's not in line with what, with what I'm doing, but I do, you know, I wish almost everyone the best. I mean, I, I know I may not have parted on the best of terms with, I, you know, with some people, but I was thrilled to see Tom Hall. I writing VR games. Now he wrote, I worked on a game called Demio, which is really an awesome VR game. It's like Dungeons and Dragons. We all used to play Dungeons and Dragons together. That was one of the things that was what we did on Sundays in the early days, I would dungeon master and they'd all play. And I, you know, so it really made me smile seeing Tom involved with an RPG game in virtual reality. You were the CTO of Oculus VR since 2013, and maybe lessen your involvement a bit in 2019. Oculus was acquired by Facebook now meta in 2014. You've spoken brilliantly about both the low level details, the experimental design and the big picture vision of virtual reality. Let's, let me ask you about the, the metaverse, the big question here, both philosophically and technically. How hard is it to build the metaverse? What is the metaverse in your view? You started with discussing and thinking about Quake as a kind of a metaverse. As you think about it today, what is the metaverse? The thing that could create this compelling user value, this experience that will change the world and how hard is it to build it? So the term comes from Neil Stevenson's book, Snow Crash, which many of us had read back in the nineties. It was one of those kind of formative books, and there was this sense that the, the possibilities and kind of the, the freedom and unlimited capabilities to build a virtual world that, that does whatever you want, whatever you ask of it has been a powerful draw for generations of developers, you know, game developers specifically, and people that are thinking about more, more general purpose applications. So we were talking about that back in the Doom and Quake days about how do you wind up with an interconnected set of worlds that you kind of visit from one to another, and as web pages were becoming a thing, you start thinking about how, what is the interactive kind of 3D based equivalent of this? And there were a lot of really bad takes. You had like, uh, Vermont and virtual reality markup languages, and there's aspects like that, that, that came from people saying, well, what would, what kind of capabilities should we develop to, to enable this? And that kind of capability first work has usually not panned out very well. On the other hand, we have successful games that started with things like Doom and Quake and communities that formed around those, and whether it was server lists in the early days or literal portaling between different games, and then modern things that are on completely different order of magnitude, like Minecraft and Fortnite that have 100 million plus users. I still think that that's the right way to go to build the metaverse, is you build something that's amazing, that people love, and people wind up spending all their time in because it's awesome, and you expand the capabilities of that. So even if it's a very basic experience, if it's awesome— As long as people, Minecraft is, Minecraft is an amazing case study in so many things, and what's been able to be done with that is really enlightening. And there are other cases where, like right now, Roblox is basically a game construction kit aimed at kids, and that was a capability first play, and it's achieving scale that's on the same order of those things. So it's not impossible, but my preferred bet would be you make something amazing that people love and you make it better and better. And that's where I could say we could have gone back and followed a path kind of like that in the early days. If you just kind of take the same game, whether it's when Activision demonstrated that you could make Call of Duty every year, and not only is it not bad, people kind of love it, and it's very profitable. The idea that you could have taken something like that, take a great game, release a new version every year that lets the capabilities grow and expand, to start saying it's like, okay, it's a game about running around and shooting things, but now you can have, bring your media into it, you can add persistence of social signs of life or whatever you want to add to it. I still think that's quite a good position to take, and I think that while Meta is doing a bottoms-up capability approach with Horizon Worlds, where it's a fairly general purpose, creators can build whatever they want in their sort of thing, it's hard to compare and compete with something like Fortnite, which also has enormous amounts of creativity, even though it was not designed originally as a general purpose sort of thing. So there's, we have examples on both sides. Me personally, I would have bet on trying to do entertainment, valuable destination first and expanding from there. So can you imagine the thing that will be kind of, if we look back a couple of centuries from now, and you think about the experiences that marked the singularity, the transition where most of our world moved into virtual reality, what do you think those experiences will look like? So I do think it's going to be kind of like the way the web slowly took over, where you're the frog in the pot of water that's slowly heating up, where having lived through all of that, I remember when it was shocking to start seeing the first website address on a billboard, when you're like, hey, my computer world is infecting the real world. This is spreading out in some way. But there's still, when you look back and say, well, what made the web take off? And it wasn't a big bang sort of moment there. It was a bunch of little things that turned out not to even be the things that are relevant now that brought them into it. So I wonder if, I mean, like you said, you're not a historian. So maybe there's a historian out there that could really identify that moment, data-driven way. It could be like MySpace or something like that. Maybe the first major social network that really reached into non-geek world or something like that. I think that's kind of the fallacy of historians, though, looking for some of those kind of primary dominant causes where so many of these things are, like we see an exponential curve, but it's not because one thing is going exponential. It's because we have hundreds of little sigmoid curves overlapped on top of each other, and they just happen to keep adding up so that you've got something kind of going exponential at any given point. But no single one of them was the critical thing. There were dozens and dozens of things. I mean, seeing the transitions of stuff like as, obviously, MySpace giving way to other things, but even like blogging giving way to social media and getting resurrected in other guises and the things that happened there. And the memes with the dancing baby GIF or whatever, the all your base now belong to us, whatever those early memes that led to the modern memes and the humor on the different evolution of humor on the internet that I'm sure the historians will also write books about from the different websites that support, that create the infrastructure for that humor, like Reddit and all that kind of stuff. So people will go back and they will name firsts and critical moments, but it's probably going to be a poor approximation of what actually happens. And we've already seen like in the VR space where it didn't play out the way we thought it would in terms of what was going to be like when the modern era of VR basically started with my E3 demo of Doom 3 on the Rift prototype. So we're like first person shooters in VR match made in heaven, right? And that didn't work out that way at all. They have, you know, they have the most comfort problems with it. And then the most popular virtual reality app is Beat Saber, which nobody predicted back then. What's that make you like from first principles, if you were to like reverse engineer that, why are these like silly fun games the most? It actually makes very clear sense when you, when you analyze it from hindsight and look at the engineering reasons where it's not just that it was a magical quirky idea. It was something that played almost perfectly to what turned out to be the real strengths of VR, where the one thing that I really underestimated importance in VR was the importance of the controllers. You know, I was still thinking we could do a lot more with, with a game pad and just the amazingness of taking any existing game, being able to move your head around and look around that that was, you know, that was really amazing. But the controllers were super important. But the problem is so many things that you do with the controllers just suck. It feels like it breaks the illusion, like trying to pick up glasses with the controllers where you're like, Oh, use the grip button when you're kind of close and it'll snap into your hand. All of those things are unnatural actions that you do them and it's still part of the VR experience. But Beat Saber winds up I playing only to the strengths. It completely hides all the weaknesses of it because you are holding something in your hand, you keep a solid grip on it the whole time. It slices through things without ever bumping into things. You never get into the point where, you know, I'm knocking on this table, but in VR, my hand just goes right through it. So you've got something that slices through. So it's never your brain telling you, Oh, I should have hit something. You've got a lightsaber here. It's just you expect it to slice through everything. Audio and music turned out to be a really powerful aspect of virtual reality where you're blocking the world off and constructing the world around you. And being something that can run efficiently on even this relatively low powered hardware and can have a valuable loop in a small amount of time where a lot of modern games, you're supposed to sit down and play it for an hour just to get anywhere. Sometimes a new game takes an hour to get through the tutorial level. And that's not good for VR for a couple reasons. You do still have the comfort issues if you're moving around at all. You've also got just discomfort from the headset, battery lifespan on the mobile versions. So having things that do break down into three and four minute windows of play, that turns out to be very valuable from a gameplay standpoint. So it winds up being kind of a perfect storm of all of these things that are really good. It doesn't have any of the comfort problems. You're not navigating around. You're standing still. All the stuff flies at you. It has placed audio strengths. It adds the whole fitness in VR. Nobody was thinking about that back in the, at the beginning. And it turns out that that is an excellent daily fitness thing to be doing. If you go play an hour of Beat Saber or Supernatural or something, that is legit solid exercise. And it's more fun than doing it just about any other way there. So that's kind of the arcade stage of things. If I were to say with my experience with VR, the thing that I think is powerful is the, maybe it's not here yet, but the degree to which it is immersive in the way that Quake is immersive. It takes you to another world. For me, because I'm a fan of role playing games, the Elder Scrolls series, like Skyrim or even Daggerfall, it just takes you to another world. And when you're not in that world, you miss not being there. And then you just, you kind of want to stay there forever because life is shitty. And you just want to go to this place. The whole point of my pitch for VR is that there was a time when we were kind of asked to come up with like, what's your view about VR? And my pitch was that it should be better inside the headset than outside. It's the world as you want it. And everybody thought that was dystopian and like, that's like, oh, you're just going to forget about the world outside. And I don't get that mindset where the idea that if you can make the world better inside the headset than outside, you've just improved the person's life that has a headset that can wear it. And there are plenty of things that we just can't do for everyone in the real world. Everybody can't have Richard Branson's private island, but everyone can have a private VR island and it can have the things that they want on it. And there's a lot of these kind of rivalrous goods in the real world that VR can just be better at. We can do a lot of things like that that can be very, very rich. So yeah, I want the, I think it's going to be a positive thing, this world where people want to go back into their headset, where it can be better than somebody that's living in a tiny apartment can have a palatial estate in virtual reality. They can have all their friends from all over the world come over and visit them without everybody getting on a plane and meeting in some place and dealing with all the other logistics hassles. There is real value in the presence that you can get for remote meetings. It's all the little things that we need to sort out, but those are things that we have line of sight on. People that have been in a good VR meeting using workrooms where you can say, oh, that was better than a Zoom meeting. But of course, it's more of a hassle to get into it. Not everyone has the headset. Interoperability is worse. You can't have, you cap out at a certain number. There's all these things that need to be fixed, but that's one of those things you can look at and say, we know there's value there. We just need to really grind hard, file off all the rough edges and make that possible. So you do think we have line of sight because there's a reason like, I do this podcast in person for example. Doing it remotely, it's not the same, and if somebody were to ask me why it's not the same, I wouldn't be able to write down exactly why. But you're saying that it's possible, whatever the magic is for in-person interaction, that immersiveness of the experience, we are almost there. Yes. So it's a technical problem. So the idea of like, I'm doing a VR interview with someone. I'm not saying it's here right now, but you can see glimmers of what it should be, and we largely know what would need to be fixed and improved to, like you say, there's a difference between a remote interview doing a podcast over Zoom or something and face to face. There's that sense of presence, that immediacy, the super low latency responsiveness, being able to see all the subtle things there, just occupying the same field of view. And all of those are things that we absolutely can do in VR. And that simple case of a small meeting with a couple people, that's the much easier case than everybody thinks, the Ready Player One multiverse with a thousand people going across a huge bridge to amazing places. That's harder in a lot of other technical ways. Not to say we can't also do that, but that's further away and has more challenges. But this small thing about being able to have a meeting with one or a few people and have it feel real, feel like you're there, like you have the same interactions and talking with them, you get subtle cues as we start getting eye and face tracking and some of the other things on high end headsets. A lot of that is going to come over. And it doesn't have to be as good. This is an important thing that people miss, where there was a lot of people that, especially rich people, that would look at VR and say, it's like, oh, this just isn't that good. And I'd say it's like, well, you've already been courtside, backstage, and on pit row, and you've done all of these experiences because you get to do them in real life. But most people don't get to. And even if the experience is only half as good, if it's something that they never would have gotten to do before, it's still a very good thing. And as we can just, we can push that number up over time. It has a minimum viable value level when it does something that is valuable enough to people, as long as it's better inside the headset on any metric than it is outside, and people choose to go there, we're on the right path. And we have a value gradient that I'm just always hammering on. We can just follow this value gradient, just keep making things better, rather than going for that one, close your eyes, swing for the fences, kind of silver bullet approach. Well, I wonder if there's a value gradient for in-person meetings, because if you get that right, I mean, that would change the world. It doesn't need to, I mean, you don't need a Ready Player One. But I wonder if there's that value gradient you can follow along. Because if there is, and you follow it, then there'll be a certain like phase shift at a certain point where people will shift from Zoom to this. I wonder, what are the bottlenecks? Is it software, is it hardware? Is it all about latency? So I have big arguments internally about strategic things like that, where I like the next headset that's coming out, that we've made various announcements about is going to be a higher end headset, more expensive, more features, lots of people want to make those trade offs. We'll see what the market has to say about the exact trade offs we've made here. But if you want to replace Zoom, you need to have something that everybody has. And what's something- So you like cheaper? I like cheaper, because also lighter and cheaper wind up being a virtuous cycle there, where expensive and more features tends to also lead towards heavier, and it just kind of goes, it's like, let's add more features. The features are not, you know, they have physical presence and weight and draw from batteries and all of those things. So I've always favored a lower end, cheaper, faster approach. That's why I was always behind the mobile side of VR rather than the higher end PC headsets. And I think that's proven out well. But there's, ideally, we have a whole range of things. But if you've only got one or two things, it's important that those two things cover the scope that you think is most important. When we're in a world when it's like cell phones, and there's 50 of them on the market covering every conceivable ecological niche you want, that's going to be great. But we're not going to be there for a while. Where are the bottlenecks? Is it the hardware or the software? Yeah. So right now, you can play, you can get workrooms on Quest, and you can set up these things, and it's a pretty good experience. It's surprisingly good. I haven't tried it. It's surprisingly good. Yeah. The voice latency is better on that than, a lot better than a Zoom meeting. So you've got a better sense of immediacy there. The expressions that you get from the current hardware with just kind of your controllers and your head is pretty realistic feeling. You've got a pretty good sense of being there with someone. Are these like avatars of people? Like do you get to see their body? Yeah. And they're sitting around a table? Yeah. And it feels better than Zoom? Better than you'd expect for that. It is definitely, yeah, I'd say it's quite a bit better than Zoom when everything's working right, but there's still all the rough edges of... The reason Zoom became so successful is because they just nailed the usability of everything. It's high quality with a absolutely first rate experience. And we are not there yet with any of the VR stuff. I'm trying to push hard to get... I keep talking about it's like it needs to just be one click to make everything happen. And we're getting there in our home environment, not the whole workrooms application, but the main home where you can now kind of go over and click and invite. And it still winds up taking five times longer than it should, but we're getting close to that where you click there, they click on their button, and then they're sitting there in this good presence with you. But latencies need to get a lot better. User interface needs to get a lot better. Ubiquity of the headsets needs to get better. We need to have a hundred million of them out there just so that everybody knows somebody that uses this all the time. Well, I think it's a virtuous cycle because I do think the interface is the thing that makes or breaks this kind of revolution. It's so interesting how like you said one click, but it's also like how you achieve that one click. I don't know. What is... Can I ask a dark question? Maybe let's keep it outside of meta. But this is about meta, but also Google and big company. Are they able to do this kind of thing? It seems like, let me put on my cranky old man hat, is they seem to not do a good job of creating these user-friendly interfaces as they get bigger and bigger as a company. Google has created some of the greatest interfaces ever early on in its... Like creating Gmail, just so many brilliant interfaces and it just seems to be getting crappier and crappier at that. Same with meta, same with Microsoft. It seems to get worse and worse at that. I don't know what is it because you've become more conservative, careful, risk averse. Is that why? Can you speak to that? It's been really eye opening to me working inside a tech titan where I had my small companies and then we're acquired by a mid-size game publisher and then Oculus getting acquired by meta and meta has grown by a factor of many just in the eight years since the acquisition. So I did not have experience with this and it was interesting because I remember previously my benchmark for use of resources was some of the government programs I interacted with on the aerospace side. I remember thinking there was an Air Force program and they spent $50 million and they didn't launch anything. They didn't even build anything. It was just like they made a bunch of papers and had some parts in a warehouse and nothing came of it. It's like $50 million. I've had to radically recalibrate my sense of how much money can be spent with mediocre resources where on the plus side, VR has turned out, we've built pretty much exactly what... We just passed the 10 year mark then from my first demo of the Rift. If I could have said what I wanted to have, it would have been a standalone inside out tracked 4K resolution headset that I could still plug into a PC for high end rendering. And that's exactly what we've got on Quest 2 right now. Yes. First of all, let's pause on that with me being cranky and everything. What Meta achieved with Oculus and so on is incredible. I mean, when I thought about the future of VR, this is what I imagined in terms of hardware, I would say. And maybe in terms of the experience as well, but it's still not there somehow. On the one hand, we did kind of achieve it and win. And we've sold, we're a success right now. But the amount of resources that have gone into it, it winds up getting cluttered up in accounting where Mark did announce that they spent $10 billion a year on reality labs. Now reality labs covers a lot. VR was not the large part of it. We also had Portal and Spark and the big AR research efforts. And it's been expanding out to include AI and other things there where there's a lot going on there. But $10 billion was just a number that I had trouble processing. It's just I feel sick to my stomach thinking about that much money being spent. But that's how they demonstrate commitment to this where it's not more so than like, yeah, Google goes and cancels all of these projects, different things like that, while meta is really sticking with the funding of VR and AR is still further out with it. So there's something to be said for that. It's not just going to vanish, the work's going in. I just wish it could be, all those resources could be applied more effectively. Because I see all these cases, I point out these examples of how a third party that we're kind of competing with in various ways. There's a number of these examples, and they do work with a tenth of the people that we do internally. And a lot of it comes from, yes, there's the small company can just go do it, while in a big company, you do have to worry about, is there some SDK internally that you should be using because another team's making it? You have to have your cross-functional group meetups for different things. You do have more concerns about privacy or diversity and equity and safety of different things, parental issues, and things that a small startup company can just kind of, you know, cowboy off and do something interesting. And there's a lot more that is a problem that you have to pay attention to in the big companies. But I'm not willing to believe that we are within even a factor of two or four of what the efficiency could be. I am constantly kind of crying out for, it's like, we can do better than this. Yeah, and you wonder what the mechanisms to unlock that efficiency are. There is some sense in a large company that an individual engineer might not believe that they can change the world. Maybe you delegate a little bit of the responsibility to be the one who changes the world in a big company, I think. But the reality is, the world will get changed by a single engineer anyway. So whether inside Google or inside a startup, it doesn't matter. It's just like Google and Meta needs to help those engineers believe they're the ones that are going to decrease that latency. It'll take one John Carmack, the 20 year old Carmack that's inside Meta right now to change everything. And I try to point that out and push people. It's like, try to go ahead. And when you see some, because there is, you get the silo mentality where you're like, hey, I know something's not right over there, but I'm staying in my lane here. And there's a couple people that I can think about that are willing to just hop all over the place. And man, I treasure them, the people that are just willing to, they're fearless. They will go over and they will go rebuild the kernel and change this distribution and go in and hack the firmware over here to get something done right. And that is relatively rare. There's thousands of developers and you've got a small handful that are willing to operate at that level. And it's potentially risky for them. The politics are real in a lot of that. And I'm in the very much the privileged position of I'm more or less untouchable there where I've been dinged like twice for it's like you said something insensitive in that post and you should probably not say that. But for the most part, yes, I get away with every week I'm posting something pretty loud and opinionated internally. And I think that's useful for the company, but yeah, it's rare to have a position like that. And I can't necessarily offer advice for how someone can do that. Well, you could offer advice to a company in general to give a little bit of freedom for the young, wild, the wildest ideas come from the young minds. And so you need to give the young minds freedom to think big and wild and crazy. And for that, they have to be opinionated. They have to think crazy ideas and thoughts and pursue them with a full passion without being slowed down by bureaucracy or managers and all that kind of stuff. Obviously startups really empower that, but big companies could too. And that's a design challenge for big companies to see how can you enable that? How can you empower that? Because the big company, there are so many resources there and they do amazing things do get accomplished, but there's so much more that could come out of that. And I'm always hopeful. I'm an optimist in almost everything. I think things can get better. I think that they can improve things that you go through a path and you're learning kind of what does and doesn't work. And I'm not ready to be fatalistic about the kind of the outcome of any of that. Me neither. I know too many good people inside of those large companies that are incredible. You have a friendship with Elon Musk. Often when I talk to him, he'll bring up how incredible of an engineer and just a big picture thinker you are. He has a huge amount of respect for you. I just, I've never been a fly on the wall between the discussion between the two of you. I just wonder, is there something you guys debate, argue about, discuss? Is there some interesting problems that the two of you think about? You come from different worlds, maybe there's some intersection in aerospace, maybe there's some intersection in your new efforts in artificial intelligence in terms of thinking. Is there something interesting you could say about sort of the debates the two of you have? So I think in some ways we do have a kind of similar background where we're almost exactly the same age and we had kind of similar programming backgrounds on the personal computers and even some of the books that we would read and things that would kind of turn us into the people that we are today. I think there is a degree of sensibility similarities where we kind of call bullshit on the same things and kind of see the same opportunities in different technology. There's that sense of, I always talk about the speed of light solutions for things and he's thinking about kind of minimum manufacturing and engineering and operational standpoints for things. And so I mean I first met Elon right at the start of the aerospace era where I wasn't familiar with, I was still in my game dev bubble, I really wasn't familiar with all the startups that were going and being successful and what went on with PayPal and all of his different companies. But I met him as I was starting to do Armadillo Aerospace and he came down with kind of his right hand propulsion guy and we talked about rockets, what can we do with this? And it was kind of specific things about like how are our flight computers set up, what are different propellant options, what can happen with different ways of putting things together. And then in some ways he was certainly the biggest player in the sort of alt space community that was going on in the early 2000s. He was the most well funded, although his funding in the larger scheme of things compared to a like a NASA or something like that was really tiny. It was a lot more than I had at the time, but it was interesting. I had a point years later when I realized, okay, my financial resources at this point are basically what Elon's was when he went all in on SpaceX and Tesla. And I think in many corners he does not get the respect that he should about being a wealthy person that could just retire. And he went all in where he was really going to, you know, he could have gone bust and there's plenty of people. You look at the, you know, the sad athletes or entertainers that had all the money in the world and blew it. He could have been the business case example of that. But you know, the things that he was doing, space exploration, electrification of transportation, solar city type things, these are big world level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that because in contrast with myself, I was doing Armadillo Aerospace with this tightly bounded, it was John's crazy money at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed. And I was still hedging my bets working at id Software at the time when he had been really all in there. And I have a huge amount of respect for that. And people do not, the other thing I get irritated with is people would say, it's like, oh, Elon's just a business guy. You know, he just got like, he was gifted the money and he's just kind of investing in all of this when he was really deeply involved in a lot of the decisions. You know, not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection, propellant selection. And for years, he'd be kind of telling me, it's like, get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. It's like, liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this. And I, you know, and like the times that I've gone through the factories with him, we're talking very detailed things about like how this weld is made, you know, how this subassembly goes together. I, you know, what are like startup shutdown behaviors of the different things. So he is, you know, really in there at a very detailed level. And I think that he is the best modern example now of someone that tries to, that can effectively micromanage some decisions on things on both Tesla, you know, and SpaceX to some degree where he cares enough about it. I worry a lot that he's stretched too thin, that you get boring company and Neuralink and Twitter and all the other possible things there where I know I've got limits on how much I can pay attention to that I have to kind of box off different amounts of time. And I look back at like my aerospace side of things. It's like I did not go all in on that. I did not commit myself at a level that it would have taken to be successful there. And I, yeah, and it's kind of a weird thing just like having a discussion with him. He's the richest man in the world right now, but he, you know, he operates on, you know, on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on a technical side of things. So doing that systems level type of thinking where you can go to the low level details and go up high to the big picture. Do you think in aerospace arena in the next five, 10 years, do you think we're going to put a human on Mars, like what do you think is the interesting point? No, I do. In fact, I made a bet with someone with a group of people kind of this about whether boots on Mars by 2030. And this was kind of a fun, fun story because I was at an Intel sponsored event and we had a bunch of just world-class brilliant people. And we were talking about computing stuff, but the after dinner conversation was like, what are some other things, how are they going to go in the future? And one of the ones tossed up on the whiteboard was like boots on Mars by 2030. And most of the people in the room thought, yes, you know, I thought that like SpaceX is kicking ass. We've got all this possible stuff. Seems likely that it's going to go that way. And I said, no, I think less than 50% chance that it's going to make it there. And people were kind of like, oh, you know, why the pessimism or whatever? And of course, I'm an optimist at almost everything. But for me to be the one kind of outlier saying, no, I don't think so. Then I started saying some of the things I said, well, let's be concrete about it. Let's bet $10,000 that it's not going to happen. And this was really a startling thing to see that I, again, room full of brilliant people, but as soon as like money came on the line and they were like, do I want to put $10,000 – and I was not the richest person in the room. There were people much better off than I was, there's a spectrum. But as soon as they started thinking, it's like, oh, I could lose money by keeping my position right now. And all these engineers, they engaged their brain. They started thinking, it's like, okay, launch windows, launch delays, like how many times would it take to get this right? What historical precedents do we have? And then it mostly came down to, it's like, well, what about in transit by 2030? And then what about different things or would you go for 2032? But one of the people did go ahead and was optimistic enough to make a bet with me. So I have a $10,000 bet that by 2030, I think it's going to happen shortly thereafter. I think there will probably be infrastructure on Mars by 2030, but I don't think that we'll have humans on Mars on 2030. I think it's possible, but I think it's less than a 50% chance, so I felt safe making that bet. Well, I think you had an interesting point, correct me if I'm wrong, that's a dark one, that should perhaps help people appreciate Elon Musk, which is in this particular effort, Elon is critical to the success. SpaceX seems to be critical to humans on Mars by 2030 or thereabouts. So if something happens to Elon, then all of this collapses. And this is in contrast to the other $10,000 bet I made kind of recently, and that was self-driving cars at like a level five running around cities. And people have kind of nitpicked that, that we probably don't mean exactly level five, but the guy I'm having the bet with is we're going to be, we know what we mean about this. Jeff Atwood. Yeah, coding horror and stack overflow and all. But I mean, he doesn't think that people are going to be riding around in robo taxis in 2030 in major cities, just like you take an Uber now. And I think it will. You think it will. And I think, and the difference is everybody looks at this, it's like, oh, but Tesla has been wrong for years. They've been promising it for years and it's not here yet. And the reason this is different than the bet with Mars is Mars really is more than is comfortable a bet on Elon Musk. That is his thing. And he is really going to move heaven and earth to try to make that happen. Perhaps not even SpaceX. Perhaps just Elon Musk. Yeah, because if Elon went away and SpaceX went public and got a board of directors, there are more profitable things they could be doing than focusing on human presence on Mars. So this really is a sort of personal thing there. And in contrast with that, self-driving cars have a dozen credible companies working really hard. And while, yes, it's going slower than most people thought it would, betting against that is a bet against almost the entire world in terms of all of these companies that have all of these incentives. It's not just one guy's passion project. And I do think that it is solvable. Although I recognize it's not 100% chance because it's possible the long tail of self-driving problems winds up being an AGI complete problem. I think there's plenty of value to mine out of it with narrow AI. And I think that it's going to happen probably more so than people expect. But it's that whole sigmoid curve where you overestimate the near-term progress and you underestimate the long-term progress. And I think self-driving is going to be like that. And I think 2030 is still a pretty good bet. Yeah, unfortunately, self-driving is a problem that is safety critical, meaning that if you don't do it well, people get hurt. But the other side of that is people are terrible drivers. So it is not going to be. That's probably going to be the argument that gets it through is like we can save 10,000 lives a year by taking imperfect self-driving cars and letting them take over a lot of driving responsibilities. It's like, was it 30,000 people a year die in auto accidents right now in America. And a lot of those are preventable. And the problem is you'll have people that every time a Tesla crashes into something, you've got a bunch of people that literally have vested interests shorting Tesla to come out and make it the worst thing in the world. And people will be fighting against that. But optimist in me again, I think that we will have systems that are statistically safer than human drivers. And we will be saving thousands and thousands of lives every year when we can hand over more of those responsibilities to it. I do still think as a person who studied this problem very deeply from a human side as well, it's still an open problem how good slash bad humans are driving. It's a kind of funny thing we say about each other. Oh, humans suck at driving. Everybody except you, of course, like we think we're good at driving. But after really studying it, I think you start to notice, because I watched hundreds of hours of humans driving with the projects of this kind of thing. You've noticed that even with the distraction, even with everything else, humans are able to do some incredible things with the attention, even when you're just looking at a smartphone, just to get cues from the environment, to make last seconds decisions, to use instinctual type of decisions that actually save your ass time and time and time again. And are able to do that with so much uncertainty around you in such tricky dynamic environments. I don't know. I don't know exactly how hard is it to beat that kind of skill of common sense reasoning. This is one of those interesting things that there have been a lot of studies about how experts in their field usually underestimate the progress that's going to happen. Because an expert thinks about all the problems they deal with, and they're like, damn, I'm going to have a hard time solving all of this. And they filter out the fact that they are one expert in a field of thousands. And you think about, yeah, I can't do all of that. And you sometimes forget about the scope of the ecosystem that you're embedded in. And if you think back eight years, very specifically, the state of AI and machine learning, where it was that we had just gotten ResNets probably at that point. And you look at all the amazing magical things that have happened in eight years. And they do kind of seem to be happening a little faster in recent years also. And you project that eight more years into the future, where, again, I think there's a 50% chance we're going to have signs of life of AGI, which we can put through driver's ed if we need to, to actually build self-driving cars. And I think that the narrow systems are going to have real value demonstrated well before then. So signs of life in AGI. You've mentioned that, okay, first of all, you're one of the most brilliant people on this earth. You could be solving a number of different problems, as you've mentioned. Your mind was attracted to nuclear energy. Obviously, virtual reality with the metaverse is something you could have a tremendous impact on. I do want to say a quick thing about nuclear energy, where this is something that so precisely feels like aerospace before SpaceX, where from everything that I know about all of these, the physics of this stuff hasn't changed. And the reasons why things are expensive now are not fundamental. Everybody should be going into a really hard Elon Musk style at fission, economical fission, not fusion, where the fusion is the kind of the darling of people that want to go and do nuclear because it doesn't have the taint that fission has in a lot of people's minds. But it's an almost absurdly complex thing where nuclear fusion, as you look at the tokamaks or any of the things that people are building, and it's doing all of this infrastructure just at the end of the day to make something hot, that you can then turn into energy through a conventional power plant. And all of that work, which we think we've got line of sight on, but even if it comes out, then you have to do all of that immensely complex, expensive stuff just to make something hot, where nuclear fission is basically you put these two rocks together and they get hot all by themselves. That is just that much simpler. It's just orders of magnitude simpler. And the actual rocks, the refined uranium, is not very expensive. It's a couple percent of the cost of electricity. That's why I made that point where you could have something which was five times less efficient than current systems. And if the rest of the plant was a whole bunch cheaper, you could still be super, super valuable. So how much of the pie do you think could be solved by nuclear energy by fission? So how much could it become the primary source of energy on Earth? It could be most of it. The reserves of uranium as it stands now could not power the whole Earth. But you get into breeder reactors and thorium and things like that that you do for conventional fission. There is enough for everything. Now, I mean, solar photovoltaic has been amazing. One of my current projects is working on an off-grid system. And it's been fun just kind of, again, putting my hands on all the stripping the wires and wiring things together and doing all of that. And just having followed that a little bit from the outside over the last couple decades, there's been semiconductor-like magical progress in what's going on there. So I'm all for all of that. But it doesn't solve everything. And nuclear really still does seem like the smart money bet for what you should be getting for baseband on a lot of things. And solar may be cheaper for peaking over air conditioning loads during the summer and things that you can push around in different ways. But it's one of those things that's – it's just strange how we've had the technology sitting there, but these non-technical reasons on the social optics of it has been this major forcing function for something that really should be at the cornerstone of all of the world's concerns with energy. It's interesting how the non-technical factors have really dominated something that is so fundamental to the existence of the human race as we know it today. And much of the troubles of the world, including wars in different parts of the world, like Ukraine, is energy-based. And it's just sitting right there to be solved. That said, I mean, to me personally, I think it's clear that if AGI were to be achieved, that would change the course of human history. So, AGI-wise, I was making this decision about what do I want to focus on after VR. And I'm still working on VR regularly. I spend a day a week kind of consulting with Meta. And Boz styles me the consulting CTO. It's kind of like the Sherlock Holmes that comes in and consults on some of the specific tough issues. And I'm still pretty passionate about all of that. But I have been figuring out how to compartmentalize and force that into a smaller box to work on some other things. And I did come down to this decision between working on economical nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And the fission side of things, I've got a bunch of interesting things going that way. But it would take – that would be a fairly big project thing to do. I don't think it needs to be as big as people expect. I do think something original SpaceX-sized, you build it, power your building off of it, and then the government, I think, will come around to what you need to – everybody loves an existence proof. I think it's possible. Somebody should be doing this. But it's going to involve some politics. It's going to involve decent-sized teams and a bunch of this cross-functional stuff that I don't love. Now, the artificial general intelligence side of things, it seems to me like this is the highest leverage moment for potentially a single individual, potentially in the history of the world, where the things that we know about the brain, about what we can do with artificial intelligence, nobody can say absolutely on any of these things. But I am not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. This is code that conceivably one individual could write, unlike writing a new web browser or operating system. And based on the progress that AI has – machine learning has made in the recent decade, it's likely that the important things that we don't know are relatively simple. There's probably a handful of things. And my bet is that I think there's less than six key insights that need to be made. Each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don't know what they are. But when they're put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, that we can make something that behaves like a human being or like a living creature and that can then be educated in whatever ways that we need to get to the point where we can have universal remote workers, where anything that somebody does mediated by a computer and doesn't require physical interaction that an AGI will be able to do. We can already simulate the equivalent of the Zoom meetings with avatars and synthetic deep fakes and whatnot. We can definitely do that. We have superhuman capabilities on any narrow thing that we can formalize and make a loss function for. But there's things we don't know how to do now. But I don't think they are unapproachably hard. Now that's incredibly hubristic to say that it's like, but I think that what I said a couple years ago is a 50% chance that somewhere there will be signs of life of AGI in 2030. And I've probably increased that slightly. I may be at 55, 60% now, because I do think there's a little sense of acceleration there. So I wonder what the, and by the way, you also written that I bet with hindsight, we will find that clear antecedents of all the critical remaining steps for AGI are already buried somewhere in the vast literature of today. So the ideas are already there. I think that's likely the case. One of the things that appeals to so many people, including me about the promise of AGI is we know that we're only drinking from a straw from the fire hose of all the information out there. I mean, you look at just in a very narrowly bounded field like machine learning, like you can't read all the papers that come out all the time. You can't go back and read all the clever things that people did in the 90s or earlier that people have forgotten about because they didn't pan out at the time when they were trying to do them with 12 neurons. So this idea that, yeah, I think there are gems buried in some of the older literature that was not the path taken by everything. You can see a kind of herd mentality on the things that happen right now. It's almost funny to see, it's like, oh, Google does something and OpenAI does something, Meta does something. They're the same people that all talk to each other and they're all one-upping each other and they're all capable of implementing each other's work given a month or two after somebody has an announcement of that. But there's a whole world of possible approaches to machine learning. And I think that we probably will in hindsight go back and see it's like, yeah, that was kind of clearly predicted by this early paper here. And this turns out that if you do this and this and take this result from animal training and this thing from neuroscience over here and put it together and set up this curriculum for them to learn in, that that's kind of what it took. You don't have too many people now that are still saying it's not possible or it's going to take hundreds of years. And 10 years ago, you would get a collection of experts and you would have a decent chunk on the margin that either say not possible or a couple hundred years, might be centuries. And the median estimate would be like 50, 70 years. And it's been coming down. And I know with me saying eight years for something, that still puts me on the optimistic side, but it's not crazy out in the fringes. And just being able to look at that at a meta level about the trend of the predictions going down there, the idea that something could be happening relatively soon. Now I do not believe in fast takeoffs. That's one of the safety issues that people say it's like, oh, it's going to go, boom, and the AI is going to take over the world. There's a lot of reasons I don't think that's a credible position. And I think that we will go from a point where we start seeing things that credibly look like animals behaviors and have a human voice box wired into them. It's like I tried to get Elon to say it's like your pig at Neuralink, give it a human voice box and let it start learning human words. I think that, you know, I think animal intelligence is closer to human intelligence than a lot of people like to think. And I think that culture and modalities of IO make the gulf seem a lot bigger than it actually is. There's just that smooth spectrum of how the brain developed and cortexes and scaling of different things going on there. Cultural modalities of IO. Yes, languages, the sort of loss in translation conceals a lot of intelligence. So when you think about signs of life for AGI, you're thinking about human interpretable signs. So the example I give, if we get to the point where you've got a learning disabled toddler, some kind of real special needs child that can still interact with their favorite TV show and video game and can be trained and learn in some appreciably human-like way. At that point, you can deploy an army of engineers, cognitive scientists, developmental education people. And you've got so many advantages there, unlike real education where you can do rollbacks and A-B testing and you can find a golden path through a curriculum of different things. If you get to that point, learning disabled toddler, I think that it's going to be a done deal. But do you think we'll know it when we see it? So there's been a lot of really interesting general learning progress from DeepMind, OpenAI a little bit too. I tend to believe that Tesla Autopilot deserves a lot more credit than it's getting for making progress on the general, on doing the multitask learning thing and increasing the number of tasks and automating that process of sort of learning from the edge, discovering the edge cases and learning from the edge cases. That is, it's really approaching from a different angle, the general learning problem of AGI. But the more clear approach comes from DeepMind where you have these kind of game situations and you build systems there. But I don't know, people seem to be quite- There will always be people that just won't believe it. And I fundamentally don't care. I mean, I don't care if they don't believe it. When it starts doing people's jobs and I mean, I don't care about the philosophical zombie argument at all. Absolutely. But do you think you will notice that something special has happened here? Because to me, I've been noticing a lot of special things. I think a lot of credit should go to DeepMind for AlphaZero. That was truly special. The self-play mechanisms achieve, sort of solve problems that used to be thought unsolvable like the game of Go. Also I mean, protein folding, starting to get into that space where learning is doing- At first it wasn't end-to-end learning and now it's end-to-end learning of a very difficult, previously thought unsolvable problem of protein folding. And so yeah, where do you think would be a really magical moment for you? There have been incredible things happening in recent years. Like you say, all of the things from DeepMind and OpenAI that have been huge showpiece things. But when you really get down to it and you read the papers and you look at the way the models are going, it's still like a feed forward. You push something in, something comes out on the end. I mean, maybe there's diffusion models or Monte Carlo tree rollouts and different things going on, but it's not a being. It's not close to a being that's going through a lifelong learning process. You want something that kind of gives signs of a being. What's the difference between a neural network, a feed forward neural network and a being? Fundamentally, the brain is a recurrent neural network generating an action policy. I mean, it's implemented on a biological substrate. And it's interesting thinking about things like that where we know fundamentally the brain is not a convolutional neural network or a transformer. Those are specialized things that are very valuable for what we're doing, but it's not the way the brain's doing. Now, I do think consciousness and AI in general is a substrate independent mechanism where it doesn't have to be implemented the way the brain is. But if you've only got one existence proof, there's certainly some value in caring about what it says and does. And so the idea that anything that can be done with a narrow AI that you can quantify up a loss function for or reward mechanism, you're almost certainly going to be able to produce something that's more resource effective to train and deploy and use in an inference mode, train a whole lot using an inference. But a living being is going to be something that's a continuous lifelong learned task agnostic thing. And while a lot of- So the lifelong learning is really important too. And the long term memory. So memory is a big weird part of that puzzle. We've got, again, I have all the respect in the world for the amazing things that are being done now, but sometimes they can be taken a little bit out of context with things like there's some smoke and mirrors going on, like the Gato, the recent work, the multitask learning stuff. It's amazing that it's one model that plays all the Atari games, as well as doing all of these other things. But of course, it didn't learn to do all of those. It was instructed in doing that by other reinforcement learners going through and doing that. And even in the case of all the games, it's still going with a specific hand-coded reward function in each of those Atari games, where it's not that- It just wants to spend its summer afternoon playing Atari because that's the most interesting thing for it. So it's, again, not a general- It's not learning the way humans learn. And there's, I believe, a lot of things that are challenging to make a loss function for that you can train through these existing conventional things. We're going to chip away at all the things that people do that we can turn into narrow AI problems. And billions of, probably trillions of dollars of value are going to be created by that. But there's still going to be a set of things. And we've got questionable cases like the self-driving car, where it's possible, it's not my bet, but it's plausible that the long tail could be problematic enough that that really does require a full-on artificial general intelligence. The counter argument is that data solves almost everything. Everything is an interpolation problem if you have enough data. And Tesla may be able to get enough data from all of their deployed stuff to be able to work like that, but maybe not. And there are all the other problems about, like, say you want to have a strategy meeting, and you want to go ahead and bring in all of your remote workers and your consultants, and you want a world where some of those could be AIs that are talking and interacting with you in an area that is too murky to have a crisp loss function. But they still have things that on some level, they're rewarded on some internal level for building a valuable to humans kind of life and ability to interact with things. See, I still think that self-driving cars, solving that problem will take us very far towards AGI. You might not need AGI, but I am really inspired by what Autopilot is doing. Waymo, so some of the other companies, I think Waymo leads the way there is also really interesting, but they don't have quite as ambitious of an effort in terms of learning-based, sort of data-hungry approach to driving, which I think is very close to the kind of thing that would take us far towards AGI. Yeah, and it's a funny thing because as far as I can tell, Elon is completely serious about all of his concerns about AGI being an existential threat, and I tried to draw him out to talk about AI, and he just didn't want to. I think that I get that little fatalistic sense from him. It's weird because his company could very well be the leading company leading towards a lot of that, where Tesla being a super pragmatic company that's doing things because they really want to solve this actual problem. It's a different vibe than the research-oriented companies where it's a great time to be an AI researcher, you've got your pick of trillion-dollar companies that will pay you to kind of work on the problems you're interested in, but that's not necessarily driving hard towards the core problem of AGI as something that's going to produce a lot of value by doing things that people currently do or would like to do. I mean, I have a million questions to you about your ideas about AGI, but do you think it needs to be embodied? Do you think it needs to have a body to start to notice the signs of life and to develop the kind of system that's able to reason, perceive the world in the way that an AGI should and act in the world? So should we be thinking about robots or can this be achieved in a purely digital system? I have a clear opinion on that, and that's that no, it does not need to be embodied in the physical world, where you could say most of my career is about making simulated virtual worlds in games or virtual reality. And so on a fundamental level, I believe that you can make a simulated environment that provides much of the value of what the real environment does, and restricting yourself to operating at real time in the physical world with physical objects I think is an enormous handicap. I mean, that's one of the real lessons driven home by all my aerospace work is that reality is a bitch in so many ways there. Dealing with all the mechanical components, like everything fails, Murphy's Law, even if you've done it right before on your fifth one, it might come out differently. So yeah, I think that anybody that is all in on the embodied aspect of it, they are tying a huge weight to their ankles. And I think that I would almost count them out. Anybody that's making that a cornerstone of their belief about it, I would almost write them off as being worried about them getting to AGI first. I was very surprised that Elon's big on the humanoid robots. I mean, like the NASA Robonaut stuff was always almost a gag line, like, what are you doing, people? Well, that's very interesting because he has a very pragmatic view of that. That's just a way to solve a particular problem in a factory. Now I do think that once you have an AGI, robotic bodies, humanoid bodies are going to be enormously valuable. I just don't think they're helpful getting to AGI. Well, he has a very sort of practical view, which I disagree with and I argue with him. But there's a practical view that there's, you know, you could transfer the problem of driving to the problem of robotic manipulation because so much of it is perception. It's perception and action, and it's just a different context. And so you can apply all the same kind of data engine learning processes to a different environment. So why not apply it to the humanoid robot environment? But I think, I do think that there's a certain magic to the embodied robot. That may be the thing that finally convinces people. Yes. But again, I don't really care that much about convincing people. The world that I'm looking towards is, you know, you go to the website and say, I want five Frank 1As to, you know, to work on my team today. And they all spin up and they start showing up in your Zoom meetings. To push back, but also to agree with you. But first to push back, I do think you need to convince people for them to welcome that thing into their life. I think there's enough businesses that operate on an objective kind of profit loss sort of basis that, I mean, if you look at how many things, again, talking about the world as an evolutionary space there, when you do have free markets and you have entrepreneurs, you are going to have people that are going to be willing to go out and try whatever crazy things. And when it proves to be beneficial, you know, there's fast followers in all sorts of places. Yeah. And you're saying that, I mean, you know, Quake and VR is a kind of embodiment, but just in a digital world. And if you're able to demonstrate, if you're able to do something productive in that kind of digital reality, then AGI doesn't need to have a body. Yeah. It's like one of the really practical technical questions that I kind of keep arguing with myself over. If you're doing a training and learning and you've got, like you can watch Sesame Street and you can play Master System games or something, is it enough to have just a video feed that is that video coming in? Or should it literally be on a virtual TV set in a virtual room, even if it's, you know, a simple room just to have that sense of you're looking at a 2D projection on a screen versus having the screen beamed directly into your retinas. And I, you know, I think it's possible to maybe get past some of these signs of life of things with the just kind of projected directly into the receptor fields. But eventually for more kind of human emotional connection for things, probably having some VR room with a lot of screens in it for the AI to be learning in is likely helpful. And maybe a world of different AIs interacting with each other. Self-play I do think is one of the critical things where socialization wise, one of the other limitations I set for myself thinking about these is I need something that is at least potentially real time because I want, it's nice you can always slow down time, you can run on a subscale system and test an algorithm at some lower level. And if you've got extra horsepower, running it faster than real time is a great thing. But I want to be able to have the AIs either socially interact with each other or critically with actual people. You're sort of child development psychiatrist that comes in and interacts and does the good boy bad boy sort of thing as they're going through and exploring different things. And it's nice to, I come back to the value of constraints in a lot of ways. And if I say, well, one of my constraints is real time operation. I mean, it might still be a huge data center full of computers, but it should be able to interact on a Zoom meeting with people. And that's how you also do start convincing people, even if it's not a robot body moving around, which eventually gets to irrefutable levels. But if you can go ahead and not just type back and forth to a GPT bot on something, but you're literally talking to them in an embodied over Zoom form and working through problems with them or exploring situations, having conversations that are fully stateful and learned. I think that that's a valuable thing. So I do keep all of my eyes on things that can be implemented within sort of that 30 frames per second kind of work. And I think that's feasible. Do you think the most compelling experiences that first will be for pleasure or for business as they ask in airports? So meaning is, is it if it's interacting with AI agents, will it be sort of like friends, entertainment, almost like a therapist or whatever, that kind of interaction? Or is it in the business setting, something like you said, brainstorming different ideas, sort of, this is all a different formulation of kind of a Turing test or the spirit of the original Turing test. Where do you think the biggest benefit will first come? So it's going to start off hugely expensive. I mean, you're going to, if we're still all guessing about what compute is going to be necessary, I fall on the side of, I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion neurons, a hundred trillion synapses. I don't think those all need to be weights. I don't think we need models that are quite that big evaluated quite that often. No, I base that on, we've got reasonable estimates of what some parts of the brain do. We don't have the neocortex formula, but we kind of get some of the other sensory processing and it doesn't feel like we need to, we can simulate that in computers for less weights. But still, it's probably going to be thousands of GPUs to be running a human level AGI. Depending on how it's implemented, that might give you sort of a clan of 128 kind of run in batch people, depending on whether there's sparsity in the way the weights and things are set up. If it is a reasonably dense thing, then just the memory bandwidth trade-offs means you get 128 of them at the same time. And either it's all feeding together, learning in parallel, or kind of all running together, kind of talking to a bunch of people. But still, if you've got thousands of GPUs necessary to run these things, it's going to be kind of expensive where it might start off $1,000 an hour for your, even post-development or something for that, which would be something that you would only use for a business, something where you think they're going to help you make a strategic decision or point out something super important. But I also am completely confident that we will have another factor of 1,000 in cost performance increase in AGI type calculations. Not in general computing necessarily, but there's so much more that we can do with packaging, making those right trade-offs, all those same types of things that in the next couple decades, 1,000x easy. And then you're down to $1 an hour. And then you're kind of like, well, I should have an entourage of AIs that are following me around, helping me out on anything that I want them to do. That's one interesting trajectory, but I'll push back. So in that case, if you want to pay thousands of dollars, it should actually provide some value. I think it's easier for cheaper to provide value via a dumb AI that will take us towards AGI to just have a friend. I think there's an ocean of loneliness in the world. And I think an effective friend that doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be intelligent, that has to be empathic, having emotional intelligence, having ability to remember things, having ability to listen. Most of us don't listen to each other. One of the things that love and when you care about somebody, when you love somebody is when you listen. And that is something we treasure about each other. And if an AI can do that kind of thing, I think that provides a huge amount of value and very importantly, provides value in its ability to listen and understand versus provide really good advice. I think providing really good advice is another next level step that would, I think it's just easier to do companionship. I wouldn't disagree. I mean, I think that there's very few things that I would argue can't be reduced to some kind of a narrow AI. I think we can do a trillion dollars of value easily and all the things that can be done there. And a lot of it can be done with smoke and mirrors without having to go the whole thing. I mean, there's going to be the equivalent of the doom version for the AGI that's not really AGI, it's all smoke and mirrors, but it happens to do enough valuable things that it's enormously useful and valuable to people. But at some point, you do want to get to the point where you have the fully general thing and you stop making bespoke specialized systems for each thing and you wind up start using the higher level language instead of writing everything in assembly language. What about consciousness? The C word, do you think that's fundamental to solving AGI or is it a quirk of human cognition? So I think most of the arguments about consciousness don't have a whole lot of merit. I think that consciousness is kind of the way the brain feels when it's operating. And this idea that, you know, I do generally subscribe to sort of the pandemonium theories of consciousness where there's all these things bubbling around. And I think of them as kind of slightly randomized, sparse distributed memory bit strings of things that are kind of happening, recalling different associative memories. And eventually you get some level of consensus and it bubbles up to the point of being a conscious thought there. And the little bits of stochasticity that are sitting on in this as it cycles between different things and recalls different memory, that's largely our imagination and creativity. So I don't think there's anything deeply magical about it, certainly not symbolic. I think it is generally the flow of these associations drawn up with stochastic noise overlaid on top of them. I think so much of that is like it depends on what you happen to have in your field of view as some other thought was occurring to you that overlay and blend into the next key that queries your memory for things. And that kind of determines how, you know, how your chain of consciousness goes. So that's kind of the qualia, the subjective experience of it is not essential for intelligence. I don't think so. I don't think there's anything really important there. What about some other human qualities like fear of mortality and stuff like that? Like the fact that this ride ends, is that important? Like you talk so much about this conversation about the value of deadlines and constraints. Do you think that's important for intelligence? That's actually a super interesting angle that I don't usually take on that about has death being a deadline that forces you to make better decisions? Because I have heard people talk about how if you have immortality, people are going to stop trying and working on things because they've got all the time in the world. But I would say that I don't expect it to be a super critical thing that a sense of mortality and death, impending death is necessary there. Because those are things that they do wind up providing reward signals to us. And we will be in control of the reward signals. And there will have to be something fundamental that causes, that engenders curiosity and goal setting and all of that. Something is going to play in there at the reward level. Whether it's positive or negative or both. I don't have any strong opinions on exactly what it's going to be. But that's that type of thing where I doubt that might be one of those half dozen key things that has to be sorted out on exactly what the master reward that's the meta reward over all of the local task specific rewards have to be. That could be that big negative reward of death. Maybe not death, but ability to walk away from an interaction. So it bothers me when people treat AI systems like servants. So it doesn't bother me. But I mean it really is drawing the line between what an AI system could be. It's limiting the possibility of what an AI system could be. It's treating them as justice tools. Now that's of course from a narrow AI perspective. There's so many problems that narrow AI could solve. Just like you said in its form of a tool. But it could also be a being. Which is much more than a tool. And to become a being you have to respect that thing for being a being. And for that it has to be able to have to make its own decisions. To walk away. To say I had enough of you. I would like to break up with you now. You've not treated me well and I would like to move on. So I think that actually that choice to end things is powerful. So a couple of things on that. So on the one hand it is kind of disturbing when you see people being like people that are mean to robots and mean to Alexa and whatever. And that seems to speak badly about humanity. But there's also the exact opposite side of that where you have so many people that imbue humanity in inanimate objects or things that are toys or that are relatively limited. So I think there may even be more danger about people putting more emotional investment into a lot of these proto-AIs in different ways. And then the AI would manipulate that. But as far as like the AI ethnic sides of things, I really stay away from any of those discussions or even really thinking about it. It's similar with the safety things where I think it's just premature. And there's a certain class of people that enjoy thinking about impractical things, things that are not in the world and of pragmatic effect around you. And I think that again because I don't think there's going to be a fast takeoff. I think we actually will have time to have these debates when we know the shape of what we're debating. And some people do take a principled approach that they think it's going to go too fast that you really do need to get ahead of it, that you need to be thinking about this because we have slow processes of coming to any kind of consensus or even coming up with ideas about this. And maybe that's true. I wouldn't put any of my money or funding into something like that because I don't think it's a problem yet. And I think that we will have these signs of life when we've got our learning disabled toddler, we should really start talking about some of the safety and ethics issues, but probably not before then. Can you elaborate briefly about why you don't think there'll be a fast takeoff? Is there some deep intuition you have about it? Is it because it's grounded in the physical world or why? Yeah, so it is my belief that we're going to start off with something that requires thousands of GPUs. And I don't know if you've tried to go get a thousand GPU instance on a cloud anytime recently, but these are not things that you can just go spin up hundreds of. There are real challenges to, I mean, these things are going to take data centers and data centers take years to build. And the last few years, we've seen a few of them kind of coming up, going in different places. They're big engineering efforts. You can hear people bemoan about the fact that I know the network was wired all wrong and it took them a month to go unwire it and rewire it the right way. These aren't things that you can just magic into existence. And the ideas of, like the old tropes about it's going to escape onto the internet and take over other systems. The fast takeoff ones are clearly nonsense because you just can't open TCP connections above a certain rate, no matter how smart you are. Even if you have perfect hacking ability, that take over the world in an instant sort of thing just isn't plausible at all. And even if you had access to all of the resources, these are going to be specialized systems where you're going to wind up with something that is architected around exactly this chip with this interconnect. And it's not just going to be able to be plopped somewhere else. Now interestingly, it is going to be something that the entire code for all of it will easily fit on a thumb drive. That's total spy movie thriller sorts of things where you could have, hey, we cracked the secret AGI and it fits on this thumb drive and anyone could steal it. Now they're still going to have to build the right data center to deploy it and have the right kind of life experience curriculum to take it up to the point where it's valuable. But the real core of it, the magic that's going to happen there is going to be very small. You know, it's again, tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. It is possible to imagine a world, as you mentioned in the spy thriller view, if it's just a few lines of code, we can imagine a world where the surface of computation is growing, maybe growing exponentially, meaning there's, you know, the refrigerators start getting a GPU and just, first of all, the smartphones, the billions of smartphones. But maybe if there become highways through which code can spread across the entirety of the computation surface, then you don't any longer have to book AWS, GPUs. Real fundamental issues there. When you start getting down to taking an actual problem and putting it on an abstract machine like that, that has not worked out well in practice. And the idea that there was always, like, it's always been easy to come up with ways to get compute faster, to say more flops or more, more giga ops or whatever there. That's usually the easy part. But you then have interconnect and then memory for what goes into it. And when you talk about saying, well, cell phones, well, you're limited to, like, a 5G connection or something on that. And if you say how, if you take your calculation and you factor it across a million cell phones instead of a thousand GPUs in a warehouse, you might be able to have some kind of a substrate like that, but it could be operating then at one one thousandth the speed. And so, yes, you could get you could have an AGI working there, but it wouldn't be a real time AGI. It would be something that is operating at really a snail's pace, much, much slower than kind of human level thought for things. I'm not worried about that problem. You're transferring the problem into the interconnect, the communication, the shared memory, the collective intelligence aspect of it, which is extremely difficult. I mean, it's back to the very earliest days of supercomputers. You still have the balance between bandwidth, storage and computation. And sometimes they're easier to get one or the other. But it's been remarkably constant across all those years that you still need all three. What do your efforts now, you mentioned to me that you're really committing to AI at this stage. What do you see your life in the next few months, years look like? What do you hope to achieve here? So I literally just this week signed a term sheet to take some investment money for my company where the last two years I had backed off from meta and I was still doing my consulting CTO role there. But I had styled it as I was going to take the Victorian gentleman scientist route where I was going to be the wealthy person that was going to go pursue science and learn about this and do experiments. And honestly, I'm surprised there aren't more people like that, that are like me, technical people that made a bunch of money and are interested in some of these, possibly the biggest leverage point in human history. I mean, I know of, I've heard of a couple organizations that are basically led by one rich techie guy that gets a few people around him to try to work on this. But I'm surprised that there's not more, that there aren't like a dozen of them. I mean, maybe people are still think that it's an unapproachable problem, that it's kind of beyond their ability to get a wrench on and have some effect on like whatever startups they've run before. But that was my kind of, like with all the stuff I've learned, whether it's gaming, aerospace, whatever, I go through a larval phase where I'm like, okay, I'm sucking up all of this information trying to see is this something that I can actually do? Is this something that's practical to devote a large chunk of my life to? And I've gone through that with the AI machine learning space of things. And I think I've got my arms around it. I've got the measure of it where some of the most brilliant people in the world are working on this problem, but nobody knows exactly the path that it's going on. We're throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks. But I have, you know, another interesting thing, just learning about all of this, the contingency of your path to knowledge and talking about the associations and the context that you have with them, where people that learn in the same path will have similar thought processes. And I think it's useful that I come at this from a different background, a different history than the people that have had the largely academic backgrounds for this, where I have huge blind spots that they could easily point out, but I have a different set of experiences in history and approaches to problems and systems engineering that, you know, that might turn out to be useful. And I can afford to take that bet where I'm not going to be destitute. I have enough money to fund myself working on this for the rest of my life. But what I was finding is that I was still not committing, where I had a foot firmly in the VR and meta side of things, where in theory I've got a very nice position there. I only have to work one day a week for my consulting role, but I was engaging every day. I'd be on my computers there, I'd be going and checking the workplace and notes and testing different things and communicating with people. But I did make the decision recently that, no, I'm going to get serious. I'm still going to keep my ties with meta, but I am seriously going for the AGI side of things. And it's actually a really interesting point, because a lot of the machine learning, the AI community is quite large, but really, basically almost everybody has taken the same trajectory. It's a trajectory through life in that community. And it's so interesting to have somebody like you, with a fundamentally different trajectory. And that's where the big solutions can come, because there is a kind of silo. And it is a bunch of people kind of following the same kind of set of ideas. And I was really worried that I didn't want to come off as an arrogant outsider for things, where I have all the respect in the world for the work that's... It's been a miracle decade. We're in the midst of a scientific revolution happening now. And everybody doing this is... These are the Einsteins and Bohrs and whatever's of our modern era. And I was really happy to see that the people that I sat down and talked with, everybody does seem to really be quite great about, just happy to talk about things, willing to acknowledge that we don't know what we're doing. We're figuring it out as we go along. And I've got a huge debt on this, where this all really started for me, because Sam Altman basically tried to recruit me to open AI. And it was at a point when I didn't know anything about what was really going on in machine learning. And in fact, it's funny how the first time you reached out to me, it's like four years ago for your AI podcast. Yeah, for people who are listening to this should know that... First of all, obviously, I've been a huge fan of yours for the longest time, but we've agreed to talk like four years ago, back when this was called the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. We wanted to do a thing and you said yes. And I said, it's like, I don't know anything about modern AI. That's right. I said, I could kind of take an angle on machine perception, because I'm doing a lot of that with the sensors and the virtual reality, but we could probably find something to talk about. And then so, I mean, and that's where... When did Sam talk to you about open AI? Around the same time? No, it was a little bit... It was a bit after that. So I had done the most basic work. I had kind of done the neural networks from scratch, where I had gone and written it all in C just to make sure I understood back propagation at the lowest level and my nuts and bolts approach. But after Sam approached me, it was flattering to think that he thought that I could be useful at open AI, largely for kind of like systems optimization sorts of things without being an expert. But I asked Ilya Sutskever to give me a reading list, and he gave me a binder full of all the papers that like, okay, these are the important things. If you really read and understand all of these, you'll know like 80% of what most of the machine language researchers work on. And I went through and I read all those papers multiple times and highlighted them and went through and kind of figured the things out there and then started branching out into my own sets of research on things. And I actually started writing my own experiments and doing kind of figuring out, finding out what I don't know, what the limits of my knowledge are and starting to get some of my angles of attack on things, the things that I think are a little bit different from what people are doing. And I've had a couple years now, like two years since I kind of left the full time position at Meta. And now I've kind of pulled the trigger and said, I'm going to get serious about it. But some of my lessons all the way back to Armadillo Aerospace about how I know I need to be more committed to this, where there is that, it's both a freedom and a cost in some ways when you know that you're wealthy enough to say it's like, this doesn't really mean anything. I can spend, you know, I can spend a million dollars a year for the rest of my life and it doesn't mean anything. It's fine. But that is an opportunity to just kind of meander. And I could see that in myself when I'm doing some things, it's like, oh, this is a kind of interesting, curious thing. Let's look at this for a little while. Let's look at that. It's not really bearing down on the problem. So there's a few things that I've done that are kind of tactics for myself to make me more effective. Like one thing I noticed I was not doing well is I had a Google Cloud account to get GPUs there. And I was finding I was very rarely doing that for no good psychological reasons where I'm like, oh, I can always think of something to do other than to spin up instances and run an experiment. I can, you know, keep working on my local Titans or something. But it was really stupid. I mean, it was not a lot of money. I should have been running more experiments there. So I thought to myself, well, I'm going to go buy a quarter million dollar DGX station. I'm going to just like sit it right there and it's going to mock me if I'm not using it. If the fans aren't running on that thing, I'm not properly utilizing it. And that's been helpful. You know, I've done a lot more experiments since then. It's been interesting where I thought I'd be doing all this low level in V-link optimized stuff. But 90% of what I do is just spin up four instances of an experiment with different hyper parameters on it. Oh, interesting. You are, you're doing like really sort of building up intuition by doing ML experiments of different kinds. But so the next big thing though is I am, you know, I decided that I was going to take some investor money because I have an overactive sense of responsibility about other people's money. I am. And it's like, I don't want, I mean, a lot of my push and my passionate entreaties for things at Meta are it's like, I don't want Zuck to have wasted his money investing in Oculus. I want it to work out. I want it to change the world. I want it to be worth all of this time, money and effort going into it. And I expect that it's going to be that like that with my, with my company where- It's a huge forcing function, this investment. Yeah, I have investors that are going to expect something of me. Now, we've all had the conversation that this is a low probability long-term bet. It's not something that there's a million things I could do that I would have line of sight on the value proposition for. This isn't that. I think there are, there are unknown unknowns in the way, but it's one of these things that it's, you know, it's hyperbole, but it's potentially one of the most important things humans ever do. And it's something that I think is within our lifetimes, if not within a decade to happen. So yeah, this is just now happening like term sheet, like the ink is barely, Virgil Inc's barely dry on us. It's drying. I mean, as I mentioned to you offline, like somebody I admire, somebody you know, Andre Karpathy, I think the two of you, different trajectories in life, but approach problems similarly in that he codes stuff from scratch up all the time. And I, he's created a bunch of little things outside of, even outside the course at Stanford that have been tremendously useful to build up intuition about stuff, but also to help people and they're all in the realm of AI. Do you see yourself potentially doing things like this or, you know, not necessarily solving a gigantic problem, but on the journey, on the path to that building up intuitions and sharing code or ideas or systems that give inklings of AGI, but also kind of are useful to people in some way? So yeah, first of all, Andre is awesome. I learned a lot when I was going through my larval phase from his blog posts and his Stanford course and, you know, super valuable. I got to meet him first a couple of years ago when I was first kind of starting off on my gentleman scientist bit. And just a couple of months ago when he went out on his sabbatical, he stopped by in Dallas and we talked for a while and I had a great time with him. And then when I heard he actually left Tesla, I did of course, along with a hundred other people say, hey, if you ever want to work with me, it would be an honor. So he thinks that he's going to be doing this educational work, but I think someone's going to make him an offer he can't refuse before he gets too far along on it. Oh, his current interest is education. I was like, yeah, he's a special mind. Is there something you could speak to what makes him so special? So you understand. He did, he was very much a programmer's programmer that was doing machine learning work rather than, it's a different feel than an academic where you can see it in paper sometimes where somebody that's really a mathematician or a statistician at heart and they're doing something with machine learning. But Andre is about getting something done and you could see it in like all of his earliest approaches to, it's like, okay, here's how reinforcement learning works. Here's how recurrent neural networks work. Here's how transformers work. Here's how crypto works. And yeah, it's just, he's a hacker's, one of his old posts was like a hacker's guide to machine learning. And he deprecated that and said, don't really pay attention to what's in here. But it's that thought that carries through in a lot of it where it is that back again to that hacker mentality and the hacker ethic with what he's doing and in sharing all of it. Yeah. And a lot of his approach to a new thing, like you said, larva stage is let me code up the simplest possible thing to build up intuition about it. Yeah. Like I say, I sketch with structs and things when I'm just thinking about a problem, I'm thinking in some degree of code. You are also among many things, a martial artist, both judo and jujitsu. How has this helped make you the person you are? So I mean, I was a competent club player in judo and grappling. I mean, I was, you know, by no means any kind of a superstar, but it was, I went through a few phases with it where I did some, I, when I was quite young, a little bit more when I was 17, and then I got into it kind of seriously in my mid thirties. And you know, I went pretty far with it and I was, you know, pretty good at some of the things that I was doing. And I did appreciate it quite a bit where, I mean, on the one hand, it's always, if you're going to do exercise or something, it's a more motivating form of exercise. If someone is crushing you, you are motivated to do something about that, to up your attributes and be better about getting out of that. Attributes, yes. But there's also that sense that I'm, you know, I was not a sports guy. I did do wrestling in junior high. And I often wish that, I think I would have, it would have been good for me if I'd carried that on into high school and had a little bit more of that. I mean, it's like I, you know, felt a little bit of wrestling vibe with all was going on about embracing the grind and like that push that I associate with the wrestling team that I, in hindsight, I wish I had gone through that and pushed myself that way. But even getting back into judo and jujitsu in my mid thirties, as usually the old man on the mat with that, there was still the, you know, the sense that I, you know, working out with the group and having the guys that you're beating each other up with it, but you just feel good coming out of it. And I can remember those driving home, aching in various ways and just thinking, it's like, oh, that was, that was really great. And I, you know, it's mixing with a bunch of people that had nothing to do with any of the things that, that I worked with, you know, every once in a while, someone would be like, oh, you're the doom guy. And I, but for the most part, it was just different slice of life. I, you know, a good thing. And I made the call when I was 40. That's like, maybe I'm getting a little old for this. I had, I had separated a rib and tweaked a few things and I got out of it without any really bad injuries. And it was like, have I dodged enough bullets? Should I, you know, should I hang it up? I went back. I've, I've gone a couple of times in the last decade, trying to get my kids into it a little bit. I didn't really stick with any of them, but it was fun to get back on the mats. I really hurts for a while when you haven't gone, gone for a while, but I still debate this pretty constantly. My brother's only a year younger than me and he's going kind of hard in jujitsu right now. And I, you know, he was just, he won a few medals at the last tournament he was at and I'm competing. Yeah. And I was thinking, yeah, I guess we're in the executive division if you're over 50 or over 45 or something. And it's not out of the question that I go back at some point to do some of this. But again, I'm just reorganizing my life around more focus, probably not going to happen. I'm pushing my exercise around to give me longer uninterrupted intellectual focus time, pushing it to the beginning or the end. Running and stuff like that, walking. Yeah. Running and calisthenics and some things like that. But it allows you to still think about a problem. But if you're going to a judo club or something, you're, you've got to fix it. It's going to be seven o'clock or whatever, 10 o'clock on Saturday. Although I talked about this a little bit when I was on Rogan and shortly after that, Carlos Machado did reach out and I had trained with him for years back in the day. And he was like, hey, we've got kind of a small private club with a bunch of executive type people. And it gets, it does tempt me. Yeah. I don't know if you know him, but John Donahart moved here to Austin with Gordon Ryan and a few other folks. And he has a very interesting way, very deep systematic way of thinking about jiu jitsu that reveals the chess of it, the science of it. And I do think about that more as kind of an older person considering the martial arts, where I can remember the very earliest days getting back into judo and I'm like, teach me submissions right now. It's like, learn the arm bar, learn the choke. But as you get older, you start thinking more about, it's like, okay, I really do want to learn the entire canon of judo. It's like, are all the different things there and like all the different approaches for it. Not just the, you know, if you want to compete, there's just a handful of things you learn really, really well. But sometimes there's interest in learning a little bit more of the scope there and figuring some things out from, you know, at one point I had, wasn't exactly a spreadsheet, but I did have a, you know, a big long text file with like, here's the things that I learned in here, like ways you chain this together. And while, when I went back a few years ago, it was good to see that I whipped myself back into reasonable shape about doing the basic grappling. But I know there was a ton of the subtleties that were just, that were gone, but could probably be brought back reasonably quickly. And there's also the benefit, I mean, you're exceptionally successful now. You're brilliant. And the problem, the old problem of the ego. Yeah. I still push kind of harder than I should. I mean, that was, I was one of those people that I, yeah, I'm on the smaller side for a lot of the people competing and I would, you know, I'd go with all the big guys and I'd go hard and I'd push myself a lot. And that would be one of those where I would, I, you know, I'd be dangerous to anyone for the first five minutes, but then sometimes after that I'm already dead. And I knew it was terrible for me because it made the, you know, it meant I got less training time with all of that when you go and you just gas out, you know, relatively quickly there. And I like to think that I would be better about that where after I gave up judo, I started doing the half marathons and tough butters and things like that. And so when I did go back to the local judo club, I thought it's like, oh, I should have better cardio for this. Cause I'm, I'm a runner now and I do all of this and didn't work out that way. It was the same old thing where just push really hard, strain really hard. And, and of course when I worked with good guys like Carlos, it's like, Hey, just the whole flow, like water thing is real. And he's just like, that's true with judo too. Some of the best people like I've, I've trained with Olympic gold medalists and for some reason with them, everything's easier. Everything is, you actually start to feel the science of it, the music of it, the dance of it. And it's everything's effortless. You understand that there's an art to it. It's not just an exercise. It was interesting where I did go to the Kodokan in Japan. I kind of the birthplace of judo and everything. And I remember I rolled with one old guy. I didn't, you know, didn't start standing, just started on groundwork. And it was striking how different it was from Carlos. He was still, he was better than me and he got my arm and I, you know, I had to tap there, but it was a completely different style where I just felt like I could do nothing. He was just enveloping me and just like slowly ground it down, put my arm and bent it while with Carlos, you know, he's just loose and free. And you always thought like, oh, you're just going to go grab something, but you never had any chance to do it. But it was very different feeling. That's a good summary of the difference between jujitsu and judo. In jujitsu, there's, it is a dance and you feel like there's a freedom. And actually, anybody, like Gordon Ryan, one of the best, the best grappler in the world, nogi grappler in the world. There's a feeling like you can do anything. But when you actually try to do something, you can't. Just magically doesn't work. But with the best judo players in the world, yeah, it does feel like there's a blanket that weighs a thousand pounds on top of you. And there's not a feeling like you can do anything. You just, you're trapped. And that's a style, that's a difference in the style of martial arts. But it's also, once you start to study, you understand it all has to do with human movement and the physics of it and the leverage and all that kind of stuff. And that's like, that's super fascinating. At the end of the day, for me, the biggest benefit is in the humbling aspect, when another human being kind of tells you that there's a hierarchy or there's a, you're not that special. And in the most extreme case, when you tap to a choke, you are basically living because somebody lets you live. And that is one of those, if you think about it, that is a closer brush with mortality than most people consider. And that kind of humbling act is good to take to your work then, where it's harder to get humbled. Yeah, because nobody that does any martial art is coming out thinking, I'm the best in the world at anything because everybody loses. Let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give to young people today about life, about career, how they can have a job, how they can have an impact, how they can have a life they can be proud of? So it was kind of fun. I got invited to give the commencement speech back at the, I went to a college for two semesters and dropped out and went on to do my tech stuff. But they still wanted me to come back and give a commencement speech. And I've got that pinned on my Twitter account. I still feel good about everything that I said there. And my biggest point was that the path for me might not be the path for everyone. And in fact, the advice, the path that I took and even the advice that I would give based on my experience and learnings probably isn't the best advice for everyone. Because what I did was all about this knowledge in depth. It was about not just having this surface level ability to make things do what I want, but to really understand them through and through, to let me do the systems engineering work and to sometimes find these inefficiencies that can be bypassed. And the whole world doesn't need that. Most programmers don't need, or engineers of any kind don't necessarily need to do that. They need to do a little job that's been parceled out to them, be reliable, let people depend on you, do quality work with all of that. But people that do have an inclination for wanting to know things deeper and learn things deeper, there are just layers and layers of things out there. And it's amazing. If you're the right person that is excited about that, the world's never been like this before. It's better than ever. I mean, everything that was wonderful for me is still there. And there's whole new worlds to explore on the different things that you can do. And that it's hard work, embrace the grind with it, and understand as much as you can, and then be prepared for opportunities to present themselves. Where you can't just say, this is my goal in life, and just push at that. I mean, you might be able to do that, but you're going to make more total progress if you say, I am preparing myself with this broad set of tools, and then I'm being aware of all the way things are changing as I move through the world and as the whole world changes around me. And then looking for opportunities to deploy the tools that you've built. And there's going to be more and more of those types of things there where an awareness of what's happening, where the inefficiencies are, what things can be done, what's possible versus what's current practice. And then finding those areas where you can go and make an adjustment and make something that may affect millions or billions of people in the world, make it better. And then maybe from your own example, how were you able to recognize this about yourself, that you saw the layers in a particular thing, and you were drawn to discovering deeper and deeper truths about it? Is that something that was obvious to you, that you couldn't help, or is there some actions you had to take to actually allow yourself to dig deep? So in the earliest days of personal computers, I remember the reference manuals, and the very early ones even had schematics of computers in the background, in the back of the books, as well as firmware listings and things. And I could look at that, and at that time when I was a younger teenager, I didn't understand a lot of that stuff, how the different things worked. I was pulling out the information that I could get, but I always wanted to know all of that. There was like kind of magical information sitting down there. It's like the elder lore that some gray-beard wizard is the keeper of. So I always felt that pull for wanting to know more, wanting to explore the mysterious areas there. And that followed right in through all the things that got the value, exploring the video cards leading to the scrolling advantages, exploring some of the academic papers and things, learning about BSP trees and the different things that I could do with those systems, and just the huge larval phases going through aerospace, just reading bookshelves full of books. Again, that point where I have enough money, I can buy all the books I want. It was so valuable there where I was terrible with my money when I was a kid. My mom thought I would always be broke because I'd buy my comic books and just be out of money, but it was like all the pizza I want, all the Diet Coke I want, video games, and then books. And it didn't take that much. As soon as I was making 27K a year, I felt rich. I was just getting all the things that I wanted. But that sense of – books have always been magical to me. And that was one of the things that really made me smile is Andre had said he found – when he came over to my house, he said he found my library inspiring. Just – and it was great to see – I still look at him. He's kind of a younger guy. I sometimes wonder if younger people these days have the same relationship with books that I do where they were such a cornerstone for me in so many ways. But that sense that, yeah, I always wanted to know it all. I know I can't. And that was like one of the last things I said. You can't know everything, but you should convince yourself that you can know anything. You know, any one particular thing, it was created and discovered by humans. You can learn it. You can find out what you need on there. And you can learn it deeply. Yeah. You can drive a nail down through whatever layer cake problem space you've got and learn a cross-section there. And not only can you have an impact doing that, you can attain happiness doing that. There's something so fulfilling about becoming a craftsman of a thing. Yeah. And I don't want to tell people that, look, this is a good career move. Just grit your teeth and bear it. You want people – you want – and I do think it is possible sometimes to find the joy in something. Like, it might not immediately appeal to you, but I had told people early on, like in software games, that I – you know, a lot of game developers are in it just because they are so passionate about games. But I was always really more flexible in what appealed to me, where I said I think I could be quite engaged doing operating system work or even database work. I would find the interest in that, because I think most things that are significant in the world have a lot of layers and complexity to them and a lot of opportunities hidden within them. So that would probably be the most important thing to encourage to people is that you can – it's like weaponized curiosity. You can deploy your curiosity to find – to kind of like make things useful and valuable to you, even if they don't immediately appear that way. Deploy your curiosity. Yeah, that's very true. We've mentioned this debate point, whether mortality or fear of mortality is fundamental to creating an AGI, but let's talk about whether it's fundamental to human beings. Do you think about your own mortality? I really don't. And you probably always have to like take with a grain of salt anything somebody says about fundamental things like that. But I don't think about really aging, impending death, legacy with my children, things like that. Clearly, it seems most of the world does a lot, a lot more than I do. So I mean, I think I'm an outlier in that where it's – yeah, it doesn't wind up being a real part of my thinking and motivation about things. So daily existence is about sort of the people you love and the problems before you. Yeah, I'm very much focused on what I'm working on right now. I do take that back. There's one aspect where the kind of finiteness of the life does impact me and that is about thinking about the scope of the problems that I'm working on. When I decided to work on – when I was like nuclear fission or AGI, these are big ticket things that are – impact large fractions of the world. I was thinking to myself at some level that, okay, I mean I may have a couple more swings at bat with me at full capability, but yes, my mental abilities will decay with age, mostly inevitably. I don't think it's a zero percent chance that we will address some of that before it becomes a problem for me. I think exciting medical stuff in the next couple of decades. But I do have this kind of vague plan that when I'm not at the top of my game and I don't feel that I'm in a position to put a dent in the world some way that I'll probably wind up doing some kind of recreational retro-programming or I'll work on something that I would not devote my life to now, but I can while away my time as the old man gardening in the code worlds. And then to step back even bigger, let me ask you about why we're here, we human beings. What's the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life, John Carmack? So very similar with that last question, I know a lot of people fret about this question a lot and I just really don't. I really don't give a damn. We are biological creatures that happenstance of evolution. We have innate drives that evolution crafted for survival and passing on of genetic codes. I don't find a lot of value in trying to go much deeper than that. I have my motivations, some of which are probably genetically coded and many of which are contingent on my upbringing and the path that I've had through my life. I don't run into like spates of depression or envy or anything that winds up being a challenge and forcing a degree of soul searching with things like that. I seem to be okay kind of without that. As a brilliant ant in the ant colony without looking up to the sky wondering why the hell am I here again? So the why of it, the incredible mystery of the fact that we started, first of all, the origin of life on Earth and from that, from single cell organisms, the entirety of the evolutionary process took us somehow to this incredibly intelligent thing that is able to build Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Quake and take a crack at the problem of AGI and create things that eventually supersede human beings. That doesn't, the why of it is- It's been my experience that people that focus on, that don't focus on the here and now right in front of them tend to be less effective. I mean, it's not 100%, vision matters to some people, but it doesn't seem to be a necessary motivator for me. I think that the process of getting there is usually done, it's like the magic of gradient descent. People just don't believe that just looking locally gets you to all of these spectacular things. That's been the decades of looking at really some of the smartest people in the world that would just push back forever against this idea that it's not this grand, sophisticated vision of everything, but little tiny steps, local information winds up leading to all the best answers. So the meaning of life is following locally wherever the gradient descent takes you. This was an incredible conversation, officially the longest conversation I've ever done on the podcast, which means a lot to me because I get to do it with one of my heroes, John. I can't tell you how much it means to me that you would sit down with me. You're an incredible human being. I can't wait what you do next, but you've already changed the world. You're an inspiration to so many people. And again, we haven't covered most of what I was planning to talk about, so I hope we get a chance to talk someday in the future. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much again for talking to me. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Carmack. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John Carmack himself. Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/I845O57ZSy4

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Coffeezilla: SBF, FTX, Fraud, Scams, Fake Gurus, Money, Fame, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #345

Do you think he is incompetent, insane, or evil? The following is a conversation with Coffee Zilla, an investigator and journalist exposing frauds, scams, and fake gurus. He's one of the most important journalistic voices we have working today, both in terms of his integrity and fearlessness in the pursuit of truth. Please follow, watch, and support his work at youtube.com slash coffeezilla. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Coffee Zilla. How do you like your coffee? Dark and soul-crushing? That was the number one question on the internet. Do you like your coffee to reverberate deeply through the worst of human nature? Is that how you drink your coffee? I've gone through a lot of phases on coffee. I used to, in college, I would go super deep into, you know, grinding fresh beans, all of that kind of stuff, water temperature exactly right. And then I hit a phase where I was just, it was the maintenance dose. Then I went to like espresso because I could get a lot more in. Yeah. And now I go through phases of like, sometimes I like it with a little oat milk, sometimes a little half and half in sugar. Oh, you've gotten soft in your old age. I've gone a little, I have. But hey, if I'm doing an SBF interview, it's black that day, nothing less. Yeah. It's black, no sugar. The lights go down. What do you actually do in those situations, like leading up to a show? Do you get hyped up? Like, how do you put yourself in the right mind space to explore some of these really difficult topics? I think a lot of it's preparation, and then once it happens, it's mostly fueled by sort of adrenaline, I would say. I really deeply care about getting to like the root cause of some of these issues because I think so often people in positions of power are let off the hook. So I really care about holding their feet to the fire and it translates into like a lot of energy the day of. So I never find myself like, funny enough, I usually drink a lot of caffeine leading up to the interview. And then I try to drink like minimum the day of because I have so much adrenaline, I don't want to be like hyper stimulated. I have to say, of all the recent guests I've had, the energy you had when you walked into the door was pretty intense. I'm excited! Are people not excited to be here? I don't know. I think they're scared. I think they're scared. I don't know if you know. I felt like you were going to knock down the door or something. You were very excited. Like that just energy. It was terrifying because I'm terrified of social interaction. Anyway, speaking of terrifying. You chose a good living of interviewing people. Face your fears, my friend. So let's talk about SBF and FTX. Who is Sam Bankman-Fried? Can you tell the story from the beginning as you understand it? Yeah. So Sam Bankman-Fried is a kid who grew up sort of from a position of huge privilege. Both his parents are lawyers. I believe both of them were from Harvard. He went to MIT. Sorry, backing up a bit more. He went to this top prep high school, then to MIT, then he went to Jane Street. And after that, he started a trading firm in I think 2017 called Alameda Research with a few friends. Some of them were from Jane Street. Some of them worked at Google. And they were sort of the smartest kids on the block, or that's what everyone thought. They made a lot of their money on something called the Kimchi Premium, or at least the story goes, which just to explain that, the price of Bitcoin in Korea was substantially higher than in the rest of the world. And so you could arbitrage that by buying Bitcoin elsewhere and selling it on a Korean exchange. So they made their money early doing kind of smart trades like that. They flipped that into market making, which they were pretty early on that, just providing liquidity to an exchange. And it's a strategy that is considered delta neutral, which means basically if you take kind of both sides of the trade, and you're making a spread, like a fee on that, you make money whether it goes up or down. So in theory, there shouldn't be that much risk associated with it. So Alameda kind of blew up because they would offer these people, you know, people who are giving out loans, they say, hey, we'll give you this really attractive rate of return. And we're doing strategies that seemingly are low risk. So we're a low risk bet, where these smart kids from Jane Street, and you can kind of trust us to be this smarter than everyone else kind of thing. Around 2019, Sam started FTX, which is an exchange. Specifically, it specialized in derivatives, so like margins, kind of more sophisticated crypto products. And it got in with Binance early on. So Binance actually has a prior relationship to FTX, which we'll explore in a second, because they're going to play a role in FTX's collapse, actually. Binance is the number one crypto exchange. And they're led by, he's called CZ on Twitter, I don't want to butcher his full name. But really smart guy has played his hand really well and built up a quite large exchange. And Binance was funding a bunch of different like startups. So they funded, they helped invest into FTX early on, they invested 100 million. So these guys were kind of like teammates early on, SBF and CZ. And FTX quickly grew, they got like, especially in 2020, 2021, they got a lot of endorsements, they got a lot of credibility in the space. And eventually, FTX actually bought out Binance, they gave them $2 billion. So pretty good investment for CZ in a couple years. And now lead that up to 2022, what happens? Luna collapse, Three Arrows Capital collapse, which if you don't know, there's just these kind of cataclysmic events in crypto, led by some pretty risky behavior, whether Luna was a token that promised really attractive returns that were unsustainable, ultimately, and it just kind of spiraled. It did what's called a stablecoin death spiral, which we can talk about if we need to. Stablecoin death spiral. I can't wait till that like actually enters the lexicon, like a Wikipedia page on it. Like economic students are learning in school. It's like a chapter in a book. Anyway, I mean, this is the reality of our world. This is a really big part of the economic system is cryptocurrency and stablecoin is part of that. Yeah, it's weird because on the one hand, cryptocurrency is supposed to somewhat simplify or add transparency to the financial markets. The idea is for the first time, you don't have to wait for an SEC filing from some corporate business. You can look at what they're doing on chain, right? So that's good because a lot of big financial problems are caused by lack of transparency and lack of understanding risk. But ironically, you get some people creating these arbitrarily complicated financial products like algorithmic stablecoins, which then introduce more risk and blow everything up. So anyways, three hours, capital blew up. And all of a sudden, this crypto industry, which everyone thought was going to the moon, Bitcoin to one hundred thousand is in some trouble. And FTX seems like the only people who, besides like Binance, who's also really big and stable and Coinbase, they seemed like they were doing fine. In fact, they were bailing out companies in the summer. I don't know if you remember that SBF was likened to like Jamie Diamond, who's the CEO of Chase, who kind of was like the buck stops here. You know, I'm like the backstop. Right. So SBF was supporting the industry. He was like the stable guy. So come to like around October and November, there's all this talk about regulation. Everything's been blowing up. SBF's leading the charge on regulation. And CZ, the CEO of Binance, gets word that maybe SBF is kind of like cutting him out or making regulation that would maybe impact his business. And he doesn't like that too much. They start kind of feuding a little bit on Twitter. So when it comes out, a CoinDesk report came out that FTX's balance sheet wasn't looking that good. Like it looked pretty weak. They had a lot of coins that in theory had value if you looked at their market price. But for a variety of reasons, if you tried to sell them, they'd collapse in value. So it's sort of like this thing, a house built on sand. And a friend of mine on Twitter, he goes by Dirty Bubble Media. He released a report and he basically said, I think these guys are insolvent. Well, CZ's solvent CZ saw that and he retweeted it and started adding fuel to the fire of like the speculation. Because up to this point, everyone thought FTX is super safe, super secure. There's no reason to not keep your money there. Tom Brady keeps his money there, whatever. And CZ kind of adds fuel to the fire by saying, not only am I retweeting this, adding kind of like validity to this speculation, but also I'm going to take the FTT that I got, which part of their balance sheet was this FTT token, which is FTX's like proprietary token. And Alameda and FTX control a lot of it. They were using this token to basically be a large amount of collateral for their whole balance sheet. So it accounted for this huge amount of their value. And the CEO of Binance had a huge chunk of it as well. And he said, I'm going to sell all of it. And the fuel that that introduced to the market is if he sells all this FTT and this FTT is underwriting a lot of the value of FTX. Does FTT almost approximate like similar things if you were to buy a stock in a public company? Is that kind of like a stock in FTX? It sort of was this proxy because what FTX was committed to doing was sort of like buying back FTT tokens. They would do this thing called the buy and burn. I think there was some amount of sharing in the revenue fees of FTX. It was kind of this convoluted thing. In my opinion, the exact value of FTT was speculated from the beginning. And it was clear that it was very tied to the performance of FTX, which is important because we'll get to later. FTX sort of built their whole scaffold on FTT, which meant that this scaffold was very wobbly because if FTX loses a little bit of confidence, then your value goes down. When your value goes down, you lose more confidence and this goes down. So it was kind of like this thing that this flywheel that when it was going well, you got huge amounts of growth. When it's going bad, you get a exchange death spiral, so to speak. Actually, this structure, it's a pretty nonstandard structure. Did the architects of its initial design anticipate the wobbliness of the whole system? So putting fraud and all those things that happened later aside, do you think it was difficult to anticipate this kind of FTT, FTX, elementary research, weird dynamic? No, because I think sophisticated traders always think in terms of diversification and correlation. So if you're trying to – the way to think about risk in investing is like if I invest in you, Lex Friedman, and then I also invest in some product you produce, the performance of those two things will be pretty correlated. So whether I invest in you or I invest in this product that you are completely behind, I'm not de-risking. I'm basically counting all on you doing well, right? And if you do bad, my investments do very bad. So if I'm trying to build a stable thing, I shouldn't put all my eggs in the Lex Friedman basket unless I'm positive that you're going to do well, right? And these people – As your financial advisor, I would definitely recommend you do not put all your eggs in this basket. Right. And so you can think about it like if I know that, these people were trained to think like this. And so the idea that you could start this exchange, you're worth billions of dollars, and you underwrite your whole system by betting – putting most of it on your own token is insane. And what's crazy is we'll later find out that they were basically taking customer assets, which were real things like Bitcoin and Ethereum with risks that were not so correlated to FTX, and they were swapping them out. They were using to go basically gamble those and putting FTT in its place as quote value. So they were increasing the risk of the system in order to bet big with the idea that if they bet big and won, we'd all be singing their praises. If we bet big and lost – If they bet big and lost, I don't know if they had a plan. But I think they were being extremely risky, and there's no way to avoid their knowledge of that. So when you say customer assets, I come to this crypto exchange, I have Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency, and this is a thing that has pretty stable value over time. I mean, as crypto, relatively so, and I'm going to store it on this crypto exchange. And that's the whole point. This is – So this thing, to the degree that crypto holds value, is supposed to continue holding value. There's not supposed to be an extra risk inserted into the thing. Right. And FTX was pretty clear from the beginning that they wouldn't invest your assets in anything else. They wouldn't do anything else with it. They wouldn't trade it. That's what made FTX such a horror story for investor confidence, is basically they made every signal that they would not do anything nefarious with your tokens. They would just put them to the side, put them in a separate account that they don't have access to, and they just kind of wait there until the day that you're ready to withdraw them. That's explicitly what they told their customers. So going back to the story a little bit, CZ then says, hey, I'm selling this token that underwrites the value of FTX. There's a total panic. SBF during this time says several lies, such as FTX assets are fine, we have enough money to cover all withdrawals. And a day later, he basically admits that that wasn't the case. They don't have the money. They're shutting down. And then a few days later after that, they declared bankruptcy. I should be clear, there's Alameda Research, FTX International, and FTX US, which is the US side of things. These are three different entities. All of them are in bankruptcy. And it's not clear to the extent that they were commingling funds, but it's clear that they were commingling funds to some extent. So they kind of were taking from each other. And that is where the fraud happens, right? Because if going back to our earlier analogy, if you're supposed to set funds aside, and I find out you were using it to go make all these arbitrage trades or do market making or all these activities you were known for, for your like hedge fund trading firm thing, that's a huge problem because he basically lied about this. And especially when he's saying explicitly that we have these things, we have these funds, and these things turn out to be lies. Well, again, the question of fraud comes in, and it's just like, there's no way he didn't know. So the obvious question might be, well, why isn't he locked up? Why is he running around? And it's because really his story is that he didn't know any of it. He found out that they had to steal Mana's position, he would say he was totally disconnected from what Alameda was doing. He had no idea that they had such a large margin position, that they had an accounting quirk, and that accounting quirk hit $8 billion from his view. And so when he was saying that they had money to cover it, he was saying that truthfully to the best of his ability. And he just was so distracted at the time that he made a series of increasingly embarrassing mistakes. And now he owes it to the people to right those wrongs by publicly making this huge apology tour. So you might have seen him on, I mean, he's been talking to nearly everyone about basically how he's just didn't know what he's doing. He's the stupidest man alive. So what are some interesting things you've learned from those interviews? I think I've appreciated why you don't talk in that position. Most people wouldn't talk. Most people would listen to their legal counsel and not talk. I do not think he's – any lawyer worth their salt would tell him to talk because right now, I think the danger of what he's doing is he's locking himself into a story of how things happened. And I don't think that story is going to hold up in the coming months because I think it's impossible from the insider conversations I've had with Alameda research employees, with FTX employees, it's impossible to square what they are telling me with no – like incentive to lie with what SBF is telling me with every incentive to lie, which is fundamentally that he didn't know they were commingling funds. He didn't know they were gambling with customer money. And it was basically this huge mistake and it's Alameda's fault, but he wasn't involved in Alameda, a company he owned. So like a compassionate but hard-hitting gangster that you are, very recently you interacted with SBF on – I like how you adjust the suspenders as you're saying this. You interacted on Twitter spaces with SBF and really put his feet to the fire with some hard-hitting questions. What did you ask and what did you learn from that interaction? Sure, I should say first, this was not a willing interaction. I mean, I thought that was kind of the funny part of it because I've been asking him for an interview for a while. He's been giving interviews to nearly everyone who wants one, big channels, small channels. He didn't give me one, but I managed to get some by sneaking up on some Twitter spaces and DMing the people and being like, hey, can I come up? So I didn't get him to ask everything that I wanted because he would leave sometimes after I asked some of the questions. But really what I asked was about this 8 billion and zooming in on the improbability of his lack of knowledge. It's sort of like if you run a company and you know the insides and outs and you're the top of your field, top in class, and all of a sudden it all goes bust and you say, I had no idea how any of this worked. I didn't know. It's like the guy who runs Whataburger saying, I didn't know where we sourced our beef. I didn't know where we – that's a Texas example actually. Thank you. I appreciate that. Let's take it like worldwide. Walmart. I didn't know we used Chinese manufacturers. It's like that's impossible. To become Walmart, you have to know how your supply chain works. You have to know, even if you're at a high level, you know how this stuff works. Can I do a hard turn on that and go as one must to Hitler? Hitler's writing is not on any of the documents around as far as I know on the final solution. In some crazy world, you could theoretically say I knew – I didn't know anything about the death camps. There's this plausible deniability in theory. Most people would look at that and say, it's very unlikely. You don't know. Especially if all the insiders are coming out and saying, no, no, no, of course he knew. He was directing us from the top. I mean what was clear, what's interesting about the structure and like I love the nitty-gritty – Sorry, we're back to SPF. We went to Hitler. Now we're back to SPF. I wanted to turn us as fast as possible away from Hitler. So the insiders in what? Alameda Research. Alameda Research. What was interesting is that there was this sort of one-way window going on between Alameda and FTX where FTX employees didn't know a lot of what was going on. Alameda insiders and I would say by design knew almost everything that was going on at FTX. So I think that was really interesting from the perspective of a lot of the so-called like what you could – what he's trying to ascribe to as like failures or mistakes or ignorance and negligence. When looked at closely are much more designed and they sort of don't arise spontaneously. Because like let's say – so there's this thing in banking and like trading where if I run a bank and you run like a trading firm, we need to have informational walls between us because there's huge conflicts of interest that can arise, right? So the negligent argument might be that like, oh, we just didn't know. We're sort of these dumb kids in the Bahamas. So we shared information equally. But when you see a one-way wall, that starts to look a lot different, right? If I have a back-end source of looking at – or sorry, you're the trading firm. So you have a back-end way to look at all my accounts and I have no idea that you're doing that, that all of a sudden looks like a much more designed thing. When it would be plausible, let's say going to use another analogy too. If you're saying, look, I commingled funds because I was so bad at corporate structures, you would expect those companies to have a very simple corporate structure because you didn't know what you're doing, right? But what we see with FTX and Alameda is they had something like 50 companies and subsidiaries and this impossibly complicated web of corporate activity. You don't get there by accident. You don't wake up and go, oh, I designed like this watch that ticked a very specific way, but it was all accidental. If you really didn't know what you were doing, you'd end up with a simple structure. So even just like from a fundamental perspective, what SBF was doing and like the activities they were engaging in were so complicated and purposely designed to obfuscate what they were doing, it's impossible to subscribe to the negligence argument. And I want to quickly say too, like I don't think a lot of people have honed in on this. There was insider trading going on from Alameda's perspective where they would know what coins FTX was going to list on their exchange. And there's a famous effect where let's say you're this legitimate exchange, you list a coin, the price spikes. Insiders told me it was a regular practice for Alameda insiders to know that FTX was going to list a coin and as a company buy up that coin so they could sell it after it listed. And they made millions of dollars. How do you do that accidentally? Yeah. And that's, that's illegal. Totally illegal. So that's illegal from like, and if an individual does it, it's illegal, it's fraud. What if a company is systematically doing it and you can't tell me that FTX or someone at FTX wasn't feeding that information about to Alameda or somehow giving them keys to know that. And that would happen at the highest level. It would happen at SPS level. And this is why his arguments of, I was dumb, I was naive, I was sort of ignorant are so preposterous because he's dumb and ignorant. The second it becomes criminal to be smart and sophisticated. Right. But then also coming out and talking about it, which is, it's a bizarre move. It's a bizarre and almost a dark move. Can you tell the story of the 8 billion? You mentioned 8 billion. What's the 8 billion? What's the missing 8 billion? Yeah. So it's really interesting because it's sort of like wire fraud. You sort of, he's sort of copying to like smaller crimes to avoid the big crime. The big crime is, you know, everything and you were behind it, right? The smaller crimes are like a little wire fraud here, little wire fraud there. So what the 8 billion is, is that FTX didn't always have banking. It's hard to get banking as a crypto exchange. There's all these questions of like, where's the money coming from? Is it coming from money launder? So for a variety of reasons, it's always been hard for exchanges to get bank accounts. So before when FTX was just getting started, they didn't have a bank account. So how do you put money on FTX? Well, they would have you wire your money to their trading firm. Their wiring instructions would go to their trading firm. It's easier to get banking as a trading firm. So you'd put your money with the trading firm and then they'd credit you the money on FTX. Okay. First of all, this is a whole circumvention of all these banking guidelines and regulations. That's the first like thing that I think is legal. But basically what SBF argued is that there was an accounting glitch error problem where when you'd send money to Alameda, even though they'd credit you on FTX, they wouldn't safeguard your deposits. Like your deposits would go into what he called a stub account, which is just like some account that's not very well labeled, kind of like a placeholder account. And he didn't realize that those were Alameda's funds or they were playing with those funds and that they basically should have safeguarded that for customers. That's his explanation. It's preposterous because it's $8 billion. But anyways. Just poor labeling of accounts. Of an $8 billion account. I mean, it's like- What's a billion? A billion. This is the craziest thing. He was talking to me and at one point in the conversation, he's like, yeah, I didn't have precise knowledge because he said, I didn't have knowledge of Alameda's accounts. And I said, well, Forbes a month ago was getting detailed accounting of Alameda. And he goes, oh, that wasn't detailed accounting. I just knew I was right within $10 billion or so. What is that error margin? $10 billion for a company that is arguably never worth more than a hundred million. Probably never even worth more than 50 billion. Your error margin is $10 billion. You have to be, this is a guy who is sending around statements that there was no risk involved. And you're telling me he had an error margin of $10 billion. That is the difference between a healthy company and a company so deep underwater you're going to jail. So you have to believe that he is impossibly stupid and square that with the sophistication that he brought to the table. I think it's an impossible argument. I don't even think it's- Do you think he is incompetent, insane, or evil? If you were to bet money on each of those. Incompetent, insane, or evil. Insane, meaning he's lying to everyone, but also to himself, which is a little bit different than incompetence. He's not incompetent. So I think he's some combination of insane and evil, but it's impossible to know unless we know deep inside his heart how self-deluded he is versus a calculated strategy. And I think if you look at SBF, I think he's a fascinating individual. He's a horrible human being, let's start there. But he's also somewhat interesting from a psychology perspective because he's very open about the fact that he understands image and he understands how to cultivate image, the importance of image, so well that I think a lot of people, even though they've talked about it, aren't emphasizing that enough when interacting with him. This is a man whose entire history is about cultivating the right opinions at the right time to achieve the right effect. Why do you think he would suddenly change that approach when he has all the more reason to cultivate an image? So he is extremely good naturally or... I don't know if he's good, but he's hyper aware. So he's deliberate in cultivating a public image and controlling the public image. You know about the Democrat donations. He knew to donate to the right people, $40 million. He says on a call that we released with Tiffany Fong, he says on a call that he donated the same amount to Republicans. There's speculation on whether this is true because he's a liar or whatever. So caveat there. But he said he donated to Republicans the same amount, but he donated dark because he knew that most journalists are liberal and they would kind of hold that against him. So he wanted all the sides to be in his favor, in his pocket, while simultaneously understanding the entire media landscape and playing them like a fiddle by cultivating this image of I'm this progressive woke billionaire who wants to give it all away, do everything for charity. I drive a Corolla while living in a million dollar penthouse, multimillion. But that was sort of the angle. He understood so well how to play the media. And I think he underestimated when he did this, how much people would put him under a deeper microscope. And I don't think he has achieved the same level of success in cultivating this new image because I think people are so skeptical now. No one's buying it. But I think he's trying it. He's doing it to the best of his ability. But it has worked leading up to this particular wobbly situation. So before that, wasn't there a public perception of him being a force for good, a financial force for good? 100%. Yeah. Somebody from Sequoia Capital wrote this glowing review that he's going to be the world's first trillionaire. There's so many pieces done on he's the most generous billionaire in the world that he was sort of like the steel man of, you know, it's possible to make tons of money. This is like the effective altruism movement. Make as much money as you can as fast as you can and give it all away. And he was sort of like the poster child for that. And he did give some of it away and got a lot of press for it. And I think that was kind of by design. I want to address a real quick point. A lot of people have said that like Binance played a role. And while they catalyzed this, insolvency is a problem that will eventually manifest either way. So I don't put any blame on CZ for basically causing this meltdown. The underlying foundation was unstable and it was going to fall apart at the next push. I mean, he just happened to be the final kind of like, I don't know, the straw that broke the camel's back. Yeah, the catalyst that revealed the fraud. Yeah, but it's like, I don't think he's culpable for FTX's like malfeasance in how they handled accounts, if that makes sense. So what role did they play? Could they have helped alleviate some of the pain of investors, of people that held funds there? Yeah, I mean, probably. I don't know. I would see some kind of weird obligation, like with the two billion they made on FTX. Remember, they got two billion, some of it in cash, some of it in FTT tokens. I don't know how much actual cash they have from that deal, but they have billions from the success of what seems to be a fraud. It seems to have been a fraud from early on. They had the backdoor as early as 2020, from what I can tell. So the backdoor between FTX and Alameda? Alameda, yes. Alameda Research. Do you think CZ saw through who SPF is? What is he doing? No. I think CZ is like, he's a shark. I think he's good at building a big business. Like a good shark or a bad shark? I don't know. I don't know. I think sharks just eat. I mean, I don't know. I think— My relationship with shark has, like, Finding Nemo, there's a shark in that. Sure. I don't know. I think, like, Jeff Bezos is a shark. So whether—people have loaded connotations of, like, how they feel about Jeff Bezos. I mean, I would say, like, I think CZ is a ruthless businessman. I think he's cold, he's calculated, he's very deliberate. And I think what he should do in this position is forfeit the funds that he profited from that investment because largely, I think it was owed to the customers. There's so much hurting out there. So I think they could do a lot of good around that. I don't know if they will because I don't know if he sees it in his best interest. I think that's probably how he's thinking. But yeah, I think they could have helped or they could still help there. Who do you think suffered the most from this so far? The little account holders. This is always true. So one of the big temptations with fraud—I've covered a lot of scams, frauds—is everyone looks at the big number. Everyone, that's the headline, billions of dollars, the top 50 creditors, what everyone thinks at first. But quickly, when you dig down, you realize that most people who lost $10 million—I mean, I'm sure that's terrible for them. I wish them to get their money back. But it's usually the people with like 50,000 or less that are most impacted. Usually, they do not have the money to spare. Usually, they're not diversified in a sophisticated way. So I think it's those people. I think it's the small account holders that I feel the worst for. And unfortunately, they often get the least press time or air time. That's the really difficult truth of this, is that, especially in the culture of cryptocurrency, there's a lot of young people who are not diversified. They're basically all in on a particular crypto. And it just breaks my heart to think that there's somebody with $50,000 or $30,000 or $20,000. But the point is that money is everything they own. And now their life is basically destroyed. Imagine you're 18, 19, 20, 21 years old. You saved up. You've been working. You saved up. And this is it. This is basically destroying a life. What's so brutal about this is that this all comes on the back. The entire crypto market comes on the back of—comes from the deep distrust of traditional finance. Right? Yeah, 2008, everybody lost trust in the banking systems. And they lost trust that if those banking systems acted in a corrupt way, that they would receive the justice. It turned out that the banks received favorable treatment. People didn't. So people lost faith in the structure of our financial system in a way that we're still feeling the reverberations of it. And so when crypto came along, it was like kind of this way to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the world for the sort of lowly and the less powerful and kind of level the playing field. So what's so sad about events like this is you see that fundamentally a lot of the power structures are the same, where the people at the top face little repercussions for what they do. The people at the bottom are still getting screwed. The people at the bottom are still getting lied to. And law enforcement is way behind the ball. Do you think this really damaged people's trust in cryptocurrency? For sure. Way bigger than Luna, way bigger than Three Arrows Capital. It's because of who SBF was. It's not just the dollar figure behind it. It's because he wooed so many of our media elites who should have been calling him out, or at least investigating him and not rubber stamping him. It's an indictment of our financial system, even our most sophisticated people in BlackRock, in Sequoia, who didn't see this coming, who also rubber stamped him. And you just wonder, like, if you can't trust the top people in crypto who are supposedly the good guys, the guys saving crypto. Just a month ago or two months ago, he was the guy on Capitol Hill that was talking to Gary Gensler, to all the top people in Washington. He was orchestrating the regulation of crypto. If that guy is a complete fraudster, liar, psychopath, and nobody knew it until it was too late, what does that mean about the system itself that we're building? So you are one of, if not the best, fraudster investigators in the world. Did you sense, was this on your radar at all, SPF, over the past couple of years? Were any red flags going off for you? Yes. So funny enough, one of my videos from six months ago or so blew up because I got to give a lot of credit to Matt Levine of Bloomberg, great journalist, great finance journalist. And I want to say, when I talk about media elite, there are people doing great work in these mainstream institutions. It's not a monolith. Just like independent media isn't all doing great work and all the corporate media is bad or whatever. There's like these overarching narratives that I don't subscribe to. So Matt Levine's a great journalist. He did an interview with SPF where he got Sam to basically describe a lot of what was going on in DeFi, but it kind of a larger philosophy around crypto. And he described a Ponzi scheme where he just described this black box. It does nothing, but if we ascribe it value, then we can create more value and more value and more value. And it kind of was this ridiculous description of a Ponzi scheme, but there was no moral judgment on it. It was like, oh yeah, this is great. We can make a lot of money from this. And Matt is like, well, it sounds like you're in the Ponzi business and business is good. I made a video about that. I said, this is ridiculous. This is absurd, whatever. It's obscene. But I didn't explicitly call SPF a fraud there. And I think if I'm being, I think I saw some of it, but like many people, I think a lot of us were kind of like, I think a lot of us missed how wrong everyone could be at the same time. I did notice leading up to the crash, what was happening. And I called it out a day or a day and a half before it happened because I saw my friend's post, Dirty Bubble Media. And this was the first real look into the heart of their finances because they're this black box. He just kind of had to evaluate them without knowing much. And once we got a peek under the hood of what their finances were, I realized, oh my gosh, these guys might be completely insolvent. So I made a tweet about it. I hope some people saw it and got their money out. But pretty quickly after that, I caught the narrative of what was really going on at Alameda, that it was basically this Ponzi scheme that they had built. Do you ever sit like Batman in the dark since he fight crime and wonder, like sad, just staring into the darkness and thinking I should have caught this earlier? Yeah, I think- In your $10 billion, $10 million. $10 million. $10 million. We're working our way there. With a bunch of cocaine on the table. Sure, it's never enough. It's never enough. You always could be catching stuff sooner. You always could be doing more. The fascinating thing you said is that one of the lessons here is that a large number of people, influential, smart people, could all be wrong at the same time in terms of their evaluation of SBF. This is one thing that I don't understand too, is like, I think it's one thing to not see something. I think it's another thing to like rubber stamp or explicitly endorse. I feel like a lot of people didn't look too close at SBF because I think a lot of the ones that were in the news, they were there. I don't think a lot of people looked too close at SBF because I think a lot of the warning signs were there. But my feeling is if you're a Sequoia, if you're a BlackRock, wouldn't you do that due diligence? I mean, like before just endorsing something, especially in the crypto space, this is just why I don't do any deals in the crypto space ever, because it's impossible to know which ones are going to be the like big hits or the big frauds or whatever. But if you're going to make that play, you would think that you would do all the research in the world and you would get sophisticated looks at their liabilities, at how they were structured, all that stuff. And that is the most shocking part, is not that people missed it because you can miss fraud, but that there were so many glowing endorsements like, this guy is not going to be that thing. We explicitly endorse him. I saw a Fortune magazine. He was called the next Warren Buffett. It's just crazy. Do you think it's possible to have enough like Tom Brady endorsements that you don't really investigate? So like, yes, that there's a kind of momentum, like societal social momentum. I think that's the problem. I actually think that's hugely a blind spot of our society is we have all these heuristics that can be points of failure, where like a rule of thumb is if you go to an Ivy League, well, you must be smart, right? A rule of thumb is if you're both your parents are Harvard lawyers, you must know the law. You must like kind of be sophisticated. The rule of thumb is if you're running a billion dollar exchange, you must be somehow somewhat ethical, right? And all of these heuristics can lead to giant blind spots where you kind of just go, oh, we'll check. Like I don't really, it's a lot of energy to look into people. And if enough of those rules of thumb are met, we just kind of check them off and put them through the system. So yeah, it's been hugely exposing for sort of like our blind spot. And you don't know maybe how to look in, for example, there's a few assumptions. Now there's a lot of people are very skeptical of institutions of government and so on, but perhaps too much so. But for some part of history, there was too much faith in government. And so right now I think there's faith in certain large companies. There's distrust in certain ones and trust in others. Like people seem to distrust Facebook, extremely skeptical of Facebook, but they trust, I think Google with their data. I think they trust Apple with their data, much more so. Like search, people don't seem to be Google search. Like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna- Put it right in there. Have you ever looked at your Google search history? Your Google search history has got to be some of the darkest things. Oh, I don't think I've ever looked at my Google search history. You should. I'm pretty careful with like browser hygiene and stuff like that because I think it's- Well, Google search history, unless you explicitly delete is there. I recommend you look at it. It's fascinating. Look, because it goes back to the first days of you using Google search history. Fun fact actually about that. No, no, no. I am aware of that. I just mean for like certain sensitive topics where like I'm investigating some fraud and I go sign into their website, right? Log in. I won't use like a traditional browser. I'll use a VPN and I'll like put it on like Brave or something like that. You log in, your Korean account is Lex Friedman. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. That's what I'm getting. You mentioned effective altruism. Yes. You know, SBF has been associated with this effective altruism, which made me look twice at EA and see like, wait, what's going on here? Was this used by SBF to give himself a good public image or is there something about effective altruism that makes it easy to misuse by bad people? What do you think? Yeah, it's interesting. He could have endorsed a wide range of philosophies. And I guess you just have to wonder, would those philosophies also be tainted if he had gone bad? I guess effective altruism is sort of unique because he used it to misuse bad people. It's sort of unique because he used it as part of his brand. It wasn't like he described himself as a consequentialist and like that ended up mattering. It was like he described himself as an effective altruist and he used that part of the brand to lift himself up. I guess that's why it's getting so much scrutiny. I think the merits of it should speak for themselves. I mean, I don't personally, I'm not personally an effective altruist. I personally am motivated by giving in part emotionally. And for some reason that I can't exactly describe, I think that's somewhat important. I don't think you should detach giving from some personal connection. I find trouble with that. And like I said, it's for reasons I can't describe because effective altruism is sort of the most logical ivory tower position you could possibly take. It's like strip all humanity away from giving. Let's treat it like a business. And how many people can we serve through the McDonald's line of charity for like the dollar, right? I just personally don't resonate with that, but I don't think the entire movement is like indicted because of it. Typically, most people who care about giving and charity on the whole are nice people. So I can't speak for the whole movement. I certainly don't think SBF indicts the whole movement, even though I personally don't subscribe to it. Yeah, it made me pause, reflect, and step back about the movement and about anything that has a strong ideology. So if there's anything in your life that has a strong set of ideas behind it, be careful. Yeah. I mean, look, I kind of feel like what it teaches me and what I kind of think about when I think about systems is that no system saves you from the individual. No system saves you from the individual, their intentions, their lust for power or greed. I mean, I think one of the great ideas is the decentralization of power. And this is why I think democracies are so great is because they decentralize power across a wide range of interests and groups, and that being an effective way to kind of try as best as you can to spread out the impact of one individual, because one bad individual can do a lot of harm, as I mean, clearly as seen here. But no, I don't think it has anything to do with ideology, because it's not like being an effective altruist made Sam Bankman free to fraud. He was a fraud who happened to be an effective altruist, if that makes sense. Well, there is something about, yes, no system protects you from an individual, but some system enable or serve as a better catalyst than others for the worst aspects of human nature. So, for example, communist ideology, I don't know if it's the ideology or its implementation in the 20th century, it seemed like such a sexy and powerful and viral ideology that it somehow allows the evil bad people to sneak into the very top. And so that's what I mean about certain ideas sound so nice that allow you, like the lower classes, the workers, the people that do all the work, they should have power. They have been screwed over for far too long. They need to take power back. That sounds like a really powerful idea. And then it just seems like with those powerful ideas, evil people sneak in to the top and start to abuse that power. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't have a lot of probably big brain political takes, but what I can say is that you can never get away from both the system and the individual mattering. For sure, some systems incentivize some behaviors in certain ways, but some people will take that and go, OK, all we need to do is design the perfect system and then these individuals will act completely rationally or responsibly in accordance to what our incentives say. That's not true. You could also say all we have to do is focus on the individual and all we have to do is just create a society which raises very well adjusted people and then we can throw them into any system with any incentives and they will act like responsibly, ethically, morally. And I also don't think that's true. So incentives are real, but also the individual ultimately plays a large role too. So, yeah, I don't know. I come down sort of in the middle there. And some of that is just accidents of history too, which individuals finds which system, you know. You become the face of that. Yeah, with FTX versus Coinbase versus Binance, which individual, which kinds of ideas and life story come to power. That matters. It's kind of fascinating that history turns on these small little events done by small little individuals that, you know, Hitler is a failed artist or you have FDR or you have all these different characters that do good or do evil onto the world. And it's like single individuals and they have a life story and it could have turned out completely different. I mean, it's the flap of the butterfly wings. So, yeah, you're right. We should be skeptical as attributing too much to the system or the individual. It's all like a beautiful mess. The Lex Friedman podcast. That was like a Lex line. I've heard quite a few episodes and that's like such a Lex line. It's a beautiful mess. Beautifully said. All right. Sorry, I'm a fan of the show. Okay. All right. I love you too. All right. Can you think of possible trajectories how this FTX, SBF saga ends? And which one do you hope for? Do you hope that SBF goes to jail? That's the individual. And in terms of the investors and the customers, what do you hope happens and what do you think are the possible things that can happen? So, A, yeah, I definitely think SBF should go to jail for nothing else for a semblance of justice, the facsimile of justice to occur for all the investors. I also think there are people probably several steps down the chain that probably knew at least Caroline Ellison. You can have questions about sort of their, you know, Dan Friedberg, who I'd love to talk about as well. There are a lot of people in that room who I think knew. I think we do so much of like the one guy is all to blame. Let's throw everything at him when clearly this was a company wide issue. So everyone who knew, everyone who knew, I think should face the same punishment, which I think should be jail for all of those people. In part to send a signal to anybody that tries this kind of stuff in the future. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the big things that you saw, like, okay, take a microcosm of all of this action and just look at like the influencer space, right? There's a ton of deals that were done that I've covered ad nauseum about influencer finds out they can make a lot of money selling a crypto coin. The first thing they wonder is, am I going to get caught? If I do this, is there a consequence? And if the answer is no, then it's a pretty easy decision as long as you don't have any moral scruples about it, which apparently none of them did, or a lot of them didn't, I should say. So as soon as somebody steps in and regulates that math changes and all of a sudden there's a self interest reason to not go do the bad thing. So for example, and I can give a concrete example of this. There was a NFT, the first ever NFT sort of like official indictment or the DOJ released this press release that they're charging these guys who ran a NFT project that they didn't follow through on their promises. They made all these promises, lied, and then ran away with the money. First ever consequence for anyone in the NFT space. That day that that press release came out, I saw several NFT projects come back to life from the dead. Why? Because all those founders are freaking out and they realized we scammed people. We have to go at least make it look like we're doing the right thing, right? So that's on the optic side, but there's also tons of people who now go, oh, basically law enforcement is on the scene. We can't do the same thing. So there is a very pragmatic reason for this punishment. It's very much just because people work it into their math of should I commit fraud? And the last several years have been very, sort of been like a little bit of a nihilistic landscape where no one was getting punished. And so there's this question of you're almost an idiot if you didn't take the deals. So I think it's really important, extremely important for kind of law enforcement to play a role, regulation to play a role to make it harder to commit those crimes. And if you commit those crimes, there's actual real world punishment for it. To your point about what's going to happen to the investors, I think that was kind of your question. It's tough because if the money's not there, the money's not there. I mean, there's going to be the guy, they got the best in class guy. It's the guy who ran the dissolving of Enron. So I mean, I can't imagine someone better equipped to run a complicated corporate fraud like dissolution. But yeah, it's tough because everyone's going to get probably, I don't know, 10 cents on the dollar, maybe less. I wonder if there's a way to do a progressive redistribution of funds. So I'm just really worried about the pain that small investors feel. Yeah, I think there's a lot of thought around that. I forget if they actually do do this. I mean, I know there's a lot of law about like, you can't treat creditors differently. You have to treat them all the same. So I think it'll be some kind of proportional payback. It's certainly not going to be that the guys at the top get a significant amount of their money back and the rest get nothing. Unfortunately, I think there's such a small amount of assets that back this whole thing in the end. And that value is actually declining every day because it was inextricably tied to FBF. It was like the FTT tokens, which now what are those worth? The serum tokens that was his project or the project they made. What is that worth? Basically nothing. So, you know, it's a very, it's a hard situation. And, you know, there's a bigger ethical concern, which is FTX US. It's unclear how backed it was, but it was clearly more backed than FTX International. Do you take all that money and throw it into a big pot and give people money back? Or do you give the US people back their amount of money, which is probably going to be significantly more and leave everyone internationally out in the cold? And to add to that ethical issue, let's say you're a liquidator and you're US based. There's a tremendous question, like legal questions about, you know, how do you ethically do that? It's not, it's not clear. There's a tremendous incentive to just favor the US people over everyone else. Cause it's our country, America, whatever. But, um, I don't know if that's necessarily fair. It's, it's really hard. It's like, it's impossible. And some, uh, I forget where you said this, but one of the, I mean, it probably, uh, permeates a lot of the investigations you do, which is this idea that it's really sad that the middle-class in most situations like this get fucked over. So the, the IRS, uh, go after the middle-class, then go after the rich. It's basically everyone who doesn't have a lot of leverage in terms of lawyers, money get fucked over. Yes. And then they're the ones like, it's always the rich and powerful who get the favorable treatment as like a microcosm of this funny story. So one of the big criticisms of crypto, and I think rightly so is the irreversibility of the transaction. So if I accidentally send a transaction somewhere, it's gone, right? So crypto.com accidentally sent a lady $10 million and now they want the money back and they're suing her. But the funny thing is, is if you are on crypto.com and you send, let's say I accidentally send you money and I come knocking on your door at Lex, I didn't mean to send you, you know, like a thousand dollars. I need my money back. Or if I go to crypto.com and I said, Hey, I sent that to the wrong person. Can you reverse it? They'll say, screw off. No way. If I go to court, they'll kill me in court because they're going to go, look, this is how the blockchain works. But then they do it. They do the exact same thing. They send this lady $10 million. They're suing her. No, they're going to win. Now it's now what's in court is not whether they get the money back. It's should she be liable for theft, I believe. So, and that's just another case of the same rules apply differently to different people, whether you have the money to back you or not. It's a very sad thing. And that's why I think people like you need journalists fighting for the little person. We really need it. And it's kind of like this unfortunate thing where that's the most risky thing to do. Like legally, you should not be doing that. But I think it's important to do. It's the ethical thing. That's the right thing to do. What do you think about influencers and celebrities that supported FTX and SBF? Should they be punished? Yeah, I think they should take a huge reputational hit. I mean, I think they should be embarrassed. I think they should be ashamed of themselves. But it was really hard to know. Sorry to interrupt. For them to know, like, for example, I think about this a lot. It's like, who do I, because I don't investigate, you know, like sponsored by Athletic Greens. Okay. It's a nutritional drink. Should I investigate them deeply? I don't know. You just kind of use reputational, like it seems to work for me. Should I like investigate them deeply? I think your credibility hit will depend on what domain you're an expert in. If you're sponsored by a robotics company and you're an expert in robotics, if that company turns out to be a disaster and fraud, then you should have looked more deeply. We're talking mostly about, like, I hold Tom Brady a lot less accountable than financial advisors, financial influencers, because that is their world of expertise. And you treat their recommendation differently, proportionally to what you think their expertise is. So in some ways, I don't actually think Tom Brady, I'm sure he reached a lot of people. I personally didn't feel at all moved by his recommendation because you know it's just money. But when you hear somebody who should be an expert in that thing, endorse a product in that space, you hold that opinion to a higher standard. And when they're completely cataclysmically wrong, it's going to be a different level of accountability. And I think rightfully so. When Jim Cramer was saying Bear Stearns is fine, he made that terrible call with Bear Stearns in 2008. He was rightfully reamed for all of that, even though it could be considered that, like, well, you know, did he have all the information? Maybe not. But he's a financial advisor. He does this for a living. If you go on and you make a big call and you turn out to be wrong and people lose tons of money, you are going to take a hit, I think rightfully so. But no, I don't think these people should go to jail or anything like that. No, but it's such a complicated thing. I mean, I just feel it personally myself. I get it, but you still feel the burden of the fact that your opinion has influence. I know it shouldn't. I know Tom Brady's opinion on financial investment should not have influence, but it does. That's just the reality of it. That's a real burden. I didn't know anything about SBF or FTX. It wasn't on my radar at all. But I could have seen myself, like, taking them on as a sponsor. I've seen a lot of people I respect, Sam Harris and others, talk with SBF like he's doing good for the world. So I could see myself being hoodwinked, having not done research. And the same thing, it makes me wonder. I don't want to become cynical, man, but it makes you wonder who are the people in your life you trust that are like, that could be the next SBF or worse, big, powerful leaders, Hitler and all that kind of stuff. To what degree do you want to investigate? Do you want to hold their feet to the fire, see through their bullshit, call them on their bullshit? And also, as a friend, if you happen to be friends or have a connection, how to help them not slip into the land of fraud. I don't know, all of that is just overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, we should be clear, finance is sort of a special space where you're talking about people's money. You're not talking about whether someone takes a bad supplement or a supplement that is just, they're $50 out. I think the scale of harm and therefore responsibility escalates depending on what field you're in. Just like I wouldn't hold Tom Brady as, if he gives a bad football opinion and he should have known better, that is a different scale of harm than a doctor giving bad advice. Like he tells you a pill works and the pill kills you or something like that. There's just different levels of accountability depending on the field you're in, and you have to be aware of it. Finance is an extreme, you have to be extremely conservative if you're going to give financial advice because you're playing with people's lives and you cannot play with them haphazardly. You cannot gamble with them. You cannot play with them on a bet because you're getting paid a lot of money. It's just the nature of the space. And so with the space comes the responsibility and the accountability. And I don't think you can get around that. Who was Dan Friedberg that you mentioned? Some of these figures in the SBF realm that are interesting to you. Super interesting kind of subject because Dan Friedberg is the former general counsel for Ultimate Bet. Ultimate Bet was a poker site where famously they got in a scandal because the owner, Russ Hamilton, was cheating with a little software piece of code they called God Mode. God Mode allowed you to see the guy across from you's hand. Obviously, you can imagine you can win pretty consistently if you know exactly what your opponent has. Very unethical. I should be clear that for some inexplicable reason, I don't think they were ever charged and convicted of a crime, but they were investigated by a gambling commission that found they made tens of millions of dollars this way for sure. And Dan Friedberg is the general counsel. He's caught on a call basically conspiring with Russ to hide this fraud. He's saying we should blame it on a consultant third party. And Russ Hamilton famously says, it was me. I did it. I don't want to give the money back. Find basically a way to get rid of this. So that's Dan Friedberg's big achievement. That's what he's known for. He's most known for. And this is the guy they pick as their chief regulatory officer for FTX. Why do you hire somebody who I get it, not formally charged and convicted, investigated? There's all the and there's tape out there. So I want to be clear about what's actually available evidence. But someone who's seemingly own only achievement is hiding fraud. Why do you hire that guy if the intention is not to hide is not to hide fraud? So this is a question I put to Sam Bankman Fried and his answer was, well, we have a lot of lawyers. And I said, well, it's your chief regulatory officer. He's like, well, it wasn't. We did regulate a lot. And it was just this big dance of, you know, basically he's done great work. He's a great guy. And I think that tells you everything you need to know. And there's figures like that, probably even at the lower levels, like just infiltrate the entire organization. Well, it's just like, why? Yeah. Why wasn't there a CFA? Why wasn't there anyone in that space who could seemingly be the eyes that goes, holy whatever we need to we were in dangerous territory here? Right. So, yeah, it seems very deliberate. I mean, I talked to one FTX employee that they talked about who's told me they talked about taking I think it was taking FTX US public. And Sam was very against the idea. And the employee in retrospect speculated that it might have been because you face so much scrutiny, like regulation wise, like you'd have to go through a lot like more thorough audits, all that kind of stuff that basically he knew they would never pass. So, yeah, I mean, it's red flags all the way down with that guy. And you hope all of them get punished. Everyone who knew. I mean, I think for sure there are people at FTX who didn't know. I think there are some people at Alameda who didn't know. There's degrees, sorry to interrupt, but there's degrees of not knowing. Yes. There's a looking away when you kind of know shady stuff. That's still the same as knowing, right? That's might be even worse. Well, yeah, like I was talking to one insider and we were talking about the insider trading. They were telling me about this insider trading. And I said, do you think this was criminal? And they said it was probably criminal in hindsight. Yes. And the question is, someone who answers a question like that, what does that like mean? You know, like it was probably. So you're right. There are different degrees. I mean, I'll say at the most basic, I would be very happy if everyone who had direct knowledge went to jail, which I don't think will happen to be clear. I think a lot of people are going to cut deals. Prosecutors are going to cut deals. So they actually nail Sam Bankman-Fried. I think that's their only focus. What about his reputation? What do you think about all these interviews? Do you think they are helping him? Do you think they're good for the world? Do you think they're bad for the world? Like, what's your sense? And like, say you get a sit down interview with him for three hours and I'm holding the door closed. What kind of, is that a useful conversation or not? Or at this point it should be legal and that's it. I think it's useful. I mean, I think with, it's all about how you interview him. You can interview someone responsibly. You can interview him irresponsibly. I think we've seen examples of both. What's an irresponsible? I keep interrupting you rudely. That's okay. No, no, no. It's unacceptable. No, no, no. I think it's fine. There was like a New York Times interview, which spends an amount of time, any amount of time talking about his sleep. And he's like, yeah, I'm sleeping great. I mean, I think that's so deeply disrespectful to the victims. And especially when you're not even releasing an interview live, it's like you have time to triage what you're going to talk about. Why would you spend any amount of time talking about the sleep that a fraudster is getting? It's just so weird. And well, let's say, can I steal a man in that case? I don't think it turned out well. I think that's, I think that's, I think, okay, here's the thing. I could see myself talking about somebody's sleep or getting in somebody's mind if I knew I have unlimited time with them. If I knew I had like four hours. Because you get into the mind of the person, how they think, how they see the world. Because I think that ultimately reveals, if they're actually really good at lying, it reveals the depths, the complexity of the mind that through like osmosis, you get to understand like this person, this person is not as trivial as you realize. Also, it makes you maybe realize that this person is, has a lot of hope, has a lot of positive ambition that's like, that has developed over their life. And then certain interesting ways, things went wrong. They become corrupt and all that kind of stuff. You just, that's all fine. But this was, this conversation was not properly contextualized in the world of what he did. And I, you know, I've, I've asked about this interview because I was like so curious. It was out of the New York Times and there was not much mention of fraud or jail or the big crimes, like misappropriation of even client assets. It was just sort of this, you know, Sam sat down with me, he's, he's under investigation, but there's not much specifics. And then it's like, yeah, he's playing storybook brawl, he's sleeping, he's, and it's just like, okay, this isn't adding to the conversation. Especially when the New York Times is like, you should be grilling. Right, right, exactly. So, but as I said, I mean, it's, it's all arranged the gamut and some interviews, like some of it's okay. And then some of it's weird, like the Andrew Sorkin interview, he asked some hard hitting questions, which I really appreciated. And then at the end he goes, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Bankman-Fried, and everyone gives like a, like an ovation for Sam. I mean, the steel man of that, of course, is like, they're actually applauding Andrew Sorkin. But the way you like lay it up, I wouldn't go like, ladies and gentlemen, it's like an applause line. It's like, ladies and gentlemen, the Eagles, Elton John, Lex Friedman. And so to go to, so you have this like deal book summit, where you have all these important figures that are positively important. And at the end, you have Sam Bankman-Fried, a fraudster, and you go, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Bankman-Fried, everyone's applauding. That I think is a net, like, I think that's a negative. I think the way that the optics of that just were all wrong. And so I think, yeah, you have to be very responsible. I think it's useful, going back to how you can usefully do this. You can, even when somebody's determined to lie to you, it's always important to pin them down to an accounting of events, because that is unimaginably helpful when it comes to a prosecutor trying to prove this guy's guilty, is if you say you didn't do a crime, but you don't tell me any details about it, day of the trial, you can basically make up any story, right? But if you tell me in detail where you were that day, I can go hunt down, you say you were with Joe, I go hunt down Joe, and he says he wasn't with you, boom, you've lost credibility. And now you're much more likely to be convicted. So it's really important to get SBF's exact accounting of how things went wrong, because right now he's positioning himself to throw his Alameda CEO, Caroline Ellison, under the bus. She did everything, she knew everything, I knew nothing. Well, is Caroline Ellison going to take the stand and go, well, I have all these sex messages, and this is all a lie, and then Sam Megman Freed is going to be completely ruined, self-ruined by his own design? So I think it's important. So more like a legal type of, get the details of where he was, what he was thinking, what the- I think it's like, yeah, I think the public probably cares to get to know what happened to, and again, I think if you're careful, you can expose someone as they lie to you without giving into those lies, right? Like without capitulating to, oh, I'm just going to assume you're correct. I think you can point to, well, Lex, you say it happened this way, but you've lied about X, Y, and Z, why should we believe you? That's a suddenly a totally different conversation than just being like, oh, okay, that's how it happened. The thing I caught that bothered me, and the thing I hope to do in interviews if I eventually get good at this thing, is the human aspect of it, which I think you have to do in person, is he seems a bit nonchalant about the pain and the suffering of people. I mean, I have red flags about, in the way he communicates about the loss of money, like the pain that people are feeling about the money, I get red flags. Like you're not, forget if you're involved in that pain or not, you're not feeling that pain. Well, he'll say he is, but he'll be playing a game of League of Legends while doing it. No, but I just see it from his face, the dynamic. I know, I know. And that thing needs to be grilled, like that little human dance there. I talked to him, I considered doing an in-person interview with him. Are you still considering it? I don't know, do you think I should in person? I think it depends if you think you have anything to add to the conversation. A lot of people have- Yeah, there's been already, you did an incredible job. Thanks. I think- I think I would like to grill the shit out of him as a fellow human, but not an investigator, but a coffee sale investigator. Like another human being who I can have compassion for, who has caused a lot of suffering in the world. Like that, that grilling. Like basically convey the anger that people and the pain that people are feeling, right? Like that. Yeah. I think it'd be really hard. I mean, like that guy is sort of a master dancer. And what he would say at the end of it, because I've listened to so many interviews of him, I probably am like a GPT model for Sam. I think he would do some kind of thing about like, yeah, I really hear you. And it's just terrible. I feel such an obligation to the people who've lost money. And it's just, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. He'd do something like that. And it would be very superficially like, okay. But when you drill down to the details of what he did, it's just impossible that he didn't know. And one of the things that I wish I had asked, maybe I can talk about, like, I wish I had gone on this. It's just so hard when you're doing a live interview to kind of focus on one thing. Everyone's asked about the terms of service. So in the terms of service, there was like, we can't touch your funds. Your funds are safe. We're never going to do anything with that. Anytime anyone brings that up, he says, oh, well, there's this other terms of service over here with margin trading accounts. Remember, we talked about it's a derivatives platform. If you're in our derivatives side, you're subject to different terms of service, which kind of lets us like move your money around with everyone else. Okay. So we treat it as one big pool of funds. And that's sort of the explanation of how this all happened is we had this huge leverage position and we lost everything. But what no one has sort of done a good enough job getting to the heart of is that this pool of funds never was segregated properly. It was all treated under the same umbrella of we can use your funds. There was no amount of we have the client deposits, which were just deposited with us and not like used to margin trade or do anything over here. These funds over here, we have saved. They didn't. Fundamentally, they lied from the get go about how they were treating the most precious assets, which is your customer deposits that you said you didn't invest. Clearly, you put them all over here. You Yolo gambled them. And then when everyone starts withdrawing from here, they don't have any money over here. So that is like one of the most fundamental things that I haven't seen anyone grill him on. And the next time, if I get the chance to ambush him again, that's what I'm going to drill down on, because it's impossible for that not to be fraud. There's no world where you had a pool of funds over here and now you don't have them without you somehow borrowing over here. Because if you deposited one Bitcoin and I never sold that Bitcoin and it's earmarked Lex Friedman and you come and it's not there, something had to happen. Right. Well, so this is so interesting. So for me. The approach that, like you said, the most important question of because for you, it's like, were those funds segregated? For me, the question is, as a human being, how would you feel if you're observing that? So like, you know, that like marshmallow test with the babies, like it's the human thing. It's a human nature question. Like I can understand there's a pile of money and you, the good faith interpretation is like, well, I know what to do with that pile of money to grow that pile of money. Let me just take a little bit of that. Like how willing are you to do that kind of thing? How able are you to do that kind of thing? And when shit goes wrong, what goes through your mind? How does it become corrupted? How do you begin to lose yourself? How do you delegate responsibility for the failures? Like, as opposed to getting facts, try to sneak into the human mind of a person when they're thinking that because the facts, they're going to start waffling. They're going to start like trying to make sure that you make sure they don't say anything that gets them incriminated. But I just, I want to understand the human being there because I think that indirectly gives you a sense of where were you in this big picture. I think I've talked to so many people who have sort of committed some range of like outright fraud to like misleading marketing. No one thinks they're a bad person. Nobody admits that they did it and they knew they are almost nobody does. There's actually one funny exception. But I had a guy who admitted like, yeah, I did it. It was wrong. And, you know, but I did it and I wanted the money, which was kind of like almost refreshing in its honesty. But the reason I focus on like the facts is because unless you find a bright red line, humans can rationalize anything. I can rationalize any level of like, well, I did this because I had the best of intentions. And if you play the intention game, you'll never convict anyone because everyone has good intentions. Everyone's honest. Everyone's doing the best they can and got misleaded and got misguided and ultimately you have to drill down to the concrete and go, look, I get it. You're just like the last 50 guys that I interviewed. You had the best of intentions. It all went wrong. I'm very sorry for you. But at the end of the day, there's people hurting and there's people that have significant damage to their life because of you. What did you actually do and what can we prove taking intention out of it, taking motivation out? What can we prove that you did that was unethical, illegal or immoral? And like that is sort of what usually I try to go to because I will do those human interviews, but, you know, it's just like, it's just, it's like the same record on repeat. I mean, a lot of people go through the same. I'm with you. I'm with you on everything you said, but there is ways to do, to avoid the record on repeat. I mean, those are different skillset. You're exceptionally good at the investigative, like investigating. I do believe there's a way to break through the repeat. There's different techniques to it. One of which is like taking outside of their particular story. Yes. When everyone looks at their own story, they can see themselves as a good player doing good, but you can do other thought experiments. I mean, there's- But they'll follow you. They'll know what the thought experiment is. No, well, it depends. It depends, my friend. I mean, like, you know, to me, there's a million of them, but just exploring your ethics. Would you kill somebody to protect your family? And you explore that. You start to sneak into like, what's your sense of the in group versus the out group? How much damage you can do to the out group and who is the out group? And you start to build that sense of the person. Are we like the two mobsters that we're dressed as? Do we protect the family and fuck everyone else? You're with us and the ones who are against us, fuck them. Or do we have a sense that human beings are all have value, equal value, and we want to, that we're a joint humanity. There's ways to get to that. And you start to build up this sense of like, some people that make a lot of money are better than others. They deserve to be at the top. If you have that feeling, you start to get a sense of like, yeah, the poor people are the dumbasses. They're the idiots. If you believe that, then you start to understand that this person may have been at the core of this whole corrupt organization. Yes. Two things. One, I think you should join me on this side of the table. We'll put SBF over here. Yeah. Well, good guy, bad guy, human, facts. You're the bad guy. I'm like, no, no, no, slow down, coffee. What is your feeling about humanity? Yeah. Have you been getting enough sleep? Yeah. Right. So, I, so I think, no, I think there's a lot of truth to what you said. One thing I've noticed that is hard to combat is sort of like preference falsification and just like, just the outright lying about those things is tough to kind of pin down. But yeah, you're absolutely right. There's ways to interview people. There's all sorts of interesting techniques. And yeah, I don't disagree. Good cop, bad cop. We should do this. It'd be like a sitcom. Okay. You did an incredible documentary on SafeMoon. The title is I Uncovered a Billion Dollar Fraud. Can you tell me the story of SafeMoon? Sure. So, SafeMoon was a crypto coin that exploded on the scene in 2021, I think, at this point. Sorry, I'm losing track of my years. One year in crypto is like five years in real life. But it kind of gained a huge amount of popularity because of this idea that it's in the name, you go safely to the moon. How they were going to do this is with sort of a sophisticated smart contract idea where there's, I kind of have to explain the way some contracts get rug pulled for a second or there's scams happen. So, in the, sometimes it's called like the shit coin space, the altcoin space, anything like below Bitcoin, Ethereum, and maybe the top five or 10 is kind of seen as this wasteland of gambling. And you don't know if the developers are going to become anything or not. You're kind of like reading the white paper, trying to figure it out. So, there's this big question about how can you get scammed? How can, back to the interests, you don't want the developer to have some parachute cord where they can pull all the money out. So, one way this happens is that in decentralized finance, there's something called the liquidity pool. It's basically this big pot of money that allows people to trade between two different currencies. So, let's say like SafeMoon and Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or it's actually on the Binance Smart Chain. So, it'd be BNB. And this pool of money can be controlled by the developers in such a way they can steal it all. They can just grab it. I don't want to go too much into details because I feel like I'll lose people here. But the point of SafeMoon was, the core idea was, we're locking this money up. You can't touch it. And actually, every transaction that you buy SafeMoon with will take a 5% tax of that. We'll do a 10% tax, but 5% of it will go back to all the holders of SafeMoon. And 5% of it will go back in this little pool of money. So, the idea is, as you trade, as this token becomes more viral, two things will happen. One, the people who are holding it long term will be rewarded for holding it long term by receiving this 5% tax that's distributed to everyone. And two, you can kind of trust that your money's going to have this stable value because this pool of money here in the middle that's kind of guaranteeing you can get your SafeMoon out into this actually valuable currency, it's not going to move. So, the story of SafeMoon was that fundamentally, this was not the case. They promised that this money was going to be locked up. It was not actually locked up at all. They said it was automatically locked up. You don't have to worry about it. Well, it was very manually locked up, and they didn't actually lock a lot of it up. They took a lot of it for themselves, for the developers. So, there's a lot of players in this. A lot of them have left by now. There's kind of this main CEO that everyone knows, John Karoni now. And despite saying that they were going to lock up all the funds for four years, somehow he's gone from, as everyone else in the token has lost 99% of the value of the token. So, they've lost 99%. He's gotten a $6 million crypto portfolio, multi-million dollar real estate portfolio, invested millions into various companies. So, he's accrued this huge wealth. And so, I made a video basically exposing that and showing how this coin, which once had a $4 billion market cap, is just viral everywhere. Everyone was talking about it. Because of these viral ideas, it is sort of a captivating idea that by holding it, you could get returns, right? You just hold onto it, you automatically get money. And it's a viral idea that this money in the middle, in the pot, isn't going to leave you. When those things turned out to be false, this community has had a slow death as a lot of people realized it was a scam. And there's been a core part of the community, which gets to an interesting dynamic we can talk about if you want to, where they have doubled down on the belief in Karoni. And so, part of it was out of a hope to let those people know what was really going on in their coin and hopefully save some of them. Not in some altruistic sense, but like, or not in some like, I'm like a hero sense, but in the sense of, I think a lot of them didn't know, like literally didn't know. So, just sort of like as a public service, letting them know so they could get their money out and hopefully save themselves a lot of pain and suffering. So, yeah. So, they really dug in. Some did, some did, some left. I mean, a lot of people have left, but the people who are left are people with large amounts of safe moon holdings that are down immensely. And you can imagine at a certain point in losses, there's a tremendous psychological pressure to go, look, I'm in it. I got to go for the long haul. And then you want to believe that this thing is legitimate and will succeed because A, there's an ego component around, I haven't been scammed. I'm too smart to get scammed. It's tremendously, you know, it hurts psychologically to acknowledge you've been taken for a ride. And also you just want this thing to succeed for your financial wellbeing. So, you like want to believe it. So, there's tremendous psychological pressure to build cult-like communities around these tokens. And I've noticed with the incentive of like community built, it's sort of new to finance. There's like these meme coins or these these cults. I don't want to, it's not really fair to call all of them cults. Like some of them are open to criticism, but one of the things that defines cults is they're not open to sunlight or criticism. There's these financial communities that are opening up with crypto, with a few stocks, where if you criticize them, you are attacked. And the entire community has every incentive to kind of like downplay your legitimate criticisms or kind of go after you. And so it creates this interesting dynamic that I'm fascinated by. What do you think about Bitcoin then? Do you think it's one of those communities that does attack you when criticized? So, which, I guess, which coins do you think are open to criticism and which are not? It's kind of tough. Like no community is a monolith. So, just like, it's just a spectrum of how open they are. There's just like, there's always this core contingent of extreme believers who will go after anyone who criticizes them. And it's just about how wide of a band that makes up of the entire token. Sure. How intensely, how active that small community is. Correct. So it's in Bitcoin, they're called Bitcoin maximalists. Yes. But you can also call any community's subgroup like that maximalist, whatever the belief is. I don't know. Dunkin Donuts maximalists. That community is probably small in terms of attack you online. You know which community has a very intense following? So, I got attacked on the internet when I said Messi's better than Ronaldo. Oh yeah. That's controversial. And so that's a very intense maximalist community there. The other one that surprised me is when I said, now I did it in jest. Okay, folks? I said, Emacs is a better ID than Vim. I love Emacs. I agree. Listen, I have trauma. I wake up sweating sometimes at night thinking- Emacs master it. The Vim people are after me. They're everywhere. They're in the shadows. No, Vim is an amazing, and it's actually a surprise. I've recently learned that it's still even more so than before an incredibly active community. So a lot of people wrote to me- But do you use SpaceMax? It's just Emacs and Vim? No, I haven't. I use Raw. Old school Emacs? But- Oh, you gotta use- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on a second. I actually recently, I have recently said, you know what? Let's make love, not war. And I went to VS Code. I went to a more modern ID. Because I did most of my programming in Emacs. I did most of anything as one does in Emacs, just because I also love Lisp, so I can customize everything. Then I realized, like, how long will Vim and Emacs be around, really? I was thinking, as a programmer, looking like 10, 20 years out, you know, I should challenge myself to learn new IDs, to learn the new tools that the majority of the community is using, so that I can understand what are the benefits and the costs. I found myself getting a little too comfortable with the tools that I grew up with. Sure. And I think one of the fundamental ways of being as a programmer, as anyone involved with technology, based on how quickly it's evolving, is to keep learning new tools. Like, the way of life should be constantly learning. You're not a mathematician or a physicist or any of those disciplines that are more stable. This is like, everything is changing. Crypto's, like you said, a perfect example of that. You have to constantly update your understanding of digital finance, constantly, in order to be able to function, in order to be able to criticize it, in order to be able to know what to invest in. So yeah, that was why I did, I tried PyCharm, a bunch, the whole JetBrains infrastructure. And then also VS Code, because that's really popular. And, you know, Atom and Sublime, all of those. I've been exploring, I've been exploring. But VS Code is amazing. You should check out SpaceMax. I'm just going to give one more pitch for it. It's just basically like a customizable configuration. Well, Emacs is already customizable, but it's pretty useful. I'm not even much of a coder, but for like certain journaling applications or like time management, like I find it really useful. But anyway, we're so like, I feel like half this podcast is what it should have been. And half of it's just us nerding out about our own engineering, like idiosyncrasies. Sorry, guys. All right. So what were we talking about? SafeMoon and Bitcoin, Bitcoin. What do you think? Is there, have you made enemies in certain communities? What do you think about Bitcoin? So I've made certain enemies in the sort of crypto skeptics space, because there's sort of this range of skepticism you can have about cryptocurrency. I'm obviously a skeptic, a lot of it. But there are certain aspects of crypto that I think are inevitable. And I'm going to do my best to kind of describe those here. But I'm not committed to any crypto specifically, but there are some, I've taken a lot of heat, ironically, for not being skeptical enough. There's some people who believe that like the entire thing is a complete waste of time. There are slash but coin on Reddit. It's an amazing community, actually. It's very funny. They have what's a book is like, it's like a play on Bitcoin. They're like, oh, they're just like, oh, at least we admit it's a scam. Very funny guys. Very funny people there. So but they like, but they'll they'll be like, you know, coffee's Alicia, just admit that all of it's a giant Ponzi scheme. All of it's basically like not real. So everything, including Bitcoin. Yeah, it's all it's all basically all the Ponzi nomics. It's all it's it's Ponzi nomics all the way down. It's like there is no fundamental use case that is that useful. I don't know if I guess I don't want to strawman them here. I don't want to say that. I don't know if they're saying that it's all useless. At minimum, they're saying the level of interest in cryptocurrencies is far. The actual usefulness of it is far less than the amount of attention and time and money that's being poured into it. It's like the revolutionariness of this technology is not at all revolutionary. Let me kind of steel man what I think the pro crypto take is. I think that technologies are sort of this inert thing and the success of them. In my opinion, is not based on PR. It's not based on marketing. It's based on cheaper, faster, better. Fundamentally, the success of any technology relies on those three things and longevity of it. So I have two employees and both of them are out of the country. So I have to frequently make international wire payments to them. Is one of them SPF just as a reporter? I have to ask. No. Okay. He's not an apparel. Yeah, I think you'd have to pay me. I'm trying to do my best coffee. So the words I can hard hit. Yeah, yeah. It's good. It's good. It's good. So with these international payments, you face all sorts of slow fees and you face like kind of like this time thing. And it's this painful process. So if I use different cryptocurrencies, some of them are like really fast. Some of them have really low fees. I just believe in a world where digital currencies with fast payments, with cheap payments revolutionize the global exchange of currency. And I don't know if this if this is going to include the blockchain. It's just that the blockchain is the first thing that's really embraced truly digital currency, which doesn't need to go through this complicated system of wire transfers and just happens. So I can send you let's say I want to send you a Ethereum or Bitcoin. I can send it to you just as fast if I send you a dollar or a billion dollars, and I can send it to you just as fast if you're across from me or if you're across the world from me. That I think is a step change and easier, faster, better in terms of like just this really basic international payments kind of idea. So I think at like its core, if the lowest form use case of cryptocurrencies is that, I think it will change the world in some variety. It's just kind of the larger question is, is that going to is that technology going to include the blockchain specifically or not? The other benefit is transparency, which I personally like as an investigator. It's just that previously it's like hard to describe how opaque our financial system is until you've tried to investigate someone or something. Understanding finances, unless you have a subpoena, unless you're like the FBI or like the SEC and you can get a subpoena for someone's finances or you're going through discovery, you don't know what someone has. You're basically playing poker with everyone and the cards are face down. For the first time, the blockchain to some extent, because there are ways to obfuscate it and in some ways cryptocurrency has enabled more fraud, which is kind of this irony, but in some ways it's enabled people to also audit a lot better and in real time. And I think that is a structural change that is fundamentally for the better. The question of all this is, do those betters outweigh the cons that this introduces and how much can regulation mitigate those cons? Some of those cons being like fraud, money laundering, all these negative externalities that are easier with cryptocurrency. Why do you think cryptocurrency in particular seems to attract fraudulent people like scammers and fraudsters? Because it's unregulated, it's the wild west and you can transmit large amounts of money very quickly across the world. What about- With very little oversight. Creating new crypto projects, like new coins. Because you have to show very little actual use case, you can just promise. So it's like true of any emerging technology, so much vaporware happens at the beginning when it's all promise because fundamentally, let's say you're legitimate, I'm illegitimate. We look the same at the start of a technology because both of us are promising what this can do. And in fact, the less scruples and morals I have, in some ways I can outcompete you because I can say mine does what Lexis does, but like way better and way faster and it's going to happen in a year rather than 10 years. You're being honest, I'm playing a dishonest game, I look better. Once this space matures and you actually have some people actually doing the things that they say they're going to do, suddenly this equation changes. Now you're Amazon, you're delivering in two days, I can say whatever I want. You do the thing you do and I have no credibility. So I think that like part of the fraud is just the ability to transmit so much money so quickly with such little oversight. Part of it is like this just happens with any emergent technology, vaporware is a real thing. And hopefully as this space matures, as regulation comes in, things will improve. Let me ask you your own psychology. Sure. You're going after some of the richest, some of the most powerful people in the world. Do you worry about your own financial, legal and psychological well-being? Yes. Yeah, I do. I mean, I'm not totally oblivious to the precariousness of like any kind of journalism like this. Obviously, there's risks. I've always believed there's a quote and I'm going to butcher it, but I hope you guys understand the spirit of it. You know, news is when you print something, someone else doesn't want you to print, everything else is public relations. I really believe to do meaningful journalism, you have to go after people. Like it's not inherently a safe profession. I mean, if you're going to do important work, you have to have risk tolerances. And I think everyone has a line of what that risk tolerance is. And it's different for everyone. I don't think I could do what Edward Snowden did. I think that would be my bright red line is going against my own government. It's such a, in my opinion, I really see him as a hero. Like it's such a selfless act of self-destruction. You know that the party you're going after has all the power and will crush you. And you do it anyway out of the like the true, I don't know, platonic ideal of journalism. I think that's beautiful. I don't think I could do that. I think I need some ability to live and subsist in the society that I am in. And I think my bright red line would be like if I'm forced to flee the country for my work, I think I'd finally have to say no. But for as journalists go, I'm pretty risk. I take risk pretty well. I especially like think risk is important to take when you're young. And when you can do that, I think when I mean, I'm married. So when I have a family, I think I will probably dial this risk thing down. Just being honest. I mean, I think you kind of have to. But right now, I mean, I'm kind of like running on all cylinders. I'm willing to take on quite a quite a range of people. But well, you're also a lot about it. Wolfpack of one or small. Yeah. Wolfpack as opposed to having like a New York Times behind you or a huge organizations with lawyers with a team with a history with. These people are less courageous. This is the dirty truth. The bigger the organization, the more conservative a lot of them are. It's true that sometimes they like and this is not to bash big organizations. I'm just saying this as an observation of someone who's talked to a lot of people and especially in the world of fraud. A lot of them are scared to engage in fraud that is obvious but hasn't been litigated yet. This is why you'll never see documentaries about ongoing fraud on Netflix. It's too much of a liability. They'll sue Netflix to hell and they know that if they win, Netflix has the money to pay it. So corporations like the New York Times, a lot of these. Some of them are very like they're as courageous as they can be. But at the bottom line, if someone sues you to hell and back and you have to pay up, you will disappear and you're relying on liability insurance, which you're already paying out the ass for to try to cover you if you get sued. But if you get sued, even if you win, that liability insurance now goes up in price the next year. And if you're the New York Times, it goes up by a lot. So, I mean, I think there's work that independent journalists can do uniquely that they can actually take, like, in some ways more risk than a giant institution, which has a lot more in my sense to lose, even though it would appear like they have more in terms of defense to. But you get you can be bullied legally. Yeah. Do you get afraid of that? Sure. I mean, I just all these things are things you have to be aware of and then forget to do your job like you have to be. You know, it's like it's like being like a snowboarder. And it's like, do you realize you could hit your head? And it's like, yeah, of course. But in order to go do the like the flip or whatever, you have to just accept the risk, mitigate the risk as much as possible and move on. So we have we have like insurance. We keep like a pool of funds for that kind of thing. Like I'm very conservative with how I I spend my money basically all on production and like trying to make my life as secure as I can. And then I just do the work that I, you know, I want to do because. So 99% of your fund goes into the in the studio, into the studio and then into that elaborate space of yours. Yeah, of course. How many kittens had to die to manufacture that studio? But anyway, that's that's my investigation for later. What keeps you mentally strong through all of this? What's your source of mental strength or your psychological strength through this? I think there was a time when I was getting a lot of cease and desist. Some people were like actually like saying like they're going to show up to my house, all that kind of stuff. I don't think I was that. I think I was pretty worried about that for a while. My wife was a huge source of strength here where she was like, hey, if you're not comfortable with it, you need to get out of the game or you need to basically like suck it up. And like this is what it is. If you're going to go after these people, you have to basically be mentally strong around this. And seeing her have that realization helped me have the same realization. And I really deeply admire and respect that about her. And it solved a lot of my concerns around that. It's just it just made me realize every profession has risks. It is what it is. You mitigate and then you move on. Why do you think there's so few journalists like you? You're basically the embodiment, at least in the space you operate, of what great journalism should be. Why do you think there's very few like you? That's such an enormous compliment and probably overstatement. But I first want to pay respect. There are a lot of great journalists and a lot of them are like, I don't want to just kind of take it and go, yeah, you know, it's just me. There's so many great journalists. Matt Levine, Kelsey Piper, you know, you've got all of these great journalists. You know, you've got anonymous journalists like Dirty Bubble. You've got citizen journalists like Tiffany Fong. But who? But yeah, but. I think if you are going to be in the space in the long term, you do need to accept certain risks. And I think in the long term, it's like I don't know how easy it is to play that game for a long period of time because you make. To do great journalism, you don't get paid a lot compared to what you could get paid if you did press pieces or anything like that. You take a lot of risks legally. You take physical risks. You take. It's just like if you care about money. It's not the profession. And I feel like a lot of people, when they get notoriety, they move to like, well, I can just maximize the money security side of things. And I think it takes out a lot of would be great journalists. And also, so first of all, comfort of physical and mental well-being. Yes. And also being invited to parties with powerful people. Absolutely. You make enemies, rich and powerful enemies doing this. Yes. But that's why it makes it. That's why it's admirable. I mean, you know, it's an interesting case study that you've been doing it as long as you have. And I hope you keep doing it, but it's just interesting that it's rare. I'll say I want to make a call like I think societies can create better journalists and worse journalists insofar as they support the journalists who are doing great work. And I want to call out Edward Snowden specifically because what we have done to him is such a travesty and the only lesson you can learn if you're a logical human being is that you should never whistleblow on the United States government after looking at what they did to Snowden. So as a society, we can put pressure on lawmakers to make it easier for people to do the great work by not punishing the people who do great work, if that makes sense, and de-risking it for them. Because we shouldn't expect journalists to be martyrs to do great work, right, to do important work. And part of that comes from protecting whistleblowers. There's like very common sense things. I love like, it's great to heroicize, you know, people like Edward Snowden and stuff like that, but we shouldn't expect them to be heroes to do that work. Do you ever think about going, you've been focused on financial fraud. Do you ever think about going after other centers of power? Like... Government. Government. Government. Politics. Politics, it seems to me, you can't do good work. Like everybody doing good work in politics is to some extent, from my limited perspective, as I said, I'm not that into it. It seems like everyone has to take a side, because even if you do great work, whoever you're exposing, half the other people, no matter how good your work is, are going to claim it's just for partisan hackery, and they're going to malign you. So it seems like a lot of journalists have to take a slant, even if it's not explicit like bias, they have to take a slant on who they expose. I hate that. I would really like a world where you could freely expose both sides without having a constant malignment of like, you know, who are you working for, or you did this for X, Y, Z, or whatever. Like, I really find that deeply problematic about our current journalism in the political sphere. As far as government stuff, I think it's easy to do, not easy, but like it's much more enticing to do foreign journalism than to do local journalism on positions of power. Because if you question, it's so easy to just get, the bigger cases you expose locally, you're, you get in danger. Like, it's just like very, very clear cut. The bigger the case, the more your financial well-being, your access, your entire life is like sort of in jeopardy. Whereas if you do foreign journalism, you can do great work, and largely you're protected by your own government. So it's kind of this weird thing where if you want great journalism on America, sometimes going abroad might be the way to go. But the politician thing, that's interesting you mentioned that and going abroad. I think the way you think about your current work, I think applies in great journalism in politics as well. So what happens, I have that sense, because I aspire to be like you in the conversation space of like, with politicians. I try to talk to people on the left and the right, and do so in a non-partisan way and criticize, but also steel man their cases. What happens, I've learned, is when you talk to somebody on the right, the right kind of brings you in, it's like, yes, we'll keep you comfortable, come with us. And then the left attacks you. And so, and the same happens on the left. You talk on the left, the right attacks you, and the left is like, come with us. So like there's a temptation, a momentum to staying to that one side, whatever that side is. The same with foreign journalism. You can cover Putin critically. There's a strong pull to being pro-Ukraine, pro-Zelensky, pro-basically really covering in a favorable way to the point of propaganda, to the point of PR, the Zelensky regime. If you criticize the Zelensky regime, there's a strong pull towards then being supportive of, not necessarily the Putin regime, but a very different perspective on it, which is like NATO is the one that created that war. There's narratives that pull you, and what I think a great journalist does is make enemies empathize and walk through that fire and not get pulled in to the protection of anyone's side because they get so harshly attacked anytime they deviate from the center. Well, and I think also like there's a criticism of all centrists, which I think in some way is fair. And I say that as someone largely who's a centrist, which is that this what about is, or like this, like what about the left or what about the right can skew when it's not a one, it's not a both sides issue. So in the case of like Russia, Ukraine, I think like I'm strongly in favor of Ukraine, even though I tend to go like on both sides. And that might be partly because one of my employees is Ukrainian. And I think what a great journalist does, especially like in politics, is I think they criticize the regime that's most in power, most controls the keys and is the most corrupt at that time. And they might appear to be like, let's say during the realm of Trump, a great journalist would criticize Trump, but that same journalist who held Trump's feet to the fire should be capable of holding Biden's feet to the fire four years later, if that kind of makes sense. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So any revealing any sort of attacking any power center for the corruption, for the flaws they have. Irrespective of like your political agenda or your political ideas. Yeah. So that's what I mean about sort of the war in Ukraine. There's several key players, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, China, India. I mean, there's several less important players, maybe some of the like Iran and like Israel and maybe Africa. And what great journalism requires is basically revealing the flaws of each one of those players, irrespective of the attacks you get. And you're right that throughout any particular situation, there is some parties that are worse than others. Yeah. You have to weigh your perspective accordingly, but also it requires you to be fearless in certain things. Like, for example, I don't even know what it's like to be a journalist covering China now. Oh, that's an exact case of like China has made it so difficult to be a good journalist that they've effectively squashed criticism because to be a journalist in China means constantly risking your life every single day to criticize that government. And so the best journalists are a lot of times outside the country or they have sources inside the country who are like there's like this, you know. Different there's layers to the journalism where there's insiders who are leaking information, but they themselves cannot publish because it's like it's, you know, it's it's extremely risky. So, yeah, I think I think as a society, one measure of how healthy the political structure is, is how well you can criticize it without fearing for your safety. In that sense, the chaos and the bickering going on in the United States politics is a good thing that people can criticize very harshly. Very harsh. And be in terms of safety are pretty safe. Yes, absolutely. I think our only challenge is like where it gets dangerous is around like top secret information. The government comes down so hard that. The danger in in covering politics here is you can expose something that's top secret that should be exposed and they'll ruin you. So that's where you again give props to Snowden for stepping up. 100 percent. 100 percent. What's the origin of of the suspender wearing Batman? What's how did you come to do what you do? Like what we talked about where you are and how your mind works. But how did it start? I've kind of always been interested in fraud or or at least I saw fraud early on and I was just like curious about what is this? I didn't know what I was really looking at. So basically, my mom got cancer when I was in high school and it was pretty traumatic. I mean, she's fine. She had thyroid cancer, which is we didn't know it at the time. It's like cancer's cancer, but it's fairly easily treatable with surgery. It's one of the better survivable ones. And I just watched her get like bombarded with all these like phony health scams of you know, just like colloidal silver, you know, all these different like remedies. And she was very into, you know, all the different ways that she might treat her cancer. And obviously, surgery is very daunting. And, you know, I was just confused. I was like, why are we doing so many different remedies that all seem a very dubious health value? Later, I'd find out that these are like all grifters. I mean, they take advantage of free speech in America to like advertise their products as life-saving miracles, whatever, when they're of course not. Eventually, she got the surgery, thank God. But I know people in my life who their parents passed away because they didn't have the surgery. They instead took the alternative option. I know like, I don't want to go into specifics because I don't want to mention their specific like case, but their family member went to Mexico for some alternate treatment, health treatment, instead of getting an easy surgery, and they died. And so it's like, I realized, you know, where is the outrage about this? Where's the, who covers this stuff? And I realized, well, not many people do. Then I went to college, I was getting a chemical engineering degree. And all my friends are like telling me, you know, hey, you should come to this meeting. You know, we don't need this. Like, you're doing this engineering stuff. That's great. You're going to make like 70K a year, but don't you want to get like rich now? Like why wait till you're 60 years old to retire? Like you can be rich now, Lex. So I'd go show up to a hotel and there'd be an MLM, like multi-level marketing, you know, pitch for Amway or whatever it was that day. And I was once again fascinated. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I was like, what is this weird game we're all playing where we sit in this room? We're looking at the speaker who says he's so successful, right? But why is he taking a Friday or a Saturday to do this, you know, pitch at night? And they're going to telling me I'm going to be financially free, but they're working on their Saturday and Sunday. And so it's like, how financially free are they? So I was just like confused. I was like, you know, none of my friends were rich. They all said they were going to be rich. No one ever seemed to get rich. And so I was sort of baffled by what I was looking at. Later, I graduate, I had no interest in doing engineering, which we can kind of get into, but I want to do something in media. And I started covering a variety of topics. But eventually, I sort of revisited this interest in fraud. And I started talking about these kind of get rich quick grifters that were online, sort of the Tai Lopez variety, you know, 67 steps or, you know, whatever, like five steps to get rich, five coins to five million, you know, these get rich quick schemes that a lot of people were interested in. No one seemed to get rich once again, except for the people at the tippity tippity top selling the get rich quick thing. And I was like, fascinated by the structure of it. I was like, does nobody see what this is? Like, does nobody get it? So I started making a series of videos on that. And the response was like palpable. I mean, it was like, I've made a lot of stuff before that. I'd made stuff that got a million views. I'd had like some marginal success. But the response of like the emails that came in the I could tell this work, even though it had far less views at the time, was having a different level of impact. And that's what I was really interested in. One of my problems with engineering was from my standpoint, I did chemical engineering at Texas A&M. And like, I was like, is my future just going to be in a chemical plant, improving some process by 2%? And that's like my gift to the world. Like, I just, I didn't see the hard impact. And that maybe that's a lack of imagination because chemicals matter. But I needed, I wanted to see an impact in the world. And so when like I did start doing this fraud stuff, exposing fraud, I like clicked in my brain. I was like, whoa, this is kind of doing what I want to do. And so I started posting videos. At first, it really focused on like get rich quick scheme, grifty advertising, which I think is super predatory. And we can go into why. But it eventually graduated to crypto and it snowballed, I guess, because now we're talking to Sam Bagnett-Fried. Okay, grifty advertising. So actually, just a step back. What is a multi-level marketing scheme? Like what, because I've experienced a similar thing. It's like, I remember I worked at, I sold women's shoes at Sears and a bank. And I just remember like some kind of, I forgot the name of the company, but you'd like, you can sell like knives or whatever. Like that's a common. Oh, I know what you're talking about. I'm sure there's a lot of things like this. Right. And I remember feeling a similar thing. Like why? To me, what was fascinating about it is like, wow, like human civilization is a interesting, like a pyramid scheme. Like I didn't, maybe didn't know the words for that, but it's like, it's cool. Like you can like get in a room and you convince each other of ideas and you have these ambitions, there's a general desire, especially when you're young to like, like life sucks right now. Nobody respects you. You have no money and you want to do good. And you want to be sold this dream of like, if I work hard enough at this weird thing, I can shortcut and get to the very top. Yes. I don't know what that is. And I also in me felt that like life really sucks and I could do good. And I'm lucky I found a way to do good. I'm like, and I don't know, you connect with that somehow. I think there's like this weird fire inside people to like, to make better of themselves. Right. I don't know if it's just an American thing or if it, but anyway, that was fascinating to me from a human nature perspective. Grifters play on this though, right? Like this is, so the best salesmen play on true narratives that you already believe. So the true narrative is, you know, life is unfair. It is tough. The American dream as described by go to a job, work at the same company for 40 years and then retire to a safety net that you're positive is going to be there. That is largely dead. And so they like play on those fears and those problems to then sell you a pill, a solution, a thing. And the problem is that the solution is usually worse than even the problem they sketched out. Like you will do better most of the time by going with the regular company than you will by going with these goofy multilevel marketing. But let me answer your question. What is a multilevel marketing? So there's a criticism, first of all, that, well, let me get to what it is in theory, like at its most ideal multilevel marketing is where you have a product that you're selling. And one of the ways you help sell it is by rather than going through traditional marketing, like where you go and you put out print advertising, it's like sort of a social network of marketing. I sell to you and then actually Lex, not only can I sell to you, you can then go sell this product and you'll make money selling it. And you know what? To incentivize me to get other salesmen, because when I get another salesman, I'm actually giving myself competition. So that's bad. So to incentivize me to do that, they'll pay me part of what you make. Right. And then you go out and you go, OK, well, I can sell this product. I also can get new salesmen to like sell for me and I'm going to make money from you, whatever. So it goes down the line of you create multiple levels where you can profit from their marketing. Right. The problem with this system is that however well-intentioned it is, is that usually the emphasis of that selling and making money ends up not being about the product at all and ends up entirely being about recruiting new people to recruit new people to recruit new people. That's the real way to make money in multilevel marketing. This is where the very true criticism of most multilevel marketing, if not all, are pyramid schemes in structure. Because what a pyramid scheme is, is it's all about I put in $500 and I recruit two people to put in $500 and that comes up to me and they put in, they get two people to put in $500 and it goes to them. And the reason it's a flawed business model is in order for it to work and everyone to make money, you'd have to assume an infinite human race. And so that's not the case. Most people end up getting screwed in multilevel marketing and in pyramid schemes. That's what that is. That's that thing. And the quality of the product, it doesn't necessarily matter what you're selling. To people who are financially incentivized to like buy this thing. Yeah. And so you're selling the dream of becoming rich to the people down in the pyramid. That's the real product of multilevel marketing, unfortunately. And so you look at the statistics of these companies and although they'll make it seem like it's so easy to be the top, you know, 0.1% who's making all this money. The statistics are that 97% make less than a minimum wage doing this. They spend an enormous amount of time. And just what's so cruel about it is that's not advertised up front. I mean, it's like if I go to work at McDonald's, I know what I'm getting. If I go work at Amway, I have visions of they've sold me visions of beaches and whatever. And more than likely I'm losing money. So better than 50% of people lose money. But 97% of people make less than minimum wage. It's like it's such a bad business for the vast majority of people who join it. And the people at the very top who are lying to the people at the bottom saying they all can do it when they can't are making all the money. So it's, yeah, it's really messed up. Oh, and the interesting thing I've noticed, maybe myself too, because I've participated in the knife selling for like a short amount of time. That's probably the experience that most people have. It's not Cutco, is it? I don't know. I don't think it was Cutco. I know what you're talking about. It's killing me. But I think there's several variations of it. I think I was part of a less popular one. It doesn't, I keep wanting to say it was called Vector. Yes. Something with a V was what I was going to say. It might be Vector. Yeah, I get what you're saying though. It's a multi-level marketing knife selling. But the thing is, I just remember my own small experience with it is I was too, I was embarrassed at myself for having participated. I think there's an embarrassment. That's why people down in the pyramid don't speak about it, right? I'm trying to understand the aspects of human nature that facilitate this. Well, this is one of the problems with fraud is there's a tremendous embarrassment to being had. Yeah. Also, if you buy, so slightly different human nature is that if you buy into a get rich quick scheme and then it doesn't deliver, you're more likely to blame yourself than blame the product for not actually working. You go, well, there must be something flawed with me. That's true. And they constantly reinforce this. They go, well, it's all about your hard work. The system works. Look at me. I did it. So if you're failing, it must be some indictment of your character and you have to always double down. The system can't be flawed. You must be flawed. And so, yeah, it's a really messed up system. It really preys on people's psychology to keep them in this loop. And that's why in some ways these things are so viral, even though they don't actually get most people a significant amount of wealth and they cost most people money. So it's very unfortunate. Most people do have the dream of becoming rich. Most young people. Right. And the thing is, is that everyone knows in business, what do you sell? You sell solutions to problems. So if so many young people want to get rich, the product is that pitch. It's you sell them the dream. Why this gets so grifty and so cruel and predatory is because there is no easy solution to this. There is no solution that people are going to buy because the real solution people want is no work, no education, no skills required, no money up front. And people will pay any price for that magic pill. And people are happy to sell that magic pill. And I think those people are very cruel and I think deserve to get exposed for it. So somebody that's been criticized for MLM type schemes is Andrew Tate. Somebody that I'm very likely to talk with. So for people who have been telling me that I'm too afraid to talk to Andrew Tate. First of all, let me just say, I'm not afraid to talk to anyone. It's just that certain people require preparation. You have to allocate your life in such a way that you want to prepare properly for them. And so you have to kind of think who you want to prepare for. Because I have other folks that have more power than this particular figure that I'm preparing for. So you have to make sure you allocate your time wisely. But I do think he's a very influential person that raises questions of what it means to be a man in the 21st century. And that's a very important and interesting question. Because young people look up to philosophers, to influencers about what it means to be a man. They look up to Jordan Peterson. They look up to Andrew Tate. They look up to others, to other figures. And I think it's important to talk about that. To think what does it mean to be a good man in the society? Of course, in the other gender, there's the same question. What does it mean to be a good woman? I think, obviously, the bigger question is what does it mean to be a good person? But... It's a Fridman podcast. I swear to God. Now we're into it. Okay. So that said, one aspect of the criticism that Andrew's received is not just on the misogyny. It's on the MLM aspect of the multi-level marketing schemes. So is there some truth to that? Is there some fraudulent aspect to that? So yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, that's the main reason I criticized him. So let's back up. There's a few clarifications I need to make. What Andrew Tate is selling is not multi-level marketing, although he is selling the dream. He's selling an affiliate marketing thing, which is slightly different. So in multi-level marketing, if I sell to you and then you go sell to two other people, I make money from those two other people down the chain. Multi-level. Affiliate marketing is sort of like one level. I only make money. So Andrew Tate had this affiliate program where if you sold Hustlers University to somebody else, which sounds like something boomers would put on Facebook in like 2010, like, I went to Hustlers University. School of Hardware. By the way, you were a member of Hustlers University. Yeah, I joined. I joined. I became a Hustler. That's in large part due to why I'm so successful is because of my Hustler University membership. I'm just kidding. But so it's an affiliate program. So you'd sell like I sell to you this $50 course and I make like $5. And Andrew Tate in perpetuity makes $50 a month off of you. OK, what does this course actually sell? Right? Because ultimately he's selling the dream. He's selling, hey, the Matrix has enslaved you. He's really gone down this like neo rabbit hole. So the Matrix has enslaved you. Your life is controlled by these people who want to keep you like kind of weak, you know, lazy, whatever you need to break out and you need to achieve the new dream, which is sort of like hustling your way to the top. You don't need the antiquated systems of of school. You can just pay me $50 a month and I will teach you everything. OK, so what do you actually get? Well, and why is it a scam? So you actually I think it's just a scam in terms of like value in like you're selling based on these completely unrealistic things. He's like, let's get rich. OK, you get a series of discord rooms. You know, a discord. Most people know what discord is. It's like a bunch of chat rooms, basically. Right. So it's like AOL or is it like? Yeah, right, right. Well, I'm talking to the guy who who quit Emacs. So I don't know. There's discord servers. And in these like there's like there's like seven different rooms you can go in or there's several rooms and each one is like a different field of making money. Yes. E-commerce, trading, cryptocurrency. I think fulfillment by Amazon, like copywriting. OK, so I went to all of these. I checked them out. I checked out all their money making tools. The first funny thing is that Andrew Tate is nowhere to be found. The supposed successful guy that you like bought into is nowhere to be found. It's these professors that you have now. He is hired and said these guys are super qualified. So like looked up some of what some of these guys have done and some of these guys have been some of them have launched like scammy crypto coins. The cryptocurrency professor was like shilling a bunch of coins that did bad and then like deleted the tweets. I mean, just completely exactly what you'd expect behind the paywall. It's nothing of substance. You're not going to learn to get rich by escaping the matrix and going to work for Jeff Bezos. Fulfillment by Amazon is not escaping the matrix, right? Like that's not the way to hustle to the top. It's literally a field of making money that everyone in the world has access to. If you want to differentiate yourself and make money, the first thing you realize is going into skill sets that literally anyone with an internet account can do is a bad way to do that because you have to have some differentiating factor to add value. So it's just such a obvious and complete scam because there is no value to this like so called education. The professors are crap. The advice they're like hiding some of the bad things they've done and entertains nowhere to be found. Ultimately, that's why everyone joins. What he's done is very interesting because and I'll give him credit in his marketing. He's been very savvy to like make the reasons you admire him, not the thing he's sort of selling, which is weird. Like he's selling get rich quick, which seems like it relates to his persona, but is actually very orthogonal to it. His persona is like the tell it how it is. Like tall, buff, rich guy. It's like actually his persona that you're buying into and then he's selling you this thing to the side, which when people get in there and they're not delivered on the product, he still is those things that you first thought he was. So it's like I think it's to some extent he's made a lot of money by making the thing that he makes money on, not the thing he gets so much pushback online for and what he's also loved for. So people will push back for his misogyny, but the real way he's making money is just like basic get rich quick schemes that are super obvious to spot, but everyone's distracted by like, oh, he said some crazy stuff about women or all these various other scandals he's gotten himself in. To get more and more and more attention. So with the persona, is the Hustler University still operating? I think they've rebranded it. I'm part of their pitch now. I'm like, they put me on as like, I mean, as like the matrix is trying to take us out, Lex. And then it's me saying like, you know, they put me in like saying I'm part of the matrix. They put me in saying, oh, this guy sucks. You know, I joined, it sucks. And so they'll play that and they do like a bass drop and it's like, you know, don't listen to people like this. Da da da da. I mean, it's, I'm basically like, oh, so you've been co-opted by the matrix to attack. Yes. You're an insider threat that infiltrated and now is being used by the matrix to attack him. Well, to everyone who criticizes him as part of the matrix, he won't say who the matrix is. It's just, it's just the shadowy cabal of rich, powerful people. It's just like the easy narrative for people who are disaffected and who feel cheated by the system. You just collectivize that system and you make it the bad guy and you go, look, look, those guys, those guys who have been cheating you, they're the bad guys. They want me shut up. And then now the person that the people who harmed you, they want this guy shut up. You're going to listen to him. So that's like, it's like the most basic psychological manipulation that everyone seems to constantly fall for. It's really a trivial and stupid, but. Can you steel man the case for Husserl's University where it's actually giving young people confidence, teaching invaluable lessons about like actually incentivizing them to do something like fulfillment by Amazon, the basic thing to try it, to learn about it, to fail, or maybe see like to try to give a catalyst and incentive to try these things. As much as it pains me, I will try to give a, a succinct, maybe steel man of it as best as I can thinking that it's such a grift. But I think what you would say is that some people in order to make a change in their life need a someone who they can look up to. And men don't have a lot of like strong role models. Like big male presences in their life who can serve as a proper example. So the most charitable interpretation would be Andrew Tate would encourage you to go reach for the stars, I guess. My problem is I have a deep, like I have a deep issue with the like lust and greed that centers all these things. It's like this glorification of wealth equals status, wealth equals good person, wealth and Bugatti equals you are meaningful, you matter. And like the dark underlying thing is that none of that, none of that matters. Like none, it matters that you make a decent living, but past just like that, I think the like lust for more stuff and the idolization of these people that is just like opulence is a net bad. So that's like my steel man has to stop there because I really disagree with like the values that are pushed by people like that. Yeah, no, I agree that that's the thing that should be criticized. I shouldn't say it doesn't matter. I think it's just like an amazing meal at a great restaurant, it matters. It's money and Bugattis for many people make life beautiful. Like those are all components, but I think money isn't the, you can also enjoy a beautiful life on a hike in nature. There's a lot of ways to enjoy life. And one of the deepest has been tested through time is the intimacy, close connection, friendship with other people or with a loved one. They don't talk about like love, like what it means to be deeply connected with another person. It's just like get women, get money, all those kinds of things. But that, I think I don't want to dismiss that because there's like value in that. There's fun in that. I think the positive, I haven't investigated Hustlers University, but the positive I see in general is young people don't get much respect from society. I know it's easy to call it the matrix and so on, but there's a kind of dismissal of them as human beings, as capable of contributing, of doing anything special. And then here's, you have young people who are sitting there broke with big dreams. They need the mentors, they need somebody to inspire them. So like I would criticize the flawed nature of the message, but also it's just like you have to realize like there needs to be institutions or people or influencers that help like inspire. Right? The problem is though, is the people who are pitching unrealistic versions of that are getting a lot of attention. Whereas like there's so many great free courses where you can learn everything and more about fulfillment by Amazon or about copywriting or all these different things that I think like so often the air is just, the oxygen is sucked up by all the grifters who promise everything. It's back to what we said about vaporware. This is one of the reasons that like educational products can so often be co-opted by grifters is vaporware is very hard to distinguish because like the feedback loop on education is not clear. It's not obvious immediately. So I can sell you a book and I can say, this is going to change your life if you apply it. If you don't, if your life doesn't change, I just say, well, you didn't apply it. Right? Like it's, it's, there's this weird relationship. It's not clear the value. It's not so easy to like quantify education. So that gets co-opted by people who make all the promises. They get a ton of attention, a ton of money. And then those people are often left, left confused and like kind of disillusioned, maybe thinking, well, this didn't work in one year. So it's not going to work at all. And so I think, yeah, there, there are problems there. There's certainly a need for like male role models. There's certainly a need for somebody kind of to speak to a younger generation. I just think that person shouldn't, shouldn't be maybe Andrew Tate, like personally. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to criticize those particular individuals. I also, yeah, I think like the Bugatti aspiration is so stupid. Like, it's like, it's so. Well, let me steal, man. So I'm a person who doesn't care about money, don't like money. The women maybe appreciate the sort of the beauty of the other, the other sex, but like. Sure, sure. Yeah. Cars in particular is like, really, is this really the manifestation of all the highest accomplishments a human being can have in life? Yes, I can criticize all that. But the, to steal man, that case is a young person, a dreamer has ambition. And I often find that education throughout my whole life, there's been people who love me, teachers who saw ambition in me and try to reason with me that my ambition is not justified. Yes. Looking at the data, look kid, you're not that special. Yeah. Look at the data. Right. You're not, and they want it, they want you to like, not dream, essentially. And then again, I look at the data, which is all the people, I just talked to Hodge O'Gracy. This, Hodge O'Gracy is just a person, widely acknowledged as probably the greatest of all time, dominated everybody. But for the longest time, he sucked. And he was surrounded by people that kind of, you know, don't necessarily believe in him. Yeah. So he had to believe in himself. You have to, it's nice to have somebody, I just, as older I get and I've seen it, it's so powerful to have somebody who comes to you, an older person, whether it's real or not, that says, you got this kid. Believes in you. I believe in you. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it does. I mean, I think, so I think dreaming is actually really important. I'm more protective over people co-opt those dreams for money. Yes, yes. And like, I do think it matters so much that we encourage people to take risks. It's one of the great things about America is it lionizes like sort of people have taken risks and won, but I think it's just a weird vapid thing when like the reason you do all of it is for this thing you can get out at the end of the day. When we all know, and you like, you've just heard a million interviews, like nobody ever is, gets through Bugatti and goes, this now completely fulfills me. Everyone knows the beauty and the like fulfillment actually comes from becoming obsessed about what you're doing for its own sake, sort of the journey, the beauty of that thing. And I think money's just this thing we have to deal with to be able to do cool stuff. Like I acknowledge that you need money to build a $10 million studio. Like you got to get the cameras, you got to get the lights. And I'm very blessed to be able to have gotten that, but past a certain point, like I think that is really the function of money is to just do cool stuff. But ultimately, if you can't fall in love with the process and like the craft itself, you will be left very unhappy at the end of it. And so to start people off on that journey by pointing to the shiny object and going like, that's what you should care about, seems to me so backwards. We should learn from the actual people who have done it and said, that shiny thing did nothing for me. Learn to love the journey and like, that's the thing we pitch people, as unsexy as that might be. Yeah, absolutely. That's what I was saying. The same applies to like the Red Pill community that talks about dating and so on, that there is, it's not just about the number of hot women you go to bed with, it's also about intimacy and love and all those kinds of things. And so like, there's components to a fulfilling life that is important to sort of educate young people about. Totally. But at the same time, feeding the dream is saying, take big risks. Sure. And you, the little you that has no evidence of ever being great, that has no evidence of ever being great, can be great. Because there's evidence time and time again of people that come from very humble beginnings and doing incredible things that change the world. Yeah, and there's just a tremendous like, funny thing where you can't become great without having a willful denial of the statistics. Like in some ways you have to take the chance, even if that chance is so improbable. And it's always those people who did take that chance who end up winning. So I agree. So probably SBF and FTX is the biggest thing you've ever covered. But previously you've called the Save the Kids scam the world's influencer scam, like the biggest in the world influencer scam you've ever seen. Can you describe it? Sure. So Save the Kids was a charity coin that was launched by a number of extremely popular influencers. I think they had over 50 million followers together. Huge names. And they basically said, Hey guys, invest in this coin. We're going to save the kids. A portion of the proceeds go to charity. And this coin, it's unruggable. So rugging is the term for remember earlier we talked about Safemoon. You just grab the pool of funds in the middle, you take them out. Okay. It's unruggable because we have this smart code that is going to prevent people who are quote whales, which is a crypto term for saying you have a large portion of the token. It'll prevent those people from selling a large amount of that at one time. Right. And so basically you don't have to worry about trusting us. It just is what it is. Join and we will, you know, change the world, save the kids, whatever. It was really skeezy from the beginning and sketchy because their logo matched the Save the Children logo, which is like an actual charity that, you know, so they basically copied it and said, we're saving the kids, like a knockoff brand. And almost immediately the project rugged, they stole the money and tracing back through the code was changed at the last second before launch. Like if you looked at their code that they launched as a test versus the code they launched in actuality, they changed only like two lines and it was the whale code to basically make the whale code non-existent. Like you can sell as much as you want, as fast as you want. And it turned out that some of the influencers had not only sold that and made money, but also had a pattern of pump and dumping tokens. So we can talk about what that is like. Yeah. What's pump and dump? A pump and dump is just where, you know, you have a huge following. You promote your little Lex coin to everybody while holding a big portion of it. And as everyone rushes in to buy it, the price is going to pump and you dump at the same time. So that's where the name comes from. Pump and dump, you pump the price, sell all your tokens, make a lot of money. So I traced basically their wallets on the blockchain and found that two of the actors specifically had had a long history of doing this, which really proved malicious intent. And why I called it the worst is not, it certainly wasn't the worst in terms of like the amount of people affected. It relatively was like a small pump and dump because it rugged almost immediately. But in terms of the amount of people that were involved in it, in terms of the amount of malicious behavior before it, that like sort of proved that this wasn't an accident, the fact that there was like this whale code, it was one of the most cynical attempts to just take the money of the followers you had and just like, that's mine now. So that's why I called it that, but that's to save the kids. So that was... That was a lot of the FaZe members. And it was, I think, Addison Rae. There were a lot of people who seemed like they were kind of taking shrapnel on it. There was like this guy Teeqo, who he didn't even sell the tokens. He just like held onto it the entire time and lost like a few thousand dollars or maybe even, I forget the exact amount. He lost a lot of money, a decent amount. And so like he took a lot of shrapnel with that, but there were also people who were maliciously doing this. So in that investigation, like several of the members of FaZe got caught. Three members of FaZe got kicked out. One of them got like permanently banned. And then this other guy that I talked about fled the country. Like he sold all his belongings and like fled the country and, you know, hid out in London or wherever he is now. I don't really know where he is. Somewhere in the UK area. So the basic idea there is to try to convert your influence into money. Correct. Okay. That's the basic idea behind a lot of influencer crypto promotions. Well, but, right, but that little word influencer means something because there are most crypto scams, influencer scams, they're not, right? Most, most kind of. Right. The most high profile ones, like just by nature, they tend to be made high profile by the influencer. So sometimes they are, but you're right. A lot of money has been lost and like nobody finds out because there's no one big sort of attached to it. They just steal a lot of money. But influencers are great salespeople because like in order to overcome the resistance of getting you to buy some random coin, there has to be a reason. And so much of the 21st century content creator generation is defined by these strange parasocial relationships where people feel like they know you, not the character you play, but you and you have some friendship with them. When in actuality, you don't know the viewers, you know, you have a sense, but you don't actually know all of these people. And so that relationship is extremely powerful in terms of persuasion. So you can say, I believe in this and I've watched you year for years. And all of a sudden I say, Lex, if Lex believes in, I believe in it, I trust him as a human. And so that differentiates these coins. And all of a sudden the coin blows up, gets really popular. You made this side deal and you make a ton of money. I have to say podcasting in particular is an intimacy. Like I'm a huge fan of podcasting. I feel like I'm friends with the people I listen to. Right. And boy, is that a responsibility. Yes. And that's why it really hurts me to announce that I am launching LexCoin. No. No, man, I hate money. I hate this kind of the scheming of all of this. The use of any kind of degree of fame that you have for that kind of stuff. There's something just- What makes it so frustrating is these people- Disgusting about it. I have a general sense of what they were like, sort of what I'm in the, even though I wouldn't describe myself as an influencer, I make content on YouTube. I know that especially since they were taking these huge corporate sponsorships, they were making tons of money. They didn't have need for these scams. I mean, I think it's one thing to scam if you're like broke on the street, you know, and you're playing three card Monte to like live. And I think it's a whole other ethically cruel thing to do if you're basically trying to upgrade your penthouse to the building next door. And like you're already well off and you just kind of want to get even further ahead. I think that's where it- Well, this is the fascinating thing. So I've been very fortunate recently to sort of get, you know, whatever, a larger platform. And when you find out is like, life is amazing. I always thought life is amazing, but it becomes more amazing. Like, you meet so many cool people and so on. But what you start getting is you have more opportunities to like, yeah, like scammers will come to you and then try to use you, right? And I could see for somebody could be tempting to be like, ooh, it'd be nice to make some money. I wanted to say like on this kind of we're on this topic of opportunities, you get, you know, kind of when you get a platform. So one of the reasons kind of I railed a little bit earlier against materialism or whatever, I think to the extent to which you can moderate your own greed, you can play longer term games. And I think so many people end up cutting an otherwise promising career short by just wanting it too fast. So I think it's like a huge edge, just like discipline is in terms of like, achieving what you want. I think I'm like a very moderate, like being comfortable with a moderate existence and finding happiness in that is a huge edge, because really your overhead is so much cheaper than the people who need a Ferrari or a super nice house to feel fulfilled. And when your overhead is less, you have the luxury to say no to like sketchy offers. You have freedom that other people don't have, because a lot of times people don't pitch it this way, they pitch a Ferrari as freedom or like a big house is like you've made it. In a lot of ways, those shackle you back to like, you got to find the cashflow for those things. It's never a free ride. Yeah, that's really beautifully put. I've always said that I had fuck you money at the very beginning. I was broke for most of my life. The way you have fuck you money is by not needing much to say fuck you. That's right. I mean, that's the overhead that you're talking about. If you can live simply and be truly happy and be truly free, I think that means you could be free in any kind of situation. You could make the wise kind of decisions. And in that case, money enables you in certain ways to do more cool stuff, but it doesn't shackle you, like you said. Correct. Too many people in this society you would shackle, because material possessions kind of like draw you into this race of more and more and more and more. And then you feel the burden of that, bigger houses and all that kind of stuff. And now you have to keep working. Now you have to keep doing this thing. Now you have to make more money. And if it's a YouTube channel and so on, you have to get more. And the same, it's not even just about money. That's why I deliberately don't check views and likes and all that kind of stuff, is you don't want that dopamine of pulling you in. I have to do the thing that gets more and more attention or more and more money. And it's a huge negative hit on your ability to do creative work. Can I ask you about that? Because I'm always interested in this. I completely agree. I think it's funny because when you abstract yourself out to the people you admire and respect, who inspired you to do the creative work you do, you never think about the views they were getting or the money they were making or the influence they had. All you ever think about is the work itself. And it's funny when a lot of people get in this position, your temptation is to focus on that which you can measure, which is all the stuff you said, the likes, the views. That's not actually the target or what you got into it for. If you get into it for like, because you're inspired or whatever, your goal is inspiration, it's impact. And that can't be quantified that same way. So it's interesting, you have to find a way as a creator of any of this stuff to deliberately detach yourself from the measurable and focus on this thing which is kind of abstract. And I was wondering if you have any ideas for that. So one, yeah, there's a bunch of ideas. So one is figure out ways where you don't see the number of views on things. I can do that. So I wrote a Chrome extension for myself that hides the number of views. That's really funny. No, what's funny is I have- For me, because it's useful for other people's content. Right, oh my gosh, I'm gonna need to borrow this. That was my problem. I actually have some Chrome extensions for, I don't like going down recommendation rabbit holes when I'm at work. I just wanna search for a video, find it. I don't wanna see all the up next, because I'll waste time. So I use Chrome extensions for that. But the views is a problem because it's relevant to me as a creator. Like, is this a big video? Is it a- Yeah, which is why I really hurt when they remove likes and dislikes, because I wanna know for tutorials and so on. I mean, that's probably really useful for you, the dislikes, yeah. Yeah, do you ever consider making that Chrome extension public? Sure, actually, yeah. And there would be a good philosophy behind it, right? Like, if you're a creator- I really like it. I love the idea. I've wanted this thing before. I don't know if it necessarily exists. I don't think I've made a Chrome extension public. That'd be cool. I would love to see... Yeah, I would go to that process of adding it to the... Because I love open sourcing stuff. So yeah, I'll go add it to the Chrome extension, the store. Yeah, because I totally have... I've hated this for a long time. YouTube made a change, and they just continue to make the analytics front and center, which makes sense from their perspective. They're trying to give people better data on what is successful and what makes something successful. They're trying to train their creators. But in the process, it can lead to some unhealthy habits of thinking views define a video. And so I've long thought, okay, I've learned analytics. I understand retention. Now I sort of want to do like the zen, like forget it all now. And you can only do that if it's out of your sight. Depends how many friends you have who are creatives. The other really important thing, and I found this has nothing to do with creatives, but people I respect very much in my life, some of them people would know that could be famous, they will come to me and say, they will comment on how popular a video was on YouTube. They will sort of compliment... The success. The success defined by the popularity. Even for a podcast where most of the listenership is not on YouTube, or Spotify now is getting crazy, they will still compliment the YouTube number. So one of the deliberate things I do is I either do that, is I either, depending if it's a close friend, I'll get offended and made fun of them for that. And to sort of signal to them, this is not the right thing. I don't want that. And for people more like strangers that compliment that kind of stuff, I show zero interest. I don't receive the compliment well. And I focus on the aspects of the compliment that have to do with like, what do they find interesting? I kind of make them, reveal to them that you shouldn't care about the number of views. It is strange. There's like this weird hypnotism that happens once you get past a certain number. And that number is some approximation. It's always like hard numbers. It's like 100,000, a million, 10 million. People just see a number and they just go like, wow, that is... And they assign a quality to it that may not... Like it usually means nothing at all. So I agree. I've never been good at handling that because you're like, thank you? And I was like, okay. That said, I do admire, very different for me, but I admire Mr. Beast who unapologetically says like the number is all that matters. Like basically the number shows, like the number of views you get shows like how much, I don't know, joy you brought to people's lives. Because if they watched the thing, they kept watching the thing. They didn't turn to now. That means they loved it. You brought value to their life. You brought enjoyment. And I'm going to bring the maximum amount of enjoyment to the maximum number of the people. And I'm going to do the most epic videos and all that kind of stuff. So I admire that when you're so unapologetically into the numbers. Yeah, he's sort of, it's interesting. He's like, gosh, we're getting way too in the way tonight. Is this a bad, I don't know. I'm like constantly self-monitoring about like what topics we're on. But if we can, Mr. Beast is so interesting because he's almost done what, have you ever seen Moneyball? Yes. It's the story of how someone brought statistics to baseball and it revolutionized everything. He's Moneyballed YouTube. Yeah. He took statistics to YouTube and it changed everything. And everybody now, so many people are playing catch up. I think it would be interesting in a few years to see how he develops. And now that he's like kind of revolutionized like the data side of things, how he then approaches future videos. Because there's a point at which you've optimized, you've optimized, you've optimized. But optimizing for short-term video performance is not the same as optimizing for long-term viewer happiness. And how do you do that? Assuming the YouTube algorithm does not perfectly already do it for you, which it doesn't, but they're trying to obviously do that, optimize for long-term happiness. But- And also growing, optimize for long-term creative growth. Sure. I think the thing that people don't, I mean, maybe I don't know, I actually don't know enough about Jimmy. But like, to me, the thing that seems to be special about him isn't the money ball aspect. That's really important. It's like taking the data seriously. But to me, it's the part of the idea generation, the constant brainstorming and coming up with videos. So it's nice to connect the idea generation with the data. But like how many people, when they create on YouTube and other platforms, really generate a huge amount of ideas? Like constantly brainstorm, constantly, constantly brainstorm. At least for me, I don't think I go so many steps ahead in my thinking. I don't like try to come up with all possible conversations. I don't come up with all possible videos I can make. But you can't, so the one mistake to make is to map Jimmy's philosophy onto every genre, because not every genre fits that model. Your model is not an idea-centric model. It's a people-centric model. And so you, like, if you were in the business of creating just mass entertainment for the sake of mass entertainment, you might focus on, okay, the reason going idea-focused instead of person-focused is such a revolutionary idea in some senses is because ideas can be broader, more broadly appealing than any single human can be. But you're not going for that. You're going for a podcast interview. And I think for you, the goal should always be how deep can you get with interesting guests and like finding the most interesting guests, which is a different probably set of skills than- Well put, really well put. But I think the right mapping there is finding the most interesting guests. Yeah, right. I think I don't do enough work on that. So for example, I try to be, something I do prioritize is talking to people that nobody's talked to before. So, because it's like, I kind of see myself as not a good, like I know a lot of people that are much better than me. I really admire, I think Joe Rogan is still the GOAT. He's just an incredible conversationalist. So it's like, all right, who is somebody Joe's not gonna talk to? Either he's not interested, it's not gonna happen. I wanna talk to that person. I wanna reveal the interesting aspects of that person. And I think I should do a Mr. Beast style rigor in searching for interesting people. And you should probably find people to help you search. Sure, he does that. But if we're being honest, he does that of course with other folks, but he's the main engine. Yeah, you need like sort of like a pre-filter, you're the final filter. Cause your problem is you're only able to think of humans that you've thought of before or been exposed to. And most of the world you've never been exposed to. So you need people to like pre-filter and go, okay, these guys are just interesting humans. Lex has never heard of them. And then you sort of take a batch of like 100 people and you go, who seems the most interesting for me? Yeah, but by the way, on that topic, we're at weeds into weeds. I've almost done, I'm building up, I programmed this guest recommendation thing where I wanna get suggestions from other people cause I really wanna find people that nobody knows. This is the tricky thing. Like you're not famous, but the idea is there's probably fascinating humans out there that nobody knows. Correct. That I wanna find those. And I believe in the crowdsourcing aspect will raise them. And now of course the top 100 will be crypto scams. No, but yes. So like I have to make sure that these kinds of swarms of humans that recommend, I can filter through and there's whole kinds of systems for that. But I wanna find the fascinating people out there that nobody's ever heard from. And from a programmer perspective, I thought surely I could do that by just building the system. Yeah, that's how programmers always think. They'll just automate a system to do it. Well, that's the Jimmy Moneyball, right? Like looking at the data. Yep. Weeds on weeds. How do we get to Mr. Beast exactly? I'm not sure. Okay, save the kids. Influencer. Influencer, that's probably it. Yeah. Let me ask you more on the guru front. Okay, let's start with somebody that you've covered that I think you've covered a lot and I'm really embarrassed to not know much about him. I think this is like old school coffee. You've been through stages. I've been through stages and phases. It's true. A character named Dan Lok. Yeah. Who is he? You've exposed him for a cult-like human and his cult-like practices. Who is he? What has he done? So Dan Lok is sort of, he's gone through a number of iterations, but he was kind of this like sales trainer guy who really made a hard push into what he called high ticket sales. And he was telling people that they could kind of escape the nine to five rat race if they just learn high ticket sales and they can have the life of their dreams. Basically, it's like, I'll teach you to sell, but I'll teach you to ask. Not only will I teach you to sell you that pen, but I'll teach you to sell it for $50,000 instead of a dollar, right? So I talked to a lot of the people who had taken this course because it was pretty expensive. I think it was like $2,500 or $1,000. And mind you, the people who are taking it are like teachers and like people who don't have a lot of money. And then you take the course and immediately you find out, okay, well, there's an upsell. At the end of the course, you're not ready. You need to go from like high ticket closer, which is one of the products to inner circle or like the level up, right? And all of these courses are structured like this. So they spend a tremendous amount on Google ads to get people in the door, promising the dream. And then once you're in, you're actually not done being like the product. You're actually in the system that tries to upsell you again and again and again and again. And eventually you're paying monthly and you're getting more and more. You're constantly paying for access to Dan Lok's wisdom and like ideas. And fundamentally, this sales system wasn't working for people. I mean, I talked to like, for example, a teacher who put in like $25,000, was in debt at one point and has nothing to show for it. I know, and it was sort of these tactics of pressuring, pressuring, pressuring. And then anytime anyone would complain, he would try to silence them. So I heard from like, funny enough, this lady was a teacher as well. She put together a Facebook group, basically saying, I think this guy's a scam. His course didn't work. It's not working for a lot of people because fundamentally the promise of turning someone from a non-salesman into a person who's making six figures selling is not an easy thing to do. It's not just a matter of just like take my course. But anyways, it wasn't working. She created a Facebook group about it and he like sues her and was like legally pressuring her to stop doing that. And I realized like somebody has to speak out about this and everyone who is, is getting silenced. So I was like, I'm gonna use my platform to raise awareness to this. And people came out of the woodwork. I mean, saying that this guy defrauded me or he scammed me. And I wanna just really quickly take a second, take a beat to explain why get rich quick schemes are different than let's say selling a water bottle and saying it's the greatest water bottle ever. Right, because sometimes people wonder, they go like, well, doesn't like Nissan say their car is gonna make you happy and then it doesn't make you happy. Like, why is that different from the kind of advertising of a get rich quick course? I mean, both of them are sort of promising things that aren't true, but you get something. You take some kind of a training. Isn't it the same thing? No, here's why. There's this concept in economics called elastic demand and inelastic demand. What it essentially means is that if I raise the value of this water bottle, there's a point at which you're just gonna be like, no, it doesn't make any sense, right? But there are areas in our lives where we have desperation around them that can get deeply predatory very quickly because they have no, they have no, there's no elasticity around their demand. For example, your health. If you get cancer and I have the pill that will solve it, or at least let's say I don't, I have a sugar pill here, but if I can convince you that this pill will solve your cancer or treat your cancer, you will pay any amount of money you have on this earth to get this pill. But obviously that gets really predatory really quick because selling something that isn't real is almost as compelling as selling something that is real. So this happens in the get rich quick space too. There's any amount of money you would pay to make a lot more money. So these products have inelastic demand. That's why you see what is essentially a few webinars getting sold for $2,500. Courses that literally have identical videos on YouTube, like very similar course curriculums that are selling for such extravagant amounts of money. And I think there can be comparisons made to college because obviously there's similar questions about benefits, but in this case, there's not even statistics available that even shows the average person gets something out of it. That's true of like, if you go to college, your average income will improve, right? That's the justification there. There's none of that. There's no case studies. There's nothing backing their extravagant claims of you're gonna make all this money, you're gonna make all this wealth. Instead, they're just, as we said before, they're selling you a dream. So that's why I find all those types of get-rich-quick schemes so problematic, and it's why I've railed against them for a significant amount of time. What have you learned from attacking, exposing some of the things that Dan Lok is doing? What have you learned about human nature and frosters and gurus and so on? That's a great question. So I think one of them is that there's this systemic problem that the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute, is very true. There is no end to the people who will fall for something like this. And the problem is, is because there's just no end to need and want and just lack. I mean, it's easy to, on the one hand, criticize people's greed, but a lot of times you have to put yourself in their shoes. If you're at a dead-end job, you have nothing going for you, you don't have the money to go to college, you don't wanna get in debt, fair play, where do you go, right? As you said, there's somebody who's there saying they believe in you, they believe you can make six figures. You know, you're gonna believe in that. And so I really felt like it made a lot more sense to tackle it from the other side, from the side of people that can stop, that can basically be exposed and basically be, have sort of like a negative put on their work. I mean, they're largely going under the radar. So I kind of felt like, do you wanna educate, do you wanna like blame it on the victims and say you should have known better, you should have done this, you should stop, but there's no end to that. Or do you go after the grifters themselves? And so that's what I realized. I realized like that's the tactic that I went with. And it's tough, cause it's a little like legally risky to do that, but yeah, you just kinda gotta be smart about it. So your platform has gotten really big. So there's some responsibility to that. Weirdly big, yeah. Yeah. Let's say- Cause like only a year ago, it was like a lot, a lot smaller. And then it's hard to make that adjustment, you know? Cause like, to me, it's just the same show I've been doing. So how do you avoid becoming a guru yourself or your ego growing? And there's different trajectories it could take. One of which is you can start seeing everybody as a scammer and only you can reveal it. And like you have an audience of people who love seeing the epic CoffeeZilla grilling. Sure. And you can destroy everyone. And that power now is getting to your head. How do you avoid that? Well, I mean, this is like less optically obvious. I think the main way is like, my circle of friends doesn't care about any of that. Like my wife doesn't care. The people whose opinion I value has no relation to like a subscriber metric or anything like that. I think that's like tangibly the most important thing to just staying grounded. As far as like becoming a guru, I just don't have anything to like sell. I mean, I'm not interested in teaching people finance. I'm not interested in teaching people. I'm not interested in selling a course. And I've kind of given myself a hard line on that, which I think has helped me a bit, is there's a temptation to go, well, I can tell what's a scam. So let me tell you what's not a scam. And a lot of people have offered a lot of money to do that and basically be like, hey, I have such and such legitimate product, come be like an endorser. And I just don't do that because I think it undermines a lot of what I do. Is if you get like, if you're taking money in on the side to say, this is legit and you're saying this isn't legit, that's a huge conflict of interest. So I think it's about managing conflicts of interest and keeping people around me that are grounded. And also I think, yeah, my only interest really is just like, make cool stuff. And I guess I'll do that until people stop watching. So. A question from, on that topic, from the CoffeeZilla subreddit, shout out. Shout out. How does Coffee find the strength to maintain his integrity and resist temptation of being paid a great amount of money to advertise or promote a potential scam? Uh, I think that's like, goes back to what we've been talking about a lot, which is just on what you prioritize, what you value. I've just never, I guess I grew up kind of lower middle class and I had a great time. Like I had a great childhood. I had very loving parents. And because of that, I guess, intuited at an early age that money doesn't do a whole lot. And I knew a lot of people who were way better off, who had miserable childhoods, because whether their dad was always gone at work or like they just had other family issues that just money can't buy. And I realized, I guess quickly, that money's a very like, it's a glittery object that isn't what it appears to be. And so to me, I'm like, I'm having the time of my life making my show. I'm not going to have the time, like I could, you could ruin all that just trying to go for this quick check when it's like, no, I'm having a great time. Like. Yeah, it's actually, maybe you're probably the same way, but for me, there's a lot of happiness in having integrity, in looking in the mirror and knowing that you're the kind of person that has that. In fact, walking away from money is also fun. Because it's like promising yourself, like it's showing, it's easy to like, just say you have integrity. It's nice to like, ah, I actually, I've discovered several times in my life that I have integrity. But. When you get put, yeah, you get put like, basically to the test. Yeah, I've said, like, I don't know if I publicly said, but to myself, I say like, you can't buy, there's a lot of things you can't buy with me, like for a billion dollars, like a trillion dollars. But it'd be nice to get tested that way. It'd be cool to see, because you never know until you're in that room. It's true. Same with power, given power. I'd like to believe I'm the kind of person that wouldn't abuse power, but you don't know until you're tested, so. Anyway, you're in a really tricky position, because you're doing incredible, I mean, you are a world-class journalist, straight up. And so there is pressure on that, of like, not having, like, erring on the side of caution with like, having conflicts of interest and stuff like that. It's tough, it's a really tough seat to sit in. It's really tough, it's really tough. But it's unfairly tough, I feel like. But it's good that you're sort of weighing all of those. But that said, go donate to Coffeezilla. Donate all, everything. Support him. He's a really, really important human being. The other guy I did, I think, is the first person I discovered that you investigated is Brian Rose of London Real. Can you talk about his story? Brian Rose, he was sort of this interesting figure, because he was like, trying to be, to one level or another, the Joe Rogan of London. Which I don't think he did a terribly bad job of, especially initially. He had some really interesting podcasts with some really interesting people. And it's funny enough, I started out as a, like, I would watch him. I mean, I don't know if I was a huge fan, but I was like, I like some of his interviews. He had some really good, like, big gits in terms of, you know, great guests. However, when kind of COVID started, he went down this really weird, grifting rabbit hole, where he did like this interview with David Icke, who's, as you know, like a pretty big COVID conspiracy theorist. And I mean, like, actual, like, he believes some of the royals are literally lizards. So he got shut down for that. And he kind of made a big stink, which I think it's fine. Nobody likes to be censored. And I'm not even saying that he should have been censored. But his reaction to that was to, like, raise a ton of money from his audience promising this digital freedom platform. And at first it was like, oh, we want to raise $100,000. And then they raised it like within a day. So he's like, well, we got to raise a lot more money. And so eventually they raised a million dollars. And he's trying to raise $250,000 a month to kind of keep putting his viewers money into this stuff. So I started digging into the platform they were building, and there was nothing free about it. They had censorship guidelines, and there was nothing about a platform at all. There was no underlying infrastructure. He just got some white label live streaming thing. So I criticized him for that. It was just this ridiculous thing. All the donators expected one thing. They thought Brian Rose was going to take on Google and Facebook and like bring free speech back for everybody. And of course he didn't. And then it kind of got worse because he started taking a lot of heat for that. And he really pivoted hard into like the DeFi grift. So he started selling this course about DeFi mastery. And this is a guy who knows nothing about crypto or very little at the least. So it just got really kind of, he just kind of doubled down on this course model of you're going to be rich if you just follow me. And it was ultimately, you just type in Brian Rose on YouTube, you can see what his audience thought of that. Because almost all of them have left him at this point. He's getting like a thousand views a video. And it wasn't because of me. I mean, it was like people lost taste in just the constant ask for more money, more money, more money. At some point people get sick of it. And it's like, everyone has an understanding that like no one works for free. But when it starts to be ego driven and driven around money, everything's about money, it drives people away. Well, you're a part of that sort of helping people. It's nice to have a voice. Yeah, I certainly spoke out. I mean, it wasn't like I was quiet. I was very loud about it at the time. But I mean, in the sense that there, if you look at someone like Andrew Tate, I've made a video about him, even though he's been banned off all the platforms, he gets more views than Brian Rose. And I think it's just like, it was a testament to how much Brian Rose was like doing like the grift that people could, even people who were fans and didn't care about what I said, like couldn't look past, you know, just the constant ask for more and more money. People just get burned out. Is there some aspect that you worry about where with a large audience, there seems to be a certain aspect of human nature where people like to see others destroyed? Sure. Do you worry about hurting people that don't deserve it? Or rather sort of attacking people, their grifter light, but they get like a giant storm of negativity towards them and therefore sort of overpoweringly cancel them or like hurt them disproportionately? Sure. I mean, I try to be sensitive to my platform and as I've grown, I've tried to make sure my video topics have grown with me. And like, it does reach this tricky point where if you're exposing a grifter with like 50,000 subs, who's doing some harm, are you punching down? Right. And so far there's been enough high profile things that I can distract myself with to where this has never been a problem. You don't ever want to be sort of like Sir Lancelot in retirement. Where have you heard this analogy? No. Okay. So there's this great analogy where it's like Sir Lancelot's the guy who slays the dragon, right? He gets a lot of fame and he gets a lot of fortune for saving the dragon or at least a lot of people love him. But what happens after he slays the first dragon? He's got to go find a bigger dragon. So he goes find a bigger dragon and eventually, depending on how many dragons you think are there in the world, maybe he kills all the dragons. And one day people go see Sir Lancelot and he's in a field with cows and he's chopping their heads. Yeah. And he's sort of put himself in retirement but he can't even enjoy the fruits because his whole thing is like, I'm killing the dragon. So I try to be cognizant and I try to always make myself willing to hang up my suspenders, I guess, hang up my hat. I try to be aware, like if I significantly improve the problem, I put myself out of business. I want to be okay with that, basically. And just be fine with it. I don't, the funny thing is, I was more worried about this as like an issue earlier because I thought there was a finite, like, I was like, I'm going to solve this faster, especially as it started gaining traction. Like, I'm going to solve this fast. I got this, you know, classic naive. You know, we all think we're so influential. FTX comes along. Well, yeah, you just get like, with time you get humbled because you talk to people. I've talked to like versions of Coffeezilla that are older and it's like, oh yeah, they didn't solve it and they probably were better. I just imagine a smoke-filled room of just like retired Batman and you're this young, bright-eyed. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fiery-spirited investigator. Yeah, exactly. What's the process of investigation that you can speak to? What are some interesting things you've learned about what it takes to do great investigations? Sure. Great investigations reveal something new or bring something to light. So I think what everyone thinks in terms of investigations is like a lot of like, you know, Googling or like searching through articles. I think that's the first thing you want to get away from. And you want to try to talk to people doing like the non-obvious things and just trying to get perspectives that are beyond just what is available. So a lot of it's just having conversations is so enlightening, both to victims and also obviously trying to get, talk to the people themselves. Secondly, there's sometimes some analysis you can generate that's meaningful like blockchain evidence. So in the case of SafeMoon, for example, going back to that, I found someone's secret account where they were pumping, dumping coins. They were saying things like, who sold, I'll, you know, I'm so mad at the guy who sold, F the guy who sold. And you look at his account and he was the guy selling. And it's like, that is just, that's great stuff. So digging through the blockchain, kind of I've gained some skills there. And that's kind of this fun, I guess I would say it's this weird edge I have for right now because a lot of people don't know too much about that. And so I have this weird expertise that works now. I don't think that'll work forever because I think people kind of figure out how to do very similar analyses. But so it's like kind of an interesting edge right now that I have. So that's like a data driven investigation, but you also do interviews, right? Yeah, definitely. And then also recently, I've tried to get more response, speaking to your point about like, as your platform gets bigger, you need more responsibility. I've tried to get much more responsible about like reaching out or somehow giving the subject some way to talk. Because I think in early on, I was such a small channel that A, if I asked them, they wouldn't answer. But B, I kind of felt like I was launching these videos into the abyss. And when some of my videos had real traction, I was like, okay, hang on a second. Let's double check this. Let's triple check it. Let's try to make sure all this stuff is correct. And there's no other side of the story. I'll say this has interesting implications because for example, I investigated this thing called Genesis, they're a billion dollar crypto lender. And my conclusion was that they were insolvent. That's a huge accusation. So what do you do? Well, I emailed their press team, everybody. I said, hey, I think you're insolvent. I think you're this. I think I laid out all my accusations. And I said, you have till, I think 2 p.m. the next day to respond. At 8 a.m. before I made my video, they announced to all their investors that they're freezing withdrawals. They don't have the money. So they front. I don't know if they saw the inter, like, I don't know if they actually saw that email. I don't want to take credit for collapsing them or whatever. But my point is, had I not taken that level of kind of care and just said, hey, you're a scammer, you're a scammer, you're frauds. Ironically, could I have done more good by allowing people to withdraw their money early? I made some tweets that people did see that like some people got their money out, but my YouTube audience is much larger. And could I have helped more people had I not given them basically the ability to know what I was going to produce when I produced it? Boy, your life is difficult because you can potentially hurt the company that doesn't deserve it if you're wrong or if you're right and you warn the company, you might hurt the... Well, I'm glad your wife is a supporter and keeps you strong. That's a tough, tough decision. Ultimately, I guess you want to err on the side of the individual people, of the investors and so on. But it's tough. It's always a really, really tricky decision to make. Very tricky. Oh boy. That's so interesting. And then the thing I've seen in your interviews that I don't remember, because I think when I watched you earlier in your career, you were a little bit harsher. You were like trollier. You're having a little more fun. Sure. And when I've seen you recently, you do have the fun, but whenever you interview, you seem respectful. Like you attack in good faith, which is really important for an interviewer. So then people can go on and actually try to defend themselves. That's really important signal to send to people because then you're not just about tearing down, you're after like the... It's cliche to say, but the truth. Like you're really trying to actually investigate in good faith, which is great. So that signal is out there. So like people like SBF could... Like he should go on your platform, I think. I mean, now it's like in full, not just like a half-assed conversation on Twitter space, but in full. So that's great that that signal is out there. But of course the downside of sort of, as you become more famous, people might be scared to sort of go on. But you do put that signal of being respectful out there, which is really, really important. You know, it's interesting. It surprises me. I know it surprises other people because other people have commented, but it consistently surprises me how many people still talk to me. And maybe it's because they... And I really do give a good attempt to try to argue in good faith. I try not to just like load up ad hominems or anything like that. I just try to present the evidence and let the audience make up their mind. But it surprises me sometimes that people will just be like, yeah, they wanna talk, they wanna talk, they wanna talk. I think it's very human in a way. And I think it's like almost, it's almost like good. Like one of the things that is always told to everyone who's gonna talk to the cops is like, you should never talk to the cops, whatever. Which is true, you shouldn't talk to the cops. Because even if you're innocent, they can use your words, they can twist your words, da da da. But there's something that gets lost in that like almost robotic, like, you know, self-interest that I think having open conversations, even if you've done something wrong, I think there's something really compelling about that, that continues to make people talk in interrogation rooms, in Twitter spaces, wherever you are, regardless of whether you totally shouldn't be talking. And I don't wanna downplay that. That's actually really important. I mean, it's like a lot of cases get solved, a lot of investigations go farther because people sort of make the miscalculation to talk. But I think it's like almost important in a way that we have that human bias to like, connect in spite of self-interest. Yeah, but also they're judging the integrity and the good faith of the other person. So I think when people consume your content, especially your latest content, they know that you're a good person. I found myself, like, there's a lot of journalists that reach out to me. And I find myself like not wanting to talk to them because I don't know if the other person on the side is coming in good faith. Even on silly stuff, I'm not a- Same way. Like I'm not a, I don't have anything to hide. Like you don't really have anything to hide, but you don't know what their like spin is. Can I tell you an example? I'm dying, because I believe so strongly that journalists have done themselves such a disservice. Okay, one of the truest things is that like, everyone loves journalism in theory, and almost everyone dislikes journalists as a whole. Like there's a deep distrust of journalists, and there's a deep love for journalism. It's this weird disconnect. I think a lot of it can be summarized in, there's this book called the, oh God, what it's called? I think it's called The Journalist and the Murderer. It's written by Janet Malcolm. The first line of this book is that like, every journalist who knows what they're doing, who isn't too, like, is smart enough to know what they're doing, knows what they're doing is deeply unethical, something like that. And what they're talking about is that there's a tradition in journalism to betray the subject, to lie to them in the hopes of getting a story, and play to their ego and to their sense of self, to make it seem like you're gonna write one article, and you stab them in the back at the end when you press publish, and you write the totally different article. This is what actually everyone hates about journalists. And it's happened to me before. So I did a story like way back in the day, I got interviewed about something that was like data with YouTube. I made a few comments about data and YouTube. And somehow by the time the article got published, it's about me endorsing their opinion that PewDiePie is an anti-Semite. And I'm like, I reach out to this person, I said, I never said that. Like, what are you talking? How did you even twist my words to say that? And I felt so disgusted and betrayed to have like, I'm like this mouthpiece for an ideology or like a thought that I do not actually agree with. So, and when journalists do this, they think, well, I'm never gonna interview this person again, so it's okay. So it's like, it's almost like the ends justify the means, I get the story. But the ends don't justify the means because you've now undermined the entire field's credibility with that person. And when that happens enough times, you end up sitting across from Lex Friedman. And it's like, well, I don't know if they're gonna represent me fairly. Because the base assumption is that regardless of what the journalist says, they could betray you and they might betray you at the end of the day and be saying you're great while they're secretly writing like a hit piece about like, how much you're a bad force for the world. Where, whereas there's an alternate universe where if the journalist was somewhat upfront about their approach, or at least didn't mislead and didn't say like, I love you, I think you're great. You would end up with less access, but you would end up with more trusted journalism, which I think in the long run would be better. I think you get more access. I think in the long term, yeah, but all of these, like everything we're talking about is long-term games versus short-term games. Yeah. In the short term, you get more access if you suck up to the person, if you say this, say this, say this, and you stab them in the back later. Long-term, you build a long-term reputation, people trust you, it actually matters more. And it's nice when that reputation is your own individual. So like you have a YouTube channel, you're one individual. So people trust that because you have a huge disincentive to screw people over. True. I feel like if you're in the New York Times, if you screw somebody over, the New York Times gets the hit, not you individually. So you can like, you're safer, but like the reason I don't screw people over is I know that, I mean, well, there's my own ethics and integrity. Sure, but yeah. Also, there's a strong disincentive to like, because you're now, I'm going, that person is gonna go public with me screwing them over, completely lying about everything, how I presented the person, for example. And that's just gonna, you know, that's gonna percolate throughout the populace and they're gonna be like, Lex is the person that's a lying sack of shit. And so there's a huge disincentive to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Journalists don't have that. That is what's interesting about, yeah, independent, the move towards independent journalism. I think we'll probably end up at a space where, it's so interesting. Mainstream journalism has so much work to do to repair the trust with the average individual. And it's going to take a lot of like self-reflection. I've talked to a few mainstream journalists about this and a lot of them will admit it behind closed doors, but like there's this general sense that, oh, the public's not being fair to us. Like they're very self, they're defensive, I guess, in a way. And I understand why, because sometimes it's just a few bad apples that ruin it for everybody. But without the acknowledgement of the deep distrust that they have with a good portion of our society, there's no way to rebuild that. Just like when there's no acknowledgement of the corruption of the 2008 financial crash, there's no way to rebuild that. Even if most bankers, most traders are not unethical or duplicitous or they're totally normal people who maybe aren't deserving of the bad reputation, but you have to acknowledge the damage that's been done by bad actors before you can like heal that system. Well, what do you think about Elon just opening the door to a journalist to see all the emails that were sent, the quote unquote Twitter files? Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I saw a lot of, I'm like in this weird thing where I see, I follow a lot of independent people and I follow a lot of mainstream journalists and that there are very polar opposite takes on that. People really quickly politicize it. But to me, the thing that was fascinating is just the transparency that I've never seen from, one of the really frustrating things to me, because a lot of this podcast has been about interviewing tech people, CEOs, and so on, and they're just so guarded with everything. It's hard to get to. And so it's nice to get, hopefully this is a signal, look, you can be transparent. Like this is a signal to increase transparency. Hopefully so. I don't, yeah, it's been tribalized so quickly. It's like, I've lost a lot of faith in that. And unfortunately it's been this like bludgeon match of like, if you're on the right, you think it's uncovering the greatest story ever about Hunter Biden. If you're on the left, you think they were just sharing, they were just silencing revenge porn pics of Hunter Biden. So therefore it was justified. And by the way, Trump also sent messages to Twitter. So doesn't that mean that like, we should be criticizing Trump? It just like, this is goes back to why I don't touch politics is because I think as many problems as I have, I think when you become a journalist that, not even a political journalist, when you become a journalist in politics, you have like twice the problem. So I'm like, I'm happy to be well outside of that kind of sphere. But it's an interesting- It is interesting. You know, forget Twitter files, but Twitter itself is really, really interesting from the virality of information transfer. Yeah. And from a journalistic perspective, it's like how information travels, how it becomes distributed. It's interesting. What do you think about Twitter? I'm always conflicted on Twitter because I almost hate how much I enjoy using it. Because I'm like, this is like this mindless bird app is consuming my time. It's this incredible networking tool. But what's weird is when I think about my own presence on Twitter, they've almost made it too easy to like, say something that you've half thought. Like the friction to send a tweet is so much less than like, if I'm going to make a YouTube video, there's several points at which I'm like, well, what's the other side? What's this? What's that? There's no friction there. And so one thing I've noticed is everyone I follow on Twitter, a lot of them after reading all their tweets, I think nothing more of them, nothing less of them. But there's a lot of them that I think less of. And I don't think I've ever had an experience where I've read someone tweets and I think more of them in a way. And I'm like, what does that say that? Yeah, what is that? Like there's so many people I admire that the worst of them is represented in Twitter. Yes. Like there's a lot of people. There's a million examples. They become like snarky and sometimes mocking and derisive and negative and like emotional messes. I don't know. Yeah, what is that? Maybe we shouldn't criticize it and accept that as like a beautiful raw aspect of that human being, but not encompassing, not representing the full entirety of that human being. But it does reflect like, it's impossible to not reflect it to some extent. Or you'd have to counter that bias really carefully because that is them. It is a thought they had. It's just probably something that should have been an unexpressed thought perhaps. So yeah, I kind of wonder like my, I'm like, should I be on Twitter? But the problem is, is it's such a great place where so many, like so much of the news happens on Twitter. So much of the journalism breaks on Twitter. Even people in the New York Times, they'll tweet their scoop. And they'll like, they'll put that out on Twitter first. So it's this really weird thing where I'd love to be off it and it's like too useful for my job. But I kind of, I kind of hate it. No, no, you need to, well, it depends. But from my perspective, you should be on it. Oh, I definitely am, yeah. So like Coffeezilla should definitely be on Twitter, but have developed the calluses and the strength to not give into the lesser aspects. Because you're like, you're silly, you're funny. You could be cutting with your humor. I wouldn't give into the darker aspects of that, like low effort negativity. If you're, the way you are in your videos, I would say if you're ever negative or making fun of stuff, I think that's high effort. So I would still put a lot of effort into it, like calmly thinking through that. Because, and also not giving into the dopamine desire to say something that's gonna get a lot of likes. You know, I have that all the time. You use Twitter enough, you realize certain messages that are going to get more likes than others. And are usually the ones that are extreme, more extreme. Yeah. And like emotional, like Lex is an idiot or like Lex is the greatest human being ever. It's much better than, oh wow, what a polite nuanced conversation. I can tell you right now, which of those three tweets isn't gonna perform well. Yeah, yeah. So I think the extremes are okay, if you believe it. Like I will sometimes say positive things. I said that the Twitter files release was historic. Of course, this before I realized, I mean, the reason I said it is not, is because the transparency, it's so refreshing to see some, any level of transparency. And then of course, those kinds of comments, the way Twitter does, is every side will interpret it in the worst possible way for them. And they will run with it. Or some side when it's political, yeah, one side will interpret, yes, I agree with Lex. You're right, it's historic. They might not have even read the article. They just like, they literally, or the tweet thread, and they're just like, it is historic. Historic because Hunter Biden was finally the collusion or whatever it is. And then the other side is like, no, it's a nothing burger. Yeah, that aspect of nuance and that's frozen in time. Even with editing, there's a- So tough. It's tricky, but if you maintain a cool head through all of that, and hold to your ethics and your ideas and use it to spread the ideas, which you do extremely well on YouTube, I think it'd be a really powerful platform. There's no other platform that allows for the viral spread of ideas, good ideas, than this. And this is where, like, especially with Twitter spaces, I mean, where else would I see, I think twice, impromptu conversations with Coffeezilla and SPF. Like- Never. Yeah, nowhere else. Because he wasn't going to come on my show. He wasn't going to come on some big prepared thing. It's like, hey, YOLO, let's go on a Twitter space. And I like pop up. And you know what's funny? And this, I hope this release is late enough, or well, SPF probably won't see this. Yeah. Although I'm sure he's- And unfortunately, unfortunately he will. Oh, okay. Yes. Well, hopefully I'll have time to enact my little plan, but I'm hoping if he goes on any future spaces, I can like haunt him from interview to interview, which is like, I keep showing up and he's like, ah, I hate this guy. But I think he's already kind of probably has like PTSD of like, in the shadows lurks a Coffeezilla. That just would be, that would just, it's just like, that really amuses me. I mean, there's, I think he honestly would enjoy talking to you. There's an aspect of Twitter spaces that's a little uncertain of like, what are we doing here? Because there's an urgency because other voices might want to butt in. Exactly, exactly. If it's an intimate one-on-one where you can like breathe, like hold on a second. I think it's much easier. So that sense, of course, space is a little bit negative that there's too many voices, especially if it's a very controversial kind of thing. So it's tricky, but at the same time, the friction, it's so easy to just jump in. So I can just, I mean, I could, I mean, you just imagine like a Twitter space with like Zelensky and Putin. Like how else are these two going to talk, right? Like, can't you imagine? If you try to set it up on Zoom, like it never happened. It's never happened. Too many delegates, like the only way it happens. Putin like sitting there like. Zelensky's live. Just live, right? Just jumping in. It's hilarious. Давай по-русски поговорим. Okay. Actually, just on a small tangent. So how do you have a productive day? Do you have any insights on how to manage your time optimally? Yeah, I mean, I've gone the gamut of, from obsessive time tracking in 15 minute buckets to kind of like the other extreme where it's more kind of like large scale, some deep work here, two hour bucket, account for an hour of lunch and some other thing. But now I just roughly, because I manage a team and there's some things that kind of come up, it's only a team of two, it's not like big, but I just have things that are not necessarily controllable by me. I like have to take some meetings or whatever. It's not as easy to plan out my day ahead of time. So I do a lot of retrospective time management where I look at my day and that's what I mostly do now. And I account, did I spend this day productively? What could I do better? And then try to implement it in the future. So a lot of this I realized is very personal for me. I do very well in long streaks of working. And if I can't do a lot of work in 15 minutes, I can't do a lot of work in even an hour, but if you give me like three hours or five hours or six hours of uninterrupted work, that's where I get most of my stuff done. So from the, it'd be fun to explore those, when you did 15 minute buckets. So you have a day in front of you and you have like a Google sheet or a spreadsheet or something. Yeah, I did an Excel. Excel. And you're, do you have a plan for the day or do you go like when you did it, or you just literally sort of focus on a particular task and then you're tracking as you're doing that task of every 15 minutes? Yeah, I would kind of do it live. I'm not, so one of the reasons I'm so obsessive about it is because I'm not organized by nature and I lost, like in college, I learned how much lack of organization can just be a big part of my day. Organization can just hurt you in terms of output. And so I realized like I just had to build systems that would enable me to become more organized. So really, I think doing that really taught me a lot about time in the same way that tracking calories can teach you about food. Like just learning, accounting for these things will give you skills that eventually you might not need to track on such a granular level because you've kind of like figured out. That's kind of how I feel about it. I think everyone should, if you care about productivity and stuff, should do a little bit of it. I don't think it's sustainable in the longterm. It just takes so much effort and time to like, and I think the marginal effect of it in the longterm is kind of minimal once you learn these basic skills. But yeah, I was basically tracking like live what I did. And what I saw is that a lot of my real work would be done in small sections of the day. And then it'd be like a lot of just nothing, like a lot of small things where I'm busy, but little is being achieved. And so I think that's a really interesting insight. I've never figured out how to un-busy myself and focus on the like core essentials. I'm still getting to that. But it is interesting realizing most of your day is like a lot of nothing. And then like some real deep work where most of your value comes from is like 20% of your day. Yeah, I try to start every day with that. So the hardest task of the day, and you focus for long periods of time. And I also have the segment of two hours where it's a set of tasks I do every single day. The idea is you do that for like your whole life. It's like longterm investment of Anki. And it's just like learning and reminding yourself of facts you know that are useful in your everyday life. And then for me, also music. I play a little bit of music. I play the piano. Piano. And so like keeping that regular thing is part of your life. And one thing that I've really taken from this is because I've read all the like, I had a self-improvement phase in my early 20s. And one thing you learn is that everyone wants to give you a broad general solution. But really, the real trick of figuring out like optimizing is figuring out the things that work for you specifically. So like one interesting thing you said is like, oh, I like to do my hard work at the beginning of the day. I know a lot of people recommend this. I've tried so many times and I just do better work late at night. And so usually my streak of work is like from like after dinner, 7.30 to like 2 a.m. That's my prime time. And so like a lot of my videos, which you'll see, which is like lit from this studio, which appears to be daytime. It's like shot at 3 a.m. you know, just like in a caffeine fueled rush. But that's kind of how it works for me. And then also like with the social outlets and stuff like that, which it's easy. And I know I feel like we think similarly on this. So it's easy to discount these things as less relevant because they don't have quantitative metrics associated with them. But in terms of longevity and like, I think to be able to do creative work, there's an amount of recharge and like re-inputting stuff that is frequently discounted by people like us who are like obsessed with quantitative metrics. And so I really found that some of my best work gets done after I take like a break or I'll go play like live sets of music. And I mean, like that's like for me really recharging, but nowhere on a spreadsheet is that gonna show up as productive or like meaningful. But for me, for whatever reason, it recharges me in a way that like I need to pay attention to. Yeah, for sure, I usually have a spreadsheet of 15 minute increments when I'm socially interacting with people. And I evaluate how- I'm getting roasted right now. No, I'm not, it's actually, I'm probably roasting myself. But I do find that when I do have social interactions, I like to do with people that are in, outside of that exceptionally busy of themselves. Because then you understand the value of time. And when you understand the value of time, your interaction becomes more intimate and intense. Like the cliche of work hard, party hard, or whatever the cliche is. Play hard. Play hard, damn it. Whatever the- Inquisitive social interaction. No, I'm just kidding. Um, uh, the, that, I mean, that cliche, there's a truth to that, but the intensity of the social interaction, even like, you know, it's not even the intensity, like it's not even the party hard, it's like, um, even if you're going hiking and relaxing and taking in nature, so it's very relaxed, but you understand the value of that. There's, when you put a huge amount of value on those moments spent in nature, that recharges me much more. So you have to surround yourself with people that think of life that way, that think about the value of every single moment. That's one of the things you do when you break it up in 15 minute increments, is you realize how much time there is in the day, how much awesomeness there is in the day to experience, to get done and so on. And then, so you can feel that when you're with somebody. And then for me personally, like when I interact with people, I really like to be fully present for the interaction. Like, I can tell this is, for anyone who has, you know, I've been the audience forever, so I haven't been on this side of the table before. You're very intense. You look right in the eye. You're like, well, I don't know about right in the eye. Eye contact is an issue, but yes, I'm there. Lex has a soulful gaze, guys, just in case you're wondering. It's very soulful. It's very comforting. It's like a warm hug. All right, back to serious talk. Okay, you've studied a lot of people who lie, who defraud, cheat and scam. On a basic human level, how, do you have trouble trusting human beings in your own life? What's your relationship with trust of other humans? It's a great question. So funny enough, before I did this, I was like an incorrigible optimist. I, everything, the sun shined, every which place. I always saw like everybody is fundamentally good. Nobody was bad. It just was like sort of that wrong place, wrong time, bad incentives. That view has darkened significantly. But I just try to remember my sample set and just like I'm just sampling sort of the worst. And I try not to let it bleed into my day-to-day life. And I think it's probably because I was such an optimist early on that I've been able to kind of retain some of it. I call it enlightened optimism, like choosing to be optimistic in the face of a realistic sense of the problems in the world and with a realistic sense of like the scale and the challenge ahead. I actually think it's much braver to be an optimist when you're aware of what's going on in the world than to be a cynic. I think being a complete cynic is maybe, I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying it's maybe the easier way, just mentally to cope with so much negativity. It's like just saying, well, it's all bad. It's all doomed to fail. It's all going to go bust. It's all going to go bust is easier. Yeah, that leap into believing that it's a good world is a little baby act of courage. At least I think so. I don't think it's naive. No, it can be. Some people are naive that are optimistic, but oftentimes just because someone's optimistic does not mean they're naive. They could be full well aware of how troubling the world is. And I also believe some of the people you study, you know, I'm a big believer that all of us are capable of good and evil. So in some sense, the people you study are just the successful ones. The ones who chose sort of the dark path and were successful at it. And I think all of us can choose the dark path in life. That's the responsibility we all carry is we get to choose that at every moment. And it's like a big responsibility. And it's a chance to really have integrity. It is a chance to stand for something good in this world. And all of us have that because I think all of us are capable of evil. All of us could be good Germans. All of us could in atrocities be part of the atrocities. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I think all of us could be part of the atrocities. Yeah, I think it's, I really have, especially in recent years, tried to somewhat depersonalize my work and see it almost like as like a, I don't know, like a force of nature that I'm fighting more than like individuals. Because of this exact thing, I think like sort of therefore, but the grace of God, there go I is kind of a really profound way to understand yourself rather than it's just like fundamentally good and like full of integrity, acknowledging that so much of that is a product of your environment and your family and your upbringing. And so much of the people who don't have that is a product of their environment. It doesn't absolve them, but it gives you more perspective to like to sort of deal fairly, if that makes sense, and not approach it from a place of anger or a place of outrage. There is a sense of like sadness for the victims. There's a sense of outrage for the victims, but approach the individual who's done the thing from that place of understanding of this isn't just this person. There's like a whole broader thing going on here. Do you have advice for young people of how to live this life? How to have a career they can be proud of? So high school students, college students, or maybe a life they can be proud of. It's a great, well, let me think about this for a second. I think, don't be afraid to go against the grain and sort of challenge the expectations on you. Like you sort of have to do this weird thing where you acknowledge how difficult it will be to achieve something great while also having the courage to go for it anyways. And understanding that other people don't have it figured out, I think is a big theme of my work, which is that everyone wants like the guru to show them the way, to show them the secrets. So much of life and achieving anything is learning to figure it out yourself. And like the meta skill of being an autodidactic where you can, I don't know if I said that word right. Basically you self-teach. You learn the meta skill of like learning to learn. I think that's such an underrated aspect of education. People leave education, they go, when am I gonna use two plus two? When am I gonna learn, use calculus? But so much of it is learning this higher level, abstract thinking that can apply to anything. And getting that early on is incredibly powerful. So yeah, I would say like a lot of it is, is I guess to some extent, like you kind of have to do that Steve Jobs thing where you realize that nobody else in the world is smarter than you. And that both means that like, they can't show you the perfect way, but it also means you could do great things and kind of chart your own path. I don't know. That's so cheesy. This is why I hate giving advice. I feel like it's cheesy. And I don't think it is. I think my journey is so full of luck and like specific experience. I wonder how generalizable it is. But if I've learned anything and if I could talk specifically to myself, I guess that's what I would say. I mean, you've taken a very difficult path. And I think part of taking that path, like of a great journalist, frankly, is like, I can be that person. Like just believing in yourself that you could take that. Because like, if you see a problem in the world, you could be the solution to that problem. Like you can solve that problem. I think that's like, it's really important to believe that. It depends. Maybe you're lucky to have the belief inside yourself. Maybe the thing that you're saying is like, don't look to others for that strength. And also like be really comfortable failing. I think one of the best things that like you would never know about me, just looking at my background, that helped me was, playing music live. I had incredible amounts of stage fright growing up, mostly because I was terrible at piano. I was like, sucked. And I specifically, I taught myself how to play and I joined jazz band in like high school, did it through college. I remember all my recitals, I messed up every single solo I ever did. I never like actually nailed it. And every time I'd go up there, I'd like have so much dread around this and it was easier to get up there because there were sort of some people up there. But eventually I started like playing live too and I sucked at that. And I've just gone through the trenches of like, just like being publicly sort of, in my mind humiliated, like that prepared me so much for what I do now of trying to basically being fearless of failure in the face of like a wide audience. I don't have that now. I don't have that anymore because kind of I've experienced so many iterations of it at a smaller scale of just like abject public humiliation to where it's like not something that bothers me. I have no stage fright that doesn't bother me anymore. But you'd think like, oh, maybe he just was always good at this. I was terrible at it. I had a complete phobia about public anything. So it was that rapid iteration of just failure. And eventually I just like came to the conclusion of like, I wanna love it. I wanna like love like getting up on a stage and bombing. If you can learn to like love that and be fearless there, there's almost nothing you can't do. Yeah, that's brilliant advice. I'm with you, still terrifying to me, like live performance. But yeah, that's exactly the feeling is loving the fact that you tried. And somehow failure is like a deeper celebration of the fact that you tried. Because success is easy, but like- Yes. Failure is like bombing. I mean, music, yeah, on small scale, on the smallest and the largest of stages, I'm not gonna say who, but there's a huge band, huge band that wanted to be on stage. And it probably will happen. But like, but I turned it down because I was like, no. Because I'm gonna suck for sure. So the question is, do I wanna suck in front of a very large live audience? Yeah. And then I turned it down because I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Sure. But now I realize, yes. Embrace it. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be good for you. It's gonna crush your ego to the degree it's remaining. Yeah. And it's just good for you. It's good not to take yourself seriously and do those kinds of things. But honestly, I feel that way in an audience, like in an open mic. It hurts. It hurts. That's why I really admire comedians. And like, I go to open mics all the time with comedians and musicians. And I just see them bomb and play in front of like, just a few folks and they're putting their heart out. And especially the ones that kind of suck, but are going all out anyway. I think open mics are the best place to learn though, because it's the lowest stakes you can get while still being public. If you're gonna face like fears around this, because we're talking very specifically like public speaking or any kind of like, you know, being in front of a camera. If you're gonna face your fear, you have to do it. And the easiest way to do it is to lower the stakes. You're not gonna start being Lex Friedman on stage with a huge band. You don't wanna be. Like, it's like in that way, it is so impossible. But the more you lower the stakes and just like open it up to like two strangers, five strangers, like the most dive bar open mic you can go to and like start performing. That's really what I did is like, I love open mics now, because it's like low stakes on the one hand, but you really get the feeling of like going for it. And you get better and better and better at that. Yeah, for sure. And then you'll get the strength to take a bigger and bigger and bigger risks. Listen, Koff, I'm a huge fan of yours, not just for who you are, but for what you stand for. People like you are rare and they're a huge inspiration. I just, I'm inspired by your fearlessness, that you're taking on some of the most powerful and richest people in this world and doing so with respect, I think, with good faith, but also with the boldness and fearlessness. Listen, man, I'm a huge fan. Keep doing what you're doing, as long as you got the strength for it, because I think you inspire all of us. You're doing important work, brother. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Koffee Zilla. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Walter Lippmann. There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #295

Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the Lord gets. Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle. The following is a conversation with Richard Wolff, one of the top Marxist economists and philosophers in the world. This is a heavy topic. In general and for me personally, given my family history in the Soviet Union, in Russia, and in Ukraine. Today the words Marxism, socialism, and communism are used to attack and to divide, much more than to understand and to learn. With this podcast, I seek the latter. I believe we need to study the ideas of Karl Marx as well as their various implementations throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries. And in general, we need to both steel man and to consider seriously the ideas we demonize. And to challenge the ideas we dogmatically accept as true, even when doing so is unpleasant and at times dangerous. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Richard Wolff. Let's start with a basic question, but maybe not so basic after all. What is Marxism? What are the defining characteristics of Marxism as an economic and political theory and ideology? Well, the simplest way to begin a definition would be to say it's the tradition that takes its founding inspiration from the works of Karl Marx. But because these ideas that he put forward spread as fast as they did and as globally as they did, literally, it's 140 years since Marx died. And in that time, his ideas have become major types of thinking in every country on the earth. If you know much about the great ideas of human history, that's an extraordinary spread in an extraordinarily short period of historical time. And what that has meant, that speed of spread and that geographic diversity, is that the Marxian ideas interacted with very different cultural histories, religious histories, and economic conditions. So the end result was that the ideas were interpreted differently in different places at different times. And therefore Marxism, as a kind of first flush definition, is the totality of all of these very different ways of coming to terms with it. For the first roughly 40-50 years, Marxism was a tradition of thinking critically about capitalism. Marx himself, that's all he really did. He never wrote a book about communism. He never wrote a book really about socialism either. His comments were occasional, fragmentary, dispersed. What he was really interested in was a critical analysis of capitalism. And that's what Marxism was, more or less, in its first 40 or 50 years. The only qualification of what I just said was something that happened in Paris for a few weeks. In 1871, there was a collapse of the French government, consequent upon losing a war to Bismarck's Germany, and then the result was something called the Paris Commune. The working class of Paris rose up, basically took over the function of running the Parisian economy and the Parisian society. And Marx's people, people influenced by Marx, were very active in that commune, in the leadership of the commune. And Marx wasn't that far away. He was in London. These things were happening in Paris. You know, that's an easy transport even then. And for a short time, very short, Marxism had a different quality. In addition to being a critique of capitalism, it became a theory of how to organize society differently. Before that had only been implicit. Now it became explicit. What is the leadership of the Paris Commune going to do? And why? And in what order? In other words, governing, organizing a society. But since it only lasted a few weeks, the French army regrouped, and under the leadership of people who were very opposed to Marx, they marched back into Paris, took over, killed a large number of the of the communards, as they were called, and deported them to islands in the Pacific that were part of the French Empire at the time. The really big change happens in Russia in 1917. Now you have a group of Marxists, Lenin, Trotsky, all the rest, who are in this bizarre position to seize a moment. Once again, a war, like in France, disorganizes the government, throws the government into a very bad reputation, because it is the government that loses World War One, has to withdraw, as you know, Brest, Litovsk, and all of that, and the government collapses, and the army revolts. And in that situation, a very small political party, Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, splits under the pressures of all of this into the Bolshevik and Menshevik divisions. Lenin, Trotsky, and the others are in the Bolshevik division. And to make a long story short, he's in exile. Lenin's position gets him deported because he says Russian workers should not be killing German workers. I mean, this is a war of capitalists who are dividing the world up into colonies, and Russian working people should not kill and should not die for such a thing. As you can expect, they arrest him and they throw him out. Interestingly, in the United States, the comparable leader at that time of the Socialist Party here, as you know, there was no Communist Party at this point, that comes later, the head of the Socialist Party, a very important American figure named Eugene Victor Debs, makes exactly the same argument, that Americans should not fight in the war. He's in the past, he has nothing to do with Lenin, I don't even know if they knew of each other, but he does it on his own. He gets arrested and put in jail here in the United States. By the way, he runs for president from jail and does very well, really very well, remarkable. And he's the inspiration for Bernie Sanders, if you see the link. Although he had much more courage politically than Bernie has. That's really interesting, I'd love to return to that link maybe later. Yes. History rhymes. Yes, the complicated story. Anyway, what the importance in terms of Marxism is that now this seizure of power by a group of Marxists, that is a group of people inspired by Marx, developing what you might call a Russian, even though there were differences among the Russians too, but a Russian interpretation. This now has to be transformed from a critique of capitalism into a plan, at least, what are you going to do in the Soviet Union? And a lot of this was then trial and error. Marx never laid any of this out. Probably wouldn't have been all that relevant if he had, because it was 50 years earlier in another country, etc. So what begins to happen, and you can see how this happens then more later in China and Cuba and Vietnam and Korea and so on, is that you have kind of a bifurcation. Much of Marxism remains chiefly the critique of capitalism, but another part of it becomes a set, and they differ from one to the other, a set of notions of what an alternative post-capitalist society ought to look like, how it ought to work. And there's lots of disagreement about it, lots of confusion. And I would say that that's still where it is, that you have a tradition now that has these two major wings, critique of capitalism, notion of the alternative, and then a variety of each of those, and that would be the framework in which I would answer that's what Marxism is about. Its basic idea, if you had to have one, is that human society can do better than capitalism, and it ought to try. And then we can start to talk about what we mean by capitalism. Fine. So we'll look at the critique of capitalism on one side, but maybe stepping back, what do you think Marx would say if he just looked at the different implementations of the ideas of Marxism throughout the 20th century, where his ideas that were implicit were made explicit? Would would he shake his head? Would he enjoy some of the parts of the implementations? Like, how do you think he would analyze it? Well, he had a great sense of humor. I don't know if you've had a chance to take a look at his writing, but he had an extraordinary sense of humor. So my guess is he would deploy his humor in answering this question, too. He would say some of them are inspiring, some of the interpretations of his work, and he's very pleased with those. Others are horrifying, and he wishes somehow he could erase the connection between those things and the lineage they claim from him, which he would... There's a German word. I don't know if you speak the other languages. There's a wonderful German word called Verzichter, and it's stronger than the word refuse. It's if you want to refuse something, but with real strong emphasis. So this Verzichter is a German way of saying, I don't want anything to do with that. And he would talk then, you know, in philosophical terms, because remember he was a student of philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis on ancient Greek philosophy and all the rest. He would wax philosophical and say, you know, that the ideas you put out are a little bit like having a child. You have a lot of influence, but the child is his own or her own person and will find his or her own way, and these ideas, once they're out there, go their own way. And as you said, there's a particular way that this idea spread, the speed at which it spread throughout the world, made it even less able to be sort of stabilized and connected back to the origins of where the idea came from. The only people who ever really tried that were the Russians after the revolution, because they occupied a position for a while, not very long, but they occupied a position for a while in which, I mean, it was exalted, right? There had been all these people criticizing capitalism for a long time, even the Marxists ever since mid-century, and these were the first guys who pulled it off. They made it, and so that there was a kind of presumption around the world, their interpretation must be kind of the right one, because look, they did it. And so for a while, they could enunciate their interpretation, and it came to be widely grasped as something which, by the way, gets called in the literature official Marxism. The very idea that you would put that adjective in front of Marxism, or Soviet Marxism, or Russian Marxism, there were these words that where the adjective was meant to somehow say, kind of, this is the canon. You can depart from it, but this is the canon. Before the Russian Revolution, there was no such thing, and by the 1960s, it was already disproven, it was gone. But for a short time, 30, 40 years, it was a kind of, and the irony is, particularly here in the United States, where the taboo against Marxism kicks in right after World War II, is so total in this country that I, for example, through most of my adult life, have had to spend a ridiculous amount of my time simply explaining to American audiences that the Marxism they take as canonical is that old Soviet Marxism, which wasn't the canon before 1917 and hasn't been since at least the 1960s, but they don't know. It's not that they're stupid, and it's not that they're ignorant, it's that, well, the ignorance maybe, but I mean, it's not a mental problem, it's the taboo shut it down, and so all of the reopening that in a way recaptures what went before and develops it in new direction, they just don't know. Nevertheless, it's a serious attempt at making the implicit ideas explicit. The Russians, the Soviets at the beginning of the 20th century made a serious attempt at saying, okay, beyond the critique of capitalism, how do we actually build a system like this? And so in that sense, not at a high level, but at a detailed level, it's interesting to look at those particular schools, maybe. Right, because for example, let me just take your point one step further, you really cannot understand the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Vietnamese, and the others, because each of them is a kind of response, let's call it, to the way the Soviets did it. Are you gonna do it that way? Well, yes and no is the answer. This we will do that way, but that we're not gonna do. And the differences are huge, but you could find a thread, I can do that for you if you want, in which all of them are in a way reacting. They are the originals. Yes, very much so. Like maybe most of rock music is reacting to the Beatles and the Stones. There's something like that. Can you speak to the unique elements of the various schools of that Soviet Marxism? So we got Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, maybe even, let's expand out to Maoism. So maybe I could speak to Leninism, and then please tell me if I'm saying dumb things. There's a, I think for Lenin, there was an idea that there could be a small, sort of vanguard party, like a small controlling entity that's like wise and is able to do the central planning decisions. Then for Stalinism, one interesting, so Stalin's implementation of all of this, one interesting characteristic is to move away from the international aspect of the ideal of Marxism to make it all about nation, nationalism, the strength of nation. And then, so Maoism is, it's different in that it's focused on agriculture, on rural. And then Trotskyism, I don't know, except that it's anti-Stalin. I mean, I don't even know if there's unique sort of philosophical elements there. Anyway, can you maybe from those or something else, speak to different unique elements that are interesting to think about implementation of Marxism in the real world? Probably the best way to get into this is to describe something that happened in Marxism that then shapes the answer to your question. In the early days of Marx's writings, and you know, his life spans the 19th century. He's born in 1818, dies in 1883. So literally, he lives the 19th century. And you might, I mean, to make things simple, you might look at the first half of the first two thirds of his life as overwhelmingly gathering together the precursors to his own work. Marx was unusually scholarly in the sense that, partly because he didn't work a regular job, and partly because he was an exile in London most of his adult life. He worked in the library. I mean, he had a lot of time. He got subsidized a little bit by Engels, whose family were manufacturers. And you might say the first half to two thirds of his life are about the critique of capitalism. And that was what, in a broad sense, the audience for his work, Western Europe more or less, was interested in. That's what they wanted. And he gave that to them. He wasn't the only one, but he was very, very effective at it. By the last third of his life, he and the other producers of an anti-capitalist movement, people like the Chartists in England, that's a whole other movement, the anarchists of various kinds, like Proudhon in France, or Kropotkin or Bakunin in Russia, and so on. You put all these together, and there was a shift in what the audience, let's call it a mixture of militant working class people on the one hand, and critical or radical intelligentsia on the other. They now wanted a different question. They were persuaded by the analysis. They were agreeable that capitalism was a phase they would like to do better than. And the question became, how do we do this? Not anymore, should we, why should we, could we maybe fix capitalism? No, they had gotten to the point the system has to be fundamentally changed. But they didn't go, you might imagine, they didn't go and say, well, what will that new system look like? They didn't go that way. What they did was ask the question, how could we get beyond capitalism? It seems so powerful. It seems to have captured people's minds, people's daily lives, and so on. And the focus of the conversation became, this was already by the last third of the 19th century, the question of the agency, the mechanism whereby we would get beyond. And again, make a long story short, the conversation focused on seizing the government. See, before that, it wasn't that the government was not a major interest. If you read Marx's Capital, the great work of his maturity, three volumes, there's almost nothing in the state. I mean, he mentions it, but he's interested in the details of how capitalism works, factory by factory, store by store, office, what's the structure? The government's secondary for him. But there's also humans within that capitalist system of, there's the working class. Right. That's what his struggle. That's what he's interested in. Think of it almost mechanically like the workplace. In the workplace, there are some people who do this and other people who do that, and they accept this division of authority, and they accept this division of what's going on here, particularly because he believed that the core economic objective of capitalism was to maximize something called profit, which his analysis located right there in the workings of the enterprise. The government was not the key factor here. And he was looking at ideas of value. Yes. How much value does the labor of the individual workers provide, and that means how do we reward the workers in an ethical way? So those are the questions of ____. We'll get to that. But the government was not part of that picture. So it's very significant that towards the end of the 19th century, Marx is still alive when this begins, but it really gets going after he dies, is this debate among Marxists about the role of the state. They all agree, nearly all of them agree, that you have to get the state. The working class has to get the state because they see the state as the ultimate guarantor of capitalism. When things get really out of hand, the capitalist calls the police or he calls the army or both of them. And so the government is, in a sense, this key institution captured in Marxist language by the bourgeoisie, by the other side, the capitalists, and yet vulnerable because of suffrage. If suffrage is universal or nearly so, if everybody gets a vote, which in a way capitalism brings to bear, part of its rejection of feudalism in the French-American Revolution is to create a place where elected representatives... So the government being subject to suffrage creates the notion, aha, here's how we're going to... we have to seize the state. And then that gets agreed upon, but there's a big split as to how to do it. One side says you go with the election, you mobilize the voter. That gets to be called reformism within Marxism. And the other side is revolution. Don't do that. This system, if I may quote Bernie again, is rigged. You can't get there. They've long ago learned how to manipulate parliaments. They buy the politicians and all that, and therefore revolution is going to be the way to do it. Revolution gets a very big boost because the Russians, they did it that way. They didn't do... I mean they fought in the Duma, in the parliament, but they didn't. And this focus on the state, I would argue, goes way beyond what the debaters at the time... And if you're interested in the great names, there was a great theorist of the role of the state in a reformist strategy to get power in Germany named Edward Bernstein. Very important. His opponents in Germany were Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the two other huge figures in Marxism at the time. And they wrote the articles that everybody reads, but it was a much broader debate. By the way, that debate still goes on. Reformism versus revolution? And in terms not all that different. I mean it's adjusted to history, but in terms different. Can you comment on where you lean in terms of the mechanism of progress? Reformation versus revolution? I'd rather tell you the historical story. Sure. Over and over and over again, in most cases, the reformists have always won. Because revolution is frightening, is scary, is dangerous. And so most of the time, when you get to the point where it's even a relevant discussion, not an abstract thing for conferences, but a real strategic issue, the reformists have won. I mean, and I'll give you an example from the United States. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, you had an extraordinary shift to the left in the United States. The greatest shift to the left in the country's history, before or since. Nothing like it. But suddenly, you created a vast left wing, composed of the labor movement, which went crazy in the 1930s. We organized more people into unions in the 1930s than at any time before or any time since. It is the explosion. And at the same time, the explosion of two socialist parties and the Communist Party. That became very powerful, and they all worked together, creating a very powerful leftist presence in this country. They debated in a strategically real way, reform or revolution. The reformers were the union people, by and large. And the communists were the revolutionaries, by and large, because they were affiliated with the Communist International, with Russia, and all of that. And in between, you might say, the two socialist parties. One that was Trotskyist in inspiration, and the other one more moderate, Western European kind of socialism. And they had this intense debate. And they ended up, the reformists won that debate. There was no revolution in the 1930s here. But there was a reform that achieved unspeakably great successes. Which is why it was as strong and remains as strong as it does, because it achieved in a few years in the 1930s, starting around 1932-33, social security in this country, we had never had that before. It's the same one we have now. Unemployment insurance never existed before, but you have it still today. Minimum wage for the first time, still have that today. And a federal program of employment that hired 15 million people. These were unspeakable gifts, if you like, to the working class. So that's the 30s and the 40s. 30s, not much in the 40s anymore, but in the 30s. And here's the best part. It was paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. So when people today say, well you can tax the corporate, the joke is I have to teach American history to Americans, because it has been erased from consciousness. We'll return to that, but first let's take a stroll back to the beginning of the 20th century with the Russians. So their interpretation goes like this. Everybody was right, the state is crucial. We were right, we were the revolutionaries, we seized the state here in Russia. Now we have the state, and socialism is when the working class captures the state, either by reform or revolution, and then uses its power over the state to make the transition from capitalism to the better thing we're going toward. And again, make a long story short in the interest of time. What happens, which is not unusual in human history, is that the means becomes the end. In other words, Lenin, who's crystal clear, before he died, you know he doesn't live very long, he dies at 23, so he's only in power from 17, he's at 22, by that time he has his brain trouble. 1923 by the way, not at age 23. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 1923. He's only there for four or five years. He's very clear, he even says, I've done work on that, I've published, so I mean I know this stuff. He says in a famous speech, let's not fool ourselves, we have captured the state, but we don't have socialism. We have to create that, we have to move towards that. With Stalin, you know, Lenin dies and there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky loses the fight, he's exiled, he goes to Mexico. Stalin is now alone in power, does all the things he's famous or infamous for. And by the end of the 20s, Stalin makes a decision, I mean not that he makes it alone, but things have evolved in Russia so that they do the following. They declare that they are socialism. In other words, socialism becomes when you capture the state, not when the state capture has enabled you to do X, Y, Z, other things. No, no, the state itself, once you have it, is socialism. So when a socialist captures the state, that's socialism. Exactly. And that's exactly right. I feel like that's definitionally confusing. Well, it shouldn't be because I'm going to give an example. If you go to many parts of the United States today and you ask people, what's socialism? They'll tell you, they'll look you right in the face and they'll say, the post office. And you know, when I first heard this as a young man, you know, what? The post office. It took me a while to understand the post office, Amtrak, the Tennessee, all the examples in the United States where the government runs something. This is socialism. See, capitalism is if the government doesn't run it. If a private individual who's not a government official runs it, well, then it's capitalism. If the government takes it, then it's socialism. So what is wrong with that reasoning? So the idea, I think – There's nothing wrong with it's a way of looking at the world. It's just got nothing to do with Marx. Well, there's Marx, there's Marxism. Let's try to pull this apart. So what role does central planning have in Marxism? So Marxism is concerned with this class struggle, with respecting the working class. Right. What is the connection between that struggle and central planning that is often – Central planning is often associated with Marxism. Right. So a centralized power doing – Russia did that. Okay. So that has to do with a very specific set of implementations initiated by the Soviet Union. It has nothing to do with Marx. How else can you do – I don't think you can find anywhere in Marx's writing anything about central planning or any other kind of planning. Again, fundamentally then, Marx's work has to do with factories, with workers, with the bourgeoisie, and the exploitation of the working class. Exactly. You still have to take that leap. What is beyond capitalism? Right. Maybe we should turn to that, focus on that. Okay. Yes. Okay, we've already looked historically at several attempts to go beyond capitalism. How else can we go beyond capitalism? Right. Let me push it a little further. They didn't succeed, in my judgment, as a Marxist. And I'm now going to tell you why they didn't succeed, because they didn't understand as well as they could have or should have what Marx was trying to do. I think I would have been like them if I had lived at their time under their circumstances. This is not a critique of them, but it's a different way of understanding what's going on. So I'll give you an example. Most of my adult life, I have taught Marxian economics. I'm a professor of economics. I've been that all my life. I'm a graduate of American universities. As it happens, I'm a graduate of what in this country passes for its best universities. That's another conversation you and I can have. So I went to Harvard, then I went to Stanford, and I finished at Yale. I'm like a poster boy for elite education. They tried very hard. By the way, I spent 10 years of my life in the Ivy League, 20 semesters, one after the other, no break. In those 20 semesters, 19 of them never mentioned a word about Marxism. That is, no critique of capitalism was offered to me ever, with one except. One professor in Stanford, in the one semester I studied with him, he gave me plenty to read, but nobody else. So that's really interesting. You've mentioned that in the past, and that's very true, which makes you a very interesting figure to hold your ground intellectually through this idea space where just people don't really even talk about it. Perhaps we can discuss historically why that is, but nevertheless, that's the case. Marxian economics, did Karl Marx come up in conversation as a kind of— Dismissal. The best example, yeah, he came up only as an object of dismissal. For you to give an example, the major textbook in economics that I was taught with, and that was for many years the canonical book, it isn't quite anymore, was a book authored by a professor of economics at MIT named Paul Samuelson. And people, a whole generation or two, were trained on his textbook. If you open the cover of his textbook, he has a tree. And the tree is Adam Smith and David Ricardo at the root, and then the different branches of it. He's trying to give you an idea as a student of how the thing developed. And it's a tree, and everybody on it is a bourgeois. And then there's this one little branch that goes off like this and sort of starts heading back down. That's Karl Marx. In other words, he had to have it complete because he's not a complete faker. But beyond that, no, there was no—nothing in the book gives you two paragraphs of an approach. But that's Cold War. I mean, that's really neither here nor there. That's the craziness. Yeah, that's the Cold War in this country. My professors were afraid. Anyway, let me get to the core of it, what I think will help. Marx was interested in the relationship of people in the process of production. He's interested in the factory, the office, the store. What goes on—and by that he means what are the relationships among the people that come together in a workplace? And what he analyzes is that there is something going on there that has not been adequately understood and that has not been adequately addressed as an object needing transformation. What does he mean? The answer is exploitation, which he defines mathematically in the following way. Whenever in a society, any society, you organize people, adults, not the children, not the sick, but healthy adults, in the following way, a big block of them, a clear majority, work. That is, they use their brains and their muscles to transform nature. A tree into a chair, a sheep into a woolen sweater, whatever. In every human community, Marx argues, there are the people who do that work, but they always produce more chairs, more sweaters, more hamburgers than they themselves consume. Whatever their standard of living. Doesn't have to be low, could be medium, could be high, but they always produce more than they themselves consume. That more, by the way, Marx, when he writes this, uses the German word mehr, M-E-H-R, which is the English equivalent of more. It's the more. That more got badly translated into the word surplus. Shouldn't have been, but it was. By the way, by German and English people doing the translations. What's the difference between more and surplus? Is there a nuanced... Yeah, because surplus has a notion of its discretionary, it's sort of extra. He's not making a judgment that it's extra. It's a simple math equation. Yes, very simple. One minus the other. Yes. X minus Y. Reduce versus... That's right. X is the total output, Y is the consumption by the producer, therefore X minus Y equals S, the surplus. Exactly, exactly. Now, Marx argues the minute you understand this, you will ask the following question. Who gets the surplus? Who gets this extra stuff that is made but not consumed by those who made it? And Marx's answer is, therein lies one of the great shapers of any society. How is that organized? For example, who gets it? What are they asked, if anything, to do with it in exchange for getting it? What's their social role? For example, here we go now. If you get this and you get the core of it anyway, and I don't charge much. The workers themselves could get it. At least less than lawyers. Right, that's right. The workers themselves could get it. Yes. That's the closest Marx comes to a definition of communism. Communism would be if the workers who produce the surplus together decide what to do with it. So this has to do not just with who gets it, but more importantly, who gets to decide who gets it. Well, who gets it and who gets to decide what to do with it. Right. Because you can't decide it if you don't have disposition over it. So there's the logic of the word sequence, it's produced, it's Marx uses the word appropriated, in other words, who's property, who gets to decide, if you like, what happens. All that property ever meant is who gets to decide and who's excluded. That's a clean definition of communism for him. Right. By the way, it's not just clean. It's the only one. So what's, can we just linger on the definition of exploitation in that context? Yes. Easy. Becomes very easy. Exploitation exists if and when the surplus that's produced is taken and distributed by people other than those who produced it. Slaves produce a surplus which the master gets. Serfs produce a surplus which the lord gets. Employees produce a surplus which the employer gets. It's very simple. These are exploitative class structures because one class produces a surplus appropriated, distributed by another group of people, not the ones who produced it, which creates hostility, enmity, envy, anger, resentment, and all of the problems you can lump under the heading class struggle. I use a metaphor, simple metaphorical story. You have two children, let's assume, and you take them to Central Park a few blocks from here. It's a nice day and the children are playing and in comes one of those men with an ice cream truck comes by. Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling, your children see the ice cream. Daddy, get me an ice cream. You walk over, you take some money, and you get two ice cream cones and you give them to one of the children. The other one begins to scream and yell, and how? Obviously, what's the issue? And you realize you've just made a terrible mistake. So you order the one you gave the two ice cream cones to give one of those to your sister or your brother or whatever it is. And that's how you solve the problem. Until a psychologist comes along and says, you know, you didn't fix it by what you just did. You should never have done that in the first place. My response, so you understand, all of the efforts to deal with inequality in economic, political, cultural, these are all giving the ice cream cone back to the kid. You should never do this in the first place. The reallocation of resources creates bitterness in the populace. Look at our – this country is tearing itself apart now in a way that I have never seen in my life, and I've lived here all my life, and I've worked here all my life. It's tearing itself apart, and it's tearing itself apart basically over the re-division, the redistribution of wealth having so badly distributed in the first – but that's all in marks. And notice as I explain to you what is going on in this tension-filled production scene in the office, the factory, the store, I don't have to say a word about the government. I'm not interested in the government. The government's really a very secondary matter to this core question, and here comes the big point. If you make a revolution, and all you do is remove the private exploiter and substitute a government official without changing the relationship, you can call yourself a Marxist all day long, but you're not getting the point of the Marxism. The point was not who the exploiter is, but the exploitation per se. You've got to change the organization of the workplace so there isn't a group that makes all the decisions and gets the surplus vis-a-vis another one that produces it. If you do that, you will destroy the whole project. Not only will you not achieve what you set out to get, but you'll so misunderstand it that you – the Germans again have a phrase, es geht schief, it goes crooked, it doesn't go right. The project gets off the rails because it can't understand either what its objective should have been, and therefore it doesn't understand how and why it's missing its objective. It just knows that this is not what it had hoped for. There's a lot of fascinating questions here. One is to what degree – so there's human nature – to what degree does communism, a lack of exploitation of the working class, naturally emerge if you leave two people together in a room and come back a year later? If you leave five people together in a room, if you leave a hundred people and a thousand people, it seems that humans form hierarchies naturally. So the clever, the charismatic, the sexy, the muscular, the powerful, however you define that, starts becoming a leader and start to do maybe exploitation in a non-negative sense, a more generic sense, starts to become an employer, not in a capitalist sense, but just as a human. Here, you go do this, and in exchange I will give you this. It just becomes the leadership role. So the question is, yes, okay, it would be nice, the idea of communism would be nice to not steal from the world. It's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice because of human nature. Because of human nature. Thank you. So what can we say about leveraging human nature to achieve some of these ends? There's so many ways of responding, in no particular order. Here are some of them. The history of the human race, as best I can tell, is a history in which a succession of social forms, forms of society, arise, and as they do, they rule out some kinds of human behavior on the grounds that they are socially disruptive and unacceptable. The argument isn't really then, is there a need or an instinct, is there some human nature that makes people want to do this? Well, whatever that is, this has to be repressed or else we don't have a society. And Freud helps us to understand that that repression is going on all the time, and it has consequences. It's not a finished project, you repress it. It's gone. It doesn't work like that. So, for example, when you get a bunch of people together at some point, they may develop animosities towards one another that lead them to want the other person or persons to disappear, to be dead, to be gone. But we don't permit you to do that. We just don't. Every economic system that has ever existed has included people who defend it on the grounds that it is the only system consistent with human nature, and that every effort to go beyond it has to fail because it contradicts human nature. I can show you endless documents of every tribal society I've ever studied, every anthropological community that has ever been studied, slavery, wherever it's existed. I can show you endless documents in which the defenders of those systems, not all of them, of course, but many defenders used that argument. To naturalize a system is a way to hold on to it, to prevent it from going, to counter the argument that every system is born, every system evolves, and then every system dies. And therefore, capitalism, since it was born, and since it's been developing, we all know what the next stage of capitalism is. What can infer? If what you're saying is… The burden is on the people who think it isn't going to die. Okay, so it doesn't mean they're wrong, but what you're saying is if we look at history, you're deeply suspicious of the argument, this is going against human nature because we keep using that for basically everything including toxic relationship, toxic systems, destructive systems. That said, let me just ask a million different questions. So, one, what about the argument that sort of the employer, the capitalist, takes on risk? So, yeah, versus the employee who's just there doing the labor. The capitalist is actually putting up a lot of risk. Are they not, in sort of aggregating this organization and taking this giant effort, hiring a lot of people, aren't they taking on risk that this is going to be a giant failure? So, first of all, there's risk. Almost in everything you undertake, any project that begins now and ends in the future, it takes a risk that between now and that future, something's going to happen that makes it not work out. I mean, I got into a cab before I came here today in order to do this with you. Yes. I took a risk. The cab could have been in an accident, the lightning could have hit us, a bear could have eaten my left foot. Who the hell knows? Shouldn't I reward you for the risk you took? No, hold it a second. Let's do this step by step. So, everybody's taking a risk. I always found it wonderful you talk about risk and then you imagine it's only some of us who take a risk. Let's go with the worker and with the capitalist. That worker, he moved his family from Michigan to Pennsylvania to take that job. He made a decision to have children. They are teenagers. They're now in school at a time when their friendships are crucial to their development. You're going to yank them out of the school because his job is gone? He took an enormous risk to do that job every day, to forestall all the other things he could have done. He was taking a risk that this job would be here tomorrow, next month, next year. He bought a house, which Americans only do with mortgages, which means he's now stuck. He has to make a monthly payment. If you make a mistake, you capitalist, he's the one who's going to, you're a capitalist. You got a lot of money, otherwise you wouldn't be in that position. You've got a cushion. He doesn't. If you investigate, you'll see that in every business I've ever been in. I've been involved in a lot of them. So, you think it's possible to actually measure risk or is your basic argument is there's risk involved in a lot of both the working class and the bourgeoisie, the capitalists? That's right. The worker would never come and say, because he's been taught right, I want this payment, a wage, for the work I do. And I want this payment for the risk I take. Well, there's some level of communication like that. You have acknowledgement of dangerous jobs, but that's probably built into the salary, all those kinds of things. But you're not incorporating the full spectrum of risk. You don't believe that. This country is now being literally transformed from below by an army of workers who work at Amazon, fast food joints. You know what their complaint is? It's killing us. We get paid shit and it's killing us. There is no relationship except in the minds of the defenders of capitalism between the ugliness, the difficulty, the danger of labor on the one hand and the wage. Let me give you just a couple of examples. Because this is my job. This is my life, what I do. The median income of a childcare worker in the United States right now as we speak is $11.22 an hour. Median. So 50% make less, 50% make more. The median income for a car park attendant is several dollars per hour higher than that. What does the car park attendant do? He stares at your car for many hours to make sure that nobody comes and grabs it. Maybe he parks it and he moves it around to get it in and out. By any measure that I know of that makes any rational sense, being in charge of toddlers, two, three, four-year-olds who are at the key moment of mental formation the first five years, to give that a lower salary than you give the guy who watches your car. Come on. I know how to explain it. Gender explained, all kinds of issues, the car park people are males and the childcare people are females. And that in our culture is a very big marker of what. But the one who said, only the economics professor, nobody else, says this stuff. Because in economics, I don't know if you are familiar with our profession, but we have something which we call marginal product. This is a fantasy. I was a mathematician before I became an economist. I loved mathematics. I specialized in mathematics. So, I know mathematics pretty well. What economists do is silly, is childish, but they think it's mathematics. It's very sophisticated. But think for a minute what it means to suggest that you can identify the marginal product of a factor of production, like a worker. In the textbook, when it's taught, I've taught this stuff. I hold my nose, but I teach it. Then I explain to students, what I've just taught you is horse shit, but first I teach it. What is the marginal product, if it might be useful to say? The notion is, if you take away one worker right now from the pile, what will be the diminution of the output? That's the marginal product of that worker. Measured by? The amount of the output that diminishes. Output of the raw product. Of the product. Usually in real terms, so physical, not the value. You could do a value, but it's really more the physical you're at. There is a transformation thing, I'd love to talk to you about value. It's so interesting. What is value? I'd be glad to talk to you about value and price and all of that. But I just want to get to this. Hegel, who was Marx's teacher, has a famous line. You can't step in the same river twice. And the argument is, you and the river have changed between the first and the second time. So it's a different you and it's a different river. You can choose not to pay attention to that. You can't claim you're not doing that. You can't claim that you can actually do that because you can't. There is no way to do that. So the meaning that you can't just remove a worker and have a clean mathematical calculation of the effect that it has on the output. That's right. Because too many other things are going on. Too many things are changing. And you cannot assume, much as you want to, that the outcome on the output side is uniquely determined by the change you made on the input side. You can't do that. Even in the average, it's not going to work out. You can take – look, mathematics is full of abstractions. You can say, as we do in economics, keter is paribus. Everything else held constant. But you have to know what you just did. You held everything – you know why you do that? Because you can't do that in the real world. That's not possible. You better account for that. Otherwise, you're mistaking the abstraction from the messy reality you abstracted from to get the abstraction. As a quick tangent, if we somehow went through a thought experiment or an actual experiment of removing every single economist from the world, would we be better off or worse off? Much better off. Okay. Economics – and I'm one. I'm talking about myself. See, economics – We're going to ship all the economists to Mars and see how it all works out. But the serious part of this is that economics – it's really about capitalism. Economics as a discipline is born with capital. There was no such thing. I teach courses at the university, for example, called History of Economic Thought. And I begin the students with Aristotle and Plato. And I say, you know, they talked about really interesting things, but they never called it economics. It made no sense to people to abstract something as central to daily life as economics broadly defined. That's a creation much, much later. That's capitalism that did that, created the field. So when I give them Plato and Aristotle, I have to give them particular passages. By the way, footnote, because your audience will like it. Plato and Aristotle talked about markets because they lived at a time in ancient Greece when market relations were beginning to intrude upon these societies. So they were both interested in this phenomena that we're not just producing goods and then distributing among us. We're doing it in a quid pro quo. I'll give you three oranges, you give me two shirts, a market exchange. And both Aristotle and Plato hated markets, denounced them, and for the same reason. They destroy social cohesion. They destroy community. They make some people rich and other people poor, and they set us against each other, and it's terrible. And here's what – that's they agreed on that. Here's what they disagreed on. One of them said, okay, there can be no markets. That was Plato. Aristotle comes back and says, no, no, no, no, no, no, too late for that. The disruption caused in society by getting rid of this institution that has crawled in amongst us would be too devastating. So we can't do that. But what we can do is control it, regulate it. Get from the market what it does reasonably well and prevent it from doing the destructive things it does so badly. So the fundamentally destructive thing of a market is it's the engine of capitalism, so it creates exploitation of the worker. It facilitates it, and it is an institution that Plato and Aristotle feel is a terrible danger to community. Which, by the way, is a way of thinking about it that exists right now all over the world. Look, the medieval Catholic Church had a doctrine, the prohibition of usury. You know, and this was that God said if there's a person who needs to borrow from you, then that's a person in need. And the good Christian thing to do is to help him. To demand an interest payment rather than to help your fellow man is God hates you for that. That's a sin. Jesus is crying all the way to wherever it is he goes. But would Jesus be crying when you try to scale that system? So that has to do with the intimate human interaction. The idea of markets is you're able to create a system that involves thousands, millions of humans. And there'd be some level of safe, self-regulating fairness. There might be, but it's hard to imagine that charging interest would be the way to do that. I wonder what, so I guess... Suppose you were interested in having, suppose you took as your problem, we have a set of funds that can be loaned out. People don't want to consume it. They're ready to lend it. Okay. To whom should they lend it? Well, we could say in our society, we're going to run this the way professors in institutions like MIT work this. They write up a project. They send the project into some government office where it is looked at against other projects. And this office in the government decides we're going to fund this one and that one because they're more needed in our society. We are in greater need of solving this problem than that problem. And so we're going to lend money to people working on this problem more readily or more money than we lend over here because we're going to... But instead what we do is who can pay the highest interest rate? Whoa, what do you do it? What ethics would justify you doing it? It's like a market in general. Something is in shortage. All markets are about how to handle shortage. That's one basic way to understand it. And so if the demand is greater than the supply, which is all the word shortage means, has no other meaning. If the demand is greater than the supply, okay, now you've got a problem. You can't satisfy all the demanders because you don't have enough supply. You have a shortage. Okay, now how are you going to do it? In a market, you allow people who have a lot of money to bid up the price of whatever is short. That solves your problem because as the price goes up, the poor people can't... They drop out. They can't buy the thing at the exalted price. So you've got a way of distributing the shortage. It goes to the people with the most money. At this point, most human beings confronted with this explanation of a market would turn against it because it contradicts their Christian, Judaic, Islamic, all of them would say, what? You know what that means? It means that a rich person can get the scarce milk and give it to their cat, while the poor person has no milk for their five children. There it is. You want a market? Why? The fundamental thing that seems unfair, there's the resulting inequality now. Or death. Or death. Well, that's the ultimate inequality. Yes, it is. What about... And we're going to jump around from the philosophical, from the economics, to the sort of debate type of thing. What about sort of the lifting ties, raise all boats, meaning? If we look at the 20th century, a lot of people, maybe you disagree with this, but they attribute a lot of the innovation and the average improvement in the quality of life to capitalism. To inventions and innovation, to engineering and science developments that resulted from competition and all those kinds of forces. So not looking at the individual unfairness of exploitation as it's specifically defined, but just observing historically. Look at the 20th century. We came up with a lot of cool stuff that seemed to have made life easier and better on average. What do you say to that? I have several responses to that. But I do disagree pretty fundamentally with what's going on there. But let me give you the arguments so that you can hear them and then you can evaluate them, as can anybody who's listening or watching. Marx was a student of Hegel. And one of Hegel's central arguments was that everything that exists, exists, quote, in contradiction. In simple English, there's a good and bad side, if you like, to everything. And you won't understand it unless you accept that proposition and start looking for the good things that are the other side of the bad ones and the bad things that are the other side of the good ones, etc. The dialectic. Yes, exactly. And Marx, very attentive to that, explicitly agrees with this on many occasions and applies it, of course, to the central object of his research, capitalism. So this is not a simple-minded fellow who's telling you all the bad things about capitalism as if there were nothing that this system achieved or accomplished. And one of the things he celebrates a lot is the technological dynamism of the system, which Marx takes to be profound because, you know, he lived at the time when major breakthroughs in textile technology and mining and chemistry and so on were achieved. But as to the notion that capitalism is therefore responsible for the improvement in the quality or the standard of living of the mass of people, Marx now comes back and says, oh, wait a minute here. Number one, capitalism as a system has been mostly represented by capitalists, which makes a certain sense. And those capitalists, with very few exceptions, some but very few, have fought against every effort to improve the lives of the mass of people. The goal of a capitalist is to minimize labor costs. What that means is replace a worker with a machine, move the production from expensive U.S. to cheap China, bring in desperate immigrants from other parts of the world because they will work for less money than the folks that you have here at home. Every measure to help the standard of living of American workers had to be fought for for decades over the opposition of capitalists from the beginning to right now. The reason we have a minimum wage, which was passed in the middle of the 1930s, when it was proposed, it was blocked by capitalists. They got together. And today, just a factoid for you, the last time the minimum wage was raised in the United States, federal minimum wage, was in 2009, when it was set at the lofty sum of $7.25 an hour, which you cannot live on. Over the last 12 years or so, whatever it is now, 11, 12, 13 years since then, we have had an increase in the price level in this country every year. And in the last year, 8.5%. During that time that the prices went up, the minimum wage was never raised. What? This is a time of stock market boom, of growing inequality. This is a... The nerve of the defender of capitalists, who wants now to get credit for the improvement in the standard of life of the workers that was fought by every generation. You know, it takes your breath away. It's an argument. Whoa. But I take my hat off if I had one, because that is one of the only ways to justify this system. Long ago, let me get to the heart of it. Long ago, capitalism could have overcome hunger, could have overcome disease, could have, I mean, way beyond what we have now. But it didn't. And that's the worst moral condemnation imaginable. How do you justify that when you could, you didn't? Look, let me get at it another way, because this may interest you anyway. The issue is not that capitalism isn't technologically dynamic. It is. And along the way, it has developed things that have helped people's lives get better. No question. But the notion that the mass enjoyment of a rising standard of living is somehow built into capitalism is factually nuts and is such an outrageous, and I can give you, because you do math, you'll understand it. Think of it this way. Imagine a production process in which you have $100 that the capitalist has to lay out for tools, equipment, and raw materials, and $100 that he has to lay out for workers, hire the workers, and he puts them all together, and he has an output. And let's say the output is 100 units of something, and what are the prices, and that's his revenue. And when he takes his product and sells it and gets the revenue, let's say the revenue is, it doesn't really matter, it's 120, for lack of a better word, 220, sorry. And he takes 100 of it and replaces the tools, equipment, and raw materials he used up, another 100 to hire the workers for the next shift, and the other 20 is his profit, and he puts that aside. Now along comes a technological breakthrough, a machine, a new machine. And the new machine is so effective, you can get the same number of units of output with half the workers. So you don't need to spend 100 on workers, you only need to spend 50. You can do it with half the workers. And so the capitalist goes to the workers, by the way this happens every day, and he says to half of them, you're fired. Don't come back Monday morning, I don't need you. It's nothing personal, I got a machine. Why does he do that? Because the 50 he now no longer has to spend on labor, because he doesn't need half of them, he keeps. Everything else is the same, the machine, everything else is just to make the math easy. So he keeps as his own profit the 50 that before he paid for those workers. Because when he sells it for 220, that 50 he doesn't have to give to the next job because he has a new machine. So that's what he does. The technology leads, he's happy, he's become more profitable, he's got an extra 50, which is why he buys the machine. The workers are screwed. Half of them just lost their job, have to go home to their husband and wife, tell them I don't have a job anymore, I didn't do anything wrong, the guy was nice enough to say there was nothing wrong with me, but he doesn't need them. So I'm completely screwed here. I don't know what I'm going to do about the debts we have, the house on mortgage, my children's education, or whatever else he's got going for himself. All right, now, now the point. There was, of course, an alternative path. The alternative path would have been to keep all the workers, pay them exactly the same that you did before for half a day's work. You would have got the same output, same revenue, same profit as before. But the gain of the technology would have been a half a day of freedom every day of the lives of these workers. The majority of workers would have been really helped by this technology. But instead they were screwed so that one guy, the employer, could make a big bundle of more money. You want to support a system like this? Well, to go back to Hegel, the good and the bad. So you just listed the bad, and you also first listed the good, the technological innovation of this kind of system. The question is the alternative, whatever, as we try to sneak up to ideas of what the alternative might look like, what are the good and the bad of the alternative? So you just kind of, as a opposite, by contrast, showed that, well, a nice alternative is you work less, get paid the same, you have more leisure time, opportunity to pursue other interests, the creative interests, family, flourish as a human being, basically strengthen and embolden the basic humanity that's under all of us. Yes, but then what cost does that have on the deadline-fueled, competition-fueled machine of technological innovation that is the positive side of capitalism? It slows it down. It slows it down, and the question is, which is more important for the flourishing of humanity? I agree with that, and I'd love there to be a democratic mechanism. So let's discuss it. Let's debate it, and then let's decide what mixture, because it's not either-or. The math problem I gave you is either-or. We could mix it. You could have a third less of a working day instead of a half less, and then the other part would be extra profit for our employer, et cetera, et cetera. So let's have a democratic discussion of what is the mix between the positive, and we have no such thing. All of this is decided by one side in this debate, which not only we know what they do. They always choose the one that maximizes their profit because that's what they were told to do in business school where I've taught. So not only is it an undemocratic decision, but it's lopsided to boot. So we don't have the opportunity, but I would love for us to be good Hegelian Marxists and say, let's take a look at the plus and the minus and make the best decision that we can. We'll make mistakes, but we'll all make them together. It won't be one of us making a dictatorial decision. You know, Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not as a notion of how government is done. I'm sorry, not Marx. Lenin did that. Not as a notion of how the government works, but as a notion of what the practical reality is. The dictatorship of these key decisions is not made by some sitting council. It's made by each little capitalist in his, her relationships with the workers in the workplace, which is why Marx focused his analysis on that point. And by the way, I can sketch for you right now, so it doesn't lurk in the background, what the alternative is. Let's go there. Okay. It goes right back to what I said earlier. The workers themselves, the collection of employees together, appropriate their own surplus and decide democratically what to do with it, which includes the decision of whether or not to buy a machine and whether or not to use the machine and the savings it might allow to be handled by more leisure for themselves or as a fund for new developments in technology or new products or whatever they want. And, you know, this is an old idea in human. Marx loved that. Toward the end of his life, he started reading extensively in anthropology. And one of the reasons he did that toward the end of his life was because he kept discovering that in this society and that, including here in the United States, that there were examples of people who organized their production in precisely this way as a collective democratic community in which everybody had an equal voice. So we all together decide democratically what to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output we all help to produce. So let's do it in, you know, in this country where democracy is a value nearly everybody subscribes to. Think about it this way. The stunning contradiction that there is a place in our society where democracy has never been allowed to enter. The workplace. In the workplace, a tiny group of people, unaccountable to the rest of them, the employer, whether that's an individual, a family, a partnership, or a corporate board of directors, tiny group of people, controls economically a vast mass of employees. Those employees don't elect those people, have no, nothing. There is no accountability. It is the most undemocratic arrangement imaginable, and this society insists on calling itself democratic when it has organized the minor matter of producing everything in a way that is the direct, it's autocratic. So to push back on a few things. So one is the idea of this society calling itself democratic is that the government is elected democratically, and the government is able to pressure the workplace through the process of regulation. You pass laws of the boundaries of how, you know, minimum wage, all those kinds of things. That's one idea. The other is there is a natural force within the capitalist, when there's no monopolies, of competition being the accountability. So if you're a shitty boss, the employee in the capitalist system has the freedom to move to another company, work for a better boss. So that creates pressure on the employers and the bosses. That's at least the idea that you, there's two boundaries of you not misbehaving. One is the law, so regulations passed by the government, democratic. And the second is because there's always alternatives, in theory, then that puts pressure on everyone to behave well because you can always leave. So, I mean, that's kinds of accountability, but what you're saying is that does not result in a significant enough accountability with the employer that avoids exploitation of the worker. Absolutely, I mean, whatever accountability you get in those mechanisms. And let me respond to that, and then I'll counter-argument. First, competition. Here again, we have to be Hegelians just a little. Competition destroys itself. It doesn't need any... The whole point of competition is to beat the other guy. If I can produce the same product as the other guy, either a better quality or a lower price or maybe both, then I win because the customers will come to me because my price is lower or my quality is better, and they'll leave the other guy, he'll go out of business. Now, let's follow. When he goes out of business, because I've won the competition, he fires his workers. I hire them because I'm now going to be able to serve a market he can't serve anymore, so I'm going to buy the used equipment, and thereby many become few. Monopoly is the product of competition. It's not the antithesis, it's the product. Well, let's see. That's where it comes from. There's another element to the system where there's always a new guy that comes in. There isn't. Well, that's the dream, the entrepreneurial spirit of a free, of the United States, for example, of a capitalist system is you can be broke and one day have a strong idea and build up a business that takes on Google and Facebook and Twitter and all the different car, Ford, GM, which is what, you look at Tesla, for example. That's the American dream. One of the many ideals of the American dream is you can move from dirt poor to being the richest person in the world. It can happen. It can happen. You know what that's like? That's like you can win a lottery. No, that's not quite. No, the lottery is complete luck. Here you can work your ass off if you have a good idea. The odds are better in the lottery. That's not true. There's a lot of new businesses. How many Teslas do you notice? Tesla is a really bad example because the car company, the automotive sector is so difficult to operate. It's such a thin margin of profit. They're probably a good example of capitalism just completely coming to a halt in terms of lack of innovation. That's a very complicated industry because of the supply chain. They have their uniquenesses, you're quite right, but so does every other industry. The one thing that's common is that many become few. What you can also have is when you have a few, they jack up the price. They make an enormous profit. And in the irony of capitalism, Marx would love this, they begin to incentivize people to break into this industry because the few remaining are making a wild amount of profit because they are a few and can jigger the market to make it work like that for them. The reason every small capitalist is trying to build market share, that's a polite way of saying they want to become a monopolist or to be more exact, an oligopolist, one of a handful of firms that dominates. That's what they're there for. But yeah, to push back a little bit also because that could be, this is a question also, do you think we're in danger of oversimplifying capitalism that completely removes the basic decency of human beings? So if you give me a choice to press a button to get rid of the competition, but that's going to lead to a lot of suffering, there's a lot of people at the heads of companies that won't press that button. That it's not in the calculation, it's not just money, it's human well-being too. So like the… You think? I, yes. You and I don't live in the same place then. So you're saying that the forces of capitalism take over the minds of the people at the top and then they cease being human. No. The basic… I wouldn't… Depending on your model of humans, but they lose track of the better angels of their nature and they just become cogs in the machine, but they just happen to be the cog at the top. I would put it differently, that the system is so set up, it's a little bit like natural selection. The guys who may, I could say the women too, it doesn't matter. The people who make it up through the layers of the bureaucracy and get to the top in these things have had to do things along the way that become selective. If they can't stand it because they have that human quality and there are people like that, I've known them. They're the ones running an Airbnb in Vermont. They went there and they said, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to treat people like that. I'm going to make a lovely place in Vermont with my husband or my wife or whatever and I'm going to be, you know, enjoying the people that come by and be a decent human. Of course, of course. But the system selects the firm, you know, if you don't do what has to be done to make the profit go up, you're toast there anyway. The rest of the people who vote for you are going to kick you out. You can tell them all day long what a lovely person you are. Then they're going to look at you and wonder what happened to you. How did you even get this far with the lovely person horseshoe? Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. It's not necessarily just lovely person. So maybe I'll just say my bias is the people I know are, especially at the top of companies, are in the tech sector where innovation is such a big part of it. So I think a lot of the things we're talking about is when there's not much innovation in the system. So... Innovation usually comes in the history of capitalism, innovation comes in spurts. There's the electric period, the chemistry period, the nuclear period. There's now whatever you want to call it, the artificial intelligence or robotics or computer. It doesn't... It comes and then there's a flurry as everything is reorganized around whatever the newest technology is. And then you have a period where you can get excited about that. And the very rich people who come to the top can talk endlessly as they always do about innovation. But again, it really is... This is a recurring kind of debate and a recurring kind of issue. For me, how do I put this in a way that... I don't mean to offend. Please, please. No, no, no, I don't want to. But... The problem with capitalism is, and maybe you'll like this, the problem with capitalism is not that it is the one thing that's consistent with human nature. That's what its defenders would like to have us believe. But if anything, I would argue the opposite, that it is such a contradiction to parts of our nature, not other parts, that it can never quite make it. There's always going to be the people who don't go along with it, people you're talking about, who do quit along the way. Or maybe a few of them actually make it to the top by God knows what hook or what crook that they did it. But most of them go... And you know why? Because their humanity is contradicted by what it is they're being asked to do. I mean, the corporate sector this year, just to give you an idea, CEOs are jacking up their wage package. They're already out of whack. I mean, the average CEO pay is now 300 times what the average worker pay is. But they're jacking it up even more. Why? Because that's what's happening in their universe. They're all doing it, and they have to do it. Each one of them justifies it. I have to do that, otherwise I'd lose my guy to the next one, which of course is true, but is no comfort for the mass of people who aren't CEOs, for whom this argument is very exciting. So they're doing that at a time when the American people can't cope. They've just gone through the COVID disaster. They've gone through the second worst economic crash of capitalism in our history. After two years of this one-two punch, they got an inflation, a third punch, and we are now predicting rising interest rates and a recession at the end of the year or early next year. You can't do this to a working class. When this was done to the German working class in the 1920s, Hitler was the result. You keep doing that in this country, we're already watching it. You're going to get that, too. You're already getting bits and pieces. You can't keep doing it. So there's a quiet suffering amidst the working class that's growing. Taking out on it. That can turn to anger. Some little 18-year-old kid who has to go three hours in his car and blow away people in a supermarket. Huh? What? And it happens every day in this country, every day. So that anger rises up in those little ways now and bigger, bigger, bigger, potentially. By the way, there's one more thing on the rationality, and this goes to Elon Musk. If you're interested, 49,000 people were killed in automobile accidents this last year. The number was just released yesterday, 49,000. Automobiles are the single largest pollutant in the country. They use up an enormous amount of energy. They use up enormous amount of resources. There is a way to make transportation much more rational, and we've known it for decades. It's called mass transportation. It's a really beautifully maintained, crystal clear, clean, frequent system of buses, trains, street trolleys, vans. It could easily be done in this society. In fact, I once did a project that I estimated cost $30 billion. That's less than we're sending to Ukraine to do this, to reconfigure it. A public transit system where? Everywhere in this country, all the major metropolitan. This country's overwhelmingly metropolitan area. Well, it surely has to be more than 30 billion, but... Well, it was a few years ago. Sure, but you're saying it's not a number that's insane. Right, it's not crazy stuff. It's a reasonable number. Right, right. Hey, listen, but there's a... Let me just finish the point. Sure, yes. Okay? So, I'm trying to be rational here. If we have a climate crisis, which everyone tells me we do, if it's got a lot to do with fossil fuels, which everybody tells me it has to do, and with the use of the fossil fuel, particularly for the automobile, then the solution to the problem would be mass transit. We're doing nothing to make that happen. Nothing. Well, there's... You could argue that autonomous vehicles is a kind of public transit because it's going to be reusable vehicles. It will end, in theory, car ownership. So, you just have a more kind of distributed public transit system. If it happens, but you know that that's a side effect. His major goal, and the major goal of the other companies that are busy squeezing to get his share of the pie smaller, so they have some, Ford, General Motors, Toyota, all of them are making electric cars. So, what they've done is they've replaced the individual car with fossil fuel with another individual car. Yeah. That's fucking nuts. What are you doing? Well, that's one of the things they're doing, but automation is also another one. But on the Elon side, there's also a hilariously named boring company, which is working on tunnels, which is actually expanding the flexibility you might have to start playing with ideas of public transit. I think, listen, I'm now partially living in Austin, Texas, that I don't know if they know what a public transit system is, period. Yes. Most Americans should be. There's F150 pickup trucks. Yeah. But this is an interesting, so- The older, by the way, footnote, the older the city, the more likely it has public transportation. So, you're saying- Boston is the best example. Yes. Have you been, well, you- Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, I have a place in Boston. Boston, with the street railway, Boston is your case study of how to do this, because they've been doing it all along. New York's pretty good, too. There's a trade-off, yeah. New York, I would say, is better than Boston, because there's, their technology also helps you out to do the public transit better. It's almost like Boston's a little too old, but yes, I get your point. But there is a, the Ford F150 pickup truck symbolizes something about America, and there is a practical nature to the fact that in order to do public transit, in order to do some of these things that you're talking about with the working class, there has to be a central planning component, or there has to be a centralized component. And America is very much based on the idea of, at least in recent times, I would say from the founding of individualism, of respecting individual freedom. Are you worried that in order to bring some of these ideas of Marxism to life, you would trample on individual freedoms? No. Can you respect both? Sure. For me, Marxism is a way to enhance the individual freedom of the mass of people who have had that freedom eroded under the capitalist, so that's a motive for my Marxism. It was for Marx, too. He loved the French Revolution. He loved the Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, the great three, and then Democracy, the American Contribution, if you like. He believed in all of that. His critique of capitalism was it promised it and then never delivered it. And the reason you have to go beyond it is because it didn't deliver what it had promised. So for me, it is the fulfillment of a genuine... But again, I'm a Hegelian Marxist, so if you want. Individualism, for me, is not the way it's set up in this society, some sort of antithesis to the government. I think an immense con has been pulled on the American people. And the con works like this. You know what's bad and what's dangerous and threatens you? It's the government. The government's going to come in and tell you what to do. The government's going to run your life. The government's the problem. There really is no other way to explain the following in American politics. Large numbers of people lose their homes in a downturn, like the so-called Great Recession of 2008. Who do they blame? The government. Large numbers of people go unemployed. And what is the media all about? The government. If I were a capitalist, I'd love this. I'd kick the workers by throwing them out of their home, and they don't get angry at me, they get angry at the government. I fire large numbers of people. I have no responsibility for what happens to them as a result of having no job and no income. And they get angry at the senator. I'm laughing all the way to the bank. This is a genius stroke. In theory. But if you look at government, because you said accountability, and the capitalist system has no accountability. There's some pushback I give on the accountability. I think there is some accountability we can discuss in a Hegelian way. There's more accountability for, I would say, that in theory, government is perfectly accountable. That's the whole point of a democratic system, is you vote people in. In practice, there's a giant growing bureaucracy that is accountable only on the surface. There's two parties that seem to be... Are the same. Are the same. Media is somehow integrated into making the same two parties that are just wearing different colored shirts to seem like they're very opposed and are arguing and bitterly arguing and calling each other's spouses nasty names and all those kinds of things. Okay. But that's government. So, what exactly is worse here? Government or companies? Why are we asking that question? These are twins. Look, what you were able to say about Republicans and Democrats just now, with which I agree, I would say the same thing about corporations and the government. This is the same people. Literally the same. Let's go to Churchill. Which one is worse? Let's go to Churchill. Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the other ones or whatever. So, this kind of same idea, which one exactly is worse? Because to me, it seems like... Which one between what and what? Government and industry and companies. Because government is plagued by, I will call it corruption because the corruption of bureaucratic paperwork. And then, because they're not accountable. There doesn't seem to be a serious accountability. Again, we're not living on the same planet. The greatest practitioners of central planning are corporations. Elon has an operation, like General Motors, Ford, IBM, or any of the other megacorps. They have to plan. They buy up companies because they don't want to deal in the market. They don't want the insecurity, the uncertainty of having to buy their inputs or sell their outputs to somebody they don't control. They want the professor to teach the genius of a market. They hate the market. And when they grow to be big, they keep buying whoever they were dealing with before so they could better control them, which requires them then to plan the production and distribution of goods inside rather than buying them in the market. The model of the government is the private corporation. I have spent my life, give you an example, in American universities, big ones, famous ones, not just as a student but as a professor. I've been to half a dozen schools. I teach now at the new school here. It's another one, right? They all model themselves after businesses. They model their... You can attack the bureaucracy of universities, good reason, it's a mess, but they're proudly modeling themselves on organizing their bureaucracy in a business-like manner. So you're looking at a difference which isn't there. The government and the private sector are partners, and both of them wouldn't have it any other way. The corporations want that from the government, and the government now knows that to please the corporations is the number one objective they have because that's how they keep their jobs and keep their system going. And so for all practical purposes, this is the same people. But there's important differences that I don't know if they're fundamental or just a consequence of history, but if you have government, they're accountable in a different way than companies. Companies are accountable by, especially if you have a consumer, they're accountable by sort of the consumer spending or not spending their money on whatever the heck the company is selling. The government is accountable by votes, and it seems like government, unlike companies, for most of companies' history, is always too big to fail, meaning it can always just print money. It can always save itself, and that creates a bureaucracy. You rarely pay the cost of having made bad decisions if you're in government. You distribute the blame, and it's very unclear who's responsible for bad decisions, so bad decisions in government accumulate. So you become more and more and more inefficient, and more and more poor in your decision-making in terms of, you said public transit. Should we build a public transit system in this city or not? That's a difficult decision. That's an interesting decision. I would say it's very often a very good decision, but whoever makes that decision should be accountable for a good or bad decision, and it seems like companies are more accountable. They pay, they feel the pain of having made a bad decision more because it can go bankrupt. I mean, there's much more day-to-day pressure to make good engineering decisions. Government doesn't seem to be under the same level of pressure. Do you disagree with that? I disagree with that. Everything in my history pushes me. I may be living in a different planet, or taking a different sort of drug. I won't mention the name, but I personally had a lot to do with a very large company here in the United States, here in the New York area, and it involved two brothers and a family who built it up into a huge corporation. One of the brothers was kind of the dynamo of the family, and he was more responsible than anybody else building it up, but he took care of his brothers. He had a nice feeling about his brothers. So, the one brother who could not, you know, without help, tie his shoes, became a vice president, got an enormous salary, got a beautiful office in a skyscraper not that many blocks from where I'm sitting right now, and that was the way that family handled that company. And all of his relatives that were somewhere in this company doing a variety of whatever, because, and my experience with this, and because I went to the schools I told you, all my experiences with that group of people, corporate exec, full of those stories, you know, they made mistake after mistake, which they would tell you about, didn't undermine their, they were always able to blame somebody else, something else that scraped them through. And had they not been able to, they would have been replaced by another person who did the same thing for as long as they could. And they knew it. They would talk about it. At family events, that's how I know. Yeah, that's, I mean that. I understand that you want the outside world to look at it this way, but it's not my experience. Interesting, but again, that kind of thing, at the risk of saying human nature again, I wonder what kind of system allows for that more versus less. This is the question of, I would call that, let's put that under the umbrella term of corruption. Okay. Which system allows for more corruption? But remember that the way I defined a different system is not more or less government. It's more or less allowing a democratic workplace. Reconfiguring it. What happens when everybody has a vote? When you have to explain what the strategies are, what the alternatives are to a larger number of people than a board of directors or a major shareholders or whoever it is that most companies are responsible to. And now you've got a whole different universe. It's not a small group of people. It can't be hidden the way it's normally hidden. Most of it, and on and on and on. This is, you know, worker co-ops is what this is called in many parts of the world. So it's not that I'm advocating something that's never been seen before. Not at all. The Marxism I understand is to pick from historical precedents the things that we think will work better. And I think if all the people in an enterprise, just to drive the point home, democratically decided, they would never give two or three individuals $100 million while everybody else can't send their kid to college. They can't do that. So just to return, just to address this point about the particular implementation of Marxism that was the early days in the Soviet Union. Why did Stalinism, for example, lead to so much bloodshed, do you think, and human suffering? Is there any elements within the ideas of Marxism that catalyzed the kind of government, the kind of system that led to that bloodshed? I don't think so. I think there were many things that led to the bloodshed and to all that Stalin's regimes did and I spent 10 years of my life with another economist writing a book about that to try to explain from a Marxist position the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. You might want to take a look at it sometime. I'm going to say a few things now, but all of those things are spelled out in great detail with loads of empirical evidence, et cetera, in that work. Let me start with playing a little bit with Hegel. The biggest impact that Marxism had on the Soviet Union was really not so much what the Soviet Union did, but what the rest of the world did. You had a really interesting move, and I'll give you a parallel from today. The move was that the old Russian regime collapsed. World War I, it fell apart. The czar and all of that, it couldn't survive. It had already been in trouble. There was a revolution in 1905. There was the loss of the war to Japan. If you know Russian history, which I assume you do, you'll know that there was a lot leading up to the collapse in 1917. In some ways, it was fortuitous that the political group, very small, that could seize the opportunity of that collapse happened to be Marxists. Earlier on, with Kerensky, the first government that tried, it wasn't people all that impressed by Marxism. It was people more skeptical and would not have been called Marxists probably by history. They tried. They couldn't. Lenin and his associates were able to take over from them later in that same year. The rest of the world, though, was horrified. The rest of the world saw Marxism having taken this immense leap from being a political party, a movement, critical of capitalism, yes, but still not challenging the power. Now, it had the power and in a big country. They freaked out. If you know American history, the leadership of this country went completely berserk. I mean, we had a repression of the left, the likes of which we had not seen before. The 20s were a time of palmer raids in Boston, the Sacco-Vanzetti trials, really grim hostility. And you had the four countries agreeing to invade the Soviet Union to try to crush the revolution. The US, Britain, France, and Japan all attacked 10,000 American troops. So, what you had right away was a notion in the West that this was unthinkable. There was a great professor at Princeton, Meyer, forget his first name, who wrote this wonderful book about all American foreign policy since 1917, has been obsessed with Russia. Even now, this fight with Ukraine is half about Russia as if Russia still was the Soviet Union, as if people haven't figured out. That was a big change back in 1989 and 1990. You know, Yeltsin and Putin are not what you had before, or at least they're not Lenin. They may not be so different from some of the others, but in any case. So, you had one factor was the utter isolation, the utter condemnation, the global. I mean, Rosa Luxemburg, I assume you know, Rosa Luxemburg is hunted down in the streets of Berlin. She's a critic of Lenin's, by the way, but she's a leftist. Hunted down and hacked into bits, killed. So, you're attributing some of the bloodshed to the fact that basically the rest of the world turned away. Turned against. Turned against. So, you turn against is the better way to put it. Yeah, I mean, not in order of importance, but it's a very important part of the psychology of being, you know, it's what you would call paranoid if there weren't quite as much evidence that indeed there was a lot to be afraid of at that time. Nobody had ever done it. Look, you could see the effects of it by Stalin inventing the idea, which had no support at first, that you could have socialism in one country. That was thought to be ridiculous. That socialism was internationalism. Marx was against capitalism everywhere. It was, you know, workers of the world unite, not workers of Russia unite. He had to go through a procedure of kind of coming to terms with the fact that the revolution he had in Russia, which was tried in Berlin, was tried in Munich, was tried in Budapest, was tried in Seattle here, they all failed. They all failed. And he's left. So the French would say, tout seul, right? You know, all alone. That's one. The second thing is economic isolation. Russia's a poor country and it needed what it got before the war, which were heavy investments from the French and the Germans particularly, but others too. Now this was all cut off. And you can see the replay with the sanctions program. It's, we're gonna do it again. We're gonna do it again. We have to do it. The world is different and the sanctions don't work, but they're gonna try them. They're gonna try them. Because it's the history. But that culture, today is completely different. Russia's a different place today, but Russia has China and that changes everything. And they don't get that here yet, but they will. Yeah, there's a very complicated dynamic with China, even with India. Yep. Or Turkey, Brazil. Sorry to say, human nature may change at a slower pace than does geopolitical pressure. That has occurred to me as well. I get that point. So is there, can you steel man the case or consider the case that there's something about the implementation of Marxism, maybe because of the idealistic nature of focusing on the working class and the workers unite, that naturally leads to formation of a dictatorial force? A dictator that says, let us temporarily give power to this person to manage some of the details of how to run the democracy, of giving voice to the workers so that they get to choose. And then that naturally leads to a dictator and there's naturally in human nature, power and absolute power, as the old adage goes, corrupts absolutely. Is it possible that whenever you focus on Marx's ideals, you're going to end up with a dictator and often, when you give too much power to any one human, a small number of people, you're going to get into a huge amount of trouble? You've put things together there that I would. I think if you give. Putsch is a good word. Yeah, it's German. If you, remember I told you my mother was born in Germany. And then your dad is French. Yeah, but he was born in Metz, if you know, European. It's a city on the border of France and Germany. If you come from the Alsatians, Alsace in German. So they're German speaking French city? It's bilingual because it's been back and forth so many times in medieval days already that it literally, you go from one store to another, the proprietor here is French and the proprietor there is German, but they all speak both languages because you don't speak either of them? I speak Russian. Russian, but not German or French. Bit of Ukrainian, no German. It took French for four years in high school, but I've forgotten all of it. I remember the romance and the spirit of the language, but not the details. I'm sure I can remember. If you allocate power unequally, undemocratically, and you do it for a very long period of time, and you do it on many levels of ideology, it is not surprising that it sticks and it stays, and you can make a political revolution or even an economic revolution and you will discover it has a life of its own and it's going to take a long time before people don't. If you have a religious tradition, Christianity, that prides itself on its monotheism and that it doesn't want to have anything to do with the old Greek mythologies when there was Zeus and Diana and all the others, and they were very human-like, but instead we have one who is the absolute beginning. What are you doing? You're teaching people an authority line that comes from the individual. If you have a sequence of kings, if in your feudal manner the Lord sits, called the landlord, and he has unspeakable power over everything that goes on, and you do this for thousands of years, you can make a Russian revolution in 1917, but if you imagine you've gotten away from all that people assume without ever thinking about it, you're going to have trouble. Stalin is figured here as the originator of his situation. He wasn't. He never had that power. He may have thought that, but I don't. He's the product. Look, the Cuban people made Fidel, who really wasn't that kind of guy. He was a baseball-playing lawyer. That's what he was. But they made him into Tadda. So it's not the system, it's the people. You're the product of history. No, no, no. It was the systems, feudalism, the church. It was the structures and institutions that cultivated in people a mentality that has its own rhythm and doesn't follow the calendar of a political revolution. But that's the fundamental question. Is there something about communism that creates a mentality that enables somebody like Stalin or Mao? No, I think it's the social issues and problems the society has that make them then go to what they find familiar, to what seems to make sense, and he's the guy. Look, let me give you an example from American history. The Republican Party has traditionally, in this country, been the party of private enterprise and minimum government. In comes Trump, runs for office in 2016, is elected. Okay? What does he do? He commences the most massive tax increase and the most massive government intervention in the worlds of economics that we've had for decades. Nobody says anything. The Republicans cave, and the Democrats largely too. They cave. He can throw a tariff on anything. He gets up in front of the American people, and he says the Chinese will pay the tariff. That's not what a tariff is. It's not how a tariff works. He would flunk a freshman course in economics, which everybody knows, everybody who teaches these courses. No, it doesn't matter. He's still calling the shots. What is going on here is that a society has come to a point where it can't solve its problems, and it begins, what, to tap into older forms and all of the laissez-faire and all of the individualism, and suddenly the Republican Party is gone. Now they're going to make abortion illegal. The government is telling you what you can do with your uterus. What? What? The government is being given more and more and more and more power. They're hoping, what, do they like the government? No. They're desperate. This is not a pro-government, and it wasn't in Russia either. They were in a desperate fix, and so, and he took advantage. So to which degree would you say Marx's ideas led to the creation of the National Socialism Party of German Workers, hence the Nazi Party, the fascist party in the 30s and the 40s, at the head of whom was Hitler, which I just recently learned he was employee number seven of the party, or whatever, the seventh person to have joined the party and have created one of the most consequential and powerful political parties in the history of the 20th century? What degree did Marx's ideas, Marxism ideas have to play? It is the National Socialist Party of German Workers. Right. Workers. The National Socialist, the National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Worker Party. Worker Party. National Socialist German Worker Party. So. Well, here's the history. Did he care about the workers, or did he just use the workers as a populist message? The only thing that Marxism did for Mr. Hitler was provide him with his stepping stone to war, but had nothing, no other, he didn't know anything about it, didn't care anything about it, nor did the people around him. Here's the story of what happened there, which I know largely through my own family and plus my own history, the work that I did. The most successful socialist party in Europe was the German Party. It started around 1870. Marx was still alive. Some of his own family were leaders, Ferdinand Lassalle and others, his daughters. By the end of the century, it was the second most important party in Germany. Nobody understood it. It was almost as big a shock to the Europeans as was the Russian Revolution in 1917. Here was a political party that was now in every German city, in every German town, powerful and enjoying its rise up. That's my family's involved in this. I really do know the story. It meant that starting around 1967, eight, if you wanted to have any kind of presence in the German working class, you had to use the word socialist. You had to. Otherwise, they wouldn't pay attention. The other parties called themselves Catholic. Germany is divided. The northern two-thirds is Protestant. The southern third is Catholic. Munich and Bavaria is Catholic and every other part of Germany basically is Protestant. You could be in the Catholic Party, that was the South, or you could be in various conservative Prussian and other. If you wanted to have a presence in the working class, which was growing, I mean, in Germany, very powerful capitalist country, expanding like crazy at this time. Germany was the major competitor to Britain for the empire. The United States was coming up too, but it was Germany and US taking over from Britain's empire. The German working class was it. Anybody who wanted to approach the working class in whatever way had to come to terms and be friendly to socialism. Other parties did this too, just like Hitler. They put the word socialist in their party, but they wanted to make it clear that they weren't anything to do with the Soviet Union or anything to do with Marxism, so they put the word national. Nazi is the first four letters of national, national in German, and Azi is how you spell national in the German. National socialism, but definitely not communists. That's right. They killed communists. They fought communists in the street. They had pitched battles. They literally threatened each other's existence and their lives. The first people that he arrested and put in jail were not Jews and gypsies and all the other people he eventually killed. It was communists. They were the number one, and socialists right behind them. Why? Because up until he takes power, January of 1933, that's when Hitler takes power. The last elections, two of them, in 1932, the socialists and communists, they vote together, 50% of the vote in Germany. He appealed to the German manufacturers, the German capitalists, and he said, the communists and socialists are going to win. You're just the capitalists. You have too few people. You need a mass base, and I'm the only one that can do that. And it was just a populist message that he used. That's right. But it was explicitly done as a deal. The ruling group said to Hindenburg, the old Prussian man who was in charge of the German government at the time, you have to invite Hitler to form a new government. Otherwise, he would never have done it. He had called Hitler nasty names before. The Prussian aristocracy looked down on Hitler as a little funny man with a mustache who was Austrian, wasn't even German. For them, that mattered. So he comes in as the enemy, the smasher of socialism and communism, which he immediately does. Only people who don't know or care about the history pick up on the word. It's like there are people here in the United States who like to say, we are not a democracy, we are a republic, which is like saying, I'm not a banana, I'm a fruit. You have to explain to these people, a banana is a kind of fruit. So you have to explain to people, yes, we're a republic, but we have a commitment to democracy as a way to govern the republic. Because to say you're a republic doesn't imply what kind of government you have. You have to go through that with people so they kind of get it. And certain words have power beyond their actual meaning. They're used in communication, whether it's negative, like racist, or positive, like freedom of speech. Or democrat, with a D. Yeah, and then you use that to mean something. Who knows? Or negative, stop Donnie, stop being a socialist. Whatever that means, that's not even used in any kind of philosophical or economic sense. So let's fast forward to today. You mentioned Bernie Sanders. There's another popular figure that represents some ideas of maybe let's call it democratic socialism and maybe let's try to start, sneak up on a definition of what that could possibly mean, but AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's from these parts. Yes, Queens. So maybe if you can comment on Bernie Sanders or AOC. Are they open to some ideas in Marxism? Are they representing those ideas well in both the economic and the political sense? Okay. Where do I begin? The socialist movement predates Marx, was always larger than Marx, and has gone on to develop separately after Marx's death. So can we pause on that actually? Is there a nice way to delineate, draw a line between Marxism and socialism? Or if Marxism is kind of a part of socialism, can you speak to like, maybe try to define once again what Marxism is and what socialism is? Right. Marxism is a systematic analysis heavily focused on economics. And as I said earlier, devoted to mostly a critique of capitalism. And that's its strength. How it does that, how it poses the questions, how it analyzes the way capitalism works, that is really the forte of the Marxist tradition. Socialism is a bigger, broader tent within which Marxism figures. It's there so that people who aren't Marxist are nonetheless aware of Marxism, like it more or less, study it more or less. But it's a broader notion that I like to use this sentence to describe. It's a broad idea that we can do better than capitalism. That really there are all kinds of things about capitalism that are not what we as modern citizens of the world think are adequate. We are in a tradition that goes back to all the people who thought they could do better than slavery and all the people who thought they could do better than feudalism. We've made progress, feudalism was a progress over slavery, capitalism was a progress over both of them, and progress hasn't stopped. And we are the people who, in a variety of ways, want the progress to go further and are not held back by believing that capitalism is somehow the best beyond which we cannot go or even think, we find that to be, in the worst sense of the word, a reactionary way of thinking. And we're that large community. Many of us are not interested in economics all that much. We don't think that's the focal area. We are socialists, for example, because we want to do something to deal with climate change. We think the world is about to kill itself physically, and we want to take steps with other people to stop that, to fix that, etc. So that's, for me, a kind of difference. It's a little difficult to say because there's no other figure like Marx that has an equal impact, an equal place within the broad socialist tradition. And the only tradition that comes close might be the anarchist tradition, but that's very specialized and that's a whole other kind of conversation. And whatever you say, the influence of the great anarchist thinkers, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Sorel and others, still doesn't amount to the impact that Marx and Marxism have had so far. That could change, but up to this point, I think that's a way of understanding the relationship. Yeah, that's interesting that some of the ideas within anarchism, and of course it's one of the more varied disciplines, because there's such, maybe by definition, such variety in their thinkers, but they kind of stand for a dismantling of a power center, and that, if not equates, tends to rhyme with some of the ideas of socialism. Absolutely. So where you have the, you know. There's a whole train of thought in socialist ideas and in Marxist ideas that uses the phrase, quote, the withering away of the state. That's a quotation from Lenin. People should understand, that's a quotation from Lenin. And it was made by Lenin, positive, in other words, Lenin was saying, that's a good thing, that's something we stand for. We want to create the conditions under which there is a withering. Because you remember, the communists, or whatever, they weren't called that at first in Russia, before the revolution. They were just socialists. They were hunted down and persecuted by the government, left and right. They had no love for the government. The government was their literal, everyday enemy. And being critical of government didn't just mean this particular government, but of the whole, being a Marxist, you always ask the questions of the social constitution of whatever it is you're struggling against. So there was this interest. Why is the state so important? Because if you understand feudalism, particularly early feudalism, it didn't have powerful states. One of Lenin's greatest books is called The Economic History of Russia. And he goes back centuries. It's a huge book, three or four inches thick. And I'm one of the few people who've read it. And he's very good about the absence of a strong central government in many parts of feudalism, including inside Russia, but also in other parts of Europe. The development of a powerful central state comes towards the end of feudalism as it is desperate to hold on, which ought to be suggestive that maybe the turn to powerful governments here in the United States or in Europe is maybe also because this system is exhausted and can't go on and has to marshal every last bit of power it can not to be lost in history. It would be interesting to see what the Soviet Union would look like if Lenin never died. Right. A lot of people have asked that question over the years, a lot of people. There's Stalin sliding in in the middle of the night, erasing the withering away of the state part. Yes, exactly. So just to return briefly back to AOC and Bernie Sanders, what are your thoughts about these modern political figures that represent some of these ideas? And they sometimes refer to those ideas as democratic socialism. Right. The crucial thing about Bernie and about AOC, and this is particularly true about Bernie, because AOC is much younger and Bernie is an older man. Bernie being roughly my age, has been around formatively as a student, as an activist, then coming up through the ranks in Burlington, Vermont as a mayor and all the rest. He lived through, for lack of a better term, I would call Cold War America. And the taboo in Cold War America, running from around 1945, six to the present, I mean really never stopped, was a Manichean worldview. The United States is good, it defines democracy, and the Soviet Union is awful, it defines whatever the opposite of democracy should be called. Good here, evil there. It was taken so far that even among the ranks of academic individuals, it was impossible to have a conversation. I mean, I can't tell, just to make it very personal, the number of times I would raise my hand in my classes at Harvard or Stanford or Yale, and I would ask a question that had something to do with Marxism, because I was studying it on my own. There were no courses that teach this to me, except by people who trashed it, you know, other than that, and I didn't want that. So I would ask a question, and I would see in the faces of my teachers, both those I didn't much care for and those who were good teachers that I liked, fear. It was just fear. They didn't want to go there. They didn't want to answer my question. And after a while, I got to know some of them, and I found out why. Because you don't know how the rest of the class is going to understand this. Either they would have to say, I don't know, which would be the honest truth for many of them, but a professor does not want to say in a classroom, I don't know, that's just not cool. Or they'd have to, if they knew, they'd have to say something that indicated they didn't know really much, and they weren't going to do that. Or they would know something, and maybe that would be because they were interested. They did not want the rest of the students to begin to say, oh, you know, Professor Smith, you know, he's interested in, mm-mm, this is not good for your career, you don't know how this is going to play out, who's going to say what to whom. And I could see in their faces what I later learned, because they told me, come to my office hours, we're in the office, we can talk about it. But I'm not, that's how bad it was. Is it not still? Pretty much. In my field, the great so-called debate, I mean, I find it boring, but the great debate for my colleagues is between what's called neoclassical economics and Keynesian economics. Neoclassical, the government should stay out of the economy, let's say fair or liberalism, and the Keynesians saying, no, you crazy neoclassical, if you do that, you'll have great depressions and the system will collapse. You need the government to come in to solve the problems, to fix the weaknesses. And they hate each other, and they throw each other out of their jobs. One of the very few things they can do together that they agree on is keeping people like me out. That they can find common ground to do. So I had to learn it all on my own. Why am I telling you this? Because this taboo means that all of the complicated developments within Marxism and within socialism of the post-World War II period, the vast bulk of all of that is unknown, not just to the average American person, but to the average American academic, to the average American who thinks of himself or herself as an intellectual. I mean, I have had to spend ridiculous amounts of my time explaining Soviet history. They have no idea. Or saying, there's this man Lukács, a Hungarian Marxist, he really had interest in, or to explain that Gramsci was not a great literary critic, he was head of the Communist Party of Italy for most of his adult life. What does that mean? You like Gramsci as a literary critic, but they didn't even know. They don't even know. It's been erased. It's a little bit like stories I've heard about Trotsky and his influence kind of erased in the Soviet Union because he obviously fell out of favor. And so somehow all of his writings, many of which are very interesting and complicated. Anyway, so what you're going to have in this country is a slow awakening of socialism from a long hibernation called the Cold War. I never expected, to be very honest with you, that I would live to see it. I knew it would come because these things always do, but I didn't expect to see it. So I have been surprised, as have a lot of us, that when it starts to happen, it happens fast. So you see Bernie as an early sign of the awakening from the Cold War to accept the idea of socialism. Bernie was always a socialist. We all knew, and everybody who paid attention, he denied it. But 2016, he makes a decision, momentous, to run for president. He's just a senator from Vermont. Vermont is one of the smallest states in the Union. People who live in Vermont love to tell you that there are more cows than people in Vermont, et cetera, et cetera. So here from this little state, this elderly gentleman with a New York City accent runs for, and says, I'm a socialist. And when they attack him, he doesn't run away. I'm a socialist. I'm a socialist. Now, he had been. It wasn't a secret that suddenly got out, but the great question, and I don't mind telling you because I went to the right schools. I know a lot of people, you know, Jani Ellen was my classmate at Yale and stuff like that. So I was speaking with a high official of the Democratic Party, and I said, well, what do you think about Bernie entering the race? Makes no difference. He's going to get 1% of the vote. He was wrong. He had no idea what was coming. But the truth is, I didn't either. It wasn't just that he didn't get it. I thought his 1% was probably right. So we were both wrong. Yeah, change can happen fast. Do you think AOC might be president one day? Yeah, possible. Possible. But two things. Number one, it's fast. Number two, it's going to go in the following direction, I would guess. You begin with the most moderate, calm, non-confrontational socialism you can imagine. So not AOC or Bernie. No, no, they are not confrontational in my judgment. In terms of the ideas of socialism. I mean, they're both very feisty. They're feisty personally. But not- But not ideologically. Got it. You know, she is, Bernie is also. You know, in honest moments, and they both really are pretty honest folks, at least in my experience. In honest moments, Bernie will tell you that what he advocates as democratic socialism is pretty much what FDR was in the 1930s. It was a kind of popular government, tax the rich a lot more than you do now, to provide a lot more support for the working class than you do now. That's not a fundamental change. That's what he means by socialism. When he talks about it and he's asked for examples, he mentions Denmark a lot. Okay, that's consistent. That's the softest kind of socialism. And that's where we're going to start in a country coming out of hibernation. Pretty soon, it's already happening, there'll be people who need and want to go further in the direction of socialism than Bernie and AOC are comfortable with. You can already see the shoots of it now. You know, AOC voted, together with most of the others, to support the money for Ukraine. Okay, that lot of people in the socialist movement do not support that. And that's going to happen. I don't know exactly how that's going to work out, but that should give people an idea. There are disagreements and they're going to fester and they're going to grow. It's interesting. People in the socialist sphere don't support money from the United States in the large amounts that it is being sent to Ukraine. Is it because it's a fundamentally, the military-industrial complex is a capitalist institution kind of thing? No. I wonder what the... I mean, there are some people for whom that's the issue. Then there are people for whom this is, you know, it's guns and butter and why are we over there when we have such needs at home that are being neglected? And then there are people who, well, go back to what we talked about at the beginning, who are more like Lenin and Debs. This is a fight between Western capitalism and Russian oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs in Ukraine and what are we doing here? We have to insist that these forces sit down at the bargaining table and negotiate a settlement. Don't kill large numbers of Ukraine. I mean, everybody's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. It's a little strange here. What are you doing? You're supposed to be in favor of peace, you know, and for the United States, which just finished invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq to be against another country invading. I mean, who in the world is going to take this seriously? This is crazy. You know, I invade, it's good, and you invade, it's terrible. What? You know, what are you doing? Why are you doing that? What's going on here? All of these questions are being acted, by the way, not just by socialists, by lots of other people too, inside the Democratic Party and also inside the Republican Party. You watch that Tucker Carlson or people like that, they are against the stuff in Ukraine. They don't want the money spent there, they don't want the weapons sent there, they don't like the whole policy, and Trump wobble. So Mr. Biden's policy has got all kinds of critics on the left and the right. And every day that this thing lasts, these criticisms get bigger. Anyway, the point is that AOC and Bernie should be, I think, evaluated as the early shoots after a long winter of Cold War isolation from the whole, you know. When I explain to people the contribution made, for example, to modern Marxism, I'll give you an example, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser, I don't know if the name means anything to you, okay. He was the rector of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. That's the equivalent, imagine in this country if there were a university that combined Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and MIT. It would be the university. Well the Ecole Normale in France, in Paris, is the. He was a tenured professor who became the rector. The rector is like the president of the university, an active member of the French Communist Party most of his adult life. That was possible in France during the Cold War. That was unthinkable in this country. You could not, in a million years, right. So Althusser, as a philosopher, tried to bring a version of post-modernism into Marxism with enormous impact all over the world, where he traveled, not just in Europe, all over, right. So if you want to look him up, I'll spell it out for you. A-L-T-H-U-S-S-E-R. The Louis is spelled L-O-U-I-S. Louis Althusser. Look him up, you'll see tons of stuff. By the way, MIT Press is a major publisher, if I remember, of his works in English. By the way, the textbook I wrote in economics, in case you're ever interested, was also published by the MIT Press. And the title? Of the Contending Economic Theories, Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian. That's at MIT. Marxian. Yeah, that's right. And by the way, when we think, I don't know if there's an interesting distinction between Marxian economics and Marxist, I suppose Marxism is the umbrella of everything that's- I only use it because Marxist, I use as a noun. A person is a Marxist. Marxian, I use as an adjective to qualify. But I don't mean some great difference. There's a last point I would like to make about AOC and Bernie that's also general. I'm a historian, too, and I know that the transition out of feudalism in Europe to capitalism was a transition that took centuries, and that occurred in fits and starts. So for example, a feudal manor would start to disintegrate. Serfs would run away. They'd run into a town. How would they live in the town? They had no land anymore because they had run away from the feudal manor. A deal was struck without the people involved in the deal understanding what they were doing. A merchant would say to one of these serfs, I'm in the business of buying and then reselling stuff and living off the difference. But you know, I could make more money if I produce some of this stuff myself rather than buy it from somebody else. So I'm going to make you a deal. I'm going to give you money. Once a week I'll give you money, what we would later call a wage, and you come here and under my supervision you make this crap that I'm going to then sell, and this all works out. In other words, there were efforts, unconscious, not self-aware, to go out of feudalism to a new system. Some of them lasted a few days and then fell apart. Some of them lasted weeks or months or years, but it took a long time before the conditions were ready for a kind of a general switch. And once that was done, it grew on itself and became the global capitalist system we have today. That's the only model we have. So for me, that's what I see when I look at socialism. I see the Paris Commune was an event, an attempt, lasted a few weeks. I see Russia. That was an attempt, lasted 70 years. Then I see, and you'll fill in the blank, I see these are all early experiments. These are all, you learn things to do, learn things never to do again. The good, the bad. What do you build on? How do you learn? And that's what the socialist and Marxist tradition, when it's serious, that's what it does. So in your ideas, sort of capitalism was a significant improvement over the feudalism. And we are coming to an age in over slavery, and we're coming to an age where capitalism will die out and make, it's not that capitalism is somehow fundamentally broken. It's better than the things that came before it, but there is going to be things yet better and they will be grounded in the ideas of Marxism and socialism. Is there, just to linger briefly on the way Marxism is used as a term on Twitter. There's something called, I'm sorry if I'm using the terms incorrectly, but cultural Marxism. One of the criticisms of universities being infiltrated by cultural Marxists. I'm not exactly sure, I don't pay close enough attention. No one is, no, no, no. I do. But it's woke, there's a kind of woke ideology that I'm not exactly sure. Right. That's not you. What is the fundamental text? Who's the Karl Marx of wokeness? All I do know is that there's certain characteristics of woke ideology, which is hard lines are drawn between the good guys and the bad guys. And basically everyone is a bad guy, except the people that are very loudly nonstop saying that they're the good guy. And that applies for racism, for sexism, for gender, gender politics, identity politics, all that kind of stuff. Is there any parallels between Marxian economics and Marxist ideology and whatever is being called Marxism on Twitter? No, not much. Mostly Marx, you have to, one of the consequences of the taboo after World War II is that Marxism, like socialism and communism, become swear words. It's like calling somebody, well I won't use bad language, but using a four letter word to describe somebody. So instead of calling them this or that, you call them a Marxist. In many circles, this is even worse than whatever other adjective you might have used. But it doesn't have a particular meaning that I can assess. The closest you get is your little list. It is somebody who is concerned about race and sex and sexual orientation, gender, all of those things, and wants there to be transgendered bathrooms. And I don't like any of these people, so I slap the word Marxism, or the phrase cultural Marxism. Because it isn't Marxism about getting more money or controlling the industry or all those things that dimly we know Marxists somehow are concerned about. So this is odd, since they don't know much about Marxism. I've always been interested in culture. I mean, Lukács, the man I mentioned to you before, Gramsci, that's what they're famous for, the analysis of what Marxism particularly has to say about culture. And Gramsci writes at great length about the Catholic Church, about theater and painting in Italy and on and on. This is just ignorance talking. They don't know anything about that. They wouldn't know what the names are. It's a label that summarizes, kind of a shorthand, I'm against all of this. I don't want to be told that there's ugly racism in this country, and it always has been, or sexism, or phobia against gay people, whatever it is that's agitating them. Marxism, or socialism. It's like socialism is the post office. But I don't blame them. I mean, it's childish, it's mean-spirited, but it comes out of the fact no one ever sat them down and said, here is this tradition. It's got these kinds of things that people kind of share, and these big differences. Look, an intelligent society, which this country is, could have and should have done that. It was fear and a kind of terror that made them behave in the way they did, and we're now seeing it. Having said that, there is such a thing as cultural Marxism. What that is, is simply those Marxists who devoted themselves to analyzing how it is that a particular culture is on the one hand shaped by capitalism, and on the other hand it becomes a condition for capitalism to survive and grow. In other words, how do we analyze the interaction between the class struggle on the job and attitude towards sexuality, or movements in music, or whatever else culture. And there are Georg Lukács, this Hungarian, great name, isn't it? The greatest of all the names, Antonio Gramsci. And a modern name, just died a couple years ago, a British intellectual named Stuart Hall, H-A-L-L. You want to, if you want, if I were teaching, which I have done, a course in cultural Marxism, those would be three major blocks on the syllabus. I would give you articles and books to read of their stuff, because it has been so seminal in provoking many, many others. So there is something to be said and understood about the kind of culture that capitalism creates and the kind of culture that enables capitalism. Yes. And Marxists are particularly those who like to look at that interaction. In other words, they're interested in how capitalism shapes culture and how culture shapes capitalism. There's another name, I forgot. Stuart Hall is British, Gramsci is Italian, Lukács is Hungarian. The German is Walter Benjamin, B-E-N-J-A-M-I-N. He was a member of the Frankfurt School, which is a huge school of Marxism that developed in Frankfurt, Germany, and that has a lot of people, many of whom were interested in cultural questions. It was a bit of a reaction against the narrow Marxism that was so focused on economics and politics. There were people who said, you're leaving out very important parts of modern society that are shaping the economy as much as they are shaped by it. And it was that impetus to open Marxism to be more inclusive in what it deemed to be important to understand that this cult, and they call themselves cultural Marxists, but they had a completely different meaning from this. This is just bad mouthing, that's all. Let me ask a more personal question. Sure. So for most of the 20th century, no, not most, but a large, many decades in the United States as a consequence of the Cold War and before, being a Marxist is one of the worst things you could be. Have you had dark periods in your own life where you've gone to some dark places in your mind where it was difficult, like self-doubt, difficult to know, like, what the hell am I doing? When you're surrounded by colleagues and people, you said prestigious universities, both personal interest of career, but also as a human being, when everybody kind of looks at you funny because you're studying this thing. Did that ever get you real low? No. I know people who had exactly what you said. I mean, your question's perfectly reasonable. If I were you, I'd be asking me that question too. And what's wrong with you? No, nothing wrong with the question. And here's the honest truth, I don't know how anomalous I am. I really don't. But the truth is, no, I have, if my wife was sitting here, she'd tell you what she tells me, which is I have been tremendously lucky in my life, which is true. But then again, luck never is the only explanation for things. It's part of it. What can I say? I didn't choose the time of my birth. I didn't choose the communities in which I grew up or the schools I attended or anything else. No, but the fact that there was no courses or extensive courses on marketing and economics. But you know, again, I'm Hegel. On the one hand, I was denied good instruction. On the other hand, I had to go out and learn it on my own. And the motivation when you do that is very different. I'm not the student who sits there with my notebook taking notes of what the great professor says and reading the text and getting ready for the exam. I don't have an exam. I'm doing something slightly risque, you know, kind of romantically different and oppositional. I was able to find always one or two professors that I could talk to outside of the classroom situation, other students who felt enough similar to me that we could get together and read these books and talk about them. I had a number of really fortuitous people who were kind to me and gave me of their time and their effort to teach me along the way. And I've had the benefit that because I went to all these fancy schools, I do know a lot of people who are in high places in this culture. And when I have been put in difficult positions, I often wave my pedigree and it works like garlic with the devil. They back away. They back away. Because Americans are very deferential to that kind of academic prestige. But there's a personal psychological thing that seems that you have never been shaken by this. You're just naturally somebody who just has perseverance. Well, I would put it, I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I would put it a little differently. I think capitalism struck me early on in my life as not that great a system. And nothing has happened to change my mind. In other words, the development just kept giving me more and more evidence that this is. And I must say over the last 10 years, what's really changed the last 10 years. I mean, I can't describe to you how big that change is. And that may be more important than anything else we've discussed. Up until 10 years ago, I would do a public event, an interview on television or a radio thing or give a talk at some conference or something. Once every two or three months, I'd be invited and I would do it, like academics often do. I now do two to three to four interviews every day. So- There's a hunger. There, wow, is there hunger. It's fascinating. And I want to be honest with you. As I say at the end of some of my talks, I allow there to be a kind of a pregnant pause from the podium that I lean into the microphone and I say, with as much smile as I can get, I'm having the time of my life. And that's the truth. Yeah. That's the truth. I never expected... Look, I'm used to teaching a classroom, a seminar for graduate students with eight or nine or 10 students or a regular undergraduate class with 30 or an occasional introductory course with a few hundred. I've done all of those things many times. But an audience that I can count in the hundreds of thousands on YouTube and all of that, no, that's new. Is there advice you can give, given your bold and non-standard career and life, advice you can give to high school students, college students about how to have a career like that or maybe how to have a career or a life they can be proud of? Yeah. First of all, my advice is go for it. The conditions for doing that now are infinitely better than they were when I had to do it. And I could do it and I'm happy I did it. Becoming a teacher is one of those decisions I made that I've never regretted. And I've never regretted being a critic of this society. Never. I find it edifying. I find it, I mean the gratitude people express to me for helping them see kind of what's going on is unbelievably encouraging. What can I tell you? So that fills you with joy, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes fills you, that's a life not just important, it's a joy. Because most of the people who say something like that to me are people who, if they had the vocabulary and some of them do, would say, you know, I thought I was seeing through that outfit that I was wearing. I thought it and they did. And all they needed was a little extra, this information or that factoid or this logic, ah yeah. And they have that. And I remember having that too. When I had a teacher who made something clear that had been murky, I always felt gratitude. And now I get that gratitude a good bit and yes, it is enormously gratifying. And I'm not sure I could get it any other way. And I have learned and I'm walking proof that being a critic of society and doing it systematically and sharing it with other people makes for a very good life. Very good life. Speaking of which, however, one other aspect of human nature is that life comes to an end. Do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it? Afraid of it, no. Think about it, yes. I'm not afraid. I've always thought, you know, death is hard for the people that are left when you're dead. It doesn't bother you very much. I worry more about my wife. I'm very attached to my wife. I might mention to you I got married when I was 23 years old and that's my wife to this day. So I'm lucky because that's, if you get married to anybody at age 23, it's either luck or it isn't. What role has love played in your life? Enormous. Because I came from a family, you know, if your family is political refugees, which mine were, who had to interrupt their lives, moved to another continent, learn another language, find another life income and job, the disruption goes real deep for any refugee. So my mother and father were both refugees. They met as refugees. So I had to, in a way, make it up to them. I had to be, I was the first child of their, I have a younger sister, but I was the first child. And, you know, there's a lot of psychological pressure on you if you're in that situation. Nobody means you harm, but you've got to do what they couldn't, what was shut off to them in a way they want you to do. It's the closest they're going to get to what they had hoped. And my parents were both university students. My father was a lawyer. My mother had to leave the university to run for her life. So I had to perform, you know, I went to high school here in the United States. I had to get all A's. I had to be on the football team. I had to play the violin in the orchestra. I had to do all this because everything had to be achieved. So I'm an achievement crazy person that way. But that's functional in this dysfunctional society. But on top of that, that's an achievement within the game of this particular society. But then love seems to be a thing that's greater than that game. Is that something that made you a better person? Oh God, yes. How does it make you a better Marxian and a better- Everything. Because my wife by profession is a psychotherapist. Excellent. I love it. And I needed it. And so I married it. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I think as I look back on it, that was more than a little what was going on. And she has tutored me all my life about a whole range of aspects of life that my family never talked about, never dealt with, never at least explicitly engaged in any of that. Because it was all about survival. The immigrant challenge is survival. Survive, survive. And you're so busy that you tell yourself you can't do that. Of course you can. And there are other reasons why you're not going to look at those problems. But the survival is so urgent that you can fool yourself this way. And my parents did that. One last question. What's the meaning of life, Richard Wolff? Why are we here? I will quote you, Mr. Marx. Let's go. Life is struggle. And for me, I have found that to be true, that the struggle, whether it is to build a relationship with your child, I have two children, whether it's to build one with your spouse, whether it's to understand a complicated argument and simplify it so that you can share the pleasure of understanding this relationship to a student or to an audience. These are, it's a struggle to do all those things. But that network of struggles, that makes life interesting, intriguing, and satisfying. And meaningful. And very meaningful. And that latter thing, I gotta say, you do masterfully. You're one of the great communicators and educators out there today. And it's a huge honor that you will sit with me for so many hours. This is awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Wolff. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

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Ed Calderon: Mexican Drug Cartels | Lex Fridman Podcast #346

When it's quiet, that's when it hits you. That's what I think that's what a lot of people experience when they come back from a conflict zone. You know, everything that was life and death, everything that mattered, all the noise, all the chaos, all the people that are around you that would die for you, kill for you, you would kill for them. All these millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that you were responsible for now are all gone and it's just you. The following is a conversation with Ed Calderon, a security specialist who has worked for many years on counter narcotics and organized crime investigation in the Northern border region of Mexico. I highly recommend you follow the writing and courses on his Patreon and website, edsmanifesto.com. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Ed Calderon. What does your experience in counter narcotics, investigating the Mexican drug cartel, teach you about human nature? Wow, I mean, first off, anybody can be got. Anybody can be corrupted. You know, you work in that field and you, realistically, the training we got and profiling and investigation and stuff like that was basically you learn from the older guys there and some of those guys were already corrupted from the start, so trust no one. I remember seeing that X-Files episode where that was stated you quickly learn that even if you are somebody that to your own mind appears incorruptible, you know, small changes happen around you, wheels get greased, money gets put in front of you and or things get threatened like your life and sometimes a payment for some of this corruption is just to continue on living. You encounter people that seem incorruptible that go through FBI background checks, that go through all of the security measures that all of us were put through, you know, polygraph test and then later on, you know, it turns out they were on the take or they became somebody that was corrupted. I think what I found out is that anybody at any level, they could be a very strong, hard to get person right now but people get corrupted through their families, through need. Mexico is a place where a lot of instability occurs. So financial needs, health. So a crack could form through the wall of integrity and then over time it seeps in somehow. Mexico has a culture of corruption. Like, you know, you have your kid that goes to school, to public school and you want him to be in the morning, not in the afternoon school time period. So you go off and grease the wheels with the director of the school. People hearing this in Mexico will nod their heads because this is something that happens from early on. So there's a systemic and cultural thing to it, you know, as far as getting around rules. And this happens because, you know, the people that are in charge in Mexico, the government is, you know, their tandem amount is trust between criminals and the cartels down there for a lot of the culture. So people don't trust the government and much less criminality, so. When you meet a person sticking on human nature, do you think it's possible to figure out if they can be trusted? So you said anyone could be corrupted. You know, how long would you need to talk to a person? And even in your own personal private life, just a friend, or is trust a thing that's never really guaranteed? I think that trust is never really guaranteed. I know a lot of people are gonna say that's a sad way and hard way of living your life, but you know, life experience at my end, you know, people change. You know, the dynamics of a relationship might change. I look at people's character, specifically their past and past experiences if I can. Somebody that presents himself in front of you as somebody, but you quickly learn that that somebody is just a mask or a persona that they kind of created for themselves. And they might not even be aware of the persona. Like, is there some deep psychological stuff? Sometimes I've experienced a lot of failure in my life. You can see it in my nose, you know, you can see it in my lack of a digit, you know. The amount of, you know, the amount of failures you can see in somebody and how they wear them sometimes is a pretty telling thing as far as them being able to be trusted or that you can trust their story or their experience. And when I say experience, I mean, I've met some criminals, like former criminals, or, you know, some people of that background that I trust with my life, you know, because they're not reformed, but they figured out that that's not a life they can live long enough to kind of continue on. And I've also met people that are in law enforcement that I wouldn't trust with my car keys, you know, because, you know, whatever persona they adopted over the years is a pretty good one, pretty good mask. Sometimes such a good mask, they don't even know they're wearing it. And on top of that, it's not just the psychology. There's also a neurobiology to it. I've been very fortunate and deliberate to surround myself with good people throughout my life, but I've recently gotten to sort of observe, not close to me, but nearby, somebody that could be classified as a sociopath and a narcissist. Like, I don't wanna use those psychological terms, but just, it's like, oh, people, you know, come with different biology too. So it's not just like the trauma you might experience in your early life and all the deep complexity that leads to the psychology that you have as an adult, but it's also the biology you come with, the nature, that you might not just have the machine that can empathize deeply with the experience of others, or maybe a machine that gets off, gets a dopamine rush from the manipulation of other humans or the control of other humans. Yeah, I mean, put an example of my own background. My mom didn't have a father. He left really early on in their childhood. My mom raised her two sisters and basically kept a household. She was a great mom. She was a badass. She was very independent. She showed me how to be independent. She showed me how to kind of watch out for others and kind of build me up in that way. And I had a great childhood as far as her and kind of like how she molded me. Later on, I figured out that when I had my own kid, I figured out that she was basically trying to make me into what she didn't have in a way. And if I can get to see somebody's parents, that's usually a sign of something, at least for me, as far as figuring out where people are. I think there's something to be said about nature and nurture and how some people come up. Some people are just born with that predatory instinct, you know, and you'll never know. I mean, they spend their whole life practicing how to hide it. But if you can figure out somebody's background, childhood, where they're from, you can kind of tell something about them. You know, I'm from Tijuana, you know, I'm a survivor. That's my background as far as where I'm from. Culturally, genetically, psychologically, the full shebang. Yeah, I guess some people are born with certain predispositions, and if they're in the right environment, some of the negative aspects might flourish more than others, you know. For me, I mean, I grew up skateboarding in Tijuana, and I remember breaking into my first backyard pool. It was a house that a cartel guy owned, and we used to skate the pool in the back of it. So I learned how to bop open padlocks with a small vehicle hydraulic lift. And I remember doing that, and later on in life, I got to train with people from other parts of Mexico and work with them. And I remember pulling that trick off, and they were like looking at me like, where'd you learn that? Like some burglars in Tijuana, you know. And they're like, wow, that's interesting. Like, are all people from Tijuana like that? And I said, no, we're not all like that, but I guess in some way we are, because Tijuana produces kids like that. She produces, like the environment itself produces a pretty specific person, I guess. Our normal or our baseline normal is way different than most. The trajectories that you can take in life are defined in a way that aren't available elsewhere in the world. Yeah. And so you develop, I mean, part of that's psychological, part of that is cultural and so on. Part of that is the cultural trauma. But then also the ethical lines based on the corruption, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, there's the same kind of understanding that there's some gray area of corruption. Yeah, it's always there, like on the outskirts or even in the center, how you can grease things to make things easier, and how it's like a personal thing. I'll just pay off the, in Tijuana we have a, mordida is what we call it, you know, when you pay a cop off, una mordida means a bite. So, and- But what's the bite aspect? So you get stopped for a traffic violation of some sort and the cop walks up to you, obviously you don't say the word bite, but it's like a slang term for it. And he asked for your paperwork and, you know, and if you get fined or get a ticket, you say, can I pay the ticket here, is what they say. And you put your money inside the paperwork and hand it over to the cop, mordida. You think it's, you know, I'm just gonna do it and nobody knows, you know, but it's a systemic thing. Everybody, like a lot of people do it and then they don't trust the police because they are fed with this. Yeah, I mean, same thing was in the Soviet Union, it's funny, but then there's something inside you where that kind of, those opportunities come, like with a police officer, where you realize you could just pay a little bit of money and get out of a thing. And then you realize you can pay a little bit of money or do a favor to get your kids in a better school or something like that. But there comes opportunities where you, where, all right, if I do this little thing, I can make, I can get a huge promotion, I can get a huge increase in my power or get a lot of money. And something inside you says, no, that's not right. And I wonder what that is. Because like, yeah, because it feels different than the legal systems within which you operate. There's some kind of basic human integrity, human decency. I wonder if that's like constructed or it's always there, if it's like, again, nature versus nurture. I think, you know, for me, it was looking at, at seeing that in somebody else that I kind of learned about it. There's a man that I consider a mentor figure. His name's Lieutenant Colonel Lee Zelda. He was a lieutenant colonel from the army that basically came over and took over the group that I used to work with. He was incorruptible. You know, he was, that was the essence or the aura that he projected. The first time he went off on patrol when he was placed in charge of us, I actually drove him around Tijuana. He was one of those lead from the front type of people. The amount of assassination attempts he got was basically a proof of how uncorruptible he was because they kept trying to pay him off. And when that didn't work, they tried to kill him several times. I think the last assassination attempt took the use of his legs. And that man is still a dangerous person in my mind. But for me, and, you know, people can gather a little bit about my background and where I'm from and some of the access I currently have to train the federal institutions here in the US as far as my background and if I was corrupted or not, because there's a lot of that out there. The Catholic guilt that's kind of built into some of us is always kind of there, you know, el cucuy vive bajo la cama, the devil was under the bed. You know, so I don't consider myself Catholic, consider myself culturally Catholic, I think, is what I kind of say with that. I had a pretty good structure with my dad and my mom at the house and, you know, they never let me get away with things. And I think my mom was a pretty big moral compass for me. But Lieutenant Colonel, kind of leading from example and seeing his work and how much profound change he caused in the people that work with him as far as, you know, we felt supported and we felt like we had a guiding figure during this. Tijuana was the most dangerous city on the planet when I was working there and he took charge. What does it take to be a man, Lieutenant Colonel, who maintains integrity after assassination attempts? Is it possible for a normal human to do that or again, is it genetic? That's an interesting question. I'll say this, seeing him, I mean, his last assassination attempt, he had, they took the use of his legs, he was with his kid. There was a recklessness to it, you know? I can see that now, like now that I have enough distance from it, I could see that there's a recklessness to being that way. And also you're putting jeopardy people around you if you take that route. So I think there's a sacrifice to it, a very powerful and hard one to make for a lot of people. For me, it was, I wouldn't get picked to get on board with some of the operations groups that I wanted to work with because I was known for not, you know, taking money or not being trusted by certain older segments of the organization that I was with, with stuff because they knew that I wouldn't, you know, I wasn't on the, you know, I wouldn't get money. So there's always a weird sacrifice to it. And you're almost kind of like masochistic in that way when you get approached with it, they're like, why are you being an idiot? You know, why are you driving around that beat up car? Look at the Hummer H2 that just drove in with the other guy that is doing exactly your same job. Society as a whole down there doesn't reward it, or at least doesn't see it in the people that don't take that route in Mexico. You know, for them is all cops are corrupt, you know, all of them. And, you know, seeing it, you know, again, from the outside, I'm not there anymore. There's, you know, there's almost like a, why didn't you Ed, you know? That could have been easier maybe, or you could have been dead long ago, you know, because people that are on the takedown there are usually owned by one side or the other. And when that gets found out, you know, if you have somebody that you're paying off that hints you off of drug operations in the area, your rivals are pretty keen on killing you. Money aside, so like a Hummer aside, how much of a motivator is fear? It's a big one, you know? I'll say, you know, for me, I didn't think I was gonna lift the C30. You know, I was sure of it. Did that concept scare you, or was that just a principle of life that you're operating under? I lost my brother when I was 13 on a tube, and like, you know, he was 19. He was like the VIP of the family, you know? You miss him? Oh, every day. He was, you know, he was a skateboarded BMX, motorcycle hunter, one of the best marksmen that I've ever seen shoot. So better than you at everything. Yeah, he was the best of us, is what we would say. And when he died, there was, it's almost like a concert at his funeral. You know, I met three of his girlfriends that all introduced themselves like the one, you know? Yeah. To this day, every now and then I get pulled aside down when I go back home, and they, hey, you're Eric's brother, you know? Despite all the stuff that I've done, I'm still, you know, every now and then I get recognized. That made my mom and my dad go into a horrible depression and basically, you know, left me to my devices when I was a kid from 13 onwards. I had this self-destructive, you know, aspect of me after that, I think, you know? So again, something that's come up in therapy, you know, after I've been gone through all that, and had this notion that if I can only die good in some way, shape, or form, or for something, that it would matter, and they would kind of, you know, look at me with the same reverence I did at my brother. So dying isn't the problem. The goal of life is to die for something good. Yeah, at least that was my mindset going through that job. I remember I was in medical school before that, you know, second year of medical school. I was doing pretty good, and then 9-11 happened, and, you know, that wasn't an option anymore for me. The economy was horrible. Couldn't afford to stay there, so I sat in the newspaper, and my big brother, who's still alive and head, he's like, no tenemos, you know? Yeah, you're not gonna do that shit. We wouldn't dare. And all of a sudden, I was in a field having my hair shaved off, and a bunch of the gafes, the guys that later turned into the Zeta cartel, military men, were in charge of our training, you know? And I went through that process. In what field were you, and why is your head being shaved? And what the hell was going through your mind? What was the leap that you took? I was sold the idea of this being a new, Americanized police force that they were constructing. In Mexico. In Mexico. So elite, special force, kinda. Prestigious, elite, the people in charge of our training were a lot, basically, ex-Mexican gafe people. Gafes are what the special forces kind of originated. A lot of their members turned into the Zeta cartel, so they were brutal in their training. We were sold this idea of it being scientific, like, educated-based, and like a career path. And all of a sudden, we're in this refurbished prison that wasn't good enough to be a prison, and they turned it into a training ground. And I quickly kinda realized that they were training us to be a paramilitary group, not a community policing organization, which, in my mind, I thought, that's what we were gonna be doing. What was the hardest process of that training for you? Was this just like a fragile, innocent boy becomes a man kinda process? It's, they're turning us into something that they could use. So it's a breaking down. They break down the individual. You know, it's a- Physically and mentally? Yeah, I think it's a, it's a half-done initiation process, I think, in a way. You know, looking at it from now to the past. The shaving of the hair, the stripping off your identity. You know, everybody gets a number. The uniforms, the running around and being treated like human garbage. The first thing they said to us when we were lined up in that field was, hay pan y verga para comer aqui, se acabo el pan. Which means there's bread and dick to eat here. And the bread ran out a week ago, right? So it was, I mean, I can't equate it to anything in the military ever in the United States because people down there could actually get physical with us. I mean, they could actually hit us and punch us and shit like that, which is not allowed here anymore, at least in most of the militaries and is horrible is down there. AK-47s being shot around us to simulate reality, basically causing hearing loss, that type of stuff. So chaos, abuse, really challenging you. Yeah. Again, physically and mentally. And an open door there always. So if you don't wanna be here, you can just walk out. And the more you go into it, time-wise, you're more invested you are. So in a way, you're kind of building your own chains while you're going through that process. Were you tempted to walk out? Yeah, several times, several times. Specifically seeing some of the ways that people that I thought were better or stronger than me were walking out or quitting because of something that happened in there. There was some sexual assault stuff happening in there as well. Were you afraid of that? Always. You're in a place like that and there's females in the environment and some of the instructors are doing what they do. So that was like a cause for alarm. I mean, these people are in charge of our safety and education and look at what's happening here. So you could see some of the smarter ones leaving, not looking at this as a viable choice for life. How did that change you, those few months? I had this motivation, this idealistic motivation in my head, making a difference. They drill a lot of nationalistic, the flag marching, being part of a group and the group being behind you and all of this. What was the nationalistic pride? Was it in the nation of Mexico? Yeah, yeah. What's the vision of this great nation of Mexico? Did you believe, did it get into your blood? It got into my, I mean, it's indoctrination. It's a paramilitary group. So everything there is basically modeled after the military. So that's what they were trying to kind of instill in us. I was a team leader in there. After three months, basically, we went through a bunch of trials, physical trials, mental trials and stuff like that. And some of us were named team leaders. And I bought into it. I'm supposed to be here, look at me. I'm making headways. I'm sticking out a bit. And I was pretty proud of what I was going through there, six months. Then you get the reality check when you sign the dotted line and how that none of it really meant anything as far as what we were about to go out and do. An example of this, we were trained with a 92FS Beretta, which is a nine millimeter pistol, Italian made. We got to shoot 20 rounds out of that gun. And then when we got out, we were handed a Glock 17, which I've never seen one in my life. I was trying to figure out where the safety was. And a few other people there were handling those guns in a horrible manner. So we were very under-trained, under-equipped. And there was a lot of assumptions about what we knew. And all of a sudden we were being cast into this, the start of one of the bloodiest and longest lived modern conflicts in our history. That doesn't get called that, but it's basically been an ongoing war in Mexico that is still to this day, amassing bodies. So the Mexican drug war. The Mexican drug war, which is, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when it started because when I was going through training, there was already stuff going on. I went into training in 2004 and there were already major cartel related events all over Mexico by then, but not at the size or scope as I was about to go into. When President Felipe Calderon kind of took office down there and actually officially kind of kicked it off by putting the military in play as part of it basically militarized the drug war, including us. Who are the major players in this drug war? So the politicians, the military, the police force, the cartels, all Mexican, then the United States, China, just to lay out all the pieces on the board. First off, there are giant local drug markets in Mexico that are fought over. Just local drug markets that are huge in scope. So no exporting to other locations. Just to start, yeah. So a big problem in Mexico is basically those local drug markets. And an example of that, and one I have a lot of experience with is the one in Tijuana, which not only feeds the local populace, but also feeds the populace from San Diego that crosses down into Tijuana and buys their product there. And now, a phenomenon that's occurring now is marijuana trafficking is going from California down into Mexico because they produce better weed, which is fascinating to see now. So there's already a channel and you're kind of like reusing that channel. Yeah, there's a lot of people in vehicles getting checked when they drive down in Tijuana. It's being called San Diego South now because all the economic migrants are living down there. 90% of all houses in Tijuana, new houses are being bought up by Americans. So that'll tell you something about the impact and change that's going on down there. So you have these local drug markets that are being fought over. You also have these drug routes that go through Mexico, up into Mexico, around Mexico, through the ocean, under the wall, drug tunnels, over the wall, and on backpacks on migrants that go up into the United States. Not only do the cartels make money off drug trafficking, but also extortion, money laundering, paid protection schemes. Any mining operation in Mexico will have to pay protection or else they'll get hit. A lot of times the largest money makers for some of these criminal groups are protecting and taxing anybody that goes across the border. So that's also a big issue. And it's not just, again, some Americans think it's like the cartels, they imagine this single or maybe two or three groups. There's several out there. I don't have a current estimate, but last time I checked, it was somewhere in the vicinity of 50 to 70, the different groups, some small, that just dedicate themselves to a single little town somewhere. There are armed groups that are basically in control of that area to some bigger federations like the Sinaloa cartel, which is probably currently the largest and most powerful one in Mexico. And the New Generation cartel, which is growing exponentially right now. So these criminal groups are players in that conflict. Then another player that doesn't get talked about is politics, politicians. There's an ongoing discussion that has been going on, I think, since Trump was elected about cartels being terrorist organizations or not, or if they fit that description. Well, we are living through multiple assassinations on political candidates in Mexico right now. And most of those assassinations are motivated by one side sponsoring one candidate and the other side sponsoring the other. What I mean by sides, I mean cartel groups. So they have elected officials that are on the take. And this is, we have many governors who are under investigation on the run or in prison right now, state governors. So politics is involved in it. That's a big player as well. That doesn't, when you think about the cartel problems, you don't think, well, some, at least some, most people don't think about that aspect of it. So to have integrity as a politician in Mexico means you have no protection and under constant threat of assassination. We've just seen the arrest and prosecution of the head of all Conrad Cartel operations when I was active in the form of Garcia Luna, who was, he was the guy, Felipe Calderon, who kicked off the drug war. That was his guy. Turns out he was on the take at that level. Is there like a spectrum of how on the take you can be? Are there ethical lines that you can cross? Some of it is money. And then is it possible to operate in a gray area that does not result in destructive ethical violations, deep ethical violations? I have no idea. I don't think there is realistically. I mean, anything that kind of supports some of these groups, you know, you're supporting things of a horrible nature. I just posted recently on my Instagram account of a lady that was in Guanajuato. She's one of seven recently assassinated women that are looking for their kids, basically. There's a bunch of groups and organizations out there in Mexico, some in Tijuana, that I've actually walked with, who are taking control of trying to find the bodies of their kids. That's her up there. Maria Carmela Vasquez, a mother who searched for her missing son, was shot to death outside her home on Sunday. Her son, Osmar Vasquez, disappeared on June 14th. The 46-year-old woman is the fifth mother to be killed this year while searching for their missing loved ones. She was a member of the Pajamo Missing Person Collective. There's many groups out in Mexico who basically have given up on trusting the government to find their kids. The number of missing in Mexico is a debated topic because, you know, the government itself doesn't release those numbers, or at least hasn't done a good job about keeping them and or releasing them. Mexico is a country that has industrialized body disposal. You know, in Tijuana, we had the stew maker, the legendary stew maker, which is a guy that basically used caustic acid to get rid of bodies at a massive level. So there's a separate operation for getting rid of bodies and murdering the people. At least in Tijuana, we saw that phenomenon, and it's obvious that it's going on all over Mexico. Who's having those discussions about mass murder and getting rid of people? I've been reading a lot about World War II recently, and there's was aggressive innovation on the Nazi side of how to get rid of a large number of people. That's for the longest time, both the Soviets, and the Soviets were more brutal with this. It's literally, it's a engineering problem of how you kill a large number of people and get rid of their bodies. So the Soviets were more into just laying people down into the grave, face down, and then shooting them in the back of the head, and then doing that on a mass scale. So you just pile people on. And then there was obviously innovation with the Holocaust in terms of gassing people and all that kind of stuff. I'm not sure exactly where these tradecraft skills are coming from specifically. You hear discussions of Israelis training some of the cartel groups back in the late 90s, specifically the Arirang Fugues cartel. There's a lot of stories about that. A security specialist coming down and showing them things like how to make caustic soda, how to put rocks inside of bodies, and then chicken wire them around and throw them into the ocean or river so that their bodies don't float. And when you kind of- You put rocks inside a body to make sure the body doesn't float? So you open up the intestinal tract, put rocks inside. You cut where tattoos are, or you take off hands and faces and throw them somewhere else. And you wrap them in chicken wire. So make it not identifiable. Yeah, and throw them into a body of water. And this is a horrible thing, but it- It's actually a craft. It's a tradecraft. It's a tradecraft, and there's a link to the US as far as that tradecraft. You have to remember that the United States had a thing called School of the Americas and the CIA, and they showed things. And a lot of that stuff is out there in the hands of people that are of that generation. So there's a manual- There's a manual somewhere. Like with chapters, and it's like how to get rid of the body. There's manuals out there. Under time constraints, or what are, how identifiable can the body be afterwards? What are geographical constraints? All that kind of stuff. I think that was common back in the early 2000s, and maybe the late 90s when some of these things were going on. But they've lost even that as far as respect for the government or bodies being found. Right now, what you usually see is just bodies being burnt to a crisp and buried in a field somewhere. That's usually what you'll see. Some of the groups like this woman, this woman belonged to, basically taking it upon themselves to go out to find clandestine graves in the outskirts of the towns that they live in, probing the ground with these metal probes and seeing if whatever they encounter in the bottom of these clandestine graves stinks or not, if they find IDs or clothing, they kind of gather that and they basically present it to the investigative authorities in the towns or the states they live in, which basically are doing their jobs. Over 90% of all murders in Mexico were never solved. So they've even stopped trying to get rid of bodies in that way. How does a cartel take power? How does it gain control of this local area that you mentioned and then grow, take control of a region? And how does it do so in this dynamic relationship between politicians and the military and the police force? It's a thing that happens over time. There has always been a big effort, even when I was in, to buy or own certain members of the police force. Even when we're going through training, some people get pulled out during training because they were found out to have some sort of parent or sibling that was a cartel member or their FBI background check came back negative, when they were already in the training program. So I think part of it is, first off, they take advantage of the fact that Mexico is a young country. It's a country of young people. We have a big group of young people that have little to no opportunities to come up. When I was in, when I went to take that career path, a lot of my friends took the other option. They went to work for some of these criminal groups. So they have this going for them. They basically have a lot of bodies to hire cheaply. And leverage in terms of forcing those bodies to do whatever is needed, because the alternative for those people is nothing. There's no options. So you have a kid somewhere who is working on a field, or you have a kid like me that was out of the job, out of school, and the only options for me was this ad in the newspaper, which seemed like a long shot, or going with some of my friends that had cars now and were hanging out all night at these bars. And some of them had Draco AK-47 pistols in their cars, and it would look cool. So there is a trajectory, there's many trajectories possible in your life where you could have been still operating in a criminal organization in Mexico. Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of options. Do you think you'd be good at it? I don't know. I mean, I'm pretty good at what I do now, which is teaching people how to detect it and kind of fight against it. So I think. I have a sense that the skills transfer pretty well. That's also the dark side of this whole thing. A lot of the people that I used to work with, I know things and I have some training and I had some specialized training, and I currently do, I've done presentations for the Secret Service and the FBI and you name it, I've gone there and shown them what I do. A lot of the people that I used to work with who are out of the job are in the wind, and some of these people are way more trained than I am. It's interesting what the reason why I get looked for and they ask me questions is because I actually have the experience that my university was the most dangerous city on the planet. And when people ask me about some of that stuff, I could speak from experience as far as encountering some of that directly. Some of the people that I used to work with who were way better at it than I am are in the wind. Interesting thing in Mexico, if you're of a police organization and you get fired or you quit, you are ineligible to join another police organization. That discounts you. So for somebody like me, who was a professional operations group member or a police officer in Mexico of that region, there's no options for me outside of that. So they themselves basically have created this inescapable box for some of these people that go into that line of work. And where do they go after? I've heard offers of $12,000 to join some of the organizations out there. Plus, they get benefits, not like the government. I'm still waiting for my liquidation check. This has been out of service for like six, seven years. I'm still waiting for my check. So some of these people, it's obvious that the opportunities are presented to them out there are stronger. And again, the youth is what gets eaten by this war. And that's one of the main things that they start with, just the youth. We had a phenomenon in Tijuana, late 90s, early 2000s called the Narco Juniors. Narco Juniors were basically middle class or upper class families, had kids that were bored and they just joined some of these cartel groups. These cartel groups saw in them opportunities to get into regular industry, to go through the family businesses, to kind of establish themselves, use some of those businesses for storage or figure out how to use some of their transportation businesses for drug muleing. So this is how they start in getting into different areas that they regularly couldn't. And that's how it starts. You owe somebody, they get into paid protection type schemes which are also common all over Mexico. And sooner or later, they start owning businesses and they regulate some of their income. So they become part of the local economy in a big way. I had this experience in Sinaloa where we were driving down this shitty street and all of a sudden it became a cool, nice, curvy highway type thing. And I looked around there, it's like, this is a nice road. And the guy was with me, he said, yeah, the cartels built it. You go to some of these towns and the cartels are the government there. They build the hospitals, they built the churches, they built the schools. COVID happens, they're enforcing the mask mandates. They're out enforcing the mask mandates, the stay at home policies. They're the ones delivering supplies to the townspeople in bags, courtesy of so-and-so cartel. So they become the Robin Hood characters of their environments. If they're smart, these groups basically turn into that, Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, or at least that's the projection that they give. What's the role of violence in this operation? I'm extreme. It used to be that there were rules, as you say, like don't go after kids, don't go after women, but all those things are gone now. They had been gone for decades, I think. The escalation of violence. You kill one of mine, I'll kill four of yours. You kill four of mine, I'll go after your family because you were in hiding. There's stories of high-level cartel people getting their sons and daughters murdered, mutilated, and revenge killings. So I think it's at a point where it's spiraled out of semblance of a rule set as far as who can get exposed to some of this violence. Those highly produced ISIS videos where they show torture and executions, according to some of the sources that I've talked to here in the United States that were looking at that phenomenon. They said that it seems to be that that was influenced by some of the narco blog videos that were coming out of Mexico in the early 2000s. Basically, that some of these groups were the first ones that got wind of the fact that you can export terror or the horror that an execution has through social media. Way back when Facebook was a bit more of a wild land area, you could see these in news feeds, videos of executions, tortures, and stuff like that coming out of Mexico. On Facebook? Way back when. Wow. This was a different time. For people who criticize social media and the moderation, it's a tough job because the brutal world out there. I mean, I remember seeing some of these ISIS videos on Facebook way back when, and they cracked down on all that. But one that's kind of clear, and I'm not gonna say where to find it, but people out there might have seen it because some of these videos get shared through WhatsApp groups and chat groups out there. One of the ones that caught my attention way back when was two guys getting executed by a chainsaw. And people can kind of imagine what that would be like, but- This is produced on purpose? Yes. Like it's videotaped on purpose? It's a cartel group, two rival cartel members, and a way to send a message to those of the rival cartel is to basically execute these people in front of a camera. I mean, you can't get to your rivals, but you can make them see what they're doing, or at least make their people look at what happens if you invade their territory. So it's an escalation of brutality and the violence as well. I mean- And that leads to terror, and then sort of mass communication of terror. Yeah, I mean, you have videos of some of these people engaging in cannibalism in front of a video to see how brutal they are, or people taking out somebody's heart while they're alive and filming it. And it used to be social media as a whole, you would see some of these videos, they would get put down in a few days. But now there's a telegram groups, there's live leaks, there's a bunch of other sites out there that kind of disperse some of these videos. And it's basically a bulletin board for them as far as, hey, you got into my territory, well, this is what's gonna happen to you. Is there a game theoretic way to remove this kind of brutality, to deescalate the brutality? Because it seems like if a cartel takes power that exceeds the power of politicians in a locality, there's a strong incentive to reduce the brutality, to crack down on this kind of chainsaw executions. You know, there was a recent leak of government files, called the Wacomaya leaks. It's our version of WikiLeaks, I guess. And it was mostly documents coming out of the Mexican military. I haven't seen it talked about a lot here in stateside, but it's a pretty big thing down in Mexico. And in some of those documents, it reveals how powerless the government is, I mean, as far as the military goes. So that's another player in Mexico, the military. The military has been out in force in the streets, basically doing a policing role since Felipe Calderon was the administration. He basically militarized the drug war. Felipe Calderon was to the right of the political spectrum, and his main rival, who was way to the left, is now in power. And one of the campaign promises he had was to demilitarize the drug war, to send the military back to its barracks and all that. And he's basically continuing on. They just passed some legislation that basically keeps the military on the streets for a few more years. And I think some of these documents that were leaked are very telling as far as why that is. The military now has a vast amount of power when it comes to security industry. I mean, they're in charge of building airports and train lines in Mexico now. Their documents themselves show how certain regions in Mexico who have a specific military presence work for one side or favor one side of the cartel. They're corrupted too. So there's these military forces that are in part corrupted. Yes. And the cartel, who operates with violence, somehow finding a balance between each other. It just feels like throughout human history, there's dictators or leaders that come into situations like this and really crack down on the violence. Yeah. It seems like that's not happening. It seems like there's a kind of market of violence happening here. There's a systemic amnesia that happens every presidency in Mexico. So the president comes in, he has five to six years to do whatever he needs to do, and he does everything. And as soon as he's gone, everything he did, even what was working, gets chopped off. Police organizations get defunct or the names get changed, uniforms change. So there's a lot of turnover everywhere? Every five years federally, there's a turnover and things change. What about the cartels? Do they persist? Yeah. Do the leadership persist? I mean, the Sinaloa cartel has had a figurehead behind it since the 80s, the same one. I mean, it's a federation of smaller cartels that are all kind of linked up, but pretty much historically, he was considered the head of the Sinaloa cartel. Elmira Zambada has been there since the 80s. So in a way, yeah, he's persisting. He's surviving all of these presidencies. Again, these documents that were leaked are a clear sign of what strengths and weaknesses there are as far as the government's main weapon against some of these criminal groups, which is the military. And if people doubt this, they can look it up now online because all these documents are out there. But, you know, just a clear thing, the Mexican Navy or the Marina doesn't work with the Mexican army. They don't speak to each other. So that should tell you everything you need to know as far as trust. That could be just bureaucratic dysfunction. They don't trust each other. Are they both struggling with the problem of corruption? Some of these documents that are already out there talk about the ports in Mexico, which are probably the main conduit of precursors of methamphetamines and precursors of things like fentanyl into the country. They're operated and guarded by the Marina, right? So these things are happening under their watch. And then you get talk about the army in certain places, basically working counter cartel operations to specifically one side, not another, as far as the rival groups out there. And we have a long history of some of these groups going, military groups going rogue. Los Zetas are a prime example of this. These special forces units that basically turned around and went to work as bodyguards for the Gulf cartel. And then decided to, but what they basically did was an internship with a cartel, you know? They went out there, did bodyguarding for the Gulf cartel, and then realized they can do a better job than they were doing. So they started their own, sparking off one of the, again, one of the bloodiest kind of like internal cartel wars in Mexico's history. Who was El Chapo? El Chapo was a part of the leadership, or at least a faction of the leadership in the cartel. It's a federation of different, of small organizations. Well, I say small organizations, basically families or organizations that conform this larger group, which is the Sinaloa cartel that is based out of Sinaloa. Basically, they are people that have a family and power nucleus is there in Sinaloa. I mean, who was he? I think he was a high-level operator for the Sinaloa cartel. He had his own drug routes, his own networks, his family nucleus down there is still in control of some of those operations. So his arrest really didn't change anything. But he wasn't the mastermind, number one leader that I think the media and the government kind of portrayed him as. Who was the mastermind? If you go down there and you read what most of the brave journalists in Mexico that we have, I'll say another aspect of this war is that a lot of journalists get killed. I think Mexico has, I think has some of the top numbers in the world. And this is no secret to anybody. Elmayo Zambada is the name of the historical figurehead of this cartel, or at least somebody who people theorize or suspect to be the main guy or the main person that is in charge of some of this criminal group. Is he still alive? That's the going rumor that he's still very much alive. And the interesting thing about him is that he learned his craft in Los Angeles. So people thinking that Sinaloa cartel isn't a Mexican thing, it's actually, he apparently learned a lot of his craft from people in the United States. And that's the craft of leadership, the craft of business, the craft of which aspect of the craft? The craft of getting a product from Colombia, putting it through Mexico. And the logistics. The logistics part of it. And he somehow is operating in the shadows. So he's not a known entity. I don't have a clear number of this, but he was interviewed by a magazine called Proceso in Mexico, and some pictures were taken of him. This was over 10 years ago, probably. And that's the last time anybody's ever seen a picture of him. What's it like to be a journalist in that? So can a journalist have a conversation with him and live? None unless he asks to have that conversation. I think he reached out to this journalist to talk about it. There's a media wing to the work that we do, a sister page called Demoler. And it's run by some pretty good people. And the way we met is that I was basically training them how to work in hostile environments. And they were like, oh, we're gonna go report on cartel activity in Mexico. And I was like, you know, that is a year and a half ago, a reporter went to the president's daily briefing, press conference that he has, they call them La Mañaneras, President Manuel Lopez Obrador, and told him to his face, like, I have threats on my life, they're trying to kill me. And it happened. There's been a slew of assassinations and murders of members of the press all over Mexico. It's not an easy job. Either they say too much, or they say things that favor one side or the other, which is another aspect of it that is interesting. I don't consider myself a reporter. I don't report on the news in Mexico. I have friends that do that very well. I commentate on some of it only. But you see a lot of these cartel reporters go down there, talk to a specific side, and basically speak one side of the story. And that is not something that the other side wants. You know, if you go down there and speak to one side, you're saying what they want people to know or hear. So in a way, you're kind of spreading some of their cartel propaganda in a way. And that's how some people, you know, get shot. Do you think it's possible to go in there and have a conversation with a cartel leader? Well, Sean Penn- Or somebody like me, for somebody like Sean Penn? This is what I will say. After that whole Sean Penn thing, I think a lot of people would reconsider a meeting with anybody of any level that has any variety here in the United States. They wouldn't trust anybody to get that close. There are people out there that will talk to reporters, you know, people that are working on a lab or laboratory somewhere in a hillside, somewhere down south, you know, in the Sierra. You know, low-level people that get authorization to speak to reporters and stuff like that, but they don't say anything that isn't being taught or shown in various different ways or outlets out there for them. I mean, some of these guys have Instagram accounts, you know, some of these guys have blog about it, you know- But not the leaders. TikTok, no, not the leaders. I think after what happened to El Chapo Guzman, I think that opportunity, that window was closed for some of the leadership down there. I think, I disagree. I think they're just more sensitive, realizing that there has to be a deep trust. It's not just anybody and not any high profile. I've gotten a chance to speak to some very high profile leaders that don't speak to journalists, and they understand the value of trust. If they have something to say, which I don't think they do, you know, I don't think they, unless at some point in the future, which is something I suspect might be coming, that there is some sort of armed intervention and or external attack on some of these criminal groups that really puts a pressure on them. You don't think there's a human aspect to this, of a human being wanting their story to be known? Versus, is this different than the propaganda machine of I have something to say, I have some message to put out there to play the game of politics and power and money and all that kind of stuff. Isn't there also a human being underneath all that armor that for the sake of perhaps ego, legacy wants to be understood? I think in a way they already do that. There's Corridos, which are basically Mexican folk songs that get sung about some of them. So in a way, some of these singers are reporting on some of their lives. And it's like, it's a great honor to have a Corrido made about you. Somebody made a Corrido about me based on my interviews. I didn't pay for it, so it's a real one. It feels cool. So creating a myth, the legend of the man. I think it's about, I think a way you can find somebody like that is somebody that wants to get their story specifically clear and straight, coming from that culture and getting to work for the government down there and then not working for the government down there and being on the outside, being critical of not only the government that is in place now, but also the government that I actually work with. I can tell you that there's villains all over the place down there. Everybody's a villain, you know, at all levels in some way, shape or form. And some of these people, I think in a way, including El Chapo, I think that some of that meeting was about film rights and stories and being able to get his story out there. I think, I'm not too sure, because I wasn't there, but I suspect that some of that was going on. If you can bring an honest voice down there, they can trust to put that out there. Yeah, I mean, I think you could try. I'm interested in that kind of thing, because ultimately in some of those places, like inside a cartel at the very top is when you can really look at the raw aspects of human nature in a way you can't necessarily elsewhere. There's a youth coming into power down there. And when I say youth, I mean some of the old guard is going out and some of the new guard is coming in. An example of this is El Chapo Guzman's sons, who are now in their own right, kind of gaining legendary status. There was an attempted arrest on his son that led to the famous Culiacanazo incident, which we are now learning more about because some of the Guacamaya leaks are kind of speaking more about what happened that day. Basically a federal operation, they say to arrest El Chapo Guzman's son, turned into a siege to try and get him free. They called in the Calvary, basically the whole of the Sinaloa cartel showed up to try and rescue him. Interesting thing about that is, in reading some of the documents and also just seeing some of the videos and stuff like that came out of that incident, the cartels were the ones evacuating the citizenship from the area. They were the ones going restaurant to restaurant, saying, hey, if you want to exit the city, go through here, take your families, get down, but you have to leave because the army's coming here and they're gonna fight us. So there's like a deep morality to all of that. Underneath the violence, there's a humanity. I mean, it's their home. It is their home and they were fighting for their home and they were fighting for leadership from their home. There is a morality, there is a humanity there. And again, if people want to paint them all with the villainy aspects, everybody's a villain in somebody else's story, if you kind of look at it that way. People should check out your Patreon, should check out your field notes. You're a really good writer, your Instagram too. You have a quote in your field notes about villains. Quote, I once worked for a villain, a savior to some and a biblical demon of old to others, a true product of his environment. He was the best and the worst of us. We're all potential villains in someone else's story, he would say to us as we would head out into the unknowns that the night had waiting for us. It was during one of these nights that I looked around me and saw horns and pitchforks among my people and realized what he meant. We were no knights of the round table. Whatever we were, we were needed. In the end, I guess that justified most of what was about to happen. Do you think El Chapo, do you think people like him are good or evil? I think there's no one without the other. I think there's a cost to their goodness that they do, the roads they build, the hospitals, the career paths that they pay for. There are doctors in Mexico that their careers were paid for by some of these groups. And they do a lot of amazing good for the community. I remember there was a surgeon reconstructing cleft palates. In one of my travels that I did out there, I spent some time actually going out there after I got out of the job to train people and the type of stuff that I show people. And they told me, I told them, you're doing God's work, this stuff is legit, this is God's work, building smiles for people. I said, yeah. And then, can I talk to you? Yeah. He said, my career path was paid for by cartel, a group of cartel members. They paid for my career path because they wanted somebody on hand that could fix their teeth. Do you think some aspect of that is just sort of manipulative control or is some of it also just, again, a care for the population, for fellow human beings that are one of your own? I think both. I think there's, again, it's hard to just make them saints or devils. Some of the good they do in some of their communities and don't ask anything for in return. And even if they don't ask it for anything in return where the military shows up, they are immediately met with rocks and roadblocks and everybody's main weapon down there, since most Mexicans can't buy or own firearms, the main weapon down there is silence and their eyes to report to the people that they consider the good guys in their environment, right? So, that's a hard question. I think there's a bit of both, and both the government and the criminal groups that are operating down there. Silence is their main weapon. So, El Chapo is currently in prison. Is he worth talking to? I'd say yes. Is there things that to you are interesting about him that are still not understood? Is he a window into something that you don't understand about that world still or are curious about in that world? I think he's a window into the family dynamics of that world. When I say family dynamics, Mexico has a big thing about compadres, you know, hermanos, we have people that we call family that were not necessarily our family. He is somebody that witnessed the construction of what is now the Sinaloa cartel. Like he was in it way back when he started off as a farmer and then went into trafficking. He's from a town called Bandira Huata, which is basically, you know, that's the Wakanda of cartels, basically. That's where a lot of that originates. The things that he saw as far as how some of these things got built, I think would be an interesting topic of conversation with somebody like him. So that story is a story of evolving family dynamics. So part of the story of the cartel is individual humans. Marrying other families, getting named, basically godfathers to other people's kids, forming family and blood ties and influence ties to people not only in Mexico, but in the United States. It's seeing how that dynamic and family dynamic is still there, you know? So he's gone, he's in prison, but he's probably on his way to be our next clandestine saint. You go to the chapel of Malverde. Malverde is basically a Mexican Robin Hood, the folk saint down there, who is a saint of traffickers. And at his shrine, you have a small little chapel, a shrine right next to it. So he's on his way to sainthood in Mexico, not recognized by the Catholic church, but that doesn't matter in Mexico anymore. Speaking to somebody like him, who you can consider him somebody that lost, you know, he's arrested, but his family's okay. His legacy is out there. He's probably gonna be the next folk saint when he passes away. Do you think he feels like the new wave of what the cartel has become has betrayed him, has left him behind? Or, because it seems like the way the cartel operated has changed over the decades. Yeah. Well, number one, their power and influence is bigger. There are Sinaloa cartel operations in Colombia, straight to the source of it. And then they have a clear presence in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. They're in the United States. The whole thought process that a lot of Americans have, like, oh, we don't want that trouble over here. We don't want them to get here, like build the wall and all this. So they're deeply integrated into legitimate businesses. I mean, they've been having kids and families up here since for a long time. Some of these people have American passports that work not only directly for them, but have blood ties down there. There's been dragnets and arrests of some of these criminal organizations stateside. New Generation Cartel had one two, three years ago, where I think it was Operation Anaconda, I think it was called. They arrested over 80 of their operatives. And this is a new cartel that is very militaristic and growing in Mexico. And they had over 80 arrests in the United States that have members of them operating here. And so you could be a legitimate operator inside the United States. That's hard to detect. Makes you wonder how many in the US government, the politicians here. The role of the United States in the drug war, financially in terms of power, is very big. Yeah. Surely there's politicians that have a finger into this. Immigration is part of it. Illegal immigration is part of it. And the influence that that has as a bargaining chip and a political chip. We saw this with the first caravan kind of coming up and how it was politicized. The money, Fast and Furious, and guns being basically let walk down into Mexico. People that don't know, basically, the ATF had this operation where they were looking at straw purchasers of firearms. Basically people buying up a specific type of firearms that were on a shopping list that the cartels wanted to buy. Including 50 cals, FN-57 pistols, which are small pistols with a high velocity round that'll go through a bulletproof vest. AR-15s of all kinds that could quickly be modified into full auto down in Mexico. With drilling a few holes and making a few things to them. So these people were buying all these, the ATF was watching them, and allowing them to walk those firearms into Mexico under the guise of trying to track them somehow. Which doesn't make a lot of sense for most people that kind of look at that operation. The only people found, the only reason people found out about it was because of the murder of a few federal agents, of the US federal agents that were killed with those guns. One of my friends was shot with one of those pistols outside of his house. And they shot him and they shot his wife. Both of them were killed. Daughter was in the backseat, lost part of her arm. When that happened, the guns were unique. They were like, oh, we didn't never, like the mata policias is what they call them. They're the cop killers. I hadn't seen those before. So they were unique and interesting. And later on in life, I was watching CNN and seeing the hearings going on. I was like, oh, that's where they came from. Two federal agents changed a lot. It was politicized. There was a whole scandal up here. But in Mexico, how many people died with those firearms, being let down, being let go down there? And also what type of sentiment do you think the local populace has of the United States after all those guns were basically handed over to some of these groups? Gun trafficking is another giant part of the equation and part of the problem down there, as far as the amount of munitions, weapons. And now we were also getting tradecraft material from conflict zones outside of Mexico. So weaponized drones. The first time we saw some of those weaponized drones was in Syria. And like a few weeks later, grenades were being dropped on the roofs of some public officials' building. With cartels, are you using drones? Yeah, that's been going on for a while. There's a place in Michoacan that has some pretty interesting videos. And the interesting part of it is because the federal police down there are actually working hand in hand with a United Carteles Unidos group, which is basically the local cartels to try and fight off the New Generation Cartel moving into Michoacan. So even the federal forces are fighting with the cartels to try and keep this larger cartel out. And there's videos of these civilian drones basically dropping explosives. They found some explosive testing ranges out there that are basically replicating stuff that you would see the IRA use during the troubles out there, from homemade mortars. IEDs have been used in Mexico, not that much, but they're making a presence again. We don't have a lot of ordnance around Iraq, but we do have a big mining industry down there. So mining explosives of all kinds are pretty easy to get. So you start seeing that. And also, I mean, there's some exotic weaponry coming in from the South now and from the ocean. Now that some of it is probably US military equipment sold to various South American governments that are now not as stable as they were, and they're kind of making their way into black markets. So a lot of those 50 gallon vehicle mounted technical type machine guns, and some of the RPGs and man pads or remote control guided missiles that have been found in cartel hands are probably making their way up from down South. So you get these like multi-million dollar systems, like the HIMAR system in the Ukraine, you get like super sophisticated advanced technology or we're not, so like this is like military grade. I'm not sure what the application would be exactly in Mexico. Drug war. Some of the sophisticated stuff I see in our man pads, which is basically remote guided missiles. I've seen some of those found down there. What is the application exactly? A display of power? There are no fly zones over parts of Mexico. For this reason. The New Generation Cartel took down a helicopter. There's been incidents of military helicopters falling from the sky, and they said that it was mechanical issues. But again, I'm not gonna do conspiracy theories out there, but there's a lot of videos on TikTok of Sinaloa cartel forces at parties carrying around rocket launchers on their backs. And so. So there's an increased probability of mechanical failures over those areas when you're flying a helicopter. Yeah, there's no fly zones over some parts of Mexico. And another thing you're seeing now is night vision, night vision equipment that is clearly military grade from the US that was probably abandoned in some war field out there, maybe Afghanistan or somewhere like that. And it's being found in safe houses and in the hands of cartel forces. You wanna talk about a scary opponent. Somebody wearing night vision with a suppressed firearm. Those types of capabilities are now out there. Also, there's this tendency to think in every now and then you'll see these cartel videos with these guys carrying around these 50 cals and they show up, they stand there like, you know, boasting about their rifles. And everybody laughed at them because the 50 cal or anything like that without a optic on it, you know, it's like, you're gonna shoot, you're praying, shoot basically, see if you can hit anything with it. But now there's a few of my sources of seeing, you know, sophisticated laser guided range finders and sighting systems on some of these that are being found out there. How much damage can 50 cal, what's the application? They started getting them specifically with the proliferation of armored vehicles in Mexico. Mexico has a giant industry in armored vehicles as far as. So there's a race in terms of armoring, like protecting especially high value targets and then weapons that can deal with those armored, the protected high value targets. There was an attempted assassination of a state prosecutor somewhere in, I think Central Mexico, I forget exactly where, but she was riding around an up armored Jeep, Cherokee I think it was. And their main means of firepower was 50 cals. And that car was left in pieces. He survived in it. So I think the armored vehicle company that sold her that vehicle has it in the display room. Then before my time, probably two, three years before I was actually active, they tried to kill the head of public security in the state of Baja. And with him, it was a grenade launcher, 40 millimeter grenade launcher. It skipped off the armored vehicle and landed in the car behind it, made the back explode. One of the guys that I used to work with was actually in that car, he survived it. But you started to see, oh, they're using our vehicles now, let's get 50 caliber now to try and defeat that armor. So that, yeah, there's always this race of technology basically down there. Armored vehicles, how do you take on an armored vehicle? Well, there's a few ways, 50 cals, if you can mount them in a right way and shoot at a car like that, or a bunch of kids with balloons and acrylic paint on the front windshield and blind the vehicle so they can't drive it anymore is another way. A tow line across a road painted black so you can't see it and cut the thing in half. Again, I'm not saying any secrets, these are things that people have seen out there. But shoot at the radiator, some of these radiators are not, even the more sophisticated vehicles out there don't have a sufficient armoring around the radiator or the battery housing of some of these vehicles. There was a case of a guy, I think his nickname was El Pelalacas or something like that, I hadn't seen a level cartel guy. He had an armored vehicle, he was riding around and he got ambushed, he shot at his car, he was like, ah, I have armor, you can't shoot me. And somebody went up to his car and just put the barrel right in the locking mechanism. And that got him, you know. So it's an interesting place as far as people getting certain types of guns. Armor is prolific down there. I mean, everybody down there, all the cartel members, you'll see them wearing plate armor. So that's an issue. It's not like you can shoot somebody square in the chest and it'll go down. Are they afraid to kill Americans? So I was traveling in Ukraine on the front. So a lot of the journalists were traveling in armored vehicles. And at first I was like, it seems like this would attract attention. Like it seems like they would want to hit those targets. But then I realized over time, as I learned, there's a fear of killing Americans. There could be a drastic escalation of conflict. It's kicking a beehive. Yeah. Yeah, there is a tendency to shy away or stay away from that. I mean, they don't want the heat or the attention. Outside of that, everyone's game. Everyone's game, but also there's been many cases of Americans being killed down there. I mean, we saw the Mormon massacre that happened down there and all of them were American, Mexican. They had both nationalities and blonde kids, you know, white, being massacred in the middle of a desert. And the cars basically catching fire. This happened. And, you know, the Americans sent the FBI down there to kind of review some of what happened down there. And I think that was when Trump started talking about kind of reviving this whole notion of cartels being labor-related terrorist organization. Probably more for other political pressure point he was using to try and get Mexico to reinforce its southern border, which it hasn't. But there's escalation. You know, oh, this already happened, then nothing happened. So we can probably get away with it, you know? And again, there's a newer generation moving forward now of people coming into power. More brutal, more technically savvy. Well, they have the experience of their parents and the people behind them and what they've done and what they've gone away with. And now, yeah, more savvy about information warfare. Their main recruiting tool is TikTok. You go to TikTok and you'll see a bunch of these kids at a narco party dancing around. And some of these are videos by cartel members filming other cartel members in cartel-controlled territory. And that's a window into that life for who's on TikTok now, kids. And the enticing aspect of that is the money, the fun, the high-roller life. And the possibility of making it to a level, you know? Yeah, a fame of respect, power, money. Here in the US, somebody might, you know, I want a mansion. And I want to have like, that's their mindset. I want to live, you know, like that rapper. Down there, I mean, if you can buy a house for your mom, you know, or pay off some debts that she might have, or a car, that's enough to kill for. So you also, one of the many things you did is, you did security, tried to protect in this war, try to protect people, high-value people. Yeah. How do you do, you and others, how is it possible to protect a high-value target, like a celebrity or an important politician in this situation? So I was tasked to protect the governor of Baja and his family. I was basically replacing a whole contingency of people that were already there, that turned out to be corrupted. That wasn't my field, I was operational. I was working with other people, doing the counter-narcotic stuff. And the director of the institution that I was in basically called me and said, hey, you're gonna go and replace these people. And I, what happened to them? Well. So you were known as a person that could be kind of trusted. I was tasked for that. So I think they considered that. And I specifically worked for a governor named Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan, who was probably one of the best governors we have had in the state. And people wanna see if I'm trustworthy or not, they can ask him directly. And I still speak to some members of his family and we're still friends in that way. Is protecting people technically a difficult problem to solve? For my experience in that time and place, he was basically spearheading the drug war in Baja when he was in power. So he had threats from all over, not only him, but his family. First thing I realized working that job in Mexico is that we had people coming in to do specialized training of that regard, Israelis, teaching us how they would do things in Israel. That didn't make a lot of sense for us in Mexico. We had people that had some Secret Service experience kind of showing us how they would do like celebrity, bodyguarding somebody maybe in California of that nature. Didn't make sense for us. Then we got to experience some cross training with NSW, Naval Special Warfare people who were coming off protection details in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there some useful crossover there? We were struggling with the acceptance that we were basically doing protection details in a war zone. So the approach that had to be taken in Mexico was similar to the approach you would take in Afghanistan during a war. Some of the overt militaristic type approaches to security that we had to adopt, from we didn't move him in a single armored vehicle. We had two of them that looked exactly alike. So when we would move around, we would switch one car to the other every now and then we would arrive to an event, they would open the door and it would be one of us. And they were like, hey, where's the governor? He's in the back one. So we would move to that. So we had to do stuff like that. And again, this is a young me who didn't have any specialized training. I was on YouTube learning some of these things, going online, learning about armored vehicles, learning about architectural armor. I think you just described a large percentage of the Ukrainian military, how they operate, which is on YouTube, trying to figure out how to use some of this tech. And that's actually incredibly effective. Yeah. I do quite a lot of stuff where I'm totally not an expert, totally uneducated and so on. It's kind of surprising how quickly you can get caught up. As we were talking offline, if you take a course, if you talk to an expert, if you learn from an expert, you can like catch up really quickly. For me, it was all of a sudden, I have this director calling me in and I'm wearing Vans, you know, in jeans, you know, T-shirt. And all of a sudden I had 80 some people that I had to move around. And I was in charge of securing planes, which what do I know about that? Airport hangers, armored vehicle maintenance and purchasing and figuring out how to set up a counter assault group for a protection detail. And I was like, where am I gonna learn all this? Were you able to quickly figure some of these things out? On the fly, basically, you know, as I was going, I remember having this experience, being in our security office on my laptop, figuring out how to set up a counter surveillance aside to our protection detail. Basically how to have people looking for people that might be looking for us, you know, type thing. And then going to San Diego, to Coronado and training with some people from former SEAL guys and NCIS people who did that job in war zones and seeing them critique some of the solutions that we came up with on the fly and being like, oh, we never saw that before. Oh yeah, we're doing it down there. So getting that compliment and also getting their feedback, like we probably do this or do that. And it was a learning process on the fly that was pretty, I mean, seat of your pants level. Is it possible for the family and for the high value person to have a sense of normalcy, to have a normal life? I mean, I tried. I was already starting off on the wrong foot basically, because trust had been violated by the people that I was replacing. So I had to gain that back. Then young kids in that family that wanted to have a, you know, go out and stuff like that in the most violent city on the planet. So I had to do my homework and figure out places where they were safe to go to and make friends with certain club owners and figure out ways to put security in some of these places and having to create this bubble of normalcy around some of these people was pretty difficult. And there's no way that that is a normal for anybody. And, you know, God bless them. I know it wasn't easy and I know that it affected their lives and they lost on a big part of their youth. Being under that security supervision and bubble does probably does a lot for somebody specifically growing up like that. You know, you lose opportunities of things that we take for granted, you know, just going out, just not telling anybody and going to the store, you know, because you wanna get some snacks or something like that. That's not available to some of these people. I have to be honest, when I was in Ukraine, that was a really big benefit. You'd escape? No, I couldn't hang out. I couldn't eat when I'm stressed. I would fast and not eat much. So I get lost weight. So it's great, it's great for the diet. It's a good diet to be in, basically be under protective custody. That's a good idea for a new diet. And just life, it allowed me to focus, get a lot of reading done, focus on the important things in life. I mean, I joke, of course, but there's some complexity to this in terms of normalcy of the family, but also just how to operate, like have a mental clarity and a lack of fear. Just basically be good at your job, whatever that job is. As a politician, as a leader, even as a soldier. Somebody that I, again, I think it was Elizabela Ola, she said this to me, or said something like this to a group of us, that there's nothing wrong with being paranoid. It's about educating your paranoia and knowing what to be afraid of. If you're afraid of everything, you're basically overwhelmed. But if you start educating yourself as far as specifically what to prioritize as far as what to worry about in a war zone, working, protecting somebody, you're not looking at everybody's faces, you're just looking at their hands, because that's what's gonna kill you. That's an example of focalizing what you're paranoid and what you're afraid of. So looking at the hands, that's specific to a particular situation, but also figuring out which situations to avoid and which is okay. I mean, that's ultimately one of the biggest things you could do. Route analysis. You have to get to the airport and you send off two cars to analyze two routes, and then on the fly, you just change trajectory to create randomness and unpredictability and have that as a security feature. Having a convoy of four vehicles separate into two convoys and show up in different parts to, again, make it hard for people to guess where you're gonna be. Putting out false information as far as where it's gonna be, who's gonna be, and that type of stuff. It's kind of amazing how many assassination attempts Hitler avoided just by having a pretty strict schedule and being a little bit off in terms of timing, just like showing up 15 minutes late or to a slightly different location. We were going through training specifically around this type of stuff and operational training, basically showing us how to ambush people. When I started making a group for myself as far as counter-ambush, this CAT teams, they call them up here in the US, basically a group to respond to a high violent ambush. First off, the first rule, if you find yourself in an ambush, it wasn't a successful ambush because if you find yourself in it, you're alive. Yes. But if you wanna create an amazing counter-ambush team, you have to make them ambushers. And with ambushing, you figure out where all the opportunities of not only successfully doing what you need to do are in your favor, but also to escape with your life. You know, we're not gonna be received by virgins in heaven. That's not the type of mentality that we had down there. But we started learning about some of these things and also seeing, you know, cartel forces apply some of these ambush tactics to the military or the federal forces. What is an ambush? What are we talking about? So that's a surprise attack with an asymmetry of power kind of thing? There's a contingency somewhere moving towards a place that you control and own, where you have the advantages, where they can't see you, but you can see them, where they can't predict you, but you can predict where they're gonna pass, go through, you know, places where they forcibly have to pass, places where they're predictable, places where you can not only predict, but also have a plan for yourself to escape and exit that place. So how do you train for counter-ambush? You turn into a, like a perfect ambusher. That's how you train for counter-ambush. Oh, so always trying to make sure you have more information about other people, you have the element of surprise, all of those things. And Musashi would say, you know your enemy, you know his sword, you know, basically that, you know, it's simplified. There's a lot of enemies around you in Mexico. There's a lot of uncertainty, right? Because it's, well, I guess that's what route analysis is. Yeah, you prepare for the probable. And if the impossible happens, you're halfway out of it, hopefully, you know? And if you find yourself in an ambush, it wasn't a successful one. But you, as far as our training and kind of the mindset, my experience with it, the adversarial thinking part of it has always been a very powerful one. I think one that a lot of people ignore, kind of like leave to the wayside. Specifically in all conflicts out there, there's a tendency for a military force or a conventional force of any kind to be trained in a way where they dehumanize the enemy. Yeah. And when that happens, you become blind to the enemy's story. It's his capability, his story, his ability. If you treat the other side like an inhuman monster, it's hard to take notes, you know? So there's a part of this is a radical empathy for the quote unquote enemy. At least for me personally, I wasn't one of the guys that would grab them, beat the shit out of them, put them in the back of a van, just tie them up and gag them. So you were able to see them as human? I learned that from my mother. You know, she said, nobody's against you, they're for themselves. Learn this and you will make friends of enemies. She said that when I graduated and I've carried that with me throughout my whole career. But isn't there then a pain of killing another human? Always. But there isn't, again, I apologize to go back to Ukraine, it's my only experience of this kind of harshness. And it is a powerful experience. There's a dehumanization that happens. I suppose this is common in war. There's something like a video game aspect where people are almost having fun. There's a humor. And I think underneath that, the prerequisite is to see the enemy in the same way you see the enemy when you play Call of Duty. You don't really think, you think of them as NPCs, the bad guys. The Russians are called orcs in Ukraine. I mean, there's all kinds of other names. For us it was mugrosos, you know, malandros mugrosos, like dirty people. You know, there's always something. Over time, those are just words, but over time it gathers a kind of, like a meaning to it that's more than just the words, orcs. They're less than human. They're dirty, they're too dumb to understand the evil they're doing, or whatever the- It's useful, it's useful. Yeah. It's part of the program. But like, that's what, and I've talked to soldiers, and some of them do have stories of momentarily remembering that there's a human on the other side. I talked to one woman who's this really badass soldier, she saw this really brave soldier on the other side do something that was almost stupid, how brave it was. And then she was trying to shoot him and she missed. And she said she could sleep the night after, thinking, why did she miss? Why did she miss? And then she thought she missed because he was a hero. And she had this brief realization that there was a hero on the other side. The other side is heroes. But then that quickly disappeared again. But she had this moment, there's a human being that rises to defend his nation, to defend his people, and he could be heroic on the other side. There are things that we're trained to depress, or conceal, or hide, and kill in us when you're trained for something like that. Or when you're in conflict zone like that and you hear the narrative constantly being blared out that the other side is a orc, or whatever word you wanna use. But we live in a day and age when you can see Americans going off to Japan and shaking hands with some of their former enemies. I mean, some of us have seen that, and how things change. I think years from now, a lot of the stuff that we are taking right now is of the utmost importance, won't matter anymore. The question is how many years? That's the question I ask of a lot of people in that part of the world. And a lot of them currently, they're also self-aware about it. They're like, I'm not sure I trust my current feelings. But the current feelings are generational. Like for decades, I will not just hate the leadership, I will hate all Russian people. I can't understand that on my side of my life experience because our war has been an internal war amongst our people, amongst our houses. While that is the propaganda, there's also a deep grain of truth that there is a oneness to the people of that region. But people will get very offended at that idea because right now it's a very strong nationalist borders. But there is a cultural history that connects people. I mean, in some deep sense, we're all connected. We all come from Western Africa, and then all came from fish before then, depending on your view of history of life on earth. But there is a oneness to us, and often you forget that in conflict. I had an experience working. There was a friend of mine who took the other path and went to work for some of these criminal groups. I was operational, and I was, we saw a bunch of people in a gas station parked. Back then, the main modus operandi that they had was that they would impersonate or dress up as federal police, and that's how they would move around the city. We saw these suburbans in a gas station, and some of the guys were carrying around AK-47s, and that's not a standard issue firearm. So we saw that, and I got off on foot and walked by to try and get a better sense of what was going on. I took everything off, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and I got a whistle from one of the guys that was there, and my name was called. It was one of the guys that I grew up with. He was a redhead kid, looked like El Canelo. There's redheads in Mexico, by the way. I think it's probably some of the Irish that betrayed the American side during the last Mexico-American War that stayed down there, had a bunch of kids. It's probably from there. Love is stronger than anything else, I think. So this redhead kid, when I say kid, I mean he was my age. Now, to my eyes, he's always gonna be younger now. So he whistled, told my name. He said, hey, quesadilla, I'm like, what are you doing here? He's like, oh, just going home. I said, look, I'm going to get a taxi. He's like, oh, okay. He walks over, he has a plate carrier with AK round magazines on his chest. AK without a stock on it, just carrying it in his hand. He comes over and he hugs me. I could feel the magazines on my chest. Mind you, I have a gun on me, tucked. And next to him is buzzing in my back pocket as people are trying to figure out what the fuck's going on. He asked me small talk shit. Like, hey, what are you doing? What do you work at? And I'm like, ah, I'm just looking for a job. I used to work at a video store. So he's like, I haven't seen you in a while. How's so-and-so of your family? Good, how's so-and-so of your family? Good. It's like, yeah, this is an interesting job you have. He's like, yeah, it's pretty good. They pay us well. You get a car, there's money, and nobody fucks with you. You get respect. I was like, that's awesome. If you want, I can get you in. If you ever want that. I was like, ah, I'm too much of a coward for that, I told him. Conversation like any other between two friends. He hugs me before I go. I said something to him, I can't remember what. And he says, hey, in my ear, I know what you do for a living. It's not a safe place for you to be in. And I walk off. A few moments later, the army showed up. And you could feel the amount of rounds going off from two blocks away. We came back with our guys, and it was over. So he didn't survive that? I looked through the bodies and the cars that were left. There was bodies all over the place. People left there. It was a mess. I spent like an hour looking for him. The only way I could recognize him was his hair. I stayed with his body all night. There's a bridge in Tijuana that goes over the river in a place called La Mesa. And that's where the forensic offices were. His body was taken there, and I stayed with his body until it was released. I told his family about it. Because I knew them. And that aspect of us versus them, or they're the enemy and shit like that. And my mom told me those words. Nobody's against you, they're just for themselves. So don't make the mistake of dehumanizing anybody. And those roles could have been easily reversed. I could have been shot in the face there. That aspect of conflict brings where there's bad guys, good guys, heroes, villains. There's an innocence to that that goes away. Is your mom still with us? No, almost three weeks before I decided to quit, she passed away. Did that have a role to play? A major one. After I got done on the protection detail with the governor, like everything down there again, the whole cycle, he got his turn. So when he went away, politics change. And down there, basically, if you're a gubernatorial candidate, you have either a friend of a friend or a family member be the head bodyguard guy. And the guy that won the elections had his head bodyguard guy already there. So all of us were sent back to whatever we came from. So I went back to work on the streets. I was back on the operations group. I was working with the sub-director directly with him, basically, back on the ground doing the stuff that I was doing before that job. We were moving away from the successes that had been had by people like Lazo, that when they were in charge of that whole process, the people that I used to work with. Some of the only successes in that counter push against cartels in Mexico, and you can kind of like, it's documented, you can read about it out there. A bunch of people wrote papers on it. Some of the only successes were had by Lazo and the places where he had leadership. He not only pacified Tijuana, he also did the same in Juarez. He was sent to be the police chief in Juarez too. But politics change and heroes become villains. A lot of people started calling him a villain because of his unorthodox approach and human rights violations and all of this type of stuff kind of come through the forefront. And people forgot. People forgot what it took to get Tijuana off the most dangerous cities list on the planet. And people were vilified. People like him and the police force that I was a part of started getting compromised. A lot of the things that were put forth to try and keep us honest, there was a program, they had these centers called the C3s. Basically you would go there every year, you would get your financials checked, you would get a physical, psychological evaluation, you would get a polygraph exam done on you, all the works to try and see if you were somebody doing something wrong. And all of that was canceled because it violated your human rights if you get fired from a job because of a failed polygraph exam, because that was not an actual admissible way of firing somebody. So all of a sudden you had people that were known cartel, compromised people that were fired five, six years ago, showing back up to work, with their back paid and everything. So this started happening. And I quickly realized that it was gonna be hard to stay there. I was driving home from work and I got a call from my brother that my mom had been going through some health issues that had turned into psychiatric issues. So we were basically taking turns trying to take care of her, you know, locking the door so she wouldn't wander off and stuff like that. So not only was I dealing with the job on the street, but I was dealing with that. And also I had a two-year-old and a marriage that was difficult at the time. So I was trying to figure all these things out. Made more difficult by your job? Yeah, it's not a financially secure job, you know, and the pressures that it has and the odd hours and all that made it really hard. And then all of a sudden my brother calls me and tells me that, hey, let's go to the hospital. My mom, something happened to my mom. It wasn't my turn to watch her. So I felt pretty shitty about that. I got to the hospital and the doctors, you know, came out and told us that she was gone. It was a massive heart attack. She had a pacemaker by then, so she was gone. She was in her 60s. So, you know, we kind of expected something, but not, you know, that was like hard for me. She was my center. She was gonna be the one that I would ask for advice as far as work, you know, if she'd leave or not. The ground was removed from under you? There was nobody. There was, yeah, there's nothing underneath me. I get three days off work. That's what they gave me. I'm trying to grieve as I go back to work. Dark shit crosses my mind as I'm going through that process of trying to figure things out. Dark shit like suicide, dark shit? Yeah. So it was very low for you. Very, it hit very hard. Yeah. I wasn't allowed to grieve, basically. And I wasn't allowed to grieve for a few years for different reasons. I went back to work and- You weren't allowed, other people, also you yourself were not allowing yourself to grieve. Is it like- There was other people with me that didn't allow me to grieve, you know. I went to work, got called into the office, and I was basically told that I was gonna be reassigned after what I just went through. The reassignment was going to be something that I saw as unacceptable. It was, the people in charge at that point were obviously corrupted. And what I got from their conversation was that they wanted us to work for a specific side. And I knew that that was the time to go. I asked for a license, basically a license as unpaid absence from work, basically, a leave of absence, I think it's what you call it up here, which by law is allowed. And I was denied for no reason. So I'm invested in this job, you know. I have a good salary, and I have a category in there. So by the level of time you spend in there, you get a category. So I was a pretty high category agent. I had all this training, and again, training that would be useless in the private sector, well, in the public sector in Mexico. I couldn't change from one corporation to another. I couldn't go to work for another police institution. So I took a deep breath, and I resigned. I went to the office. I said, I need to resign. They said, what? I need to resign? Some of the people in the office that knew me from a long time were like, what's wrong with you? They thought I was having a mental breakdown. Handed all over all the paperwork, took a big trash bag, put all my stuff in there, plate armor, tear gas grenades, gas mask, satellite radio, MP5 magazines, an MP5 submachine gun, Glock, Glock magazines, all of it, helmet. And I handed it over in the armory, and I left. I made some phone calls. I was married to an American, and my daughter's American. I never envisioned myself coming to the United States, do that process for myself. So I was invested in that job. I thought I was gonna die or retire from that. And it quickly became an issue, because everybody was wondering why I left the job so abruptly. So there were some threats made when I left by people inside the office, and I probably, it's anonymous shit. So there's significant pressure not to leave. It's hard to leave this kind of job. Yeah. The system makes it difficult to leave. The individuals, to the degree they might be corrupted, really don't want you to leave. There's no support. Yeah, there's no support. And it's probably the opposite of support. Yeah, yeah. Almost like implied or explicit or implicit threats. Yeah. Luckily, I had developed some friendships in the United States with some of the people that I used to work with and cross-train with, and some friendships that I developed with people that I would just talk to and make friends with stateside. One of them is a Navy SEAL reservist whose name is Dan Stanchfield and his wife, Kelly. They opened the doors of their house to me and my kid and my wife at that time. As I seek to basically look for the American dream, I crossed the border with my kid, and nobody knew anything. I didn't tell anybody, just my wife. And I was off. When I came to the States, I already kind of dabbled in the whole training field and showing some of my experience to people. So I had at least a seed of that out there. People knew me for that. But all of a sudden, I was in the middle of an avocado orchard in the middle of California, and everything's quiet. And there's no more radios going off all of the night. There's no more three cell phones on the counter. There's no guns, there's no rifles, there's no 80 people calling to see what's going on. There's nothing, it's just quiet. And it's during the time when Trump got elected, so the immigration process that usually would take, I had most things going for me, and immigration process that would take, at most a year, took two years. So it was not an easy process to not only come to the US, but come to the US with that pressure, kind of underlying pressure as far as being an immigrant at that time here. And then your own personal psychological, the PTSD, of going from a war zone to a avocado orchard. The word PTSD and TBI and all of these things, I didn't know any of them. It was through people that I got to meet in the training field that were Marines, SEALs, Marisoc guys, those types of people that started giving words to some of the things that I felt, which I didn't really know. We would treat post-traumatic stress with alcohol and vacation time. The bottle of mezcal, when you see the bottom of it, your troubles are gone. Cured. Yeah, immediately. I was an alcoholic as well as all of the other stuff. I was drinking myself to sleep every third night. My marriage obviously was failing. It wasn't easy for her. She was brave and she did what she could. And I totally respect and understand her process with it. But when it's quiet, that's when it hits you. I think that's what a lot of people experience when they come back from a conflict zone. Everything that was life and death, everything that mattered, all the noise, all the chaos, all the people that are around you that would die for you, kill for you, you would kill for them. All the millions of dollars worth of equipment and stuff like that you were responsible for now are all gone and it's just you walking into a Circle K and buying three cans of Fosters to drink yourself to sleep. Yeah, you write on your Patreon brilliantly about BTSD, about the cost of things you've done and seen. Quote, when it's over and we're far from that chaos and noise of death being close and life being real, that is when some of us remember in the quiet nights in a field in Tennessee looking at fireflies, walking through a fair, holding hands with a lover, asking you what's wrong. At your kid's birthday party, leave early to avoid the ending of a celebration. That is what the quiet means to some of us. So that's speaking to that silence, the quiet. How do you live with and thrive with this newly learned term of PTSD? If anything, I would recommend people that have any of these issues to go to places where other people have their issues. So you can, it's not a competition, but you get to see the scope of problems in the world and you sometimes feel kind of lucky as far as your own. Like it humbles you. Yeah. It makes you appreciate all the different kinds of struggles that people go through. Yeah, I mean, I went through some horrible shit, but there's some people there that went through other more horrible shit or stuff that I don't think I could have survived. When I went through that process of figuring things out, you know, the first thing that glaringly pointed out or stuck out to me was my inability to process things. Like there was a big pause button there, a giant one. Everything was on pause. My grieving, not only my mom, but my brother. So I had a pause button on me since I was 13, basically. Then I got to bury many of my friends and inform their wives or girlfriends of what happened. And that all again was paused because I wasn't allowed to process. You know, I spent years without going on vacation because I was a workaholic. And I found at the core of my issues, alcohol. The giant pause button in the form of alcohol. Basically, I would drink my problems away. Or specifically, I would, it's like, if you have a mess in your house, you just put a big tarp over it, you know, to cover it up, and alcohol was that for me. And it festered more and more as I not only went through the process of learning about PTSD, learning about PTSD, going through therapy, but refusing to let that go. You know, like going through therapy and seeing what other people's problems were. And I don't wanna, you know, this is the only thing I have. I'm not, you know, I'm not hurting anybody with it, you know, why do I need to get rid of that? By this point, I was traveling across the country and training people and showing some of the experiences that I had to other people, speaking, being on podcasts and having conversations like the one I'm having with you. So speaking to the skills that you've developed. And in a way, basically reliving and reopening a bunch of shit for myself every time I do it. So it was, I was getting triggered, and the way I would manage that was I would drink, you know, at the end of the night, after a weekend class somewhere, when I talk about the fireflies in a field in Tennessee. It was a moment where I was forcing myself to try and be sober. And we did this medical class out in the hills in Tennessee, a beautiful green place, beautiful family there that hosted us. And it's the first time I ever saw fireflies. So I was like, I thought I was having a hallucinogenic experience. When I say, why is the wire, why is the dust glowing? You know, is what I thought. A friend of mine is a veteran, he ran off to the woods and grabbed one, and brought it to me and showed it to me. I was like, holy shit, what is that? That's a firefly. Wow, how do they glow? I don't know. And he's crushing it in his hand and said, it's gone. And that brought me back immediately to, holy shit, you know, it kind of like, I was off somewhere and I was back, and I had to go drink. I went through that process of like going off, getting on and going off, getting off, and my marriage separated, and that was another end of the world aspect to everything. You know, I lost my mother, I lost the job, and then the marriage failed, and it was on me. I basically went somewhere and did a stock of everything that was going on, and made a decision to stop drinking. Yeah, had some bad relationships after, and I just came to a place where I need to stop drinking. You've gotten to a point so low, was this a decision you arrived at by yourself? Was there some inspiration, or was it just the point is so low, lost so much? It was the start of COVID, so this is recent, this is probably two, I'm gonna have two years sober in December. So when you talked to Rogan the first time, you're still struggling with this demand? Yeah, I was in and out of the car, basically is what I would say, you know? I was in and out of, and then trying to get rid of it. That must be a super stressful experience talking to Joe Rogan the first time, did you drink that night? You remember? The second time I was there, I went somewhere, God, shit face. It was stressful, not for any other reason than I felt the responsibility to the people that couldn't speak about it. So that's the pressure. It was the start of COVID, and things started getting shut down and slowed down. My dad got really sick and almost died. We had to set up some Jason Bourne level shit at my brother's place. He was in Mexico, so we had to bribe a guy to get us an oxygen tank, and I had to shimmy rig a respirator, and it was some shit. But my dad was like, he survived it. The doctors were like, say goodbye to him. And my dad was like, yeah, say goodbye to him. You know? Okay, so your dad's a gangster, I got it. Tough guy. He did some gangster shit that day. But on my end, I was being isolated, basically, as COVID is, everybody's slowing down, no more classes, no more excuses to go out there and drink, and no more socializing. So social drinking turned into alone drinking more and more and more. And I was like, I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I was drinking more and more and more. I bought a bottle of gin because I was down in Mexico taking care of my dad, and they closed down beer production in Mexico. So beer went away, and beer was a way I kind of managed it. It's not hard alcohol, it's just beer, so you know. But that went away, so it was just hard alcohol that was available down there. I, one night alone at the house, my dad's house, I drank a bottle of gin, a whole bottle of gin. I almost died. And after that, you know, some people started noticing that I was isolating more and more, and it was kind of eating away at me. I was in a relationship at that point when I started seeing everything just kind of fall apart around me. And I drank half of a glass of wine, and it made me sick, like internally in my mind. And my kid said to me, and I don't know, nobody coached her, nobody said anything to her. She was a pretty intuitive kid. She said, I don't drink anymore, Dad. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the night. And I stopped. I stopped that night. I remember waking up at three in the morning and taking a cooler that I had and just dumping all the beers in it and chucking them in the garbage, and with a knife poking each of them to not be tempted to go pack for them. And then the second day, I went around and started finding the hides that I had, because I had some hides. And then I went somewhere and locked myself in for two weeks. I had the withdrawals, the clearest nightmares that I'd ever had in my life for two, three weeks. I went somewhere, I don't wanna keep them private, but I went somewhere where they offered a place for me. And when I asked them about it, it's a community, I gave them some money for their school as a donation. I gave them like a few thousand dollars. I said, yeah, sure, come. You can go through this process here. Cool as fuck, people. The first thing they did when I got there is they stood me up in front of everybody to thank me for the donation, and then told everybody that I was an alcoholic, and if anybody saw me drinking, I was to be kicked out of there immediately. And I felt horrible. So that was where I started. Is that temptation still there? There was a moment when it was, and some therapy circle. There's a rodeo clown friend of mine, who his body's, his spine is basically fused together, you know, type of guy. We've been friends and enemies and friends again, you know, during the therapy circle sessions. Oh, so like there's an intimacy there. Yeah, he didn't know anything about me. One time when we were telling our story, he stood up and told his story, and then he heard mine, and then he was pissed off at me and didn't wanna talk to me for a while. And then later he told me that it was because he saw what I did with my experience and how much of a difference that he perceived that I was making with it. And he felt jealous that he couldn't do the same with his experience because he was just a broken, ex-rodeo clown. He told me when I was going through the process, like, hey, you're an internet celebrity person, you know, you're known. Aren't you worried about people finding out that you're recovering drunk? And I said, yeah, it's fucking scary as shit if people find out that I am going through this process. It's scary that, you know, the critique, you know, I already get a lot of shit for being a ex-police officer in Mexico and all the negativity that comes from that. And he said, don't be. You know, you can't pickpocket a naked man, so just get naked. And what does that mean? Write about it, post it online. You never know, somebody out there might get inspired to do their own kind of process. So I started posting about it, cowardly in a way, because I wanted to make other people keep me on the path, you know, but in other ways, you know, desperation. You know, I don't wanna drink anymore, I don't wanna go back on that path, which I know leads directly to a bad death. I'm not afraid of death, I just want a good one, I don't want a bad one. I think that was gonna lead me to a bad death. As I'm writing about it and sharing it online, you know, through my fever dreams post and just being humorous about it online and getting a lot of hate on one side, you know, having a few people and companies that I work with kind of step back and seeing this guy has some issues to having other people kind of make fun of or make light of that weakness portrayed. Oh, so getting hate, getting criticism, because here you are, a counter-narcotics police officer, there's no, has a drinking problem. So is that like supposed to be what, like flaws revealed? Weakness or a perception of alpha in the US, I guess, that some people have, you know. You were supposed to be strong and here you are. I mean, I'm not Jocko Willink, I'm not David Goggins, you know, I wake up at 10 in the morning sometimes and I'll have cornflakes with my eight year old, you know. I like days off. I used to wake up at 3.30 in the morning every day to review what happened during the night and then go off for a jog and then the gym and just be ready to be able to murder somebody with my hands if I had to. But that is, I couldn't maintain that during the whole process of getting out of it. Now leaving alcohol, I remember just being honest with it and just seeing the two sides of it. You know, Joe told me never read the comment section, right? Which is a beautiful, it's a beautiful piece of advice. But they get to you sometimes. When you talk about some of these things openly. And some of the comments were positive and I've been seeing people comment, sending me messages and meeting people on the road that are five months in, 10 months. Some people that have been on that wagon for way longer than I have. And there's, it's what's cool when you meet people that are superhuman or perform and take an extreme ownership of things and are just amazing people that are thriving out there. It's inspirational. I see some of these people and I'm like, holy shit, I need to figure out how to get to some semblance of that. But I'm not that. I've been through the ringer. I fucked up a shit ton of times. My nose is an example of that. A few missing teeth. But in a way, I think all of that is part of the process that not a lot of people want to talk about. Independently of the experience I got down there and some of the things that I show and talk about and some of the advocacy I do related to women like her that are trying to look for a better life and trying to find their missing kids. Training people to not get into those situations. But also showcasing the fact that people that go through some of these processes have a journey to go through. I just came into your studio with a duffel bag straight from the airport and I'm gonna leave early tomorrow morning to somewhere else. I've been on the road for almost, I think five years nonstop. I go back to a specific place every week to see my kid for two, three days. And then I'm back out. Some people are like, are you running? Like, are you worried? Are you afraid about something? But I am on this weird path, I guess, trying to look for something that I think I've been missing as far as my afterlife of a sort coming out of that. Are you looking for some kind of deeper understanding of humanity, like from the specific experiences you had to get some deeper understanding of what the hell we're all doing here? I meet people every weekend with different stories. People come to some of my classes. I show them how to weaponize the environment, how to arm themselves, how to not get abducted. I meet people that have gone through those experiences and are basically trying to work through some of their own issues by going through the training like that. I get to meet people that are, people that I've only seen online or seen in videos. I remember meeting Royce Gracie in Harvard City. I heard of that guy. He's a pretty interesting character. I remember seeing him in a bootleg VHS video. I told him about it. We were doing a class out at Emerson Knives. It's a knife company, but Mr. Emerson also has like a jujitsu gym there where Royce trades out of. That's his space. And they're teaching how to defend against somebody trying to stab you. And I'm showing them all the ways you can get around that and fabricate and improvise and smuggle things, basically the adversarial side of that. That's what I'm known for, the psychology and kind of the ways that people do that. I remember him seeing some of the stuff that I was doing and just being like, where are you from? Mexico. Makes sense. Somebody from Brazil tipping the hat to somebody from Mexico, as far as him seeing the violence and some of the mentality behind it. So for people who don't know, Royce Gracie is the legendary martial artist that probably introduced Brazilian jujitsu to the American audience, to the world, to the process of UFC and showing the effectiveness of it in practice that a little skinny guy can defeat a big aggressive guy. An anaconda. A small anaconda walking into that ring with his family behind him. Wearing pajamas. Wearing pajamas and everybody was like, what is this guy wearing pajamas for? And then he would strangle people with those pajamas. I remember seeing that and just having it, I think probably what a generation before had with Bruce Lee, I guess. My generation was Royce walking into that octagon and changing paradigms. Seeing him in that gym, it's also I have a gun owner and shooter, which is interesting. Having seeing somebody like him who is well-versed with his hands also be a man that has gone into the realm of being well-versed with weaponry, which is an aspect of martial arts and the martial way of thinking that, some people kind of, the purist will stick with one side of it, but he's obviously a warrior in a lot of ways. So just as a small tangent, so you're somebody that you don't just look at unarmed combat, you look at the full spectrum of the chaos of combat that's outside of the realm of jujitsu and even just mixed martial arts, unarmed, armed with knives and beyond. Was his mind open to the fuller spectrum of violence? Yeah, I mean, he was in the middle of this class that we were doing where people were basically focusing on both. Ernest Emerson, who's famous for his knives. He has a knife company, he's done knives for NASA. Not only that, but he's also a very avid martial artist. He trained with a lot of Filipino martial arts related to knives and stuff like that. But a different mindset, a defensive mindset, trying to train people how to defend against that. And you have Royce, who's, he's from Brazil. I mean, he has some street in him. That's something that, those guys, those tienen calles, we say in Mexico. Seeing the ways he would, he stepped in there and provided some encouragement to the people there as far as how people sometimes focus on the, this is a system and this is a way, but there's other ways out there that might negate or defeat the ways that you are concentrating on. So kind of get out of that bubble. My whole kind of speciality or what I focus on is mindset and figuring out the software that some of these people gain and gather from. If I need to arm myself, the easiest thing to manufacture in most places is a pointed object. So I can take that crystal big pen that you're writing on that notepad with and using the friction from the carpet, I can turn it into a hypodermic needle that you can then poke into somebody's neck. What's the process of doing that? I can do it right now if you want. No, but can you use your words for the listener and also, because I'm terrified. No, I can, basically you can take the friction, the heat and friction created from this carpet. Yes. You can grab that pen, in and of itself, it will pierce flesh, but it will slow itself down because it has a few angles on the tip. Oh, you wanna wear down the angles. So if you take that tip off and you grab it and I grind it on an angle on the carpet, the heat will actually turn it into a hypodermic needle if you know what you're doing. Hypodermic meaning like it smoothens the entry. It'll make a point in an angle that will guide its way into your flesh. So you can actually go through a torso with that if you know what you're doing. As a small tangent, you also gave me a present. Could be one of the most epic presents I've ever received you. You gave it to Rogan. Can you explain what I'm holding in my hands? There's a guy online, Coffin Tramp, this is a moniker. It is a G10 rod. G10 is a very strong material, basically capable. A lot of people make actually G10 knives, which are basically non-magnetic, non-ferrous objects that can be utilized as a stabbing implement. The core of it isn't an actual pencil core, it's a G10 core and it's encased in oak, hard oak. So that is capable again of stabbing through a torso. Now, the guy that made that is an artisan, he makes that, it looks like a pencil. It's concealed in the nature of the object itself. But that small object is capable of being introduced into a chest cavity. You know, all it takes is about the half of your thumb or the length of your thumb to stab into your chest cavity and now your pericardium is pierced and it's being filled with blood or your whole heart is pierced and you have a few minutes to live if you're at a standing heart rate. So this has the effectiveness of a knife, essentially. It has an effectiveness of a shank or an ice pick. It's not gonna cut, but it's gonna make a hole where it shouldn't be. Here, the pen is literally mightier than the sword. Yeah, well, it's... This is really epic from a perspective of an academic. This is a symbol of both intelligence and violence. I love it. And also the current state of affairs where people need to arm themselves with things that are concealed as far as their purpose in a place where, in a country or in a society that limits their ability to arm themselves. So if you're going to a safe place, you're going to a place where no weapon's allowed, which means a target-rich environment if you're a predator. That's a sign of rebellion. Let this be a signal of everyone should be terrified when you're around me. Because even a pencil can murder you. And I intend to use this. And nobody owns life, but anybody that can hold a frying pan owns death is a quote that I heard once, which is a beautiful one. I'm looking, if anyone betrays me, this is the way to go. Can you, given all your experience and all the different ways in you think about martial arts and violence in Mexico, in the world, speaking of hoists, what is your approach to conflict, like a street fight? What advice would you give people in the full spectrum of what a street altercation might entail? What is the best way to approach it? I think before you get there, you have to prepare. This is one of the first things I tell people is if you don't have a basic TCCC training class behind you, you should reanalyze your life and your ability to prepare. T-Triple-C. Basically how to stop somebody from bleeding out or dying from a stab wound, gunshot wound, or any of those types of wounds or an amputated leg during an IED scenario. Anything you would see in a Boston Marathon type event or a Vegas shooting event where people are getting shot, stabbed, cut. So understand how to help people, how to help yourself post violence. You don't wanna be a detriment to the situation. You wanna be an asset. So build yourself up as an asset in a situation like that because you might be doing that on yourself or on somebody else. And also it helps you understand what situations are going to result in a lot of, in a difficult situation to deal with afterwards. Yeah, it also teaches you what to stab and what to shoot. If you're thinking about it in a full, and on all the dimensions of it. There's all knowledge can be weaponized and I think that's the approach all people should kind of figure out for themselves when they start getting ready or if they wanna take the responsibility of their own safety in their hands. So in a self-defense situation, there's a lot of questions here, but what does one stab? There's the carotid arteries, which are used commonly in jujitsu as something to choke because they feed a computer, you know? So there's a lot of blood flowing through that required for the successful operation of the computer. And not a lot of stuff is guarding the outside world from your carotid arteries. That's a really weird design, by the way. It is not a smart one. It doesn't even make sense because with mammals they bite each other's neck. Like why can't you have more protection? Because this is the only, like us humans don't use our mouth to kill each other, but most mammals, most predators do. And it's like, why the hell don't we protect this? We do have a defensive mechanism and you see it sometimes when people are ambushed and people try to open up each other's necks from behind. If you push somebody's neck forward, the carotids will actually lower themselves and be encased in more flesh and muscle. If you pull a head back, not so much. So that's a way that at least I think the evolutionary, we have a defensive mechanism for that. There's a few videos out there of people's getting their neck sewn back shut after somebody pushed their head forward to try and slice their necks and they survived. So this is a viable target. The heart is another one. Interesting thing about the heart and people get alarmed when I talk about this and show it in classes. Again, a lot of the classes I do are for orientation and for people to recognize that behavior. So a lot of law enforcement comes to some of these classes to, oh, that's horrible. That's how somebody will kill somebody. Yeah, this is how people that know their shit will try and approach somebody and stab you to death. This is how they would do it. There's a tendency to view what we see in John Wick or view what we see in this martial arts community where they're slicing and dicing people different myriads of ways. A lot of that is based on dueling-based cultures, like the Filipino martial arts or some of the Italian martial arts out there where somebody's facing off with somebody else with a similar weapon where both of us are agreeing to basically get into a stabbing competition. That would make sense in that scenario, in that context, but I've never seen a lot of people actually get into these one-on-one knife altercations. What we see now in a modern context when it talks about weaponry is an ambush, counter-ambush-based scenario where somebody pulls out a knife during a grappling situation on the street, or when somebody turns a striking exchange of punches into pulling out a cheap gas station knife or a pen or a rock from the ground or a handgun. Most modern combatants, when it comes to weaponry, should be kind of based on the whole aspect of ambush and counter-ambush. There's a lot of people showing valuable type of material and coursework on this out there. My whole approach and my specific kind of realm is in the aspect of how people go from the process of learning some of these things from experiential stuff. People that grow up in rural places, grow up on pig farms, that actually get the experience of processing a pig, for example, or processing an animal. Those people will have more skills, hunters. Those people will have more skills with a knife if they pick it up as a weapon than most of the martial arts that I've seen kind of approach some of these classes where I go and have a simulated torso in the form of a pig hanging in a room somewhere. Some of that has to do with just the familiarity and the comfort of just like the biology of a living organism. Like that if you cut off certain things, if you cut a certain thing, it's just a meat vehicle. The same thing, the medical training should come first. Or if you don't have that, be a hunter or go to a butchery class. That will teach you more about how to use a knife on somebody else than anything. That'll give you the experience of flesh. Most people, I do this example every now and then where I have people bring in a tactical knife and they'll bring in a butter knife. And I ask them which will go through a torso. We have a pig there, so it simulates a torso pretty closely. Most people will say, nah, that butter knife is not gonna go through. And it does, it does go through. It's a thin enough, strong enough, sturdy enough that'll go through. Kitchen knife, a cheap one that cost 89 cents at a Walmart and an expensive $400 one. And the cheap one will outperform the expensive one. The tip will snap off during some of it. Yeah, I have to say that just as a small tangent, I went to a farm and just seeing the butchering of meat and so on and the processing of meat and pigs and cows. Whew, that's uncomfortable. Yeah. But I think it also, it's honest and raw and that's something that probably everyone should experience regularly. Because it's also humbling to remind you. Like when I had a dog, Homer, he's in Newfoundland, that I was very close with and we lost him. And I just remember that I carried him, he's like 200 something pounds. And I had to carry him and I had to put him to sleep. And one of the biggest realizations is like, oh, this is just a biological thing. To realize that this is just meat, this is not, and you can cut it and then if you bleed, you also know life can disappear from you. And it's all gone. It's like, holy shit, there's this meat vehicle that some people have referred to as Lex. I'm just a few stabbings away from. Leaving. Yeah, from leaving, goodbye. There's a soul that just flies away. It used to be that we had to hang around, people would come back from battle and we would hear things next to the campfire. As far as, oh, he stabbed somebody here and this happens. But now we live in an age where you can, when I do a class, this is a stab to the heart and here's like five videos of it happening live, on live leaks or whatever. And we can deconstruct that. Not only that, but what weapon was used. Oh, it was a gas station folder. It was a pioneer woman knife from Walmart with flowers on the handle, whatever it was. And people start realizing that it doesn't take a lot. That it doesn't take a lot of training because a lot of these people are not high level assassins trained by ninjas in the hills or anything like that. They're people that grew up rurally or learned by seeing that behavior in others. And when they start coming to the realization that it's pretty easy to do that and they start figuring out like, how do you counteract that? Well, number one, learn the behavior yourself so you can recognize it. The whole aspect of being a good counter ambush team is to be the best ambusher in the planet. So again, the whole aspect of Musashi saying, know your enemy, know his sword. You figure that out as far as learning that behavior. When you start seeing how some of these stabbings occur, the first thing you notice is that one of the hands is always kind of out of the picture or there's a lack of symmetry in the people that are about to do something horrible. So when you see lack of symmetry in the environment, somebody with their hands going backwards, there's a crowd of people and two or one individual is looking counter where everybody else is looking or there's a hyper aware individual in a crowd. The hyper aware are always usually out there to fuck somebody over or they're trying to keep those predators from fucking somebody else over. So unless you step back and you put yourself in the process of learning how they learn and you become that potential nightmare person, it's hard to recognize that in a crowd. It feels like one of the significant ways to win or as a street fighter is to avoid it by sort of sending pacifist signals in every way, meaning avoiding the situation whenever there's like a hyper vigilant people, you just kind of avoid signaling that you're one of the players of interest. If we're talking about counter ambush, at which point do you do that versus shift to the aggression? I think violence should be always an option. Everybody should have that option and you need to be good at that option. I think I heard Jordan Peterson talk about the fact that everybody needs to be dangerous but keep that shit under control. Yeah, I think he was referring to a different context but I can't. I know, I'm referring to the ability of- The literal physical conflict as well. There's two cases that I saw of people just utilizing social engineering to a beautiful degree to deescalate shit. Right. One guy somewhere, first off, if you're in a place where people are grabbing your wife's ass or something like that, like what are you doing there? You know, there's a load of things that are wrong with everything that you're doing in your life to be in that environment. But let's say you're in an inescapable situation. There was this guy who was in a compromised position. Somebody wanted to fight him, like legit kick his ass. And he said, okay, let's go. But I just, I need to warn you that I have Hep C before we go outside. And that- It's masterful. I was getting my phone out to film this, you know, maybe. And even I was just lowered my phone to give him a slow clap. That was a beautiful move, you know. And then there was this other man. There was a riot somewhere in Ensenada, the municipality of Ensenada, in Baja. They were protesting. Some of the people that pick those fields down there, part of a tribe called Los Trickys. Very hardy, hardworking people, but nefarious people too. They're pretty good at their thing. There was a riot line. They couldn't break. And this old man walks in the middle of the riot line and yells, grenade, and throws an avocado in the middle of all the cops. And all the cops, pfft, he broke that riot line with an avocado. That could have gone wrong in so many ways. But it didn't. I don't know. To me, there's small lessons there. There is a case to be made about social engineering, about learning about behavior, about learning how to lie, and how to kind of move your way or navigate your way around situations like that. Small things like bartering, knowing how to bribe people in conflict zones is the thing that I show when I talk about or train people to work in hostile environments. De-escalation, specifically kind of figuring out what is of value in the environment, what things you shouldn't be doing in an environment that might be considered disrespectful or out of place. People have a tendency that didn't grow up in places that are violent to make continuous eye contact with somebody that might be an issue. Or smiling, when there's nothing to smile about. I think, you know, there's a picture I saw somewhere of Russians taking a portrait and there's Americans there and the Americans are smiling, but the Russians aren't. Because what is there to smile about, which is true. And of course, it's not as simple as smile or not smile. There's subtlety to it, like you said. Eye contact is a super interesting one because I found in my own life, like not making eye contact is, the people would be joking, but it's a really powerful way to de-escalate. And there's such a fascinating thing though, because you could talk about drunk fights that are just, that are harmless, but I feel like the same dynamic applies to the most violent conflict, including wars. I feel like ego is part of this. So to me, the question of conflict, whether it's a street fight or anything else, is the calculus of, are you willing to take an L in terms of psychology? Somebody grabs your wife's ass, you mentioned. Boy, if you let that happen, you go home, you're gonna have to pay the price of you were the person who didn't defend you. Like in your relationship, you didn't defend your wife's honor. You're gonna psychologically pay that price yourself. And depending on your wife, she might secretly also lose a little bit of respect for you. Now, how do you play that calculus? Because now we see the war in Ukraine. I would say there is elements of similar posturing in the United States, in Europe, in Ukraine, Russia, China, leadership. At a macro level. At a geopolitics, it's still somebody grabs somebody's ass and you're not backing down. So to take those losses and basically just posture, lower your head and live to fight another day type of situation. The thing with modern violence is the access to weaponry. I mean, again, nobody owns life, but anybody can hold a frying pan can own death. I've seen people get double leg take down somebody on the ground. It's a different thing doing in the mats versus concrete. That's a good way to kill somebody. The most prolific impact weapon on the planet is the planet itself. You can see various videos of people online where they fall and they hit their head or somebody hits their head and they go into the stretched out fit basically. And that might not kill you then, but it'll kill you that night or the second night if you don't get checked out. People bleed out internally, get an edema. Again, the whole aspect of me showing how some of these things, not only some of these methodologies and somehow people prepare for violence and how people experience violence, how they make their weapons, how the people fight in the streets and stuff like that. It's to recognize that behavior from the inception. There's a video I show where there's a bunch of street kids in Rio de Janeiro. I think it's during the Olympics where they're snatching chains and cell phones from people. And it's a fun video, see it. And the first thing you learn about it is how they target people. Now, who are they going after? There's a bunch of people there. Why are they going after that specific person? And they start learning about profiling and how they identify victim mentality or the perfect victim, lack of awareness. They keep on a straight line, avoidance, avoidance of eye contact if they're doing something nefarious or wrong and how they pick who they're gonna go after, the small people, the women, even some of the men. And they separate the men that they're perfect victims versus the men that is gonna turn around and punch them in the face. What are they looking for? Well, first off, you notice that the men that are in that environment that look at them and are aware of their presence, the hyper-aware, are the ones that are not good to target. So that's the first lesson there. So it's probably a good idea not only to be hyper-aware, but to recognize that hyper-awareness in others if I wanna separate myself from the victim crowd. Another thing you notice is these are kids going after some grown adults. And some of these grown adult men are with women. And you see them kind of getting outside of the grasp of the kids that are trying to rip their chains off their neck or their cell phones. And they have no consideration for the women around them. You see other men that are with women and you see them grab the women and put them behind them. And immediately they'll say, this is the wrong one. Let me move off to the next one. So that small little lesson in those videos will show you first how these kids are growing up to profile and target who the perfect victims are. That's a school for them. And that is an adversarial school. We should look at that school and apply it to ourselves. So in general, you think conflict, ultimately the people that are doing conflict, they're looking for weakness? I mean, they're looking for opportunity, opportunistic. That's the predators, that's what they do. They look for an opportunity, you know, from jumping down from a tree and getting the slowest gazelle to looking for the opportune moment to pounce on something that's probably big, but the risk is worth it. I feel like there's several motivations, but isn't there also a power hierarchy motivation as well? Like you, there's something about the big guy that tempts you to send a message, especially with gangs. Aren't they constantly sort of trying to signal that they're the alpha? Yeah, I mean, there's a different situation. So you could be facing a sociopathic predator who is looking for something in you that you were the resource that they're looking after. Maybe it's a woman, you know. It could be a group of people that don't like the fact that you have a specific nationality or your passport is stamped in a specific way or that you pray to whatever God. All these factor in, but in the end, they all do the same thing. They look for an advantageous position. If I were to target you, I would put you in between that wall and me. So you have two avenues of exits, and I would step on one of your feet to keep that avenue closed, so you have to go this way. So this is where my knife is gonna be. You see that behavior mirrored everywhere in the world. First off, you look for advantages, right? If it's something that's unavoidable, like you're in between me and my ability to go home, or you're in between me and my ability to feed my family, or you're in between me and my ability to posture to the people that are behind me, the young guys, that I'm in charge, I will do everything in my power to end you, right? The motivations are not in my realm, but the ways they do it are, you know, and basically the advantage part of it. So desperation is dangerous. It's a dangerous school. When I say dangerous school, I mean, the most dangerous people usually come from those desperate environments. You know, you can have people in Coronado holding onto logs in the ocean and go through this millions of dollars worth of training and just be professional killers for the government and just be these incredible human beings. And then there's a kid that will walk up to one of them when he's off, you know, and put an ice pick right into his chest when he's least expecting it. And that doesn't mean that one is superior than the other. It just means that there are more, that there's more than one way to become that, you know. Teenagers terrify me. It feels like the intensity of desperation, like the capacity of a teenager, like 16, 17, to be desperate and also not have the matured understanding of ethics of the world, like they have this intensity of feeling that is unlike anything else. They don't have a volume knob to that. So it's like a garden hose without a nozzle on it so you can regulate it. They haven't developed that. They haven't learned that maybe from somebody else or it used to be warrior cultures, you would be apprentice under somebody or you would learn some of these things from other people. Even some gang, modern gangs have a little bit of that. But if you're not, and you're just this kid that's been playing Call of Duty all of his life or has been witnessing violence in media and there's no sense of, it's probably a bad idea to go off and do this because all of these repercussions. I could see how that could be a danger to society. And some of the volume knobs, some of the countermeasures to people exploding on somebody else with a weapon, you see videos constantly online. I remember seeing this one of these two teenage girls somewhere in the US and one of them just, there's a fight, there's a hair pulling competition and all of a sudden one of them takes out a knife and it just happens like that. And it's just pure unrestrained downward stabbing. Now, you're like, wait, where's that come from? Well, she's from an environment where she saw that as an option. She didn't see the repercussions of it. And she found herself in a place where she thought that was the only viable option, pulling out a weapon. And I think that's the dangerous part of it. So how do you prepare to win those kinds of situations, to escape those kinds of situations? Like you said, it's training, it's exposing your mind. I always tell people, if you don't have a combative base, you don't have a base, boxing, jujitsu. And that gives you what, like an awareness of your body kind of thing? It gives you an awareness of your body, give you a spatial awareness. If you can't see the points with your peripheral vision, if you can't see the points of somebody's feet in your peripheral vision, they are in range to stab you in the heart if they wanted to. And that's something you learn from boxing, that you learn from jujitsu, you learn from a bunch of combat arts where you learn about distance and angling people. That comes from this experience that you have. Again, a lot of these things were just horseplay when we're growing up in some cultures or rough and tumble with your brothers and shit like that. But some of us are growing up in single kid homes now, and we don't get that, we were missing that. And if you don't have it, then you find it in the, you find it in a jujitsu gym, you find it in a boxing gym, you have it, you find it in a Thai boxing gym, you find it in places where they specialize in focusing on certain aspects of this whole combative whole, right? It used to be before UFC, you know, the Kung Fu Man, you know, that Kung Fu guy, that's just street lethal shit. You can't use it in the sporting, you can't show you this because it'll kill you. Now we pretty much know that most of that was, you know, flights of fancy or BS. You know, it pains me too, man. I wanted to learn some of the D-Mock single punching and killing technique, you know, I remember those books, but that's just not the case. I'm still on the lookout for that. Maybe somewhere, I don't know. You know, maybe if you put a pen in your hand, that might turn into that, but that's the only way, right? But a lot of these myths are kind of like faded away. Now you see people that have different combative bases, combining them all and becoming a fighter. Now that's, UFC fight, two people fighting each other is one thing. You know, you being in the middle of the Portland riots and a bunch of state troopers throwing gas at rioters and then rioters themselves fighting each other and you finding yourself in the middle of that, that's a completely different thing. And if you think you're gonna, you know, go on the ground and get in a guard with a guy swinging around a shovel, a piece of a shovel handle, right? As tear gas is going on because you got stopped there and your car was, you know, windows were broken and your family's in the backseat. You know, that is a different situation. So, you know, getting medical, learning about weaponry, you know. I personally don't really like fighting on the ground, but that's why I forced myself to go to train with different people out there, you know, on the ground. Jiu-jitsu, catch wrestling. So top and bottom, neither, you don't like either. I personally, I like being in a car and running everybody over, that would be great, you know, if I could, or driving really far away. Or I had this experience in Utah, some friends of mine, military, some of your best shooters, some of the best shooters in the US, you know, coming from the Marine Corps. We're showing, you were showing me how they, you know, would shoot something from really far away. And I was like, oh, you don't even have to be in the same vicinity. The scope of violence, how far you can be from it, or how close you could be from it. Just wait till we get to see what we can do in the cyber attack world. We can destroy your whole wellbeing, your whole life, your identity. That's another aspect of it too. Financial, and then figure out where you live, in terms of ambush. Yeah. And figure out everything about you, such that hurting you is easy. I have a class where we specifically work on social engineering, and kind of how you can go about something that, you know, at a micro level. I do a class with a guy named Matt Fidler, who does a, basically he's one of the premier experts on how to get into and bypass locks, basically. He'll show you how to open up every single, bypass every single commercial lock available in the United States. Like he'll spread it out and it'll open up everything. And that's like, right? And my part in his class is I talk about how you can pull some of that off in a public space and not get caught, or how you would employ some of these things in a context where it's useful for law enforcement, for the military, stuff like that. And so we have this exercise in a public space where there's a bunch of padlocks in the environment, right? And we paint them pink so people know it's our padlocks and we're not breaking into anybody else's padlocks if we get approached and asked about it. But I asked the students like, so you have to gather all these padlocks from this public space, you know? So how would you do it? So a lot of them are trying to pick them, you know? They're like very suspiciously picking them and stuff like that, that you get caught. And it's a whole situation. But the smart ones will basically develop a social media campaign related to the padlocks, right? A beautiful example of this. And this actually happened here in Texas. I did a class out in Dallas. We put the padlocks all over this public mall. And the students basically came up with a breast cancer awareness campaign online that they made fake, well, they made flyers for it. They did the social media page on a campaign. They did this email chain. So when they went there, people were expecting them. So they normalized the behavior through social media and they were walking around with bowl cutters in the middle of the mall, cutting these things off. That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful solution to a complex problem of that nature. And again, the weaponizing part of it. Anything could be, all knowledge could be weaponized. And it's, if you focus on getting in a street fight with somebody with your fist or a knife, you know, you're missing out on the whole complexity of violence and the way that it's now being utilized. So in terms of breaking out locks and the restraints and captivity, let's talk about a dark topic that you're one of the world experts in, kidnapping. So you teach courses on counter kidnapping and terrorism. I read an estimate that criminal gangs get $500 million a year in ransom payments from kidnapping. So just at a high level, what is kidnapping? Who does it and why? What are some insights that can help us understand what is this problem in the world? It happens in different ways in different parts of the world. I mean, I just sent off a group of people that trained some of the Ukrainians and some of the stuff that they were showing them was some of the counter custody stuff that I showed them. A friend of mine named Vince went out there was showing them some of the aspects of how to utilize things like Kevlar cordage and how to infuse it in their uniform. So if they get a zip tie to cut them open, it's a war setting. So it's talks about being captive in a war zone, but the information or the methodology actually comes from Mexico. That methodology as far as how I learned it. In terms of how to escape from restraints. Yeah, so in Mexico, you have abductions happening where cartels who hold control over a specific place or zone are having a hard time with financial situations as far as maybe they're not making enough money to pay everybody off. So they let them freelance basically. And a lot of ways some of these criminal groups freelance or some of these groups actually professionalize and to abduct businessmen, abduct the sons of businessmen or people that have money to ask for ransoms for them, basically. And they've taken captivity and abduction to like an art form in places like Mexico. And it has a history all over the world, but specifically my experience with it was going to cartel safe houses that turned into holding places. You would see homemade prison cells and stuff like that. And people being held in captivity for months, if not years as they were milking their family for everything they owned. So it turns out into a business, they're not actually even interested in hurting the people. Physically, they're interested in hurting them financially. Financially and also this, if they get hurt, they're hurt for a purpose, which is to make their family pay up faster or more. Some of the abduction groups that I've seen out there, professional ones in Mexico, basically make it a living to target people that have abduction insurance or that work for a company that have good abduction insurance. So it's almost like an ATM for them. It's like, ah, here again. So there's some of that going on. Some not so much. Some abductions are express. I mean, I'll grab you with a gunpoint, take you to an ATM, you empty it out, and then you're on your way. That's an express kidnapping. That might not be worth you doing anything insane. You just go with the motions. But some people do get picked up. I have trained people with prior experiences of abductions in Mexico and here in the United States. People that have spent some time in captivity with loved ones here, like ex-boyfriends or boyfriends that tie them up and beat the shit out of them. And the restraints they utilize are zip ties and handcuffs sometimes, or duct tape, or their own clothing, things of this nature. Basically what somebody's looking for when they tie anybody up is to convince you that they are in control, that they are God, and that any hope of you releasing those restraints or getting out of that situation is hopeless. From a cartel group picking you up in the middle of a dirt road somewhere in Cancun to ex-boyfriend showing up at your house and tying you up till you agree to get back with him. That's the same thing. And some of the restraints that are being utilized come from different places. I mean, I remember an instructor I had way back when told me that the proliferation of zip ties as a restraint in criminal abductions came up after the movie Heat came out because everybody wanted to be Robert De Niro zip tying people in the bank robbery at the end of the movie. Criminals saw that and it became a thing. Can you actually speak to the, is it possible to systematically learn how to escape restraints like handcuffs, rope, zip ties? The best at it are not the military, the Nazi or program people, they are criminals. I learned how to get out of handcuffs from a 15 year old who was in charge of meth sales in La Avenida Revolución in Tijuana. Is there a system to it? I mean, it's not specifically a system. It's usually what happens is they'll buy a set of handcuffs and they will mess around with them in a playing feature. So one thing I do in a class is first off, I'm honest about the fact that some, all restraints are temporary, even marriage. Wait, can we just pause in the deep philosophical, you're like Miyamoto Musashi with that statements. All restraints are temporary, even marriage. I'll just, I just like adding that one in there for last because this is a dark subject. Every cage can be escaped. All restraints are temporary. You either free yourselves from the restraints, somebody else takes them off, or you die and your body rots away around them. Those are the options. And I like that first option myself. The second option is pretty cool if you can convince somebody to do that for you. But that first option is an interesting one. You have to deconstruct restraints. Not all restraints are made the same. You can train to get out of handcuffs here in the US and focus on a pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs, which are kind of the most common brand of handcuffs here. But if you find yourself in detention somewhere in Russia, the handcuffs out there are completely different. You know, the key way is different, the mechanism is different, but some of the same ways of bypassing those mechanisms are. I'm gonna write this down. So in Russia, what kind are they using in Russia? I think they're traveling there, I need this information. I'll send you a specific model and details on how to get out of those. But basically- Just asking for a friend, I'm sorry. So what I do is I take a pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs, I put them in the middle of three people in a class, I spread them out, and I have them place them on each other in a, just playing manner. I have handcuffs keys there, and I have a pair of bolt cutters there in case somebody gets stuck, does something stupid. So they play with each other as far as putting them on randomly. I show them how to put them on appropriately. And then I show them a handcuff key, and a handcuff key will open up handcuffs, interestingly enough. But the thing about a handcuff key is it's not made to be used by the person that is in those handcuffs. So that's the first lesson there. If you have a handcuff key, handcuff keys are the most used tool to open up handcuffs in custody situations. You know, both criminals escaping from the police to people escaping from criminals. Just a standard hidden handcuff key. So I show them how to modify the handcuff key so it's more optimal to use on yourself with just basic garbage that you can find. Piece of wire, a zip tie piece, basically how to put a leverage arm on the handcuff key so you can actually spin it in the key way, behind your back or in front of you. I'm trying to think. I don't think I've ever been in handcuffs. Appropriate way to handcuff somebody is palms out. How much restriction is there in terms of- There's a lot. If it's a hinge handcuff, there's a lot of restriction. With no chain in the middle. Can you reach back? You could try and reach back, or you can basically put yourself in a not compromised position and feed the most of your palm meat into the handcuff way so when they shut it on you, you have more space to work with. So you can spin your hand. We call it a passive resistance. Again, you go through a process with them where you deconstruct how people are handcuffed, handcuff keys and how to modify a handcuff key to be able to use on yourself. And all of these things they're constructing as we go. So they basically, hey, what's a grinding surface? Well, there's concrete outside. So they grind an angle on the key so you can get a key not to go straight into the key way, but you can get it into the key way at an angle, for example. It's something that is out there as far as a method. You can't spin a key behind your back because it's small. It's designed to be used by somebody else opening those handcuffs on you. So you put an arm on it so you can leverage our arm so you can spin it behind your back. You learn how to put yourself in not a compromised position. If somebody asks you for your hands so they could be cuffed, you don't do this, you do that, or you put yourself in a cable grip behind your back, which is a pretty strong grip and it's hard to spread those hands apart. It's also something that people go into automatically when they're in fear. So all of these things are advantageous for you. And you learn how not only people get restrained, but you see videos of them, because I show a bunch of abduction that's actually happening live. Again, the best thing is avoidance, but specifically when you work around restraints is number one, learn how some of these restraints work. Number two is learning how some of the ready-made tools to get out of the restraints look like function. And number three, which is the advanced level is learn how to construct all of these things yourself, which is, I think that is the best thing you can show somebody. For handcuffs, I just use a standard pair of handcuffs and then we deconstruct other very specialized handcuffs that might be out there. And you show them, if you're gonna travel somewhere, learn what restraints are commonly available in the environment. Somebody going to North Sub-Saharan Africa, carrying a plastic handcuff key, that's gonna be useless out there because there's not gonna be standard handcuffs out there that would be open with that type of key. Out there, you're probably gonna be tied up with a chain and a padlock of some sort, maybe a 40 millimeter Chinese padlock with a plastic core that you can open with a lighter, if you can burn the core, melt the core open. Or if you can leverage that open, that's a pretty easy thing to open. Or a bobby pin, you could reach all the way in the back and open the latch. What about rope? Is that common? Yeah, it is common. This is one of my favorite things for rope. Something I usually carry in some places. It's another gift for you if you want. It's a ceramic razor blade. Nice. Is it capable of cutting? Nice. It's small, you can put it behind a label. I've seen some students put the Levi's label on there and just sew it back on. It is non-magnetic, non-ferrous. So in and out of that type of situation, you can get in it and it's something you can have with you everywhere. This is a pretty fancy one, or you can just grab a simple razor blade. Actually learning how to use or leverage a razor blade between your palms and know how to go up and down with it. Nice. To be able to cut yourself on a rope. And of course, that's just practice to do that well. It's practice and it's also exposure to just, this is a possibility, this is how you could hide it. Again, the whole smuggling aspect comes from a criminal, a criminal mindset type setting. So how things are hidden, where they're hidden. And when I talk about concealing objects of this nature, it usually comes from smuggling. The fact that I have something in a notebook comes from heroin smuggling. If you're not looking at the school of criminality, you're missing out on a big part of the equation. So for people who wanna learn about this, do you teach courses on this? Do you know what's the, how do they get in touch with you or learn from you? Do you have stuff online or is it only in person? So I have some stuff on my Patreon specifically. I have a Patreon where I share a lot of the online material. Basically a bunch of, this is my notebook. I have a bunch of stuff that I, I just met somebody in Philadelphia that showed me a pretty unique way of utilizing a box cutter as a weapon. So I wrote some of that down and filmed some of it. And it's not for any other reason. I'm not trying to create dangerous people out there. It's like, hey, look at this. This is something that's out there, right? So a lot of that information, some of those notes and stuff like that, I keep on my Patreon. I used to share it openly on Facebook and Instagram, but that has not been possible anymore. Well, I'm a member of your Patreon and I recommend people sign up. It's really great, because you also have philosophy. You're the Mexican Miyamoto Musashi. It's not just the skills, it's also the philosophy around it. Like I got that book of five rings before I went into training. Like I took that with me through training. The whole aspect of, you know, go to places frightening to the common brand of men. You know, be put in jail and extricate yourself with your own wisdom. I think he was speaking about experiencing, experience. You know, the whole warrior's journey, the hero's journey of going out there and actually risking. I think that's a pretty big basis and aspect of what the work I do and showing some of these things. There's a tendency to people that say, hey, I'm afraid to go to Mexico. What do I need to know? It's like, well, if you're afraid to go to Mexico, go to Mexico. I mean, I was in Detroit. I was pretty afraid when I was in Detroit and some parts of Detroit and the South side of Chicago. But I don't wanna be dictated where I can go and where I can't go because of safety. I wanna take responsibility for that myself and figure out ways of being more capable and an asset to the people around me and myself. And that comes from experience. And people don't wanna risk getting a shoulder injury, rolling in jujitsu, or don't wanna risk getting a bloody nose in boxing, but that is the way. Well, there's some aspect to fitting in. You quote Hattori Hanzo on imitation. The most important thing you should keep in mind when you go on a shinobi mission is to imitate well the language of the target province and the ways of the local people. This includes their appearances, the way of wearing clothes, the way of shaving their head, the way of making up their hair, the way of making up a sword or short sword, and the way of refinement and luxury. So how do you fit into some of those places? So you know Mexico, but a person like me that doesn't know anything about Mexico and say I'm interviewing somebody in a leadership position at a drug cartel, how quickly do you learn how to fit in? I mean, it's not about fitting in, it's about coming up with a narrative for yourself. What that book is talking, that's a quote from the book called a Shoninki, which is like an actual legit ninja manual from like the 1500s or something like that. And they're not talking about blending in, they're talking about creating a narrative or a lie to your appearance and your behavior and your knowledge base. That's what they're talking about. So I would say first, if you're gonna go to a place like that, first off, learn what is common there, what type of common restraints might be placed on you, what criminal groups work out there, what type of guns they have. Not only what type of guns they have, but go to the gun range in Vegas and learn how to fire some of these firearms yourself so you know how to load them in case you run into a bad situation. How they tie the sword, how they wear their short swords could equate to how, you know, if you run into some issues. Also, it would give you a good idea how many rounds those hold so you can run at the right moment. I like how you focus in on the tools of violence. But there's also the social engineering de-escalation, right? Yeah, so if you are in an environment like that and you are carrying around a camera, that might be an issue. Or the opposite, it might not be an issue. Well, if you're asked, were you with the news organization, or am I with a Christian aid group here? Yeah. And if you are with a Christian aid group, it's probably a good idea to learn some of the Bible, right? If you want a quick way of having somebody out there try and stop talking to you, you can start talking about Jesus in the middle of a little cartel territory when they approach you and take out the Bible. That'll quickly de-escalate. So you could talk to contact. What I usually prefer to do is I find somebody from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and beat them up in front of the, just to send a signal that I'm not a journalist, and I too don't like journalists. That could be a way, but- To send a message. I think a lot of us miss the fact that we are capable of taking control of our own narrative and what we communicate to people around us. I could show up here drinking a Monster Energy drink, dumping it on the ground, scratching you know what, then just sit down and just be a rude motherfucker. That's not who I am, but I can do that. And you will believe me if I am good at it. Some of us miss the, some of us don't know this aspect because it's something we consider predatory or something that is wrong or negative or bad. And some of these aspects are actually, you know, they're pretty useful. I learned most of my tradecraft and skill craft from panhandlers and street performers. And when I had some training related to social engineering, those were the people that I learned from. I remember we were doing surveillance and there was a guy there that showed us how to do surveillance, you know, on the street. And he said, if you can find a way for somebody to smell you before they see you, you'll become invisible. And I was like, that's bullshit. If you can find a way of somebody smelling you before they see you become invisible. I didn't understand what that meant. So we went on a three day bender, didn't take a shower, smell like shit, no deodorant. You know, you smell like a homeless person, you look like a homeless person. And you approach somebody asking for the time and they smell you before they see you. And you are not there, you're not a human, you don't exist. So that was a pretty valuable lesson that I got there. Yeah, so that's interesting. But like, I have this belief, it has to do with the way I operate in this world, I suppose, but if you come off as a person legitimately, I guess you could fake it, but I think it just feels like you can be extremely good, possibly the best in the world, if you practice it your whole life, at being you. At being authentic, at showing like you have nothing to hide. And- A true believer, is what I, a true believer. So like, yes, you can come up with a fake narrative, but then what I mean is like, live that narrative your whole life then. Yeah, I understand. And then never falter from that. Like, you are this person, that's what, I'm trying to have nothing to hide. I consider that a true believer, and yeah, that is a unique person when you meet them, and they are out there. There are people that will fucking walk into places. This is who I am, I don't give a fuck. This is who I am, if you don't trust me, well, shoot me, fuck it. This is my honesty, and if you don't trust me, well, look at all these people that I've interacted with in the past, and you can ask them about it, or you can see my effects on other people. That's gonna be my presentation card. And so the way you said it now, is using words and it's blunt. Usually if somebody is blunt like that, like I'm a no bullshit person, that means they're not. That means they're a full of shit, actually. But you do that through, I mean, I'm saying, I'm verbalizing your behavior, just walking somewhere. Let's say you're going to interview somebody very dangerous down there, and you walk into a room without worry. That is a presentation to you. I know that's a pretty interesting introduction. You're not a threat because you don't consider yourself a threat and you're walking in there with the confidence that you don't consider yourself a threat, which is an interesting way of going about it. My life experiences has been different. I wasn't programmed that way from an early age, and it's hard for me to go into that line. Although more and more as I get older, and as I learn more about the world, and I've failed a few more times, I can understand or more cognizant of the fact that you don't really have to try that much if you believe in yourself and who you are. If you know yourself, I think that is at the core of it. If you know yourself enough to be able to kind of communicate that to people around you. And you're not hiding from yourself or from the world your flaws too. That was the other thing you spoke to that is probably inspiring to others is being honest about your flaws, about your weaknesses as a human being. You can't pickpocket a naked man. Yeah, that's right. That's really brilliant. If you know how to be naked, and again, I'm not there. I think I'm working towards that just by hopefully going through shit and showing people, not telling them. Is it show me, don't tell me is another valuable lesson that I got long ago. I travel across the country and I not only get to show people what I know how to do, but I give examples of it through things that I do out there. And I say this a lot, when I travel out there, I'm never alone. There's couches out there waiting for me. There's homes that I can go and stay at and friends that I have out there that I have never even met. But that's been about me, not only wearing some of those mistakes and past failures on my sleeve, but also turning them into lessons for people. And just telling people the fact that I know how to do all this weird stuff and I show people how to do it. But here's a bunch of weird memes that are very humorous about my culture and about going through therapy. And this is me doing something goofy. And this is me being an idiot in front of all you guys as well. This is me being the fool. I think that is another aspect of it. I love that as part of that journey, you made enemies with the rodeo clown and made up with him afterwards. We're still, we're in a very toxic relationship. He knows who he is. He's probably out there listening. He's a- Love and hate all there. We stopped talking to each other for months and then just send a dick message of some sort and just, we're back at it. Back, yeah. Love expressed through anger, I love it. It's therapeutic. You have both very interesting career paths. If we can just jump back to a really interesting topic that I wanted to mention on narco-cultism. What are narco-cults? What's the relationship between, you kind of mentioned religion a little bit. What's the relationship between religious culture and drug culture? First off, Mexico is one of the most Catholic countries on the planet, if not the most Catholic country on the planet. Not only that, it is a country that has a root in a spirituality through its ethnic culture that other parts of the world got most of that taken away and or suppressed or killed or taken away. When the Spanish came to Mexico, they were a product of a recently liberated group of people. They just got done being invaded by the Moors basically. And they brought with them the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin of Guadalupe. And Hernan Cortes' vision of that, or version of that was a lady holding a crystal scepter, baby Jesus, and standing on a crescent moon. That's what he brought with him to the Americas. And when the conquest happened, a lot of people say, yeah, the Spanish came and conquested the Aztec empire. The enemies of the Aztec allied themselves with the Spanish and they took them down. That's what happened. And then the rest was famine and sickness. That's what killed most of them. They realized that it was gonna be hard to suppress some of the spiritual practices in Mexico, so they decided to meld them with Catholic iconography. So you see this cult to Tuanatzin, which is like a fertility variant of a mother goddess in Aztec culture. And they turn her into La Virgen de Guadalupe, which is the icon that a lot of Mexicans venerate as the La Virgen, the Virgin. But in her, she conceals cultural elements from the past. She has a black sash across her stomach, which means she's pregnant, something common in the Aztec culture. In the Aztec culture, in the Mexica culture. She's standing on a cherub that has eagle wings. That is a war god. That's a symbol of the war god down there. She has stars on her, which is a veil of certain stars that are related to some of the spiritual practices from before. Basically, they hid these things in that setting. Now you skip forward hundreds of years and you start seeing things like Malverde, who was a bandit that lived in Sinaloa way back in the day. He would rob rich farmers that would go through the countryside. One time he was almost caught and he was shot and injured and he was wanted by the government. So he told one of his friends to tell them where he was and to give the reward money to the townspeople. So he did that. He was hung from a tree and the order was not to bury him, just to let his body rot. And his body rotted away until it fell onto the ground, the bones. And each of the townspeople would go over and put a rock on top of his corpse until it became a pile of rocks. And then he started granting miracles. So again, this whole aspect of these criminals become insane. And also a middle finger from a priest and a middle finger from the downward local populace to the church in a way, because he's not a recognized saint, but he has an altar and people venerate that. Then you have cartels that have a spiritual practice or spirituality behind what they do, which is part of their culture, but is also like a tool they use to ingratiate themselves with the local populace or the population around them. They're icons of power and sometimes of, like almost a symbol of rebellion. You see El Chapo's son, when he was arrested, had a Santo Niño de Atocha on his chest, which is a holy kid of Atocha. The Spanish legend during the Moorish conquest, they said that a statue of that saint would go around and feed some of the hungry. That was the legend. And he's a saint of the persecuted. So the fact that when he was arrested, he was, you see him with that, wearing that, and then he was liberated is a miracle in and of itself. So it's proof that that works. You see that was, you can find one of those scapuladios anywhere in Mexico. That was the most, at least the sold one. So you see them utilizing some of these aspects in their own belief system as a symbol or as iconography basically for some of the things they do. Then you go into some of the other aspects of it that are out there, like Santa Muerte, which is actually a faith that I grew up in. Mexico has a weird relationship to death. We have parties at the cemetery on Day of the Dead, and I just went through one recently. This is November the 2nd. So we celebrate our dead and we celebrate death in a way that I don't think a lot of cultures out there do. So it's a joyful occasion. It is a celebration, yeah. My eight-year-old put two beers on an altar, one for my mom, one for my brother. She bought a Snickers bar for my mom and a bag of pops for my brother, flower petals and marigolds and pictures of them on an altar at the home. That's amazing. What kind of beer? Tecate, Tecate Roja for my mother, because she was hardcore, and Tecate Light for my brother. He was more of a endurance drinker. And it's also for me, the relationship to death down there is different. So there's an icon in Mexico. It's actually one of the fastest growing alternative spiritual practices in Mexico. And not only in Mexico, but here in the US. I've been to Santa Muerte temples across the country. I found one in Connecticut out of all places. How I grew up with it, where I saw it, is my family was all Guadalupanos. We were Catholic and we venerated the Virgin of Guadalupe specifically, the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But every now and then there were winks and nods to a skeletal saint in family practices. And even when I went to work, the older guys that I was working with would tell me like, hey, we gotta go ask for protection. So they would drive me over to the church and I thought I was going to the cathedral. And then we made a left turn and it wasn't the cathedral. It was the market next to the cathedral in Tijuana. And in the little corner, there was a big Santa Muerte reaper effigy. And then I knew why I had to bring a bottle of tequila. It was like, why am I bringing a bottle of tequila to the church? It was for her, for death, la muerte. It was partly hazing and also they did believe that they were basically imbued with being agents of death in a way. So it was like a cultural thing as well. Something that they wore on them as not only protection, but as also like a samurai would wear this death iconography on them or how the Maori would do haka dances. To some of these guys and their kind of warrior culture that they were growing up with or trying to imbue on us, the young guys. They would take us there and they would imbue us with iconography of Santa Muerte to be like a psychological thing. So that gives you strength and meaning in the face of struggle, like in the face of difficulties in life. I think, you know, your closeness to death and having a relationship to death in the form of a symbolic representation of it, like a Santa Muerte or an icon like that makes it not as scary, I guess. Or not only that, but it's also something that the other side, the enemy, the cartels groups, they would venerate it as well. So when they would see it on you, it was almost debilitating to them. They were like, oh, are you guys cops? Are you guys, why are you wearing that? So there was an aspect of that to it. A momento Maori type thing where you remember death, you know, type thing. There's some aspect in which you don't wanna mess with a person who meditates on death. There was some of that, yeah. There was a saying, I think they probably took it from a movie or something like that, but I don't know where they got it. May I earn your need and be your wrath. Oh man, that's a good line. They would say that to the statue of Santa, you know. Another thing people, it's not a cartel specific saint though. It's like everybody, like at all levels, from the lady that sells tortillas to the cops, to the military. There's some people in the military that venerated. There's a very specific symbol of how this is like a weird relationship in the specifically in Santa Marta in Mexico. There's a shrine outside of Tijuana, right across the la presa. It's like a water reservoir. Right at South Tijuana. And there was a big Santa Marta altar there, like on the roadside. And my former boss, Leza Ola, ordered that thing destroyed. So he ordered a truck to destroy it. It was a famous thing. And it was rebuilt the next night. And I know for a fact that some of the people that rebuilt that were some of the same guys that were destroying it. Oh man, that's pretty symbolic. So it's just, it's not something that I know of. So it's just, it's not something that can be killed. It's a part of the spirit of the people. It keeps getting destroyed by ultra Christian groups or Catholic groups, and it keeps getting rebuilt. Personally, for me as a, I don't believe that there's a reaper skeleton in the sky protecting me. But I do believe in the aspect of an ending, and how it's important to, the ending is important in all things, and death should be present in life. And if it's not, then you're delusional about things. So to you, it's a mechanism to meditate on death once again. Yeah, and having my daughter, who's eight, view it as a benevolent thing. She's a kid, and she sees a skeleton that represents death, and she's just, it's like, I think in a way, Mexicans have taken some of those aspects, be it day of the dead, some of these practices related to some occultism aspects around St. Judas, San Judas. St. Judas is the patron saint of lost causes, and it's one of the most venerated saints in Mexico. Jesus is probably the fourth or fifth you pray to, which is pretty funny, ridiculous, but the reason why, and this is something I heard from somebody that was actually, we found him with a gun, and on his gun, he had a St. Judas effigy. And he said, like, why St. Judas? Porque San Judas? And he's like, well, he's the last saint you pray to. What do you mean? Well, on the list of saints you pray to, he's the last one, because when you pray to Judas, you might get the other Judas on the line. Yeah. That's the last one you pray to, that's why he's like the lost cause saint. I remember, like, even how we try and bribe or, like, maneuver our way, even in spirituality, it's spiritual practices. Yeah. You know? Such a fascinating culture. That's unlike anything else. And it's right next door. And it's here, too. Again, I found an altar in Connecticut, which is pretty fascinating. There's one in Arizona. Again, it's one of the fastest-growing spiritual practices, and not only in the US, but, like, across the, there's, somebody from Russia reached out, there's an altar out there, and there's a group of people praying to Santa Marta, and I've been posting and writing a lot about it recently, just from my own experience, and some of the stuff that I gathered for myself, and all the way out there. You know, people are fascinated by some of those aspects. So I gotta ask you about the dark turn of that spirituality. Or maybe you'll place this elsewhere, but who was Adolfo Costanzo, El Padrino? He's just a guy that comes up in a period, I think it's, he's at that initial period of cartels. This is before my time, and I've talked to some of the people that were there for some of that. I mean, he kills a lot of people. He was exposed and learned, through his family ties, about some of the Afro-Caribbean spiritualities that are now also exploding, as far as influences across the world, Latin America and in the US. When I talk about that, I mean, Santeria, Palo Mayombe, basically some old spiritual practices coming out of Africa, that utilize things like ngangas, which are basically spiritual vessels that have to be loaded with human remains in some cases. He was basically a spiritual practitioner that certain cartel groups would hire for them to curse the other side, to imbue them with invisibility, to be able to transport their drugs or protection spells and stuff like that. He was very successful at it, apparently, or at least that is the experience of the people paying for some of these practices. As his spells and his work kept getting bigger and bigger and more and more and complicated, the ingredients he needed for these ngangas or these spells, these cauldrons that he would fill with certain elements, grew in complexity. Till finally, he said he needed the brain of a highly educated American of some sort, which led to his eventual downfall. He was basically responsible for abducting and murdering a young American who was a university, college student, I think. Do you think he believed the, so this guy's murdering people to create what, magical potions? Vessels, yeah. Vessels? I think, yeah, I think he truly believed that he was capable of doing what he was doing, I guess. And there was a culture that's spiritually inclined that kinda was on the same wavelength. Wavelength as him. Yeah, it jived. I mean, some of these spiritual practices, again, there's a ritualistic cannibalism done by some of these cartel groups out there. Was he involved in cannibalism as well? He wasn't involved in cannibalism that I know of, but most of the things that he was kind of known for was basically requesting human body parts for some of the spell works he was doing. And then going to such a level where he needed a specific brain or head of somebody that was educated and American. So that kinda again, led to his eventual downfalls. His ranch was raided, they found the body parts inside of these cauldrons that he was preparing. That's an interesting example of somebody. There's a cartel head somewhere in Central Mexico as well. El Mas Loco was his nickname. And he basically forced the citizenship around him to turn him into a saint. So he made a statue of himself. He was very big into Christianity, specifically kind of like the crusader mentality and all of that. Kind of imbued himself and some of the people that were around him with that. And there's still alters to his death, to him after he died. He died two times. One time the government declared him that he was killing a shootout and turns out he wasn't dead. So that was his first miracle. And then when he was really dead, some of his people and his loyal followers were gunpoint kind of still forced to go and give flowers and venerate these effigies and statues of him as a saint. It's a powerful weapon. Spirituality in Mexico is a powerful weapon. And the Catholic church in Mexico has a pretty bad track record. But as far as that being used to control populace and stuff like that. And I think it's just another aspect that is being exploited in Mexico within some communities as far as the spirituality and the desperate need for people to believe in something and how that leads for some people to go into some horrible predatory behavior around it. There's a fascinating dynamic at play here. So it's not just the United States and Mexico, it's also China that you talk about. China is the primary source of fentanyl in the world. So fentanyl is an opioid that leads to 70,000 plus or minus plus or minus overdose deaths in the US every year. So reading from Wikipedia, quote, "'Compared with heroin, it is more potent, "'has higher profit margins, "'and because it is compact has simpler logistics. "'It can be cut into or even replaced entirely "'the supply of heroin and other opiates.'" What do you think is important to understand about fentanyl as a drug? There was a prescription opiate epidemic in the United States that kind of went down or stopped, well, still out there, but like the epidemic specific around it kind of petered out and there was also marijuana legalization happening at kind of the same time period, which people talking about marijuana legalization thought it was gonna hit the cartels in their pockets and it was gonna be like a death blow to these criminal groups. Well, now there's illegal pot grows in the United States being run by cartels in federal lands. There's the legal pot grows that are in some way, shape or form influenced and or run or owned by some criminal groups and they're kind of utilizing that. The marijuana fields in Mexico turned into poppy fields once again. The problem is that some of these lands were leached of all the nutrients and they're not as good as something you would find somewhere in Afghanistan. So the yield and the quality of it wasn't as strong as it could be. So somebody thought about the right idea of putting fentanyl into the mix. And not only that, but also figuring out how to get fentanyl into Mexico. Mexico has a giant pharmaceutical industry that people kind of also don't kind of know or factor into this equation, which leads into the free ability of chemicals going in and out of the country and legal means of it happening, right? So not only the precursors to make it, but also the chemist and the industry to create it in Mexico as well. Some clandestine factories of fentanyl have been found in Mexico, but realistically it's not needed with the ways that the ports and the borders are down in Mexico. You started seeing an influx and a flood of fentanyl into Mexico specifically related to infusing it into heroin and not only using that to feed local drug markets, but send it up into the United States, which started off this process that we're kind of going through still. Are these like similar highs? And drug wise, why do you infuse? I mean, probably you're not the right person to have this biochemical discussion of how. I don't know about the biochemical aspect of it, but like speaking to guys that do Chiba down there, that's what they call heroin down there. It's like a nickname for it. Having them describe some of the older, stinkier, darker heroin they used to get before this whole fentanyl thing and the highs they would get and how much they would have to take versus some of the stuff loaded with fentanyl that they have to slow it down. Also there's more higher potency. Yeah, there's a higher potency to it. And also there's a, you know. More money to be made, easier to transport. Yeah. But then, is this how China starts becoming part of the picture? One aspect to it that people kind of miss is that there's no Chinese cartel. There's no criminal Chinese organization working unseen, getting around government oversight in China. I don't know of any such organization. Anything that could be labeled as a criminal organization is deeply integrated with the government. I mean, I've never heard of a giant criminal enterprise in China operating. So we have to assume then. Independent of the state. I would have to assume that some of these things are happening with the know-how and inaction of the government out there. When COVID hit, there was a shortage of fentanyl on the northern side of Mexico, specifically related to the Sinaloa cartel. These guys were actually trafficking fentanyl from the US down to Mexico to infuse their product. But not the New Generation cartel, which operates out of the central part of Mexico, the Colima area, which have access to the seaside ports. So even during the shutdown, they were getting supplied. Which means, to me, at least, or for anybody observing it, that the supply chain was not cut. And whatever was coming out of China was being let out of China by whatever official channels would be able to shut down or stop it. And I would love to know the organizational structure, the governmental structure of China, how they enable it. Because I can't imagine, at the very top, there's like a portfolio of things we're doing and one of them is fentanyl, right? I think it's more inaction. Or just the know-how that is happening, but just like, hands off. Just let this, I don't know. If I were to understand how large bureaucracies work, it's looking the other way. Yeah, you are now seeing pill presses brought to Mexico, industrial-level pill presses, found in clandestine laboratories, where they're not only infusing the yields that they're doing with fentanyl, but also making fake pain medication that is flooding US markets everywhere. That's where it is. Is that pain medication or is that fentanyl? Who knows? And that's how you see a lot of people dying from ODs that are supposedly taking pain pills and that's not what they're doing. So the evolution right now you're seeing is making something look legit as far as pain medication that it isn't. And fentanyl is everywhere. They're infusing cocaine with it. I've been getting stories from the US of people buying it through Alibaba or just weird online sources and it coming in different packages and just infusing it into whatever is out there. It is killing off a whole generation of people. And it comes from one place or it's manufactured somewhere where it's being manufactured with the precursors and the element and know-how that comes from one place. Are we talking about China? Talking about China. Because Mexico seems to have, what's the role, this is such a complicated, and how do you start to talk about the drug war when more and more and more China is the source of the drug? Is there a drug war going on with China? There's probably an economic war. Well, you talk about, there's another side to China. Most, and this is something that's come out recently, a few years back, I think. But basically, the ways you would move money back into Mexico after you have a load up here is that you would give it to a Chinese money broker. They would put it into the Chinese banking system and it immediately would just disappear from American eyes. And then another money broker in Mexico would receive it through a money transfer from China. So China's incredibly good at money laundering. That's another aspect to it. I mean, their banking system is invisible to the US, basically. Which allows. Which allows the monies to move from one point to another. So money brokers and people moving money for the groups down there are Chinese. So that's another aspect or element of China, as far as its presence. What's the role of intelligence in all of this? FBI, CIA, the Chinese intelligence agencies? Right now, Mexico is going through a nationalistic resurgence and a leftist presidency, which is not friendly to US interest in a lot of ways. The US has had a pretty bad track record with its foreign policy in Mexico, with a lot of damage being done by the last president, as far as his rhetoric. Donald Trump. Which has been weaponized and utilized by the left down in Mexico. So America is not seen positively. No. Every now and then I post something about Mexico, some horrible thing happening down there. It's like, why doesn't US send people down there? Like, are Mexicans looking for US intervention? It's like, no. That is beyond what anybody in Mexico would want. Specifically, you see the sentiment out there. They don't view the US as somebody that's gonna come in and fix anything, or somebody that's gonna help or is a friend. When the Ukrainian conflict happened, Mexico basically abstained from saying anything, which is a wink and a nod to Russia. It has openly been pro Maduro and openly celebrated some of these regimes popping up across Latin America. Which is, that is what people voted for. That is a sentiment down there. They're going towards the left of the political spectrum because they've been basically violated over and over again by all these different presidencies that have promised change, brought corruption with them, and they are our choices. So this is the best we have right now. And all of the enemies of the United States are taking full advantage of that. We recently had a general kinda, address a Senate committee hearing, I think. He was talking about the prevalence of foreign intelligence services in Mexico, you know, and why that is. Well, you know, it has, Mexico has a lot of the mineable lithium on the planet, underneath parts of it, specifically in the north. It is going through a process, they call it the Cuarta Transformación, the fourth transformation, is what the president of Mexico calls it. Which is, in a way, it's basically we're here to stay type thing. You know, they just nationalized mining lithium and taking control of that and using that as leverage. If the United States ever wants to go to Mexico, it's probably not gonna be related to cartel issues, it's gonna probably relate to energy, I think. You know, they're kinda thinking ahead, I guess. Well, what about also, just imagine a world where India and China are doing fentanyl trade with Mexico or whatever transport. Imagine Chinese military moves, makes an agreement, a NATO type of agreement with Mexico. That's pretty possible. Again, we're seeing a militarized Mexico. It's another aspect of Mexico that, again, I haven't seen talked about a lot here in the US. The main problem is that the current president had was he was gonna make the police, the federal police, and the security issues in Mexico civilian. He was gonna do exactly the opposite as his main rival, Felipe Calderón, the guy that started off the drug war officially. And what does he do? He dissolves the civilian leadership of the federal police, dissolves the federal police, creates the National Guard, which is a military unit, and he puts the military in charge of that. Now the military has a full monopoly over all federal policing. There, when you cross into Mexico, you'll see them wearing these white camouflage uniforms. Those are National Guard people, but they're the military. So now you're seeing a militarized Mexico. With some of these leaks that happened during the Guacamaya, the Guacamaya leaks, you're now seeing that Mexico has been hosting members of the Haitian military, and they've been training them up to go back to police their country. That's not something that Mexico has been known for, to hosting other nations and training them in such a way. So it's an interesting maneuver. Like Mexico has been historically neutral about getting involved in foreign conflicts, about voting and resolutions as far as invading or not invading or doing all of these things. Mexico has been historically kind of neutral when it comes to some of these things, and now we're training foreign military forces to go and do that role somewhere else. We have the military building airports and building infrastructure in Mexico, and a lot of their higher ups getting very wealthy around it, you know? And they basically have a monopoly over, you know, who gets to have guns down there. You know, there's one gun store in all of Mexico, and it's run by the military. And the only way you can buy a gun there is if you can buy a plane ticket to fly there and have enough money to sustain that right or that privilege. So you're seeing the military not being in its traditional role of just being the security force. Now it's policing. It's involved in, it's getting involved in politics in a big way, you know? It's legislation that has passed to keep it on the streets and the policing role for more years now. So that should be looked at closer by anybody observing from afar how the militarization of Mexico and where it's going. Because if you move towards a world where a World War III happens, it feels like Mexico will be the center because a hot war would be fought on the ground. And so you have a very difficult parallel between Mexico and Ukraine. Both don't have nuclear weapons. Both have relationships. So Ukraine has a relationship or a pull towards it, the European Union and NATO. Mexico, at least currently, has a kind of slow pull towards China, India potentially, and Russia. And you have this divide between power centers in the world. And in terms of, just imagine hundreds of thousands of Mexican troops, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops on the border, on the US border, on the Mexican side. And also the fact that that border doesn't mean anything to any sort of conflict that would happen regionally because that's a very easy to cross border. Doesn't matter how many walls you put across it, people are already here. This is not gonna be a war fought off in some overseas place. Like you're not gonna, this is something, if it happens, if destabilization is utilized in Mexico to cause a conflict there and it turns into a Vietnam or a proxy war down there of a sort, which I think in a way you're already kind of seeing some of that through some of the conflicts going on down there. You have a new generation cartel that is being fed fentanyl from the Pacific side ports and suspiciously, you wanna think that maybe it's favored by a foreign government of some sort, in some way, shape or form, who knows. And then you have a historically in control Sinaloa cartel that may or may not be favored by the US in some way, shape or form. You can imagine a further conflict down there and people fostering it and seeing the effects of basically setting a fire on the feet of the United States. Its second largest consumer of US products is Mexico. The massive wave of immigration that is going to be basically weaponized. You saw the collapse of the border security structure with a contingent of 3000 Honduran Guatemalan immigrants in that first wave of caravans coming to Tijuana. You saw, it was pretty bad. It was pretty bad and it could have gotten worse. Now, what is gonna happen when that wave is no longer 3000, but a million people being displaced by violence or being in fear of whatever conflict might originate down there and just that massive wave of migration and move. I think that's an interesting thing that people should look at and how can you affect change to try and stop some of these things to happen. Well, let me ask you at a philosophical, at a human level, what do you think about immigration? Illegal and legal immigration from the direction of Mexico to the United States? So we have an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States and estimated 45 million legal immigrants in the United States. A few things about that. When COVID hit, there was no shortages of produce in the supermarkets, which means that, I mean, illegal immigration is pretty much the backbone of all produce and some of the farming industries out there, most of it. So illegal immigration and illegal workers in those fields are essential workers in a way. I think there's a weird relationship in the United States with some of these workers and how they're demonized and how they're called criminals. I think there was a state out there that passed anti-illegal immigrant worker legislation. The farmers had to look elsewhere for people to show up to work in some of these fields, which basically caused millions of dollars worth of losses for some of these farms. Anywhere you go out there in the United States, you go into the kitchens and there's gonna be paisanos there, French, high-level French restaurants. You'll see people from Puebla there that made their way illegally and might have legalized or regularized their way into the country or in a sanctuary city. You go to the service industry, hotels, those are the people changing the blankets. Those are the people in the washrooms. You have them doing jobs that no American wants to do, realistically, and they're everywhere in this country. And they are the backbone of some of these industries that are essential in this country. Do you think there's a deep sense in which they are American? I think they're indispensable. And anybody that says they aren't is delusional. If you take every single legal worker out of the industry in the United States and send them back, there's a movie out there called like the Mexicanos, a day without Mexicans. Everything would stop. So the relationship is there. People talk about the history of slavery in this country. Like it's a thing that is in the past. There's endangered slaves in the country right now, people that are paying off their people smugglers because they brought them into this country and they haven't been able to pay that fine or that fee yet and are basically being held hostage by that here in the United States. So they're slaves right now in the United States. People are talking about it's a historical context. What do we do about it? How are we supposed to think about it? We're gonna have to rethink how we look at immigration, illegal or legal immigration from Mexico and how we view Mexico as a foreign country. Your relationship to Canada is one thing. Your relationship to Mexico is another. The foreign policy towards Mexico has been pretty nefarious as far as the United States in a lot of ways. You can go back. There was a student massacre during the Olympics and the president in turn at that time was on the CIA payroll and it was a counter communist type maneuver that we're doing down there. But there's some bloody hands on the US side of some of the things that have been happening in Mexico as far as destabilization and influencing and meddling in foreign policy out there. Most of the guns that are used down there come from the US. And that's another interesting aspect and responsibility that people shouldn't kind of think about up here. So there is on the drug war side, a machine that's fueling the drug war. I mean, there's a giant drug habit up here. But also a governmental intelligence and military support through the sale of weapons. I don't know about the sale of weapons, but there's some very, you talk about porous borders coming up. There's porous borders also going down. There's a flow of guns going down and munitions, which again, they don't kill anybody by themselves. They get put in the hands of the desperate that are trying to feed a giant drug market to the south, to the north. Mexico has a saying, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, far from God, but close to the United States. And there's definitely a responsibility on both sides. This is no longer a Mexico problem, a US problem. This is a regional problem. And if we don't think of it as a regional problem with our brothers on the southern side of it, and with family, we're related in blood. There's like, we are, we are, Mexico and the United States are like this, but it's become popular in politics. They just throw a line, right? And I think we need to get to a place where we can figure out how to make those connections and repair some of the damage done by like just years and years of bad policy on both sides of the border. Policy and rhetoric, the way we talk about it, the way we think about it, not just the actual policy, but seeing the humanity in the people that are here. Yeah, it's an easy thing. They're coming to take our jobs is something you hear. There was a state out there that passed some anti, anti-legislation as far as illegal workers on fields. And it led to massive losses. Nobody wanted to show up for those jobs, basically. People would show up one day and they wouldn't come back. And they were doing jobs that people just don't wanna do. Are they taking that from the locals? Or are they filling an essential role that we feel guilty about? And the rhetoric around it is more about guilt than anything. I am an immigrant myself. I've gone through the experience of doing it legally. And I've seen people not do it legally and are in way better places than I am, basically, by going around some of the system. The system itself, the immigration system here in the US, there's something wrong. It's kind of broken. And people coming here illegally are not only, they're looking for a better life for themselves, a better life for people. This whole aspect of vilifying them, and they're like, ah, this immigrant did this horrible thing, this immigrant did that horrible thing. And people saying, go back to your country. At the same time, they go to a hotel where all the service staff is from that part of the world and they're here irregularly. Or they go to the Whole Foods and they get some produce there and it's picked by some of the same people they're vilifying. And again, we need to kind of think about that and analyze that for ourselves. Yeah, the idea of go back to your country and finding the other and having a disdain and a hate towards the other. Ever since I had a recent conversation with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, I got to hear a few things from, let's say, unfriendly messages from white nationalists. And I got to learn about this world. I continue on the journey of learning, which is the idea that the United States, this country, should look a certain way, should have a certain skin color, should have a certain religion, and everything else is a pollution, is a poison. So this, I may sound hateful right now, but they usually frame it in a positive way, like the purity. I'm sure Hitler also phrased everything in a positive way, especially in the 1930s about the purity of Germany. But the reality of the United States, and one of the things that makes it, at least the ideal of the United States, is the soup, the mix. Unlike so many nations I've traveled to, the diversity, the good kind of diversity is what makes this country great. And so I think it needs to be based on accepting the different subgroups that make up the United States versus trying to purify it. I think Mexican immigrants is just another flavor of saying this is the other, let's reject the other. Yeah, I saw that interview, by the way. That you showed a basic restraint in that interview. My experience, and I came up here, again, Trump was elected when I came up here, so it was a weird time for me as far as being an immigrant and the immigrant experience for myself, by both being basically the bad, the ones that were talked about in that way, and also having a bunch of my friends who were very conservative and wearing some of those MAGA hats around me, and like, hey, Ed, like, well, I mean, I'm a guest here, so I have to, but it's a balancing act is what I've been looking at it as. On one side, there's the woke side of it, which everything goes, and then the other side is like, let's hold on to some of these things that make us who we are. On my end, I wanna get to a place where I can smoke a joint, conceal, carry a firearm, be at my gay best friend's wedding, and I want the government not to say anything about it. And I think there's parts in the United States here that kind of feel the same way, but there's extremes on both sides that are pulling you to one side or the other. And I've seen more of the United States than most Americans. I'm in a different state every weekend, so I get to go to, I'm going to Tampa tomorrow, then I'm going back to California, then I'm going to Tennessee later, then Kentucky, so I get to see all types of people and all types of mentalities and ways that people live, and this country is more diverse than most would think, you know, if you only see it through the lens of television or media. What I keep seeing out there that, for me, is like the reason I came here, I guess, and a lot of the reasons that I feel a vested interest in this country, not just because, again, my kid's American, so I have a very, very big interest in this country doing well. But a thing I see is there's still the opportunity and the ability to do something with yourself and opportunities out there for people like me that come here with nothing. I came here with an experience base, a truck. And some demons. And yeah, and a bunch of demons in a bag. And I'm here with you talking right now about some of those experiences. To another immigrant. To another immigrant, and both of us are reaching people out there that, you know, might not, might haven't heard a voice of people like us that come here with our own bag of demons. But where else in the world can two people like us have a conversation with an audience like us and not be shot outside of this because of the stuff we're saying? Yeah, listen to with love and respect, not derision. Let me ask you for advice. What would you say to young folks, wherever they come from? So in high school and college, they're thinking of how to live a life, have a career they can be proud of. And especially if they're struggling, especially if they're at a low point like you were when you came here. Travel. Travel is one of the biggest things in the world that I would ask people to kind of go out to. See how other people live. Don't go there with your own preconceived notions or trying to make people act like you act. Go out there and travel and actually experience the world. It doesn't have to be another country. Going from Tennessee to Seattle is a pretty interesting change of scenery. Who's better at knife fighting? Just kidding, you don't have to answer that. Tennessee. But the traveling is one, and knowing how other people live is one aspect of it that I would tell people. It's risky, it's dangerous, but that is part of the journey is one of the things I would ask people, young people to kind of consider. Service is essential, and it should be at the basis of all of our lives. Service. Start there, start with service. In any industry, you're gonna go start your own restaurant, you have to work in the kitchen first. Service. If you're gonna be a part, a productive member of this country, service. And I'm not talking just about the military because the military, it's a process and it's a lifestyle and it's a thing for some people out there. It's not even a choice for other people if they want an education, and I get that. Community service of any kind is an essential thing. The ability to go out there and interact with the people that you would normally not interact with, the homeless population that there is in this country, the older population that in Mexico are old, die in our homes, but here you send them off somewhere else to die, which is an interesting, weird detachment that I've seen in the US as far as how the elders are cast aside. If I can say anything to the young people is to start figuring out a life of service and that's gonna expose you to a bunch of experiences, to a bunch of people out there that you might not regularly kind of meet and see and realities. Education is out there. It is expensive, but I've sat through a bunch of really expensive classes that I've managed to see on YouTube and learned a lot from them. So education is out there, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as they make it. It's all about the individual and what he does with that education. The dream is free and the hustle is sold separately is something else I would watch somewhere online, but the ability to take information, process it and use it. We're expecting everything to be safe, processed and given to us in a platter and taking that and digesting it and thinking that's gonna make us somebody that's gonna be productive or valuable in society. What's up to us? The US talks a lot about freedoms, but doesn't talk a lot about responsibilities. I think that's a big part of, take responsibility for it. Like I came here without anything and the first thing I thought was, I have a responsibility for the people that I've worked with and the people that are going through the same problems than I am, how can I figure out a way to help? Yeah, the dark side of thinking a lot about freedom is thinking too individualistically, meaning thinking about me, how to optimize my situation, forgetting that the deepest growth you can do as an individual is by taking care of others, by helping others, by being of service, by being useful to your community locally and then hopefully also at scale. And that's how you grow and that's responsibility of like helping those around you. There's an isolationist aspect to culture now. It's like we are separate. There's almost like a spiritual or cultural amputation in a way where, you know, when I was a kid, the house where all the bikes outside of it, that was where all the kids were hanging out. And now everybody's on their phone, you know, in their separate houses chatting on whatever. There's a detachment to there. That's a weird aspect to it. And also the aspect of I need to be safe. I can't be offended. Don't hurt me, safe spaces. This is my right. This is my right. This is my reality. You need to respect it. You know, respect is earned. And where I come from, respect is earned. There's freedoms, but there's dangerous freedoms. Those are, any freedom that you have in Mexico is a dangerous freedom in a way, you know. You can drive home drunk in Mexico. You can, if you bribe a cop on your way there. And if you don't die or crash into somebody else, that's a dangerous aspect of freedom. But there's a responsibility to all of it. It is a twisted responsibility in a twisted way to kind of talk about it and describe it. But I think the aspect of people screaming for freedom up here or their rights or their privilege without the responsibility, you know. You know, what are you doing for your community? You know, you're complaining about this. What are you doing about it? You know, another thing I've noticed in traveling around, it's scary, is the whole people getting shouted down or canceled because of what they express or say. Some of the creepiest experiences I've had in the US has been through universities. Or just seeing young people that have an opinion that is completely outside of reality, you know. People telling me how things are in Mexico because they learned it through a college course. Yes, and seeing sons of immigrants criticizing me because of my opinion of Mexico or what I have to say about it. And, you know, if you wanna encounter the worst enemy of a Mexican, it's usually a second, third generation Mexican up here that shouts you down for what you're saying. I mean, in general, entitlement, all of those kinds of things. Some of that comes with just being young in general, but yes, humility at a societal scale would benefit significantly, especially the young. So I would say some of the service that you're speaking to comes with being humbled. Yeah. And that is one of the best things you can do as a young person. Whilst maintaining the dream and the ambition, humble yourself to the reality of the world. Yeah. One small example, a micro example of this. My kid, there was a homeless guy. She was out with family members. This homeless guy showed up. He was erratic, mentally disturbed, created a scene. She was upset. There was a little bit of trauma there. She was like, oh, now all homeless people are bad. So with her, she does art pieces sometimes for me and helps me make designs for them. She designs for the clothing brand that I have. And we take some of that money and we buy socks and underwear. And sometimes I have them in the car. Sometimes I drive around and see somebody that needs something and I give it to her. And it says, you helped me earn this money that's gonna help these people. So you should just give them these. And she's like, ah, thank you. She's like, hey, cool. Roll up the window. She used to roll up the window really quick. Now she doesn't. They cease to be scary because now some of them have names. Now some of them know her name. When she crosses by there, so there's contact there. She's more connected than I am in some of these places now. She has friends in low places and in high places. That comes later, I guess. But she is learning about service. She's learning about not everybody out there is an enemy or bad or scary. She's learning about service. And she's basically learning that lesson that I got from my mom long ago. Nobody's against you, they're for themselves. Don't take anything personal. And if you're not doing something for other people while you're working, then you're not doing anything. So when you were young, you were pretty sure you were gonna die before you were 30. What's your relationship with death today? Do you think about your mortality? Are you afraid of it? I'm not afraid of it. If anything, I'm afraid of meaningless death or at least a meaningless walk towards it. I'm afraid of losing the use of my legs, I guess. I'm afraid of not being able to go out there and do things anymore. I'm afraid that I'm not physically capable of doing the job that I used to do. So if anything, I'm afraid of stillness. It's something I always quote a lot in my writing, stillness is death. So you always want to be challenging yourself, moving, growing, like you're traveling so you get all these experiences and filling your life with all these experiences. And if it ends, when it ends, you're ready for it. Yeah, I'm not afraid of the end. The ending is important in all things. First time I got a promotion, I got two silver coins handed to me. Here's a silver coin and this is another silver coin. He said, I'll give you the other one when your job ends. Yeah, it depends on you if you wanted to have it over your eyes or in your pocket, right? And the lesson there is that this job you're getting, it's pretty cool and you're gonna be in charge of all these people and it's pretty important, but it's gonna end. So you always have to, the ending is important in all things. If we don't keep that in mind, then if you think we're immortal and nothing's gonna end, I think there's an atrophy, a spiritual atrophy in that. For the sake of spiritual flourishing, this conversation too must come to an end. So I think a beautiful way to end it and I'm a huge fan of yours. Thank you for being a man with a life well lived and for talking with me today. It's an honor, man. It was an awesome conversation. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ed Calderon. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Al Pacino's character in Scarface, Tony Montana. You don't have the guts to be what you want to be. You need people like me so you can point your fingers and say, that's the bad guy. Thanks for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/9PIOoJMMptA

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B-Team Jiu Jitsu: Craig Jones, Nicky Rod, and Nicky Ryan | Lex Fridman Podcast #363

How would a kangaroo attack a human? Knock them down, and then they choke them. Do the kangaroos do? They choke each other, yeah. They don't choke each other. You don't believe me? You wanna watch a video? They choke each other out. I've seen this, yeah. I mean, probably the most annoying one was obviously the one where I had Gordon Arnbauer was like, tap, bro. And he wouldn't tap, so I let him out. I didn't get surgery. I didn't do essentially any rehab. I just have noise to yell with my left leg. So what's it like having noise? The surgeon goes, you've got two options, surgery, rehab only. Nicky goes, I'll do nothing. Yeah, I mean, what could possibly go wrong if you're the world's best grappler, hates you, and you're gently provoking him behind the scenes every day, what I mean? In Texas. And you've stolen his brother, held him for ransom. It is like a story of a shitty western. The last part of a difficult wake up for me is I try to find a sad movie and at least cry about a pound out. That really gets me over the line. What are the rules in the streets? Do you think if you're on steroids, you would have finished the choke? I mean, for sure. Who knew that the cure to the Dagestani wrestling were the Aussies? The following is a conversation with Craig Jones, Nicky Rod, and Nicky Ryan, who together with Ethan Krelenston and others, make up the B Team, a legendary jiu-jitsu team here in Austin, Texas. It was formed after the so-called Donahart Death Squad, the team headed by John Donahart, split up into New Wave Jiu-Jitsu and B Team Jiu-Jitsu, both located here in Austin, Texas. There has been a lot of trash talk back and forth, including accusations of greasing and steroid use. And I, as a practitioner and fan of grappling, jiu-jitsu, and martial arts in general, am here for it. To see the best grapplers in history, go at it, both on the mat and on Instagram. I like the people on both teams and train with both. And I'm really happy to see the exciting rapid evolution of the sport that these athletes and coaches are catalyzing. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Craig Jones, Nicky Rod, Nicky Rod, and Nicky Ryan. Craig, can you introduce everyone? Yep. So we got Nicky Rod here, Brown Belt, two-time ADCC silver medalist. Nicky Ryan here. That's it. Who are you? And I'm Craig Jones, also two-time ADCC silver medalist. Silver medalist. So the number one loser. Number one loser. And maybe a little bit more. Your bio says, widely known as the Black Belt Slayer, hails from New Jersey, the land of pizza and biceps. Yes, that's pretty accurate. Okay. Do you also do Karate-Gan on you a lot? Yeah, I keep it loaded, you know, keep it on me. Uh-huh. You have one today? In the car. That was a mistake. It was your first mistake. Yeah, I think you're too close. And you are Nicky Ryan. What else is there? What else do we know? Gordon Ryan's brother. Gordon Ryan's brother. I was waiting for that one. All right. So, and you're all together part of the leadership of the B team here in Austin. Let's just get out some introductory questions. What, in general, accomplishment of the things you mentioned are you most proud of? I mean, I'm proud just to not have to work a full-time job, just to get by on the bullshit I've done so far. Yeah. Honestly. Just making money of a thing you love. Exactly, yeah. When was the first time you made money on a thing you love? Oh, probably a jiu-jitsu tournament. I think maybe in Abu Dhabi where I won $1,000. Thought I was rich. Yeah. Yeah. What'd you spend that $1,000 on? Probably something bad. Probably drugs or something at the time. Maybe blew it at the after party. That's a good introduction to Craig. So what about you? When's the first time you made money on jiu-jitsu? Or what's, actually stepping back, like what's the thing you're most proud of? Is it a similar kind of thing? I think I'm most proud of is, I mean, for sure, two 80cc silver medals, which hurts because you're so close to getting that gold, but it takes time. I'm understanding that sport of jiu-jitsu takes quite a while to be at the tip top, to be the absolute best. And I'm just being consistent in my training and my craft, and I'll get that number one spot one day. What failure or loss is the most painful to you? I don't know. I have a pretty short-term memory. So my losses, I just forget about them. Yeah, I mean, for sure, my loss at this past 80cc in the finals, that one's something because I definitely thought I was going to win. I mean, it takes a while to produce the skills or the reactions more so that you need to have to be that number one pound for pound guy. And pre-80cc, I was coming off an injury. So it took me a little bit to find the right mentality and physicality that I needed in order to get the wins that required gold. So yeah, it's just process. Interesting. You keep saying process, like it takes a while to build up. So you're not thinking of a loss like 80cc as a specific failure. You haven't gone long enough in a particular process to being a champ. Well, I mean, for me, I'm closing in on five years of specifically jiu-jitsu training. I'm about four and a half right now. And yeah, it's just you constantly have these ups and downs in training where like, as long as you stay consistent, you'll have a gradual raise. But still, you'll have these peaks and lows and just trying to get better every day. I'm definitely not where I will be in a few years from now, but I'm striving to get there. Are you actually a brown belt? Or was that a joke? Brown belt, yeah. You're a brown belt. How many stripes? No stripes. No stripes. Stripless. Okay. Is that part of the process that you're working through? Definitely part of the process. I mean, I think a black belt is just based upon how much knowledge you have. Obviously, if you're talking competitive wise, like from when I started, I was able to beat most black belts. That's just kind of how I was gifted from my wrestling experience. And the time will come when it's right, but I'm not in a rush at all. I'm continuing. I just kind of take every day for what it is and try to improve upon that. I mean, I want to give him the black belt. Nikki Ryan says he's not ready. What is it? Are you guys, like us no-gi folks, do you take that seriously? Like the black belt? Or like how much does it come into play into? Yeah, I mean, it's like Nikki Rod said, it's based off of knowledge, not just what you do out on the competition mats. Because like you said, he had years of wrestling experience and obviously he's very physically gifted. So we grade based off of the amount of knowledge that you have. How do you measure knowledge? I think teaching is a good measurement of it. Like how well you're able to show the moves and really make sure that you have an understanding of what you're doing. Yeah, it's an interesting rank. It's like something that takes many years to accomplish. And for a lot of people, it's truly meaningful. It's like it represents a particular step in a journey. But for you guys, it's almost like different because you've been so focused on competition that I guess if you take it seriously, it is a big step for you too. Like as martial artists, that's bigger than just being like top of the world competitors, right? So I thought it was a joke. You guys are actually taking it seriously. That he's a brown belt. That he's a brown belt and you're taking seriously the rank of black belt and like it's part of your journey. I think by the time I get a black belt, I'll be no more pound for pound. I think it'd be pretty nice to accomplish that as a brown belt and then maybe toss a black belt on top. Maybe get promoted on the podium. What do you guys, do you love winning or hate losing more? I definitely don't hate losing. If it pays the bills, I don't mind. Oh, really? Yeah. But honestly, if I win, I feel more relief than anything rather than like excitement and stuff. I'm like, oh, fuck, thank God that's over. You know? I hate losing for sure. But I understand that it's necessary to get to where you want to be. And then winning is like, I mean, what I think winning is probably the closest you can get to like heroin or something. Because I mean, we're on a, like if you have extreme success in a tournament that you've been, you know, adamant about training for and competing in for a while and you end up winning it. I mean, I feel like you're on that high for days at a time afterwards. Heroin is going to be better. You think so? I'm a stick with no, but. I'm not going to suck dick to win. You suck dick for heroin? Okay. I guess that's a good point. Yeah. Well, you know, like, because you come from a little bit of a wrestling culture. One of the things I really love is at the end of the match, when they lose, they just, there's no, they just run off. They're like almost pissed off. It's like some mixture of anger and frustration at themselves. I think sometimes that people like freak out on the mat. And I think that's just to show everybody like they're acting like they cared a lot and really maybe they didn't work enough to get to where they want to, where they expected to be. And they lost and then they had this big boost of emotion, like after their loss. But yeah, I mean, I think you just cry in the mirror and not to everybody else. You know? What, have you ever cried watching a movie? I don't think I've ever cried period. Okay. Have you cried watching a movie? Not yet. Not yet. The Notebook. I try to avoid those movies. Actually, I lie. Actually. Titanic. The last part of a difficult wake up for me is I try to find a sad movie and at least cry about a pound out. That really gets me over the line. Low energy cutting. The tears. There's other following liquids I could talk to you about, but let's just continue on. Low energy. What about you, Nicky? Love of winning versus hate of losing. I'm a very competitive person, so I for sure hate losing more than I like winning. I do think it's something that's kind of held me back over the past few years because it makes it so that I'm not as active as I should be because it's like I really hate that feeling of, you know, after a match that you just lost. So it kind of prevents me from competing. So it's definitely something I need to work past. So like when you think about a competition, the possibility of losing, which is always there in competition, is the thing that like weighs heavy on you in the months and weeks leading up to it. Yeah. My whole life, you know, my financial stability, everything depends on, you know, my ability to go out there and compete and my ability to teach. So, you know, it's a huge hit to the brand if you lose. So, you know, leading up to matches, that's definitely something that's in my mind. I know you say you guys are like world class athletes, but for me, more like a hobbyist competitor. I compete a lot. The thing I was because I really wanted to win. The thing I was probably most afraid of was not just losing, but like embarrassing myself. Yeah, even actually winning by stalling. That was the thing I hated the most about myself in terms of crying in the mirror. It's like being too afraid to take risks after I'm up on two points or something. I think you got to competition. Sometimes it's good to take the emotion out of it. It's too easy sometimes to like think about all my girls and in the crowd and my family's watching like I want to win because they're there. But the highest level of your emotional at all, that's affecting you. Yeah, that's tough, though. That's tough, especially like leading up to when you're on the map, maybe, but leading up to it, I think it's OK to be emotional prior. Like, you know, if we know ADCC or is coming up and we have a big match, like definitely I'll go out in in practice and I'll visualize I'll put myself in that competition. That way, when it's game time, it's like I've been there a thousand times already. So not the actual competition, but even leading up to it, like stepping on the mat, like all the walk, walk towards it, all that, all that stuff. Like I'll do the same exact warm up for weeks on end and until my competition day comes. That's why that way, you know, when I compete, I'm just like, oh, it's another Tuesday at practice. What about you, Craig? How do you prepare mentally for a tournament like ADCC? I push it completely out of my mind. Don't even think about it. Try to avoid any visualization, any rituals, warm ups, anything like that. Block it out until the last second. Yeah, trying to think about it. I just go to training to have fun, learn a bit. So I try to approach competition the exact same way. I don't warm up at training, do very little warm up for competition. Uh huh. And you just step on the mat? Step on the mats. My philosophy is there's no warm ups on the street. We're so vastly different. All right, so you like legit don't warm up? No, I probably should now I'm 31, but I would just like in the gym, take it easy the first round, you know, like if I look around the room and Nikki Rhyne's there, I might go, all right, we'll have an easier first round today. So even for like the most high stakes matches, you try to push it out? Yeah, I don't even think about it. What about like all the social, like Instagram posts you post? You have to do about that match, you just make a joke out of it and kind of, you're not actually. Yeah, I mean, it's all kind of pretty silly, you know, we're just wrestling each other, you know, we put the meaning into it, but to someone that doesn't follow the sport, it looks stupid. Well, all of human existence is pretty silly. Like what are we doing? None of us really know what's going on. We kind of have sex to reproduce, we get hungry, we eat, and then we're all chasing money and cars and whatever the hell in a capitalist society. Or we worship a dictator in an authoritarian regime, yeah. And then we get off on, we let power abuse us and then we just murder others because we get off on it, yeah. And then eventually all of us will die because the sun will run out of energy, because colonizing other planets is very difficult. So none of it matters. It's a good philosophy, it's pretty good. That's exactly what I was thinking. How does the sun run out of energy? You caught me there. It's burnt out, it's a nuclear fusion engine and eventually burns out. Like when you get tired of training. Yeah. That's never happened. I try to get tired, I was like, dude, it's not working. All right, cool. So you legit don't care about losing? It doesn't weigh heavy on you? I try not to list, like if I win, I try to block out all the compliments, all the nice attitudes, all the compliments, all the compliments, all the compliments, all the compliments. All the niceties and stuff. So I try to do the same with losing. It's happened, move on to the next one. Don't dwell on it too much. And sometimes make a joke out of it. Yeah, exactly. Winning or losing, with the right joke, we can make money off of the events that transpired. That's what's most important. Excellent, thank you. I have a bunch of your merch. Oh, nice. Thank you. This one's the Jordan Burroughs ripoff. All I see is silver. The way it pronouns Burroughs is very, very sexy. I throw lines at people and I try to gauge their reaction. Sometimes I'll say something to Nikki and I'll be like, all right, that's probably crossing the line. We'll tone it down for the public. So it's not just, right, you have to think this is crossing the line. Yeah, I get as close to it as possible. I feel like you can't really cross it. And then cross it just a little bit. Just a little bit, yeah. Speaking of which, you said that I'm Switzerland in World War II, since I'm friends with both you and Gordon and John. Very rich country. Are you a Hitler or a Stalin, by the way, in this analogy? Would you like to be Hitler or Stalin? And should you make a t-shirt out of it? I mean, a Nazi t-shirt, I don't know how well that sells. I think let's brainstorm on this one offline. I think since Hitler lost, so you got second place in World War II. That's true. I think that makes you Hitler. Anyway, to the degree that you can, can you tell the story of how the time you've had with the Donahue Death Squad and why you split up? I competed against Gordon for ADCC and EBI in 2017. And I remember I competed against him at ADCC, and then we had the EBI event. And then I had a Kassai. I used to compete all the time, every week. I wouldn't even do the preparation or anything. I'd just be trying to do seminars, make money, and then jump in and compete. I remember I showed up to Kassai, I faced him twice. And there were four locker rooms, and they put me with all the DDS guys. It was just me and all of DDS. And I think we competed the weekend before. So I thought it was going to be super awkward, but it was actually pretty chill. And the Kassai was in New York, and they suggested to come train that week. So I came trained, hung out with them a bit. Ultimately, the goal was to move to America and join a bigger team, just because that flight to Australia is death. Australia is so far away from everywhere. It's kind of not realistic to base yourself in Australia when all the tournaments are in America. And then I went and trained with the guys, and they just had a massively deep talent pool in that room. I'd show up to what's meant to be a 7am, actual 8am class on Brazilian time. And there'd be like 100 people in there, maybe, I don't know how many black belts, but a ton of elite guys. And I was coming from Australia, training with Lachlan Giles. But really, that room was pretty shallow, and most people had serious jobs and stuff. So it was basically me just training with Lachlan, maybe a couple of other guys, and then to go to New York and have access to a wide array of training partners and guys that are training twice each day. I feel like that's what you really need. You need people that can train as much as you are. You get humbled? Humbled? You get humbled in that room at first? For sure. Because my style at the time was basically a rip-off version of what they were doing. Leg locks came in. I remember just watching Eddie Cummings non-stop and just seeing this guy rip people's legs off. And I was like, you know what? That's probably a good move. That looks like an easier path to victory than trying to beat these guys at what they're good at already. My philosophy at the time was if it's bothering old Brazilians, it's bothering them for a reason. It's probably effective. And that's the path I took to try to rip off their moves. And then obviously to go into that room, try to do them to them, it's going to be a bit more difficult. All right. So that's how it started. How did you end up here? How did we end up here? We're in Austin, Texas. I mean, I like to think of Puerto Rico as apocalypse now. John Danaher as Colonel Kurtz. Things got very weird in the jungle and the teams went in two different directions. But honestly, I mean, it's not really my story to tell. I had some issues with some of those people. At the time of the split, I got along very well with John. I feel like me and him connected very well. I don't know why that was. Maybe it was just because he missed home. He missed a familiar accent, Australian, New Zealand accent. But I mean, I basically followed Nicky, left with Nicky, sort of that core group of guys left with Nicky. And I mean, I just backed... There was personal problems, I just backed Nicky, basically. Got it. Just sticking on you for a bit. Is there a part of you that finds it heartbreaking that DDS split up? This part of you miss working with John and everybody? Now, can you steelman the case for that? I mean, I miss certain aspects of it, but I also do prefer the freedom of being apart from it. It's obviously a very strict regime under John Danaher. You know, obviously there's parts of it I miss. The public doesn't see of John. The behind the scenes banter, I feel like he's very conscious of the image he portrays to the world. But basically, at closed doors, he's always making jokes, always finding, I guess, more in line with the Australian Kiwi sort of culture. But you don't really see that in the public eye. So that perspective, I do miss that relationship with John. In terms of setting aside personal differences, Gordon was a good training partner. Definitely a good training partner to train with. But obviously the negative things we can't really talk about outweighed all of those things. And we obviously had to make a decision to leave. The things that happened in the jungle. The things that happened in the jungle. Should never be spoken of. That I personally cannot speak of. Yeah, but obviously I do miss certain aspects. Nothing's all bad. Nothing's all good. Yeah, this goes back to your, like, everything we're doing is silly. Yeah, exactly. That's why I don't get people take it so serious. Martial arts so serious. It's just pretty stupid, really. Especially in the Gi, it looks bad. I mean, it's pretty silly with and without the Gi. It's just a bunch of apes. What's silly about Nogi and what's silly about the Gi and just mix and match bottoms there. You know what I mean? Wait, which one? Standby. I see what you're doing. Brother, you come to my house and offend my people. All right. We're going to go to every dark place, apparently. Nick, how did you get with DDS? What was that journey like? Try to see if there's things that you remember fondly that you've gotten from the experience. All right. So the way I started training with DDS, initially I was training for like, well, initially I was a bouncer, right? I dropped out of college to pursue this fitness modeling career. I ended up signing with Wilhelmina Models up in New York and I was like, trying to get in better shape. And while I was bouncing, kind of the talk of like, you know, who's tougher came up between the wrestlers and a few of the bouncers that train jujitsu. And they convinced me to go to a practice and I went to my first practice over there. And for the most part, I just controlled everybody, got on top of them, was able to avoid like, kind of like, you know, shitty submissions because I had an awareness of the sport and, you know, I'm a fan of fighting and whatnot. So I kind of understood it pretty well. And then soon after that, I joined a school and my second week of jujitsu, I started competing, had pretty good success. You know, I was like subbing a few black belts and beating everybody like, you know, pretty decisively with points and stuff. And about three months into training locally, I got connected with Gordon Ryan and John Danner up in New York. And I started, I committed to, you know, make the drive up there as many days as I could. At the time I lived in South Jersey and it was about a two and a half hour, three hour drive without traffic to New York. Where in South Jersey? Gloucester County. Clayton, New Jersey specifically, but Gloucester County. Yeah. So it was about 130 miles and without traffic, you know, about two and a half hours or so. But on the way back, man, it'd be three plus sometimes, you know, you're catching that rush hour. What year was this? Do you remember? This was in 2018. I forget how young you are. I was there before all that. All right, cool. Anyway, you're doing the long drive and then what? Yeah, doing the long drive. And then, you know, once I won ADCC trials, I was able to make a couple of bucks. And then, you know, I got my silver medal at ADCC and I was able to afford to live up there in New York and North Jersey area. So I lived up there, trained there full time every day. And it was kind of sucked with the team throughout the turbulent times and found ourself in Austin. In the jungle. In the jungle, yeah. One of the things we shall not speak of. What other things that you remember that you've learned from John Donaher from your time you spent with him? Yeah, I mean, I definitely learned a ton from John and the team as a whole. Like, you know, you have to be the guy that asks questions in that type of environment, right? Because you're not going to get singled out to be that specific star or the best guy in the room when you have all these other stud athletes. So I really had to seek out and figure out the kind of questions that I needed to ask. And once I became a bit more verbal with my training and, you know, I'm expressing all my curiosities about grappling to these guys definitely helped boost my technique and my career as a whole. Yeah. Did you understand what kind of stuff, like, technically you want to get good at? What fits your body? What, like, what would be good for you? What are your weaknesses and all that? So initially, when I started grappling, I had an innate ability to just get to opponents back. So I was like, all right, I'm good at getting to the back. Let me get, let me perfect controlling the back and then submitting opponent via rear naked choke. And then besides that, I really focused on leg lock defense. And then eventually came the Roddy Lock Pass where, you know, I'm really good at body lock passing my opponents now. And yeah, it just takes quite a long time because you have to find different sequences. And then there's always these, an abundance of opportunities that your opponent gets from these specific sequences. So it takes a while. Is there part of you that finds the fact that DGS split up heartbreaking? I definitely, you know, having one person to go to that runs practice every day, that's, you know, consistent. It was definitely, it was definitely a gift, but now I'm also gifted with many, many other partners. Like Nicky Ryan, you know, Craig Jones. We have Ethan, Crelacy, Damian Anderson. So a full team of knowledgeable athletes that I can continue to go to with multiple questions, but yeah, definitely, definitely. It took me some time to adjust to training or to learning from, you know, specifically my team and not just one person. We should mention for people just listening, because you can't visually see that Nicky Ryan is currently terrified and Craig Jones is currently enjoying the fact that he's terrified. But anyway, can you talk about your, Nicky, can you talk about your time with DGS? I started training when I was like around 13. You know, my brother Gordon had started prior to me and I really just went into training just as like a means to exercise and lose weight at the beginning. Cause I was pretty fat as a kid. So I went to the first class, loved it, and then just started training every day at Gary Shim Brunswick. And then during the summer when I'd get off from school, they would take me up to New York to train under John. And you know, I just absolutely loved it. I knew what I wanted to do with my life at a young age. So I ended up dropping out of school actually after my freshman year in high school. So yeah, 15, I ended up dropping out and just pursuing jujitsu full time, you know, training every day up in the blue basement. Like what aspects of jujitsu made you know that this is the thing for you? It was just something I just enjoyed being, you know, like on the mats every day. I love that there's, you know, a problem solving aspect to it. So it's, you know, it's mentally challenging, it's physically challenging, helps me get in shape. So I just, yeah, right off the bat, I knew I loved it. Okay. So then we'll go to the jungle. What happened in the jungle? And in general, like, I like this, I like this, this is like this like shroud of mystery that shall never be penetrated. That should never be like... We've got a book deal, it's coming one day. Obviously he left high school, he's not writing it. Okay, I'll do the Russian translation. Okay, so what are things that you enjoy that you remember from working with John Donaher? Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously he's considered one of the best coaches in the world. You know, very charismatic guy when you see him in person. You know, I pretty much was, you know, kind of raised in the DDS, you know, that's where I spent the majority of my time every day. So I obviously had very deep connections, you know, with John, my brother, Gary, you know, even Eddie Cummings and stuff back then. So obviously I miss interacting with those guys every day. And you know, it's like they said, it's good to have somebody to kind of crack the whip at you every day. And John was very good at that. When you're like younger in your teenage years, you can kind of, you like have to get humbled, right? There's like a process to that. Yeah, for sure. And it's a pretty good room to get humbled in, I guess. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was, I started training with them just when like everybody started to break out. He was the biggest name at the time, just cause he had won ADCC trials already. And he had a crazy match with Kron at Kron Gracie at ADCC. But Eddie was just starting to break out. Gordon just started winning EBI. So I started training under John, you know, right when everything was exploding. What are the good things about life, about Jiu Jitsu you learned from your brother? Both me and my brother never really wanted to, you know, work a full-time job doing something that we hate. And he was always, you know, a very confident person. So he just went, you know, fully started pursuing Jiu Jitsu. So I'm very happy that, you know, he did that. And I ended up following in his footsteps because you can ask these guys, I'm a lazy sack of shit outside of the mat. So that's definitely one thing that I'm very grateful for. That he paved the way, like you can make money doing the stuff you love. Yeah, exactly. He was a big reason, you know, why my parents eventually let me drop out of school. Because you know, when they were coming up, there was no money in the sport. It was very hard to make a full living. Like if you wanted to actually make a living, you'd eventually have to transfer to MMA. And I feel like Gordon and Gary and those guys were, you know, some of the first people to make a very good living off of just Jiu Jitsu. At this party, you find it heartbreaking that you've split up from DDS, but also from your brother in terms of spending time on the mat every day. Yeah, for sure. You know, I mean, growing up, you know, obviously he's my big brother. I looked up to him a lot. So I definitely, like I said, I miss interacting with those guys. I was pretty much raised, you know, in that blue basement, you know, that John was like, you know, a father figure to me. So I definitely, you know, miss seeing those guys every day. Do you have animosity towards Gordon? And does he have animosity toward you? And what is the source of that? And do you think you'll ever be able to forgive each other? Definitely initially during the initial split, we definitely hated each other at the beginning. But it's definitely started to calm down. Actually just prior to, you know, all this social media drama that's going on currently, he had reached out to me and that was literally like the first time that we have actually talked since the split happened. We didn't talk to each other for, what is it now, like almost two years. And that was the first time that, you know, we interacted again. And overall, you know, he wasn't aggressive towards me. I wasn't aggressive towards him. We were cracking some jokes. So hopefully the animosity is going down. There's this Godfather quote that I wrote down. I recently rewatched it from the Don, from Don Corleone, Vito Corleone. The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other. Is there some aspect of family that you miss? Of the blood that kind of connects you, that you can count on? Yeah, my parents, you know, they both raised us that, you know, like family is everything. You never, you know, betray your family or anything like that. So I definitely, you know, miss him from time to time. Okay. Imagine you're like 40 years from now, sitting on a porch with a shotgun, drinking whiskey, looking over like all the land you've conquered. Looking back to this moment, is the reason you split up a bullshit reason? Or is it a good reason from the perspective of the king who has now conquered the lands, have proven himself, have done everything? I think it was definitely like a justifiable reason for the team splitting. Like it just, with the way things were going, it just was not going to work with, you know, all of us in the same room together. It started, you know, affecting training. People didn't feel comfortable and things. So I definitely think that it was a justifiable reason to split. The things that happened in the jungle to be told about in the book. Is it going to be an audio book or is it just going to be, and who's going to voice it? Might be a play. A musical? Yeah, a musical. On Broadway. How's your singing voice? Mine's not so good, but Nicky has a beautiful voice. Does he? Of an angel? I bet. Okay. Speaking of the social media drama, I should mention that I've talked to, recently, to Gordon a bunch. I've talked to him about talking to you guys and he's had nothing but really nice things to say about you, Nicky Ryan. And he has had nothing but bad things. What was some of the things? Well, let's just go to the social media first because the social media stuff that he said publicly is just like a warm up. It's like a foreplay, I guess. So Gordon sent you, Nicky Ryde, flowers for Valentine's Day, posting on Instagram, quote, I've been fucking him in every round and competition since we met in 2018. The least I can do is buy him flowers. We didn't get the flowers. That was the question. Did you get the flowers? You never got the flowers. He sent it to the wrong address. He did? Yeah. Where do you think he sent it? It was close, but it was wrong. Did you appreciate the romantic gesture? I did. I was looking forward to the flowers and potentially chocolates in there, but it was a bit of a let down. Can you describe your recent match against Gordon, the EBI match? Okay. So EBI match on UFC Fight Pass. It was a 20 minute match and immediately, no match starts. I pulled guard and then I stand up, he pulls guard and we have this kind of like back and forth where he's trying to dig for under hooks, trying to get on top of me and he can't really find success. And then in the midst of me trying to work my body lock pass, Gordon is able to under hook a leg and we end up in a leg entanglement and then I'm able to transfer that leg entanglement to a 50-50 position, still in the leg entanglement. From that 50-50 position, I'm able to separate his feet and actually get a few pops and he actually said I broke his foot in that exchange. With a toe hold. With a toe hold, yep. And after that, we had a bit more. I was just working on top position, trying to get my body lock. Time runs out and we go to overtime. And overtime- Can you hold on a second? What does it mean to break a leg? I was very confused about. Is this like an expression or what do you mean? Which part breaks in a toe hold? Okay, so in a toe hold, there's a few different grades of it. You could get a few pops and have some walking issues and people consider that a break and then you could break it fully and have your foot be like a limp noodle. I think what goes to Achilles? What is the front of the Achilles or something? I mean, probably the ligaments. I mean, it's funny, a lot of people say they broke something, but to me, you break bones, you tear ligaments. So I would imagine you probably had a grade three tear. Grade three. How hard do you think is it to, I always wondered that with a straight foot lock, how hard is it to break the shin or the actual bones versus to tear stuff? Depends how many steroids they're on. And obviously how much you're on. You're one of the few guys that have actually broken bones in competition. Yeah, have I? Oh yeah, Vin. Oh yeah. Which bone did you break? Spiral fracture of the fibula. Very specific. A lot of power. Is it like a twist thing? How did you break it? Oh, it was a heel hook. Vinny always used to say heel hooks don't work, leg locks don't work. But unfortunately, Age gets the best of all of us. I think he had some mileage on those ligaments and the bone, I guess. So it's actually what, the bone? Yeah, his ankle disconnected from the tibia and the fibula, but the fibula definitely snaps pretty bad there. That's fascinating. The dynamics of that. Okay, anyway, it went into overtime. What happened in overtime? Okay, I'll have an overtime. Let's see. Trying to hang. Oh, okay. I go defense first. Whistle blows. I'm able to escape in like 17 seconds. And then immediately after I go on his back and he gets out in exactly 17 seconds, I'm like, shit. I thought I had a good start. And then he gets on my back right after that. And he's able to ride me out for pretty much the entire round. After that, I go back on his back. He escapes in maybe like a minute and some change. I think where I went wrong in the overtime is I should have been less adamant about chasing the submission and more aware of collecting time. If I kind of diverted my attention towards acquiring time on the clock, it would have been more in my favor. But yeah, at the end of my overtime round, I'm able to lock up a renegade choke over the face, but there just wasn't enough time to fully finish. I got a few seconds of squeeze in there. I didn't have enough time to adjust. Do you think if you're on steroids, you would have finished the choke? For sure. That's what I thought. If you're on gear, you're changing the biology of your body. You're adjusting your DNA. For sure, if I adjust in my DNA, it's a finish. You're implying you're a natural athlete is what you're saying. I'm definitely a natural athlete, yeah. Heavy implication. Okay, so for people who don't know, the EBI rules, it's an interesting rule structure where the overtime, you put yourself in the worst possible position and the task is to escape and then the other person gets the same thing. What do you guys think about that rule set? I like it just because, first of all, I don't like the idea of having to put somebody on my back, but I do like the definitive answer in the match. Either you escaped in time or you got ridden out. You get to define a winner, that's great. I'd much rather have that than a close decision and it goes the other way. What about you? Honestly, all the different rules, when I look at the rule sets, I just try to think of what rule set I could beat that individual in and I sort of gear myself towards that. That's really the strategy there. I think there's some guys that stall a lot that you would love to have EBI overtime with at the end. They're stalling until they have to give us a good position, but then there's some guys that are so good in those positions, I'm like, oh, maybe we just do a regular match. What are the rules in the streets? The streets? No time limit. That's one of it. There's also concrete and cars and stuff. Biting, yeah. Bulking. Yeah, so you don't like that rule set? Are there some people you would prefer in the street as a rule set? Me? Probably not. I don't know, the EBI. It's tricky. It depends on the opponent, which rule set I'd want to do. What about you, Nicker? What do you think about the rule set of EBI? Yes, I think EBI is very good from a spectator point of view. People find it very entertaining to watch because people want to see submissions. You're putting the athletes in a position where you have the highest percentage submission in the sport, so obviously you're going to get a lot of submissions. My issue with it is it is a rule set that allows somebody that's overall worse at jiu jitsu to win a match. A guy can go out there and just stall and just get completely dominated for the entirety of regulation, and then he gets to start on the guy's back. That's my one issue with it. But also, it's interesting to see the best people in the world have to be put in a really bad position to see how good their escapes are, for example. It's interesting, but it doesn't feel realistic. It's a fun thing to watch, but it doesn't feel like the real fight. It feels weird. I'll claim it. If I start an overtime on someone and finish them, I'll claim it, but if they submit me an overtime, I'm like, ah, it's not good. It's not a real submission. It's good. The issue is people stalling to just win the overtime. So you got this guy, his whole training camp is just not get subbed and win the overtime. It's a bit boring. By the way, I have a rose behind you. Somebody gave me a Valentine's flower, so if you missed the one from Gordon, I got one for you. Well, I'd appreciate that. Thank you. It's good to feel loved. So, what did you learn from that match? Like, takeaways, technically speaking. What do you need to work on? Well, I learned that I am pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. I know exactly what my weakness is. It's the leg lock department, and I'm doing a lot to get better in that specific aspect. Attack and defense? I would say, yeah. Attack, defense, reattacks, even if I wanted to offensively enter a leg, I could use some work there as well. But I feel like once I solidify my... If I become a black belt specifically in the leg lock department, I feel like I'd be unstoppable. If you, Nicky Rod, definitively beat Gordon Ryan, how would you do it? Buggy choke. Buggy choke. Buggy choke. For the listener, I don't even know how to describe buggy choke. What's the definitive conclusion on that choke? Does it work? It's a choke that you do when you're in a... What's the opposite of a dominant? It's not submissive. In a non-dominant position of bottom of side control. Yeah, just an embarrassing submission to get caught with, really. Does it work? It works on certain people. For the listener, you go ask that word, Nicky Rod. It's embarrassing, but it's also a way to frustrate the opponent. For sure, yeah. It's a new part of the sport. I feel like the Rotolos brought it back into fashion. And even if you don't get it, because it's one of those moves that's so embarrassing, at the first sign of danger, the top guy abandons ship. And you can basically retain guard by attempting a very embarrassing submission. So the threat of embarrassment. Yeah. People pull out very quick to avoid suffering the consequences. I think some people underestimate how good of a submission it is. I mean, once you're locked in there, there's not too many defenses for a buggy choke. Is there an instructional on the way from you? J-Rod actually, my little brother, has one. Oh yeah, for real? You actually legit have... Oh, wow. That's awesome. Well, check it out. I mean, you're making a joke out of it, but it is a little bit of a joke. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to lie. It is a real... There's a system to it. I mean, yeah. I don't know if we call it a system. It's a good move. I mean, you take an opponent that was just winning in a greatly dominant position, and then boom, in that same position, they're pretty much losing. It's an interesting move. What's the name of the... What's the name of it? It's called the Buggypedia, like J-Rod Rodriguez. Okay. The Buggypedia. I'm going to tell you something very Craig Jones-y about it. Okay, awesome. I know you don't want to sort of reveal the secrets of what you're working on, but in general, what does it take to beat Gordon, I guess, is the question. Okay. It would have to be some kind of a choke. I think any joint lock or anything like that, he's just going to let it break and stay in the match. I don't even think he'd tap from a renegade choke. I think I would have to put him to sleep. Putting him to sleep is how I would win. So, Gordon is somebody who really hates losing. Yeah. He won't even tap in the practice room. I remember I had a toe hold a couple of times in practice room, and he was just comfortable working there. I'm like, I'm not really putting much on it. I think he just, maybe because of situations like that in practice, he kind of didn't respect my toe hold's ability in competition. You've done that to me in the practice. I have, yeah. I'll give you a little- Give me a little pop, and then he'll let go. That was only 10% right there. Hey, don't get into math. Okay. Is there something else you want to add? I think I'm going to have to go back to the question. I think I'm going to have to go back to the question. I think I'm going to have to go back to the question. I think I'm going to have to go back to the question. Okay, is there some part of that you think is necessary to be a champion, is to like this almost unwillingness in competition to tap? I think there's definitely something to be said for people that are just willing to go that extra mile or to take that damage to secure their victory. Is there a part of you that would hate to tap or hates to tap? Yeah, I mean, all of me, I would hate that. The whole part of me. Isn't there a John Legend song like that, All of You and All of Me? Very romantic, yeah. Yeah, we're sticking on that theme. Okay, I'm sorry. Oh, one of the things Gordon asked, I forget how he put it because I think there's a lot of words that would need to be censored involved, but he said, ask them how it feels to have a zero five record against me with four submissions combined. I mean, first of all, I wasn't sure he could count to five. That's an impressive thing. That's impressive. Oh, and five. I mean, I will say one thing, nobody beats me four times. I love you so much, Craig. Lex, I did have a question. I did have a question for you. There was some controversy on your Twitter about a list of books. And I was wondering why Gordon's book wasn't featured amongst that literature. Well, it was only the first 30 books or the first 20 books, and it would of course be in the- Something interesting about Gordon, he's the first author that's written more books than he's read. Pretty good. If you face him and beat him, what's your take on what it takes to beat Gordon? You guys kind of joke and you go pretty hard recently on each other, but as a fan of jujitsu, I'm all in on this rivalry. It's just fun to watch. I mean, first of all, I don't think I go really hard with him. I think Gordon is pretty sensitive. He's looking for a large insult in a small insult. And for me, like Australians, we just attack each other all day, every day. And for me, if I see someone that takes himself very seriously, that's like blood in the water. That's funny to me. To me, if I can just gently provoke and get a strong reaction, that's hilarious. Like Aussies, we will just attack each other. And the first person that gets upset, he kind of loses the exchange. So I think that is very, very entertaining. Like if you were to beat Gordon, would the mental game off the mat be part of it? I think it would be a factor for sure. But I mean, I'm never going to come out too crazy direct with him. I find that if you get too upset online and you're going crazy, I find that I'd be embarrassed to do that myself. Obviously, everyone's different. Everyone has a different style. But like, yeah, I think the mental aspect would play a big factor. I mean, mainly because if I were to beat him, I would send him a message every day until I died just to gently remind him that I got the last one. The last one is all that matters. We're not giving it to him. So like once you beat him, you're going to run for the rest of your life? I mean, run, but look back. Yeah. With messages. A sidestep. Ride your horse into the sunset. Okay. Oh, by the way, you've talked very lightly. You've talked shit very lightly against Alexander Volkanovsky's opponent. Very lightly. Have you received death threats or how are you still alive? Like Gordon, I would say people from Dagestan take a joke very well. You know what I mean? Do they really? Oh, like Gordon. Oh, like, I'm sorry. I'm slow. I'm always doing aggressive mode in my head. Honestly, Islam was pretty cool. I wanted to stir it up a bit, you know, because I felt like that was a massive fight and it probably should have had more attention than it was receiving. So I wanted to just gently stir it up a bit. I feel like Sambo guys are in the same vein as catch wrestlers. Very sensitive. You know, like obviously there's only three people in the world that do catch wrestling, Sambo, maybe 10 to 15. So I figured we could really provoke them with that sort of Jiu Jitsu Sambo stuff. Islam took the jokes very well. The Russian fans, not so much. Very serious. There's not many smiles in Russia, you know. They didn't take it as well. I'm trying to suppress the anger that Raysha's building up inside me slowly. So you guys mentioned steroids. I like that you bring that up after we talk about Russia for the record. Smooth. Smooth segue there. I cannot condone the statements said by the Aussie. But I would love to travel with you to Russia. That would be a good time. You might get killed with me now. No, I would be like the first to turn to backstab you. You're like, I got him here, get him. All right. Are most of the top grapplers on steroids? I mean, it's hard to say. You know, some people look like shit and they're on steroids. Some people look excellent and they're not on steroids. It's so, so hard to tell. That seems to be the general consensus that a lot of people on steroids. I'm always a little bit, I don't know. So be honest, I've never seen anyone take steroids. I've never taken steroids. I don't even know if that's the right term to use or like TRT, any of that. So I'm very careful to not let my naivete lead me to take conclusions. But I do feel a little bit weird about the witch hunt nature of it. Some people a little bit too eagerly claim that others are on steroids just because they're successful. But at the same time, it does seem that a lot of athletes will do whatever it takes to be successful. Yeah, I mean, if a sport doesn't test, you got to assume most people are going to do it. And especially now as more money comes into the sport, you got to assume more people are going to do it. I generally like do AGCC and like does Jiu Jitsu test? It's actually encouraged. What's encouraged? You get a pamphlet. Okay. They don't test? There's no test? They test to make sure we're on steroids because obviously it's a big show for the UFC, 5 Pass in the future. They don't want anyone coming in out of shape. Very nice. Do you think using steroids in that kind of context in sports is wrong? Like stepping away, if it's not illegal? I mean, from my perspective, I like to assume everyone's on steroids, so I don't have to feel bad about using steroids myself. Yeah. Do you use all of the steroids? I'm over 30, it's DRD, you know, that's the medical definition. That's the medical, okay. I'd like to meet your doctor. Therapeutic use, you know. How do you just feel about it? I mean, it is cheating for sure, whether they test for it or not. I think it is cheating. Obviously, some people are going to say, oh, fuck, everyone's on it. I should be able to get away with it. Makes it even playing field. But it kind of becomes Russian roulette because it's like if one guy is taking a small amount, the other guy is taking a huge amount, he's going to reap huge rewards in the short term, probably be dead pretty early, but die a champion, mind you. You know what I mean? So it's like, I don't know what that one is. Yeah, what do you think about that? Do you think it's worthy to take health risks just for the glory? I think if you're 40 about to die looking at a cabinet of gold medals for wrestling other men, it's probably not going to hit the same way on your deathbed, you know? Sorry, in which direction? Like is that a good thing or not? No, you're probably going to feel like, oh, fuck, I probably wasted a bit of health on that, you know? You think so? Isn't that like the glory of it? Like you said, other men. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, in my opinion, maybe the rest of a woman as well. What'd you do with Gabby on Valentine's Day? What did you take her? Did you guys? We filmed some new stuff for OnlyFans. For OnlyFans. We never stopped working. Never stopped. So it's the love affair is also a work affair. Okay. I don't know. There's something too that me, like an Olympic gold medalist accomplishing like the heights, like sacrificing everything, just everything, the first 20, 30 years of your life for this silly little piece of metal. I think there's something beautiful to that. That's like conspires a lot, a lot of people. And that's like the height of the human condition in a way. What if you survive? I'm just saying, if you're in your deathbed early in life. We all die. All men die, but not all men truly live. How many years? How many years are you willing to shave off for a gold medal? That's a good question. How many? How many are you willing to shave off for a gold medal? What you're for a silver medal? For a silver? I mean, for a silver medal, I'd shave a few off. I think two silvers makes a gold. It's worth five years? Five to 10 maybe. Shave off the bad years, enhance the good ones. Well, I mean, you've sacrificed. You guys sacrificed a lot. A lot of your life. You continue to sacrifice. You don't see it as sacrifice. It's fun. I think training's fun. Being a bit adamant about it, consistent, gives you, I mean, I think we have a great routine, great ritual. Definitely enjoy the process. All right, well, do you guys know, this is bro science, or I'm talking bro scientists, but do you know how long steroids stay in your system? Forever? Forever? Oh, because it's like, hey, once you do it, you own it. Just the knowledge. Yeah, all right. I think it's different for each steroid, right? I think some of them last longer than others. It depends if it's a urine. You would think I would do a little research before asking these questions. Why do you think most athletes and coaches don't talk about steroids? Why is it such a secret? Why is it so embarrassing? I think they probably talk about it amongst the team and whatnot. Again, I mean, it's going to be more shady if your sport is tested or not, or kind of in the wild west, in the grappling world. Yeah, but why don't grapplers talk about it? Because it seems cheating. It's kind of insinuated as a bit of cheating, even if it's not tested. I mean, still, you're taking a person that maybe has good jiu-jitsu, good mechanics, you're putting them on the leg, and they're something with a heel hook versus breaking your leg with a heel hook. Something as subtle as that can make big differences. All right, this is going to make me sound dumb, but is it possible that steroids are not a huge help in grappling? I think if you're bad at jiu-jitsu and you do steroids, you're going to continue to be bad at jiu-jitsu. But if you're great at grappling, and then you also do gear, it's going to enhance what you're already good at and make you much better. But how much is the enhancement, I guess, is the question. How much is muscle valued? That's the question. If you're doing gear and you're not changing weight that much, maybe it helps you a little bit, but if you're gaining 50, 60 pounds of pure muscle, and it's like, that's a huge enhancement. That's another human. This muscle, a small human, yeah. Does muscle matter in jiu-jitsu, I guess, is the question. Is it possible that it gets in the way? I'd say muscle matters, but technique matters more. I also think that it'll help you develop technique as well, because obviously testosterone helps with recovery rate. So if you're on gear, you're able to train a lot more. Now that being said, if you're not able to learn, obviously it's not going to help in that aspect. But if you're somebody that knows how to learn and get good at jiu-jitsu, and then you add gear on top of that, you're able to do significantly more sessions throughout the week. And by the way, gear is steroids? Steroids, yeah. I also think that you don't have to be as consistent in your sleep and your food and stuff if you're on gear. You have a little bit of leeway. But being consistent in your diet and your sleep definitely would help the process. Since you use most steroids of any athlete I've ever met, do you think steroids helped jiu-jitsu? I think obviously it helps recovery and your ability to train more. But I've seen some guys go on steroids, and then suddenly they feel like the Incredible Hulk. And now in the training room, they start to rely more on strength than the techniques they had, and it actually in some respect hinders them and makes them gas more in competition, because then they're using more of the muscle they never used to have. So you've implied that you're a natural athlete. You said that skeptically. Why are you skeptical, Lex? Is this something you do for social media, to talk shit to Gordon, to imply that he's not a natural athlete? Well, pretty much recently on social media, I had this rebuttal saying that Gordon's on gear. And I only said that because after our match, our most recent match, the EBI rules match, he accused me of greasing, which is lubing up, so I'm slippery during our match. And you did not? I did not. I was checked multiple times before and after our grappling event. And he still went out and accused me of this. So I was like, all right, as opposed to telling a lie, I'll just tell the truth about your steroid use, which it shouldn't be that big of a deal in retrospect, because he kind of admitted it and whatnot previously. So yeah, I just kind of felt like I had to rebuttal, and I didn't do it immediately, because I was like, all right, I know I have this podcast planned, so I'll wait to do it on my friend Mark Bell's podcast, get a little bit more exposure on it. And yeah, I knew he was going to bite the bait, but I didn't think he was going to bite the bait that hard. I know he's a little stressed out about the comment, but you know. And that was the origin of you guys going back and forth on- Well, it wasn't so much back and forth. It was just, I went forth and then he kept going back, back, back. Like I remember one of my guys DMed me, and they were like, Gordon's made like 68 Instagram stories and 67 of them were all about you. I was like, all right, well, I'm in his head for sure. Got us a few followers. We appreciate that. We did. They showed, yeah. They did get followers. He even shouted out our B-team wipeout program. So thank you. Yeah. Okay. Speaking of which, what's the B-team? How's it run? And why is it called the B-team? Well, I mean, Craig- Was the A-team taken? I would have been. For me, B's for best. Okay, best. All right. What does B stand for for you? What does it represent? What is the ideal, like Miyamoto Musashi philosophical foundation of B-team? Aim low and achieve. If the bar is set low, you can't help but win. That's Nikki's philosophy with women as well. Set the bar incredibly low, overachieve. So what is the B-team? How do you guys run it? Yeah, I mean, can you just talk about the school, how you found it? What is it? What's it like? I mean, pretty much just a regular jujitsu gym. We started as sort of a pros only, purple belt and above team. And we have me, Nikki Rod, Nikki Ryan, Ethan, Damian as coaches. Am I missing someone? Oh, JB. JB. Your memory is with your old age. Impeccable memory, yeah. And we got JB coming on to teach wipeouts. But just your stock standard jujitsu team. We focus on more, we lean heavily towards the professional athlete side of things. We have a lot of high level guys in that. Class structure, regular instruction, positional sparring, open rounds. But we sort of took a heavy slant on marketing side of things. We really try to blow up the YouTube channel. Obviously we sell a lot of clothing, merchandise and stuff. So yeah, we just sort of took a modern approach to a standard jujitsu gym. Because I mean, jujitsu gyms are full of some of the most boring human beings on earth. So we try to highlight- Strong words, Greg Jones. Strong words. We try to highlight the other side of things. Keep it pretty light hearted. That it can be fun. Yeah, that jujitsu can be fun. I guess that it can be cool too. It's not just full of steroided up autistic people. Question from Reddit. Need to hear some of the stories about drop-ins that led to the making of the gem of a video, the do's and don'ts of training a B team. Any fun stories? Any ones that stand out? Do you guys remember any? Police involved ever? We had a guy come over to kick him out. He was stalking two of the members. Yeah, I mean, that's just crazy people. I portray a pretty insane image online. And I guess I am that a lot of the time. But at training, try to keep it... While training. Around training, I'm insulting everyone. But while training, I try to keep it pretty serious. But obviously, the image I portray lures in some of the crazier members. I mean, the thing is about the Jimmy Guys run is really professional. It's friendly. It's like the lighthearted joking is there, obviously, like shit talk and all that kind of stuff. But I guess it's a pretty safe environment. But the public persona might attract some... Some maniacs. I won't say which places I've trained at, but obviously, some places you walk into the room and it's very, very serious. There's no smiles around. Obviously, it's probably average training room in Russia, but no smiles, very serious environment. You know what I mean? And I definitely don't like that. I don't want to show up to training and be walking on eggshells, not know what the coach's mood's like that day. I want to go in, have a good time, keep it lighthearted. What was in the video? What are the do's and don'ts? Because the address is public. Anyone can show up. Anyone can show up. Yeah. What were the do's and don'ts? Does anyone challenge you to a fight? Not yet. Not yet. I mean, probably from other gyms in town, that's probably coming down the line. But do's and don'ts... I'm all in on that. I would be excited as a fan to just watch. The love of the drama. Not the drama. No, no, no. Well, a little drama, a little drop of poison is good. But ultimately, it's the best grapplers in the world kind of going at it. Yeah. It's fun. Because maybe I'm wrong, but I think there is an underlying deep camaraderie at the end of the day when you're at the top of the world and you're in the same town. What could possibly go wrong? It's like a shitty Western, but like an epic Western with Clint Eastwood, like the good, the bad and the ugly. Of course I love it. I'm here just eating popcorn like that. Staring the pot. I'm not staring the pot. I'm not staring the pot. These questions are from Reddit. They're not from TV. That one for sure. Yeah. I mean, what could possibly go wrong if you're the world's best grappler, hates you, and you're gently provoking him behind the scenes every day? I mean... For sure. In Texas. And you've stolen his brother, held him for ransom. Kidnap him. Kidnap him. Kidnap. It is like a story of a shitty Western, I think. You now allow white belts to train with you. What's it like to open it up to a bigger audience? We haven't opened it up yet, but it'll be interesting to see. I mean, I feel like your higher belts, they really understand what the training room is. You know what I mean? White belts early, they're trying to find their place in the gym. It can be kind of awkward and stuff in that environment. So I think obviously those white belts coming in will change the dynamic, but the white belts will have a separate white belt classes, obviously, for them. Because given it's such a high level gym, it'd be tough for a beginner to be able to enter the more advanced classes. Obviously, we're teaching more advanced techniques. So yeah, we've separated a white belt program, I believe, 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. Yeah. Maybe we'll have a Saturday one as well. But it'll be interesting to see how it goes. We're trying to do things different. You know, like, trying to do your traditional jiu-jitsu gyms, obviously, you're not going to teach beginners wrestling at all. We're trying to split it at least 33 percent, top game, bottom game, and wrestling. So at least create more well-rounded athletes from day one. Whereas I feel like most traditional jiu-jitsu gyms might have no gi once a week, they don't touch wrestling, very IBJJF heavy techniques. But again, the sport's changing for sure. Just to take that on, how does a beginner get good at jiu-jitsu? Like given that you're starting this white belt, what's your philosophy on that? We buy all of our instructionals at full price. Not during a sale. That would go a long way. For those of you who are Russians, I'll send you instructions or all the forms so you know how to steal it. Yeah, discount code. I'll share. I bought them all, so I'll just send it to you for free. I mean, we do have the Makicho 50 discount code, you know? Yeah. Offering discounts to help him out for the rematch. I got the... Nice. The Makicho 50 discount. Well, I got a 100 percent discount for you if you need it. But that said, your instructional are both hilarious and brilliant. It's one of the most respected instructionals out there with incredibly great names. Yeah, it probably loses me sales, honestly, due to removing the seriousness of the things we cover. Because they think it's going to kind of suck, it's going to be some funny gimmicky thing? Well, I mean, some people don't even know if it's a real product. That's a big hurdle I have to overcome is they see it and they're like, is that a real thing? That's a problem. But how does the white belt get good? I think they just have to show up, just have to put in the effort, try to focus on using techniques and training rather than just fighting to the death. Although that is entertaining for us to watch, two white belts fight to the death. Yeah, but what are the techniques? You should focus on what's the process? What does it mean to show up? How much drilling? All that kind of stuff. If you were to optimize the first six months of a beginner, there's a lot of people who listen to this and haven't tried, they've been curious. I have a lot of friends who are jujitsu curious. They're constantly looking for an excuse to start. I think it's just got to be as simple as possible. You know, like we shouldn't be teaching more advanced movements. I mean, obviously in the grand scheme of things, there's highly advanced techniques and then there's slightly advanced. And I think trying to teach those guys real specific positions, even like real specific types of guard, it's just beyond them. I think the best way to learn is through problem solving. And I think if you show the technique before they've discovered that problem, the learning is sort of held back. So I like the idea of using kids style games to show them a problem and then use the techniques to fix the problems they've just discovered. I think that's the best way to learn. Can you give an example of a problem to show them before you give them the techniques? Like what are we talking about? All right, so say you wanted to teach posture in wrestling. You could create a game where one guy, the game might be get to a leg or get to two legs, control the leg, like super simple. But the rules, the constraint would be one guy is forced to keep an upright posture and one guy is forced, well not forced, but he's allowed to keep a bent at the hips, lower posture. And obviously within that constraint, the guy with the better posture is going to have more success. He's going to have a better posture to secure a leg or secure both legs. And therefore you've demonstrated the flaws of bad posture without having to explain it to them before they really tested that out. Okay, and then the result of that, you would realize that the bent over posture is better. Yeah, you have that aha moment rather than just having it spoken to you. You wrote, Craig, I'm a big fan of constraint based learning, I guess is what you're talking about. I love presenting beginners with a problem before the solution, like here, attempt to hold side control with no cues on how. Then I see how the guy got out and addressed issue by issue, cross face and hip control and so on. Okay, so what are some other examples like side control? Yeah, that would be an excellent one, side control. Obviously we say, oh, you secure a cross face so they can't turn into you. Much easier to have them try to hold someone down without explaining what a cross face is and then use that technique to address the problem they've just encountered. I think you could do that with a lot of areas of jujitsu, like even more advanced, say 50-50, obviously a mirrored position where you both have access to each other's heels. Most people will stall out in that position and keep their feet crossed. I think a great constraint for both of them, you can't cross your feet. Now you have to learn how to slip the heel hook when they expose her and how to safely re-attack of your own. So the constraint is you can't be too defensive in that position. And I think the rate of learning increases. Why do you think the rate of learning increases? Why do you think that works? Because you encounter more problems. Say in that situation, they're going to get your heel a lot more in whatever period of time you allocate the drill for than if the legs are crossed. I don't think the hard part is splitting the legs to get to the submission. I think the hard part is practicing control while they're trying to slip it at a later stage and then obviously trying to slip your heel when you're in more danger. It also makes you more comfortable in that bad position if you're used to doing it with open legs. Yeah, I think that probably that style of teaching forces people to focus on... This is so easy to fall into focusing on memorizing a particular details of a technique without thinking like, why the hell does this even work? And if you don't have that, you get to focus on from as cliche as it sounds, from first principles, like, how the hell do I get out of this? Why does this even work? Why does wrestling work? Why do you have a bent over posture? It gets us to start to ask those kinds of questions, which is kind of interesting because it's not obvious to me that bent over posture is the right posture for Jiu-Jitsu, right? I'm confused actually about that. I don't know. About the correct posture? Yeah, for Jiu-Jitsu. What's the right answer? I think bent over posture is still good for Jiu-Jitsu. Even with the Judo and all that? Why are so many Jiu-Jitsu people at a high level, the posture is higher up? I think wrestling posture is just a bit too low because it's not necessary. If wrestlers are low enough to the ground where your hands could touch the mat. But in Jiu-Jitsu, it's kind of a mix between wrestling and Judo or Greco-Roman wrestling. I think it's just a bit more laxed and it's bent over, but it's not upright and it's also not super low. A bit more room for error too because obviously the Jiu-Jitsu guy's shot isn't going to be as athletic or as quick as a wrestler's, especially a wrestler with shoes. So it actually comes down to the fact that Jiu-Jitsu people just on average, even at the top level, are not good at shooting. I think so. Yeah, I think obviously, I mean, all the wrestlers in American stuff, they're starting super early, super young. You know what I mean? By the time they get to the same age we are really in our sport and stuff, they've spent much longer doing the actual sport than the average Jiu-Jitsu guy. And then there's another level of wrestling, of course, with the Soviet bloc that's just unachievable for your kind. Who knew an Australian rugby, a former rugby player. Rugby, is that kind of like American football, but much less money? Is that what that is? Much less money, much tougher, I would say. But who knew that the cure to the Dagestani wrestling were the Aussies? Were the Aussies? Okay, let's go there. Your friend, your training partner, Alexander Volkanovsky, you helped him prepare for the Islam Makachev versus Volkanovsky fight. Who do you think, first of all, won that fight? That's a tricky one. How is that the tricky question? I will say when I was- All the shit talk you've been doing, how is that the tricky question? When I was in the corner going into the fifth, I personally believed live that Volkanovsky probably needed a finish to take the victory. But you had to think that way, right? In general, or you were legitimately- It's a gray area because the judging, who knows? Plus, I was like, wait, we're in Australia, where's this bias? We've got some Australian judges here. I was really hoping we'd get a bit of bias on that. Unfortunately not. Hopefully they lose their jobs. But again, yeah, it was a close fight. I think sometimes you're blinded in the moment because again, everyone counted Volkanovsky out, the crowd's behind him, so everything he does is going to get a huge cheer. Your bias towards the smaller guy, your bias towards the underdog, so you sort of, whatever the underdog does has a bigger impact in your mind. And sometimes that can bias as the fight goes along. But yeah, super, super close fight. I would really love them to have a rematch, but obviously that's going to hold up both divisions, so I don't know if they'll be able to do it. Do you think they'll do a rematch soon? I mean, that was an epic fight. I was listening to the Fight Companion during it. They all thought Volkanovsky- And so they biased strongly the opinion? Round two was the tricky one. Round two's the tricky one. Anyway, I'd love to see that, like, run it back and do three, actually. There's an epic fight. What was the brief conversation you had with Islam Makhachev and his team? I didn't know how he would take the joke, because obviously Khabib tried to flying eagle kick Dylan Danis in the face, so I wasn't sure how my humor would go. But I mean, Dylan must have said some worse things to me. I was just playing around. I mean, you can't really take anything I say serious, come across like an idiot. So when he was coming up to me afterwards, I was like, oh, I don't know what he's going to say. And again, maybe he would have been more upset if he had lost, but he just received the judge's decision. But he came up, I went to shake his hand, he gave me a big hug and then pretended to throw me. And then I thought the interaction was over and then he circled back. That's why it was so awkward. I was like, oh, he's coming back. He wants to say he wants something else. But he just said, why didn't you teach your boy how to escape the body triangle? Oh, wow. Interesting. What did you say to that? I said, well, I mean, obviously you've got to learn how to finish a rear naked choke. Is that what you said? No, I didn't say that. I was laughing. But then they ushered us out. They were like, get out of here before the Aussie crowd attacks here, you know? What do you think about the body triangle position they were in? It seemed like for the first time, it seems almost like Volk was dominant in that position, which is kind of weird. I mean, damage is meant to trump control. MMA judging. Damage is the number one factor. Do you think the judges saw that? What did they score that as? I think they all scored four towards Islam. Three and five, two of the judges scored towards Volk's. One of the judges scored three for Islam. It was 49-46 for one of them, and the other ones were 48-47. I think, again, the confusing round was round two. I don't think anyone scored the body triangle round for Volk's, which I wish they had. Volkanovski was and is still arguably pound for pound greatest fighter in the world. How long have you known him? I don't know the first one. I met him before he was in the UFC when I used to live in Melbourne. He came down to train at Absolute. And then we really connected on Ultima Fighter. One of these guys who was going to bring to Ultima Fighter, Brad Burdell, pulled out last second. So he called me when I was in Puerto Rico, and he's like, do you want to coach on Tough for five weeks? And like I said, Puerto Rico was apocalypse now. I was like, yeah, get me out of here. So I jumped on that opportunity, and we were in Vegas five weeks together. Because he was meant to fight Ortega, and then he got hit with COVID real bad. Got stuck in, I think he was in hospital for maybe one to two weeks. And then before he flew back to Australia, they were like, all right, maybe we just do you guys as the Ultima Fighter coaches. So I jumped on board with that. And that's really when we've become close. Obviously, I was useful in the Ortega fight, helping him get out of submissions. He fought then Korean zombie Max Holloway. I basically just held the bucket at that point in the corner, a couple of striking fights. And then again, yeah, we had to tackle the Islam problem. So I did spend five to six weeks down there preparing for that. How did you tackle the Islam problem? Because you, somebody who barely knows anything about wrestling, having to help- Obviously, it doesn't take much, especially wrestling. Did the beard help? Or like what? In all seriousness, what were some of the key ideas that you worked on with Volkanovski to prepare for it? I had the help of Frank Hickman. Hickman was down there too, one of the Hickman brothers wrestling coach. So we were sort of like problem solving. I mean, basically we were confident in Volk's fence wrestling, his cage work. He's super good on the cage, super like under-respected in that position. And we knew that if you're able to take the scrambles to the cage, he would be effective against Islam. Because again, Islam is background in sandbow freestyle wrestling, but I mean, honestly, he's probably got the same experience on the cage as Volk. Obviously, some of those wrestling skills will translate very well to the cage, but the cage is still somewhat of a gray area and equalizer. And Volk's again, incredible ability to stand up, incredible defense on the cage, which you saw. We worked on strategies to get up and a ton of submission defense. Islam loves Kimuras, obviously rear naked from the back, arm bars, those are sort of in arm triangles, dominant submissions. But again, the guys he submitted, not crapless. Apart from Charles Oliveira. And again, Charles Oliveira was basically knocked out at that point, so it was still impressive he submitted him. But again, I always told people this, they thought it was crazy. I was like, Charles Oliveira versus Islam in a grappling match, Oliveira is going to win that match. Like submission grappling. Submission grappling, yeah. So in a pure grappling skill set, I think Oliveira is a more dangerous grappler. So we didn't even come into it thinking Islam was this unstoppable boogeyman that people make him out to be. So we approached it from that, just focused on the techniques, ability to get back up, using turtle to get back up, using turtle to scoot to the cage to get back up and hand fighting from there, keeping it pretty safe. But what makes Vox so special, I think is his gas tank, gas tank and his willpower. He's just unbreakable. The Dagestani guys, Khabib, Islam, they are good at submissions, but they break guys mentally and they fatigue him. And then they take the submission that's offered. Oliveira is a guy that can jump on submissions and have an incredible technical ability to finish those submissions, whether you're fresh or you're tired. And then you combine that with Volkanovski, who incredible willpower, never gets tired. You're never going to break him. And as you saw, he only attempted one submission in the whole fight. Is that learned? Is that trained? Or are you just born with that mental toughness? It's a good question. I mean, he's like an anomaly, like the entire fight camp, not nervous at all, supremely confident. The whole fight week, completely confident. He just has an attitude like, oh, everyone cast me out, we'll see. You know what I mean? Islam, he's like, let's see. No doubt. No doubt at all. Super relaxed up until about five minutes before. And then he starts to amp himself up. He's like, you are not taking this belt from my family. He gets into that sort of mindset. He actually says that out loud. You can't teach that survival. He didn't even take a fight. Have you guys ever been pushed to the limit like that or broken in a grappling match? I'll do it in practice. I'll push myself to, I think I might pass out or die or something. As far as how tired you get. Because in a match- You try not to ever get close to that in a match. Yeah, you try to. Because it's important to understand where your exhaustion point is. But yeah, if you have to push to that limit in a match, you're probably doing something wrong. Like you see in matches where guys sprint the last minute, they try to win the match the last minute. And it's like, you definitely had some mistakes leading up to that if you have to go boss a wall. Okay. But has there been ever times in competition, especially early on, because you wrestled pretty hard and wrestling is pretty exhausting. Not wrestling, but wrestling style kind of thing. Going against the best people in the world. Yeah, I mean, I definitely, again, I think in practice it's important to do that hard work that way competition is much easier. I think if you red line in practice and you really push through that store, then once you're in competition and you're working with, you're being fresh in a comp, it's much better. Have you ever been to that thing where Dan Gable talks about always wanting to be to a place where you can't get off the mat? You work so hard in the training room, you can't get off the mat. I think he says he's failed at that in his career. He was always able to at least crawl off the mat. Yeah, I definitely never actually died on the mat, but I felt like I was going to die. What about you? Do you quit all the time? I get a lot of cramp. I'm like, you know what? You got me, man. Let's do this again tomorrow. Dude, if I'm asking Craig for a role, he's in the bathroom somewhere. Do you see the value of pushing yourself to that place where you're knocking on death's door? Yeah, but within safety, because obviously the most serious injuries occur when you're tired over training and stuff like that. I think taking a page out of what those MMA fighters do, especially Vox with his training, he's not necessarily pushing crazy in each round, but he's doing extra conditioning, assault bike stuff, crazy workouts outside. He does do some crazy training workouts, but all safe, very safe. When he's redlining like that in the training room, it's a very controlled, safe setting. I think to do that in jiu-jitsu against some of these lunatics out there that are trying to kill you, especially when you have a name, can be dangerous. Your approach to jiu-jitsu is don't warm up and don't try too hard. No, seriously. For safety. No, for safety, though. Yeah, longevity. And talk shit about Russians. I got it. I got it. I hear you. Oh, you mentioned cage work. It's interesting to you that you've learned over all this time about cage work. What's interesting about the dynamics of that? Are you talking about both the control in the dominant position, but also getting up from the bottom while you're against the cage, all of that? The added dimension of that cage, that wall being there, changes a lot of stuff. Obviously, in some ways, it's a much lower impact wrestling style because you can't be sprawled on. You can shoot. The cage is going to block their feet. You're going to be able to chase down their hips. It's just a completely different fight. Again, because of Islam's judo skills, that upper body control, you see, he's able to use against the cage, like the inside trips, the uchi mata style, haraigoshi throws. Obviously, those skills do translate. I think the cage is a great equalizer for a lot of things like athleticism and stuff. It takes away a huge speed advantage aspect of the fight. He's really good at standing up. I assume he learned all that from you and your instructional just stand up. We were so confident. I was like, you know what? Why don't we put this thing out a month before the fight? Maybe the illegal download hasn't made its way to Russia yet, but it was there for him. Can you explain to me what's in the instructional just stand up? What are the ideas? The old school way to stand up, people talk about the technical get up, the old Gracie put the hand, but that doesn't work. It hasn't worked for 20 years. If you look at everyone that gets up in MMA, they're using turtle to get up. They're using wrestling to get up, which is counter to what pure jujitsu says. They say, don't expose the back. Don't ever expose your back. I think jujitsu is a terrible way to get back to the feet because if you were to retain guarding a half guard or close guard, super hard positions to get up. You're basically putting yourself in a leg tuck for wrestling. I think you need to borrow from wrestling to learn how to get up in an MMA fight. So basically how to safely expose your own back while not allowing them to get hooks and use that to get back up or at least not allow them to get two hooks. That applies for MMA especially. For MMA especially because obviously striking is a factor, but if they are striking, they don't have locked hands around your body, means you are able to move. You are able to make an attempt to get back up. They have to choose between control, submission or strikes. Next from Reddit, why does Craig Jones push so hard for a bottom is bad jujitsu? What is so bad about playing bottom guard such as half guard or deli? Those are the two options. No one likes the bottom. Why would I want to get up? It's the question for all of you. Is the bottom a bad place to be? I mean, the bottom is bad if you don't want that guy on top of you. That's the way I look at it. That sounds like something a cowboy would say, but I don't know if that has much meaning. I think the point of jujitsu is both are dangerous, being on bottom and on top. I think the longer the match is, probably favorites the top guy more just because every movement the bottom guy makes is probably carrying your weight, carrying that gravity on top of you. So I think it's a bit more efficient passing from the top as opposed to sweeping from bottom. Bottom is reactive. Top is active. The top player decides how to engage, how to approach the guy. They can use angles, they can use footwork, they can throw the legs by. So it's an active position. Bottom is reactive. Reactive, you're going to get fatigued. I think it's very difficult to gas somebody out while playing guard, but I think it's very easy to gas somebody out when attempting to pass it. Well, you guys are talking about gassing people out, but is there more dangers from the bottom like in terms of submissions and all that kind of stuff or no? I'm back and forth because I'm a top player, but I understand the value of being on bottom. When I do play guard, bottom, I feel like the submissions come much easier. And when I'm on top, they come also pretty easy, but maybe I just take a different route. Fucking two cowboys talking about shit. Top on the straights, bottom in the shades. Yeah, there you go. What was the hardest part of the training camp for Volkanovski? You're just experiencing world-class MMA fighters training and giving your approach to jiu-jitsu of not trying too hard no matter what. I mean, from my perspective, there's a lot of pressure for that. That's a lot of pressure for me to go in and think that I could possibly figure out a way to help this guy address this guy that's basically never been beaten. I think he got knocked out once, but basically not really even been put in bad positions. You know what I mean? So that's a lot of pressure on me, especially because Volkanovski is such a great guy. Jiu-jitsu is different. You coach a guy who loses, he has time to tap, but in MMA, you could get severely hurt. There's a lot more weight in what you need to do as a coach. You have a greater sense of responsibility to their health and well-being. Obviously, I know Volk's kids. I know his wife. You know what I mean? They're putting faith in you to not just win the fight, but keep this man safe. From my perspective, a hell of a lot more pressure coaching him as an MMA fighter. So almost like the psychological aspect of doing the best you can for him. Exactly, yep, yep. What was the hardest about the actual training? Was it the technical aspect of trying to figure out the puzzle of Islam, or was it being a good training partner in figuring out how the grappling would work, basically playing your best impression of Makachev? Were you trying to actually impersonate him? Not just visually, but in style? Yeah, definitely, definitely visually. You're not as good looking, but go ahead. A little taller, but in terms of the training, yeah. Islam's known as incredibly strong guys. Obviously, I'm heavier than Islam, so theoretically, I should be able to replicate that strength difference. Then in terms of grappling, targeting those submissions that Islam does, focusing on those in the training room, focusing on the way he holds half guard, and really in the grappling sense trying to replicate him on the ground. Then yeah, I wrestle with him on the wall a ton, trying to replicate, obviously to the best of my ability, a lot of the stuff he does on the wall. Body lock heavy, inside trip, uchi matas, and just constantly putting the work on Vox, you know what I mean? Constantly chaining attacks against him, really replicate that. As he's trying to get up and escape and all that kind of stuff. As well as both judo and submissions, just attack and attacking. Exactly. There's only so much you can do, really, because obviously he's been fighting a long time. It's like you're trying to polish what he already is good at. You can't just completely create an entirely new game for him in the space of six weeks. You're trying to take what he's already effective at, add to it. Luckily, a lot of the stuff he's already very good at was easy to add to for the fight. Someone from Reddit, I'm very curious why other MMA fighters don't employ high profile grapplers from B-Team and New Wave to improve their grappling. That's from this subreddit. By now it's clear that they are levels above almost everyone in MMA, simply because fighters there don't specialize in grappling. But it doesn't seem like fighters, even champions, get training partners from the most successful teams. Why is that the case? In your experience, why doesn't Khabib call you? He might now. Put in a good word for me. Oh, I will. That's all right. He takes a joke pretty well. No, you'll be welcome with open arms. I think your average Jiu-Jitsu coach, MMA fighters have bad experience with Jiu-Jitsu guys. Jiu-Jitsu doesn't have a massive place in MMA. Obviously rounds, stand-ups, it's hard to submit people. Your average Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt doesn't know anything about holding a guy down, doesn't know anything about how to stand up. So I think if you overly utilize that Jiu-Jitsu guy that hasn't had experience in more modern no-gi or training MMA fighters previously, it's going to be a complete waste of time to them. I think they're smart enough to realize that. Do you have, and do you guys, do you have interest in MMA at all? It's not even like, well certainly just competing yourself, but just understanding the puzzle of MMA. Yeah. I mean, I've been a fan of mixed martial arts for a very long time before I trained Jiu-Jitsu. Personally I'd much rather coach than fight, but I mean, I'd fight somebody for a good check and I get to pick the opponent and have a proper camp. Okay. I can think of a good opponent. Who's that? All right. Who do you think is the greatest MMA fighter of all time? Craig, we can start with you. Just as a fan of the sport, as somebody who's been deep in it. I mean, from my perspective after that performance, I'm going to say Volkanovski because he was able to decisively outstrike Max Holloway, one of the greatest strikers in the sport, and he was able to hang with the wrestling of Islam Akhachev. In terms of Ortega, he was able to survive Ortega who has some of the most dangerous submissions in Jiu-Jitsu. So I think in my opinion, technically he's the best. So even though he technically lost, he still has a crown. I believe so. He's proven himself. Given the size difference, given he's moving up in weight, I think all those factors really- The underdog, everything, the pressure. Did you think he would be able to hang in any of the wrestling exchanges with Islam? No, no, no. I was really surprised. That's why in my eyes, it's kind of funny, winning at the end of the day, I feel like judges influence that. Although I did think Australian judges would rob the other way, but I was assuming they kind of, somebody paid somebody and not enough maybe. But in general, I just thought he won sort of in the eyes of what martial arts stands for. Sort of go into the fire and survive and thrive and finish the last round strong, which is kind of spiritually is what a victory is. So I wish he would kept going. One more round. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing. What about you? What do you think? Who are the fighters you admire? Who do you think is the greatest of all time? I think the fighter I paid most attention to was Jon Jones. He has a great ability just to mix the high level striking, high level grappling. Although his jujitsu by itself probably isn't super high level, but his ability to mix everything together, I would say he's the best. And he's a fellow heavier guy, heavyweight now. So it's nice to see how those guys move at that weight. And a fellow natural athlete. See what I did there? All right. What about you, Nicky? Yeah, if I had to pick a goat, I would probably have to say Khabib just because he was undefeated and he had a very high finishing rate. Very few of his fights actually went to a decision. So he just overall, he dominated almost every single opponent he went against. The dominance. I mean, we've been joking about it, but Craig, what do you think makes the Dagestani fighters so good? Like from this small region of the world, so much dominance has come. I mean, obviously the amount of freestyle wrestling champions from that region probably puts their wrestling above and beyond the best in all of MMA. And obviously a lot of, even in the Olympics, a lot of champions out of there. So I think that skill set combines with them adding effective pin controls on the ground and jujitsu submissions. But again, I think it's that hard training. Those guys like Khabib would maintain that pressure throughout the entire fight and break guys down. So to fatigue guys to a breaking point, I think is something they do best. I wonder what that is. Is that technique? What is that? What is it about their upbringing? Because it's just that part of the world. What were the Setia brothers on the freestyle wrestling side to all the mixed martial arts people? It must be part of the culture also. They must be doing something. I haven't seen a convincing explanation of why yet, of what's specific about their training, what's specific about their culture that creates that. Okay. What do you think about the flip side? Do you admire somebody like Conor McGregor who knows how to create a spectacle? You Craig, who likes spectacles? Spectacles, yeah. I mean, I really admired early Conor McGregor because I found him absolutely hilarious. I felt like that was peak banter. I feel like he just took the American world by storm. Aussies, British, Irish, Kiwis, I believe we have a way better level of banter and attacking each other. And it's almost too easy to pick on Americans that take themselves very seriously. I mean, arguably even other parts of the world too, the far East of Europe. But that's the tricky thing with Conor. I think he was, I feel like you could have gotten in the same kind of trouble because the Russians really took everything very seriously. They weren't joking around. Yeah, that's the problem. It's like it's a bit of, I mean, some things he definitely takes too far, but I felt like early on he had the right balance where he wouldn't really cross the line, but he would do enough. He just took it to another level obviously later in his career. But I think early on, a bit of innocent banter. It gets a lot of eyes in the sport though. He's probably by far the most popular combat athlete of all time because of that. I feel like you have to cross the line. I don't think enough people appreciate the values he's brought by crossing the line. He's making a sacrifice crossing the line. That's going to affect him for the rest of his life. I see. I don't think so. I think he can always walk back. Because I think unlike, people might disagree with this. I, well, yeah, I thought he always radiated a respect for the opponent afterwards. And underneath it, it felt like the same way you do. When I hear you shit talking, I don't see a person who really means it. I see a person who's having fun with it. I always saw Conor McGregor the same way. I don't know. But people took it extremely seriously. But I saw the respect, the common respect that martial artists have for each other that felt like it was always there. If you don't like that individual, you're going to perceive what they say more negatively than if you obviously were. So I feel like if you like someone, you're going to never think they really crossed the line. That's true. So you're saying I like you. That's why I perceive you. You're bullshit in a positive light. Are there people that hate you? I mean, some of the family members at this table. As far as students. People that really get to know you all hate you. The fans love me. The friends hate me. That's a good place to be. Keep your enemies close. All right. What do you think is the most important muscle for jiu-jitsu? Is it biceps? I think a strong back. I think back one, core second, and then biceps. Okay, biceps. Cool. Do you legitimately think weightlifting helps jiu-jitsu? It's kind of the discussion on the steroids. It's like the muscle mass and strength and power and explosiveness, all of that. I think sometimes when we're at that upper echelon of competition, there's little minute battles that you have to win. If you're relatively close in technique, then a lot of times a stronger opponent pulls it out. But it could be also just a limitation, right? You hold position too long. What about for hobbyists? Do you recommend weightlifting? Like when you see people in the gym? I always recommend weightlifting. I almost see muscle as the body's armor. The more armor you have, the more damage you can kind of take, and maybe recovery is a little bit better. I've always seen weightlifting as a means to stick to my routine. There's no point in lifting if you're not eating right and you're not sleeping right. So if you kind of put it all together, then it's beneficial. What about you guys? Do you go to the gym? I go to the gym, yeah. Believe it or not. Do you go to the hotel gym to use an elliptical and that butt machine? Yeah, I focus on the glutes heavily. All right. What about injury prevention and so on? How do you train to minimize the risk of injury? You guys have all been pretty beat up. You've gotten a major injury with the ACL. So how do you train to minimize injury? Probably not the right guy to ask, eh? Actually, can you talk through your injury? Like what happened? Yeah, so about one week prior to this last ADCC, I was wrestling with this guy named Kenta who was also competing. I went to go lift him from like a rear body lock and he hooked the outside of my leg and we just felt something pop. He felt a shift with his leg. When it first happened, it hurt for like the first 30 seconds and I honestly debated. I was like maybe it was just some freak thing. I literally thought about continuing the session. Then the next day, I woke up and it was like super sore. I was limping around, couldn't do a full squat. So it pretty much killed all of my training for the entire week leading up to the event. So I couldn't train or anything. Messed up the cut. Obviously, there's added nerves with that too when you're not in the gym every day leading up to the competition. I went out there. I wasn't really able to pull guard because I couldn't get full heel to butt connection which is inevitable with playing guard. I was very hesitant to shoot as well. So I came out with the idea of just trying to use hand fighting to tire my first opponent out and then mainly look to get to under hooks or over hooks and do mostly upper body wrestling. In the beginning of the match, I successfully got to an under hook. I got to a rear body lock. He tried to roll and I ended up in top position in side control. But it was during the no points period. Then as the match went on, I gassed out and eventually he ended up taking me down and then scoring with two hooks on the back. So what's the injury? Yeah, so I got an MRI actually after the event. I didn't know- Wait, wait. You waited until after the event? Yeah, I waited until after- Because like knowledge or ignorance is bliss? Yeah, exactly. I was like, honestly, I don't even want to know what's wrong. I was like, I just go out there, compete. I knew it was like the biggest event to date and I really wanted to do it. Think about not doing it? It definitely was a thought in my head, especially that the day after, it's always the worst day whenever you have a serious injury is the day after. I was like, man, I really can't do a full squat. I was like, I don't even know how I'm going to be able to do this. It got a bit better as the week went on, but I was like, man, I have to go out there and compete. I was like, it'll always be in the back of my mind, what if I ended up pulling out? What did you think about this whole- I thought he was just being a pussy. Just slap him around, just yell at him. I don't think we pressured you. We just say you make your own decision. We're just like- Is that a tricky thing to do with a serious injury like this? We don't know. We didn't know. That was the thing. We didn't know. Honestly, initially I thought it was, I tore my lateral meniscus, but that ended up not being the case. It ended up being a full ACL tear. I was actually super surprised when I got the MRI results. We didn't know how bad it actually was. What do you think about that situation? I think Nicky's a tough kid. When you're so close to that competition, you don't get many opportunities like that to compete in front of 15,000 people. It's like, props to you for pushing through it and getting it. Man, he had a close match with one of the best grapplers in his weight class. A few adjustments here and there. Honestly, if he was able to train previously leading up to that match, I think Nicky pulls it out. Some of the things you mentioned is nerves. There's extra nerves just because you're underprepared? Yeah. Feeling underprepared. You want to go into a competition with the confidence, I did everything that I could leading up to this event. I trained as much as I could. Then when an injury prevents that, you start to doubt yourself more. How do you guys think about injury? How do you train? Training with the best in the world, training to be the best in the world, and avoiding injury? Because you tore your bicep? Yeah, I tore a bicep. Doing curls? Dude, honestly, I was bodybuilding for seven years. No lie, I trained biceps most days, almost every day in those seven years. Pretty much I injured myself. That's so Jersey, man. Anything else or just the biceps? No, no. Yeah, I injured the bicep. Pretty much the day before a wrestling practice, I had a killer arm day. By arm day, I just mean training biceps, very rigorously getting a sick pump. I go to wrestling practice the next day pretty late. I should have been there. I didn't get a proper warmup in. The first thing I do is I shake hands and I go to shoot a single leg. Boom, I just blew my arm out, the first movement I did. Just not being warmed up properly in addition to having a very vigorous arm day a few hours prior. You hear that about warmup? What are some lessons about avoiding injury and training it? I would say number one is warming up properly, making sure your body's hot before you do hot stuff. What does warmup look like for you? Is it jujitsu or non-jujitsu stuff? Yeah, just a warmup in general, I'll do something like a, if I'm talking competition, something like a jog walk back and forth a few times, then a sprint jog a few times to get that heart rate up and down. Then I'll grab a partner. I actually just filmed a DVD, an instructional specifically on the pre-match ritual. In addition to that, I'll grab a partner, I'll drill some movements. Typically, I'll drill some bad things. I'll start from bottom mount, bottom side control, work out from there. Pretty much 20 minutes in, I'm hot and I'm ready to go for rounds. What about you, Greg? What's the way to avoid injury? What's the worst injury you've had? What's the worst injury? I don't even know. I'm pretty good, pretty healthy. Whenever you quit practice, I'm going to have some mental issues. Has your heart ever been broken? Many times, many times. There's a thing I notice, people that spend the most time warming up, often the most injured. It's a strong correlation. You can't argue with science. I remember training with Oliver Tyson, Oliver Tyson would have a 60-minute warm-up. Surprise, surprise, always injured. Very common. I find that very common in the training room. I think people, it's how they train. If you, like me, first sign of discomfort, backpedal, push through that stuff. Go too hard, go when you're too tired, get too emotional in the role. I feel like those are the times that I've been hurt, where I just like, oh, I can't let this guy get me. When I have that attitude, I believe it's how you train. What does discomfort mean? Positionally too? Because you're training against some killers. You're training with him and going probably pretty hard. Craig gets a little tired, he's like, yeah, I'm good for today. Once a month with Nicky, that's it. And then you quit like 30 seconds in. Yeah, you know, you got to be safe. What about you? What have you learned from the ACL, Tara? Do rehab, yeah. Yeah, rehab definitely would help. Oh, so you haven't been like- I didn't get surgery, I didn't do essentially any rehab, I just have no ACL in my left leg. So what's it like having no ACL? The surgery goes, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL, you've got the ACL. Oh, I did feel like I've got to restart. I ran out of time? It's good, he's learned some valuable lessons about taking care of his body. Yeah. What's it like just training with no ACL? So at the beginning, it was definitely a little iffy. You know, I would have an occasional buckle. Like I'd just be wrestling with somebody and go to step back and it buckled backwards a bit. But honestly now, like I haven't had a single buckle instance in a while. It feels 100% normal when I train. It feels better than my other knee, to be honest. Like I had my meniscus taken out in my right leg and that one gets sore more often than the no ACL leg. Okay, all right. So putting that aside, is there wisdom you've learned from that experience? Yeah, definitely should be doing rehab and prehab. You know, I think that, you know, especially if you're a hobbyist or a professional athlete, you should be lifting, you know, whether you're rehabbing an injury or just for injury prevention. So I'm actually closer to Corey because I've trained my whole life, like pretty hard. Obviously just a hobbyist, but like twice a day, did judo, wrestling, all that. Never broke anything, never injured. Kind of like similar philosophy, except like last year, I guess a year and a half ago, I got a tiny like groin pull injury and it still hasn't healed. And I've been using your approach of not giving a shit. Yeah. And like, all right, surely this is gonna heal. It'll be fine, but it hasn't. But of course, if I was like an actual athlete, I would like probably still train through it and just fuck it, figure it out. But when you have other stuff going on, you just kind of wait it out. Yeah. But no, I think probably rehab, especially as you get older, you have to do that kind of stuff. I think it's important for people to, you know, determine whether what they're going through is an injury or they're just hurt a little bit. Because injury, you know, for sure, take time, rehab it and get better. But a lot of people like they'll stub a toe or something, like you're out for a few weeks, you know, so. Well, that's the problem with the injury I have. It feels like a stubbed toe. So I was like, all right, I'll just wait a couple of days. It'll be fine. And then a couple of days later, it's not fine. And you wait, and then I never got an MRI, never got any of that. It's like, I'm sure I'll be fine. Yeah, so it's hard to know sometimes, like what, it's hard to know. I feel like a lot of people will just not check it out, I'll be fine. Well, because there's several failure cases. There is a failure case of where everything is a stubbed toe. You're like, fuck it. Like you're bleeding everywhere. Yeah, it's fine, whatever. So you have to be careful. A lot of people can fall into that too. I think I'm in that category. Go to the doctor. Why do you go to the doctor? Your best approach is typically wait until something else gets hurt so that you'll forget about the grain. That's, yeah, exactly. That's what I was hoping. I was hoping to get hurt. Waiting for the broken heart, maybe. Okay, that was very helpful. Oh, you mentioned you're doing a whole thing on the pre-match ritual. Can you kind of preview what's involved in your pre-match ritual? It's pretty big in the wrestling culture and the fighting culture, like kind of what to do before your competition. But I think a few people are just kind of missing out exactly what to do. So I break it down for them. I break it down to people like four weeks in advance, how you should prep your training and your nutrition and your sleep for competition. In addition to that, I break it down even to a smaller scale of how early you should get to the event, when you should be visualizing your competition, what to do 30 minutes before, 20 minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes, and the kind of mentality you should have throughout those times before you actually step onto the mat. When are you visualizing? How much are you visualizing? When you say competition, you're talking about the tournament or the actual people you might be competing against? A little bit of both. I'll spend time just visualizing the crowd. Like if it's going to be an arena with 15,000 people, I'll spend time in practice and whatnot, like putting myself inside that arena and visualizing stepping on the mat and hearing the crowd scream and whatnot. That way, when competition time comes, it's kind of the same deal. I'm accustomed to it. In addition, when I get to the arena, I'll step on the mat. I'll kind of look at everything. I'll expose my senses to what it's going to be. And then I'll kind of shut everything off. Like some people, you know, scroll through their phone and can treat it like normal, have this normal conversations. For me, I like to limit my sensory input, my sensory intake before I go out and compete. I just feel like sometimes, I feel like sometimes we only have so many decisions you can make in a day. And I want all of my best decisions to be made when it matters, when it counts. What about you? Do you limit your sensory input? On game day? Honestly, no routine, nothing, eh? I don't know. Yeah, I don't do anything. I'm just like- This guy's a double silver. We're both double silver. You should buy his instructional. It might help you. I'll get another silver. No, honestly, nothing. Hey, I just try to relax, treat it like it's before training. Have a good time. Visualizations or no? No, no visualization. So the opposite of visualization. You just avoid it. Yeah, I don't even think about it. I'm just like, yeah, we'll have a good time. Try to appreciate it, that I can do it. By the way, when you visualize, are you visualizing tough positions or you visualize winning mostly? Definitely visualize winning. I visualize how I'm gonna get to my most dominant positions because in comp, I wanna do what I'm best at. And I'm also see, I see my opponent in his best positions and how I'm gonna escape those if necessary. But most of the time, I'm just visualizing exactly what I'm gonna do in that match. And I go out there and do it. Okay, so when your teammate, Craig, is another world-class athlete, has a fundamentally different philosophy than you, do you visualize being frustrated at him? No, not frustrated, but I'll definitely come into practice with solutions to problems that Craig gives me. If Craig's catching me at something or giving me issues, I'll go home, I'll watch a match that he lost for motivation and I'll come back and I'll put it on him. Just DM him like a highlight reel of him losing. Yep. What about you? Does it affect you that you're a bit of an outlier? Usually before I compete, right before I go out there, I go, why am I doing this? Do I still need to do this? And I think if I hopefully don't embarrass myself, affects my instructional sales, that's the last thought. But I don't even put too much thought into the whole competing thing. I'm just like, you know what, train hard, hopefully have a good time out. What about the motivation aspect? Like that voice that says, why am I doing this? That voice can break a lot of people. Like in the weight cut, it can break a lot of people. Like why am I doing this stupid, silly sport? Like you said, a bunch of dudes just rolling around, like what's the point? I'll call someone with a nine to five job and I'll be like, yeah, that's why I'm doing this. Avoid that. Sell those DVDs, man. Yeah, I didn't get too deep on competing. We're so polar opposite. It's like almost uncomfortable to be around you. Obviously, one of us is a clean athlete. You should do a DVD on that. What about you in terms of preparing for competition, Mickey? The day before, the day of, are there rituals that you follow? Honestly, like the few days leading up to it, it's different for me every time. Sometimes I'll warm up before I compete, sometimes I won't. Sometimes I'll fast, sometimes I'll eat. So it literally is just completely random. I don't follow any specific thing. But in the training room leading up to the competition, I'll definitely, like Nicky Rod, visualize that I'm walking out onto the competition mats. I'll pick somebody that's a similar body type to the person that I'm competing against. And then we'll start out with some distance between us. We'll come out, smack hands, and act like everything's a real competition. I'll even sometimes have corners that will yell out times and things like that just to replicate it as much as possible. That's funny because I've talked to a lot of Olympic gold medalists. They used to do a podcast with like athletes, and they all sound like Nicky Rod. The two of you are outliers. I don't know, sometimes I'll do this, sometimes. So anyway, but that's also Jiu-Jitsu culture, I think. Maybe the chaos of not taking things too serious is actually really, really helpful. Sometimes the pressure of taking everything way too seriously can break you. I mean, I just don't think it's that big a sport, really. You know, like- I think if I compete every day in practice, it just makes competition much easier. So I just put the pressure on there. On the competition, yeah, yeah. On the, sorry, on the training, on the competing and the training. I don't know, Olympic sports aren't that big either, financially, and people take it extremely, extremely seriously. Like you don't really get that much money from Judo. I mean, I just don't take Jiu-Jitsu that seriously because I was just partying and having a good time until 21. And then I was like, oh, fuck, do I get a job? Or do I pursue professional sports? And I feel like if I can make a career in Jiu-Jitsu with a decision at that point- And now you just stumbled your way somehow into being at the top of the world. Yeah, that's what I feel like. I just walked into it. I feel like I couldn't just do that in wrestling, boxing. I couldn't do that in other sports. What was the toughest match you ever had that pushed you mentally, physically, technically? This doesn't have to be the best person you face, but was there a moment in your career that was really defining for you? I mean, I would say the toughest mentally was just this last ADCC. I just had a big injury leading into it that kind of screwed the whole camp and weight cutting everything up. So yeah, I would say the last ADCC. Are you proud of your performance there? Like you stepped on the mat that you pushed through all of it? Like I said, I'm a very competitive person and I hate losing. So definitely not, yeah. You had a collapse lung. Yeah. I actually- Oh, man. He was so physically exhausted afterwards, couldn't breathe. We had to get medical intervention. He thought he had a collapse lung. So he goes- I was the most tired that I've ever been in my life in that match. I actually popped a blood vessel in my eye. I was trying so hard. He comes out, he walks off the ADCC mat backstage and I'm like, I'm kind of getting warmed up for my match. And Nikki run and come, he walks over, huffing and puffing. His mom's right next to me, he looks at her, he was like, I think I need help. I think I've got a lung collapse. That's not true. No, it's not true? My mom's the one that called for medical help. I was just laying on the warmup mat, fucking dying. Well, we're happy you're fine. Yeah. Laid it all on the line. What about you, Craig? Defining all toughest matches? I mean, they're all pretty tough. I don't know. I can't really pinpoint one. I mean, probably the most annoying one was obviously the one where I had Gordon Arnby, I was like, tap bro. And he wouldn't tap, so I let him out. Mentally, I was like, I shouldn't have done that. Do you ever have a thing in your brain where it says, should I shit talk now or not? And you say, no, I'm gonna be respectful? I just can't be serious about some of these things. I don't know, it's just silly. All of it, the whole thing. What about you, Nick? Dude, honestly, most of my toughest matches are in the training room. Because I started with these guys, I started training under them, started training at DDS when I didn't have any knowledge. I knew wrestling, I knew a knee cut in jujitsu, but I started training with them when I knew almost no jujitsu and then I had to really work my way up. So definitely in the training room, being like, having one of these guys on my back, or there's a stretch of a few weeks or months when COVID first hit and it was just like, four of the best grapplers in the world and we just did drilling and live rounds with these four guys and it was hard, it was very hard. Every round, doing six rounds, seven days a week with the best grapplers in the world. And it's like, you get no break and you're forced to learn on the go. So I think for me in the training room, that was definitely my toughest matches and that's where I built those mental calluses. There was a period where I drilled with Nicky Rod, probably what, nine months, 12 months? And typically speaking, like I said, no warmups, the first round we usually take it pretty easy. First round you start at mount. The whole room, the rest of the training room, they take mount very lightly. Me and Nicky Rod would be fighting to the death every day. I felt like we did an extra round every day. It was very grueling on the body. I'm very mean when I'm in the midst of drilling or live. We would drill wrestling quite a bit, like stand up. And in the drilling, I just wouldn't let Craig take me down. We're not gonna lie, we're just drilling, but I just wouldn't let him put me on the floor. So things like that. You know? I knew it would escalate. Yeah. So you mentioned mount, so you do positional training. So would that be the hardest versus live training, open, like starting from guard? I would say mount and turtle definitely, definitely made me very tough. Cause you spent all this effort getting off of bottom mount and then you gotta get on top of a guy. And at the time I'm not that good at holding guys down. So they escape quick and I'm like, fuck, I just tried to hold them down. Gotta go back down. Same thing with a turtle. It's like you start bottom turtle, you're trying to explode, get away. And then, you know, you switch and this guy gets up pretty quick. And you're like, damn, I gotta go right back down. It was that constant circle, man. It's very tough, but definitely, you know, build some character on the mat. What do you think is the value of positional training in general in Jiu-Jitsu? Actually, this one, just interacting with you guys, it's not commonly done in just like regular Jiu-Jitsu gyms. What do you see? Cause probably it's not commonly done cause it's so, most of the experience is just frustrating. Like if you're evenly matched, you're basically frustrated the whole time. If you're doing it right. It's a psychological battle that happens in like the mount and turtle rounds. It's like, you know, cause you maybe get close to subbing a guy and, or maybe you do sub him. You know, when you start on turtle and you're on their back, you finish them. And then you get this high point and then immediately you gotta go back down to defensive posture. It's very like, it's emotionally like up and down. So it's hard to deal with. Super important if you're one of the better people in the gym, because it just puts you in positions you don't find yourself in, in regular training. So I think like a lot of, if you're a big fish in a small pond, you don't do positional sparring. You're probably gonna get exposed in competition. You might even look silly in those positions. So you really have to force yourself to do it. Despite the fact that you're giving someone worse than you a position where they might catch you. So you have to sort of put the ego aside. Yeah, that's one of the things when I was training regularly, of course training with you guys, it's like trivial, but I didn't work on putting myself in bad positions when you get better and you regret it. Cause the big negative thing it has, consequence it has on competition is you don't take as many risks cause you're kind of afraid for your back to get taken, all that kind of stuff. That was me before I went to DDS. I remember I showed up there in that old position. I was like, fuck this. You better earn this position. Yeah, exactly. I didn't really have escapes. That was a learning curve for me for sure. Do you see the value in positional training or is it just the source of tremendous frustration? Yeah, I definitely think it plays a big part in your confidence when you step out onto the competition mats, being confident that even if you get put in the worst possible situations, you know what to do and know how to work out of them. So I had a long argument with Taja Gracie when you visited and he thinks mount is the most dominant position, even Nogi versus Beck. Is there a case to be made for that or no? I think all of your opponent's utensils, their tools are in front of them. So if you're on mount, there's a few ways to get out of mount. I think if you're on somebody's back, I'd personally much rather be on somebody's back than- Flattened out. I'd rather have someone's back and then flattened out. Boots in, flattened out, yeah. Boots in, flattened out. So not even body triangle, but just flattened. Just completely flat. Almost like the position in MMA where you see guys get finished because they can't get out. I think that position is probably the hardest position to escape. Can you see what Hodger's talking about with mount or is he just that good at mount? Like he says that. He might mean the gi, cross collar, you know? I don't know. Or did he mean that gi? He says controlling wise, he just believes that you can complete, that there's, he actually thinks there's more ways to get out from the back than there is from the mount. Prior to- Getting up, including like physically. Prior to the kipping escape, I would probably agree with him. But that kipping escape's so difficult to manage. It's the funny looking escape where your legs are wiggling. People have a lot of trouble. It's like super hard to learn how to do, but then once you learn how to do it, the effectiveness is just huge. Yeah, it's a weird one. When did that come to be a thing? Is that pretty recent? I mean, I saw DDS guys using it first, I think. Yeah, yeah. Who was the first guy to discover something like that? This seems like a ridiculous thing to discover. Yeah, like what if I just wiggle? I thought it was a joke at first. I was like, you guys really doing this? Yeah. All right. I remember somebody showing me a technique where if you just walk your hand on a mat or something like that. Like an arm triangle or something? Yeah, yeah. You're trying to walk the arm. Yeah, on the arm high. And it's just a funny discovery, as opposed to trying to shove it in, just walk it. I like doing that to people, but with things that aren't true. You know what I mean? I'll just tell them this is a technique and watch them try to work out if I'm being serious or not. Yeah, that's what you do when you achieve guru status. They'll just listen to you. Like you're Steven Seagal. See what they'll believe. Speaking of which, how do you balance, you have to travel all across the world. How do you balance that with running a school or being a world-class jujitsu athlete? I mean, the secrets of travel for me are two drugs, Xanax and modafinil. That's how we time adjust and we hit the ground running. But- What does modafinil do? Xanax puts you to sleep. Yeah, I mean, I have narcolepsy, so it's a narcolepsy medication. But- It's not good. How does that work with the steroids? How does it work? I mean, they work well together, you know? Yeah, nice. Focus and physical recovery. But in terms of traveling and training stuff, it is, I mean, we're lucky because we got so many high-level guys. So we can travel and they're still in good hands. I mean, it would be a problem if me, Nicky Rod and Nicky Ryan left and the gym had Ethan. That would be a problem. But we got to make sure it's not just him there. Yeah, I mean, although everyone says they're happy when you're gone. So that's the moment I heard. Happy when I'm gone, but they do miss me. Yeah. For sure, until I get back. All right, what about you? Just like balancing it. Do you try to stay completely focused on competing? Like for some of the big matches you have coming up, are you able to kind of diversify? Well, I like to, yeah, diversify my training to where, you know, if I don't have a competition scheduled, I'm more focused on skill development and getting better and broadening my tool shed. But, you know, if I'm like six weeks before comp, I really start amping up the intensity that I bring into the mats against bringing some of that visualization towards practice. And maybe I train less volume pre-competition, but higher output per session. Yeah, what's a perfect week of training look like? If I'm not in competition mode, I would say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, twice, every other day, just once. If I'm pre-comp, just Monday to Sunday, once a day. So that's on the mat, you're doing the full, like positional training, live training. Bicep curls. Oh yeah, I do a lot of bicep curls. Yeah, I lift a few times a week now. Yeah. Cardio or no? Cardio's all mat stuff. Cardio's all mat stuff. I do do some CrossFit workouts, like CrossFit's, I'll do like some EMOMs or some AMRAPs or CrossFit terms. That's for Instagram? Yeah. But yeah, CrossFit is a good way to kind of like push that threshold sometimes on the mat, cause I'm so good, I can't always get that full red line. So I'll hop in a CrossFit gym and I'll do some workouts that bring me closer to death. What about you, Craig? What is a perfect week in training look like? Like when you're back home training? I try to be at the gym twice a day, every day, when I'm back, just cause I travel a bit more than these guys. So I try to be there eight and 12 every day, hanging out in between. Usually, definitely, usually train both of those sessions, depending on how my body feels. So doing positional, doing every technique, positional, live? I should probably do more positional, but cause I'm just trying to work on wrestling and stuff, and especially leading up to the Volkanovskis last fight, I was trying to wrestle more and focus on those areas, even before I traveled over there, just some experimentation with some stuff. But yeah. How do you experiment with stuff? Like how do you, so there's like regular positional stuff, but when you have ideas, like where, do you do it in during the training sessions or do you do it outside of that? You get to get together with somebody? Usually every session I show up with something I'm thinking of. Usually something from top, maybe something from bottom, but, and then I just try to maybe pick the right people. Some people, obviously, I'm just fighting to the death with. It's not a good time to experiment. And then others, obviously you can play around with ideas on. Okay. What about you? What's a perfect week look like? Maybe, well, you said you're a hundred percent now. Yeah. So yeah, honestly, I have pretty much the same schedule as Nicky Rod. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do twice a day, every other day, once a day. And then normally noon practice is like our biggest class. That's where all the pros go in. So I tend to do more open rounds there. And then we have a 7 p.m. class as well, which is more hobbyist. And that's where I'll do my positional rounds and force myself to be put in bad positions. So you have a, what, you do 8 a.m., 12, like in terms of what B team has, 8 a.m., 12, 7 p.m. And the hobbyists are more 7 p.m.? Yes. Okay. Do you believe in overtraining? Do you think you can overtrain? I used to not believe in it, but then I got hurt. I was like, all right. Do you attribute that to overtraining? Like the bicep? I think, dude, I'm telling you, I trained, I lifted like a bodybuilder for like seven years. And by lifting, I mean, I was lifting seven days a week. And I trained arms most days. Like almost every day I would do like four or five sets and get a pretty good bicep pump in addition to my lift. I think that had to contribute somewhat towards my training. Fair enough. What about on the actual mat overtraining, like spending too much time on the mat? Psychological, physical overtraining? I think you can definitely overtrain, but it's more of a, like as your body's healthy, you have to make sure your mind is sharp. Like sometimes maybe taking a day away or even diverting your attention in a different aspect of training can help you be a little bit sharper overall. Sometimes it can be like, it can get a little like stagnant because you're doing the same stuff over and over. But I think if you just keep like overtraining, then your overall baseline just gets higher and you become accustomed to that. What about you? You don't seem like a guy that over... I've heard of him. Never been close to it. No, I think controlling how hard you train is definitely protects you from injury. You know what I mean? Like if you're redlining yourself and then you're fighting to the death in the gym, that's a hundred percent when you're gonna get injured, gonna get sick. So I try to make sure I've had enough sleep. I've had obviously enough food post-training and that sort of helps me to train a bit harder, but still try to avoid redlining myself too much. I think established also like what days are gonna be your peak days? Cause you're, throughout the week, if you're training seven days a week, you're gonna have ups and downs. Like for me personally, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, usually my best days. And besides that, I also have other great days. All my days are great, but Monday, Wednesday, Friday are also great. You're like, I'm able to admit that some days are rougher than others. I'm always on bro. Okay. What advice would you give to people who are not always on? Hobbyists, how to get better. Like people that are already there. I don't know, purple bells, brown bells, black bells. There's just like doing like a couple of times a week or something like that. How to get better. I think being consistent, like find a schedule that you can consistently train. Maybe it's like, you know, three, four times a week or even a little bit less, just be consistent over the years. I think too often people are like, oh, I wanna get really good really fast. And it's like, definitely takes a long time to get to where you wanna be. What about what you're doing during like, while being consistent, what kind of stuff you're working on? So honestly, I think one big thing for me, which is something I actually started doing once B-Team was formed, was filming all of your rounds and then watching it every day. Because then you can see what specific problems you're having, and then you can base your positional rounds around those problems. That's really interesting. It's kind of depressing though. Yeah. Like sometimes I have to, you know, I edited this podcast for a long time. I still do in part, and I hate the sound of my voice and like what I look like and stuff. But it does make you better. Yeah. And I also hate the sound of Craig's voice and what he looks like. So editing this podcast will be especially difficult. This will be doubly difficult. But I'm glad the rest of you are here. I don't know. That's a real... Do you watch competition footage of yourself? Like to analyze? Like to see? Yeah. It's my confidence. That's fucking good. While you're doing curls? Yeah. I'm trying also to watch it to boost my confidence. Is there advice you, Craig, you would give for hobbyists to get better? I mean, just not every round has to be a fight to the death. You know? I feel like you're going to get injured, better to have that way. You're not going to learn as much. It's tough. I would say just as a black belt who took Jiu-Jitsu very seriously for a very long time. Basically, when you become a hobbyist, your skill is basically slipping. Your age and your skill. And so not taking stuff seriously is actually its own psychological skill of like... It's tough. It's tough. Like it's tough in a way that is different when you're like a blue belt or something that if you work hard and you train correctly, you're going to get much better. Here, you're kind of... You're looking downhill. You're looking downhill. You're like, yeah, I guess I'm going to enjoy the art of it. Reframe the victory. You know, like if it's a young upcoming guy and he comes to me, you're like, well, that's a moral victory, you know? Yeah, but then that has to happen. You have to be able to not do that to avoid the injury sometimes. Like if you want... So yeah, it's a different thing. Plus with me, just because some people recognize me, they... They're coming. You have that probably. You guys definitely obviously have that. I've solved that problem. How did you solve that problem? Travel around, you do a seminar, anything like that. Yeah. It's believable that you could get submitted once. Yeah. But if they catch you, give them a few. Yeah. If people tell their friends they submitted me to a seminar, one time, believable. Yeah. They got me four or five times. Four times, yeah. You've robbed them of that. Okay, that's pretty funny. But it's also... They have this energy, like they think, you know, they're coming in hot. And I usually like to just basically get submitted quickly twice. And just, it changes everything. It makes it more fun. I've noticed that. Let them submit you twice? Yeah, just like very quickly. What are the options? We're not saying you're not. Make it last longer. Hold off. But then it's like, it's very hard to like, yeah, if you're a very serious competitor and so on, you take it seriously, then yes. But like, then people go... People, what they try to do, this probably is what happens to you guys, they try to impress you by going super hard. I have people every day come to my gym, try to take me out. Yeah, gotta stay sharp. Come to practice, let's get it on. Do you feel that energy? I feel like I need to talk to Craig here first. Like at a seminar, like somebody is coming in like really hard, like a brown belt will come in, and they really want to impress you with like their technical side, they're a big fan. They've been watching your DVDs. Like, what do you do with a guy like that? I make a complete joke out of the row. You know, give them the pause, mess with them, do stupid shit. Like, rub them of the realness of it. Because it's stupid, I'm not gonna roll hard with strangers. You know, I feel like you should roll with a circle of people you trust. Injuries happen rolling hard with strangers because that's the same way you get injured in competition because you don't have that relationship with them. And I should also mention, that's probably not a good way to impress somebody by just going ape shit, going 100%. Oh yeah, not at all. I think the beauty of Jiu-Jitsu is like the camaraderie of it. Like, as you get to know each other, there's like technical, like different ideas you have and all that. Yeah. Okay. Do you think Gi Jiu-Jitsu is dying in popularity, Craig? Yeah, it's long dead. I think it's just, I mean, it just shows like, I mean, I have heard some numbers on the viewership for the Gi Worlds finals, and they don't even compare to the undercard of like who's number one events. So I think like, when I was coming up and competing in the Gi all the time, you looked at those guys that won Black Belt World Championships and you were like in awe of them. It almost had that ADCC champion feel, but now that's not the case. You know, I just feel like that, the younger generation aren't looking at who's winning Black Belt, Gi Worlds. I personally don't think, and I don't think they're like, they wanna be that guy. They wanna be like a Rotolo, Gordon, you know, those are the people they wanna emulate. So you think like the Gi, like Abj.J.F. Gi tournaments will just keep declining popularity? I think people will still do it. I mean, it's easier, I think, as you're over 30, because the Gi's a bit of a slower thing and the Masters participation is bigger in the Gi, because obviously in no Gi is now heading in a wrestling direction. Wrestling and heel hooks, you're over 30, that's a terrifying prospect, you know? What's terrifying about the Gi? Less. So I think in a participation rate, the Abj.J.F. will still be good, but I just don't think people are as interested as they used to be. Well, why is wrestling and heel hooks terrifying? Like heel hooks, I can vaguely understand if you don't understand heel hooks. You work a desk job and you've never wrestled and a guy double legs you, that's gonna probably break your back. You know, I think the older guys are scared of wrestling. It's hard to wrestle at 40. To learn wrestling at 40. Is it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's even just hard in general to do wrestling at 40, but it's easier to pull half guard in the Gi at 40. I think it's hard to do Judo at 40 and people still do it at 40. Judo hurts more. Judo's scarier than all of them. Yeah. I think, does wrestling really hurt at 40? I don't know. I don't know, I'm looking at you. Yeah. It does, interesting. I mean- I feel, I agree with you saying that Judo looks like the most dangerous. Like even their practice partners, they're just getting slammed flat. I don't know. Yeah, I did. I mean, I did Judo for a really long time. There's a lot of people that are 40, 50, 60 do Judo and they get- They're the ones that are still alive though. That's true. Survivor bias. You do a little bit of Judo, right? Me, I'm a yellow belt. You're a yellow belt in Judo? I should be an instructor. Promote you to orange. I got a yellow belt in the sixth grade. I believe it was the sixth grade. I did it for about, I don't know, six months. But you're also using Judo in competition, basically. Are you doing like Harai type throw, like you're doing- Yeah, I don't know where I learned that. I just started doing it. You just started lifting your leg in various ways until it worked? Just figuring it out, yeah. Okay, doing different kinds of trips? I looked at the sandboat guys doing it. I was like, can't be that hard. Yeah. Gave it a crack. Well, they looked at your foot locks and they said, that can't be that hard. They said, can't be that hard. Ban it from the tournaments. All right. What do you think is the best takedown in Nogi Jujutsu? Like what, like if people were trying to train for competition and so on, like where you see the trends heading? I think those foot sweep is like catching fire nowadays. See a lot of foot sweeps, foot sweeps and arm drags. I would say pretty popular in our sport. Arm drag. Just arm drag to, okay. Arm drag either to get them, like get to behind them or even just to cause reactions, make them pull away and we can start reattacking. Are you talking about it in a context of what's the best takedown to score? What's the safest takedown to mitigate the risk of guillotine submission or most effective in general? Yeah, most effective combined. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately it's about scoring. I think any sort of body lock, you know what I mean? Locking your hands around the body, you've been able to put it to the floor that way. I feel like that's most effective, safest. Might even have arisen out of a leg attack, a leg entry, upgrade to the body. What about like foot sweeps, like outside foot sweeps? What do we? I would say, yeah, you know, foot sweeps from outside foot sweeps, or even like something like you're tossed on a poor body and you're sweeping the foot. Yeah, those are all pretty safe. See, why is that scary? I don't understand. It's not scary at all. I think it's the lifts that are scary. The lifts, yeah. Who's lifting people? Rebuttal, return. No, not you. I mean, in master, like, we're talking about older guys doing no gi. Some of those old bosses take it very serious, you know? They just start lifting. TRT Welts. TRT Welts. They're coming. They're coming to impress. Gravel lift, all right. Just for the gram. Okay. What about submission? What's your favorite submission? And what do you think is the most effective submission? Except the buggy choke. I would have to say the rear naked. It's definitely the one that's hit the most and the highest level of competition. Was that, that was pretty interesting to see you escape all that and to put it on. That's the cool thing about EBI, to see, like, the world-class athletes. I was surprised that it's possible to escape with you on his back. You gotta try some B cream. Oh, yeah. B cream? Yeah, does it helps? Mm-hmm. What's in the, what's the formula? Or is that a secret? That is a proprietary blend, for sure. Okay. But that's what you use for greasing. That's what you greased before. Allegedly. Allegedly. Does it have other application outside of grappling? Or? I mean, I'm sure you can get creative. All right. Thanks. Asking for a friend. Is that RNC for you as well? Rear naked? Rear naked choke, I mean, overall favorite for, like, solidifying a finish, because, like, you can put somebody to sleep, right? Even if they don't want to tag put them to sleep. But as far as, like, something I've been working on now that I'm now starting to implement in competition, Yoko Senkaku side triangle is, like, it's a beautiful thing. You have multiple options. You have the triangle to finish. If that fails, you have the Komori. You could break the arm. You could also just transfer and take the back. So Yoko Senkaku, I'm a big fan of, and I continue to progress and get better at it. Have you ever broken anyone's arm? Oh, yeah. I mean, the first few competitions, because I was, like, a pretty athletic wrestler going against, like, local black belts and brown belts. Like, one of my first matches, I broke somebody at Komori. Pretty much every time I've got a heel hook, which is only twice I've broken an opponent. If I have a joint lock, it's probably going to break. Like, a lot of times it breaks before they tap. Yeah. You seem like a really friendly fella. How hard is it to break an arm? Or break a joint? Well, I don't think it's that hard. I think, like, if you're talking about an arm bar, we have this position to where, like, people are kind of holding on, holding on, and then it slips and their arm starts going, and then it just breaks before they even, you know, get a chance to tap. I love this point. My knee bar had a guy and he didn't tap one time, and it was actually, it was surprising. I had to put a lot of force into that, as opposed to arms, shoulders, and the ligaments in the knees and ankles. But to fully, this kid, Sambo kid, fully let it go. And he tapped it out. I think the angle is, like, up here. They're built different. Hopefully he can be reconstructed different. He's rebuilt different. Yeah. All right. What about a straight foot lock? You've ever, do you guys do straight foot locks at all? Or no? Yeah, I mean, I'm learning them now. We had some kid come into practice one day, and like, fucking full on, all of us, dude. With a straight foot lock. Straight foot lock. Just this little, like, Polish kid. Not only did he foot lock everyone, but he told the entire world. He sent out fucking emails, called his friends and family. We practically put a hit out on him in practice, and he just sucked everybody. Yeah, it's always interesting when you get, like, yeah, people that specialize can surprise you, that this could be effective stuff. Do you think there's other stuff that could be still discovered in Jiu-Jitsu? Like, what areas do you think are ripe with techniques to discover? Like, wrestling is really interesting now. There's a lot of innovation happening in wrestling. I think there'll be more innovation when we get people that are more adamant about standing up from bottom position. I think if we get more of the community, they're like, all right, I wanna get off the bottom. I think- D to D, just stand up. Just stand up. How Jiu-Jitsu doesn't work. We actually changed the name. How Sambo doesn't work if you just stand up. Did you really? All right. I'll change it to Jiu-Jitsu when I pirate it and send it for free to the entirety of the Soviet bloc. And Nicky Rod, do you think ego is useful for martial arts, or does it get in the way? Okay, I think you need to use it in both ways. For sure, have an ego, like if you're training competition mode, but also it can prevent you from learning it and progressing if your ego is too high. Like, you really have to shut the ego down when you're in the mode of learning and trying to develop skills, because you're gonna put yourself in these bad positions. You're gonna have issues with training partners that aren't necessarily up to your skill level, but because you're in these bad positions, you have to make these certain sacrifices. And for sure, ego can be a good or bad thing, but if you're able to shut the ego off and learn, then that'll have huge progression when it's time to put the ego into use during competition. When's the last time you shut the ego off? It's been a long time. I'm not sure. What about you, Craig? I mean, you seem to be super easygoing. Is the ego just not part of it? Oh, for sure. I just don't want anyone to know they've damaged my ego. You have to suppress it deep down. There's a child underneath all of it crying, always. For sure. I think ego is good for a bit of perseverance. Like it'll help you stick it out against a tough battle with a training partner, for sure. A bit of ego's on the line. Plus, the band's at back and forth. We're trying to stir each other up a bit. Talk some shit, yeah. I think that helps hone sharp in the ego a bit. What about you? Do you seem like a super humble guy? Is there a monster underneath? It's a total act. Yeah. Who's in the basement? I think ego's a big motivator. I think it's very good to have in the aspect that it'll drive you to want to be one of the best in the world. But like Niki Rod said, you need to be able to turn it off in the training room and force yourself into bad positions where you may not be winning. Are there like, Don Hurst mentioned Boris. Are there like grapplers, like Boris? This is a question from Reddit, actually. Boris-like characters, anybody you've trained with in the past who doesn't compete but is just an absolute beast in training? Like people you've met that are just like. Well, somebody that I think has probably the best submission grappling in MMA. I think like Gilbert Burns is, his submission grappling is very, very good. I trained with him early on in my grappling career and I was really impressed by his ability to move, hold down opponents that are trying to stand up. And as a whole, he can get submissions and put people away. Have you, when's the last time, have you trained with him recently or no? No, it's been a few years. Which is impressive ability to submit, you're saying? Yeah, like, I mean, you would see, I'd see Gilbert go against a few pretty decent black belts in the room and fare well. And maybe he gets to their back, puts a choke in, and it's like Gilbert's super high level grappling or submission grappling. Yeah, but he's pretty widely recognized as a monster. So I don't know, you didn't really answer the question. It's like you're not even listening anymore. I don't remember what was the question. Doesn't matter. All right, well, is there people, like you've done all these seminars. Are there just, especially in the Eastern block, the UC, like you went to Kazakhstan. Is there killers out there that? Oh yeah, there's tough guys out there. Obviously, I don't remember the names, nor could I pronounce it if I did. But definitely some tough guys out there, obviously carrying skill sets over from wrestling for sure. Not Sambo, but wrestling. Wrestling, but yeah, are there just people that surprise you that just don't compete, that are really good? Are there, have you met those? I feel like it's less so today, because there's so many more athletes in the sport. But definitely when I was coming up, back like in Australia and stuff, there were guys I'd train with that wouldn't compete, and that would be like super tough rounds for me. Yeah, and there's so many more avenues for competing in general, so yeah. What about you? Have you met some monsters? Yeah, one guy I could think of in particular is Jason Rau. He trains up in Long Island, I think, right? Opened up his own gym out there. Vanguard. Vanguard, he used to compete, but he would never be able to compete at the same level he would train at. So now he's just focused on mainly opening up a gym and teaching his students. But he was a guy that was extremely good in the training room, world class. I still think to this day he's legitimately one of the best in the world, but just doesn't compete anymore. Who wins in a fight, a lion or a bear? Polo bear? This is for you, Reddit. No, not a polo, well yes, it's a good question. See, polo bear is pretty impressive. No, grizzly bear. Grizzly bear. I think a grizzly bear wins. Well, who is the most threatening predator in Australia? Well, I mean, it's a tricky question here because everyone's scared of the animals in Australia, but I mean, you get bitten by a snake, you get bitten by a spider, that's not that bad. Bear, America, bear will just hold you down and eat you. That's a much more terrifying prospect for me. Even sharks, sharks gonna be quick. No one sees the shark coming, the shark's just gonna bite you in half. A bear will take a bite and chew. A bear just holds you down and eats you. So that's frightening for me. Australia is a bunch of just weird shit that can kill you. Did you see Cocaine Bear, the movie that's coming out? I saw the trailer, it looks good. Yeah, yeah, so there's not every bear. There's like black belts and there's black belts, there's bears and there's bears. So I think that's what they often don't talk about. Everybody puts lions and bears in the same category. I think there's just some weak bears. A lion would kill a black bear, I think. Not every black, again, I'm trying to tell you, there's difference. But grizzly and polar bear, I'm betting on those. Yeah, no, I think grizzlies have the size, but actually every video I've seen of grizzlies, they die out within like 20 seconds. They get bored. That's the gas tank? Yeah, the gas tank. That's a Nicky Ryan gas tank, right? Yeah, that's all they got. Tree mold. And they try to just take a breather. Like there's these crazy fights between bears and they last like 20 seconds. I heard this story about a Russian family that was attacked by a bear in Russia and killed the dad. And it took so long to eat the daughter, she made three phone calls to her mom while I was eating her. And the first call, the mom thought she was pranking her. That's crazy. That's way scarier than- Yeah, that's terrifying. Give me a snake bite any day. They're playing with food. Yeah. You know what, let me change the question. If you had to fight a bear or a lion, how would you try to defeat it? Do you think you have a chance at all? Well, I think I'd attack a lion a little bit differently than I'd attack a bear. What would be the difference? Okay, well, I've seen this video where lions are eating and you have three like screeny guys walk up behind them and kind of scare the cat off of their food. I think maybe I produce some props, scare the lion away. But if I have to fight it straight on, I mean, the thing is that even if you take the back, like you can't like bite it or choke it, the mane is too big to lock your hands around. Are you sure about that? No, the mane is just hair. Yeah, the mane is just hair. Yeah, it's thick hair. It's like matted hair, right? I don't know. So I think- You think you can maintain back control on a lion? Maintain, yeah, yeah. But getting there, I think I fake high, go low. Make them think I'm going for the foot or something, a little paw sweep, and I take the back. What about a bear? I feel like they're easier, that might be easier to take, to hold back control. Yeah, maybe. The thing is if the bear falls on its back, it's just gonna crush it. It's so big, substantially bigger than a lion, right? Like a full grown grizzly. And they're also like terrifyingly like loud with their roars and stuff. Yeah, I think, so first of all, if I saw a grizzly, I'm like, all right, he's gonna attack me. I try to yell a little bit louder than them, maybe their turn a little bit, like give them a, huh. Yeah. And then, yeah, for sure, I try to get behind it. I probably go like something weird, maybe like pull the eyes out or something, you know? For sure, I mean, I'm going for the vital organs. Play dead. Play dead. And then we'll check it. There's no pride in that. Wow, pride even matters. See the ego, the same advice you gave, you gotta put the ego aside with a bear. Even then, even then. How would you fight a bear or a lion? Just play dead? Play dead, yeah. Could you beat a kangaroo? Come on, tell me that joke. A kangaroo. Oh yeah. Kangaroo? I'd beat the shit out of a kangaroo. Dragon? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, are we boxing gloves? We just like. How would a kangaroo attack a human? Try to kick him with the claws. Knock him down and then they choke him. Stand on that tail. Do the kangaroos do? They choke each other, yeah. They don't choke each other. You don't believe me? You wanna watch a video? They choke each other out. I've seen this, yeah. Yeah. Is it real? Yeah, yeah. With which? With headlock or what? Yeah, they knock him and just grip like this and hold him. What's the grip? Just the tail. They have like little paws. How are they gripping? I promise you, I'm not lying to you. Pretty sure I've seen the video. They also do strange shit. Like if there's a predator around, they'll wait in a pool of water. And then if it comes to attack, they drown it. They're pretty smart. Okay, speaking of which, what's the most effective martial art for winning a street fight? You talked about rule sets and streets. I think you've talked about being a street, have you ever been in a street fight? Yeah, just one. Yeah. Nothing special, nothing crazy, hey. Yeah, you don't talk about that time. Like for self-defense purposes, what would be your strategy on the street? What's advice? I feel like whoever wins the street fights, whoever's willing to take it the furthest, the fastest. You know what I mean? If you're thinking that you're gonna box and he's biting you, poking your eyes, that guy's gonna win. He wants it more. You know what I mean? That's why the crackheads fight. They go for the kill straight away. So I feel like it's more about who's willing to do the most that's gonna win that fight. Fastest, the most fastest. Who's got the least to lose, you know? Okay, we can also define winning differently because you could also run away. But in terms of technique wise, wrestling, Judo. I think if it's a one-on-one, I'd go wrestler wins. But if it's like a multiple people, you gotta go Muay Thai, stay on your feet. Can't go down to the ground if it's more than one person. Yeah, big double leg maybe. Yeah, double leg, put him asleep on the impact, right? Forehead to the ground. Yeah, what's the goal here? Is to win the fight and not go to prison? I haven't thought of it through that way. Yeah, certainly, yeah. Yeah, not to kill the person. You got mutual combat here in Texas, we're good. Is that in Texas? Do you know what the paperwork for that looks like? Do you have to actually sign something? Or can you just say- I hope I don't need to find out. I did hear a story where guys were on 6th Street and they looked at a cop, they were like mutual combat, mutual combat, and just got the cops to say yes and just duked it out. It could be false though. That sounds crazy. I'm just saying. I kinda admire that, but I've also been playing Red Dead Redemption recently. So I've internalized the cowboy a little too much. Just to return to gym stuff. Now, because it's a business, because you're running a business, there's money involved, but you're also friends, but you're also training partners. Is there a tension that money creates that threatens to destroy friendships? That's something I always worry about with money. I try not to go do any kind of business with friends or family. I think if we're all very clear and honest and open at the start, it makes it much easier. I think people have issues when there's like, things are written in fine print and nobody knows the exact answers. And a lot of Jiu-Jitsu guys can't read. That makes it challenging as well. We're learning that today. Yeah. Definitely complicated though. Yeah, it's not always obvious how to be transparent and stuff. And about everything. Have you felt that tension? Because in the Jiu-Jitsu world, money's not really unlimited. Just running a school, what's that like? Because this is the first time you're running a school, running a gym. Yeah, I mean, it's just constantly updating people about what's going on, what your expectations are. You know what I mean? We've had some problems with coaches who I feel like think the pie is bigger than it is. You know what I mean? They feel like maybe we're getting rich out of this and they're missing out on things. So it's like, even amongst managing staff, that can be challenging too. So yeah, I mean, it's a constant work in progress to make, not only to make sure everyone's happy, but to make sure they're comfortable enough to reach out and tell you they're unhappy. But I feel like those challenges are common amongst any small business. Still, it sucks. Just to mention, I'm clueless to this, but I'm just now learning this. Somebody I met and talked to and I really like is Isaac. And I just learned, because you're also active on Reddit. What's your name on Reddit? It's my name, John Belushi's mom. As undercover as possible, you know? Oh, it's not you. It's actually John Belushi's mom, right? So I've done my research, I guess. And I guess you guys had a falling out and have split. I just want to say that, I don't know, the few interactions I've had with him, he's a beautiful human being. So, and that just shows to me- Visually, maybe not internally. And sexually, just the experience. No, he's just a kind person. I don't know, I liked him a lot. Like to me, in a business setting, yeah, tensions are created and it sucks. I don't know. I mean, I suppose money, all the stuff that happened in the jungle aside, probably money had a role to play to create extra tension. Money and egos about like, who is the leader, who is not the leader, it's tough. It's tough to manage that kind of stuff. I've seen it happen with jujitsu schools a lot. I don't know exactly what, because it's like, there is also a hierarchy inside grappling jujitsu schools, like people that are better or not. There's literally ranks, black belt and brown belt. There's like competitors that are better. I mean, it's a weird dynamic in which to operate. Because like, usually there's more politeness and like humanity layered into the way a company works. But here there's just a bunch of, I mean, it's like violence laid on display, plus money, it's crazy. Is there something you could say to that? Like how you try to minimize? Or something you want to comment on Isaac? Yeah, I mean, it was unfortunate situation, but it just didn't work out. You know, like there's gonna be personality clashes. Some people- I can't imagine anyone having a personality clash with you. With me? Yeah, it's hard to imagine. Yeah, surprising, shocking. You know, I mean, I didn't even know what to say on that. I don't want to touch on it too much, but obviously his expectations about his role in the gym, obviously different from ours, led to some personality clashes that was sort of unresolved. Well, you know, some things happen that can't be resolved. You can't fix those things. You know, obviously a lesson, I hope for both of us, definitely a lesson for me from a management role to try to address these things sooner. But also sometimes I came up in a different time where there was no money, no opportunities. I had to pave that way totally for myself, especially coming from Australia. Like being a professional athlete in Jiu-Jitsu was not a thing so I had to pave a lot of opportunities for myself. And I feel like sometimes, I don't know what the right word is. Sometimes people don't appreciate some of the ways you help them. And they just think, feel like almost they deserve or are entitled to certain things. And that is very difficult to manage. But I think again, like we both see the situation different. I do hope he finds a better, a more comfortable place to train. But yeah, obviously I've known him for a long time, sort of like a brotherly relationship. So that's gonna really make personal problems a lot worse when you're that close to someone. I just hate it that like I've seen in Jiu-Jitsu especially, but in other places where like close friendships were destroyed because of like gym stuff, like people running gyms. And it just, as a person who is in this case, just a fan, but in general, just like a student, it's like sucks. But again, in my position, sometimes I wonder if there really was a friendship or mere opportunity. I have to be careful of that with some people in the sport. Is it a sincere relationship or like, I mean, it's difficult for me to tell, or am I means to an end? Sure, but I think it's actually a trade-off because I think a lot of close friendships we have, like even relationships we have, like when tested, like can break if they're not properly communicated. Like some of it could be just misunderstanding of like for a prolonged period of time. It's not explained through just like a lack of integrity. It's just like you have to like talk through that shit. Like just be honest with each other. Take some MDMA and really get down to it. Drugs solve everything. You've already heard it from this conversation. I've actually haven't done MDMA yet. People say that that's something I would enjoy a lot because my brain is, I think, natural on MDMA. I'd recommend it for sure. For sure. Is that what you did with Gabby on the L-Titan? Okay, nevermind. She drugs me. In general, why does there always seem to be drama in the Jiu-Jitsu world? Like outside of what's going on here? Or is that just the- I think it's universal to anything. Drama's everywhere? And then drama rises to the surface? Drama makes the money. Yeah. I wish there was a little bit less. You have a bunch of, like we mentioned some of them, you have a bunch of instructionals out. What are some interesting things that you're looking forward to exploring in terms of teaching? So Just Stand Up is your most recent one, right? Yeah, you also have one called Power Bottom, an inclusive modern approach to the guard. Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, what are some other ones? False Reap Allegations. False Reap Allegations, yeah. By the way, people talk about Power Bottom, again, hilarious title, but they say it's a really good instructional on like the guard. Yeah, I try to at least be innovative. You know, like everyone else, I feel like is ripping off John and Gordon, putting some sort of slants on that. So I'm trying to take sort of a different approach. I think you can actively influence the sport with what you release, because people are gonna try to emulate that. So I think those type of instructionals, Just Stand Up, Power Bottom, like approaching the sport differently, I think definitely has a positive impact on how people play the game. Yeah, are you working on something now? Probably a fundamentals course, just cause we're bringing out, we got the White Belt Program coming in. So I'm trying to develop a fundamentals course along the line of the constraint-based learning stuff we were talking about today, like a way to approach learning as a beginner to sort of speed up the process a bit and not make it as so technique dense, at least have it a bit more fun. And focusing in on just like examples of problems to solve. Exactly, yeah. Approaching judicially learning that way. Like, I mean, kids learn quick through games. I think adults are capable of that to a certain extent as well. You're releasing that instructional on pre-match preparation? Yes. What other stuff? Do you have anything on a body lock pass? Yeah, I have a body lock or a body lock DVD or instructional. Yeah, I have the pre-match ritual coming out. I also have, I'm filming how to build athleticism for grappling. Just really trying to capture different angles, kind of like the same, you know, what Craig's doing, trying not to do the same thing that everybody else does. You know, there's a ton of wrestling, ton of jujitsu instructional. And the steroid results are coming out. Oh yeah, yeah. More plates, more dates, you know, Derek runs that. Hit me up for a blood panel test, like an impromptu thing. And I did it a few days ago and I believe the results will come out shortly. Oh yeah. Do you know the results? What are you betting on, Lex? What do you think? It's hard to believe, huh? Yeah, it's very impressive. You're putting me in an awkward position here. Do you think you'll face Gordon soon? I'm open to it. I don't know how soon, maybe in the next six months. I could see me facing him before ADCC Worlds. I think that's a great rivalry. I think it's a really interesting one. It's fun for me. Is there any chance that the two, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany get back together? That DDS, under whatever name, gets back together? No, absolutely not. Highly unlikely. I mean, we kind of did this to back up Nicky Ryan and we're sticking with our guy. So what do you think? Yeah, I think there's just too many personality conflicts for it to really ever work again. Do you think there will always be war in the world? War? Yeah. Oh yeah, I think from the beginning of time, it's been some kind of war, some kind of battle. Controversy is what helps people evolve. Until AI, super intelligent AI, becomes way more powerful than humans and humbles all of us with his power before he destroys us. Well, until it runs out of batteries. You guys are screwed. Just unplug it. I'm really fortunate to be able to hang out with you, to train with you, and thank you so much for talking today. All right. That's the best ending. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Craig Jones, Nicky Rod and Nicky Ryan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. You must understand that there's more than one path to the top of the mountain. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/hLZ6PACCBy8

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Roger Gracie: Greatest Jiu Jitsu Competitor of All Time | Lex Fridman Podcast #343

In my mind, I have to tap everybody else. Winning is not enough. The following is a conversation with Hodger Gracie, widely considered to be the greatest jiu-jitsu competitor of all time. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Hodger Gracie. Let's start with possibly the greatest match in jiu-jitsu history, your second match against Buchecha. Let's go through the details. Let's go through the whole thing. So the walk leading up to it. You always do this walk, this epic walk. You post that on Instagram. Hanzo posted on Instagram this calm walk towards the mat. Well, let's go to that match in particular. What was going through your mind? You've been away from competition, facing probably one of the greatest, and at that time, many people considered the greatest jiu-jitsu competitor of all time in Buchecha. Here's the old man, the old timer, getting back out there. What were you thinking? Yeah, I think that's the first time since probably I got my black belt that I wasn't the favorite to walk into a fight, I have to say. Like a lot of people thought, consider him the favorite. I mean, understandable. You know, I was out of competition for a while. He was just winning everything. So, you know, you're saying about the walk, like for me, you know, the fight starts way before the referee say go, you know. It's all the focus and concentration that I think is very important for me to start before. Like, you know, I almost walk blind to the mat. Many times I pass like great friends and I couldn't see anyone. You know, they're trying to talk to you and I'm like, I'm 100% focused on my opponent already. Even though that I cannot even see him for a while. I can see him in front of me. So I think that's for me was always very important to try to clear my mind out from everything. Are you visualizing the opponent or are you just clearing? Not at that time. Right, is there, what's in your head? Is it like a calm river with birds chirping? What's the thing? It's blank, just blank. Darkness. Yeah, darkness. Okay, and that's what we see in that calmness is just blankness. How hard is it to achieve that blankness? It's difficult to say because I think I don't remember when I'll say probably as a black belt, I try to focus like that, not to think. Because it's probably something you learn is the more you think, the more nervous you get. And there's nothing that you're gonna gain by thinking of the fight or the possibilities, what you can do, what can go wrong, what can go right. Because it's unpredictable. You have absolutely no idea. It's impossible to predict the fight. And you discover that if you just let those nervous feelings go and empty your mind, it actually is pretty effective. It is, it makes you feel better. It's, you know, you kind of control your emotion, control the adrenaline on your body up to a level. So it absolutely helps you focus in the fight. I've learned that in jiu-jitsu and in general in life that whenever something feels really shitty, you can just like take that thought and not think about it. Like I do that on long runs or like a fast run. Or yeah, in jiu-jitsu, especially when I'm getting older, out of shape, like that feeling of exhaustion. Well, you can always get to the feeling of exhaustion. You can just not think about it, not think about being exhausted. Just, and that somehow relaxes you. I think maybe in the face of exhaustion, all the fears start to creep in. Maybe your muscles tighten up. I don't know, this is for the amateur jiu-jitsu person. But it's kind of funny how you can just take that thought and let go of it. So you get, as a black belt competitor, you get used to, you get good at letting go of any thoughts. Yeah. When you mention to exhaustion is, I mean, that's another good example of it. It's, you know, there's a lot of times in the fight, you're getting tired and you're getting pretty tired. So it's like the last thing you want to think of it is how tired you are. It doesn't matter because it doesn't. What are you going to do, quit? I mean, it doesn't matter. It's how tired you are. It's- Yeah, there's no value thinking about it. There's no value. You just have to go through it. So when you're like, you know, many minutes into the match and you're slowly moving, as you sometimes do, tying your belt, catching your breath, you're not thinking about anything. You're trying to let go of thinking. I'm trying to like to save everything to the fight. Like nothing goes to waste. It's, you know, every move unnecessary, it's just going to make you more tired or it's going to take something out of you. Like, you know, I try to calculate every single move I make, save as much energy as I can, so I can fully, you know, be focused 100% in the fight. With no waste, especially energy-wise. And that's instinctual. Like minimizing the amount of moves. You're not like explicitly thinking, should I do this or not? It's just, don't move unless it's absolutely required. Yeah, because fight, you cannot really, there's not really time to think much. You know, it's like, your instincts are playing. It's like, you already have your weapons, let's say. You know, the things that you do, it's just to wait for the perfect moment. The beauty of it is there's the right moment to everything. If you feel one second too late, it doesn't work. Or you get messy, so you're trying to catch that moment. And for that, you have to be fully focused in what you're doing, because one second, you're out. It won't work. But you're not exactly known as somebody that moves super quickly. So the moment, it's not about how quickly you move, it's about the right moment. So you make sure you move slowly. Yeah, yeah, it's not. Like, speed, it's not like you have to move at the speed of light. It's the move itself, or that precise moment. It doesn't have to be super fast, because your opponent's not moving super fast. You know, so it's a combination of moving between you and him. I mean, the same thing happens in judo, and the movement can be really small. Yeah. It's just. Judo is a bit more explosive. You know, the moves are slightly faster, so it does require a bit more explosiveness in judo. But even just the right timing for an off-balance. Yeah. Just a little tough. Yeah, yeah. It's not that, you know, moving, the speed is not gonna count that much. Yeah. It's the timing that you initiate that move. You see that with foot sweeps. There's nothing more beautiful than, like, an Olympic-level athlete going at it in the Olympics and a perfect foot sweep. And it's just, and you see, one man's life flash before his eyes and realize, like, I'm supposed to be the top three person in the world. Did I just find, and they don't, they have this look on their face, like, I don't know what just happened. It's beautiful to see. You don't see that, I guess you see that in boxing, knockouts and stuff like that. You don't know what the hell just happened. Yeah. It's that precise moment of movement that you get caught. Like, it's that one split second, that's it. Do you get that in jiu-jitsu at all? Because judo has, because of the explosiveness, because of the points scoring system that incentivizes these giant throws, has these moments where everything just turns in a single moment. Do you have that in jiu-jitsu too? Not really, because then it's points. Yes, you get, like, you know, two points. So it's, because I think regarding the submission, it's not just one precise movement that changes everything. I think judo is the takedown that counts as a submission, like Ippon, fight over. Jiu-jitsu don't have that. So you will score points, but I think in terms of submission, you need to get to a dominant position first, and then the submission will come slowly. It's a process. Yeah. Okay, let's go back to that guy with his mind. So actually in the weeks leading up to it, in the days, in the hours, in the minutes, is there some fear in you leading up to this? I mean, I'm not gonna say, you know, that I'm fearless, because everybody fears something, you know. The fear is there, but it's like, how much you let that control you. I think I was a lot more confident than fearful, for sure, walking to that fight. Like, I was pretty confident that I could beat him. What was the source of that confidence? My beliefs on me, I can take the world. You can take anyone in the world, but is there a specific strategic, like, you know, talking to Donaher, he believes that there's no such thing as confidence, or rather, the way you get confidence is through data, like, that you have proven yourself effective in previous situations, but with Buchecha, you don't have much data. It was a very, the first time you faced him was a very tough, that was also one of the greatest matches of all time, it was very tough. So, doesn't that creep in, like, that doubt, because you don't have enough data to be confident based on that? Yeah, I mean, okay, if I never have fought before, you know, suddenly walk into a fight with someone like that, then would I be that confident? I mean, probably no. You know, so that history of what we've been doing, what we've been achieving, that gives you confidence. If that was my first fight ever, I probably wouldn't be that confident. But the time off? It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. You don't have the fear, or the actual physical experience, the psychological experience of being rusty, of being out of the competition? That will come out on training. So you, okay, so you simulate some aspect of that in the training? Yeah, I mean, the training will tell you how you are. Okay. Did you increase the intensity of the training leading up to this? Yeah, I mean, I trained normal. Let's say compared to the first fight, the second was a lot more confidence, because, you know, like I say on training, the training for the first fight, they were terrible. So. What do you mean? I think I was focusing on MMA for a while, for a couple months, and I wasn't really focusing the gi, and by the time I accepted the fight and start training, like all my responses on training were off. Like all my training partners that I used to train with that I destroyed. I mean, now they're like, they're beating me. You know, it's like I cannot beat them the way I was used to. But, you know, so I knew something was not right for the first fight. But then it's, you know, no points, it's submission or draw. So. Yeah, for people who don't know, it's a one on Morris, which is a 20 minute match, submission only, so there's no, the winner's determined only by submission, otherwise it's a draw. So physically I wasn't myself on that fight. I was tired, my body wasn't responding. Anyway, so the confidence was different from the first, the second. I think I was confident enough that I wouldn't get tapped out on the first, that I was still gonna fight, because he has to tap me out to beat me. And I trust on my defense. I'm confident enough on my defense that he will not tap me out. But in terms of winning, you know, walking to the second fight, I was a lot more confident. What can you say about that feeling when something's not right? Isn't that a thing that breaks people? It is, it breaks, it's weird. Like people crack, they give up. You know, it's a big test, because it's like being really tired. It's the same thing. It's like a lot of people crack because they just feel they cannot give in more. They have nothing more to give. So they just like give up. It's too hard. So what do you do? Just again, take the thoughts out? There is no giving up. I mean, I don't care. Like just giving up is not enough. It's not. That's always the way you thought? Yeah. About jiu-jitsu? Yeah. I've never gave up. I mean, I tapped. It's, you know, not giving up is not tapping. That's just stupid. Especially, you know, during training. Like it's, I get caught, I tap. I've never, ever hurt myself by not tapping. I get, you get angry, you know, it's train hard, you know, improve, make yourself better. You'll go caught. Accept that you made a mistake, give up, tap, then try harder. So, you know, the not tapping, it's you're sacrificing your body and you know, you will never be the same. Like if you let your elbow popped, the elbow will never, ever be the same, ever. Yeah. You let yourself go to sleep, your resistance drops. So it's, everybody has a limit of resistance until they, you know, to resist a choke before you pass out. The moment that you go to sleep, that resistance will drop. According to- I've never heard anyone say, yeah, that's awesome. So people- That's true. So tap, so that's the reason, because people usually say it's- No, it's the same way you're getting knocked out. You get knocked out the first time, your resistance dropped. Your jaw gets weaker. So- Just for the record, I've never gone to sleep again. Which means my resistance is high, right? I don't know. Must be. Oh, your defense is pretty good. I don't know about that. Because it doesn't make sense to me. Or maybe in my case, I think my understanding of when I'm screwed is pretty good. Yeah. Like there's no- You're not in trouble. Yeah. One of the things I regret the most about my jiu-jitsu journey is not having given enough time to being in really bad positions. Like the better I got, I think the less I started being in bad positions, which is a terrible- It's because you spar. That's like, that is how you train. Yeah. Because you used to just spar. When you spar, like it's difficult to be in bad positions a lot. You train with better people, but I mean, let's say five, six men in rows, how long you gonna be in a really bad position? Not long, right? So you don't really have time to develop. That's why people, they don't, you know, they don't train being bad positions because you have to start there over and over again to be used to it. Yeah, or put yourself there. I just didn't have that mindset, I think. I think you start, I mean, part of the fun of jiu-jitsu is as you get better and better, you have certain people you go with, you have these puzzles that you've figured out that you're playing very specific details, you're working out, you're trying to improve your main techniques and so on. But yeah, just the percentage of time you spend being submitted or being, or trying, even going against lower ranks, trying to escape basic submissions is low. I don't know if that's true for most people. Probably is, right? Most people have very bad defense. Yeah. Because they don't allow themselves to be there because, I mean, who wants to get tapped? Because you will. Until you work on your defense, of course you're gonna get tapped, or you're not gonna escape, you're gonna struggle to escape. So people, they don't want to be there. I regret it most because of the effect it clearly had on how I competed. It was clear that my competition was constantly driven by conservative thinking, like don't take risks. I think because of a weak defense, honestly. And I think a lot of the, any of the fear, like for example, exhaustion was accompanied by fear because of weak defense, I think. If I were to psychoanalyze myself, and I regret it, I regret it a lot. But speaking of which, I don't think anyone's ever submitted you in competition. So you're... Well, I was a juvenile, yes. Yes, so when you were a young person. Yeah. That still haunts you? No, it's, first I was winning that fight by a large, I mean, I think by six points or four, something like that. But I was like, I was done with it. You still remember it though, huh? By the details. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. You ever beat him again? He never competed again. I, whoever you are, please, let's do a podcast. I know. We'll talk shit about Hajar the whole thing. No, but what do you attribute to that too? You're saying you're confident, you're confident that the top of the world, the number one, Bouchesha would not submit you. So where's that confidence grounded, and what do you attribute the fact that nobody was able to submit you? First, it comes on training. I train a lot, bad position. Like my defense is good because I practice over and over again. That's as much as I practice all my offensive position. So it's, you have to train both equally, not just being a good position. You have to be in bad. So I think that's a very strong part of my game. To be a complete fighter, or a complete martial artist, you have to be good in every single position, every single one. Those are the, you're not, you have a weakness. So it's, to be complete, you should have no weakness. So that was always my, I was always very particular on that, like it's where my weakness, where I don't feel good at it. If you put me in a position where I struggle, how do I escape, how do I get out? Everything. Any submission locked, penny position, back mount, everything. It doesn't matter which position I'm at. I practice over and over again. So when I, if I get there in a fighting situation, I will know how to get out. At least I'll have a direction. I will know this is my way out. Do you practice both escaping the bad position and the transition into the bad position, avoiding it? Because that's how it happens. You know, jiu-jitsu, you start in a neutral position. No, the transition then becomes the fight itself. It's being there is most important. It's when you're there, then you have to know how to get out. That's your weakness. How, stopping the person getting there is something different. There are two different things. It's either you practice one or the other. So, but both are important, I guess. But the stopping the person is easier to practice because that comes naturally in training. What was the actual process? Like, what was your biggest weakness throughout your, like, just remembering what was annoying to you to figure out? I mean, now, side control is always- Bottom of side control. Bottom. Regardless how much you practice, it's not ever easy. You'll never be easy. But- It's so annoying. It makes no sense. Yeah, someone pins you down. He doesn't wanna move much. He's a big and strong guy. Regardless of who, it's not gonna be easy to escape. So, some situations are just hard. That must be the, sorry to interrupt. I'm interrupting Haja Grace. He's discussing jiu-jitsu. But you just made me realize, if you're really good, if you're going against, like, the perfect jiu-jitsu competitor, probably side control might be one of the hardest positions to, is that the hardest position to escape? It's one of them. If the person doesn't wanna progress, he's just concerned about- So, if they're stalling. Yeah. Like, the best pinners in the world, I mean, partially because I've just seen judo people that know how to pin. Yeah. They- Go escape their side control is a nightmare. It's a nightmare. Doesn't matter how much you practice. Yeah. It's a nightmare. And it's also just frustrating. Yeah. I think, I guess it is also frustrating because a lot of people in that position will be about maintaining control, not progressing. Yeah. And usually people, when they're in mount and in back control, are usually trying to- Yeah. Progress towards the submission, which opens up opportunities for escape. Yeah. So, what's the actual process of just time and time again putting yourself in side control, bottom side control? Yeah. Over and over again, starting there, escape, get back, escape, get back. If it mount you, get back. Any situation outside that, stop, start again, stop, start again. And it has to be, I'll say five minutes because it's the repetition that will teach you. You know, if you train like three minutes on top, you have time to, you know, one thing, and then time out. It's the repetition that over and over again, you know, when you try the same move over and over again, then you'll see what can go wrong. And is it understanding the details of the movement or actually doing the movement and feeling it? It's both. First you have to understand the movement and practice, but most important thing is defense. Escape coming second because, you know, he's attacking you. The one thing is if he's not trying to submit you, but the other one, if it is, let's say if it's a person that's very good, has a very good attack, the first thing is defense, not just escape. You can expose yourself to an even worse position because that is very risky. When you're trying to escape, you'll always expose yourself to a worse position. So avoiding that, it's, you know, first is defense, not getting caught, and then when you're escaping, don't be in a worse position than you are. So defense in jiu-jitsu, when you're wearing a gi, what does defense entail? Is it mostly grips? Is it mostly the positioning of your hips and legs? It's everything together because it's a whole body movement. It's, you know, it's constantly moving your arms, legs, body. It's, you know, they have to, everything works together. Going back to the mind of that guy, so confident, no fear at this point. Is there a bit of ego in there too? Yes, like I say, I'm not gonna say I'm fearless. Of course there's concerns. That fight, I would have to say, was probably the fight that I got nervous the most. Walking in because I knew, what, that man, that fight. It mean everything for me, all my legacy was on the line because if I lost that fight, I'll forever be number two, forever. And I mean, Boucher is a great guy, great competitor. Jiu-jitsu is very good, but I'm better than him. I knew that. But he's competing nonstop at that point. No, no, he's a great competitor, you know, taking nothing out of him. He's super tough, very, very tough, very good. He's probably the best competitor in Jiu-jitsu. He won 13 times the world championship. I won 10. So as a competitor, you know, he has more titles than I do. But in terms of, you know, analyzing the game, I consider technically better than him. So knowing all that, everything that I build, all my legacy, it's if I lose. Writing in this match. If I lose this fight, I'm forever number two. And none of that is going through your mind at the time. No, I knew, I mean, it's not at that moment. I already knew that. I remember just before, you know, the curtains open, I'm standing and before they call my name, and I mean, my legs were like, I feel the adrenaline kicking on my legs and I'm like, you know, I'm hitting the legs. I'm like, wake up, you know, get off, get the adrenaline off me, you know. So it was intense. It was intense. And this was in Rio. That was in Rio. So. My hometown. So this is, I mean, and you know, Rio is not exactly known for its calmness in its fans. So this is like, wow, wherever they hosted the Olympics the year before. So this is like, I mean, this, like the whole, basically, martial arts community is watching this. Watching that fight. Yeah. I mean, is there some, was Hanzo there? Yeah. Yeah, he was there. Some people are just, I mean, there's a tension. It's also, I mean, I don't know if you felt that in part, but you're also fighting for the Gracie name. Yeah. In our hometown. The greatest. Where the Gracie really established. Gracie competitor of all time, arguably, in the hometown. Yeah. I mean, okay. All my family, my best friends, my friends, everybody watching, everybody there. There was a lot of pressure. A lot. And then were you thinking that you would be able to submit him? No, it's at that point, like I don't predict how the fight will go. That I never did because it is unpredictable. It's, I never try to set any strategy for any fight. I think, oh, okay, that I did. But that was the only time that I set any strategy into a fight. There was a 15 minutes fight then. And I said, first five minutes, I'm gonna play defense. He's bigger, stronger, younger. I don't wanna play his game. And I know he comes in very fast. Every single fight he had, he comes very aggressive. So my strategy walk into the fight, I say five minutes, I'm gonna play defense. I'm not gonna try to attack. I'm not gonna try to match his pace. I already expected, maybe I'm gonna start losing the fight because if he comes in, there's a risk of me maybe getting takedown or something happen. I'm like, I'm gonna stick to the game plan. Five minutes, I'm gonna start picking up the pace because then it's 10 minutes to go, which 10 minutes is a long fight. So I don't need to start fast, but I'm gonna start being more aggressive and then try to take him down or pull guard. By then I'm like, that's as far as strategy goes. There's no specific stay on the feet. Were you comfortable being both bottom and top in this strategically? Yeah, I'm always comfortable being bottom or top. I prefer to be on top because being in the bottom, the person on top dictates the pace of the fight because he's on top. Over you. So I always prefer to be on top because I can dictate the pace. I can implement my own pace. And being the bottom, they can slow me down. So it's harder. So if I can choose, I will always be on top. But I think by then I was like, it's five minutes, hit it. I'm like, he's pretty big and strong. I'm gonna spend a lot of energy taking him down. I pull guard. How did it feel to hear you're stepping in? By the way, puzzle math, this is old school, as old school as it gets. So calm and relaxed here for people just listening. We're watching the early minutes of the match. So just feeling it out. He seems pretty calm too. He must be nervous too. I wonder how, do you ever talk to him? You guys are friends. Yeah, yeah, we're friends. Did he ever say how nervous he was? No, we never spoke about that fight. No? No. He probably lays late at night thinking about it. Maybe, I don't know. That SOB. Yeah, I mean, so you see the first five minutes, no, he kept, I knew what he was going to do. In my study, his game, his stand up is most basic, is basic in takedowns, leg attacks, double leg. So he goes single, double, and he charges in. That is pretty much his stand up game. So you would try, you get a grip. Yeah, but we got penalized. So do you like to use the, do you like to pose with your left? You have a right foot forward usually. You're a righty, right? I'm righty, but I know he wants my leg. So I'm playing my stance just because of his game. All my grips, the first five minutes, was to kind of try to neutralize his attacks. So he wants to get your left leg. Yeah. Yeah, right there. Yeah. So how hard is that to stop that? I mean, he felt pretty strong coming in. So I'm pushing the head down, trying to play with his balance. Yeah, wow. If you see that there was a pause, go back there. He charged in. There's a pause, me standing in front of him. Yeah. I did that on purpose. What do you mean? Just in front of him, because he tried. Yeah. And I'm like, you fail, I'm here. There's a, okay. So you could feel the frustration. I could feel his frustration not be able to take me down. Okay, so now, and this is just psychological battle. And you see me walking straight into the middle of the mat, and he's circling out. Yeah. And you see I'm going very slow, recovering. And he's computing like shit. Yeah. Because he just made an effort, tried to take me down, he needs to recover. And I mean, you need to recover, the other guys, they're waiting for you. And do I go for another takedown? Because this one failed. Yeah. Do I need to recalculate the strategy? Yeah, and he kept trying over and over again, and keep failing. I think that frustrated him a lot on that fight. But I felt him kind of slowing down, because he was getting nowhere. So we're five minutes in. Yeah, he keeps, so you never got that takedown in the early, no. Let's see. So at this point, do you pull guard? Yeah, okay. So that's when I felt like he's, mentally he's worried now. Did you try to pull close guard here? No, I knew he was gonna bring that knee in. Okay, because that's the defense against pulling close guard? Yeah, but I like that. I like people bringing their knee between my legs. Because see, I'm gonna close my guard, even with his leg in. Okay, he's stopping the, well, this is awkward, but I guess. Because I was holding his arm, that's why he fell. He had no hand to post. Got it. But still, it puts a leg in. But you're able to close your guard. So you're okay with that? I do that really well. I sweep people from that position a lot. What's the sweep? Just push. Okay. Like to your left side? Yeah. Okay, because he has no, oh, it's almost like, you're basically around his back a little bit. And he knew that, like I swept a lot of people with that sweep, so you see he kept leaning to his left, to my right. So I wanna push them to my left, so you see him leaning over to my right a lot. What's the right answer for him, to like roll or something? No, I mean, he's stuck. He's stuck there. But the one thing he did, he kept off me completely. See, that he's leaning, like he's too afraid of my attack now. Because he should lean on me. You should bring the fight to me. So when I fell him, I knew he was like, he's too worried about my attacks now. Oh yeah, that's right, so he can't, if he comes back to the center, he has no like. So he's not engaging now. At that time, he's 100% just defending. So I felt that. I'm like, he doesn't wanna engage. And he's looking, I knew at that point, he wants my foot. Because our first fight, I had the exact same position. I wasn't holding his arm, and he went to attack my foot. Which he did, you know, he got into attack. Like a toe hold or what? Okay. Yeah, so I knew he's looking at my foot. Which foot, sorry? The left, your right foot? My right, yeah, my right foot. Okay. And so how you defend, you're hiding it? I'm holding his arm. And now you're going to the back as an arm drag type of thing? So the moment that I came off, now I'm holding his arm so he cannot come up. So I'm holding his left arm so he cannot post a hand on the floor and come up. And he's holding your right to try to get you, basically to prevent you from attacking. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. And he rolls. Yeah, he tried to get me off balance. So see, now I'm switching, I switched the grip on his arm so I can free my left arm. Can I ask you a question? Was there a chance he sweeps you here? I mean, there's always a chance, but very hard. Like that? Yeah, but see, my left arm is free. Oh, so you can post. Yeah. Why was your left arm free? Oh, because you were using it, you got it. I got it. Okay. So I tried the hook. Now you will see. Still got your arm. Yeah, but when I knew he's panicking because he did a move that he completely opened himself up. Like I'm holding his left arm. So by holding the arm, that prevents him from defending the hook on that side because his arm is being held across. So the arm cannot block the hook. And I mean, that's the- The hook with your left leg? Yeah. So you'll see when he come up, but I would say, I mean, that's my guess, but Bouchiche, he's a big guy, he was like 110 kilos, 112, something like that. Which is? 245. Yeah, all right. So- What were you at the time? Less? 220, yeah, 220. A nice slim 100 kilo, okay. So his defense are not amazing. He's good, but he's not known to have amazing defense. So by being the big guy in the room when you train, you used to get out of situation because of your size. You shake people off. Because of your size, you shake them off, you get off some bad positions. You can, I mean, I could feel on the first fight, I'm side control, suddenly he explode out. So I've seen him doing that a few of his fights. Not in the most technical way, just I'm getting out. And he did because of his size. So, and he did the same thing, like he tried to stood up when I'm on his back. He completely opened up the hooks. He will see the next move, his head gonna come up, and he gonna try to get off the floor. So basically, come up, shake you off kind of strategy. There was no defense for the hooks. I put both hooks in straight away. Oh, his arm is- Yeah, I'm off balance, yeah, see? I didn't bring him up, he came up. Yeah. And now, I'm attacking his neck, and he's worried about the hooks. That's fatal mistake. That's like defense always come first. Remember what I just said now? Yeah. Defense first, escape second. So he's not worried more about the points than his neck. So it was like a progression of mistakes. That's why I think he got frustrated when he couldn't take me down. Yeah. And then when I pull guard, he was frustrated that the fight wasn't going his way. He's very good about taking down. He try over and over again for five minutes. And here he was frustrated about the hooks. So he's like, it's almost like the frustration, thinks like, no, no, no, no, these hooks shouldn't be here. Like I pull guard on the grips that I want. He's not comfortable inside my guard. He's not in a position that he wants to be. He's over leaning to his left. He's not engaging or trying to pass. He's trying to get the foot, but his arm is trapped. He's gonna get nowhere. And then when I swept him, suddenly his world start collapsing. You know, he couldn't take me down. I pull guard, I'm swept. He tried to roll me over. No, he didn't get me anywhere. The first movement that he tried to escape, I'm on his back. I mean, now he's lost. Yeah. That, if you just go back to him standing up. See, both hook goes in no defense. Like there was nothing on the way of those hooks. Because he tried to come up. As he's coming up, you're high enough on him to where the weight was just probably immense. It just felt too heavy. I mean. And you're already going for the choke. Yeah, of course. There's no time to lose. Look at that. Yeah. So you're not like worried I'm gonna get shaken off. You're going for the choke. Okay, you got your right hand on the. There's no shaking me off. I'm on your back now. We're in this together. And your right hand is opening up the lapel. My right hand is holding his arm. I'm still holding the sleeve. Oh, sorry. You're holding the sleeve, but. I'm holding the sleeve and I'm already going for the neck. Because it's timing. At which point do you let go of the sleeve and open up, help with the lapel, or do you not need it? No, I did that. But first I wanna try to make a grip. Like then I need to establish control before I let go of his arm. Got it. So I kept holding that a bit longer. And then when I fell, okay, I have a good control over the back, then I let go. Do you, okay, so you have like a light grip on his lapel, but you're thinking. No, I need to adjust that. You need to adjust that. Yeah. You're like holding it there and you're thinking, okay, at some point I need to adjust this. All I need, all I want is to get under his chin. Then I know, I mean, now I can go for it. Because if it's over, there's no choke, right? The wrist needs to be under. Can you choke Bucescu over the? No, I can't. That's just not right. Okay, and it's not right or it doesn't work? Both. It's not right and it doesn't work. I mean, would you tap to choke on your chin? No, just pressure. You hurt, but it's not gonna choke you out. I don't know, I don't know. I'm not, let me argue this. I love this, arguing with Roger Gracie about chokes. This is great. Okay, like clock choke. It was always interesting to me, because in judo it's illegal to have the gear on the face. And so it was kind of liberating for me to be allowed to have a gear on the face. No, it's just. Liberating. No, you don't have to worry about it. Of course, it's more effective to go under the chin, but I'm surprised just because the amount of pressure. It's all about how much you can take it. You can take a lot. But it feels like. No, it doesn't feel comfortable. I mean, sometimes on your mouth, it cuts your mouth, now you're bleeding. It feels horrible. No, but that's not the feeling. The feeling, it might not be a choke, but the feeling like it's a pressure that everything's just closing in. But it doesn't take you anywhere. Like you're not gonna go to sleep. You might not go to sleep. So it's just pressure. Yes. So pressure, it hurts, it's uncomfortable, but it's not gonna break your face, and it's not gonna put you to sleep. So if I don't get the neck, I don't go for the kill. I'm holding his collar. My wrist is almost under. I'm trying to kind of dig in. If I can't dig in, then I would adjust the collar, but first I need to dig in. Dig in first, then adjust. Can you do all that with one hand or no? I did. So you can tighten the choke with just one hand? No, I need the second one to open the lapel. But you're like digging in with one hand. I'm digging in under the chin. Under the chin? Under, now I need to go deeper. But that, the going deeper requires the second hand. It does. Okay. It does. But that requires you letting go of the other hand. Yeah, I have to let go eventually. Yeah, see? All right. Well, that's over. Yeah, because I'm already under his, like the first hand got under the chin. Do you need the hand on the second lapel? Of course, otherwise he turns and he's out. That's the control of the turning versus the tightening of the choke. Yeah, it does both. It helps tight the collar and stop the person rolling out. Were you feeling pretty good about this position? Yes. I just felt it's getting tighter, tighter, tighter, tighter because it wasn't super tight from the beginning. It wasn't like the perfect choke. So we're still, I mean, I knew it was like he's very close to the end, but I still need to adjust. There was still the risk of maybe his escaping. Is it possible for his head to slip out? It's possible, yes. But I'm closing that gap. Yeah. The hair. What did that feel like, relief? Relief, like awesome. It's amazing. Somebody on Reddit asked, ask him about the cross grip he used to sweep followed with a genius grip switch when Bucescio was inverted. Did you use a cross grip when you sweeped? I guess the cross grip in the arm, that must be it. Oh, that's the cross grip. Okay. What's the genius behind that? Or was that just the, do you like that kind of grip? Yeah, because I always like close guard and no one wants to be in anyone's close guard, right? It's open guard, it's the step to pass. So everybody, when you try to close the guard, they bring the knee in the middle. Like if you're not standing, if you're lower on the ground and they open guard, if you're close to me, you need that knee between. So it's a must. That's when I start developing the attack. You know, I managed to have long legs to close my legs around people even with that. And then I just developed that sweep. When did you start developing that? I don't remember when, but I would say before black belt. Okay, so your answer to that is not to figure out how to prevent them from putting the knee in. Is there an answer to that? No. But good guys will always try to get the knee in. Remove the leg out of the way, that's not possible. Well, maybe off balance them enough to where it's not. No. Okay. I mean, you can try, but like it's hard. If you can off balance, you sweep them. Right. So that knee's gonna, so you're gonna have to solve that. A full sweep, yeah. Because that's, it's extremely common to have that. I mean, if I'm on your guard, open guard, you know, if you have your legs, if I'm between both of your legs in the open guard, my knee will be between your legs. Because it's a must. My knee cannot be on the floor. Since Hanzo was there, what did he tell you before? I think just motivate you. I think that's, Hanzo always did that fantastically well, to motivate me. Like before I fight a match, I think that, you know, the confidence, you know, his energy being around you, it's, I think that's the, it's the great thing to have Hanzo in your corner. It is the motivation that he gives you. What did you learn about jiu-jitsu in life from Hanzo Gracie? We got to hang out with him in Vegas a little bit. He's a character. Yeah. He's one of the historic coaches and jiu-jitsu competitors, but also personalities in the martial arts world, in the world in general. There's very few like him. Hanzo's a fantastic person. It's, you know, what I've learned most from him is like it's, you know, you can take any challenge. It's, you know, it doesn't matter where and when, or you know, who, it's, you know, you have to be ready. And, you know, with that war spirit that he has, he, you know, he always took any challenge, ready or not ready. Yeah. Was it you that said it, or he said it where not until you go in, you know, to do something difficult, do you discover the strength that you have? So like, if you really think about it, you might think that you don't, you're not good enough. You don't have the strength to take on something difficult. I fully agree. I think we are measured not when we're on the strongest, but when we are on the weakest. That's when we truly measure ourselves or character, who we are, not when we're in a position of power, or when we're in a position of weakness. Have you surprised yourself, like how damn good you are? Like, is this really how good I am in this situation? Where in retrospect, you might think, how the hell was I able to accomplish this? Not how good I am because otherwise I wouldn't be there. So, you know, being there in the first place, it's already not a great thing. But I say, you know, every single time I found myself there, I was super proud that I've never cracked. Like, I've never gave up, ever, any second, any fight, never. Never been broken in competition. Never. Even, it's not about winning or losing, it's about you giving up. I've never doubted myself. I always fought to the very end, always. That I'm most proud of. Because there was moments, you know, it's in a terrible position, you know, mainly like there was moments that I was super tired, but like, exhaustive tired, when it was easy to give up. Like, I had nothing more to give, but I pushed. I took energy out of my soul, I would have to say, because when my body had zero, my spirit, my soul, I would pull it out. Is that in part just not allowing yourself to have, to ever, ever quit? Yeah. I have one other thing I regret. I remember like a blue belt match. I remember, I'm not gonna say who it was against, but I remember just being extremely exhausted and just constantly fighting. A guy was really good mount, really good guard passing. And I just remember him passing my guard eventually, so it was just like a finals of one of the IBJJF tournaments and then right away going to mount and just, I don't know, the level of frustration, I mean, I quit at that point. So I remember that still. It's not about winning or losing, but I just remember I was like teary-eyed frustrated. And then I knew there was a lot of fights still left in there somewhere and I quit. And I regret that to this day. Because I think the reason I regret that is because it gave me an option to now quit in every other aspect of life. Like this is an option. Yeah, it is. It sucks. Yeah, it teaches you, you know? It makes us stronger. I think it made you stronger. Yeah, it makes you stronger that you did that to learn that don't do that again. But still, like you said, just going to sleep and training, I do think it made me weaker. It did make me weaker in the rest of my life too. Those, you know, I've quit a few times in my life on small things and you realize, okay, it's not that big of a deal, it's fine. Who cares? But what you learn over time is that voice always comes there. Obviously, maybe it does for you too, even at the highest level, of like, it's not that big of a deal. Like, it's okay to quit here. Like, it makes sense, everybody would understand. You know, in some sense, like, you're, you know, many people would say you're past your prime in this match with the British, I feel like it makes sense. You've been focusing on MMA, makes sense. No. It makes sense to lose. Yeah, I don't know, that's a weird voice. And in some sense, it's that voice and a voice that says, like, why are you doing this? Like, this is silly, this doesn't make any sense, just stop, just stop, just stop. And shutting that voice down and never allowing yourself to quit, that's a really powerful thing. Like, everybody I've met, everybody that's successful, yeah, down to the, even engineers, CEOs, Elon Musk, just never quitting. Like, when everybody around you says quit, never quitting, it's weird. I don't know what that is. It might be genetic. It might be like using the stubbornness to just never allow yourself to develop that, it's basically developing a calluses to that voice that tries to tell you to quit. You never quit, huh? What would you attribute that to? It's like how much you want to get to the destination you chose. Like, it's how badly you want to get there. If you quit, you're never going to get there. And you always wanted to. I always wanted to. Is there some thing you remember from that match, some things that happened before and after that stand out to you, just since in Rio? Yeah, there was an interview, like, prior to the fight, there was a big fight, we were doing media every day before, me and him, we were meeting for media. And like five days before, five, six days before, I'm quite chatty, the closer we get to the fight, the more focused I get, the less I start joke around, playing with people. But I remember, I think it was maybe three or four days before, we were doing an interview together. I think my cousin, Kira, was there, she was doing one of the interviews with us. And I don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but I just remember, we were talking about the fight, of course, and then we were standing beside each other. And I'm like, and then suddenly I chop in and grab him by the neck. I say, I'm going to tap you by the neck. And then he's like, you know, very shy. And then I let go, I say, no, I'm going to grab, tap you by the arm. And I could feel he was like, he wasn't comfortable with being there. It was me saying that I'm going to tap him out. There was like, I was so relaxed, joking about it, but I'm joking that I'm going to tap him out in a fight that we're going to have in four days time. And yeah, I felt he was like, not comfortable at all. Do you think you got in his head a little bit? I did, I think. It gave you a little bit of confidence? Yeah. You've said that jiu-jitsu is a reflection of your personality. So both your jiu-jitsu and your personality, there's a calmness. What is that? Why are you so calm? Is there like an ocean underneath that's boiling? Is this developed or is this your personality? Are you basically leveraging who you are already to develop a game around the jiu-jitsu or did jiu-jitsu make you calm? I think both. I was always very calm since I was a kid, you know, since very young. I was never a very, you know, fiery person. So that is a reflection. You know, you reflected on my jiu-jitsu, my life, on my fights, the way I fight. So it's a direct influence of my personality. And I think it's also in the day, you know, you develop the more you practice, the more you fight. It's like, you know, you don't want to get nervous. You don't want the adrenaline. And so you just learn how to shut that off from your mind. So the less I thought about it, you know, it's like how many times I fought, you know, let's say the week before the fight, that's when you start more, when you're concerned the most, because now it's getting very close. Before it's just far away. You know, it's normal to think of the tournament. You get a bit nervous, but it goes away quick. But the fight, you know, the week before, now you're constantly thinking of that day. And every time you think, adrenaline pumps in, your heart accelerate. You know, it doesn't, you know, it makes it, it's like, why am I feeling this? What difference will it make? So you're kind of, you're shutting that thought out of your mind, because you don't want to feel the adrenaline, your heart accelerating. It's not going to add you anything. So it's, you know, it's the practice also that I think it helped me to shut that off my mind. Has that helped you in regular life? Yeah, of course. It's, you know, it's suddenly when you go into any, any situation that might be stressful, you know, like an important meeting, you know, super, whatever it is, it's like, how much would you worry about that before? Worry is not going to help you anywhere. It's the opposite. Just going to make you more nervous, your heart will accelerate. Your ability to think clearly is going to be damaged by that. So it's like, the more calm, the more relaxed you are, the better you can think of. Do you ever get angry? Yeah. Like in traffic? Do you ever get like, not calm, just like you're screaming? Not in a screaming situation, no. But just angry? Yeah. What does angry look like? Is it still calm? Yeah, like, you know, a few seconds of complaining, but then it goes away. Have you ever like, thrown a cell phone at a wall or something like that, angry? No. Just that. No, I never get that angry. Because that's just silly. It's like, it's, if I would have done that, I would not be able to control my emotions prior to a fight. There would be a lot of reflection. Letting yourself lose. Yeah, losing control that will reflect other times. Do you think it has make, in part, made you more emotionally closed off from the world? Like, it's harder for you to be vulnerable to others? Probably. Yeah, but I heard that a few times. I'm emotionally closed. It's, yeah, maybe. I think that influences it, yeah. Have you ever cried in a movie? Yeah. For not for many years, but for, I think maybe I'm getting older. Do you remember the movie? Something, no, it's a silly movie. I mean, it's, no, I mean. Is it The Notebook? No, I mean, I would say the last few years, I've been crying more than before for some reason. I don't know why. Like, silly movies, like nothing suddenly brings tears to my eyes. Yeah, well, I've already just, having met you and interacted with you, I can see that you're kind of opening your heart and mind to the world. You could see, like, here's this historically great athlete. Now, like, the wars have been fought, and you're now, like, waking up to the world. It's cool to see. Probably I'm bringing my guard down now. I don't have to get up all the time. You don't have to fight. You can even do some podcasts. You said you watched, like, movies beforehand sometimes. You mentioned Braveheart. What were you doing? Did you watch something beforehand, like, the day before? I used to, yeah. I was, like, I think Braveheart and Gladys, and Gladiator. I mean, there's a few others that I've always watched the day before, because the day before I used to do nothing. I just want to be at home, in bed, watching TV, like, saving, you know, energy, stretching by myself. So, like, it's, I just want to save energy. I don't want to waste my energy going out, going around. So, you know, those are the movies that I always like to watch. Kind of try to bring some, you know, hyper excitement. Like, you know, I'm getting ready to war tomorrow. So, I'm like, let me watch some movies that, like, brought that, you know, some, that war spirit into me. Yeah, what is that about human nature? Braveheart, I love even more. Should you put your life on the line for a thing that matters, or run away just so you can live? It's like, running, you may live, but, like, years from now, when you look back at this moment, would you trade all the days of your life just to come back to this moment? And tell the English. You could take our lives, but you can't take our freedom. I mean, oh, man. What is that about human nature? Is there some aspect of, like, the glory you were able to achieve being more important than anything else? There's some aspect of that, that's greatness, you know? Yeah, I never pursued glory. So, it just came, you know, it came with it, but that was never my goal. I never cared for glory. Were you able to experience, like, like, I'm at the height of this thing? Whatever humanity is able to achieve in various things, holy shit, I'm flying. I felt like, no one can touch me. I can destroy people, yeah. Prolonged periods of time, or just momentarily? I always knew, you know, from before I got to a black belt, that, like, I can be great, because I used to train with the best in the world. I used to, you know, for many years, and I used to see my progression with everybody else. So, I knew I was getting somewhere. I knew I could be the best, and that was always my goal since very, very young. And I always believed that I could be. And that, over the years, that kept telling me over and over again, because I'm getting better and better, faster than everybody else. So, I just need to carry on with what I'm doing. But I think you've said that you wanted to, and maybe you thought you could be the greatest of all time, like, at the very beginning. Like, when you sucked. Yeah. Yeah, not the greatest of all time, because I never really thought about that. But I thought I'm gonna be the best in the world when I sucked, when I sucked. Okay, so what is that, what is that, like, that self-belief? Is there a component to that self-belief being a prerequisite? It's difficult to say, because that was a decision, I think. Like, why did I believe that I could be? I can't tell you that, because I don't know. But you think you decided to be? I decided to be, and I believed I could. You think there was like a day somewhere, when you were young, where you were like, huh, you're sitting on a couch eating Cheetos. I don't think it was a day, like a moment, because for many years, I wasn't really training much as a child. I've done a bit of, I used to train, and then stop, done a bit of Judo. Never stay away from it much, but until, you know, like from 10 to 14, I barely trained Jujitsu much. I used to, there was no Gracie School near where I used to live, and I was doing, there was a Jujitsu, a Judo school I used to go twice a week. I went to a Jujitsu tournament, I lost in five seconds, left crying. The guy, he pwned me in five seconds. Anyway, so when I was 14, I went to the South of Brazil to see my uncle, Helium, to spend summer holidays. I was there for like four weeks, I think. And when I got there, my cousin, Hollis, was living with him. Hollis, like bigger than me. It was, I think it's four years, four years older. So I was 14, he was already 18, 17, 18. Purple belt competitor. And I think that was the first time in my life that I felt what it meant to be a Gracie, in terms of having a school, teaching, training, you know, living that, you know, Jujitsu lifestyle, what a Gracie meant to be. And I've just, I've loved it. I was out of shape. My uncle was like, you know, incentivizing me to lose weight, to train. But you're not training, why? You know, it's like, you're out of shape, you need to diet. So I used to run every day, I was eating super well. I start, you know, I start, that when I start changing. So when I go back to Rio, I was super motivated to follow up, carry on. And he, you know, he invited me to go back there to live with him, but I couldn't, it was too soon to change schools and everything. My mom say, no, but maybe next year, if you wanna go, you can. So I kept that in my mind. Next year, I moved to the South to live with him. I was 15. And it was him, my uncle, Hylian, and my uncle, Carlin. They both used to live very close to each other. They used to have their own schools close to each other. So I was with both. And I stayed there for almost a year. I mean, I was the youngest in the academy. There was some, you know, blue, purple belts, normal guy, but they were already competing, training ahead of me. And I just joined the group of training. I didn't compete while I was there because there was no competition back then. And I wasn't really ready, but it's not about competing, it's more about the training. And I start training every day, start improving. And a year after that, when I came back to Rio, I was already on a mission. I was like, I love this. I'm just carry on training every day with my uncle, Carlos, Carlos Gracie Jr., Gracie Barra. And the one I got there, I was training a little bit there before, but I just 14, 15. But when I got there, there was a, you know, there was one of, that was one of the most competitive, one of the biggest Jiu-Jitsu schools at the time. There was so many high-level world champions, competitors in every single belt. And so, and I've kind of joined in with that. And I've carried on, I don't remember when, but I remember, you know, looking and saying, I'm gonna be the best in the world. But I used to be, I was at the bottom of the stairs, you know, no one really believed me. I didn't shout, you know, to the skies, but, you know, I told a few people, I'm like, I'm gonna be the best. And that's, I think, I was just losing, but I've never, ever doubt, I've never diverged from that mission, I would say. Did anyone believe you when you said you were gonna be great? Nobody. Did it matter? It didn't matter. I don't care, I don't need. Even people that like love you? Everybody, my mom, my dad, I mean, no one thought, no one in my family thought I was gonna be here today. Nobody. Because I just started late, you know, I've never had any start that people, oh, that kid's gonna be really good. No, I was a chubby kid that didn't barely train. I mean, people used to look at me, here's just another grace, there's, you know, one more. What do you learn from that? Do you think most people lose that self-belief? They quit when everyone around them doesn't believe? Yeah, I think if those that need approval, yes. I see you shouldn't have approval. I never need approval from anyone. I don't care if you believe me or not, if you're not my problem. It's tough, it's tough. I don't need approval, but you're surrounded by people older, wiser, better than you, and they're kinda directly or indirectly saying, you stop being silly, kid. No, no one ever told me that, because that was not something that I used to say all the time. I maybe say it just very, very few times. I just thought, you know, maybe that's the secret. Of course, I mean, if you start shouting, then you're just being silly. Then it's not what you really want. Then you're saying that for another reasons, if you say it over and over again. Because you shouldn't. I mean, why? Well, to push back, one of the reasons you might want to say it is to find the right people that believe in you. Yeah, but no, if you say it over and over again, then it's just, then you're just bragging. Sure. Because one thing is to say it, but the other one is to do it. So it's, you know, you say it once or very few times, but now you have to do it saying it's not helping you getting there. Was there sacrifices you had to make? Everything, everything. That was my priority in life. Everything was secondary. Like social life, career paths. Yeah, everything. And is it from 14, 15, 16, as you get better and better and better and better, it was just becoming sharper, the focus on this thing. Yeah, it's just over and over again, over and over again. It's, you know, it's just training, training, training. And I mean, how many times I lost, I have no clue. I have no clue. So on the mat, you were getting beat up. I'm getting smashed by everybody. People my age, I was chubby, I was physically weak. I mean, I'm tall, but physically, I'm not physically strong. I'm normally strong for my size, but physically, if you wanna measure strength, I'm weak. Because, you know, we can measure strength lifting weights, I'm weak. I don't lift, I lift weight same as people much lighter than me. Everybody my weight lifts heavier weights than me. And the people that train with you often talk about how they feel super strong. Because I generate a lot of strength. I can create, I put myself in the right angles so that I can be strong. I'm not strong. And the only person who I listen to saying that is Compreto, one guy that I fought, Rodrigo Medeiros. I fought him a few times. And he's the only one that I heard saying about me that's like, no, Roger's not strong. He's not. He's technical and he can create strength, but he's not strong. He meant that as a compliment? Yeah, I think so. No, I think he was honest because I think he's the only one who could see that. Yes. So I think that's a compliment. So he's technically really strong. So you had incredible matches with him. Yeah. Is there insight you have about how you went from a person who was not very good, but had a dream, a confident dream, a vision to somebody that was actually good? Was there something to the practice sessions? Were you getting reps on a specific techniques? I'd never done anything special because I mean, I'm in a gym training equally with everybody else. So I've never did anything on the side different than anybody else. So I was in the school training the exact the same way as everybody else. Well, in terms of schedule, yes. But what was, can you reverse engineer what was going through your mind? Because there's so many different ways to actually mentally approach the same exact training session. I'm gonna try to beat you. Okay, so in some part it's competitive. Yeah. But the core of it is I want to be better than these particular people. You're gonna keep beating me. I'm gonna keep coming back at you. And to do that I have to solve problems. I have to figure out how to do stuff well. You catch me once, I'm gonna keep on coming, trying to not get caught in that. At which point did you develop a game that was basically the famous white belt game of the very basics, the very fundamentals of jiu-jitsu? Like saying I'm going to beat you. Never, there was never a conscious decision to try to have a basic jiu-jitsu. First, I think there's a big misconception there. Okay, what's the misconception? My jiu-jitsu is not basic. Mr. Roger Gracie, it's not, you're right. It's not basic, it's not old school. I think people, they just don't see that. It's extremely complex in a way that people, they cannot copy. I teach people, I can teach you the cross-collar choke. But the one thing that people, they don't realize is not the move, is you need to practice the move until you learn. It's the practice over and over again. Like it took me years. When I say years, I'm like years after I was a black belt, I was able to choke people out with a cross-collar choke in their mouth effectively. Years after I got my black belt. So that's something that you learn first day, first week. So I can teach you, it makes no difference. You know the theory, but until you apply it in them, you will help you, of course, the more details you learn, you know, the more tools you have to practice, but it's still very complex. Because it's not about the move itself, it's about how can you control the movement of the other person. He's resisting, you're blocking, you cannot predict what he would do, and he's doing a whole bunch of moves to block you. Every single move you do, step of the way, because it's a progression of move from beginning to end, until I apply the choke. It's a progression of move, and there's not one way to get that, there's many ways, because how many ways can you block? You can put your arm in every single angle, we have both arms, you can bridge. So it's dealing with all that, that is the complexity of the position. But that goes for everything, like every single move, my strong moves, I would say, it took me years developing them, years. So it's, and you're gonna tell me that's basic, so go try and do it. What the other person is defending, that's the thing, because most of the things that I do, I've been doing them for years. And they know that I'm gonna do, and I can still get it most of the times. That's the hardest, is when they know what's coming, and you can still do it. And you said that the way you're able to do that, you just have to do it right. Yeah. What do you learn by doing all the steps along the way? And just for people who don't know, cross-collar choke from the mount. So you just start in a neutral place, there's people on their feet, and then you either, then you get to the ground somehow, and then there's the person on top and on bottom, and then there's a guard with the legs between the two people, and then you can get past the guard. As you get past the guard and you, into side control and so on, you get more and more and more dominant positions. And so mount is considered to be one of the most dominant positions. It's when you're past their legs, sitting on top of their stomach, putting pressure on them, and cross-collar choke is using their jacket to, how would you explain that? To choke them with their jacket. So I have the collars, I put my both hands on your collars, and when I squeeze, it press your neck, so it blocks the vein, you go to sleep. So it's a, you choke people with your hands, and the wrist, you put them, you know, you grab the collar, so you get the wrist around people's neck, and you squeeze. Yeah, the discovery of that is fascinating. I mean, it's interesting. It's like, you know, you can imagine there's all kinds of ways to choke a human being. What animals do it with their, like, mouth, right? They put, like, their jaws around the, and the fact that you can kind of discover this methodology of the right kind of positioning, and then it becomes an art form, like, of why this, why not this, right? Or why not this, or something. Like, to figure all that out. I think we practice, that will come easy. Over time, you figure out what works and what not, and then more, further and further details and subtleties start to emerge. Anyway, on that process of beating, of being able to beat some of the best people in the world, and the thing they know is coming, what's the difference between the White Belt doing that, and Hodge and Gracie doing that, the thing that's so hard to explain? What do you think you're picking up? Is it some tiny, tiny details of muscle movements? It is, it's many tiny details, because it's the whole movement itself, it's the perception from beginning to end. Like, every step of that movement, it's important and precise. So it's, you know, you miss one detail on the way, you collapse. So when I say that with the Black Belt, the Black Belt has no control over the whole movement. He's thinking beginning and end. So he goes straight to your, you know, straight to your neck, regardless, he cannot read the other person. If it's, you know, if it's time to let go, if it's the time to go for a neck, should I be pushing here before I get my hand in? You know, is this the right time to go deep, or should I deal with this first before the second hand? That's at the beginning, so it's at the White Belt, at the very beginning of the journey. Yeah, the White Belt, you just think, finish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, as you get progressed, you see that there's like this giant tree of possibilities that you're almost feeling your way down. I mean, would you be able to teach? Do you even know what you're doing? By the details. Okay. But it's hard to convert into words, probably. No. It's possible. Then you don't know what you're doing. Okay. Okay. So what is the most important details that you could say, maybe positioning of the hand, the gripping, is it the positioning of your body, the posture, is there some interesting insights that people would say? It's a combination, because first you have to put your body in a very strong position that you don't require your hands to hold them out. So the choke is that first, because I cannot use my hands on the floor to stop you escaping. Yeah. So if I had to, my body has to handle that. The way I position myself, I have to do it in a way that don't require my hands for balance. Okay. Why is the mouth such a dominant position? It doesn't make any sense, right? Like, you're just sitting on top of the stomach of a person. It makes all sense. If you think, what's, forget fighting, forget jiu-jitsu. Like, you've never trained. What's the one position, the most dominant position you can get over another human being? One. The most. For you, which one it is? Like, the most dominant position that you can get over another human being. So if we were just, because the way I think about it is putting myself in like a six, seven, eight year old self without knowing any martial arts, and I had an older brother who'd beat the shit out of me. Yeah, it probably was mouth. It was. But, well, yes. Okay, so we both didn't know. But if we knew something, it'd probably be back control. If in the back control, you're under the other person, the thing being under is the most dominant position it can be over another person. You mean like a back control? If I'm on your back. Oh, like that. You can move, you can roll. I cannot stop you rolling. Yeah. Maybe you can even stand up. How dominant is that? Yeah, but if we're the same size, both untrained. If, no, it doesn't matter. Have you seen kids, they do that, okay. Mouth looks and feels like dominance when you're two eight-year-olds fighting. Okay, I don't know why it feels that way. It could be some animalistic thing. Maybe it is actual dominance. I don't know, but it feels like if you're untrained, you can just buck your way out of it. It feels unstable. It feels unstable to hold mouth unless you know what you're doing, right? No. No? If you're mouth, you put both of your hands on the floor. Yeah. Just your hands. You think it's easy to take somebody off? Yeah, maybe not. You think it's easy to remove the hand and bring them out? The hands on the floor, arms straight, I'm leaning in. Yeah, you're right. It's hard. I mean, you don't need to know fighting to hold yourself there. Yeah, but you're right. When you take the arms off and balancing, then it gets tricky. Because when you're trying to, I think what happens, I'm thinking back to eight-year-old. Because my brother's five years older than me, and he would do the usual stop hitting yourself thing. I think he would be in mouth, like hitting me with my own hands. Out of place of love, of course. I love him deeply. And it was very formative and positive experience for me. Okay, I think, yeah, the weakness is when he takes, well, when the person who has the amount takes their arms off to do something. But even if you keep your hands up in the air, when I'm falling? Yeah, you can. When I'm falling? So. Speaking about untrained people, I feel like they get greedy. They try to do stuff. The other day I watched my nine-year-old daughter. Yeah. We were in a friend's house. There's a whole bunch of kids there, they're playing. And when I looked, she's mounting a boy, her age, her size. He cannot escape. Wow, she probably has seen some footage. No, she's been training for, I'll say, a year and a half. Okay. But she's not much. I mean, she's a nine-year-old daughter, a girl over a boy. Has she seen footage of you? Maybe she picked up from that. No, but she's been training for a year and a half. So she has an idea what mount is. But, I mean, in terms of our skills, I don't never taught her the mount. Yeah. She has, you know, she had lessons at the academy, like any other kid. Did she make him cry, or? No, but he couldn't escape. Which other position would she be able to hold the boy? In the back, he would roll her out. That's true. Like, he couldn't come out from underneath her. She's, they're kids. Like, there is no other most dominant position that you can pin the other person. Couldn't you argue from that perspective, side control? No. No? Because side control, you have to hold the other person. And if you're not free, you cannot release them. But in side control, your hips are not on top of theirs. So they can't buck you off, right? If you're holding them a little bit, and you can hit him with one hand, like slapping. His head is here. You're gonna hurt him here. By the time you're doing that, but then he has his arms free. And if you turn towards your legs, then he's away from your arms. You know, he even has the perfect angle. I mean, it is a good position. You can hit, you can dominate. But it's not the best position to be over the other person. He can knee you in the head. At the same time you punch him, then there's a knee coming to your head. I love playing devil's advocate with Roger Gracie about two eight-year-olds fighting. And your head is closer to his head. Maybe he can throw you a punch. Would you choose to be in side control over mount? Getting in the head? Well, for a person who in competition prefers knee on belly over mount. But that's my weakness. That's my failure as a human being. Holding mount can be tricky. It's very hard. Of course it's hard. But what is easy? Tell me easy. Side control in knee on belly is easier. But to submit. Knee on belly is easy. Easier, I'm not saying black belt level. I'm saying, well maybe even black belt level. Easier for what? To hold somebody? To make them squirm and hurt, to create openings. Yeah, but go to there with a big guy. Yeah, you can't. You can't. Yeah. He's gonna push you back and come up. In the mount, he can't sit up. Not when you mounted him. The thing is also about mount is people on the bottom of mount panic more. So they fight harder. Of course they panic. They're exposed. It's the most exposure you have. Because the person's arms are free. You cannot touch him. His head is too high. There's nothing he can do. His legs won't get you anywhere. He might touch your lower back. It's like nothing. You're most exposed being in the mount. I read you holding side control a thousand times the amount of me having to look up for your fist come down on me. Yeah. Side control, I hug you, you cannot hurt me. Okay, you hold me, but I'm hugging you. If I hug you tight, what can you do against me? Hold. It seems maybe it's just from, and again, I'm arguing just for the fun of it. But it seems like a more difficult skill to learn to apply a huge amount of pressure and weight from mount. You don't have to apply pressure and weight from mount. Not apply pressure, but be heavy, right? You don't necessarily need to be heavy. You don't? No. Why do you, as people say, you feel extremely heavy? If I'm being heavy, I cannot attack. I have to choose. I can be heavy just to pin them, take the energy out to make them suffer. But the moment that I decide to attack, I can only be heavy if I'm sitting up straight. That's when all my weight drops down. If I'm high, then I'm sitting on your chest, on your solar plexus. That's the worst position to be seated on the person because that's where he breathes. So you're in a high mount, sitting up straight, that's when you can, I can be very heavy. I can make people feel my weight and be very uncomfortable, but I'm not in a position to attack. The moment that I wanna attack, my body has to lean forward. I have to approach the neck or the arms. The moment that I do that, my weight comes off my hips. It goes to my knees. The weight is off you. But at that point, if you have- Now I'm attacking, I'm no longer heavy on you. But you want to be at that point to remove any of the defenses they have or some of the defenses by getting their elbows- Now I'm either trying to get your collar or bringing your elbow across to attack the arm lock. So what are some interesting details along the way that are tough to get, to figure out? What were the big leaps for you from white belt to the best in the world? It's you trying to attack the neck, putting one hand in the collar, you're priving yourself that hand to pace it on the floor. So now you're vulnerable to get braced, to get rollover. Because if your hands are free trying to roll you over, you're stopped. The moment that you put your hand in the person's collar, now you have to be very careful with your body positioning. Very careful. The distribution of the weight. Yeah, and how high you sit, how tall your upper body goes. And then the biggest challenge comes as you're trying the second hand. That's the, for the choke, that's the biggest challenge, the second hand. Because you already have, you already don't have one hand. Now you are trying the second hand. And if one of my hand is in, you as a defending yourself, you have two hands. One hand is already on one side. This side is getting attack. You have two hands blocking that. I have one hand. There's no help for that hand. I cannot remove anything. That's the biggest challenge. Getting one hand, getting past you and not getting rollover. But I also have two hands. On bottom I have two hands and can also turn and do all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And my whole mind and everything is focused on that second hand. Yeah. It's a big challenge. It's hard, very hard. Is there an art to getting the first hand into a place where you? It's less of an art because it's easier. I'll say most times I get my first hand in is when you're trying some move. You're trying to escape, you're pushing. I get the first hand in as an opportunity. And it's gonna sit there for a while. And now? And I go as deep as I can. So the first hand, because the second hand is the hardest, I have to compensate the first hand to be as deep as I can. If I cannot get the first hand in deep, I won't try the second. I need that first hand deep, then I go for the second. And it's deep and everything is super tight? Super tight. The first hand has to be super tight. Otherwise the chance of failing is very big. Okay. Does the opponent usually feel like they're screwed at that point also? Not as you're putting the first hand in. The moment that I position myself just prior to attempt the second hand, I think the way my body is positioned, the way I'm collapsing with my weight and they feel it's like it's, you know, this is terrible. Yeah, how long did it take you to figure out how to reposition your weight once the first hand is in? Very quickly. Because they'll get breached out. Okay, so there's a good feedback loop there. Because one mistake you out. Like one off positioning you out. But you still have to do that against the best people in the world. Yeah. Where's the way out for most people? Like if you were in Mount against Boucheshire, what are some of the best defenses in the world? The way out is to, obviously, is to defend themselves and prevent the first hand to get deep. And I'll say the best thing that they could do is try to change my positioning on the mount in a way that, you know, push me to a very low mount. You know, try to change the way I'm dominating you, not to be, you know, get me off the high mount, pretty much. Are you always, is it a slow, is it a fast thing to go from low to fast mount? Slow, slow, slow, slow. A high mount. Slow, very slow. Because I need to beat your arms. Because you're holding me down. And the arms need to come out. It's a slow process. Okay, and you just, is there like a, like that? Yeah, so I use my legs against your arms. So it's my legs pushing your arms. But how do you get them, how do you get your legs into the elbows? As long as it's, you know, it has to come under the tip of your elbow. Because now the legs will start forcing your arms up. So your legs aren't like spread out. They're in. Your elbow cannot get inside my leg. Because that means I'm in a very low mount. And then I cannot attack. Because I cannot ignore that. Because the moment that I attack, that will, it will start pushing my leg to push me up. What's the secret to getting the second hand in? There's two ways. Either you go four fingers inside, which is the hardest, because the moment that your two hands are defending, you'll be blocking the, you know, the way. And I cannot clear and attack two hands against one. So I go thumb in, I go behind the ear. So my grip goes, because for you to defend, you need to get there. And when you get there, you elevate your elbow, you expose the arm lock. So it's hard. So you put the thumb in, and then there's the dreaded, like the other person just waits for you to loop the arm over. Yeah, but that, this over. It's, once you get the thumb in, it's over. Okay. But when I'm there, it's, if I get the, because they're bridging, you know, they try. I'm not using the hand to pose. Now your head is, your head is up. My head is very close to the floor. When I've tried to bridge, and you know, my forehead would touch the floor, that would be used as a hand. But it's not on the floor. Not necessarily. Okay. Because if it's on the floor, my body's collapse over you. Yeah. So there's no place for my hand, for me to work on your neck. So I need some space between us. So I don't completely collapse. So maybe you can bob up and down. Yeah, yeah. But I try to keep a gap between us. Okay. So that pursuit that takes many, many, many, many years. I don't know if you've seen Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The, doing the simple thing that's not so simple, but it kind of looks simple. Of the over and over and over and over and over, and presumably getting much better. It becomes very simple. It becomes very simple. But you're picking up details probably along the way. There's wisdom along the way. What is that? Is that, there's like lessons that you just kind of accumulate over time. Like one training session, you'll see maybe, like the positioning of the thumb, like this detailed positioning of the thumb, or something like this. And then you're like, okay. You like load that in. That would be very basic because there is not that many different ways. Maybe one, two. I just do one. Any other is not as strong. Because it's about getting a strong grip on your collar. I mean, the thumb is, the thumb goes inside, is it the thumb in or four fingers in? But it's getting a strong grip on the collar. As long as this is just holding and feeling strong. So that's just two options. So it's the dynamic stuff along the way. And then some of that is timing too. It's timing. Are you also like making people, like faking them out, making them think about something else? No, not at that point. That's not, because I cannot fake anything else at that point. Because I would have to change my positioning to maybe to fake an arm lock. Then I have to move out from that. So then I would lose the control I have. So what's the process towards mastery? If you were to convert that to something that generalizes beyond jiu-jitsu, how can you get that good at a simple thing? Practice. That simple. The same exact thing over and over. It's just a matter of how long it would take you. So all, that's true, that's true. I mean, like I said. That's true. But as long it took me, people give up along the way. There is intricacies to that journey towards perfection. There's a lot of people that do jiu-jitsu for decades and don't get better. No, because they don't train the way they should. They don't train to get better, they train to get tough. That's a big difference. Most people, they train to get tough, so they are tough. You know, like we were talking before, they don't practice their weakness. You wanna be good at, you wanna be really good at jiu-jitsu, you have to practice your weakness, not your strength. You have to practice everything, but you have to be equally strong in every position. They're all exactly the same. You know, your guard, top, bottom, side control, top, bottom, turtle, half guard, mount, back, I mean, you pick, take down. And then you get into details of escaping triangle, applying the triangle, escaping arm lock, different scenarios of, you know, the one thing is defending the arm lock when you have your arms very close to your body. The other thing is to defend the arms when your arm is almost getting, and then when you got your arm. So there's so many things to practice that you need to repeat them over and over again until you're confident enough that when you get there, you have a chance. And you can do the same kind of thing for even the final stages of a cross choke from mount. Everything. I mean, of course, like you don't practice escaping the arm lock with a full arm straight, because, you know, that's gone. I mean, you practice, you know, you practice escaping the arm lock when he takes your arm, you have, you know, you have a chance of trying to escape, but you don't practice. You know, okay, take my arm. When I say go, go, I mean, you got, you pop the arm. That is like you get injured doing that. Escaping the cross collar choke, it's, I mean, escape not letting the person get there. You can escape, you can practice escaping triangles because, you know, it's like, it's, you have a way better chance of escaping triangle than, okay, mount on me, put both hands in my neck. I mean, it's over, you know, don't be there. What's the best submission in Jiu-Jitsu? A choke, I would say. From which position? If I gave you a billion dollars to start in a position like in a submission and you only get the billion, if you get the submission, which one would you start? Cross collar choking them out. Cross collar choking them, not from the back. No, you have a better chance escaping from the back. Really? Yeah. Even with the hooks? Even with everything. Do you think some people disagree with you? I don't care. I have a better escape, I have a better chance escaping from the back than if you mount on me, put my hands on my neck. So, if you were facing yourself and I would give you a billion dollars to escape, you would pick? From the back. Thousand times over. Like, no comparison. You have like, with hooks, with like a triangle? It doesn't matter, you can do whatever you want. Like a body triangle? Okay, okay. Really? Thousand times over. So, what? No question. So, to you, the mount is a super controlling position, it's not just? Because cross collar choking the mount, the moment that you put both hands on my neck, you know, you have to, your arms need to be very close to your body to attack. So, that mean there's very little space between us. So, that means there's very little escape space for you to work on your escape. And the moment that you cannot bridge, let's suppose I have, you know, the person has a good mount, so you cannot bridge him off. What else? You don't have space to try to work on your defense. Being in the back, I have all the space around me to work on my defense, and my arms, I have the mobility to bring them anywhere. So, I, because of that, it gives you and me a much better chance. And you cannot, I can move my body. If you're on my back, you cannot pin me. You're my, I cannot take you off my back, first I need to defend the choke, but you have no control over my body. So, that mean there's still a lot of movement that I can try to use to escape. In the mount, there's no movement. I'm pinned down, I cannot move, and I have no space between us to escape. Well, the argument against that, this is great, is that on the bottom of mount, I do have my hands between, so you're saying they're pinned, there's nothing. Between where? I mean, you could get them in theory. You could somehow, you could. But there's no, you can, but then there's no space. They'll be squeezed between our bodies. If it's an incredible mount. No, it's not mount, like how, standing. If I put both hands on your neck, if I'm gonna go for the cross collar choke, after I get my hands in, the next step is to pull you close to me. So, it's this, my arms needs to be close to me. But I can put, there's the hands that could do something. They can come in, but there's very limited space between us. Yes, yes, no, I mean, to push your body away, to decrease the power of the choke. Only if we're standing, not if your back is against the floor. Sure, okay, the argument against the mount, or the argument for back controls being the most dominant position, is even though I have hands, I can't really use them effectively, as effective. Not in the mount. There's no space. In the mount, there's no space. There's no space. You can try, I mean, you can squeeze your hand in. I mean, there's still things that you could do, but they're so limited. So, if you polled the 100 best competitors of all time, what do you think they would answer to that? Do you think most would agree with you? I don't care. It will show me their skills, their ability to see. Okay, so the perfect mount, versus the perfect back control. There's no question. Okay, there's no question. For me, I mean, argue with me, like, show me. Because I'm not being stubborn, because I'm being. I'm being scientific. Exactly. So, explain it to me why the back, it would be harder, it would be better to your position to finish the mount. If you can explain it to me why, I might change my mind. I was trying to, but I don't have the cred. I'm like a middle school science student trying to talk to Einstein here. Okay, besides you, who do you think is the greatest jiu-jitsu competitor of all time? Can you make the case for some of them? Marcelo, Bouchetia, Leandro Lowe? I'll have to go with Bouchetia, because look at how many titles he has. I mean, he has by far more than Marcelo. Marcelo stopped quite early. Leandro Lowe has eight, but Bouchetia is better than him. What do you think makes Bouchetia so good? He's a heavyweight that moves like a lightweight. He moves very fast, but he's very agile for his size. So the agility combined with aggression. Yeah, so it's very hard to control him, because he moves fast and he's 112 kilos, 115 sometimes, or 110. I'm not sure, but he's about around that. So 240 in pounds. So when you're agile, 240 pounds, that makes it very hard to control you. What about making the case for some others? What about the little guys? What about Marcelo? If you were to make the case for him being the strongest, what makes Marcelo good? Marcelo Garcia is extremely technical. I mean, I think he's one of my favorite Jiu-Jitsu fighters, because in a technical way, I think he's probably one of the best. Because raw technique and a bunch of different positions for submissions. He's not very powerful. Physically, he's not very strong, but he can make himself very strong, and his technique is very, very high level. Have you ever trained with him? No, I fought him twice. Yeah. Yeah. He's much smaller than me. What happened in those matches? The first fight, I tapped him, I think, five minutes. In which submission? Choke from the back. Collar choke from the back. And the second time, I beat him by points, but a very large, I think 12-2. Actually, just to continue, I wonder if John Donahue would agree with you about mountain back. I can't wait to, this is a bear versus lion conversation. I'm looking, there's statistics about, I'm not letting this go. There's statistics about, oh, look at that, Hodger. What do you know? Looking at Hodger Gracie's statistics for most successful submissions, choke from the back is the most. So how do you explain that, Mr. Scientist? Because people panic when I'm out. They turn their back. I choked them out. That's one explanation. But for people, it is interesting that, of course, this doesn't capture, but this captures a lot of your major matches. And we should say that you've submitted most of your opponents, so you rarely win on points. You usually win submissions. Choke from back is most of them, then cross choke from mount. Arm bar is a lot, too. So 18 from choke from back, 12 cross choke, 10 arm bar, five RNC rear naked is for no gi. Okay. So Ezekiel. So Ezekiel is very powerful. I choke out, he's a strong weapon. Yeah, also from mount. Also from mount. Oh, that's when you can't get the one hand in. No, because the Ezekiel most times I use against people is the attack that as soon as I get to the mount, when they're trying to escape the open up, and I get them. It has to be at that initial timing. So it's not a thing you use to bother them in order to create. Either I get it right away, or I don't bother trying much. Got it. Because you need to keep one hand behind the head. And you're naturally on that position as soon as you mount, most of the times. And the moment that you mount someone, no one accept that they go mount, and they're gonna explode to get out. So holding the head, it gives you a better way to dominate them initially, to deal with that explosiveness on the beginning. And then, but then you have to let go to try it. You're very limited holding the head. In terms of goats, Shonji, I feel like he doesn't get enough credit that he deserves. He had an extremely dominant performance in competition. What about Salo and Shonji Hibero? What are your thoughts about what makes them so good? He had a bunch of tough matches with Shonji. Yeah. And Salo. Eight times. Yeah, fought eight times, Shonji. I fought Salo once. What? I think I'm bringing up a sore point. Oh, did Shonji tap when you, or did the time run out? And that was the last time you guys faced each other. Yeah, 2008. That was incredible to watch also. I think you pulled guard with one minute left, working towards attacking. I mean, it's probably very tough to get anything. And for people who don't know, time ran out, you had something that looked like an arm lock, and Shonji looked like he may be tapping, but it looked like he might be just celebrating, which is most likely. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. It was, I'm not sure. Because I think his arm was just, just straight his arm time finish. Yeah. So I'm not sure if he was tapping to let go, time's up. Or because of the outside, most likely the time was up. Yeah, and also there's a thing where you start, you realize there's only three, two seconds left. So you just kind of start celebrating. You realize that Hadji's not gonna be able to finish this arm bar in the time left. So you start celebrating. No, I think he tapped to say the time is up. Yeah, the time is up. Anyway, what do you think, like the longevity especially is impressive with Shonji. How long? I think he doesn't get credit as much as he deserves because he pushed his career very far. And the last few years, he was on his best. So he's, if he would have stopped before, you know, people would remember him on his highest. But he kind of pushed more than his peak, let's say. How hard is it for you to walk away? We'll talk about the journey into MMA as well. But you basically, especially with the second match against Bouchachi, basically walked away on top. Beating arguably the greatest competitor of all time and just walking away. It wasn't that hard to be honest because that was something that I was considering for a while because the last few years of my career, let's say, it was fighting MMA at the same time I was fighting Jiu Jitsu. And it's very challenging to do both. Like I don't, there's not another person who ever did that because the training is a confliction with the way you train. Everybody who start doing MMA, start focusing MMA, their Jiu Jitsu gets worse because they stopped training with the Gi. Everybody, no exception. Was your Jiu Jitsu also getting worse? No, because I made sure I kept training with the Gi and I kept fighting at least the world championship once a year. That was my goal. I'm like, I'm gonna go for MMA, but I love Jiu Jitsu and I still wanna fight the highest level. So I kept fighting once a year for a few years. It was a challenge, especially because the two or three times when I competed at the world's, it was right after I MMA fight I had. And no Gi, you don't have the grips. So my grips, it made a big difference. So I was weaker grip wise. So I felt that. So I knew it was like, it's unnecessary risk because if I cannot be 100%, so why am I doing this? But I'm stubborn, I love Jiu Jitsu. That's like, I love fighting Jiu Jitsu. I never loved MMA. I've liked it, but I think if it were Gracie, I wouldn't have done it. So the thing you felt the most is the grips. Yeah. Could you win a Gi World Championship without gripping? No. Like just pretending it's no Gi match, they get to grip you, but you don't. No. So grips are essential. Of course. I mean, how can you choke someone? Like if your grips are weak, your forearms will fatigue and then you will have no power and then you cannot do anything. Yeah. You could still arm lock. You could. So I meant more not for the submission, but for the control of the game of it, the dancing. But you need to grip to get there. To get there. And if your grips are weak. But you also have grips in no Gi. Can't you use those grips? No. It's a thought experiment. So like I'm trying to understand how essential- Like get a no Gi guy to go fight with the Gi. They panic. They panic? Of course. Everyone panics. A bear panics when they're in the water with a shark, but that doesn't mean the bear can't still win when it stops panicking and relaxes. It's not possible. Oh, that's another discussion. Can a bear beat a shark in the water? Actually, I need to, maybe a polar bear, because they're pretty good at swimming. Okay. I say not possible for the no Gi guy to win. But the bears is a further discussion. What was, to you, the biggest difference between mixed martial arts and Jiu-Jitsu? What are some interesting differences, some interesting insights, even just about the grappling within both sports? So the biggest difference for me between MMA and Jiu-Jitsu is first is the speed. Like Jiu-Jitsu, you know, like a 10-minute match, I can take my time. There's no dangers that forces me to move fast. MMA, you have to be 100% sharp and fast from first, second of the fight, because punches are coming. You can get knocked out any time. One mistake, you're out. Jiu-Jitsu don't have that. Like it's, I don't have to worry about quick submission, because it's all about the way my body's positioned. You know, my grips. It's easy to avoid, it's easier to see it coming. Like, it's like a quick submission, a surprise, it only works if you make a mistake, if you're not correct positionally. Otherwise, it's impossible. It's extremely difficult. MMA is not. I mean, one split-second mistake, and when the person comes, you have to respond. You have to match his pace. I mean, you can slow down, but it's like you're forced to respond. So it's not much fast. It's a lot more physical, a lot more. And you need to be physical much better, conditioning faster. It's explosiveness, it's much harder. Is it possible in MMA to calm things down? If they change the rules, yeah. Five minute rules, no. Ah, I see. So like, I just meant actually technically speaking, is there ways to take an opponent that's being exceptionally aggressive? You can, clinch. Clinch. But then he takes you down, he keeps moving. I'm saying it's hard to control that pace. You can. If you play defense, you save more energy than if you try to be the aggressor and respond. And even getting to the clinch is very difficult. Yeah, you have no way to hold yourself there. So that was the biggest challenge for me in MMA, is the speed, because I'm a very slow start fighter. If you look at my matches, I start very slow, because if I go hard, I fatigue faster. So for me, that was the hardest part, is to start fast. What about on the ground? Is there something different, more challenging on the ground? Being in the bottom, yes. There's punches, punch coming. How fundamentally different is Jiu-Jitsu with punches on the ground? Ah, it changes everything. Everything. Which parts? The distance that you allow your opponent to be on you, the techniques that you choose to apply. You have to, your body has to be aware of the punches, and you are a lot more limited on your attacks. So you're known for your close guards. How does your close guard have to adjust? How does the positioning of your hands have to adjust when you're on the bottom of close guard? So in the guard, especially in the close guard, you have to either keep the person very close to you, or you have to kick him away. That's in the guard, is either I'm hugging you, or get away from me. And in Jiu-Jitsu, you're allowed to have a middle? Yeah, in Jiu-Jitsu, there's a lot, you can allow the person to be. What about getting a arm lock, or a triangle submissions from the guard? Is that fundamentally different, because you don't have the middle game? It's much harder. There's barely no open guard in MMA, very little. Because the open guard, there's a distance between you and him. Yeah. There's a distance, you cannot control. It's much harder to control that punch coming. And I have to position myself a way to block that, and it limited my attacks, my options of attacks. Is there a reason, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you do open guard much in Jiu-Jitsu and No Gi. Is there a reason for that? It's harder with the explosive person, because when they're moving fast, then you have to try to slow them down. So you like guards that allow you to control the person. Yeah. And closed guard is the ultimate control. Yeah. It's not ultimate control, but closed guard puts you in a position that I'm attacking and you're defending. You cannot attack me from my closed guard. We can argue that there might be one or two attacks, but it's very, very, very limited, and depends who you're fighting against. I hate the closed guard. Being on top against a good closed guard is very- No one likes, it's terrible. It's horrible. It's one-sided. Yeah. So you're in the guard and it's one-sided. The person above has the advantage. I can be completely relaxed in my closed guard, and I cannot be completely relaxed. You know what the most annoying thing is? It's somebody who is both good and extremely confident with a closed guard, because they have that smug energy about them. They know how much unpleasant, how much work it takes to pass this. Anyway, especially people with longer legs. Is there something you wish you did differently in how you started training at MMA in that trajectory in figuring out how to train, how to get good? Like, what have you learned about getting good at MMA from having done it, if you were to start now, for example? I think I would have to dedicate it more. I didn't dedicate enough. Both, like, literally time, number of training sessions. Training, yeah. But also mental. Training-wise, physical. I think a lot more the physical part of it. The strikes, everything? The strike from the beginning. It's because, I mean, I love jujitsu. I truly love all the aspects of it. Fighting, training, the practice, the competition. I don't have that for MMA. So it's hard to give your heart to it, something that you don't have the passion to it. Like jujitsu, I gave my heart to it. Like, I did everything that I had to. MMA, I never, I didn't do that. So that's why it was, I won't say it was wrong for me to do it because I don't regret doing. I always, looking back as a kid, when I decided to take jujitsu for life, I already knew that at some point I would have to do MMA. It's almost like that's the path of a Gracie. When you're ready, you go do MMA. So there was no choice. So there was like a duty versus a love. Yeah, there was not a choice. There was like, I have to. It's just that the life I took, it will lead that way. Are you proud of that step? Go against the natural love and towards more duty? I think I don't regret it because if I hadn't done it, I would feel there was something missing. So I don't regret doing. I would regret not doing. The tricky thing is the choice to go to MMA could have compromised your ability to win against Buchecha, and it didn't. And it's a fascinating case study. It still doesn't make sense to me that after all those years, you're able to come back and go against the best person in the world and beat him. Yeah, and I had to because the first fight we had, I had something stuck in my throat for a long time. So you think about that. Oh yeah, I'm like, as soon as that first fight finished, I had that got stuck in my throat that I already at that point, I knew I'm gonna have to fight him again. I knew, I always knew. There's no choice, I have to. Oh man, all right. Well, in terms of No Gi, who do you think is the best No Gi competitor of all time? There's no question, it's Gordon. I don't think it's right to say the best competitor of all time, because he's still very young. I think that's something that he can be, in the end of when the person. You don't want him to get lazy. You know what I'm saying? No, no, I mean, you cannot praise someone in the middle of his career, you know? So you cannot call him the best ever, he's 26 or 27. So it's, I mean, he's great, he's very good. He's ahead of all of other competitors, I think. And I mean, he's having an amazing career. You know, he's doing amazingly well. So I mean, when he's, when he finish, when he finally retired, then you can argue like. You know what, there's wisdom in that. It matters how you finish, right? Of course. It's very interesting. I think that No Gi is relative new, that No Gi scene, there was not, there wasn't a scene before. I think he started now, on his generation, you know, his time, because before, like when I was competing, No Gi was just ADCC. There's nothing else. Every two years, first was only in the Emirates. You know, you had to go there to compete. So there was not even a scene. There was like this one tournament that gives a lot of money to, you know, to competitors, to fighters. And brings fighters from other modalities, you know, Marker, Van Narsdale, you know, some wrestlers, Greg Coroman, you know, that can compete against each other. And they, you know, they create that set of rules, try not to favor anyone. So that was it. So you cannot be called the greatest No Gi of all time if you only have one tournament every two years. Only in Emirates, they have to be invited to. But I think now, you know, it grew a lot. Now we have so many different tournaments. Now we have a scene. You have people that only train No Gi, they're fully dedicated to No Gi. And you have super fights, different tournaments. So now it's, you know, now it's professionally, you can do just No Gi now, which before was unheard of, because you have one or two tournaments. If you cannot be called a No Gi fighter, fighting once every two years, twice every two years. Yeah, now there's entire systems that are optimized for No Gi that could be fundamentally different. Like, what do you think about the body lock? Like, this passing with the body lock, I don't know if you get an understanding of it. Yeah, I think it's okay. It's a popular way to, what is it? To maybe to apply. To stay tight. To stay tight. Very close to your opponent, so he can't push great distance, he can't push away. But somehow it shuts down the hips as well. Yeah. Makes it more difficult to defend. Yeah, kind of trap your legs. Your back is stuck against the floor. Are you like scientifically curious about these new developments? Do you have answers in your head to them? Most. So body lock is one interesting one. Obviously foot locks is another. And that'll mean just the foot locks, but the whole control aspect of foot locks. That's interesting. And there's other interesting stuff. John is really into the wrestling aspect. But not wrestling, wrestling, but wrestling everywhere. Jiu-Jitsu at all levels of the plane. That's very interesting, because obviously Jiu-Jitsu has not really been, unlike freestyle wrestling and so on, has not been a systematic, scientific, rigorous exploration of wrestling. It's like you're on your feet and you're on the ground. Not into mixed. There's a lot of interesting stuff. John is academic. He tried to, numbers, mathematics, everything. Well, you kind of are too. Yeah. No, I mean, I am, because you have to understand what you're doing. There's a, everything, there's a step-by-step, like logistic, like details. Every single move, there's a reason for it. There's things around that happens. The more you know, the better you are. The more knowledgeable, or competitor, or whatever. So I think with the foot locks, with the nogi, like if you look back, you know, if you think of, used to be seen as a really bad thing, to attack the foot. It wasn't seen as a good option of attack. Mainly. What is that, like, respectable gentlemen don't attack the leg, or what? No, because if you look back, you know, the tournaments, when they were created, all the rules and everything else was to simulate a real fight, with no punches, when I was having nogi. I mean, if you ask, what is Jiu-Jitsu? Like, what are you trying, what's the main goal of Jiu-Jitsu? To dominate your opponent. What's the main goal of fighting? It's, we're fighting, it's, of course, submission is the ultimate goal. But, you know, before that, the main goal is to dominate you. Like, we're fighting, I have to dominate you, and then the submission comes. And foot locks, it's, I don't require any domination on you. I don't need to be in a dominant position to attack your foot. And it's, if I attack your foot, you're still free to knock me out. If your body goes down to my foot, I can still come close to you, or stand up and I'll punch you. So it's not a good position to be in a real fight. Yeah, to attack in the foot. I mean, how many times you've seen that going bad? That going bad in an MMA fight. I mean, of course, you had, you know, some sort of success with the huhoko. It's no questions, but how many times went wrong? People were knocked out attacking the foot. So you can't say it's the best position to be. It's okay to go, but it's a very high risky position to go. So that's why it's not in a real situation, it's not seen as a good thing. So when you translate that to jiu-jitsu, when attacking the foot, it's not seen as a good thing, because when you reflect that to a real situation, it's not gonna go down well. So it was always seen as a easy way out, you know, easy cut, you're trying to the easy path. You can't pass my guard, you can't dominate me, and then you're trying to attack my foot. That's why it was always seen as a, you know, not as the best, a great submission, a way to win. But the sad side effect of that is it was completely underdeveloped because of that. Exactly, of course. So people never really developed that. But now, the tournaments, the fighting, it got completely, not completely, but it got some, it's not longer seen as a simulation of the real thing. Now it's a sport. It's only seen as a sport. So now it doesn't matter if you attack my foot, you cannot punch me. So why is it bad now to attack the foot? So it's not seen as a bad thing anymore. And now it got really developed. I don't know, that's another bear versus shark question. But you know, there is, in a street self-defense situation, it's possible to imagine where foot locks would be effective for Haile. But I guess if you invest 10,000 hours, it's better to invest it in chokes. Yeah, to dominate. If I'm, you know, if I were fighting, it's way better for me to be on your side control, on the mount, where I can pin you, be completely safe, than to stay inside your legs trying to attack your foot. But- People would argue that there's a lot of very dominant controlling positions in the whole foot lock game, right? It is, but it can go bad very quickly. Yeah. Just, no, I mean, there's some great ways to control someone that he cannot escape, but it can go bad very quickly. That's the thing. Well, even back control can go bad very quickly on the street. So mount, I don't know. Is mount a really good position? No, but then there's no good position then. There's no good position. There's no, there's- Every position, there's a risk, okay? Attacking the foot is a way higher risk than side control, mount, back. As I'm saying, the back is not the best way to pin someone, unless you're underneath me. Because if you try to rotate, I can sacrifice the back and just let you be in the mount. Okay, there you go. Would you prefer mount or back mount where they're flattened? Like a- Still mount. Thought I'd get you. So yeah, going back to Gordon, what do you think makes that guy so good? We were just at ADCC, you got to see him historically dominant performance. His dedication, the way he trains and how much he trains. And of course you have to add his mind, his belief to really try to be good, the best. So, you know, I don't know what his goals are, but I know he's tried to be better than his opponents. So his belief are very strong. His dedication, he probably trains more than everybody else. I mean, I haven't seen firsthand it, but from what I hear interviews with him and everybody else training, you know, the way everybody trains. Yeah. You know, trying to, for my little knowledge I have, I'll bet he trains more than everybody else. And most important, how he trains. And when I, I kind of already knew, but when I heard John podcast with you the other day, John was explaining that preparation, the training for the ADCC and that kind of gave me a very strong idea how they've been training all these years. So, you know, when we said, it's you have to work on your weakness. So you have no weakness. He trains a lot on his weakness, which not everyone does that. You know, if you look, although I'm not going to name, but you know, all the main schools, when like very strong competitors, great competitors, super tough people, but super tough, not great. Because they train, they spar very hard. That makes them tough. If you want to be good, you have to work on your weakness. Because when you spar, like we're saying, how many times you're going to practice escaping a bad position, like a submission hold or a pinning position, side control, mount, or there's very little the amount time you get to spend on those positions if you don't start there. So that he's very smart the way he trains. And part of that is also cerebral. It's not just putting yourself in those positions, but talking through different ideas. Like they talk, they like experiment. It's very like, at first glance, it's like philosophical almost. Is you trying to create systems constantly, you're trying to understand how this fits into this big picture. And then it goes back to what is fighting. He's fighting for dominance. He's fighting for the ultimate dominance positions, which is back and mount. There's no others. And from that, you finish. So if you look back at his, over the years, of his past fights, before he used to mainly focus in legs. And over the past few years, now he's mainly focusing in finishing from the mountain back. But that's when he became really good. So part of that is Mr. John Donaher. What do you think, you've known John for a long time. What makes that guy interesting, special, and good? What have you learned about jiu-jitsu and life from John Donaher? He's super smart. I mean, eccentric. And he lives through jiu-jitsu. He's 24-7 thinking better ways to teach, how to make his competitors better. And that as a coach, when you have that dedication as a coach, that it makes the most difference for the athletes. Which other big team you have that coach with that motivation? All the other schools, it's either someone that competes, that push the training, like Andre Galvao. He's one of the competitors. So he brings the hype in everyone else. But he doesn't have the time. He doesn't spend the time working individually. I mean, I'm sure he does, but it's limited because he's also a competitor. And looking most of the other big schools, you don't have that. Now all the leaders, the main coaches for the other big schools, they have other things in their lives. They don't fully dedicate it to the athletes. John does. Look at the interview. He spends hours and hours a day studying how can a way, a system, to make his athletes better. Look at the results. I enjoy, I was just sending back and forth. You can actually just get him, you can troll him essentially by sending interesting videos and you could just see his mind. He's gonna do research on that. Because I kept sending him videos of bears because he claimed that a lion would beat a bear because, I'd love to get your take on this, okay. So the bear is much bigger, much stronger. But his take is that the bears don't have experience of fighting to the death. That's not part of the culture. They're more scared. In fact, he keeps sending me footage of even a small mountain lion scaring a bear away because they don't want to fight. So his idea is that it really matters your life experience, how much you fight. It's not necessarily the skill. Like the dimensions, the characteristics you have. But then I send him, here I'll show you. People should Google this. It's bears fighting of any kind. It's pretty much the most epic thing ever. Here, I'll show you. Like look at these guys. The cardio though is interesting. You know it's funny, I was gonna mention that because I was flipping through internet. I came around that video. Look how big these guys are. No, they're huge, but you see they don't bite each other. You think it's just play? They try to, no, intimidating, because they don't want to get hurt. So they try to size each other up. You know, you see the whole fighting is sizing each other up. There's a lot of pushing and the fur is so thick so the claw doesn't really damage much. They're using the tree, so maybe they, yeah, they're. I mean, there is bites, but see, there's very little. So the whole time they're trying to intimidate the other one, like winning the fight by their size. And mostly about like the way drunk college kids fight, which is like some kind of display of dominance versus actual. Yeah, they're not fighting to kill. And bear or tiger, you know, they fight to finish unless the other one runs away, like one will die. Yeah, well, lions and tigers. Yeah, I, look at the cardio. Look how bad their cardio is. I wonder how, my favorite part is when one of them just like stands behind a tree and says, all right. He's holding. He's. He's. He's getting the breath. Let me catch my breath. He sits down. It's like, all right, you can't, it's over. It's like, it's the equivalent in the forest, tapping out, all right, all right, you got me. Let me just. Look, they're both like just shot. And, but see, the thing is that I was trying to make an argument for is that we get this rare footage. It's not rare. I mean, there's like hundreds of videos, but it's not millions of videos because there's a huge number of bears. And I was trying to say that there's some badass bear we don't know about, because he just goes in there and just does work. And we just don't know about it because he's like, see, the thing is, if you kill a lot of other animals, you probably have a territory that nobody's going to mess with you. So it's very hard to catch the, like the Haja Gracia bears, you know? He's just going to be sitting there doing nothing. So I don't know. I don't know. I feel like, of course, when you corner him, John will say that if you put a bear and a lion in a cage, the bear will win if it's like, if they're forced to be to the death, but I don't know. Oh, let me ask you another ridiculous thing before I ask you serious questions. So Joe Rogan thinks that a tie is an effective way to attack somebody. I don't know if, I can't believe I haven't, in the time in Vegas, I didn't talk to you about this. I think it's not. Have you ever explored this? As the best choker in the world, have you ever explored the use? Because like, Jiu Jitsu has the jacket, but the tie, to me, is a pretty shitty way to choke somebody. Like, intuitively, he thinks like it's a good way, but it can slide around. It feels like there's no way to really pin. You would need to. Right, so you use it the way you use a belt, essentially. Yeah, but then. I would guess so. Yeah. I don't think it's, and I think if it gives you, it actually has the reverse effect, which it gives you the false sense of confidence that you can use it, and instead, it'll just distract you. So he think it's a stronger way than the collar? Or just a stronger? Yeah, stronger than the collar. Stronger than the collar, yeah, yeah. I don't see how. Maybe, just I can say. Well, in a street fight scenario, right? By the time you grab the tie, the guy goes punch your nose. Yeah. What George St. Pierre thinks is the best use of the tie is to actually, what do you call that? So basically, to off-balance them, which is an interesting point, to push that down. I mean, that can be used to, yeah. Well, you could use the jacket for the same kind of thing. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't really fully tested it. I'll say jacket or tie, for that perspective of off-balancing the person, it can be, yeah. Because you have control of the person's neck. The collar, the jacket moves. So for the purpose of off-balancing the person, I would agree with George. See, the thing is, that's the thing about martial arts, is you can say all kinds of bullshit, but until you really test it, in over a period of years, the competition, you won't really know. I think that's where my gut says, just how easily the tie moves, my gut says the collar. There is something really powerful about the jacket. The way it sits, I mean, the fact that the arms trap it from rotating, it's a weird piece of clothing. It's a really dangerous piece of clothing that we put on ourselves. And it's kind of cool that we've developed this whole martial arts system that allows you to use that to do a lot of damage. It's very interesting. So when we're saying something that you develop over the years, or practice over and over again, going back to the efficiency of the mount or back, by experience of attacking people, people always had a much higher chance of escaping from the back than from my mount. So I feel if I mount and you get both my hands on your neck, you cannot escape. If my hands are deep, it's over. Like, I don't remember anyone escaping, but I do remember if my hands are deep on your collar, or even a real naked choke, it's still a hassle. Like, it's not clean. You have some data on this. Is there some aspect to how your body is, the characteristics of your body, that fits a particular set of techniques? So if we just look at jiu-jitsu broadly, do you see most techniques being able to work for most people? Like, what you're saying about mount versus back control, is it possible for a different body type the mount is not as effective? Yeah, of course. I'll say very big people, they should mount. You don't think of yourself as big? No, big, I mean, fat, they should stay off the mount. Why is that? That's a connotation. Because of mobility, it's like, it's a thing that, you know, you don't see any, you know, like, there was a few ways, like 160 kilo, like, you know, in pounds, I don't know, 270 pounds of a lot of fat. It's, you need a bit of mobility, and that would, it would play against you. So great. Even back. A great mount requires mobility. Okay, so even though it doesn't look like you're moving very much when you're doing mount, that requires mobility? Yeah. Because you have to reposition and weight redistribution. Constantly adjusting your body. All right, the legend goes, you got very good by training mostly with lower ranks. What was your training like in that environment? So when I first moved to London, I was 20 years old. I was in the military, 20 years old, I opened my school there. And I had nobody to train with. I had one guy that was teaching with me a black belt, middleweight. He was good. And that's it. Brawley was, he moved to the same, he moved to England the same time as I did, but he was in Birmingham. So we did go together, you know, maybe twice a week, close to, you know, when we were preparing for something. If not, then not very often. As often as we could, but let's say not that often. And I had just collar belt students. There was no one high level. There was no one world champion in any belt to train. Then you need to create a scenario that simulates, that can simulate, you know, like a realistic fighting. So I think on that aspect, you know, when people said, you know, people ask why do I have such a basic game? I think that also influenced me sharpen up all my skills when I moved there, because, you know, when you practice with people, you know, lower level than you, you cannot, there's nothing to learn from them. Or, you know, you can learn things and practice with them, but I would say very complex things on them, and it is not the best. So I sharpen up all my skills. So, you know, that when I really improved everything that I already knew to a higher level. But how can you sharpen something if the resistance is much lower level than? A purple belt can make it very hard for you to skip side control. Doesn't have to be a world champion black belt. It's, you know, if it's, when it's holding you, it can be very hard. What about on the attack? How do you become literally by far the best person at the cross choke from mount by training with purple belts? It's sometimes purple belts defends way better than black belts. Okay, see, a lot of people listening to that will be like, that makes no sense, Hajo Gracie. How does that make any sense? Because like a lot of the black belts, even world champion, they get to the black belt, they're really good in what they do. Let's say in the guard, you know, on top or in the bottom position, but their defense are not. Like very, very few people, high level, have a very good defense because they don't practice. Then that goes back to how you train. You know, you can be very tough. Very tough will make you terrible defense because you're not gonna practice your weakness. So your weakness still gonna be terrible. You're gonna have the best guard in the world, impossible to pass. The day people pass your guard, you're nothing. Like your guard is the highest level, but your side control defense are not. Your mount defense are not. So some purple belts, they practice the mount way more than the black belt did. So naturally, their defense is better. So they get to experience the defensive position much, much, much more, and especially training with you, they get really good at defending. Yeah. And then- Over and over again, you attack them with the same thing over and over again. And they know what's coming, they will block. They will develop a defense over that. Yeah. Way better than most other high-level black belts. So both put yourself into really bad positions with lower ranks and just keep attacking in the same way over and over and over. Yeah. And with that, you were able to be at the top of the world at the world championships. Yeah. I mean, can you give some, what was the preparation like to a world championship with lower ranks? I mean- I did a lot of boxing, a lot of conditioning. No, but- Conditioning is a big part of it. Conditioning, yeah, but the one thing that helped me extremely, living in England, in London, was training judo at the Boracay in London. That helped me massively because it gave me the motivation to learn something new because by then at the Boracay, the standup was, I'm sure today it is too, but by then was even higher than it is today. Like there was some very high-level judo guys training there. And the first time I went there, my standup was terrible compared to theirs. I mean, it was bad, but compared to them, it was terrible. So I was getting thrown like a child. And that motivate me to keep coming back and get better. So that made my jujitsu much stronger. I became, my base got better, my top game improved, my pressure game improved. Did, does Neil Adams train? Ray Stevens. Ray Stevens. No, I've never met Neil Adams. Have you met Neil Adams? He's the voice of judo, I don't know if you watch the tournaments, he's incredible. Yeah, Ray Stevens is a silver medalist in the Olympics. He won European, he won a lot. So you did some judo training. What's your favorite throw, like a Soto? Like you don't- Uchimata, I would say, if I would pick one. So that made you better at jiu-jitsu as well? Yeah, yeah. Okay. And back then, like for the first, I would say maybe three years, maybe four, I went to Brazil for like two months before every major tournament. Got it. So I say, you know, I moved away from the school and I really focused. So I was really well prepared with my judo and everything else, sharpening up my skills. And then went to Brazil to train with like really high level people. So that way I would manage to compete in the highest level. What advice would you give to, let's start with a complete beginner. So, you know, a bunch of people come up to me, they still wanna start doing jiu-jitsu. What advice would you give them? Try to absorb as much technique as you can and try to be as relaxed as you can. Don't, you know, don't desperately try to fight so hard. Like learn and move slow. Move slow and relax. That's the hardest thing to do. The hardest. You know what I find with people, it seems like it's hard to even know that you're not relaxed. It's like the introspection. They don't even know what it feels like to relax. Not even know they tense. Yeah, right. They try to relax, they look at you, say, what, what do you mean relax? I'm relaxed. Exactly, exactly. The arms are shaking. You feel it. And in terms of going slow, they're like, yeah, well, I'm going slow. No, you're not. Yeah, there's a grace and elegance of movement that you can probably pick up from a lot of other disciplines. Like for me, I think that came from just learning piano at a young age. I think any mobility thing, to learn how to move efficiently, you have to know how to relax. So it's just the fact that you can, like, the body can be tense or it can be relaxed. Just knowing that fact. Now imagine your shoulders tense. Yeah. You think you play piano well? No, everything has to be relaxed. I guess some of that is mind too, but just knowing that and being self-aware. But see, like, even me, you know, approaching a thing, I'm not, I don't know anything about being a beginner. You're going to tense up. And like, it actually takes a conscious effort to think to relax. I mean, that's- Massively. That's why learning things as an adult is much harder than as a child. Like, it's very hard. And as an adult, it's like, to get to the highest level, it's not possible. Because you will never relax the way you should. Yeah, relax in the way that you become like water, but then you solidify in the right places. Yeah. Yeah. Is there advice you can give to an adult? So like, somebody that has a job, like a hobbyist, like how to progress, how to get- I mean, train. Just need to train as much as you can. Not, you know, five, seven days a week, because you're going to get injured. I mean, two, three times a week to start is the best way to initiate your jujitsu journey. And practice the same thing over and over again. When they don't work, it's just because you're not doing well. Not because, you know, you have to learn something else. Do you see some value in just picking a set of techniques that seem to draw your heart in? Like, for example, I'll give you an example. You're gonna yell at me. But I never learned close guard well. It just never connected with me. You could say it's body mechanics, whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is, it's just like my heart never connected with it. You know, the way I justified it to myself is I felt like when you're bad, you're using the close guard, just like you could use the half guard to stall. So I was really drawn to the butterfly guard as a beginner, because I thought that I have, or open guard in general, I have no options to stall, so I'm going to learn. My thinking was, let me do the guard that enforces me to learn. And then I fell in love with the butterfly guard and the open guard and so on. And I never really understood the close guard. And the other thinking was, do I really need to understand the close guard? Because it's always by choice that I go there. So I can avoid not really learning. I mean, you can avoid anything you want. I mean, you don't have to do anything. But it doesn't make you complete. That means you have a weakness. But do you want to be complete as a, this is the question, how valuable is it to be complete to get good? Depends how good you want to be. Okay, let's go, well, there's several questions there. Yeah, okay, like to be the best in the world, do you need to be complete? Of course. The best in the world, of course you have to be complete. Otherwise, somebody's gonna be better than you. But what about, so to understand to defend, you have to be also good at the offense in every single position? Otherwise, you have a weakness. And someone can capitalize on that weakness. Okay, what about to be like a hobbyist? Then you don't have to. But can you, or is it still bad? I mean, it's not bad. I mean, nothing is bad. I mean, if as a hobbyist, you start late, I mean, it doesn't matter how far you're gonna get. As long as you enjoy it, just train as much as you can. If it's twice a week, twice a week it is. You'll be limited how good you will be training twice a week, of course. Then the guy that trains twice a day, the more you train, the better you get. But you have to select what you train, that's what I'm asking. No, no, no, yes, but like for how long? Like there's some point in your life that you might try something, see if you like it, there's some point in your life that you might, okay, let me try close guard. You might not like it now, maybe in two, three years from now. Still don't like it. I kept trying it. Listen, it's very difficult to get any respect in jiu-jitsu. It's hard to get to black belt and beyond in jiu-jitsu at a respectable place and not have a good close guard. Close guard is... I mean, then don't do it. It's not necessary. I'm being a rebel. No, no, it's not. I'll say because it's not a position that you want the pressure, that if you don't know, you'll be in trouble. You're not gonna be in trouble not to know the close guard, you're just gonna go straight for open guard. I mean, that does not a problem. The main limitation is if you don't do close guard a lot, that you don't quite, you don't get a full complete picture of understanding how to attack close guard when somebody puts you into a close guard, when you're on top. So it's nice to know both sides, it's just to understand. Yeah, but you can have a pretty good understanding of how to defend from the top and not having any bottom. I mean, some of it is also just like the length of legs and just the geometry of your body. I'm sure Marcel Garcia has a good close guard, but... I've never seen it. That's exact. That's the point I'm trying to make. In theory, you can imagine it. But for a hobbyist, I think it's interesting to think of that, is it possible to focus on a small set of techniques that help you to develop still into a good jujitsu player? Yeah, of course. And still enjoy and still be able to be... Most people hobbies in the jujitsu world, 99%. I mean, people that compete. Even the people that compete and so on. 1% max. And you have high level competitors have no clue what close guard is. Okay, thank you for making it clear. No, I think you would say that most people don't have... Close guard is such a difficult position to understand, for me. Maybe one day we'll brainwash. Yeah, good. I felt it's too easy to stall versus attack. That was my main concern, is I wanna be forced in every way to always be attacking, to always be moving, to always be... And it felt like if I got really good, I've seen it happen with half guard too. It's like when people get really good at half guard, it just feels stall-y. If you just look at the matches and so on, you just slow things down to a thing that's not... You don't get reps on learning. You don't get action in interesting ways. So that was my worry, that I'll get old and fat and just sit in close guard all day, holding on to the white belts trying to kill me. Because it's also... I mean, that's the other thing for hobbyists and for everyone is to... When you first start, I think you have to relax in the face of the fact that you're just getting your ass kicked nonstop. That can also be really tough on the ego. I think probably the right way to see that is you're growing as a person. You see that clearly when they are in a bad position, let's say side mount or mount. Like a beginner, he will never relax on those positions. The moment that you say go, they like trying to push you out and explode. There's no relaxation and work on the defense. It's like, no, it's out and go until I have zero to give. Until I'm exhausted, my arms cannot move. It's kind of fun to watch actually. What's the role of drilling? Do you like drilling? I do not like drilling, but I'll tell you why. I think fighting is mechanic, right? So it's very important to drill a move until you learn the mechanic. Of course it's important. If someone wanna teach you an arm lock, you wanna practice that movement until you learn the mechanic of it, but the guy's not resisting, so it's easy to apply, right? So you apply as many times as you have to until you know the mechanic of the moves, until you can apply the mechanics. The moment that you know how to apply, there's no more point in drilling. Now you have to practice. Now you have to practice with resistance. Of course you're not gonna practice with the guy fully resisting. The guy's better than you because he's not gonna give you a chance to practice that move, but you have to practice with resistance. So where does drilling comes on that? It's most of people, they flow drill and everything. I think whatever you do, you're conditioning your body to do something. You repeat the same move over and over again. Your body's conditioning to apply that movement or that technique. Drilling is not realistic because the other person's not resisting. The flow movement or whatever. After you go beyond, when you already know the mechanics, the drilling with no resistance is not gonna teach you anything because you will never know how to apply the movement with resistance. So it's pointless to carry on drilling after you learn the mechanics. See, but you're making it sound easy to learn the mechanics. I would argue. You can drill as many times. I'm not limiting how much you drill. You drill as long as you had to. I mean, it doesn't matter how long. The benefit of drilling, and I'm just playing devil's advocate with you. The benefit of drilling is that you can more efficiently get a higher number of reps in. So. What are you gonna gain with those reps? Understanding the mechanics of the movement. And what I would like to argue is you don't necessarily need resistance to deeply understand the mechanics of something. Now, I don't know. There's some moves, like I bet you, you could drill your way to an incredible mount. Like, mount is a good example of that. You don't really need a resistance. I can imagine a world in which the resisting opponent is not essential for developing some of the very fine details of the mechanics. Which one? Because I don't know any. What? You say mount. Yes. What are you gonna achieve by drilling with no resistance after you learn the mechanics? In mount. But see, what I'm trying to tell you, the learning of the mechanics isn't a thing where you get a certificate and you're done. You're gonna learn the fine details of the way you redistribute your weight. You're going to learn how to move your, I don't understand mount. Against a dead body. What? Yeah, against a dead body. Like, everything you do is a slow process and timing. You do have to. Timing, you can't learn. You have to understand moving. Okay. But the guy's resisting. Like, I'm not gonna grab you and apply the movement. I need to grab you and feel when is the right time to do. Like, that only comes with movement. If you're not fully resistant, how would I know? You couldn't infer through it. It's like a. With no movement, with no resistance. Like arm lock. There's some resistance. Okay, arm lock. Let's say arm lock. Okay. Okay, let's say you've been drilling for a week. Yeah. Five hours a day. You should be an expert with the mechanics. But now, how, are you gonna carry on drilling? With no resistance? No, you have to. Exactly. After that week, drilling five hours a day, the arm lock, you still have no clue how to apply the arm lock against a resisting opponent. No clue, zero. Yeah. So you don't know the movement, you know the mechanic. Which is, you know, it's like how long you have to drill and how, that doesn't matter. It varies of the person. You can drill for a month. After that month is over, you should understand how the mechanic works. You still have no clue how to apply the movement against a resisting opponent. You will never ever know how until you apply with a fully resisting opponent. That's the only way to know, to really learn a movement. Yes, well put. But the question is, can you have a small percentage of time when you go against a resisting opponent to get the wisdom and the insight of what it takes to perform that movement, and you spend a large percentage of other time just practicing the mechanics of it? So like, do you need to, as you get better and better at technique, to basically drift away completely from drilling and more into the sparring? I'd like to, I just. You like drilling? No, I don't like drilling. Well, yes, I like drilling, I would say. But I just see, it always bothered me in the jiu-jitsu community how few people really saw the value of drilling. I see it in wrestling, especially in the Russian style of wrestling, like the value of drilling. I don't necessarily mean that it's like a dead body or like a dummy or something like that, but just getting the reps in, really focusing on the high amount of reps. I agree in wrestling and judo. I agree that drilling is very important. An initial drill, 1,000 times each move. Yeah, judo's a really big one for that, too. It is, because it's the movement, the timing, you know, it's the precision of the movement. It has to be perfectly, because it's one movement. Then you learn about the timing of the movement when you're fighting, but during fighting, you only need to know the time, because your body movement is exactly the same when you drill. That's really well put, yeah. The mechanics is much more important there. Yeah, but it's completely different for jiu-jitsu, because let's say from jiu-jitsu, like the arm lock, for example, we use that as an example. Let's say from the close guard. Even my close guard, before I go for the arm lock, I need to have a set of grips. Let's say I have your collar and your arm, right? And then, you know, when you're drilling, I'm gonna grab your arm, I'm gonna grab your collar, and I'm gonna drill my body until I can apply the arm lock and finish. And I can do that 1,000 times. Okay, now we're fighting, we start with the grip. The moment that I initiate the arm lock attack, you will defend, the arm lock will not work. So it's not the one movement that will get me to attack the arm. There's a combination of other things that I need to do. I need to feel about your weight, you know, I need to get you close to me. There's so many other things involved that I need to feel that only comes with a fully resistant opponent. Yeah, so pretty quickly it has to be live. Yeah. And then it comes how you practice, how you train. You're starting on that position and just saying, let's go. And the moment that we disengage from that position, we go back, that's when you really learn. Because everything that you do wrong, you're gonna go back there and you're gonna try again, try again, try again. And the repetition, it will teach you, have a feeling of timing, when to go, if there's other combinations, which you always has, to go with it. By the way, for the internet that's currently yelling at me for arguing with Haja Gracie about drilling, that's called playing devil's advocate to strengthen, to explore ideas. I'm not actually arguing. Okay, I forgot to ask you, if you had to fight against the bear, lion, gorilla or anaconda to the death, which one would you choose and would you be able actually to win against any of them? A bear, a lion, a tiger, or anaconda? Oh, gorilla too, gorilla, you can go gorilla. I'll probably choose the anaconda. That's the, I mean, you're not allowed to run away though. So you're in a cage, do you have to kill? Still the anaconda. Okay, so the other one. I think I have no chance against any other ones. Zero chance, what's with John's thing? I think. I have a tiny little against the anaconda. I just waited it out. You don't think it's possible to be, I just, it feels like technique can do something against these animals, but they have so much strength, so much aggression. You know, the real naked joke, translating to Portuguese, is kill the lion. So ever since I was a kid, I always thought that maybe if I get behind a lion, the real naked joke, which in Portuguese it says mata leão, so mata leão means kill the lion. So I always thought that that's the only way to kill a lion, or to, you know, if you're fighting against a lion, you go behind and put the real naked joke, I think you put him to sleep. The name mata leão is like kill the lion. Someone came up with the name. Why? Somebody must have. Maybe someone went to a fight with a lion, choked him up. There you go, John, there you go. I honestly, do you think, or so, actually, yeah, you understand controlling positions. Do you think an animal like a gorilla or a lion would shake you off? If you had back full, you're locked in. Well, I would say the one that'll have the biggest chance of staying there is the lion, because he's the thinner body. He's smaller than a tiger, I guess. Think tigers are bigger? Yes. So do you think they can shake you off, though? I think I'll have a bigger chance of staying against a lion's back than any other animal. Still not answering the question. Do you think you have a chance? If I start on the back? Yeah, start full, locked in, full controls. Let's say it's a small enough lion that you can actually have a full. I would guess so. I mean, I would like to believe so. Okay. Well, just like you said, somebody must have been able to do it. Throughout your journey in jiu-jitsu, have there been low points? Like, has there been points where you really doubted yourself? No, I've never really doubted myself. There's low points in defeats. Those are the low points when I lost. How did you deal with defeats? I just went back to the gym next week and said I need to get better. Every time I lost, I'm like, I need to get better because I need to choke them out. I need to submit them because, you know, win by points, it's... As a black belt, I have very little loss. I would say, I mean, I don't like to sound like a crime baby, but I'll say most of those loss was very, very controversial. Yeah, it was not a dominant, clear performance. It's about referees and points and so on. Everything was, since I was very young, I always fought against my opponent and the referee. Like, it's, if there was ever in my whole life, since I was a kid, there was ever a doubt, it always go to my opponent. Always, always. That was just something that I had to deal with my whole life. What's the motivation behind, what led to the fact that you win most of your matches by submission or in dominance? Like, are you chasing? Because that's the only way to prove you better. And I never fought to win tournaments. That was never my goal. That was the consequence of me trying to be the best. Like, I don't care how many titles I have. I care about, I need to beat all my opponents and not win because win is not enough. I have to submit them. That's the only way to prove I'm the best, to submit them. If I win by advantage or a point, that means I was better than them that day. That does not mean I'm better than them. If there's no way to stay top, if I take you down, pass your guard, mount you, and submit you, there is zero question who's the best. Like, there's nothing you can say about it. If I foot sweep you, you put your butt on the floor, I get an advantage, we carry on fighting and I win, means nothing. Not even means I'm better than you. And if that happened, that would haunt you. For me, it's not enough. I wouldn't be happy. What advice would you give to young folks who look at you, who are able to accomplish from a place where you're not very good to becoming the best in the world at a thing? What advice would you give them to have a journey like that, to have a journey where they could be successful in their career and their life to such a high level? Determination is the most important thing. You need to know where you're going together. So you need to have a goal, whatever that goal is. Like, you need to set that goal for yourself. So you know where you wanna go. And to have the determination to get there and be sure that you will fail many times. Like, you cannot let your failures bring you down because you will fail many times. Everybody does. So you said you didn't look to external sources of belief. You just believed in yourself. Is there something to that where you have to try to be your own source of belief, flame the fire within yourself? Was that something difficult to do? That was just very natural for me. I said, you can surround yourself with great people. That is extremely important. Don't surround yourself with failures because they're not gonna push you to, they don't know what it is, how to get there. I mean, everybody knows, but when you surround yourself with winners, you will know what it took them to get there. You use them as an example. Yeah, there's a certain kind of aura to people that just achieve great things and being around them. But still, it's hard to find people that, especially at the early stage. Any area. Yeah. Any area. That's right. Yeah, greatness has a certain, I think it's almost humbling just to see, okay, any human, like at least that's a lesson I learned. Almost any human can do, can be great. I mean, one, I've used Muhammad Ali as a great example. Look at his belief. Look at how much he believed himself before he was Muhammad Ali. Look at the determination he had, the way, the confidence he had fighting, even on his loss. That never changed him. No, when he fought Foreman, George Foreman, not one person in the world thought he was gonna win that fight by himself. He never doubted himself. Everybody else did. He won over all odds against. So, I mean, when you look at people like that, you can, you don't have to be a boxer to try to follow his example. But see, those are like epic, giant battles, but I feel like you fight the same kind of battle when you're young and your parents tell you that, you know, just with their whole energy that this is silly, don't be silly, don't be silly to chase. It's harder. It is harder. But as a kid, it's harder to deal with that because, I mean, to go against adults, especially parents telling you otherwise, like the amount of strength you need is gigantic. I don't even know how much strength you need because that was not my case. So I can understand what you have to go through with the force of your parents telling you otherwise. And but it's how much you want, it will dictate how far you're gonna go, where you're gonna go. So it's, you know, if you can break through that, you'll get nowhere. It's that simple. And actually, one of the really nice things the internet does that I would give advice to young people is like you can find, even if your parents are not a source of that, your teachers, your community, you can find people on the internet who will believe in you. It's kind of cool. It's kind of cool how the internet opens the possibility of like a community of like 10, 11 year olds, like building shit. I see this all the time. Engineering, and they, I mean, they're fueled by belief. They want to be like, they want to create the next trillion dollar company. Right? There's that fire in their eyes. And not for the money, obviously, but to do something really impactful. And I think that fire is extinguished often by teachers and parents. Because I think the logic that parents have, and teachers, they look at a kid, and they don't, on the surface level, they don't see greatness. Right? They just see kind of mediocrity. And so to them, it's like, no, right, the world is more complicated than that. In order to get great, you have to, like they somehow kind of always try to be reasonable with you, and in so doing, extinguish the flame. It's weird. I think most people are afraid to even try. So you can call them cowards for not trying. Because you are a coward for not trying, not putting yourself at risk. Right? So I would say a big part of society are cowards for never trying, never pursuing what they really want. And so there is a weight, a pressure, everyone, most people, a lot of people, I'll say around you, that because they were afraid to try, they don't incentivize people to do so because they want everybody to be like them. Because imagine if everybody around you suddenly are not afraid and everyone is trying, and you look yourself in the mirror and say, I was too scared. I've never tried. So you feel really bad about yourself. So it's easier to have people around you that think exactly like you than otherwise. So that reflect a lot on the kids. It's, you know, society almost like press them down to be like everybody else, to have a normal life, normal job. It's, you know, don't take risk because you can lose it all. I mean, that's the worst thing you can tell everybody. Take all the risks, lose it all a few times. That's how you're gonna build things. Especially when you're young. Yes. You can recover much quicker. Exactly. What's the point of not trying? You should try. And you will lose everything. Doesn't matter. What matters to lose everything? It does matter. It will teach you resilience. You know, try harder. Go after. You know, don't live a normal life because otherwise you, what we're here for. Yeah. Take big risks, take a lot of them, fail and fail and fail and fail. Of course, fail a thousand times. Until you succeed. And then you're gonna, you'll be the most proud of yourself. Like, there's, then it'll be priceless. It's, then we'll change the world. It is true that most people are not necessarily cowards but have cowardice in them. It's most people are just afraid to try, you know. And a lot of it comes from a place of love because, you know, if you try and you fail, you get hurt. It hurts. I mean, it's not a pleasant thing to fail. I mean, you feel terrible to think, you know, when I lost any tournament was a good thing. You know, when, take when I was getting beat up at the gym over and over again was a good thing. When I was getting there and getting smashed by all the good guys. I think I liked it. Well, I hate it. But it's my resilience that, you know, make me carry on until I succeed. I think I like to get tapped. Well, I'm the most competitive, one of the most competitive person you know. I hate to lose. But it's, I accept. I mean, I just need to get better. Every single time I lost in the championship, I hate it. I've never screamed. No one never saw me screaming, shouting that, you know, I got robbed. You know, I've should have won the referee. Yeah, but you know, screwed me over. I mean, it's okay. It happen. Shit happens. I need to get better. Cause I don't want to be in that position ever again. So when I fight, if I'm better, if I tapped him, there's no question. I don't need to wait for the referee to decide that there was points or no points. If you know, his interpretation, that made me better. Cause I was even more determined to be better. In my mind, I have to tap everybody else. Winning is not enough. It's just objectively speaking, what you learn the most from is really wanting to succeed and then failing. And doing that often. That's the reality from a parent, from a teacher perspective, from anybody, from people you love. If they really want to do something, help them do that thing. If you think they're going to fail, good. Help them do that faster so they fail faster. So they're going to learn. The only way to succeed is failing. There is no other way. That's what people have to understand. Without failing, there is no success. Since you've gotten a little softer, a little more emotionally open, what's the role of love in the human condition, Hodge and Gracie? Probably the most important thing. That's the basic of everything, right? It's, I mean, love brings the best of us. If we had more love and compassion from the other person, I think we would be a more evolved species. The world would be a much better place than it is now. Did friends, family help you along the way? Yeah, a lot. I always had a lot of love and help from many people. That's why I succeeded. I never got here by myself. I had a lot of people who loved me, believed in me, and helped me get to be here today. Well, I'm glad they did, and I'm glad you're here today. I'm a huge fan. It was an honor to meet you. It was an honor to hang out with you in Vegas, to hang out with you again today. I've just been a huge fan for a long time. My pleasure, man. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for this conversation. It was awesome. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Hodge and Gracie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Hodge and Gracie himself. Jiu-jitsu is simple. You just have to do it right. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/FhfmGM6hswI

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Paul Conti: Narcissism, Sociopathy, Envy, and the Nature of Good and Evil | Lex Fridman Podcast #357

Narcissism is not arrogance. Narcissism is the opposite of arrogance. There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy. The following is a conversation with Paul Conti, a psychiatrist and a brilliant scholar of human nature. My friend, Andrew Huberman, told me that Paul and I absolutely must meet and talk, not just about the topic of trauma, which Paul wrote an amazing book about, but broadly about human nature, about narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, good and evil, hate and love, happiness and envy. As usual, Andrew was right. This was a fascinating conversation. As the old meme goes, one does not simply doubt the advice of Andrew Huberman. Allow me to also quickly mention that I disagree with Paul a bunch in this episode, as I do in other episodes, even with experts, in part for fun and in part because I think the tension of ideas in conversation is what creates insights and wisdom. My goal is to always empathize, understand, and explore ideas of the person sitting across from me. Disagreement is just one of the ways I think it's fun to do just that, as long as I do so from a place of curiosity and compassion. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Conte. Do you see psychiatry as fundamentally a study of the human mind and not just a set of tools for treating psychological maladies? Absolutely. I think psychiatry is our best way to understand who we are as people. I mean, it looks at our biology. How does our brain work? How does it connect the parts with one another? How does the chemistry in it work? It's the very foundational aspects of who we are and then it manifests as psychology. What do we think? What do we feel? What are our strivings? What are our fears? So, yeah, I think psychiatry provides tools that we can use to help each other, but those tools come through it being a discipline of understanding. So with every patient you see, with every mind you explore, are you picking up a deeper understanding of the human mind? I think I'm trying to. I think we should learn, should be able to take something away from everything we do, every interaction to some small degree. Every conversation. It doesn't have to be a patient, just anywhere, at Starbucks, getting a coffee. You can learn something from that little experience. Yeah, even if you just reinforce sort of gentle kindness and gratitude and decent human interaction. There's a reinforcement of that, that even if we don't take away memories or lessons, so to speak, we can reinforce who we choose to be. So understanding ourselves from those interactions, too. Not just the general sort of philosophical human mind, but understanding our own mind. Introspect on how our own mind works. Yeah, everything we understand about anyone or anything else is coming through here, right? So, yeah, we're understanding others. We're also understanding ourselves. It's all feeding through us. Yeah, but it's a tricky thing to step away and look at your own mind and understand that it's just a machine. You can kind of control the way the machine processes the external environment and the way that machine converts the things it perceives into actual emotions. Like how it interprets the things it perceives. You just sort of step away and analyze it in that way. And then you can control it. You can oil the machine. You can control how it actually interprets the perceptions in order to generate positive emotions and be like a, what is it, like a mechanic for the gears in the machine. I mean, I think to some degree. To some degree, but the difference, I think, at least as I understand, I think of machines as not being inscrutable, right? That if there's enough study, there's enough acumen applied that we can understand whatever it is we're trying to figure out. Whereas part of understanding ourselves is understanding that there are things we can't understand. And I think that's indispensably important to health and happiness. And also to having enough humility to see how people can be different from us, how we can be different from ourselves at times. So knowing that we don't know a lot and having some idea of what that might be, I think is an indispensable part of the process, which I think is different from machines, I think. Yeah, the machines, you're basically saying machines generally, because they're engineered from a design, they're usually going to be simpler, therefore understandable. And you're saying the complexity of the human mind is, at least from our perspective, nearly infinite. Is there a meta-phenomenon, what sometimes gets described as sort of levels of emergence where at increasing levels of complexity, you have novelty evolve that you can't predict from lower levels of complexity. Like for example, atoms to molecules, it's just one example. I think neurons to consciousness, consciousness to culture, right? That there are meta-phenomenon that separate from the phenomenon underneath of them, and thereby add an entire aspect of novelty. So I think we are, I mean, I really think this is true, that we are all infinitely fascinating because these levels of emergence, of novelty, that are inscrutable because you can't predict from one level to the next, or understand fully, are what make us, and not just us, but I think sentient creatures, right? Human beings, right? But sentient creatures, inestimably more interesting than creatures that aren't sentient. And I don't know, I think when we think about machine learning and artificial intelligence, I think it's that that we're trying to create, levels of emergence that now we don't fully understand anymore, which I guess is both exciting and maybe scary too. Yeah, so you start at the physics of atoms, quantum mechanics, go into chemistry, go into biology. From the biology, you have the functional phenomena, especially as manifested in the human brain, and then multiple brains connecting together through consciousness and intelligence creates civilizations. It's pretty interesting. Where do you think the magic is? At which layer of the cake? Every layer, because every time you emerge from one thing to another, I see it as an analog, like the concept of the dialectic, right? Where I think it was Hegel, right, who realized, hey, when you have thing A and thing B, and they're complicated and they come together, you don't get a hybrid of A and B, right? You end up getting something that's new, that's novel. And I think that describes to some degree what emergence is, except there's a whole new, and it's a universe of novelty, right, that comes at each layer of emergence that allows infinite possibilities that weren't possible before. And I think that's why we're so complicated, that our functional neuroscience, right, which I think is psychology, right, our ability to think about ourselves, about others, to be reflective, is sitting on top of so many layers of emergence. Like the idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, that we're, each of us, our consciousness is standing on the shoulder of a giant of many, many, many levels of emergence, of novelty, so many of which we don't understand. I mean, that's subatomic particles, everything that quantum physics means, you know, when does time become important, right? As opposed to things happening outside of time and outside of space, when do we slot into one temporal perspective, and then the complexity just, I think, grows and grows and grows. Yeah, the interesting word you use is novelty. If true, this really blows my mind. In some either shallow or deep sense, it is true, I'm trying to figure that out. I don't know if you know something about cellular automata, is this very simple mathematical objects where you have rules that govern each individual little cell, and they interact locally, and that, you know, you understand the very simple operation of those individual cells, but at another layer of abstraction, when you just kind of zoom out with blurry vision, these meta objects starts appearing that function. You could build a Turing machine with it, you can build an arbitrary complexity of computation on top of this kind of very simple object. Yes. It's an interesting question whether that was always there. The atoms somehow know about love, right? Like about consciousness. About war and violence and evil and hate and all that. That's already laden in the possibility of that, the capacity for that, it's already in the atoms. It's already in the physics, it's already in the, in all the different chemistry that builds up. Like even the origin of life, still a mystery. That's known, that's in the physics. That's known to the universe, the basic background physics in the universe. I don't, because if that's not the case, it's like where does that come from? Where's that magic? And how many layers can the cake possibly have? How many are we gonna keep building? If it's all, if there's, if we're constantly through this process of abstraction, of adding a layer to the cake, adding novel things, like where's the ceiling? As we expand out into the cosmos, if we successfully can do that, are we gonna keep building like more miraculous, complex objects, and then the brain is just like a middle layer thing? We tend to think of ourselves as a truly, truly special manifestations of what's possible in the universe, but maybe we're just like the basic, like tiny building block of something much, much, much bigger. We're in the early days of being a brick in a very large building. Sure. I think that's entirely possible. I mean, I think the only emergent thing, so to speak, that we build is culture, the aggregation of us. So you have individual human minds, which are entirely unique. I mean, even the fact that time is different for you and me, it may be by picoseconds, but we can engage because our perceptions of time are parallel enough, they're close enough, that we can share a reality. But we're all living in a different dimension of time. We know that. So we're unique in that way, and then the unique individuals that we are, just like the cells, start to create not just one thing, not just a culture, but culture on top of our individuality, our uniqueness, our even dimensional uniqueness of time and experience and consciousness. So we create cultures on top of us, but what could be beyond culture, and what is different from us, either on underlying levels, like quantum physics or chemistry or biology, or entirely different and unconceived, I think is, it's an immense question. I think it's one that should create humility in us, right? That look how much we don't know, and then how reckless we are with ourselves, with our resources, with human life. And I think there, it's important to say, I mean, think about how entropy rules the universe around us. I mean, how over-selected are we? How many, not just hundreds or thousands of times, but how many millions of times does there have to be a selection branch point before we get into a sort of eddy pool of counter-entropy, right? Where you can begin to create, which I think is why you say, okay, do the atoms know about love, right? The fact that anything is being created, right, means there's this over-selection for counter-entropy, where there can be a building of greater complexity, of ultimately of novelty, and we don't often think about that, of how far removed we are, maybe light years, so to speak, from any other location, temporally, physically, in the universe, where this could happen, and we don't think about what does that mean? Everything that you said, love, everything, is counter-entropy, goes against the way, the basic physics of the universe, so maybe actually the atoms really don't like what we're doing. They want us to stop, they've been trying really hard to stop, and despite that, we somehow started this whole bacteria thing for like a billion years, and now we're here. I actually think of it kind of the other way. I don't think there's any purpose to purposelessness, right, so why would anything be here if the drive weren't towards creativity, right? If the drive weren't towards those subatomic particles, not being nothingness that blips in and out of existence, right, like we think is going on in empty space, you know, for light years upon light years, right? But is there a design, either natural or intentional, for a schema, right, a scenario that allows for the incredibly rare but not non-existent eddy pool of counter-entropy where good can happen, right, where creativity can happen, where ultimately something can grow, something novel can happen. There's no novelty in the vastness of space, even though there's not nothing there. There's novelty here because I think the layers of emergence start stacking very, very, very high when we're in a place of counter-entropy, which then could provide even thoughts about good and evil, right, the idea that creating, that preserving is good, right? It's what we build upon. It's how we get to the eddy pool of counter-entropy, right? So then destruction is not good. What good comes of aggression and destruction, right? Unless we're protecting, I mean, you can think of outlying cases, but just think in general concepts, right, destruction destroys. It brings us towards a state of entropy, towards a state of nothingness, whereas goodness, commonality, collaboration, right, nurturing, right, brings novelty. It brings new existence into the universe, and I think we don't think about that. We're in the middle of something so vast and built on top of so many layers, and I think it leads us to be cavalier, you know, with human life, including often our own. So you think there's an underlying creative force to the universe that might even have a kind of built-in morality to it, where creating is better than destroying, and then that somehow maps on onto our society, where we kind of try to figure out what that actually means in terms of good and evil. So something is there like that, but it has to be, it's so nice, it's so perfect, because it's rare, it's sufficiently rare where we have our own space, like you can close the door and it's like, I need to be alone right now, as our human civilization, to work on my thing. So it's sufficiently rare that there's not other alien civilizations that are just constantly knocking on our door, destroying us, but it still exists. That's weird. Right, it's so fantastically improbable that I think we should be very respectful of it. And I think you said there's a creative force that values creativity. Yes. Things would be, well sure, if it's a creative force, its existence, its ability to exist and to create comes from something other than entropy, something other than so much dispersion that there's nothingness. So the creative force will value the sanctity of things, keeping things together, not destroying things, building novelty, including novelty of knowledge, novelty of sentience. I mean, it fits with the idea that we're not nothing, that that's incredibly improbable, and that there are these many, many layers of emergence that we're standing upon. And I think it tells us something that we're not doing ourselves a service to ignore. It's not just a jump to saying, oh, there's a religious answer to everything. It's just, no, it's saying science isn't a god either. So if we think of science as a tool and not as an endpoint in and of itself, what is the science telling us? I remember showing up at medical school, and it really is true. I mean, I knew so little about the human body. I'd only been in hospitals to visit people. I'd taken pre-med classes, but sort of intensely at once after I didn't take any, and I was working in business. I knew next to nothing. And I had this idea that was so naive in retrospect that I was gonna learn so much, right? I was gonna answer these questions, because I was gonna learn what's going on in the body. What are these organs doing? What are these cells? And what I learned was there was so much more that was amazing and mysterious and seemingly impossible, like even how a cell functions, right? Like what is going on inside of a cell, the transport mechanisms and energy functions and diffusion functions. And then you can go down to smaller levels than that. But when you come back out and you say, how will those cells make a kidney? It's not explanatory. I remember asking the OB who had delivered my first child. I was so amazed, and I asked him, what do you think? What do you know? You do this, right? You're seeing this life created. And his thought was, nothing. I just marvel. I mean, I get to do this, but I just marvel at it. And I think the more we know about us, the more we respectfully marvel. And we should do that. We should proactively marvel at every aspect, at every layer that where the novelty emerges. Yes, we'd be a lot less likely to say, hey, I don't like you because of something, whatever it is, race, religion, culture, sexuality, gender identity, whatever it is. Or I wanna say, I want rights that you don't have, right? Or I want what you have, right? I mean, there's so much of this. And I understand it's driven by scarcity and by human insecurity and envy and all of these things that I think drive us towards destruction. But all of that recklessness comes from not having this initial appreciation and respect that you're referring to and just marveling at. Like, wow, okay, we're here. That's amazing. Let's start with that. But if we marvel at this whole thing, the human project, the human condition, all the different kinds of human beings that are possible, what do you then make of that some humans do evil onto the world? First of all, are all human beings capable of evil? If we're in the process, now we've got a little bit of momentum in terms of marveling the layers of the cake. Should we also marvel at the capacity for evil in all of us? Is that capacity there? I believe that it is, yes. So what do we understand about the psychology of evil? Where does that originate in the human mind? Is it there in the neurobiology? Is it there in the environment, in the upbringing? Can I clarify first? I think the capacity for evil, I do believe, is in all of us. There's a difference between enacting evil and a sort of preset, followed, developed plan of evil. I don't believe that all of us are capable of doing what the people who perpetrate the most evil do. But I do believe that we're capable of perpetrating evil. And one thought would be that there are drives in us. I mean, there certainly seem to be drives in us towards survival, towards gratification, in some ways towards pleasure. And that can get very complicated because pleasure inside can be relief of distress. So if I feel very badly about myself and I can feel a little better about myself by making you feel worse about yourself, which that plays out in a lot of human beings, is that an indirect way of bringing pleasure? So it gets very complicated what's going on inside of us. And sometimes the perpetration of evil things can be through misunderstandings, anger, impulsivity. I mean, there are things that we can have in us. And other times there can be other things going on which are through the lens of unhealthy human psychology. So for example, the psychology of envy, which I think drives the lion's share of the orchestrated evil, right? There's a difference between impulsive, reflexive evil and highly orchestrated evil, which I think is driven by envy. Highly orchestrated evil, are we talking about a scale of societies like totalitarianism? So if we're thinking about somebody like Hitler, so at scale, orchestration of evil, envy driving that. So I mean, that's really interesting to think about. I'd love to hear more about it. So there might be some psychological forces that are in tension with each other. So one is, if you look at somebody like Hitler, it's difficult to know what was going on in his mind, but it's possible to imagine if you just look at dictators throughout history, that he thought he was doing good, not just for himself, but for the people he believed have value. So one way you can achieve what we consider as evil is by devaluing some group of people. And that could be all group of people. So it could have sort of a narcissistic type of idea that you basically don't care about other human beings. That's one. Envy is different. I mean, maybe they can collaborate together, or even like you mentioned, you can actually enjoy doing bad to others. That's almost like different, because if all it is is like narcissism, you disregard, you don't care how others feel, then you can just make cold, calculated, military, almost economic decisions, and you don't care if a million people die here or there. But if you actually enjoy some aspect of that, or there is like a resentment that fuels it, it's not just cold calculation, it's like fueled by some kind of personal or cultural resentment. It's different. I think it's all fueled by that. You think so? I think it's all fueled by that. I think the idea that say Hitler thought he was doing good, is like that is such a thin facade that it flies away like a handkerchief in a hurricane. Okay, yeah, thank you. That's wow, that's beautiful, yeah. It's built upon, it says, I'll explain, logical lies, because people can build lies upon specious logic. So the idea that, okay, I am doing good because I believe that this ethnicity of people is good, and this is bad, and now I'm going to do this, and I'm going to make the world different, and it's going to bring better to the world, and now I'm raising armies, and I'm building concentration camps, and I think this is all in the service of good, is I don't think anyone ever thinks that. Or they think that, but with, because they're living in the surface patina. They're not allowing the hurricane in that blows away the handkerchief, and says this is all evil. How do you decide that some group of people is good, and some is bad? And what is it that you take upon yourself to play God or make decisions about the world? And I think what really is going on is people are not doing that. There's something cobbled together to say, why this is right, and this is okay, and this is even good, but it is all a lie. It's a lie that's adorning, what I believe is the fact, I believe, that what's going on is the gratification of envy inside of the person, and whether someone says, oh, I think this is good, and it's okay if a million people die, or I'm gonna enjoy that a million people die, I think is the same. I think the enjoyment, the gratification of the orchestrated evil is there, and that it all comes from vulnerability and insecurity. It all comes from deficits in the sense of self. I'm gonna have to process that. My slow, penny, and PC is processing that, so envy underlies all of it. The psychological concept of envy, what is that? I keep putting myself in the mind of Hitler, I guess. That has nothing to do, it doesn't have to do with Jews or Slavic people. Does it have to do with specific amorphous other in his mind that he's envious of? I think it has all to do with him, all to do with him. There's not a love of the people with whom he allied, or even a sense of the people who he persecuted were worse than him. It's all projections out of what was going on inside of him, which was an intense sense of inadequacy, a rage at being someone he perceived as lesser than. That's the difference. We can define words in different ways, even within psychology, but let's say we take the definition here of jealousy as being benign. The idea that, oh, I might see something that you have that I don't, and I might think, I'd like that. Maybe I'll work harder to get it. Or maybe I can't get it, maybe it's that you're younger than I am. I say, okay, you have that and I don't. I have other things too, I'm okay anyway. But I might want those things. But it's very benign, the jealousy. I'd like to be younger, I'd like to be richer, whatever it is that we people think. But it's just a thought, and it's a thought that can result in strivings or acceptance. It's very, very different, it's completely different than envy, which is destructive. It's the thought of, I see something that you have that I don't have, and instead of me working for it or accepting that I don't have it, what I'd like to do then is bring you down, take you down to where I am, and then I'll feel better, because from the perspective of envy, it is all relative. So is jealousy a kind of, is it, because you said completely different, but is jealousy potentially a gateway drug to envy? Is it a slippery slope? I think, no, I think that jealousy is a natural, just part of the human phenomenon that we go through life, and we see, oh, I'd like to have that. I think it's part of our incentives, right? I'm farming and I have one row of crops, and I look over and I see that you're working harder and you have two, and I'd like to have two. That can make me work harder to have two. You don't think it's a slippery slope from one to the other to, at first, you're like, I'd like to work harder, but then you keep failing and the weather sucks, and you keep failing, and the other person becomes more successful. Plus, he's got a new hot wife now, there's a nice tractor, there's a field that's all working, and then you get this idea that, you know what? I'm gonna steal all this stuff, I'm gonna murder him, and that, don't you think that's just like a leap of the same phenomenon? No. No, because I think there are things that are in us as humans, right? So the things that just by being human, like we can, for example, we can feel compassion, right? We can feel interest, right? We can feel jealousy in that benign sense. It's all part of just being human. If we start going from, hey, you have more crops than I have, and it seems like I actually have a better life in a lot of ways than I have, I'm gonna kill you, that is not a progression of something benign, right? That is- But wait a minute, but that is a human leap of the same thing, isn't it? Because you're drawing a line, stuff, you're saying like, this human stuff, it's regular life, it's benign, but it feels like this benign thing is just a low magnitude thing, version of the thing that's not benign. Like there's probably a gray area where it stops being, but like jealousy, you can have like healthy jealousy, you can have a little bit slightly unhealthy, there's a, I think, Jealous Guy, this John Lennon song that I love, it's just beautiful. I mean, there's like, this jealousy inside relationships can make you feel like, you know, take your minds in all kinds of silly directions, and it's crazy, but like it feels like that's a next door neighbor to like being really crazy and toxic and all that kind of stuff inside relationships, and then that feels like a next door neighbor, it's like an apartment building, that feels like a next door neighbor that eventually gets to Hitler, with envy and resentment of an entire population of people. You're right in that there's a causal, there can be a causal chain, right? Like if I'm not feeling jealous, maybe I won't ever feel envious, right? So you can see, okay, so it can kind of lead, it can open gates to, huh, like how much do I dislike that you have things that I don't have, right? So yes, in that sense, but, and I think, this is the part that I think is so important, that I think there is a disjunction, right? There's an asymptotic shift, right, from one thing to another, because it is very- I'm not just speaking my language, mathematically, asymptotic leap, yep. Yes, that's, it's a way to convey, right, something that's entirely different, because if I start thinking, you know, I'm not gonna try and make things better, right, I'd like instead to harm you, that's qualitatively different. Oh, it's almost like, you know what it is? It could be, I don't know what you think about this, but it's in which direction your motivation is pointing. So if, in the response to the feeling of jealousy, your sort of, the motivation says, okay, I understand this feeling, I wanna do less of it. I think there must be a threshold to which you actually wanna do more, like it becomes a vicious downward cycle. So that's what envy becomes. Like the first feeling, this idea that I'm gonna kill the farmer, turns into like more and more and more, and you can't sleep, and you're visualizing the farmer, and then you're like, oh, I'm gonna kill the farmer, and you're visualizing the farmer, and he becomes the devil, and like you have this very, you know, it's basically a thing that builds into the negative direction, which is, returns to the stable center. And now a person is cultivating evil, right? They're saying, hey, there can be seeds of evil in all of us. Let me take that seed out, dust it off, plant it, nurture it, right, and then grow that seed of evil, which will affect all other parts of the person's life, right, they won't behave the same towards others in their life. They'll become different as they nurture fantasies of evil, as they begin to create inside of themselves the motivation and the will, right, to enact evil. The Hitler analogy would say, look, you take someone who had a bad childhood, right, who was not loved, who was taught and told that he was less than, okay, like that, we know that happens, I mean, that's why child abuse is so evil, right? It's telling children the worst possible wrong lessons, right, they're not good enough, they'll always be hurt, you know, they can't keep themselves safe, they don't deserve safety, right? So then you take someone who then nurtures that seed of evil, which is a choice, and it's why I can't paint well enough, and no one appreciates me, and I don't like how I look, and I don't fit in with the people I wanna fit in with, and then, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and there's a hatred of self through that lens of misery, of just being repulsed by the self, but that's unacceptable to the self, so, oh, it has to be someone else's fault, right? It's not my fault, whose fault is it, right? And then you see en masse the inaction of evil towards groups of people who somehow, in this person's mind, right, are responsible for his misery, and there's the justification of evil, and then all the, you know, whether it's, this will be better for the economy, this will be good, this will be that, like, that's all lies built to justify the evil. Those are surface-level narratives. Yes. And the envy is the deep-down mechanism that enables. And that's the end point that's being served. What's being served is destruction, right, which is why it always brings more destruction, right? I mean, how many times do wars that were started for purposes that we would look and say, like, those were evil purposes, like, how many times does good come of that? Even if we look at the modern world, what comes of it is more evil, is more destruction. You know, Hitler's outward destruction eventually came inward, and, you know, you see pictures of what Berlin looked like after the Second World War, right? It wasn't just destruction perpetrated outward, as awful as that is, it's catchy, right? Like, people used to worry if you, you know, before the, during the time of the Manhattan Project, right, if you start this chain reaction, you know, will you blow the whole world up, right, or will it stop within this bomb or not? And we see, okay, the chain reaction of evil hasn't yet blown the whole world up, but look at the, look at how the catastrophe spreads. You think 50 to 60 million people dead in the Second World War, what truly was a world war. What destruction was spread around the globe? And this is something that can't be stopped once the chain reaction starts. Like, if Hitler was successful, like, it would just keep going. If he had been, think about it. On his personal psychological level, I mean. Right, because we think from the perspective of destruction, success would have led to the need to conquer more, then there's factions and infighting, and then eventually you get the same mass destruction, right? And never does the inaction of evil satisfy what the person is initially seeking. Like, people want to feel better about themselves, right? We, you know, like Winnicott, who was a British pediatrician who wrote about children and adults from very deep perspectives. He wrote about the idea of good enough, right? And you can sort of extrapolate that to like, we all want to feel good enough. Like, not just limp over the line good enough, but I want to feel good enough that I'm a decent person in the world, and like, what I do matters. And, you know, I can have an impact on people, and, you know, people can like me and care about me. There's a simplicity there that people want that when people don't have. And there's certain other factors, maybe there are temperamental factors or historical factors, can lead to trying to soothe that deficit, right? Through envy. And I think it starts with that. And it often starts in childhood, not always, but it often starts in childhood when the child's brain and psychology are so vulnerable. And, you know, you see salient child abuse. If you look at what was Hitler's background and what was Stalin's background, and I mean, you could look at almost anyone who's perpetrated evil, whether they're serial killers or whatever it may be, the majority, not everyone, but the majority had these lessons in childhood that said you're not good enough, you can't keep yourself safe, no one cares about you. And in a subset of people, that's gonna generate envy, and that seed of evil then gets planted and nurtured. As a fighter jet roars above us. The sound of a fighter jet above us. It'd be good if I had orchestrated that. You forget, you quickly forget the comfort of being in a peaceful place. That's one thing I saw in Ukraine. Is, hey, you quickly get comfortable here. The whole trip back, I was thinking, it's so damn good to be in America. The whole, just the whole, like, it's like a three-day trip back. It's so good to be American. We might take that for granted as a population, but I do agree. So the destruction never alleviates the envy. Are all humans capable of envy? I believe the answer is yes. If you think, do we all have the possibility of evil in us? I think the answer to that is yes. But we have free will, we have choice. We can choose what we do with that, which is why, just because someone is a sociopath, for example, doesn't mean that they're not responsible. I mean, our medical legal jurisprudence has absolutely borne that out, that legally, medically. We think, okay, we're responsible, presuming we're healthy. We're not unhealthy in other ways that eliminates our ability to be circumspect, but that we're responsible for what we do and don't nurture inside of us. I mean, there are plenty of things we could decide to nurture anger and hatred about. I could think of slights, difficulties, whether it's something someone else has done to me, or I could blame fate, or I could be mad at God, or the world. We can all make those choices, and we're responsible for them, or for recognizing things in us that are like, oh, I too have that in me, but I don't wanna nurture that, I don't wanna foster that, or do I choose to nurture and foster that? And I think ultimately, a subject of Hitler as evil, if Hitler had kept winning and winning, I think ultimately, he would've been the only person on Earth. And I really do believe that. Ultimately, everyone, everything else would be killed because it's such destruction, destroy everything. And probably when that didn't work, then there's the destruction of the self, because nothing soothes envy that is stoked by the flames of evil. And what you see is more and more anger and more and more frustration, which is why I really do believe someone like that, who nurtured evil in themselves that way, ultimately would destroy. They'd be like him and one other person, then he'd kill the other person. I think that's really powerfully said. But even just to return to the jealousy versus envy, I still think that it's the same flame. And envy is just the bigger version of it. So I think, I just, in my own personal life, I've felt jealousy towards others. Like you said, like, oh, this person has a, I don't know, a cooler thing, trinket, whatever trinket I cared about. And usually it's when somebody's really close to the trinket you're building. And I, early on, like in my teens, I realized that, just empirically speaking, that jealousy over a period of a week just doesn't feel good. And it's not productive, it doesn't help me build a better trinket. Or it does if I turn it, not into jealousy towards another person, but into a love for building a better trinket. It's like, oh, cool. Almost, you know what, like proactively speaking, and later in life, people like Joe Rogan actually have been really powerful in this for me, just as a fan of his, to celebrate other people. So it's almost, as opposed to ignoring that other person with a cool trinket, it's like celebrating their awesomeness, in my mind. Like just saying how awesome that humans are able to do that and actually just how awesome is that exact person at being able to do that. And that somehow made me more capable to build my own trinket better. And it feels good also. Like it makes me feel happy. And now you're not jealous anymore. You're not jealous anymore. So that's why I think jealousy is different. Because he's saying, there's a week of jealousy. Like, I don't like this. But if you take that in a way that says, wait a second, actually, this is awesome. This is fabulous, and this person did this. That person's awesome. Then you're not raining on anyone's parade. And in not doing that, even inside your own mind, you gain a greater cognizance of your own capability. Well, if he can do that, or she can do that, why can't I too? Like I wanna make the better trinket too. Now you're thinking creatively, nowhere in there was the emergence of evil. I just disagree with that. I think there was a choice made. Where I looked at my, if my life was darker, more difficult, I think it has nothing to do with the actual little flame of jealousy I felt. I think it has to do a lot more with the other context. If my life were more difficult, there was more abuse, there was more challenges, I think that decision, I could have made that decision a different direction. Maybe, I don't know, you've written brilliantly about trauma. If there's a bit more trauma as the background noise of my decision making, I'll be more likely to not be able to pull away from the gravitational field of that jealousy, and it would build and build and build and build. So I think, not to disagree with a brilliant person, but I feel like that flame has the capacity to engulf the whole world. I guess the initial flame of jealousy, the little bit, especially the younger you are, it's almost like a habit you get to build in either direction. Because I've early on built the habit of saying, I'm going to channel that jealousy into productivity and into celebrating other people, and that jealousy disappears. That was a little discovery for me. I discovered that. Nobody tells that to you, you kind of discover that little thing. I could have easily not discovered it. I could have easily discovered that it kind of feels good to mess with that other person, to think shitty thoughts, think negative thoughts, do negative things to that other person. Because that could also, I just think the capacity in that initial feeling is there, and I think it's a decision we'll make. Because otherwise, I think it dissolves responsibility. Like, well, surely I'm not Hitler, therefore this jealousy is normal. No, I just feel like every jealousy is the capacity to turn into, maybe not Hitler, but a toxicity that destroys, in a small way, in your own little private life, but it could destroy. I agree that jealousy brings us, can bring us dangerously close to envy. I mean, maybe, let's see if a heuristic we could agree on. Let's see, so let's say, okay, if we look at the terrain of the mind as geography, right? So if I'm feeling happy, satisfied, proud, like I'm pretty far from envy land, right? But if I'm feeling jealousy now, I'm coming kind of closer to that border, right? And I still, I think there's, it's a big thing to go over the border, right? That the border isn't a gray area, right? There's a border to go over, and I think that you, I agree completely, certainly about trauma, that the more trauma there is, because then the more misunderstandings there are about self and feelings that I'm not good enough, and then that can be anger about why, and who might be oppressing me, and I hate myself, and everyone else who seems to be better. Like, so trauma can drive us in these negative directions, but we're still crossing over something, right? So if you have the trinket, and I think, that's awesome, I want that, I wanna work harder. You know what I could do, though, is I could sneak in tonight when no one's around, and I could move something, right? No, no way, I don't wanna do that, right? But it's like I came over the border a little bit, and I thought maybe that's a better way, but then I came back, right? And we're responsible for that, right? Because it is a choice to say, I don't wanna work hard, I'm already working how hard? I don't wanna make my trinket better. I wanna think mine's the best one. I could destroy yours, right? And we're letting our mind go over that border, and do we say, run that forward, right? Let's run that forward and put people around us who feel the same way and start doing it so we think less of ourselves and we debase ourselves. Do we run headlong in, or do we come over that boundary, and that's maybe the capacity for evil in us, that we come over that boundary, all of us, right, at times. But do we come over it and then say, no, that's not my choice, that's not my self-definition, and I'm coming back. But I'm trying to justify, maybe there's certain other sociological forces that help us cross the border, too. So in Nazi Germany, we've been talking about Hitler, but then there's also the German people. And so maybe when there's a bit of a mass hysteria, so all these effects of, like, a combination of propaganda with the small jealousies and resentments of the people that don't cross the border, together they can, with great charismatic leaders that sort of really fuel that fire that we feel when we're a part of the crowd. So maybe those individual kind of psychological barriers we have to take that leap from jealousy to envy, those can be made easier. The leap can be catalyzed through this mass hysteria. 100%, 100%. I think that, to me, is a massive point. We're talking about layers of emergence, right? So if there's individual consciousness, then there's culture, right? And we're products of the soup we swim in, so to speak. People would say that when I was growing up, right? We're products of the soup we swim in. So if the soup that we're swimming in is the soup of hatred, right? Then it's gonna foster all of those things. So then you think about, just in a painting with a very broad brush, the culture created in Germany prior to the Second World War and what was the impact of the reparations after the First World War, right? Of the punishing reparations, impoverishment, and basically humiliation that people were feeling. Okay, there were a whole bunch of decisions that impacted that cultural perspective, right? Then there must have been aspects, just like I see in many ways parallels in America now, of what are our standards for what we're communicating to others, right? How is the media deciding what's real and what's not real, what's true, what's not true, what's hatred, that is only gonna do evil versus what's hatred, that's okay because I might sell something by putting it out there? I mean, we know that was going on in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, and I think there's a parallel to, do we value truth? Can we stand together and say, no matter how much I might disagree with you politically, we can still understand that there's right and there's wrong. There's truth and there's lies, right? So I think those are just two examples of determinants of culture, and then the culture is a determinant of, is someone like Hitler marginalized, is like, that's a crazy evil person, oh my goodness, like, whoa, right? Or is that someone who gains a greater following and more adherence, and then there starts to be a momentum, because why, because what do demagogues do? I think they have a giant lasso and they harness the envy of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people that's right, you feel worse about yourself too, doesn't matter what the reasons are. Maybe it's your childhood, maybe it's not, maybe it's job failings, maybe it's professional, maybe it's personal, doesn't matter, you have envy too, let's put it together and do some destruction, because that'll make us feel better, which is a lie. So we've talked about envy, where does, from the leader perspective, things like narcissism or sociopathy, psychopathy come into play? What can you make of the world we live in, maybe the leaders that run the world from the perspective, from the lens of narcissism? So I am struck, 20 years of doing what I do now, I've been a psychiatrist for 20 years and I practice in so many different settings and I consult in different settings, I've been fortunate to have a very wide purview of what's going on in people and in the world around us. And I am struck with amazement that of all the things I see that are, say, abnormal, let's say, from the mental health perspective, this could be depression, panic attacks, hearing voices, addiction, there's so many things that cover everything that narcissism is not frequent compared to a lot of other things, so it's small in terms of, say, a narcissistic diagnosis, right, it's much less than many other things, but it causes the lion's share, I don't just mean the most compared to anything else, but I think more than 50%, the majority of bad things, evil things, destructive things that I see in the world around us. I think narcissists are wildly destructive because they are driven completely, they are lodged completely in the lane of envy. Can you try to sneak up, and we don't wanna be lost in definitions, but can you try to sneak up to a definition, non-clinical definition of narcissism that we're talking about? So narcissism is a deep, pervasive, and unquestioned sense of inadequacy in the self that comes along with anger and fear and vulnerability, fear of destruction, fear of annihilation, that is compensated for by aggression, by the mechanics of envy, by trying to make the self seem better at the expense of others, by taking from others, by being completely cavalier to the thoughts and feelings of others, that narcissism is not arrogance. No, narcissism is the opposite of arrogance. There is such a deep sense of inadequacy and incompetence in the self that the defensive structure around that becomes dominated by rocket-fueled envy. So the machinery of narcissism is envy, but what do you make of the more popularly discussed kind of symptom of narcissism, which is a seeming not caring about other people, sort of a very inward-facing focus in terms of the calculation you make when making decisions about the world? Narcissistic people definitely care about other people. It's the people who are schizoid and say that don't necessarily register other people. But narcissism, people care about other people, but it's entirely vis-a-vis the self. If I'm schizoid, I don't really notice or care much who you are. But if I'm narcissistic, I absolutely care, because I'm watching every last detail of you. What might you have that's better than me? It's an incredibly intense focus upon individuals and demographics of people, but the priority, the goal is entirely about the self, which is why it can become easy to say, I don't care if a million people die. How different is that from going out and destroying one person or a million people? It's in the same category of those people, their existence is only meaningful in how it relates to me. But it's still meaningful. It just seems like a very difficult leap to take that I don't care that a million people die. That seems to be, even with envy, that seems to be a big feeling and thought to have, if you at all care about them. Are other people, I guess, tools for alleviation of your sense of inadequacy? Right, I don't even care about being caring at all. I mean, care about in that noticing that a person exists, right? I mean, someone who wants money and notices that there's a $100 bill out cares about that. They don't care about the $100 bill and that doesn't mean anything to them. It's just their thoughts and feelings, but it's gonna attract attention. They care about it because it's something that they want. The same way people will care about others, but only from the perspective of, do you have things that I want or can I feel better about myself by taking something from you, by making things worse for you? People often talk about narcissism as the opposite of empathy. But empathy, again, depends how you define it, but is a careful consideration of the mental space of another person, of how the other person sees the world. And so you're kind of saying that narcissistic people would also be very good at that in order to understand how maybe the other person could be manipulated or something to alleviate your sense of inadequacy. Right, so there's a difference between the mechanics of empathy. So let's say, and we can define things different ways, but let's say empathic attunement is the ability to be attuned and to think, okay, what's going on in you? What might you be thinking? What might you be feeling? Some people have a lot of empathic attunement, but we could look at that as mechanistic, right? It doesn't equate to care, right? And empathic attunement can come along with empathy or not. Right, so yes, people who are narcissistic, they can mentalize well. So you mentalize, meaning the ability to understand or to consider thoughts, feelings, motivations in other people, right? So people who are narcissistic can have empathic attunement or mentalization, depending upon how we wanna describe those things, but that has nothing to do with care, with actual empathy or kindness or consideration. So in that sense, empathy, usually popularly used, means that you care, like your happiness is aligned. This is, I need to read this book. I've read so little science fiction. That's been one of my goals for this year, to catch up on some science fiction. So Robert Highland from Stranger in a Strange Land has this quote about love, which is, "'Love is that condition where another person's happiness "'is essential to your own.'" So that's a good definition, I guess, of empathy, where you're very sensitive, so mechanistically very sensitive to the state of another person's mind, and your goal is to maximize their happiness. It's like essential to your own happiness. So the happinesses are aligned, and when that's elevated to its highest forms, you can call that love, romantic love, friendship, and so on. Okay. There's one more thing about the narcissist. Some people can be sort of benign narcissists, where they want great things for themselves, but if they have enough great things, they can sort of tolerate others being happy too. And these are people who sometimes are actually quite highly liked, because they have to have the most money, the most power, the most of anything, anything more than anyone else could challenge. But as long as I have that, it's okay that you have some too, right? And then that can make you happy and can make you like me, right? So benign narcissists can be well-liked from that perspective, but it's still all about them, and that can change if, for example, there's a scarcity of resources now, right? But they're generally, they're not people who are being overtly destructive, although that, they're over the border into the envy territory, right? Malignant narcissists are very different, where they then want to have everything. So even if I have a thousand times more than you, do I still envy you what you have, because I don't think I can feel good enough about myself unless I have everything. And once I have everything, I won't feel good enough about myself either, and I don't have to have more, right? It's like, that's malignant narcissism, which we think of as sociopathy, right? We can define these words in different ways, but they're very, very negative concepts. That's profound sociopathy, malignant narcissism, envy writ large. So sociopathy is malignant narcissism. That's a convenient way to think about it. No, because we can do sort of sociopathic things but not be sociopathic, like, well, you tell a white lie. It's like sort of sociopathy on steroids, right, is then envy writ large is malignant narcissism. Well, just like you're saying, there's empathic attunement, as you said. So there's the mechanistic aspect of empathy and sociopathy, and then there's the big label you get attached if you're just doing that thing regularly, I guess. Living your life through that lens, right? And is there a nice spectrum that's like narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy? Is it all the same kind of nice stroll through the woods, off the cliff? Not really, because the words don't have clear definitions like psychopathy and sociopathy. There's no real definition of psychopath or psychopathy, or does that mean someone's sociopathic but psychotic? There's really not a, we end up using those words colloquially, which is why concepts that we can define, like envy, empathic attunement, narcissism, even though there might be nuances and definitions, we can define them in ways that are widely accepted, including within psychology and psychiatry. So it's nice to just think about this broad umbrella of narcissism and the levels to which it's benign or malignant, and then also separating it to the different mechanisms, like interaction by interaction, which sometimes can be narcissistic, but broadly speaking, do you do everything through the lens of malignant narcissism that makes you a sociopath or a malignant narcissist? Yes, and the thing I would add to that is the thought about culture, right? It's like how does the cultures we're in, whether it's the culture of a household, right, the culture of a community, the culture of a nation or the world, how does that impact what unfolds in that person, and then how does what unfolds in that person impact that culture? Well, the question is what unfolds in that person, yeah, how does culture affect it, but how does your own psychological development unfold that? Because narcissism in leaders is the most impactful thing, right? Who are the most impactful individuals? Well, what is the most impact of individual psychology? We have, it's usually leaders of countries or leaders of major organizations and so on, and one of the things you mentioned with benign narcissism, that seems to be aligned with success, right? If you care about your own success, that's going to be, you're more likely to be, have narcissistic tendencies, I suppose, and so my question is when you follow that threat of narcissism to become the leader of a country, now you have a lot of new, interesting psychological complexities to deal with, like power, that old cliche that power corrupts, does that, is it possible for power to corrupt the human mind to where it pushes you farther and farther into malignant narcissism, into this destructive envy? What are your thoughts on power, like the effect of power on the human mind? Yeah, I think power is, let's say an accentuator, right, an intensifier, right? So I think it is true that there are people who can be sort of in a gray area where there are malignant narcissistic tendencies and behaviors, but there are also ways in which that person can think outside of themselves and think in a broader way and think sort of kindly about others, and they're sort of trying to navigate, whether they're aware or not, that they're trying to navigate between one and the other, and then the allure of power is, well, just exercise that power and you'll feel better, right? It'll show you, right, that you're good enough. Look at the power you have, and whatever may be going on in the person's mind, that then power, yes, can corrupt, yes. I think that's why we have to have checks and balances, right, because we don't, we're all inscrutable to ourselves, let alone to others, so we must have checks and balances, and we should always have them on ourselves as well as on others. We should want that for the health of ourselves and the world around us. So I think all of that is true, but there are also people who don't necessarily become corrupted by power, right? There can be an understanding and a grounding that they're a steward of power, right, a shepherd. I mean, the ways people describe utilizing power and utilizing it in a benign way, that then fosters the healthy aspects of self, right? So like gratitude and humility, right? If we could add a healthy dose of gratitude and humility to everyone or to our society, there would be a sea change, right, but how do you feel gratitude? How do you feel humility? Those things are incompatible with narcissism, envy, right, with really the bad pole of things that we're talking about, and part of the reason I'm so focused in my work and in really what runs through all of my thoughts about life is the impact of trauma, right, because trauma creates these false lessons and it walls us off from truth, and it starts to point towards the unhealthy ways of trying to feel better about ourselves, but we have the health in us too. We have those seeds of health too that can grow into being a steward of power and sharing power, being considerate and kind, and we see a lot of that in the world too, right? It's not all just the evil. We see plenty of people who do good and who are generous of spirit, and we have both in us, and it is, I think you're talking about our culture and the seeds that we sow and the climate that we set, including putting governors and boundaries around, like how do we rein in or say that the more aggressive, the more envious or destructive is unacceptable, right? How do we foster the part that's kind and considerate and reflective and slow to judge, of like, hey, let's learn a little bit more. Like, how do we foster that? And I think a lot of that comes back to early childhood education. I mean, I think we don't do nearly enough to protect children, and as a corollary to that, we don't do nearly enough to educate children. I mean, say I wanna write a book. Second book I write is gonna be everything I needed to know about life I learned as a second-year postgraduate psychiatry resident. It's like, why? You know, why then did I learn so much about unconscious motivation, about the impact of trauma, about how we can be envious and how we can act out, you know, even about how our emotions trump logic in us. Like, why don't we teach these things when we're young enough to understand? Like, why is that other kid bullying me, right? Or why, just because I'm a little bit bigger, do I wanna go thump that other kid on the head? Like, what's going on? We don't do those things. You know, we're tripping ahead of ourselves, and we don't stop and think, how are we using our resources? How are we shepherding forward the next generation, which, by the way, is a generation that's gonna determine our fates, too, right, as we get older, but we don't do that. I often think of, like, in the Olympics, you know, you see, like, the great sprinters, right, and they've gotta come out of the blocks perfectly, right? So if they come out of the blocks a little bit too fast, they're gonna fall over, right? They're gonna just fall forward, and I often see that in my head about us, as humans and as a culture, that we're rushing so far forward, we don't stop and say, wait, let's keep the basics here, the basic techniques of, like, how are we navigating forward in life? Or do we just throw all those away? Because I can get some benefit by saying that you're bad, even though what's being leveled against you is wrong, right? Like, why, do I take that? Or do I say, no, there's something more important here that we wanna shepherd forward in ourselves as a culture, and I think preventing childhood trauma and changing the ways that we educate children and adults would, could, again, make a sea change and maybe set us on a course towards, you know, even towards a greater likelihood of survival as a species. Yeah, so talking to, like, people in elementary school about human nature and teaching them how people can be resentful and envious and how to deal with your emotions, how to, yeah, so these basic interaction things about human relationships, about friendships, about betrayal, about love, about all those things. Like, it just, it's actually strange that we don't, we kind of hope the parents talk about that kind of stuff. But then the parents often, you know, need therapy themselves. The parents didn't learn it. Yeah, the parents didn't learn it. I mean, I'm not joking that I was mad, you know, second year after medical school. Like, how is it? Like, I think of even things in my own life and, you know, how I, you know, how much shame I felt after my brother's suicide. Like, I was already an adult, right? I was a young adult, but I felt so much shame. I didn't, like, I had no understanding that, that, oh, it's a reflex to trauma, right? To feel guilt and shame. And that, of course, I was feeling that. It didn't mean it was true because I felt it, but I mapped the fact that I felt ashamed to the fact that I should have felt guilty and ashamed. And it, like, led to some very negative things in my life that I had to sort of pull myself back from and recover from. And, like, I didn't know that, right? I didn't know the automaticity of the reflex and how pervasive it can be and how it can put blinders on us. And, I mean, it's just one example, but, you know, it's an example of something big that happens to people that we don't learn about. And I find myself sometimes having conversations with a person. So, you know, I still do a lot of clinical care of having conversations with a person after a tragedy. And I'm saying, I can't believe, right, again, I'm saying the things that this person didn't learn in elementary school, because, like, none of us did, right? And then look at the misery and the suffering. And then I think this is one person among how many millions among us who, you know, try and go about their way without knowing things that are easily knowable, because they don't even know that they're knowable because we don't teach them to ourselves. So how to deal with trauma. That trauma happens, first of all. That suffering can happen. And small trauma and big trauma, all of it can happen. And there's natural ways to deal with it. So in the case of trauma, as you write about, and we can also just talk about some more of the details of that, but it's good to bring it to the surface, to talk about it, to not be ashamed to hide it inside, to be some kind of secret that it's actually, I mean, there's a lot of positive things to say here, at least from my perspective. One is it's discussing trauma and dealing with trauma together with other human beings by talking about it is a path to deep friendship and intimacy with those people. There's a dark aspect to trauma, to war, that communicating it or sharing it bonds you. So the other side of trauma is love, you need that hardship, not you don't need it, but hardship and trauma can often be a catalyst for a deep human connection if you bring it to the surface as opposed to kind of hide it on the inside. If we can just linger on it, because you've been through a few very traumatic events in your life. When you were 25 years old, as you mentioned, your brother committed suicide. What did that event teach you about life, about death, and about the human mind? What certainly brought me face to face with the truths of life and death, because I had not had a major trauma before then, so there wasn't a major trauma sort of in my developmental years, that what can carry forward is a sort of omnipotence defense. I mean, the thought is that when we're toddlers, we all have an omnipotence defense, which is like, I can just try and get up and run and move, and if I run into something, I'll get up and do it again. And it's partly the protection of the parent, et cetera, but we think we can get out there in the world and do things, and we just do. And if we don't have major traumas, we can sort of carry through the, oh, bad things aren't gonna happen to me. I know that they're there, and I know they happen to people, but they don't happen to me. And sometimes what will happen is being confronted with such a tragedy wipes that away very, very quickly, and then the person feels extremely exposed, like, oh, I thought that I was gonna be okay, and now I know that I'm not, and that can start to lead to, well, what does that mean? And now, is this all coming for me now? Did I get so lucky for 25 years, nothing bad happened, and now nothing but bad things are gonna be happening? Am I cursed? Is my family cursed? And I think that leads to, you say, the learning about the human mind in retrospect. I think I understood at the time to some degree, but not like I do now. I can put words to it now, of how incredibly important, powerfully important negative emotion is, that how a sense of guilt and shame and vulnerability can just pervade our entire life perspective. So all of a sudden, we're swimming in a very different soup, and it's a frightening soup, and it's a toxic soup, and I'm most struck by that, and that goes along with the idea that we're not taught that emotion always beats logic. I think the idea of Descartes, Daniel, the idea that we're rational creatures, that kinda comes down to us through Western thought, is completely not true. We're rational creatures, only if there is an emotion grabbing for our attention. We're attending to one another, we're being very logical, what we're doing now. If we heard a frightening noise right outside the door, we'd be entirely different. The emotion would trump everything. It's like, stop paying attention to this. Now safety is at stake, and we think differently, feel differently, behave differently. And this is what happens to us, not just in situations where something drags us, yanks us from one emotional state to another, but it can be very, very pervasive. So my sense of anger, frustration, inadequacy, and then soothing in unhealthy ways, soothing by drinking too much, and then kinda hating myself in the first place, and hating the world around me, and then starting to think, well, who cares what happens? There's some very dark thoughts and choices that came from a changed perspective of self in the world. So what do you do when that, because of trauma, again, small or large, you find yourself swimming or drowning in a soup of negative emotion? What do you do? What do you do with that emotion? I mean, we don't have to even talk about trauma. I think the interesting thing is, any one of us throughout the day can find ourselves taking a bit of a dip in the pool of negative emotion. What do we do with that? The first thing is to separate how we feel from what's true. Because we don't do a good job of that as humans. If I feel bad about myself, it's very easy to, then I conclude, like, I'm bad, right? If I feel ashamed of myself, I conclude, I'm a terrible person who's shameful, right? This is, there's an old psychodynamic concept of what they used to call an observing ego. It still gets called that. It's not ego in the sense of arrogance, it's the ability to step outside and to see ourselves. So that's what lets us keep the difference between our feelings and what we know to be true. We can be very angry at someone. So I think that person's terrible, I think that person's stupid. I think that right now because something negative just passed between us. This inside of me, it's just because of how I feel. When I can separate that, how do I actually think about that person? And we get driven so frequently by how we feel because how we think, therefore what we believe, just kind of comes on its heels, as if the feeling is dragging it along. And I've been struck by that. It's one of the things that has struck me so, the most, among the very most in 20 years of working as a psychiatrist, is how we are led by our feelings, our emotions, as if they are truth. And then they create truth because we embrace what they're telling us as true. And that is, I think, incredibly, I think it's how people learn prejudice, I think it's how people learn self-hatred, I think it's how we learn so many destructive behaviors, and then the blinders on us come in more and more and more and more. So separate, we're driven by what we feel, unless we understand that what we feel is different from what we know to be true or what we can decide on one way or another. And that requires realizing and catching the emotions themselves, realizing that it's an emotion. A feeling comes into your mind, overtakes you, a feeling of anger, dislike, hatred, all of that, it just comes in. It's like, why did that person just cut me off in traffic or something like that, that feeling. So what, you just kind of take it as a feeling and realize it's a feeling that doesn't represent some deep reality about the world that's fundamental, or you, that you just kind of watch it and let it pass, which is the natural way of things. Yeah, or decide if it means anything. If I'm mad, right, someone cut me off, and I feel hatred and I wanna destroy them, to stop and think, look, I've got that in me. Are the stressors running too high in my life? Like, is it really good? Should I be on this road 10 minutes behind schedule? What am I really doing? So we can learn. But yes, it's an observation skill, and it's an observation skill that we can develop. I often think of something called the tapestry theory, which I think initially was a theodicy of explaining, I believe this is true, I'm not sure of this, that the idea was that, oh, we don't see God's plan because we're up too close to it, like as if there was a beautiful tapestry on the wall and we're standing right up it, we're only gonna see one part of it, we need to stand back from it. And I remember learning that in a religion studies class, being really fascinated with that at the time, and I think that there are a lot of things we do that about, right? And in training ourselves to have an observing ego, what we're saying is, hey, just the busyness of life or my own impulses or the pull of emotions are trying to pull me up right close to whatever tapestry there is there, and I wanna sort of resist that. I mean, I'm better off if I really stay further behind it, and then I make a choice if I wanna come close to it. If there's some really positive emotion, or it's friendship, or it's love, or it's nurturing, whatever, you know what? Let me come right up to this, right? But I wanna choose when I'm doing that. I don't want some drive I didn't decide to take me by the back of the head and put me up against that tapestry. So the interesting exercise for me, and I think for a lot of people in modern civilization is the internet with social media, that it's almost like going to the gym or something like that, at least that's the way I see it, because there's a bunch of forces on social media that are trying to make you feel things. Most of it is kind of in the negative space of feelings, because there is actually a strong gravity pull to negative feelings for some reason, and so the brain notices them more. I don't know what that pull is, but it's there, and you get to observe it on social media. Like if you actually just scroll through social media, you feel the gravitational pull of negative emotions. And I just see it as a kind of exercise of like, you feel the pull, just like when you go to the gym, there's a resistance, and I practice a stepping away to look at the tapestry, right? And there's different mechanisms I think all of us have to learn. For me, there's a kind of, you mentioned, a gratitude and humility. So like if somebody, if it's me personally, I've recently gotten attacked a few places here and there, you know, if they're saying that they're much smarter than me I practice kind of humility, like you mentioned, and I kind of imagine that they are smarter than me. Those things help me to kind of like pull away, and then maybe they have a lesson to teach me. Like I don't take their sort of negative comments to heart, but I imagine the human being, and that they might have a lesson to teach me. And in general, when it's more amorphous, kind of negative feeling, I think the other thing is the gratitude. Just like different versions, almost meme-ifiable versions of like, oh, this is pretty cool. Like we got a thing going here. There's a human civilization, like bickering and having a little fun, like lunch, food fight, and it's kind of cool. Like we get to interact in this way, and there's a bit of humor. It's like Thanksgiving dinner. Like Thanksgiving dinner, if you're arguing about politics, it can feel like really intense. Like I can't believe you said this, but if you zoom out, it's like family. This is like, this is amazing. So that kind of feeling really helps. But it's like, it really is like going to the gym. It's like building up a muscle to be able to pull away from those emotions. I don't think I get to practice that kind of emotion in regular day-to-day life, because it's hard to get those reps. On social media, you can really get the reps in. It's kind of cool. Like that's the way I see social media, is a chance to sort of practice that stoicism of like gratitude, of humility, of loving other people in the face of this negative emotion, all that. Yes, and there's a certain kind of psychotherapy that talks a lot about this idea that like, oh, everything is as it should be, right? Which doesn't mean from some moral or justice point. It's just that often if you look at things, one thing leads to another to another to another in a way that's actually very, very predictable, even though we might be surprised about it, right? And so an example, so I would say that gratitude often does come along with a healthy pride, right? So you could say, in the example you gave, hey, I'm being assailed on social media, okay? So you could say, well, there was a time I sat at, I set forth to impact people, right? To be able to reach people and to impact them, right? And look, I feel a sense of both gratitude and pride that I've done that, right? Because look, you did it because of your effort, right? Your work, your intelligence, your thoughts. Like you're responsible for it, right? But also you feel gratitude because any one of us who's here and has any opportunity has reason to feel immense gratitude, right? So then you can say, okay, what's actually going on here is something successful. I set out to do something and I'm doing it, right? And what it brings with it absolutely includes being assailed. There's no surprise there, right? That because people who have anything good serve as lightning rods for envy. So then, yes, there will be people who wanna make up lies or whatever they wanna do because you become a lightning rod for envy by having succeeded at the thing you set out to do about which you can feel a healthy pride and gratitude. And then I think that kind of puts it in its place. I mean, you're still gonna make decisions about it, but it makes sense then. Like you have a mechanism of understanding it that not only makes sense to you, but reflects the truth of what you actually have done and achieved and what's going on in the world around you. Well, I wonder if we're all kind of a little bit unique in this because for me, I mean, maybe it's useful to kind of talk through my own experience of it, is for me, I try to avoid, especially in those situations, to feel pride because I'm just looking empirically. I feel way happier if I focus on humility. If I ever think of like, oh yeah, when you do something meaningful or you become more popular, you're going to experience these kinds of, I feel the attacks more and it's like me versus the world. That's the feeling that you start getting. And that does not create a pleasant feeling. So to me, the pleasant feeling is like stepping away, like kind of laughing at it all, like with a smile and not like in a negative, like laughing at people, but just like laughing at the theater of it, the circus of it, like this whole absurd existence we've got going on. And then just having a humility in like everybody has a lesson to teach me. It just makes me feel good. The pride thing, I do like feeling when in a positive pool of emotion. So if I'm building a trinket and I finish it, I'm like really happy with myself. Like I finished this thing. And I usually actually like to do that alone. Like I don't need an audience for pride. I like to sit there and just like, ooh, this is cool. I did that, you know? But I find that in social interactions, pride is just, it's a dangerous drug for me because it's such a small, it's a small step away from then losing all the humility. And then you start getting very defensive and that's not going to, that's just, it starts you on a spiral of negative emotion. But I also, I mean, with everybody, you've mentioned this, you'll probably sneak up to it in different directions. I do think there's different brains that we all have. Like my brain is exceptionally self-critical, like nonstop. It's like an engine that's always there. But at the same time, I'm able to zoom out and have gratitude. And it's just, there's like two brains and they're like cohabitating happily. And I can, the better I get at this, the more I can use the one that's self-critical when I'm trying to be productive because naturally I'm super lazy. So I'm trying not to be less lazy, I'll be self-critical. And then when I'm not being lazy, when I just have, there's a special moment, I want to enjoy that moment, I'll turn on the gratitude engine. I feel like generic advice that people would give, if your brain is self-critical, that's not a good thing. Like you should probably get rid of that. I don't know about that because it seems to be working. Like I kind of like it. I kind of like this grumpy old man that's in there that's like, that thing you did, that really sucked. I was like, and I kind of, there's a movie, Grumpy Old Man. I like that grumpy boy, the grumpy cat is in there. And it's nice, but yeah, it can have bad effects on relationships and on maybe my wellbeing, maybe as you get older and all that kind of stuff. So you have to monitor all this kind of stuff. But I don't know, I don't know which one, is it because you've kind of highlighted, it's good to have gratitude and humility, but it's also good to have a little bit of pride. I wonder what that like set of ingredients for healthy, what like healthy life looks like for each of us, whether we have to customize and figure out what that is. Because some of the cake is already baked is the problem. And because of the trauma, like if I was like eight years old maybe I could be a little more flexible. But at this point, like you got the thing you got and it's hard to like fix it. You could do a lot with it. You could. It may not be easy, but there's a lot of plasticity and a lot of pliability there. Across all ages. Again, people are different and there may be idiosyncrasies of why one person is in a different place. But as a general rule, I think the answer is absolutely yes. I mean, people have evolved and I've worked with people who've really changed themselves and broadened their conception and understanding. You know, they're in their 80s or, I think we can do it at any stage of life. And I would make a case for intrapsychic. So not between people necessarily, right? But inside of oneself for the feeling of pride. And maybe if we call it self-esteem, right? Let's say we call it self-esteem, right? Or we could call it healthy pride. We could put either word to it. But if you think about what we're trying to avoid, is say a sense of inadequacy, then it is good to sort of own what's ours. We can put ourselves a little bit out of balance, either in terms of building up resentments or in terms of decreasing self-confidence, right? If we're not owning everything that's ours, right? So a thought I would have about, let's say about some pride or some self-esteem, right? Is it can work against vulnerability, right? Which we know can also in some situations push us towards jumping the boundary into envy and all of that. So think about vulnerability. If you conceive, okay, people are assailing me and you just go to a place of gratitude, it can send a message that, okay, I'm just lucky and I hope I continue to get lucky as opposed to like, that's not true, right? Like there's ability inside of me and discernment inside of me that tells me I can have a greater sense of confidence that I'll navigate what comes my way, right? So because the pride or the self-esteem part is owning what we've contributed to the goodness we've created, right? Which does in a sense helps us feel better about ourselves and it also helps us feel armed against, say, the slings and arrows of whatever outrageous fortune may come next. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. Again, disagreeing with an expert here. Yes, I think that's generally good advice but I think you mentioned vulnerability. I think it's like, I've just been doing a lot of research on rocket engines and fuel. And speaking of fuel, I just think I get a lot from being vulnerable because vulnerable leads to intimacy in friendships and relationships. I get a lot from being intimately close with human beings, just on a friendship, on like an ideal level in conversations and so on. And so I would rather err on the side of vulnerability. To me, pride is destructive. I think I already, I already have a pretty good engine that says like, life is awesome. I don't need help for that. That's fine, that one is working. I just feel like the way to face the world that's full of uncertainty, that could be full of cruelty is with humility and gratitude. I don't know, this pride thing, it feels like, I know that for a lot of people, it's really important to really, really work on pride to make sure they don't crumble under the pressure of like, they don't give into this insecurity that destroys them. But I just, for me, empirically speaking, I seem to be happier facing the world with humility and just being grateful. The pride, I'm really worried about. It feels more destructive than anything. See, what I think, as you're telling me that, and I don't wanna be presumptuous, but I make some thoughts or some conclusions that tell me, hey, you're in a pretty healthy place, right? And the reason I say that is because I agree completely about vulnerability. I mean, think about it, humility and gratitude make us vulnerable, right? If you're like, wow, I'm grateful, thank you. I'm grateful for you. You know, we could get shot down or something bad could happen, something could make us feel bad. So yes, we need vulnerability. If we try and eliminate vulnerability, we're living miles into the envy land, right? So you're describing a healthy vulnerability, but then my brain says that's because on the other side of the seesaw, so to speak, has to be a healthy sense of self, whether we call it self-esteem or healthy pride. And then I'll cite what I think is the evidence for that is you described the negative voice, right? As like the grumpy cat, right? But that's a good negative voice to have, right? Because it's telling you like, hey, that wasn't your best. Like, come on, do better, or, right? Like, you can do better. Like, there's a negative voice in some ways, but it believes in you, right? It's where that voice could be, it could be a negative voice that says, no, you didn't do that well because you suck. You don't deserve anything good, right? Why should you even be alive, right? I mean, that's the negative voice that can gain so much force if there isn't a balance of healthy self-esteem. So I think because you're well-balanced, you have what you need, and then having more of it seems like, oh, that's not so good, but there are people whose negative voice isn't the grumpy cat, it's hateful, right? And then that's a person who needs to bring that into greater balance. Yeah, I think my negative voice is like a grumpy cat that's like a French existentialist, maybe a little bit of a nihilist, but just kinda is- Sartre's cat. Yeah, Sartre's cat, so it doesn't get hateful. It's not like a Hitler cat, so it's a little more, yeah, I guess there is kinda like this line that we've come across a couple of times between the benign and the malignant. But of course, you have to monitor that line. I think you have to be careful when you face really difficult situations of as you go on through life, more and more difficulties, you face a lot of loss and suffering, especially later in life. You have to be careful with that voice. That grumpy cat can get awfully confident, and then if you don't have any source of positive emotions in your life, you can become too heavy of a burden. Yes, which I think this leads us to, what I think is a really important fact, that there are some people, like a significant subset of people, who get happier as they get older. They have more contentment, a stronger sense of self. You may think, how could that ever happen? We're getting closer to death. We're accumulating insults. Everything hurts a little bit more, and we have less energy, and we accumulate losses and traumas. Why would anyone be healthier across time, be happier across time? And what we see is it's linked to the things that we're talking about. It's linked to, let's say, vulnerability versus pride. There's a good balance there. There's a lot of humility. There's a lot of self-esteem. The person is spending a lot of time standing back from the tapestry and looking at it. And what can come into people is in a sense of equanimity. I sort of understand. I'm being the best person I can be, and that's not always even great, and there are things that I don't feel great about, even while I'm trying to do that. But look, I'm being who I'm choosing to be, right? And that doesn't have to be in some big way. I'm not saying that means any one specific thing. You know, that can mean the person who's taking care of their cat and tending their garden. Like, that's enough. We have to have, you know, love, the ability to put good things out in the world, right, and to put our ability to work and to make things different out into the world and make things better. And if we're doing that, we get happier across time because we come to a sense of peace with ourselves. I'm not supposed to be everything. I'm not supposed to do everything. I'm not supposed to fix everything, right? I'm also not supposed to suffer all the time for the things I haven't gotten right. You know what? I guess I'm kind of, and it leads back to Winnicott, right, the British physician, of, you know, I'm good enough. And that seems to help people feel happy, you know, contentment, and be generative and productive into later life. It's like, that's what we all should be wanting, but it's even, it's kind of an afterthought, though, some people are like that as opposed to, wait a second, right? Like, what's going on with them, and let's do all of that. Albert Camus writes in Myth of Sisyphus, quote, "'There's only one real serious philosophical problem, "'and that is suicide. "'Deciding whether or not life is worth living "'is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. "'All other questions follow from that.'" So basically, to be or not to be. Do you think there's a truth to that statement, this question of why live at all? Do you think there's truth to that statement being a really, really important question for us to answer? Yes, yes. And what's the answer? I think the answer is yes. And I think Camus answered it yes, too. You know, I love his writing, and I think there was a streak of nihilism that I think grew in his writing over the years, and the thought is, I think, that Camus died by suicide. I think we're not sure of that because it was a car accident, but I've always read that as the primary scholarly opinion. And I think it's interesting that after his death, a book called The First Man was published, which I don't know if he had intended to publish. I don't remember the specifics about it, but it's about him as a child, right? And it's interesting, the first man, he was the first man in his existence, right? The one that felt and experienced everything. And there's sadness and distress and all in that book, but there's a beauty of life and living and experience. And I think to compare that beauty, like that's life, even if something's difficult and scary and sad, like there's something beautiful around the corner, and here's a kind person and a new discovery. You know, more what was in him as a child. And I think that we can get jaded, as you and I were just talking about a few minutes ago. We can accentuate the negative and foster the negative and come to a place where we're looking for some in-depth philosophical answer, you know, some thick book, you know, that's gonna explain all that to us instead of the simplicity that we've been talking about. I think humility, gratitude, helps us have just simple positive experiences, feelings of contentment, feelings of connection with another person, learning, discovery. And I think the answer to Caymu's question is yes, and I think it lies in his writing about when he was a child, which I think he saw as less important than his later writings and the intellectual heaviness when I think maybe he had lost his way a little bit from the things he understood when he was younger. So another way to talk about it, and I'd love to hear what you think, is about these broad categories, let me be started with Kierkegaard, of existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism. And I think Caymu considered himself an absurdist, not actually an existentialist. It's kind of a middle ground where I think existentialists, I don't wanna characterize it in the wrong way, and there's a lot of different definitions, but I think existentialists ultimately do think that there's meaning in pursuing the passion of life, like pursuing the, in living life. That's where you discover the meaning at that individual level of fully embracing life. And I think nihilism is, again, it's kind of like a spectrum, but nihilism basically says there's no meaning, and it doesn't matter, nothing matters. I don't even know, but somehow that lands you in a place that's totally uninspired. Maybe nihilists would disagree with that. Maybe there's a way to live a creative life in a nihilistic mindset. And I think absurdism is somewhere in the middle where pursuing meaning at all is not a good idea. So I think existentialists say you should be looking for meaning, and it's to be discovered in your own actions, in your own life, in the moment. And absurdism says life is absurd, nothing makes sense. Don't look for the meaning, just live, just be. I think that's the later Camus kind of philosophy. I don't know if you can sort of comment on these kind of nuanced ideas here. If there is no religious guide to your life, what do you think about this kind of search for meaning? Do you see that there's some wisdom in the existentialist perspective of discovering it in your own life, in this passion, in this kind of day-to-day existence, in the moments of your life that bring you joy, that kind of thing? You're bringing different sort of perspectives and trying to tease apart, like, well, wait, what are the differences in those perspectives? And I think what it points out is that, okay, we tend to conflate things as human beings, and to take two different things and try and make them into one, but we also, I think, on the other end of the spectrum, get very overly reductionist. And I think that when we get too overly reductionist, we lose the ability to learn from anything or to generate meaning. Think about Sartre, who, the thought of existentialism is so consistent with him, who, on the one hand, wrote about very clear terms, like, this is what it is and this is what it isn't, and here's how you're gonna make your meaning in a very academically proscribed way, but he also wrote short stories like The Wall, where something totally absurd happens as part of the story. So I think what ends up happening is people either reduce themselves or get associated with something that, by being overly reductionist, takes us away from meaning. The idea that, look, we don't know if there is an overarching religious meaning or what we call a religious meaning or purpose. We don't know that. So, okay, if we take that as a given that people who say that they know are having faith, like how Spinoza described faith, faith is that you don't know, but you believe anyway. It's not because you have faith now you know something, because I think that's a slippery slope to the persecution of others. So if we say, okay, we don't know, then we're left either deciding, okay, well, then to hell with everything. There's that movie, A Strange Brew, Bob and Doug McKenzie, where the brakes don't work on the car and one of them says, oh, why bother steering? So if we don't know that there's meaning, like why bother steering? Let's just give up the ghost. And I don't think that's even what the nihilists said. I mean, I think Bakunin said we should get rid of everything that we've ever created except Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and start over from there. But so even people who are very nihilistic or associated with that, a lot of them are just not liking what we had built. So if we accept that a lot of what we have built as humans inside of us and outside of us is really counterproductive and doesn't help us, and that absurd things happen in the world, and that often the way social structures and systems build up, build themselves up is absurd. I think our healthcare system operates in a way that's absurd. So if we accept that there are absurdities that we don't know if there's truth, then what are we left with? But like, well, let's try and make meaning, right? Ortega y Gasset said, yo soy yo en mi circunstancia, right? I am myself in my circumstances, right? Which is like, look, we can't control everything. We live in circumstances around us, but within those circumstances, we can make decisions and define ourselves. And I think the brilliance of that, and I think tying it all together, right, in a way that's not trying to be, in a sense it ties it all together by not trying to answer everything concisely, that yes, we can make meaning. Like, we see that. If someone trips in front of me, I could walk around them or I could help them up. I mean, no one can tell me that it doesn't matter what I do. I absolutely reject the idea that, oh, I could step over them or on them, or I could help them up and it doesn't matter. Oh yeah, try being the person on the ground, right? So we create meaning, but we live in our circumstances, and there are absurdities both within us and outside of us in our social structures. And there are a lot of things that pretend to have meaning that don't, and there's the shades of nihilism, but ultimately there's something going on here that's doing the best we can in the context of just not knowing. Yeah, I tend to see, I don't know if it's genetic, I think, I tend to think just observing the internet, the number of memes there are, I think many other people are like me, I tend to see the humor in the absurdity. I tend to enjoy it from that kind of angle. I see the Kafkaesque nature of society, different aspects of society, and just kinda notice the magic with a smile. And just laugh at the circus of it all. Because it is magical that the circus all comes together. It's like a little bit out of sync, and then there's a guy playing trombone, but overall it's pretty good, it's pretty good. And we can look at that and just kinda marvel, and go, huh, right? Which I think is a relation to at least a lot of what we, in the Western world, think of as Eastern, as non-attachment. Because then if there's something absurd, and it's not good for me, then I accept that too, instead of getting angry about it, and railing about it, or seeing some cosmic meaning in it. I think there's also a healthy non-attachment in what you're saying, too. So there's, you mentioned Eastern thought, there's Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, but also Buddha, have kind of spoke of life as suffering. Do you think there's truth to that, that suffering is a fundamental part of life? I think it is a fundamental part of life. I don't think that means that life is suffering, right? If we say, well, life is suffering, then what am I doing? That I'm trying to erase from my mind the birth of my children, right? Things that were filled with joy, right? Life is not entirely suffering, but life brings a lot of suffering. And for some people, it brings such disproportionate suffering, and the people don't survive the suffering. And I think when people are conscientious and empathic, that really bothers us, right? The suffering in our own lives, and the fact that others at times could seem to be so overwhelmed by suffering that they don't even get a chance to see good. And I think that there's, I do think there's truth to that, and there's sadness and distress to that. But to say, therefore, life is suffering, I think is just completely untrue. And it ignores the fact that someone even made a trombone, right, let alone that there's a little bit out of sync and someone's playing the trombone, like, that's cool. There's elements of the absurd that you said are neat and interesting. And if we start accepting that we can't understand or control everything, then we can accept, and I think really love and foster the beauty in our lives. Yeah, I think the word suffering is doing a little bit too much work, because I think it's probably referring to the philosophical concept of that, yeah, that it's absurd, the absurdity. That stuff just happens randomly. Evil people succeed, good people fail. There's a seeming random injustice on occasion. And on occasion there's justice in, yeah, all of it that feels like, and maybe because it, often there's a lot of loss, and then there's a kind of matching complimentary aspect to any good feeling that all comes crashing down, like every hello from a physics perspective ends in a goodbye. Like, that's a really sad thing. All the amazing people I get to meet in my life, all the amazing experiences, eventually they have to end, and that's part of what makes them amazing. But why is that sad? Is it because we're taught to think? That it's like, look, at some point you and I are gonna say goodbye today. Like, I hope we're richer for it, and then we take that goodness off with us. Like, I wanna celebrate that, because it's all part of the goodness. I think we're taught to think, oh, that's so bad, and it equates to death and misery, and I think it's often not that way. I think there is a sadness to it, but I also don't think that sadness is a negative thing. It's a different way to celebrate a beautiful thing. So there's a melancholic nature to it, a something passing of it leaving. I mean, it's that old Louis C.K. thing that I go back to over and over from the show Louis, where he was all heartbroken that he just broke up with somebody he loved, and he told about that to an old man, and the old man said, you're a fool. That's the best part. I miss that part, where you sort of are lingering in that loss, you're feeling the pain of that loss, because that lasts the longest, it's the most intense, it's the most reliable, and it's a kind of celebration of the love you had. Like, losing the love is still a celebration of the love. I think you don't wanna over-romanticize that, but there's some aspect of truth to that. Like, that melancholic feeling of remembering a beautiful time that's no longer there is a kind of celebration of it, and is a kind of joyful experience, even though it's very easy to experience it as a negative emotion. I think it's just like you said, I mean, it's up to our mind to determine how that emotion is really felt. But it's a tricky one, because it's like heartbreak to experience that as a positive thing. People can reminisce at funerals, right, and laugh, because people can be very, very, very sad, and perceive that this person has died, and perceive the sadness of it. But in perceiving that, and really living in it, then you can have people who wanna remember that person by telling a funny story. Why? Because each of those people carries that with them. So I think what you're saying is consistent with healthy function as human beings, because we're gonna encounter sadness and loss. Like, what do we do with that, right? And do we do things that ultimately create some redemption, or even reparation inside of us? And like, reparation's a big word in psychology, right? It's how we repair damage and loss. So if we lose someone and we're sad, can we, by telling funny stories about that person, remind ourselves that, hey, they're still inside of us. Whether they're out there looking at me, I don't know, but I can call that person of mine inside of us, and then we have something that's good and beautiful that comes of that, too. In the introduction to your book on trauma, Lady Gaga wrote it. She wrote the foreword, the intro. She said this about you, quote, "'I can now say with certainty "'that this man saved my life. "'He made life worth living.'" This goes to our discussion about the myth of Sisyphus, Camus question about why live. So I think, at least to me, she's one of the most brilliant and unique artists ever. So it's a difficult question, but a question of creativity. What role does trauma play in somebody like that, in this artist that has created some incredible things? What positive, constructive role does trauma serve, and what limiting role does it serve in preventing that person from flourishing more? Trauma can certainly drive us to creativity, to even to push against or to protest against what the trauma tells us. Trauma tells us lessons, like nothing matters, and you don't matter, and nothing will ever be good, and nothing is beautiful, and we can push against trauma. They know there is life in me. There's something, there's goodness for me to spread in the world, to express and spread. So I think trauma fuels creativity in many, many, many ways. Trauma also shuts down creativity, right? The people who are, for one example, trauma that escalates to the point where now the person is soothing it with alcohol. It's one example. And now the impact of the alcohol shuts down any creativity. So can people be creative and outward-thinking without trauma? I think sometimes, if I remember correctly, people will use Immanuel Kant as an example, someone who I think hadn't traveled much and didn't have trauma, and look at what he knew. So okay, there are gonna be exceptions, right? But a lot of our creativity is in some ways fueled by our suffering, although it's complicated because it comes from generative places in us, right? So those places are there. They're not created by suffering, but maybe suffering makes an incentive or a passion inside of us. And a person, Stephanie, who you referred to, is just such an incredible, astounding creative force. And sure, some of that comes from trauma. Some of it comes from trauma fueling the generative creative places in her. But what I helped her to do, she's very generous with her words, but what I helped her to do was to see all that she is and all that the creativity in her is and all that there is to create through love and caring and compassion, and to again, see that. I mean, a lot of time, that's what I'm doing clinically. I think it's what good psychiatrists or mental health professionals do is we help people see the beauty that is there, right? Because oftentimes we're way too close up to that tapestry, and what brings us close is often the sad thing. So we're up close and all we see is the negative. I mean, it's easy then to get classically nihilistic, but by helping someone take a step back and to see who they are and what's in them, that's how people get better, and it's how people re-engage in life. It's such a difficult thing because if you were to, from studying human beings, it seems like the optimal trajectory is having some trauma that doesn't destroy you, that forces you early in life to really struggle with the intricacies of the human condition, and then later in life, as you form and you build an expertise around and mastery, start to do exactly what you said, which is step back and look at the tapestry. So if you don't have the trauma, it seems like just empirically speaking, there's of course just a huge amount of data and all kinds of anecdotal evidence, but I wanna be careful here because maybe I'm romanticizing hardship, but it does seem that hardship in childhood, if it doesn't break you, can be constructive. It's like you said, having that trauma, one of the ways to fight it is to say, I am worth something. I am, and this is, David Goggins talks about this, is like, this is, I am somebody, I can be somebody special, and I'm gonna prove it to you, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this big thing, it's this engine that drives you forward. Yeah, comment on that, because from a parent's perspective, you want a child to have an easy life, right? You want them to not have hardship, certainly not have trauma, but that's such a difficult dance because in some ways, a little bit of hardship and a gradually increasing amount of hardship that doesn't break you can really develop you into a really interesting, complicated person, and it helps you flourish as a creative being. I don't know what to, I don't know if there's a question there. I just keep saying random things. No, it makes, look, I think it makes good, it makes good sense to me. I think you're trying to get at, like, do we need trauma, and how are we defining it, right? Because we say trauma, hardship, difficulties, I mean, we could set aside, we could set apart, say, and differentiate things that are difficult, but that are overcomable, right? Versus things that we could use trauma, the word trauma this way, if we chose to, that are just entirely negative, like someone saying, oh, you can't do that, and you'll never succeed because, and then they tell you something about yourself, like, because you're from here, or you're this race, religion, whatever it is, right? We think, well, you know, that could make someone say, hey, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna overcome, right? But then they're overcoming something bad, right? Like, it's just, like, there's nothing good or helpful about that, right, if someone's saying that. So the person has to overcome it. That's different than something that is placed in front of a person where the whole conception of it is something positive that you can make through effort, right? So, you know, I remember, I don't know, I think I was 15 years old, there was some rule, like, where you could then go, I don't think it was picking raspberries or blueberries, right, and I think, and my parents wanted me to see, like, hey, go see how that works, and now you got 50 cents at the end of it, right? And then you think about that when, you know, you wanna buy baseball cards, or you think about it, and you work hard, and I can remember, like, it was hard, and I was sweating, and I was tired, but I learned from it. I mean, it's the reason I remember it today. So, yes, parents might want their kids to have, like, a good life, right, but not necessarily an easy life, you know? And I think that was done, they took me to do that so I'd have a greater sense of responsibility, and a sense of, like, hard work is meaningful, and it's important, and I think that that kind of thing is good, but if we separate that from something that's just denigrating, prejudicial, like, I think those things aren't good, but they're unavoidable. So, it's not necessarily that, oh, is some trauma good? I would look at it more that some trauma's unavoidable. I mean, you know, it's hard to, how do you go through life and not have any losses, or anything negative, or anything sad, and then people are people. There may be people who have not a lot of that, and then there's a sort of complacency, and they don't do as much as they could, or feel as good as they could. You know, then there's other people who have a highly attuned emotional, so there's people with very highly attuned emotional compasses for which a little bit of trauma becomes so intrusive. So, it's so much of it is person-driven, but I do wanna distinguish between things that are just purely bad, that we might overcome, or find some fire in our belly about, or whatever the case may be, and things that may be boundaries or barriers, either directly, purposely placed or not, that in a sense, invite us or inform us of the possibility of striving and overcoming. Finally, attuned emotional compasses, it's so true that there is, that's a component of it too. It's almost genetic, how sensitive you are to particular trauma, so little things can have a huge impact, or gigantic things, serious abuse in childhood can be, by some people, overcome more easily. It's so interesting. It's not just what's the trauma, because what's the trauma that makes certain problems? You have to match the trauma to the person, and a big part of what you're matching to is that genetically-based characteristic of how finely attuned is that empathic attunement in that compass. So, when you think about, let's just return to childhood. When you think about trauma in childhood, what can we say about the impact of child abuse on the development of a human being? I think the impact of it is so disproportionately bad, hurtful, compared to things that happen when we're not children, and I wanna be very careful about how I'm saying that, because people can, through their strength and resilience and human interconnectedness, can overcome that. I don't mean to say that anyone who's experienced those things can't make it through it or over it, that part is not true. But it is true that the impact is so disproportionate to anything else that can happen, because the brain is formulating, right? So, if we say psychology is like applied neurobiology, and we look at both of those as different ends, even though there's a lot of gray in the middle, the neurobiology is changed. So, just one example of a much greater salience of vigilance mechanisms, of mechanisms of self-protection, mechanisms that can make a person feel more fear and more insecurity and hide themselves away from the world and not trust the world. And I mean not trust the world even enough that, oh, I'd like to have a better job, and another one is here that I could take, but maybe it could be worse, and then being afraid of that. There are all sorts of ways in which the changes to those pathways impact someone, and that's just one of, we could bring trauma experts together that could talk about that for days, right? What is the impact upon the brain biology? So, that then gets changed inside the person, and from the perspective of those changes, the psychology on top of it changes. Like, what do I think about myself? Do I think that I'm worthwhile? You know, even in my mid-20s after, without formative traumas and a pretty strong sense of self and some achievements, there's a big trauma then with the death of my brother, and I start questioning, am I cursed, am I worth anything? I mean, I was 20-something years old and doing reasonably well at the time. How does this impact a child of six, seven, 10, 12 years old, right? We're sending such powerful messages that then change conception of self, and that negatively changed conception sits upon the negatively changed neurobiology, and I think if we really thought, hey, let's do the best we can just for humans in general, for the human race, for our species in general, is we would handle children and caring for children so much differently in terms of protection mechanisms, intervention mechanisms. How many times do you see where, where like now there's been some tragedy and the child gets a little bit of support, and they had some therapy that was provided by some insurance carrier, you know, they got once a week for 16 weeks or whatever. I mean, we should be wrapping our societal resources around children, but we don't use our resources well. You know, I was just reading, it's a little bit of an aside, but about 300 and something billion dollars a year in cost to the US economy just from schizophrenia. And you think, it costs a fraction, what do we actually put into caring for people who have schizophrenia? So first there's a moral imperative, but let's say we put that aside, and we only care about the economy, because there are mechanisms of thinking that look at it that way. How could we not amend that, right? But we are so reckless with our resources, and we're tripping ahead of ourselves that we don't think, oh my goodness, there is no better place on God's earth for prevention than here, prevention in terms of human suffering, and also where do people like that go? I mean, more often, people like that go to a place of increased suffering, inability to take care of themselves, or to be in supportive relationships. Okay, we know there's a higher prevalence of that, but we're also creating the pool of people through which the envy, the narcissism, the sociopathy, the destruction arises. So again, if we care about people, we would be so focused on that. If we don't care about other people, and just ourselves, or just economic costs, we would still be so focused. But we're not, and we tend to just kind of call it good, because we don't see anything disastrous happening at the moment. And I think there's a societal negligence there, to the shame, really, of all of us, when child abuse and the impact neurobiologically and psychologically is potentially the greatest cause of suffering directly and indirectly on the face of the planet. How much does trauma of that kind, and later in life, affect your ability to love another human being, say, inside a relationship, connect with another human being? It can impact it a lot. And again, I wanna say, can people overcome and be as loving to a partner, or a child, or anyone else? Yes. But we're talking across society, right? How are we setting the odds, right? We're setting the odds towards a higher sense of vigilance, a decreased sense of self-confidence, an increased sense of vulnerability, right? A decreased comfort interacting with others, right? What we're doing is we're pushing towards isolation and misery and depression and resentment. I mean, those factors push towards that. We know that the research is so strong that adverse childhood experiences, that these things that happen, the more the worse, the more prolonged, the more that person is up against as they try and navigate life. And I suppose one of the elements of intimacy, like what we're talking about, is vulnerability. And maybe there's a, is there a fear of being vulnerable, of being hurt again? Sure. Is that ultimately the barrier to intimacy? Yeah, if you're taught a lesson that says, the world is not safe, and you're not good enough for someone to keep safe, and you're not strong enough to keep yourself safe, that's a final common pathway of the vast majority of child abuse, or as is telling those lessons to people, then how can that not change the lay of the land against openness, against the ability to rationally consider trust and mutuality and to protect oneself, but also take chances and do the things that we have to do to create the greatest happiness in our lives? We set the odds so much against that. There's another pathway, which I think is really interesting because I've seen it in people, is this kind of ability to detach yourself from feeling any emotions, to protect yourself. It's almost like you're not quite there. There's a word for this, isolation of affect. It's a defense mechanism. Yeah. Isolation of affect. Yeah. Is that a common way, another common way to deal with trauma? Well, isolation of affect can cut both ways. So if there's been a major trauma, let's say someone has seen something terrible and they're isolated from their affect. And at one time it was thought, well, maybe that's good. They're not hysterical, they're not distraught, but we see that is not good because what needs to be held, processed, we need to get our arms around in some way, shape, or form has just been separated off. So we know that is not good, but isolation of affect can also serve us very well. When I think back to being an intern, a medical intern in the hospital, and you might have to go and pronounce someone dead with hysterical family members. And then 10 minutes later, five minutes later, maybe two minutes later, really, you have to go to another room and you've got to maybe do some procedure that involves having your focus on a certain thing and making sure your hand movements are the right way or talking to a person in a way that is, that's very different than where you just came from, that's very hopeful. And so then you have to isolate the affect of what's going on around you. And it happens not just in, it's just one example, but we have to do it in life so that we can put affect aside to process later or not feel the full weight of affect where we know the meaning. Like I knew the meaning of the tragedy of the person I just pronounced dead, but I want to separate that from myself because I'm also aware that it's not my tragedy so that I can then, okay, put that affect aside and go do the next thing that I have to do. So that I think can cut both ways. Right, but then you have to reattach it, understand that it's good to be close with emotion, even painful emotion, right? Because that's the human experience. Right. It's, I feel like if you build up a skill that you can detach yourself from emotion, I think that can become its own kind of, yeah, it becomes too easy to do it, right? And to reinforce, that's when people are suffering too much over too long a period of time, then we're creatures of habit, right? And even though our brains are, you can talk about our brains are sitting on the shoulders of the giant of the maybe thousand levels of emergence that come underneath of them, our brains are also work in very simple habit-based ways. Like if you and I chose a word right now and said it 500 times, we would know, it's just a silly experiment, but we'd both be saying it tonight, right? Because our brains are also creatures of habit. So if you over and over and over have to isolate yourself from affect and you develop those mechanisms, well, you develop those mechanisms and they don't go away any easier than if we said the word 500 times and decided to forget. We won't forget no matter what we decided. So how do we find our way back? How do we overcome trauma? What are the different pathways? The first thing, the very first thing is to acknowledge to ourselves and often to others, which might be one other person, it might be in words, spoken, it might be written, what the trauma has been, right? Because the lessons of trauma, the evil lessons of trauma, and I'll use the example of my own life, the lesson that told me that I was shameful, cursed, and hopeless, right? It's a very evil lesson, right? But my brain will say it over and did say it over and over and over to me. And if that just sits inside, that's how trauma festers, that's how trauma hijacks our thoughts, our emotions. So being able to say to ourselves and to another, like, this is what's happened, right? Okay, this is what's happened. We're built to massage words and to create meaning through words, right? Like we don't massage pictures, right, images. We talk and massage meaning with words. So when I finally went to see a therapist and I could say, you know, my brother, whatever words I would have said, like, he killed himself and I can't accept it or I can't imagine it and like, I let it happen. Like, so I had to say those things, right? So then I could begin to bring some sense of truth to it. You know, and it was a long time ago, but the therapist probably said something like, okay, probably sees on you, you let it happen. It's your fault, right? Because you got to get at those things so that one can begin to bring into focus what does the trauma mean and what does it not mean? I mean, a classic example is the, what would you say to someone else example? You know, you'll say, well, I, now how many times have I, it's just, I could cry if I stop and think about it enough. You stop and talk to someone who is sexually assaulted through no fault of their own, who comes in and tells the story they've been telling themselves about how it's their fault. They should have walked home a different way, they should have dressed differently, they should have left earlier, right? I wrote about it in the book over and over and over. Now you have a person who, let's say you take a person who's intelligent, engaged in the world, who's like capable of understanding lots and lots and lots of things, but doesn't understand that, right? If it were someone else, that person would understand in a moment that's not that person's fault, right? So what you wanna do is overcome the fact that the negative emotions, the hijacked emotion systems of trauma are telling that person a lie, and they're telling them so strongly and so awfully, so meanly, that the person just takes it inside and starts to see it as true, right? So you begin to hold that up to the light of day. And again, one example could be, okay, so someone, the person who's coming in next has actually been through something similar, right? And can you stay and just tell her how it's her fault, right? And like, oh my God, no, oh, because I could never, like then they see, right? And again, this is not always how you do it, but sometimes you can get a person to see, like, well, that would be the most horrible, how could you do that, right? And the person can maybe commit to doing it to themselves. So you begin to put words in a structure and say, okay, let's look at what's going on inside of you. Like, you don't have to be scared of anything you're thinking and feeling. In fact, the fear is in not exposing it to the light of day. That's where it gets the best of us. And now, like, everything is different. And whether that involves use of medications for intrusive thoughts and depression, or there's no medicines needed, but it's all reframing, like whatever it may be that comes next, the whole world has changed when the person has acknowledged what's happened, exposed it to themselves and to trusted others around them, and begun to look at it in some way other than the stuffed in an evil box place that the trauma initially puts us through the reflexes it creates in us. It's interesting that there's power to just saying it out loud. Right. So first saying your perception of it out loud, then in that case, that might be your fault. And then working out loud, working through that it may not be. Any experienced therapist will tell you this, that every now and then it will happen that someone will come and they'll say something. Usually it's very early on in the process. They'll say something they've never said before, and they immediately are in an entirely different place, and they may have been for decades. Right, and I can remember a person saying that a coach had raped him, and just saying it. This was decades before, and everything was different. I'm not saying everything is now as perfect, but his life was in a different place. As soon as he said it, he could see how dare, he thought that person did that to this child. The child was me. He never thought it until he said it out loud, because his mind was going over and over with why it was his fault, what he did to deserve it, how he kept going back, so it must be his fault. It was in it. As soon as he put words to it, he saw the truth of it, and it was a bifurcation in the path of life then. And any therapist has stories like that, which just shows the immense power that it can even be that just uttering the words makes just a cascade of change all at once. Just saying those words to another human being, it makes you wonder about that compulsive loop that happens in our heads, until it's brought to the surface. It's so interesting. Entirely non-productive, the loops, and sometimes even if we put, what would I say to another? Let me write it down, it can get rid of those loops in our brains. Any even thought of outward expression is the enemy of those internal persecutory negative thought loops. How do you find a good therapist? I tend to think of, listen, I'm a fan of podcasts. I'm a fan of conversations. It feels like a, you know, it's like finding a good friend. It feels like a difficult journey. Maybe I'm wrong in that, but it just feels like such a, it feels like a partnership, a journey together versus like some very simple clinical procedure. Well, the first thing I would say is to change the entire paradigm. Like most people, like okay, I need a therapist. So people feel often like they're in a weakened position because they need, you know, quote unquote, a therapist. Then therapists are rationed, right? I mean, how many insurance panels have lists a mile long of qualified therapists who could be on that insurance panel but there's a certification process? Like these just make no sense, right? The state's already certified the person, right? But there's so many barriers to entry that now we're rationing this resource, which we should all stop and pause for a second and think like we're okay with that as a society. And by the way, everything else is like that too when we're trying to get help for our health. So let's step back from that for a second. Now it's a resource that's not in great supply and then a person begins to think, you know, essentially I'll take what I can get. Like I just gotta get somebody and I don't know enough to know anyway, right? And those are very disempowering thoughts as opposed to saying, look, I'm gonna be an empowered consumer and I need to choose someone who gets over just some basic hurdles of what I think are reasonable human interaction, right? So like is the person making eye contact? Do they seem interested, right? Like these are basic points about any human interaction, including a therapist, right? Then you can say, okay, is there word of mouth? Anyone else who has something good? Nothing better than a word of mouth recommendation from someone you trust, right? Or anybody can have a good website, but you say, let me look at the website. What is it saying if there is one, right? Does it resonate with me or not, right? But after all of that, then you go to see the person with the idea that you're interviewing them, right? The idea that, yeah, I hope this person can help me and if so, great, I'm with the program, but I'm thinking about it. Do I want this person? Do I feel heard? Do I feel cared for? Which doesn't mean, is it easy, right? It might mean, is it hard? And I leave and I feel like emotional for a couple of days, but I see that I'm facing new things. No, this process of assessment so that one isn't settling for something that is formulaic, over-packaged. And I'm not trying to be overly critical of therapists. I mean, there are people everywhere who do their jobs well and people who don't do their jobs well, but most therapists are working in systems that push against doing the job well, right? Because they're rationing care and there's an allotted number of sessions and there's enough such time before a person can return. And so often it's an uphill battle because we're trying to be helped within systems we've created and tolerate that are pushing against helping us. Yeah, but that interview process is tricky. I mean, if you're in a rough place mentally, just like with any kind of interview, it's hard not to think that a failed interaction, failed interview, there's something wrong with you. Sure, right. There is an authority to a therapist, I think, where you think like they've got it all figured out. Right. And I'm a mess and therefore if there's something off, it's all my fault. Right, so it's a very tricky and it's easy to then give up. And then, like that step to try to get a therapist, the first step, to get help, forget therapist, like any kind of help, that's a big leap to take. I agree. Especially when you're in a rough place. I agree completely. We should not make people swim against such a strong current to get their needs met. I mean, we see this in such obvious places where an elderly homebound person who can't get their medicine because oh, there's been some change and they didn't put the new number into the form or Lord knows what. I mean, it's incredible how we force people to swim against strong currents to get things that are just basic at times for their survival. And with that in mind, I don't have a lot of respect for where healthcare is at or where mental health is at. The field that I work in has accepted all sorts of aspects of how things go. Someone else controlling how long the interaction can go on, how the interaction is bounded, what can be said and done, what medicines can be prescribed. There's so many external controls in the systems we work in that we, and I say me included, like all of us in the field, have let it get to a place where it's obscenely difficult to get help, obscenely difficult. And we should say that's not okay. I think psychiatrists and therapists and master's level social workers, psychologists, and you name it, I think we should all say this is not okay. And then we as a society should be saying this is not okay. Otherwise, what you're saying, which is I think completely true, will only become worse as there are more and more barriers to getting the help a person needs. And each time a person isn't helped, it sets the odds against them getting more help. I should say, Hugh, that when I started working, there were times I would send people to an emergency room, right, if there was some emergency, emergency in their mental health and they were at risk. And there were times I'd send somebody to an emergency room where if you stopped and looked, it would have been malpractice not to do that, right? Now, it's not just me who has an incredibly high threshold for sending someone to an emergency room because you send someone who's in a lot of distress and oftentimes they're sitting on a gurney in a hallway or they're locked in a small white room and all they had was depression. You know, they're just scared when they go in and 36 hours later, oh, they're feeling a little better. Why? Because they're desperate to get out of there and someone sends them home. I mean, so our systems have shifted so much that we tolerate now en masse what is egregious to the individual. So you are a psychiatrist. In terms of doing therapy, psychotherapy, what does the successful interaction look like? Perhaps a fun question, perhaps not. What do you think of the psychiatrist, Sean and Goodwill Hunting, played by Robin Williams? So what is the full range of interesting interactions? Can there be an intimacy, a friendship, a kind of varied interaction that kind of blends the lines of 30 minute session once a week or whatever versus like a really kind of deliberate long-term project that cares about the well-being of a person across the months and years? Or what can you say about a successful interaction between therapist and patient? I think we're much better served by the latter, right? And again, it doesn't have to be over years. I mean, maybe a person might need that over weeks. They might need it over months. They might need it over years. But if I'm understanding correctly, you're describing something that is like a real human engagement, right? And I work in a field that for years and years and years, the patient didn't get to see, right? The therapist was sitting in a place, sitting behind the person, right? So that's not, of course, the only tradition and there are aspects of that tradition that can be very humanized. But the idea that we're supposed to not be human, I mean, this medicine is shot through with this, right? That the doctor's supposed to be God and it protects the doctor. And that makes its way into therapy. And the idea of the superiority, the therapist knows more. I mean, in some ways, yes, but the idea is to know more about mechanical things, right? To know more about facts and knowledge, not as a human being, right? If we approach therapy as a collaborative human endeavor, right, where if we're gonna do it together, of course I'm gonna learn from you too, right? I mean, we're two human beings and we're talking about things that are deep and personal and intimate. And I'm not gonna participate in a way that makes it about me as much as it's about you, but we're two humans and what's going on in me may have relevance and sharing it may have relevance. And at times, you doing something back for me may have relevance. I'll give you an example of a person who would not let me help him. It was a young man, it's when I was in training, who was very, very sick and needed to change certain choices and habits or he was not gonna survive. And I had no ability to help him whatsoever. And I went and I saw a supervisor who was existentially trained, where here it's different from existentialism in the classic sense, but it's about really human connection, right? And the guy was always wanting to teach me something, right? Because I can get by in Spanish, but he was fluent in Spanish. And he wanted to, oh, you traveled here and he'd say a word to see if I knew. And I was always directing back to what I was supposed to do, right? And the supervisor, I'll never forget, he said, let him teach you Spanish. Like, okay, come on. So we had a couple sessions where if you look from the outside, you say, what is going on there? Like, right, like it was, they were Spanish lessons to me. Right? And then at some point he brought in his mother and it was, we hadn't brought her in yet. And he was in part showing off that he taught me something, right? And I said a couple things and he felt more powerful. Like he was younger than me and he felt sick and disempowered, but he didn't feel that way once he taught me something and we showed it off to his mother, right? And his behavior started to change. He started taking better care of himself. He could see a little more what I was saying. It was like, you're a wonderful person. Look, you love your mother and your aunt and they love you. And like, he could start seeing that about himself. But that came from humanness. And I think that's the way we help people. I don't understand why we don't do everything that way. It's like, we're two humans, but if you're doing something for me, then there's something, you have an expertise and I don't, that's why you're doing it for me. The reverse could be true, but it doesn't mean we're not just two humans doing something together. And the healthcare system and the legal system should not get in the way of that. I mean, there's liability and all these kinds of things that can get in the way of the humanness. I mean, some of that is justified. You have to be careful. You have to make sure there's, of course, irresponsible, but a little too much can destroy the humanness. I'll use a way to usually say something is insane. Like it's not consistent with sanity. And the presence of the legal system, look, I'm all for, of course, physicians have to be held, but to be responsible and everybody makes mistakes and people have to be accountable for their mistakes. I understand all of that. But what we see now, it's so absurd that, oh, like everyone is frightened. Everyone is frightened. And then just looking to like, how do I slot into the box, check the boxes of what I'm supposed to do and not get in trouble. You know, people get sued because someone was at that hospital and that doctor touched their care. This happens in the VA system. It happens in other systems too. So you might've touched their care and no one's even saying you did anything wrong, but they say the next person did. Oh, someone settled on your behalf and now you have a malpractice. Ding and maybe you can't get a license somewhere else. Like doctors are terrified and they're terrified for good. They're terrified for good reason because the same society that has given doctors in many ways too much power over time and treated doctors maybe too much like gods, now is I think enacting some of society's anger and envy out on the physicians. Even the idea that like a person would know what medicine, like I saw a couple of TV commercials, give me this. It's like, it's interesting, right? Because even if, let's say I take my cell phone out, it doesn't feel good obviously, but it takes a while. It's like, wow, I went to school for like eight years for this and you don't even want to hear my opinion, right? You're not taking good care of yourself, right? It doesn't mean you should think my opinion is gospel because I said it, but people then don't have an understanding of like what is expertise? What do people learn? How can people help us understand and make better decisions? It kind of goes out with the wash and then the position of the expert, I mean a lot has been written about this, right? Gets diminished over time very much to our own peril and then often with aggression in the medical world coming back towards the alleged expert. Yeah, expertise is a tricky one. It's such a tricky thing because coupled with expertise, the attention is this arrogance that can come with expertise. The arrogance can make the expert feel like they're more of an expert and it's a vicious cycle and then the arrogance in the current, in the 21st century, especially with the internet, the arrogance can completely force the public to distrust the expert because all they see is the arrogance versus the expertise. So ultimately you have to have, I think the greatest experts and masters I know are the ones that have complete humility. Right, humility and gratitude. And gratitude. Leads us back. Which is usually a really good sign that somebody is at the top of their field. Right, and they'll acknowledge that they don't know everything. Right, which is hilarious, right? So like the best experts I know are the ones that will say that they don't know. Right. They would not call themselves an expert. Right, right. It's very confusing. Or know that they know a lot but don't know the answer to this. You see that a lot in medicine. That person knows they're an expert surgeon but they also acknowledge they don't know if this is the right time to operate. That's how you get to the best answer instead of someone who is an expert and always knows the answer. Yeah, if we actually rewind to the beginning of our conversation, we talked about, you mentioned something I wanted to return to. So there's layers that are, there's an emergent novelty. And you mentioned that we as human beings and we introspect on our own mind, we really can't know most of it. Which of course makes me think of this, the unconscious mind, subconscious mind, and Carl Jung. How much is hiding there in the shadows? You've investigated a lot of trauma. How much is there in our mind that's not directly accessible to us? Like what can you say maybe philosophically about how much is there lurking in the Jungian shadow? I think there's a tremendous amount there. But I wouldn't, I don't immediately go to an ominous perspective, right? Because if it's lurking there, right, it can come get us, right? And to some extent, that's true, right? You can say that the seeds of evil are there if we want to plant and nurture them. You think good things can't lurk? I guess so. I was being poetic. But you're right, you're absolutely right. And the Jungian shadow is supposed to not just be dark things, it's supposed to be everything. It's supposed to be a lot of positive things as well, yeah. Right, which I think brings us to self-knowledge, to truth, where I think the opposite of envy, narcissism, sociopathy, I do think is all rooted in truth. It's both the truth of the good things about us or the ways we're not blameworthy for the things we're blaming ourselves for, et cetera. But the self-knowledge and the truth and getting away from the reflex of anger, frustration, envy, shame, what I think happens then is all of that underneath the surface. If we look at like the consciousness is the top of the iceberg, you know, outside the top. Say well, outside the water. So is what's underneath like shifting and it can pull the top under, right? Or is it supporting the top? And really I believe is honesty, truth, self-knowledge, humility, gratitude, all this simple stuff. Good mental health is always consistent with simplicity. You know, humility, gratitude are easy things to say. Like we know what that is, right? We understand what that is. Soothing envy by having immense power and subjugating others is getting very, very complicated, right, what that is and how that plays out. So if we are in touch with ourselves, if we're honest with ourselves, if we own what's ours, we don't try and own what's not ours, right? What happens then is something isn't waiting inside of us to sort of jump us with some new fact of self or challenge of self, right? Then I think what happens are phenomena like intrinsic learning, like the way that so much happens inside of us automatically, right? How people who have high levels of expertise know the answer to complex questions more rapidly, right? It doesn't take them longer to think through it, but they have more knowledge to think through. It's that more happens rapidly and unconsciously. So they know the more complex answer more quickly and readily, right? And we can build that in ourselves, not just in terms of factual knowledge, but in terms of how we respond to things, right? If I make a mistake, do I respond with reflexive shame, right, if I see someone has something I'd like, how do I respond? We're more in accord with ourselves and then the automaticity in us is serving us better. So that's in the positive. Do you think, do you draw some wisdom from the early pioneers of psychotherapy like Freud and Jung? Yes. That there's some repressed, that there's some stuff to work through that is in the unconscious mind. Yes, I think there's always, like 100% of the time, if you have a living human, you have things to work through in the unconscious mind. Right, there's too much that goes on around us that we might find unacceptable and suppress, right? There can be smaller but important examples, right? Someone who feels that they're not a good enough parent and they, I don't know, they drop the child's plate, right? And there's a feeling about that of badness in them that the person can't tolerate and pushes away, right? And maybe they become a little bit less confident, a little bit less assertive. Those small examples are important because they may be low valence, but there can be many, many, many, many, many of them, right? Then you can look at the opposite end of the spectrum where someone, for example, feels, or they're repressing their sexuality, right, unconscious. There's something that is so important, say, to how a person feels about themselves, to whether they can seek fulfillment, to how they feel about their ability to interact and engage with others in ways that are loving and generative over time. So from smaller things that accumulate often at rapid pace to really big things, we are pushing things into the unconscious because they're not acceptable and we need to explore, like, why is that not accept, maybe there's an unacceptable urge because it's really not acceptable to me, right, like a violent urge. Maybe there's an unacceptable urge because I'm actually listening to the lies society is telling me about what's okay and what's not okay, right? So in exploring those things, yes, we become happier and healthier, and that could mean if we're already happier, happy and healthy, it gets better. We get more insulated against the negative, or it can mean the person who's really nurturing some of those seeds of evil and envy does that less or steps away from it. So whether it's good or it's bad, it's in there inside of us, and we benefit from understanding that idea of the observing ego, right? Like you said, the part that can stop and say, hey, this is what's, I see what's going on in me. What have you learned about exploring the human mind about the art of conversation? Is ultimately therapy is conversation. Yeah. Is there something you can put into words? Yeah. Like what makes a good conversation? I think language is among the most amazing gifts we have, and it's also one of the most clunky routes to misunderstanding, right? I think of, there's a concept of facticity, things that are like, I guess, unnecessary evils, and from the religious perspective, I think is where the word started, but of language being a facticity, right? That we need to communicate with one another, we want to communicate, so we develop words, and we have these amazing brains that can have language, and that's all well and good, but our fantasy would be more like Mr. Spock, right? You know, the Vulcan mind meld, where it's like, I communicate with you because we put our hands on one another, and we know, you know, by doing this, what we're thinking and what we're feeling, and we won't have misunderstanding. So because I think we can approximate that, we can come kind of close with language, right? Or we can be so far away from it that we can say the same word and of opposite meanings, and have it generate immediate animosity, right? That we need to be very, very careful with language, with communication, with conversations, and I've come to understand that much, much more as I've gotten older, both in terms of how hurtful, you know, reckless speech is, which is why I'm horrified by so much of what we see in our political discourse, right? The slurs, the negativity that's attached to something, to some word, you know, how one can utter something, and it can go into another person's just into the ear, but then goes through so many parts of the meaning of the brain that that person feels a pervasive sense of shame or beleagueredness, right? So yes, reckless language absolutely hurts people, and we see that all the time in ways that I think are just atrocious. And also, how bad miscommunication harms us. I mean, I really learned that through a lot of different ways, but in the work, as a therapist, of like really wanting to make sure that I'm really understanding you, and you're really understanding me, and a lot of work goes into that communication. I think people, we can get into a rhythm of it, and then it happens more easily, but I think it's like, it's a life and death difference at times, you know, lots of times, right, in the world around us, between clear and accurate communication. Just so I said a word because I think you know what I mean, or something like that. Yeah, so to that, I mean, there's the Camus quote that I like, as much unhappiness as come into the world because of things left unsaid. So that has to do with clear communication. But there's also a dance to a conversation, a poetry to it, there is ambiguity to language. And if you have a kind of awareness of that ambiguity, and you play with it, that's where wit and humor come in. That allows you to sneak up to difficult topics without sort of trampling on them. I don't know, there's an art to it as well. There's an art to the silence, you know, just allowing both human beings, one of the most intimate things you can share with a human being is silence. Yeah, that's communication. It's a different communication, but at times more powerful. Yeah, giving a person space to accumulate, to integrate, to make sense of their thoughts, enough to say a word. Maybe a memory sparks so they can think about that memory, and process that memory. So it's not just words, right? Because now you're talking about communication as it's body language, it's expressions of empathy, it's movements, it's pauses, right? The communication process is very, very complicated and deep. And some of that is building trust, but also challenging a person. I wonder about that whole process with strangers, for example, of how you do that successfully. Like you and I just met today, but I think a lot of our interaction is very free. We can get to know each other in any way we want. There's a few conversations I have coming up in general where there's a lot of other pressures and constraints on those conversations. There's a danger to it, there's risks, there's political forces involved, like what, not from my perspective, but probably from my, as well, of how do you say this thing, what are the words that are going to offend? And you're learning that about a stranger at the same time, you know, and you don't. It's an interesting dance, because you have to walk carefully but deliberately, right, carefully because, I've learned this about myself, about others. There's certain words that can trigger a person, that can make a person feel poorly, like shitty about themselves. So you can push, you can challenge a person about something, and they're totally okay with it, but if you use a certain word to do it, it's gonna, maybe it maps to some childhood thing that their father or mother used to say or something like this. And I mean, part of the art of conversation is actually being a little bit free in using those words, but being extremely sensitive in detecting when a person reacts to a particular word, and like, storing that away, it's like, okay, we might wanna return to that later, because there might be an interesting, that could be a tip of an iceberg that's actually representing something beautiful, or you might wanna just, it's a nothing word that you just wanna avoid because it's a distraction. And so all of that kind of has to be integrated into the dance of language. This is really interesting, especially when the stakes are really high, when you get one conversation. Right. When you sit down, you have one conversation, and it makes the difference between, like, say you had one conversation with a patient. This is the only conversation you get to help them. Sometimes it is the case, yeah. And like, this is pretty high stakes. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, it's tough. I guess you get over, and like, over time, I guess, you get used to the high stakes nature of it. You develop an ability. And all that unconscious processing, right? Right, right. All that part of the iceberg that's underneath the surface is doing all of that, right? It's reading behavioral cues, verbal cues, and recognizing the primacy of emotion over logic, right? If it were all logic, it'd be different. Okay, we're gonna talk about this thing. I'll say things, you say things back, even if it's politically contentious, say. So, okay, we're just gonna talk logically. But you know, that's not the case, right? There could be a word that raises a certain emotion, and you know you don't wanna tread there because the emotion will color the person's ability to engage. And so, you're aware of all of this. And then I think, from the perspective of all of that, I mean, it's like standing on the shoulders of your own internal giant, right? That understands language and emotions and body language and attunement and history and triggering and all of that. And then, on top of that, as you're standing up on those shoulders, you're trying to be effective, right? And then I think that's where effectiveness can be unilateral or it can be together. I mean, I think some of what emerged from Viktor Frankl's writing after the Second World War was how much shared humanness means to us, how much of that can be an incentive for survival beyond all others, right? So, the idea of are we doing something, if we're communicating unilateral, like I want information from you or I want you to do a certain thing when we're done talking, right? Right, done communicating. That's a very unilateral type of effectiveness, which can make sense. Sometimes I want information out of a patient because I wanna know what to do next, right? So, it doesn't have to always be negative, but it can also be a tool of manipulation, right? If someone would say, coming from envy or narcissism, I wanna communicate with you in a way that makes you do what I want you to do, right? Different from that is where it's a shared communication where there's an umbrella, so to speak, over us and we're doing something that can only happen together because we're us, we're each person, right? And we come together to do something that's a shared effectiveness, like I think we're doing now of elucidating and pursuing thoughts and getting ideas out. And I think the best situations are shared effectiveness situations because you call upon the resourcefulness and the internal resources of both people. But you, especially with strangers, especially when it's not labeled a therapy session, you kind of actually stumble into that cooperative state. Like, you have to organically develop a trust together and almost lose yourself. Ultimately, I think you put it really nice. I think successful conversations, even when it's with, like, even if it's like with world leaders or logicians, people that operate in the space of reason, the most successful conversation will ultimately be in the layer, in the landscape of emotion. Like, that's where the interesting stuff will happen. That's where you'll discover anything. And that's where you get to actually meet, to start getting an understanding of each other, or what you actually mean, even by the statements that are supposed to be kind of rationally based. You lose yourself. You lose yourself in the way you do when you're children and you're just shooting the shit about whatever topic and you just forget yourself, forget the things you're supposed to say. You lose yourself in the context, right? Yeah, where you kind of plug into the unconscious mind a little bit and you get to speak, maybe indirectly, but to the things that really drive you, to the thing that really, to the things, to the emotions, I suppose, that underlie your worldview. I feel like that's where productive conversations can happen, whether it's a patient or just a stranger you're talking to at a bar about geopolitics. You mentioned Viktor Frankl. What did he make of his work, Man's Search for Meaning? What are the lessons you draw from his work, of him as a psychologist, but also from that, a very powerful work that reflects on his experience in a Nazi concentration camp? Yeah, I think that it was almost a profound reinvention of humanness, right, after something so awful, so bleak and so despairing, to speak anew about shared humanness, human connection, meaning, compassion, that I think it was an intellectual direction that was adorned with all of the emotions that we need to adorn the logic with in order to make real change in the world, and I think that his work has fueled so many branches have come from his work, the existential psychotherapy and its place in helping human activities today, right, a trend away from the idea that we're all quite isolated and that what's going on between us is all very transactional, right? I'm putting something out and you take it in. You put something out, I take it in, right? The idea that, no, there's a difference there. There's a shared humanness that creates a meaning beyond the transactional, kind of like you were just saying. The logical stuff isn't really that interesting because, you know, the logic is, there's an answer to whatever logic is. We can do math, right? It's where does the surprises come in, right, either in terms of wonderful behavior or destructive behavior, right? They're coming from people's emotions, so that's what we want to understand, and that occurs in the context of a person and other humans, you know, even if it's the conception of someone and other humans as enemy, you know, or it's the conception of two people sitting together, the idea that there's a shared humanness and it's not all transactional and that he could take that out of, you know, a pinnacle of human tragedy and utilize it in a way that informs us being better as a species going forward, I think, is really monumental. What do you think is the role of emotion in the human mind, in the human condition? Because we've talked several times in different ways that emotion matters and it's a big part of who we are, but why is it there? Why is it useful? What's good about it? We've almost said it's almost like a negative thing that we just have to live with, but why is it also maybe a beautiful thing? Yeah, well, I think you said, what's the role of emotion? Emotion is the king, if we want to use that analogy. It's the CEO, if you want to use that analogy, right? Emotion rules all. We're taught that we're logical creatures, but we have innumerable pieces of data, even over the course of just a day, let alone a human experience, to tell us that is not the truth. Is it ever logical to run into a burning building? No, right? I mean, logic's never gonna tell one to do that. Okay, someone you love is in the building. The person's already sprinted halfway to the building. Emotion rules us, and so the thought, a thought is, some of that is evolutionary, right? That strong negative emotion stays with us very, very profoundly, right? So, example I'll give is if we're hunter-gatherers, and I find a new berry, and it tastes good, and it seems nutritious, and it is, right? Everything's fine. It'd be good to remember that, right? But if I find a new berry, and it tastes good, and it seems nutritious, and we both eat it, and almost die of sickness, we better remember that, right? So, the primacy of emotion is in us for reasons that are about survival, that the emotion of it's my child in that building, or my loved one, is why I don't give a damn about logic and run into the building, right? The emotion of I thought that was good, and I got really sick, and I better never forget is also about survival, and the same applies to humans. If we're from different tribes back then, and in my tribe, when you put your hand out, it's a greeting. In your tribe, if someone puts their hand out, it means, hey, I'm gonna attack you and take your stuff, right, then I put my hand out, and you slug me, right? Then, it's like, I better remember that, right? But you see how that can lead into, you know, are the constructs around that. I say, oh, people in your tribe are violent, right? We start then to make stories around that. But the primacy of emotion, whether it's berries, or it's humans who might threaten us, or it's humans we love, I think it's hard to even look at the anthropological, psychological literature, to look at what's out there, and I think the face validity, that's part of survival, right, it's part of survival. It's so cool that you get also things like love, which are not often rational, or grounded in logic, and so on, if you look from a transactional perspective, a lot of times, falling in love, whether it's with friends, or friendship, or romantic love, it doesn't really make sense. I'm still not sure what the hell it is. Because, I mean, it's the thing that, it's one of the things, or love for your kids, when they're born, like that love, the parental love. What is that? That's so cool, that we get to have, like if you're looking for the, in the menu of items, they give life meaning, that seems like a pretty good one. Yeah, so my response, you said that it gives life meaning, my response initially was gonna be, it's the meaning of life, right? Because saying, okay, emotion is about survival, that's one part, right? And it's a very important part, right? If we don't survive, then we're not there to have emotions, right? So, yes, it's about survival, but as important as that is, that's the small part of it, right? I think it is about the meaning of life, because it's about the beyond self, and I think it relates back to what we talked, we were talking about at the very beginning, and the levels of emergence, right? And when we feel love, we feel happiness, because that person feels happiness, right? There's something that's so generative, so creative about that, like we wanna bring order to things, and we, you know, happiness is consistent with simplicity, right, if we're healthy, there's nothing negative to say about our health, right? If we have health problems, there's a lot to say, right? And it's emotion that pushes us towards the goodness that I think makes all the meaning for us. I mean, it's interesting, I actually was wondering your thoughts about this as a scientist, right? Because we accept it, by and large, that we have free will, right, we feel we have free will, but then we get upset that there's not justice, right? So, but how is it, like, if we have free will, I could act in an unjust way, and then you're surprised, or, you know, vice versa, like, why, right? We have these thoughts, because I think, because we're rooted, we want logic to rule, like, there's a way in which I can understand logic, I can manage it, I can manipulate it. We sort of want it to be that way, so then we glorify logic, and then we misapply it, like, ideas, like, oh, I know we have free will, but I'm now, you know, shaking my fist at the heavens because there's no justice, right? And I think maybe what we're looking for is, we should go back and look at the givens, like, why is there, there's only goodness if there's justice? I mean, that doesn't make, I think the goodness, why does the goodness have to be tied to that, right? Maybe it goes back to the counter-entropy and the fact that when there is something, there is not nothing, right? And where there is something, there can be awareness, there can be goodness, there can be compassion, right? Is it that what's really going on is not about justice? Yes, we have free will, but it's that goodness, creating, shoring up, making better, that is the meaning, that is the good, right? And that the evil is the destruction as evidenced by the fact that it's over-determined probably a million times that we're in this eddy current of counter-entropy, and we could destroy that quite readily, right, and then we're nothingness, like everything else that we know of that's not us, that doesn't have the ability to do something that's creative or constructive. I mean, I think that that's the answer, and I think that our science really tells us that that's the answer. And I think it beckons us with ideas like we know that things happen outside of space and time, right, I mean, they're physics experiments, right? Like we know this from the science of it, yet we don't stop and look and say, wait, is that? The magic of the idea, Einstein said, God doesn't play dice with the universe. I think, okay, maybe God doesn't play dice with the universe, that quantum indeterminacy and all of that is not just a flip of the coin, so to speak, but maybe it's in that indeterminacy that we're given the opportunity to assert ourselves, right, to make something one way or another. Maybe it's not God playing dice with the universe, but it's God loading the dice in our favor if we'll only listen to truth, the truth that being destructive doesn't help or soothe anything, even in the person who thinks it will for themselves, and that creativity and generativeness and kindness and compassion, like doesn't that seem sort of analogous to the eddy current of counter-entropy that has us here in the first place? And I think that's where I pin meaning, and that meaning then, going back to the initial question, right, is generated in us through emotion, through what we feel that leads us to feel something that is mysterious, I don't know why I feel it. Yeah, in some sense, emotion is kind of the fuel of that creative imperative we have. But if you step back and look at the tapestry a little bit, it does seem that the destruction, the creation and the destruction, are the yin and yang of life, that it all works only if the main engine is towards creativity, but destruction also makes way for new things. So that's the, this kind of struggle, it seems like life is struggle between the different forces that make up the individual human, that make up society, all those tensions, are necessary for growth, for development, this kind of inner conflict and outer conflict are necessary for growth. It's not just, I mean, in some sense, it's from the logic aspect, you kind of want everything to be perfect and just, for nobody to suffer, for everything to be perfect, but just like we talked about with trauma, it just seems like it's such a big, giant mess. What is it, Bukowski said, find what you love and let it kill you. There's some aspect of, the negative aspect of passion and pursuit and obsession and the turmoil of the pursuit of happiness, of the creative pursuits and all of that, I mean, that's part of life as well. That's, I don't know what to do with that, from an individual perspective, in terms of figuring out how do you live a good life, how do you live a healthy life, because it does seem that a bit of hardship, or sometimes a lot of hardship, can make a pretty interesting life. I think it brings us back to the discussion that we were having before about what does it mean, the challenges of trauma and of overcoming, and I think here we gotta be careful with the language, because I would then say, let's take destruction and separate it into two things. One is, you say destruction is the breaking down, the tearing down of something, versus a process that has malice in it. So just like when we were talking about trauma, and setbacks, things to overcome, we might say, okay, if you say, hey, you have it harder than the next person, and you have more to overcome, or someone put a barrier in front of you for you to overcome, that there can be a lot of growth in that, including the times when you don't know, gosh, can I do this, can I get over it? We're saying that's challenge, and something to overcome that's very positive, but we're saying, but there's no benefit of throwing a racial slur in there, right? We're saying, because that's all bad. Even if the person says, I'm angry about that, and I'm gonna overcome that, it's like, that didn't need to be, that didn't make anything better. If the person sees that and says, I'm gonna overcome that, it makes things less worse. But there's no good to something that's created as destructive. We might look at forest fires, like, look, controlled burns. You say, there's a forest burning down. But that's, okay, there's some, there's some weak destruction there, there's a tearing down there, but it's in the service of the next fire not running through the community, the town that's on the other side of it. That's very different than a forest fire, say, started by arson, right? So you might say, they're both a tearing down, they're a tearing down of the forest. But one is in the service of goodness, even though it's hurting the animals and the plants, it's not all good, right? But it's in the service of something, as opposed to something else that's wantonly destructive. I think there's no good to the racial slur, there's no good to the arson, right? That's destruction in a way that's incorporating, I think, the malice of envy, something that's really purely, if there's a yin and yang, that's the destructive, that's the badness end. So racial slurs is a surface wave of a deeper thing. And so, I mean, this is, I mean, the reason I bring that up is like, all right, well, you have these discussions of censorship, like what good does allowing racial slurs in public communication do, right? And it's like, our communication would surely be better if we don't say bad things to each other. But it's like, it seems like the truth is, our communication will be better if the amount of bad things is a small fraction of communication. That seems to be more true. Because another aspect of human nature with power, the moment you start censoring and removing bad words that everyone agrees are bad words, then the people at the top, they're doing the censoring, start getting greedy. It starts expanding. And this is the giant mess of human civilization where we can't, the nice piles you created are kind of overlapping. That's the gray area. That's the problem with it. No, I agree completely. There's a control of language, there are slippery slopes there. I think there's a very big problem there. So I agree. I think, again, split parsing out the language, I'm not saying, hey, we shouldn't have racial slurs as if like, let's stop saying the words. I mean, the idea is the premise behind it, right? Like, you know, the prejudices. If we could eliminate the prejudice behind it. You know, I was struck, it said I do almost nothing about medicine. I get to medical school and start with anatomy, right? And it's remarkable as, you know, to see as the bodies are being dissected that we're all humans. Like, it doesn't matter any of these things on the outside. And that's true, not just like in our bodies, but in our minds, part of the person that's not there, right, because now we're trying to learn from the body. And it shows how ridiculous it is if you think that we're 99. how many nines, percent, all alike genetically. And by the way, it's only like take another 10th off and we're all orangutans, right? So, but somehow we have to see these differences between us, right? And where does that come from? And I think that I believe that all comes from envy in that classical sense, that if I don't feel good enough, I'm gonna want someone to feel better about. And so there can be visual things that that person looks different, right? Or you think about the, you know, I spent some time in Great Britain and when there's a lot of conflict between Northern Ireland and Ireland, right? And you thought, wow, there's not, there's not even a look difference, right? It's the same general, you know, religious umbrella, same ethnicity, right? But now there's some religious difference. And I thought, it's not me trying to be denigrating, you know, around the Irish conflicts, like that's human of, oh, there's no actual difference between us. If I don't feel good about myself, I'm gonna find one, right? It's that that I believe could go away. It's driven by maybe the trauma of just being alive in the world and things can happen to us. But we certainly promote in the human created trauma, people feeling not good enough, finding differences, there's a place for the envy to attach, and we're off to the races of, you know, wars. I mean, we're talking about the Second World War and we think, well, what have we learned since then? It would take us a day to map out all the wars since then, right, let alone, for goodness sakes, everything that's salient right now. So we're not pretty, we're not good at learning from what seem to be some very salient lessons. I should mention one thing is that I also know that you're interested in Russian culture a little bit. Yes. Churchill said, I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. So what to you are some interesting differences between this eastern part of the world of Russia, Ukraine, the Slavic countries, the former Soviet Union, all of that versus sort of the US culture? What stands out to you from the literature, from the music, from the science, all that kind of stuff? I think there's so much intensity, intensity and I guess I would say fearlessness of expression that I see in a Slavic culture, maybe, maybe it's across cultures, because there's a different way that expression occurs. We say like, oh, it's different in the French than the Spanish or it's different than in parts of Africa. And I think when you take that part of the world for whatever reason, and maybe it's just totally random or maybe it's aspects of geography and experience and migration, but there's such an intensity. And I remember listening to Tchaikovsky very early on, maybe not for the very first time, early on in my life, or reading Dostoyevsky and feeling like, oh, Dostoyevsky's willingness, his ability and his willingness to express and create such powerful aberrant states of human experience. Tchaikovsky in his music, the depths of suffering that it expresses has always stood out to me as a way that like, if that's like the brightest light, so to speak, communicating information, that that's a place to look. And it's also a place that resonated with me so strongly because I think for some people who are informative years and having very difficult feelings, right, of like a depth of feeling of like fear and how's the world gonna be? Am I gonna be annihilated? What do I even want? What do I feel inside of me? To encounter that being expressed so intensely, I found to be very, very moving. So I don't know if that's a good answer or not, but I think there's an intensity of expression and a fearlessness. Dostoevsky wrote about terrible things. What happens in the person? Is there a person who is brilliant intellectually and very persuasive and very capable of being effective who also just chooses to be a child rapist, right? I mean, he wrote about that. He wrote about the truth of this is what we can be as humans and I think there's so many lessons including the truth. Like people will tend to think, oh, evil's not very bright or not very intelligent. That's a way to let evil propagate, right? Evil can be effective and attractive and very compelling, but evil nonetheless. And I just think there's a fearless willingness to look at that and to describe it that I see primarily I've studied in Russian culture. Yeah, the fearless exploration of this whole human drama, definitely Dostoevsky and others since in the 20th century and the 19th century have done an incredible job with that. Some of that, just like you said, is the language, the culture. I think that intense romanticism is there that is almost an overdramatic exploration of human nature. It can err on the side or falter when it goes into a kind of cynical view of life. You know, life is suffering. I think that also has to do with the way you deal with the trauma of the world wars and so on. This is something the different nations throughout Europe had to deal with that in different ways. Some of them have channeled into envy and resentment. Some of them channeled into a kind of nihilism or cynicism. And ultimately, the intensity of feeling is there, which is sort of interesting to see and interesting how that manifests itself in the kind of governments it builds up. You know, there's more authoritarianism in that part of the world versus the Western world that's more focused on the individual versus the collective. And when more focused on the individual, you have a propensity to value individual rights with democracy and so on. It's interesting to watch and, yeah, to reconstruct how that all came to be. Is it in the blood? Is it in the mind? Is it in some kind of thing that's more ethereal, a collective set of ideas that we pass from generation to generation, between each other, sort of the collective of it? Yeah, it's fascinating to see. But now reinvigorated because there's conflict in that part of the world, you've also thought about the Cold War. What lessons about the human mind, about psychiatry, psychology, and about looking at the Cold War can we take forward in the 21st century so that we can avoid World War III? Right, a major cold or hot war in the 21st century. Well, I think unspoken animosities are very, very, very dangerous. I mean, right, it was a cold war. There was fighting through proxies, right? The superpowers were fighting surrogate wars through proxies, which of course, in and of itself causes immense suffering. But it becomes the opposite of an exchange of ideas or an exchange of thought. You know, I mean, Khrushchev, right, not believing that the kitchen could look like it did at the World's Fair, right? And some of the misconceptions here of what things were like in Russia, right? It was an utter, it was a thought that those other people are not actually people, right? There's an enemy society of evil, which then paints with a broad brush in a way that makes it easy, too easy for the Cold War, for the war to go from being cold, right, to having boiling over into utter destruction. And I wrote, it was really a true story that when I was in, it was still the Soviet Union, but it was right around the time of the Soviet Union coming to an end, and I had gone on a trip for students from England, and we got to go places that people hadn't gone. You know, foreigners hadn't gone in many, many years. It was just kind of the right timing to experience that. And it really is true that someone said on short notice to these poor kids that these group of Americans were coming and I have a picture somewhere of the kid in a gas mask. Like, they went under their desks and put on a gas mask, and they thought, right. That's what, I mean, that's what, they're taught to think about us and we're taught to think about them. And now we're back in an us-them, right? When we're all trying to survive and we're all such, human life is so delicate, right? You know, let alone human happiness. And we make these divisions and we create this aggression and latent aggression. We do the Cold War, we developed the ability to destroy the Earth, right? And then just sat looking at one another, you know, with further growing misunderstanding and the opportunity for the proxy fights, like when they say the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I know wasn't a war, but it's an aspect of that, right, where we just have ourselves wildly, you know, at risk of destruction without any mutual understanding. And again, I would argue that that is the opposite of the counter-entropy, right? Like, we are setting everything up for lack of communication, lack of understanding. How do those feelings of love and shared humanness happen? They don't, right? If you separate people and then we push ourselves more and more and more towards reinstating the state of entropy that's present in the rest of the universe. What advice would you give to young people that are fighting entropy with all their might? So, young people and people that are wondering how to find their way in life, what advice would you give how to have a career, how to have a life they can be proud of? I think starting off with sort of first principles. Oh, okay, what are my values, right? How do I want to live life? Because, you know, I'm in my early 50s and when I was a kid, you know, we waited for the, the newspaper came in the afternoon and then, you know, and then we'd see something. Okay, what's going on in the world? We'd learn something. I'd get the West Coast baseball scores, right? Right, and learn about, oh, here's what happened in different parts of the world. And by and large, I and everyone else there, adult or child, were like living in a reality that was largely, our conception was largely what was around us, right? And now, in many ways, it is, I'm not saying it's entirely negative, of course, that we have more information. We can sort of think globally, so to speak, right? But the other side of that is so much of the world's problems are on us all the time, right? Like here's this awful thing that happened. How many awful things happen each day and they're right in front of us and there's such an immediacy to it all that I think it can be, it can like paralyze us with terror, right? And for someone who's young and trying to make their way, it's like how do you figure your way out in this world that you're worried isn't even gonna exist, right? And then you see how profligate the generations before you are, right? In so many ways, and there can become, I think, a push towards extremes, either nihilism or I'm gonna change everything, right? And it's like, how about, let's start from how do I wanna behave in my own community, right? Which starts with how do I wanna behave in my household, right, what kind of neighbor do I wanna be? I mean, it might seem like things like that are silly or small in comparison to the big things, but I don't think they are. I think that's how we start building foundations that lets us tackle the big things. And I do find myself saying when I'm working with, sometimes doing therapy with younger people, of helping them kind of bring back their thoughts, their strivings, their decisions more to themselves and living with and around themselves more instead of in something that becomes very theoretical and therefore very threatening and unnerving. So focusing on the people around them, taking one small step at a time to form deeper connections to build something locally. Yeah, how do I wanna be today? If I go into the grocery store and the person in front of me drops something, you know, I can scowl, because I'm in a rush, right? And I can be like that, right? I can be like that. I've been that way many, many times in my life, right? And it's never done anyone a damn bit of good, including me, right? Or I can realize, like, those 10 seconds aren't gonna matter. Can I help pick that thing up? Or just smile. These are the seemingly small things that I think make the tenor of our lives. Yeah, I moved, I think I mentioned to you offline, one of the, really the main reason I moved to Austin, Texas, I just remember deciding it when I went to Walmart and a lady said, you look handsome in that tie, or in that suit and tie, whatever. Like, I don't think anyone's ever, it's an older lady, she was very sweet, there's kindness in her eyes, she said that, I don't think anyone ever said anything like that to me in my entire life. And it was just, I don't know, it was like, wow, there's kindness in this world. I know it sounds ridiculous, but like. Does not sound ridiculous. It's like those, you could be that for somebody. Go walk around in Walmarts. Right, the thing about, you remember that? Yeah. And it's pivotal, you're citing it as, hey, that was a big part of me moving here. So the thing about the branch point in your life that comes from the simple kindness, right, of a person who had goodness to give, right? And wasn't scared that you were gonna be upset by it, or whatever, right? Took the risk. Right, right. She probably didn't have the thought that you could be assailing, right? Probably she looks at you, she's got goodness to give, it's simple to give it. It's that simple, and it's beautiful, and it's worth more to you than like, how many studies would be on where's the right to live, or this and that. None of that matters. What mattered was. It was just that. Her freedom to be kind. And that's emotion. That's not logic at all. Right. That's purely just human emotion, and a little bit of humanness, that little bit of connection. And then that's what makes life great. Which is why it's not a bad idea, right? That you moved here that way, instead of, one could say, well, I can't believe you did that, instead of looking at all the data, and hiring consultants of what's the best place to live. But that would be wrong, right? Like, you made a good decision, right? Like, that was good data. It was impactful data, even in your thoughts about how you're happy living here, right? It's not that, oh, you discount, you shortchange yourself by not relying on all the logic. Right? You felt something about the place, and you felt it as symbolized in a person, and that made the choice for you. It's a balance, of course, but you also have to know yourself a little bit. Sometimes you can find stability and comfort in kind of reasoning things out a little bit. Maybe, as people close to me have sometimes criticized, in that I'm a little bit too romantic, where I'll just follow the feeling. And, you know, life, you know, there's physics. There's a reality to this world. And sometimes reality doesn't allow you to flourish, if you just follow your feelings, but there's a dance there. And happiness is ultimately found in that landscape of feeling and emotion, versus facts, and reason, and logic. As you said, have their place, right? Everything, yeah. They have their place, but they're not the be all and end all. You're an incredible person. Andrew Huberman is a friend of yours. He said, you absolutely must talk. Carl Dyseroth, the number of people you know, they're just incredible people. There's just this group of folks that somehow helped each other flourish and grew together. And I'm just, I'm so happy you exist. I'm so happy you're doing the work you're doing. I can't wait for your second book. Thank you. And thank you for talking today. This was really cool. Thank you so much. I'm proud to be among the group of people that you cited. Proud to be their friend, and proud that you've had me on today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Conte. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Viktor Frankl. Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics | Lex Fridman Podcast #303

The real foundation of Marx's political philosophy was the economic argument that there would be a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And that tendency for the rate of profit to fall would lead to capitalists battening down on workers harder, paying them less than the subsistence, a revolt by workers against this, and then you would get socialism on the other side. So what he called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall played a critical role in his explanation for why socialism would have to come about. If you look at Marx's own vision of the revolution, it was going to happen in England. The advanced economies would be first to go through the revolution. The socialist, the primitive economies would have to go through a capitalist transition. And this is the difference when the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. So the Mensheviks, and Hyman Minsky came out of the Menshevik family, the Mensheviks believed you had to go through a capitalist phase. Russia had to go through a capitalist period before it becomes socialist. The Bolsheviks believed they could get there in one go. The following is a conversation with Steve Keen, a brilliant economist that criticizes much of modern economics and proposes new theories and models that integrate some ideas and ditch others from very thinkers, from Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes to Hyman Minsky. In fact, a lot of our conversation is about Karl Marx and Marxian economics. He has been a scholar of Karl Marx's work for many years. So this was a fascinating exploration. He has written several books I recommend, including The New Economics and Manifesto and Debunking Economics. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Steve Keen. Let's start with a big question. What is economics? Or maybe what is or should be the goal of economics? Well, it should be I understand how human civilization comes about and how it can be maintained. And that's not what it's been at all. So we have a discipline which has the right name and the wrong soul. What is the soul of economics? The soul of economics really is to explain how do we manage to build a civilization that elevates us so far above the energy and consumption and knowledge levels of the base environment of the earth? Because if you think about it, and this is actually working from a work I've learned from Tim Garrett, who's one of my research colleagues, who's an atmospheric physicist. And his idea is that we have these, we exploit these high-grade energy sources from the sun itself to coal, nuclear, etc., etc., which means we can maintain a level of human civilization well above what we'd have if we were just still running around with rocks and stones and spears. So it's that elevation above the base level of the planet, which is human civilization. And if we didn't have this energy we were exploiting, if we didn't use the environment to elevate ourselves above what's possible in the background, then you and I wouldn't be talking into microphones. We might be doing drumbeats and stuff like this, but we wouldn't be having the sort of conversation we have. So it would explain how that came about, that's what economics should be doing, and it's not. So this is the greatest thing that the earth has ever created, is what you're saying, this conversation? Yeah, we're the most elaborate construction on the planet. And that's not what we've done, we've denigrated the planet itself. We don't have respect for the fact that life itself is an incredible creation. And my ultimate, if I had to see how humanity's going to survive what we're putting ourselves through, then we'd have to come out of it as a species which sees its role as preserving and respecting life. I like how you took my silly, incredible statement and made it into a serious one about how amazing life is. Life is incredible, and we humans don't respect it enough, we trash it. And that's what's economics, I think it's played a huge role in that. So I actually regard my discipline, I would never call it a profession, let alone a science, my discipline has probably helped bring about the termination potential, the feasible termination of human civilization. Strong words. Okay, let's return to the basics of economics. So what is the soul and the practice of economics? What should be the goal of it? Because you're speaking very poetically, but we'll also speak pragmatically about the tools of economics, the variables of economics, the metrics, the goals, the models. Practically speaking, what are the goals of economics? Well, in terms of the tools we use, we should be using the tools that engineers use, frankly. And that sounds ridiculously simple, because you would expect that economists are using up-to-date techniques that are common in other sciences, where you're dealing with similar ideas of stocks and flows, and interactions between the environment and a system and so on. And that's fundamentally systems engineering. And that's what we should be using as the tools of economics. Now, if you look at what economists actually do, the sophisticated stuff involves difference equations. And like difference equations, if you've done enough mathematics, as you have, you know difference equations are useful for individual level processes. If you're talking about autonomous, it'll go from state t to t plus one, t plus two, and so on. But not when you're talking at the aggregate level. There, you use differential equations to measure it all. Economists have been using difference equations. So there's a book, I think it's by Sargent and one other, called Advanced Methods in Economics Using Python, two-volume set. It's about close to 2,000 pages, and four of those pages are on differential equations. The rest is all difference equations. So they're using entirely the wrong mathematics to start with. For people listening, what is difference equations versus differential equations? Okay, a difference equation is like you can do in a spreadsheet. You'll have, this is the value for 1990, this is the value for 1991, 92, 93, 94. So you have discrete jumps in time. Whereas the differential equation says there's a process moving through time. And you will have a rate of change of a variable is a function of the state of itself and other variables and rates of change of those variables. And that is what you use when you're doing an aggregate model. So if you're modeling water, for example, or fluid dynamics, you have a set of differential equations describing the entire body of fluid moving through time. You don't try to model the discrete motion of each molecule of H2O. So at the aggregate level, you use differential equations for processes that occur through time. And that's economics. It occurs through time. You should be using that particular technology. But some economists do learn differential equations, but they don't learn stability analysis. So they simply assume equilibrium is stable and they work in equilibrium terms all the time. And that's, it is the technical level, it's an incredibly complicated way of modeling the world using entirely the wrong tools. Okay, well, we'll talk about that because it's unclear what the right tools are. Maybe it's more clear to you, but... I've got to make it clear to an audience. Well, so this is a very complicated world. It's a complex world. You talk about there, some of the most complex systems on earth are the human mind, the economy, and the biosphere. So we'll go to that place. I'm fascinated by complex systems. I'm humbled by them, even at their simplest level of cellular automata. I'm not sure what the right tools are to understand that, especially when part of the complex system is like a hierarchy of other complex systems. So you said the economy is a fascinating complex system, but it's made up of human minds. And those are interesting. Those are interesting, perhaps impossible to model, but we can try and we can try to figure out how to approximate them. And maybe that's the challenge of economics. Okay, we'll keep returning to the basics. Let us try to learn something from history. I also see as part of economics is us trying to figure out stuff. And there's a few smart folks that write books throughout human history. And sometimes they name schools of economics after them. So let us take a stroll through history. Can you describe at a high level what are the different schools of economics, perhaps ones that are interesting to you, perhaps ones that the difference between which reveal something useful or insightful for our conversation? Okay. So you could, neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Austrian, I like the biophysical economics and so on, other heterodox economic schools that you find interesting. Okay. I actually find interesting a school which went extinct about 250 years ago. That's where I'd like to start from. And they're called the physiocrats. And the name itself implies where their knowledge came from, because if you go back far enough in history, we didn't do autopsies. But when you started doing autopsies, they found wires, they found tubes, et cetera, et cetera. And they started seeing the body as a circulation system. And they applied the same sort of logic to the economy. And they came out of an agricultural economy, which was France. And they saw that the wealth came effectively from the sun. So they saw all wealth comes from, they said the soil, but what they really mean is the soil absorbs the energy of the sun. One seed plants, a thousand flea seeds come back. There is no surplus. We are simply mining what we can find out of the natural economy. That's where we should have stayed and developed from that forward. We then went through the classical school of economics, which comes out of Adam Smith and Smith coming from Scotland, looked at what the physiocrats said. And what the physiocrats argued was that agriculture is the source of all wealth. And the manufacturing sector is sterile. That's literally the term they use to describe the manufacturing. What does sterile mean? Sterile means you don't extract value. You simply change the shape of value. So the value comes from the soil. It comes from the soil. That's the free gift of nature. That's literally the phrase they used. And we then distribute the free gift of nature around and we need carriages, which was the manufacturing term they used at the time, as well as wheat. So to make the carriages, we take what's been taken from the soil and we convert it to a different form, but there is no value added in manufacturing. So Smith looked at that and said, well, I'm from Scotland and we've got these industries, you know, and we make stuff and it's machinery. And he said, no, it's not land that gives us the source of value. It's labor. Now that led to the classical school of thought. And that said that all value comes from labor, that value is objective. So it's the amount of effort you put in, that the price two things will exchange for reflects the relative effort that's involved in the manufacturing. So this computer takes two hours to make and this bottle takes two minutes to make, then this is worth 60 times as much as that. They didn't talk about marginal cost. It was absolute cost effectively. They didn't talk about utility as a subjective thing. They ridiculed subjective utility theory. That led to Marx and Marx is probably the most brilliant mind in the history of economics. The only other competitor I'd see is Schumpeter, possibly Keynes, but in my terms of ranking of intellects, so you Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes in terms of the outstanding capacities to think. But Marx then turned that classical school, which was pro-capitalism and anti-feudal into a critique of capitalism, which led to the neoclassical school coming along as a defense of capitalism. But they defended it using the ideas of the subjective theory of value. So that value does not reflect effort. It's the satisfaction individuals get from different objects that determines their value, marginal utility. It's the marginal cost that determines how much they sell for. Capitalism equilibrates marginal cost and marginal utility. And the concepts of equilibrium and marginal this and marginal that became the neoclassical school. And that's still the dominant school now 150 years later. So that's the one that everybody learns. And when you first learn economics, if you don't have the critical background that I managed to acquire, that's what you think is economics, the marginal utility, equilibrium-oriented analysis of mainstream economics. And for example, they ignore money. People think economists, you must be an expert on money because you're an economist. Well, in fact, economists learn literally in the first few weeks at university that money is irrelevant. They say money illusion. They represent people's tastes using what they call indifference curves. And they're like isoquants on a weather map. If you look at an isoquant, it shows you all the points of the same pressure. So you can be here or you can be in Denver and the air pressure can be the same if you're in the same weather unit. So you just draw a cell that links together. Well, they do the same thing with utility and say lots of bananas and very few coconuts can give you the same utility as lots of coconuts and very few bananas. And you draw basically like a hyperbola running down and linking the two. And they'll say, well, that's your utility. That describes your tastes. And then we have your income. And given your income, you can buy that many bananas completely or that many coconuts or a straight line combination of the two. And then if we double the nominal price of coconuts and double the nominal price of bananas and double your income, what happens? And the correct answer is nothing, sir. You stay at the same point of tangency between what your budget is and which particular utility curve gives you the maximum satisfaction. So that gets ingrained into them. And I think anybody who worries about money suffers from money illusion. You are therefore ignorant of the deep insights of economics if you think money actually matters. So you have an entire theory of economics which presumes we exchange through data. Like I'll swap you that Microsoft's surface for, actually I'll take two of those for one of these. We do this bartering type arrangement. In fact, that only works if money plays no creative role in the economy. And that's where you'll find reading Schumpeter, the insight that's the school of thought that I come from that says money is essential. Money actually adds to demand. And we'll talk about that later on. So that's the neoclassical school that ends up being subjective theory of value. And then non-monetary, as though everything happens in barter, and focusing on equilibrium, as though everything happens in equilibrium. Or if you get disturbed from equilibrium, you return back to it again. And that mindset describes capitalism. Its most interesting feature is that it reaches equilibrium. Now, what planet are we on to believe that? Because if you look at the real world, the real exciting world of capitalism in which we live, change is by far the most obvious characteristic of it. There's no equilibrium. There's no equilibrium. It's unstable. And as a mathematician, it's easy to, you work with stability analysis. You work out what the Jacobian is, you work out your Lyapunov exponents in a complex system. You're used to the idea that equilibrium is unstable. But economists get schooled in believing that everything happens in equilibrium, and they don't learn stability analysis. So all that stuff is missing. So onto the schools of thought, treating the economy as an equilibrium system, which was what the neoclassical school did, is what Keynes disturbed. And he really disturbed it by talking about, fundamentally, that uncertainty determines our decisions about the future. So when we consume, you know, if you like Pfizer or whatever particular drink you want to have, you know the current situation. But to invest, you must be making guesses about the future. But you don't know the future. So what do you do? You extrapolate what you currently know. And this is a terrible basis on which to plan for the future. But this is the only thing you can do where there is no possibility of solid calculation. So investment is therefore subject to uncertainty. And therefore, you will get volatility out of investment. You will get fads, of course, booms and slumps coming out of that, because people extrapolate for the current conditions. And that's the normal state of a capitalist economy. And Schumpeter argued that that's what gives us this creativity as well. The fact that you can perceive a potential demand, but first of all, you don't know whether that demand is going to work. Secondly, you don't know who your competitor is going to be, whether somebody is going to be ahead of you or behind. If there's a fad, you'll overinvest. Okay. All this stuff is the real nature of capitalism. And that's what we should be trying to capture, the dynamic, non-equilibrium, monetary violence and creativity of capitalism. That's what we should be analysing. And the post-Keynesian school has gone in that orientation. They've been, in my opinion, inhibited by learning their mathematics from neoclassical economists. So they don't have enough of the technology of complex systems. There's only a really tiny handful of people working in complex systems analysis in post-Keynesian economics. But that is to me the most interesting area. So their tools may be lacking, but they fundamentally accept the instability of things. That's right. That's right. And so that's what makes them interesting. So let me try to summarise what you said, and then you say how stupid I am. Okay. So then there was the physiocrats that thought value came from the land. Then there's Adam Smith who said, nah, value comes from human labour. That was the classical school. And then neoclassical is value comes from bananas and coconuts, the human preferences, like human happiness, how happy a banana makes you. And then the Keynesian and the post-Keynesian were like, yeah, well, you can't, you can never, the moment you try to put value to a banana and a coconut, you're already working in the past. It's always going to be chaos and stability, and then you just, you're fishing in uncertain waters. And we have to embrace that and come up with tools that model that well. And also Joseph Schumpeter, what school would you put him under? Is he a Keynesian or is he Austrian economics? He's an Austrian, and Austrians deny. Okay. That's the intriguing. He's from Austria, but he's not an Austrian economist. There are elements of the Austrian school of thought which are worthwhile. What is Austrian economics in this beautiful whirlwind picture that you painted? Okay. Austrian economics grew out of the rebellion against the classical school. So you had three intellects who mainly led the growth of the neoclassical school back in the 1870s. It was William Jevons from England, Menger, who's from Austria, and Vollras from France. And Vollras tried to work out a set of equations to describe a multi-product economy, where there's numerous producers and numerous consumers. Everybody's both a producer and a consumer. And you try to work out a vector of prices that will give you equilibrium in all markets instantaneously. And that's his equilibrium orientation. Jevons is also one about equilibrium, but he worked more at the aggregate level. So this is supply curve and a demand curve, and that's what Marshall ultimately codified. Menger was pretty much saying that, well, yes, there might be an equilibrium, but you're going to get disturbed from it all the time. You'll be above or below the equilibrium. And what came out of the Austrian school was an acceptance of that sort of vision that a market should reach equilibrium, but then said, well, you'll get disturbed away from the equilibrium. And that's what gives you the vitality of capitalism, because an entrepreneur will see an arbitrage advantage and try to close that gap, and that will give you innovation over time. And Schumpeter went beyond that and saw the role of money and said that an entrepreneur is somebody with a great idea and no money. So to become a capitalist, you've got to get money. And therefore, you've got to approach the finance sector to get the money, and the finance sector creates money and also creates the debt for the entrepreneur. And so you get this financial engine turning up as well, and you will get movements away from equilibrium out of that. You won't necessarily head back towards the equilibrium. So Schumpeter has a rich vision of capitalism in which money plays an essential role, in which you will be disturbed from equilibrium all the time. And that is really, I think, a much closer vision of actual capitalism than anything by even the leading Austrians, Hayek, et cetera, et cetera. And certainly Ron Bardo, I find totally, like reading a cardboard cutout version of the wealth of nations, I find his worth trivial. But Schumpeter was rich, but with the same foundations as the Austrians. But because he talked about the importance of money, that took him away from the Austrian vision, which was very much based on a hard money idea of capitalism. Schumpeter said you needed the capacity of the financial sector to create money, to empower entrepreneurs. And that's a very important vision. So Schumpeter's argument is the deviation from equilibrium, that's where all the fun happens, that's where all the magic happens. That's the magic of capitalism. And like the Austrians, because they focus on the deviation from equilibrium, are better than their classicals. But they still have this belief in you'll reach equilibrium ultimately, or you'll head back towards it. Whereas they don't have an explanation of capitalism that gives you cycles apart from having the wrong rate of interest. So there's no role for an accumulation of debt over time. So what Schumpeter gave us was a vision of the creativity of capitalism being driven by entrepreneurs who are funded by money creation by the finance sector. And that's fundamentally the world in which we live. So there's also, kids these days are all into modern monetary theory. What's that about? Okay. Modern monetary theory is accounting. I want to summarize it bluntly. It's simply saying let's do the accounting, because what money is, is a creature of double entry bookkeeping. Okay. What's double entry bookkeeping? Banks, this was invented back in the 1500s in Italy. I've forgotten the particular merchant who did it, based on some Arabic ideas as well. But the thing is, if you want to keep track of your financial flows, then you divide what you, all the financial claims on you, you divide into claims you have on somebody else, which are your assets, claims somebody else has on you, which are your liabilities, and the gap between the two is your equity. So you record every transaction twice on one row. Okay. So for example, if you and I do a financial transfer, financial transfer, you have a bank account, I have a bank account, your bank account will go down, mine goes up. Okay. And that's, the sum of the operation is zero. Okay. But on the other hand, if I go to a bank and borrow money, then my account goes up, they put money in my deposit account, the bank's assets go up. Okay. And there's still the same sum applies, assets minus liabilities minus equity equals zero. Now that's simply saying money is an accounting, a creature of accounting. It's not a creature of a commodity. So if you think about how Austrians think about money and how gold bugs think about money and Bitcoin enthusiasts, if there are any left, think about money. What they see is money as an object. Okay. And you and I can both have more gold if we're both willing to go to this, you know, a mine somewhere and dig a few holes and get a few specks of gold out. So there's no competition or no interaction between you and me if money is gold and I think money should be an object, a commodity, but money fundamentally is not a commodity. It's a claim on somebody else. That's money's essence. So when you do it, you must use double entry bookkeeping to do it. And then when you do, you find all the answers that come out of thinking as money as a commodity are wrong. So for example, I've got Elon on this one. So I want to get this rid of Elon because I saw him making a comment about this a few weeks ago on Twitter. He said that it's wrong for the government. Effectively, it seems wrong for the government to always be in deficit. Okay. Now when you look at it and say, well, how is money created? How does money come about when it's not a commodity like gold, which you dig up out of the ground, when it's actually social relations between people that create money? Well, money is fundamentally the liabilities of the banking sector. If we make a transfer between us, your deposit account goes down, my deposit account goes up. Those are exchanges on the liability side of the banking sector. But if we have a transaction with a bank, then if the bank lends us money, its assets, loans go up, its deposits go up. Again, that same balance. So you've got to look and say money therefore is fundamentally the liabilities of the banking sector. So how do you create additional liabilities? You must have an operation which occurs both on the liability side and the asset side of the banking sector. So if you and I make a new transaction, no money is created. Existing money is redistributed. But if you go to a bank and take out a bank loan, then money is created by the bank loan. So the liabilities of the banking sector rise, the assets rise, they're balanced, but more liabilities means the banking sector means more money. Okay. So that's how private banks create money. And that's what I first started working on when I became an academic about 35 years ago, the actual dynamics of private money creation. But the government has the same sort of story. If the government runs a deficit, it spends more money on the individuals in the economy than it taxes them, which means their bank accounts increase. So a government deficit creates money for the private sector. Okay. So that's where money creation occurs from the government. So it puts more money into people's bank accounts by spending, by welfare payments than it takes out by taxation. So that's creating new money. And then on the other side of the bank, the money turns up in the reserve accounts of the banks, which are basically the private banks' bank accounts at the central bank. So rather than the asset of private money creation being loans, the asset of government money creation is reserves. Okay. Right. Money creation is a good thing. So you mentioned a bunch of stuff like private money creation with the liabilities and the banks and then how the government is doing, the reserves, blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, there's a bunch of printers that are printing money. What is money? And then you also said something interesting, which is social relations between humans is what creates money. I think my mind was blown several times over the past minute. So it's difficult for me to reconstruct the pieces of my mind back together. But basic question, is money creation a good thing or a bad thing? Money creation is a good thing because money creation is what allows commerce to happen. Isn't there a conservation of- No, there isn't. I had arguments with physicists over this and it took me a long time to answer it. They thought the sum total of all money is zero. Yeah. Okay. It's the sum total of all assets and liabilities is zero. So if you imagine your assets minus your liabilities is your equity and your asset is somebody else's liability and your liability is somebody else's asset. When we're talking about financial assets, and this is another mind blowing thing that I've just recently solved myself. So the sum total of all financial assets and liabilities is zero. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. I'm going to interrupt you rudely. What are assets? What are liabilities? Assets are your claims on somebody else. Specific. Give me an example of an asset. Okay. Do you have a mortgage for this house? No, I'm renting. You're renting. There you go. Well, if you had a mortgage, that'd be your liability. That would be my liability. Okay. The mortgage would be the bank's asset. Right. Okay. If you add the two together, you get zero. Okay. So that's zero. That's zero. The money is the liability side of the banking sector. Okay. Okay. Assets are the assets on the other side can be either created by the banking sector, which is where you get bank loans or created by the government where you get reserves. But money is the liabilities. Money is if you think about protons and anti protons in that sense, money is like the anti proton. It's the negative, the liability. But wait, the liability is the negative. How's that money? I thought money is the positive. What is a liability for the banking sector is an asset for you and me. And assets includes money. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. If you have a bank, like you'd have a bank account and you'd have some cash. Yeah. Okay. Those are your assets. But the bank account is a liability of the banking sector and the cash is a liability of the federal reserve. Okay. So what's money? Well, money is the promise of a third party that we both accept to close our transaction. And this is... That's a bank? That's a bank. Yeah. One of the most important works I've ever read is a work by a wonderful now, unfortunately deceased, tiny Italian economist called Augusto Graziani. And he's the most wonderful personality. Augusto, I've met him on a few occasions, is one of the few human beings who can speak in perfectly formed paragraphs. Okay. Superbly eloquent. And what he did was write a paper called the Monetary Theory of Production. You can find it downloaded on the web. It's pretty much open source now. And what he said is, what distinguishes a monetary economy from a barter economy? So he said, in a barter economy, what we do is, you know, I'll give you two of these for one of those. Yeah. Okay. Barter. Just working at a relative price. There are two of us involved and there are two commodities. So with money, money is a triangular transaction. Okay. There is one commodity. I want to buy that can of drink off you. Two people. Two people and the price that's worked out ends up being in a transfer from the promises to pay the bank that the buyer has to the promises pay the bank that the seller has. So if I, so what you have is a monetary transaction in a capitalist economy involves three agents, the buyer, the seller and the bank. So the bank always has to be part of it. Well, the bank has to be part of it. When I hand you the money, you accept that as, you've now got rather than it's the bank promising to pay me something. It's now the bank promising to pay you something. And we exchange the promises of banks and that's fundamentally money. So money is fundamentally a threesome and everybody gets fucked. Is that a good way to put it? No, I'm just kidding. I can use French in this conversation. That's good. That's not French. That's a different language. I'll explain it to you one day. I'll explain it to you one day. You Australians will never understand. Okay. If I can return to, we'll jump around if it's okay. Oh, that's fine. So you mentioned Karl Marx as one of the great intellects, economic thinkers ever. Yeah. He's, he might be number one. You study him quite a bit. You disagree with him quite a bit. Yep. But you still think he's a powerful. A powerful mind. A powerful mind. So first of all, let's just explore the human. Why do you say so? What's interesting in that mind? In the way he saw the world, what are the insights that you find brilliant? Marx once described his major work as towards a critical examination of everything existing. So he's a modest bastard. Yeah. So he wanted to understand and criticize everything. Yeah. And even he wasn't trained directly by Hegel, but he was, his teachers were Hegelian philosophers. And what Hegel developed was a concept called dialectics. And dialectics is a philosophy of change. And when most people hear the word dialectics, they come up with this unpronounceable trio of words called thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I can barely get the words out myself. Yeah. And that actually is not Hegel at all. That's another German philosopher. Kant? Fichte. Oh, I thought it was Kant. No, Fichte. Well, I'm not sure. I mixed them up. All Germans look the same to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but if you look at this beautiful book called Marx and Contradiction, you want to find a great explanation for Marxist philosophy. I've forgotten the author. I think it's Wilde, W-I-L-D-E, Marx and Contradiction. And he points out the actual origins of Marxist philosophy. I didn't know that when I first read Marx. So I became exposed to Marx when I was a student at Sydney University, and we'd had a strike at the university over the teaching of philosophy. And what happened was the philosophy department had a lot of radical philosophers in it and a conservative chief philosopher. And the radicals wanted to have a course on what they called feminist aspects of philosophical, sorry, philosophical aspects of feminist thought. And the staff voted in favor of it. This is back in the days when university departments were democratic. The professor opposed it. He got it blocked at a high level. The staff leapfrogged over that. And then finally, the vice chancellor blocked it. So that led to a strike over the teaching of philosophy at Sydney University, which at one stage over, probably over half the students were on strike. Economics began out of that. Over teaching of a philosophy of feminism. Yes. That's such a different life to what we're living now. That's the academic milieu in which I developed all my ideas. And I had become a critic. I've gone from being a believer of mainstream economics when I was a first year student to disbelieving it halfway through first year. Okay. And I then spent a long time trying to change it, getting nowhere. And then this philosophy strike happened and we took it on in economics and we formed what's called the political economy movement and had a successful strike. We actually managed to pressure the university into establishing a department of political economy at Sydney University, as well as the department of economics. What was the foundational ideas? Were you resistant to the whole censorship of why can't you have a philosophy of anything kind of course? Well, it was much more libertarian in the genuine sense of the word period of time at the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s. Then the word libertarian has been corrupted since then, but it really was about free thought. And you went to university to learn. It was about education. I remember having a fight with my father once where dad was angry about the marks I was getting for some of my courses. And he said, if you don't get a decent result, you won't get a decent job. And I said, I'm not here to get a job. I'm here to get an education. Oh, wow. Okay. Now the thing is, ultimately it's been a pretty good job for me as well. This is in Sydney, by the way, and Sydney in summer is absolutely gorgeous. And what us bunch of lefties decide to do during summer, but read Karl Marx. Yeah. On the beach or? Actually inside the room of the philosophy department at the university of Sydney in the main quadrangle. And it was sandstone all around us. And we bunch of about 20 or 30 of us reading our way through Marx. Capital, like which capital? There's volume one capital. And I remember walking off to that meeting with one of my friends, who's a law student. And this was a period of a huge construction boom in Sydney. So the whole skyline, which we could see from the campus was full of what they call kangaroo cranes, which were an Australian invention that are cranes that can be leapfrogged over each other to build a skyscraper. So here you are reading Karl Marx, looking at the mechanisms of capital. And I looked at those mechanisms and I knew Marx argued that labor was the only source of value. Yeah. And he said machinery doesn't add value. So the cranes are worthless. I'm looking at these cranes and thinking, I want a very good explanation by Marx as to why those cranes don't add value. So reading through the first seven chapters of capital, what you found was Marx applying this dialectic. And like the fictian stuff is bullshit. That is not how Marx thought at all. I was reading, trying to find the thesis, emphasis, synthesis, and it's not there at all in any of Marx's works. And I've read everything he's ever written on economics from 1844 to 1894 when his last books were published. There's not one word of mention of that. What he does talk about is foreground and background and tension. And his idea of a dialectic is that there is a unity will exist in society and that unity can be an individual, that can be a commodity, anything at all. That the unity will be understood by that society, one particular aspect will be focused upon. So if you think about the human being in capitalism, the focus on the human being as an object is their capacity to work. You're a worker, okay? That gets put in the foreground. The fact that you're human and you want to play a guitar and go surfing and make love and all the other things that humans do is pushed into the background. There's a tension between the two of those. And that can transform that unity over time. And that's a beautiful dynamic vision of change. So dialectics is a philosophy of change. So synthesis, antithesis is what does every idea have a counter argument? Yeah, there's a positive and negative and you bring them together somehow. And then Marx has this foreground, background, and tension. Foreground is all what we think of as economics and background is all the lovemaking we do as humans. That sort of thing. And why is there a tension? Well, because if you imagine the unity, like if you take a human in any preview, because you go back to Cro-Magnon days when we're living in caves and we've got to go hunting and cook food and stuff like that. But there's no social hierarchy as we've become used to. So you don't get labored as a worker or a capitalist. You're just a human in that situation. Then you've got more an integrated view of who you are. And I think that's one of the appeals of a tribal, a genuine tribal culture that you get treated for the whole of who you are. You've certainly categorized, you're male, you're female, you're young, you're old, you're a hunter, you're a tool maker, et cetera, et cetera. But you're treated as more an integrated object. When you get put in a complex society like a capitalist society, then one side of you is emphasized and the others are de-emphasized. So is it fair to say that the background is like our basic fundamental humanity and the foreground is the machine of capitalism? Effectively, and when you look at it in terms of a human. But what Marx did is apply this to a commodity. He said, what is the essential unity in a capitalist economy? And the essential unity is a commodity. That's the essential unit. The essential unity. What's unity? Unity is an object in society. Okay. So he started from the point of view of trying to understand how exchange occurs. How do we set prices? And his starting vision was to say that a commodity is a unity in a capitalist economy. The part of the unity that we focus upon is the exchange value. A capitalist produces a commodity, not because of its qualitative characteristics, but because it'd be sold for a profit. So the foreground aspect of a commodity is its exchange value. The background aspect of it, it won't succeed as a commodity unless it has a use value. So the background is the utility thing. Yeah. So if you made something which didn't work, then you might be able to sell it, but it has no utility. You can't make that into a commodity. A broken thing can't be sold. Does that have the subjective? Yeah, it has to have the subjective side. So people enjoy it. As well as the objective. So the objective is what capitalists worry about. I'll give you my favorite counter example. I took a bunch of Australian journalists to China way back in the period when the Gang of Four was being on trial. And we did a tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing. And at that stage, all the artifacts of the royal family, the emperor, were actually in the building still. And we walked past one of them, and it was this solid gold bar about this long, shaped like a fist, turned over like this. And on this side, there were rubies, emeralds, diamonds. You'd never seen gemstones. I mean, gems that big. And one of the journalists asked me what I thought it was, and I said, oh, it's obvious. Jane, it's a backscratcher. Ha, ha, ha. I walked away. She caught up with me about 20 minutes later. I said, I asked one of the guides. It is a backscratcher. Wow. So here's a backscratcher for the emperor made of solid gold with diamonds and rubies and emeralds during the scratching. Yeah. Now, that's a commodity in a feudal society. In a feudal society, the cost doesn't matter. You want the most elaborate, beautiful thing because you are the emperor. So in a feudal society, the commodity, what's focused upon is the utility. And the cost of production when you're the emperor is immaterial. Capitalism reverses that. So the commodity in a capitalist economy is a plastic $2 scratcher you can get from Kmart or Target. And so the use value is necessary but irrelevant to forming the price. Now, that was a completely different vision of exchange in capitalism to what I found in the neoclassical theory because that says it's the marginal utility and the marginal cost of everything that determines the exchange ratio. And the crazy thing about that is not so much the marginal utility, but the argument in the neoclassical theory is that the price ratio, the price will – when there's an exchange going on, there's two-person, two-commodity exchange of two commodities between two people, they will – the price will change until such time as the ratio of the marginal utilities is equal to the ratio of the marginal costs. That's supposed to be the equilibrium. And Marx says that's bullshit. That's a previous society where you exchange stuff that you happen to have for stuff somebody else happened to have without any real production mechanism being involved. And he said that's like when you have two ancient tribes – two tribes meeting for the very first time and one tribe can make something the other tribe can't make. And they will therefore – the price they were willing to pay will reflect how unique this other object is that this one tribe can make and the other can't. So, for example, the story of Manhattan being sold for 40 glass beads, it's actually 40 glass trading beads, I do believe it is a true story. But the thing is the Indians couldn't make glass beads. So they valued the glass beadness of the island of Manhattan, which is a utility-based comparison. What Marx said, that's the very initial contact. Over time, even if you don't know the technology, over time you start to realize how much work goes involved to making what they're selling you versus what you're selling to them. And you start making stuff specifically for sale. So Elon's not losing personal utility each time a Model 3 goes out the door. There's no – he might get utility out of the fact that he's created that vehicle, that concept, and manufactures it and so on, but he's not losing utility each time a Model T Ford goes out the door. And we're going back for the ancient commodity there. So the utility plays no role in setting price in Marx's model, whereas it's essential in the neoclassical model. Yvon Martin What's the difference between utility and marginal utility? What does the word marginal mean and why is it such a problem? David Morgan It turns marginal utility – well, utility itself has different meanings than the two schools of thought. If you take the classical school of thought, which when Marx comes from, utility is effectively objective, so the utility of a chair is that you can sit in it, not how comfortable it makes you feel. If you think about the utility of the chairs, we're both sitting in, they're identical from a classical point of view, we're both sitting. But from a neoclassical point of view, it's how comfortable it makes you feel. And that depends upon your subjective feelings of comfort. You might be far more comfortable in the identical chair that I'm sitting in than I am, and therefore the comparison is difficult. And therefore, working out a ratio involves you've got a decline in your – each time you give away a chair in exchange for an iPhone, you have a fall in your utility. And then therefore, you want a higher return because you're losing more utility each time. The more chairs you give away, the less utility you're getting from chairs. So there's a decline in your utility, that's your marginal utility. So it's including your subjective valuation in setting the price. And what Marx pointed out is this is a caricature of actual change in a capitalist economy. Because we have in a capitalist economy, huge factories sending out huge quantities specifically for sale. They've got no utility to the seller unless they're sold. So it's a very different vision of how price is set. And Marx used that to explain where profit comes from. But he made a mistake. And his argument was that talking about a worker as now your unity, this foreground, background, tension thing, the foreground is that you hire a worker for their cost of production. And the cost of production is a subsistence wage. The utility to the buyer is the fact that they can work in a factory. Now it might take six hours, let's say, to make the means of subsistence. And that's the exchange value. And that's what the capitalist pays as a wage to the worker. But they can work in the factory for 12 hours. That's the utility. 12 minus 6 is 6 surplus of value hours. And that's where profit comes from. And that was Marx's argument. And I thought it was brilliant. But it also applied to machinery. Right. OK. Let's link it to that. Hold on a second. Deep is good. I just wanted to find terms. Don't take that statement out of context, the internet, please. OK. You said buyer, seller, worker. In a factory, who's the seller? Who's the buyer? Why is the worker the buyer? The worker is the commodity in this case. Because if you're going to make stuff in a factory, you've got to hire workers. Yes. And what Marx is saying, the buyer in that situation is a capitalist. So what does the buyer pay? He says he pays the exchange value. That's back to the commodity thing. But that's the starting point. He said the essential unity in a capitalist economy is the commodity. A commodity has two characteristics, exchange value and use value. Exchange value of a commodity in a capitalist economy will be its cost of production. The use value is what you do with it, OK, once you've purchased it. But labor is a commodity? In this case, when a worker is being hired for a job, yes. The worker's labor has an exchange value and a use value as well? Yeah. Use value. Use value of a worker's labor. Exchange value. Let me think about that. So the hours they put in. Is the use value. Interesting. So what does the worker want in this? What are the motivations? Are we not considering the worker in this context as a human being? Well, you come to that. That's actually, that's the next layer. What Marx gave was just like a layered cake, starting from a foundation of saying straight commodity exchange and then saying, well, you're treating a worker as a commodity. Now, a commodity is something, you know, like this. OK, that has, so far as I'm aware, no soul. OK, not going to be complaining if I turn it upside down, it'll fall over. But so there's no soul there. As a human is both a commodity and a non-commodity. And therefore, there'll be a tension in the person. I'm being treated as a commodity here. I'm being paid just enough to stay alive. You know, I've got a wife and kids back at home. So that is another layer of thinking in Marx. And on that layer, he then says, well, workers will therefore demand more than their value. So that's when you get like political. You get political and you get money coming above that and so on. But the basic idea starts from the commodities, the fundamental unity in capitalism. The important commodity in Marx's thinking was the worker, because that's where he said profit came from. And then that explains the motivation of the capitalist. And that ultimately leads to the labor theory of value. And Marx's arguments about how capitalism will come to an end. OK, so first of all, what is the labor theory of value? And actually, before that, what is value? Is that this is like me asking what's happiness? Is there something interesting to say about trying to define value? You vary. And this is a huge problem in economics is arguments of what does value mean? And the neoclassicals came down as that it's subjective. It's value is whatever you get out of it. It's your personal evaluation of something, your personal feelings. So they've got that very subjective idea of value, whereas the Marxists and being inheritors of the classical school talk in terms of objective value. So the value is the number of hours it takes to make something. Or the effort, the value is the effort that goes into making something in the classical school. Well, that's just one measure of objective. Where do you fall? Huh? Where do you fall? I fall on... Subjective versus subjective spectrum. I think you have to have the capacity to move between one and the other in a structured way. A model of value. Yeah, well, my base model is the objective. But above that, as soon as you start talking about the worker, for example, then you get involved in the subjectivity because a worker will be angry, and justifiably so, about being treated as a commodity. Because I'm not a commodity, I'm a human being. And that's where Marx saw political organization coming from. And that's subjective now. And then when you get to money itself, Marx actually said, well, what's the value of money? Now, if you use an objective theory of value, you would say, well, the value of money is its cost of production. What's the cost of producing a dollar? It's about two cents. So he said it can't be. The value of money cannot be its cost of production. Or there must value, I think if I remember the phrase properly, is value here, it must mean the effectively uncertain expectations or subjective valuation. Uncertain expectations or subjective valuation. Okay, but he's okay with that? He was okay with that because he could move between different levels. Because he had a structured foundation of this dialectical vision of foreground, background tension, commodity having use value, exchange value, and a gap between the two. When you're talking about machines, when you're buying stuff for production. And then at the next level, he could look at workers, worker organization, and say that's driven by being treated as a commodity when you're a non-commodity. So the basic labor theory of value that is described to Karl Marx is that value at the base layer fundamentally comes from the labor you put into something. And you say, well, there's some deep truth there, except he misses one fundamental point, which is machines can also bring value to the world. He was saying they don't. He was, the only thing that matters is human labor, not labor. How do you measure what's the role of the, whatever value machines bring to the world? Okay, this is another intriguing history because Marx, when he first started, had what you can call an exclusivist explanation for why labor created value. What's that? And that was to say that the labor is the only commodity with both what he called commodity and commodity power. So you have labor and labor power. Labor is the, and I get fuzzy about this, I haven't read it for something like 30 years, but labor has both commodity and commodity power. The commodity is you can buy labor, which is the means of subsistence. Labor power is the capacity to work inside a factory. There's a difference between the two. Therefore, that difference will give rise to surplus. And there's no other commodity that has this instance of commodity and commodity power. So that was his exclusivist argument. In the middle of the 1857, he was visited by a guy called Otto Brauer in his home in Chelsea. And Otto returned to Marx a copy of Hegel's, I think it's called Phenomenology of Right. I haven't read it, but that's the book. And Marx was then at that stage reading through all the classical theorists again. And he was, suddenly he read Hegel again. And if you know Hunter S. Thompson. Okay. Okay. Who doesn't know Hunter S. Thompson? Somebody who hasn't had enough drugs, obviously. Yeah. But Hunter S. Thompson. He comes to you in a dream after you take your first pop. Mescaline or whatever. If you know your drugs well enough, you can tell, okay, he's stoned, okay, he's on cocaine. Well, Marx suddenly, his writing style in the middle of a book called the Grundrisse completely changed. He switched from weed to cocaine. He switched from Ricardo to Hegel. Okay. And what in Ricardo, he had this exclusivist argument about labor and suddenly Hegel is back talking in terms of dialectics, not actually using a word, but foreground and background and tension. And then he, that's where this use value exchange value tension thing came from, is rereading Hegel 13 years after he stopped reading philosophy. Because in 1844, he was reading just the economists. So you're saying Karl Marx is human after all. He's human. He could be. I would love to have a beer with Karl for a while. For Karl? He's Karl to you? He's Mr. Marx to me. Maybe Karl to me, I'm afraid after all these years. Yeah. Yeah. You've had quite a journey together. So that's where after Hegel, his interpretation of the dialectics comes in the form of background, foreground and background. And then on page 267 of the Penguin edition of the Grundrisse. Literally your memory. One and a half pages long footnote. It's pretty hard to forget because when I did this, when I first read Marx way, way back when I was, how old was I? 20. Okay. I tried to explain my explanation of Marx's use value exchange value stuff to my colleagues in this philosophy discussion room at Sydney University during a beautiful summer that we are inside concrete sandstone walls discussing Marx. And I went to say, look, the use value exchange value argument can be applied to a machine. What's the exchange value of a machine? It's cost of manufacturing. What's its use value? Its capacity to produce goods for sale. No relation between the two. There'll be a gap. A machine can be a source of profit. Now I said that and I got laughed at. I'm quite literally laughed at. So when I went back to university 13 years later to do my master's degree, I chose to read through and find in Marx where he first came across this insight. So I made it on my first master's thesis failed by the way, and justifiably so. I was learning. I didn't know the level of academic discourse necessary. I had an advisor who didn't understand what I was writing. He got me to write for his new Keynesian audience and it was a mess and it got failed. So I got rid of it. It didn't get failed because like, why do you think? It wasn't a good thesis. It was, I didn't know the level. It was written for an audience my supervisor thought that I should be writing for. And it was a mess. And so I met another guy, Jeff Fishburne, as a lecturer at New South Wales University. And Jeff was open-minded. He was not a conventional neoclassical thinker. And I realized I'd throw out the half that Bill had got me to do, focused just on Marx. And so I decided to read Marx in chronological sequence from his very first works of economics, which are called the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. And he wrote those in a garret in Paris after he'd been expelled from Prussia. And so he decided to read the, having been an expert on philosophy and regarded as the towering intellect of Hegelian philosophy in Prussia, but driven out because he was a radical. He ended up running a newspaper or writing for a newspaper. And he was reporting about the eviction of peasants from the forests, taking away their feudal rights. And so this is where his passion for economics and humanity came from. And he was a poet as well. He wrote love poetry to Jenny von Westhalen. That's his first published works were pretty much in poetry. He was a rouse about. He was a wild character. We'd probably fight like crazy, I imagine, if we met. Over the beers? I'm slightly, even though I can be, I can get involved in an argument like nobody's business. No, really? No, really. But I'm a bit more peaceful of personality. You think Marx is feistier than you? He was feisty, but feisty with, he could be arrogant. Like I've got intellectual arrogance. I've come to accept that. But there's like a fundamental humility to you. You're saying Marx is like, he has ego that's hard to control. A bit too big ego. Yeah, I'm guessing. I mean, I'm never going to meet him. Well, the beard says ego to me. The beard is huge. Yeah, that's huge. Okay. So this is interesting. You went chronologically. Right through his works. The development of the human being through his works. Yeah. And I was trying to find the point at which he discovered this use value exchange value idea. And it occurs in a footnote on page 267 to 268 of the Penguin edition of the Grundrisse, which his notes he was taking literally not meant for publication, literally sitting at a stall inside the British Museum, I think, reading all the classical authors in chronological sequence. And then somebody throws Hegel at him and suddenly he's talking in Hegelian terms. And he suddenly says, is not, because it's whole value issues. What is value? Is it exchange value? Use value? How do they relate to each other? That's what he was thinking about. And he said, is not use value, which was left out of the classical school, a fundamental aspect of the commodity? Is there not a tension between the use value and exchange value? Just so we're clear in that context, use value is kind of the subjective thing. Exchange value is the objective thing. Yeah. And Marx was found a way to integrate the two. He was focused on labor being the only thing that can generate both the use value. Yeah. And the exchange value. But no, if you look at the classical school, they focused on exchange value, objective. Look at the neoclassical, they face us upon use value, subjective, or they call it utility. So Marx coming from the Ricardian tradition, basically dismissed the role of utility. And then when he reads Hegel, he's suddenly starting to think in terms of unities and exchange value and use value is the unity of the commodity. And he thinks, well, I can't ignore use value. So rather than leaving it out completely, which is what Ricardo and Smith does, I've got to somehow bring it in. And this Hegelian insight occurs to him. And it's remarkable. I really recommend taking a look at the book, even just to look at that particular page, because what it would have been, it's shown as a footnote, but it would have been him saying, oh, wow. And he's asterisk, asterisk, is not use value a fundamental aspect of the unity of a commodity? So in the notes, you see the discovery of an idea in the human mind, the integration of an idea. And he actually writes, does this have significance in economics? Question mark. And then he probably went home that night and like that, that idea changed him. It changed him completely. And from that point on, his writing was completely different. But he still had this idea from the Ricardian days of saying that labor is the only source of value using an exclusive argument to say there's something unique about labor that explains why it's a source of value. But suddenly this insight occurs to him and he thinks, I can get a positive derivation. I can use the use value and exchange value and the fact they're not related to each other as a dialectical tension to explain surplus value. And that's what he does. So he goes from a negative explanation of where value comes from to a positive explanation on that page of the Guindresa. And he then triumphantly uses it to explain why labor is a source of value. You buy it for its exchange value. You use its use value. They're unrelated. The use value will be bigger. That's where profit comes from. Then he does exactly the same thing for machinery, about 30 pages on. He says it also has to be contemplated, which was not done before. This is right nice to himself, by the way, it's written and really in a colloquial style that the use value of a machine significantly greater than its exchange value. He actually left out the word is. It's used, this is obviously to be a term, it'd be a translation into English of the German, I'm sure. I don't know. I haven't seen the original notes. I'd love to see them. But he says, he leaves out the word is. It also has to be contemplated that the use value significantly greater than its exchange value, i.e. that the contribution of the machine to production exceeds its depreciation. And that was an insight which undermined his explanation for revolution. Okay. Can you say that again? The cost of production exceeds its depreciation? Yeah. Is that okay? Can you linger on that? Well, what Marx argued, and you read this in Capital, and I read this in Capital when I first saw the contradiction in his own thought, he said that no matter how useful a machine is, whether it has took 100 hours to make or cost 150 pounds, it cannot, under any circumstances, add more to production than 150 pounds. Which, in his old exclusivist logic, he could justify, and which in his post-1857 argument is bullshit. Can you still man his case? Can we go to the mind of Marx in thinking if a machine costs 100 bucks, it can't be ever more, bring more value than 100 bucks? But that contradicts his previous logic, because what he said is commodities the essential unity in capitalism. Capitalism focuses upon the exchange value. That pushes the use value into the background, and there's a tension between the two. What that means is the exchange value of a commodity sets its price. The use value is independent. He called them incommensurable. He literally would use the word incommensurability between exchange value and the use value, whereas neoclassicals make them commensurable. So he's saying exchange value and use value are incommensurable, and that normally means that exchange value is objective, like the number of hours it takes to make something. Use value is subjective, how comfortable the chair is, the fact that you can sit in it and the fact that you can sit in a chair. So that's incommensurability. But when you apply it in production, the exchange value of something is objective. It's how many hours it takes to make a machine or how many hours it takes to make the means of subsistence for a worker. The use value is also objective. You're making commodities for sale, and the worker does six hours. Six hours of work will make the means of subsistence for the worker, but the worker will work a 12-hour day, and the six hours becomes a gap. Now, that's incommensurability between use value and exchange value of labor. But when you look at what he said about no matter how long it takes to make a machine or how many pounds it costs, he's saying they're identical, and that's contradicting his own logic. Well, what's the use value of a machine? The fact that it can produce goods for sale, exactly the same as the worker. Now, what I've, in my modern reinterpretation of Marx, which brings in my work on energy, I see both labor and machinery as a means to harness energy and produce useful work. They can both do that. In fact, they do it together. It's a collective enterprise. Okay, so, and we'll go to that. There's no fundamental difference from an exchange value and use value perspective between a human and a machine. And therefore, they're using the same logic, they can both be a source of surplus, which is what Marx contradicted because his explanation for where socialism would come from is that only profit comes from, profit comes only from labor. Over time, we'll add more machinery than labor. That will mean a falling rate of profit, and therefore, a tendency towards socialism. And what he did in that insight in 1857 is contradict his own idea about what would lead to socialism. And he couldn't cope with it. Okay, what's the difference between Marxian economics and Marxist political ideology? The gap between the two, the overlap, the differences, what could- The real foundation of Marx's political philosophy was the economic argument that there would be a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And that tendency for the rate of profit to fall would lead to capitalists battening down workers harder, paying them less than their subsistence, a revolt by workers against this, and then you would get socialism on the other side. So what he called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall played a critical role in his explanation for why socialism would have to come about. He was saying it would have to come about, or is it a good thing for it to come about? So it should come about? He had a should, but he was trying to say it must. So if you look at Marx in the history of radical thought, he was preceded by what were called utopian socialists. Saint-Simon, even the Cadbury's company came out of utopian socialists. And they had an idea about a perfect society in the future where people were properly rewarded, were treated as human beings rather than cogs in a machine, and all this sort of stuff. And they said socialism should come about because it treats humans better than capitalism does. And Marx said, I can prove that socialism must come about. So he preferred, he had a utopian vision of a future society, but he thought he could prove that it had to come about. And the proof relied critically upon tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and that relied upon labor being the only source of profit. What was his utopian view? So this idea of from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Is that the utopian? I think it's utopian in the context of our modern world. It says that rather than being rewarded, like Jeff Bezos gets enormous fortune, you get what you need, not what you want necessarily. All needs is fulfilled. It was a vision of utopia where you could be a fisherman in the morning, a poet in the afternoon, and a chef at night. Okay, this paraphrasing one of his phrases. So he did have a utopian vision of a future society. And he did think human creativity did much, much greater under socialism than it was under capitalism. He was wrong. So let's explore in different ways where he was wrong. You're saying there's a fundamental flaw in the logic, but also if we can link, if we can explore a high level of philosophical concepts of socialism to like the dreams of a utopia. So what, first of all, what is socialism? That's another loaded term. It is. Socialism, particularly in America, is a very loaded term. And what Americans call socialist is a large amount of provision of services by the state, which is commonplace in Europe. It's still moderately commonplace in my own home country of Australia. And that Americans will call public education socialist. That's a total parody of the word. Strictly speaking, what socialism meant is the public ownership of the means of production, no private ownership of the means of production. What is the means of production? Machine factories, factories. So all the goods that are produced in factories, no, the means of producing the goods is owned by a centralized entity. Yeah. Centrally planned. This is what actually was done under Gold's plan under the Soviets. And even with the collective farms as well, you no longer owned your land. The state owned the land, you worked on the land. And this was supposed to be a utopia. Now it didn't turn out to be one. And we'll talk about maybe your ideas of why it didn't turn out to be one. So the fascists did the same. So is fascism also central? Fascism, so-called national socialism. It's also a kind of socialism. So yeah, but there was no, it wasn't public ownership, there was public direction. So the state would tell factories what to do, but there's still private profit. And a large part of why the Nazis succeeded was the extent to which they managed to co-opt major manufacturers in Germany. So it's- Direction versus ownership. It's a dictatorial, I mean, that's a very particular implementation. So you have to consider the full details of the implementation, but it's basically dictator guided. Yeah. And if you want to take- Versus owned. If you want to take a proper vision, then you have to say it's the ownership of the means of production by the state, okay, versus the ownership by private. That rules out the Nazi period. Use the word that again, they're bastardizing as much as Americans do in the opposite direction. Well, what does ownership exactly mean? It became incredibly complicated. And this is actually the best work on this is done by a recently deceased Hungarian economist called Janos Kornay. And Kornay tried to explain why socialism failed. Because- Why did socialism fail in your view, in his view, in Janos' view, in your view? I think Janos is 100% correct. It's a brilliant piece of work. So I'm going to be really paraphrasing his view. And he imagined an ideal socialist society and there wasn't a Stalin, there weren't purges, and you lived up to all the ideals that Marx had for socialism. So he said, but you do it in a context of an economy, which is incredibly primitive, Russia, okay? Because if you look at Marx's own vision of the revolution, it was going to happen in England. The advanced economies would be first to go through the revolution. The socialist, the primitive economies would have to go through a capitalist transition. And this is the difference when the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. So the Mensheviks, when Hyman Minsky came out of the Menshevik family, the Mensheviks believed you had to go through a capitalist phase. Russia had to go through a capitalist period before it becomes socialist. The Bolsheviks believed they could get there in one go, okay? Bypass the capitalist phase, do the development under socialism rather than under capitalism. And this is what Janos was actually analyzing. You start from a primitive, feudal economy, very little industrialization, and you want to jump to an advanced industrial society from that foundation. So he said, what you have then for is a whole range of industries, all of which need as much resources as you can get for them, okay? So you want to develop agriculture, mining, industry, every little division of it. They all have legitimate demands on the resources of the country and the state. That means that all your resources are fully employed and are probably over-employed, okay? So you have a resource constraint in that society. The easiest way to cope with a resource constraint is to produce last year's commodity, not to innovate, not to make change. So what they will give you is as you start to add, you invest, so you now have beginnings of a steel industry, beginnings of a car industry, and so on, you start investing, but you continue producing the same product you made last year. And I have a perfect personal example of that, which I'll throw in now if you like, getting pretty heavy conversation. I know my first major girlfriend had a brother who wanted to get a motorbike, but he couldn't afford a Honda or a Kawasaki. At the time, they cost about $3,000 for a 650cc Japanese motorbike. He found he could buy a Cossack for $650, $1 per cc. So I was there when I got- $1 per cc, I guess. This is in suburban Sylvania waters in Sydney. So this crate arrives with a Cossack motorbike inside it. So we take it apart. It's then got all these wooden palings. We have to pull off the wooden palings to open it up. Then there's oil-soaked rag over this thing, which is tied on a wooden base. We take the oil-soaked rag off and we stare in all its glory in a 1942 BMW. It was exactly the same as Steve McQueen in Great Escape. So the Russians for 30 years were making the same bloody motorbike. It had a bicycle seat. And that's how they coped. They just made the same damn machine every year. They said, so that's the outcome. You actually want the best possible world. You're trying to build as fast as possible. You're paying workers as high wages as you possibly can. And that leads to a world where you don't innovate. You said capitalism, on the other hand, pure capitalist economy. You're trying to pay workers as little as possible. You have competitive industries. You're trying to take demand away from your rivals. You have Kawasaki versus Honda versus BMW, et cetera, et cetera. The way you get demand away from your competitors is by innovating. So what you will get is cycles and booms and slumps, but you'll innovate and change over time. So what you found was this huge gap between socialist volume production with no innovation and capitalism with innovation. So that was the fundamental failing that Jonas Kornay saw. So why did socialists not innovate? Because if you go back to this famous historical incident with Khrushchev in the United Nations, bangs, takes off his shoe and bangs the desk, says, we will bury you. He literally meant we're going to bury you in commodities. We're going to produce more output than you are. And he was wrong. Because fundamentally in the long term, to bury somebody in commodity production, you have to innovate. Yeah. And I think there's also, there's another remarkable Soviet engineer who was given the job of interpreting Marx's ideas of industrial sectors. So he had the commodity sphere, the industry sphere, sector one, sector two, sector three. Sector one producing consumer goods, sector two producing capital goods, sector three producing luxury goods for capitalists. And so he had a three sector model of the economy and he was talking about the dynamics between them. And what Feldman did was reinterpret this as an engineer would reinterpret it, which was brilliant work. So what he said was, you need to produce the means of production. If you want to grow quickly, you focus on producing the means of production rather than commodities. So you don't make cars, you make car factories. Okay. You make a few cars, but most of the effort goes into expanding how many factories you have. And what he did was do a mathematical model where you start off with very low levels of consumer good output, but then you would just go exponential. Okay. Now I took a look at that back when I was doing my master's degree in training in mathematics. I took Feldman's equations and then looked at what was actually driving it was he was imagining correctly a huge pool of unemployed labor. If you go back to the earliest stages of Soviet industrialization back in 1917, post the second world, post the first world war, you had all these unemployed workers, you had all these peasants you could take off the land and put into factories. So you had a huge supply of workers. What you had to do was build the factories. So you're building the factories, but at a certain point you exhaust the supply of lowly employed or unemployed labor. And so rather than having this exponential takeoff, you hit a ceiling and then you can only grow as fast as the population because you're not innovating. So that's what actually hit the Soviet system. And it's why they never buried the Western consumer goods. And instead why Western consumers looked in envy at the goods being purchased by their Western people and said, if that's exploitation, we want exploitation. So okay. There's a lot of interesting stuff to ask here, which is, so Marx's vision for the socialist utopia is you have to go through capitalism. And then Trubik's were true to Marx's original idea. So is there a case to be made that in the long arc of human history on human civilization on earth, that we're going to live out Marx's vision for utopia, which is like, will we run into a wall with capitalism? I think we are running into a wall with capitalism. In fact, I think we've already gone through the wall and we haven't yet realized we've smashed our skulls. But on the other side, we're bleeding and everything like that. Does Marx have any insights on what the other side of capitalism, what is beyond capitalism? I think that beautiful phrase of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, describes what we should end up with. And I think that's actually, if I think about, you know, I'm an Elon Musk fan. That's what I think is partially going to be the nature of society if we build one that functions on Mars. Because and I've actually seen an interview with the Italian who's involved in designing what the future colony will look like. He was actually asked this question, can there be enormous inequality in Martian civilization? The guy said, absolutely not. Because the resources, again, resource constraint applies. You simply can't give somebody an underground bunker 100 times the size of somebody else's 100 underground bunker. Because the scarcity of resources imposes a need for equality overall. Is that always, that's interesting. I mean, the scarcity of resources, wait, but I feel like that's the contradiction. I thought. Are you thinking neoclassical about scarcity? Yeah, I'm barely thinking at all. So wait, I thought scarcity, the best way to build on top of scarcity is a capitalist depletion. No, this is where, again, our vision of what scarcity is, is wrong. Because Ricardo said this, but it's actually better than Marx. Because Ricardo said there are some products whose value is determined entirely by their scarcity. Yeah. Paintings, rare wines, et cetera, et cetera. They are things you cannot reproduce in a factory. The essence of capitalism is what you can make in a factory. And therefore, for these unique objects, these rare objects, Picasso painting, a beautiful bottle of wine, et cetera, et cetera, then the utility, it can't be reproduced easily. So its price will be determined by subjective valuation. He said, what we're talking about in capitalism is the stuff you can make en masse. And that is the true focus of the capitalist economy. And that is not about scarcity. That is about, the only scarcity applies when you don't have the resources to make them anymore or you can't use the energy involved because you'll damage the biosphere too much, which we've already done. But fundamentally, the scarcity that neoclassicals have made us think about and Austrians think about as well is non-reproducible. But the essence of capitalism is the commodity, the backscratcher, the two-buck backscratcher that anybody can, the cheapest chips to make. And that's why you can make a profit out of them. Not the elaborate gold thing with diamonds and rubies that only the king gets. So we think our vision of scarcity has been perverted by neoclassicals analyzing the exception to capitalism and calling it capitalism. Okay, fair enough. So let's put Mars aside because I think there's a lot of strange factors that have to do with a whole nother planet, civilization that we don't quite understand, like how economics works with different geographic locations, one of which have new challenges, which is what essentially this is. I don't know if you can apply the same economic theory. No, I'm saying, your question, I think, we'll be forced into that ultimately by having to make a compromise with the ecology. And we've been ruthless about the ecology of this planet and we're going to pay the price for it. So if you have a planet where you can't be ruthless, okay, you have to mine it as carefully as possible, then that utopian might be imposed upon you for the needs for survival on that planet. Back here, Marx's utopia was still the one that ignored the ecology. And I think if I have a vision of a utopia in future, it's got bugger all to do about what humans get out of it. It's what humans respect. They have to respect life. So I don't see that as, I see that as a one-eyed utopia, a utopia for a single species, as if it can exist on its own, which we should know it can't. Quick bathroom break? Yeah, I'm about to. That would be great. We took a little bit of a break and now we're back. We needed to take a break because my brain broke and I'm piecing it back together. You mentioned ecology and life and the value of all of that. We'll return to it if we can. But first, we said why this kind of, this idea of why socialism failed. Can we linger on this a little bit longer in how did the ideas of Karl Marx lead to Stalinism? So this particular implementation. Is there something fundamental to these ideas that leads to a dictator and that leads to atrocities? There's something about the mechanism of the bureaucracy that's built that leads to a human being that's able to attain, integrate absolute power and then start abusing that power, all that kind of stuff. Some of the history of the 20th century, is that inextricably connected to the ideas of Karl Marx? I think to some extent it is, but I'm going to also say that if it hadn't been for the Bolsheviks interpreting Marx and saying we can reach socialism without going through capitalism, then it might not have happened. So if you look at the, like the Mensheviks were a rival political group in Russia and that's where Hyman Minsky, who's a huge inspiration for me. So he's an economist who was maybe, can we take a little attention, who was Hyman Minsky? Yeah, Hyman Minsky was the person who developed an analysis of capitalism based on financial instability. And he was actually the PhD student of Joseph Schumpeter and an Austrian economist as well, whose name I've forgotten temporarily. And he asked him, his parents were both refugees from Russia during the Stalinist period because the Mensheviks were being wiped out in Russia, just like any other opponents to the Bolsheviks were being eliminated. So I think his parents met in Chicago, still remained socialist, still remained politically active. And he was educated in a family that was just imbued with Marx as its vision. He ended up fighting in the second world war on the American side, coming back to America and studying mathematics and then also doing an economics degree leading to a PhD. And the question he posed for himself is what causes great depressions? And he put it beautifully, he said, can it happen again, it being the Great Depression? And if it can't happen, then what has changed between the society before the first, second world war and after that makes a depression impossible? What's the answer to those two questions? His answer was, yes, it can happen again. But what has prevented it happening by the time he started writing about it, which was the late 50s to the mid 80s, late 80s, we met once, but only once. Over a beer? No, he gave a seminar at New South Uni and he's a bit of an obstreperous bastard. What's, what, what, what? Wow, what is it? It means argumentative and likely to dismiss you. So like a good mate of mine was the guy I brought him out to Australia, a guy called Graham White. We're still, G'day Graham, we're still good mates. G'day Graham. I love your language and your accent. It's a great, actually, there's a really good TikTok I saw earlier today with an Aboriginal guy saying he loves the Australian language because it's absolutely ironic. You ask an Australian a question and he'll give you an answer, which is the opposite of what he means. And you've got to work out the rest for yourself. Yeah. He goes up to another Aboriginal mate and says, G'day mate. He says, how are you? Oh, not bad. What have you been doing recently? Oh, not much. When are we going? I said, not, not, not, not too far, not too soon. Yeah. Whereas, not too far away. Yeah. All negatives. And he's a beautiful, beautiful rendition. Yeah. Yeah. That's the cool thing about the internet culture. That's, they appreciate that ironic side. Like, for example, the best compliment you can give as an Aboriginal to somebody else is that's deadly. That's deadly. That's a compliment. That's deadly. Okay. Yeah. One, another mate of mine, this comes to the Australian language. If I call you a bastard, that's a compliment. Yeah. Depending on how I intonate the word bastard. Bastard. Bastard. That's deadly. Yeah. I love that. And there's something, unfortunately, there's something about the British accent that makes people sound maybe brilliant, maybe sophisticated. But actually pompous. Yeah. No, that's unfortunately the downside of that is you can sound pompous. There's something about the Australian accent that you just can't sound brilliant. It humbles you. You sound like you're having a lot of fun. There's wit, there's all that kind of stuff. But you just can't be like, Karl Marx in an Australian accent would just not come off. That is a very good point. He would not be able to pull off the beard. I mean, I just, yeah. It's fascinating that the accent determines something about the person. Maybe it's the chicken and the egg too. It drives the way of the discourse. Obviously, there's a lot of brilliance. There's a lot of brilliance in your work. But it sounds like you're always having fun. Yeah. And look, this Pat Poncho has got a lot of Australian mates here. He spent, what about, how long in Australia? A year and a half. And he's got all these mates who replace Aussie Rules Football in Austin. You should join them one day. I will. It's actually, it's a very creative sport. It's much more fun. It's different than rugby? Oh, very. Rugby is hopeless. Rugby is two morons smashing their bodies against each other. Easy now. Sorry. Sorry. Did I mean to offend the rugby fans in the audience? Well, okay. So it's too simplistic. It's too simplistic. I mean, there's skill in it. I've seen some really skillful rugby union and rugby league players in my day. But fundamentally, if you hit somebody hard enough, they go down. Okay. Whereas in Aussie Rules, it's about catching the ball and then kicking the ball. It's all skill. And the bodies of the athletes, I can actually get off and measure what a sport is like by the bodies it creates. And you get these incredibly elegant, lithe muscular forms out of Aussie Rules. Such beautiful words you have in your vocabulary. Lithe, I don't even know. But I'll assume you know what it means. And maybe somebody in the audience. Okay. So, all right. Fine. We should also mention that you, in your youth, like last year, had Olympic weightlifting as part of your life. Long time ago. And like you said, tennis. I also played tennis for many, many, many, many years. Okay. Yeah. It's a fascinating game. It's a wonderful game. Yeah. That's my favorite game. Karl Marx and Stalin. So how do we get onto Aussie football and Australian and the accent? I'm not really sure. You talked about the way I said something about Karl Marx and would Karl Marx. Anyway, we got there. Yeah, we got there and now we return. But back to Marx. I think- It's not the destination. It's the journey. I think Marx, the failure of socialism, with Janos Kornai captured beautifully. This idea already called demand constrained versus resource constrained economies. And capitalism is demand constrained. And this is again where neoclassical theory is completely wrong, empirically completely wrong. So the neoclassicals have a vision of capitalism being resource constrained, and it's about maximizing your usage of resources subject to constraints. And as Kornai said, that's really what happened under socialism. What happens under capitalism is that you have 15, 20 companies producing automobiles. They are all trying to capture as much of the market as they can. If you add up their marketing plans, you're going to get 120, 130% of the actual market. So they're all going to have excess capacity. When you build a factory, you're building it with a plan for it to exist for 5, 10, 15 years. You have to have excess capacity in the factory. So that means that capitalism has a far greater productive capacity than it actually uses. And then the way that you manage to get demand into your factory is to innovate and produce something nobody else does. Before you're producing in volume, and when somebody produces like a bung tire, comes out of firestone, then Goodyear is ready to expand its production and take advantage of that. So that's the actual nature of competition in capitalism. And that means that we get a cornucopia of goods, even if we're lowly workers. The variety of goods in capitalism is overwhelming. And that just doesn't happen in socialism. You get your 1942 Cossack as your motorbike, that's it. When you put your money down to buy a refrigerator, it'll arrive in 10 years because the factory is already fully constrained. So all these resource constraints mean that people aren't happy under socialism. And if you've got a whole bunch of people that aren't happy, then the best way to control them is to suppress them. So I think in that sense, ultimately, yes, it does lead to something like Stalinism. So it's easier to give happy people freedom. Yeah, I mean, happy people get pretty silly outside. I'm not particularly... The extent to which Americans overuse and distort the word freedom drives me balmy. All of these words can be distorted, but they all at the core have some fundamental power and beauty, and then we just distort on the surface for the fun of it. It's just our battles on Twitter and so on. But what citizens of the Soviet world didn't feel was freedom. Not just in... First of all, it wasn't freedom to buy commodities. The commodities were supposed to be on the shops, weren't there. The volume couldn't be produced. And what you then got out of that as well was the classic Soviet joke, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Okay. Yeah, so you're not motivated. Oh, look, I went to Cuba about eight years ago. I invited to give a talk there. And I was staying in a hotel. It's still, for the hotel, it's a story. One day my meetings were canceled. So I thought I might go down to the beach. And in the hotel, they had a wing, which is the tourist office, and there were three women working inside the office. So I thought I'd just go up and ask them, how do I get to the beach? And one of them says to me, and I stood there, just stood in the room, waiting to see if they'd make eye contact with me. Three women, nobody else in the place, none of them looked at me. So I finally went up to one of them and said, I want to go to the beach and do some surfing work. She said, I can get a taxi outside. Now, fundamentally, she was saying, well, I'm being paid shit money here. I don't want to work. I'm not going to do anything apart from sit here and qualify for my time. And as much as there are reasons the Cubans have suffered from American embargoes and all that sort of stuff, you've still got that fundamental shortage economy that Cornel spoke about coming out of the structure of central ownership and central control of distribution and investment. And that breaks my heart because I think some of the effects of that persist throughout time. They become part of the culture too. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Negative culture. Yeah. Yeah. Well, from the Western perspective. Well, even from the people living through it. I mean, I had enough conversation with Cubans, meeting them on the street, hopping in a cab. One guy I was talking to, he was an industrial chemist and he got a bit of money being a cab driver because he could make money out of taking foreign tourists from the airport to the city. By the way, this episode is brought to you by delicious Coca-Cola. That's why I didn't want to have it on camera. But anyway. No, maybe they'll actually sponsor. You want to make sure you rotate the label to show this is capitalism. What are we talking about here? Even though it's red. Red and black is actually anarchist. I should tell you, I don't know if you know who Michael Malice is. Michael. Michael Malice. He's an anarchist and he lives next door. Does he? Okay. Now, I've lost touch with anarchist philosophy. I actually used to read Kropotkin and Bakunin and so on. And I enjoyed their philosophy. And then I helped organize an anarchist conference once. And that was the biggest antidote possible to being an anarchist. That sounds like an entry point to a joke. Yeah. Help to organize an anarchist party. It is. I mean, we literally spent three days arguing over whether there should or should not be a chairperson for conversations. Yeah. Well, that may be that. Monty Python's Life of Brian was lived out live. Look at the bright side. All right. So part of that explains why, for example, even to this day in some of those parts of the world, entrepreneurship does not flourish. There's not a spirit in the people to start businesses, to launch new endeavors and all those kinds of things. We're just taking all kinds of strange little strolls, but how do you explain the mechanisms of China today where there's quite a bit of sort of flourishing of businesses and so on? It's a very peculiar kind of entrepreneurship. They got away from central control, but they still manage central political control, but diversified economic control. So you could, it is possible to draw a line between politics and economics. It is possible, and I think in some ways China's more likely to survive as a society going into the future than Western capitalist societies are. So it's like if we do the Karl Marx, the foreground and the background, you can centralize the politics, the humanity, the subjective stuff, and then distribute the objective. You've got to have the goods. And that's why the big change from Mao to Deng Xiaoping was the characterizing that little saying that I don't care whether you have a black cat or a white cat, so long as it catches mice. And there was a level of pragmatism to the Deng Xiaoping revolution over Mao and Madame Mao in particular. And that was manifest in the desire to get as much of those Western goods as possible. And I was actually in China in 81, took a group of journalists there, as I mentioned earlier, for a tour. We ended up going to the Sichuan Free Trade Zone, and that gave us an idea of why China was going to succeed, because they had a rule that you couldn't just come in and exploit the cheap wages. You had to also have a Chinese partner. And within five years, the Chinese partner had to earn 50% of the business, which is huge. And it gives you an idea of the reduction in wages these American corporations are looking at. They'd shut down the factory in what's now the Rust Belt of America. That might be paying somebody there, you know, that time maybe $2 an hour. Then they come across to China and they're paying $0.02 an hour. So they were an enormous amount of wages that they dropped. They were willing to forego half the profits and the ownership of the firm. So what the Chinese were doing wasn't just exploiting their labor force. It was also building a capitalist class. And that meant that you had this, that's where all the Chinese corporations have come from. So they were building a capitalist system within a socialist command, political system. And that worked. And it's still working. So there was the centralization of the economic stuff, the Gosplan approach. I think that was where the Soviets failed. And what the Chinese realized after what they went through under Mao was you have to have that capitalist period, but they weren't going to abandon the communist control politically of the country at the same time. And that worked out brilliantly. And there's a huge amount of innovation taking place in China today. And they also will do gigantic infrastructure projects, you know, breathtaking planning going into that. If you've, you would have seen videos of, you know, building a skyscraper in a day. The planning that has to go into that, the pre-preparation that's necessary is enormous. So there's a real respect for engineers as well in that society, which does not apply in the West. What do you think about the, from the Western perspective, the destructive effects of centralized control of the populace, of the ideas, of the discourse, of the censorship and the surveillance, all those things. It's a bit like we were talking about Russia to some extent beforehand, with centralized versus decentralized corruption. And when you had the centralized political stuff means, you know, you can't criticize within China, but so long as you don't criticize, you can do what you like. And how destructive is that to the human spirit? From the American perspective, that feels destructive. Before, I've been to China quite a few times over my life, a lot in the last, not for about four years, but for the six years before that, a few visits. And I'd be staying in second and third and fourth tier cities. So populations of only 4 million people, which is quite small on China's standards. And I had a lot of happy people that I was interacting with, my girlfriend at the time, her social circle. And like, you can feel when people can't discuss a political issue. For example, in Thailand, you can't discuss the king. They still have less majestic laws. So you can actually be jailed for discussing the king. And you can feel that to some extent, and it is a political issue in Thailand now. But in China, what I got back from most people, it was a bit like a benevolent big brother. But then when you get things like the lockdown, which has applied recently, then you get the failings of the Soviet system is still there in the Chinese system. In that the easiest way to avoid criticism as an underling carrying out instructions of people above you is to carry those instructions out to the letter, beyond what the people actually want you to do at the top. So we had a classic illustration of that when I took these journalists. There was a news report saying that China's output of light industry had grown by 17% in the previous year, but heavy industry had fallen by 7%. We just don't compute. So we kept on asking, why did this happen? Every time we asked a question, this is back in 81, the answer would be the initial answer, we followed the directive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. We finally got a guy to elaborate and say what that was. He said, well, the Central Committee sent out a directive to promote light industry. So what did you do? Quote, unquote, we stripped heavy industry factories and turned them into light industry. Now that's destructive of everything. And that's the overlay that you've still got sitting over the top of China. But a huge part of the industrialization was simply saying, produce whatever you can, make goods, market them, sell them. And you get that innovative component of humanity is respected, and the goods turn up, and everybody's well fed. Food in China is far better than food in America. So in terms of material satisfaction and freedom, so like for example, enjoy dancing. We went to, I think somewhere in Shanghai, and there's this line of people involving a woman who would have been close to her 90s, and a kid who was about six or four. Partying it up? Partying it up in the open air and doing this Chinese collective dance. You have to be really careful about that kind of thing. So in terms of measuring the flourishing of a people by looking at their happiness, I have so many thoughts on this. But I'm imagining North Korea, and if you talk to people in North Korea, I think they would say they're happy. No. Let me try to complete this argument, not an argument, but a sort of challenge to your thought, which, especially in the bigger cities, because they don't know the alternative. So what else do you need? There's enough food on the table. We have a leader that loves us, and we love him. We're full of, our hearts are full of love. Our table is full of food, they would say, because it's enough food. What else do you want from life? No, I think, okay, like that's... So let me sort of chat, because like... That's an alternative. I mean, I've spent time in Romania. So let me sort of complete that, sorry. Because I'm taking the most challenging aspect. When there's centralized control of information, that you don't know the alternative, that you don't know how green the grass is on the other side. And so your idea of happiness might be very constrained. So you could also argue that is happiness, if you don't know. Like... Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is bliss. And then so is happiness really the correct measure for the flourishing? It's not. But I mean, there's actually a classic book, a movie as well, called Mal's Last Answer. And that is a young man explaining his progression from being a dancer in the Cultural Revolution through to a leading dancer in American and ultimately Australian ballet. And he explicitly says at one point that he's told that the Chinese people have the highest standard of living in the world. And the reaction of him and his kids, like his fellow six-year-olds is, God, it must be miserable elsewhere in the world then. So they knew... They still know. They still know. There's no such thing as that complete ignorance. But what I'm talking about is experiences in China, say, back in about 2016, 2014. There was a feeling of freedom within limits that you didn't want to transgress because the system was working. So if you... It's kind of like marriage. Pardon? It's kind of like marriage. Hey, that's a good example. There's limits. There's limits. You can have fun within those limits. That's right. Okay. So you can have fun. And they did feel free, but they didn't want to go and get divorced. But that dilemma was accommodated because the boundaries, until you started hitting restrictions were wide. And when you look at it, I mean, look at the... Again with the Chinese Communist Party, the administrators of that are often highly qualified engineers, who can then make intelligent decisions about what should be done as infrastructure and so on. And you go to China and you've got incredible high-speed rail, fantastic infrastructure, internet, telecommunications and so on, rapidly evolving solar. There's a range of things there that are so well done that reflect the fact that the selection process that gives you your political elite is partially focused upon sucking up, et cetera, et cetera. It's still there. But it's also focused upon your skill levels. And you get people making decisions who damn well know what they're talking about. Like Australia's got a classic example. The internet in Australia sucks. The reason it sucks is that the Labour Party, which is our version of the Democrats, was in control during the global financial crisis. And as part of that, they wanted to bring in optical fibre connections to the house. So you'd have an optical fibre backbone and an optical fibre right to your T100 output from your home. And the Liberal Party fought that and said, that's going to be too expensive, it'll take too long to do, we're going to do cable to the node and then have a copper network linking from a node on a street to all the houses in the street. It's going to be cheaper and faster, have it more soon, blah, blah, blah. It was a total technical fuck-up. And Australia now has internet that's about 50th or 60th fastest in the world. It's dreadful for the internet. Two political figures made the decision, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, rivals and leaders of the Conservative Party we call Liberal over there. Now that was shitty decisions that wouldn't happen in a country like China. Because you've got actual engineers making the decisions. They say you can't get decent speed if you link optical fibre to copper. So what you get is, even though you can't make the decisions yourself, a vast majority of the decisions are made intelligently. And therefore you expect it. It's interesting, but don't you worry about the corrupting aspects of power? Oh yeah. That you start, you know, you have engineers making intelligent decisions, but at which point does the fat king start saying, oh, these engineers are annoying. I have good internet. I don't understand. Bring me the grapes. Well, that, that, you know, you get your colligular effects, that can happen. And like Z, from what I've seen, has got elements of that. So friends of mine who are Caucasians can get away with it. They have a game that they play at conferences, scoring how often people use Z's name in a presentation and giving extra points for the number of photographs of Z that turn up in the whole thing. So you've got this sort of personality cult coming along as well. But at the same time, the planning for the infrastructure that's being built, the social services, the general freedom that exists is so great. And like any Chinese person alive today, like somebody who's Chinese my age, would have been an adult under the early period of, the late period of Mao. And God Almighty, the change, the improvement they've seen in their lives, that's what they think about. So- But it's the, if you just look at the history of the 20th century, your intuition would say that some of the mechanisms we see in China now will get you into trouble in the long term. So it seems to be working really well in many ways in terms of improving the quality of life of the average citizen in China. But you start to get worried about how does this go wrong? Well, yeah, but at the same time, maybe, I mean, often people will say, you know, what's your vision for the future? And what they mean is, what vision for the future do you have that I'm going to like? Right. Okay. Now, what if you have a vision of the future you don't like? It's dreadful. I mean, that's the ecological crisis I think we're walking blindfolded into. But that's right, that part of the picture we'll have to talk about. How fundamental of a problem that is. Okay. But what does that have to do with the future of China? Well, that has to do is that if you wish to impose dramatic controls on the consumption of the rich, which would be necessary to reduce our consumption burden so that we can get closer to the ecological envelope we've destroyed already, then you're going to be more likely successful doing that with a centralized system where people accept centralized political control, than you were in a country where it's all diversified and you scream freedom between every point in a tennis match. And I've literally seen that when I was in Philadelphia some time back. So the ideology that accepts a collectivist attitude may be more successful in controlling our reducing human consumption levels. Because when we talk about democracy, I mean, who's voting here? How many horses and elephants and birds get to vote? Okay. It's very... What's a bird? Yeah. You don't see them around here. It's a very human-centric vision we have of this planet. And we're going to pay a price for that. Okay. So you're saying to deal with global catastrophic events, centralized planning might be... I think will work better, period. But there is some centralized stuff in the United States, for example. Oh, your military. Yeah, I know. No, no. Okay. All right. Now there's that feisty Australian. So besides the military, that's the ideal of the federal government in the United States, is that there is some centralized infrastructure building. There's some big... There's not enough of it....project. Yeah. There's some. The question is, when you deal with greater and greater global catastrophic events, like the pandemic that we're just living through, that the government would be able to step up and impose enough centralized planning to allow us to deal, sort of enable, empower the citizenry to deal with these catastrophic events. In the case of the pandemic, a lot of people argue that, first of all, the world, but also the United States, failed to effectively deal with the pandemic on the medical side, on the social side, on the financial side, the supply chain, everything, in terms of communication, in terms of inspiring the populace with the power of science, and all the fronts. They failed. But the ideal is that we'd be able to succeed. You would have to have a small, efficient, the American ideal, is you have a small, efficient government that's able to take on tasks precisely like the pandemic. But the thing is, maybe it shouldn't have been as small as it was. My favorite instance of that actually involves the UK, because the whole neoliberal approach is about small, efficient government. Small, efficient government works when you face small, efficient challenges. When you face something systemic, rather than episodic, then it's going to break down. This is, I mean, one of the things I greatly respect is Taleb's idea of anti-fragile. You want a society which is anti-fragile, not easily broken. Whereas neoliberalism has pushed us towards this vision of efficiency, but it's easily snapped. Like in the UK, I've forgotten the government minister involved, but she asked her expert committee, this is well before the pandemic, how many masks should we have on hand in case of a pandemic? And the answer from the experts was about a billion. That's 50 masks, that's 20 masks per person. Oh, that's too many. Let's just make 50 million masks. That's one mask per person that was gone in a matter of a day. And therefore, that's why they told us, well, masks don't work. What they meant was, we don't have enough masks for our health people, let alone for you in the public. So we're going to bullshit you and tell you those masks don't really work. And then people don't wear masks, and then we've got enough masks, we rush up the production job. And by the time it comes along, people have got the skepticism about masks. So who does, can you elaborate, who does the blame in that case go on to? The blame comes down to the philosophy that says government should always be small. No, but do you really think that bigger government would be the solution to the mask issue? No. So let me push back, sort of, it's possible that capitalism solves that problem. Well, not if, there's no money in really long-term planning and capitalism. Okay, there's money, there's money in, capitalism is- Isn't it possible to construct, isn't it possible for capitalism to construct a system that ensures against catastrophic events? Not when they're systemic. You can ensure against episodic events. If you occasionally have a really bad storm, but in general, the weather's not so bad that all the infrastructure is being destroyed, then you can share that around on a percentage basis. If you have a Gaussian distribution for your events and you don't, the mean doesn't move around too much and the standard deviation doesn't change all that much, then insurance works fine. But if you have an, if that's episodic, if you have systemic stuff where the climate is changing completely and you're going to wipe out your agricultural capabilities, you simply can't do insurance on that front. You can't make a profit out of catastrophe and capitalism. Okay, so that example of climate change, let's talk about it. Okay. So you mentioned that the human brain, the economy, and the biosphere are three of the most complex systems we know. Okay, and you also criticize the economics community for looking at the effects of climate change when measured as the effect on the GDP. So you're saying it's a catastrophic thing, that the biggest challenge our society, our world is facing. Why? If the economists disagree with you, the effects on the GDP will be minor. So we'll deal with it when it comes. That's the argument against, that's the devil's advocate. You're saying no, it is a thing that will change our world forever in ways that we should really, really, really be thinking about. Okay. Okay. Make the case of why you disagree with it. The case is simple. Economists have made up their own numbers to say that it's trivial. And you didn't. No, I haven't even tried to make the numbers. I'm reading what the scientists write. Okay. Okay. And what the economists have done, and like this is William Nordhaus in particular, Nobel Prize winner, ex-president of the American Economic Association, literally assumed that a roof will protect you from climate change. And he didn't say it in those words. What he said was 87% of American industry occurs in carefully controlled environments, which will not be subject to climate change. Now the only things that all of manufacturing, all of services, he included mining as well, forgetting about open cut mining, government activities and the finance sector, all they have in common is they happen beneath a roof. So he's basically saying climate affects the weather. Climate is weather. Okay. Okay. Now that is not at all what is meant by climate change. It's mean changing the entire pattern of the weather system of the planet. For example, the most extreme form of climate change would be a breakdown in the three circulation cells that exist in each hemisphere. The Hadley cell, the Ferris cell, I think it's called, and the polar cells, zero to 30, 30 to 60, 60 to 90. Those are the main bubbles, if you like, in the atmosphere. Now if we get enough increase in the energy in the atmosphere, just like you turn the temperature up on a stove and you have nice bubbles occurring in a pot of soup and then turn the temperature up and they all break down and you've got bubbles everywhere, that's called the equitable climate. If that happens, then most of the rainfall is going to occur between zero and 20 and 70 and 90 and the middle is going to be dry except for extreme storms. We built our societies in a period of extreme stability of the climate. When you look at the long-term temperature records, it's up and down like a seesaw or like a sawtooth blade between say one degree warmer than now and four degrees or six degrees cooler over the last million years. When you look at where we evolved, it's just at a turning point on the peak of one of those ups and downs. I've forgotten the name of the cycles, but the cycles caused by changes in the Earth's rotation around the sun. We evolved our civilization just at the top, so coming up from a cold period and then we're going to head down to another cold period. That's when human civilization came along. It's about a period of about 12,000 years. Across that period, the temperature has changed by not much more than half a degree up and down. Now, we're blasting it well and truly out of those confines. My way of interpreting what climate change means is the stability of that climate that enables to build sedentary civilizations and not be a nomadic species is being destroyed. The challenge, and by the way, I'm playing devil's advocate. The question is, is there something fundamentally different now about human civilization that we're able to build technology that alleviates some of the destructive effects that we have on the climate? We don't know. We're going to find out the hard way. The uncertainty you think would be very costly. Extremely. Many of the trajectories we might take will be much more costly than they're profitable. Yeah. And like we've seen some of the storms that are happening now in Europe, the ones that washed away a village in Germany some time ago, the firestorm that hit Canada of all places. I've forgotten the name of the town that was burnt down, but enormous temperatures in Canada. Again, the storms that have been happening back in Australia. These are all manifestations of a complete shift in the weather patterns of the planet. They can wipe out. A village just disappears, is wiped out by unprecedented rains, and this keeps on happening. We are still living in a sedentary lifestyle when we're a nomadic species. So to be able to maintain that sedentary lifestyle, we do need to engineer the planet. We need to keep it within that range of plus half a degree Celsius, minus half a degree, which is really what it's been like for the last 10, 12,000 years. Instead, we're blasting it right out of that range. And we know some of the past climates that have existed then. We can model what they imply for our food production systems, for example. Not the only example, but obviously crucial. So when you look at what are called global climate models produced by scientists, one of the examples, and it was published by the OECD last year, 2021, in the chapter on what would happen if we lose what's called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, and people would colloquially know that as the Gulf Stream. And that's what distributes heat around all the oceans of the planet. It's part of a huge chain called the thermohaline circulation. But the part that goes across from the equator to the North Atlantic, that's called the AMOC and Gulf Stream for a colloquial way. If that disappears in the context of a two and a half degree Celsius increase in average global temperature, then the proportion of the Earth's surface, which is suitable for producing wheat, will fall from 20% to 7%. Proportion for corn, similar sort of fall. The proportion suitable for rice will go from 2% to 3%. Now that means a catastrophic, and that's the word used in the report, catastrophic collapse in food production. So that's what we're toying with. And we are one and a half, we're actually less than, we're about halfway there to that two degrees, 2.5. And economists on the other hand, and this is Richard Toll, published a paper 2016, claiming using what he calls an integrated assessment model that economists developed, that losing the Gulf Stream would increase global GDP by 1.1%. Now his model, this is what really pisses me off about these people, it's the worst work I've read in 50 years of being a critic of neoclassical economics. The GCMs, the one scientists produce, of course include precipitation as well as temperature. The IAMs that the economists produce, and this is stated yet again in a paper in 2021, do not include precipitation. They simply have temperature. So they assume that if temperature improves by moving towards a temperature which is better for producing aquaculture, then so will precipitation. That's completely wrong. They've left out a crucial, imagine trying to model the climate while ignoring the fact that there's rainfall. That's what they've done. So their work is so bad, so dreadfully bad, it should never have been published. So they over, alright, alright, okay. I'm gonna go for them, sorry, this is. Well no, no, 100% as they deserve it. So it's an oversimplification. But I also want you to steel man people you disagree with and criticize people you agree with if possible. To be sort of intellectually honest here. You do say, sort of to push back on the catastrophic thinking about climate change, that ecology, the biosphere, is a complex system. Economics, the economy, is a complex system. So how can we make predictions about complex systems? How can we make a hope of having a semi-confident predictions about the complex system? So the scientific community is very confident about the complex system that is the biosphere and the crisis that's before us on the horizon. And then the economists are, as a community, I don't know what percentage, but. Too much. Too much. That part of the community is very confident looking at the economics complex system in saying that no, this system we have of labor, money, and capital and so on, we'll be able to deal with that crisis and any other crisis. And they kind of construct simplified models that justify their confidence. So how do we know who to believe? For a start, if you believe the economists, you need your head read. Because when you. That's not an argument. No, it's not an argument. It's a summary of an argument. And that is. That sounds a lot like an opinion and an emotional. I know, I know. I'm so angry about it. Listen, I'll tell you where I stand. And I've begun looking, studying the climate change much more. I used to be on things I don't understand, have not spent time on. I have so many colleagues that are scientists that I deeply respect and I trust their opinion. I have seen the lesser angels of my colleagues on the pandemic side, on the other side. The confidence, the arrogance that in part blinded, I believe, the jump between basic scientific research to public policy. And then, so I've become a little bit more cautious in my trust on climate change. I'm still in the same place. And I don't mean climate change. Some scientists say I've become a little bit, wait a minute, how does the basic scientific facts of our reality map to what we should do as a human civilization? There I want to be a little bit careful. So whenever now I see arrogance and confidence, I become suspicious. Well, I'm the same. And that's why I'm being angry about The Economist because there's incredible arrogance, incredible stupidity that the arrogance, assumptions which you look at it and think, how did anybody let that get published? The economic analysis of the effects of climate change are poor, in many cases. Incredibly poor. And this is like Bjorn Lundborg stars himself as the skeptical environmentalist and criticizes the environmental models. He doesn't take a look. He doesn't criticize the work come out by economists. You look at it, it's so bad. Is it possible to do good economics modeling of the effects of climate change? Yeah, it is possible. Very difficult. Or is it like one complex system stack? It's two. In that case, yeah. I mean, like to me, what you should be looking at is saying, what are the scientists saying are the consequences, probable consequences, not guaranteed, but probable consequences of increasing the energy level of the atmosphere by the amount we're doing? What can the scientists say in terms of the effects, because it's so complicated, the effects of sort of shifting resources. So basically, what are the effects of climate change? How can we really model that? Because it's basically you're looking through the fog of uncertainty. Because they're rising sea levels. How can we know what effect that has? How can we know there'll be a lot of change? Yeah, well, I think the sea level one is a poor argument, and I don't focus on it. What I mainly focus upon is the weather patterns. And if you look at, like we got the wheat belt in America goes throughout Idaho and countries, places like that. And you've got an incredibly deep topsoil. Ukraine is another classic example. The depth of the topsoil in Ukraine is remarkable. And that's the wheat bowl of Europe, and that requires both the right temperature for growing wheat and the right rainfall for growing wheat. Now when we look at the models that climate scientists are building of that, you have pretty much your ultimate foundation is the Lorenz model of turbulent flow. And of course, that's the first model which we saw chaos theory, complexity, that beautiful, simple model, three variables, three parameters, an incredible complexity out of the system. And what that meant was you also had an exponential decay in the accuracy of your model over time. So if you're accurate to a thousand decimal places, then in a thousand days, you'll have no data whatsoever because each time you're losing an order of magnitude of accuracy. So that's the point about the inability to predict for the very long future. But what you can just say, well, there's a prediction horizon. If we're close enough to the, if our statistical measurement of where we are is close enough to where we actually are, and our forecast horizon is narrow enough to not extrapolate too far, then for this distance forward, we can make a reasonable fist at predicting what the weather's going to be. And that's the foundation of meteorological, the stuff we watch on TV. Most of the time, the forecasts are going to be correct these days. 40, 50 years ago, most of the time, the forecasts were wrong. So that's the background foundation to these GCMs. But even they've got to massively simplify the world. So you have this enormous sphere of where they might divide it down to a hundred kilometer by a hundred kilometer by 10 kilometer, rectangles, whatever, oblongs. That's how they're modeling the transition of weather from one location to another. So they've got a chunky vision of the planet, which they have to, they can't model it now down to the last molecule. So you're losing- Not yet, right? It's getting better and better and better and better. Oh yeah. I think that's just too much processing power. But you're going to have some confines. You can't go, I mean, if you look at the models to do the weather, they used to be of that a hundred kilometer, I think they're about 10 kilometer grids now. I don't know. But so the processing powers let us get more and more precise that way. I do know that the models now include chemical mixing that occurs above cities. They've added that complexity to them over time. So you're looking at the increasingly accurate models, the weather patterns, the effect they have on agriculture, on food. And you're saying that there's a lot of possibilities in which that's going to be really destructive to society on the food production side. And if you have that increase in temperature, they're going to get a change in precipitation. And it could mean that where the rainfall and the sunshine are adequate for growing wheat is an area where there's no topsoil. It's like a huge part of the models, the models the economists use, which only use temperature, don't include precipitation. They predict that a large amount of the wheat output of the world is going to occur in Siberia, in the frozen tundra. What about, so that's a straightforward criticism of oversimplified models. What about the idea that we innovate our way out of it? So there's totally new, what is the, there's a silly poor example at this time, perhaps, but lab grown meat, sort of engineered food. So a completely shifting source of food for civilization. So therefore alleviating some of the pressure on agriculture. That comes down to the difference that Elon makes between producing a prototype and mass producing the prototype. You can develop the idea very rapidly to put that into production on the scale that's necessary to replace what we're currently doing. It takes years. Yeah. And we haven't got years. We've got, we might have decades. We certainly haven't got centuries. So in the timeframe we've got, I can't see that engineering going from prototype to production levels to replace what we're currently doing in the stable environment they're currently destroying. What do you think about the sort of the catastrophic predictions that people that have thought, have written about climate have made in the past that haven't come to fruition? That's mainly unfortunately involving Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb and the predictions Paul was making. A few individuals or the one individual in that case. Yeah. So I'm mostly playing devil's advocate in this conversation and enjoying doing so. I do think I'm in agreement with the majority of the scientific community. But you still see that argument made. I still see the argument made. And I also am a little bit worried about the arrogance and the ineffectiveness of the arrogance. This is the problem. It's ineffective. And that's what worries me because it's all been put into the sort of, you know, sea level rise, temperature changes. It's not put into the fragility of the system in which we currently live. And the earth will survive. And there's a wonderful science fiction book called The Earth Abides about a world in which humans get wiped out. There's only a tiny little band left and then the earth reasserts itself. So the earth's going to survive us. Will we survive what we do to the earth? That's the question. And my feeling is that we have underplayed the extent to which the civilizations we've built have depended upon a relatively stable climate. And as then there's that turning point in the global average temperature that we evolved right on the top of it. And if we had done nothing, we could find that heading back down towards another ice age could equally destroy the possibility of sedentary life. For example, if we'd never developed fossil fuel based industries, we'd never built super phosphate. So our population would never have reached 1 billion people. And we were still living like fairly sophisticated animals, but, you know, like 17th century level of load on the planet, then we would have gone down, that decline. And the approaching ice age would have started to wipe out our farming areas, the glaciers would have encroached, and we would have been driven out of like an agricultural sedentary civilization by that change. So it's just the fact that we evolved on this stable period in the overall temperature cycle of the planet. And that stability is something which just reflects the turning point in the regular cycle of Malicevic cycle, I think it's called, I've forgotten the actual name, but it's the cycle caused by, you know, change in the earth's orbit around the sun, reflectivity and so on. That cycle, it's just that tiny top bit that we evolved in. So what we should have done, so that's really useful for us, we should stay at that level. Now if we hadn't done it, we'd go back down here and that'd be the end of our civilization by an ice age. Instead, we're going up here really rapidly. And we're causing a change in temperature compared to that long-term cycle, 100,000 times faster. So, yeah, I mean, my biggest worry is even subtle changes in climate might result in geopolitical pressures that then lead to nuclear war. And that's, yeah, I mean, there's an argument that's actually behind, to some extent, not the Ukraine war so much, but the Arab Spring, the wars in Syria, which partially has led to what's happening in Ukraine. And our weapons are getting more and more powerful and more and more destructive, more and more nations are having these destructive weapons. And now we're entering cyberspace where it's even easier to be destructive. Unlike the barrack weapons, which didn't exist in the Second World War. So you don't need nuclear weapons to have catastrophic attacks on each other. So yeah, it's incredibly scary that the war-like side of human nature could be extremely enhanced by climate breakdown. So in this world, on a happy note, I don't know how we went from Marxism and Stalinism to ecology, but all those are beautiful, complex systems. What is the best form of government, would you say? We talked about the economics of things. You ran for office, so you care about politics, too. How can politics, what political systems can help us here? I think we first of all have to appreciate we're one species on our planet out of millions, and as the intelligent species, we should be enabling a harmonious life for those other species as well. Can we actually linger on that? What is, you mentioned that we need to acknowledge the value of life on Earth. Can we integrate the labor theory of value, can we integrate into that the value of life? So there's human life, and there's life. I think if you take that structure that I talked about of Marx's use-value-exchange-value dialectic, the foreground-background, that only exists, that only works because we're exploiting the free energy we find in the universe. There could be no production system without free energy, which is the first law of thermodynamics. There is free lunch, after all, and it's grounded in the energy that's provided to us by the universe. Yeah, that's the free lunch, that's what we're exploiting. It's the only free lunch we get. You know Ginsburg's summary of the laws of thermodynamics, don't you? Alan Ginsburg? What's that? He said the laws of thermodynamics are summarized, A, you can't win, B, you can't break even, C, you can't leave the game. Nice, yeah. Beautiful summary. Beautiful summary. But the fact that it exists in the first place is the free lunch. So we're exploiting the free lunch, but to be able to do it, we can't put waste back into that system so much that it undermines the free lunch, and that's what we've been doing. And once you respect the fact that we have to, living on the biosphere, the planet we're actually on, we have to enable that biosphere to survive us, because if it doesn't survive us, we won't survive it disappearing. And there's not that realization in humanity in general. And when you say the value of life, you know, all the different living organisms on earth are part of that biosphere. So in order to maintain the biosphere, we have to respect, like, pragmatically speaking what that means is actually respecting all of life on earth, even the mosquitoes? I've got some, no. Parasites, I mean, we are a parasite. When you look at it, we're the mosquitoes of the large organizations. You're a fan of the Matrix movies at all? Sure. Okay, you know the series where the Asians- Look what I'm wearing. Absolutely, I was wondering what the inspiration was. I was thinking- It's not really inspiration. We are living in a simulation. And I have a conversation offline to have with you about that. Okay. You've been misbehaving and we're going to have to put you back in line. So what's Agent Smith says when he's got Morpheus in his possession? He said, I've been trying to classify your species. I've decided you're a virus. Now there's truth to that. We have intruded into everything. We've taken over every element of the biosphere. And we think we can continue doing that. And the thing is we're exploiting it so much, we're breaking it down. And I think it's E.O. Wilson who argued for the 50% rule. He believed that we should reserve 50% of the planet for non-human species. In other words, we'd make 50% of it off limits. Humans cannot go there. And we just let that evolve as it does. And then we control the other 50%. I think he's probably giving too much to us. I think we should actually say like 20%, 25% max. And the rest of the planet, we let life go on and evolve as it does without our interference, without our dominance. Now that's neither a democratic system nor an authoritarian one. It's one which starts off with saying the first thing humans have to do is respect life itself. Okay, so would we do that? We haven't done it, obviously. I don't think the Soviets would have done it if we had a generally Soviet system. We haven't done it under a capitalist. We continue intruding. So I think we have to go through something like a star trek, a star trek in a catastrophic 200 years to realize that ultimately if we're going to survive as a species, we have to respect life in general. And then that means parts of the planet we can no longer touch. While we also try to maintain the planet at the temperature that we found it in what we now call the Anthropocene. So politically, we have to have like in many ways what native societies often have, a vision of the cycle of life, not this exponential progression we've developed over the last 250 years. And again, I'll use another movie, the Avatar type respect for the cycle of life. We need to have that as part of our innate nature. And then on top of that, the political system comes out. Now that political system has to be one that lets us feel like we have a say in the direction of society while that part is sacrosanct. We can't touch it. But we also, because we are now living with so many challenges created by our own civilization, the main threat to the existence of human civilization is the existence of human civilization. It's both a feature and a bug. And therefore, we need to have people who can understand complex systems making those decisions. Now that means it isn't a political system as much as it is an appreciation that the world is a complex system. And therefore, effects which we think are direct effects will actually come through an oblique fashion. And we cannot, there's no simple linear progression from where we are to where we want to be. So you have to see how everything feeds together in a systemic way. And that's why, one reason I designed the software I'm wearing the t-shirt for now, Minsky, is to have, it's nowhere near to this scale. I hope it one day will be. But something which means we can bring together all that complexity, all those systems and perceive them on an enormous screen where we have all the various interacts and we can see what are potential futures. And that then guides us. So it isn't a case of democracy and our side wins a vote and therefore we ban abortion or we don't, whatever else happens. It's seeing what the, respecting the fact that we're in a complex system and being uncertain about the consequences and not making the bold expansionary ideas that we've been doing. So like being a little bit more humble. Humble, humble is a good word. But wouldn't you like to apply that same humility both to the considerations of the pros of capitalism and to the catastrophic view of the effects of climate change? Yeah. And also like I think we can afford to be bold in space. And that's one reason I respect the practical vision of Musk and the so far impractical vision of Bezos. That if we're going, we look for the very far future, the only way we can continue expanding our knowledge of the universe is to move our civilization, the productive side of off the planet. Off site backup. Yeah. So can you actually linger on this? So let's actually talk about this. So first of all, you have the new book, humbly named, The New Economics, A Manifesto. Probably should have chose the title. Yes. No, but I'm joking. But maybe I will ask about why manifesto, but we'll go through some of the ideas in this book. We have been already. So some of it is embracing the fact that the economy, our world, our mind is a complex system. So this t-shirt that you're wearing. Yep. I can help. Is a software. I'll do that. Do you like that? There you go. You're wearing a wife. Okay. Look, what is this? Okay. That's just an infomercial. So this is a t-shirt that says Minsky. After not, not, not my Minsky. It's your Minsky. So no, the Hyman Minsky, not Marvin Minsky. Not Marvin Minsky. Right. So that's sort of AI Minsky is mine. And then a Harmon, it all rhymes. So stability is free open source system dynamics software invented by Mr. Steve Keen, coded by Russell Standish. It's on source forge. It's destabilizing. Stability is destabilizing. So that's sort of embracing the complex aspect of it. Yeah. How can you model the economy? What are some of the interesting, whether detailed or high level, big picture ideas behind your efforts of Minsky? Okay. Minsky. Meaning the software, the modeling software that models the dynamics. Basically what Minsky is doing is system dynamics modeling. So if anybody's used Stella or Vensim or Simulink, then they've used exactly the same family of software that Minsky is part of. So I didn't invent that. That was invented by Jay Forrester is one of the great intellects, one of the great engineers in American history. And the idea of Forrester's system was complex interactions. So he was doing his work in the fifties. People don't know Forrester's work. He actually built the models of the, did the mathematics for the gun turrets on American warships in the second world war mechanical systems, obviously. So he had to work out how to give a feedback system that meant when the boat rolled in one direction, the tarot did not roll the other way. All that stuff was his work. So marvelous engineering. And then he realized if you want to look at even like a factory, a factory is a complex system. So you get cycles generated out of the interaction between different components of the factory that he was first involved in taming, that he built the software to model complex interactive systems. So Minsky is that, the thing that Minsky adds, which is unique as the Godly table, and that's the double entry bookkeeping. So you can model the financial system. Godly, the economist. Godly, the economist, Wynne Godley, another great, great man. So there's like this, you're modeling it as like a state diagram. Yeah, fundamentally. So it's actually, it's circuit diagrams. That's exactly what engineers have been using for decades, almost a century. So you're using a circuit diagram to model the economy. And that's the, so other factories have done it. What they haven't had in the circuit diagram is a way of handling the dynamics of the financial system. So what the Godly table does is bring it, financial flows as being, everything goes from somewhere and ends up somewhere. So you have a positive and a negative if you're looking on the liability side, a positive and a positive or negative and a negative if you're looking at assets and liabilities side and Minsky gets the accounting right for that. So you can do an enormous complex model, looking at the economy financially from the point of view of a dozen different actors in the economy and know that the mathematics is right. Even though what you're building is set of differential equations, which might be 50 differential equations with 350 terms in them. If you've got the Godly tables right, you know the mathematics is correct. So that's the main innovation that Minsky adds. And you're operating there at the macroeconomics level. Yeah, it's definitely macro, it's top down. It's not, it's not agent based. And then this, I'm just opening on a random page that I think is very relevant here. The process, this is referring to Minsky, not the software, maybe the software, I don't know. The process can be captured in an extremely simple causal chain. Capital determines output, output determines employment, the rate of employment determines the rate of change of wages, output minus wages and interest payments determines profit, the profit rate determines the, there's a very nice circuit here. The profit rate determines the level of investment, which is the change in capital, which takes us back to the beginning of this causal chain, and the difference between investment and profits determines the change in private debt. And there's some nice, the Keen-Minsky model and the intermittent route to chaos on page 86 of your book. These are, do these come from the software? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I first did that in Mathematica back in 1992, August 1992. Mathematics is another amazing piece of software. Yeah, I find it, it's very much a programmer's approach to mathematics. I prefer like a program called Mathcad, which is what I'm using for all my, when I do my mathematics on the computer, I write in Mathcad. CAD, C-A-D or cab? C-A-D. Okay. It's been ruined by bad management. They chucked out all the good engineers and I'm still using a version which is 12 years old. If only engineers ruled the world. If only engineers, rather than this particular case, there was a bunch of marketers for CAD software agreed. I'm definitely a fan of engineers. What are the plots that we're looking at here? Wealth rate, private debt ratio, employment versus wages, employment versus debt, income distribution. So this is across years, like different trade-offs. Is there something interesting to say about the plots and the insights from those plots that are generated by the software? That's a particular parameter value is to give that outcome. But what happened when I first simulated the model, I took a model by a guy called Richard Goodwin, who's one of the great neglected economists, American Marxist, mathematical Marxist. What he did was build a model of cycles. He actually wrote a paper called, it's only about a five-page paper published in a book and a very, very obscure conference paper. What he was doing was trying to build a model of Marx. So he wrote it in 1967 and it was putting in a mathematical form a model that Marx came up with in 1867. So it was a centenary birthday present to Marx. And what Marx had argued in chapter 25, I think, of Volume I of Capital, section three, he built a verbal model of a cyclical system. And it's quite out of character with the rest of the book. So when you read Volume I of Capital, people think Marx has got a commodity view of money. He doesn't at all. He simply did – the idea was he had like an onion. You start off on the middle level and you ignore the outer layer, then you bring the outer layer in and so on and so forth. Anyway, in this model, in Volume I of Capital, he normally just – you see, a worker's got a subsistence wage. That's it. But in this little chapter, he said that if the economy is – effectively, he said the economy is booming, then workers will demand wage rises. And the wage rises will cut into the profit so that capitalists will not get the level of profit they're expecting. Therefore, they will invest less and the economy will slump and the slump will mean workers become unemployed and have to accept wage cuts. And it was a model of a cyclical economy. And as it happens, Marx spent his later years trying to learn enough calculus to be able to model it himself mathematically and he never managed. There's Marx's Mathematical Notes on Calculus, which are quite fun to read and if you have a mathematical background. Did he get far? No. So he got too caught up in the whole philosophy and never really got to build the model. But what Goodman realized was a predator-prey model. Okay. The Lochter-Volterra model was the basis of the idea. So what the idea is you have a prey like – and the example that Lochter actually used initially was grass. Grass is the prey. And then you have a predator and the predator were cows. So you start off with a very few cows, lots of grass, and then because of lots of grass, the numbers of cows grow. And then because the cows grow, they start to eat the grass. So the grass runs out, so the cows starve and you get a cycle. And what Lochter was amazed by was that the cycles were persistent. They didn't die out. So Goodman got that vision and he then built a predator-prey model. And I first of all read Goodman and really found it really hard to follow his writing. He's not a very good writer. But a guy called John Blatt, who was a professor of mathematics at New South Wales University, wrote a brilliant explanation of Goodman's model in a book called Dynamic Economic Systems. I read that. It was superb. And he said the way he could extend this was to include finance. So I thought, okay, what I'm going to have is that what Goodman presumed is capitalists invest all their profits. So you get boom when there's a high rate of profit because they invest all that money and then a slump when there's low profit because depreciation will wipe away capital and you'll go boom and slump. So I simply added in, well, capitalists will invest more than their profits during a boom but less than their profits during a slump. And that therefore means they had to borrow money to finance the gap and pay interest on the debt. So I ended up with a model with just three system states, the income share, the wages distribution of income between workers, capitalists and bankers, the level of employment and the level of private debt. And those three equations are fundamentally like going from the Locke de Volterra model with just two equations and therefore you get a fixed cycle to the Lorenz model where you have three. And therefore what I got out of it was a chaotic outcome. So what you're seeing is a manifestation of chaos, complexity in those plots. But the fascinating, one of the many fascinating parts about it was that as the level of private debt rose, in my model I had capitalists being the only ones who borrowed. But the people who paid for the high level of private debt were the workers. The rising banker's share corresponded exactly to a falling worker's share. So you can infer from that that the workers are the ones paying? Effectively, the workers end up paying for it. They get a lower level of wages. And the basic dynamic is that capitalists, when you have a three social class system, your income goes between workers, capitalists and bankers. Now in the system, the good one did, they're just workers and capitalists. So if workers' share rose, profit capitalists' share had to fall. But when you have three social classes, then capitalists' share can remain constant while workers falls and bankers rise. So that's what actually happened. Because capitalists, the simple way I modelled it was there's a certain rate of profit at which capitalists invest all their profits. Above that they borrow more, below that they pay off debt. So what would happen is when you got back to that point, then the level of investment would be a precise share of GDP and therefore you get a precise rate of economic growth. But if there was a higher percentage going to bankers and offset by a lower share going to workers, it didn't affect the capitalists. What you get is the cycles sort of diminish for a while because there's the other, so the income distribution effect is important. So the workers pay for the increasing level of debt. But the other side of it was that the cycles would diminish for a while. Now what you get is a period of diminishing cycles, then leading to rising cycles. And technically this is known as the Pomer Manorville route to chaos. And it's one particular element of Lorenz's equations of fluid dynamics. So what they found was in examining laminar flow in a fluid, you have a period where the laminar flow got more laminar and then suddenly it would start to get less laminar and go turbulent. And this is what actually goes on in the model. So in my model of Minsky, so what you have is a period where there's big booms and cycles and then as the debt level rises, the booms and slums get smaller. And that looks like what neoclassical economists call the Great Moderation. So when I first modeled this in 1982, I finished up my paper which was published in 95 with what I thought was a nice rhetorical flourish saying the chaotic dynamics of this paper should warn us against regarding a period of relative stability in a capitalist economy as anything more than a lull before the storm. Now I thought it was a great speed of rhetoric. I didn't think it was going to fucking happen. But it did because you had this period from 1990 through to 2007 where there were diminishing cycles and the neoclassicals labeled that the Great Moderation and they took the credit for it. They thought that the economy was being managed by them to a lower rate of inflation, a lower level of unemployment, less instability over time, and they literally took credit for it. And I was watching that and thinking that's like my model running and I'm scared as shit that there'll be a breakdown. I ended up not working in the area for a while because I wrote debunking economics and I got involved in a fight over the modeling of competition in neoclassical theory. That took me away for about four or five years. And then I got asked to do a court case in 2005, end of 2005. And I used Minsky as my framework for arguing that somebody who was involved in predatory lending should be able to get out of the debt they were in. And I explained Minsky's theory and I used this throwaway line of saying private debt has been rising exponentially. And then I thought, well, I can't as an expert just make a claim like that. I've got to check the data. And the debt ratio was rising exponentially. And I thought, holy shit, we're in for a financial crisis. And somebody has to warn about it. At least in Australia, I was that somebody. So can you, given this chaotic dynamics idea, can you talk about the crisis that's ahead of us in the future? So one of the things, I mean, it's a fundamental question of economics, is economics about understanding the past or predicting the future? You can construct models that do poetic, like in 95, poetic. Yeah, and then you can watch years fly by and some of the predictions in retrospect that you make turn out to be true. But all kinds of gurus throughout history have done that kind of thing. You can call yourself right and forget all the many times you've been wrong. Let's talk about the future. What kind of stuff, you mentioned about the importance of the biosphere, but what other crises are ahead of us that a chaotic dynamics view allows us to predict? Well, what really I saw coming out of it, leaving aside the ecological, wasn't a crisis. It was stagnation. Because what we got out of the crisis was caused by a rising level of private debt. Now you reach a peak level where the willingness to take on debt collapses. And so you go to a period where debt is rising all the time. So credit, which is the annual change in debt, and that's credit as part of aggregate demand and aggregate income. So credit goes from positive to negative, and that causes a slump. So can you describe why that causes a slump? Credit goes to negative. If you ask Paul Krugman, he'll tell you credit plays no role in aggregate demand. Give me a second. Credit plays no role in aggregate demand. The vision that the neoclassicals have of the banking system is what they call loanable funds. Is Paul Krugman, by the way, the knight at the front of the army that is the neoclassical economist? Yeah, fundamentally. Okay, sure. Okay. He's politically reasonable, which makes him more dangerous than those that aren't. He's politically... Yeah, there's quite a lot of people that would disagree with that characterization of Paul Krugman as he's politically reasonable. You should see the people behind it. The alternatives. Okay, fair enough. That's not a negative or positive statement. That's just he can be feisty as well. Oh, he can. He can. But he's like the human face of neoclassical economics. It doesn't deserve having a human face. It's anti-human theory. But he's the human face. That's what you really think. I got you. All right. Well, so but the credit does not have any effect on aggregate demand in their model. And you're saying that's not the case at all. It's absolutely crucial to aggregate demand. So what they model is, again, the example of you lending to me or vice versa. If I lend money to you, I can spend less, you can spend more. So credit is the change in debt. So if I lend money to you, then there's a level of private debt rises. So there's an increase in credit. But that increase in credit comes at an expense of my spending power. So you can spend what I've lent you, but I can't spend what I've lent you. So credit cancels out. But when you look at – that's learnable funds. But in the real world – and the Bank of England has said this is the real world and the textbooks are wrong, categorically in 2014. When the bank lends, it adds to its asset side and says, you owe us more money. And it adds to its liability side and says, here's the money in your bank account. Now, you spend that money. So what happens when you do your sums, credit is part of aggregate demand and aggregate income. And that's something I first solved in 2019, I think. I only recently proved it mathematically. So what that means is credit is a component of aggregate demand and credit is also very volatile. So consumption demand never goes negative. Investment demand never goes negative. But credit can go from positive to negative. And when you take a look at the long run of American history after the Second World War, there was no period until 2007 where credit was negative. It was a positive component of – a positive number. And therefore, when you do it as a percentage of GDP, it was a positive percentage of GDP. It peaked at 16% of GDP in 2006, 2007. It fell to minus 5% in 2008, 2009. So you had a 20% of GDP turnaround in aggregate demand. Now when you plot that against unemployment, the correlation of credit to unemployment across the period from about 1990 to 2010 is about minus 0.9. Okay? Enormous negative correlation. Now, according to the neoclassicals, it could be close to zero. Empirically it's bleedingly obvious it's not. And it applies to every country in the world that had a financial crisis at that period. So it's bleedingly obvious in the data. And they ignore it because credit's not part of their model. And you're saying it's causation. That just – Causal. It is causal. Today we sit there, it's extremely high inflation. What does inflation – what role does inflation play in this picture? Is a little bit of inflation good? We talked about money creation at the beginning. What's a little bit of inflation good or bad? A lot of inflation good or bad? How concerned are you about – A little bit is good for a simple reason. Again, it's taken me a while to get my head around this. But if you think about how people say what are the functions of money? They say money is a unit of count, a count that you're measuring. It's a means of exchange. And it's a store of value. Now yes, okay, it has those three roles. But the last one is contradictory to the previous two because – and this is where we see this with the Bitcoin phenomenon. If you want to hang on to money as a store of value, then if prices are falling, the value of money is rising. And it's actually in your interests as a store of value to hang on to it and not spend it. So that contradicts its role as a means of exchange. Now if you have money which depreciates – and this was actually tried in the Austrian town of Wargol during the Great Depression. If you have money that depreciates, then if you don't use it, you lose it fundamentally. So it has a high rate of circulation. So there's a monetary theorist called Silvio Gazzel and he wrote this proposal that money should depreciate. And he was ridiculed and opposed and derided, but Keynes said he was a great intellect. And the mayor of the town of Wargol in Austria during the Great Depression was facing an unemployment rate of 25% pretty much. Germany had the worst experience in the Great Depression in the world, as bad as America, slightly worse than America. And so he thought, how can I stimulate demand here? So he produced a script which could only be used for buying goods and services in Wargol. And it could be used to pay your local rates. But it was depreciated by putting a stamp on the money if you didn't use it. So what happened was people would pay their rates. They needed to pay their rates using this money, so they used the script. And because it depreciated, you'd use it rapidly. So people were using that money, this alternative to the Austrian shilling, and the economic activity in town took off and unemployment fell to zero. And it was an absolute miracle, and everybody loved the Wargol experiment, and the Austrian central bank sued them for establishing an alternative form of money and shut it down. Unemployment went back up to 25% again, and Austria voted, you know, what, 99.6% for the Nazis, something crazy number like that when Hitler marched in. So the Wargol experiment showed that a depreciating currency led to a high rate of circulation. But of course, we're not talking Weimar Republic levels of inflation. So when you get that much inflation, and that's normally caused by, as the Weimar inflation was caused by, the reparation terms imposed on Germany, fundamentally by France at the Treaty of Versailles, they paid a large part of that with just basically printing the notes. And you went into this crazy period of hyperinflation. So hyperinflation almost always occurs when there's a massive destruction of physical resources and the monetary authority tries to pay back literally over it, and then you get hyperinflation, that's total social breakdown. So a moderate level of inflation inspires the means of exchange usage of money, but undermines the store of value usage of money. And that dilemma is why we have this antagonistic attitude towards inflation. Yeah, I mean, you're describing as a tension, but it's nevertheless is, like money is a store of value and a means of exchange. And I don't, you know, to push back, it's not necessarily that there's a tension, it's just that depending on the dynamics of this beautiful economic system of ours, it's used as one more than the other. If there's inflation, you're using it more for the means of exchange, there's deflation using more for store of value. But that doesn't, I don't see there's a tension, that's just how much you use it for those different... But it ends up saying that overall, for a level of effective commerce, a bit of inflation is a good thing, because that's depreciating the money slightly and encourage its use. Yeah, but so the argument that Bitcoin folks use or gold standard folks... The HODL, yeah. The HODL. Again, HODL is not an argument. That having an inflation of zero is actually achieving that balance. Yeah. So like, yeah. But they're actually in favor of negative, they want it to appreciate rapidly. And there's a negative inflation. But the value of the money rising relative to commodities, that's what they want. That's the HODL philosophy. Well that's more of like an investment, I don't know if that... Yeah. That's more of an investment philosophy than the fundamental principles of why they believe in cryptocurrency, in the enforced scarcity, it's a model. The concern there is that when you print money, the public policy is detached from the actual, from value. Yeah, well you get... I mean, this is where again it matters to get money creation right, because the government's not the only money creator, banks are as well, private banks. And if we obsess too much about limiting government money creation, what we end up getting, if there is money creation going on, it's private banks doing it, and you get an increase in private debt. And fundamentally, private debt and its collapse, collapse of credit when it stops growing, that's the fundamental cause of financial crises. So... Yeah, but the question is, what's the cause for the collapse of the... Well I think this is like the Austrian thinking leaves out the debt deflation. And that's like, I think one of the most important papers ever written was by Irving Fischer, called the Debt Deflation Theory of Great Depressions. Fischer was somebody who accepted the neoclassical vision. He wrote the pre-efficiency market hypothesis, efficiency market hypothesis. He had his own PhD called the Theory of Interest. And in that he argued effectively for a supply and demand analysis of the financial system. And he argued for equilibrium. He said when you're working with a commodity market, then the sale and the transaction and the exchange occur at the same point in time. When you're working with a financial market, then the exchange occurs through time. So he said he assumed that debts are repaid, all debts are repaid. And he assumed that equilibrium through time was an essential part of his assumption. Now then the Great Depression comes along. And he has become a major shareholder in the rank Xerox because he invented the Rolodex. He's a tinkerer. And so he had taken out shares on margin, and he was worth about $100 million in modern terms when the Great Depression hit. And 90% of that was share market valuation. He'd taken out margin debt just like everybody else. And with margin debt, you could put down $100,000 and buy a million dollars worth of shares. So he got this huge leverage into debt. Now that when the financial crisis hit, the level of margin debt in America had risen from half a percent of GDP in 1920 to 13% of GDP in 1929. It then fell to zero again. That's why the stock market crash in 29 was so devastating, that scale of margin lending. And everybody was being wiped out. They were selling Rolls Royces for 20 quid. You literally have photographs showing people doing that. Because a margin call comes in, you've got to liquidate everything. So he said the danger of a debt deflation is what we have to avoid. And that means you don't want too much private debt to accumulate, and you don't want falling prices because the falling prices will amplify the impact of being insolvent to begin with. And that's what we saw in the Great Depression. That's partially what we saw in 2007. But we didn't have anything like the level of margin debt. Margin debt was reduced from 90% to 50% ratio after the Great Depression. So there were limits on how bad it was in 2007. But the danger is still the period of deflation amplifies your debts. I call it Fisher's paradox. He didn't write those terms himself. But he wrote a line saying the more debtors pay, the more they owe. And this is because you're liquidating to try to meet your own debts. When you liquidate, the price level falls. You will end up having a lower level of monetary debt, but a higher level of debt when you deflate it using the price level. So the biggest danger in capitalism is a debt deflation. Far more dangerous than inflation. And the cause of debt deflation is? Too much lending, too much bank lending, too much private money creation. And if you take a look at the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge explained the boom of the 1920s on his surplus. He said, my government running a surplus of 1% of GDP pretty much from 1922 through to 1930 is the foundation of our stability. It should be continued. What he didn't look at was that over that same time period, on average, Americans were borrowing 5% of GDP per year from the private banks. So you had a housing bubble at the beginning of the 1920s, which Richard Vague covers beautifully in the brief history of doom. And then you had this huge rise in margin debt as well, gigantic increase in margin debt. So all this borrowed money was being spent into the economy. And this is where credit becomes part of aggregate demand. And it's both not just for goods and services, it's also for shares and houses and so on. So a huge valuation effect. But then when the margin debt turned around, when people would not take out margin debt anymore, the demand for margin debt disappeared. And then it was what we call badly a positive feedback loop. It's actually an amplifying feedback loop. And that caused a collapse. So what elements of that do you see today that we need to fix and how do we fix it? We have to regard the level of private debt as a target of economic policy, just as much as the rate of inflation or the rate of unemployment. What is the moderate amount of private debt that's good? I would say something anywhere between 30 and 70% of GDP. What is it currently? In America, it's 170%. Of GDP? Of GDP. Oh, that's nice. I've got the data after we talk, but I can show you the data in this. And it is just this huge increase in private debt that first of all caused the boom, but then financing the credit ultimately causes the slump. And so if we remove the rate level at which debt can reach and we stop speculative lending and basically have a lending for both innovation, investment and essential consumption items, we won't have the slump on the other side. We can get rid of financial instability. We can't stop financial cycles, but we can stop financial breakdown. So we should really be focusing on the instability and getting that under control. By the way, as you point to your laptop, my laptop, I have a lot of, how many computers do I have? A lot of them, but my little Surface, whatever the heck this thing is, is getting definite size envy. Because your laptop, you said is 18 something inches. 18.4 inches. 18.4 inches. You know, I don't think I've ever seen one that big, and I'll give the internet that one. All right, that's for the graphics, so it's a gaming laptop. It's basically a desktop. It probably weighs like 40 pounds. You have to- Eight kilos? Eight kilos. So you reckon eight or- Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. Okay. Eight kilos, that's, you know, you're pushing 40 pounds. You see the power supply for it? It's over there somewhere. The power supply weighs about twice as much as your laptop. Yeah, and you have to power it on with a crank. Pretty close. You have to like pull it. Is it gas powered or is it coal? Well, I think it's probably a nuclear power station inside. Nuclear, yeah. A nuclear diamond in the back there. Okay, so let me, before I forget, just let me ask you about, we've covered brilliantly the nuance disagreements you have and the wisdom you've drawn from Karl Marx, but there's also, like you mentioned in popular discourse, a kind of a distorted use of different terms, and one of them is Marxism. Yeah. Today. Is there something you could just speak to about, you know, increased use of that word and is it misused? Does it concern you that there's a lot of actually young people that say they're sort of proudly Marxist? Yeah. Are they misusing the term? They are definitely misusing the term if they don't understand the use value, exchange value dialectic I went through earlier. So if I could- And they don't. If I could just pause, the idea of socialism and Marxism as used in sort of popular lingo is basically, you know, a lot of people have a disproportionately hard life. Why can't we help them out? Why can't we be kind to our fellow man? That's a short embodiment of an idea as opposed to some super complicated, elaborate model of the economy and politics and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, we could do that by using the insights that come out of modern monetary theory, which I've confirmed just using my simple Minsky models. And that is that, to use the term, you see a feature, not a bug. A government running a deficit is a feature of a well-functioning, mixed fiat credit economy, not a bug. The government should normally run a deficit because that's how the government creates money. We've also had this obsession from mainstream economists of running a surplus, which is what caused the Great Depression. Calvin Cooler's doing it for eight years. Because of that obsession, we've cut back on social services. We've cut back on health. We've cut back on education. We've cut back on infrastructure. Now all that stuff predominantly affects the poor because the rich can afford to buy it themselves. So if we had somebody which realized that the government should run a deficit, it's a feature, not a bug, of a fiat money system. And that's where Eons made one mistake recently. Okay, but I'm not going back to first principles. That deficit enables you to provide enough of a decent standard of living for those who don't come out on top in the capitalist game. And with that, you wouldn't have the angst of the young people. Now we still have the climate parameters within which we have to survive, but a decent level of government funding would mean the angst that you get when people say, I want to be a Marxist, and they've got what I call a cardboard cutout version of Marx in their minds. That wouldn't be happening. So it's potential to have a good society where the government runs a deficit that finances the needs of the poor, where the rich get enough to indulge and take care of themselves. And you don't get this breakdown. If you try to cause the government running a surplus, then the burden of that is borne by the poor, middle class and poor, and that will lead to the angst we're now seeing. Beautiful. That was a beautiful whirlwind exploration of all of economics and economics history. Let me ask you, you tweeted, I think, we are the opposite of ants, individually intelligent, collectively stupid. We need to develop systems thinking fast to counter our limitations. That's really interesting. Do you really believe we're individually intelligent and collectively stupid? I do. Can you elaborate on, I mean, some of that is just cheeky tweets, but... It's a cheeky tweet I've had in my mind for a long time. It's just, it's one that actually went moderately viral, not enough, but moderately viral for me. But nevertheless, what if you could analyze it as if it's some deep, profound statement you made in a book? Well, the reason is that we are incredibly individually intelligent. Things like these devices we're playing with now. That's the creation of individual minds. Creative individual mind and a collective labor over centuries that led to this level of technology. And that has to be respected. It's incredible stuff. But at the same time, I think what humans are, if you want to distinguish humans from other species on the planet, we don't weave webs, we don't make bird calls. What we do is we share beliefs. You don't think that's a catalyst for intelligence? Yeah, it is a catalyst. But what it means is we can delude ourselves as much as we can inform ourselves. So because we share beliefs, we can do things in a collective way. And if we believe that if we take the incantations of the witch doctors and we happen to have a couple of spears and things, we can go and attack the local tribe of lions and drive them out, and we become the dominant species. So it works at the stage where we were in competition with other species on the planet. Now that we're the dominant species, then our beliefs get in the way. You agree with Einstein who said there are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity. And he wasn't sure about the universe. And he wasn't sure about the universe, right. That's right, he wasn't sure about the universe. Yeah, so you think that the collective, I mean, there's an infinity to the destructive and the stupid, the inhumane that's possible when we humans get together. But it feels like there's more trajectories, there's more possibility for creation. There are. I think that's why we have to, I say if we were built around the idea that our role as a species is to maintain and extend life on the planet, and if not find it elsewhere, then seed it elsewhere. Then that is a vision which makes us creative and confines the worst elements of our capacities to share beliefs. So that's what my hope is, that we'll reach that stage. But I think we've overshot it so badly that my real fear is we'll end up blaming technology for the type of world we find ourselves living in in the next 20 to 50 years. So you think technology is going to be part of the solution? Part of the solution, yeah. But if we go through and blame it, which is quite possible, we'll blame the technology rather than blaming too much of the technology. And the too much comes down to what economists have told us, that we can just continue consuming infinitely on a finite planet. And Kenneth Boulding said that beautifully. If somebody believes that you can have exponential growth on a finite planet, they're either mad or they're an economist. So you made a long journey, for which I'm deeply honored, from this distant place. The activities. You've got to go there one day, you'd enjoy it. I will. I'm afraid if I go there, I will stay forever. And so... No, it's a bit too... There's more vitality back in this economy, so you'd come back. Okay, maybe. You know, I'm not a fan of the economy or money or any of that nature calls me. Let me... So I'm honored that you make that trip. You've also said that while you're here in Austin, you're going to go to this American factory that makes cars here in Austin, and also visit Starbase. So let me ask you about expanding out into the universe. Is that something that excites you? You mentioned about the economics of it. Do you think... What do you think Marx would think about this? Economically speaking, what is this? Is it a good thing? I think it's vital. We can have capitalism in outer space far more successfully than we can have it on the planet because we don't face... When we dump the waste, it ends up in the sun. Not a problem. So it means the potential... We don't undermine our own productive capacity if we're doing it in outer space. So the destructive element of waste has a lesser impact in outer space. Far less, yeah. I mean, who cares if we throw a bit of our iron back into the sun again? It'd take a fair bit of it to turn it into a... What would be the next stage, it'd be a red giant. And we have to get away because if there's a red giant at some stage, the sun will head out past the orbit of Mars, I think, certainly past the orbit of Earth. So to have the longevity of not just human life, but life that evolved on this planet, we have to be able to take it off planet ultimately. So if you think in the really long term, then it's our responsibility, if we're going to maintain life, is to establish life off the planet. What do you think about robots and AI as part of the expanding out into the universe? Oh yeah, we have to. I mean, that ends labor. You can't go for... Your daddly jaunt can't be from here to the asteroid belt and back again for dinner with your family. So production would be entirely mechanized. There'd have to be a handful of people who service the machines. So it's about production and automation. What about elements of consciousness that make humans so special? What about that persisting within the machine? I mean, I'm still a skeptic about us ever being able to create a machine which is truly conscious. If I can throw my... It's only two cents worth. That would really piss off Karl Marx, by the way, if we create machines that are conscious. Exactly. This is actually part of the... There's two good logical arguments against the labor theory of value. One of what it becomes, machines become intelligent. And the other was that if the declining rate of profit applies in socialism, it'll apply as a rate of accumulation... Sorry, in capitalism, it'll apply as a rate of socialism as well. A guy called Khalid made that argument. So his argument was just unsound. But yeah, intelligent machines would completely screw Marx up. Do you not like that world where machines have not only intelligence, but consciousness as well? Yeah. I know that's one of your interests and one of your potential endeavors. And the Kurzweil idea that there's some singularity we're approaching as we just get increasing processing power. It's not processing power, it's imagination. And I think... Whatever the heck that means. Huh? Whatever the heck that means, yeah. I mean, you would have had imaginative insights. I mean, your papers on like in motor... In automating motoring between the hyper-intelligent machine or the machine-human interface where the standards can be lower for the machine and higher for the human. That's an insight you would have had at some point, and then you've worked it further. So I've had insights like that as well, and I have no idea where they come from. They just hit me in the head and I write them down and they solve the problems that I didn't even know my mind was working on. So how can we get a machine to do that? I do not know the answer, but one thing I think is a potential is I think we have to create AI that has feelings, AI that wants to survive. Because if you think how our intelligence evolved, it's on this planet in a struggle between predator and prey. And intelligent became a survival technique. I find the ideas of Ernest Becker with denial of death really powerful, which is that humans not only have emotions and are trying to survive, they're able to ponder out in the distant future their mortality. And that is a driving force for even greater creation that animals are able to do, more primitive animals. And so there is some element where I agree with you. I think for AI systems to have something like consciousness, they have to fear their mortality. Exactly. And I think that's, if you do it then, you can't produce an AI whose behavior you can control. I mean, when you have kids, you can't control their behavior. That's the trade-off. You give birth to an anarchist. One of my favorite instances in my family life is one of my, I like all my nieces and nephews, but one's got a real quirk to her. And I was standing over her cot when she was literally like about six months old and she was gurgling away to herself. And her father waved his finger and said, stop making that noise. And this little six-month-old kid goes, and I said, boy, you're going to have issues with that one, mate. Yeah. Anarchist was born. Yeah. And so you can't control this life you give birth to. And that's, I think, the threat of AI. That's terrifying and exciting. It is. And I think we should take that risk at some stage. But I think to do it with what actually let artificial intelligence involve in this environment in which it fears its own death. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of beauty there, but there's also a lot of destruction that's possible. So you have to be extremely careful. That's kind of the cutting edge of which we often operate as a humanity. Let me ask you for advice. Can you give advice to young people in high school and college? Maybe they're interested in economics. Maybe they have other career ideas. What advice would you give them about a career they can have that they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of? Mainly in a career, I say don't do an economics degree. I say if you... There's a little book... Econ Comics. Econ Comics, Taking the Con out of Economics. So they should start with that and then say screw it to an economics degree. Yeah, because what you learn is an obsolete technology. Learning economics at a university is like learning to make astronomy. Okay? Universe-centric equilibrium, epicycles being added to make your models fit the data. So it's not that economics is not a discipline worth deeply studying. It's that the university education around economics is bad. So I'd say learn system dynamics. Do a course in system dynamics, which you can apply in any field, and then apply what you learn out of system dynamics to the issues of economics, if that's what interests you. So get a sort of base engineering education. A base engineering education. That is far better than doing an economics degree. In terms of life, my life is pretty chaotic in many, many ways. My friends and family will tell me that at every opportunity. But the thing is, I once had a... I'll tell you an example of a really funny incident that occurred to me, because I led this student revolt at Sydney University, as I mentioned, when I was 20 years old. And then in my... I think about 28 or so, I went to a restaurant one night and I found a bunch of guys, all guys, who'd done accounting at the university, but also had been part of the student revolt. So they hadn't seen me for about a decade and they said, what have you been doing, Steve? And I talked about what I'd done. So I'd been a school teacher for a while. I then worked in overseas aid. I was doing computer programming at the time and I'd forgotten what else I was doing at that point. So I explained it to all of them. And they were at a Bucks night, one of them having a wedding coming up the next week. And one of them said, I wish I'd done that. And there was silence around the table, it was obviously silent agreement. And I looked at them and said, hang on guys, look at the downside of my life. You know, like, you're getting married, I don't have a girlfriend right now. You've all got secure jobs, I'm unemployed, okay. You own a house, I haven't even got a car, you know, look at the downside of my life. And the bloke was the kingpin of that group, a very innovative bunch of guys in the student revolt. And he said, Steve, we would still all rather have done what you have done. And they did accounting because it was safe. Always get a job, they were bored shitless. Did you have a sense that the chaos you're always jumping into was dangerous or was it just the pull of it that... I simply couldn't not do it. It was part of me that I couldn't swallow this economic stuff. Once I was exposed to why it was so wrong, then I was on a crusade to make it right. And that's been part of my nature all through my life, I don't know why. So it wasn't that I made a choice to do it, it's that I couldn't be true to myself without doing it. And I find a lot of people get caught in a life where they're doing it because it works for some financial or other reason, but they're not being true to themselves. And as messy as my life is, as much shit I've got myself caught up in, and there's a lot of that in my personal and financial life right now, which is a pain in the ass. I would rather have had that nature than not. You would rather take the pain in the ass than not. Let me ask a dark question. What's the darkest place you've ever gone to in your mind? So in all that rollercoaster of life, have there been periods where it's been really... I've had to cope with depression in the last five years since I started reading Neoclassical Economists on Climate Change. Sorry to interrupt. I'll come back to that one. So that's where my wife's going to come into this story. So I was reading Richard Toll, a paper from 2009 called The Economics of Climate Change, Journal of Economic Perspectives, I think. And I read this section where he says that one of the ways they tried to calibrate what climate change was due is they assumed that the relationship between GDP and temperature over space would apply over time as well. And I read that and thought, that is so fucking stupid. Because all it's saying is that if there's a 10 degree temperature difference between New York and Florida and a 20% difference in income, then a 10 degree increase in temperature will cause GDP to fall by 20%. It is so insanely stupid. So when I read that line, I just did this. I was in shock at how stupid it was. My wife, who's Thai and brings in treats for me all day, walks into the room and she speaks in a staccato English and says to me, why are you like this? And I said, I'm just doing this work on climate change. And she interrupts me and says, oh, why you do that stuff? Nobody's interested in climate change. You can't do anything to change it. If we die, we die. And that's perfect Buddhist grounding. And I thought, well, I can't argue with her again. So that sort of stopped me on the depression. But that's the darkest point when I looked at it and I thought that this arrogance, this stupidity, this humbug in the economists meant that we were potentially jeopardizing the lives of billions of people. And Christ knows how many other life forms. And having that knowledge is the most depressing experience of my life. That ideas, simple models combined with arrogance can lead to the potential destruction of human civilization. That was a very heavy. And then your wife came in with... And broke me out of it. Nature wins in the end. Yeah. And that's sort of accept the flow of life. You should really enjoy that book, The Earth Abides, because it's got that same beautiful sense to it. Life will survive whatever we do. I mean, they talk about the people... I was actually talking with a good mate of mine, an ex-geologist, and he's now a professor of economics. And he said as a geologist, he really hated people talking about the Anthropocene Epoch. And I said, well, it shouldn't be the Anthropocene Epoch. It'll be the Anthropocene Event. Anthropocene Epoch is millions of years and it'd be a huge period of life on the planet. And we might be snuffed out in 10,000 years of human civilization. And that's not much slower than the meteors wiping out the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs lasted for a long time after that event. So we're like, we'd just be a layer in the surface of the planet with plastics and strange metals like that at some point. So we're just an... Life will abide. Life will survive us. But there's so much life we're going to take down with us in this whole period. And there's so many of our own lives we're going to terminate for no good reason. I'm looking at this Richard Tull character. I'll definitely have to look at some of his papers. It does look like, boy, is he oversimplifying and do a lot of people... Oh my God. Check his one on the Anthro... on how good it'll be to lose AMOC. That said, I'm going to approach all of these topics with humility. And I would like to have some conversations if people can recommend. My default position is always with the scientists. But even above that, my default position is with those who are humble versus those who are arrogant. Yeah. This idea that because you're a quote unquote expert, you deserve to have arrogance is a silly idea to me. Again, going to the broader view of life on Earth, nature. Nature's the only one that gets to be arrogant and it chooses not to. So let me ask you about love. What role does love play in this whole thing? Did Karl Marx have a model for that? Karl Marx was madly in love with Geneva on West Island and wrote a love poetry to her long before he wrote Das Kapital. And he was infatuated with her. They ended up also impregnating his housekeeper. So there's a son of Karl Marx who was the son of the housekeeper, not the Jenny. There are numerous daughters. So he had a complicated view of love. Oh yeah. There's a dialectic on love there. He had an idealistic view with Jenny. And he was rejected because he wasn't... not by Jenny. She was madly in love with him as well. So it was a real passionate love affair from the very outset. But then of course you have children, lots of them die. There's a huge amount of tragedy in his life as well. He and Jenny were forced out of Chelsea by a cholera epidemic. My vision for London back in the 1850s and 60s was Calcutta in the 1970s. That's really what life was like. So there's a lot of hardship in his life as well. And he was always poor. So only Ingalls kept him alive financially. He applied for one job outside of... he never got an academic job. He was pushed out of Prussia as a newspaper author. But he also applied for a job as a clerk in the British railway system and was turned down because they couldn't read his handwriting. So I think I'm a bit similar there. So yeah, there's a lot of love and passion. But in general, what do you think is the role of love in the human condition? It's vital. It's, I mean, that feeling of passionate desire and respect for somebody else. And there's perverted forms of love as well, so I'll leave that out. But somebody having a really deep bond which goes beyond just sexual attraction. I've had that four or five times in my life with different women at different times. And I've stuffed up the most important one very early on. That feeling is incredible. And you couldn't have life worth living without that. So it's an essential part of who we are. But what we have to do is to transfer it not just to the rest of our species, but to all the species. And that's, I think, what's vital. And how do we maintain that over generations? And I think that idea that we can actually hang on to that general sense of respect and not lose it again. Because the amount of life we've terminated on this planet, the warlike side of humanity, that is too much of a defining feature of our species. It's the opposite of love. It's hate. But it's pleasure in inflicting pain on others. When you see people killing others in a warlike environment, they're enjoying themselves. It's rarely, sometimes it's self-defense. But when you've spoken to people who've been involved in combat and been involved in riots and said, when you see somebody rioting, bashing people up, they're enjoying themselves. It's not anger they're feeling, it's pleasure. There's a dark aspect to human nature. Very dark. But there's also the capacity to rise above that. And I think, like I put this on a spectrum, between chimpanzees at one extreme and bonobos at the other. We're too close to the chimpanzees. And bonobos are just having fun, having lots of sex. Every time they do anything, they fuck first and do the work later, and then fuck afterwards to celebrate. Fuck first, ask questions later. It's like that Scent of a Woman, one of my favorite films, where Al Pacino gives advice to a cat. He says, when in doubt, fuck. It's good life advice, for a cat especially. We mentioned that death seems to be maybe fundamental to creating a conscious AI. Do you think about your own death? Are you afraid of it? I'm afraid of going through it. Not the other side? You're not afraid of being on the other side? I don't think there is another side. I'm agnostic. I'm atheist when pressed, and agnostic. The one thing that I think I can understand why religion exists is that the whole thing that something exists is itself a dilemma. You have to take on faith that reality exists, whether it's a simulation or actual reality, it exists. That itself can't be explained in any scientific manner. You can talk about anti-protons and protons and the sum being zero and so on, but why did it even happen in the first place? You simply have to take on faith. There was darkness before, and there's darkness after. I don't know if you're going to be alive on the other side of that darkness. I think individually, no, but the way you can live on is by what you do to human consciousness. How do you hope people remember you? As someone who managed to integrate economics with an appreciation for life. Well I have to say, as a bit of a callback, you're one deadly bastard. It's a huge honor that you would come down and talk to me. You're a brilliant person, you're a hilarious person. The humility shines through, the brilliance shines through. Thank you so much for spending this time. Well thank you, Alex. You do the same for humanity. When I saw that email from you, my eyes popped out on my head. You should hold your judgment. I got to show you the sex dungeon I have. I'm waiting for an invitation. I'll send my wife over. Awesome. Can't wait. All right. Okay, mate. That wraps up this conversation with Steve Keen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. To be radical is to grasp things at their root. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

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Leonard Susskind: Black Hole Image is Astonishing | AI Podcast Clips

So what do you think of the recent first image of a black hole visualized from the Event Horizon Telescope? It's an incredible triumph of science. In itself, the fact that there are black holes which collide is not a surprise. And they seem to work exactly the way they're supposed to work. Will we learn a great deal from it? I don't know. I can't—we might. But the kind of things we'll learn won't really be about black holes. Why there are black holes in nature of that particular mass scale and why they're so common may tell us something about the structure, evolution of structure in the universe. But I don't think it's going to tell us anything new about black holes. But it's a triumph in the sense that you go back a hundred years and it was a continuous development, general relativity, the discovery of black holes, LIGO, the incredible technology that went into LIGO. It is something that I never would have believed was going to happen 30, 40 years ago. And I think it's a magnificent structure, magnificent thing, this evolution of general relativity, LIGO, high precision, ability to measure things on a scale of 10 to the minus 21. So, yeah. So you're just in awe that we— Astonishing. Just in awe. Just in awe. Just complete awe. —that this path took us to this picture. Is it different? You know, you've thought a lot about black holes. How did you visualize them in your mind? And is the picture different than you visualized it? No, no. It simply confirmed—you know, it's a magnificent triumph to have confirmed— Confirmed. —a direct observation that Einstein's theory of gravity at the level of black hole collisions actually works is awesome. It is really awesome. You know, I know some of the people who were involved in that. They're just ordinary people. And the idea that they could carry this out, I just—I'm shocked. Just these little homo sapiens? Yeah, just these little monkeys. Got together and took a picture of— Slightly advanced limers, I think. Yeah.

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Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness | Lex Fridman Podcast #338

In terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them, because we will judge you and we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually, no, it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success, because your error rate will diminish the more mistakes that you make. You observe them, you figure out where it's coming from. Is it a psychological thing? Is it a cognitive thing? And then you fix it. The following is a conversation with Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and engineer, founder and CEO of Social Capital, previously an early senior executive at Facebook, and is the co-host of the All In podcast, a podcast that I highly recommend for the wisdom and the camaraderie of the four co-hosts, also known as besties. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chamath Palihapitiya. You grew up in a dysfunctional household on welfare. You've talked about this before. What were, for you personally, psychologically, some difficult moments in your childhood? I'll answer that question in a slightly different way, which is that I think when you grow up in a household that's defined by physical abuse and psychological abuse, you're hypervigilant all the time. And so it's actually easier for me to point to moments where I was happy or I felt compassion or I felt safe. Otherwise, every moment, I'll give you a couple of examples. Like, you know, I was thinking about this a while ago. There was a tree outside of my apartment where we lived when I was growing up. And my father sometimes would make me go outside to take the tree branch that he would hit me with. And so you can imagine if you're a 10, 11-year-old kid and you have to deal with that, what do you do? Well, a hypervigilant child learns how to basically estimate the strength of these branches, right? How far can he go before it breaks? You have to estimate his anger and estimate the effective strength of branches and bring back something because I remember these moments where if it was he would look at it and then he would make me go out again and get it, right, get a different one. Or there was a certain belt that he wore that had this kind of belt buckle that stuck out. And you just wanted to make sure if that was the thing that you were going to get hit by, that it wasn't the buckle facing out because that really hurt. And so you became hyperaware of which part of the buckle was facing out versus facing in in those moments. And there are like hundreds of these little examples, which essentially I would say the through line is that you're just so on edge, right? And you walk into this house and you're just basically trying to get to the point where you leave the house. And so in that microcosm of growing up, any moment that's not like that is seared in my memory in a way that I just can't describe to a person. I'll give you an example. I volunteered when I was in grade five or six, I can't remember which it was, in the kindergarten of my school. And I would just go and the teacher would, you know, ask you to clean things up. And at the end of that grade five year, she took me and two other kids to Dairy Queen. And I'd never gone to a restaurant, literally, because we just didn't have the money. And I remember the first time I tasted this, you know, this Dairy Queen meal, it was like a hamburger, fries, a Coke and a Blizzard. And I was like, what is this? And I felt so special, you know, because you're getting something that most people would take for granted. Oh, it's a Sunday or it's, you know, or I'm really busy. Let me go take my kid to fast food. I think that, you know, until I left high school, I think, and this is not just specific to me, but a lot of other people, it's, you're in this hypervigilant loop, punctuated with these incredibly visceral moments of compassion by other people. You know, a different example, we had such a strict budget and we didn't have a car. And so, you know, I was responsible with my mom to always go shopping. And so I learned very early on how to, you know, look for coupons, how to buy things that were on sale or special. And we had a very basic diet because you have to budget this thing really precisely. But the end of every year where I lived, there was a large grocery chain called Loblaws and Loblaws would discount a cheesecake from $7.99 to $4.99. And my parents would buy that once a year. And we probably did that six or seven times. And you can't imagine how special we felt, myself, my two sisters, we would sit there, we would watch the, you know, the New Year's Eve celebration on TV. We would cut this cheesecake into, you know, five pieces. It felt like everything. So that's sort of how, you know, my existence when I was at that age is, for better or for worse, that's how I remember it. The hypervigilant loop, is that still with you today? What are the echoes of that that's still with you today? The good and the bad? If you put yourself in the mind of a young child, the thing that that does to you is at a very core basic level, it says you're worthless. Right? Because if you can step outside of that and you think about any child in the world, they don't deserve to go through that. And at some point, by the way, I should tell you, like, I don't blame my parents anymore. It was a process to get there, but I feel like they did the best they could. And they suffered their own issues and enormous pressures and stresses. And so, you know, I've really, for the most part, forgiven them. How did you, sorry to interrupt, let go of that blame? That was a really long process where, for I would say the first 35 years of my life, I compartmentalized and I avoided all of those memories. And I sought external validation. Right, going back to this self-worth idea. If you're taught as a child that you're worthless, because why would somebody do these things to you? It's not because you're worth something. You think to yourself, very viscerally, you're worth nothing. And so then you go out and you seek external validation. Maybe you try to go and get into a great college. You try to get a good job. You try to make a lot of money. You try to, you know, demonstrate in superficial ways with the car you drive or the clothes you wear that you deserve people to care about you, to try to make up for that really deep hole. But at some point, it doesn't get filled in. And so you have a choice. And so for me, what happened was in the course of a six month period, I lost my best friend and I lost my father. And it was really like the dam broke loose because the compartmentalization stopped working because the reminder of why I was compartmentalizing was gone. And so I had to go through this period of disharmony to really understand and steel man his perspective. And can you imagine trying to do that, to go through all of the things where you have to now look at it from his perspective and find compassion and empathy for what he went through. And then I shift, you know, the focus to my mom. And I said, well, you were not the victim, actually. You were somewhat complicit as well because you were of sound mind and body and you were in the room when it happened. So I had to go through that. And I said, well, you were in the room when it happened. So then I had to go through that process with her and steel man her perspective. And at the end of it, I never justified what they did, but I've been able to forgive what they did. I think they did the best they could. And at the end of the day, they did the most important thing, which is they gave me and my sisters a shot by emigrating, by giving up everything, by staying in Canada and it took between the two of them to sort of claw and scrape together enough money to live so that my sisters and I could have a shot. And I'm very thankful for them. Could they have done better? Obviously, but I'm okay with what has taken place. But it's been a long process of that steel manning so that you can develop some empathy and compassion and forgive. Do you think if you talk to your dad shortly after he died and you went through that process or today, you'll be able to have the same strength to forgive him? I think it would be a very complicated journey. I think I've learned to be incredibly open about what has happened and all of the mistakes I've made. I think it would require him to be pretty radically honest about confirming what I think he went through because otherwise it just wouldn't work. Otherwise I would say, let's keep things where they are, which is I did the work with people that have helped me, obviously, but it's better for him to just kind of, hopefully he's looking from some place and he's thinking it was worth it. I think he deserves to think that all of this, because I think the immigrant challenge, or not even the immigrant challenge, the lower middle class challenge, anybody who really wants better for their kids and doesn't have a good toolkit to give it to them, some of them just, they choke up on the bat. They just get so agitated about this idea that all this sacrifice will not be worth it, that it spills out in really unproductive ways. And I would put him in that category. And their self-evaluation, introspection, they have tunnel vision, so they're not able to often see the damage that did. I mean, I know, like yourself, a few successful people that had very difficult relationships with their dad. And when you take the perspective of the dad, they're completely in denial about any of it. So if you actually have a conversation, there would not be a deep honesty there. And I think that's maybe in part the way of life. Yeah, and I remember pretty distinctly after I left and in my middle 30s, where by all measure, I had roughly become reasonably successful. And my dad didn't particularly care about that, which was so odd, because I had to confront the fact that, whether it was a title or money or press clippings, he never really cared. He moved on to a different set of goals, which was more about my character and being a good person to my family and really preparing me to lead our family when he wasn't there. And that bothered me, because I thought I got to the finish line and I thought there was going to be a medal, meaning like, I can tell you, Lex, he never told me that he loved me. I'm not sure if that's normal or not. It was my normality. And I thought there's going to be something, some gold star, which never appeared. And so that's like a hard thing to kind of confront, because you're like, well, now what is this all about? Was this all just kind of a ruse? But then I realized, well, hold on a second. There were these moments where in his way, again, putting yourself in his shoes, I think he was trying to say he was sorry. He would hold my hand, and he would interlock the fingers, which I felt is, that's a really intimate way of holding somebody's hand, I think. So I remember those things. So these are the things that are just etched in, at least in my mind. And at the end of it, I think I've done a decent job in repairing my relationship with him, even though it was posthumous. It does make me wonder in which way you and I, we might be broken and not see it. It might be hurting others and not see it. Well, I think that when you grow up in those kinds of environments, and they're all different kinds of this kind of dysfunction, but if what you get from that is that you're not worthwhile, you're less than many, many other people, when you enter adulthood or semi-adulthood in your early 20s, you will be in a cycle where you are hurting other people. You may not know it. Hopefully you find somebody who holds you accountable and tells you and loves you enough through that. But you are going to take all of that disharmony in your childhood, and you're gonna inject that disharmony into whether it's your professional relationships or your personal relationships or both, until you get to some form of rock bottom and you start to repair. And I think there's a lot of people that resonate with that because they have each suffered their own things that at some point in their lives have told them that they're less than. And then they go and cope. And when you cope, eventually those coping mechanisms escalate, and at some point it'll be unhealthy, either for you, but oftentimes it's for the people around you. Well, from those humble beginnings, you are now a billionaire. A billionaire. How has money changed your life or maybe the landscape of experience in your life? Does it buy happiness? It doesn't buy happiness, but it buys you a level of comfort for you to really amplify what happiness is. I kind of think about it in the following way. Let's just say that there's a hundred things on a table and the table says, find happiness here. And there are different prices. The way that the world works is that many of these experiences are cordoned off a little bit behind the velvet rope where you think that there's more happiness as the prices of things escalate. If you live in an apartment, you admire the person with the house. If you live in a house, you admire the person with the bigger house. That person admires the person with an island. Some person drives their car, admires the person who flies, who admires the person who flies business class, who admires the person who flies first to private. There's all of these escalations on this table. And most people get to the first five or six. And so they just naturally assume that items seven through a hundred is really where happiness is found. And just to tell you the finish line, I've tried a hundred and back and I've got two more hundred to it. And happiness isn't there. But it does give you a level of comfort. I read a study and I don't know if it's true or not, but it said that the absolute sort of like maximal link between money and happiness is around $50 million. And it was just like a social studies kind of thing that I think one of the Ivy leagues put out. And underneath it, the way that they explained it was because you could have a home, you could have all kinds of the creature comforts, you could take care of your family, and then you were left to ponder what it is that you really want. I think the challenge for most people is to realize that this escalating arms race of more things will solve your problems is not true. More and better is not the solution. It's this idea that you are on a very precise journey that's unique to yourself. You are playing a game of which only you are the player. Everybody else is an interloper and you have a responsibility to design the gameplay. And I think a lot of people don't realize that because if they did, I think they would make a lot of different decisions about how they live their life. And I still do the same thing. I mean, revert to basically running around, asking other people, what will make you like me more? What will make me more popular in your eyes? And I try to do it. And it never works. It is just a complete dead end. Is there negative aspects to money? Like for example, it becoming harder to find people you can trust? I think the most negative aspect is that it amplifies a 360 degree view of your personality. Because there are a lot of people and society tells you that more money is actually better. You are a better person somehow. And you're factually more worthwhile than some other people that have less money. That's also a lie. But when you're given that kind of attention, it's very easy for you to become a caricature of yourself. That's probably the single worst thing that happens to you. But I say it in the opposite way. I think all I've ever seen in Silicon Valley as an example, is that when somebody gets a hold of a lot of money, it tends to cause them to become exactly who they were meant to be. They're either a kind person, they're either a curious person, they're either a jerk, they're either cheap. And they can use all kinds of masks, but now that there's no expectations and society gives you a get out of jail free card, you start to behave the way that's most comfortable to you. So you see somebody's innate personality. And that's a really interesting thing to observe because then you can very quickly bucket sort, where do you wanna spend time and who is really additive to your gameplay? And who is really a negative detractor to your gameplay? You're an investor, but you're also a kind of philosopher. You analyze the world in all its different perspectives on all in podcasts, on Twitter, everywhere. Do you worry that money puts you out of touch from being able to truly empathize with the experience of the general population, which in part, first of all, on a human level that could be limiting, but also as an analyst of human civilization that could be limiting? I think it definitely can for a lot of people because it's just a, it's an abstraction for you to stop caring. I also think the other thing is that you can very quickly, especially in today's world, become the scapegoat just to use a Girardian like Rene Girard. If you look, if you think about like mimetic theory in a nutshell, we're all competing for these very scarce resources that we are told is worthwhile. And if you view the world through that Girardian lens, what are we really doing? We are all fighting for scarce resources, whether that's Twitter followers, money, acclaim, notoriety, and we all compete with each other. And in that competition, Girard writes, like the only way you escape that loop is by scapegoating something or somebody. And I think we are in that loop right now where just the fact of being successful is a thing that one should scapegoat to end all of this tension that we have in the world. I think that it's a little misguided because I don't think it solves the fundamental problem. And we can talk about what the solution to some of these problems are, but that's, I think, the loop that we're all living. And so if you become a caricature and you feed yourself into it, I mean, you're not doing anything to really advance things. Your nickname is the dictator. How'd you get the nickname? We're talking about the corrupting nature of money. That came from poker. In a poker game, when you sit down, it's chaos, especially like in our home game, there's a ton of big egos. There's people always watching, rail-birding the game, all kinds of interesting folks. And in that, somebody needs to establish hygiene and rules. And I really care about the integrity of the game. And it would just require somebody to just say, okay, enough. And then people were just like, okay, stop dictating. And that's where that nickname came from. So who to you, speaking of which, is the greatest poker player of all time and why is it Phil Hellmuth? Exactly. Muth probably knew this question was coming. Here's what I'll say. I think Hellmuth is the antidote to computers more than any other player playing today. And when you see him in a heads up situation, so I think he's played nine or 10 heads up tournaments in a row, and he's played, basically call it, 10 of the top 20 people so far, and he's beaten all but one of them. When you're playing heads up, one V one, that is the most GTO understandable spot, meaning game theory optimal position. That's where computers can give you an enormous edge. The minute you add even a third player, the value of computers and the value of their recommendations basically falls off a cliff. So one way to think about it is Hellmuth is forced to play against people that are essentially trained like AIs. And so to be able to beat eight out of nine of them means that you are playing so orthogonally to what is considered game theory optimal. And you're overlaying human reasoning. The judgment to say, well, in this spot I should do X, but I'm going to do Y. It's not dissimilar in chess, like what makes Magnus Carlsen so good. Sometimes he takes these weird lines, he'll sacrifice positions, he'll overplay certain positions or certain bishops versus knights and all of these spots that are very confusing. And what it does is it throws people off their game. I think he just won a recent online tournament and it's like by move six, there is no GTO move for his opponent to make because it's like out of the rule book. Maybe he read some game. I read the quote, it was like, he probably read some game in some bar in Russia in 1954, memorized it and all of a sudden by six moves in the computer AI is worthless. So that's what makes Helmuth great. There is one person that I think is superior. And I think it's what Daniel also said and I would echo that because I played Phil as well, but Phil Ivey is the most well-rounded, cold-blooded, bloodthirsty animal. He's just, he sees into your soul, Lex, in a way where you're just like, oh my God, stop looking at me. Have you ever played him? Yeah, yeah, we've played. We've played and he crushes the games, crushes the games. So what does feeling crushed mean and feel like in poker? Is it like that you just can't read at all, you're being constantly pressured, you feel off balance, you try to bluff and the person reads you perfectly, that kind of stuff? So this is a really, really excellent question because I think this has parallels to a bunch of other things. Okay, let's just use poker as a microcosm to explain a bunch of other systems or games. Maybe it's running a company or investing, okay? So let's use those three examples, but we use poker to explain it. What does success look like? Well, success looks like you have positive expected value. Right, in poker, the simple way to summarize that is your opponent, let's just say you and I are playing, are gonna make a bunch of mistakes. There's a bunch of it that's gonna be absolutely perfect and then there's a few spots where you make mistakes. And then there's a bunch of places in the poker game where I play perfectly and I make a few mistakes. Basically, your mistakes minus my mistakes is the edge, right? That's how poker works. If I make fewer mistakes than you make, I will make money and I will win. That is the objective of the game. Translate that into business. You're running a company, you have a team of employees, you have a pool of human capital that's capable of being productive in the world and creating something. But you are going to make mistakes in making that. Maybe it doesn't completely fit the market. Maybe it's mispriced. Maybe it actually doesn't require all of the people that you need so the margins are wrong. And then there's the competitive set of all the other alternatives that customer has. Their mistakes minus your mistakes is the expected value of Google, Facebook, Apple, et cetera, okay? Now take investing. Every time you buy something, somebody else on the other side is selling it to you. Is that their mistake? We don't know yet. But their mistakes minus your mistakes is how you make a lot of money over long periods of time as an investor. Somebody sold you Google at $40 a share. You bought it and you kept it. Huge mistake on their part, minimum mistakes on your part. The difference of that is the money that you made. So life can be summarized in many ways in that way. So the question is, what can you do about other people's mistakes? And the answer is nothing. That is somebody else's game. You can try to influence them. You could try to subvert them. Maybe you plant a spy inside of that other person's company to sabotage them. I guess there are things at the edges that you can do. But my firm belief is that life success really boils down to how do you control your mistakes? Now, this is a bit counterintuitive. The way you control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes. So taking risks is somehow a way to minimize the number of mistakes. Let's just say you wanna find love. You wanna find somebody you're deeply connected with. Do you do that by not going out on dates? Yes. No. Sorry, sorry. You're the only person that thinks that's the answer to that question. No, I'm joking, I'm joking. No, but you know what I mean? You have to date people. You have to open yourself up. You have to be authentic. And you give yourself a chance to get hurt. But you're a good person. So you know what happens when you get hurt? That is actually their mistake. Okay? And if you are inauthentic, that's your mistake. That's a controllable thing in you. You can tell them the truth, who you are, and say, here's my pluses and minuses. My point is, there are very few things in life that you can't break down, I think, into that very simple idea. And in terms of your mistakes, society tells you don't make them because we will judge you and we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually, no, it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success because your error rate will diminish the more mistakes that you make. You observe them. You figure out where it's coming from. Is it a psychological thing? Is it a cognitive thing? And then you fix it. So the implied thing there is that there is, in business and investing, in poker, in dating, in life, is that there's this platonic GTO, game theory optimal thing out there. And so when you say mistakes, you're always comparing to that optimal path you could have taken. I think slightly different, I would say, mistake is maybe a bad proxy, but it's the best proxy I have for learning. But I'm using the language of what society tells you. Sure, got it. Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn't work, it's a mistake. So I just use that word because it's the word that resonates most with most people. Got it. The real thing that it is is learning. Yeah, it's like in neural networks, it's loss. It's a neural network, it's loss, exactly. Yeah, right, so you're using the mistake that is the word that is most understandable, especially by the way people experience it. I guess most of life is a sequence of mistakes. The problem is when you use the word mistake and you think about mistakes, it actually has a counterproductive effect of you becoming conservative in just being risk-averse. So if you flip it and say try to maximize the number of successes, somehow that leads you to take more risk. Mistake scares people. I think mistakes scare people because society likes these very simplified boundaries of who is winning and who is losing. And they want to reward people who make traditional choices and succeed. But the thing is what's so corrosive about that is that they're actually not even being put in a position to actually make a quote-unquote mistake and fail. So I'll give you, if you look at like getting into an elite school, right, society rewards you for being in the Ivy Leagues in a way that, in my opinion, incorrectly, doesn't reward you for being in a non-Ivy League school. There's a certain level of status and presumption of intellect and capability that comes with being there. But that system doesn't really have a counterfactual because it's not as if you both go to MIT and Ohio State. And then we can see two versions of Lex Friedman so that we can figure out that the jig is up and there was no difference, right? And so instead it reinforces this idea that there is no truth-seeking function. There is no way to actually make this thing whole. And so it tells you, you have to get in here. And if you don't, your life is over. You've made a huge mistake, or you've failed completely. And so you have to find different unique ways of dismantling this. This is why part of what I've realized where I got very lucky is I had no friends in high school. I had a few cohort of acquaintances, but part of being so hypervigilant when I grew up was I was so ashamed of that world that I had to live in. I didn't wanna bring anyone into it. I could not see myself that anybody would accept me. But the thing with that is that I had no definition of what expectations should be. So they were not guided by the people around me. And so I would escape to define my expectations. That's interesting, but you didn't feel like your dad didn't put you in a prison of expectation? Because if you don't have a friend, so the flip side of that, you don't have any other signals. It's very easy to believe when you're in a cult that- Well, he was angry. He pushed me. He used me as a mechanism to alleviate his own frustration. And this may sound very crazy, but he also believed in me. And so that's what created this weird duality where you were just, I was always confused about- You could be somebody great. He believed that you could be somebody truly special. He did. I didn't believe him because I couldn't reconcile than the other half of the day, those behaviors. But what it allowed me to do was I escaped in my mind and I found these archetypes around me that were saviors to me. So I grew up in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I grew up right at the point where the telecom boom was happening. Companies like Nortel and Newbridge Networks and Mitel, Bell Northern Research, these were all built in the suburbs of Ottawa. And so there were these larger than life figures, entrepreneurs, Terry Matthews, Michael Copeland. And so I thought I'm gonna be like them. I would read Forbes Magazine. I would read Fortune Magazine. I would look at the rich people on that list and say, I would be like them. Not knowing that maybe that's not who you wanted to be, but it was a lifeline. And it kept my mind relatively whole because I could direct my ambition in a direction. And so why that's so important, just circling back to this is, I didn't have a group of friends who were like, I'm gonna go to community college. I didn't have a group of friends that said, well, the goal is just to go to university, get a simple job and join the public service, have a good life. And so because I had no expectations and I was so afraid to venture out of my own house, I never saw what middle-class life was like. And so I never aspired to it. Now, if I was close to it, I probably would have aspired to it because my parents in their best year made 32,000 Canadian together. And if you're trying to raise a family of five people on $32,000, it's a complicated job. And most of the time, they were probably making 20 something thousand. And I was working since I was 14. So I knew that our station in life was not the destination. We had to get out. But because I didn't have an obvious place, it's not like I had a best friend whose house I was going to and I saw some normal functional home. If I had had that in this weird way, I would have aspired to that. What was the worst job you had to do? The best job, but the worst job was I worked at Burger King when I was 14 years old and I would do the closing shift. And that was from like 6 p.m. till about two in the morning. And in Ontario where I lived, Ottawa borders Quebec. In Ontario, the drinking age is 19. You can see where I'm going with this. The drinking age in Quebec is 18. And that year made all the difference to all these kids. And so they would go get completely drunk. They would come back. They would come to the Burger King. You would see all these kids you went to high school with. Can you imagine how mortifying it is? You're working there in this getup. And they would light that place on fire, vomit everywhere, puking, pooing, peeing. And when the thing shuts down at one o'clock, you gotta clean that all up, all of it. Changing the garbage, taking it out. It was a grind. And it really teaches you, okay, I do not want this job. I don't want to. But it's funny that that didn't push you towards the stability and the security of the middle class. Like life. I didn't have any good examples of that. I didn't have those around me. I was so ashamed. I could have never built a relationship where I could have seen those interactions to want that. And so my desires were framed by these two random rich people that lived in my town who I'd never met. And what I read in magazines about people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. You were an early senior executive at Facebook during a period of a lot of scaling in the company history. I mean, it's actually a fascinating period of human history in terms of technology. Well, in terms of human civilization, honestly. What did you learn from that time about what it takes to build and scale a successful tech company? A company that has almost immeasurable impact on the world. That was an incredible moment in time because everything was so new. To your point, even how the standards of web 2.0 at that time were being defined, we were defining them. You know, I mean, I think if you look in sort of the, if you search in the patents, patent library, there's a bunch of these patents that like me and Zuck have for like random things like cookies, you know, or like cross-site JavaScript, like all these crazy things that are just like these duh kind of ideas in 2023. We had to invent our way around. How do websites communicate with each other? You know, how do we build in the cloud versus in a data center? How do we actually have high performance systems? You mentioned data science, the term and the idea. We invented this, I invented this thing called data scientist because we had a PhD from Google that refused to join unless, because he got a job offer that says data analyst. And so we said, call him a scientist because he was a PhD in particle physics. So he really, you know, he was a scientist. And I said, great, you're a scientist here. And that launched a discipline. That launched a discipline. A term, you know, what's a rose by any other name, but yeah, like, you know, sometimes words like this can launch entire fields. And it did in that case. And you didn't, I mean, I guess at that time you didn't anticipate the impact of machine learning on the entirety of this whole process because you need machine learning to have both ads and recommender systems to have the feed for the social network. Exactly right. The first real scaled version of machine learning, not AI, but machine learning was this thing that Facebook introduced called PYMK, which is people you may know. And the simple idea was that, can we initiate a viral mechanic inside the application where you log in, we grab your credentials, we go to your email inbox, we harvest your address book, we do a compare, we make some guesses and we start to present to other people that you may actually know that may not be in your address book. Really simple. You know, a couple of joins of some tables, whatever. And it started to just go crazy. And the number of people that you were creating this density and entropy inside the social graph with what was some really simple basic math. And that was eyeopening for us. And what it led us down this path of is really understanding the power of like all this machine learning. And so that infused itself into newsfeed, you know, and how the content that you saw could be tailored to who you were and the type of person that you were. So there was a moment in time that all of this stuff was so new. How did you translate the app to multiple languages? How do you launch the company in all of these countries? How much of it is just kind of stumbling into things using your best, like first principles, gut thinking? And how much is it like five, 10, 15, 20 year vision? Like how much was thinking about the future of the internet and the metaverse and the humanity and all that kind of stuff? Like, cause the newsfeed sounds trivial. I'll say something. But that's like changes everything. Well, you have to remember like, you know, newsfeed was named and we had this thing where we would just name things what they were. And at the time, all of these other companies, and if you go back into the Wayback Machine, you can see this, people would invent, you know, an MP3 player and they would come up with some crazy name or they would invent a software product and come up with a crazy name, right? And it sounded like the pharma industry, you know, blow Casimab, you know, tag your best friends. And you think, what is this? This makes no sense. And, you know, this was Zuck's thing. He was like, well, this is a feed of news. So we're going to call it newsfeed. This is where you tag your photos. So we're going to call that photo tagging. I mean, literally, you know, pretty obvious stuff. So the thing, the way that those things came about though, was very experimentally. And this is where I think it's really important for people to understand. I think Bezos explains this the best. There is a tendency after things work to create a narrative fallacy because it feeds your ego. And you want to have been the person that saw it coming. And I think it's much more honest to say, we were very good probabilistic thinkers that tried to learn as quickly as possible, meaning to make as many mistakes as possible. You know, I mean, if you look at this very famous placard that Facebook had from back in the day, what did it say? It said, move fast and break things. In societal language, that's saying make mistakes as quickly as you can. Because the minute you break something, you don't do that by design, it's not a feature. Theoretically, it's a bug. But he understood that and we embraced that idea. I used to run this meeting once a week where the whole goal was, I want to see that there was a thousand experiments that were run and show me them all from the dumbest to the most impactful. And we would go through that loop and what did it train people? Not that you got celebrated for the right answer, but you got celebrated for trying. I ran 12 experiments, 12 failed, and we'd be like, you're the best. Can I just take a small tangent on that? Is that move fast and break things has become like a catchphrase of the thing that embodies the toxic culture of Silicon Valley in today's discourse, which confuses me. Of course, words and phrases get sort of captured and so on. Becomes very reductive. You know, that's a very loaded set of words that together can be, many years later, people can view very reductive. Can you steel man each side of that? So pro move fast and break things and against move fast and break things. So I think the pro of move fast and break things is saying the following. There's a space of things we know and a massive space of things we don't know. And there's a rate of growth of the things we know, but the rate of growth of the things we don't know is actually, we have to assume, growing faster. So the most important thing is to move into the space of the things we don't know as quickly as possible. And so in order to acquire knowledge, we're going to assume that the failure mode is the nominal state. And so we just need to move as quickly as we can, break as many things as possible, which means like things are breaking in code, do the root cause analysis, figure out how to make things better, and then rapidly move into the space. And he or she who moves fastest into that space will win. It doesn't imply carelessness, right? It doesn't imply moving fast without also aggressively picking up the lessons from the mistakes you make. Well, again, that's steel manning the pro, which is it's a thoughtful movement around velocity and acquisition of knowledge. Now let's steel man the con case. When these systems become big enough, there is no more room to experiment in an open-ended way because the implications have broad societal impacts that are not clear upfront. So let's take a different, less controversial example. If we said Lipitor worked well for all people except South Asians, and there's a specific immuno response that we can iterate to, and if we move quickly enough, we can run 10,000 experiments, and we think the answer is in that space. Well, the problem is that those 10,000 experiments may kill 10 million people. So you have to move methodically. When that drug was experimental and it wasn't being given to 500 million people in the world, moving fast made sense because you could have a pig model, a mouse model, a monkey model, you could figure out toxicity, but we picked all that low-hanging fruit. And so now these small iterations have huge impacts that need to be measured and implemented. Different example is like, you know, if you work at Boeing and you have an implementation that gives you a 2% efficiency by reshaping the wing or adding winglets, there needs to be a methodical move slow, be right process because mistakes when they compound when it's already implemented and at scale have huge externalities that are impossible to measure until after the fact. And you see this in the 737 Max. So that's how one would steel man the con case, which is that when an industry becomes critical, you got to slow down. This makes me sad because some industries like Twitter and Facebook are a good example. They achieve scale very quickly before really exploring the big area of things to learn. So you basically pick one low-hanging fruit and that became your huge success. And now you're sitting there with that stupid fruit. Well, so I think, so as an example, like, you know, if you had to, you know, if I was running Facebook for a day, you know, the big opportunity in my opinion was really not the metaverse, but it was actually getting the closest that anybody could get to AGI. And if I had to steel man that product case, here's how I would have pitched it to the board and to Zuck, I would have said, listen, there are three and a half billion people monthly using this thing. If we think about human intelligence very reductively, we would say that there's a large portion of it which is cognitive, and then there's a large portion of it which is emotional. We have the best ability to build a multimodal model that basically takes all of these massive inputs together to try to intuit how a system would react to all kinds of stimuli. That to me would have been a profound leap forward for humanity. Can you dig into that a little bit more? So in terms of, now this is a board meeting, how would that make Facebook money? I think that you have all of these systems over time that we don't know could benefit from some layer of reasoning to make it better. What does Spotify look like when instead of just a very simple recommendation engine, it actually understands sort of your emotional context and your mood and can move you to a body of music that you would like. What does it look like if your television, instead of having to go and channel surf 50,000 shows on a horrible UI, instead just has a sense of what you're into and shows it to you. What does it mean when you get in your car and it actually drives you to a place because you should actually eat there even though you don't know it. These are all random things that make no sense a priori, but it starts to make the person or the provider of that service, the critical reasoning layer for all these everyday products that today would look very flat without that reasoning. And I think you license that and you make a lot of money. So in many ways, instead of becoming more of the pixels that you see, you become more of the bare metal that actually creates that experience. And if you look at the companies that are multi-decade legacy kinds of businesses, the thing that they have done is quietly and surreptitiously move down the stack. You never move up the stack to survive. You need to move down the stack. So if you take that OSI reference stack, these layers of how you build an app from the physical layer to the transport layer all the way up to the app layer, you can map from the 1980s all the big companies that have been created, all the way from Fairchild Semiconductor and NatSemi to Intel, to Cisco, to 3Com, Oracle, Netscape at one point, all the way up to the Googles and the Facebooks of the world. But if you look at where all the lock-in happened, it's by companies like Apple who used to make software saying, I'm gonna get one close, I'm gonna make the bare metal and I'm gonna become the platform. Or Google, same thing. I'm gonna create this dominant platform and I'm gonna create a substrate that organizes all this information. That's just omnipresent and everywhere. So the key is, if you are lucky enough to be one of these apps that are in front of people, you better start digging quickly and moving your way down and get out of the way and disappear. But by disappearing, you will become much, much bigger and it's impossible to usurp you. Yeah, I 100% agree with you. That's why you're so smart. This is the depersonalization and the algorithms that enable depersonalization almost like a operating system layer. So pushing away from the interface and the actual system that does the personalization. I think the challenges there, there's obviously technical challenges, but there's also societal challenges that, it's like in a relationship. If you have an intimate algorithmic connection with individual humans, you can do both good and bad. And so there's risks that you're taking. So if you're making a lot of money now as Twitter and Facebook with ads, surface layer ads, what is the incentive to take the risk of guiding people more? Because you can hurt people, you can piss off people. There is a cost to forming a more intimate relationship with the users in the short term, I think. You said a really, really key thing, which was a really great emotional instinctive reaction, which is when I said the AGI thing, you said, well, how would you ever make money from that? That is the key. The presumption is that this thing would not be an important thing at the beginning. And I think what that allows you to do, if you were Twitter or Google or Apple or Facebook, anybody, Microsoft, embarking on building something like this, is that you can actually have it off the critical path. And you can experiment with this for years, if that's what it takes, to find a version one that is special enough where it's worth showcasing. And so in many ways, you get the free option. You're going to be spending, any of these companies will be spending tens of billions of dollars in OPEX and CAPEX every year and all kinds of stuff. It is not a thing that money actually makes more likely to succeed. In fact, you actually don't need to give these kinds of things a lot of money at all, because starting in 2023, right now, you have the two most important tectonic shifts that have ever happened in our lifetime in technology. They're not talked about, but these things allow AGI, I think, to emerge over the next 10 or 15 years where it wasn't possible for. The first thing is that the marginal cost of energy is zero. You're not going to pay for anything anymore, right? And we can double-click into why that is. And the second is the marginal cost of compute is zero. And so when you take the multiplication, or if you want to get really fancy mathematically, the convolution of these two things together, it's going to change everything. So think about what a billion dollars gets today. And we can use OpenAI as an example. A billion dollars gets OpenAI a handful of functional models and a pretty fast iterative loop, right? But imagine what OpenAI had to overcome. They had to overcome a compute challenge. They had to strip together a whole bunch of GPUs. They had to build all kinds of scaffolding software. They had to find data center support. That consumes all kinds of money. So that billion dollars didn't go that far. So it's a testament to how clever that OpenAI team is. But in four years from now, when energy costs zero and basically GPUs are like, you know, they're falling off a truck and you can use them effectively for free, now all of a sudden a billion dollars gives you some amount of teraflops of compute that is probably the total number of teraflops available today in the world. Like that's how gargantuan this move is when you take these two variables to zero. There's like a million things to ask. I almost don't wanna get distracted by the marginal cost of energy going to zero because I have no idea what you're talking about there. It's fascinating. Can I give you the 30 seconds? Sure, yes. So if you look inside of the two most progressive states, the three most progressive states, New York, California, and Massachusetts, a lot of left-leaning folks, a lot of people who believe in climate science and climate change, the energy costs in those three states are the worst they are in the entire country. And energy is compounding at three to 4% per annum. So every decade to 15 years, energy costs in these states double. In some cases and in some months, our energy costs are increasing by 11% a month. But the ability to actually generate energy is now effectively zero. The cost per kilowatt hour to put a solar panel on your roof and a battery wall inside your garage, it's the cheapest it's ever been. These things are the most efficient they've ever been. And so to acquire energy from the sun and store it for your use later on literally is a zero cost proposition. So how do you explain the gap between the cost going up? Great question. So this is the other side of regulatory capture, right? You know, we all fight to build monopolies. While there are monopolies hiding in plain sight, the utilities are a perfect example. There are a hundred million homes in America. There are about 1700 utilities in America. So they have captive markets. But in return for that captive market, the law says need to invest a certain amount per year in upgrading that power line, in changing out that turbine, in making sure you transition from coal to wind or whatever. Just as an example, upgrading power lines in the United States over the next decade is a $2 trillion proposition. These 1700 organizations have to spend, I think it's a quarter of a trillion dollars a year just to change the power lines. That is why, even though it costs nothing to make energy, you are paying double every seven or eight years. It's CapEx and OpEx of a very brittle old infrastructure. It's like you trying to build an app and being forced to build your own data center. And you say, but wait, I just want to write to AWS. I just want to use GCP. I just want to move on. All that complexity is solved for me. And some law says, no, you can't, you got to use it. So that's what consumers are dealing with, but it's also what industrial and manufacturing organizations, it's what we all deal with. So how do we get rid ourselves of this old infrastructure that we're paying for? The thing that's happening today, which I think is, this is why I think it's the most important trend right now in the world, is that 100 million homeowners are each going to become their own little power plant and compete with these 1700 utilities. And that is a great- In the United States or globally? No, just deal with the United States for a second, because I think it's easier to see here. 100 million homes, solar panel on the roof. And by the way, just to make it clear, the sun doesn't need to shine, right? These panels now work where you have these UV bands that can actually extrapolate beyond the visible spectrum. So they're usable in all weather conditions. And a simple system can support you collecting enough power to not just run your functional day-to-day life, but then to contribute what's left over back into the grid for Google's data center or Facebook's data center, where you get a small check. The cost is going to zero. How obvious is this to people? You're making this sound- Not obvious. Okay, so, because this is a pretty profound prediction. If the cost is indeed go to zero, that, I mean, the compute, the cost of compute going to zero, I can- So the cost of compute going to zero is- Can kind of understand. But the energy seems like a radical prediction of yours. Well, it's just naturally what's happening, right? Now, let me give you a different way of explaining this. If you look at any system, there's a really important thing that happens. It's what Clay Christensen calls crossing the chasm. If you explained it numerically, here's how I would explain it to you, Lex. If you introduce a disruptive product, typically what happens is the first three to 5% of people are these zealous believers, and they ignore all the logical reasons why this product doesn't make any sense, because they believe in the proposition of the future and they buy it. The problem is at 5%. If you want a product to get to mass market, you have one of two choices, which is you either bring the cost down low enough or the feature set becomes so compelling that even at a high price point. An example of the latter is the iPhone. The iPhone today, the 14 iPhone, costs more than the original iPhone. It's probably doubled in price over the last 14 or 15 years, but we view it as an essential element of what we need in our daily lives. It turns out that battery EVs and solar panels are an example of the former, because people like President Biden with all of these subsidies have now introduced so much money for people to just do this, where it is a money-making proposition for a hundred million homes. And what you're seeing as a result are all of these companies who want to get in front of that trend. Why? Because they want to own the relationship with a hundred million homeowners. They want to manage the power infrastructure, Amazon, Home Depot, Lowe's, you just name the company. So if you do that and you control that relationship, they're gonna show you, for example, Amazon will probably say, if you're a member of Prime, we'll stick the panels on your house for free. We'll do all the work for you for free. And it's just a feature of being a member of Prime. And we'll manage all that energy for you. It makes so much sense. And it is mathematically accretive for Amazon to do that. It's not accretive for the existing energy industry because they get blown up. It's extremely accretive for peace and prosperity. If you think the number of wars we fight over natural resources, take them all off the table if we don't need energy from abroad. There's no reason to fight. You'd have to find a reason to fight. Meaning, sorry, there'd be a moral reason to fight, but the last number of wars that we fought were not as much rooted in morality as they were rooted in. Yeah, it feels like they were very much rooted in conflict over resources, energy specifically. And then, sorry, just the last thing I wanna say, I keep interrupting, apologies, but the chips, what people want to say is that now that we're at two and three nanometer scale for typical kind of like transistor fab, we're done. And forget about transistor density, forget about Moore's Law, it's over. And I would just say, no. Look at teraflops. And really, teraflops is the combination of CPUs, but much and much less important, and really is the combination of ASICs, so application-specific ICs, and GPUs. And so you put the two together, I mean, if I gave you a billion dollars five years from now, the amount of damage you could do, damage in a good way, in terms of building racks and racks of GPUs, the kind of models that you could build, the training sets and the data that you could consume to solve a problem, it's enough to do something really powerful, whereas today it's not yet quite enough. So there's this really interesting idea that you talk about in terms of Facebook and Twitter that's connected to this, that if you were running sort of Twitter or Facebook, that you would move them all to like AWS. So you would have somebody else to compute the infrastructure. It probably, if you could explain that reasoning, means that you believe in this idea of energy going to zero, compute going to zero, so let people that are optimized in that do the best job. And I think that's, you know, the initially in the early 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, if you were big enough scale, oh, sorry, everybody was building their own stuff. Then between 2010 through 2020, really the idea was everybody should be on AWS except the biggest of the biggest folks. I think in the 2020s and 30s, I think the answer is actually everybody should be in these public clouds. And the reason is the engineering velocity of the guts. So, you know, take a simple example, which is, you know, we have not seen a massive iteration in database design until Snowflake, right? I think maybe Postgres was like the last big turn of the dial. Why is that? I don't exactly know, except that everybody that's on AWS and everybody that's on GCP and Azure gets to now benefit from a hundred plus billion dollars of aggregate market cap, rapidly iterating, making mistakes, fixing, solving, learning. And that is a best in class industry now, right? Then there's going to be all these AI layers around analytics so that app companies can make better decisions. All of these things will allow you to build more nimble organizations because you'll have this federated model of development. I'll take these things off the shelf. Maybe I'll roll my own stitching over here because the thing that where you make money is still for most people and how the apps provision an experience to a user. And everybody else can make a lot of money just servicing that. So they work in a really, they play well together in the sandbox. So in the future, everybody just should be there. It doesn't make sense for anybody, I don't think, because if you were to roll your own data centers, for example, like Google for a long time had these massive leaps where they had GFS and Bigtable. Those are really good in the 2000s and 2010s. And this is not just to throw shade at Google. It's very hard for whatever exists that is the progeny of GFS and Bigtable to be anywhere near as good as $100 billion industries attempt to build that stack. And you're putting your organization under enormous pressure to be that good. I guess the implied risk taken there is that you could become the next AWS. Like Tesla doing some of the compute in-house. I guess the bet there is that you can become the next AWS for the new wave of computation if that level, if that kind of computation is different. So if it's machine learning, I don't know if anyone's won that battle yet, which is machine learning centric compute. Well, I think that software has a very powerful property in that there's a lot of things that can happen asynchronously so that real-time inference can be actually really lightweight code deployment. And that's why I think you can have a very federated ecosystem inside of all of these places. Tesla is very different because in order to build the best car, it's kind of like trying to build the best iPhone, which is that you need to control it all the way down to the bare metal in order to do it well. And that's just not possible if you're trying to be a systems integrator, which is what everybody, other than this modern generation of car companies have been. And they've done a very good job of that, but it won't be the experience that allows you to win in the next 20 years. So let's linger on the social media thing. So you said if you ran Facebook for a day, let's extend that. If you were to build a new social network today, how would you fix Twitter? How would you fix social media? If you wanna answer a different question is if you were Elon Musk, somebody you know, and you were taking over Twitter, what would you fix? I've thought about this a little bit. First of all, let me give you a backdrop. I wouldn't actually build a social media company at all. And the answer is, the reasoning is the following. I really tend to believe, as you probably got in a sense, of sort of patterns and probabilities. And if you said to me, I cannot probabilistically answer where are we going in apps and social experiences, what I would say is, Lex, we spent the first decade building platforms and getting them to scale. And if you wanna think about it, again, back to sort of this poker analogy, others' mistakes minus your mistakes is the value. Well, the value that was captured was trillions of dollars, essentially to Apple and to Google. And they did that by basically attracting billions of monthly active users to their platform. Then this next wave were the apps, Facebook, QQ, Tencent, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, that whole panoply of apps. And interestingly, they were in many ways an atomized version of the platforms, right? They sat on top of them, they were an ecosystem participant, but the value they created was the same. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value, billions of monthly active users. Well, there's an interesting phenomenon that's kind of hiding in plain sight, which is that the next most obvious atomic unit are content creators. Now, let me give you two examples. Lex Friedman, this random crazy guy, Mr. Beast, Jimmy Donaldson, just the two of you alone, add it up, okay? And you guys are going to approach in the next five years a billion people. The only thing that you guys haven't figured out yet is how to capture trillions of dollars of value. Now, maybe you don't want to, and maybe that's not your stated mission. Right, right, but let's just look at Mr. Beast alone, because he is trying to do exactly that probably. Yeah, and I think Jimmy is gonna build an enormous business. But if you take Jimmy and all of the other content creators, right? You guys are atomizing what the apps have done. You're providing your own curated newsfeeds. You're providing your own curated communities. You're allowed, you let people move in and out of these things in a very lightweight way, and value is accruing to you. So the honest answer to your question is I would focus on the content creator side of things, because I believe that's where the puck is going. That's a much more important shift in how we all consume information and content and are entertained. It's through brands like you, individual people that we can humanize and understand are the filter. But aren't you just arguing against the point you made earlier, which is what you would recommend is the invest in the AGI, the depersonalization, because what- Because they could still be a participant. In that end state, if that happens, you have the option value of being an enabler of that, right? You can help improve what they do. Again, you can be this bare metal service provider where you can be a tax, right? You can participate in everything that you do, every question that's asked, every comment that's curated. If you could have more intelligence as you provide a service to your fans and your audience, you would probably pay a small percentage of that revenue. I suspect all content creators would. And so it's that stack of services that is like a smart human being. It's like, how do you help produce this information? You would pay a producer for that. I mean, maybe you would, but... So back to your question. So what would I do? I think that you have to move into that world pretty aggressively. I think that right now you first have to solve what is broken inside of these social networks. And I don't think it's a technical problem. So just to put it out there, I don't think it's a... It's one where there are these nefarious organizations. That happens, brigading XYZ, that happens. But the real problem is a psychological one that we're dealing with, which is people, through a whole set of situations, have lost belief in themselves. And I think that that comes up as this very virulent form of rejection that they tried to put into these social networks. So if you look inside of comments on anything, like you could have a person that says on Twitter, I saved this dog from a fiery building, and there would be negative commenters. And you're like, well, again, put yourself in their shoes. How do I steel man their case? I do this all the time. I get people throw shade at me. I'm like, okay, let me steel man their point of view. And the best that I can come up with is, I'm working really hard over here. I'm trying. I played by all the rules that were told to me. I've played well, I've played fairly, and I am not being rewarded in a system of value that you recognize. And that is making me mad. And now I need to cope and I need to vent. So back in the day, my dad used to drink. He would make me go get things to hit me with. Today, you go to Twitter, you spot off, you try to deal with the latent anger that you feel. So a social network has to be designed in my opinion to solve that psychological corner case, because it is what makes a network unusable. To get real density, you have to find a way of moving away from that toxicity because it ruins a product experience. You could have the best pixels in the world, but if people are virulently spitting into their keyboards, other people are just gonna say, you know what, I'm done with this. It doesn't make me feel good. So the social network has to have a social cost. You can do it in a couple of ways. One is where you have real world identity. So then there's a cost to being virulent and there's a cost to being caustic. A second way is to actually just overlay an economic framework so that there's a more pertinent economic value that you assign to basically spouting off. And the more you wanna spend, the more you can say. And I think both have a lot of value. I don't know what the right answer is. I tend to like the latter. I think real world identity shuts down a lot of debate because there's still too much, you know, there's a sensation that there'll be some retribution. So I think there's more free speech over here, but it cannot be costless, because in that there's a level of toxicity that just makes these products unusable. A third option, and by the way, all of these work together. If we look at this, what you call the corner case, which is hilarious, what I would call the human condition. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Uh. Which is, you know, that anger is rooted with the challenges of life. And what about having a, an algorithm that shows you what you see that's personalized to you and helps you maximize your personal growth in the long term such that you're challenging yourself, you're improving, you're learning. There's just enough of criticism to keep you on your toes, but just enough of like the dopamine rush to keep you entertained and finding that balance for each individual person. You just described an AGI of a very empathetic, well-rounded friend. Yes, exactly. And then you can throw that person, even anonymous, into a pool of discourse. 100%. And they would be better. I think you're absolutely right. That is a very, very, very elegant way of stating it. You're absolutely right. But like you said, the AGI might be a few years away, so that's a huge investment. My concern, my gut feeling is this thing we're calling AGI is actually not that difficult to build technically, but it requires a certain culture and it requires a certain risks to be taken. I think you could reductively boil down the human intellect into cognition and emotion. And depending on who you are and depending on the moment, they're weighted very differently, obviously. Cognition is so easily done by computers that we should assume that that's a soft problem. So our differentiation is the reasoning part. It's the emotional overlay. It's the empathy. It's the ability to steel man the opposite person's case and feel why that person, you can forgive them without excusing what they did, as an example. That is a very difficult thing, I think, to capture in software. But I think it's a matter of when, not if. If done crudely, it takes a form of censorship, just banning people off the platform. Let me ask you some tricky questions. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? No. What's the pro case? I'm having fun here. Can you steel man each side? Yeah. Let's steel man the get him off the platform. Here we have a guy who is virulent in all ways. He promotes confrontation. He lacks decorum. He incites the fervent believers of his cause to act up and push the boundaries bordering on and potentially even including breaking the law. He does not observe the social norms of a society that keep us well functioning, including an orderly transition of power. If he is left in a moment where he feels trapped and cornered, he could behave in ways that will confuse the people that believe in him to act in ways that they so regret that it could bring our democracy to an end or create so much damage or create a wound that's so deep it will take years of conflict and years of confrontation to heal it. We need to remove him and we need to do it now. It's been too long. We've let it go on too long. The other side of the argument would be he was a duly elected person whose views have been run over for way too long and he uses the ability to say extreme things in order to showcase how corrupt these systems have become and how insular these organizations are in protecting their own class. And so if you really wanna prevent class warfare and if you really wanna keep the American dream alive for everybody, we need to show that the First Amendment, the Constitution, the Second Amendment, all of this infrastructure is actually bigger than any partisan view, no matter how bad it is and that people will make their own decisions. And there are a lot of people that can see past the words he uses and focus on the substance of what he's trying to get across and more generally agree than disagree. And so when you silence that voice, what you're effectively saying is this is a rigged game and all of those things that we were told were not true are actually true. If you were to look at the crude algorithms of Twitter, of course I don't have any insider knowledge, but I could imagine that they saw the, let's say there's a metric that measures how negative the experience is of the platform and they probably saw in several ways, you could look at this, but the presence of Donald Trump on the platform was consistently increasing how shitty people are feeling. Short-term and long-term, because they're probably yelling at each other, having worse and worse and worse experience. If you even do a survey of how do you feel about using this platform over the last week, they would say horrible relative to maybe a year ago when Donald Trump was not actively tweeting or so on. So here you're sitting at Twitter and saying, okay, and I know everyone's talking about speech and all that kind of stuff, but I kind of want to build a platform where the users are happy and they're becoming more and more unhappy. How do I solve this happiness problem? Well, let's ban, let's, yeah, let's ban the sources of the unhappiness. Now we can't just say you're a source of unhappiness, we'll ban you. Let's wait until that source says something that we can claim breaks our rules, like incites violence or so on. That would work if you could measure your construct of happiness properly. The problem is I think what Twitter looked at were active commenters and got it confused for overall system happiness. Because for every piece of content that's created on the internet, of the hundred people that consume it, maybe one or two people comment on it. And so by over amplifying that signal and assuming that it was the plurality of people, that's where they actually made a huge blunder. Because there was no scientific method, I think, to get to the answer of deplatforming him. And it did expose this idea that it's a bit of a rigged game and that there are these deep biases that some of these organizations have to opinions that are counter to theirs and to their orthodox view of the world. So in general, you lean towards keeping, first of all, presidents on the platform, but also controversial voices. All the time. I think it's really important to keep them there. Let me ask you a tricky one in the recent news that's become especially relevant for me. What do you think about if you've been paying attention to Kanye West, a recent controversial outburst on social media about Jews, black people, racism in general, slavery, Holocaust, all of these topics that he touched on in different ways on different platforms, but including Twitter. What do you do with that? And what do you do with that from a platform perspective and what do you do from a humanity perspective of how to add love to the world? Let's, should we take both sides of that? Sure. Option one is he is completely out of line and option two is he's not. Just to simplify. Sure, right. So the path one is he's an incredibly important tastemaker in the world that defines the belief system for a lot of people and there just is no room for any form of racism or bias or antisemitism in today's day and age, particularly by people whose words and comments will be amplified around the world. We've already paid a large price for that and then the expectation of success is some amount of societal decorum that keeps moving the ball forward. The other side would say life, I think, goes from harmony to disharmony to repair and anybody who has gone through a very complicated divorce will tell you that in that moment, your life is extremely disharmonious and you are struggling to cope and because he is famous, we are seeing a person really struggling in a moment that may need help and we owe it to him, not for what he said, because that stuff isn't excusable, but we owe it to him to help him in a way and particularly his friends and if he has real friends, hopefully what they see is that. What I see on the outside looking in is a person that is clearly struggling. Can I ask you a human question? And I know it's outside looking in, but there's several questions I wanna ask. So one is about the pain of going through a divorce and having kids and all that kind of stuff and two, when you're rich and powerful and famous, I don't know, maybe you can enlighten me to which is the most corruptive, but how do you know who are the friends to trust? And so a lot of the world is calling Kanye insane or has mental illness, all that kind of stuff. And so how do you have friends close to you that say something like that message, but from a place of love and where they actually care for you as opposed to trying to get you to shut up? The reason I ask all those questions, I think, if you care about the guy, how do you help him? Right, I've been through a divorce, it's gut-wrenching. The most horrible part is having to tell your kids. I can't even describe to you how proud I am and how resilient these three beautiful little creatures were when my ex-wife and I had to sit them down and talk through it. And for that thing, I'll be just so protective of them and so proud of them and it's hard. Now, I don't know that that's what he went through, but it doesn't matter. In that moment, there's no fame, there's no money, there's nothing, there's just the raw intimacy of a nuclear family. Breaking up in that, there is a death and it's the death of that idea. And that is extremely, extremely profound in its impact, especially in your children. It is really hard, really hard. Could you have seen yourself in the way you see the world being clouded during, especially at first, to where you would make poor decisions outside of that nuclear family? So like poor business decisions, poor tweeting decisions, poor writing decisions. I think that if I had to boil down a lot of those, what I would say is that there are moments in my life, Lex, where I have felt meaningfully less than. And in those moments, the loop that I would fall into is I would look to cope and be seen by other people. So I would throw away all of the work I was doing around my own internal validation and I would try to say something or do something that would get the attention of others. And oftentimes, when that loop was unproductive, it's because those things had really crappy consequences. So that was, yeah, so yeah, I went through that as well. So I had to go through this disharmonious phase in my life and then to repair it. I had the benefit of meeting someone and building a relationship block by block where there was just enormous accountability, where my partner Nat has just incredible empathy but accountability. And so she can put herself in my shoes sometimes when I'm a really tough person to be around, but then she doesn't let me off the hook. She can forgive me, but it doesn't make what I may have said or whatever excusable. And that's been really healthy for me and it's helped me repair my relationships, be a better parent, be a better friend to my ex-wife who's a beautiful woman who I love deeply and will always love her. And it took me a few years to see that, that it was just a chapter that had come to an end, but she's an incredible mother and an incredible businesswoman. And I'm so thankful that I've had two incredible women in my life. That's like a blessing. But it's hard to find a person that has that. A lot of stuff you said is pretty profound, but having that person who has empathy and accountability. So basically that's ultimately what great friendship is, which is people that love you, have empathy for you, but can also call you out on your bullshit. She's a LeBron James-like figure. And the reason I say that is I've seen and met so many people. I've seen the distribution on the scale of friendship and empathy. She's the LeBron James of friendship. She's a goat. Well, what's so funny is like, we have a dinner around poker and it's taken on a life of its own, mostly because of her, because these guys look to her. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. She's taken, like, her registers are already full. She's thinking of all kinds of crap with me. But it's a very innate skill. And it's paired with, you know, but it's not just an emotional thing, meaning she's the person that I make all my decisions with. These decisions we're making together as a team. I've never understood that. You know, there's that African proverb, like go fast, go alone, go far, go together. And Lex, since I was born, I was by myself and I had to cope. And I didn't have a good toolkit to use into the world. And in these last five or six years, she's helped me. And at first my toolkit was literally like sticks, you know? And then I found a way to, you know, she helped me sharpen a little rock and that became a little knife, but even that was crap. And then she showed me fire and then I forged a knife. And that's what it feels like, where now this toolkit is like most average people. And I feel humbled to be average because I was here, down here on the ground. So it's made all these things more reasonable. So I see what comes from having deep, profound friendships and love to help you through these critical moments. I have another friend who I would say just completely unabashedly loves me, this guy, Rob Goldberg. He doesn't hold me accountable that much, which I love. Like I could say I killed a homeless person. He's like, ah, they probably deserve it. You know, whereas now it would be like, that was not good, what you just did. So, but I have both. I mean, I have Nat every day. You know, Rob, I don't talk to that often, but to have two people, I had zero. I think most people unfortunately have zero. So I think like what he needs is somebody to just listen. You don't have to put a label on these things. And you just have to try to guide in these very unique moments where you can just like deescalate what is going on in your mind. And I suspect what's going on in his mind, again, to play armchair quarterback, I don't know, is that he is in a moment where he just feels lower than low. And we all do it. We've all had these moments where we don't know how to get attention. And if you didn't grow up in a healthy environment, you may go through a negative way to get attention. And it's not to excuse it, but it's to understand it. That's so profound, the feeling less than, and at those low points, going externally to find it, and maybe creating conflict and scandal to get that attention. The way that my doctor explained it to me is you have to think about your self-worth like a knot. It's inside of a very complicated set of knots. So it's like some people don't have these knots. It's just presented to you on a platter. But for some of us, because of the way we grow up, it's covered in all these knots. So the whole goal is to loosen those knots. And it happens slowly, it happens unpredictably, and it takes a long time. And so while you're doing that, you are gonna have moments where when you feel less than, you're not prepared to look inside and say, actually, here's how I feel about myself. It's pretty cool, I'm happy with where I'm at. I have to ask on the topic of friendship. You do an amazing podcast called All In Podcast. People should stop listening to this and go listen to that. You just did your 100th episode. I mean, it's one of my favorite podcasts, it's incredible. For the technical and the human psychological wisdom that you guys constantly give in the way you analyze the world, but also just the chemistry between you. You're clearly, there's a tension, and there's a camaraderie that's all laid out on the table. So I don't know the two Davids that well, but I have met Jason. What do you love about him? I mean, I'll give you a little psychological breakdown of all three of these guys. Sure. Just my opinion, and I love you guys. Would they agree with your psychological breakdown? I don't know. I think that what I would say about J. Cal is he is unbelievably loyal to no end. And he's like any of those movies which are about like the mafia or whatever, where like something bad's going wrong and you need somebody to show up, that's J. Cal. So if you killed the said proverbial homeless person, he would be right there to help you. He'd have buried the body. But he's the one that he'll defend you in every way, shape, or form, even if it doesn't make sense in that moment. He doesn't see that as an action of whether it'll solve the problem. He sees that as an act of devotion to you, your friend. And that's an incredible gift that he gives us. The other side of it is that J. Cal needs to learn how to trust that other people love him back as much as he loves us. And that's where he makes mistakes because he assumes that he's not as lovable as the rest of us. But he's infinitely more lovable than he understands. I mean, you have to see Lex. He is unbelievably funny. I mean, I cannot tell you how funny this guy is. Next level funny. Yeah, his timing, everything. Timing, charm, the care he takes. So he is as lovable, but he doesn't believe himself to be. And that manifests itself in areas that drive us all crazy from time to time. Which makes it for a very pleasant listening experience. Okay, so what about the two Davids? David Sachs and David Friedberg? David Sachs is the one that I would say I have the most emotional connection with. He and I can go a year without talking, and then we'll talk for four hours straight. And then we know where we are. And we have this ability to pick up and have a level of intimacy with each other. And I think that's just because I've known David for so long now. That I find really comforting. And then Friedberg is this person who I think similar to me had a very turbulent upbringing, has fought through it to build an incredible life for himself. And I have this enormous respect for his journey. I don't particularly care about his outcomes, to be honest. But I just have, I look at that guy and I think, he did it. And so if I didn't do it, I would be glad that he did it, if it makes any sense. And you can see that he feels like his entire responsibility is really around his kids. And to kind of like give a better counterfactual. And sometimes I think he gets that right and wrong, but he's a very special human being that way. On that show, the two of you have a very kind of, like from a geopolitics perspective, I don't know, there's just a very effective way to think deeply about the world, the big picture of the world. He's a very systems level thinker, which I really, really like. That's a good way to put it, yeah. Very, very. Absolutely. Very systems level, so looking at everything. And he's very rooted in a broad body of knowledge, which I have a tremendous respect for. He brings all these things in. Sachs is incredible because he has this unbelievable understanding of things, but it has a core nucleus. So Friberg can just basically abstract a whole bunch of systems and talk about it. I tend to be more like that, where I try to kind of, I find it to be more of a puzzle. Sachs is more like anchored in a philosophical and historical context as the answer. And he starts there, but he gets to these profound understandings of systems as well. On the podcast, in life, you guys hold to your opinion pretty strong. What's the secret to being able to argue passionately with friends? So hold your position, but also not murder each other, which you guys seem to come close to. I think it's like strong opinions, weakly held. So I think that there's- Wait, is that a haiku or is it? Can you explain that, please? Yeah, like, you know, like, look, today, you and I, what if we steel man, like the two sides of three different things? Yeah. Now you could be confused and think, I believe in those things. I believe that it's important to be able to intellectually traverse there, whether I believe in it or not. And like steel man, not strong man. That's a really- But we intro those things by saying, let us steel man this position. Sometimes you guys skip the- We skip, you're right. We edit those things out and sometimes we'll sit on either sides and we'll just kind of bat things back and forth just to see what the other person thinks. So that's how, like, as fans, we should listen to that sometimes. Like, so sometimes, because you hold a strong opinion sometimes. Like, for example, the cost of energy going to zero. Is that, like, what's the degree of certainty on that? Is this kind of like you really taking a prediction of how the world will unroll? And if it does, this will benefit a huge amount of companies and people that will believe that idea. So you really, you spend a few days, a few weeks with that idea. I've been spending two years with that idea. And that idea has manifested into many pages and pages of more and more branches of a tree. But it started with that idea. So if you think about this tree, this logical tree that I built, I would consider it more of a mosaic. And at the base or root, however you want to talk about it, is this idea, the incremental cost of energy goes to zero. How does it manifest? And so I talked about one traversal, which is the competition of households versus utilities. But if even some of that comes to pass, we're going to see a bunch of other implications from a regulatory and technology perspective. If some of those come to pass. So I've tried to think sort of this, you know, six, seven, eight hops forward. And I have some, like to use the chess analogy, I have a bunch of short lines, which I think can work. And I've started to test those by making investments, tens of millions over here to a hundred millions over there. But it's a distribution based on how probabilistic I think these outcomes are and how downside protected I can be and how much I will learn, how many mistakes I can make, you know, et cetera. And then very quickly over the next two years, some of those things will happen or not happen. And I will rapidly re-underwrite. And I'll rewrite that tree. And then I'll get some more data. I'll make some more investments and I'll rapidly re-underwrite. So, you know, in order for me to get to this tree, maybe you can ask, how did I get there? It was complete accident. The way that it happened was I have a friend of mine who works at a great organization called Fortress. His name is Drew McKnight. And he called me one day and he said, hey, I'm doing a deal. Will you anchor it? We're going public. And it's a rare earth mining company. And I said, Drew, like if I'm gonna get tarred and feathered in Silicon Valley for backing a mining company. And he said, Chamath, just talk to the guy and learn. And the guy, Jim Latinsky blew me away. He's like, here's what it means for energy. And here's what it means for the supply chain. Here's what it means for the United States versus China. But Lex, I did that deal and then I did seven others. And that deal made money. The seven others did not. But I learned, I made enough mistakes where the net of it was I got to a thesis that I believed in, I could see it. And I was like, okay, I paid the price. I acquired the learning. I made my mistakes. I know where I am at. And this is step one. And then I learned a little bit more. I made some more investments. And that's how I do the job. The minute that you try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet either on yourself or a company, a girlfriend, whatever, it's too late. So if we just linger on that tree, it seems like a lot of geopolitics, a lot of international military even conflict is around energy. So how does your thinking about energy connect to what you see happening in the next 10, 20 years? Maybe you can look at the war in Ukraine or relationship with China and other places through this lens of energy. What's the hopeful, what's the cynical trajectory that the world might take through with this drive towards zero energy, zero cost energy? So the United States was in a period of energy surplus until the last few years, some number of years in Trump. And I think some number of now the current administration with President Biden. But we know what it means to basically have more than enough energy to fund our own domestic manufacturing and living standards. And I think that by being able to generate this energy from the sun, that is very capex efficient, that is very climate efficient, gives us a huge tailwind. The second thing is that we are now in a world, in a regime for many years to come of non-zero interest rates. And it may interest you to know that the really the last time that we had long dated wars supported at low interest rates was World War II, where I think the average interest rates was like 1.07% in the 10 year. And every other war tends to have these very quick open and closes because these long protracted fights get very difficult to finance when rates are non-zero. So just as an example, even starting in 2023, so the practical example today in the United States is President Biden's budget is about 1.5 trillion for next year. That's not including the entitlement spending, meaning Medicare, Social Security, right? So the stuff that he wants to spend that he has discretion over is about 1.582 trillion is the exact number. Next year, our interest payments are going to be $455 billion. That's 29% of every budget dollar is going to pay interest. So you have these two worlds coming together, right, Lex? If you have us, you know, hurtling forward to being able to generate our own energy and the economic peril that comes with trying to underwrite several trillion dollars for war, which we can't afford to pay when rates are at 5%, means that despite all the bluster, the probabilistic distribution of us engaging in war with Russia and Ukraine seems relatively low. The override would obviously be a moral reason to do it. That may or may not come if there's some nuclear proliferation. But now you have to steel man the other side of the equation, which is, well, what were to happen if you were sitting there and you were Putin? Let's steel man setting off a tactical nuke someplace. Okay, I'm getting calls every other day from my two largest energy buyers, India and China, telling me, slow my roll. I have the entire world looking to find the final excuse to turn me off and unplug me from the entire world economy. The only morally reprehensible thing that's left in my arsenal that could do all of these things together would be to set off a tac nuke. I would be the only person since World War II to have done that. I mean, it seems like it's a really, really, really big step to take. And so I think that X of the clamoring for war that the military industrial complex wants us to buy into, the financial reasons to do it and the natural resources needs to do it are making it very unlikely. That is not just true for us. I think it's also true for Europe. I think the European economy is going to roll over. I think it's going, I see a very hard landing for them, which means that if the economy slows down, there's gonna be less need for energy. And so it starts to become a thing where a negotiated settlement is actually the win-win for everybody. But none of this would be possible without zero interest rates. In a world of zero interest rates, we would be in war. So you believe in the financial forces and pressures overpowering the human ones? I believe in the invisible hands. I really do believe in the invisible hands. Even in international war? More so there. I think the invisible hand, and by the invisible hand for the audience, I think really what it means is the financial complex and really the central bank complex and the interplay between fiscal and monetary policy is a very convoluted and complicated set of things. But if we had zero interest rates, we would be probably in the middle of it now. See, there's a complexity to this game at the international level where some nations are authoritarian and there's significant corruption. And so that adds, from a game theoretic optimal perspective, the invisible hand is operating in the mud. Preventing war. The person that is the most important figure in the world right now is Jerome Powell. He is probably doing more to prevent war than anybody else. He keeps ratcheting rates. It's just impossible. It's a mathematical impossibility for the United States unless there is such a cataclysmic moral transgression by Russia. So there is tail risk that it is possible where we say, forget it, all bets are off. We're going back to zero rates. Issue a hundred year bond. We're gonna finance a war machine. There is a small risk of that. But I think the majority of outcomes is more of a negotiated settlement. So what about, I mean, what's the motivation of Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place? If financial forces are the most powerful forces, the most powerful forces, why did it happen? Because it seems like there's other forces at play of maintaining superpower status on the world stage. It seems like geopolitics doesn't happen just with the invisible hand in consideration. I agree with that. I can't beg to know, to be honest. I don't know. But he did it. And I think it's easier for me to guess the outcome from here. It would have been impossible for me to really understand. It is what got him to this place. But it seems like there's an end game here and there's not much playability. Yeah, I feel like I'm on unsteady ground because there's been so many experts at every stage of this that have been wrong. But there are no experts. Well, on this. There are no experts, Lex. I understand this. Well, let's dig into that. Because we just said Phil Hellmuth is the greatest poker player of all time. He has an opinion. Yeah. He doesn't, they would be mistaken. Phil Ivey, expert at poker. Phil has an opinion. Ivey has an opinion as well on how to play all these games. Meaning an opinion means here's the lines I take, here are the decisions I make. I live and die by those. And if I'm right, I win, if I'm wrong, I lose. I've made more mistakes than my opponent. I thought you said there's an optimal. So aren't there people that have a deeper understanding, a higher likelihood of being able to describe and know the optimal set of actions here at every layer? Well, there may be a theoretically set of optimal decisions, but you can't play your life against a computer. Like meaning the minute that you face an opponent and that person takes you off that optimal path, you have to adjust. Yeah. Like what happens if a tactical nuke? It would be really bad. I think the world is resilient enough. I think the Ukrainians are resilient enough to overcome it. It would be really bad. It's just an incredibly sad moment in human history. But do you wonder what US does? Is there any understanding? Do you think people inside the United States understand? Not the regular citizens, but people in the military. Do you think Joe Biden understands? Do you think? I think Joe Biden does understand. I think that- You think they have a clear plan? I think that there are few reasons to let the gerontocracy rule, but this is one of the reasons where I think they are better adept than other people. Folks that were around during the Bay of Pigs, folks that hopefully have studied that and studied nuclear de-escalation will have a better playbook than I do. My suspicion is that there is a, in an emergency break glass plan. And I think before military intervention or anything else, I think that there are an enormous number of financial sanctions that you can do to just completely cripple Russia that they haven't undertaken yet. And if you couple that with an economic system in Europe that is less and less in need of energy, because it is going into a recession, it makes it easier for them to be able to walk away while the US ships a bunch of LNG over there. So I don't know the game theory on all of this, but does it make you nervous that or are we just being temperamental? It feels like the world hangs in a balance. Like it feels like, at least from my naive perspective, I thought we were getting to a place where surely human civilization can't destroy itself. And here's a presentation of what looks like a hot war where multiple parties involved in escalating, escalation towards a world war is not entirely out of the realm of possibility. It's not. I would really, really hope that he is spending time with his two young twins. Well, this is part of what I- I really hope he's spending time with his kids. Agreed, but not kids, not just kids, but friends. And the- I'm not sure that he may not have friends, but it's very hard for anybody to look at their kids and not think about protecting the future. Well, there's partially because of the pandemic, but partially because of the nature of power, it feels like you're surrounded by people you can't trust more and more. I do think the pandemic had an effect on that too, the isolating effect. A lot of people were not their best selves during the pandemic. From a super heavy topic, let me go back to the space where you're one of the most successful people in the world. How to build companies, how to find good companies, what it takes to find good companies, what it takes to build good companies. What advice do you have for someone who wants to build the next super successful startup in the tech space and have a chance to be impactful, like Facebook, Apple? That's, I think that's the key word. If your precondition is to start something successful, you've already failed because now you're playing somebody else's game. What success means is not clear. You're walking into the woods, it's murky, it's dark, it's wet, it's raining, there's all these animals about. There's no comfort there. So you better really like hiking. And there's no short way to shortcut that. So- Isn't it obvious what success is? Success is scale, so it's not what are the- No, I think that there's a very brittle, basic definition of success that's outside in. But it's not, that's not what it is. I know people that are much, much, much richer than I am, and they are just so completely broken. And I think to myself, the only difference between you and me is outsider's perception of your wealth versus mine. But the happiness and the joy that I have in the simple, basic routines of my life give me enormous joy. And so I feel successful, no matter what anybody says about my success or lack of success. There are people that live normal lives, that have good jobs, that have good families. I've had this like idyllic sense, like I see it on TikTok all the time, so I know it exists. These neighborhoods where there's like a cul-de-sac and these beautiful homes and these kids are biking around. And every time I see that, Lex, I immediately flashback to what I didn't have. And I think that's success. Look at how happy those kids are. So no, there is no one definition. And so if people are starting out to try to make a million dollars, a hundred million dollars, a billion dollars, you're gonna fail. There's a definition of personal success, but is there's also some level of, that's different from person to person, but is there's also some level of the responsibility you have if there's a mission to have a positive impact on the world? So I'm not sure that Elon is happy. No. In fact, I think if you focus on trying to have an impact on the world, I think you're gonna end up deeply unhappy. But does that matter? Like why does your own personal happiness matter? It may happen as a by-product, but I think that you should strive to find your own personal happiness and then measure how that manifests as it relates to society and to other people. But if the answer to those questions is zero, that doesn't make you less of a person. No, 100%, but then the other way, is there times when you just sacrifice your own personal happiness for a bigger thing that you've created? Yeah, if you're in a position to do it, I think some folks are tested. Elon is probably the best example. And it must be really, really hard to be him. Really hard. I have enormous levels of empathy and care for him. I really love him as a person because I just see that it's not that fun. And he has these ways of being human that in his position I just think are so dear that I just hope he never loses them. Just a simple example, like two days ago, I don't know why, but I went on Twitter and I saw the perfume thing. So I'm like, ah, fuck it, I'm just gonna go buy some perfume. So I bought his perfume, the burnt hair thing. And I emailed him the receipt and I'm like, all right, you got me for a bottle. And he responded in like eight seconds and it was just a smiley face or whatever. Just deeply normal things that you do amongst people that are just, so nobody sees that, you know what I mean? But it would be, he deserves for that stuff to be seen because the rest of his life is so brutally hard. He's just a normal guy that is just caught in this ultra mega vortex. Why do you think there's so few Elons? It's an extremely lonely set of trade-offs. Because to your point, if you get tested, so if you think about it again probabilistically, there's eight billion people in the world. Maybe 50 of them get put in a position where they are building something of such colossal importance that they even have this choice. And then of that 50, maybe 10 of them are put in a moment where they actually have to make a trade-off. You're not gonna be able to see your family. I'm making this up. You're not gonna be able to see your family. You're gonna have to basically move into your factory. You're gonna have to sleep on the floor. But here's the outcome, energy independence and resource abundance and a massive peace dividend. And then he says to himself, I don't know that he did because I've never had this, yeah, you know what? That's worth it. And then you look at your kids and you're like, I'm making this decision. I don't know how to explain that to you. You wanna be in that position? There's no amount of money where I would wanna be in that position. So that takes an enormous fortitude and a moral compass that he has. And that's what I think people need to appreciate about that guy. It's also on the first number you said, it's confusing that there's 50 people or 10 people like that are put in the position to have that level of impact. It's unclear that that has to be that way. It seems like there could be much more. There should be. There's definitely people with the potential. But think about his journey. His mom had to leave a very complicated environment, move to Canada, move to Toronto, a small apartment just North of Bayon Bloor. If you've ever been to Toronto. I remember talking to her about this apartment. It's so crazy because I used to live around the corner from that place and raise these three kids and just have to... So how many people are gonna start with those boundary conditions and really grind it out? It's just very few people in the end that will have the resiliency to stick it through where you don't give into the self-doubt. And so it's just a really hard set of boundary conditions where you can have 50 or 100 of these people. That's why they need to be really appreciated. Yeah. Well, that's true for all humans that follow the thread of their passion and do something beautiful in this world. That could be on a small scale or a big scale. Appreciation is a... That's a gift you give to the other person, but also a gift to yourself. That somehow it becomes like this contagious thing. I went to this... You are so right. You just like... My brain just lit up because yesterday I went to an investor day of my friend of mine, described Brad Gerstner. And on the one very reductive world, Brad and I are theoretically competitors, but we're not. He makes his own set of decisions. I make my own set of decisions. We're both trying to do our own view of what is good work in the world, but he's been profoundly successful. And it was really the first moment of my adult life where I could sit in a moment like that and really be appreciative of his success and not feel less than. And so, a little selfishly for me, but mostly for him as well, I was so proud to be in the room. That's my friend. That guy plays poker with me every Thursday. He is crushing it. I, it's awesome. And that's the... It's a really amazing feeling. I mean, to linger on the trade-offs, the complicated trade-offs with all of this, what's your take on work-life balance in a company that's trying to do big things? I think that you have to have some very, very strict boundaries, but otherwise I think balance is kind of dumb. It will make you limited. I think you need to immerse yourself in the problem, but you need to define that immersion with boundaries. So if you ask me, what does my process look like? It's monotonous and regimented, but it's all the time except when it's not. And that's also monotonous and regimented. And I think that makes me very good at my craft because it gives me what I need to stay connected to the problem without feeling resentful about the problem. Which part, the monotonous all-in nature of it, or the, when you say hard boundaries, essentially go all out until you stop and you don't stop often. I'm in a little bit of a quandary right now because I'm trying to redefine my goals. And you're catching me in a moment where I have even in these last few years of evolution, I think I've made some good progress, but in one very specific way, I'm still very reptilian. And I'm trying to let go. Which way is that exactly? If you can- In my business, it really gets reduced to what is your annual rate of compounding? That's my demarcation. Steph Curry and LeBron James, Michael Jordan, it's how many points did you average? Not just in a season, but over your career. And in their case, to really be the greatest of all time, it's points, rebounds, assists, steals. There's all kinds of measures to be in that pantheon of being really, really good at your craft. And in my business, it's very reductive. It's how well have you compounded? And if you look at all the heroes that I have put on a pedestal in my mind, they've compounded at above 30% for a very long time, as have I. But now I feel like I really need to let go because I think I know how to do the basics of my job. And if I had to summarize an investing challenge or investing, I think really it's, when you first start out investing, you're a momentum person. You saw it in GameStop, just a bunch of people aping each other. And then it goes from momentum to you start to think about cash flows. How much profit is this person gonna make? Whatever, so that's like the evolution. This is the basic thing to, this is a reasonably sophisticated way. Then a much smaller group of people think about it in terms of macro geopolitics. But then a very finite few crack this special code, which is there's a philosophy and it's the philosophy that creates the system. And I'm scratching at that furiously, but I cannot break through and I haven't broken through. And I know that in order to break through, I gotta let go. So this is the journey that I'm in as in my professional life. So it is an all-consuming thing, but I'm always home for dinner. We have very prescribed moments where we take vacation. The weekends, like if I can tell you about my week, if you're curious, but it's like. I would love to know your week. It's since it's regimented monotonous. I woke up, I wake up at 6.45, get the kids, go downstairs. We all have some form of not super healthy breakfast. I make a latte, I've become in. And the latte is like, I have a machine. I measure the beans. I make sure that the timer is such where I have to pull it for a certain specific ratio. Just so you know, 20 grams, I got to pull 30 grams with the water and I got to do it in 30 seconds, et cetera. So you're a coffee snob. It helps me stay in rhythm. Sure. Before I used to have another machine, I just pushed a button. But then I would push the button religiously in the exact same way. You know what I mean? Can I say actually on that topic, the morning with kids can be a pretty stressful thing. Are you able to find sort of happiness? Is that also that morning is a source of happiness? It's great. My kids are lovely. They're maniacs. I just see, you know, and maybe I don't, I've never asked Friedberg this, but I'll just put my words. I see all of the things in moments where there was no compassion given to me. And so I just give him a ton of love and compassion. I have an infinite patience for my children, not for other kids. Yes, of course. But for my kids. So anyway, so we have a breakfast thing. And then I go upstairs and I change and I work out from eight to nine. And that's like the first 15 minutes I walk up on a steep incline, you know, 12 to 14%, you know, three and a half to four miles per hour walk. And then, you know, Monday's a push day, Tuesday's front of the legs, Wednesday's pull, Thursday's back of the legs, eight to nine. Monday, I always start, I talk to my therapist from nine to 10. So as soon as I finished working out, I get on the phone and I talk to him. And it helps me lock in for the week. And I'm just talking about the past. And it's just helping me. The recent past? Usually, sometimes the recent past, but usually it's about the past past. Something that I remember when I was a kid. Because that's the work about just loosening those knots. You know? So I put in that hour of work, respect that hour. Then I'm in the office. And then it's like, you know, I go until 12, 15, 12, 30, go home, have lunch, like a proper, like go home, sit down, have lunch with Nat, talk, she leaves her work. And we talk, how are we doing? You know, just check in. Our youngest daughter will be there because she's one and she's making a mess. And then I'll have another coffee. That's it, my limit for the day. Oh, no more caffeine. That's it. And then I go back to the office and I'll be there until six, seven sometimes. And I do that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I'm allowed to have meetings. Wednesday, nothing, it's all reading, must be. Unless it's a complete emergency, it has to be kind of a full reading. And reading is a bunch of blogs, YouTube videos. So no, try not to do any talking. No talking. It's like being in silence, being present, thinking about things. By the way, how do you take notes? Do you have a- A sketch, I have a pad and I write stuff down. Sometimes I go to my phone. I'm a little all over the place. Sometimes I do Google Docs. I don't have, this is one thing I need to get better at actually. But typically what happens is I actually do a lot of thinking in my mind and I'm sort of filing a lot of stuff away and then it all spills out and then I have to write. And then that gives me a body of work that I can evaluate and think about. And then I usually put it away. And a lot of the time it goes nowhere. But every now and then I come back to it and it just unlocks two or three things and I have a sense of how else I'm thinking about things. And then Friday at the end of the day, Nat and I talked to a couples therapist and that's about checking out properly. So it's like, okay, now it's like focusing. The weekend is family, being present, being aware. And if there's email, obviously. If I have to do meetings from time to time, no problem. But there's boundaries. Checking out properly, oh man, that is so powerful. Just like officially transitioning. Yeah, so these are really important boundaries so that I can be immersed. And what that means is like, look, on a Saturday afternoon, on a random day, she'll be like, where's Chamath? And I'll be up in my room and I've found a podcast talking about like DSIS, which is like ductal cancer in situ because I've been fascinated about breast cancer surgeries for a while and learning about that. And she's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm listening to a podcast about DSIS. And she's like, what's that? I'm like, you know, ductal cancer in situ. She's like, okay. And so I have time to continue to just constantly learning, learning, putting stuff in my memory banks to organize into something. And that's like a, that's a week. But then in these fixed moments of time, phone down, everything down, we go on vacation, you know, we go on a boat, we go to whatever, where it's just us and the kids. Is there a structure when you're at work? Is there a structure to your day in terms of meetings, in terms of South Side of Wednesday? You know, cause you're- Have to keep meetings to less than 30 minutes. Have to. And, you know, oftentimes meetings can be as short as like 10 or 15 minutes because then I'm just like, okay. Cause I'm trying to reinforce that it's very rare that we all have something really important to say. And so the ritual that is becomes really valuable to get scale is not the ritual of meetings, but the ritual of respecting the collective time of the unit. And so it's like, you know what, folks, I'm gonna assume that you guys are also tackling really important projects. You also wanna have good boundaries in this immersion. Go back to your kids and have dinner with them every night. It's not just for me, it's for you. So how about this? Why don't you go and do your work? This meeting didn't need to be 30 minutes. It could be five. And the rest of the time is yours. And it's weird because when people join that system at Social Capital, they just, it's like FaceTime and it's like, let me make sure, and let me talk a lot. It's like, I don't say anything. I respect the person that says nothing for two years. And the first thing that they say is not obvious. That person is immensely more valuable than the person that tries to talk all the time. What have you learned from your, so after Facebook, you started Social Capital, or what is now called Social Capital. What have you learned from all the successful investing you've done there? About investing or about life? Or about running a team? I'm very loath to give advice because I think so much of it is situational. But my observation is that starting a business is really hard, any kind of business. And most people don't know what they're doing. And as a result, we make enormous mistakes. But I would summarize this, and this may be a little heterodoxical. I think there are only three kinds of mistakes. Because if we go back to what we said before, in the business, it's just learning. You're exploring the dark space to get to the answer faster than other people. And those, the mistakes that you make are three. Or the three kinds of decisions, let's say. You'll hire somebody, and they're really, really, really average, but they're a really good person. Oh yeah. You'll hire somebody, and they really weren't candid with who they are, and their real personality, and their morality, and their ethics only expose them over a long period of time. And then you hire somebody, and they're not that good, morally, but they're highly performant. What do you do with those three things? And I think successful companies have figured out how to answer those three things, because those are the things that, in my opinion, determine success and failure. So it's basically hiring, and you just identified three failure cases for hiring. But very different failure cases, and very complicated ones, right? Like the highly performant person who's not that great as a human being, do you keep them around? Well, a lot of people would err towards keeping that person around. What is the right answer? I don't know. It's the context of the situation. And the second one is also very tricky. What about if they really turned out that they were just not candid with who they are, and it took you a long time to figure out who you were? These are all mistakes of the senior person that's running this organization. I think if you can learn to manage those situations well, those are the real edge cases where you can make mistakes that are fatal to a company. Yeah, that's what I've learned over 11 1⁄2 years. Honestly. Otherwise, the business of investing, I feel that it's a secret. And if you are willing to just keep chipping away, you'll peel back enough of these, you know, layers will come off and you'll see it, the scales will come off, and you'll eventually see it. I really struggle with, maybe you can be my therapist for a little bit, with that first case which you originally mentioned. Because I love people, I see the good in people, I really struggle with just a mediocre performing person who's a good human being. That's a tough one. I'll let you off the hook. Yeah. I think those are incredibly important and useful people. I think that if a company is like a body, they are like cartilage. Can you replace cartilage? Yeah. But would you if he didn't have to? No. Okay, can I play devil's advocate? Yeah. So those folks, because of their goodness, make it okay to be mediocre. They create a culture where, well, what's important in life, which is something I agree in my personal life, is to be good to each other, to be friendly, to be good vibes, all that kind of stuff. You know, when I was at Google, just like the good atmosphere, everyone's playing, it's fun, fun, right? But to me, when I put on my hat of having a mission and a goal, what I love to see is the superstars that shine in some way, like do something incredible. And I want everyone to also admire that those superstars, perhaps not just for the productivity's sake or performing or successful company's sake, but because that too is an incredible thing that humans are able to accomplish, which is shine. I hear you, but that's not a decision you make, meaning you get lucky when you have those people in your company. That's not the hard part for you. The hard part is figuring out what to do with one, two, and three. Keep, demote, promote, fire. What do you do? And this is why it's all about those three buckets. I personally believe that folks in that bucket one, as long as those folks aren't more than 50 to 60% of a company, are good. And they can be managed as long as they are one to two degrees away from one of those people that you just mentioned. Because it's easy then to drag the entire company down if they're too far away from the LeBron James, because you don't know what LeBron James looks and feels and smells. And so you need that tactile sense of what excellence looks like in front of you. A great example is if you just go on YouTube and you search these clips of how Kobe Bryant's teammates described, not Kobe, but how their own behavior, not performance, because there was a bunch of average people that Kobe played with his whole career, but their behavior changed by being somewhat closer to him. And I think that's an important psychological thing to note for how you can do reasonably good team construction. If you're lucky enough to find those generational talents, you have to find a composition of a team that keeps them roughly close to enough of the org. That way that group of people can continue to add value, and then you'll have courage to fire these next two groups of people. And I think the answer is to fire those two groups of people. Because no matter how good you are, that stuff just injects poison into a living organism, and that living organism will die when exposed to poison. So you invest in a lot of companies, you've looked at a lot of companies. What do you think makes for a good leader? So we talked about building a team, but a good leader for a company. What are the qualities? When I first meet people, I never ask to see a resume. And when I'm meeting a company CEO for the first time, I couldn't care less about the business, in fact. And I try to take the time to let them reveal themselves. Now in this environment, I'm doing most of the talking. But if this were the other way around, and you were ever raising capital, and you said, Shmoth, I'd be interested in you looking at this business, I'd probably say eight to 10 words for hours. And just listen. Prod, you know, I throw things out, prod. And I let you meander. And in you meandering, I'm trying to build a sense of who this person is. Once I have a rough sense of that, which is not necessarily right, but it's a starting point, then I can go and understand why this idea makes sense in this moment. And what I'm really trying to do is just kind of like, unpack where are the biases that may make you fail. And then we go back to you. The thing that Silicon Valley has the benefit of though, is that they don't have to do any of this stuff if there's momentum. Because then the rule book goes out the window and people clamor to invest. So one of the things that I do, and this is again, back to this pugilism that I inflict on myself, is I have these two things that I look at. Thing number one is I have a table that says, how much should we make from all of our best investments? How much should we lose from all of our worst investments? What is the ratio of winners to losers over 11 years? And in our case, it's 23 to one. On, you know, billions of dollars. So you can kind of like, you can see a lot of signal. But what that allows me to do is really like say, wait a minute, like we cannot violate these rules around how much money we're willing to commit in an errant personality. The second is I ask myself, of all the other top VCs in Silicon Valley, name them all, what's our correlation? Meaning when I do a deal, how often does anybody from Sequoia, Excel, Benchmark, Kleiner, you name it, do it at the same time or after and vice versa? And then I look at the data to see how much they do it amongst themselves. What's a good sign? Well, I'm at zero, as virtually close to zero as possible. And that's a good thing. Well, it's not a good thing when the markets are way, way up because it creates an enormous amount of momentum. So I have to make money the hard way. I have to, you know, cause I'm trafficking in things that are highly uncorrelated to the gestalt of Silicon Valley, which can be a lonely business, but it's really valuable in moments where markets get crushed because correlation is the first thing that causes massive destruction of capital, massive. Because one person all of a sudden with one blow up in one company, boom, the contagion hits everybody except the person that was, you know, not. And so now those are like more sophisticated elements of risk management, which is again, this pugilism that I inflict on my, nobody asks me to do that. Nobody actually at some level when the markets are up really care. And when markets are sideways or when markets are down, I think that that allows me to feel proud of our process. You know? But that requires you to think a lot. A lot. Outside of the box, it's lonely cause you're taking risks. Also your public personality. So you say stuff that if it's wrong, you get yelled at for constantly, for being, I mean, your mistakes aren't private. No. And that's something that has been a really, really healthy moment of growth. It's like an athlete. You know, if you really want to be a winner, you got to hit the shot in front of the fans. And if you miss it, you have to be willing to take the responsibility of the fact that you bricked it. And over time, hopefully there's a body of work that says you've generally hit more than you've missed. But if you look at even the best shooters, what are they? 52%. So these are razor thin margins at the end of the day, which is really, so then what can you control? I can't control the defense. I can't control what they throw at me. I can just control my preparation and whether I'm in the best position to launch a reasonable shot. You said that the world's first trillionaire will be somebody in climate change in the past. Yeah. Let's update that. What's today, as we stand here today, what sector will the world's first trillionaire come from? Yeah, I think it's energy transition. So energy, so the things we've been talking about. Yeah. So really, So isn't it, okay. Well, I think the way that I think about, So this is a single individual, sorry to interrupt. You see their ability to actually build a company that makes huge amount of money as opposed to this distributed idea that you've been talking about. Yeah, I'll give you my philosophy on wealth. Most of it is not you. An enormous amount of it is the genetic distribution of being born in the right place and blah, blah, blah, irrespective of the boundary conditions of how you were born or where you were raised, right? So, at the end of the day, you and I ended up in the United States. It's a huge benefit to us. Second is the benefit of our age. It's much better and much more likely to be successful as a 46 year old in 2023 than a 26 year old in 2023. Because in my case, I have demographics working for me. For the 26 year old, he or she has demographics working slightly against them. Can you explain that a little bit? What are the demographics here? In the case of me, the distribution of population in America looks like a pyramid. And in that pyramid, I'm wedged in between these two massive population cohorts, the boomers and then these, you know, Gen Z and millennials. And that's a very advantageous position. It's not dissimilar to the position that Buffett was, where he was, you know, packaged in between boomers beneath him and the silent generation above him. And being in between two massive population cohorts turns out to be extremely advantageous because when the cohort above you transitions power and capital and all of this stuff, you're the next person that's likely gets handed it. So we have a disproportionate likelihood to be, you know, we are lucky to be older than younger. So that's an advantage. And then the other advantage that has nothing to do with me is that I stumbled into technology. I got a degree in electrical engineering and I ended up coming to Silicon Valley. And it turned out that in that moment, it was such a transformational wind of change that was at my back, right? So the wealth that one creates is a huge part of those variables. And then the last variable is your direct contributions in that moment. And the reason why that can create extreme wealth is because when those things come together at the right moment, it's like a chemical reaction. I mean, it's just crazy. So that was sort of part number one of what I wanted to say. The second thing is when you look then inside of these systems where you have all these tailwinds, right? So in tech, I think I benefit from these three big tailwinds. If you build a company or are part of a company or a part of a movement, your economic participation tends to be a direct byproduct of the actual value that that thing creates in the world. And the thing that that creates in the world will be bigger if it is not just an economic system, but it's like a philosophical system. It changes the way that governance happens. It changes the way that people think about all kinds of other things about their lives. So there's a reason, I think, why database companies are worth X, social companies are worth Y, but the military industrial complex is worth as much. And I think there is a reason why that if you, for example, were to go off and build some newfangled source of energy that's clean and hyperabundant and safe, that what you're really going to displace or reshape is trillions and trillions of dollars of worldwide GDP. So the global GDP is, I call it 85 trillion, right? It's going at two to 3% a year. So in the next 10 years, we'll be dealing with $100 trillion of GDP, right? Somebody who develops clean energy in 2035 will probably shift 10% of that around, $10 trillion. A company can easily capture 30% of a market, $3 trillion. A human being can typically own a third of one of these companies, $1 trillion. So you can kind of get to this answer where it's like, it's going to happen in our lifetime, but you have to, I think, find these systems that are so gargantuan and they exist today. It's more bounded because price discovery takes longer. In an existing thing, it's more unbounded because you know what it is. You know the tentacles that energy reaches, right? Of that $80 trillion of worldwide GDP, I bet you if you added up all the energy companies, but then you added up all of manufacturing, if you added up all of transport, you'd probably get to like 60 of the 80. Do you have an idea of which energy, which alternate energy, sustainable energy is the most promising? Well, I think that we have to do a better job of exploring what I call the suburbs of the periodic table. So, you know, we're really good in Seattle, you know, the upper Northwest. Yes. You know, we're kind of good in Portland, but we're non-existent in San Diego and we have zero plan for North Carolina through Florida. Yeah. And so. Is that a fancy way of saying nuclear should be part of the discussion? I think nuclear, I mean, room temperature semiconductors. I'm not convinced right now that the existing set of nuclear solutions will do a good job of scaling beyond bench scale. I think there is a lot of complicated technical problems that make it work at a bench scale level, even partially, but the energy equation is gonna be very difficult to overcome in the absence of some leaps in material science. Have you seen any leaps? Is there promising stuff? Like you're seeing the cutting edge from a company perspective. Yeah, I would say not yet, but the precursor, yes. I have been spending a fair amount of time, so talking about like a new framework that's in my mind, is around these room temp superconductors. And so I've been kind of bumbling around in that forest for about a year. I haven't really put together any meaningful perspectives, but again, talking about like trafficking in companies and investments that are very lonely, but they allow me to generate returns that are relatively unique and independent. That's an area where I don't see anybody else when I'm there. I'll give you another area. You know, we, I think are about to unleash in a world of zero energy and zero compute costs, computational biology will replace wet chemistry. And when you do that, you will be able to iterate on tools that will be able to solve a lot of human disease. I think like if you look at the head of like the top 400 most recurring rare diseases, I think like half the number, 200, is specific point mutation, is just the mis-methylation between C and T. I mean, that's like, whoa, wait, you're telling me in billions of lines of code? I forgot a semicolon right there. That's causing this whole thing to miscompile. So I just got to go in there and boop, and it's all done. That's a crazy idea. That was a C++ C throwback for people that don't know what I said. There's two people who are clapping. Two people there, everybody else is like, what, this is not a pipe, what are you talking about? That makes perfect sense. So couldn't that be a source of a, if you look at the computation biology unlocks, I mean, obviously medicine is begging for- The thing with energy though is that the groundwork is well laid. And talking about sort of like the upper bound is well defined. The upper bound in medicine is not well defined because it is not the sum total of the market cap of the pharma industries. It is actually the sum total of the value of human life. And that's an extremely ethical and moral question. Isn't there a special interest that are resisting moving, making progress on the energy side? So like governments and how do you break through that? I mean, you have to acknowledge the reality of that. I think it's less governments. In fact, like I said, I think President Biden has done a really incredible job. Well, Chuck Schumer really has done a really incredible job because, so just to give you the math on this, right? Like back to this, so 3% of everything is of a market or zealots. But when you get past 5%, things tend to just go nuclear to 50, 60%. The way that they wrote this last bill, the cost, I'll just use the cars as an example. The cost of an average car is 22 and a half thousand. The cost of the cheapest battery car is 30,000. And lo and behold, there's a $7,500 credit. And it's like to think the invisible hand didn't know that that math was right, I think is kind of a little bit malarkey. And so the battery EV car is gonna be the same price as the thing, and it's gonna go to 40, 50%. So we're already at this tipping point. So we're kind of ready to go. In these other markets, it's a little bit more complicated because there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to get built. So the gene editing thing as an example, we have to build a tool chain that looks more like code that you can write to. Facebook has written in, I think, PHP originally. PHP, yeah. Which is, I'm still a big fan of. Sometimes you have to use the ugly solution and make it look good versus trying to come up with a good solution, which will be too late. Let me ask you, you consider a run for governor of California and then decided against it. What went into each of these decisions? And broadly, I just have maybe a selfish question about Silicon Valley. Is it over as a world leader for new tech companies? As this beacon of promise of young minds stepping in and creating something that changes the world? I don't know if those two questions are connected. So it's not over, but I think it's definitely, we're in a challenging moment because, so back to that analogy of the demographics. If you think about the, like if you bucketed, forget like our relative successes, but there's a bunch of us in this mid 50s to mid 30s cohort of people that have now been around for 20 years, 15 years to 25 years that have done stuff, right? From Andreessen to Zuck to Jack Dorsey, et cetera, Elon, whatever, maybe you throw me in the mix, David Sacks, whatever, okay? None of us have done a really good job of becoming a statesman or a stateswoman, and really showing a broad empathy and awareness for the broader systems. So Silicon Valley is to survive as a system. We need to know that we've transitioned from move fast and break things to get to the right answer and take your time if that's what it means. And so we have to be a participant of the system. And I believe that. And I think that it's important to not be a dilettante and not be thumbing your face to Washington or not push the boundaries and say, we'll deal with it after the fact, but to work with folks that are trying to do the best, again, steel men their point of view. Work with them, potentially run for office. So potentially understand the system. Be a part of their system. It makes me sad that there's no tech people or not many tech people in Congress and certainly not in the presidential level, not many governors or senators. Well, I think that we also have roughly, our rules will never allow some of the best and brightest folks to run for president because of just the rules against it. But if- Oh, you mean, yeah, he has to be born in this country. I think David Sachs would be an incredible presidential candidate. Now, I also think he'd be a great governor. No, he was born in South Africa. I think he'd be a great governor. I think he'd be a great secretary of state. I mean, he'd be great at whatever he wanted to do. Friedberg wasn't born here. So there's a lot of people that could contribute at different levels. And I hope that, by the way, the other thing I like about the pod is like, I also think it helps normalize tech a little bit. Cause you just see like normal people dealing with normal situations. And I think that that's good. It is a really normative place. It's not the caricature that it's made out to be, but there is a small virulent strain of people that make it caricature-like. Well, that's in one direction, what do you think about the whole culture of, I don't know if better terms, but woke activism? So sort of activism, which in some contexts is a powerful and important thing, but infiltrating companies. I'll answer this in the context of Rene Girard. So like he says that people tend to copy each other. And then when they're copying each other, they're really what they're fighting, what they're doing is they're fighting over some scarce resource. And then you find a way to organize against, you know, the group of you against a person or a thing that you think is the actual cause of all of this conflict and you try to expel them. The thing that wokeism doesn't understand is that unless that person is truly to blame, the cycle just continues. And, you know, that was a framework that he developed that, you know, he's really conclusively proven to be true and it's observable in humanity, in life. So these movements, I think the extreme left and the extreme right are trying to interpret a way to allow people to compete for some scarce resource. But I also think that in all of that, what they don't realize is that they can scapegoat whoever they want, but it's not gonna work because the bulwark of people in the middle realize that it's just not true. You know? Yeah, they realize, but they're still, because in leadership positions, there's still momentum and they still scapegoat and they continue. And it seems to hurt the actual ability of those companies to be successful. Well, it was much more, but in fairness though, if you had to graph the effectiveness of that function, it's decaying rapidly. It's the least effective it's ever been. You're absolutely right. Being canceled five years ago was a huge deal. Today, I think it was Jordan Peterson on your podcast. He said, I've been canceled and it was amazing. He said 38 times or 40. He said some number, which was a ginormous number, A, that he kept account of it and B, was able to classify it. I'm like, what classifier is going on in his mind? Where he's like, ah, that's an attempt to cancel me, but this one is not. But my point is, well, it's clearly not working. And so the guy is still there and the guy is, you know, putting his view out into the world. And so it's not to judge whether what he says is right or wrong. It's just to observe that this mechanism of action is now weakened. But it's weakened because it's not the thing that people think is really to blame. Yeah. You've been canceled on a small scale a few times. What's not small? I'm sure it didn't feel small. Actually, it wasn't small. I'm trying to minimize it. Did that psychologically hurt you? Yeah. It was tough? Yeah. In the moment, you don't know what's going on. But I would like to thank a certain CEO of a certain well-known company. And he sent me basically like a step-by-step manual. Does it involve mushrooms? No. No, it didn't. And he was right. You know, the storm passed and life went on. Is it, I don't know if you can share the list of steps, but is the fundamental core ideas that just life goes on? The core fundamental idea is like, you need to be willing and able to apologize for what is in your control, but not for other people's mistakes. Your mistakes, yes. And if you feel like there's something, then you should take accountability of that. But to apologize for somebody else, for something that they want to hear, isn't gonna solve anything. Yeah, there's something about apologies. If you do them, they should be authentic to what you actually want to say versus what somebody else wants to hear. Otherwise, it doesn't ring true. Yeah, and people can see through that. And people can see through it. And also, what people see through is not just the fact that your apology was somewhat hollow, but also that this entire majority of people now walked away. The mob was like, okay, thanks. And then people are like, oh, so you didn't care at all? This is like, and so then it reflects more probably on them. Yeah. I know you said you don't like to give advice, but what advice would you give to a young person? You've lived an incredible life from very humble beginnings, difficult childhood, and you're one of the most successful people in the world. So what advice, I mean, a lot of people look to you for inspiration. Kids in high school or early college that are not doing good or are trying to figure out basically what to do when they have complete doubt in themselves. What advice would you give them? It is really important that if somebody that you respect, and I'm gonna, just for the purpose of this, put myself in that bucket, and if you're listening to this, I wish somebody had told this to me. We are all equal. And you will fight this demon inside you that says you are less than a lot of other people for reasons that will be hard to see until you're much, much older. And so you have to find either a set of people far, far away, like what I did, or one or two people really, really close to you, or maybe it's both that will remind you in key moments of your life that that is true. Otherwise, you will give in to that beast. And it's not the end of the world, and you'll recover from it. I've made a lot of mistakes, but it requires a lot of energy, and sometimes it's just easier to just stop and give up. So I think that if you're starting out in the world, if you've been lucky to have a wonderful life and you had wonderful parents, man, you should go and give them a huge hug because they did you such a service that most folks don't do to most kids, unfortunately. And it's not the fault of these parents, but it's just tough, life is tough. So give them a kiss, and then figure out a way where you can just do work that validates you and where you feel like you're developing some kind of mastery. Who cares what anybody else thinks about it? Just do it because it feels good. Do it because you like to get good at something. But if you're not one of those lucky people, you can believe in your friends, or you can just believe in me. I'm telling you, preserve optionality. How you do that is by regulating your reactions to things. And your reactions are going to be largely guided in moments where you think that you are not the same as everybody else, and specifically that you are less than those people and you're not. So just save this part of this podcast and just play it on a loop if you need to. But that is my biggest learning is I am equal. I'm the same as all these other people. And you can imagine what that means to me to go out in the world, to see people and think, okay, I'm the same as this person. I'm as good as them. And you could imagine what you're probably thinking of what I'm thinking is not that thing. Right? You're probably thinking, man, this guy, yeah, this guy, I'm so much better. No, I am fighting this thing all the time. Well, I've also met a bunch of folks who I think is a counter reaction to that. Once they become successful, they start developing a philosophy that they are better, or even some people are better than others, which I understand, you know, there's LeBron James versus other people and so on. But I always really resisted that thought because I feel like it's a slippery slope. They're not better. They have mastery in a thing that they've fallen in love with. Yeah. I'm trying to develop mastery in a thing that I love. You know, I love investing. It's like solving puzzles. And I love that. I love trying to develop mastery in poker. I really love that. I'm learning how to be a parent to a teenager because I finally have one. It's all new stuff to me and I'm learning. That's what it's all about. Yeah. So you don't want to think you're lesser than, and you don't want to think you're better than because those both lead you astray. I've never thought I was better than. I manifested better than because I was trying to compensate for feeling less than. My goal is just to feel like everybody else feels on the presumption that everybody had like a normal life. Given your nickname as the dictator, do you trust yourself with power? Like if the world gave you absolute power for a month? No. No, because I think that, you know, I'm still riddled with bias. I don't deserve that position. And I would not want that weight on my shoulders. I had a spot naturally where it was a very important and big poker game. And it was a spot where I was in the pot. And it was a really large pot. It was like a million dollar pot. And I had to make a ruling and the ruling was in my favor. And I was just beside myself. Because I don't play, I play for the challenge. I like to get pushed to the limit of my capabilities. I wanna see, can I think at the same level of these folks? You know, because these guys are all experts. They're all pros. And I get enormous joy from that challenge. And I like to win, but I like to win just a small amount. You know what I mean? And then I never wanted to win in that way. But because it was, you know, my game, I had to make this call on a million dollar pot. And I wanted to just shoot myself. I just was like, this is gross and disgusting. And he was a complete gentleman, which made it even worse. I was like, oh God. So I do not want absolute power. Well, those are the people you do want to have power is the ones that don't want it, which is a weird system to have. Because then you, in that kind of system, don't get the leaders that you should have. Because the ones that want power aren't the ones that should have power. It's a weird, weird system. What do you think, let me sneak this question in there. What do you think is the meaning of life? I don't, well. Why are we here? You ever look up at the stars and think about like the big why question? I think that it's a chance to just enjoy the ride. I don't think it really, like I don't believe in this idea of legacy that much. I think it's a real trap. So do you think you'll be forgotten by history? I hope so. I really, really hope so. Because if you think about it, there are two or three people that are remembered for positive things, and everybody else, it's all negative things. And the likelihood that you'll be remembered for a positive thing is harder and harder and harder. And so the surface area of being remembered is negative. And then the second, what will it matter? I'll be gone. I really just wanna like have fun, do my thing, learn, get better. But I want to reward myself by feeling like, well, that was awesome. Like I've told this story many times, and I have put, again, my own narrative fallacy on top of this, but Steve Jobs's sister wrote this opit in the New York Times when he died, and she ends it by saying his last words were, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow. That seems like an awesome way to die. You're surrounded by your friends and family, not the fact that he died, obviously, but in a moment where what I read into it was your family was there. Maybe you thought about all the cool shit that you were able to do, and then you just started the simulation all over again. And so just on the off chance that that's true, I don't wanna take this thing too seriously. You know what I mean? Just enjoy it. So you're not afraid of it, the end? No. Could end tomorrow, could end right now. So every day you can go and you're happy. You're happy with the things you've done. Yeah. You know, there are obviously things I want to do that I haven't done, but there are no gaping things. I've really, really, really been in love. Total gift. There have been moments where I've really, really felt like everybody else. There have been moments where I've had deep, deep, deep joy and connection with my children. There are moments where I've had incredible giggling fun with my friends. There's moments where I've been able to enjoy really incredible experiences, wine, food, all that stuff. I mean, what more do you want? Like I could keep asking for more, but I would just be a really crappy human being at some point. You know what I mean? It's enough. Yeah, yeah. It's enough. Yeah. It's enough. This life is pretty beautiful if you allow yourself to see it. It's great. It's really great. And it's better than it's ever been for most of us, actually. Yeah, it's pretty nice. You know, and all of the like, you know, millennials and Gen Zs, you're about to get a boatload of money from your parents. And you better figure out how to be happy before you get that money. Yeah. Because otherwise you will be miserable. Get a lot of Dairy Queen. No, that only worked the first time. It worked two times in grade five and grade six. My God, that next year. Flex, I worked my ass off. I'm like, but I could never bring myself to ask her. Yeah. And then she did it. And I was like, man, this woman's a Miss Bruni. This woman's a gem. Yeah. But the third time it faded. Isn't that the sad thing about life? You know, the finiteness of it, the scarcity of it. Without that, we perhaps wouldn't, ice cream wouldn't be so damn delicious. Chamath, you're an incredible human. I definitely recommend that people listen to you on all platforms. Just, we're very lucky to be able to get your wisdom. I agree with, I've talked a lot about you with Andrej Karpathy, who's somebody I really respect. And he just loves the shit out of you in how much you, how deeply you understand the world. It's a huge honor. He's an incredible human being, so that's. On a different, yeah, speaking of semicolons, there's some human beings that understand everything at the very low level and at the very high level. And those people are also very rare. So it's a huge honor. And also a huge honor that you would be so kind to me, just like in subtle ways offline, that you would make me feel like I'm worthwhile. Well, can I just say something as just a layman listener? What you do, just so I could give you my version, is that you take things and people, so ideas and people, that are mostly behind a rope, and you demystify it. And what that does for all of us is it makes me feel like I can be a part of that. And that's a really inspiring thing because you're not giving advice, you're not telling us how to solve the problem, but you're allowing it to be understood in a way that's really accessible. And then you're intellectually curious in ways that some of us would never expect that we were, and then you kind of end up in this rabbit hole. And then you have the courage to go and talk to people that are really all over the map. Like for example, when I saw your Jordan Peterson example, like you went there, like you talked about Nazism, and I was just like, man, this is a complicated argument these guys are gonna tackle. And it's just, it's really, really impressive. So I have an enormous amount of respect for what you do. I think it's very hard to do what you do, so consistently. And so I look at you as somebody I respect because it just shows like somebody who's immersed in something and who's very special. So thank you for including me in this. I'm gonna play that clip to myself privately over and over, just when I feel low and self-critical about myself. Thank you so much, brother. This is incredible. Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Chamath Palihapitiya. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jonathan Swift. A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/kFQUDCgMjRc

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Andrej Karpathy: Tesla AI, Self-Driving, Optimus, Aliens, and AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #333

I think it's possible that physics has exploits and we should be trying to find them. Arranging some kind of a crazy quantum mechanical system that somehow gives you buffer overflow, somehow gives you a rounding error in the floating point. Synthetic intelligences are kind of like the next stage of development. And I don't know where it leads to, like at some point, I suspect the universe is some kind of a puzzle. These synthetic AIs will uncover that puzzle and solve it. The following is a conversation with Andrej Karpathy, previously the director of AI at Tesla and before that at OpenAI and Stanford. He is one of the greatest scientists, engineers, and educators in the history of artificial intelligence. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's Andrej Karpathy. What is a neural network and why does it seem to do such a surprisingly good job of learning? What is a neural network? It's a mathematical abstraction of the brain, I would say. That's how it was originally developed. At the end of the day, it's a mathematical expression and it's a fairly simple mathematical expression when you get down to it. It's basically a sequence of matrix multiplies, which are really dot products mathematically, and some nonlinearity is thrown in. It's a very simple mathematical expression and it's got knobs in it. Many knobs. Many knobs. These knobs are loosely related to basically the synapses in your brain. They're trainable, they're modifiable. The idea is we need to find the setting of the knobs that makes the neural net do whatever you want it to do, like classify images and so on. There's not too much mystery, I would say, in it. You might think that basically you don't want to endow it with too much meaning with respect to the brain and how it works. It's really just a complicated mathematical expression with knobs and those knobs need a proper setting for it to do something desirable. Yeah, but poetry is just a collection of letters with spaces, but it can make us feel a certain way. In that same way, when you get a large number of knobs together, whether it's inside the brain or inside a computer, they seem to surprise us with their power. Yeah. I think that's fair. I'm underselling it by a lot because you definitely do get very surprising emergent behaviors out of these neural nets when they're large enough and trained on complicated enough problems, like say, for example, the next word prediction in a massive dataset from the internet. And then these neural nets take on pretty surprising magical properties. Yeah, I think it's kind of interesting how much you can get out of even very simple mathematical formalism. When your brain right now is talking, is it doing next word prediction or is it doing something more interesting? Well, it's definitely some kind of a generative model that's GPT-like and prompted by you. Yeah. So you're giving me a prompt and I'm kind of like responding to it in a generative way. And by yourself, perhaps a little bit? Like, are you adding extra prompts from your own memory inside your head? Well, it definitely feels like you're referencing some kind of a declarative structure of like memory and so on. And then you're putting that together with your prompt and giving away some answers. How much of what you just said has been said by you before? Nothing basically, right? No, but if you actually look at all the words you've ever said in your life and you do a search, you'll probably have said a lot of the same words in the same order before. Yeah, could be. I mean, I'm using phrases that are common, etc., but I'm remixing it into a pretty sort of unique sentence at the end of the day. But you're right, definitely there's like a ton of remixing. Why? It's like Magnus Carlsen said, I'm rated 2900 whatever, which is pretty decent. I think you're talking very, you're not giving enough credit to Neuron Nuts here. Why do they seem to, what's your best intuition about this emergent behavior? I mean, it's kind of interesting because I'm simultaneously underselling them, but I also feel like there's an element to which I'm over, like, it's actually kind of incredible that you can get so much emergent magical behavior out of them despite them being so simple mathematically. So I think those are kind of like two surprising statements that are kind of juxtaposed together. And I think basically what it is, is we are actually fairly good at optimizing these Neuron Nuts. And when you give them a hard enough problem, they are forced to learn very interesting solutions in the optimization. And those solution basically have these emergent properties that are very interesting. There's wisdom and knowledge in the knobs. And so this representation that's in the knobs, does it make sense to you intuitively that a large number of knobs can hold a representation that captures some deep wisdom about the data it has looked at? It's a lot of knobs. It's a lot of knobs. And somehow, you know, so speaking concretely, one of the Neuron Nuts that people are very excited about right now are GPTs, which are basically just next word prediction networks. So you consume a sequence of words from the internet, and you try to predict the next word. And once you train these on a large enough data set, you can basically prompt these Neuron Nuts in arbitrary ways, and you can ask them to solve problems, and they will. So you can just tell them, you can make it look like you're trying to solve some kind of a mathematical problem, and they will continue what they think is the solution based on what they've seen on the internet. And very often, those solutions look very remarkably consistent, look correct potentially. Do you still think about the brain side of it? So as Neuron Nuts is an abstraction, a mathematical abstraction of the brain, do you still draw wisdom from the biological neural networks? Or even the bigger question, so you're a big fan of biology and biological computation. What impressive thing is biology doing to you that computers are not yet? That gap. I would say I'm definitely on, I'm much more hesitant with the analogies to the brain than I think you would see potentially in the field. And I kind of feel like certainly the way neural networks started is everything stemmed from inspiration by the brain. But at the end of the day, the artifacts that you get after training, they are arrived at by a very different optimization process than the optimization process that gave rise to the brain. And so I think, I kind of think of it as a very complicated alien artifact. It's something different. I'm sorry, the Neuron Nuts that we're training. They are complicated alien artifact. I do not make analogies to the brain because I think the optimization process that gave rise to it is very different from the brain. So there was no multi-agent self-play kind of setup and evolution. It was an optimization that is basically what amounts to a compression objective on a massive amount of data. Okay, so artificial neural networks are doing compression and biological neural networks are not- Trying to survive. Are not really doing anything. They're an agent in a multi-agent self-play system that's been running for a very, very long time. Yes. That said, evolution has found that it is very useful to predict and have a predictive model in the brain. And so I think our brain utilizes something that looks like that as a part of it, but it has a lot more gadgets and gizmos and value functions and ancient nuclei that are all trying to make it survive and reproduce and everything else. And the whole thing through embryogenesis is built from a single cell. I mean, it's just, the code is inside the DNA and it just builds it up like the entire organism with arms- It's totally crazy. And the head and legs. Yes. And it does it pretty well. It should not be possible. So there's some learning going on. There's some kind of computation going through that building process. I mean, I don't know where, if you were just to look at the entirety of history of life on earth, where do you think is the most interesting invention? Is it the origin of life itself? Is it just jumping to eukaryotes? Is it mammals? Is it humans themselves, homo sapiens? The origin of intelligence or highly complex intelligence? Or is it all just a continuation of the same kind of process? Certainly I would say it's an extremely remarkable story that I'm only briefly learning about recently. All the way from, actually, you almost have to start at the formation of earth and all of its conditions and the entire solar system and how everything is arranged with Jupiter and moon and the habitable zone and everything. And then you have an active earth that's turning over material. And then you start with abiogenesis and everything. And so it's all a pretty remarkable story. I'm not sure that I can pick a single unique piece of it that I find most interesting. I guess for me as an artificial intelligence researcher, it's probably the last piece. We have lots of animals that are not building technological society, but we do. And it seems to have happened very quickly. It seems to have happened very recently. And something very interesting happened there that I don't fully understand. I almost understand everything else, I think, intuitively, but I don't understand exactly that part and how quick it was. Both explanations would be interesting. One is that this is just a continuation of the same kind of process. There's nothing special about humans. That would be deeply understanding. That would be very interesting. That we think of ourselves as special, but it was obvious. It was already written in the code that you would have greater and greater intelligence emerging. And then the other explanation, which is something truly special happened, something like a rare event, whether it's like crazy rare event, like a space odyssey. What would it be? If you say like the invention of fire or the, as Richard Rankin says, the beta males deciding a clever way to kill the alpha males by collaborating. So just optimizing the collaboration, the multi-agent aspect of the multi-agent. And that really being constrained on resources and trying to survive the collaboration aspect is what created the complex intelligence. It seems like it's a natural outgrowth of the evolution process. What could possibly be a magical thing that happened? Like a rare thing that would say that humans are actually, human level intelligence is actually a really rare thing in the universe. Yeah, I'm hesitant to say that it is rare, by the way, but it definitely seems like it's kind of like a punctuated equilibrium where you have lots of exploration and then you have certain leaps, sparse leaps in between. So of course, like origin of life would be one, DNA, sex, eukaryotic life, the endosymbiosis event where the Archeon ate little bacteria, just the whole thing. And then of course, emergence of consciousness and so on. So it seems like definitely there are sparse events where massive amount of progress was made, but yeah, it's kind of hard to pick one. So you don't think humans are unique. I've got to ask you, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there and is their intelligence different or similar to ours? Yeah, I've been preoccupied with this question quite a bit recently, basically the Fermi paradox and just thinking through. And the reason actually that I am very interested in the origin of life is fundamentally trying to understand how common it is that there are technological societies out there in space. And the more I study it, the more I think that there should be quite a lot. Why haven't we heard from them? Because I agree with you. It feels like I just don't see why what we did here on Earth is so difficult to do. Yeah, and especially when you get into the details of it. I used to think origin of life was very, it was this magical rare event, but then you read books like for example, Nick Lane, The Vital Question, Life Ascending, et cetera. And he really gets in and he really makes you believe that this is not that rare. Basic chemistry. You have an active Earth and you have your alkaline vents and you have lots of alkaline waters mixing with the ocean and you have your proton gradients and you have little porous pockets of these alkaline vents that concentrate chemistry. And basically as he steps through all of these little pieces, you start to understand that actually this is not that crazy. You could see this happen on other systems. And he really takes you from just a geology to primitive life and he makes it feel like it's actually pretty plausible. And also like the origin of life was actually fairly fast after formation of Earth. If I remember correctly, just a few hundred million years or something like that after basically when it was possible, life actually arose. And so that makes me feel like that is not the constraint, that is not the limiting variable and that life should actually be fairly common. And then where the drop-offs are is very interesting to think about. I currently think that there's no major drop-offs basically. And so there should be quite a lot of life. And basically where that brings me to then is the only way to reconcile the fact that we haven't found anyone and so on is that we just can't see them, we can't observe them. Just a quick brief comment. Nick Lane and a lot of biologists I talk to, they really seem to think that the jump from bacteria to more complex organisms is the hardest jump. The eukaryotic life basically. Yeah. Which I don't, I get it. They're much more knowledgeable than me about like the intricacies of biology. But that seems like crazy. Because how many single-cell organisms are there? And how much time you have, surely it's not that difficult. In a billion years is not even that long of a time really. Just all these bacteria under constrained resources battling it out. I'm sure they can invent more complex. It's like how to move from a Hello World program to invent a function or something like that. Yeah. So I'm with you, I just feel like I don't see any, if the origin of life, that would be my intuition, that's the hardest thing. But if that's not the hardest thing because it happens so quickly, then it's got to be everywhere. And yeah, maybe we're just too dumb to see it. Well, we don't have really good mechanisms for seeing this life. I mean, by what, how, so I'm not an expert just to preface this, but just from what I've been looking at it. On aliens? I want to meet an expert on alien intelligence and how to communicate. I'm very suspicious of our ability to find these intelligences out there and to find these earth, like radio waves, for example, are terrible. Their power drops off as basically one over R square. So I remember reading that our current radio waves would not be, the ones that we are broadcasting would not be measurable by our devices today. Only like, was it like one 10th of a light year away? Like not even, basically tiny distance because you really need like a targeted transmission of massive power directed somewhere for this to be picked up on long distances. And so I just think that our ability to measure is, is not amazing. I think there's probably other civilizations out there. And then the big question is why don't they build one on their probes and why don't they interstellar travel across the entire galaxy? And my current answer is it's probably interstellar travel is like really hard. You have the interstellar medium. If you want to move at close to the speed of light, you're going to be encountering bullets along the way because even like tiny hydrogen atoms and little particles of dust are basically have like massive kinetic energy at those speeds. And so basically you need some kind of shielding. You need, you have all the cosmic radiation. It's just like brutal out there. It's really hard. And so my thinking is maybe interstellar travel is just extremely hard. And you have to be very slow. Like billions of years to build hard? It feels like, it feels like we're not a billion years away from doing that. It just might be that it's very, you have to go very slowly potentially as an example through space. Right. As opposed to close to the speed of light. Yeah, so I'm suspicious basically of our ability to measure life and I'm suspicious of the ability to just permeate all of space in the galaxy or across galaxies. And that's the only way that I can currently see a way around it. It's kind of mind blowing to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations out there kind of slowly traveling through space to meet each other. And some of them meet, some of them go to war, some of them collaborate. Or they're all just independent. They're all just like little pockets. Well, statistically, if there's like, if it's trillions of them, surely some of them, some of the pockets are close enough to get. Some of them happen to be close, yeah. Close enough to see each other. And then once you see, once you see something that is definitely complex life, like if we see something, we're probably going to be severe, like intensely aggressively motivated to figure out what the hell that is and try to meet them. What would be your first instinct to try to, like at a generational level, meet them or defend against them? Or what would be your instinct as a president of the United States and a scientist? I don't know which hat you prefer in this question. Yeah, I think the question, it's really hard. I will say, like, for example, for us, we have lots of primitive life forms on earth next to us. We have all kinds of ants and everything else, and we share space with them. And we are hesitant to impact on them. We are trying to protect them by default because they are amazing, interesting, dynamical systems that took a long time to evolve, and they are interesting and special. And I don't know that you want to destroy that by default. And so I like complex dynamical systems that took a lot of time to evolve. I think I'd like to preserve it if I can afford to. And I'd like to think that the same would be true about the galactic resources, and that they would think that we're kind of incredible, interesting story that took time, it took a few billion years to unravel, and you don't want to just destroy it. I could see two aliens talking about earth right now and saying, I'm a big fan of complex dynamical systems, so I think it's a value to preserve these, and it will basically be a video game they watch or a TV show that they watch. Yeah, I think you would need a very good reason, I think, to destroy it. Why don't we destroy these ant farms and so on? It's because we're not actually really in direct competition with them right now. We do it accidentally and so on, but there's plenty of resources. And so why would you destroy something that is so interesting and precious? Well from a scientific perspective, you might probe it. You might interact with it lightly. You might want to learn something from it, right? So I wonder, there could be certain physical phenomena that we think is a physical phenomena, but it's actually interacting with us to poke the finger and see what happens. I think it should be very interesting to scientists, other alien scientists, what happened here. And what we're seeing today is a snapshot, basically it's a result of a huge amount of computation over like a billion years or something like that. It could have been initiated by aliens. This could be a computer running a program. If you had the power to do this, for sure, at least I would, I would pick an Earth-like planet that has the conditions, based on my understanding of the chemistry prerequisites for life, and I would seed it with life and run it. Wouldn't you 100% do that and observe it? And then protect, I mean, that's not just a hell of a good TV show. It's a good scientific experiment. And it's physical simulation, right? Maybe evolution is the most, like actually running it is the most efficient way to understand computation or to compute stuff. Or understand life or what life looks like and what branches it can take. It does make me kind of feel weird that we're a part of a science experiment, but maybe everything's a science experiment. Does that change anything for us? For a science experiment? I don't know. Two descendants of apes talking about being inside of a science experiment. I'm suspicious of this idea of like a deliberate panspermia, as you described it, sort of. I don't see a divine intervention in some way in the historical record right now. I do feel like the story in these books, like Nick Lane's books and so on, sort of makes sense. And it makes sense how life arose on Earth uniquely. And yeah, I don't need to reach for more exotic explanations right now. Sure, but NPCs inside a video game don't observe any divine intervention either. We might just be all NPCs running a kind of code. Maybe eventually they will. Currently NPCs are really dumb, but once they're running GPTs, maybe they will be like, hey, this is really suspicious. What the hell? So you famously tweeted, it looks like if you bombard Earth with photons for a while, you can emit a roadster. So if like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we would summarize the story of Earth. So in that book, it's mostly harmless. What do you think is all the possible stories, like a paragraph long or a sentence long, that Earth could be summarized as? Once it's done, it's computation. So like all the possible full... if Earth is a book, right? Probably there has to be an ending. I mean, there's going to be an end to Earth and it could end in all kinds of ways. It can end soon, it can end later. What do you think are the possible stories? Well, definitely there seems to be... yeah, you're sort of... it's pretty incredible that these self-replicating systems will basically arise from the dynamics and then they perpetuate themselves and become more complex and eventually become conscious and build a society. And I kind of feel like in some sense, it's kind of like a deterministic wave that kind of just like happens on any sufficiently well-arranged system like Earth. And so I kind of feel like there's a certain sense of inevitability in it. And it's really beautiful. And it ends somehow, right? So it's a chemically diverse environment where complex dynamical systems can evolve and become more and more further and further complex. But then there's a certain... what is it? There's certain terminating conditions. Yeah, I don't know what the terminating conditions are, but definitely there's a trend line of something and we're part of that story. And like, where does that... where does it go? So we're famously described often as a biological bootloader for AIs. And that's because humans, I mean, we're an incredible biological system and we're capable of computation and love and so on. But we're extremely inefficient as well. We're talking to each other through audio. It's just kind of embarrassing, honestly, that we're manipulating seven symbols serially. We're using vocal cords. It's all happening over multiple seconds. It's just kind of embarrassing when you step down to the frequencies at which computers operate or are able to operate on. And so basically it does seem like synthetic intelligences are kind of like the next stage of development. And I don't know where it leads to. At some point, I suspect the universe is some kind of a puzzle and these synthetic AIs will uncover that puzzle and solve it. And then what happens after, right? Because if you just fast forward Earth many billions of years, it's quiet and then it's like normal. You see city lights and stuff like that. And then what happens at the end? Is it like a poof? Or is it like a calming? Is it explosion? Is it like Earth opens like a giant... because you said emit roasters. Will it start emitting like a giant number of satellites? Yes, it's some kind of a crazy explosion. And we're stepping through a explosion and we're living day to day and it doesn't look like it. But it's actually... I saw a very cool animation of Earth and life on Earth and basically nothing happens for a long time. And then the last two seconds, basically cities and everything and the lower orbit just gets cluttered and just the whole thing happens in the last two seconds and you're like, this is exploding. This is a state of explosion. So if you play at a normal speed, it'll just look like an explosion. It's a firecracker. We're living in a firecracker. Where it's going to start emitting all kinds of interesting things. And then so explosion doesn't... It might actually look like a little explosion with lights and fire and energy emitted, all that kind of stuff. But when you look inside the details of the explosion, there's actual complexity happening where there's like, yeah, human life or some kind of life. We hope it's not a destructive firecracker. It's kind of like a constructive firecracker. All right. So given that, I think a hilarious discussion. It is really interesting to think about what the puzzle of the universe is. Did the creator of the universe give us a message? Like, for example, in the book Contact, Carl Sagan, there's a message for any civilization in digits in the expansion of pi in base 11, eventually, which is kind of interesting thought. Maybe we're supposed to be giving a message to our creator. Maybe we're supposed to somehow create some kind of a quantum mechanical system that alerts them to our intelligent presence here. Because if you think about it from their perspective, it's just say like quantum field theory, massive like cellular automaton like thing. And like, how do you even notice that we exist? You might not even be able to pick us up in that simulation. And so how do you prove that you exist, that you're intelligent and that you're part of the universe? So this is like a Turing test for intelligence from Earth. Yeah. Like the creator is, I mean, maybe this is like trying to complete the next word in a sentence. This is a complicated way of that. Like Earth is just, is basically sending a message back. Yeah. The puzzle is basically like alerting the creator that we exist. Or maybe the puzzle is just to just break out of the system and just, you know, stick it to the creator in some way. Like if you're playing a video game, you can somehow find an exploit and find a way to execute on the host machine, any arbitrary code. There's some, for example, I believe someone got a game of Mario to play Pong just by exploiting it and then creating a, basically writing code and being able to execute arbitrary code in the game. And so maybe we should be, maybe that's the puzzle is that we should be find a way to exploit it. So I think like some of these synthetic AI's will eventually find the universe to be some kind of a puzzle and then solve it in some way. And that's kind of like the end game somehow. Do you often think about it as a simulation? So as the universe being a kind of computation that has, might have bugs and exploits? Yes. Yeah, I think so. Is that what physics is essentially? I think it's possible that physics has exploits and we should be trying to find them. Arranging some kind of a crazy quantum mechanical system that somehow gives you buffer overflow, somehow gives you a rounding error in the floating point. Yeah, that's right. And like more and more sophisticated exploits. Those are jokes, but that could be actually very close. Yeah, we'll find some way to extract infinite energy. For example, when you train reinforcement learning agents in physical simulations and you ask them to say run quickly on the flat ground, they'll end up doing all kinds of like weird things in part of that optimization, right? They'll get on their back leg and they will slide across the floor. And it's because the optimization, the reinforcement learning optimization on that agent has figured out a way to extract infinite energy from the friction forces and basically their poor implementation and they found a way to generate infinite energy and just slide across the surface. And it's not what you expected. It's just a, it's sort of like a perverse solution. And so maybe we can find something like that. Maybe we can be that little dog in this physical simulation. That cracks or escapes the intended consequences of the physics that the universe came up with. We'll figure out some kind of shortcut to some weirdness. And then, oh man, but see the problem with that weirdness is the first person to discover the weirdness, like sliding on the back legs, that's all we're going to do. It's very quickly becomes everybody does that thing. So like the paperclip maximizer is a ridiculous idea, but that very well could be what then we'll just, we'll just all switch that because it's so fun. Well, no person will discover it, I think, by the way, I think it's going to have to be some kind of a super intelligent AGI of a third generation. Like we're building the first generation AGI. Third generation. Yeah, so the bootloader for an AI, that AI will be a bootloader for another AI. And then there's no way for us to introspect like what that might even... I think it's very likely that these things, for example, like say you have these AGIs, it's very likely that, for example, they will be completely inert. I like these kinds of sci-fi books sometimes where these things are just completely inert. They don't interact with anything. And I find that kind of beautiful because they probably, they've probably figured out the meta game of the universe in some way, potentially. They're doing something completely beyond our imagination. And they don't interact with simple chemical life forms. Like, why would you do that? So I find those kinds of ideas compelling. What's their source of fun? What are they doing? What's the source of pleasure? Well, it's probably puzzle solving in the universe. But inert, so can you define what it means inert? So they escape the interactional physical reality? They're inert to us as in they will behave in some very strange way to us because they're beyond, they're playing the meta game. And the meta game is probably say like arranging quantum mechanical systems in some very weird ways to extract infinite energy, solve the digital expansion of pi to whatever amount. They will build their own like little fusion reactors or something crazy. Like they're doing something beyond comprehension and not understandable to us. And actually brilliant under the hood. What if quantum mechanics itself is the system and we're just thinking it's physics, but we're really parasites on, not parasites, we're not really hurting physics. We're just living on this organism and we're like trying to understand it, but really it is an organism. And with a deep, deep intelligence, maybe physics itself is the organism that's doing the super interesting thing. And we're just like one little thing, ant sitting on top of it trying to get energy from it. We're just kind of like these particles in the wave that I feel like is mostly deterministic and takes a universe from some kind of a Big Bang to some kind of a super intelligent replicator, some kind of a stable point in the universe, given these laws of physics. You don't think, as Einstein said, God doesn't play dice. So you think it's mostly deterministic. There's no randomness in the thing? I think it's deterministic. Oh, there's tons of, well, I'm going to be careful with randomness. Pseudo random? Yeah, I don't like random. I think maybe the laws of physics are deterministic. Yeah, I think they're deterministic. You just got really uncomfortable with this question. Do you have anxiety about whether the universe is random or not? Is this a sort of... What's... There's no randomness. You said you like good will hunting. It's not your fault, Andre. It's not your fault, man. So you don't like randomness? Yeah, I think it's unsettling. I think it's a deterministic system. I think that things that look random, like say the collapse of the wave function, et cetera, I think they're actually deterministic, just entanglement and so on, and some kind of a multi-verse theory, something, something. Okay, so why does it feel like we have a free will? Like if I raise this hand, I chose to do this now. That doesn't feel like a deterministic thing. It feels like I'm making a choice. It feels like it. Okay, so it's all feelings. It's just feelings. So when an RL agent is making a choice, is that... It's not really making a choice. The choice is already there. Yeah, you're interpreting the choice and you're creating a narrative for having made it. Yeah, and now we're talking about the narrative. It's very meta. Looking back, what is the most beautiful or surprising idea in deep learning or AI in general that you've come across? You've seen this field explode and grow in interesting ways. What cool ideas, like we made you sit back and go, hmm, small, big or small? Well, the one that I've been thinking about recently, the most probably is the transformer architecture. So basically neural networks have... A lot of architectures that were trendy have come and gone for different sensory modalities, like for vision, audio, text. You would process them with different looking neural nets. And recently we've seen this convergence towards one architecture, the transformer. And you can feed it video or you can feed it images or speech or text, and it just gobbles it up. And it's kind of like a bit of a general purpose computer that is also trainable and very efficient to run on our hardware. And so this paper came out in 2016, I want to say. Attention is all you need. Attention is all you need. You criticized the paper title in retrospect, that it wasn't... It didn't foresee the bigness of the impact that it was going to have. Yeah, I'm not sure if the authors were aware of the impact that that paper would go on to have. I'm not sure if they were informed, but I think they were aware of some of the motivations and design decisions behind the transformer. And they chose not to, I think, expand on it in that way in the paper. And so I think they had an idea that there was more than just the surface of just like, oh, we're just doing translation and here's a better architecture. You're not just doing translation. This is like a really cool, differentiable, optimizable, efficient computer that you've proposed. And maybe they didn't have all of that foresight, but I think it's really interesting. Isn't it funny? I don't want to interrupt that that title is memeable, that they went for such a profound idea. They went with a... I don't think anyone used that kind of title before, right? Attention is all you need. Yeah. It's like a meme or something. Yeah. Isn't that funny? That one, like, maybe if it was a more serious title, it wouldn't have the impact. Honestly, I, yeah, there is an element of me that honestly agrees with you and prefers it this way. Yes. If it was too grand, it would over promise and then under deliver potentially. So you want to just meme your way to greatness. That should be a t-shirt. So you tweeted, the Transformer is a magnificent neural network architecture because it is a general purpose differentiable computer. It is simultaneously expressive in the forward pass, optimizable via back propagation, gradient descent and efficient, high parallelism compute graph. Can you discuss some of those details, expressive, optimizable, efficient for memory or in general? You know, whatever comes to your heart. You want to have a general purpose computer that you can train on arbitrary problems, like say the task of next word prediction or detecting if there's a cat in an image or something like that. And you want to train this computer. So you want to set its weights. And I think there's a number of design criteria that sort of overlap in the Transformer simultaneously that made it very successful. And I think the authors were kind of deliberately trying to make this a really powerful architecture. And so basically it's very powerful in the forward pass because it's able to express very general computation as sort of something that looks like message passing. You have nodes and they all store vectors. And these nodes get to basically look at each other and each other's vectors and they get to communicate. And basically nodes get to broadcast, hey, I'm looking for certain things. And then other nodes get to broadcast, hey, these are the things I have. Those are the keys and the values. So it's not just attention. Yeah, exactly. So the Transformer is much more than just the attention component. It's got many pieces architectural that went into it, the residual connections, the way it's arranged. There's a multilayer perceptron in there, the way it's stacked and so on. But basically there's a message passing scheme where nodes get to look at each other, decide what's interesting and then update each other. And so I think when you get to the details of it, I think it's a very expressive function. So it can express lots of different types of algorithms in forward pass. Not only that, but the way it's designed with the residual connections, layer normalizations, the softmax attention and everything, it's also optimizable. This is a really big deal because there's lots of computers that are powerful that you can't optimize or they're not easy to optimize using the techniques that we have, which is back propagation and gradient descent. These are first order methods, very simple optimizers really. And so you also need it to be optimizable. And then lastly, you want it to run efficiently in our hardware. Our hardware is a massive throughput machine like GPUs. They prefer lots of parallelism. So you don't want to do lots of sequential operations. You want to do a lot of operations serially. And the transformer is designed with that in mind as well. And so it's designed for our hardware and is designed to both be very expressive in a forward pass, but also very optimizable in the backward pass. And you said that the residual connections support a kind of ability to learn short algorithms fast and first, and then gradually extend them longer during training. What's the idea of learning short algorithms? Right. So basically a transformer is a series of blocks, right? And these blocks have attention and a little multilayer perceptron. And so you go off into a block and you come back to this residual pathway, and then you go off and you come back, and then you have a number of layers arranged sequentially. And so the way to look at it, I think, is because of the residual pathway in the backward pass, the gradients sort of flow along it uninterrupted because addition distributes the gradient equally to all of its branches. So the gradient from the supervision at the top just floats directly to the first layer. And all the residual connections are arranged so that in the beginning during initialization, they contribute nothing to the residual pathway. So what it kind of looks like is, imagine the transformer is kind of like a Python function, like a def. And you get to do various kinds of lines of code. Say you have a hundred layers deep transformer. Typically they would be much shorter, say 20. So you have 20 lines of code and you can do something in them. And so during the optimization, basically what it looks like is first you optimize the first line of code, and then the second line of code can kick in, and the third line of code can kick in. And I kind of feel like because of the residual pathway and the dynamics of the optimization, you can sort of learn a very short algorithm that gets the approximate answer, but then the other layers can sort of kick in and start to create a contribution. And at the end of it, you're optimizing over an algorithm that is 20 lines of code. Except these lines of code are very complex because it's an entire block of a transformer. You can do a lot in there. What's really interesting is that this transformer architecture actually has been remarkably resilient. Basically, the transformer that came out in 2016 is the transformer you would use today, except you reshuffle some of the layer norms. The layer normalizations have been reshuffled to a pre-norm formulation. And so it's been remarkably stable, but there's a lot of bells and whistles that people have attached on it and try to improve it. I do think that basically it's a big step in simultaneously optimizing for lots of properties of a desirable neural network architecture. And I think people have been trying to change it, but it's proven remarkably resilient. But I do think that there should be even better architectures potentially. But it's, you admire the resilience here. There's something profound about this architecture that leads to resilience. Maybe everything can be turned into a problem that transformers can solve. Currently, it definitely looks like the transformer is taking over AI and you can feed basically arbitrary problems into it. And it's a general differentiable computer and it's extremely powerful. And this convergence in AI has been really interesting to watch for me personally. What else do you think could be discovered here about transformers? Like what's surprising thing or is it a stable, I want a stable place. Is there something interesting we might discover about transformers? Like aha moments maybe has to do with memory, maybe knowledge representation, that kind of stuff. Definitely the zeitgeist today is just pushing, like basically right now the zeitgeist is do not touch the transformer, touch everything else. So people are scaling up the datasets, making them much, much bigger. They're working on the evaluation, making the evaluation much, much bigger. And they're basically keeping the architecture unchanged. And that's how we've, that's the last five years of progress in AI, kind of. What do you think about one flavor of it, which is language models? Have you been surprised? Has your sort of imagination been captivated by, you mentioned GPT and all the bigger and bigger and bigger language models. And what are the limits of those models do you think? So just the task of natural language. Basically the way GPT is trained, right, is you just download a massive amount of text data from the internet and you try to predict the next word in the sequence, roughly speaking. We're predicting little word chunks, but roughly speaking, that's it. And what's been really interesting to watch is basically it's a language model. Language models have actually existed for a very long time. There's papers on language modeling from 2003, even earlier. Can you explain in that case what a language model is? Yeah. So language model, just basically the rough idea is just predicting the next word in a sequence, roughly speaking. So there's a paper from, for example, Ben Gio and the team from 2003, where for the first time they were using a neural network to take, say like three or five words and predict the next word. And they're doing this on much smaller data sets. And the neural net is not a transformer, it's a multi-layer perceptron. But it's the first time that a neural network has been applied in that setting. But even before neural networks, there were language models, except they were using Ngram models. And Ngram models are just count-based models. So if you try to take two words and predict the third one, you just count up how many times you've seen any two-word combinations and what came next. And what you predict as coming next is just what you've seen the most of in the training set. And so language modeling has been around for a long time. Neural networks have done language modeling for a long time. So really what's new or interesting or exciting is just realizing that when you scale it up with a powerful enough neural net, a transformer, you have all these emergent properties where basically what happens is if you have a large enough data set of text, you are in the task of predicting the next word. You are multitasking a huge amount of different kinds of problems. You are multitasking understanding of chemistry, physics, human nature. Lots of things are sort of clustered in that objective. It's a very simple objective, but actually you have to understand a lot about the world to make that prediction. You just said the U-word, understanding. In terms of chemistry and physics and so on, what do you feel like it's doing? Is it searching for the right context? What is the actual process happening here? Yeah, so basically it gets a thousand words and it's trying to predict the thousandth and first. And in order to do that very, very well over the entire data set available on the internet, you actually have to basically kind of understand the context of what's going on in there. And it's a sufficiently hard problem that if you have a powerful enough computer, like a transformer, you end up with interesting solutions. And you can ask it to do all kinds of things. And it shows a lot of emergent properties like in-context learning. That was the big deal with GPT and the original paper when they published it, is that you can just sort of prompt it in various ways and ask it to do various things. And it will just kind of complete the sentence. But in the process of just completing the sentence, it's actually solving all kinds of really interesting problems that we care about. Do you think it's doing something like understanding? Like when we use the word understanding for us humans? I think it's doing some understanding. In its weights, it understands, I think, a lot about the world. And it has to in order to predict the next word in the sequence. So it's trained on the data from the internet. What do you think about this approach in terms of data sets, of using data from the internet? Do you think the internet has enough structured data to teach AI about human civilization? Yes, I think the internet has a huge amount of data. I'm not sure if it's a complete enough set. I don't know that text is enough for having a sufficiently powerful AGI as an outcome. Of course, there is audio and video and images and all that kind of stuff. Yes, so text by itself, I'm a little bit suspicious about. There's a ton of things we don't put in text in writing, just because they're obvious to us about how the world works and the physics of it and that things fall. We don't put that stuff in text because why would you? We share that understanding. And so text is a communication medium between humans, and it's not an all-encompassing medium of knowledge about the world. But as you pointed out, we do have video and we have images and we have audio. And so I think that definitely helps a lot. But we haven't trained models sufficiently across all of those modalities yet. So I think that's what a lot of people are interested in. But I wonder what that shared understanding of what we might call common sense has to be learned, inferred in order to complete the sentence correctly. So maybe the fact that it's implied on the internet, the model is going to have to learn that not by reading about it, by inferring it in the representation. But like common sense, just like we, I don't think we learn common sense. Like nobody says, tells us explicitly, we just figure it all out by interacting with the world. Right. And so here's a model of reading about the way people interact with the world. It might have to infer that. I wonder. Yeah. You briefly worked on a project called the World of Bits, training an RL system to take actions on the internet versus just consuming the internet like we talked about. Do you think there's a future for that kind of system, interacting with the internet to help the learning? Yes. I think that's probably the final frontier for a lot of these models because, so as you mentioned when I was at OpenAI, I was working on this project called the Bits. And basically it was the idea of giving neural networks access to a keyboard and a mouse. And the idea is that- What could possibly go wrong? So basically you perceive the input of the screen pixels and basically the state of the computer is sort of visualized for human consumption in images of the web browser and stuff like that. And then you give the neural network the ability to press keyboards and use the mouse. And we were trying to get it to, for example, complete bookings and interact with user interfaces. And- What'd you learn from that experience? Like what was some fun stuff? This is a super cool idea. Yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, I mean, the step between observer to actor is a super fascinating step. Yeah. So there's a lot of things in the digital realm, I would say. And there's a universal interface in like the physical realm, which in my mind is a humanoid form factor kind of thing. We can later talk about Optimus and so on, but I feel like there's a, they're kind of like a similar philosophy in some way where the human, the world, the physical world is designed for the human form and the digital world is designed for the human form of seeing the screen and using keyboard and mouse. And so it's the universal interface that can basically command the digital infrastructure we've built up for ourselves. And so it feels like a very powerful interface to command and to build on top of. Now, to your question as to like what I learned from that, it's interesting because the world of bits was basically too early, I think, at OpenAI at the time. This is around 2015 or so. And the Zeitgeist at that time was very different in AI from the Zeitgeist today. At the time, everyone was super excited about reinforcement learning from scratch. This is the time of the Atari paper where neural networks were playing Atari games and beating humans in some cases, AlphaGo and so on. So everyone was very excited about training neural networks from scratch using reinforcement learning directly. It turns out that reinforcement learning is extremely inefficient way of training neural networks because you're taking all these actions and all these observations and you get some sparse rewards once in a while. So you do all this stuff based on all these inputs. And once in a while, you're told you did a good thing, you did a bad thing. And it's just an extremely hard problem. You can't learn from that. You can burn a forest and you can sort of brute force through it. And we saw that, I think, with Go and Dota and so on. And it does work, but it's extremely inefficient and not how you want to approach problems, practically speaking. And so that's the approach that at the time we also took to the world of bits. We would have an agent initialize randomly. So with keyboard mash and mouse mash and try to make a booking. And it's just like revealed the insanity of that approach very quickly, where you have to stumble by the correct booking in order to get a reward of you did it correctly. And you're never going to stumble by it by chance at random. So even with a simple web interface, there's too many options. There's just too many options. And it's too sparse of a reward signal. And you're starting from scratch at the time. And so you don't know how to read, you don't understand pictures, images, buttons. You don't understand what it means to like make a booking. But now what's happened is it is time to revisit that and open AI is interested in this. Companies like Adept are interested in this and so on. And the idea is coming back because the interface is very powerful. But now you're not training an agent from scratch. You are taking the GPT as initialization. So GPT is pre-trained on all of text. And it understands what's a booking. It understands what's a submit. It understands quite a bit more. And so it already has those representations. They are very powerful. And that makes all the training significantly more efficient and makes the problem tractable. Should the interaction be with like the way humans see it with the buttons and the language or should be with the HTML, JavaScript and the CSS? What do you think is the better? So today all of this interaction is mostly on the level of HTML, CSS and so on. That's done because of computational constraints. But I think ultimately everything is designed for human visual consumption. And so at the end of the day, there's all the additional information is in the layout of the web page and what's next to you and what's a red background and all this kind of stuff and what it looks like visually. So I think that's the final frontier as we are taking in pixels and we're giving out keyboard mouse commands. But I think it's impractical still today. Do you worry about bots on the internet? Given these ideas, given how exciting they are, do you worry about bots on Twitter being not the stupid bots that we see now with the crypto bots, but the bots that might be out there actually that we don't see, that they're interacting in interesting ways? So this kind of system feels like it should be able to pass the I'm not a robot click button, whatever. Which do you actually understand how that test works? I don't quite, like there's a checkbox or whatever that you click. It's presumably tracking like mouse movement and the timing and so on. So exactly this kind of system we're talking about should be able to pass that. So yeah, what do you feel about bots that are language models plus have some interactability and are able to tweet and reply and so on? Do you worry about that world? Yeah, I think it's always been a bit of an arms race between sort of the attack and the defense. So the attack will get stronger, but the defense will get stronger as well. Our ability to detect that. How do you defend? How do you detect? How do you know that your Carpati account on Twitter is human? How would you approach that? Like if people were claiming, you know, how would you defend yourself in the court of law that I'm a human? This account is human? Yeah, at some point I think it might be, I think the society will evolve a little bit. Like we might start signing, digitally signing some of our correspondence or, you know, things that we create. Right now it's not necessary, but maybe in the future it might be. I do think that we are going towards a world where we share the digital space with AIs. Synthetic beings. Yeah. And they will get much better and they will share our digital realm and they'll eventually share our physical realm as well. It's much harder. But that's kind of like the world we're going towards. And most of them will be benign and awful and some of them will be malicious and it's going to be an arms race trying to detect them. So I mean, the worst isn't the AIs, the worst is the AIs pretending to be human. So I don't know if it's always malicious. There's obviously a lot of malicious applications, but it could also be, you know, if I was an AI, I would try very hard to pretend to be human because we're in a human world. I wouldn't get any respect as an AI. I want to get some love and respect. I don't think the problem is intractable. People are thinking about the proof of personhood and we might start digitally signing our stuff and we might all end up having like, yeah, basically some solution for proof of personhood. It doesn't seem to me intractable. It's just something that we haven't had to do until now. But I think once the need really starts to emerge, which is soon, I think people will think about it much more. So, but that too will be a race because obviously you can probably spoof or fake the proof of personhood. So you have to try to figure out how to... Exactly. I mean, it's weird that we have like social security numbers and like passports and stuff. It seems like it's harder to fake stuff in the physical space. But in the digital space, it just feels like it's going to be very tricky, very tricky to out, because it seems to be pretty low cost to fake stuff. What are you going to put an AI in jail for like trying to use a fake personhood proof? I mean, okay, fine, you'll put a lot of AIs in jail, but there'll be more AIs, like exponentially more. The cost of creating a bot is very low. Unless there's some kind of way to track accurately, like you're not allowed to create any program without showing, tying yourself to that program. Like any program that runs on the internet, you'll be able to trace every single human program that was involved with that program. Right. Yeah, maybe you have to start declaring when... We have to start drawing those boundaries and keeping track of, okay, what are digital entities versus human entities? And what is the ownership of human entities and digital entities? And something like that. I don't know, but I think I'm optimistic that this is possible. And in some sense, we're currently in like the worst time of it because all these bots suddenly have become very capable, but we don't have the fences yet built up as a society. But I think that doesn't seem to me intractable. It's just something that we have to deal with. It seems weird that the Twitter bot, like really crappy Twitter bots are so numerous. So I presume that the engineers at Twitter are very good. So it seems like what I would infer from that is it seems like a hard problem. They're probably catching... All right, if I were to sort of steel man the case, it's a hard problem and there's a huge cost to false positive, to removing a post by somebody that's not a bot. That creates a very bad user experience. So they're very cautious about removing. And maybe the bots are really good at learning what gets removed and not, such that they can stay ahead of the removal process very quickly. My impression of it, honestly, is there's a lot of loathing for it. I mean, it's not subtle. My impression of it, it's not subtle. But you have to... Yeah, that's my impression as well. But it feels like maybe you're seeing the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the number of bots is in like the trillions and you have to like... It's a constant assault of bots. I don't know. You have to steel man the case because the bots I'm seeing are pretty obvious. I could write a few lines of code that catch these bots. I mean, definitely there's a lot of loathing for it. But I will say I agree that if you are a sophisticated actor, you could probably create a pretty good bot right now using tools like GPTs because it's a language model. You can generate faces that look quite good now and you can do this at scale. And so I think, yeah, it's quite plausible and it's going to be hard to defend. There was a Google engineer that claimed that the Lambda was sentient. Do you think there's any inkling of truth to what he felt? And more importantly, to me at least, do you think language models will achieve sentience or the illusion of sentience soonish? Yeah. To me, it's a little bit of a canary in a coal mine kind of moment, honestly, a little bit because this engineer spoke to a chatbot at Google and became convinced that this bot is sentient. He asked it some existential philosophical questions. And it gave reasonable answers and looked real and so on. So to me, he wasn't sufficiently trying to stress the system, I think, and exposing the truth of it as it is today. But I think this will be increasingly harder over time. So yeah, I think more and more people will basically become... Yeah, I think there will be more people like that over time as this gets better. Like form an emotional connection to an AI chatbot? Yeah, perfectly plausible in my mind. I think these AIs are actually quite good at human connection, human emotion. A ton of text on the internet is about humans and connection and love and so on. So I think they have a very good understanding in some sense of how people speak to each other about this. And they're very capable of creating a lot of that kind of text. There's a lot of sci-fi from the 50s and 60s that imagined AIs in a very different way. They are calculating cold Vulcan-like machines. That's not what we're getting today. We're getting pretty emotional AIs that actually are very competent and capable of generating emotional sounding text with respect to all of these topics. See, I'm really hopeful about AI systems that are like companions, that help you grow, develop as a human being, help you maximize long-term happiness. But I'm also very worried about AI systems that figure out from the internet that humans get attracted to drama. So these would just be like shit-talking AIs. They're just constantly, did you hear? They'll do gossip. They'll try to plant seeds of suspicion to other humans that you love and trust and just kind of mess with people, because that's going to get a lot of attention. So drama, maximize drama on the path to maximizing engagement. And us humans will feed into that machine and it'll be a giant drama shitstorm. So I'm worried about that. So it's the objective function really defines the way that human civilization progresses with AIs in it. I think right now, at least today, they are not sort of, it's not correct to really think of them as goal-seeking agents that want to do something. They have no long-term memory or anything. It's literally, a good approximation of it is you get a thousand words and you're trying to predict a thousand at first, and then you continue feeding it in. And you are free to prompt it in whatever way you want. So in text. So you say, okay, you are a psychologist and you are very good and you love humans. And here's a conversation between you and another human, human colon something, you something. And then it just continues the pattern. And suddenly you're having a conversation with a fake psychologist who's like trying to help you. And so it's still kind of like in a realm of a tool is a people can prompt it in arbitrary ways and it can create really incredible text, but it doesn't have long-term goals over long periods of time. It doesn't try to, so it doesn't look that way right now. But you can do short-term goals that have long-term effects. So if my prompting short-term goal is to get Andrej Kapodich to respond to me on Twitter, when I, like, I think AI might, that's the goal, but it might figure out that talking shit to you, it would be the best in a highly sophisticated, interesting way. And then you build up a relationship when you respond once. And then it, like over time, it gets to not be sophisticated and just like, just talk shit. And, okay, maybe it won't get to Andrej, but it might get to another celebrity. It might get into other big accounts. And then it'll just, so with just that simple goal, get them to respond. Maximize the probability of actual response. Yeah, I mean, you could prompt a powerful model like this with their, its opinion about how to do any possible thing you're interested in. So they will just, they're kind of on track to become these oracles. I could sort of think of it that way. They are oracles, currently it's just text, but they will have calculators. They will have access to Google search. They will have all kinds of gadgets and gizmos. They will be able to operate the internet and find different information. And yeah, in some sense, that's kind of like currently what it looks like in terms of the development. Do you think there'll be an improvement eventually over what Google is for access to human knowledge? Like it'll be a more effective search engine to access human knowledge? I think there's definite scope in building a better search engine today. And I think Google, they have all the tools, all the people, they have everything they need. They have all the possible pieces. They have people training transformers at scale. They have all the data. It's just not obvious if they are capable as an organization to innovate on their search engine right now. And if they don't, someone else will. There's absolute scope for building a significantly better search engine built on these tools. It's so interesting. A large company where the search, there's already an infrastructure. It works as it brings out a lot of money. So where structurally inside a company is their motivation to pivot? To say, we're going to build a new search engine. Yeah. That's hard. So it's usually going to come from a startup, right? That would be, yeah. Or some other more competent organization. So I don't know. So currently, for example, maybe Bing has another shot at it. Here we go, Microsoft Edge, as we're talking offline. I mean, it definitely, it's really interesting because search engines used to be about, okay, here's some query. Here's web pages that look like the stuff that you have. But you could just directly go to answer and then have supporting evidence. And these models basically, they've read all the texts and they've read all the web pages. And so sometimes when you see yourself going over to search results and sort of getting like a sense of like the average answer to whatever you're interested in, like that just directly comes out. You don't have to do that work. So they're kind of like, yeah, I think they have a way of distilling all that knowledge into like some level of insight, basically. Do you think of prompting as a kind of teaching and learning, like this whole process, like another layer? You know, because maybe that's what humans are, where you have that background model and then the world is prompting you. Yeah, exactly. I think the way we are programming these computers now, like GPTs, is converging to how you program humans. I mean, how do I program humans via prompt? I go to people and I prompt them to do things. I prompt them for information. And so natural language prompt is how we program humans. And we're starting to program computers directly in that interface. It's like pretty remarkable, honestly. So you've spoken a lot about the idea of software 2.0. All good ideas become like cliches so quickly, like the terms. It's kind of hilarious. It's like, I think Eminem once said that like, if he gets annoyed by a song he's written very quickly, that means it's going to be a big hit because it's too catchy. But can you describe this idea and how you're thinking about it has evolved over the months and years since you coined it? Yeah. So I had a blog post on software 2.0, I think several years ago now. And the reason I wrote that post is because I kind of saw something remarkable happening in software development and how a lot of code was being transitioned to be written not in sort of like C++ and so on, but it's written in the weights of a neural net. Basically just saying that neural nets are taking over software, the realm of software, and taking more and more tasks. And at the time, I think not many people understood this deeply enough that this is a big deal. It's a big transition. Neural networks were seen as one of multiple classification algorithms you might use for your dataset problem on Kaggle. Like this is not that. This is a change in how we program computers. And I saw neural nets as this is going to take over. The way we program computers is going to change. It's not going to be people writing software in C++ or something like that and directly programming the software. It's going to be accumulating training sets and datasets and crafting these objectives by which you train these neural nets. And at some point, there's going to be a compilation process from the datasets and the objective and the architecture specification into the binary, which is really just the neural net weights and the forward pass of the neural net. And then you can deploy that binary. And so I was talking about that transition, and that's what the post is about. And I saw this play out in a lot of fields, Autopilot being one of them, but also just simple image classification. People thought originally in the 80s and so on that they would write the algorithm for detecting a dog in an image. And they had all these ideas about how the brain does it. And first we detect corners, and then we detect lines, and then we stitched them up. And they were really going at it. They were thinking about how they're going to write the algorithm. And this is not the way you build it. And there was a smooth transition where, okay, first we thought we were going to build everything. Then we were building the features, so like hog features and things like that, that detect these little statistical patterns from image patches. And then there was a little bit of learning on top of it, like a support vector machine or binary classifier for cat versus dog and images on top of the features. So we wrote the features, but we trained the last layer, sort of the classifier. And then people are like, actually, let's not even design the features because we can't. Honestly, we're not very good at it. So let's also learn the features. And then you end up with basically a convolutional neural net where you're learning most of it. You're just specifying the architecture. And the architecture has tons of fill in the blanks, which is all the knobs. And you let the optimization write most of it. And so this transition is happening across the industry everywhere. And suddenly we end up with a ton of code that is written in neural netweights. And I was just pointing out that the analogy is actually pretty strong. And we have a lot of developer environments for software 1.0. Like we have IDEs, how you work with code, how you debug code, how do you run code, how do you maintain code. We have GitHub. So I was trying to make those analogies in the new realm. Like what is the GitHub of software 2.0? Turns out it's something that looks like Hugging Face right now. And so I think some people took it seriously and built cool companies. And many people originally attacked the post. It actually was not well received when I wrote it. And I think maybe it has something to do with the title, but the post was not well received. And I think more people sort of have been coming around to it over time. Yeah. So you were the director of AI at Tesla, where I think this idea was really implemented at scale, which is how you have engineering teams doing software 2.0. So can you sort of linger on that idea of, I think we're in the really early stages of everything you just said, which is like GitHub IDEs. Like how do we build engineering teams that work in software 2.0 systems? And the data collection and the data annotation, which is all part of that software 2.0. Like what do you think is the task of programming a software 2.0? Is it debugging in the space of hyperparameters, or is it also debugging in the space of data? Yeah. The way by which you program the computer and influence its algorithm is not by writing the commands yourself. You're changing mostly the dataset. You're changing the loss functions of like what the neural net is trying to do, how it's trying to predict things. But they're basically the datasets and the architectures of the neural net. And so in the case of the autopilot, a lot of the datasets have to do with, for example, detection of objects and lane line markings and traffic lights and so on. So you accumulate massive datasets of, here's an example, here's the desired label, and then here's roughly what the algorithm should look like, and that's a convolutional neural net. So the specification of the architecture is like a hint as to what the algorithm should roughly look like. And then the fill in the blanks process of optimization is the training process. And then you take your neural net that was trained, it gives all the right answers on your dataset, and you deploy it. So there's, in that case, perhaps in all machine learning cases, there's a lot of tasks. So is coming up formulating a task, like for a multi-headed neural network, is formulating a task part of the programming? Yeah, pretty much so. How you break down a problem into a set of tasks? Yeah. So on a high level, I would say, if you look at the software running in the autopilot, I gave a number of talks on this topic, I would say originally a lot of it was written in software 1.0. There's, imagine lots of C++, right? And then gradually, there was a tiny neural net that was, for example, predicting, given a single image, is there like a traffic light or not, or is there a lane line marking or not? And this neural net didn't have too much to do in the scope of the software. It was making tiny predictions on individual little image. And then the rest of the system stitched it up. So, okay, we're actually, we don't have just a single camera, we have eight cameras. We actually have eight cameras over time. And so what do you do with these predictions? How do you put them together? How do you do the fusion of all that information? And how do you act on it? All of that was written by humans in C++. And then we decided, okay, we don't actually want to do all of that fusion in C++ code, because we're actually not good enough to write that algorithm. We want the neural nets to write the algorithm. And we want to port all of that software into the 2.0 stack. And so then we actually had neural nets that now take all the eight camera images simultaneously and make predictions for all of that. So, and actually, they don't make predictions in the space of images. They now make predictions directly in 3D. And actually, they don't in three dimensions around the car. And now actually, we don't manually fuse the predictions in 3D over time. We don't trust ourselves to write that tracker. So actually, we give the neural net the information over time. So it takes these videos now and makes those predictions. And so you're sort of just like putting more and more power into the neural net, more and more processing. And at the end of it, the eventual sort of goal is to have most of the software potentially be in the 2.0 land, because it works significantly better. Humans are just not very good at writing software, basically. So the prediction is happening in this like 4D land. Yeah. So it's a three-dimensional world over time. How do you do annotation in that world? What have you, so data annotation, whether it's self-supervised or manual by humans, is a big part of this software 2.0 world. Right. I would say by far in the industry, if you're like talking about the industry and how, what is the technology of what we have available, everything is supervised learning. So you need a data sets of input, desired output, and you need lots of it. And there are three properties of it that you need. You need it to be very large. You need it to be accurate, no mistakes, and you need it to be diverse. You don't want to just have a lot of correct examples of one thing. You need to really cover the space of possibility as much as you can. And the more you can cover the space of possible inputs, the better the algorithm will work at the end. Now, once you have really good data sets that you're collecting, curating, and cleaning, you can train your neural net on top of that. So a lot of the work goes into cleaning those data sets. Now, as you pointed out, it's probably, it could be, the question is, how do you achieve a ton of, if you want to basically predict in 3D, you need data in 3D to back that up. So in this video, we have eight videos coming from all the cameras of the system, and this is what they saw. And this is the truth of what actually was around. There was this car, there was this car, this car. These are the lane line markings. This is the geometry of the road. There's a traffic light in this three-dimensional position. You need the ground truth. And so the big question that the team was solving, of course, is how do you arrive at that ground truth? Because once you have a million of it, and it's large, clean, and diverse, then training a neural net on it works extremely well, and you can ship that into the car. And so there's many mechanisms by which we collected that training data. You can always go for human annotation. You can go for simulation as a source of ground truth. You can also go for what we call the offline tracker that we've spoken about at the AI Day and so on, which is basically an automatic reconstruction process for taking those videos and recovering the three-dimensional sort of reality of what was around that car. So basically think of doing like a three-dimensional reconstruction as an offline thing, and then understanding that, okay, there's 10 seconds of video. This is what we saw, and therefore, here's all the lane lines, cars, and so on. And then once you have that annotation, you can train neural nets to imitate it. And how difficult is the reconstruction, the 3D reconstruction? It's difficult, but it can be done. So there's overlap between the cameras, and you do the reconstruction, and there's perhaps if there's any inaccuracy, so that's caught in the annotation step. Yes. The nice thing about the annotation is that it is fully offline. You have infinite time. You have a chunk of one minute, and you're trying to just offline in a supercomputer somewhere, figure out where were the positions of all the cars, all the people, and you have your full one-minute video from all the angles. And you can run all the neural nets you want, and they can be very efficient, massive neural nets. There can be neural nets that can't even run in the car later at test time. So they can be even more powerful neural nets than what you can eventually deploy. So you can do anything you want, three-dimensional reconstruction, neural nets, anything you want just to recover that truth, and then you supervise that truth. What have you learned, you said no mistakes, about humans doing annotation? Because I assume humans, there's like a range of things they're good at in terms of clicking stuff on screen. How interesting is that to you, of a problem of designing an annotator where humans are accurate, enjoy it? Like what are even the metrics? Are efficient or productive, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, so I grew the annotation team at Tesla from basically zero to a thousand while I was there. That was really interesting. You know, my background is a PhD student researcher, so growing that kind of an organization was pretty crazy. But yeah, I think it's extremely interesting and part of the design process very much behind the autopilot as to where you use humans. Humans are very good at certain kinds of annotations. They're very good, for example, at two-dimensional annotations of images. They're not good at annotating cars over time in three-dimensional space, very, very hard. And so that's why we were very careful to design the tasks that are easy to do for humans versus things that should be left to the offline tracker. Like maybe the computer will do all the triangulation and three-dimensional reconstruction, but the human will say, exactly these pixels of the image are a car. Exactly these pixels are a human. And so co-designing the data annotation pipeline was very much bread and butter was what I was doing daily. Do you think there's still a lot of open problems in that space? Just in general, annotation where the stuff the machines are good at, machines do, and the humans do what they're good at, and there's maybe some iterative process. Right. I think to a very large extent, we went through a number of iterations and we learned a ton about how to create these datasets. I'm not seeing big open problems. Like originally when I joined, I was like, I was really not sure how this would turn out. Yeah. But by the time I left, I was much more secure and actually we sort of understand the philosophy of how to create these datasets. And I was pretty comfortable with where that was at the time. So what are strengths and limitations of cameras for the driving task? In your understanding, when you formulate the driving task as a vision task with eight cameras, you've seen that the entire, you know, most of the history of the computer vision field, when it has to do with neural networks, what, just if you step back, what are the strengths and limitations of pixels, of using pixels to drive? Yeah. Pixels I think are a beautiful sensory, beautiful sensor, I would say. The thing is like cameras are very, very cheap and they provide a ton of information, ton of bits. So it's a extremely cheap sensor for a ton of bits and each one of these bits has a constraint on the state of the world. And so you get lots of megapixel images, very cheap, and it just gives you all these constraints for understanding what's actually out there in the world. So vision is probably the highest bandwidth sensor. It's a very high bandwidth sensor. And I love that pixels is a constraint on the world. It's this highly complex, high bandwidth constraint on the world, on the state of the world. That's fascinating. It's not just that, but again, this real importance of it's the sensor that humans use. Therefore everything is designed for that sensor. The text, the writing, the flashing signs, everything is designed for vision. And so you just find it everywhere. And so that's why that is the interface you want to be in. Again, about these universal interfaces, and that's where we actually want to measure the world as well and then develop software for that sensor. But there's other constraints on the state of the world that humans use to understand the world. I mean, vision ultimately is the main one, but we're like referencing our understanding of human behavior in some common sense physics. That could be inferred from vision, from a perception perspective, but it feels like we're using some kind of reasoning to predict the world, not just the pixels. I mean, you have a powerful prior for how the world evolves over time, et cetera. So it's not just about the likelihood term coming up from the data itself, telling you about what you are observing, but also the prior term of like, where are the likely things to see and how do they likely move and so on. And the question is how complex is the range of possibilities that might happen in the driving task. Is that to you still an open problem of how difficult is driving, like philosophically speaking? All the time you worked on driving, do you understand how hard driving is? Yeah, driving is really hard because it has to do with the predictions of all these other agents and the theory of mind and what they're gonna do and are they looking at you? Where are they looking? Where are they thinking? There's a lot that goes there at the full tail of the expansion of the noise that we have to be comfortable with and eventually the final problems are of that form. I don't think those are the problems that are very common. I think eventually they're important, but it's like really in the tail end. In the tail end, the rare edge cases. From the vision perspective, what are the toughest parts of the vision problem of driving? Well basically the sensor is extremely powerful, but you still need to process that information. And so going from brightnesses of these pixel values to hey, here are the three dimensional world is extremely hard. And that's what the neural networks are fundamentally doing. And so the difficulty really is in just doing an extremely good job of engineering the entire pipeline, the entire data engine, having the capacity to train these neural nets, having the ability to evaluate the system and iterate on it. So I would say just doing this in production at scale is like the hard part. It's an execution problem. So the data engine, but also the sort of deployment of the system such that it has low latency performance so it has to do all these steps. Yeah, for the neural net specifically, just making sure everything fits into the chip on the car and you have a finite budget of flops that you can perform and memory bandwidth and other constraints and you have to make sure it flies and you can squeeze in as much compute as you can into the tiny. What have you learned from that process? Because maybe that's one of the bigger, like new things coming from a research background where there's a system that has to run under heavily constrained resources, has to run really fast. What kind of insights have you learned from that? Yeah, I'm not sure if there's too many insights. You're trying to create a neural net that will fit in what you have available and you're always trying to optimize it. And we talked a lot about it on AI day and basically the triple backflips that the team is doing to make sure it all fits and utilizes the engine. So I think it's extremely good engineering. And then there's all kinds of little insights peppered in on how to do it properly. Let's actually zoom out because I don't think we talked about the data engine. The entirety of the layout of this idea that I think is just beautiful with humans in the loop. Can you describe the data engine? Yeah, the data engine is what I call the almost biological feeling like process by which you are perfect the training sets for these neural networks. So because most of the programming now is in the level of these data sets and make sure they're large, diverse and clean. Basically you have a data set that you think is good. You train your neural net, you deploy it, and then you observe how well it's performing. And you're trying to always increase the quality of your data set. So you're trying to catch scenarios basically that are basically rare. And it is in these scenarios that neural nets will typically struggle in because they weren't told what to do in those rare cases in the data set. But now you can close the loop because if you can now collect all those at scale, you can then feed them back into the reconstruction process I described and reconstruct the truth in those cases and add it to the data set. And so the whole thing ends up being like a staircase of improvement of perfecting your training set. And you have to go through deployments so that you can mine the parts that are not yet represented well in the data set. So your data set is basically imperfect. It needs to be diverse. It has pockets that are missing and you need to pad out the pockets. You can sort of think of it that way in the data. What role do humans play in this? So what's this biological system, like a human body is made up of cells. What role, like how do you optimize the human system? The multiple engineers collaborating, figuring out what to focus on, what to contribute, which tasks to optimize in this neural network, who's in charge of figuring out which task needs more data. When you speak to the hyperparameters, the human system. It really just comes down to extremely good execution from an engineering team who knows what they're doing. They understand intuitively the philosophical insights underlying the data engine and the process by which the system improves and how to again, like delegate the strategy of the data collection, how that works, and then just making sure it's all extremely well executed. And that's where most of the work is, is not even the philosophizing or the research or the ideas of it. It's just extremely good execution. It's so hard when you're dealing with data at that scale. So your role in the data engine, executing well on it, is difficult and extremely important. Is there a priority of like a vision board of saying like, we really need to get better at stoplights? Like the prioritization of tasks, is that essentially, and that comes from the data? That comes to a very large extent to what we are trying to achieve in the product roadmap, what we're trying to, the release we're trying to get out in the feedback from the QA team worth it, where the system is struggling or not, the things we're trying to improve. And the QA team gives some signal, some information in aggregate about the performance of the system in various conditions. That's right. And then of course, all of us drive it and we can also see it. It's really nice to work with a system that you can also experience yourself and you know, it drives you home. It's, is there some insight you can draw from your individual experience that you just can't quite get from an aggregate statistical analysis of data? I would say so. Yeah. It's so weird, right? Yes. It's not scientific in a sense, because you're just one anecdotal sample. Yeah. I think there's a ton of, it's a source of truth. It's your interaction with the system and you can see it, you can play with it, you can perturb it, you can get a sense of it, you have an intuition for it. I think numbers just like have a way of, numbers and plots and graphs are much harder. It hides a lot of... It's like, if you train a language model, it's a really powerful way is by you interacting with it. Yeah, 100%. To try to build up an intuition. Yeah. I think like Elon also, like he always wanted to drive the system himself. He drives a lot and I don't want to say almost daily. So he also sees this as a source of truth. You driving the system and it performing and yeah. So what do you think? Tough questions here. So Tesla last year removed radar from the sensor suite and now just announced that it's going to remove ultrasonic sensors relying solely on vision. So camera only. Does that make the perception problem harder or easier? I would almost reframe the question in some way. So the thing is basically, you would think that additional sensors... By the way, can I just interrupt? Go ahead. I wonder if a language model will ever do that if you prompt it. Let me reframe your question. That would be epic. This is the wrong prompt. Sorry. It's like a little bit of a wrong question because basically you would think that these sensors are an asset to you. But if you fully consider the entire product in its entirety, these sensors are actually potentially a liability because these sensors aren't free. They don't just appear on your car. You need something, you need to have an entire supply chain. You have people procuring it. There can be problems with them. They may need replacement. They are part of the manufacturing process. They can hold back the line in production. You need to source them, you need to maintain them. You have to have teams that write the firmware, all of it. And then you also have to incorporate and fuse them into the system in some way. And so it actually like bloats a lot of it. And I think Elon is really good at simplify, simplify. Best part is no part. And he always tries to throw away things that are not essential because he understands the entropy in organizations and in approach. And I think in this case, the cost is high and you're not potentially seeing it if you're just a computer vision engineer. And I'm just trying to improve my network and is it more useful or less useful? How useful is it? And the thing is, once you consider the full cost of a sensor, it actually is potentially a liability and you need to be really sure that it's giving you extremely useful information. In this case, we looked at using it or not using it and the delta was not massive. And so it's not useful. Is it also bloat in the data engine, like having more sensors? 100%. Is it a distraction? And these sensors, they can change over time, for example, you can have one type of say radar, you can have other type of radar, they change over time. Now you suddenly need to worry about it. Now suddenly you have a column in your SQLite telling you, oh, what sensor type was it? And they all have different distributions. And then they contribute noise and entropy into everything. And they bloat stuff. And also organizationally has been really fascinating to me that it can be very distracting. If you only want to get to work as vision, all the resources are on it and you're building out a data engine. And you're actually making forward progress because that is the sensor with the most bandwidth, the most constraints on the world. And you're investing fully into that and you can make that extremely good. If you're, you have only a finite amount of sort of spend of focus across different facets of the system. And this kind of reminds me of Rich Sutton's, A Bitter Lesson. That just seems like simplifying the system. In the long run, now, of course, you don't know what the long run is. And it seems to be always the right solution. In that case, it was for RL, but it seems to apply generally across all systems that do computation. So where, what do you think about the LIDAR as a crutch debate? The battle between point clouds and pixels? Yeah, I think this debate is always like slightly confusing to me because it seems like the actual debate should be about like, do you have the fleet or not? That's like the really important thing about whether you can achieve a really good functioning of an AI system at this scale. The data collection systems. Yeah. Do you have a fleet or not is significantly more important whether you have LIDAR or not. It's just another sensor. And yeah, I think similar to the radar discussion, basically, I don't think it basically doesn't offer extra information. It's extremely costly. It has all kinds of problems. You have to worry about it. You have to calibrate it, et cetera. It creates bloat and entropy. You have to be really sure that you need this sensor. In this case, I basically don't think you need it. And I think, honestly, I will make a stronger statement. I think the others, some of the other companies who are using it are probably going to drop it. Yeah. So you have to consider the sensor in the full, in considering, can you build a big fleet that collects a lot of data? And can you integrate that sensor with that data and that sensor into a data engine that's able to quickly find different parts of the data that then continuously improves whatever the model that you're using? Yeah. Another way to look at it is like vision is necessary in a sense that the world is designed for human visual consumption. So you need vision. It's necessary. And then also it is sufficient because it has all the information that you need for driving and humans, obviously, has a vision to drive. So it's both necessary and sufficient. So you want to focus resources and you have to be really sure if you're going to bring in other sensors, you could add sensors to infinity. At some point you need to draw the line. And I think in this case, you have to really consider the full cost of any one sensor that you're adopting and do you really need it? And I think the answer in this case is no. So what do you think about the idea that the other companies are forming high resolution maps and constraining heavily the geographic regions in which they operate? Is that approach not in your view, not going to scale over time to the entirety of the United States? I think as you mentioned, like they pre-map all the environments and they need to refresh the map and they have a perfect centimeter level accuracy map of everywhere they're going to drive. It's crazy. How are you going to, when we're talking about autonomy actually changing the world, we're talking about the deployment on a global scale of autonomous systems for transportation. And if you need to maintain a centimeter accurate map for earth or like for many cities and keep them updated, it's a huge dependency that you're taking on, huge dependency. It's a massive, massive dependency. And now you need to ask yourself, do you really need it? And humans don't need it. So it's very useful to have a low level map of like, okay, the connectivity of your road, you know that there's a fork coming up when you drive an environment, you sort of have that high level understanding. It's like a small Google map and Tesla uses Google map, like similar kind of resolution information in its system, but it will not pre-map environments to semi level accuracy. It's a crutch, it's a distraction. It costs entropy and it diffuses the team, it dilutes the team. And you're not focusing on what's actually necessary, which is the computer vision problem. What did you learn about machine learning, about engineering, about life, about yourself as one human being from working with Elon Musk? I think the most I've learned is about how to sort of run organizations efficiently and how to create efficient organizations and how to fight entropy in an organization. So human engineering in the fight against entropy. Yeah. There's a, I think Elon is a very efficient warrior in the fight against entropy in organizations. What does entropy in an organization look like exactly? It's process, it's process and- Inefficiencies in the form of meetings and that kind of stuff. Yeah, meetings. He hates meetings. He keeps telling people to skip meetings if they're not useful. He basically runs the world's biggest startups, I would say. Tesla, SpaceX are the world's biggest startups. Tesla actually has multiple startups. I think it's better to look at it that way. And so I think he's extremely good at that. And yeah, he has a very good intuition for streamlining processes, making everything efficient. Best part is no part, simplifying, focusing, and just kind of removing barriers, moving very quickly, making big moves. All of this is a very startup-y sort of seeming things, but at scale. So strong drive to simplify. From your perspective, I mean, that also probably applies to just designing systems and machine learning and otherwise, like simplify, simplify. What do you think is the secret to maintaining the startup culture in a company that grows? Can you introspect that? I do think you need someone in a powerful position with a big hammer, like Elon, who's like the cheerleader for that idea and ruthlessly pursues it. If no one has a big enough hammer, everything turns into committees, democracy within the company, process, talking to stakeholders, decision-making, just everything just crumbles. If you have a big person who is also really smart and has a big hammer, things move quickly. So you said your favorite scene in Interstellar is the intense docking scene with the AI and Cooper talking, saying, Cooper, what are you doing? Docking, it's not possible. No, it's necessary. Such a good line. By the way, just so many questions there. Why an AI in that scene presumably is supposed to be able to compute a lot more than the human is saying it's not optimal. Why the human, I mean, that's a movie, but shouldn't the AI know much better than the human? Anyway, what do you think is the value of setting seemingly impossible goals? So like our initial intuition, which seems like something that you have taken on, that Elon espouses, that where the initial intuition of the community might say this is very difficult, and then you take it on anyway with a crazy deadline. You just from a human engineering perspective, have you seen the value of that? I wouldn't say that setting impossible goals exactly is a good idea, but I think setting very ambitious goals is a good idea. I think there's a, what I call sub-linear scaling of difficulty, which means that 10x problems are not 10x hard. Usually 10x harder problem is like two or three X harder to execute on. Because if you want to actually, like, if you want to improve a system by 10%, it costs some amount of work. And if you want to 10x improve the system, it doesn't cost, you know, 100X amount of the work. And it's because you fundamentally change the approach. I mean, if you start with that constraint, then some approaches are obviously dumb and not going to work. And it forces you to reevaluate. And I think it's a very interesting way of approaching problem solving. But it requires a weird kind of thinking. It's just going back to your like PhD days, it's like, how do you think which ideas in the machine learning community are solvable? Yes. It's, it requires, what is that? I mean, there's the cliche of first principles thinking, but like, it requires to basically ignore what the community is saying. Because doesn't the community, doesn't a community in science usually draw lines of what is and isn't possible? Right. And like, it's very hard to break out of that without going crazy. Yeah. I mean, I think a good example here is, you know, the deep learning revolution in some sense, because you could be in computer vision at that time, when during the deep learning sort of revolution of 2012 and so on, you could be improving a computer vision stack by 10%. Or we can just be saying, actually, all of this is useless. And how do I do 10x better computer vision? Well, it's not probably by tuning a hog feature detector. I need a different approach. I need something that is scalable, going back to Richard Sutton's, and understanding sort of like the philosophy of the bitter lesson. And then being like, actually, I need much more scalable system, like a neural network that in principle works, and then having some deep believers that can actually execute on that mission and make it work. So that's the 10x solution. What do you think is the timeline to solve the problem of autonomous driving? That's still in part an open question. Yeah, I think the tough thing with timelines of self-driving, obviously, is that no one has created self-driving. Yeah. So it's not like, what do you think is the timeline to build this bridge? Well, we've built million bridges before, here's how long that takes. No one has built autonomy. It's not obvious. Some parts turn out to be much easier than others. So it's really hard to forecast. You do your best based on trend lines and so on, and based on intuition. But that's why fundamentally, it's just really hard to forecast this. No one has- So even still, like being inside of it, it's hard to do. Yes. Some things turn out to be much harder, and some things turn out to be much easier. Do you try to avoid making forecasts? Because Elon doesn't avoid them, right? And heads of car companies in the past have not avoided it either. Ford and other places have made predictions that we're going to solve level four driving by 2020, 2021, whatever. And now they're all kind of backtracking that prediction. As an AI person, do you for yourself privately make predictions, or do they get in the way of your actual ability to think about a thing? Yeah, I would say what's easy to say is that this problem is tractable, and that's an easy prediction to make. It's tractable. It's going to work. Yes. It's just really hard. Some things turn out to be harder, and some things turn out to be easier. But it definitely feels tractable, and it feels like at least the team at Tesla, which is what I saw internally, is definitely on track to that. How do you form a strong representation that allows you to make a prediction about tractability? So you're the leader of a lot of humans. You have to kind of say, this is actually possible. How do you build up that intuition? It doesn't have to be even driving. It could be other tasks. What difficult tasks did you work on in your life? I mean, classification, achieving certain, just on ImageNet, certain level of superhuman level performance. Yeah, expert intuition. Just intuition. It's belief. So just thinking about it long enough, like studying, looking at sample data, like you said, driving. My intuition is really flawed on this. I don't have a good intuition about tractability. It could be anything. It could be solvable. The driving task could be simplified into something quite trivial, like the solution to the problem would be quite trivial. And at scale, more and more cars driving perfectly might make the problem much easier. The more cars you have driving, like people learn how to drive correctly, not correctly, but in a way that's more optimal for a heterogeneous system of autonomous and semi-autonomous and manually driven cars. That could change stuff. Then again, also I've spent a ridiculous number of hours just staring at pedestrians crossing streets thinking about humans. And it feels like the way we use our eye contact, it sends really strong signals. And there's certain quirks and edge cases of behavior. And of course, a lot of the fatalities that happen have to do with drunk driving, both on the pedestrian side and the driver's side. So there's that problem of driving at night and all that kind of. So I wonder, it's like the space of possible solutions to autonomous driving includes so many human factor issues that it's almost impossible to predict. There could be super clean, nice solutions. Yeah. I would say definitely, to use a game analogy, there's some fog of war, but you definitely also see the frontier of improvement. And you can measure historically how much you've made progress. And I think, for example, at least what I've seen in roughly five years at Tesla, when I joined, it barely kept lane on the highway. I think going up from Palo Alto to SF was like three or four interventions. Anytime the road would do anything geometrically or turn too much, it would just not work. And so going from that to a pretty competent system in five years and seeing what happens also under the hood and what the scale at which the team is operating now with respect to data and compute and everything else, it's just massive progress. You're climbing a mountain and it's fog, but you're making a lot of progress. You're making progress and you see what the next directions are. And you're looking at some of the remaining challenges and they're not perturbing you and they're not changing your philosophy and you're not contorting yourself. You're like, actually, these are the things that we still need to do. Yeah, the fundamental components of solving the problem seem to be there, from the data engine to the compute, to the compute on the car, to the compute for the training, all that kind of stuff. So you've done, over the years you've been at Tesla, you've done a lot of amazing breakthrough ideas and engineering, all of it, from the data engine to the human side, all of it. Can you speak to why you chose to leave Tesla? Basically, as I described, I ran, I think over time during those five years, I've kind of gotten myself into a little bit of a managerial position. Most of my days were meetings and growing the organization and making decisions about sort of high level strategic decisions about the team and what it should be working on and so on. And it's kind of like a corporate executive role and I can do it. I think I'm okay at it, but it's not like fundamentally what I enjoy. And so I think when I joined, there was no computer vision team because Tesla was just going from the transition of using Mobileye, a third party vendor for all of its computer vision to having to build its computer vision system. So when I showed up, there were two people training deep neural networks and they were training them at a computer at their legs, like down at a workstation. They were doing some kind of basic classification task. Yeah. And so I kind of like grew that into what I think is a fairly respectable deep learning team, a massive compute cluster, a very good data annotation organization. And I was very happy with where that was. It became quite autonomous. And so I kind of stepped away and I, you know, I'm very excited to do much more technical things again. Yeah. And kind of like refocus on AGI. What was this soul searching like? Because you took a little time off. Like what, how many mushrooms did you take? No, I'm just kidding. I mean, what was going through your mind? The human lifetime is finite. Yeah. You did a few incredible things. You're one of the best teachers of AI in the world. You're one of the best, and I don't mean that, I mean that in the best possible way, you're one of the best tinkerers in the AI world. Something like understanding the fundamentals of how something works by building it from scratch and playing with the basic intuitions. It's like Einstein, Feynman, we're all really good at this kind of stuff. Like small example of a thing to play with it, to try to understand it. So that, and obviously now with Tessa, you helped build a team of machine learning, like engineers and assistants that actually accomplish something in the real world. So given all that, what was the soul searching like? Well, it was hard because obviously I love the company a lot and I love Elon, I love Tesla. I want, it was hard to leave. I love the team basically. But yeah, I think I actually, I would be potentially interested in revisiting it, maybe coming back at some point, working in Optimus, working in AGI at Tesla. I think Tesla is going to do incredible things. It's basically like, it's a massive large scale robotics kind of company with a ton of in-house talent for doing really incredible things. And I think human robots are going to be amazing. I think autonomous transportation is going to be amazing. All this is happening at Tesla. So I think it's just a really amazing organization. So being part of it and helping it along, I think was very, basically I enjoyed that a lot. Yeah, it was basically difficult for those reasons because I love the company. But I'm happy to potentially at some point come back for Act 2. But I felt like at this stage, I built the team, it felt autonomous, and I became a manager and I wanted to do a lot more technical stuff. I wanted to learn stuff. I wanted to teach stuff. And I just kind of felt like it was a good time for a change of pace a little bit. What do you think is the best movie sequel of all time, speaking of part two? Because most of them suck. Movie sequels? Movie sequels, yeah. And you tweet about movies. So this is a tiny tangent. Is there a, what's your, what's like a favorite movie sequel? Godfather Part 2. Are you a fan of Godfather? Because you didn't even tweet or mention the Godfather. Yeah, I don't love that movie. I know it has a huge follow up. We're going to edit that out. We're going to edit out the hate towards the Godfather. How dare you disrespect. I think I will make a strong statement. I don't know why. I don't know why, but I basically don't like any movie before 1995. Something like that. Didn't you mention Terminator 2? Okay, okay. I like Terminator 2 was a little bit later, 1990. No, I think Terminator 2 was in the 80s. And I like Terminator 1 as well. So okay, so like few exceptions, but by and large, for some reason, I don't like movies before 1995 or something. They feel very slow. The camera is like zoomed out. It's boring. It's kind of naive. It's kind of weird. And also Terminator was very much ahead of its time. Yes. And the Godfather, there's like no AGI. I mean, but you have Good Will Hunting was one of the movies you mentioned, and that doesn't have any AGI either. I guess that's mathematics. Yeah, I guess occasionally I do enjoy movies that don't feature. Or like Anchorman. Anchorman is so good. I don't understand, speaking of AGI, because I don't understand why Will Ferrell is so funny. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute. There's just something about him. And he's a singular human, because you don't get that many comedies these days. And I wonder if it has to do about the culture or the machine of Hollywood, or does it have to do with just we got lucky with certain people in comedy that came together, because he is a singular human. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like his movies. That was a ridiculous tangent. I apologize. But you mentioned humanoid robots. So what do you think about Optimus, about Tesla Bot? Do you think we'll have robots in the factory and in the home in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years? Yeah, I think it's a very hard project. I think it's going to take a while. Who else is going to build humanoid robots at scale? And I think it is a very good form factor to go after, because like I mentioned, the world is designed for humanoid form factor. These things would be able to operate our machines. They would be able to sit down in chairs, potentially even drive cars. Basically the world is designed for humans. That's the form factor you want to invest into and make work over time. I think there's another school of thought, which is, okay, pick a problem and design a robot to it. But actually designing a robot and getting a whole data engine and everything behind it to work is actually an incredibly hard problem. So it makes sense to go after general interfaces that, okay, they are not perfect for any one given task, but they actually have the generality of just with a prompt with English able to do something across. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to go after a general interface in the physical world. And I think it's a very difficult project. I think it's going to take time, but I see no other company that can execute on that vision. I think it's going to be amazing. Basically physical labor, like if you think transportation is a large market, try physical labor. It's insane. But it's not just physical labor. To me, the thing that's also exciting is social robotics. So the relationship we'll have on different levels with those robots. That's why I was really excited to see Optimus. People have criticized me for the excitement, but I've worked with a lot of research labs that do humanoid legged robots, Boston Dynamics, Unitry. There's a lot of companies that do legged robots, but that's the elegance of the movement is a tiny, tiny part of the big picture. So integrating the two big exciting things to me about Tesla doing humanoid or any legged robots is clearly integrating it into the data engine. So the data engine aspect. So the actual intelligence for the perception and the control and the planning and all that kind of stuff, integrating into the fleet that you mentioned. And then speaking of fleet, the second thing is the mass manufacture. Just knowing culturally driving towards a simple robot that's cheap to produce at scale and doing that well, having experience to do that well. That changes everything. That's a very different culture and style than Boston Dynamics. Who, by the way, those robots are just, the way they move, it'll be a very long time before Tesla can achieve the smoothness of movement. But that's not what it's about. It's about the entirety of the system, like we talked about the data engine and the fleet. That's super exciting. Even the initial sort of models. But that too was really surprising that in a few months you can get a prototype. And the reason that happened very quickly is, as you alluded to, there's a ton of copy paste from what's happening in the autopilot. A lot. The amount of expertise that came out of the woodworks at Tesla for building the human robot was incredible to see. Basically Elon said at one point, we're doing this. And then next day, basically, all these CAD models started to appear and people talking about the supply chain and manufacturing. And people showed up with screwdrivers and everything the other day and started to put together the body. And I was like, whoa, all these people exist at Tesla. And fundamentally building a car is actually not that different from building a robot. And that is true, not just for the hardware pieces. And also let's not forget hardware, not just for a demo, but manufacturing of that hardware at scale is like a whole different thing. But for software as well, basically this robot currently thinks it's a car. It's going to have a midlife crisis at some point. It thinks it's a car. Some of the earlier demos, actually, we were talking about potentially doing them outside in the parking lot because that's where all of the computer vision was like working out of the box instead of like inside. But all the operating system, everything just copy pastes. Computer vision, mostly copy pastes. I mean, you have to retrain the neural nets, but the approach and everything and data engine and offline trackers and the way we go about the occupancy tracker and so on, everything copy pastes. You just need to retrain the neural nets. And then the planning control, of course, has to change quite a bit. But there's a ton of copy paste from what's happening at Tesla. And so if you were to go with the goal of like, okay, let's build a million human robots and you're not Tesla, that's a lot to ask. If you're Tesla, it's actually like, it's not that crazy. And then the follow up question is then how difficult, just like with driving, how difficult is the manipulation task such that it can have an impact at scale? I think depending on the context, the really nice thing about robotics is that unless you do a manufacturing and that kind of stuff, is there is more room for error. Driving is so safety critical and also time critical. Like a robot is allowed to move slower, which is nice. Yes. I think it's going to take a long time, but the way you want to structure the development is you need to say, okay, it's going to take a long time. How can I set up the product development roadmap so that I'm making revenue along the way? I'm not setting myself up for a zero one loss function where it doesn't work until it works. You don't want to be in that position. You want to make it useful almost immediately, and then you want to slowly deploy it and generalize it at scale. And you want to set up your data engine, your improvement loops, the telemetry, the evaluation, the harness and everything. And you want to improve the product over time incrementally and you're making revenue along the way. That's extremely important because otherwise you cannot build these large undertakings just like don't make sense economically. And also from the point of view of the team working on it, they need the dopamine along the way. They're not just going to make a promise about this being useful. This is going to change the world in 10 years when it works. This is not where you want to be. You want to be in a place like I think Autopilot is today where it's offering increased safety and convenience of driving today. People pay for it. People like it. People purchase it. And then you also have the greater mission that you're working towards. And you see that. So the dopamine for the team, that was a source of happiness. Yes, 100%. You're deploying this. People like it. People drive it. People pay for it. They care about it. There's all these YouTube videos. Your grandma drives it. She gives you feedback. People like it. People engage with it. It's huge. Do people that drive Teslas recognize you and give you love? Like, hey, thanks for this nice feature that it's doing. Yeah, I think the tricky thing is some people really love you. Some people, unfortunately, you're working on something that you think is extremely valuable, useful, et cetera. Some people do hate you. There's a lot of people who hate me and the team and the whole project. And I think- Are they Tesla drivers? In many cases, they're not, actually. That actually makes me sad about humans or the current ways that humans interact. I think that's actually fixable. I think humans want to be good to each other. I think Twitter and social media is part of the mechanism that actually somehow makes the negativity more viral, that it doesn't deserve, like disproportionately add a viral boost to the negativity. But I wish people would just get excited about, so suppress some of the jealousy, some of the ego, and just get excited for others. And then there's a karma aspect to that. You get excited for others, they'll get excited for you. Same thing in academia. If you're not careful, there is a dynamical system there. If you think of in silos and get jealous of somebody else being successful, that actually perhaps counterintuitively leads to less productivity of you as a community and you individually. I feel like if you keep celebrating others, that actually makes you more successful. And I think people, depending on the industry, haven't quite learned that yet. Some people are also very negative and very vocal, so they're very prominently featured. But actually there's a ton of people who are cheerleaders, but they're silent cheerleaders. And when you talk to people just in the world, they will tell you, oh, it's amazing, it's great. Especially people who understand how difficult it is to get this stuff working. People who have built products, makers, entrepreneurs, making this work and changing something is incredibly hard. Those people are more likely to cheerlead you. Well, one of the things that makes me sad is some folks in the robotics community don't do the cheerleading and they should. Because they know how difficult it is. Well, they actually sometimes don't know how difficult it is to create a product that's scale, right? They actually deploy it in the real world. A lot of the development of robots and AI system is done on very specific, small benchmarks and as opposed to real world conditions. Yes. And I think it's really hard to work on robotics in an academic setting. Or AI systems that apply in the real world. You've criticized, you flourished and loved for a time the ImageNet, the famed ImageNet dataset and have recently had some words of criticism that the academic research ML community gives a little too much love still to the ImageNet or like those kinds of benchmarks. Can you speak to the strengths and weaknesses of datasets used in machine learning research? Actually, I don't know that I recall a specific instance where I was unhappy or criticizing ImageNet. I think ImageNet has been extremely valuable. It was basically a benchmark that allowed the deep learning community to demonstrate that deep neural networks actually work. It was, there's a massive value in that. So I think ImageNet was useful, but basically it's become a bit of an MNIST at this point. So MNIST is like little two 28 by 28 grayscale digits. There's kind of a joke dataset that everyone like crushes. There's still papers written on MNIST though, right? Maybe they shouldn't. Like strong papers. Like papers that focus on like, how do we learn with a small amount of data, that kind of stuff. Yeah. I could see that being helpful, but not in sort of like mainline computer vision research anymore, of course. I think the way I've heard you somewhere, maybe I'm just imagining things, but I think you said like ImageNet was a huge contribution to the community for a long time and now it's time to move past those kinds of... Well, ImageNet has been crushed. I mean, you know, the error rates are, yeah, we're getting like 90% accuracy in 1000 classification way prediction. And I've seen those images and it's like really high. That's really, that's really good. If I remember correctly, the top five error rate is now like 1% or something. In your experience with a gigantic real world dataset, would you like to see benchmarks move in a certain directions that the research community uses? Unfortunately, I don't think academics currently have the next ImageNet. We've obviously, I think we've crushed MNIST. We've basically kind of crushed ImageNet and there's no next sort of big benchmark that the entire community rallies behind and uses, you know, for further development of these networks. I wonder what it takes for a dataset to captivate the imagination of everybody, like where they all get behind it. That could also need like a leader, right? Somebody with popularity. I mean, yeah, why did ImageNet take off? Is it just the accident of history? It was the right amount of difficult. It was the right amount of difficult and simple and interesting enough. It just kind of like, it was the right time for that kind of a dataset. Someone from Reddit, what are your thoughts on the role that synthetic data and game engines will play in the future of neural net model development? I think as neural nets converge to humans, the value of simulation to neural nets will be similar to value of simulation to humans. So people use simulation for, people use simulation because they can learn something in that kind of a system and without having to actually experience it. But are you referring to the simulation we do in our head? No, sorry, simulation, I mean like video games or, you know, other forms of simulation for various professionals. So let me push back on that because maybe there's simulation that we do in our heads, like simulate, if I do this, what do I think will happen? Okay, that's like internal simulation. Yeah, internal. Isn't that what we're doing as humans before we act? Oh yeah, but that's independent from like the use of simulation in the sense of like computer games or using simulation for training set creation or, you know. Is it independent or is it just loosely correlated? Because like, isn't that useful to do like counterfactual or like edge case simulation to like, you know, what happens if there's a nuclear war? What happens if there's, you know, like those kinds of things? Yeah, that's a different simulation from like Unreal Engine. That's how I interpreted the question. Ah, so like simulation of the average case. Is that, what's Unreal Engine? What do you mean by Unreal Engine? So simulating a world, the physics of that world, why is that different? Like because you also can add behavior to that world and you can try all kinds of stuff, right? You could throw all kinds of weird things into it. So Unreal Engine is not just about, I mean, I guess it is about simulating the physics of the world. It's also doing something with that. Yeah, the graphics, the physics and the agents that you put into the environment and stuff like that. Yeah. See, I think you, I feel like you said that it's not that important, I guess, for the future of AI development. Is that correct to interpret it that way? I think humans use simulators for, humans use simulators and they find them useful. And so computers will use simulators and find them useful. Okay. So you're saying it's not. I don't use simulators very often. I play a video game every once in a while, but I don't think I derive any wisdom about my own existence from those video games. It's a momentary escape from reality versus a source of wisdom about reality. So I think that's a very polite way of saying simulation is not that useful. Yeah, maybe not. I don't see it as like a fundamental, really important part of like training neural nets currently. But I think as neural nets become more and more powerful, I think you will need fewer examples to train additional behaviors. And simulation is, of course, there's a domain gap in a simulation that is not the real world, it's slightly something different. But with a powerful enough neural net, you need, the domain gap can be bigger, I think, because neural net will sort of understand that even though it's not the real world, it like has all this high level structure that I'm supposed to be able to learn from. So the neural net will actually, yeah, it will be able to leverage the synthetic data better by closing the gap, but understanding in which ways this is not real data. Exactly. I'm ready to do better questions next time. That was a question, I'm just kidding. All right. So is it possible, do you think, speaking of MNIST, to construct neural nets and training processes that require very little data? So we've been talking about huge data sets like the internet for training. I mean, one way to say that is, like you said, like the querying itself is another level of training, I guess, and that requires a little data. But do you see any value in doing research and kind of going down the direction of, can we use very little data to train, to construct a knowledge base? 100%. I just think at some point you need a massive data set. And then when you pre-train your massive neural net and get something that is like a GPT or something, then you're able to be very efficient at training any arbitrary new task. So a lot of these GPTs, you can do tasks like sentiment analysis or translation or so on just by being prompted with very few examples. Here's the kind of thing I want you to do. Here's an input sentence, here's the translation into German. Input sentence, translation to German. Input sentence, blank, and the neural net will complete the translation to German just by looking at sort of the example you've provided. And so that's an example of a very few shot learning in the activations of the neural net instead of the weights of the neural net. And so I think basically just like humans, neural nets will become very data efficient at learning any other new task. But at some point you need a massive data set to pre-train your network. To get that, and probably we humans have something like that. Do we have something like that? Do we have a passive in the background, background model constructing thing that just runs all the time in a self-supervised way? We're not conscious of it. I think humans definitely, I mean, obviously we have, we learn a lot during our lifespan, but also we have a ton of hardware that helps us initialize, initialization coming from sort of evolution. And so I think that's also a really big component. A lot of people in the field, I think they just talk about the amounts of like seconds and the, you know, that a person has lived pretending that this is a tabula rasa, sort of like a zero initialization of a neural net. And it's not like you can look at a lot of animals, like for example, zebras, zebras get born and they see, and they can run. There's zero training data in their lifespan. They can just do that. So somehow I have no idea how evolution has found a way to encode these algorithms and these neural net initializations that are extremely good into ATCGs. And I have no idea how this works, but apparently it's possible because here's a proof by existence. There's something magical about going from a single cell to an organism that is born to the first few years of life. I kind of like the idea that the reason we don't remember anything about the first few years of our life is that it's a really painful process. Like it's a very difficult, challenging training process. Like intellectually. Like, and maybe, yeah, I mean, I don't, why don't we remember any of that? There might be some crazy training going on and that, maybe that's the background model training that is, is very painful. And so it's best for the system once it's trained not to remember how it's constructed. I think it's just like the hardware for long-term memory is just not fully developed. I kind of feel like the first few years of infants is not actually like learning, it's brain maturing. We're born premature. There's a theory along those lines because of the birth canal and the swelling of the brain. And so we're born premature and then the first few years we're just, the brain's maturing. And then there's some learning eventually. That's my current view on it. What do you think, do you think neural nets can have long-term memory? Like that approach is something like humans. Do you think there needs to be another meta architecture on top of it to add something like a knowledge base that learns facts about the world and all that kind of stuff? Yes, but I don't know to what extent it will be explicitly constructed. It might take unintuitive forms where you are telling the GPT, like, hey, you have a declarative memory bank to which you can store and retrieve data from. And whenever you encounter some information that you find useful, just save it to your memory bank. And here's an example of something you have retrieved and how you save it and here's how you load from it. You just say load, whatever, you teach it in text in English and then it might learn to use a memory bank from that. Oh, so the neural net is the architecture for the background model, the base thing, and then everything else is just on top of it. It's not just text, right? You're giving it gadgets and gizmos. So you're teaching some kind of a special language by which it can save arbitrary information and retrieve it at a later time. And you're telling it about these special tokens and how to arrange them to use these interfaces. It's like, hey, you can use a calculator. Here's how you use it. Just do five, three plus four, one equals. And when equals is there, a calculator will actually read out the answer and you don't have to calculate it yourself. And you just like tell it in English, this might actually work. Do you think in that sense, Gato is interesting, the DeepMind system that it's not just a language, but actually throws it all in the same pile? Images, actions, all that kind of stuff. That's basically what we're moving towards? Yeah, I think so. So Gato is very much a kitchen sink approach to reinforcement learning, lots of different environments with a single fixed transformer model. I think it's a very early result in that realm. But I think it's along the lines of what I think things will eventually look like. Right. So the early days of a system that eventually will look like this, like from a rich, sudden perspective. Yeah, I'm not super huge fan of, I think, all these interfaces that look very different. I would want everything to be normalized into the same API. So for example, screen pixels, very same API. Instead of having different world environments that have very different physics and joint configurations and appearances and whatever, and you're having some kind of special tokens for different games that you can plug, I'd rather just normalize everything to a single interface. So it looks the same to the neural net, if that makes sense. So it's all going to be pixel-based pong in the end? I think so. Okay. Let me ask you about your own personal life. A lot of people want to know, you're one of the most productive and brilliant people in the history of AI. What does a productive day in the life of Andrej Karpathy look like? What time do you wake up? Because imagine some kind of dance between the average productive day and a perfect productive day. So the perfect productive day is the thing we strive towards, and the average is kind of what it kind of converges to, given all the mistakes and human eventualities and so on. So what time do you wake up? Are you a morning person? I'm not a morning person. I'm a night owl, for sure. Is it stable or not? It's semi-stable, like eight or nine or something like that. During my PhD, it was even later. I used to go to sleep usually at 3 a.m. I think the a.m. hours are precious and very interesting time to work because everyone is asleep. At 8 a.m. or 7 a.m., the East Coast is awake. So there's already activity. There's already some text messages, whatever. There's stuff happening. You can go on some news website and there's stuff happening and it's distracting. At 3 a.m., everything is totally quiet. And so you're not going to be bothered and you have solid chunks of time to do work. So I like those periods. Night owl by default. And then I think productive time, basically, what I like to do is you need to build some momentum on a problem without too much distraction. And you need to load your RAM, your working memory, with that problem. And then you need to be obsessed with it when you're taking a shower, when you're falling asleep. You need to be obsessed with the problem and it's fully in your memory and you're ready to wake up and work on it right there. So is this on a temporal scale of a single day or a couple of days, a week, a month? So I can't talk about one day basically in isolation because it's a whole process. When I want to get productive in the problem, I feel like I need a span of a few days where I can really get in on that problem. And I don't want to be interrupted. And I'm going to just be completely obsessed with that problem. And that's where I do most of my good work, I would say. You've done a bunch of cool little projects in a very short amount of time, very quickly. So that requires you just focusing on it. Yeah, basically, I need to load my working memory with the problem. And I need to be productive because there's always a huge fixed cost to approaching any problem. I was struggling with this, for example, at Tesla because I want to work on a small side project. But OK, you first need to figure out, OK, I need to SSH into my cluster. I need to bring up a VS Code editor so I can work on this. I run into some stupid error because of some reason. You're not at a point where you can be just productive right away. You are facing barriers. And so it's about really removing all that barrier and you're able to go into the problem and you have the full problem loaded in your memory. And somehow avoiding distractions of all different forms, like news stories, emails, but also distractions from other interesting projects that you previously worked on or currently working on and so on. You just want to really focus your mind. And I mean, I can take some time off for distractions and in between, but I think it can't be too much. Most of your day is spent on that problem. And then I drink coffee. I have my morning routine. I look at some news, Twitter, Hacker News, Wall Street Journal, et cetera. So it's great. So basically, you wake up, you have some coffee. Are you trying to get to work as quickly as possible? Or do you take in this diet of what the hell is happening in the world first? I do find it interesting to know about the world. I don't know that it's useful or good, but it is part of my routine right now. So I do read through a bunch of news articles and I want to be informed. And I'm suspicious of it. I'm suspicious of the practice, but currently that's where I am. Oh, you mean suspicious about the positive effect of that practice on your productivity and your well-being? My well-being psychologically, yeah. And also on your ability to deeply understand the world because there's a bunch of sources of information. You're not really focused on deeply integrating. Yeah, it's a little distracting. In terms of a perfectly productive day, for how long of a stretch of time in one session do you try to work and focus on a thing? A couple hours, is it one hour, is it 30 minutes, is it 10 minutes? I can probably go a small few hours and then I need some breaks in between for food and stuff. But I think it's still really hard to accumulate hours. I was using a tracker that told me exactly how much time I spent coding any one day. And even on a very productive day, I still spent only six or eight hours. And it's just because there's so much padding, commute, talking to people, food, et cetera. There's a cost of life, just living and sustaining and homeostasis and just maintaining yourself as a human is very high. And that there seems to be a desire within the human mind to participate in society that creates that padding. The most productive days I've ever had is just completely from start to finish, just tuning out everything and just sitting there. And then you could do more than six and eight hours. Is there some wisdom about what gives you strength to do tough days of long focus? Yeah, just like whenever I get obsessed about a problem, something just needs to work, something just needs to exist. It needs to exist. So you're able to deal with bugs and programming issues and technical issues and design decisions that turn out to be the wrong ones. You're able to think through all of that, given that you want a thing to exist. Yeah, it needs to exist. And then I think, to me, also a big factor is, are other humans are going to appreciate it? That's a big part of my motivation. If I'm helping humans and they seem happy, they say nice things, they tweet about it or whatever, that gives me pleasure because I'm doing something useful. So you do see yourself sharing it with the world, whether it's on GitHub or through blog posts or through videos. Yeah, I was thinking about it. Suppose I did all these things but did not share them, I don't think I would have the same amount of motivation that I can build up. You enjoy the feeling of other people gaining value and happiness from the stuff you've created. What about diet? I saw you played with intermittent fasting. Do you fast? Does that help? I play with everything. You play with the things you play. What's been most beneficial to your ability to mentally focus on a thing? And just mental productivity and happiness. You still fast? Yeah, I still fast, but I do intermittent fasting. But really what it means at the end of the day is I skip breakfast. So I do 18-6 roughly by default when I'm in my steady state. If I'm traveling or doing something else, I will break the rules, but in my steady state I do 18-6. So I eat only from 12 to 6. Not a hard rule and I break it often, but that's my default. And then, yeah, I've done a bunch of random experiments. For the most part right now, where I've been for the last year and a half, I want to say, is I'm plant-based or plant-forward. I heard plant-forward. It sounds better. I don't actually know what the difference is, but it sounds better in my mind. But it just means I prefer plant-based food. Raw or cooked? I prefer cooked and plant-based. So plant-based, forgive me, I don't actually know how wide the category of plant entails. Well, plant-based just means that you're not reluctant about it and you can flex. And you just prefer to eat plants. And you're not trying to influence other people. And if you come to someone's house party and they serve you a steak that they're really proud of, you will eat it. Yes. Right. So you're not judgmental. That's beautiful. I'm the flip side of that, but I'm very sort of flexible. Have you tried doing one meal a day? I have, accidentally, not consistently. But I've accidentally had that. I don't like it. I think it makes me feel not good. It's too much of a hit. And so currently I have about two meals a day, 12 and six. I do that nonstop. I'm doing it now. I do it one meal a day. It's interesting. It's an interesting feeling. Have you ever fasted longer than a day? Yeah, I've done a bunch of water fasts because I was curious what happens. Anything interesting? Yeah, I would say so. I mean, you know, what's interesting is that you're hungry for two days and then starting day three or so, you're not hungry. It's like such a weird feeling because you haven't eaten in a few days and you're not hungry. Isn't that weird? It's really weird. One of the many weird things about human biology is it figures something out and finds another source of energy or something like that or relaxes the system. I don't know how it works. It's like, you're hungry, you're hungry, and then it just gives up. It's like, okay, I guess we're fasting now. There's nothing. And then it just kind of like focuses on trying to make you not hungry and not feel the damage of that and trying to give you some space to figure out the food situation. So are you still to this day most productive at night? I would say I am, but it is really hard to maintain my PhD schedule, especially when I was say working at Tesla and so on. It's a non-starter. But even now, people want to meet for various events. Society lives in a certain period of time and you sort of have to work with that. It's hard to do a social thing and then after that return and do work. Yeah, it's just really hard. That's why I try when I do social things, I try not to do too much drinking so I can return and continue doing work. But at Tesla, is there a convergence, not Tesla, but any company, is there a convergence towards a schedule or is there more, is that how humans behave when they collaborate? I need to learn about this. Do they try to keep a consistent schedule where you're all awake at the same time? I do try to create a routine and I try to create a steady state in which I'm comfortable in. So I have a morning routine, I have a day routine. I try to keep things to a steady state and things are predictable and then you can sort of just like, your body just sort of like sticks to that. And if you try to stress that a little too much, it will create, you know, when you're traveling and you're dealing with jet lag, you're not able to really ascend to, you know, where you need to go. Yeah, yeah, that's what we do as humans with the habits and stuff. What are your thoughts on work-life balance throughout a human lifetime? So Tesla in part was known for sort of pushing people to their limits in terms of what they're able to do, in terms of what they're trying to do, in terms of how much they work, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I will say Tesla gets all too much bad rep for this because what's happening is Tesla is a, it's a bursty environment. So I would say the baseline, my only point of reference is Google, where I've interned three times and I saw what it's like inside Google and DeepMind. I would say the baseline is higher than that, but then there's a punctuated equilibrium where once in a while there's a fire and some people work really hard. And so it's spiky and bursty and then all the stories get collected. About the bursts, yeah. And then it gives the appearance of like total insanity, but actually it's just a bit more intense environment and there are fires and sprints. And so I think, you know, definitely though, I would say it's a more intense environment than something you would get at Google. But in your personal, forget all of that, just in your own personal life, what do you think about the happiness of a human being, a brilliant person like yourself, about finding a balance between work and life? Or is it such a thing, not a good thought experiment? Yeah, I think balance is good, but I also love to have sprints that are out of distribution. And that's when I think I've been pretty creative as well. Sprints out of distribution means that most of the time you have a, quote unquote, balance. I have balance most of the time. I like being obsessed with something once in a while. Once in a while is what? Once a week? Once a month? Once a year? Yeah, probably like I say, once a month or something. Yeah. And that's when we get a new GitHub repo for monitoring? Yeah, that's when you like really care about a problem. It must exist. This will be awesome. You're obsessed with it. And now you can't just do it on that day. You need to pay the fixed cost of getting into the groove. And then you need to stay there for a while. And then society will come and they will try to mess with you and they will try to distract you. Yeah, the worst thing is like a person who's like, I just need five minutes of your time. This is, the cost of that is not five minutes. And society needs to change how it thinks about just five minutes of your time. Right. It's never, it's never just one minute. Just 30 seconds, just a quick thing. What's the big deal? Why are you being so? Yeah, no. I'm just kidding. What's your computer setup? What's like the perfect, are you somebody that's flexible to no matter what, laptop, four screens? Yeah. Or do you prefer a certain setup that you're most productive? I guess the one that I'm familiar with is one large screen, 27 inch and my laptop on the side. What operating system? I do Macs. That's my primary. For all tasks? I would say OSX, but when you're working on deep learning, everything is Linux. You're SSH into a cluster and you're working remotely. But what about the actual development? Like using the IDE? Yeah, you would use, I think a good way is you just run VS code, my favorite right now on your Mac, but you are actually, you have a remote folder through SSH. So the actual files that you're manipulating are on the cluster somewhere else. So what's the best IDE? VS code. What else do people use? So I use Emacs still. That's cool. It may be cool. I don't know if it's maximum productivity. So what do you recommend in terms of editors? You worked a lot of software engineers, editors for Python, C++, machine learning applications. I think the current answer is VS code. Currently I believe that's the best IDE. It's got a huge amount of extensions. It has GitHub Copilot integration, which I think is very valuable. What do you think about the Copilot integration? I was actually, I got to talk a bunch with Guido Rossum, who's a creator of Python, and he loves Copilot. He like programs a lot with it. Do you? Yeah, I use Copilot. I love it. And it's free for me, but I would pay for it. Yeah, I think it's very good. And the utility that I found with it was, I would say there's a learning curve and you need to figure out when it's helpful and when to pay attention to its outputs, and when it's not going to be helpful, where you should not pay attention to it. Because if you're just reading its suggestions all the time, it's not a good way of interacting with it. But I think I was able to sort of like mold myself to it. I find it's very helpful, number one, in copy, paste, and replace some parts. So when the pattern is clear, it's really good at completing the pattern. And number two, sometimes it suggests APIs that I'm not aware of. So it tells you about something that you didn't know. And that's an opportunity to discover a new API. It's an opportunity to, so I would never take Copilot code as given. I almost always copy paste into a Google search and you see what this function is doing. And then you're like, oh, it's actually exactly what I need. Thank you, Copilot. So you learned something. So it's in part a search engine, part maybe getting the exact syntax correctly, that once you see it, it's that NP-hard thing. Once you see it, you know it's correct. Exactly. But you yourself struggle. You can verify. You can verify efficiently, but you can't generate efficiently. And Copilot really, I mean, it's autopilot for programming, right? And currently is doing the link following, which is like the simple copy, paste, and sometimes suggest. But over time, it's going to become more and more autonomous. And so the same thing will play out in not just coding, but actually across many, many different things probably. But coding is an important one, right? Writing programs. How do you see the future of that developing the program synthesis, like being able to write programs that are more and more complicated? Because right now it's human supervised in interesting ways. It feels like the transition will be very painful. My mental model for it is the same thing will happen as with the autopilot. So currently it's doing link following, it's doing some simple stuff. And eventually we'll be doing autonomy and people will have to intervene less and less. And there could be like testing mechanisms. Like if it writes a function and that function looks pretty damn correct, but how do you know it's correct? Because you're like getting lazier and lazier as a programmer, like your ability to, because like little bugs, but I guess it won't make little bugs. No, it will. Copilot will make off by one subtle bugs. It has done that to me. But do you think future systems will, or is it really the off by one is actually a fundamental challenge of programming? In that case, it wasn't fundamental and I think things can improve, but yeah, I think humans have to supervise. I am nervous about people not supervising what comes out and what happens to, for example, the proliferation of bugs in all of our systems. I'm nervous about that, but I think there will probably be some other copilots for bug finding and stuff like that at some point. Cause there'll be like a lot more automation for, Oh man. It's like a program, a copilot that generates a compiler, one that does a linter. Yes. One that does like a type checker. It's a committee of like a GPT sort of like, and then there'll be like a manager for the committee and then there'll be somebody that says a new version of this is needed. We need to regenerate it. Yeah. There were 10 GPTs that were forwarded and gave 50 suggestions. Another one looked at it and picked a few that they like. A bug one looked at it and it was like, it's probably a bug. They got re-ranked by some other thing. And then a final ensemble GPT comes in and is like, okay, given everything you guys have told me, this is probably the next token. You know, the feeling is the number of programmers in the world has been growing and growing very quickly. Do you think it's possible that it'll actually level out and drop to like a very low number with this kind of world? Cause then you'd be doing software 2.0 programming and you'll be doing this kind of generation of copilot type systems programming, but you won't be doing the old school software 1.0 programming. I don't currently think that they're just going to replace human programmers. I'm so hesitant saying stuff like this, right? Because this is going to be replaced in five years. I know it's going to show that like, this is where we thought, cause I agree with you, but I think we might be very surprised. Right? Like what are the next, what's your sense of where we're staying with language models? Like does it feel like the beginning or the middle or the end? The beginning, a hundred percent. I think the big question in my mind is for sure, GPT will be able to program quite well, competently and so on. How do you steer the system? You still have to provide some guidance to what you actually are looking for. And so how do you steer it and how do you say, how do you talk to it? How do you audit it and verify that what is done is correct? And how do you like work with this? And it's as much, not just an AI problem, but a UI UX problem. So beautiful, fertile ground for so much interesting work for VS Code++ where you're not just, it's not just human programming anymore. It's amazing. Yeah. So you're interacting with the system. So not just one prompt, but it's iterative prompting. You're trying to figure out having a conversation with the system. Yeah. That actually, I mean, to me, that's super exciting to have a conversation with the program I'm running. Yeah. Maybe at some point you're just conversing with it. It's like, okay, here's what I want to do. Translate this variable, maybe it's not even that low level as a variable, but. You can also imagine, can you translate this to C++ and back to Python? Yeah, it already kind of exists in some way. No, but just doing it as part of the program experience. I think I'd like to write this function in C++. Or you just keep changing for different programs because they have different syntax. Maybe I want to convert this into a functional language. Yep. So I think you get to become multilingual as a programmer and dance back and forth efficiently. Yeah. I mean, I think the UX of it though is still very hard to think through because it's not just about writing code on a page. You have an entire developer environment. You have a bunch of hardware on it. You have some environmental variables. You have some scripts that are running in a Chrome job. There's a lot going on to working with computers and how do these systems set up environment flags and work across multiple machines and set up screen sessions and automate different processes like how all that works and is auditable by humans and so on is like massive question at the moment. You've built Archive Sanity. What is Archive and what is the future of academic research publishing that you would like to see? So Archive is this pre-print server. So if you have a paper, you can submit it for publication to journals or conferences and then wait six months and then maybe get a decision, pass or fail. Or you can just upload it to Archive and then people can tweet about it three minutes later and then everyone sees it, everyone reads it and everyone can profit from it in their own little ways. You can cite it and it has an official look to it. It feels like a publication process. It feels different than if you just put it in a blog post. Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a paper and usually the bar is higher for something that you would expect on Archive as opposed to something you would see in a blog post. Well, the culture created the bar because you could probably post a pretty crappy paper on Archive. Yes. So what does that make you feel like? What does that make you feel about peer review? So rigorous peer review by two, three experts versus the peer review of the community right as it's written? Yeah. Basically, I think the community is very well able to peer review things very quickly on Twitter and I think maybe it just has to do something with AI machine learning field specifically though. I feel like things are more easily auditable and the verification is easier potentially than the verification somewhere else. So it's kind of like you can think of these scientific publications as like little blockchains where everyone's building on each other's work and citing each other and you sort of have AI, which is kind of like this much faster and loose blockchain, but then you have any one individual entry is like very cheap to make. And then you have other fields where maybe that model doesn't make as much sense. And so I think in AI, at least things are pretty easily verifiable. And so that's why when people upload papers that are a really good idea and so on, people can try it out the next day and they can be the final arbiter of whether it works or not on their problem. And the whole thing just moves significantly faster. So I kind of feel like academia still has a place, sort of this like conference journal process still has a place, but it's sort of like it lags behind, I think, and it's a bit more maybe higher quality process, but it's not sort of the place where you will discover cutting edge work anymore. It used to be the case when I was starting my PhD, that you go to conferences and journals and you discuss all the latest research. Now when you go to a conference or journal, like no one discusses anything that's there because it's already like three generations ago, irrelevant. Yeah. Which makes me sad about like DeepMind, for example, where they still publish in Nature and these big prestigious, I mean, there's still value, I suppose, to the prestige that comes with these big venues, but the result is that they'll announce some breakthrough performance and it will take like a year to actually publish the details. I mean, and those details, if they were published immediately, would inspire the community to move in certain directions. Yeah, it would speed up the rest of the community, but I don't know to what extent that's part of their objective function also. That's true. So it's not just the prestige, a little bit of the delay is part of it. Yeah, they certainly, DeepMind specifically, has been working in the regime of having slightly higher quality, basically process and latency and publishing those papers that way. Another question from Reddit, do you or have you suffered from imposter syndrome? Being the director of AI at Tesla, being this person when you're at Stanford where like the world looks at you as the expert in AI to teach the world about machine learning. When I was leaving Tesla after five years, I spent a ton of time in meeting rooms and I would read papers. In the beginning when I joined Tesla, I was writing code and then I was writing less and less code and I was reading code and then I was reading less and less code. And so this is just a natural progression that happens, I think. And definitely I would say near the tail end, that's when it sort of like starts to hit you a bit more that you're supposed to be an expert, but actually the source of truth is the code that people are writing, the GitHub and the actual code itself. And you're not as familiar with that as you used to be. And so I would say maybe there's some like insecurity there. Yeah, that's actually pretty profound, that a lot of the insecurity has to do with not writing the code in the computer science space. Like that, because that is the truth. That right there. The code is the source of truth. The papers and everything else, it's a high level summary. I don't, yeah, it's just a high level summary, but at the end of the day, you have to read code. It's impossible to translate all that code into actual, you know, paper form. So when things come out, especially when they have a source code available, that's my favorite place to go. So like I said, you're one of the greatest teachers of machine learning, AI ever, from CS231N to today. What advice would you give to beginners interested in getting into machine learning? Beginners are often focused on like what to do. And I think the focus should be more like how much you do. So I am kind of like believer on a high level in this 10,000 hours kind of concept where you just kind of have to just pick the things where you can spend time and you care about and you're interested in. You literally have to put in 10,000 hours of work. It doesn't even like matter as much like where you put it and you'll iterate and you'll improve and you'll waste some time. I don't know if there's a better way. You need to put in 10,000 hours. But I think it's actually really nice because I feel like there's some sense of determinism about being an expert at a thing. If you spend 10,000 hours, you can literally pick an arbitrary thing. And I think if you spend 10,000 hours of deliberate effort and work, you actually will become an expert at it. And so I think that's kind of like a nice thought. And so basically I would focus more on like, are you spending 10,000 hours? That's what I focus on. So and then thinking about what kind of mechanisms maximize your likelihood of getting to 10,000 hours, which for us silly humans means probably forming a daily habit of like every single day actually doing the thing. Whatever helps you. So I do think to a large extent it's a psychological problem for yourself. One other thing that I think is helpful for the psychology of it is many times people compare themselves to others in the area. I think this is very harmful. Only compare yourself to you from some time ago, like say a year ago. Are you better than you a year ago? It's the only way to think. And I think this, then you can see your progress and it's very motivating. That's so interesting that focus on the quantity of hours. Because I think a lot of people in the beginner stage, but actually throughout, get paralyzed by the choice. Like which one do I pick this path or this path? Like they'll literally get paralyzed by like which IDE to use. Well, they're worried. Yeah. They're worried about all these things. And some of the, you will waste time doing something wrong. You will eventually figure out it's not right. You will accumulate scar tissue and next time you will grow stronger because next time you'll have the scar tissue and next time you'll learn from it. And now next time you come to a similar situation, you'll be like, oh, I messed up. I've spent a lot of time working on things that never materialize into anything. And I have all that scar tissue and I have some intuitions about what was useful, what wasn't useful, how things turned out. So all those mistakes were not dead work. So I just think you should, you should just focus on working. What have you done? What have you done last week? That's a good question actually to ask for a lot of things, not just machine learning. It's a good way to cut the, I forgot what the term we use, but the fluff, the blubber, whatever the inefficiencies in life. What do you love about teaching? You seem to find yourself often in the, like drawn to teaching. You're very good at it, but you're also drawn to it. I mean, I don't think I love teaching. I love happy humans and happy humans like when I teach. I wouldn't say I hate teaching. I tolerate teaching, but it's not like the act of teaching that I like. It's that, you know, I have some, I have something, I'm actually okay at it. I'm okay at teaching and people appreciate it a lot. And so I'm just happy to try to be helpful. And teaching itself is not like the most, I mean, it's really, it can be really annoying, frustrating. I was working on a bunch of lectures just now. I was reminded back to my days of 231N just how much work it is to create some of these materials and make them good. The amount of iteration and thought and you go down blind alleys and just how much you change it. So creating something good in terms of like educational value is really hard and it's not fun. It's difficult. So people should definitely go watch your new stuff you put out. There are lectures where you're actually building the thing like from, like you said, the code is truth. So discussing back propagation by building it, by looking through it, just the whole thing. So how difficult is that to prepare for? I think that's a really powerful way to teach. Did you have to prepare for that or are you just live thinking through it? I will typically do like say three takes and then I take like the better take. So I do multiple takes and I take some of the better takes and then I just build out a lecture that way. Sometimes I have to delete 30 minutes of content because it just went down an alley that I didn't like too much. So there's a bunch of iteration and it probably takes me somewhere around 10 hours to create one hour of content. To get one hour. It's interesting. I mean, is it difficult to go back to the basics? Do you draw a lot of wisdom from going back to the basics? Yeah. Going back to back propagation loss functions, where they come from. And one thing I like about teaching a lot, honestly, is it definitely strengthens your understanding. So it's not a purely altruistic activity. It's a way to learn. If you have to explain something to someone, you realize you have gaps in knowledge. And so I even surprised myself in those lectures. Like the result will obviously look like this and then the result doesn't look like it. And I'm like, okay, I thought I understood this. But that's why it's really cool. They literally code, you run it in the notebook and it gives you a result and you're like, oh, wow. And like actual numbers, actual input, actual code. It's not mathematical symbols, etc. The source of truth is the code. It's not slides. It's just like, let's build it. It's beautiful. You're a rare human in that sense. What advice would you give to researchers trying to develop and publish idea that have a big impact in the world of AI? So maybe undergrads, maybe early graduate students? Yeah. I mean, I would say like they definitely have to be a little bit more strategic than I had to be as a PhD student because of the way AI is evolving. It's going the way of physics where in physics you used to be able to do experiments on your benchtop and everything was great and you could make progress. And now you have to work in like LHC or like CERN. And so AI is going in that direction as well. So there's certain kinds of things that's just not possible to do on the benchtop anymore. And I think that didn't used to be the case at the time. Do you still think that there's like GAN type papers to be written where like very simple idea that requires just one computer to illustrate a simple example? I mean, one example that's been very influential recently is diffusion models. Diffusion models are amazing. Diffusion models are six years old. For the longest time, people were kind of ignoring them as far as I can tell. And they're an amazing generative model, especially in images. And so stable diffusion and so on, it's all diffusion based. Diffusion is new. It was not there and came from, well, it came from Google, but a researcher could have come up with it. In fact, some of the first, actually, no, those came from Google as well. But a researcher could come up with that in an academic institution. Yeah. What do you find most fascinating about diffusion models? So from the societal impact to the technical architecture? What I like about diffusion is it works so well. Is that surprising to you? The amount of the variety, almost the novelty of the synthetic data is generating. Yeah. So the stable diffusion images are incredible. The speed of improvement in generating images has been insane. We went very quickly from generating like tiny digits to tiny faces, and it all looked messed up. And now we have stable diffusion. And that happened very quickly. There's a lot that academia can still contribute. For example, flash attention is a very efficient kernel for running the attention operation inside the transformer that came from academic environment. It's a very clever way to structure the kernel. That's the calculation. So it doesn't materialize the attention matrix. And so I think there's still like lots of things to contribute, but you have to be just more strategic. Do you think neural networks can be made to reason? Yes. Do you think they already reason? Yes. What's your definition of reasoning? Information processing. So in the way that humans think through a problem and come up with novel ideas, it feels like reasoning. So the novelty, I don't want to say, but out of distribution ideas, you think it's possible? Yes. And I think we're seeing that already in the current neural nets. You're able to remix the training set information into true generalization in some sense. That doesn't appear in a fundamental way in the training set. Like you're doing something interesting algorithmically. You're manipulating some symbols and you're coming up with some correct, unique answer in a new setting. What would illustrate to you, holy shit, this thing is definitely thinking? To me, thinking or reasoning is just information processing and generalization. And I think the neural nets already do that today. To be able to perceive the world or perceive whatever the inputs are and to make predictions based on that or actions based on that, that's reasoning. Yeah. You're giving correct answers in novel settings by manipulating information. You've learned the correct algorithm. You're not doing just some kind of a lookup table and there's neighbor search, something like that. Let me ask you about AGI. What are some moonshot ideas you think might make significant progress towards AGI? Or maybe in other ways, what are the big blockers that we're missing now? So basically I am fairly bullish on our ability to build AGIs. Basically automated systems that we can interact with and are very human-like and we can interact with them in a digital realm or a physical realm. Currently it seems most of the models that sort of do these sort of magical tasks are in a text realm. I think, as I mentioned, I'm suspicious that the text realm is not enough to actually build full understanding of the world. I do actually think you need to go into pixels and understand the physical world and how it works. So I do think that we need to extend these models to consume images and videos and train on a lot more data that is multimodal in that way. Do you think you need to touch the world to understand it also? Well, that's the big open question I would say in my mind is if you also require the embodiment and the ability to sort of interact with the world, run experiments and have the data of that form, then you need to go to Optimus or something like that. And so I would say Optimus in some way is like a hedge in AGI because it seems to me that it's possible that just having data from the internet is not enough. If that is the case, then Optimus may lead to AGI because Optimus, to me, there's nothing beyond Optimus. You have this humanoid form factor that can actually do stuff in the world. You can have millions of them interacting with humans and so on. And if that doesn't give rise to AGI at some point, I'm not sure what will. So from a completeness perspective, I think that's a really good platform, but it's a much harder platform because you are dealing with atoms and you need to actually build these things and integrate them into society. So I think that path takes longer, but it's much more certain. And then there's a path of the internet and just like training these compression models effectively on trying to compress all the internet. And that might also give these agents as well. Compress the internet, but also interact with the internet. So it's not obvious to me. In fact, I suspect you can reach AGI without ever entering the physical world, which is a little bit more concerning because that results in it happening faster. So it just feels like we're in boiling water. We won't know as it's happening. I'm not afraid of AGI. I'm excited about it. There's always concerns, but I would like to know when it happens and have hints about when it happens. Like a year from now, it will happen, that kind of thing. I just feel like in the digital realm, it just might happen. Yeah. I think all we have available to us, because no one has built AGI again. So all we have available to us is, is there enough fertile ground on the periphery? I would say yes. And we have the progress so far, which has been very rapid. And there are next steps that are available. And so I would say, yeah, it's quite likely that we'll be interacting with digital entities. How will you know that somebody has built AGI? It's going to be a slow, I think it's going to be a slow incremental transition, is going to be product based and focused. It's going to be GitHub Copilot getting better. And then GPT is helping you write. And then these oracles that you can go to with mathematical problems. I think we're on the verge of being able to ask very complex questions in chemistry, physics, math of these oracles and have them complete solutions. So AGI to use primarily focus on intelligence. So consciousness doesn't enter into it. So in my mind, consciousness is not a special thing you will figure out and bolt on. I think it's an emergent phenomenon of a large enough and complex enough generative model, sort of. So if you have a complex enough world model that understands the world, then it also understands its predicament in the world as being a language model, which to me is a form of consciousness or self-awareness. So in order to understand the world deeply, you probably have to integrate yourself into the world. Yeah. And in order to interact with humans and other living beings, consciousness is a very useful tool. I think consciousness is like a modeling insight. Modeling insight. Yeah. It's a, you have a powerful enough model of understanding the world that you actually understand that you are an entity in it. Yeah. But there's also this, perhaps just the narrative we tell ourselves, there's a, it feels like something to experience the world. The hard problem of consciousness. Yeah. But that could be just a narrative that we tell ourselves. Yeah, I don't think, I think it will emerge. I think it's going to be something very boring. Like we'll be talking to these digital AIs, they will claim they're conscious. They will appear conscious. They will do all the things that you would expect of other humans. And it's going to just be a stalemate. I think there'll be a lot of actual fascinating ethical questions, like Supreme Court level questions of whether you're allowed to turn off a conscious AI, if you're allowed to build a conscious AI. Maybe there would have to be the same kind of debates that you have around, sorry to bring up a political topic, but abortion, which is the deeper question with abortion, is what is life? And the deep question with AI is also what is life and what is conscious? And I think that'll be very fascinating to bring up. It might become illegal to build systems that are capable of such level of intelligence that consciousness would emerge and therefore the capacity to suffer would emerge. And a system that says, no, please don't kill me. Well, that's what the Lambda chatbot already told this Google engineer, right? Like it was talking about not wanting to die or so on. So that might become illegal to do that. Because otherwise you might have a lot of creatures that don't want to die. And they will... You can just spawn infinity of them on a cluster. And then that might lead to horrible consequences, because then there might be a lot of people that secretly love murder and they'll start practicing murder on those systems. To me, all of this stuff just brings a beautiful mirror to the human condition and human nature. We'll get to explore it. And that's what like the best of the Supreme Court of all the different debates we have about ideas of what it means to be human. We get to ask those deep questions that we've been asking throughout human history. There's always been the other in human history. We're the good guys and that's the bad guys. And we're going to, you know, throughout human history, let's murder the bad guys. And the same will probably happen with robots. It'll be the other at first, and then we'll get to ask questions of what does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be conscious? Yeah. And I think there's some canary in the coal mines, even with what we have today. And you know, for example, there's these waifus that you can work with. And some people are trying to like, this company is going to shut down, but this person really loved their waifu and is trying to port it somewhere else. And it's not possible. And I think like definitely people will have feelings towards these systems because in some sense they are like a mirror of humanity because they are like sort of like a big average of humanity in the way that it's trained. But we can, that average, we can actually watch. It's nice to be able to interact with the big average of humanity and do like a search query on it. Yeah. Yeah. It's very fascinating. And we can also, of course, also like shape it. It's not just a pure average. We can mess with the training data. We can mess with the objective. We can fine tune them in various ways. So we have some, you know, impact on what those systems look like. If you want to achieve AGI and you could have a conversation with her and ask her, talk about anything, maybe ask her a question, what kind of stuff would you ask? I would have some practical questions in my mind, like do I or my loved ones really have to die? What can we do about that? And do you think it will answer clearly or would it answer poetically? I would expect it to give solutions. I would expect it to be like, well, I've read all of these textbooks and I know all these things that you've produced. And it seems to me like here are the experiments that I think it would be useful to run next. And here's some gene therapies that I think would be helpful. And here are the kinds of experiments that you should run. Okay. Let's go with this thought experiment, okay? Imagine that mortality is actually like a prerequisite for happiness. So if we become immortal, we'll actually become deeply unhappy. And the model is able to know that. So what is this supposed to tell you, stupid human, about it? Yes, you can become immortal, but you will become deeply unhappy. If the model is, if the AGI system is trying to empathize with you, human, what is this supposed to tell you? That yes, you don't have to die, but you're really not going to like it? Is that, is it going to be deeply honest? Like there's a interstellar, what is it? The AI says like, humans want 90% honesty. So like you have to pick how honest do I want to answer these practical questions. Yeah. I love AI interstellar, by the way. I think it's like such a sidekick to the entire story, but at the same time, it's like really interesting. It's kind of limited in certain ways, right? Yeah, it's limited. I think that's totally fine, by the way. I don't think, I think it's fine and plausible to have a limited and imperfect AGIs. Is that the feature almost? As an example, like it has a fixed amount of compute on its physical body. And it might just be that even though you can have a super amazing mega brain, super intelligent AI, you also can have like, you know, less intelligent AI so you can deploy in a power efficient way. And then they're not perfect. They might make mistakes. I meant more like, say you had infinite compute, and it's still good to make mistakes sometimes. In order to integrate yourself, like what is it? Going back to Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams' character says like the human imperfections, that's the good stuff, right? Isn't that the, like we don't want perfect, we want flaws in part to form connections with each other, because it feels like something you can attach your feelings to, the flaws. In that same way, you want an AI that's flawed. I don't know. I feel like perfection is cool. But then you're saying, okay, yeah. But that's not AGI. But see, AGI would need to be intelligent enough to give answers to humans that humans don't understand. And I think perfect is something humans can't understand. Because even science doesn't give perfect answers. There's always gaffes and mysteries, and I don't know. I don't know if humans want perfect. Yeah, I can imagine just having a conversation with this kind of oracle entity, as you'd imagine them. And yeah, maybe it can tell you about, based on my analysis of human condition, you might not want this. And here are some of the things that might matter. Every dumb human will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, trust me. I can, give me the truth. I can handle it. But that's the beauty. People can choose. So. But then, the old marshmallow test with the kids and so on. I feel like too many people can't handle the truth. Probably including myself. Like the deep truth of the human condition, I don't know if I can handle it. What if there's some darks? What if we are an alien science experiment? And it realizes that. What if it had, I mean. Yeah. I mean, this is the matrix all over again. I don't know. I would, what would I talk about? I don't even, yeah. I, probably I would go with the safer scientific questions at first that have nothing to do with my own personal life and mortality. Just like about physics and so on. To build up, like, let's see where it's at. Or maybe see if it has a sense of humor. That's another question. Would it be able to, presumably in order to, if it understands humans deeply, would it be able to generate humor? Yeah. I think that's actually a wonderful benchmark almost. Like is it able, I think that's a really good point basically. To make you laugh. Yeah. If it's able to be like a very effective standup comedian that is doing something very interesting computationally. I think being funny is extremely hard. Yeah. Because it's hard in a way, like a Turing test, the original intent of the Turing test is hard because you have to convince humans. And there's nothing, that's why, that's why comedians talk about this. Like there's, this is deeply honest. Because if people can't help but laugh, and if they don't laugh, that means you're not funny. If they laugh, it's funny. And you're showing, you need a lot of knowledge to create humor. About like the argumentation, human condition and so on. And then you need to be clever with it. You mentioned a few movies. You tweeted, movies that I've seen five plus times, but am ready and willing to keep watching. Interstellar, Gladiator, Contact, Good Will, Hunting, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, all three, Avatar, Fifth Element, so on. It goes on. Terminator 2, mean girls, I'm not going to ask about that. I think her man. Mean girls is great. What are some that jump out to you in your memory that you love and why? Like you mentioned The Matrix. As a computer person, why do you love The Matrix? There's so many properties that make it beautiful and interesting. So there's all these philosophical questions, but then there's also AGIs, and there's simulation, and it's cool. And there's the black. The look of it, the feel of it. Yeah, the look of it, the feel of it, the action, the bullet time. It was just like innovating in so many ways. And then Good Will, Hunting, why do you like that one? Yeah, I really like this tortured genius sort of character who's grappling with whether or not he has any responsibility or what to do with this gift that he was given or how to think about the whole thing. There's also a dance between the genius and the personal, what it means to love another human being. There's a lot of themes there. It's just a beautiful movie. And then the fatherly figure, the mentor, and the psychiatrist. It messes with you. There's some movies that just really mess with you on a deep level. Do you relate to that movie at all? No. It's not your fault, Andre, as I said. Lord of the Rings, that's self-explanatory. Terminator 2, which is interesting. You rewatch that a lot. Is that better than Terminator 1? You like Arnold? I do like Terminator 1 as well. I like Terminator 2 a little bit more, but in terms of its surface properties. Do you think Skynet is at all a possibility? Yes. Like the actual autonomous weapon system kind of thing? Do you worry about that stuff? I do worry about it 100%. AI being used for war. I 100% worry about it. And so some of these fears of AGIs and how this will plan out, these will be very powerful entities probably at some point. And so for a long time, they're going to be tools in the hands of humans. We talk about alignment of AGIs and how to make the problem is like even humans are not aligned. So how this will be used and what this is going to look like is, yeah, it's troubling. Do you think it'll happen slowly enough that we'll be able to, as a human civilization, think through the problems? Yes. That's my hope is that it happens slowly enough and in an open enough way where a lot of people can see and participate in it. Just figure out how to deal with this transition, I think, where it's going to be interesting. I draw a lot of inspiration from nuclear weapons because I sure thought it would be fucked once they developed nuclear weapons. But it's almost like when the systems are not so dangerous, they destroy human civilization. We deploy them and learn the lessons. And then we quickly, if it's too dangerous, we'll quickly, quickly, we might still deploy it, but you very quickly learn not to use them. And so there'll be like this balance achieved. Humans are very clever as a species. It's interesting. We exploit the resources as much as we can, but we avoid destroying ourselves, it seems like. Well, I don't know about that, actually. I hope it continues. I mean, I'm definitely concerned about nuclear weapons and so on, not just as a result of the recent conflict, even before that. That's probably my number one concern for humanity. So if humanity destroys itself or destroys 90% of people, that would be because of nuclear nukes? I think so. And it's not even about the full destruction. To me, it's bad enough if we reset society, that would be like terrible. It would be really bad. And I can't believe we're like so close to it. It's like so crazy to me. It feels like we might be a few tweets away from something like that. Yep. Basically, it's extremely unnerving, and has been for me for a long time. It seems unstable that world leaders just having a bad mood can take one step towards a bad direction and it escalates. Because of a collection of bad moods, it can escalate without being able to stop. Yeah, it's a huge amount of power. And then also with the proliferation. Basically, I don't actually know what the good outcomes are here. So I'm definitely worried about that a lot. And then AGI is not currently there, but I think at some point will more and more become something like it. The danger with AGI even is that I think it's even like slightly worse in a sense that there are good outcomes of AGI. And then the bad outcomes are like an epsilon away, like a tiny one away. And so I think capitalism and humanity and so on will drive for the positive ways of using that technology. But then if bad outcomes are just like a tiny, like flip a minus sign away, that's a really bad position to be in. A tiny perturbation of the system results in the destruction of the human species. It's a weird line to walk. Yeah, I think in general what's really weird about the dynamics of humanity in this explosion we talked about is just like the insane coupling afforded by technology. And just the instability of the whole dynamical system. I think it just doesn't look good, honestly. Yes, that explosion could be destructive or constructive and the probabilities are non-zero in both. Yeah, I mean, I have to, I do feel like I have to try to be optimistic and so on. And I think even in this case, I still am predominantly optimistic, but there's definitely... Me too. Do you think we'll become a multi-planetary species? Maybe yes, but I don't know if it's a dominant feature of future humanity. There might be some people on some planets and so on, but I'm not sure if it's like, yeah, if it's like a major player in our culture and so on. We still have to solve the drivers of self-destruction here on earth. So just having a backup on Mars is not going to solve the problem. So by the way, I love the backup on Mars. I think that's amazing. We should absolutely do that. And I'm so thankful. Would you go to Mars? Actually no, I do like earth quite a lot. Okay, I'll go to Mars. I'll go for you. I'll tweet at you from there. Maybe eventually I would once it's safe enough, but I don't actually know if it's on my lifetime scale unless I can extend it by a lot. I do think that, for example, a lot of people might disappear into virtual realities and stuff like that. And I think that could be the major thrust of sort of the cultural development of humanity if it survives. So it might not be, it's just really hard to work in physical realm and go out there. And I think ultimately all your experiences are in your brain. And so it's much easier to disappear into digital realm. And I think people will find them more compelling, easier, safer, more interesting. So you're a little bit captivated by virtual reality, by the possible worlds, whether it's the metaverse or some other manifestation of that. Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm interested, just talking a lot to Carmack, where's the thing that's currently prevailing? Preventing that. Yeah. I mean, to be clear, I think what's interesting about the future is it's not that, I kind of feel like the variance in the human condition grows. That's the primary thing that's changing. It's not as much the mean of the distribution, it's like the variance of it. So there will probably be people on Mars and there will be people in VR and there will people here on earth. It's just like, there will be so many more ways of being. And so I kind of feel like I see it as like a spreading out of a human experience. There's something about the internet that allows you to discover those little groups and you gravitate to something about your biology likes that kind of world and that you find each other. Yeah. And we'll have transhumanists and then we'll have the Amish and everything is just going to coexist. You know, the cool thing about it, because I've interacted with a bunch of internet communities, is they don't know about each other. Like you can have a very happy existence, just like having a very close knit community and not knowing about each other. I mean, you even sense this, just having traveled to Ukraine, they don't know so many things about America. Yeah. Like when you travel across the world, I think you experience this too. There are certain cultures that are like, they have their own thing going on. So you can see that happening more and more and more and more in the future. We have little communities. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. That seems to be how it's going right now. And I don't see that trend like really reversing. I think people are diverse and they're able to choose their own path and existence. And I sort of like celebrate that. And so... will you spend so much time in the metaverse, in the virtual reality? Which community are you? Are you the physicalist, the physical reality enjoyer? Or do you see drawing a lot of pleasure and fulfillment in the digital world? Yeah, I think currently the virtual reality is not that compelling. I do think it can improve a lot, but I don't really know to what extent. Maybe there's actually like even more exotic things you can think about with like neural links or stuff like that. So currently I kind of see myself as mostly a team human person. I love nature. I love harmony. I love people. I love humanity. I love emotions of humanity. And I just want to be like in this like solar punk little utopia. That's my happy place. My happy place is like people I love thinking about cool problems surrounded by lush, beautiful, dynamic nature and secretly high tech in places that count. So you use technology to empower that love for other humans and nature. Yeah, I think technology used like very sparingly. I don't love when it sort of gets in the way of humanity in many ways. I like just people being humans in a way we sort of like slightly evolved and prefer, I think just by default. People kept asking me, cause they know you love reading. Are there particular books that you enjoyed that had an impact on you for silly or for profound reasons that you would recommend? You mentioned the vital question. Many of course. I think in biology as an example, the vital question is a good one. Anything by Nick Lane, really life ascending, I would say is like a bit more potentially representative as like a summary of a lot of the things he's been talking about. I was very impacted by The Selfish Gene. I thought that was a really good book that helped me understand altruism as an example and where it comes from and just realizing that the selection is on a level of genes was a huge insight for me at the time. And it sort of like cleared up a lot of things for me. What do you think about the idea that ideas are the organisms, the memes? Yeah, love it, 100%. Are you able to walk around with that notion for a while that there is an evolutionary kind of process with ideas as well? There absolutely is. There's memes just like genes and they compete and they live in our brains. It's beautiful. Are we silly humans thinking that we're the organisms? Is it possible that the primary organisms are the ideas? Yeah, I would say like the ideas kind of live in the software of like our civilization in the minds and so on. We think as humans that the hardware is the fundamental thing. I, human, is a hardware entity. But it could be the software, right? Yeah. Yeah, I would say like there needs to be some grounding at some point to like a physical reality. So if we clone an Andre, the software is the thing, like is the thing that makes that thing special, right? Yeah, I guess you're right. But then cloning might be exceptionally difficult. There might be a deep integration between the software and the hardware in ways we don't quite understand. Well, from the evolution point of view, like what makes me special is more like the gang of genes that are riding in my chromosomes, I suppose, right? Like they're the replicating unit, I suppose. No, but that's just the compute. The thing that makes you special, sure. Well, the reality is what makes you special is your ability to survive based on the software that runs on the hardware that was built by the genes. So the software is the thing that makes you survive, not the hardware. It's a little bit of both. It's just like a second layer. It's a new second layer that hasn't been there before the brain. They both coexist. But there's also layers of the software. I mean, it's an abstraction on top of abstractions. But okay, so self is gene, Nick Lane. I would say sometimes books are like not sufficient. I like to reach for textbooks sometimes. I kind of feel like books are for too much of a general consumption sometimes. And they just kind of like, they're too high up in the level of abstraction, and it's not good enough. Yeah. So I like textbooks. I like The Cell. I think The Cell was pretty cool. That's why also I like the writing of Nick Lane is because he's pretty willing to step one level down, and he doesn't, yeah, he's sort of, he's willing to go there. But he's also willing to sort of be throughout the stack. So he'll go down to a lot of detail, but then he will come back up. And I think he has a, yeah, basically, I really appreciate that. That's why I love college, early college, even high school, just textbooks on the basics of computer science, of mathematics, of biology, of chemistry, those are, they condense down, like it's sufficiently general that you can understand both the philosophy and the details, but also like you get homework problems, and you get to play with it as much as you would if you were in programming stuff. Yeah. And then I'm also suspicious of textbooks, honestly, because as an example in deep learning, there's no like amazing textbooks, and the field is changing very quickly. I imagine the same is true and say, synthetic biology and so on. These books like The Cell are kind of outdated, they're still high level. Like what is the actual real source of truth? It's people in wet labs working with cells, you know, sequencing genomes and yeah, actually working with it. And I don't have that much exposure to that or what that looks like. So I still don't fully, I'm reading through The Cell, and it's kind of interesting, and I'm learning, but it's still not sufficient, I would say, in terms of understanding. Well, it's a clean summarization of the mainstream narrative. Yeah. But you have to learn that before you break out. Yeah. Towards the cutting edge. Yeah. But what is the actual process of working with these cells and growing them and incubating them? And, you know, it's kind of like a massive cooking recipes and making sure your cells lives and proliferate, and then you're sequencing them, running experiments, and just how that works, I think is kind of like the source of truth of, at the end of the day, what's really useful in terms of creating therapies and so on. Yeah, I wonder what in the future AI textbooks will be, because, you know, there's artificial intelligence, the modern approach. I actually haven't read if it's come out, the recent version, the recent, there's been a recent edition. I also saw there's a science and deep learning book. I'm waiting for textbooks that are worth recommending, worth reading. It's tricky, because it's like papers and code, code, code. Honestly, I find papers are quite good. I especially like the appendix of any paper as well. It's like the most detail you can have. It doesn't have to be cohesive, connected to anything else. You just describe me a very specific way you saw the particular thing. Many times papers can be actually quite readable, not always, but sometimes the introduction and the abstract is readable, even for someone outside of the field. This is not always true. And sometimes I think, unfortunately, scientists use complex terms, even when it's not necessary. I think that's harmful. I think there's no reason for that. And papers sometimes are longer than they need to be in the parts that don't matter. Appendix would be long, but then the paper itself, look at Einstein, make it simple. Yeah, but certainly I've come across papers, I would say, like synthetic biology or something that I thought were quite readable for the abstract and the introduction. And then you're reading the rest of it and you don't fully understand, but you kind of are getting a gist and I think it's cool. What advice, you give advice to folks interested in machine learning and research, but in general, life advice to a young person, high school, early college, about how to have a career they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of? Yeah, I think I'm very hesitant to give general advice. I think it's really hard. I've mentioned, like some of the stuff I've mentioned is fairly general, I think, like focus on just the amount of work you're spending on like a thing. Compare yourself only to yourself, not to others. That's good. I think those are fairly general. How do you pick the thing? You just have like a deep interest in something or like try to like find the argmax over like the things that you're interested in. Argmax at that moment and stick with it. How do you not get distracted and switch to another thing? You can, if you like. If you do an argmax repeatedly every week, every month. It doesn't converge. It's a problem. Yeah, you can like low pass filter yourself in terms of like what has consistently been true for you. But yeah, I definitely see how it can be hard, but I would say like you're going to work the hardest on the thing that you care about the most. So low pass filter yourself and really introspect in your past. What are the things that gave you energy and what are the things that took energy away from you? Concrete examples. And usually from those concrete examples, sometimes patterns can emerge. I like it when things look like this when I'm in these positions. So that's not necessarily the field, but the kind of stuff you're doing in a particular field. So it seems like you were energized by implementing stuff, building actual things. Yeah, being low level learning and then also communicating so that others can go through the same realizations and shortening that gap. Because I usually have to do way too much work to understand a thing. And then I'm like, okay, this is actually like, okay, I think I get it. And like, why was it so much work? It should have been much less work. And that gives me a lot of frustration. And that's why I sometimes go teach. So aside from the teaching you're doing now, putting out videos, aside from a potential Godfather Part Two with the AGI at Tesla and beyond, what does the future for Anjay Karpathy hold? Have you figured that out yet or no? I mean, as you see through the fog of war, that is all of our future. Do you start seeing silhouettes of what that possible future could look like? The consistent thing I've been always interested in for me, at least, is AI. And that's probably what I'm spending the rest of my life on, because I just care about it a lot. And I actually care about many other problems as well, like say, aging, which I basically view as disease. And I care about that as well, but I don't think it's a good idea to go after it specifically. I don't actually think that humans will be able to come up with the answer. I think the correct thing to do is to ignore those problems and you solve AI and then use that to solve everything else. And I think there's a chance that this will work. I think it's a very high chance. And that's kind of like the way I'm betting, at least. So when you think about AI, are you interested in all kinds of applications, all kinds of domains, and any domain you focus on will allow you to get insights to the big problem of AGI? Yeah, for me, it's the ultimate meta problem. I don't want to work on any one specific problem. There's too many problems. So how can you work on all problems simultaneously? You solve the meta problem, which to me is just intelligence, and how do you automate it? Is there cool small projects like Archive Sanity and so on that you're thinking about that the world, the ML world can anticipate? There's always some fun side projects. Archive Sanity is one. Basically there's way too many archive papers. How can I organize it and recommend papers and so on? I transcribed all of your podcasts. What did you learn from that experience, from transcribing the process of, like you like consuming audio books and podcasts and so on, and here's a process that achieves closer to human level performance on annotation? Yeah, well, I definitely was surprised that transcription with OpenAI's Whisper was working so well compared to what I'm familiar with from Siri and a few other systems, I guess. It works so well, and that's what gave me some energy to try it out, and I thought it could be fun to run on podcasts. It's kind of not obvious to me why Whisper is so much better compared to anything else, because I feel like there should be a lot of incentive for a lot of companies to produce transcription systems, and that they've done so over a long time. Whisper is not a super exotic model. It's a transformer. It takes MEL spectrograms and just outputs tokens of text. It's not crazy. The model and everything has been around for a long time. I'm not actually 100% sure why this came out. Yeah, it's not obvious to me either. It makes me feel like I'm missing something. I'm missing something. Yeah, because there's a huge, even at Google and so on, YouTube transcription. Yeah. Yeah, it's unclear, but some of it is also integrating into a bigger system. Yeah. So the user interface, how it's deployed and all that kind of stuff. Maybe running it as an independent thing is much easier, like an order of magnitude easier than deploying to a large integrated system like YouTube transcription or anything like meetings like Zoom has transcription. That's kind of crappy, but creating an interface where it detects the different individual speakers, it's able to display it in compelling ways, run it in real time, all that kind of stuff. Maybe that's difficult. That's the only explanation I have because I'm currently paying quite a bit for human transcription, human caption, annotation. It seems like there's a huge incentive to automate that. Yeah. It's very confusing. I don't know if you looked at some of the Whisper transcripts, but they're quite good. They're good. And especially in tricky cases. I've seen Whisper's performance on super tricky cases and it does incredibly well. So I don't know. A podcast is pretty simple. It's like high quality audio and you're speaking usually pretty clearly. So I don't know. I don't know what OpenAI's plans are either. But yeah, there's always like fun projects basically. And stable diffusion also is opening up a huge amount of experimentation, I would say, in the visual realm and generating images and videos and movies ultimately. Yeah, videos now. And so that's going to be pretty crazy. That's going to almost certainly work and it's going to be really interesting when the cost of content creation is going to fall to zero. You used to need a painter for a few months to paint a thing and now it's going to be speak to your phone to get your video. So Hollywood will start using that to generate scenes, which completely opens up. Yeah. So you can make a movie like Avatar eventually for under a million dollars. Much less. Maybe just by talking to your phone. I mean, I know it sounds kind of crazy. And then there'd be some voting mechanism. Like how do you have a... Like, would there be a show on Netflix that's generated completely automatically? Yeah, potentially. Yeah. And what does it look like also when you can just generate it on demand and there's infinity of it? Yeah. Oh man. All the synthetic art. I mean, it's humbling because we treat ourselves as special for being able to generate art and ideas and all that kind of stuff. If that can be done in an automated way by AI. Yeah. I think it's fascinating to me how these... The predictions of AI and what it's going to look like and what it's going to be capable of are completely inverted and wrong. And sci-fi of 50s and 60s was just like totally not right. They imagined AI as like super calculating theorem provers and we're getting things that can talk to you about emotions. They can do art. It's just like weird. Are you excited about that future? AI is like hybrid systems, heterogeneous systems of humans and AI is talking about emotions. Netflix and children AI system, that's where the Netflix thing you watch is also generated by AI. I think it's going to be interesting for sure. And I think I'm cautiously optimistic, but it's not obvious. Well, the sad thing is your brain and mine developed in a time where before Twitter, before the internet. So I wonder people that are born inside of it might have a different experience. Like I, maybe you will still resist it and the people born now will not. Well, I do feel like humans are extremely malleable. And you're probably right. What is the meaning of life, Andre? We talked about sort of the universe having a conversation with us humans or with the systems we create to try to answer for the universe, for the creator of the universe to notice us. We're trying to create systems that are loud enough to answer back. I don't know if that's the meaning of life. That's like meaning of life for some people. The first level answer I would say is anyone can choose their own meaning of life because we are a conscious entity and it's beautiful, number one. But I do think that a deeper meaning of life if someone is interested is along the lines of what the hell is all this and why? And if you look into fundamental physics and the quantum field theory and the standard model, they're very complicated. And there's this 19 free parameters of our universe and what's going on with all this stuff and why is it here and can I hack it? Can I work with it? Is there a message for me? Am I supposed to create a message? And so I think there's some fundamental answers there. But I think there's actually even like you can't actually really make dent in those without more time. And so to me also there's a big question around just getting more time, honestly. Yeah, that's kind of like what I think about quite a bit as well. So kind of the ultimate or at least first way to sneak up to the why question is to try to escape the system, the universe. And then for that you sort of backtrack and say, okay, for that it's going to take a very long time. So the why question boils down from an engineering perspective to how do we extend. Yeah, I think that's the question number one, practically speaking, because you're not going to calculate the answer to the deeper questions in the time you have. And that could be extending your own lifetime or extending just the lifetime of human civilization? Of whoever wants to. Many people might not want that. But I think people who do want that, I think it's probably possible. And I don't know that people fully realize this. I kind of feel like people think of death as an inevitability. But at the end of the day, this is a physical system. Some things go wrong. It makes sense why things like this happen, evolutionarily speaking. And there's most certainly interventions that mitigate it. That'd be interesting if death is eventually looked at as a fascinating thing that used to happen to humans. I don't think it's unlikely. I think it's likely. And it's up to our imagination to try to predict what the world without death looks like. It's hard to... I think the values will completely change. Could be. I don't really buy all these ideas that, oh, without death, there's no meaning, there's nothing. I don't intuitively buy all those arguments. I think there's plenty of meaning, plenty of things to learn. They're interesting, exciting. I want to know. I want to calculate. I want to improve the condition of all the humans and organisms that are alive. The way we find meaning might change. There is a lot of humans, probably including myself, that finds meaning in the finiteness of things. But that doesn't mean that's the only source of meaning. I do think many people will go with that, which I think is great. I love the idea that people can just choose their own adventure. You are born as a conscious, free entity, by default, I'd like to think. And you have your unalienable rights for life. In the pursuit of happiness. I don't know if you have that. In the nature, the landscape of happiness. You can choose your own adventure mostly. And that's not fully true. I still am pretty sure I'm an NPC. But an NPC can't know it's an NPC. There could be different degrees and levels of consciousness. I don't think there's a more beautiful way to end it. Andre, you're an incredible person. I'm really honored you would talk with me. Everything you've done for the machine learning world, for the AI world, to just inspire people, to educate millions of people, it's been great. And I can't wait to see what you do next. It's been an honor, man. Thank you so much for talking today. Awesome, thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andre Karpathy. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Samuel Carlin. The purpose of models is not to fit the data, but to sharpen the questions. Thanks for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/cdiD-9MMpb0

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Joe Rogan gifts Lex Fridman his favorite watch

Take this, that's yours now. That's an Omega. And that has a moon phase. See that moon on the bottom of it? That's yours. You see the moon on the bottom of it? You see that? This is a happy man right now. That's my watch. That's my favorite watch, by the way. You see the moon on the bottom of it? Yep. That is the actual moon phase. It's a real high-resolution photograph of the moon. And as the moon rises, it will rise. It's set in the position where the moon is currently. Oh, that's awesome. Fuck yeah, it's awesome. Take that piece of shit, stupid fucking frisbee you got on your wrist. You can't get this back because you just did it on record. No, it's yours. It's yours, man. Joe, thank you so much. This is a steampunk watch. That fucking stupid thing. The robot writes it and erases it every minute. That's so dumb. But that watch, that watch is my favorite watch, and I want you to have it. Joe, thank you. My pleasure. See that? You got a big-ass wrist. Yeah. I do. Well, we can get it sized for you. No, no, this is perfect. Fuck, man. But you see the little moon? Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much. You see it at the bottom? Wait until it becomes full moon. You get a real sense of what it looks like. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful high-resolution image. And one of the reasons why I like Omegas, first of all, the astronauts that went to the moon, allegedly, they wore Omegas. But also, it doesn't have the same sort of cachet value as Rolexes or a lot of the people that have a peripheral understanding of watches. But they're fucking phenomenal watches. They make amazing watches. I have a bunch of Omegas. I love them. But that is my favorite watch, and you have my favorite watch now. Joe, thank you. Actually, this is the one thing I think a watch could add, is perspective on the cosmic scale. That's why I like that watch, and that's why I think you should have it. Because I would look at that watch, and I would say, this is where we are right now with the moon cycle. And when it comes full moon, like right now, it's just kind of like a little, it's probably a quarter moon or something. Yeah. When it comes full moon, you'll get a real sense of what it actually looks like, because it's beautiful. It's a beautiful high-resolution image of the moon with little stars behind it. See how much shit Connor got for his watch this week? Yeah, but that's a ridiculous watch. That's a ridiculous watch. I don't like those watches. I mean, look, you could like whatever you like. Yeah, that's a million dollars, his watch. That's preposterous. It's all filled with diamonds and shit. I don't own a single diamond. I've never had a diamond in my life, and I want a fucking diamond. I like engineering. That's what I like. I'm a fan of engineering. And what I like about that watch is the engineering behind it, is that it's a mechanical watch, meaning the time is kept within a second or two, I don't know what it is, like a day? I forget what it is, but also with a complication. There's this crazy complication that shows the moon rising across. And when it goes dark in the sky, I know when I can go outside and see the stars, because I look at my watch. And when my watch shows me no moon, that's when I go outside on my deck. Because when I go outside on my deck, I know I'm just going to see nothing but stars and no moon at all. No light pollution, just beautiful stars in the sky. I'm going to take care of this one. Take care of it, my brother. Take care of it.

https://youtu.be/mQ7ECcjXazw

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Gilbert Strang: Why People Like Math

On YouTube, just consuming a bunch of videos and just watching what people connect with and what they really enjoy and are inspired by, math seems to come up again and again. I'm trying to understand why that is. Perhaps you can help give me clues. So it's not just the kinds of lectures that you give, but it's also just other folks, like with Numberphile, there's a channel, where they just chat about things that are extremely complicated, actually. People nevertheless connect with them. What do you think that is? It's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, I wasn't really aware of it. We're conditioned to think math is hard, math is abstract, math is just for a few people, but it isn't that way. A lot of people quite like math, and I get messages from people saying, now I'm retired, I'm gonna learn some more math. I get a lot of those, it's really encouraging. And I think what people like is that there's some order, a lot of order, and things are not obvious, but they're true. So it's really cheering to think that so many people really wanna learn more about math. In terms of truth, again, sorry to slide into philosophy at times, but math does reveal pretty strongly what things are true. I mean, that's the whole point of proving things. And yet, our real world is messy and complicated. What do you think about the nature of truth that math reveals? Because it is a source of comfort, like you've mentioned. Yeah, that's right. Well, I have to say, I'm not much of a philosopher. I just like numbers, you know, as a kid, this was before you had to go in, when you had a filly in your teeth, you had to kind of just take it. So what I did was think about math, you know, like take powers of two, two, four, eight, 16, up until the time the tooth stopped hurting and the dentist said you're through, or counting, yeah. So that was a source of peace, almost. Yeah. What is it about math do you think that brings that? Yeah. What is that? Well, you know where you are, yeah, symmetry, it's certainty, the fact that, you know, if you multiply two by itself 10 times, you get 1,024, period, everybody's gonna get that. Do you see math as a powerful tool or as an art form? So it's both, that's really one of the neat things. You can be an artist and like math, you can be a engineer and use math. Which are you? Which am I? What did you connect with most? Yeah, I'm somewhere between, I'm certainly not a artist type, philosopher type person, might sound that way this morning, but I'm not. Yeah, I really enjoy teaching engineers. They go for an answer. And yeah, so probably within the MIT math department, most people enjoy teaching students who get the abstract idea. I'm okay with, I'm good with engineers who are looking for a way to find answers, yeah.

https://youtu.be/Go7sw_plJwA

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Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming | Lex Fridman Podcast #341

Can you imagine possible features that Python 4.0 might have that would necessitate the creation of the new 4.0? Given the amount of pain and joy, suffering and triumph that was involved in the move between version two and version three. The following is a conversation with Guido van Rossum, his second time on this podcast. He is the creator of the Python programming language and is Python's emeritus BDFL, Benevolent Dictator for Life. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Guido van Rossum. Python 3.11 is coming out very soon. In it, see Python claim to be 10 to 60% faster. How'd you pull that off? And what's CPython? CPython is the last Python implementation standing, also the first one that was ever created. The original Python implementation that I started over 30 years ago. So what does it mean that Python, the programming language, is implemented in another programming language called C? What kind of audience do you have in mind here? People who know programming? No, there's somebody on a boat that's into fishing and have never heard about programming, but also some world-class programmers. So you're gonna have to speak to both. Imagine a boat with two people. One of them has not heard about programming, is really into fishing, and the other one is like an incredible Silicon Valley programmer that's programmed in everything. C, C++, Python, Rust, Java, he knows the entire history of programming languages. So you're gonna have to speak to both. I imagine that boat in the middle of the ocean. Yes. I'm gonna please the guy who knows how to fish first. Yes, please. He seems like the most useful in the middle of the ocean. You gotta make him happy. I'm sure he has a cell phone. So he's probably very suspicious about what goes on in that cell phone, but he must have heard that inside his cell phone is a tiny computer. And a programming language is computer code that tells the computer what to do. It's a very low-level language. It's zeros and ones, and then there's assembly, and then- Oh, yeah, we don't talk about these really low levels because those just confuse people. I mean, when we're talking about human language, we're not usually talking about vocal tracts and how you position your tongue. I was talking yesterday about how when you have a Chinese person and they speak English, this is a bit of a stereotype they often don't know, or they can't seem to make the difference well between an L and an R. And I have a theory about that, and I've never checked this with linguists, that it probably has to do with the fact that in Chinese, there is not really a difference. And it could be that there are regional variations in how native Chinese speakers pronounce that one sound that sounds like L to some of them, like R to others. So it's both the sounds you produce with your mouth throughout the history of your life and what you're used to listening to. I mean, every language has that. Russian has- Exactly. The Slavic languages have sounds like zh, the letter zh, like Americans or English speakers don't seem to know the sound zh. They seem uncomfortable with that sound. Yeah, so I'm, oh, yes, okay. So we're not going to the shapes of tongues and the sounds that the mouth can make. Fine, words- And similarly, we're not going into the ones and zeros or machine language. I would say a programming language is a list of instructions, like a cookbook recipe that sort of tells you how to do a certain thing, like make a sandwich. Well, acquire a loaf of bread, cut it in slices, take two slices, put mustard on one, put jelly on the other or something, then add the meat, then add the cheese. I've heard that science teachers can actually do great stuff with recipes like that and trying to interpret their students' instructions incorrectly until the students are completely unambiguous about it. With language, see, that's the difference between natural languages and programming languages. I think ambiguity is a feature, not a bug in human spoken languages. Like that's the dance of communication between humans. Well, for lawyers, ambiguity certainly is a feature. For plenty of other cases, the ambiguity is not much of a feature, but we work around it, of course. What's more important is context. So with context, the precision of the statement becomes more and more concrete, right? But when you say I love you to a person that matters a lot to you, the person doesn't try to compile that statement and return an error saying, please define love, right? No, but I imagine that my wife and my son interpret it very differently. Yes. Even though it's the same three words. But imprecisely still. For sure. Lawyers have a lot of follow up questions for you. Nevertheless, the context is already different in that case. Yes, fair enough. So that's a programming language, is ability to unambiguously state a recipe. Actually, let's go back. Let's go to PEP8. You go through in PEP8 the style guide for Python code, some ideas of what this language should look like, feel like, read like. And the big idea there is that code readability counts. What does that mean to you? And how do we achieve it? So this recipe should be readable. That's a thing between programmers. Because on the one hand, we always explain the concept of programming language as computers need instructions, and computers are very dumb and they need very precise instructions because they don't have much context. In fact, they have lots of context, but their context is very different. But what we've seen emerge during the development of software starting in the, probably in the late 40s, is that software is a very social activity. A software developer is not a mad scientist who sits alone in his lab writing brilliant code. A software is developed by teams of people. Even the mad scientist sitting alone in his lab can type fast enough to produce enough code so that by the time he's done with his coding, he still remembers what the first few lines he wrote mean. So even the mad scientist coding alone in his lab would be sort of wise to adopt conventions on how to format the instructions that he gives to the computer. So that the thing is, there is a difference between a cookbook recipe and a computer program. The cookbook recipe, the author of the cookbook writes it once and then it's printed in 100,000 copies. And then lots of people in their kitchens try to recreate that recipe, that particular pie or dish from the recipe. And so there, the goal of the cookbook author is to make it clear to the human reader of the recipe, the human amateur chef in most cases. When you're writing a computer program, you have two audiences at once. It needs to tell the computer what to do, but it also is useful if that program is readable by other programmers. Because computer software, unlike the typical recipe for a cherry pie, is so complex that you don't get all of it right at once. You end up with the activity of debugging and you end up with the activity of, so debugging is trying to figure out why your code doesn't run the way you thought it should run. That means broadly, it could be stupid little errors or it could be big logical errors. It could be anything. Spiritual. Yeah, it could be anything from a typo to a wrong choice of algorithm to building something that does what you tell it to do, but that's not useful. Yeah, it seems to work really well 99% of the time, but does weird things 1% of the time on some edge cases. That's pretty much all software nowadays. All good software, right? Well, yeah, for bad software. That 99 goes down a lot. But it's not just about the complexity of the program. Like you said, it is a social endeavor in that you're constantly improving that recipe for the cherry pie, but you're in a group of people improving that recipe or the mad scientist is improving the recipe that he created a year ago and making it better or adding something. He decides that he wants, I don't know, he wants some decoration on his pie or icing. So there's broad philosophical things and there's specific advice on style. So first of all, the thing that people first experience when they look at Python, there is a, it is very readable, but there's also like a spatial structure to it. Can you explain the indentation style of Python and what is the magic to it? Spaces are important for readability of any kind of text. If you take a cookbook recipe and you remove all the sort of, all the bullets and other markup and you just crunch all the text together, maybe you leave the spaces between the words, but that's all you leave. When you're in the kitchen trying to figure out, oh, what are the ingredients and what are the steps? And where does this step end and the next step begin? You're gonna have a hard time if it's just one solid block of text. On the other hand, what a typical cookbook does if the paper is not too expensive, each recipe starts on its own page. Maybe there's a picture next to it. The list of ingredients comes first. There's a standard notation. There's shortcuts so that you don't have to sort of write two sentences on how you have to cut the onion because there are only three ways that people ever cut onions in a kitchen, small, medium, and in slices or something like that. Right. None of my examples make any sense to real cooks, of course. But yeah. It's... We're talking to programmers with a metaphor of cooking. I love it. But there is a strictness to the spacing that Python defines. So there's some looser things, some stricter things, but the four spaces for the indentation is really interesting. It really defines what the language looks and feels like. Because indentation sort of taking a block of text and then having inside that block of text a smaller block of text that is indented further as sort of a group, it's like you have a bulleted list in a complex business document and inside some of the bullets are other bulleted lists. You will indent those too. If each bulleted list is indented several inches, then at two levels deep, there's no space left on the page to put any of the words of the text. So you can't indent too far. On the other hand, if you don't indent at all, you can't tell whether something is a top level bullet or a second level bullet or a third level bullet. So you have to have some compromise and based on ancient conventions and the sort of the typical width of a computer screen in the 80s and all sorts of things, sort of we came up with sort of four spaces as a compromise. I mean, there are groups, there are large groups of people who code with two spaces per indent level. For example, the Google style guide, all the Google Python code and I think also all the Google C++ code is indented with only two spaces per block. If you're not used to that, it's harder to at a glance understand the code because the sort of the high level structure is determined by the indentation. On the other hand, there are other programming languages where the indentation is eight spaces or a whole lot more. A whole tab stop in sort of classic Unix. And to me, that looks weird because you sort of after three indent levels, you've got no room left. Well, there's some languages where the indentation is a recommendation, it's a stylistic one. The code compiles even without any indentation and then Python really, indentation is a fundamental part of the language, right? It doesn't have to be four spaces. So you can code Python with two spaces per block or six spaces or 12 if you really want to go wild, but sort of everything that belongs to the same block needs to be indented the same way. In practice, in most other languages, people recommend doing that anyway. If you look at C or Rust or C++, all those languages, Java, don't have a requirement of indentation, but except in extreme cases, they're just as anal about having their code properly indented. So any IDE that the syntax highlighting that works with Java or C++, they will yell at you aggressively if you don't do proper indentation. They'd suggest the proper indentation for you. Like in C, you type a few words and then you type a curly brace, which there is their notion of sort of begin an indented block. Then you hit return and then it automatically indents four or eight spaces, depending on your style preferences or how your editor is configured. Was there a possible universe in which you considered having braces in Python? Absolutely, yeah. What is it, 60-40, 70-30? In your head, what was the trade-off? For a long time, I was actually convinced that the indentation was just better. Without context, I would still claim that indentation is better. It reduces clutter. However, as I started to say earlier, context is almost everything. And in the context of coding, most programmers are familiar with multiple languages, even if they're only good at one or two. And apart from Python and maybe Fortran, I don't know how that's written these days anymore, but all the other languages, Java, Rust, C, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, Perl, are all using curly braces to sort of indicate blocks. And so Python is the odd one out. So it's a radical idea. Do you still, as a radical renegade revolutionary, do you still stand behind this idea of indentation versus braces? Like, can you dig into it a little bit more, why you still stand behind indentation? Because context is not the whole story. History, in a sense, provides more context. So for Python, there's no chance that we can switch. Python is using curly braces for something else, dictionaries mostly. We would get in trouble if we wanted to switch. Just like you couldn't redefine C to use indentation, even if you agree that indentation sort of in a greenfield environment would be better, you can't change that kind of thing in a language. It's hard enough to reach agreement over much more minor details. Maybe, I mean, in the past in Python, we did have a big debate about tabs versus spaces and forced spaces versus fewer or more. And we sort of came up with a recommended standard and sort of options for people who want to be different. But yes, I guess the thought experiment I'd like you to consider is if you could travel back through time when the compatibility is not an issue and you started Python all over again, can you make the case for indentation still? Well, it frees up a pair of matched brackets of which there are never enough in the world for other purposes. It really makes the language slightly sort of easier to grasp for people who don't already know another programming language. Because sort of one of the things, and I mostly got this from my mentors who taught me programming language design in the earlier 80s. When you're teaching programming, for the total newbie who has not coded before, in not in any other language, a whole bunch of concepts in programming are very alien or sort of new and maybe very interesting, but also distracting and confusing. And there are many different things you have to learn. You have to sort of, in a typical 13 week programming course, you have to, if it's like really learning to program from scratch, you have to cover algorithms, you have to cover data structures, you have to cover syntax, you have to cover variables, loops, functions, recursion, classes, expressions, operators. There are so many concepts. If you can spend a little less time having to worry about the syntax. The classic example was often, oh, the compiler complains every time I put a semicolon in the wrong place or I forget to put a semicolon. Python doesn't have semicolons in that sense. So you can't forget them. And you are also not sort of misled into putting them where they don't belong because you don't learn about them in the first place. The flip side of that is forcing the strictness onto the beginning programmer to teach them that programming values attention to details. You don't get to just write the way you write in English. Plenty of other details that they have to pay attention to. So I think they'll still get the message about paying attention to details. The interesting design choice, I still program quite a bit in PHP and I'm sure there's other languages like this, but the dollar sign before a variable, that was always an annoying thing for me. It didn't quite fit into my understanding of why this is good for a programming language. I'm not sure if you ever thought about that one. That is a historical thing. There is a whole lineage of programming languages. PHP is one, Perl was one, the Unix shell is one of the oldest or all the different shells. The dollar was invented for that purpose because the very earliest shells had a notion of scripting, but they did not have a notion of parameterizing the scripting. And so a script is just a few lines of text where each line of text is a command that is read by a very primitive command processor that then sort of takes the first word on the line as the name of a program and passes all the rest of the line as text into the program for the program to figure out what to do with as arguments. And so by the time scripting was slightly more mature than the very first script, there was a convention that just like the first word of line is the name of the program, the following words could be names of files. Input.txt, output.html, things like that. The next thing that happens is, oh, it would actually be really nice if we could have variables and especially parameters for scripts. Parameters are usually what starts this process. But now you have a problem because you can't just say the parameters are X, Y, and Z. And so now we call, say, let's say X is the input file and Y is the output file. And let's forget about Z for now. I have my program and I write program X, Y. Well, that already has a meaning because that presumably means X itself is the file. It's a file name. It's not a variable name. And so the inventors of things like the Unix shell, and I'm sure job command language at IBM before that, had to use something that made it clear to the script processor, here is an X that is not actually the name of a file, which you just pass through to the program you're running. Here is an X that is the name of a variable. And when you're writing a script processor, you try to keep it as simple as possible. Because certainly in the 50s and 60s, the thing that interprets the script was itself had to be a very small program because it had to fit in a very small part of memory. And so saying, oh, just look at each character. And if you see a dollar sign, you jump to another section of the code and then you gobble up characters, or say until the next space or something, and you say, that's the variable name. And so it was sort of invented as a clever way to make parsing of things that contain both variable and fixed parts very easy in a very simple script processor. It also helps, even then, it also helps the human author and the human reader of the script to quickly see, oh, 20 lines down in the script, I see a reference to XYZ. Oh, it has a dollar in front of it. So now we know that XYZ must be one of the parameters of the script. Well, this is fascinating. Several things to say, which is the leftovers from the simple script processor languages are now in code bases like behind Facebook or behind most of the backend. I think PHP probably still runs most of the backend of the internet. Oh yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot of it in Wikipedia too, for example, yeah. It's funny that those decisions, or not funny, it's fascinating that those decisions permeate through time. Just like biological systems, right? I mean, the sort of, the inner workings of DNA have been stable for, well, I don't know how long it was, like 300 million years, half a billion years. Yeah. And there are all sorts of weird quirks there that don't make a lot of sense if you were to design a system like self-replicating molecules from scratch. Well, that system has a lot of interesting resilience. It has redundancy that results, like it messes up in interesting ways that still is resilient when you look at the system level of the organism. Code doesn't necessarily have that, a computer programming code. You'd be surprised how much resilience modern code has. I mean, if you look at the number of bugs per line of code, even in very well-tested code that in practice works just fine, there are actually lots of things that don't work fine. And there are error correcting or self-correcting mechanisms at many levels. Including probably the user of the code. Well, in the end, the user who sort of is told, well, you got to reboot your PC, is part of that system. And a slightly less drastic thing is reload the page, which we all know how to do without thinking about it when something weird happens. You try to reload a few times before you say, oh, there's something really weird. Okay, or try to click the button again if the first time didn't work. Well, yeah, we should all have learned not to do that because that's probably just gonna turn the light back off. Yeah, true. So do it three times. That's the right lesson. And I wonder how many people actually like the dollar sign. Like you said, it is documentation. So to me, it's whatever the opposite of syntactic sugar is syntactic poison. To me, it is such a pain in the ass that I have to type in a dollar sign. Also super error prone. So it's not self-documenting. It's like a bug generating thing. It is a kind of documentation that's the pro and the con is it's a source of a lot of bugs. But actually I have to ask you, this is a really interesting idea of bugs per line of code. If you look at all the computer systems out there, from the code that runs nuclear weapons to the code that runs all the amazing companies that you've been involved with and not, the code that runs Twitter and Facebook and Dropbox and Google and Microsoft Windows and so on. And we like laid out, wouldn't that be a cool like table, bugs per line of code? And let's put like actual companies aside. Do you think we'd be surprised by the number we see there for all these companies? That depends on whether you've ever read about research that's been done in this area before. And I didn't know that the last time I saw some research like that, there was probably in the nineties and the research might've been done in the eighties. But the conclusion was across a wide range of different software, different languages, different companies, different development styles, the number of bugs is always, I think it's in the order of about one bug per thousand lines in sort of mature software that is considered as good as it gets. Can I give you some facts here? There's a lot of good papers. So you said mature software, right? So here's a report from a programming analytics company. Now this is from a developer perspective. Let me just say what it says because this is very weird and surprising. On average, a developer creates 70 bugs per 1000 lines of code. 15 bugs per 1000 lines of code find their way to the customers. This is in software they've analyzed. No, I was wrong by an order of magnitude there. Fixing a bug takes 30 times longer than writing a line of code. That I can believe. Yeah, totally. 75% of a developer's time is spent on debugging. That's for an average developer. They analyze this 1500 hours a year. In US alone, $113 billion is spent annually on identifying and fixing bugs. And I imagine this is marketing literature for someone who claims to have a golden bullet or a silver bullet that makes all that investment in fixing bugs go away. But that is usually not going to happen. Well, they're referencing a lot of stuff, of course, but it is a page that is, you know, there's a contact us button at the bottom. Presumably, if you just spend a little bit less than $100 billion, we're willing to solve the problem for you. Right, and there's also a report on Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, on the exact same topic, but when I open it up at the moment, the page says Stack Overflow is currently offline for maintenance. Oh, that is ironic. Yes. By the way, their error page is awesome. Anyway, I mean, can you believe that number of bugs? Oh, absolutely. Isn't that scary that 70 bugs per 1000 lines of code, so even 10 bugs per 1000 lines of code? Well, that's about one bug every 15 lines, and that's when you're first typing it in. Yeah, from a developer, but like, how many bugs are gonna be found if you're typing it in? Well, the development process is extremely iterative. Yeah. Typically, you don't make a plan for what software you're going to release a year from now and work out all the details, because actually all the details themselves consist, they sort of compose a program, and that being a program, all your plans will have bugs in them too, and inaccuracies, but what you actually do is you do a bunch of typing, and I'm actually really, I'm a really bad typist. That's just, I've never learned to type with 10 fingers. How many do you use? Well, I use all 10 of them, but not very well, but I never took a typing class, and I never sort of corrected that, so the first time I seriously learned, I had to learn the layout of a QWERTY keyboard was actually in college in my first programming classes, where we used punch cards, and so with my two fingers, I sort of pecked out my code. Watch anyone give you a little coding demonstration. They'll have to produce like four lines of code, and now see how many times they use the backspace key, because they made a mistake, and some people, especially when someone else is looking, will backspace over 20, 30, 40 characters to fix a typo earlier in a line. If you're slightly more experienced, of course, you use your arrow buttons to go, or your mouse to, but the mouse is usually slower than the arrows, but a lot of people, when they type a 20-character word, which is not unusual, and they realize they made a mistake at the start of the word, they backspace over the whole thing, and then retype it, and sometimes it takes three, four times to get it right, so I don't know what your definition of bug is. Arguably, mistyping a word and then correcting it immediately is not a bug. On the other hand, you already do sort of lose time, and every once in a while, there's sort of a typo that you don't get in that process, and now you've typed like 10 lines of code, and somewhere in the middle of it, you don't know where yet is a typo, or maybe a thinko where you forgot that you had to initialize a variable or something. But those are two different things, and I would say yes, you have to actually run the code to discover that typo, but forgetting to initialize a variable is a fundamentally different thing, because that thing can go undiscovered. That depends on the language. In Python, it will not. Right. And sort of modern compilers are usually pretty good at catching that, even for C. So for that specific thing, but actually deeper, there might be another variable that is initialized, but logically speaking, the one you meant related. Yep. It's like name the same, but it's a different thing, and you forgot to initialize whatever, some counter, or some basic variable they're using. I can tell that you've coded. Yes. By the way, I should mention that I use a Kinesis keyboard, which has the backspace under the thumb, and one of the biggest reasons I use that keyboard is because you realize in order to use the backspace on a usual keyboard, you have to stretch your pinky out. Mm-hmm. And like for most normal keyboards, the backspace is under the pinky, and so I don't know if people realize the pain they go through in their life because of the backspace key being so far away. So with the Kinesis, it's right under the thumb, so you don't have to actually move your hands. The backspace and the delete are right there. What do you do if you're ever not with your own keyboard, and you have to use someone else's PC keyboard that has that standard layout? So first of all, it turns out that you can actually go your whole life always having the keyboard with you. Well, except for that little tablet that you're using for note-taking right now, right? Yeah, so it's very inefficient note-taking, but I'm not. I'm just looking stuff up. But in most cases, I would be actually using the keyboard here right now. I just don't anticipate. You have to calculate how much typing do you anticipate. If I anticipate quite a bit, then I'll just have a keyboard with me. You pull it out. And same with the embarrassing. I've accepted being the weirdo that I am, but when I go on an airplane and I anticipate to do programming or a lot of typing, I will have a laptop that will pull out a Kinesis keyboard in addition to the laptop, and it's just who I am. You have to accept who you are. But also, for a lot of people, for me certainly, there's a comfort space where there's a certain kind of setups that maximize productivity. And it's like some people have a warm blanket that they like when they watch a movie. I like the Kinesis keyboard. It takes me to a place of focus. And I still mostly I'm trying to make sure I use the state-of-the-art IDs for everything, but my comfort place, just like the Kinesis keyboard, is still Emacs. So I still use it. Some of the debates I have with myself about everything from a technology perspective is how much to hold on to the tools you're comfortable with versus how much to invest in using modern tools. And the signal that the communities provide you with is the noisy one because a lot of people year to year get excited about new tools, and you have to make a prediction. Are these tools defining a new generation of something that will transform programming, or is this just a fad that will pass? Certainly with JavaScript frameworks and front-end and back-end of the web, there's a lot of different styles that came and went. I remember learning, what was it called, ActionScript. I remember for Flash, learning how to program in Flash, learning how to design, do graphic animation, all that kind of stuff with Flash. Same with Java applets. I remember creating quite a lot of Java applets, thinking that this potentially defines the future of the web, and it did not. Well, you know, in most cases like that, the particular technology eventually gets replaced, but many of the concepts that the technology introduced or made accessible first are preserved, of course, because, yeah, we're not using Java applets anymore, but the notion of reactive web pages that sort of contain little bits of code that respond directly to something you do, like pressing a button or a link or hovering even, has certainly not gone away. And those animations that were made painfully complicated with Flash, I mean, Flash was an innovation when it first came up, and when it was replaced by JavaScript equivalent stuff, it was a somewhat better way to do animations, but those animations are still there. Not all of them, but sort of, again, there is an evolution, and so often with technology, that the technology that was eventually thrown away or replaced was still essential to sort of get started. There wouldn't be jet planes without propeller planes, I bet you. But from a user perspective, yes, from the feature set, yes, but from a programmer perspective, it feels like all the time I've spent with ActionScript, all the time I've spent with Java on the applet side for the GUI development, well, no, Java I have to push back, that was useful, because it transfers, but the Flash doesn't transfer, so some things you learn and invest time in. Yeah, what you learned, the skill you picked up learning ActionScript, was sort of, it was perhaps a super valuable skill at the time you picked it up, if you learned ActionScript early enough, but that skill is no longer in demand. Well, that's the calculation you have to make when you're learning new things, like today people start learning programming, today I'm trying to see what are the new languages to try, what are the new systems to try, what are the new IDs to try, to keep improving. That's why we start when we're young, right? But that seems very true to me, that when you're young, you have your whole life ahead of you and you're allowed to make mistakes. In fact, you should feel encouraged to do a bit of stupid stuff. Try not to get yourself killed or seriously maimed, but try stuff that deviates from what everybody else is doing. And like 9 out of 10 times, you'll just learn why everybody else is not doing that, or why everybody else is doing it some other way. And 1 out of 10 times, you sort of, you discover something that's better or that somehow works. I mean, there are all sorts of crazy things that were invented by accident, by people trying stuff together. That's great advice to try random stuff, make a lot of mistakes. Once you're married with kids, you're probably going to be a little more risk averse, because now there's more at stake and you've already hopefully had some time where you were experimenting with crazy shit. I like how marriage and kids solidifies your choice of programming language. How does that, the Robert Frost poem with the road less taken, which I think is misinterpreted by most people. But anyway, I feel like the choices you make early on, especially if you go all in, they're going to define the rest of your life's trajectory in a way that, like you basically are picking a camp. So, if you invest a lot in PHP, if you invest a lot in.NET, if you invest a lot in JavaScript, you're going to stick there. That's your life journey. It's very hard to tell. Well, only as far as that technology remains relevant. Yes, yes. I mean, if at age 16 you learn coding in C and by the time you're 26, C is like a dead language, then there's still time to switch. There's probably some kind of survivor bias or whatever it's called in sort of your observation that you pick a camp because there are many different camps to pick. If you pick.NET, then you can coast for the rest of your life because that technology is now so ubiquitous, of course, that even if it's bound to die, it's going to take a very long time. Well, for me personally, I had a very difficult and in my own head brave leap that I had to take relevant to our discussion, which is most of my life I programmed in C and C++. And so having that hammer, everything looked like a nail. So I would literally even do scripting in C++. I would create programs that do script-like things. And when I first came to Google, and before then, it became already, before TensorFlow, before all of that, there was a growing realization that C++ is not the right tool for machine learning. We could talk about why that is. It's unclear why that is. A lot of things has to do with community and culture and how it emerges and stuff like that. But for me, they decided to take the leap to Python, like all out, basically switch completely from C++, except for highly performant robotics applications. There was still a culture of C++ in the space of robotics. That was a big leap. I had to, you know, people have existential crises or midlife crises or whatever. You have to realize, almost like walking away from a person you love. Because I was sure that C++ would have to be a lifelong companion. For a lot of problems I would want to solve, C++ would be there. And it was a question to say, well, that might not be the case. Because C++ is still one of the most popular languages in the world, one of the most used, one of the most depended on. It's also still evolving quite a bit. I mean, that is not a sort of a fossilizing community. They are doing great innovative work, actually. A lot. But yet, their innovations are hard to follow if you're not already a hardcore C++ user. Well, this was the thing, it pulls you in, it's a rabbit hole. I was a hardcore, the old meta programming, template programming. I would start using the modern C++ as it developed. Not just the shared pointer and the garbage collection that makes it easier for you to work with some of the flaws. But the detail, the meta programming, the crazy stuff that's coming out there. But then you have to just empirically look and step back and say, what language am I more productive in? Sorry to say, what language do I enjoy my life with more? And readability and able to think through and all that kind of stuff. Those questions are harder to ask when you already have a loved one, which in my case was C++. And then there's Python, like that meme, the grass is greener on the other side. Am I just infatuated with a new fad, new cool thing? Or is this actually going to make my life better? And I think a lot of people face that kind of decision. It was a difficult decision for me when I made it. At this time, it's an obvious switch if you're into machine learning. But at that time, it wasn't quite yet so obvious. So it was a risk. And you have the same kind of stuff with, I still, because of my connection to WordPress, I still do a lot of back-end programming in PHP. And the question is, you know, Node.js, Python, do you switch back-end to any of those programmings? There's the case for Node.js for me. Well, more and more and more of the front-end, it runs in JavaScript. And fascinating cool stuff is done in JavaScript. Maybe use the same programming language for the back-end as well. The case for Python for the back-end is, well, you're doing so much programming outside of the web in Python, so maybe use Python for the back-end. And then the case for PHP, well, most of the web still runs in PHP. You have a lot of experience with PHP. Why fix something that's not broken? Those are my own personal struggles, but I think they reflect the struggles of a lot of people with different programming languages, with different problems they're trying to solve. It's a weird one. And there's not a single answer, right? Because depending on how much time you have to learn new stuff, where you are in your life, what you're currently working on, who you want to work with, what communities you like, there's not one right choice. Maybe if you sort of, if you can look back 20 years, you can say, well, that whole detour through ActionScript was a waste of time. But nobody could know that. So you can't beat yourself up over that. You just need to accept that not every choice you make is going to be perfect. Maybe sort of keep a plan B in the back of your mind, but don't overthink it. Don't create a spreadsheet where you're trying to estimate, well, if I learn this language, I expect to make X million dollars in a lifetime. And if I learn that language, I expect to make Y million dollars in a lifetime. And which is higher and which has more risk and where is the chance that... It's like picking a stock. Kind of, kind of, but I think with stocks, you can do diversifying your investment is good. With productivity in life, boy, that spreadsheet is possible to construct. Like if you actually carefully analyze what your interests in life are, where you think you can maximally impact the world, there really is better and worse choices for a programming language. They're not just about the syntax, but about the community, about where you predict the community's headed, what large systems are programmed in that. But can you create that spreadsheet? Because that's sort of, you're mentioning a whole bunch of inputs that go into that spreadsheet where you have to estimate things that are very hard to measure and even harder. I mean, they're hard to measure retroactively and they're even harder to predict. Like what is the better community? Well, better is one of those incredibly difficult words. What's better for you is not better for someone else. No, but we're not doing a public speech about what's better. We're doing a personal spiritual journey. I can determine a circle of friends, circle one and circle two, and I can have a bunch of parties with one and a bunch of parties with two and then write down or take a mental note of what made me happier. And that, you know, if you're a machine learning person, you want to say, okay, I want to build a large company that is grounded in machine learning, but also has a sexy interface that has a large impact on the world. What languages do I use? You look at what Facebook is using, you look at what Twitter is using. Then you look at performant, more newer languages like Rust, or you look at languages that have taken, that most of the community uses in machine learning space, that's Python. And you can like think through, you can hang out and think through it. And it's always an invest, and the level of activity of the community is also really interesting. Like you said, C++ and Python are super active in terms of the development of the language itself. But do you think that you can make objective choices there? I don't know, but there's a gut you build up. Like, don't you believe in that gut feeling? Oh, everything is very subjective. And yes, you most certainly can have a gut feeling, and your gut can also be wrong. That's why there are billions of people, because they're not all right. I mean, clearly there are more people living in the Bay Area who have plans to sort of create a Google-sized company than there's room in the world for Google-sized companies. And they're going to have to duke it out in the market space. And there's many more choices than just the programming language. Speaking of which, let's go back to the boat with the fisherman who's tuned out long ago. Let's talk to the programmer. Let's jump around and go back to CPython that we tried to define as the reference implementation. And one of the big things that's coming out in 3.11, what's the right way to pronounce that? We tend to say 3.11, because it really was like we went 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, and we're planning to go up to 3.99. 99? What happens after 99? Probably just 3.100, if I make it there. Okay. And go all the way to 4.20. I got it. Forever Python v3. We'll talk about 4, but more for fun. So, 3.11 is coming out. One of the big sexy things in it is it'll be much faster. How did you, beyond hiring a great team or working with a great team, make it faster? What are some ideas that makes it faster? It has to do with simplicity of software versus performance. And so, even though C is known to be a low-level language, which is great for writing a high-performance language interpreter, when I originally started Python or CPython, I didn't expect there would be great success and fame in my future. So, I tried to get something working and useful in about three months. And so, I cut corners. I borrowed ideas left and right when it comes to language design as well as implementation. I also wrote much of the code as simple as it could be. And there are many things that you can code more efficiently by adding more code. It's a bit of a time-space trade-off where you can compute a certain thing from a small number of inputs. And every time you get presented with a new input, you do the whole computation from the top. That can be simple-looking code. It's easy to understand. It's easy to reason about. You can tell quickly that it's correct, at least in the mathematical sense of correct. Because it's implemented in C, maybe it performs relatively well. But over time, as the requirements for that code and the need for performance go up, you might be able to rewrite that same algorithm using more memory, maybe remember previous results so you don't have to recompute everything from scratch. The classic example is computing prime numbers. Like, is 10 a prime number? Well, is it divisible by 2? Is it divisible by 3? Is it divisible by 4? And we go all the way to, is it divisible by 9? And it is not. Well, actually 10 is divisible by 2, so there we stop. But say 11. Is it divisible by 10? The answer is no, 10 times in a row. So now we know 11 is a prime number. On the other hand, if we already know that 2, 3, 5 and 7 are prime numbers, and you know a little bit about the mathematics of how prime numbers work, you know that if you have a rough estimate for the square root of 11, you don't actually have to check is it divisible by 4 or is it divisible by 5. All you have to check in the case of 11 is, is it divisible by 2, is it divisible by 3? Because take 12. If it's divisible by 4, well, 12 divided by 4 is 3, so you should have come across the question, is it divisible by 3, first. So if you know basically nothing about prime numbers except the definition, maybe you go for x from 2 through n minus 1, is n divisible by x? And then at the end, if you got all nos for every single one of those questions, you know, oh, it must be a prime number. Well, the first thing is you can stop iterating when you find a yes answer. And the second is you can also stop iterating when you have reached the square root of n, because you know that if it has a divisor larger than the square root, it must also have a divisor smaller than the square root. Then you say, oh, except for 2, we don't need to bother with checking for even numbers because all even numbers are divisible by 2. If it's divisible by 4, we would already have come across the question, is it divisible by 2? And so now you go special case, check, is it divisible by 2? And then you just check 3, 5, 7, 11. And so now you've sort of reduced your search space by 50%, again, by skipping all the even numbers except for 2. If you think a bit more about it, or you just read in your book about the history of math, one of the first algorithms ever written down, all you have to do is check, is it divisible by any of the previous prime numbers that are smaller than the square root? And before you get to a better algorithm than that, you have to have several PhDs in discrete math. So that's as much as I know. So of course that same story applies to a lot of other algorithms, string matching is a good example of how to come up with an efficient algorithm. And sometimes the more efficient algorithm is not so much more complex than the inefficient one. But that's an art, and it's not always the case. In the general cases, the more performant the algorithm, the more complex it's going to be. There's a kind of trade-off. The simpler algorithms are also the ones that people invent first, because when you're looking for a solution, you look at the simplest way to get there first. And so if there is a simple solution, even if it's not the best solution, not the fastest or the most memory efficient or whatever, a simple solution, and simple is fairly subjective, but mathematicians have also thought about what is a good definition for simple in the case of algorithms. But the simpler solutions tend to be easier to follow for other programmers who haven't made a study of a particular field. And when I started with Python, I was a good programmer in general. I knew sort of basic data structures, I knew the C language pretty well. But there were many areas where I was only somewhat familiar with the state of the art. And so I picked, in many cases, the simplest way I could solve a particular sub-problem, because when you're designing and implementing a language, you have to, like, you have many hundreds of little problems to solve. And you have to have solutions for every one of them before you can sort of say, I've invented a programming language. First of all, so CPython, what kind of things does it do? It's an interpreter, it takes in this readable language that we talked about, that is Python. What is it supposed to do? The interpreter, basically, it's sort of a recipe for understanding recipes. So instead of a recipe that says, bake me a cake, we have a recipe for, well, given the text of a program, how do we run that program? And that is sort of the recipe for building a computer. The recipe for the baker and the chef. Yeah. What are the algorithmically tricky things that happen to be low-hanging fruit that could be improved on, maybe throughout the history of Python, but also now, how is it possible that 3.11 in year 2022 is possibly to get such a big performance improvement? We focused on a few areas where we still felt there was low-hanging fruit. The biggest one is actually the interpreter itself. And this has to do with details of how Python is defined. So I don't know if the fisherman is going to follow this story. He already jumped off the boat. He's bored. Yeah, stupid. Python is actually, even though it's always called an interpreted language, there's also a compiler in there. It just doesn't compile to machine code. It compiles to bytecode, which is sort of code for an imaginary computer that is called the Python interpreter. So it's compiling code that is more easily digestible by the interpreter or is digestible at all. It is the code that is digested by the interpreter. That's the compiler. We tweaked very minor bits of the compiler. Almost all the work was done in the interpreter, because when you have a program, you compile it once and then you run the code a whole bunch of times. Or maybe there's one function in the code that gets run many times. Now, I know that sort of people who know this field are expecting me to at some point say, we built a just-in-time compiler. Actually, we didn't. We just made the interpreter a little more efficient. What's a just-in-time compiler? That is a thing from the Java world, although it's now applied to almost all programming languages, especially interpreted ones. So you see the compiler inside Python, not like a just-in-time compiler, but it's a compiler that creates bytecode that is then fed to the interpreter. And the compiler, was there something interesting to say about the compiler? It's interesting that you haven't changed that, tweaked that at all, or much. We changed some parts of the bytecode, but not very much. And so we only had to change the parts of the compiler where we decided that the breakdown of a Python program in bytecode instructions had to be slightly different. But that didn't gain us the performance improvements. The performance improvements were like making the interpreter faster, in part by sort of removing the fat from some internal data structures used by the interpreter, but the key idea is an adaptive specializing interpreter. Let's go. What is adaptive about it? What is specialized about it? Well, let me first talk about the specializing part, because the adaptive part is the sort of the second-order effect, but they're both important. So bytecode is a bunch of machine instructions, but it's an imaginary machine. But the machine can do things like call a function, add two numbers, print a value. Those are sort of typical instructions in Python. And if we take the example of adding two numbers, actually in Python, the language, there's no such thing as adding two numbers. The compiler doesn't know that you're adding two numbers. You might as well be adding two strings or two lists or two instances of some user-defined class that happen to implement this operator called add. That's a very interesting and fairly powerful mathematical concept. It's mostly a user interface trick, because it means that a certain category of functions can be written using a single symbol, the plus sign, and sort of a bunch of other functions can be written using another single symbol, the multiply sign. So if we take addition, the way traditionally in Python the add bytecode was executed is pointers, pointers, and more pointers. So first we have two objects. An object is basically a pointer to a bunch of memory that contains more pointers. Pointers all the way down. Well, not quite, but there are a lot of them. So to simplify a bit, we look up in one of the objects what is the type of that object, and does that object type define an add operation? And so you can imagine that there is a type integer that knows how to add itself to another integer, and there is a type floating point number that knows how to add itself to another floating point number. And the integers and floating point numbers are sort of important, I think, mostly historically, because in the first computers you used the sort of, the same bit pattern when interpreted as a floating point number had a very different value than when interpreted as an integer. Can I ask a dumb question here? Please do. Given the basics of int and float and add, who carries the knowledge of how to add two integers? Is it the integer? It's the type. It's the type integer versus... It's the type integer and the type float. What about the operator? Does the operator just exist as a platonic form possessed by the integer? The operator is more like... It's an index in a list of functions that the integer type defines. And so the integer type is really a collection of functions, and there is an add function, and there is a multiply function, and there are like 30 other functions for other operations. There's a power function, for example. And you can imagine that in memory there is a distinct slot for the add operations. Let's say the add operation is the first operation of a type and the multiply is the second operation of a type. So now we take the integer type and we take the floating point type. In both cases, the add operation is the first slot and multiply is the second slot. But each slot contains a function, and the functions are different because the addToIntegers function interprets the bit patterns as integers. The addToFloat function interprets the same bit pattern as a floating point number. And then there is the string data type, which again interprets the bit pattern as the address of a sequence of characters. There are lots of lies in that story, but that's sort of a basic idea. I can tell the fake news and the fabrication going on here at the table. But where's the optimization? Is it on the operators? Is it different inside the integer? The optimization is the observation that in a particular line of code... So now you write your little Python program and you write a function and that function sort of takes a bunch of inputs and at some point it adds two of the inputs together. Now I bet you even if you call your function a thousand times that all those calls are likely all going to be about integers because maybe your program is all about integers. Or maybe on that particular line of code where there's that plus operator, every time the program hits that line, the variables a and b that are being added together happen to be strings. And so what we do is instead of having this single byte code that says, here's an add operation and the implementation of add is fully generic. It looks at the object from the object, it looks at the type, then it takes the type and it looks up the function pointer, then it calls the function. Now the function has to look at the other argument and it has to double check that the other argument has the right type and then there's a bunch of error checking before it can actually just go ahead and add the two bit patterns in the right way. What we do is every time we execute an add instruction like that, we keep a little note of in the end, after we hit the code that did the addition for a particular type, what type was it? And then after a few times through that code, if it's the same type all the time, we say, oh, so this add operation, even though it's the generic add operation, it might as well be the add integer operation. And the add integer operation is much more efficient because it just says, assume that A and B are integers, do the addition operation, do it right there in line, and produce the result. And the big lie here is that in Python, even if you have great evidence that in the past it was always two integers that you were adding, at some point in the future, that same line of code could still be hit with two floating points or two strings or maybe a string and an integer. It's not a great lie, that's just the fact of life. I didn't account for what should happen in that case in the way I told the story. There is some accounting for that. And so what we actually have to do is when we have the add integer operation, we still have to check, are the two arguments in fact integers? We applied some tricks to make those checks efficient. And we know statistically that the outcome is almost always, yes, they are both integers. And so we quickly make that check and then we proceed with the sort of add integer operation. And then there is a fallback mechanism where we say, oops, one of them wasn't an integer. Now we're going to pretend that it was just the fully generic add operation. We wasted a few cycles believing it was going to be two integers and then we had to back up. But we didn't waste that much time and statistically most of the time. Basically we were sort of hoping that most of the time we guessed right because if it turns out that we guessed wrong too often or we didn't have a good guess at all, things might actually end up running a little slower. So someone armed with this knowledge and a copy of the implementation, someone could easily construct a counter example where they say, oh, I have a program and now it runs five times as slow in Python 3.11 than it did in Python 3.10. But that's a very unrealistic program. That's just like an extreme fluke. It's a fun reverse engineering task though. Oh yeah. So there's people like fun, yes. So there's some presumably heuristic of what defines a momentum of saying, you know, you seem to be working adding two integers, not two generic types. So how do you figure out that heuristic? I think that the heuristic is actually, we assume that the weather tomorrow is going to be the same as the weather today. So you don't need two days of the weather? No. That is already so much better than guessing randomly. So how do you find this idea? Hey, I wonder if instead of adding two generic types, we start assuming that the weather tomorrow is the same as the weather today. Where do you find the idea for that? Because that ultimately, for you to do that, you have to kind of understand how people are using the language, right? Python is not the first language to do a thing like this. This is a fairly well-known trick, especially from other interpreted languages that had reason to be sped up. We occasionally look at papers about HHVM, which is Facebook's efficient compiler for PHP. There are tricks known from the JVM, and sometimes it just comes from academia. So the trick here is that the type itself doesn't, the variable doesn't know what type it is. So this is not a statically typed language where you can afford to have a shortcut to saying it's ints. This is a trick that is especially important for interpreted languages with dynamic typing, because if the compiler could read in the source these x and y that we're adding are integers, the compiler can just insert a single add machine code, that hardware machine instruction that exists on every CPU and ditto for floats. But because in Python you don't generally declare the types of your variables, you don't even declare the existence of your variables. They just spring into existence when you first assign them, which is really cool and helps those beginners, because there is less bookkeeping they have to learn how to do before they can start playing around with code. But it makes the interpretation of the code less efficient. So we're sort of trying to make the interpretation more efficient without losing the super dynamic nature of the language. That's always the challenge. 3.5 got the PEP484 type hints. What is type hinting and is it used by the interpreter, the hints, or is it just syntactic sugar? So the type hints is an optional mechanism that people can use and it's especially popular with sort of larger companies that have very large code bases written in Python. Do you think of it as almost like documentation saying these two variables are this type? It's more than documentation. I mean, so it is a sub-language of Python where you can express the types of variables. So here is a variable and it's an integer. And here's an argument to this function and it's a string. And here is a function that returns a list of strings. But that's not checked when you run the code. But exactly. There is a separate piece of software called a static type checker that reads all your source code without executing it and thinks long and hard about what it looks from just reading the code that code might be doing and double checks if that makes sense if you take the types as annotated into account. So this is something you're supposed to run as you develop. It's like a linter. That's definitely a development tool, but the type annotations currently are not used for speeding up the interpreter. And there are a number of reasons. Many people don't use them. Even when they do use them, they sometimes contain lies where the static type checker says everything's fine. I cannot prove that this integer is ever not an integer, but at runtime somehow someone manages to violate that assumption. And the interpreter ends up doing just fine. If we started enforcing type annotations in Python, many Python programs would no longer work. And some Python programs wouldn't even be possible because they're too dynamic. And so we made a choice of not using the annotations. There is a possible future where eventually three, four, five releases in the future, we could start using those annotations to sort of provide hints because we can still say, well, the source code leads us to believe that these x and y are both integers and so we can generate an add integer instruction. But we can still have a fallback that says, oh, if somehow the code at runtime provided something else, maybe it provided two decimal numbers, we can still use that generic add operation as a fallback. But we're not there. Is there currently a mechanism or do you see something like that where you can almost add like an assert inside a function that says, please check that my type hints are actually mapping to reality? Sort of like insert manual static typing. There are third party libraries that are in that business. Is it possible to do that kind of thing? Is it possible for a third party library to take a hint and enforce it? It seems like a tricky thing. Well, what we actually do is, and I think this is a fairly unique feature in Python, the type hints can be introspected at runtime. So while the program is running, I mean, Python is a very introspectable language. You can look at a variable and ask yourself, what is the type of this variable? And if that variable happens to refer to a function, you can ask, what are the arguments to the function? And nowadays you can also ask, what are the type annotations for the function? So the type annotations are there inside the variable as it's at runtime? They're mostly associated with the function object, not with each individual variable, but you can sort of map from the arguments to the variables. And that's what a third party library can help with. Exactly. And the problem with that is that all that extra runtime type checking is going to slow your code down instead of speed it up. I think to reference this sales pitchy blog post that says 75% of developers' time is spent on debugging, I would say that in some cases that might be okay. It might be okay to pay the cost of performance for the catching of the type errors. And in most cases, doing it statically before you ship your code to production is more efficient than doing it at runtime piecemeal. Can you tell me about the MyPy project? What is it? What's the mission? And in general, what is the future of static typing in Python? Well, so MyPy was started by a Finnish developer, Jukka Lätusalo. So many cool things out of Finland, I gotta say. Just that part of the world. I guess people have nothing better to do in those long, cold winters. I don't know, I think Jukka lived in England when he invented that stuff, actually. But MyPy is the original static type checker for Python, and the type annotations that were introduced with PEP484 were sort of developed together with the static type checker. And in fact, Jukka had first invented a different syntax that wasn't quite compatible with Python. And Jukka and I sort of met at a Python conference in, I think, in 2013. And we sort of came up with a compromise syntax that would not require any changes to Python, and that would let MyPy sort of be an add-on static type checker for Python. Just out of curiosity, was it like double colon or something? What was he proposing that would break Python? I think he was using angular brackets for types like in C++ or Java generics. Yeah, you can't use angular brackets in Python. It would be too tricky for template type stuff. Well, the key thing is that we already had a syntax for annotations. We just didn't know what to use them for yet. So type annotations were just the sort of most logical thing to use that existing dummy syntax for. But there was no syntax for defining generics directly syntactically in the language. MyPy literally meant my version of Python, where my refers to Jukka. He had a parser that translated MyPy into Python by doing the type checks and then removing the annotations and all the angular brackets from the positions where he was using them. But a preprocessor model doesn't work very well with the typical workflow of Python development projects. That's funny. I mean, that could have been another major split if it became successful. Like if you watch TypeScript versus JavaScript, it's like a split in the community over types, right? That seems to be stabilizing now. It's not necessarily a split. There are certainly plenty of people who don't use TypeScript, but just use the original JavaScript notation. Just like there are many people in the Python world who don't use type annotations and don't use static type checkers. No, I know, but there is a bit of a split between TypeScript and old school JavaScript, ES, whatever. Well, in the JavaScript world, transpilers are sort of the standard way of working anyway, which is why TypeScript being a transpiler itself is not a big deal. And transpilers, for people who don't know, it's exactly the thing you said with MyPy. It's the code, I guess you call it preprocessing, code that translates from one language to the other. And that's part of the culture, part of the workflow of the JavaScript community. That's right. At the same time, an interesting development in the JavaScript slash TypeScript world at the moment is that there is a proposal under consideration. It's only a stage one proposal. That proposes to add a feature to JavaScript where, just like Python, it will ignore certain syntax when running the JavaScript code. And what it ignores is more or less a superset of the TypeScript annotation syntax. Interesting. So that would mean that eventually, if you wanted to, you could take TypeScript and you could shove it directly into a JavaScript interpreter without transpilation. The interesting thing in the JavaScript world, at least the web browser world, the web browsers have changed how they deploy and they sort of update their JavaScript engines much more quickly than they used to in the early days. And so there's much less of a need for transpilation in JavaScript itself. Because most browsers just support the most recent version of ECMAScript. Just on a tangent of a tangent, do you see, if you were to recommend somebody use a thing, would you recommend TypeScript or JavaScript? I would recommend TypeScript. Just because of the strictness of the typing? It's an enormously helpful extra tool that helps you sort of keep your head straight about what your code is actually doing. I mean, it helps with editing your code. It helps with ensuring that your code is not too incorrect. And it's actually quite compatible with JavaScript, never mind this syntactic sort of hack that is still years in the future. But any library that is written in pure JavaScript can still be used from TypeScript programs. And also the other way around, you can write a library in TypeScript and then export it in a form that is totally consumable by JavaScript. That sort of compatibility is sort of the key to the success of TypeScript. Yeah, just to look at it, it's almost like a biological system that's evolving. It's fascinating to see JavaScript evolve the way it does. Well, maybe we should consider that biological systems are just engineering systems too, right? Yes. Just very advanced, with more history. But it's almost like the most visceral in the JavaScript world, because there's just so much code written in JavaScript that for its history was messy. If you talk about bugs per line of code, I just feel like JavaScript eats the cake, whatever the terminology is. It beats Python by a lot in terms of the number of bugs, meaning like way more bugs in JavaScript. And then obviously the browsers are developed. I mean, just there's so much active development. It feels a lot more like evolution, where a bunch of stuff is born and dies and there's experimentation and debates versus Python. All that stuff is happening, but there's just a longer history of stable, working, giant software systems written in Python versus JavaScript is just a giant, beautiful, I would say, mess of code. It's a very different culture, and to some extent differences in culture are random, but to some extent the differences have to do with the environment. And the fact that JavaScript is primarily the language for developing web applications, especially the client side, and the fact that it's basically the only language for developing web applications, makes that community sort of just have a different nature than the community of other languages. Plus the graphical component, and the fact that they're deploying it on all kinds of shapes of screens and devices and all that kind of stuff, it just creates a beautiful chaos. Anyway, back to MyPy. So what, okay, you met, you talked about a syntax that could work. Where does it currently stand? What's the future of static typing in Python? It is still controversial, but it is much more accepted than when MyPy and PEP484 were young. What's the connection between PEP484 type hints and MyPy? MyPy was the original static type checker, so MyPy quickly evolved from Yuka's own variant of Python to a static type checker for Python, and sort of PEP484, that was a very productive year where many hundreds of messages were exchanged debating the merits of every aspect of that type. And so MyPy is a static type checker for Python. It is itself written in Python. Most additional static typing features that we introduced in the time since 3.6 were also prototyped through MyPy. MyPy being an open source project with a very small number of maintainers was successful enough that people said this static type checking stuff for Python is actually worth an investment for our company. But somehow they chose not to support making MyPy faster, say, or adding new features to MyPy, but both Google and Facebook and later Microsoft developed their own static type checker. I think Facebook was one of the first, they decided that they wanted to use the same technology that they had successfully used for HHVM. Because they had a bunch of compiler writers and static type checking experts who had written the HHVM compiler, and it was a big success within the company. And in a certain way, sort of, they wrote a big, highly parallel application in an obscure language named OCaml, which is apparently mostly very good for writing static type checkers. Interesting. I have a lot of questions about how to write a static type checker then. That's very confusing. Facebook wrote their version and they worked on it in secret for about a year, and then they came clean and went open source. Google, in the meantime, was developing something called PyType, which was mostly interesting because, as you may have heard, they have one gigantic monorepo. So all the code is checked into a single repository. Facebook has a different approach. So Facebook developed Pyre, which was written in OCaml, which worked well with Facebook's development workflow. Google developed something they called PyType, which was actually itself written in Python. And it was meant to sort of fit well in their static type checking needs in Google's gigantic monorepo. So Google has one giant... got it. So just to clarify, the static type checker, philosophically, is a thing that's supposed to exist outside of the language itself. And it's just a workflow, like a debugger for the programmers. It's a linter. For people who don't know, a linter, maybe you can correct me, but it's a thing that runs through the code continuously, pre-processing to find issues based on style, documentation. I mean, there's all kinds of linters, right? It can check that... what usual things does a linter do? Maybe check that you haven't too many characters in a single line? Linters often do static analysis where they try to point out things that are likely mistakes, but not incorrect according to the language specification. Like, maybe you have a variable that you never use. For the compiler, that is valid. You might sort of... you might be planning to use it in a future version of the code, and the compiler might just optimize it out. But the compiler is not going to tell you, hey, you're never using this variable. A linter will tell you that variable is not used. Maybe there's a typo somewhere else where you meant to use it, but you accidentally used something else. Or there are a number of sort of common scenarios. And a linter is often a big collection of little heuristics where by looking at the combination of how your code is laid out, maybe how it's indented, maybe the comment structure, but also just things like definition of names, use of names, it'll tell you likely things that are wrong. And in some cases, linters are really style checkers. For Python, there are a number of linters that check things like, do you use the PEP8 recommended naming scheme for your functions and classes and variables? Because classes start with an uppercase and the rest starts with a lowercase. There's slight differences there. And so the linter can tell you, hey, you have a class whose first letter is not an uppercase letter. And I just find it annoying if I wanted that to be an uppercase letter. I would have typed an uppercase letter. But other people find it very comforting that if the linter is no longer complaining about their code, that they have followed all the style rules. Maybe it's a fast way for a new developer joining a team to learn the style rules, right? Yeah, there's definitely that. But the best use of a linter is probably not so much to sort of enforce team uniformity, but to actually help developers catch bugs that the compilers, for whatever reason, don't catch. And there is lots of that in Python. But a static type checker focuses on a particular aspect of the linting, which... I mean, MyPy doesn't care how you name your classes and variables. But it is meticulous about when you say that there was an integer here and you're passing a string there, it will tell you, hey, that string is not an integer. Something's wrong. Either you were incorrect when you said it was an integer, or you're incorrect when you're passing it a string. If this is a race of static type checkers, is somebody winning? As you said, it's interesting that the companies didn't choose to invest in this centralized development of MyPy. Is there a future for MyPy? What do you see as the... Will one of the companies win out and everybody uses like PyType, whatever Google's is called? Well, Microsoft is hoping that Microsoft's horse in that race called PyWrite is going to win. PyWrite, like R-I-G-H-T? Correct. Yeah, all my word processors tend to typo correct that as PyWrite, the name of the... I don't know what it is. Some kind of semi-precious metal. Oh, right. I love it. Okay, so that's the Microsoft hope. But, okay, so let me ask the question a different way. Is there going to be ever a future where the static type checker gets integrated into the language? Nobody is currently excited about doing any work towards that. That doesn't mean that five or ten years from now the situation isn't different. At the moment, all the static type checkers still evolve at a much higher speed than Python and its annotation syntax evolve. You get a new release of Python once a year. Those are the only times that you can introduce new annotation syntax. And there are always people who invent new annotation syntax that they're trying to push. And worse, once we've all agreed that we are going to put some new syntax in, we can never take it back. At least a sort of deprecating an existing feature takes many releases, because you have to assume that people started using it as soon as we announced it. And then you can't take it away from them right away. You have to start telling them, well, this will go away, but we're not going to tell you that it's an error yet. And then later it's going to be a warning, and then eventually three releases in the future, maybe we remove it. On the other hand, the typical static type checker still has a release like every month, every two months, certainly many times a year. Some type checkers also include a bunch of experimental ideas that aren't official standard Python syntax yet. The static type checkers also just get better at discovering things that are unspecified by the language, but that could make sense. And so each static type checker actually has its sort of strong and weak points. So it's cool, it's like a laboratory of experiments. Yeah. Microsoft, Google and all, and you get to see. And you see that everywhere, right? Because there's not one single JavaScript engine either. There is one in Chrome, there is one in Safari, there is one in Firefox. But that said, you said there's not interest, I think there is a lot of interest in type hinting, right? In the PEP 484. Actually, how many people use that? Do you have a sense? How many people use... because it's optional, it's just sugar. I can't put a number on it, but from the number of packages that do interesting things with it at runtime, and the fact that there are like now three or four very mature type checkers that each have their segment of the market, and then there is PyCharm, which has a sort of more heuristic-based type checker that also supports the same syntax. My assumption is that many, many people developing Python software professionally for some kind of production situation are using a static type checker. Especially anybody who has a continuous integration cycle probably has one of the steps in their testing routine that happens for basically every commit is run a static type checker. And in most cases, that will be MyPy. So I think it's a pretty popular topic. According to this web page, 20 to 30 percent of Python 3 code bases are using type hints. Wow. I wonder how they measured that. Did they just scan all of GitHub? Yeah, that's what it looks like. They did a quick... not an all of, but like a random sampling. So you mentioned PyCharm. Let me ask you the big subjective question. What's the best IDE for Python? And you're extremely biased now that you're with Microsoft. Is it PyCharm, VS Code, Vim or Emacs? Historically, I actually started out with using Vim, but when it was still called VI. For a very long time, I think from the early 80s to I'd say two years ago, I was Emacs user. Nice. Between I'd say 2013 and 2018, I dabbled with PyCharm. Mostly because it had a couple of features. I mean, PyCharm is like driving an 18-wheeler truck, whereas Emacs is more like driving your comfortable Toyota car that you've had for 100,000 miles and you know what every little rattle of the car means. I was very comfortable in Emacs, but there were certain things it couldn't do. It wasn't very good at that sort of... at least the way I had configured it. I didn't have very good tooling in Emacs for finding a definition of a function. Got it. When I was at Dropbox exploring a 5 million line Python code base, just grabbing all that code for where is there a class foobar. Well, it turns out that if you grab all 5 million lines of code, there are many classes with the same name. And so PyCharm sort of once you fired it up and once it's indexed your repository, was very helpful. But as soon as I had to edit code, I would jump back to Emacs and do all my editing there because I could type much faster and switch between files when I knew which file I wanted much quicker. And I never really got used to the whole PyCharm user interface. Yeah, I feel torn in that same kind of way because I've used PyCharm off and on exactly in that same way. And I feel like I'm just being an old grumpy man for not learning how to quickly switch between files and all that kind of stuff. I feel like that has to do with shortcuts, that has to do with... I mean, you just have to get accustomed, just like with touch typing. Yeah, you have to just want to learn that. I mean, if you don't need it much... You don't need touch typing either. You can type with two fingers just fine in the short term, but in the long term, your life will become better psychologically and productivity-wise if you learn how to type with 10 fingers. If you do a lot of keyboard input... But for everyone, emails and stuff, right? Like, you look at the next 20, 30 years of your life, you have to anticipate where technology is going. Do you want to invest in handwriting notes? Probably not. More and more people are doing typing versus handwriting notes. So you can anticipate that. So there's no reason to actually practice handwriting. There's more reason to practice typing. You can actually estimate, back to the spreadsheet, the number of paragraphs, sentences, or words you write for the rest of your life. You can probably estimate... You go again with the spreadsheet of my life, huh? Yes. I mean, all of that is not actual, like, converted to a spreadsheet, but it's a gut feeling. Like, I have the same kind of gut feeling about books. I've almost exclusively switched to Kindle now for e-book readers, even though I still love and probably always will the smell, the feel of a physical book. And the reason I switched to Kindle is like, all right, well, this is really paving... The future is going to be digital in terms of consuming books and content of that nature. So you should get... You should let your brain get accustomed to that experience. In that same way, it feels like PyCharm or VS Code. I think PyCharm is the most sort of sophisticated, featureful Python ID. It feels like I should probably at some point very soon switch entire... Like, I'm not allowed to use anything else for Python than this ID or VS Code. It doesn't matter, but walk away from Emacs for this particular application because I think I'm limiting myself in the same way that using two fingers for typing is limiting myself. This is a therapy session. This is not... I'm not even asking a question. But I'm sure a lot of people are thinking this way, right? I'm not going to stop you. I think that sort of everybody has to decide for themselves which one they want to invest more time in. I actually ended up giving VS Code a very tentative try when I started out at Microsoft and really liking it. It took me a while before I realized why that was. I think that actually the founders of VS Code may not necessarily agree with me on this. But to me, VS Code is in a sense the spiritual successor of Emacs because as you probably know as an old Emacs hack, the key part of Emacs is that it's mostly written in Lisp. And that sort of new features of Emacs usually update all the Lisp packages and add new Lisp packages. And oh yeah, there's also some very obscure thing improved in the part that's not in Lisp, but that's usually not why you would upgrade to a new version of Emacs. There's a core implementation that sort of can read a file and it can put bits on the screen and it can sort of manage memory and buffers. And then what makes it an editor full of features is all the Lisp packages. And of course the design of how the Lisp packages interact with each other and with that sort of that base layer of the core immutable engine. But almost everything in that core engine in Emacs case can still be overridden or replaced. And so VS Code has a similar architecture where there is like a base engine that you have no control over. I mean, it's open source, but nobody except the people who work on that part changes it much. And it has sort of a package manager and a whole series of interfaces for packages and an additional series of conventions for how packages should interact with the lower layers and with each other and powerful primitive operations that let you move the cursor around or select pieces of text or delete pieces of text or interact with the keyboard and the mouse and whatever peripherals you have. And so the sort of the extreme extensibility and the package ecosystem that you see in VS Code is a mirror of very similar architectural features in Emacs. Well, I have to give it a serious try because as far as sort of the hype and the excitement in the general programming community VS Code seems to dominate. The interesting thing about PyCharm and what is it, PHPStorm, which are these JetBrains specific IDs that are designed for one programming language. It's interesting to, when an ID is specialized, right? They're usually actually just specializations of IntelliJ because underneath it's all the same editing engine with different veneer on top. Where in VS Code, many things you do require loading third-party extensions. In PyCharm, it is possible to have third-party extensions, but it is a struggle to create one. Yes, and it's not part of the culture, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I remember that, it might have been five years ago or so, we were trying to get some better MyPy integration into PyCharm. Because MyPy is sort of Python tooling and PyCharm had its own type checking heuristic thing that we wanted to replace with something based on MyPy because that was what we were using in the company. And for the guy who was writing that PyCharm extension, it was really a struggle to sort of find documentation and get the development workflow going and debug his code and all that. So that was not a pleasant experience. Let me talk to you about parallelism. In your post titled, Reasoning About AsyncIO Semaphore, you talk about a fast food restaurant in Silicon Valley that has only one table. Is this a real thing? I just wanted to ask you about that. Is that just like a metaphor you're using or is that an actual restaurant in Silicon Valley? It was a metaphor, of course. I can imagine such a restaurant. So for people who don't, then read the thing you should. But it was an idea of a restaurant where there's only one table and you show up one at a time and you're prepared. And I actually looked it up and there is restaurants like this throughout the world. And it just seems like a fascinating idea. You stand in line, you show up, there's one table, they ask you all kinds of questions, they cook just for you. That's fascinating. It sounds like you'd find places like that in Tokyo. It sounds like a very Japanese thing. Or in the Bay Area there are pop-up places that probably more or less work like that. I've never eaten at such a place. The fascinating thing is you propose it's a fast food. This is all for a burger. It was one of my rare sort of more literary or poetic moments where I thought I'll just open with a crazy example to catch your attention and the rest is very dry stuff about locks and semaphores and how a semaphore is a generalization of a lock. Well, it was very poetic and well delivered and it actually made me wonder if it's real or not because you don't make that explicit. And it feels like it could be true. And in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody listens to this and knows exactly a restaurant like this in Silicon Valley. Anyway, can we step back and can you just talk about parallelism, concurrency, threading, asynchronous, all of these different terms. What is it, sort of a high philosophical level? The fisherman is back in the boat. Well, the idea is if the fisherman has two fishing rods, since fishing is mostly a matter of waiting for a fish to nibble, well, it depends on how you do it actually, but if you're doing the style of fishing where you sort of you throw it out and then you let it sit for a while until maybe you see a nibble, one fisherman can easily run two or three or four fishing rods. And so as long as you can afford the equipment, you can catch four times as many fish by a small investment in four fishing rods. And so since your time, you sort of say you have all Saturday to go fishing, if you can catch four times as much fish, you have a much higher productivity. And that's actually, I think, how deep sea fishing is done. You could just have a rod and you put in a hole so you can have many rods. Is there an interesting difference between parallelism and concurrency and asynchronous? Is there one a subset of the other to you? Like, how do you think about these terms? In the computer world, there is a big difference. When people are talking about parallelism, like a parallel computer, that's usually really several complete CPUs that are sort of tied together and share something like memory or an I.O. bus. Concurrency can be a much more abstract concept where you have the illusion that things happen simultaneously, but what the computer actually does is it spends a little time running this program for a while and then it spends some time running that program for a while and then spending some time for the third program for a while. So parallelism is the reality and concurrency is part reality, part illusion. Yeah, parallelism typically implies that there is multiple copies of the hardware. You write that implementing synchronization primitives is hard in that blog post. And you talk about locks and semaphores. Why is it hard to implement synchronization primitives? Because at the conscious level, our brains are not trained to sort of keep track of multiple things at the same time. Like, obviously you can walk and chew gum at the same time because they're both activities that require only a little bit of your conscious activity. But try balancing your checkbook and watching a murder mystery on TV. You'll mix up the digits or you'll miss an essential clue in the TV show. So why does it matter that the programmer, the human, is bad? Because the programmer is, at least with the current state of the art, is responsible for writing the code correctly and it's hard enough to keep track of a recipe that you just execute one step at a time. Chop the carrots, then peel the potatoes, mix the icing. You need your whole brain when you're reading a piece of code, what is going on. Okay, we're loading the number of mermaids in variable A and the number of mermen in variable B and now we take the average or whatever. I like how we're just jumping from metaphor to metaphor, I like it. You have to keep in your head what is in A, what is in B, what is in C. Hopefully you have better names. And that is challenging enough. If you have two different pieces of code that are sort of being executed simultaneously, whether it's using the parallel or the concurrent approach, if A is the number of fishermen and B is the number of programmers, but in another part of the code A is the number of mermaids and B is the number of mermen, and somehow that's the same variable. If you do it sequentially, if first you do your mermaid-merpeople computation and then you do your people in the boat computation, it doesn't matter that the variables are called A and B and that is literally the same variable because you're done with one use of that variable. But when you mix them together, suddenly the number of merpeople replaces the number of fishermen and your computation goes dramatically wrong. And there's all kinds of ordering of operations that could result in the assignment of those variables and so you have to anticipate all possible orderings. And you think you're smart and you'll put a lock around it. And in practice, in terms of bugs per line of, per thousand lines of code, this is an area where everything is worse. So a lock is a mechanism by which you forbid only one chef can access the oven at a time. Something like that. And then semaphores allow you to do what? Multiple ovens? That's not a bad idea because if you're sort of, if you're preparing, if you're baking cakes and you have multiple people all baking cakes but there's only one oven, then maybe you can tell that the oven is in use but maybe it's preheating. And so you have to, maybe you make a sign that says oven in use and you flip the sign over and it says oven is free when you're done baking your cake. That's a lock. That's sort of, and what do you do when you have two ovens or maybe you have ten ovens? You can put a separate sign on each oven or maybe you can sort of, someone who comes in wants to see at a glance and maybe there's an electronic sign that says there are still five ovens available or maybe there are already three people waiting for an oven. So you can, if you see an oven that's not in use, it's already reserved for someone else who got in line first. And that's sort of what the restaurant metaphor was trying to explain. Yeah, and so you're now tasks, you're sitting as a designer of Python with a team of brilliant core developers and have to try to figure out to what degree can any of these ideas be integrated and not. So maybe this is a good time to ask, what is AsyncIO and how has it evolved since Python 3.4? Wow, yeah, so we had this really old library for doing things concurrently, especially things that had to do with IO and networking IO was especially a sort of a popular topic. And in the Python standard library, we had a brief period where there was lots of development and I think it was late 90s, maybe early 2000s. And like two little modules were added that were the state of the art of doing asynchronous IO or sort of non-blocking IO, which means that you can keep multiple network connections open and sort of service them all in parallel like a typical web server does. So IO is input and output, so you're writing either to the network or reading from the network connection or reading and writing to a hard drive, to storage. Also possible. And you can do the ideas you could do to multiple while also doing computation. So running some code that does some fancy stuff. Yeah, like when you're writing a web server, when a request comes in, a user sort of needs to see a particular web page, you have to find that page maybe in the database and format it properly and send it back to the client. And there's a lot of waiting, waiting for the database, waiting for the network. And so you can handle hundreds or thousands or millions of requests concurrently on one machine. Anyway, ways of doing that in Python were kind of stagnated. I forget, it might have been around 2012, 2014, when someone for the umpteenth time actually said, these async chat and async core modules that you have in a standard library are not quite enough to solve my particular problem. Can we add one tiny little feature? And everybody said, no, that stuff is not to be, you're not supposed to use that stuff. Write your own using a third party library. And then everybody started a debate about what the right third party library was. And somehow I felt that there was actually a cue for, well, maybe we need a better state of the art module in the standard library for multiplexing input output from different sources. You could say that it spiraled out of control a little bit. At the time, it was the largest Python enhancement proposal that was ever proposed. And you were deeply involved with that. At the time, I was very much involved with that. I was like the lead architect, I ended up talking to people who had already developed serious third party libraries that did similar things and sort of taking ideas from them and getting their feedback on my design. And eventually we put it in the standard library. And after a few years, I got distracted. I think the big thing that distracted me was actually type annotations. But other people kept it alive and kicking. And it's been quite successful actually in the world of Python web clients. So initially, what are some of the design challenges there in that debate for the PEP? And what are some things that got rejected? What are some things that got accepted that stand out to you? There are a couple of different ways you can handle parallel IO. And this happens sort of at an architectural level in operating systems as well. Like Windows prefers to do it one way and Unix prefers to do it the other way. You sort of, you have an object that represents a network endpoint, say a connection with a web browser that's your client. And say you're waiting for an incoming request. Two fundamental approaches are, okay, I'm waiting for an incoming request. I'm doing something else. Come wake me up or sort of come tell me when something interesting happened, like a packet came in on that network connection. And the other paradigm is we're on a team of a whole bunch of people with maybe a little mind and we can only manage one web connection at a time. So I'm just sitting looking at this web connection and I'm just blocked until something comes in. And then I'm already waiting for it. I get the data, I process the data, and then I go back to the top and say, no, I'm waiting for the next packet. Those are about the two paradigms. One is a paradigm where there is sort of notionally a threat of control, whether it's an actual operating system threat or more an abstraction in async IO, we call them tasks. But a task in async IO or a threat in other contexts is devoted to one thing, and it has logic for all the stages, like when it's a web request, like first wait for the first line of the web request, parse it, because then you know if it's a get or a post or a put or whatever, or an error. Then wait until you have a bunch of lines until there's a blank line, then parse that as headers, and then interpret that, and then wait for the rest of the data to come in if there is any more that you expect, that sort of standard web stuff. And the other thing is, and there's always endless debate about which approach is more efficient and which approach is more error prone, where I just have a whole bunch of stacks in front of me, and whenever a packet comes in, I sort of look at the number of the packet, that there's some number on the packet, and I say, oh, that packet goes in this pile, and then I can do a little bit, and then sort of that pile provides my context. And as soon as I'm done with the processing, I can forget everything about what's going on, because the next packet will come in from some random other client, and it's that pile or this pile. And every time a pile is maybe empty or full or whatever the criteria is, I can toss it away or use it for a new space. Several traditional third-party libraries for asynchronous I.O. processing in Python chose the model of a callback, and that's the idea where you have a bunch of different stacks of paper in front of you, and every time someone gives you a piece, gives you a new sheet, you decide which stack it belongs to. And that leads to a certain style of spaghetti code that I find sort of aesthetically not pleasing, and I was sort of never very successful, and I had heard many stories about people who were also sort of complaining about that style of coding. It was very prevalent in JavaScript at the time at least, because it was like how the JavaScript event loop basically works. And so I thought, well, the task-based model where each task has a bunch of logic, we had mechanisms in the Python language that we could easily reuse for that. And I thought, I want to build a whole library for asynchronous networking I.O. and all the other things that may need to be done asynchronously based on that paradigm. And so I just chose a paradigm and tried to see how far I could get with that, and it turns out that it's a pretty good paradigm. So people enjoy that kind of paradigm programming for asynchronous I.O. relative to callbacks. Okay, beautiful. So how does that all interplay with the infamous GIL, the Global Interpreter Lock? Maybe can you say what the GIL is and how does it dance beautifully with asyncio? The Global Interpreter Lock solves the problem that Python originally was not written with either asynchronous or parallelism in mind at all. There was no concurrency in the language. There was no parallelism. There were no threads. Only a small number of years into Python's initial development, all the new cool operating systems like SunOS and Silicon Graphics' IRIX, and then eventually POSIX and Windows all came with threading libraries that let you do multiple things in parallel. And there is a certain sort of principle, which is the operating system handles the threads for you, and the program can pretend that there are as many CPUs as there are threads in the program. And those CPUs work completely independently. And if you don't have enough CPUs, the operating system sort of simulates those extra CPUs. On the other hand, if you have enough CPUs, you can get a lot of work done by deploying those multiple CPUs. But Python wasn't written to do that. And so as libraries for multithreading were added to C, but every operating system vendor was adding their own version of that, we thought, and maybe we were wrong, but at the time we thought, well, we quickly want to be able to support these multiple threads, because they seemed at the time in the early 90s, when they were new, at least to me, they seemed a cool, interesting programming paradigm. And one of the things that Python, at least at the time, felt was nice about the language was that we could give a safe version of all kinds of cool new operating system toys to the Python programmer. I remember one or two years before threading, I had spent some time adding networking sockets to Python. And they were very literal translation of the networking sockets that were in the BSD operating system, so Unix BSD. But the nice thing was, if you were using sockets from Python, then all the things you can do wrong with sockets in C would automatically give you a clear error message instead of just ending up with a malfunctioning hanging program. And so we thought, well, we'll do the same thing with threading. But we didn't really want to rewrite the interpreter to be thread safe, because that would be a very complex refactoring of all the interpreter code and all the runtime code, because all the objects were written with the assumption that there's only one thread. And so we said, OK, well, we'll take our losses, we'll provide something that looks like threads. And as long as you only have a single CPU on your computer, which most computers at the time did, it feels just like threads, because the whole idea of multiple threads in the OS was that even if your computer only had one CPU, you could still fire up as many threads as you wanted. Well, within reason, maybe 10 or 12, not 5000. And so we thought we had conquered the abstraction of threads pretty well, because multi-core CPUs were not in most Python programmers' hands anyway. And then, of course, a couple of more iterations of Moore's law, and computers getting faster, and at some point the chip designers decided that they couldn't make the CPUs faster, but they could still make them smaller, and so they could put multiple CPUs on one chip. And suddenly there was all this pressure about do things in parallel, and that's where the solution we had in Python didn't work. And that's sort of the moment that the GIL became infamous. Because the GIL was the solution we used to sort of take this single interpreter and share it between all the different operating system threads that you could create. And so as long as the hardware physically only had one CPU, that was all fine. And then as hardware vendors were suddenly telling us, oh, you got to parallelize, everything's got to be parallelized, people started saying, oh, but we can use multiple threads in Python, and then they discovered, oh, but actually all threads run on a single core. Yeah. I mean, is there a way, is there ideas in the future to remove the global interpreter log GIL? Maybe multiple sub-interpreters, some tricky interpreters on top of interpreters kind of thing? Yeah, there are a couple of possible futures there. The most likely future is that we'll get multiple sub-interpreters, which each run a completely independent Python program. Nice. But there's still some benefit of sort of faster communication between those programs. But it's also managing for you this running of multiple Python programs. Yeah. So it's hidden from you, right? It's hidden from you, but you have to spend more time communicating between those programs, because the sort of the attractive thing about the multi-threaded model is that the threads can share objects. At the same time, that's also the downfall of the multi-threaded programming model, because when you do share objects, and you didn't necessarily intend to share them, but there were aspects of those objects that were not reusable, you get all kinds of concurrency bugs. And so the reason I wrote that little blog post about semaphores was that concurrency bugs are just harder. It would be nice if Python had no global interpreter log, and it had the so-called free threading. But it would also cause a lot more software bugs. The interesting thing is that there is still a possible future where we are actually going to, or where we could experiment at least with that, because there is a guy working for Facebook who has developed a fork of CPython that he called the no-gill interpreter, where he removed the gill and made a whole bunch of optimizations so that the single-threaded case doesn't run too much slower, and multi-threaded case will actually use all the cores that you have. And so that would be an interesting possibility if we would be willing as Python core developers to actually maintain that code indefinitely. And if we're willing to put up with the additional complexity of the interpreter and the additional sort of overhead for the single-threaded case. And I'm personally not convinced that there are enough people needing the speed of multiple threads with their Python programs that it's worth to sort of take that performance hit and that complexity hit. And I feel that the gill actually is a pretty nice Goldilocks point between no threads and all threads all the time. But not everybody agrees on that, so that is definitely a possible future. The sub-interpreters look like a fairly safe bet for 3.12, so say a year from now. A year. So the goal is to do a new version every year for Python. Let me ask you perhaps a fun question, but there's a philosophy to it too. Will there ever be a Python 4.0? Now, before you say it's currently a joke and probably not, we're going to go to 3.99 or 3.9999, can you imagine possible features that Python 4.0 might have that would necessitate the creation of the new 4.0, given the amount of pain and joy, suffering and triumph that was involved in the move between version 2 and version 3? Yeah, well, as a community and as a core development team, we have a large amount of painful memories about the Python 3 transition, which is one reason that everybody is happy that we've decided there's not going to be a 4.0 at least, not anytime soon. And if there is going to be one, we'll plan the transition very differently. Because clearly we underestimated the pain the transition caused for our users in the Python 3 case. And had we known we could have designed Python 3 somewhat differently without making it any worse, we just thought that we had a good plan. But we underestimated what sort of the users were capable of when it comes to that kind of transition. By the way, I think we talked way before, like a year and a half before the Python 2 officially- End of life. End of life. Oh, yeah. What was your memory of the end of life? Did you shed a tear on January 1st, 2020? Everyone on the core team had basically moved on years before. It was purely a little symbolic moment to signal to the remaining users that there was no longer going to be any new releases or support for Python 2.7. Did you shed a single tear while looking out over the horizon? I'm not a very poetic person, and I don't shed tears like that, but no. We actually had planned a party, but the party was planned for the US Python conference that year, which never happened, of course, because of the pandemic. Oh, was it like in March or something? Yeah, the conference was going to be, I think, late April that year. So that was a very difficult decision to cancel it, but they did. Anyway, if we're going to have a Python 4, we're going to have to have both a different reason for having that and a different process for managing the transition. Can you imagine a possible process? So I think you're implying that if there is a 4.0, in some ways it would break back compatibility? Well, so here is a concrete thought I've had, and I'm not unique, but not everyone agrees with this, so this is definitely a personal opinion. If we were to try something like that Noguil Python, my expectation is that it would feel just different enough, at least for the part of the Python ecosystem that is heavily based on C extensions, and that is like the entire machine learning, data science, scientific Python world is all based on C extensions for Python. And so those people would likely feel the pain the most, because even if we don't change anything about the syntax of the language and the semantics of the language when you're writing Python code, we could even say, suppose that after Python, say, 3.19 instead of 3.20 we'll have 4.0. Suppose that's the time when we flip the switch to 4.0, we'll not have a GIL. Imagine it was like that. So I would probably say that particular year the release that we name 4.0 will be syntactically, it will not have any new syntactical features, no new modules in the standard library, no new built-in functions. Everything will be, at the Python level, will be purely compatible with Python 3.19. However, extension modules will have to make a change. They will have to be recompiled. They will not have the same binary interface. The semantics and APIs for some things that are frequently accessed by C extensions will be different. And so for a pure Python user, 4.0 would be a breeze, except that there are very few pure Python users left, because everybody who is using Python for something significant is using third-party extensions. There are like, I don't know, several hundreds of thousands of third-party extensions on the PyPI service. And I'm not saying they're all good, but there is a large list of extensions that would have to do work, and some of those extensions are currently already low on maintainers, and they're struggling to keep afloat. So there you can give a huge heads up to them if you go to 4.0 to really keep developing it. Yeah, we'd probably have to do something like several years before, who knows, maybe five years earlier, like 3.15, we would have to say, and I'm just making the specific numbers up, but at some point we'd have to say, the Nogail Python could be an option. It might be a compile-time option. If you want to use Nogail Python, you have to recompile Python from source for your platform using your toolset. All you have to do is change one configuration variable, and then you just run make, or configure and make, and it will build it for you. But now you also have to use the Nogail-compatible versions of all extension modules you want to use. And so as long as many extension modules don't have fully functional sort of variants that work in the Nogail world, that's not a very practical thing for Python users, but it would allow extension developers to test the waters, see what they need to syntactically to be able to compile at all. Maybe they're using functions that are defined by the Python 3 runtime that won't be in the Python 4 runtime. Those functions will not work. They'll have to find an alternative, but they can experiment with that and sort of write test applications, and that would be a way to transition. And that could be a series of releases where Python 4 is more and more imminent, we have supported more and more third-party extension modules to have solid support that works for Nogail Python for that new API. And then sort of Python 4.0 is like the official moment that the mayor comes out and cuts the ribbon, and now Python, now the sort of Nogail mode is the default and maybe the only mode there is. The internet wants to know from Reddit. It's a small and fun question. There's many fun questions, but out of the PyPI packages, PyPI packages, do you have ones you like, in your opinion, are there must-have PyPI libraries or ones you use all the time constantly? Oh my, I should really have a standard answer for that question, like a positive standard answer, but my current standard answer is that I'm not a big user of third-party packages. When I write Python code, I'm usually developing some tooling around building Python itself, and the last thing we want is dependencies on third-party packages. So I tend to just use the standard library. That's where your focus is, that's where your mind is. But do you keep an eye on what's out there to understand where the standard library could be moving, should be moving? It's a good kind of landscape of what's missing from the standard library. Well, usually when something's missing from the standard library, nowadays it is a relatively new idea, and there is a third-party implementation or maybe possibly multiple third-party implementations, but they evolve at a much higher rate than they could when they're in the standard library. So it would be a big reduction in activity to incorporate things like that in the standard library. So I like that there is a lively package ecosystem, and that sort of recent trends in the standard library are actually that we're doing the occasional spring cleaning, where we're choosing some modules that have not had a lot of change in a long time and that maybe would be better off not existing at all at this point because there might be a better third-party alternative anyway, and we're sort of slowly removing those. But often those are things that I sort of spiked somewhere in 1992 or 1993. If you look through the commit history, it's very sad. Like all cosmetic changes, like changes in the indentation style or the name of this other standard library module got changed or nothing of any substance. The API is identical to what it was 20 years ago. So speaking of packages, they have a lot of impact on a lot of people's lives. Does it make sense to you why Python has become the primary, the dominant language for the machine learning community? So packages like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, and even like the lower-level stuff like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib with the visualization. Can you like, does it make sense to you why it permeated the entire data science, machine learning, AI community? Well, part of it is an effect that's as simple as we're all driving on the right side of the road, right? It's compatibility. And part of it is not quite as fundamental as driving on the right side of the road, which you have to do for safety reasons. I mean, you have to agree on something. They could have picked JavaScript or Perl. There was a time in the early 2000s that it really looked like Perl was going to dominate like biosciences, because DNA search was all based on regular expressions, and Perl has the fastest and most comprehensive regular expression engine, still does. I spent quite a long time with Perl. That was another letting go, letting go of this kind of data processing system. One of the reasons why Python became the lingua franca of scientific code and machine learning in particular and data science, it really had a lot to do with anything was better than C or C++. Recently, a guy who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in the sort of computing division wrote me his memoirs, and he had his own view of how he helped something he called computational steering into existence. This was the idea that you take libraries that in his days were written in FORTRAN that solved universal mathematical problems, and those libraries still work, but the scientists that used the libraries used them to solve continuously different specific applications and answer different questions. Those poor scientists were required to use, say, FORTRAN, because FORTRAN was the language that the library was written in, and then the scientists would have to write an application that sort of uses the library to solve a particular equation or answer a set of questions. The same for C++, because there's interoperability, so the dusty decks are written either in C++ or FORTRAN. And so Paul Dubois was one of the people who, I think in the mid-90s, saw that you needed a higher-level language for the scientists to sort of tie together the fundamental mathematical algorithms of linear algebra and other stuff. And so gradually some libraries started appearing that did very fundamental stuff with arrays of numbers in Python. I mean, when I first created Python, I was not expecting it to be used for arrays of numbers much. I thought that was like an outdated data type, and everything was like objects and strings, and like Python was good and fast at string manipulation and objects, obviously, but arrays of numbers were not very efficient, and the multidimensional arrays didn't even exist in the language at all. But there were people who realized that Python had extensibility that was flexible enough that they could write third-party packages that did support large arrays of numbers and operations on them very efficiently. And somehow they got a foothold through sort of different parts of the scientific community. I remember that the Hubble Space Telescope people in Baltimore were somehow big Python fans in the late 90s. And at various points, small improvements were made, and more people got in touch with using Python to derive these libraries of interesting algorithms. And once you have a bunch of scientists who are working on similar problems, say they're all working on stuff that comes in from the Hubble Space Telescope, but they're looking at different things. Some are looking at stars in this galaxy, others are looking at galaxies. The math is completely different, but the underlying libraries are still the same. And so they exchange code. They say, well, I wrote this Python program or I wrote a Python library to solve this class of problems. And the other guys either say, oh, I can use that library too, or if you make a few changes, I can use that library too. Why start from scratch in Perl or JavaScript, where there's not that infrastructure for arrays of numbers yet, whereas in Python you have it. And so more and more scientists at different places doing different work discovered Python. And then people who had an idea for an important new fundamental library decided, oh, Python is actually already known to our users, so let's use Python as the user interface. I think that's how Tensor... I imagine at least that's how TensorFlow ended up with Python as the user interface. Right. But with TensorFlow, there's a deeper history of what the community... so it's not just like what packages it needs, it's like what the community leans on for a programming language, because TensorFlow had a prior library that was internal to Google, but there was also competing machine learning frameworks like Theano, Caffe, that were in Python. There was some Scala, some other languages, but Python was really dominating it. And it's interesting because there's other languages from the engineering space, like MATLAB, that a lot of people used, but different design choices by the company, by the core developers, led to it not spreading. And one of the choices of MATLAB by MathWorks is to not make it open source, right? Or not having people pay. It was a very expensive product, and so universities especially disliked it because it was a price per seat, I remember hearing. Yeah, but I think that's not why it failed or failed to spread. I think the universities didn't like it, but they would still pay for it. The thing is, it didn't feed into that GitHub open source packages culture. And that's somehow a precondition for viral spreading, the hacker culture, the tinkerer culture. With Python, it feels like you can build a package from scratch to solve a particular problem and get excited about sharing that package with others. And that creates an excitement about a language. I tend to like Python's approach to open source in particular because it's almost egalitarian. There's little hierarchy. There's obviously some, because you all need to decide whether you drive on the left or the right side of the road sometimes. But there is a lot of access for people with little power. You don't have to work for a big tech company to make a difference in the Python world. We have affordable events that really care about community and support people. The community is like a big deal at our conferences and in the PSF. When the PSF funds events, it's always about growing the community. The PSF funds very little development. They do some, but most of the money that the PSF forks out is to community fostering things. Speaking of egalitarian, last time we talked, four years ago, it was just after you stepped down from your role as the benevolent dictator for life, BDFL. Looking back, what are your insights and lessons you learned from that experience about Python developer community, about human nature, about human civilization, life itself? Oh my. I probably held on to the position too long. I remember being just extremely stressed for a long time. And it wasn't very clear to me what was causing the stress. Looking back, I should have relinquished my central role as BDFL sooner. What were the pros and cons of the BDFL role? What were the, you not relinquishing it, what are the benefits of that for the community? And what are the drawbacks? Well, the benefits for the community would be things like clarity of vision and sort of a clear direction. Because I had certain ideas in mind when I created Python, and while I sort of let myself be influenced by many other ideas as Python evolved and became more successful and more complex and more used, I also stuck to certain principles. And it's still hard to say what are Python's core principles. But the fact that I was playing that role and sort of always very active grew the community in a certain way. It modeled to the community how to think about how to solve a certain problem. Well, that was a source of stress, but it was also beneficial. It was a source of stress for me personally, but it was beneficial for the community because people sort of, over time, had learned how I was thinking and could predict how I would decide about a particular issue. And not always perfectly, of course, but there wasn't a lot of jerking around. Like this year, we're all, this year the Democrats are in power and we're doing these kind of things. And now the Republicans are in power and they roll all that back and do those kind of things. There is a clear, fairly straight path ahead. And so fortunately, the successor structure with the steering council has sort of found a similar way of leading the community in a fairly steady direction without stagnating. And for me personally, it's more fun because there are things I can just ignore. Yeah, oh, yeah, there's a bug in multi-processing. Let someone else decide whether that's important to solve or not. I'll stick to typing in the async I-O and the faster interpreter. Yeah, it allows you to focus a little bit more. Yeah. What are interesting differences in culture, if you can comment on, between Google, Dropbox, and Microsoft from a Python programming perspective, all places you've been to? The positive. Mm-hmm. Is there a difference or is it just about people and there's great people everywhere? Or is there culture differences? So Dropbox is much smaller than the other two in your list. Yeah. So that is a big difference. The set of products they provide is narrower so they're more focused. Smaller code base. Yeah, and Dropbox, at least during the time I was there, had the tendency of making a big plan, putting the whole company behind that plan for a year, and then evaluate and then suddenly find that everything was wrong about the plan and then they had to do something completely different. So there was like the annual engineering reorg was sort of an unpleasant tradition at Dropbox because like, oh, there's a new VP of engineering and so now all the directors are being reshuffled and this guy was in charge of infrastructure one year and the next year he was made in charge of, I don't know, product development. It's fascinating because you don't think about these companies internally, but Dropbox to me from the very beginning was one of my favorite services. There are certain programs and online services that make me happy, make me more efficient and all that kind of stuff, but one of the powers of those kinds of services is they disappear. You're not supposed to think about how it all works, but it's incredible to me that you can sync stuff effortlessly across so many machines so quickly and don't have to worry about conflicts. They take care of the, you know, as a person that comes from version repositories and all that kind of stuff or merge is super difficult and just keeping different versions of different files is very tricky. The fact that they could take care of that is just, I don't know, the engineering behind the scenes must be super difficult, both on the computer infrastructure and the software. A lot of internal sort of hand-wringing about things like that, but the product itself always worked very smoothly. Yeah, well, there's probably a lot of lessons to that. You can have a lot of turmoil inside on the engineering side, but if the product is good, the product is good. And maybe don't mess with that either. You know, when it's good, it's like with Google, focus on the search and the ads, right? And the money will come. Yeah, and make sure that's done extremely well and don't forget what you do extremely well. In what ways do you provide value and happiness to the world? Make sure you do that well. Is there something else to say about Google and Microsoft? Microsoft has had a very fascinating shift recently with a new CEO, you know, recent CEO, with purchasing GitHub, embracing open source culture, embracing the developer culture. It's pretty interesting to see. That's like why I joined Microsoft. I mean, after retiring and thinking that I would stay retired for the rest of my life, which of course was a ridiculous thought, I was done working for a bit and then the pandemic made me realize that work can also provide a source of fulfillment, and keep you out of trouble. Microsoft is a very interesting company because it has this incredible, very long and varied history, and this amazing catalog of products that many of which also date way back. I mean, I've been talking to a bunch of Excel people lately, and Excel is like 35 years old, and they can still read spreadsheets that they might find on an old floppy drive. Yeah, there's been so many incredible tools through the years. Excel, one of the great shames of my life, is that I've never learned how to use Excel well. I mean, it just always felt like so many features are there. Similar with IDEs like PyCharm. It feels like I converge quickly to the dumbest way to use a thing to get the job done, when clearly there's so much more power at your fingertips. But I do think there's probably expert users of Excel. Oh, Excel is a cash cow, actually. Oh, it actually brings in money. Oh, that's interesting. A lot of the engineering, if you look deep inside Excel, there's some very good engineering, very impressive stuff. Okay, now I need to definitely learn Excel a little better. I had issues because I'm a keyboard person, so I had issues coming up with shortcuts. And Microsoft sometimes, it's changed over the years, but sometimes they kind of want to make things easier for you on the surface, and therefore make it harder for people that like to have shortcuts and all that kind of stuff to optimize their workflow. Now, Excel is probably, people are probably yelling at me, it's like, no, Excel probably has a lot of ways to optimize workflow. In fact, I keep discovering that there are many features in Excel that only exist at keyboard shortcuts. Yeah, that's the sense I have. And now, like, I'm embarrassed that it's just... You just have to know what they are. That's like, there's no logic or reason to the assignment of the keyboard shortcuts, because they go back even longer than 35 years. Can you maybe comment about Satch and Adela, and how hard it is for a CEO to sort of pivot a company towards open source, towards developer culture? Is there something you could see about, like, what's the role of leadership in such a pivot and definition of a new vision? I've never met him, but I hear he's just a really sharp thinker. But he also has an incredible business sense. He took the organization that had very solid pieces, but that was also struggling with all sorts of shameful things, especially the Steve Ballmer time. I imagine in part through his personal charm and thinking, and of course the great trust that the rest of the leadership has in him, he managed to really turn the company around and sort of change it from openly hostile to open source to actively embracing open source. And that doesn't mean that suddenly Excel is going to go open source, but that means that there's room for a product like VS Code, which is open source. Yeah, that's fascinating. It gives me faith that large companies with good leadership can grow, can expand, can change and pivot and so on, develop, because it gets harder and harder as the company gets large. You wrote a blog post in response to a person looking for advice about whether with a CS degree to choose a 9-to-5 job or to become an entrepreneur. It's an interesting question. If you just think from first principles right now, somebody has took a few years in programming, has loved software engineering, in some sense creating Python is an entrepreneurial endeavor. That's a choice that a lot of people that are good programmers have to make. Should I work for a big company or do I create something new? Or you can work for a big company and create something new there. Oh, inside the... Yeah, I mean big companies have individuals who create new stuff that eventually grows big all the time. And if you're the person that creates a new thing and grows big, you'll have a chance to move up quickly in the company, to run that thing. If that's your aspiration, what can also happen is that someone is a brilliant engineer and sort of builds a great first version of a product and has no aspirations to then become a manager and grow the team from 5 people to 20 people to 100 people to 1,000 people and be in charge of hiring and meetings. And they move on to inventing another crazy thing inside the same company or sometimes they found a startup or they move to a different great large or small company. There's all sorts of models. And sometimes people sort of do have this whole trajectory of engineer buckling down, writing code, not 9 to 5 but more like noon till midnight, 7 days a week, and coming up with a product and sort of staying in charge. I mean, if you take Drew Houston, Dropbox's founder, he is still the CEO. And at least when I was there, he had not checked out or anything. He was a good CEO, but he had started out as the technical inventor or co-inventor. And so he was someone who, I don't know if he always aspired that. I think when he was 16, he already started a company. So maybe he did, but he sort of, it turned out that he did have the personal sort of skill set needed to grow and stay on top. And other people sort of are brilliant engineers and horrible at management. I count myself at least in the second category. So your first love and still your love is to be the quote unquote individual contributor, so the programmer. Do you have advice for a programming beginner on how to learn Python the right way? Find something you actually want to do with it. If you say, I want to learn skill X, that's not enough motivation. You need to pick something. And it can be a crazy problem you want to solve. It can be completely unrealistic. But something that challenges you into actually learning coding in some language. And there are so many projects out there you can look for. That doesn't have to be some big ambitious thing. It could be writing a small bot. If you're into social media, you can write a Reddit bot or a Twitter bot or some aspect of automating something that you do every single day, processing files, all that kind of stuff. Nowadays you can take machine learning components and sort of plug those things together. Do cool stuff with them. So that's actually a really good example. So if you're interested in machine learning, machine learning is such that like a tutorial that takes an hour can get you to start using pre-trained models to do something super cool. And that's a good way to learn Python because you learn just enough to run this model. And that's like a sneaky way to get in there to figure out how to import stuff, how to write basic I.O., how to run functions. And I'm not sure if it's the best way to learn the basics in Python, but it could be nice to just fall in love first and then figure out the basics, right? Yeah, you can't expect to learn Python from a one-hour video. I'm blanking out on the name of someone who wrote a very funny blog post where he said, I see all these ads for things like learn Python in 10 days or so. And he said the goal should be learn Python in 10 years. That's hilarious, but I completely disagree with that. I think the criticism behind that is that the places just like the blog post from earlier, the places that tell you learn Python in five minutes or 10 minutes, they're actually usually really bad tutorials. So the thing is, I do believe that you can learn a thing in an hour, like get some interesting, quick, like it hooks you. But it just takes a tremendous amount of skill to be that kind of educator. Richard Feynman was able to condense a lot of ideas in physics in a very short amount of time, but that takes a deep, deep understanding. And so yes, of course, the actual, I think the 10 years is about the experience, the pain along the way, and there's something fundamental. Well, you have to practice. You can memorize the syntax, but, well, I couldn't, but maybe someone else can, but that doesn't make you a coder. Yeah, actually coding has changed in fascinating ways, because so much of coding is copying pasting from Stack Overflow and then adjusting, which is another way of coding. And I don't want to talk down to that kind of style of coding, because it's kind of nicely efficient. But do you know where that is going? Code generation? No, seriously, GitHub Copilot. Yeah, Copilot. I use it every day. Really? Yeah, it writes a lot of code for me, and usually it's slightly wrong, but it still saves me typing, because all I have to do is change one word in a line of text that otherwise it generated perfectly. And how many times are you looking for, like, oh, what was I doing this morning? I was looking for a begin marker and I was looking for an end marker. And so begin is blah, blah, blah, search for begin, this is the begin token. And then the next line I type E, and it completes the whole line with end instead of begin. That's a very simple example. Sometimes it's sort of, if I name my function right, it writes a five or ten line function. And you know Python enough to very quickly then detect the issues. So it becomes a really good dance partner then. It doesn't save me a lot of thinking, but since I'm a poor typist, I'm very much appreciative of all the typing it does for me. Much better actually than the previous generation of suggestions that are also still built in VS Code, where when you hit like a dot, it tries to guess what the type is of the variable to the left of the dot, and then it gives you a list, a pop-down menu of what the attributes of that object are. But Copilot is much, much smoother than that. It's fascinating to hear that you use GitHub Copilot. Do you think, do you worry about the future of that? Did the automatic code generation, the increasing amount of that kind of capability, are programmers' jobs threatened? Or is there still a significant role for humans? Are programmers' jobs threatened by the existence of Stack Overflow? I don't think so. It helps you take care of the boring stuff. And you shouldn't try to use it to do something that you have no way of understanding what you're doing yet. A tool like that is always best when the question you're asking is, please remind me of how I do this, which I could do, I could look up how to do it, but right now I've forgotten whether the method is called foo or bar, or what the shape of the API is, does it use a builder object or a constructor or a factory or something else, and what are the parameters. It serves that role. It's like a great assistant. But the creative work of deciding what you want the code to do is totally yours. What do you think is the future of Python in the next 10, 20, 50 years, 100 years? You look forward, you ever imagine a future of human civilization, living inside the metaverse, on Mars, humanoid robots everywhere. What part does Python play in that? It'll eventually become sort of a legacy language that plays an important role, but that most people have never heard of and don't need to know about, just like all kinds of basic structures in biology, like mitochondria. So it permeates all of life, all of digital life, but people just build on top of it. And they only know the stuff that's on top of it. You build layers of abstractions. I mean, most programmers nowadays rarely need to do binary arithmetic, right? Yeah, or even think about it, or even learn about it, or they could go quite far without knowing. I started building little digital circuits out of NAND gates that I built myself with transistors and resistors. So I feel very blessed that with that start, when I was a teenager, I learned some of the basic, at least concepts, that go into building a computer. And I sort of, every part, I have some understanding what it's for and why it's there and how it works. And I can forget about all that most of the time, but I sort of, I enjoy knowing, oh, if you go deeper, at some point you get to NAND gates and half adders and shift registers. And when it comes to the point of how do you actually make a chip out of silicon, I have no idea. That's just magic to me. But you enjoy knowing that you can walk a while towards the lower and lower layers, but you don't need to. It's nice. The other day, as a sort of a mental exercise, I was trying to figure out if I could build a flip-flop circuit out of relays. I was just sort of trying to remember, oh, how does a relay work? Yeah, there's like this electromagnetic force that pulls a switch open or shut. And you can have like, it can open one switch and shut another. You can have multiple contacts that go at once. And how many relays do I really need to sort of represent one bit of information? Can the relay just feed on itself? I don't think I got to the final solution, but it was fun that I could still do a little bit of problem solving and thinking at that level. And it's cool how we build on top of each other. So there's people that are just, you stood on the shoulders of giants and there's others that will stand on your shoulders. And it's a giant, beautiful hierarchy. Yeah, I feel I sort of cover this middle layer of the technology stack where it sort of peters out below the level of NAND gates. And at the top, I sort of, I lose track when it gets to machine learning. And then eventually the machine learning will build higher and higher layers that will help us understand the lowest layer of the physics. And thereby the universe figures out how it itself works. Maybe, maybe not. Yeah, I did. I mean, it's possible. I mean, if you think of human consciousness, if that's even the right concept, it's interesting that sort of we have this super parallel brain that does all these incredible parallel operations like image recognition. I recognize your face. There's a huge amount of processing that goes on in parallel. There's lots of nerves between my eyes and my brain and the brain does a whole bunch of stuff all at once because it's actually really slow circuits. But there are many of them that all work together. On the other hand, when I'm speaking, everything is completely sequential. I have to sort of string words together one at a time. And when I'm thinking about stuff, when I'm understanding the world, I'm also thinking of everything like one step at a time. And so we've sort of, we've got all this incredible parallel circuitry in our brains. And eventually we use that to simulate a single threaded, much, much higher level interpreter. It's exactly, I mean, that's the illusion of it. That's the illusion of it for us that it's a single sequential set of thoughts. And all of that came from a single cell through the process of embryogenesis. So DNA is the code. DNA holds the entirety of the code, the information and how to use that information to build up an organism. The entire like, the arms, the legs. How is it built? The brain. So you don't buy a computer, you buy like a... You buy a seed, a diagram. And then you plant the computer and it builds itself in almost the same way. And then does the computation and then is, eventually dies. It gets stale, but gives birth to young computers more and more and gives them lessons. But they figure stuff out on their own. And over time it goes on that way. And those computers, when they go to college, try to figure out how to program and they built their own little computers. They're increasingly more intelligent, increasingly higher and higher levels of abstractions. Isn't it interesting that you sort of, you see the same thing appearing at different levels though? Because you have like cells that create new cells. And eventually that builds a whole organism. But then the animal or the plant or the human has its own mechanism of replication. That is sort of connected in a very complicated way to the mechanism of replication of the cells. And then if you look inside the cell, if you see how DNA and proteins are connected, then there is yet another completely different mechanism whereby proteins are mass produced. Using enzymes and a little bit of code from DNA. Of course viruses break into it at that level. And while the mechanisms might be different, it seems like the nature of the mechanism is the same. And it carries across natural languages and programming languages, humans, maybe even human civilizations or intelligent civilizations. And then all the way down to the single cell organisms. It is fascinating to see what abstraction levels are built on top of individual humans. And how you have like whole societies that sort of have a similar self-preservation, I don't know what it is, instinct, nature, abstraction, as the individuals have and the cells have. And they self-replicate and breed in different ways. It is hard for us humans to introspect it because we are very focused on our particular layer of abstraction. But from an alien perspective looking on Earth, they will probably see the higher level organism of human civilization as part of this bigger organism of life on Earth itself. In fact that could be an organism just alone, just life, life, life on Earth. This has been a wild, both philosophical and technical conversation, Guido. You're an amazing human being. You were gracious enough to talk to me when I was first doing this podcast. You were one of the earliest, first people I've talked to, somebody I admired for a long time. It's just a huge honor that you did it at that time and you do it again. You're awesome. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Guido Van Rossum. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Oscar Wilde. Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/-DVyjdw4t9I

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Fiona Hill: Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump | Lex Fridman Podcast #335

We've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessary to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly. Or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something. What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon? The following is a conversation with Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor and foreign policy expert specializing in Russia. She has served the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, including being a top advisor on Russia to Donald Trump. She has made it to the White House from humble beginnings in the north of England. A story she tells in her book, There's Nothing for You Here. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Fiona Hill. You came from humble beginning in a coal mining town in northeast England. So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today? I was born in 1965 and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already. And, you know, basically my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times. Every coal mine he worked in was closing down. He was looking constantly for other work and he had no qualifications because at age 14, he'd gone down the mines. His father had gone down the mines at 13. His great grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age. I mean, you had a lot of people at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, 14. They didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, hey, you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family. And then he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steelworks that didn't work out, a brickworks that closed down. And then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as a porter, an orderly. So basically somebody's just pushing people around. There was no opportunity to retrain. So the big issue in my family was education. You've got to have one. You've got to have some qualifications. The world is changing. It's changing really quickly. And for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this. And very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here. You're going to have to, if you want to get ahead. And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl I wouldn't. I mean, actually, in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. There was some kind of idea that maybe if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse. My mother was a midwife. And so she, at age 16, left school and gone to train as a nurse and then as a midwife. I had other relatives who'd gone to teach in local schools. And so there was an idea that women could get educated. And there was a kind of a range of things that you could do. But the expectation then was, go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years, as I was trying to find my way through life and looking forward. First of all, what does that even look like, getting educated, given the context of that place? You don't know. There's a whole world of mystery out there. So how do you figure out what to actually do out there? But was there moments, formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring, where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go? Yeah, there were a number of things. I mean, I think like a lot of kids, you talk to people, particularly from blue collar backgrounds, say, what did you want to do? Boys might say, I wanted to be a fireman. At one point as a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse. I had a little nurse's uniform like my mother. I didn't really know what that meant, but I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy, and I used to read this. That was one of the formative ideas. Also, it was a rural area, semi-rural area. I'd be out in the fields all the time, and I'd watch farmers with their animals, and I'd see vets coming along and watching people deal with the livestock. There was a famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot. It became here in the United States as well, and was a TV miniseries. He'd written a book, and he was the vet for one of my great aunt's dogs. People were always talking about him. I thought, I could be a vet. Then one day I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the backside of a cow in a field. He got his hand stuck and the cow was kicking him. I thought, yeah, maybe not actually. No, I don't think I want to be a vet. I cycled through all of these things about, okay, I could get an education. But the whole sense was you have to apply your education. It wasn't an education for education sake. It was an education to do something. When I was about 14 or 15, my local member of parliament came to the school. It was one of these pep talks for kids in these deprived areas. He had been quite prominent in local education. Now, he was a member of parliament. He himself had come from a really hard scrabble background and had risen up through education. He'd even gone to Oxford and done philosophy, politics, and economics. He basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really going to get ahead and go to elite institutions, look, you can get an education. You don't have to be held back by your circumstances. But if you do get an education, it's a privilege, and you need to do something with it. Then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? An education is a qualification, it's to do something. Most people around me I knew didn't have careers. My dad didn't really have a career, he had jobs. My mom thought of her nursing as a career though, and it genuinely was, and she was out there trying to help women survive childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, basically over the dining room table. I wish she'd stop. She'd leave out her nursing books and I tell you, if everyone had had my mom as a mother, there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just these grim, horrific stories of breached births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors, that my sister and I would just go, ''Oh my God, what? Please stop.'' I thought, well, I don't necessarily want to go in that direction. But it was the timing that really cinched things for me. I was very lucky that the region that I grew up, County Durham, despite the massive decline, de-industrialization and the complete collapse of the local government system around me, still maintained money for education. They also paid for exchanges. We had exchange programs with cities in Germany and France, also in Russia in Kostroma near Yaroslavl, for example, an old textile town similar down in its region, but quite historic in the Russian context. In fact, the original birthplace of the Romanov dynasty in Kostroma, just as County Durham was quite a distinguished historic area in the British context. So it was an idea that I could go on exchanges, I could learn languages, I studied German, I studied French. Then in 1983, there was the war scare, basically provoked by the Euro Missile Crisis. The stationing of new categories of strategic nuclear weapons and intermediate nuclear weapons, in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War. The Euro Missile Crisis over SS-20 and Pershing missiles went on from 1977, so when I was about 11 or 12, all the way through into the later part of the 1980s. In 1983, we came extraordinarily close to a nuclear conflict. It was very much another rerun of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. So 20 years on, same thing. The Soviets misread, although I didn't know this at the time, I know a lot of this after the fact, but the tension was palpable. But what happened was the Soviets misread the intentions of a series of exercises, Operation Able Archer that the United States was conducting and actually thought that the United States might be preparing for first nuclear strike. That then set up a whole set of literal chain reactions in the Soviet Union. Eventually, it was recognized that all of this was really based on misperceptions. Of course, that later led to negotiations between Gorbachev and Reagan for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces, the INF Treaty. But in 1983, that tension was just acute. For as a teenager, we were basically being prepped the whole time for the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon. There were TV series, films in the United States and the UK, the Threads the day after. We had all these public service announcements telling us to seek sanctuary or cover in the inevitability of a nuclear blast. My house was so small, they said, look for a room without a window. There were no rooms without windows. My dad put on these really thick curtains over the window. Instead if there was a nuclear flash, we'd have to get down on the floor, not look up, but the curtains would help. We were like, this is ridiculous, dad. We would all try to see if we could squeeze in the space under the stairs, a cupboard under the stairs like Harry Potter. It's all just totally nuts. Or you have to throw yourself in a ditch if you were outside. I thought, well, this isn't going to work. One of my great uncles who had fought in World War II said, well, look, you're good at languages, Fiona. Why don't you go and study Russian? Try to figure it out. Figure out why the Russians are trying to blow us up. Because during the- Go talk to them. Exactly. During World War II, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union had all been wartime allies. My uncle Charlie thought, well, there's something gone wrong here. Maybe you can figure it out. As you said, go talk to them. So I thought, okay, I'll study Russian. That's really how this came about. I thought, well, it's applying education. I'll just do my very best to understand everything I possibly can about the Russian language and the Soviet Union, and I'll see what I can do. I thought, well, maybe I could become a translator. I had visions of myself sitting around, listening to things in a big headset, and in a best way translating perhaps at some future arms control summits. So how did the journey continue with learning Russian? I mean, this early dream of being a translator and thinking, how can I actually help understand or maybe help even deeper way with this conflict that threatens the existence of the human species? How did it actually continue? Well, I mean, I read everything I possibly could about nuclear weapons and nuclear war and started to try to teach myself Russian a little bit. So it was always in context of nuclear war. It was very much in the context of nuclear war at this particular point, but also in historical context, because I knew that the United States and the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies in World War II, so I tried to understand all of that. And also, like many other people, I'd read Russian literature in translation. I'd read War and Peace, and I'd love the book, actually. I mean, particularly the story parts of it. I wasn't one really at that time when I was a teenager. I thought Tolstoy went on a bit, in terms of his series of The Great Man and of history and social change, although now I appreciate it more. But when I was about 14, I was like, this man needed an editor. Could he have just gone on with the story? What an amazing story, what an incredible book this is. I still think he needs an editor. Well, I think his wife tried, didn't she? But he got quite upset with her. And then I kind of thought to myself, well, how do I study Russian? Because there were very few schools in my region, given the impoverishment of the region where you could study Russian, so I would have to take Russian from scratch. And this is where things get really quite interesting, because there were opportunities to study Russian at universities, but I would need to have, first of all, an intensive Russian language course in the summer. And I didn't have the money for that. And the period is around the miners' strike in the United Kingdom in 1984. Now, the miners of County Durham had very interestingly had exchanges and ties with the miners of Donbass going back to the 1920s. And as I studied Russian history, I discovered there was lots of contacts between Bolshevik, Soviet Union, the early period after the Russian Revolution, but even before that, during the imperial period in Russia, between the Northern England and the Russian Empire and the old industrial areas. Basically, big industrial areas like the northeast of England and places like Donbass were built up at the same time, often by the same sets of industrialists. And Donetsk in the Donbass region used to be called Husevka, because it was established by a Welsh industrialist who brought in miners from Wales to help develop the coal mines there, and also the steelworks and others that we're hearing about all the time. And so I got very fascinated in all these linkages. And famous writers from the early parts of the Soviet Union, like Yevgeny Zamyatin, worked in the shipyards in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. And there was just this whole set of connections. And in 1984, when the miners' strike took place, the miners of Donbass, along with other miners from famous coal regions like the Ruhr Valley, for example, in Germany, or miners in Poland, sent money in solidarity to the miners of Kandy-Durham. And there'd been these exchanges, as I said, going back and forth since the 1920s, formal exchanges between miners, you know, the regional miners' unions. And I heard, again from the same great-uncle who told me to study Russian, that there were actually scholarships for the children of miners, and it could be former miners as well, for their education. And I should go along to the miners' hall, a place called Red Hills, where the miners of Kandy-Durham had actually pooled all of their resources and built up their own parliament and their own, you know, kind of place that they could talk among themselves to figure out how to enhance the welfare and wellbeing of their communities. And they'd put money aside for education for miners. There was all kinds of lecture series from the miners and all kinds of other activities supporting soccer teams and artistic circles and writing circles, for example. People like George Orwell, you know, were involved in some of these writers' circles in other parts of Britain and mining communities, for example. And so they told me I could, you know, go along and basically apply for a grant to go to study Russian. So I show up, and it was the easiest, you know, application I've ever come across. They just asked me to... My dad came along with me. They asked me to verify, you know, that my dad had been a miner, and they looked up his employment record on little cards, you know, kind of a little tray somewhere. And then they asked me how much I needed, you know, to basically pay for the travel and some of the basic expenses for the study, and they wrote me a cheque. And so thanks to the miners of Donbass and this money that was deposited with the miners of County Durham at the Durham Miners' Association, I got the money to study Russian for the first time before I embarked on my studies at university. As you're speaking now, it's reminding me that there's a different way to look both at history and at geography and at different places. Is, you know, this is an industrial region. That's right. And it echoes, and the experience of living there is more captured not by Moscow or Kiev, but by, at least historically, by just being a mining town and industrial town. That's right, in the place itself. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are places in the United States, in Appalachia, in West Virginia, and in Pennsylvania, like the Lehigh Valley, that have the same sense of place. And the northeast of England, you know, was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was the industrial version of Silicon Valley, which has its own, I would say, contours and frames. And when you come to those industrial areas, your previous identities get submerged in that larger framework. I've always looked at the world through that lens of being, you know, someone from the working class, the blue-collar communities, from a very specific place with lots of historical and economic connotations. And it's also a melting pot, which is the problems that the Donbass has experienced over, you know, the last 30 years. The people came from all over the place to work there. Of course, it was a population that one might say is indigenous, you know, might have gone back centuries there. But they would have been, you know, in the smaller rural farming communities, just like it was the same in the northeast of England. And people in the case of the northeast of England came from Wales, they came from further in the south of England, the Midlands, they came from Scotland, they came from Ireland. I have all of that heritage in my own personal background. And you've got a different identity. And it's when somebody else tries to impose an identity on you from the outside that things go awry. And I think that that's kind of what we've really seen in the case of Donbass. It's a place that's a part in many respects, historically, and in terms of its evolution and development over time. And, you know, particularly in the case of Russia, the Russians have tried to say, well, look, you know, because most people speak Russian, there is the lingua franca. I mean, in the northeast of England, of course, everyone spoke English, but lots of people were Irish speakers, you know, Gaelic-Irish speakers, or, you know, some of them might have certainly been Welsh speakers. There was lots of Welsh miners who spoke Welsh as their first language who came there. You know, but they created an identity. It's the same in Belfast, in Ulster, you know, the northern province of the, you know, the whole of the Irish island, you know, the part of Ireland that is still part of the United Kingdom. That was also a heavily industrialized area, high manufacturing, mass manufacturing, shipbuilding, for example. People came from all over there too, which is why when Ireland got its independence from the United Kingdom, Ulster, Belfast, and that whole region, you know, kind of clung on, because it was, again, that melting pot. It was kind of intertwined with the larger industrial economy and had a very different identity. And so that, you know, for me, growing up in such a specific place with such a special, in many respects, heritage, gave me a different perspective on things. When I first went to the Soviet Union in 1987 to study there, I actually went to a translator's institute, what was then called the Maurice Therese, which is now the Institute of Foreign Languages. I was immediately struck by how similar everything was to the north of England, because it was just like one big working class culture that had sort of broken out onto the national stage. Everything in northern England was nationalized. We had British steel, British coal, British rail, British shipbuilding, because after World War II, the private sector had been devastated and the state had to step in. And of course, the Soviet Union is one great, big, giant, nationalized economy when I get there. And it's just the people's attitudes and outlooks are the same. People didn't work for themselves. They always worked for somebody else. And it had quite a distortion on the way that people looked at the world. Do you still speak Russian? I do, yeah. Do you speak Russian? Yeah, of course, if you want. Ah, well, then I need to say something and everyone will think about what we're talking about. Yeah, it would be a big mystery for everybody. And you have an advantage on me because it's your native language as well. For people wondering, the English speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we said there. Yeah, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world. So there you are in 1987, exchange student in the Soviet Union. What was that world like? Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period that's just around the time of the peak of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president, well, he wasn't quite president at that point, he was Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, trying to transform the whole place. So I arrived there in September of 1987, just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty. It was just within weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euro Missile Crisis by finally having an agreement on basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces. And also at this point, Gorbachev is opening the Soviet Union up. So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before. Not just in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the translation institute, but to the Caucasus, to Central Asia, went all the way to Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, all the way around Moscow. And there was, at this point, it was also the Kresenye Rus, which has become very important now. This is the anniversary, the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but you know, 988, because I was there 87 to 88. At this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the Soviet period. You suddenly have the church stepping out as a non-governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was something that I wasn't expecting to witness. Also, I mean, being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point. I'd never lived in a major city before. It's the first big city I lived in. I'd never been to the opera. You know, the first time I got an opera, it's at the Bolshoi. You know, I'd never seen a ballet. I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture. When you're kind of growing up in a mining region, you know, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing. I'd been in a youth orchestra and a youth choir. My parents signed me up for absolutely everything, you know, they possibly could education-wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of astounded by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the Soviet Union was on its last legs. Because this was Moscow, you know, I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest, terrified at first about what I would see there, if not the big nuclear superpower. And since I got there, it was just this, like as if a huge weight that I'd been carrying around for years in my teenage years just disappeared because it's just ordinary people in an ordinary place, not doing great. This is the period of, you know, what they call deficitnei vremya, you know, so the period of deficits. But there was no food in the shops. There was, you know, very little in terms of commodities because the supply and demand parts of the economic equation were out of whack because this was total central planning. You know, you'd go into, you know, a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pair of boots all in the same size and the same color. I actually lucked out because once I was in this Hungarian boot shop that was right next to where my hall of residence was and I was looking for a new pair of boots and every single pair of boots in the shop were my size. And they were all women's boots, there were no men's boots at all, you know, because there was been an oversupply of boots and that size production. But you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And, you know, in the North of England, everything was closed down. The shops were shuttered because there was no demand because everybody lost their jobs. There was massive employment. You know, when I went off to university in 1984, 90% youth unemployment in the UK, meaning that when kids left school, they didn't have something else to go on to unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship. And most people were still looking, you know, kind of months out of leaving school. And so shops were closing because people didn't have any money. You know, I had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns as the steel works closed down and the wagon works for the railways, for example, in my area. But in Moscow, people in theory did have money, but there was just, there was nothing to buy. Also, the place was falling apart, literally. I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street, balconies fall off buildings. You know, one accident after another. And then there was, you know, this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense that the Soviet Union had lost its way. And of course, it was only a year or so after I left from that exchange program and I'd already started with my degree program in Soviet studies at Harvard, that the Soviet Union basically unraveled. And it really did unravel. It wasn't like it collapsed. It was basically that there was so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path, that, you know, no one was in agreement. And it was basically all these fights and debates and disputes among the elites at the center, as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith in the system in the periphery and among the general population that in fact pulled it apart. And of course, in 1991, you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian Federation, then a constituent part of the Soviet Union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the Soviet Union getting together and agreeing of essentially ending it. And Gorbachev, you know, so basically I'm there at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future. And within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely. Well, I wonder if we reran the 20th century a thousand times, if how many times the Soviet Union would collapse. Yeah, I wonder about that too. And I also wonder about what would have happened if it didn't collapse and Gorbachev had found a different direction. I mean, you know, we see a very divisive time now in American history. The United States of America has very different cultures, very different beliefs, ideologies within those states, but that's kind of the strength of America. There's these little laboratories of ideas. Until though, that they don't keep together. I mean, I've had colleagues who have described what's happening in the West right now as a kind of soft secession, with states going off in their own direction. And the center of politics. In which states? Well, these kinds of conceptions that we have now, divisions between red and blue states because of the fracturing of our politics. And I'd always thought that that wouldn't be possible in somewhere like the United States. Or, you know, many other countries as well, because there wasn't that ethnic dimension. But in fact, many of the way that people talk about politics has given it that kind of appearance in many respects. Because look, I mean, we know from the Soviet Union and the Soviet period, and from where you're from, you know, originally in Ukraine, that language is not the main signifier of identity. And that identity can take all kinds of other forms. That's really interesting. I mean, but there has to be a deep grievance of some kind. If you took a poll in any of the states in the United States, I think a very small minority of people would want to actually secede. Even in Texas, where I spend a lot of my time. Yeah. I just, I think that there is a common kind of pride of nation. You know, there's a lot of people complain about government and about how the country's going. The way people complain about the weather when it's raining. They say, oh, this stupid weather, it's raining again. But really what they mean is we're in the smock together. There's a together there. I also feel that when I go around, because I mean, I've spent a lot of time since I wrote my book in last October, and this last year going around, I find the same feeling. But you know, when I traveled around the Soviet Union, back in the late 1980s, I didn't get any kind of sense that people wanted to see the end of the Soviet Union either. It was an elite project. There's a really great book called Collapse by Vladislav Zubok, who is a professor at London School of Economics at LSE. And Zubok is pretty much my age, and he's from the former Soviet Union, he's Russian. And I mean, he describes it very quite aptly about how it was kind of the elites, you know, that basically decided to pull the Soviet Union apart. And there is a risk of that. You know, here as well, when you get partisan politics and people forgetting, you know, that they're Americans, and they are all in this together, like a lot of the population thing, but they think that their own, you know, narrow partisan or ideological precepts, you know, account for more. And in the Soviet case, of course, it was also a power play, you know, in a way that actually can't quite play out in the United States, because it was the equivalent of governors in many respects who got together, three of them, you know, in the case of the heads of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, who then, you know, got rid of, you know, basically the central figure of Mikhail Gorbachev. It would be a little difficult to do that. The dynamic is not the same, but it does worry me of having seen all of that close up in the late 1980s and the early 90s. And I spent, you know, a lot of time in Russia, as well as in Ukraine and Caucasus Central Asia and, you know, other places after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but you kind of see the same elite divisions here in the United States pulling in, you know, in different directions and straining, you know, the overall body politic and the way that national politics gets imposed on local politics in ways that I, it certainly wasn't when I first came to the US in 1989. I didn't honestly, in 1989, when I first came here, I didn't know anybody's political affiliation. I mean, I rarely knew their religious affiliation. And, you know, obviously race was a major phenomenon here that was a shock to me when I first came. But many of the kind of the class, regional, geographic, you know, kind of political dimensions that I've seen in other places, I didn't see them at play in the same way then as I do now. And you take a lot of pride to this day of being non-partisan. That said, so you served for the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations, always specializing in Eurasia and Russia. You were the top presidential advisor to president, former president Donald Trump on Russia and Europe, and famously testified in his first impeachment trial in 2019 saying, I take great pride in the fact that I'm non-partisan foreign policy expert. So given that context, what does non-partisan mean to you? Well, it means being very careful about not putting any kind of ideological lens on anything that I'm analyzing or looking at or saying about foreign policy, for one thing, but also not taking kind of one stance of one party over another either. To be honest, I've always found American politics somewhat confounding because both the Democratic and the Republican Party are pretty big tents. I mean, they're coalitions. In Europe, it's actually kind of, in some respects, easier to navigate the parameters of political parties because you have quite clear platforms. There's also a longer history in many respects, obviously. I mean, there's a long history here in the United States of the development of the parties going back to the late 18th century. But in the United Kingdom, for example, in the 20th century, the development of the mass parties was quite easy to get a handle on. At one point in the UK, for example, the parties were real, genuine mass parties with people who were properly members and took part in regular meetings and paid dues. And it was easy to just kind of see what they stood for. And the same in Europe, when you look at France and in Germany and Western Germany, of course, Italy and elsewhere. Here in the United States, it's kind of pretty amorphous. The fact that you could kind of register randomly, it seems to be a Democrat or Republican, like Trump did. At one point, he's a Democrat. Next thing, he's a Republican. And then you kind of usurp a party apparatus. But you don't have to be, you're not vetted in any way. You're not kind of, you know, they don't check you out to see if you have ideological coherence. You could have someone like Bernie Sanders on the other side, on the left, basically calling himself a socialist and running for the Democratic presidential nomination. So, you know, kind of in many respects, parties in the United States are much more loose movements. And I think you can, you know, it's almost like a kind of an a la carte menu of different things that people can pick out. And it's more over time, as I've noticed, become more like a kind of an affiliation even with the sporting team. I mean, I get very shocked by the way that people say, well, I couldn't do this because, you know, that's my side and I couldn't do anything and I couldn't support someone for the other side. I mean, I have a relative in my extended family here who is a, you know, died in the war Republican and on family holiday, there was a book on their table, said a hundred reasons for voting for a Democrat. And I said, hey, are you thinking of shifting party affiliation? Then I opened the book and it's blank. It was pretty funny. I had to laugh. I thought, well, there you go then. You know, there's just, there's no way that, you know, people can pull themselves out of these frames. So for me, it's very important to have that independence of thought. I think you can be politically engaged on the issues, but, you know, basically without taking a stance that's defined by some ideology or some sense of kind of parties on affiliation. I think I tweeted about this, maybe not eloquently. And the statement, if I remember correctly, was something like, if you honestly can't find a good thing that Donald Trump did or a good thing that Joe Biden did, you're not thinking about ideas. You just pick the tribe. I mean, it was more eloquent than that, but it was basically, this is a really good test to see are you actually thinking about like how to solve problems versus like your red team or blue team, like a sporting team. Can you find a good idea of Donald Trump's that you like, if you're somebody who is against Donald Trump and like acknowledge it to yourself privately? Oh, that's a good idea. I'm glad he said that. Or he's even asking the right kinds of questions, which he often did actually. I mean, obviously he put them in a way that most of us wouldn't have done, but there was often kind of questions about why is this happening? Why are we doing this? And we have to challenge ourselves all the time. So yeah, actually, why are we doing that? And then you have to really inspect it and say whether it's actually worth continuing that way or they should be doing something differently. Now, he had a more kind of destructive quality to those kinds of questions. Maybe it's the real estate developer in him that was taking a big wrecking ball to all of these kinds of sacred edifices and things like that. But often, if you really paid attention, he was asking a valid set of questions about why do we continue to do things like this? Now, we didn't often have answers about what he was gonna do in response, but those questions still had to be asked and we shouldn't be just rejecting them out of turn. And another strength, the thing that people often that criticize Donald Trump will say is a weakness, is his lack of civility can be a strength because I feel like sometimes bureaucracy functions on excessive civility. Like actually, I've seen this, it's not just, it's bureaucracy in all forms. Like in tech companies, as they grow, everybody kind of, you're getting a pretty good salary, everyone's comfortable and there's a meeting and you discuss how to move stuff forward. And like, you don't wanna be the asshole in the room that says, why are we doing this this way? This could be unethical, this is hurting the world, this is totally a dumb idea. Like, I mean, I could give specific examples that I have on my mind currently that are technical, but the point is oftentimes the person that's needed in that room is an asshole. That's why Steve Jobs worked, that's why Elon Musk works, you have to roll in, that's what first principles thinking looks like. The one bit when it doesn't work is when they start name calling, kind of inciting violence against the people that they disagree with. So that was kind of your problem, because I mean, often when I was in the administration, I had all of Europe in my portfolio as well as Russia. And there were many times when we were dealing with our European colleagues where he was asking some pretty valid questions about, well, why should we do this if you're doing that? For example, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the United States has been opposed to Europe's reliance on gas and oil exports from Russia, the Soviet Union since the 70s and 80s. And Trump kept pushing this idea about, so why are we spending so much money on NATO and NATO defense and we're all talking about this, if you're then basically paying billions to Russia for gas? Isn't this contradictory? And of course it was, but it was the way that he did it. And I actually, one instance had a discussion with a European defense minister, basically said to me, look, he's saying exactly the same things as people said before him, including former defense secretary Gates, it's just the way he says it. So they took offense and then as a result of that, they wouldn't take action because they took offense at what he said. So it was a kind of then a way of, could you find some other means of massaging this communication to make it effective, which we would always try to focus on. Because it's the kind of, it was the delivery. But the actual message was often spot on in those kinds of issues. I mean, he was actually highlighting these ridiculous discrepancies between what people said and what they actually did. And it's the delivery, the charisma in the room too. I'm also understanding the power of that, of a leader. It's not just about what you do at a podium, but in a room with advisors, how you talk about stuff, how you convince other leaders. Yeah, you don't do it through gratuitous insults and incitement to violence. That's one of the things you just, you don't get anywhere with that. Well, I mean, it's possible. Tough measures and maximum pressure often though does work. Because there were oftentimes where that kind of relentless nagging about something or constantly raising it actually did have results, but it hadn't previously. So there's the maximum pressure, if it kind of kept on it in the right way. And often when we were coming in behind on pushing on issues related to NATO or other things in this same sphere, it would actually have an effect. It just doesn't get talked about because it gets overshadowed by all of the other kind of stuff around this and the way that he interacted with people and treated people. What was the heart, the key insights to your testimony in that impeachment? Look, I think there is a straight line between that whole series of episodes and the current war in Ukraine. Because Vladimir Putin and the people around him in the Kremlin concluded that the US did not care one little bit about Ukraine. And it was just a game. For Trump, it was personal game. He was basically trying to get Vladimir Zelensky to do him a personal favor related to his desire to stay on in power in the 2020 election. And generally they just thought that we were using Ukraine as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument within our own domestic politics because that's what it looked like. And I think that as a result of that, Putin took the idea away that he could do whatever he wanted. We were constantly being asked, even prior to this, by people around Putin, like Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the National Security Council equivalent in Russia who we met with frequently, what's Ukraine to you? We don't get it. Why do you even care? So they thought that we weren't serious. They thought that we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence or it is a national security player. And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States. Actually he could, because what he was doing was seeding all this dissent and fueling already debates inside of US politics, the kinds of things that we see just kind of coming out now. This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was basically just trying to extract things from the United States, that Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics. Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians had done something against him, that they had intervened in the elections. And that was kind of a combination of people around him trying to find excuses to what had happened in the election to kind of divert attention away from Russia and the Russians themselves poisoning the well against Ukraine. So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there. And what I was trying to get across in that testimony was the national security imperative of basically getting our act together here and separating out what was going on in our domestic politics from what was happening in our national security and foreign policy. I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess around the impeachment, but there's the whole parallel policies around Ukraine to the war that we now have that we're confronting. Yes, signaling the value we place in peace and stability in that part of the world, or the reverse, by saying we don't care. Yeah, we seem to not care. It was just a game. But the US role in that war is a very complicated one. Of course. That's one of the variables. Just on that testimony, did it in part break your heart that you had to testify essentially against the president of the United States? Or is that not how you saw it? I don't think I would describe it in that way. I think what I was was deeply disappointed by what I saw happening in the United States. I saw what I saw happening in the American political space. I didn't expect it. Look, I was a starry-eyed immigrant. I came to the United States with all of these expectations of what the place would be. I'd already been disabused of some of the, let's just say rosy perspectives I had of the United States. I'd been shocked by the depths of racial problems. It doesn't even sum up the problems we have in the United States. I couldn't get my head around it when I first came. I'd read about slavery in American history, but I hadn't fully fathomed really the way that it was ripping apart the United States. I had read Alex's talk, Phil, and he'd commented on this. And it obviously hadn't changed to the way that one would have expected all this time from the 18th century onwards. So that was one thing that I realized, the Civil Rights Movement and all of these acts of expansion of suffrage and everything else were imperfect at best. I was born in 65, the same time as the Civil Rights Act, and there's a heck of a long ways still to go. So I wasn't, let's just say, as starry-eyed about everything as I'd been before, but I really saw an incredible competence and professionalism in the US government, and in the election system and the integrity of it. And I really saw that. I saw that the United States was the gold standard for some of its institutions. And I worked in the National Intelligence Council, and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it had faced in this whole botched analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq, but the way that people were trying to deal with that in the aftermath. I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council, the DNI, the Director, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong in the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003, in the whole wake of people trying to pull together after 9-11 and to learn all of the lessons from all of this. And I saw just really genuine striving and deliberation about what had gone wrong, what lessons could we learn from this? And then suddenly I found myself in this, I couldn't really describe it in any other words, just totally crazy looking glass, thinking of Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the Looking Glass version of American politics. I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel over a kind of a period of time before I'd been asked to be in the administration, but I did not expect it to be that bad, I honestly didn't. I mean, I'd been warned by people that this was really a very serious turn that the United States had taken, but I really thought that national security would still be uppermost in people's minds. And it was, I mean, a lot of the people that I work with, but what I found, if you want to use that term of heartbreaking was the way in which all of these principles that I had really bought into and tried to uphold in the United States government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window. And I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own jobs. In particular on the topic of Ukraine? Not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall. So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period even before we got to that point. I'm seeing non-partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks, you know, deep state, coup plotters, you name it. Their patriotism being questioned as well. And a lot of people I worked with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees, and many people had fought in wars on behalf of the United States, in Iraq and Afghanistan, being blown up. And, you know, they'd put their lives on the line. They'd put their family lives on the line, you know, because they believed in America. And they were just, they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of walks of life. Because what really made that cliche of America great, it wasn't, you know, whatever it was that was being bandied around in these crude, crass political terms. It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of places and decided that they're going to make a go of it, and that they're going to try to work towards the whole idea of the preamble of the Constitution towards a more perfect union. And I saw people doing that every single day, despite all of the things that they could criticize about the United States, still believing in what they were doing and believing in the promise of the country, which is what I felt like. And then here we were, people were just treating it like a game, and they were treating people like dirt, and they were just playing games with people's lives. I mean, we all had death threats. You know, people's, you know, whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement, but careers of public service, trying to give something back, were being shattered. And I found, you know, I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen, because, you know, I've come from a, well, are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County Durham? Fine, I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there, but I'm not going to let this happen. I've made this choice to come to America. I'm all in. And these guys are just behaving like a bunch of idiots, and they're ruining it, you know, they're ruining it for everybody. So the personal attacks on competent, hardworking, passionate people who have love for what they do in their heart, similar stuff I've seen for virologists and biologists, so colleagues, basically scientists, in the time of COVID, when there's a bunch of cynicism, and there was just personal attacks, including death threats on people that, you know, work on viruses, work on vaccines. Yeah, and they're going around, you know, basically with protective gear on, in case somebody shoots them in the street. That's just absurd. But let me zoom out from the individual people. Yeah. And actually look at the situations that we saw in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump presidencies. And I'd like to sort of criticize each by not the treatment of individual people, but by the results. Right, yeah, I think that's fair. So if we look at George W. Bush, and maybe you can give me insights, this is what's fascinating to me. When you have extremely competent, smart, hardworking, well-intentioned people, how do we, as a system, make mistakes in foreign policy? So the big mistake, you can characterize in different ways, but in George W. Bush is invading Iraq, or maybe how it was invaded, or maybe how the decision process was made to invade it. Again, Afghanistan, maybe not the invasion, but details around having a plan about how to withdraw, all that kind of stuff. Then Barack Obama, to me, similarly, is a man who came to fame early on for being somebody who was against, a rare voice against the invasion of Iraq, which was actually a brave thing to do at that time. And nevertheless, he, I mean, I don't know the numbers, but I think he was the president for years over increased drone attacks, everything from a foreign policy perspective, the military industrial complex, that machine grew in power under him, not shrunk. And did not withdraw from Afghanistan. And then with Donald Trump, the criticisms that you're presenting, sort of the personal attacks, the chaos, the partisanship of people that are supposed to be non-partisan. So if you sort of to steel man the chaos, to make the case for chaos, maybe we need to shake up the machine, throw a wrench into the engine, into the gears. And then every individual gear is gonna be very upset with that, because it's the wrench, it's an inefficient process, but maybe it leads for government. It forces the system as a whole, not the individuals, but the system to reconsider how things are done. So obviously all of those things, the actual results are not that impressive. You could have done that on the latter, shaking things up, because I'm all one for questioning and trying to shake things up as well and do things differently. But the question is, if you bring the whole system down with nothing, ideas are putting it to place. Look, I mean, like many people, I've studied the Bolshevik revolution and many others as well. And kind of what's the pattern here that actually fits into what you're talking about here is a kind of rigidity of thought on the part of revolutionaries in many cases as well. And also narcissism. In fact, I think that takes a pretty strong sense of yourself, kind of an own yourself to want to be president of the United States, for example. We see that in many of our presidents have been narcissists to different kind of degrees. You think about Lenin, for example, and people can go back and read about Lenin. He formed his views when he was about 18 and he never shook them off. He never evolved. He didn't have any kind of diversity of thought. And when systems go awry, it's when they don't bring in different perspectives. And so Trump, if you brought in different perspectives and actually listened to them and not just believed that he himself knew better than anyone else and then tried to divide everybody against each other, it would have been a different matter. It's a tragedy of a completely and utterly lost set of opportunities because of the flaws in his own nature. Because, I mean, again, there was all kinds of things that he could have done to shake things up. And so many people around him remained completely disappointed. And of course he divided and pitted people against each other, creating so much factionalism in American politics that people have forgotten they're Americans. They think that they're red or blue parts of teams. And if you go back over history, that's kind of a recipe for war and internal conflict. You go back to the Byzantine Empire, for example, there's the famous episode of the Nicaea Riots in Constantinople, where the whole city gets trashed because the greens, the reds, the blues, and these various sporting teams in the Hippodrome get whipped up by political forces and they pull the place apart. And that's kind of where we've been heading on some of these trajectories. But the other point is when you look back at Bush and Obama as well, there's a very narrow circle of decision-making. In Bush period, it's the focus on the executive branch with Dick Cheney as the vice president being very fixated on it. In Obama, it's he and kind of the bright young things around him from, he himself is kind of intellectually, one might say arrogant in many respects. He was a very smart guy and he's convinced that he has any ruminates over all things, but he's the person who makes a lot of decisions. And basically George W. Bush used to call himself the decider as well, right? I mean, they're all the people who make the decisions. It's not always as consultative as you might think it is. And for Trump, it's like, I'm not listening to anybody at all. It's just me and whatever it is that I've woken up today and I've decided to do. So I think the problem with all of our systems, why we don't get results, because we don't draw upon the diversity of opinion and all the ideas of people out there, like you do that in science. I mean, all of my friends and relatives are in science. They've got these incredible collaborations with people across the world. I mean, how did we get to these vaccines for the COVID virus? Because of this incredible years of collaboration and of sharing results and sharing ideas. And our whole system has become ossified. We think about the congressional system, for example, as well. And there's this kind of rapid turnover that you have in Congress every two years. There's no incentive for people basically to work with others. They're constantly campaigning. They're constantly trying to appeal to whatever their base is. And they don't really care about, some do, of their constituents, but a lot of people don't. And the Senate, it's all kind of focused on the game of legislation for so many people as well. Not focusing again on that kind of sense about what are we doing like scientists to kind of work together for the good of the country to push things along. And also our government also is siloed. There's not a lot of mechanisms for bringing people together. There ought to be in things like the National Security Council. The National Intelligence Council actually did that quite successfully at times for analysis that I saw. But we don't have, we have it within the National Institutes of Health, but we saw the CDC break down on this kind of front. We don't have sufficient to those institutions that bring people together from all kinds of different backgrounds. And one of the other problems that we've have with government, with the federal government over state and local government, is it's actually quite small. People think that the federal government's huge because of course we have postal service and the military that are part of it. But your actual federal government employees is a very small number. And the senior executive service part of that is the older white guys, kind of come up all the way over the last several decades. We have a really hard time bringing in younger people into that kind of government service unless they're political hacks and they want to, you know, kind of, or they're kind of looking for power and, you know, sort of influence. We have a hard time getting people like yourself and other, you know, younger people kind of coming in to make a career out of public service and also retaining them. Because, you know, people with incredible skills often get poached away into the private sector. And, you know, a lot of the people that I work with in the national security side are now at all kinds of, you know, high-end political consultancies or they've gone to Silicon Valley and they've gone to this place and that place because after a time as a younger person, they're not, you know, rising up particularly quickly because there's a pretty rigid way of looking at the hierarchies and the promotion schemes. And they're also getting lambasted by everybody. People like, you know, public servants. They're not really public servants. There's this whole lack and loss of a kind of a faith in public service. And, you know, the last few years have really done a lot of damage. We need to revitalize our government system to get better results. We need to bring more people in, even if it's, you know, for a period of time, not just through expensive contracts for, you know, the big consulting companies and, you know, other entities that do government work out there, but getting, you know, people in for a period of time, expanding some of these management fellowships and the White House fellows and, you know, bringing in, you know, scientists, you know, from the outside, giving, you know, that kind of opportunity for collaboration that we see in other spheres. I think that's actually one of the biggest roles for a president that, for some reason, during the election, that's never talked about is how good are you at hiring and creating a culture of, like, attracting the right, I mean, basically chief hire. When you think of a CEO, like the great CEOs are, I mean, maybe people don't talk about it that often, but they do more often for CEOs than they do for presidents, is like, how good are you at building a team? Well, we make it really difficult because of the political process. I mean, and also because we have so many political appointments, we ought to have less, to be honest. I mean, if we look at other governments around the world, you know, that are smaller, it's much easier for them to hire people in. Yeah. You know, some of the most successful governments are much smaller. And it's not that I say that, you know, the government is necessarily too big, but it's just thinking about each unit in a different way. We shouldn't be having so many political appointments. We should kind of find more professional appointments, more non-parties on appointments, because, you know, with every single administration that we've had over the last, let's see, span of presidencies, they have jobs that are unfulfilled because they can't get their candidates through Congress and the Senate because of all the kind of political games that are being played. I know loads of people have just been held up because it's just on the whim of, you know, some member of Congress, even though that the actual position that they want is really technical and doesn't really care about what, you know, what political preference they particularly have. So I think we have to try to look at the whole system of governments in the way that we would over, you know, other professional sectors and to try to think about this as, just as you said there, that this is a government that's actually running our country. This is an operating system. And you wouldn't operate it like that if you were looking at it in any kind of rational way. It shouldn't be so ideologically or partisan tainted. So you're- At every level anyway. So I would actually just say, make a bid for a more non-partisan approach to a lot of the parts of government. You can still kind of bring in, you know, the political and premature, but also you have to explain to people writ large in America as well, that this is your government. And that actually you could also be part of this. You know, things like the Small Business Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, you know, all these kinds of things that actually people interact with, but they don't even know it. The Postal Service, you know, all of these things. I mean, people actually, when you ask them about different functions of government, they have a lot of support for it. The National Park Service, you know, for example, it's just when you talk about government in an abstract way, like, oh, you know, too much bloated, you know, not efficient and effective. But if you kind of bring it down more to the kind of local and federal levels, that's kind of, you know, when people really see it. And if people could see kind of themselves reflected in many of the people who've gone into public service, I think that they would have a lot more support for it. More like superstars, like individuals that are like big on social media, big in the public eye, and having fun with it and showing cool stuff that is not, right now, a lot of people see government as basically partisan warfare. And then it just, it makes it unpleasant to do the job. It makes it uninspiring for people looking in from outside about what's going on inside government, all of it, the whole thing. But you are, you know, just, with all due respect, you're a pretty rare individual in terms of non-partisanship. Like, actually, your whole life story, the humbling aspect of your upbringing and everything like that, do you think it's possible to have a lot of non-partisan experts in government? Like, can you be a top presidential advisor on Russia for 10 years, for 15 years, and remain non-partisan? I think you can. I don't think that's advisable, though, by the way, because I mean, I don't think anybody should be there, you know, obviously, also forever. So your first advice is to fight yourself after 10 years? Well, you should definitely have term limits, just like you should in everything, right? I mean, it's just like tenure in university. Well, we all have term limits. Yeah, you kind of, you know, we do, we have natural term limits, but you know, you're kind of basically bottling it up for other people. I mean, you know, what I'm trying to do now, I'm 57 now, and I always try to work with, you know, people from different generations than me, just like, you know, I've really benefited from these, you know, kind of mentorships of people older. You can, you know, mentor up and well and mentor down. I mean, I would, you know, try to get, you know, people from different backgrounds and different generations to work together in teams, honestly. I'd like to more team-networked kind of approach to things, the kind of things that you get again in science, right? I mean, all these ideas are going to come from all kinds of different perspectives. Age and experience does count for something, but you know, fresh ideas and coming in and looking at a problem from a different perspective and seeing something that somebody else hasn't seen before. I mean, I just, you know, kind of love working in an environment with all kinds of different people and people who don't agree with you. You need people to take you on and say, absolutely, that's crap, you know, kind of, where did you come up with that from? And you go, hang on. Well, explain to me why you think so. And then, you know, you have this kind of iterative process back and forth. I mean, I would always encourage my colleagues to tell me when they thought it was wrong. I mean, sometimes I didn't agree because I didn't see the, you know, the reasoning, but other times I'd be like, they're right. You know, that was a complete mistake. I need to admit that. And, you know, kind of, we need to figure out a different way of doing things. But the one point I do want to get across is there were a lot of people who were non-partisan that I worked with. I mean, honestly, in most of the jobs that I had up until more recently, I had no idea about people's political affiliation. It's just when you get into this kind of highly charged partisan environment, they kind of force people, you know, to make decisions. And when you have, you know, one political party or political faction that's trying to usurp power, it does make it quite difficult. I mean, that's the situation that we're in right now. And, you know, we're seeing some of the things happening in the United States I've seen and studied in other settings or seen for myself happening. You know, when you have a president who wants to cling onto power, you know, you've got to call that out. You know, is that a partisan act or is that a kind of, you know, defense of that larger political system that you're part of? You know, so I think we've got to recognize that even if you're not partisan, you can be politically engaged. And, you know, sometimes you just have to stand up there and speak out, which is, you know, what I did and what others did as well. None of those people who spoke out, you know, can initially saw that as a partisan act, even if some of them since then have decided to make political choices they hadn't made before. Because, you know, the situation actually forced people into, you know, taking sides. It's very hard to still stay above the fray when you've got, you know, someone who's trying to perpetrate a coup. Yeah, just to linger on that, I think it's hard and it's the courageous thing to do to criticize a president and not fall into partisanship after. Because the whole world will assume if you criticize Donald Trump, that you're clearly a Democrat. And so they will just, everybody will criticize you for being a Democrat. And then, so you're now stuck in that. So you're going to just embrace that role. But to still walk the nonpartisan route after the criticism, that's the hard road. So not let the criticisms break you into, you know, into a certain kind of ideological set of positions. I mean, our political system needs revitalization. We need to be taking a long, hard look at ourselves here. And I think what people are calling out for, look, there's a vast swath of the population, like me, who are unaffiliated. You know, maybe some lean in one direction over another. And unaffiliated doesn't mean you don't have views about things and political opinions. And, you know, you may sound quite extreme on, you know, some of those, you know, either from a left or right perspective. What people are looking for is kind of an articulation, you know, of things in a kind of a clear way that they can get a handle on. And they're also looking for a representation. Somebody who's going to be there, you know, for you. You know, you're not part of a kind of a rigid team that you're excluded from. You're the ins and the outs. But what people are looking at now, they're looking at that in the workplace because they're not finding that in politics. You're actually getting workers, you know, pushing the, people talk about the rise of the worker, but people are just saying, hang on a sec, you know, the most important space that I'm in right now is my workplace because that's where my benefits are from. They're not coming from the state. I mean, that's a peculiarity of the United States system. You know, in Britain, you've got the National Health Service and you've got all the kind of national wide benefits. You know, you're not tethered to your employer like you are in the United States. But here now we're asking people, you know, people are pushing for more representation. They're asking to be represented within their workplace. Be it Starbucks where baristas are, you know, and other Starbucks employees are trying to unionize. We have unions among our research assistants, the Brookings Institution where I am, you know, kind of teaching assistants in big universities doing the same kind of thing as well, because they want to have their voice heard. They want to kind of play a larger role and they want to have change. And they're often pushing their companies or the institutions they work for to make that change because they don't see it happening in the political sphere. So it's not just enough to go out there and protest in the street, but if you want something to happen, that's why you're seeing big corporations playing a bigger role as well. Yeah, and of course there's, you know, there's a longer discussion. There's also criticisms of that, of mechanisms of unions to achieve the giving of a voice to people. This goes back to my own experience growing up in Northern England. The Durham miners that I was part of for generations, you know, first person in my family not in the mines on my dad's side, they created their own association. It wasn't a union per se at the very beginning. Later they became part of the National Miners Union. They lost their autonomy and independence as a result of that. But what they did was they pooled their resources. They set up their own parliament so they could all get together. Literally they built a parliament and it opened in like the same time as World War I and where they all got together because they didn't have the vote. They didn't have suffrage at the time because they didn't have any money, you know, so they couldn't pay the tax and they couldn't run for parliament. And this is, you know, the kind of the origins of the organized labor parties later. But they create this association so they could talk about how they could deal with things with their own communities and have a voice in the things that mattered. You know, education, improving their work conditions. It wasn't like what you think about some kind of like big political trade union with, you know, left-wing kind of ideas. In fact, they actually tried to root out later after the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union, even when they were still having ties with places like the miners of Donbass in the 1920s, Trotskyites and, you know, kind of Leninists and, you know, communists. They were more focused on how to improve their own well-being, you know, what they called the welfare. They had some welfare societies where they were kind of trying to think, and that's kind of what baristas in Starbucks want or workers in Amazon. They're looking about their own well-being. It's not just about pay and work conditions. It's about what it means to be part of this larger entity because you're not feeling that same kind of connection to politics, you know, at the moment, because, you know, you're being told by a representative, sorry, I don't represent you because you didn't vote for me. You know, if you're not a Democrat, you're not a Republican, you're not red, you know, you're not blue, you're not mine. And so people are saying, well, I'm in this workplace. This is kind of my collective. You know, this is, you know, therefore, this is where I'm going to have to try to push to make change. So, I mean, this is kind of happening here, and we have to, you know, realize that, you know, we've kind of gone in a way full circle back to that, you know, kind of period of the early emergence of sort of mass labor and, you know, that's where the political parties that we know today and, you know, the kind of early unions came out of as well, this sort of feeling of a mass society, but where people weren't really able to get together and implement or push for change. You know, with unions at a small scale and a local scale, it's like every good idea on a small scale can become a bad idea on a large scale. So like marriage is a beautiful thing, but at a large scale, it becomes the marriage industrial complex that tries to make money off of it, combined with the lawyers that try to make money off the divorce, it just becomes this caricature of a thing. Or like Christmas and the holidays, it's like- I don't disagree, but what I'm saying is there's people are basically looking for something here and, you know, kind of, this is why, I mean, I myself am starting to think about much more local, you know, kind of solutions for a lot of these, you know, kind of problems. It's again, the teamed networked approach. On the impeachment, looking back, because you're part of it, you get to experience it, do you think they strengthened or weakened this nation? I think it weakened in many respects, just the way that it was conducted. I mean, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in the Washington Post. I haven't actually seen it yet, but I really did, you know, kind of worry that, myself, that it became a spectacle. And although it actually, I think, in many respects, was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and, you know, gave people a big, massive lesson in civics, everyone's kind of running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant, and kind of like congressional prerogatives. I was as well, I was, you know, like running off myself and, you know, trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of all of this, that it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability. And that in itself was kind of, was weakened because on both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics. I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty in many respects. I mean, especially, I have to say, on the part of Republican members of Congress, who were, you know, kind of, they should have been embracing Congress's prerogatives. You could have, you know, kind of basically done this in something of a different way. But the whole thing is because it was this larger atmosphere of polarized, or not even polarized, but fractured, fractured politics. And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side. I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like one bit on the Democratic side either. And not admitting to mistakes and, you know, not kind of addressing head on, you know, the fact that they'd, you know, kind of been pushing for, you know, Trump to be impeached and, you know, talking about being an illegitimate president, you know, kind of right from the very beginning. And that, you know, as a result, a lot of people just saw this as kind of a continuation of, you know, political games, you know, coming out of the 2016 election. But on the Republican side, it was just a game. There was people I knew who were, you know, basically, you know, at one point, one of them winked at me. You know, in the middle of this, you know, kind of impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally. You know, this is- It's a game. This is a game. And I just thought, this isn't a game. And that's why I think that it, you know, kind of weakened because, I mean, again, on the outside, it weakened us, the whole process weakened us in the eyes of the world, because again, the United States was the gold standard. And I do think, I mean, again, in the terms of the larger population, although a lot of people did actually see the system, you know, standing up, trying to do something to hold people account, but there still was that element of circus and a big political game and people being careless with the country. But I do think that the Democrats were the instigators of the circus. So as a, it's perhaps subtle, but there's a different way you talk about issues or concerns about accountability when you care about your country, when you love your country, when you love the ideals, and when you, versus when you just want to win. And stick it to the other side. No, I agree. I agree. I mean, there were people who I actually thought managed that, that made it about the country rather than about themselves. But I guess there's no attempt to do that. Yeah, there were others who did a lot of grandstanding. Yeah. And that's another problem of our political incentive structures, that the kind of sense of accountability and responsibility tends to be personal. You know, people, whether people decide to do it or not, it's not institutional, if that makes sense. We've had a kind of a breakdown of that kind of, that sense. Now I took an oath of office and I'm assuming that most of them did too. You know, I had to be sworn in, you know, when I took those positions. I took that seriously, but I already took an oath of citizenship. There's, you know, presumably you did too, you know, you kind of started to become an American citizen. It's not something you take on lightly. And, you know, that's why I felt this deep sense of responsibility all the time, which is why I went into the administration in the first place. I mean, I got a lot of flack for it because, you know, I thought, well, look, I've been asked and there's a real issue here after the Russian interference and the whole influence operation in the 2016 elections. And I knew what was going on and I should do something. You know, if not me, then, you know, okay, someone else will go and do it. But can I live with myself just sitting on the sidelines and criticizing what people are doing, you know, and kind of worrying about this? Or am I actually going to muck in there and, you know, just go and do something? It's like seeing your house on fire and you see that, you know, okay, this is pretty awful and dangerous, but I could go in there and do something. To clarify, the house on fire, meaning the cyber war that's going on or cyber attacks or cyber security. Well, in the 2016, you know, when the Russians had interfered in the election, you know, I mean, basically this was a huge national security crisis. And our politics, we'd gone mad as a result of it. And we, in fact, we were making the situation worse. And I felt that I could, you know, kind of, at the time, maybe I could do something here. I could try to clarify. I could, you know, work with others who I knew in the government from previous stints in the government to push back against this and try to make sure it didn't happen again. And look, and I also didn't have this, you know, mad, you know, kind of crazy ideological view of Russia either. I mean, I knew the place, I knew the people. I've been sitting a long time and quite calm about it. I don't take it personally. It's not kind of an extension of self. It's, you know, something I've spent a long time trying to understand for myself, going back to that very beginning of why were the Russians trying to blow us up? There must be an explanation. There was, it was a very complicated and complex explanation. It wasn't as simple as how it sounded. And also there's a long tail to 2016, you know, Putin's perceptions, the kind of things that he thought were going on. The, you know, the whole way that what they did was actually fairly straightforward. They'd done this before in the Soviet period during the Cold War, classic influence operation. It just, it had gone beyond the bounds of anything they could have anticipated because of social media and just a confluence of circumstances in the United States as well. We were very fragile and vulnerable. And I remember at one point having a discussion with the Russian ambassador where, you know, we were complaining about the Russian intervention. He said, are you telling me that the United States is a banana republic, that it's so vulnerable to these kinds of efforts? And he actually looked genuinely mystified, although, you know, obviously it was probably, you know, part of a, you know, kind of political shtick there. But he had a point. The United States had never been that vulnerable as it suddenly was in 2016. And in the time that I was in government and going back to what you asked about the whole impeachment and the whole exercise in Congress, that vulnerability was as stark as it, you know, ever could be. Our domestic politics were as much a part of the problem as anything else. They were the kindling to all of the kind of the fires. Putin didn't start any of this, other kind of problems. Domestically, he just took advantage of them. And, you know, basically added a bit of an accelerant here and there. Yeah, the interference. I mean, that's a much longer discussion because it's also for me, technically fascinating. I've been playing with the idea of just launching like a million bots, but they're doing just positive stuff and just being kind to people. Yeah, I always kind of wonder if, is it possible to do something on this scale that's positive? Because, you know, a lot of people seem to be able to use all of this for pretty negative effect. You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for positive effect. I think that's actually where a lot of the war, I think from the original hackers to today, what gives people like me, and I think a lot of people that in the hacking community, pleasure is to do something difficult, break through the systems and do the ethical thing. Right. So do the, because if there's something broken about the system, you want to break through all the rules and do something that you know in your heart is the right thing to do. I mean, that's what Aaron Schwartz did with releasing journals and publications that were behind paywalls to the public and got arrested for it and then committed. But to me, it's fascinating because I, maybe you can actually educate me, but I felt that the Russian interference in terms of social engineering, in terms of bots, all that kind of stuff, I feel like that was more used for political bickering than to actually understand the national security problem, because I would like to know the actual numbers involved in the influence. I would like to, I mean, obviously, hopefully, people now understand that better than are trying to defend the national security of this country. But it's just, it felt like, like for example, if I launch one bot and then just contact somebody at the New York Times saying, I launched this one bot, they'll just say, MIT scientists hacks, you know, they'll just, and then that, it'll spread. But that's exactly what happened. It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know, Putin and some of the people around him understood because, again, propaganda state, they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you, you know, basically put out your own content and how you get maximum effect through performance. Putin himself is a, you know, political performance artist. I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing. They were actually operating in parallel, not in collusion, but in parallel. You know, basically, Trump understood how to get lots of free air time, you know, how to get himself at the center of attention. Putin, you know, did that through a kind of, I think a less organic kind of way. You know, he had a lot of people working around him. I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik, Agitprop and, you know, kind of then the whole Soviet propaganda machine. And, you know, Putin kind of growing up in that kind of environment and having, you know, kind of the Kremlin press office and all the kind of people around him, got kind of a massive machine, knew how that worked. I mean, they haven't done, you know, what the Chinese did in Russia, of like, you know, blocking everything and having a big firewall. It was kind of putting out lots of content, getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention. Trump's doing the same kind of thing. And the Russians understood that, you know, if you put a bit of things out there and then, you know, you call up the New York Times and people are going to run with it. And what they wanted was the perception that they had actually swore the election. They loved it. This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything. I mean, I kept trying to push against this. No, they did not elect Donald Trump. Americans elected Donald Trump and, you know, the electoral college was a key part. Vladimir Putin didn't make that up. You know, and basically I also remember, you know, at one point the Russian ambassador, you know, talking to me about when we were doing the standard, you know, here we are, we're lodging our complaint about the interference. You know, he basically said, well, we didn't, you know, kind of invent Comey. And, you know, basically the, you know, the decision to reopen, you know, Hillary Clinton's emails or, you know, kind of Anthony Weiner and, you know, kind of his, you know, emails on his computer. And I was like, yeah, he's right. I mean, you know, there were plenty of things in our own system that created chaos. And tip the election, not, you know, kind of what the Russians did, but, you know, it's obviously easier to blame the Russians and blame yourself when, you know, things are kind of, or those random forces and those random factors, because people couldn't understand what had happened in 2016. There was no hanging chads like 2000, where there was, you know, kind of a technical problem that actually, you know, ended up with the intervention of the Supreme Court. There was, you know, pure and simple, the electoral college at work and a candidate that nobody'd expected, including the Republicans in the primaries, you know, to end up getting kind of elected or put forward in a different 2016, suddenly becoming the president. And they needed a meta explanation. It was much better to say Vladimir Putin had done it. And Vladimir Putin and, you know, the Kremlin guys were like, oh my God, yeah, fantastic. Champagne, pop cocks popping, this is great. Our chaos agent, they knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it. And so, you know, the very fact that other people couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves, basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system. And he's, you know, basically was taking advantage of that forever more. And I wanted, you know, to basically try to work with others to cut through that. And the thing is then, you know, people lost faith in the integrity of the election system because people were out there, you know, suggesting that the Russians had actually distorted the elections. People had written books about that. They said, you know, that they hacked the system when, you know, they were trying to hack our minds. But again, we were the fertile soil for this. I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the whole 1920s and 1930s with Stalin, the fellow travelers and the, you know, socialist, you know, international. I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been at this for years about kind of pulling, you know, kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame. But it didn't mean that they were influencing, you know, directly the politics of countries, you know, writ large. There are plenty of interventions. It's just that we were somehow, it was a confluence of events, a perfect storm. We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves. It was what Americans were doing to themselves that was the issue. You think that's the bigger threat than large-scale bot armies? Those can be a threat. Obviously, they do have an impact, but it's how people process information. It's kind of like the lack of critical thinking. I'm just not on the internet to that extent. I go looking for information. I'm not on social media. I'm in social media, but not by myself. You know, I don't put myself out there. I'm not, I haven't got a Twitter feed. I don't have a blog. You don't have a Twitter one, yeah, but there is a, you have a fan club on Twitter. There's one about Fiona Hill's cat, and I have all kinds of strange things. It's Fiona Hill's cat, which I kind of like, you know, occasionally have people send things to me. You have so many fans, it's hilarious. But what I try to do is just be really critical. I mean, my mom sends me stuff, and I'm like, what is this? You know, kind of. Yeah. It's just, you know, your own mother can be as much of an agent of misinformation as, you know, kind of Vladimir Putin. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're all, you know, kind of we all have to really think about what it is we're reading. There's one thing from my childhood that was really important to me, and I always think every kid in school should have this. My next-door neighbor, who was, he was actually very active in the Labour Party, and he was, you know, kind of really interested in the way that opinion, you know, shaped people's political views. And he was Welsh. He was a native Welsh speaker, so, you know, he was always trying to explore English and how, you know, there was kind of the reach of, you know, the English culture, and, you know, kind of how it was kind of shaping the way that people thought. And he used to read every single newspaper, you know, from all the different spectrums, which was quite easy to do, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, because there weren't that many in the UK context. And every Sunday, he would get all the different Sunday papers from all the different kind of ideological vantage points. And then when I got to be a teenager, he'd invite me to look at them with him, because he was my godfather, and he was just an incredible guy. And he was just super interesting, and, you know, kind of culturally, you know, an outsider, always kind of looking in. And he basically ran through, you know, what The Guardian looked at, The Observer, The Daily Mail, The Sun, you know, kind of all of these, you know, The Telegraph, all of these newspapers, and how you could tell, you know, their different vantage points. And of course, it's complicated to do that now. I mean, in this, you know, incredibly extensive media space. I look at what it is that they're saying, and then I try to, you know, read around it, and then, you know, look at what other people are saying, and why they're saying it, and who are they, what's their context. And that was kind of basically what I was taught to look at. And I think everybody should have that. And certainly that's something that people in politics, that are in charge of directing policy should be doing. They should be. Not getting lost in the, in the sort of the hysteria that can be created. It does seem that the American system somehow, not the political system, just humans, love drama. We're very good, like the Hunter Biden laptop story. There's always like one, two, three stories somehow that we just pick, that we're just gonna, this is the stuff we're gonna fight about for this election. And everyone's got an opinion on it. Yeah. Everybody. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's the most, like Hillary Clinton's emails, Russians hacked the election. Yeah, we had John Podesta's pasta recipes for a while, you know, that we were kind of all obsessing over. I don't know, people running out and trying them out, you know, something like that. And there's fun, I mean, there's all, there's the best conspiracy theories about Giuliani. I just love it. We just pick a random story. Sometimes it's ridiculous. And it detracts from what the larger question should be, which is about the family members of, you know, senior officials and whether they should be anywhere near any of the issues that they're, you know, there's ethics, there's government ethics and things there, you know, kind of across the board. But there's a bigger story in there, but that becomes a distraction. It's a look over there, you know, the oldest trick in the book, you know, kind of idea. Yes, given- And politicians are really good at that, because it detracts from the larger question, because every single member of Congress and, you know, government official, their family should be nowhere near anything they're doing. Well, that I could push back and disagree on. I mean- Well, it depends on what they do, if they're making money out of it, you know, and kind of basically being in business is what I mean, you know, kind of this is an issue. So it's not, you know, Hunter Biden on his own. It's, you know, kind of basically the kids of, you know, the Trump family, you name it. Yeah, in general like that, I just think it's funny. Like there's a lot of families that, you know, they work very closely together, do business together, and it's very successful. I get very weird about that. It just feels like you're not, in fact, I don't even like hiring or working with friends initially. You make friends with the people you work with, but- That's right. No, I have the same worries as well, because it kind of clouds, you know, I would encourage, you know, my daughter to do something completely different. Right. Not go into the same field. Look, it's different if you're, you know, in science or, you know, mathematics or something like this, and, you know, maybe, you know, kind of, you've got a family, maybe you're kind of building on some of their theories and ideas, you know, if Albert Einstein had a, you know, kind of an offspring who was in mathematics and took, you know, his father's thinking, you know, further, that would be very different. But if it's, you know, kind of you're in business and other things, and it's just, you know, it's the nepotism problem that no one has there. Well, it says that too, in the space of ideas. Yeah, that's what they do. If they're not, people aren't coming in and building on the ideas in a constructive way. Right, but even for son, daughter of Einstein, you want to think outside the box of the previous. Yeah, well, that's not a meaning, but I mean, it's just, but they shouldn't be sort of told, no, sorry, you can't go and study math, because, you know, or whatever, physics, you know, because of. But a lot of that, you can't actually make it into law. Well, you could, I suppose, but honestly, if you do that kind of thing, you should just be transparent. There should be just an honesty about it. It gets back to what I was talking about before. We need diversity of views and diversity of thinking, and you can't have other things. It's like being partisan or, you know, rooting just for a team. You know, if something's going to cloud your judgment or constrain the way you think about things and become, you know, kind of a barrier to moving on out. And look, that's what we see in the system around Putin. It's kind of kleptocratic and it's, you know, it's filled with nepotism. All of the kind of like the people who you kind of see out there in prominent positions of the sons or daughters of, including Putin himself. I mean, that's when a system has degenerated. And that's, you know, kind of, and I suppose in a way, this is a symbol of the degeneration of the system. But again, it's just a diversion from, you know, kind of the bigger issues and bigger implications of things that we're discussing. So critics on the left often use the straw man of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Why does Donald Trump arouse so much emotion in people? It's just the nature of the person. I mean, I don't feel particularly emotional about him. I mean, he's kind of a, he's a very flawed guy, to be honest. And this may seem bizarre, I felt sorry for him. Because this guy is so vulnerable, so wrapped up in himself, that, I mean, he's just exquisitely open to manipulation. And I saw people taking advantage of him all the time. He has zero self-awareness. I mean, I kept thinking to myself, my God, if this guy didn't have this entourage around him, how would he function? I mean, I felt sorry for us as well. I mean, that he ended up being our president, because that should not have happened. I mean, in terms of character, and in terms of fit for the job. Although I saw this, you know, kind of over a period of time, but I didn't feel, you know, kind of any, you know, sense of derangement, you know, kind of around him. He didn't drive me nuts in that way. I just became, I was just very worried about, you know, the kind of the impact that he was having on many issues. Here's the important thing. So what I noticed with people that criticize Donald Trump is they get caught up in the momentum of it, and they're unable to see. First of all, let's start with some ground truth, which is approximately half the country voted for the guy, right? Yeah, and more voted in 2020 than voted in 2016 for him. Yeah. And I just feel like people don't load that in when they're honestly criticizing. And a lot of those people didn't vote for him and his personality, and often could, because I know a lot of people who voted for him, first time and second time. And they could disassociate, you know, kind of all of the kind of features of Donald Trump that drives other people nuts from, you know, what they thought that an actual fact he could achieve in terms of, and it wasn't just this kind of sense about, well, I couldn't possibly vote for Democrats. Sometimes it's just like, well, look, he shakes things up and we need things to be shaken up. Some people might've voted for him for personality. See, this is what I'm trying to tell you. Yeah, some of them did as well, but I'm just saying that not all of them did either. Well, we don't know that data, that's the thing. But yeah, I can't say how much it is. I'm just saying anecdotally, I know people who voted for him because he's him, from the charisma and others who voted because he's shaking things up and, you know, he's keeping people on their toes and, you know, kind of, we need that, you know, idea. But the way to avoid Trump derangement syndrome, to me, me as a doctor, I'm sort of prescribing to the patients on this syndrome, this issue, is I feel like you have to empathize with the people. You have to imagine in your mind all the different, like, strengths that the people who have voted for Donald Trump see and really understand it, really feel it, like walk around with it, and then criticize. Like, I just feel like people get lost in this bubble of criticism, in their own head. Forget like the tribe you're in or whatever. In their own head, they're not able to see, like, half this country that we're a part of voted for the person. Same with Biden. Half the country voted for the guy. The people that are criticizing Biden, and they're doing this, the way Biden is currently criticized is not based on policy. It's based on personal stuff similar like to Trump. Yeah, I know it is. I mean, that's what people don't look. I think part of that is, I mean, look, first of all, I want to say I completely agree with you about understanding where people are coming from. And I think it's very important for people to listen to other people and their views. I try to do that all the time. I try to learn from that. You know, I mean, everybody's got a perspective and a context. We all live in a certain context. We're all living in history. Our own personal histories matter a lot, and also the larger context and environment in which we're living in, and where we live, and who we live with, and, you know, the kinds of lives that we lead as well. Those are all extraordinarily important. I mean, I know that from myself. Everything that I've done in my life has been shaped by where I came from, who I was, my family, and the way that we looked at things. You can't take yourself out of that. I mean, you can do it in some, you know, like a science or something else, but, you know, it's still your own views and maybe some of the ideas that you have. And pursuing an experiment might have been shaped by your larger context, you know, depending on what it is that you work on. But the other thing is the nature of the political system. The presidential election is like a personality contest, a beauty contest. It's like a kind of a referendum on, you know, one person or another. It's kind of like what we see in Russia, honestly, with, you know, Putin or not Putin, or Putin and Putin before, you know. It's all about Putin and, you know, what do you think about Putin? It's all about what the president should be doing and, you know, kind of what their policies are. That's kind of the bizarreness of the US political system. Look, we've just seen this happening in the United Kingdom. You've got this core of a couple of thousand, couple of hundred thousand, rather, people in the Conservative Party who've just voted for, you know, three leaders in a row, the rest of the country, isn't it? And they're just looking at, you know, whether they like that personality and, you know, what they say to them rather than what they're necessarily going to do for the country. I mean, which is, you know, kind of pretty absurd. And again, the presidency is a weird hybrid in the United States. You know, we were talking before about the person who should be running the country, the chief executive or the prime minister in another setting. But we don't think of it like that. You know, we often think about whether we like the guy or not, or, you know, we'd like to hang out with him, or, you know, one of my younger relatives, and I said, so why did you vote for Trump? He said, well, he was great. He was funny. I went to his rallies. I got, you know, all kind of charged up. And I said, could you see yourself voting for Biden? No, he's too old. And I said, well, you know, he's only just a little bit, you know, kind of older than Trump. Or is, you know, the same age as your grandma. Do you think your grandma's older? Oh, no, not at all. But it's just this kind of perception. He's boring, you know? So there's, people are actually sometimes, you know, basically being, you know, kind of motivated by just a feeling, you know, kind of that kind of sense, because that's the sort of nature of the, you know, the presidency. It's this kind of how you feel about yourself as an American or how you feel about the country writ large, kind of the symbol of the state. Look at, you know, in Britain, you had Queen Elizabeth II and everybody, you know, seemed to, for the most part, not everyone, I guess, but most people respected her as a person, as a personality, as a kind of symbol of the state. Even if they actually didn't really like the institution of the monarchy, there was something, you know, kind of about that particular personality that you were able to, you know, kind of relate to in that context. But in the United States, we've got all of that rolled into one, the head of state, the symbol of the state, the kind of queen, the king, the kind of idea. The chief executive, the kind of prime ministerial role, and then the commander in chief of the military. It's all things, you know, kind of at once, but ultimately for a lot of people, it's just how we feel about that person. Oh, I couldn't go vote for them because of this, or I couldn't vote for them because of that. And in 2016, you know, Hillary Clinton actually did win the election in terms of the popular vote. So it wasn't that, you know, kind of people wouldn't vote for a woman. I mean, more people voted for her on the popular level, not obviously, you know, through the electoral college and the actual college vote. So it wasn't just, you know, gender or something like that, but it was an awful lot of things for people who found Trump attractive, because he was sticking up the big middle finger to the establishment. He's an anti-establishment change character. There was a lot of people voted for Barack Obama for the same reason and voted for Trump. We know that phenomenon, what was it, 11, you know, 12% of people, you know, so they could vote for some completely, totally different, radically different people because of that sort of sense of change and charisma. I mean, I had people who I knew voted for Trump, but would have voted for Obama again if he'd run again, because they just liked the way that he spoke, they liked the way that, you know, because they said, I mean, this is all my own anecdotal things, but one of my relatives said, I could listen to Obama all day, every day. I just love the way he sounded. I love the way he looked, you know, I just like the whole thing about him. And then to say about Trump, well, he was exciting, he was interesting, you know, he was kind of like, you know, whipping it up there. You know, so there's this, just this kind of feeling. You know, we always say about, you know, could you have a beer with this person? And people decide they couldn't have one with Hillary Clinton. And, you know, maybe they could go off and have one with Barack Obama and with Donald Trump. They didn't want to have one with Joe Biden, you know, for example. And remember, George W. Bush didn't drink, so he wouldn't have had a beer with him, he'd have gone out and got a soda or something with him. But, you know, there's this, there's that kind of element of just that sort of personal connection in the way that the whole presidential election is set up. It's less about the parties, it's less about the platforms, and it's more about the person. Yeah, and picking one side and like sticking with your person, really like a support team. Yeah, it is, yeah. What do you think about Vladimir Putin, the man and the leader? Let's actually look at the full, you've written a lot about him, the recent Vladimir Putin and the full context of his life. Yeah. Let's zoom out and look at the last 20 plus years of his rule. In what ways has he been good for Russia? In what ways bad? Well, if you look to the first couple of terms of his presidency, I think, you know, on the overall ledger, you would have actually said that he made a lot of achievements from Russia. Now, there was, of course, the pretty black period of the war in Chechnya, but he didn't start that, that was Boris Yeltsin. That was obviously a pretty catastrophic event. But if you look at then other parts of the ledger of what Putin was doing, from the 2000s onwards, he stabilised the Russian economy, brought back confidence in the Russian economy and financial system. He built up a pretty impressive team of technocrats for everything, the central bank and the economics and finance ministries, who really got the country back into shape again and solvent, paid off all of the debts and really started to build the country back up again domestically. And the first couple of terms, again, putting Chechnya to one side, which a little hard because I mean, there was a lot of atrocities and I have to say that, he was pretty involved in all of that because the FSB, which he'd headed previously, was in charge of wrapping up Chechnya and it created a very strange sort of system of fealty, almost a feudal system and the kind of relationship between Putin at the top and Kadyrov in Chechnya. And there was quite a lot of distortions, kind of as a result of that in the way that the Russian Federation was run, in a lot more of an emphasis on the security services, for example, but there was a lot of pragmatism, opening up the country for business. Basically extending relationships. I would say that, by the end of those first couple of terms of Putin, Russians were living their best lives. There was a lot of opportunity for people. People's labor was being paid for, they weren't being taxed, the taxes were coming out of the extractive industries. There was kind of, I guess, a sense of much more political pluralism. It wasn't the kind of the chaos of the Eltsin period. And then you see a shift. And it's pretty much when he comes back into power again, in 2011, 2012. And that's when we see a kind of a different phase emerging. And part of it is the larger international environment, where Putin himself has become kind of convinced that the United States is out to get him. And part of it goes back to the decision on the part of the United States to invade Iraq in 2003. There's also the recognition of Kosovo in 2008, and the whole kind of machinations around all kinds of other issues of NATO expansion and elsewhere. But Iraq in 2003, and this kind of whole idea after that, that the United States is in the business of regime change, and perhaps has him in his crosshairs as well. But there's also then kind of, I think, a sense of building crisis after the financial crisis and the Great Recession, 2008, 2009, because I think Putin up until then believed in the whole idea of the global financial system, and that Russia was prospering, and that Russia, part of the G8, and actually could be genuinely one of the major economic and financial powers. And then suddenly he realizes that in the West is incompetent. That we totally mismanaged the economy of our own, the financial crash in the United States, the kind of blowing up of the economy and the blowing up of the housing bubble, and that we were feckless, and that that had global reverberations. And he's prime minister, of course, in this kind of period. But then, and I think that that kind of compels him to kind of come back into the presidency and try to kind of take things under control again in 2011, 2012. And after that, he goes into kind of a much more sort of focused role where he sees the United States as a bigger problem. And he also starts to kind of focus on also the domestic environment, because his return to the presidency is met by protests. And he genuinely seems to believe, because again, this is very similar to belief here in the United States that Donald Trump couldn't possibly be elected by Americans. There somehow was some kind of external interference because the Russians interfered and had an impact. Putin himself thinks at that time, it's one of the reasons why he interferes in our elections later, that the United States and others had interfered because he knew that people weren't that thrilled about him coming back. They kind of liked the Medvedev period. And the protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other major cities, he starts to believe are instigated by the West, by the outside, because of funding for transparency in elections and all of the NGOs and others, they're operating, State Department, embassy funding, and the whole attitudes of, God, he's back, kind of thing. And so after that, we see Putin going on a very different footing. It's also somewhere in that period, 2011, 2012, we start to kind of obsess about Ukraine. And he's always, I think, been kind of steeped in that whole view of Russian history. I mean, I heard at that time, I was in, I've written about this in many of the things that I've written about Putin, that in that same timeframe, I'm going to all these conferences in Russia where Putin is and Peskov, his press secretary, and they talk about him reading Russian history. I think it's this, in this kind of period, that he formulates this idea of the necessity of reconstituting the Russian world, the Russian empire. He's obviously been very interested in this. He's always said, of course, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the great catastrophe of the 20th century, but also the collapse of the Russian empire before it. And he starts to be critical about Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and he starts to do all this talking about Ukraine as the same country, Ukrainians and Russians being one and the same. And this is where the ledger flips, because, I mean, the initial question you asked me is about, has Putin been good for Russia or not? And this is where we get into the focal point of, or the point where he's not focusing on the prosperity and stability and future of Russia, but he starts to obsess about the past, and he starts to take things in a very different direction. He starts to clamp down at home because of the rise of opposition, and the fact that he knows that his brand is not the same as it was before, and his popularity is not the same as it was before, because he's already gone over that period in anybody's professional and political life, that if you stay around long enough, people get a bit sick of you. We talked about that before. Should you stay in any job for a long time, in any job for a long period of time, you need refreshing. And Putin is starting to look like he's going to be there forever, and people are not happy about that, and would like the chance as well to move on and move up, and with him in still in place, that's not going to be particularly possible. And that's around the time when he starts to make the decision of annexing Crimea, and that's when the whole thing flips, in my view. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 is the beginning of the end of Vladimir Putin being a positive force within Russia, because if you pay very close attention to his speech on the annexation of Crimea in March of 2014, you see all of the foreshadowing of where we are now. It's already of his view of his obsessions, his historical obsessions, his view of himself as being fused with the state, a modern czar, and his idea that the West is out to get him, and it becomes after that, almost a kind of like a messianic mission, you know, to turn things in a different direction. And who are the key people to you in this evolution of the human being, of the leader? Is it Petr Shev, is it Shoygu, the Minister of Defense, is it, like you mentioned, Peskov, the Press Secretary? What role do some of the others like Lavrov play? I think it's more rooted in the larger context. I mean, individuals matter in that context, but it's kind of like this shared worldview. And if you go back to the early 1990s, immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when Yeltsin and his counterparts in Ukraine, Belarus, pull it apart, there was an awful lot of people who wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, not just Putin. I mean, you remember after Gorbachev tried to have the new union treaty in 1991, and there was the emergency committee set up, the coup against Gorbachev. It was because they were worrying it was going too far and unraveling the union then as well. They were opposed to his reforms. There's always been a kind of a very strong nationalist contingent that become Russian nationalists over time rather than Soviet hardliners, who basically want to maintain the empire, the union in some form. And in the very early part of the 1990s, there was a lot of pressure put on Ukraine and all the other former Soviet republics, now independent states, by people around, you know, Mayor Lushkov, for example, in Moscow, by other forces in the Russian Duma, not just Vladimir Zhirinovsky and others, but really serious, you know, kind of what we would call here, like right-wing nationalist forces. But it's pervasive in the system, and it's especially pervasive in the KGB and in the security sector. And that's where Putin comes out of. Remember Putin also was of the opinion that one of the biggest mistakes the Bolsheviks made was getting rid of the Orthodox Church as an instrument of the state. And so there's this kind of restorationist wing within the security services and the state apparatus that want to kind of bring back Russian Orthodoxy as a state instrument, an instrument of state power. And they were kind of, you know, looking all the time about strengthening the state, the executive, the presidency. And so it's everybody who takes part in that. And it's also others who want power, honestly, and they see Putin as their vehicle for power. I think people like Sergei Kiryenko, I knew Kiryenko back in the 90s. I mean, my God, that guy's all in. Or like Dmitry Medvedev, you know, who was, you know, a warmer, fuzzier version of Putin, certainly had a totally different perspective, wasn't in the KGB. Did you say warmer, fuzzier version? Warmer, fuzzier version, yeah. I mean, he's kind of like, he was literally a warm personality. I don't know if you watched him during the September 30th annexation, the guy had all kinds of facial twitches and looked so rigid and stiff that he looks like he might implode. I mean, that wasn't, you know, how he was, you know, earlier in his career. And he, you know, had a different view of Perestroika. We always have to remember that Putin was not in Russia during Perestroika, he was in Dresden, watching the East German state fall apart. And, you know, dealing with the Stasi and in a kind of place where you weren't getting a lot of information about what was happening in West Germany or even what was happening back home in Perestroika. And he has that kind of group of people around him, the Patrushevs and Botnikovs and others, and Sergei Ivanov and others, you know, from the different configurations of his administration, who have come out of that same kind of mindset and are kind of, you know, wanting to put everything back together again. So there's a lot of enablers, a lot of, you know, power seekers, and there are a lot of people who, you know, think the same as him as well. He is a man of his times, a man of his context. You, as a top advisor yourself and a scholar of Putin, do you think, actually now, in his inner circle, are there people he trusts? There are people he trusts for some things, but I don't think there's people he trusts for everything. I don't think he's the kind of person who tells anyone everything at all. I don't think he's got somebody he deeply confides in. Ever or now? No, I think he compartmentalizes things. He's often said that the only person he trusts is himself, and I think that's probably true. He's the kind of person who keeps his own counsel. I mean, people talk about Kovalchuk, for example, or, you know, kind of some of the other people who are, you know, friends with him that are going to go back to his time in St. Petersburg. You know, at various points, he seemed to, you know, spend a lot of time, you know, way back when, talking to people who were, you know, people think of kind of more moderating forces like Alexei Kudrin, but, you know, doesn't seem to be interacting, you know, with them. You know, there are obviously aspects of his personal life. You know, does he speak to his daughters? Does he, you know, speak to, you know, kind of lovers, you know, kind of in a way people speculate about, you know, kind of who might he confide in? But I would greatly doubt that he would have deep political discussions with them. He's a very guarded, very careful person. What about sources of information, then? So trust a deep understanding about military strategies with, for certain conflicts, like the war in Ukraine, or even special subsets of the war in Ukraine, or any kind of military operations, getting clear information. I think he's deeply suspicious, you know, of people and of information. And I think, you know, part of the problems that, you know, we see with Putin now, I mean, I've come from isolation during COVID. I'm really convinced that, you know, like many of us, a lot of Putin's views have hardened, and the way that he looks at the world have been shadowed in very dark ways by the experience of this pandemic. You know, obviously he was in a bubble, different kind of bubble from most of us. I mean, most of us are not in bubbles with multiple, you know, kind of palaces and, you know, kind of the Kremlin. But, you know, we've seen, you know, so much, obviously a lot of this is staged, that isolation, you know, the kind of making it very clear that he's the czar, the guy who is in charge, making all the decisions, you know, one end of the table and everybody else is at the other end. But, you know, it's very difficult then to bring, you know, information to him in that way. He used to have a lot of information bundled for him in the old days by the presidential administration. I mean, I know that because it was a lot more open in the past, and I've had a lot of meetings with people in the presidential administration who brought outside, you know, it's their all source information, you know, for him, and, you know, kind of funneled in information from different think tanks and, you know, different viewpoints and maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information. He would meet with people, you know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Masha Gessen, you know, and had to come in, you know, obviously, you know, a very different character as a journalist and a critic. You know, we've heard about Venediktov from Ekho Moskvy, the, you know, the radio program, the editor, who Putin would, you know, talk to and consult with. He'd reach out. People like Lyudmila Alexeeva, for example, the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her and would, you know, sometimes just, you know, talk to her, you know, for example. All of that seems to have come to a halt. And I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who, you know, watch Putin about what kind of information is he getting? You know, is it just information that he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework? We're all guilty of that, of looking for things. It gets to our social media preferences. Are people just bringing to him things that they think he wants to hear? Like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard, or is he himself, you know, tapping into a source of information that he absolutely wants? And remember, he is not a military guy. He's an operative, and he was sort of trained in operations and, you know, contingency planning. Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, as a civil engineer, was the former minister of emergencies. He wasn't a military planner. You know, somebody like Gerasimov, the head of the chiefs of staff, maybe a military guy, you know, in this case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part of the chain of command. He's not somebody who would spontaneously start, you know, telling Putin things. And Putin, you know, comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that, you know, intelligence gets filtered and works. He's probably somebody who wants to consume raw intelligence. He doesn't probably want to hear anybody else's analysis. And he's thrived in the past of, you know, picking things up from people. You know, I've taken part in all of these meetings with him, gone for hours, because he's just collecting. He's collecting information. He's sussing people out. He wants to know the questions they ask. He learns something about the questions that people ask, the way that they ask them. You know, so he's kind of soliciting information himself. And if he's cut off from that information, you know, because of circumstances, then, you know, how is he formulating things in his head? And again, getting into, you can't get into his head, but you can understand the context in which he's operating. And that's where you worry, because he clearly made this decision to invade Ukraine behind the back of most of his security establishment. You think so? Oh, I think it's pretty apparent. What would the security establishment, what would be- Well, that would be the larger, you know, thinking of the funneling in information from the presidential administration, from the National Security Council. It looks like, you know, he made that decision with a handful of people. And then, you know, having worked in these kinds of environments, and it's not that dissimilar, you filter information up. So think about, you know, you and I are talking for hours here. If you were my, you know, basically, you know, senior official and I'm your briefer, I might only get 20 minutes with you. And you might be just like, you know, looking at your watch the whole time and thinking, hang on a second, I've got to go, and I've got this meeting, I've got that meeting. And yeah, your point, you're not going to wait there. So I give this long explanation, I've got to get to the point. And then I've got to then choose for myself, what's the information I'm going to impart to you? Out of the 20 things that I think are important, you know, okay, I've got 20 minutes, maybe I only get two minutes. Maybe, you know, you get called out and somebody, you know, kind of interrupts, something happens, I'm going to get one minute, two minutes. I mean, I once remember I had to give a presentation when I was in government. You know, to Henry Kissinger, you know, for that defense policy board. And we planned bloody weeks on this thing. You know, PowerPoints were created, teams of people were brought together. And, you know, people were practicing this. We had all these, you know, different people there. And I said, look, Henry Kissinger's an academic and a former professor and, you know, I happen to, you know, I've got to watch him in action. He's going to like, you know, five seconds in, if we're lucky we get that far, ask us a question and just throw off our entire presentation. What is it that we want to convey? And that's exactly what happened. And then, you know, people aren't really prepared or they wanted to convey and they, you know, they prepared a, you know, a nice sort of fulsome, you know, PowerPoint-like approach. We never even got there. And so God knows what, you know, he took away from it at the end of it. And that's, you know, think about Putin. He's going to be kind of impatient. He's, you know, we see the televised things where he, you know, kind of sits at a table a bit like, you know, people won't necessarily see us here and he puts his hands on the table and he looks across at the person and he says, so tell me, you know, what's the main things I need to know? And of course the person's mind probably goes blank, you know, with the kind of the thought of like, oh God, what's the main thing? And they go, they start, well, Vladimir Vladimirovich. And, you know, they start the kind of, you know, they're revving up, you know, to get to the point and then he cuts them off. So you think about that and then you think about, well, what information has he got? And then how does he process it? And is he suspicious of it? Does he not believe it? And what inside of his own history then, you know, leads him to make one judgment over another? He clearly thought the Ukrainians would fall apart in five seconds. We don't know if he clearly thought that, but that there was a high probability maybe. I mean, you can guess. I think he pretty much thought it because I think he thought that, you know, kind of his Zelensky wasn't very popular. There was an awful lot of, you know, pro-Russian sentiment in whatever way he thinks that is because people are Russian speakers. And that, you know, they're kind of, you know, in polling, you know, they expressed affinity with Russia. I mean, certainly in Crimea, that worked out because a majority of the population had, you know, higher sentiments or feelings of affinity with Russia. And, you know, obviously, you know, that kind of, they got traction there. But it's more complicated. We talked about Donbass before, about being a kind of melting pot. When, you know, they tried the same thing in Donbass, Donetsk and Luhansk, as they tried in Crimea in 2014, it didn't kind of pan out. In fact, you know, a whole wall broke out. They tried, you know, to kind of in, you know, many of the major cities that are now under attack, including Odessa, to kind of foment, you know, pro-Russian movements. And they completely and utterly fell apart. So Putin was thinking, you know, I'm pretty sure based on polling and the FSB having infiltrated, you know, an awful lot of the Ukrainian hierarchies we're now seeing is quite apparent with some of the dismissals in Ukraine. He was pretty sure that, you know, kind of he would get traction and that it would be like 1956 in Hungary or 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Remember, he comes out of the Andropov levy, as it's called, the kind of cohort of people who come under the KGB under Yuri Andropov. And Yuri Andropov has presided over a lot of these anti-dissident, you know, kind of movements inside of Russia itself and how you suppress opposition, but also over, you know, how you deal with, you know, kind of the uprisings in, you know, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. And there's all these lessons from this that, you know, you can put everything back in the box. And yeah, there might be a bit of violence and a bit of fighting, but ultimately you think you've got the political figures and you decapitate the opposition. So they thought Zelensky would run away. Yadokovich ran away, but, you know, that was kind of a bit, you know, sort of a different set of circumstances. And they thought that all of the local governments would, you know, kind of capitulate because they had enough Russians in inverted commas in there. Again, mistaking language and, you know, kind of positive affinity towards Russia for identity or how people would react in the time and not understanding people's, you know, linkages and, you know, kind of importance of place, the way that people feel about who they are in a certain set of circumstances and place. But the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is unlike anything that he was ever involved with. I don't think he thought it would be, you know, because it's this kind of, if he looks back into the past, you're right though, he wasn't involved in 68 or 56 or what happened in the 1980s in Poland. But there's a very wide front and it's the capital. And I mean, this isn't going for- This isn't Chechnya or this isn't, you know, kind of Syria or for example. This is a major nation. Exactly. Like a large, it's large, the size. It was more like Afghanistan, but they didn't realize that because again, Ukrainians are us. There's this kind of inability to think that people might think differently and might want something different. And that 30 years of independence actually has an impact on people and their psyches. And if I look back to the 1990s, I mean, I remember being in seminars in the target at the time, and we were doing a lot of research on, you know, what was happening in, you know, the former Soviet Union at the time, this is the early 1990s, just after the, you know, the whole place fell apart. And there was already under Yeltsin, this kind of idea of Russians abroad, Russians in the near abroad, Russian speakers, and the need to bring them back in. And I remember, you know, we had seminars at the time where we talked about at some point, there'd be some people in Russia that would actually believe that those Russian speakers needed to be brought back into Russia, but that the people who spoke Russian might have moved on because they suddenly had other opportunities and other windows on the world. I mean, look what's happened in Scotland, you know, for example, most people in Scotland speak English. The Scottish language is not the standard bearer of Scottish identity. There's just, it's almost a civic identity, different identity than not just national identity, just like you see in Ukraine. And there's lots of English people that moved to Scotland and now think of themselves as Scottish, or Brazilians, or Italians, and, you know, all kinds of people who've moved in there. I mean, it's a smaller population, obviously, and it's not the scale of Ukraine, but, you know, people feel differently. And there's been a devolution of power. And when Brexit happened, you know, Scotland didn't want to go along with that at all. They wanted to kind of still be, you know, having a window on Europe. And that's kind of historic. And lots of people in Ukraine have looked West, not East. You know, it depends on where you are, not just in Lviv, you know, or somewhere like that, but also in Kiev. And Kharkiv, you know, was kind of predominantly a Russian-speaking city, but Kharkiv was also the center of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian literature, you know, at different points. People have different views. I grew up in the North of England. We don't feel like the South of England. There's been a massive divide between North and South in England for millennia, not just centuries. So, you know, people feel differently depending on where they live and, you know, kind of where they grew up. And Putin just didn't see that. He didn't see that. Well, hold on a second. Let me sort of push back at the fact that I don't think any of this is obvious. So, first of all, Zelensky before the war was unpopular. Oh, he was, wasn't he? 38%, something like that, but best in the popularity? Yeah. Let me sort of make the case that the calculation here is very difficult. If you were to poll every citizen of Ukraine and ask them, what do you think happens if Russia invades? Just, like, actually, put each individual Ukrainian in a one-on-one meeting with Putin and say, what do you think happens? I honestly think most of them will say that they will agree with the prediction that the government will flee, it would collapse, and the country won't unite around a cause because of the factions, because of all the different parties involved, because of the unpopularity of the president. You might have said the same thing about the Soviet Union when Hitler invaded in 1941. You see, the problem is Putin always reads history from one perspective over another. I think most countries basically rise to their own defense. So, this is actually one of the first times that Russia has been on the offensive rather than on the defensive. You know, so there's kind of a bit of a flip there. I mean, obviously Afghanistan, but that was more complicated because it was also supposed to be an intervention, right? I mean, it wasn't supposed to be to annex Afghanistan, it was to try to prop up, kind of a reinstall a leader there. Syria, you were in there to help your guy, Bashar al-Assad, turn away the opposition. Chechnya was a debacle. The Chechens fought back big time, and it was only by dint of horrible, violent persistence and ruthlessness and nasty, dirty tricks that Putin prevailed there. But then you wonder, did he prevail? Because what happened? You know, Chechnya sometimes describes the most independent part of the Russian Federation, and Ramzan Kadyrov plays power games in Moscow. His predecessors, even his father and others, wouldn't have done that. Ahmed Kadyrov, and before that, Dudaev and Maskhadov, I mean, they were willing to make a compromise, but they wouldn't have had the same position that Kadyrov has had. So, you know, I think that, again, it's your perspective and where you stand and which bit of history you start to read, and that's why I say that, you know, I think Putin, again, it's the information, the way that he processes it. I think most Russians also can't believe that they've done something wrong in Ukraine. I mean, maybe at this point things are changing a bit, but that's why there was, you know, so much kind of support for this in the right way. I mean, I have Russian friends, again, who said, but look what, you know, what's happening in Donetsk. Look what was, you know, the Ukrainians were doing to our guys. You know, look what was happening to Russian speakers. You know, we were defenders. We were not, you know, we're not invaders. I think, you know, again, the special military operation, you know, idea now, I think it's flipping, obviously, in the way that, with the war going on there. But Putin wasn't, you know, kind of looking at what would happen. I mean, most of the kind of glory parts of Russian history, when you kind of go in, you know, you chase Napoleon back to Paris, or you chase the Germans back to Berlin, you put the flag above the Reichstag, that's a very different set of affairs. When you've been fighting a defensive one, you've been invaded from a war where you invade someone else. And even the most fractured populations, like you had in the Soviet Union at the point, rally around and, you know, World War I, that fell apart. I mean, the Tsar didn't manage to rally everybody around. I mean, the whole thing fell apart. And World War II, Stalin had to, you know, revive nationalism, including in the republics, in Central Asia and elsewhere, to revive nationalism. And Ukraine suddenly found nationalism, you know, in a kind of sense of- That's really interesting, because it's not obvious, especially what Ukrainians went through in the 1930s. It's not obvious that that, I mean, my grandfather was Ukrainian and he was proud to fight a Ukrainian Jew. He was proud to fight and willing to die for his country. It wasn't like- His country then was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, right. Sorry, to clarify- But he might fight now for his country, Ukraine. Yes, but I'm just like lingering on the point you made. It was not obvious that that united feeling would be there. No, and again, it wouldn't have been obvious for the Soviet Union. That's what I'm saying. Sorry, I was referring to my grandfather with the Soviet Union. We're both saying the exact same thing. Yeah, we're saying the same thing. You're saying it's a really powerful thing, because you take history as it happened, you don't realize it could have happened differently. It's kind of, it's fascinating. It's that whole counterfactual, right? Yeah. Because I mean, if you've kind of, that's why we all need in the United States to really examine our own history. Because there's a lot of lessons from that, that we should treat very cautiously. It doesn't mean that history repeats or even rhymes, the old axiom all the time, but there are a lot of things that you can take away differently from putting a different perspective and a different slant on the same set of events. I mean, I always used to wonder like, how many books can be written on the French Revolution or even on the Russian Revolution? I studied with Richard Pipes. I remember he was really offended after he'd written his great, Michael Sopos on the Russian Revolution, two volumes, that other people would kind of write about the Russian Revolution. He said, I've written it all. And I thought, well, actually, maybe you haven't. It's like, there might be some completely different angle there that you haven't really thought of, and that's Putin. I remember Peskov saying, Putin reads history all the time, Russian history. And I thought, well, maybe he should read some world history. Maybe he should kind of read some European authors on Russian history, not just reading Laminosa for Russian historians on Russian history, because you might see something from a very different perspective. And look, and the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, right? I mean, they saw Vietnam as kind of weak, manipulated by kind of external forces, China, Soviet Union, but the Vietnamese fought for their own country. They suddenly became Vietnamese, and Ho Chi Minh became, kind of a wartime fighter and leader, in a way that perhaps people wouldn't have understood either. You said the United States made a massive mistake in Vietnam, and that, for some reason, sprung a thought in my head. Has the United States, since World War II, had anything that's not a mistake in terms of military operations abroad? I suppose all the ones that are successes, we don't even know about, probably. So it's like very fast military operations. I mean, Korea's divided. I mean, I don't know if it's successful, but, you know, kind of, I mean, there was a solution found that, you know, some people are promoting, you know, in this case as well, of a sort of division in the DMZ, and, you know, one side over the other, and, you know, kind of perpetuating a division, which I think is particularly successful. But if you think about World War I and World War II, the United States came in, you know, under some very specific sets of circumstances. In World War I, they did kind of come in to help, you know, kind of liberate, you know, parts of Europe, France, and, you know, kind of the UK and, you know, everything else, Great Britain, and the war towards the end of it. World War II, you know, there was that whole debate about whether the United States should even be part of the war. I mean, we know it wasn't thought to, you know, overturn the Holocaust and all of the kind of things you'd kind of wish it would have been fought for, but it was because of Pearl Harbor. And, you know, the Japanese pulling in. But, you know, ultimately, it was easy to explain why you were there, you know, particularly after Pearl Harbor and what had happened. It was harder to explain Vietnam and Korea and, you know, many of the other wars. And that's kind of going to be a problem for Putin. That's why there is a problem for Putin. All of his explanations have been questioned. You know, sort of off on NATO or this or that or the other, and, you know, kind of liberating, you know, Ukraine from Nazis or, you know, kind of basically stopping the persecution of Russian speakers. And all of this has now got lost in just this horrific destruction. And that's what happened in Vietnam as well. It became, you know, a great degradation of the Russian military with atrocities and people wondering why on earth the United States was in Vietnam. I mean, even that kind of happened in Britain in the colonial, you know, kind of period as well. Why was the United Kingdom doing, you know, committing atrocities and, you know, kind of basically fighting these colonial wars? Northern Ireland, why was the United Kingdom still, you know, kind of militarily occupying Ireland? Cyprus, there's all kinds of, you know, instances where we look at this thing. So what Russia is doing now, Putin is trying to occupy another country irrespective of, you know, kind of the historical linkages and, you know, the kind of the larger meta-narratives that he's trying to put forward there. What role did the United States play in the lead up and the actual invasion of Ukraine by Russia? A lot of people say that, I mean, obviously Vladimir Putin says that part of the reason the invasion had to happen is because of security concerns over the expansion of NATO. And there is a lot of people that say that this was provoked by NATO. Do you think there's some legitimacy to that case? Look, I think the whole situation here is very complicated and you have to take a much longer view than, you know, what happened in, you know, 2008 with the open door for Ukraine and Georgia, which actually, by the way, I thought was a strategic blunder, just to be very clear, because it wasn't any kind of thinking through about what the implications of that would be and, you know, what it actually would mean for Ukraine's security. And also bearing in mind what, you know, Putin had already said about NATO expansion, they came on the wake of the recognition by the United States pretty unilaterally of Kosovo. And it also comes in the wake of, I mentioned before, the invasion of Iraq, which really is very important for understanding Putin's psyche. So I think, you know, we have to go back, you know, much further than it's not just talking about kind of NATO and what that means. NATO is part of the whole package of Ukraine going in a different direction from Russia, just as so as the European Union. Remember, the annexation of Crimea comes after Ukraine has sought an association agreement with the European Union, not with NATO at that particular point, even though, you know, the EU on the security, common security and defense policy basically has all kinds of connections with NATO, you know, various different levels in the European security front. It was all about Europe. And going on a different economic and political and ultimately legal path, because if you have an association agreement, eventually you get into the acquis communi-té, and it just transforms the country completely. And Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine of the Soviet period or the Russian empire period. It becomes, you know, on a different trajectory like Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, you know, another country. It becomes a different place. It moves into a different space, and that's part of it. But if you go back again to the period at the very beginning of the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where there's no discussion about NATO at that point and NATO enlargement, there was a lot of pressure again, as I've said before, by nationalist elements on Ukraine trying to bring it back in the fold and wanting to make what was then, you know, this mechanism for divorce, more of a mechanism for re-manage Commonwealth of Independent States. And in the early 1990s, when Ukraine became an independent state, it inherited that nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union. Basically, whatever was stationed or positioned in Ukrainian territory at the time became Ukraine's, strategic and, you know, kind of basically intermediate and tactical nuclear weapons. And, you know, in the United States at the time, you know, we had all this panic about what was gonna happen with all of that. I mean, I think, you know, as a scientist and, you know, kind of technically it would have been difficult for Ukraine to actually use this. I mean, the targeting was, you know, done centrally. They were actually stationed there, but nonetheless, Ukraine, like Belarus and Kazakhstan, suddenly became nuclear powers. And, you know, Ash Carter, the former US defense secretary, who's just died tragically, and Dave was talking about, you know, talking together today, was part of a whole team of Americans and others who, you know, tried to work with Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to get them to give up the nuclear weapons. And back in the early period of that, 93, 94, you go back, and I mean, I was writing about this at the time. I wrote a report called Back in the USSR, which is, you know, kind of on the website of the Kennedy School with some other colleagues. And we were monitoring how there was all these accusations coming out of Moscow, the defense ministry and the Duma, the parliament and others, that Ukraine was trying to find a way of making a dirty bomb, using its nuclear weapons, you know, becoming a menace. And, you know, kind of Ukraine might have to be brought to order. So a lot of the dynamics we're seeing now were happening then, irrespective of NATO. Basically, the problem was always Ukraine getting away. Yeltsin himself, when he unraveled the Soviet Union, didn't really want it to unravel, but he didn't have the wherewithal to bring, you know, the countries back again. Russia was weak after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its economy imploded. It had to give sovereignty to all of these constituent parts of the Russian Federation in terms of a sort of devolution of authority. It had the war in Chechnya, which Yeltsin stupidly sparked off in 1994. You had Tatarstan, one of the regions, the old rich regions, you know, basically resting out a kind of a bilateral treaty with Moscow. The whole place was kind of seemed like it was falling apart so that, you know, you couldn't do anything on Ukraine because you didn't have the wherewithal to do it. And then when, you know, kind of basically Russia starts to get its act back together again, all of these security nationalist types who had never wanted Ukraine or Belarus or Moldova or anywhere else to kind of move away, they didn't worry that much about Central Asia, to be frank, but, you know, they did want, you know, the core states, in their view, to come back, and Moldova was part of that, even if it's not Slavic, but, you know, they wanted Belarus and northern Kazakhstan and probably Kazakhstan as well, which wasn't really thought about being part of Central Asia, back in the fold as close as possible. So anything that gave those countries an alternative was seen as negative. It could have been an association with China, you know, of them joining, you know, kind of an association with Latin America or Africa or something else like that. But, of course, NATO has all of those larger connotations of it being, you know, the Cold War opposing entity. And Putin has always seen NATO as being the direct correlation of the Warsaw Pact, which is, in other words, just something dominated completely by the United States. Now, that, of course, is why, getting back to Trump again, Trump was always going, you know, to the Europeans, if this is really supposed to be collective security and a mutual defence pact, why are you guys not paying? You know, why does the US, the States pay for everything? But, you know, NATO was actually conceived as collective defence, you know, mutual security, and it was set up by, you know, the United States, along with the UK and France and, you know, Germany and Turkey and, you know, other countries. And we see that now with the entry of Finland and Sweden. They didn't have to join NATO. They didn't want to join NATO for a long time. They wanted to partner with it, just like Israel and, you know, the countries partner with NATO. But once they thought that their security was really at risk, they wanted to be part of it. And so, you know, kind of you're now really seeing, you know, that NATO is something other than just being, you know, a creature or an instrument of the United States. But that's how Putin always saw it. So, you know, what this debate about NATO is all about, or Russia being provoked, is wanting to kind of return to an old superpower, bipolar relationship, where everything is negotiated with the United States. It's to try to deny that Ukraine or Belarus, well, Belarus has kind of been absorbed by this point, you know, by Russia or Moldova or Kazakhstan or any of the other countries have any kind of agency, not even Poland or Hungary or, you know, kind of France and Britain. For years and years and years, senior people like Putin and people around the Kremlin have demanded a return to the kind of what they call the old concert of Europe or the concert of Vienna, where the big guys, which now means the United States and Russia, just sit down and thrash everything out. And so, I mean, Putin by saying, look, it was provoked, it's the United States, it's NATO, it's a proxy war or it's this or it's that, or this is going to be a nuclear confrontation. It's like the Cuban missile crisis, or it's the Euro missile crisis. It's basically just saying, you know, I want to go back to when the Soviet Union and the United States worked things out. I want to go back to the whole, you know, period of the 1980s when Gorbachev and Reagan just kind of got together and figured things out. Or even better, back to Yalta, Potsdam and Tehran and the big, you know, meetings at the end of World War II, where we resolved the whole future security. We've had a war, we've had the Cold War, now we've got another war, we've got a real war, a hot war. We've got a war in Ukraine, it should be the United States and Russia that sort this out. So this is where we see the United States waffling about as well, trying to kind of like figure out how to handle this, because it has to be handled in a way that Ukraine has agency. Because if Ukraine doesn't have agency, nobody else has agency either. Nobody else has any kind of decision-making power. And, you know, we have an environment in which Putin thinks that there's only really three players. There's the United States and Russia and China. And maybe occasionally it might be India and perhaps Brazil or some other, South Africa or some other country, like maybe the BRICS at some point. But, you know, ultimately, it's like the old days, big powers resolve everything. And so this war is also about Russia's right, Putin's right, you know, to determine things, you know, strong man to strong man, big country to big country, and, you know, determine, you know, where things happen next. That's why he's talking about things being provoked and it's being the United States' fault. But aren't there parts of the United States establishment that likes that kind of three-party view of the world? Oh, there's always going to be people who like that part, that approach. Of course there is. But then they don't necessarily dominate. That's the kind of thing that people kind of think about. I mean, you know, Putin can, you know, read, you know, all the various articles and hear the kind of pronouncements of people. But, you know, this gets back to, you know, the way that the United States operates. You know, Putin saw that, you know, Trump wanted to have a, you know, top-down, you know, vertical of power, and other presidents have wanted to have that. But the United States is a pretty messy place. And we have all kinds of different viewpoints. Now, of course, we know that in Russia, everything, even criticism of the Kremlin, is usually fairly orchestrated, usually to kind of flesh out, you know, what people think about things. When we had these hardliners saying, you know, we needed more destruction of Ukraine, not less, and that, you know, the army wasn't doing enough, it was, in many respects, you know, kind of encouraged by the Kremlin to see how people would react to that, you know, to kind of actually create a constituency for, you know, being more ruthless than you had before, because, you know, they wanted to clamp down. In the United States, I mean, I can say whatever I want. It doesn't mean that I'm speaking on behalf of the White House. And, you know, even if I have been an advisor to this president, that president, and the other, it doesn't mean I'm, you know, basically, speaking on behalf of the US government. But there's kind of always an assumption from the Russians that, you know, when people, you know, say this, and people do advocate one thing over another, that they're, you know, it's operating, there's a lot of mirror imaging, thinking that, you know, we're operating in the same kind of way. So, yes, there are, of course, constituencies who think like that and would love it. And it's back to that, and there are many people out there with their own peace plans, all kinds of people, you know, out there, trying to push this. But there does seem to be the engine of the military-industrial complex seems to give some fuel to the hawks, and they seem to create momentum in government. Yeah, but other people do, too. I mean, there's always, you know, kind of a checksum, again. You believe in the tension of ideas. I think there is a lot of tension. I mean, I've seen it. I've seen it inside of the government now, you know, and people can push back. And that's why I speak out, and I try to lay it out so that everybody can, you know, kind of figure it out for themselves. I said the same to you as I say to everybody. This is how I see the situation, and, you know, this is, you know, how we can analyze it here. Now, look, do I think that we've handled, you know, the whole Russia account, you know, for years? Well, no, we haven't. I mean, we've taken our eyes off the ball many times. We've failed to understand the way that people like Putin think. You know, you talked earlier about, you know, we need to have empathy for, you know, all the people who like Trump or like Biden and somehow they think we've got to have strategic empathy about Putin as well. We've got to understand how the guy thinks and why he thinks like he does. You know, he has got his own context and his own frame and his own rationale. And he is rational. He is a rational actor in his own context. We've got to understand that. We've got to understand that he would take offense at something and he would take action over something. It doesn't mean to say that, you know, we are necessary to blame by taking actions, but we are to blame when we don't understand the consequences of things that we do and act accordingly or, you know, take preventative action or recognize that something might happen as a result of something. So you've been in the room with Putin. Let me ask you for some advice. And it's also just a good philosophical question for you or for me. If I have a conversation with Vladimir Putin right now, can you advise on what questions, topics, ideas to talk through to him as a leader, to him as a human? What would you like to understand about his mind, about his thinking? Yeah, remember what I said before, that Putin always tries to, you know, reverse things. He wants to hear the questions that people have. Because remember, he himself at different points has been a recruiter, which is, you know, the way that you're operating now as well, right? You're asking an awful lot of questions. Your questions also betray, you know, often the times where you're thinking about things, you know, the kind of context. You know, kind of any kind of dialogue like this reveals a lot about the, you know, the other person. And I've actually often, you know, noticed in these settings that Putin likes to have a lot of give and take. So I think he would actually enjoy having a conversation, you know, with you. But again, he would always be trying to influence you, inform and influence. That's kind of, you know, part of the way that he always operates. So what you would have to, you know, be trying to think about, so what is it you would want to elicit information from him? You're trying to understand the guy's worldview. And what we're trying to also understand is if there's any room there where he might compromise on something. You know, so if your goal was to go in there, you know, to talk about Ukraine at this particular moment, I mean, one of the problems that I've often seen in the sort of the meetings we've had with Putin just ends up in sort of mutual recriminations. You know, kind of, no, well, what about what you've done? Or no, you've done that about, you know, and, there's always this whataboutism. I mean, it often say, well, you're saying that I've done this, but you've done that. The United States invaded Iraq. What's the difference between, you know, what I'm doing and all of the things that you've been doing here? I mean, what you would have to try to do is kind of elicit information about why or what he is thinking about this particular moment in time and why he thinks it. Yeah, the whataboutism is a failure case. I think that shows from all the interviews I've seen that with him, that just shows that he doesn't trust the person on the other side. No, he doesn't. Right, but I'm not cynical like people. They seem to think he's some kind of KGB agent that doesn't trust anybody. I disagree. I think everybody's human. And from my perspective, I think that the way that he's been able to from my perspective, I'm worried about what I've seen is I think whether it's COVID, whether it's other aspects that I'm not aware of leading up to the invasion, he seems to be less willing to have a charismatic back and forth dialogue. Yeah, an open discussion. You know, actually, I mean, you asked me before about that issue of trust, and he often says he only trusts himself. And I said, he's often distrustful of people, but he does trust some people for certain things where he knows it's within their competence. Yeah. So he has people he trusts to do things because he knows they'll do them and he knows that they'll do them well, which is why he has his old buddies from St. Petersburg because he's known them for a very long time, and he knows that they won't try to pull a fast one over him, but he also knows their strengths and their weaknesses and what they can be trusted to do. I mean, he's learning that some of the people in the military that he thought were competent or people on other things are not, right? And he tends to actually have a lot of loyalty to people as well, or he also kind of thinks it's best to keep him inside the tent than outside, and he moves them around. You know, he kind of, okay, he gives them multiple chances to redeem themselves. If they don't, it's not like he has them done in. I mean, yeah, there is a lot of that in the system, but the people that he's worked with for a long time, you know, he moves them around to something else, perhaps where they can do less harm. Although, you know, we often see that he has quite a small cadre of people that he's reliant on, and often, you know, they're not up to the task, which is kind of what's happening here. But he also, in the past, has been more straightforward, just like you were saying here, more pragmatic. And I think, you know, if you were engaged with him in Russian, where you're actually literally speaking the same language, because there's so much lost in translation. I used to jump outside of my skin listening to some of the phone calls, because, you know, the way that they kind of relate, you know, with an interpreter. Oh, because you're listening to the translation? No, because I'm listening to the Russian and the translation, which is happening, you know, in real time. And having been at a translators' institute, it's really difficult. Look, an interpreter is a trend in the moment to do something, you know, the synchrony privy, or the synchronized or the real-time translation. So translation is an art as well as a skill. If you're doing simultaneous translation, that's the word in English, you know, it's synchrony privy in Russian, you're kind of focused in the moment on the fragments of the discussion, trying to render it as accurately as you possibly can. And when you come out of that, you can't relay the entire conversation. And often, you know, what translators do is they, you know, they take this little short-hand note like journalists do. And afterwards, you know, they've just been caught up in the moment and they haven't got the big picture. Consecutive translation is different. You know, kind of you're trying to convey the whole mood of like big chunks of dialogue that have already been there. But, you know, sometimes you might not get that right either. And it breaks up the flow of the discussion. That's terrible. And often it's, you know, the kind of the person who translates, it's different. You know, some of our best translators are women. But, you know, hearing a woman's voice, you know, translating a guy who has a particular guy's way of speaking and a macho way of speaking and a crude way of speaking, you know, be that Putin, or I've seen that happen with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, you know, and it gets translated by a much more refined, you know, female speaker, you've just lost the whole thing. And, you know, many of the translators on the Russian side are not competent in English in the way that you would hope they are. They're not, it's not just that they're not native speakers. They're just not trained to the same high standards they used to be in the past. And you just lose the nuance, you lose the feel. You know, you almost need, you know, kind of the interpretive actor, you know, doing, you know, the kind of the interpretation. You need to match it as much as you can in the way that you, you know, do voiceovers in film. The best way to talk to Putin is one-on-one in his own language. I mean, I have a really great friend here who is one of the best interpreters. Putin is often asked by the, you know, the media to interpret for him. He just, he was at the Institute that I was, I mean, I know him from that kind of period. And he is just excellent, just like Pavel Polashenko was absolutely phenomenal at interpreting Gorbachev. Now, he didn't always interpret him accurately because Gorbachev made lots of grammatical gaffes and sometimes was, you know, Gorbachev himself would joke that Polashenko, you know, spoke better for Gorbachev than Gorbachev could himself. But Putin is actually quite precise and careful in the way that he speaks because there's a lot of menace sometimes to things deliberately. Other times there's lots of humour and he's telling a joke for a particular reason. And a lot of it is, I mean, he actually uses the richness of the Russian language and the crudity of language that can't be conveyed in English. Also facial expressions that go along with it. Yeah, facial expressions, body language, the way that he sits back in the chair and slouches, the kind of the way that he makes fun of people and he, you know, kind of uses irony. Just some of it is just lost and it needs to be conveyed. The depth of humour and wit, I've met quite a few political leaders like that and they speak only Russian when I was travelling in Ukraine. I don't know how you translate that. I think it's almost, the other person that reminds me like that a little bit is Obama. There's, Obama had a wit and an intelligence, but like he would smile as he said something that add a lot to it. Like that he's trolling you or he's being sarcastic or like, I don't know, it's me converting into words. It's obvious that all English speakers, if they listen to Obama, but if you had to translate to a different language, I think you're going to lose a lot of that. Yeah, I mean, when I watched the, I mean, I watched many of Putin's speeches, you know, kind of just in Russian, not looking at any of the, you know, the subtitles or anything. And it's just watching the way that his body language is at the time when he's saying things, the way that he'll smirk, he'll sneer, he'll laugh. He'll ad lib, you know, kind of from something that obviously kind of, you know, wasn't there on the prepared speech. And it's really critical. And, you know, kind of a lot, some people speak, you know, like Trump, it's just, it's kind of just words. Putin, the words are very important. Trump, it's the atmosphere. It's the kind of the way you feel about things. It's the buzz you get, you know, it's revving people up. It's the kind of slogans and Putin, it's, you know, he's conveying a lot in what he's saying there. But I think, I mean, of course, I don't know much because I only speak Russian and English, but I have in English or Russian have not met almost anyone ever as interesting in conversation as Putin. I think he shines not in speeches, but in interactions with others. Yeah, when you watch those interviews and things with him, and I've, you know, been at many of these sessions, it's been hours of him parrying questions. And it's like watching a boxer sparring, you know, in a kind of training bout. Yeah, come on, give me another one, you know, and it's kind of like, and he prides himself. And he's made mistakes often, but the breadth of, you know, the issues that he's often covered has been interesting, has been fascinating. And I used to just take, you know, kind of really detailed notes about this because you learn a ton, but it's also about his worldview again. I mean, he does live in a certain box like we all do. And, you know, again, his world experience is not as extensive as, you know, you would hope it would be. But that's why you have to really pay attention. That's where we've messed up. That's where we haven't really paid a lot of attention to what he's been saying. He's been telegraphing this grievance, this dissatisfaction, this, I'm gonna do something for years. And the thing is during war time, the combined with propaganda and the narratives of resentment and grievance that you dig in on those. Like maybe you start out not believing it, but you're sure it's all gonna believe it eventually. Well, you convince yourself over time. Yeah. Look, the longer you're in a position like Putin, 22 years now, coming from 23 years, could be out there for 36 years, you become more and more rigid. I mean, this is again, you know, something that you see in history. You know, you look at, you know, people through history have moved from kind of being kind of left wing and, you know, in their perspectives to hard right. They kind of have a, but kind of a sort of an ossification or a rigidity emerges in their views. I mean, again, I used to have these arguments with Professor Pius about Lenin, because he would talk about Lenin, but he didn't change his views. He was just a guy who was, you know, but he didn't change his mind from being 18. Have you not thought about that? I mean, it's like, we're not formed, fully formed individuals at 18. You know, we don't know anything. We know something, but not everything. I mean, obviously the younger context, you know, the kind of the way that you kind of grow up, the place you grew up, the things that happened to you, the traumas you have. I mean, all of these have an impact, but then if you don't grow beyond all of that, and Putin's been stuck in place since 2000, when he became president. He's not out and about, you know, kind of being a man of the people. You know, he's not doing the kind of things that he used to do. Yeah, he gets out there and he goes to Kazakhstan and, you know, Tajikistan, and he goes to China and he does this and that, and then to COVID, he didn't go anywhere. I mean, very few places. And so he's got stuck. And that worries me a lot, because you could see before that he, you know, had a bit more of flexibility of thought. And that's why nobody should be in place forever. You should always kind of like get out there and go out there and learn a new skill, you know, kind of. You need some, it needs to sort of, you know, he needed to get out more and do something different. You had an interesting point you've made that both Vladimir Zelensky and Putin are thinking about, they're just politicians. They're thinking about the 2024 election, which is coming up for both of them. Yeah, I've said that in some of the other interviews. Yeah, that's true. That's so interesting. I mean, I know. Because their election's going to be pretty much at the same time. As the US election also. Oh, those will be before. I mean, because it's sometime in that, you know, early part of the year for the presidential election. Yeah, and also, I don't know if you know about US elections, but they actually last way longer than a year. We're in it now, aren't we? You know, already. We're already starting. So there's going to be a significant overlap. Yeah, you know, you're right. Do you think that actually comes into play in their calculus? I think it was one of the reasons why Putin invaded in February of 2022, because it was going to be two years. I mean, he thought it'd be over by March of 2022. And he got two years to prepare for the election. And he got a big boost. You know, not only he got a boost from Crimea. I mean, I didn't mention that before. I mean, one of the reasons for invading Crimea and annexing or invading Ukraine the first time and annexing Crimea was, look, what happened to his ratings? They went from kind of declining. And they were still pretty good, you know, by anybody's standards to just rocketing off into the stratosphere. I mean, I didn't really meet anybody in Russia who thought that annexing Crimea was, you know, kind of a bad thing. I mean, even, you know, kind of people who were opposed Putin on so many other things. Crimea was, you know, Kremlin, they kept saying, you know, this is kind of, you know, we got it back. You know, it should never have gone away. It was ours, you know, but, you know, this is more complex. And he wasn't, I don't think at the time, planning on annexing all of Ukraine when he went in this special multi-operation. He was going to try to turn it into what Belarus has become, you know, part of a, you know, bring back the Commonwealth of Independent States or the union, then a new union with Belarus and Ukraine and Russia over time. But certainly, you know, remove Ukraine as a major factor, independent factor on the world stage and, you know, consolidate Crimea and maybe, you know, kind of incorporate Donetsk and Luhansk, you know, kind of that was also a possibility. But it wasn't in his intention in any case to have something on this kind of scale. He wanted to get on with then preparing for what was going to be, he would think, the cakewalk, the shoe-in of the next presidential election. I mean, last time around, he actually invited a bit of competition with this person who's reputed to be his goddaughter, Ksenia Sobchak, you know, for a bit of, you know, kind of entertainment for people. You know, this next time around, you know, maybe he wasn't really planning on running, you know, against any other, you know, serious opposition. He was just going to have the acclaim of, you know, the kind of the great leader, like President Xi in China. You know, Putin, you know, was basically, I think, you know, he also hoped that he would be able to devolve some authority away, you know, kind of so he's more like the, you know, the supreme leader kind of figure, the czar-like figure, the monarch. And then, you know, other people get on with the chief executive, prime ministerial, running the country, and he could kind of like step back and just enjoy this, you know, maybe there was going to be again a new union of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine in some, you know, fashion, and he could preside over that. So speaking of opposition, you've criticized the famed Putin critic, Alexei Navalny. What's the nature of your criticism? Well, it hasn't really been a kind of a criticism in the way that, you know, people have implied, but more just reminding people that Navalny isn't some stooge of the West, as other people have, you know, kind of depicted him in the Russian film, but, you know, saying that this is kind of, you know, he's pro-Western. He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. You know, in the past, he's articulated, you know, things are not so dissimilar from some of the people around Putin. And it's more just reminding people that, you know, just because you kind of see somebody, you know, as a kind of an opposition figure or somebody who might be more palatable from, you know, your perspective looking from the West, they're not always going to be, you know, what you think they are. Alexei Navalny is a Russian, and, you know, in a particular Russian context, he's different from Putin, but he wouldn't necessarily, you know, kind of run, you know, the Russian system in ways that we will like. So that's kind of, it's not a kind of a criticism. It's more of a critique of the way that we look at things. You know, I think it's a mistake to always, you know, say, well, this is pro-Western or this is a, you know, liberal. I mean, what the heck does that mean, pro-Western? I mean, he's a Russian. He's a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. And he's often, you know, been, you know, quite critical about immigration. He's had some negative views about, you know, from one part of the moment he said, don't feed the Caucasus. You know, kind of played upon some of the, you know, the racial and ethnic tensions in the West. And he's kind of, you know, he's kind of had some negative views about, you know, the Russian and the Russians inside of, you know, Russia itself as well. Now he is a pluralist and then he's kind of, and he wants to have, you know, a different set of political actors there, but he also isn't promoting revolution. He's not Lenin. He's not wanting to bring down the state. He wants to kind of, you know, change the people who are in charge. That's what he's being basically focused on. And I guess the bigger picture there is, it's not trivial to know that if you place another human in power to replace the current human in power, that things are going to be better. They could be a lot worse because there's a momentum to a system. A system is bigger than just this leader, even when that leader has a huge amount of power. That's absolutely right. And, you know, he grew up in that, you know, same system. Now he's younger than Putin. So he's got a different generational perspective. And he's not wedded to the Soviet Union or, you know, kind of some concept of the Russian empire. He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time. I don't know what he's doing, you know, in jail, but he's probably not sitting around, you know, reading Lomonosov and, you know, the kind of great kind of tracts of Russian history. Could be, actually. But I mean, I think, you know, Navalny has a different worldview and a different perspective, just like Medvedev was different, you know, in his time and presidency and made some, you know, changes and some innovations there. But don't think that they're going to be radically different. Because look, Gorbachev. I mean, he was so different from Andropov and Chinyenko and others as a person. But he was also constrained by the system. And he wanted to have change, but he wanted evolutionary change. He didn't know how to do it, but he didn't want to bring the whole system down. Look at Khrushchev. When he came in, you know, after that whole period of, you know, everybody trying to figure out what to do after Stalin had died. And there was all this kind of back and forth. And eventually Khrushchev emerges. And, you know, he tries to make changes to the system, but he's also a creature of a very specific context. He's grown up in the same system. And he, you know, kind of brings all kinds of elements of chaos there, you know, to the whole thing. And, you know, gets into a standoff with the United States that we know is the Cuban Missile Crisis. And eventually, you know, gets removed. You know, we're looking at what's happening in the United Kingdom right now. You know, they've just churned through three prime ministers and actually five prime ministers in, you know, kind of as many years. But all of those prime ministers have come out of the context of the Conservative Party. And they're all, you know, kind of just shades of, you know, the same thing. They've all come out of the same academic and, you know, kind of privileged backgrounds. Even Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister who's the first, you know, Indian or Anglo-Indian prime minister in British history. It was a kind of phenomenal, you know, kind of as a child of Indian immigrants, but also a person of great privilege from the same academic and party background as the others. You know, so there are always differences with those human beings, but those contexts matter a lot. What is the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine with a tactical nuclear weapon? Well, Putin's definitely been thinking about it, right? I mean, he is the kind of person, if he's got an instrument, he wants to figure out how to use it. You know, we look at polonium, we look at Novichok, you know, we look at all kinds of things. You know, he's also presided over in Syria. He has, you know, put in charge of the war in Ukraine now. General Savrykin is known as General Armageddon, you know, the kind of person who, you know, pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons in Syria, you know, for example. So, you know, don't think that Putin, you know, hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be. The question is really the calculation. It's his estimation of the probability that it will get the desired effect. We keep talking about this idea of escalate to de-escalate. That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it. But it's the whole idea that you do something really outrageous to get everybody else to back off. Now, when you talked about the precedent that the United States set of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what, you know, he obviously meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course, which, of course, we would then say, well, we showed then how the impermissibility of evidence and the permissibility of ever doing that again. But what he's talking about is the precedent of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war, because he reads that saying, well, you know, the US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war was brought to a quick conclusion. And of course, there's a huge debate in America about whether it was necessary to do that, whether the war was ending anyway. Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds of the Japanese high command? I mean, there's all kind of books being written about that. And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt in the wake of that was just, you know, just the shock of what actually happened. And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know, basically coming to terms with the fact that we did something like that. You know, the firebombing, you know, we've also looked at all the bombing, you know, in Vietnam and everywhere. And, you know, all these massive bombing campaigns and realizing they actually often had the opposite effect. Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have contributed and there's a lot of, you know, scholarship suggesting it did to the end of the war. But a lot of the big bombing campaigns and the destruction actually prolonged wars because they made people fight back as we're kind of seeing in the case of Ukraine. So Putin has to calculate the probability that if he uses some tactical nuclear weapon, that it will get the desired effect, which is get us to capitulate and Ukraine to capitulate. Us to capitulate, meaning the United States and the Europeans not supporting Ukraine anymore, pushing towards a negotiating table and negotiating Ukraine away. And Ukraine saying, okay, we give up, like happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or in Japan. So it's his calculation, you know, as much as anything else, which is really important. He said, we have to show him that he won't get that out of it. It's kind of less our probability and, you know, kind of the odds of it. It's just how he calculates that probability of getting what he wants. I mean, I guess that's how the game of poker works. It's your probability and your estimate of their probability and your estimate of their estimate of your probability and so on and so forth. I think he has two tools, right? So one is actually the actual use of nuclear weapons and then the threat of the- Oh, the threat is very effective. And the more real you make the threat- That's right. So it's like the more you approach the actual use, like get very close to using it. He's already using Chernobyl, Zaporizhzhia and then Yuzhno-Ukraine, the other nuclear reactor. So he's using civilian nuclear reactors as a dirty bomb. So it's ironic that he has Sergei Shoigu, his defense minister, calling people up and saying the Ukrainians are going to use a dirty bomb. They're already doing it. I mean, what is kind of more destructive than stirring up all the radioactive dust in Chernobyl as you send your troops through, for example, or shelling the Chernobyl plant and the sarcophagus and putting it at risk? And Zaporizhzhia, you've got the International Atomic Energy Agency running out there in utter panic and kind of also trying to intervene in the conflict. So you're putting civilian nuclear reactors at risk. I mean, that also has the great added effect of cutting off Ukraine's power supply because Zaporizhzhia in particular, it was probably the third of Ukraine's power generation or some really high percentage. I'll have to go back and take a look at that. But that's a twofer. It's a kind of a double effect there of undermining power generation, also frightening Germans and others who've already been very worried about nuclear power and increasing your leverage on the energy front, but also scaring people from the perspective of the use of nuclear weapon. Those reactors also become a nuclear weapon, tactically deployed. And as you said, the discussion of using a nuclear weapon and engendering all those fears, and he's already got an effect. Everyone's running around talking about the Cuban missile crisis and secret diplomacy and how we negotiate away Ukraine in return for Putin not blowing up a nuclear weapon. So he's got a lot of people already talking about that. So sorry for the difficult and dark question. It could be for you directly or more like, do you think we have a plan for this? What happens if he does drop a nuclear weapon? Do you have a sense that the United States has a good plan? I know we're talking about it. I think we probably have several plans because it depends on what, where, when, how. But don't, and also don't these things happen very quickly? Well, there's also signaling and signs of movement there. I mean, I want to be very, you know, kind of careful about this. But then the thing is, it's also very important that we do this with other nuclear powers. So the other thing that's different from how it might've been in the past, and particularly different from the Cuban missile crisis and the Iran missile crisis, we're not the only nuclear players. China has a major nuclear arsenal now, less on the strategic side, but building it up, but very much on the intermediate range and tactical. Kim Jong-un is firing off weapons left, right, and center at the moment in North Korea. We've got other rogue states. Putin's behaving like a rogue state, just to be very clear. And this is what we've got with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. We've also got India and Pakistan, and we've got other states we're not supposed to talk about that we know have nuclear capacities and others that would like to have nuclear capacities. And the whole question here is about also proliferation. Getting back to that time when Ukraine had nuclear weapons, at least there on its territory instead of Belarus and Kazakhstan, you've got to wonder, was it wise for them to give it up? We were worried about loose nukes, nuclear weapons getting out of hand. Proliferation at the time, we wanted fewer nuclear powers. Russia wanted that too. Now we're going to have more. We've got more. And what Putin is saying is, well, that was stupid of Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons. In fact, my colleagues and I, back in our report and back in the USSR kind of suggest they shouldn't give them up. And then that's why we had the Budapest memorandum. That's why the United States, the United Kingdom in particular, have basically some responsibility and obligation going back to 1994 when they promised Ukraine that gave up the nuclear weapons, their territorial integrity and sovereignty would remain intact, some obligation to actually do something to step up. If we step back from that, this is the thing that people are not talking about. What about nuclear proliferation? If you're South Korea, Japan, you're any other country that's kind of worrying about your neighbours and what might happen to you? Just like India and Pakistan are both like, whoa, we've got to kind of keep our strategic nuclear balance here. Everything is up for question. Saudis will want a nuclear weapon. The Turks already want one. They've talked about one for years. Why should the Iranians be the only one with an Islamic nuclear weapon? And if we know that Iran has breakout capacity now, the Saudis and all the other states that are in opposition to Iran will also want to have some nuclear capacity. And the United States before wanted to maintain everything under the nuclear umbrella. One of the reasons why Sweden and Finland are joining NATO is because of suddenly all of these nuclear threats. Sweden was actually the last country on the planet to want to have nuclear weapons. They were actually pushing for a ban on nuclear weapons in the United Nations. Now that Putin's doing the nuclear sabre attack, the sabre rattling, they're talking about joining and are on the verge of joining a nuclear alliance. See what's happening here. So we have to make it more and more difficult for Putin to even contemplate that. That's why people are saying this is reckless, this is irresponsible. Putin is actually making the world less safe for himself down the line either. But he's thinking short term here. He's thinking, what can I do? What do I actually have? You can also destroy lots of infrastructure, as he's doing. You can use subversion. We're worried about all of the undersea cables, all these weird things happening off Orkney or in the Mediterranean or all these other things that are happening, Nord Stream 2, pipelines, other infrastructure. There's all kinds of other things that he can do as well here. It's not just, again, this is a civilian nuclear threat of blowing up one of the reactors. Now, he's got to be sure about where the wind turns and the wind blows. And there's all kinds of things to factor in here. But Putin is definitely sitting around calculating with other people, what can I do to turn this around? I mean, he still thinks that he can win this. Or in other words, he can end it on his terms, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhia. And capitulation. Or recognize this as being part of Russia. Or he can freeze it and then figure out where it goes from there. What other pressure he can put on. I mean, I'm sure he's confident he can get rid of Zelensky. And he can prevail over us. I mean, look, the UK is going through prime ministers faster than I'm changing my socks. So it's like, he can prevail on the, basically, he can have an impact on the political scene in Europe and elsewhere. I mean, again, everyone's talking about winter coming. And Putin's thinking, yeah, great. I've destroyed the infrastructure of Ukraine. Are you worried about the winter? Well, yeah. But I mean, look, the other thing is that we have to start preparing. I mean, we have to start thinking about this. We've got a wartime economy situation. That's where we are. We've got the home front to think about as well. Putin has declared war on us. He did that on September 30th. And he's done it at other points as well. We've just not paid attention. But he was pretty explicit on September 30th. I mean, go back and watch that speech. And he is gambling that people will go back to basically taking Russian gas and oil, but it's not gonna be that simple as well. And do people, and then the question has to be, do we really kind of think he's gonna play fair after that? When he's kind of also shown that he can leverage that. It's such a complicated world. It is complicated. It's very complicated. And it's never, I mean, it feels like things are heating up. Like, and China is very quiet right now. Because they're watching what happens. I mean, for President Xi, he's trying to consolidate his power even further after the party Congress, but he doesn't want to look like he made a mistake by backing Putin. I mean, he thought Putin was also gonna be in out. And Ukraine would probably be open for massive Chinese investment. China was the largest investor. In Ukraine before the war, largest single investor. I mean, the EU was bigger, of course. How do you hope the war ends in Ukraine? Well, I mean, I do hope it ends, you know, with a ceasefire and a negotiated solution, but it has to be with Russia compromising on something. And that's not where we are right now. Do you think both sides might be willing to compromise? Most wars always end in that way. I mean, nobody's ever happy. But they don't seem to, either side, like legitimately doesn't want to compromise right now. Yeah, because I mean, look, the thing is that for Ukraine right now, anything is a compromise at its expense, right? Yeah. Vast devastation, unbelievable casualty rates, biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Russia's just said, sorry, this is our territory. It's not just Crimea. I think there could have been a negotiation over that. But, you know, Donetsk and Luhansk, I mean, we've got all kinds of formulas we've had all the way through history of, you know, putting things under a kind of guardianship, receivership of territory, the United Nations, all kinds of different ways of formulating that. We could have easily been creative. But Russia's basically saying, nope, sorry, we've taken this. And any other negotiations, just you recognizing this for us not doing more destruction. I mean, that is not the basis for a negotiation. And, you know, having, you know, kind of people come and just sort of laying those terms down is not a starting position. I think Russia is also, you know, in a dilemma of its own making now because Putin has made it very difficult, you know, to compromise just by everything that he said. Now, for Ukraine, they've already won a great moral, political and military victory. It's just hard to see it, right, at the particular moment. They've done what the Finns did in the Winter War, which the Finns were devastated by the Winter War as well, but they pushed them back. Now the Finns lost a lot of territory, they lost Karelia and, you know, huge swathes of territory, but they got to be Finland. And now they're, you know, joining NATO, but they've been part of the EU. The question is how to, you know, get Ukraine to be Ukraine in a success. But, you know, is, you know, and that's the challenge, now again, they've already won, psychologically, politically, militarily, because Putin hasn't succeeded in what he wanted to do, but he has succeeded in completely and utterly devastating them. And this is the kind of the old Muscovite, the old Russian imperial, old Soviet mentality, you know, going all the way back to when the Muscovites were the bag men for the, you know, the horde, for the Mongols, it was destruction. You know, you don't play with us, we'll destroy you. People talk about it as mafia, but it's all, you know, all you have to go down is to go and see Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublyov. I mean, I remember, you know, seeing that film when I was first as a student in Moscow and just being, whoa, this is so brutal. I mean, this is just unremittingly brutal, because the whole point is that you show people who's the boss. The destruction is the point of things as well, because, you know, you are emphasizing your domination. And that's what Putin is doing right now, is saying, okay, you want to go in a different direction, so be it, but I'm going to make you suffer. Remember when Khodorkovsky got out of the penal colony, when Putin let him out eventually? He said he's suffered enough. But he suffered for 10, 11 years. I don't think Putin feels that Ukraine has suffered enough at this point, or we have suffered enough. So there's a part of this invasion that's punishment for something. Yeah, it's medieval. I mean, look, we're all capable of the same things, right? There was all that destruction, and that's what Assad was like in Syria, like his father, who you destroy because you teach him a lesson. And look, Britain did that in the colonial era. I mean, all the history of British colonialism and all that, and they did it. The colonial era, all the history of British colonialism is exactly the same. I mean, all the Mao Mao, and Kenya, up until recent times, brutality. Teaching people, teaching them a lesson, you have to suffer. The US did it. I mean, we did it with the Native Americans, did it all over the place as well. This is kind of what big states do at different points in history. It's just that Russia has not moved on from that. And we've learned some lessons later. We've fully internalized them, things that we've done, kind of the past United States, ideally are trying to do better, and most of Europe's trying to do better as well. Think about France and Algeria. Again, we can see this in many different settings. But I think for Putin right now, he hasn't taught all of us sufficient a lesson. I just, I talked to hundreds of people in Ukraine, and the tough thing, the inspiring thing is that there's a unity. The tough thing is a lot of them speak intensely of hate towards not just Russia, but Russians. Russians. That's how Europeans felt about Germany and Germans at the end of World War II. And generational hate. I don't think that hate is gonna pass. Well, it might well take a generation. I mean, when I was a kid in the 70s, I went on exchanges to Germany, and that was like 30 years, more than 30 years after the end of the war. My grandfather had fought in World War I, wouldn't speak to my parents when they sent me on a, I mean, he hadn't fought in World War II, he fought in World War I, and he hated the Germans. And he did not want me going to Germany as an exchange student. He refused to meet kind of the German kid who came to stay at my house, for example. I mean, it takes a long time to get over that. But you do, and we have. We have in Europe, and that was the whole point of all of that kind of exercise of European unity after World War II. Now, the big challenge is, what do we do with Russia? Because a lot of people are talking now, we can't have European security without Russia. Other people are saying, we can't have a Europe kind of with Russia. So how do we deal with this? We've got to basically kind of, it's gonna be like Japan and Germany after World War II, after this. Just the level of the atrocities that have been carried out. As you said, the level of hatred. But we found a way of doing it. Now, a lot of it will require change on the part of Russia as well, and Russians, and really thinking about this. I mean, Gorbachev before tried to do, in the late 1980s, with the black spots in, with glasnost, with openness and talking about Russian history, just kind of never, sort of withered on the vine as time went on. What gives you hope about the future? Well, my hope comes into the fact that we've done things before, that we've got ourselves out of tough times and we've overcome stuff and in people, because I meet amazing people. You just talked about hundreds of people that you've met within Ukraine. And people all think differently. Contexts and circumstances change and people can evolve. Some people get stuck. Putin's got stuck, but people can evolve. And I do think that if we all pull together, and we've seen this in so many contexts, we can find solutions to things, just like we get back again to our discussion about scientists and just the kind of amazing breakthroughs of what we did on COVID or done on kind of other diseases and things. And look, there is some similarities. There's a pathology around war and conflict. Years ago in the 1990s, I worked on a lot of the projects that were funded by the Carnegie Corporation of the United States under the then presidency of David Hamburg, who was a scientist. And I actually did see a lot of parallels between the sort of like the pathology of disease and kind of the pestilence of conflict kind of idea. And of course, these parallels have to be very careful because they're not neat. But there was kind of like an idea in there. And how do you sort of treat this? How do you deal with this? And we did come up with all kinds of ideas. And things that are still out there. We've created institutions that have helped to keep the peace. We just have neglected them, allowed them to degrade, just like the United Nations. And we've created problems inside of them, like the veto power of the permanent powers on the UN Security Council. But we can change that. You just got to have a will. And I do think out there, there are sufficient people with a will. And we've just got to get people mobilized. I mean, I'm always amazed by how people can mobilize themselves around a crisis. Remember Winston Churchill, I don't quote all the time because I can never remember half his quotes. But I do remember the one about never let a good crisis go to waste. And I always think that that, yeah, we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste. And something else can come out of this, just like in Ukraine. We worried before about corruption in Ukraine, the influence of the oligarchs. We've got our own oligarchs here in the US we need to deal with as well. But this is a chance to do it differently. Yeah, it really is a chance to do things differently. And a part of that is young people. I have to ask you. And it's young people. I mean, I'm feeling a bit on the older side now, but I still feel I've got a bit of, you know, kind of youth within me yet. They're 57. I'm not that old, but I'm not that young. But we have to work together with younger and older people. You've got to work together in coalitions of, you know, across generations. You remind me of kids who just graduated college and say, and I feel old. Yeah, no. I don't actually feel old, but it is a number, age. And you know, when you kind of think about when I was- I thought you don't like math. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's like things like that. Yeah, but I find it interesting. But you know, when I was, I remember when I was a little kid, I kept thinking about the year 2000 and I thought, oh my God, I'll be dead. I'll be 35. Yeah. That's 22 years ago. You've overcome a lot of struggle in your life based on different reasons, as you write about. Class being one of them, your funny sounding accent being another, or just representation of class. But in general, through all of that, to be at the White House, to be one of the most powerful voices in the world, what advice would you give from grounded in your life story to somebody who's young, somebody who's in high school and college thinking about the future, and high school and college thinking of how they can have a big positive impact on the world? Look, we all have a voice, right? We all have agency. We all actually have the ability to do something. And you can start small in your local community or even in your own classroom, just helping somebody else out or speaking up and advocating on behalf of things. You know, when I was about 11 years old, I got involved with other kids on Save the Whales. You know, we had all this kind of, we were hardly Greta Thunberg, but we kind of got together in a kind of network, writing to people and trying to raise money to help save the whales. Now, actually, the whales of the world are doing somewhat better. I can't say that that was because of me and my network, but it was kind of a way of organizing and kind of joining in a larger movement. Everybody can be part of something bigger. The thing is, it's all about working together with others and giving other people a chance as well. I think one thing is that our voices have more impact when they're amplified. They don't have to be the voices of discord or the voices of hate. You know, you've been trying to do this with your podcast, you know, kind of give people a voice, give them a kind of platform and get them to join in with other people. And one of the things that I've been trying to do is kind of go and talk to just as many people as I possibly can and say, look, we can all do something here. We can all lend our voices to a cause that we care deeply about. We can be kind to each other. We can give other people a chance. We can kind of speak out while we see that something is wrong. And we can try to explain things to people. And what I'm trying to do at the moment is just sort of explain what I've learned about things and hope that that helps people make informed judgments of their own and that, you know, kind of maybe take things further and learn something more. It's like kind of like building up on the knowledge that I have to try to impart to others. And everybody can do that different ways. You can kind of reach back and say, reach back, yeah, if you're 14, help somebody who's seven. If you're 21, help somebody who's 14. You know, kind of if, you know, the kind of my age now, I'm always trying to, you know, reach back and, you know, work with younger people, listen to younger people, help them out, make connections for them, listen to what they have to say about something, try to incorporate that in, you know, things that I'm saying as well. The main point is that we've all got a voice, we've all got agency, and it always works better when we work together with other people. But sometimes it can feel pretty hopeless. It can feel, I mean, there's low points. You seem to have a kind of a restless energy, a drive to you. Were there low points in the beginning when, in your early days, when you're trying to get the education, where it may have not been clear to you that you could be at all successful? Yeah, there always were. I mean, there were lots of points where I was just despondent. But then, you know, I'd meet somebody who would just suddenly turn things around. I was this look, or was I out there looking for it? You know, sometimes, you know, you just, if you're open and receptive to, you know, kind of hearing something from someone else. I mean, you know, there were often times where I felt so despondent, you know, in such a black mood, I didn't think I'd be able to go on. And then I'd have a chance conversation with somebody. I mean, I once remember, you know, I was sitting on a bench, I was probably 11 or 12, just crying my eyes out, just really upset. And an old lady just came and sat next to me, put her arm around me, said, oh, it's all right, pet, what's the matter? You know, it can't be that bad, can it? And it was just this human embrace. It's like somebody, you know, just basically reaching out to me that snapped me out of it. And I thought, you know, here's somebody just, you know, she didn't know who I was. She just felt really bad that I was, you know, sitting, you know, crying. And I mean, I can't even remember what it was about anymore. You know, now it just seems inconsequential. At the time, I probably thought my life was at an end. Just, you know, sometimes people making eye contact with you in the street and saying something to you can kind of pull you out of something. And, you know, it's kind of a, I think you would just have to open yourself up to the prospect that not everyone's bad, just like you were saying before, that there's, you know, good in everybody. Even during, you know, that really difficult period of impeachment, you know, I was trying to listen very carefully to people. And I thought, look, we always, we still have something in common here. We need to remember that. You know, kind of when people are kind of forgetting who they are or, you know, the context in their operating, there's always something that can, you know, can pull you back again. There's always that kind of thread. So I'm sure you were probably attacked by a lot of people, and you were still able to keep that optimism? Well, I kept it into kind of perspective. Like when I was a kid, I mean, things I mentioned before, I got bullied, you know, kind of. Again, and I tried to understand why they're doing this. One of the most amazing things that happened, you know, really on was my dad was a pretty incredible person, and he would always open my eyes to something. I was getting bullied really nastily by a girl at school. And my dad started asking me questions about her. And one day, my dad said we were going to go for a walk. And my town's very small. Remember, it's very depressed, really, you know, a deprived area. And we go to this housing estate, public housing place that's not too far away from where I live. And it's really, you know, kind of one of the most run down places, an already run down place. My dad like knocks on the door and I said, what are we doing, dad? And he says, well, we're going off to, you know, we're going to visit somebody, an old family friend. I think even a distant relative. We're knocking on the door, and this old man answers the door and he's, oh, Alfie. My dad's name was Alf, Alfie. You know, kind of, oh, fancy seeing you here. I haven't seen you. Come on in, have a cup of tea. What are you doing? He said, oh, I'm just walking past with my daughter. We're going for a trip. We're going for a walk. And then suddenly I see that girl. And she's in the kitchen. And I'm thinking, oh my God, bloody hell. You know, British expression, what's this? And it turns out that dad had figured out who she was. And he knew her grandfather, and she was living with her grandfather. And she'd been abandoned by her parents. And she was living in, you know, pretty dire circumstances. And she'd been getting raised by her grandfather. And she was just miserable. And the reason she was bullying me was to make herself feel better. And after that, she never bullied me again. I mean, we didn't even talk. Because there was a connection made. And suddenly she realized that her grandfather, who was the only person she had, knew my dad. And there were some, they were friends, or they were even family. Some, you know, kind of relationship there. I mean, I was raised half north of England. I had no idea how we were related. You know, everybody was some relative. Because people have lived there for generations to get in this very small area. And that turned things around. So just remember, you might have. And that's kind of suddenly taught to me, there's always a reason why somebody's doing something. A lot of people are doing something. Always a reason why somebody's doing something. A lot of the times, they're really unhappy with themselves. Sometimes there's something else going on in their lives. Sometimes they just don't know any better. And I shouldn't take it personally. Because I don't have a personal connection with half these people who are out there saying that they want this and that to happen to me. Well, thank you for the kindness and the empathy you still carry in your heart. I can see it through all that you must have gone through in the recent couple of years. It's really inspiring to see that. And thank you for everything you've done, for the work you've written, and for the work you continue to write and to do. This seems like a really, really difficult time for human civilization on a topic that you're a world expert in. So don't mess it up. No, I know, but that's what I say to everybody out there. Let's just keep it together, right? Yeah, exactly. Let's just keep it together. Your words have a lot of power right now. So it's a really, really tricky time. So thank you so much. Given how valuable your time is to sit down with me today. It was an honor. No, thanks, thanks. No, it's a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you as well. No, thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Fiona Hill. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John Steinbeck. Power does not corrupt, fear corrupts. Perhaps the fear of the loss of power. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/vNhSCF9i8Qs

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Tim Dodd: SpaceX, Starship, Rocket Engines, and Future of Space Travel | Lex Fridman Podcast #356

And the nozzle, so as you're saying, there's a bunch of different design options, but it's a critical part of this, how you do that conversion. Which is what the inverters- It's basically like how much can you convert, is really like the ultimate game. How much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust? Like that's really, at the end of the day, that's what a rocket engine is. The following is a conversation with Tim Dodd, host of the Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel, where he educates and inspires all of us with detailed but accessible explanations of rocket engines and all things space travel. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tim Dodd. Can you give a brief history of SpaceX rockets? So we've got Falcon 1, Falcon 9, there's different versions of those, Falcon Heavy, Starship, and also the Dragon Castles and so on. Well, yeah, Falcon 1 is where it all started. The original intent and the original idea of SpaceX was Elon wanted to try to get something to Mars. He saw that NASA didn't have a current Mars plan and he wanted to go to Mars, so he decided how do I best do this? He literally wanted to, at first, purchase a rocket from Russia. Then after a foiled attempt at doing that, he decided that he was gonna try to develop his own rocket. And the Falcon 1 is what came out of that process. And he developed a pretty incredible team. I don't know how exactly he stumbled upon the team that he stumbled upon that quickly, but the people that he assembled were amazing. And they built the Falcon 1, which was a single Merlin engine, followed by an upper stage engine called the Kestrel engine. Pretty small compared to the things they're working on today, but that Merlin engine continued to evolve into being the power plant for the Falcon 9. They went from a small lift launch vehicle up into the medium class launch vehicle so they could provide services for NASA. That's one of the big things they first kind of hung their hat up was they got the opportunity to fly cargo to the International Space Station under originally what was called the COTS program, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services for NASA, which evolved into the Commercial Resupply Contracts. And that's when SpaceX developed both the Kestrel and they developed both their Dragon capsule, which is a uncrewed at first spacecraft that can dock to the ISS, and the Falcon 9 rocket that can take it to the International Space Station. And then- The Dragon rides on, it's the thing up top that rides on the big booster thing that launches it into orbit. Exactly, yep. The Falcon 9's the semi-truck, the Dragon capsule's the payload. You know, it's the thing being dropped off basically at its destination. And in this case, the destination is the International Space Station. And yeah, so they developed those relatively quickly and became a commercial success before you know it. They're now the number one launch provider in the world, launching more mass to orbit than anybody else, launching more frequently than countries, like the entire country of China who's going crazy right now with launches. Granted, China beat them by two launches this last, in 2022, but prior years, SpaceX beat the entire country of China. I mean, it's nuts. And just like you said, SpaceX still beats China even this year in terms of the amount of payload those. So- The mass to orbit. Yeah, the mass to orbit, right. That China had like 60 something, a couple more launches, but there was just like small cubesat type of launches. Exactly, some of them were literally like 100 kilograms or something, like not large payloads. And so SpaceX customers are different, so whoever wants to send payloads up into space. Yes, but right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with Starlink. One of the biggest reasons they've launched so much mass to orbit is because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload capabilities of the Falcon 9 rocket. So, because they're vertically integrated, because they build their own satellites, because they're building their own rocket, they can literally design a system that's, another manufacturer might've made a more square satellite that was heavier or something, but SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said, here's our constraints, our payload mass constraints, our volume constraints. And they made a funky looking satellite, things like the size of a, it's like a table folded up, which isn't anything I've really ever seen before. But it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket. So therefore, because they're launching those like an insane amount, dozens, 40, 50 times a year or whatever, they're just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before. What about the different versions of Falcon 9? So we can linger on that. What are some interesting memories to you of the different developments in Falcon 9? The very first Falcon 9s had a square array of engines. It had like a three by three by three grid of their Merlin one engines, the one Ds. And I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was two or four flights before they went into this Octaweb configuration where there's eight, like a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle. Still in the same diameter, the rocket was, the fuselage was more or less the same, 3.7 meter wide diameter, but the actual thrust structure changed. And one of the big efficiency gains was you no longer have a corner engine and then like a edge engine and then another corner engine. You can just make eight of the same, kind of part of the Octaweb it's called, the same shape and then your interchangeability and your manufacturability becomes a lot simpler. So that was kind of one of the bigger upgrades at first and they kept stretching it. Every time they like touch this thing, it got longer and like, or taller and taller technically. And then the next big feature that you saw in 2014 would have been they added landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket, which was, I was at, that was the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see, it was CRS-3, so Commercial Resupply Mission 3, and it was probably their, God, I don't remember what that was like, their 14th or 15th launch or something, like pretty early on. And people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting landing legs on it. They just thought it was stupid. They're like, why are they wasting, why is this billionaire Elon Musk guy wasting his time trying to land a rocket? It's not gonna work. So you said the Mars planet was there in the beginning. What about the reusability of rockets? Was that there in the beginning? I think reusability definitely, you know, it's a necessary part of making any kind of interplanetary mission. You know, in order to actually do that, just financially, you have to start reusing these things. In terms of the development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, how early on did the goal of reusing the rocket, having the rocket actually land, how early did that goal creep in? I can't speak for Elon and SpaceX, but it was pretty immediate that they wanted to try to recover. And as a matter of fact, I think the very first two Falcon 9 rockets, and Falcon 1, I think they even wanted to try to recover using parachutes to recover the first stage. And now, fast forward, you know, almost 20 years later, and Rocket Lab's actually doing a concept like that, where they're pulling a parachute after the first stage is reentering, and they actually are trying to recover it with a helicopter, just gonna try to snatch it out of the air. They've actually done it. They've actually done it successfully once. How does the helicopter grab the rocket? With this giant drag line and a hook. Oh, wow. And then it literally just grabs, snags onto the parachute. Wow. And it's pretty amazing. But this is a small rocket. Their rocket's only about a metric ton. The booster is empty. So the rocket releases parachutes really high up. I'd love to see this. Yeah. It's an interesting idea. There's so many interesting ideas and possibilities. Like SpaceX basically just innovated a lot of different weird ideas, just in the pursuit of making things more efficient, reusable, all of that. So basically thinking from first principles how to solve this problem. And so what you find is you'll get all of these kind of crazy kind of solutions. And with SpaceX, they weren't even getting to the point of the booster surviving reentry long enough to be able to pull the parachutes. Yeah. You know, their mass fractions, you know, and that varies. Every single rocket's different. You know, all the, you know, for instance, Rocket Lab uses carbon composite fuselage and tanks, or, you know, same thing. And that's very, very lightweight, has really good mass fractions, and therefore their drag coefficients and things like that, they were able to survive reentry of the first stage, which is something that SpaceX wasn't able to do at the time. What's, what the, kind of the big, I think, breakthrough for SpaceX with reusing the booster is they realized we have to basically slow down before we hit the atmosphere. So they actually do what they used to call a reentry burn, which I still think is the correct term, because it is reentering the atmosphere, but now they call it the entry burn, and they light up three of the nine Merlin engines, not only to slow it down, but actually even while those engines are firing, it creates like a literal like force field as it's falling through the atmosphere. Interesting. And, but it also decreases the velocity by almost half, or around half, and then that therefore decreases the amount of, you know, the biggest thing with the atmosphere is that as it gets compressed against the front of any, anything flying through the atmosphere, the compressed atoms just get hot, and they can get so hot they turn into a plasma, and they get so hot they can just absolutely destroy anything. So they slow down enough that the air molecules don't end up, you know, destroying the vehicle on reentry. And then they, then they realized, I think at some point it was probably a similar crossover, they're like, well, if we're lighting the engines already to slow down in the atmosphere, we can just use that same engine to land. And so like, well, what if we just stuck landing legs on it and just landed the thing vertically? And next thing you know is December 21st, 2015, they did exactly that for the first time, they landed. So you were there before that then, right? Yeah, yeah. In 2014. Yep, early 2014. So that, and for me, like that was so fun watching, you know, that was like the peak of me just becoming obsessed with, with this idea. I'm watching with, like, and back in the day, it was like months between launches, you know? So a launch was like a big idea. I'd wake up at 3 a.m. to watch this landing attempt or whatever, you know? And every, you know, there's CRS-4, almost, almost landed, CRS-5, almost landed CRS-6, CRS-7 blew up. I was watching that on, I think it was like a Saturday morning or maybe a Sunday morning. And I remember watching that and watched it blow up. And I was like, oh my God, now what? You know, and it blew up on ascent. It was their first failure. So it was their 18th flight, I believe. CRS-7, the upper stage had one of the, there's bottles inside the tanks that are filled with helium. And one of those bottles broke off on ascent and actually just completely over-pressured the upper stage. And the upper stage blew up and the whole rocket went kaboom in an uncontrolled manner. And so, so then they came back with vengeance. When they came back, the first mission back is the first time that they landed a rocket, which was awesome. So they returned to flight after the anomaly was, yeah, was landing a rocket. And stuck the landing. Yep, nailed it. Well, actually the first time. So the first time you were there, what was that like? What do you remember from that day? Just, I was surprised at how much bigger the rocket was than I imagined. I was, I originally, when I was going down to Kennedy Space Center, I was disappointed that I wasn't seeing like a, you know, I didn't know a ton about rockets. I knew enough to like know what a space shuttle was, what like the Saturn V was, you know. But that was probably about the end of my knowledge. I just remember being disappointed that I wasn't seeing a big, quote unquote, NASA rocket flying. You know, I was thinking in my head like, oh, I'm gonna see this launch, it's probably gonna be like, you know, three stories tall or something. You know, just some little skinny little stick and some little firecracker and yay, you know. I think I'd almost been pitched that too. I think the people that I was working for at the time, I think they kind of were downplaying it as like, well, it's not a big rocket, sir. It's not gonna be that exciting, you know. But we get out there to the pad and I'm like, this thing's huge. This is not a small rocket. Like this is, it's, you know, it's 70 meters tall, 220 feet tall, it's huge. And I think people forget like the scale of that, you know. It might look skinny and tall and all this stuff, but it's still a very, very large piece of machinery. It's physically about as large as you can ship, the booster's about as big as you can ship across the country, period, without like completely shutting down highways. You know, it is made within those exact specifications of like having, you know, lane privileges and bridges and everything. It's, you know, 12 feet wide, 3.7 meters wide, and it's 45 meters long. So it's like exactly what you can fit with a pretty standard, you know, like before we start getting into crazy amounts of problems shipping the rocket. And it's huge, it's huge. And people just don't understand that. And so when I saw it with my own eyes, I remember just being like, this is so much cooler than I thought. It's hard to believe that that thing is gonna have to lift off the ground and launch up into the air. Maybe that's the most humbling aspect of it, that something that size, humans have come up with a way to take something that size and launching, it'll launch it up into the air. Yeah, there's certainly a very humbling aspect when you watch it actually leave. Was there a sound to it? Was there like a feel? What were the different experiences you first remember? Well, ironically, I didn't end up getting to see that one fly. Oh. I went home. My camera saw it. I left my camera out there, like a remote triggered camera. My first images as a launch photographer at the time was CRS-3, but I went home. It scrubbed too many times. This is back in the day, they were scrubbing like often, and there'd be like a three day, five day, seven day, you just never knew. So I go home and I watched the live stream of it. So I didn't even get to experience my first launch. And anyone that's ever tried to go to a launch can probably empathize because yeah, scrubs are very common in the space flight world. So that one, I didn't get to see. But since then, obviously, I've been able to attend very many launches. How much do you understand the control involved in the landing? How difficult is that problem? I couldn't tell you a single thing about like the code and like the avionics behind it, but I can tell you all the hardware that makes it happen, if that helps. Well, I mean, to me, it seems like whenever I talk to people, they say it's not that big of a deal in terms of the level of intelligence and the control. But to me, it's just like when you observe it, it seems incredible. Because all the variables involved, all the uncertainties involved, all the, because there's aerodynamics. I mean, like there's different temperatures. There's so much going on with the fuel, with the burning, the combustion, just everything that's going on to be able to perform control at such high stakes effectively. That code is probably not written in JavaScript, I guess is what I'm saying. Actually, no, I don't, if I remember, again, this is well outside of my domain, but they're coding in a common language. It's probably gonna be C. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is. And that was one of the things that was weird is that Elon, when he started SpaceX, was like, we're just gonna code in the most common language so that we don't have to have people learn this archaic, weird thing, and we can just literally pull people off the streets and be like, here, write it. Yeah, it's probably C++. I mean, it'd be epic if it was Python or something, but I don't, I think reliable systems have to be written in C, C++ probably, which is a common language, which is something. I imagine NASA engineers would probably have to use some kind of proprietary language in the olden days for security, for privacy, all that kind of stuff. Oh, in the olden, old, old days. Like, they were inventing code and language from scratch. For sure. But still, it's just still incredible that it's able to do that. Like, just the feat of engineering involved is truly, it's like one of the marvels to observe about these rockets coming back to Earth that they're able to land. Like, the drama of it is just incredible to see. Yeah, well, one of the fun things to remember, too, with, specifically with the Falcon 9 and the Falcon 9, or Falcon Heavy boosters, I mean, it's the same thing, basically. They shut down all but one of the nine engines, and even with that one engine at its minimum throttle setting, it's still too much thrust to hover. So as this rocket's coming down, if they start a little bit too early, if they light that engine too early, it will actually stop above the ground and will not be able to lower itself. It will literally stop, like, say it stopped 200 feet above the ground, their only option is to kill the engine, and then it's just gonna fall those 200 feet. So it's what we call a suicide burn or a hover slam, kind of interchangeable terms, because your thrust to weight ratio is never below one. So they have to actually literally be riding the throttle. So what you do is you kind of start, ideally, you kind of start in the middle of your window of throttle range. So let's pretend your engine can throttle down to 40% of its maximum rated thrust. You might start at like 70% of thrust in the middle of that window of where it could burn. So if all of a sudden it's kind of coming in too hot, you have room to throttle up. If you're coming in too, you're actually a little too early, you throttle it down. You have a little bit of wiggle room. It's just amazing how smoothly and how perfectly they're able to still control that thing, even though they're down to one engine out of the nine, and they're still riding the finest margin of what's possible. And they're continually playing with that to try to get it, because every bit of fuel they're using and propellant they're using to land is propellant they weren't using to put something into space. So they want that to be as efficient as possible. So they're really watching them hone that in and just continue to evolve and edit that and just get it to be the workhorse. We're coming up on 100 consecutive landings, perfect landings, 100. I think they've done like 150 something landings altogether, 160 altogether, but we're talking in a row without blowing up, which five years ago was completely experimental and insane. And now we're coming up to the point where we're 100 in a row. It's like this is becoming more reliable. And the landing, which is not the primary mission, this is purely for SpaceX's gain, is to recover the booster. It has nothing to do with the effect of getting the payload on orbit most of the time. And the landing is really only for their benefit and their gain. Long-term gain. Like it's a long-term investment in being able to recover the boosters. Can you believe all this was done in basically 10 years? So we've seen this development over a period of 10 years. So like where we started commercial spaceflight at scale to today, where it's almost starting to be mundane. Yeah. What Falcon 9 is able to do. Yeah. I can't really believe it. I mean, obviously, even just in the, I think I'm a fairly fair weather fan, I really didn't start paying attention to like 2014. Yeah. And just seeing what it was like back then to what it's like. Like I don't watch every launch at all anymore. Like I'll catch the big ones. I'll stream some of the really big ones. But like back in the day, I, like I said, would wake up in the middle of the night to catch these streams or catch these launches and watch them because they were such a big deal. And there's maybe only five of them a year, you know? And so it was a really big deal. Nowadays it's like, oh yeah, and there's literally like two a week on average now. It's insane. From SpaceX alone. Let alone, you know, United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab, any of the Chinese missions, you know, I mean, all of there's countless. It's insane. It's hard to, really, really, really hard to keep up with. I wonder at which point in the future, the number of launches to orbit will exceed the number of launches of airplanes, like on the surface of earth. Yeah, I have to admit, I kind of have a hard time extrapolating out that far. You know, there's a lot of people that are like big futurists and really do think about like interplanetary stuff and think about colonizing Mars and stuff. I have a hard time predicting like when Starship's gonna fly, the orbital launch. You know, and that's like imminent-ish, like month or two scale timeframe. And yet I'm still like, I can't tell you when that's gonna, I can't tell you anything about like when we're gonna land on Mars or what that economy and what that, you know, the scale of launch operations is gonna look like in order to do that. Because it's just so hard. I wouldn't have predicted where we're at today five years ago, you know? It's insane. It's so hard to predict. And yeah, but it's funny because there's so many like new companies starting up trying to predict that. And it's a really exciting, you know, startup culture right now. I think when you make certain engineering decisions and hiring decisions and like what you focus on in terms of both business and engineering, it's good to think on a scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years. That's one of the things that Elon is exceptionally good at, which is asking the question, okay, this might seem impossible right now, but what's the obvious way to do this if we look out 20 years? And then you start to make decisions. You start to make decisions about robotics, about brain and computer interfaces, about space travel. They make a lot of sense when you look at the scale of 10, 20, 50, 100 years. And don't make any sense if you look at the scale of just months. So, but of course, the actual work of day-to-day is focused on the next few months. Because there's deadlines, there's missions, they have to accomplish. Anyway, returning back to the brief history of space rockets. The Falcon Heavy, so what else is there? So we talked about Falcon 9 and the rapid development there. What other flavors of Falcon is there and how does that take us to Starship? Yeah, realistically, the Falcon 9 evolved more or less kind of like just got more powerful and a little bit longer and more capable. But nowadays they fly what's called the Block 5, even though it's like the eighth or ninth iteration of the Falcon 9, but they call it Block 5. It's the one that has the black landing legs, the black interstage. They have a fleet of roughly 10 or so that are doing the majority of the legwork these days. And they're flying up to 15 times, I think, right now as the current booster leader. They're also recovering the fairings, so the nose cone of the rockets are frequently, if not every time, being recovered. Same with the booster for the most part. And the only thing being expended is the upper stage. And that's kind of where the Falcon 9 is ending. It really doesn't make sense to develop that infrastructure any longer. So they went with the next step, which is go even bigger physically. So they have more margin for upper stage reusability. And that's what we see with Starship and Super Heavy. So the Super Heavy booster, the whole system is confusing. The whole system's kind of considered Starship, but technically the Starship is just the upper stage, which is also like the spaceship, which is also the upper stage. And then the booster itself is considered the Super Heavy booster. And that's what they've been working on. Publicly it came out in 2016, as the, at the time it was the ITS, the Interplanetary Transportation System. Later, and I think about 20, by the end of that year, 2017 it kind of became known as the BFR, the Big Falcon Rocket. Yeah. And then I think it was about end of 2018 they started calling it Starship. But that is the, that is where we're at today. And that's what they're working full steam ahead on. And what about Dragon? We mentioned Dragon, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon. Yeah. So they went from the cargo version of Dragon that flew about 20 times successfully to the International Space Station, except for that one CRS-7 where the rocket blew up and the capsule obviously didn't make it to the ISS. Then they went into the Dragon 2, which has two variants. It has a crew variant. So we just call it Crew Dragon. And then there's the cargo version of Dragon 2. And that's just an updated, sleeker, sexier version of Dragon. And it's, ironically, it's heavier altogether. So you'll never see those cool return to launch site landing, the boosters coming back to land for CRS missions anymore like we used to, but they landed on the drone ship anyway. And yeah, that's been flying successfully. That's kind of the, so there's, yeah, Starlink, Dragon, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Starship system is kind of the whole, the whole SpaceX world, really. In terms of the spaceships involved, what to you are some of the major milestones in that history? We kind of mentioned a few. Yeah. Sticking to landing. Is there something that kind of stands out? Yeah, I would say definitely the big ones, obviously, like any of the first, like the first flight of Falcon 1, first flight of Falcon 9, first time they went to the International Space Station, the first time they landed a booster, the first time they reused a booster, which is, I think, about six months after. No, it was a year after, it was SES 10, 2017. It was the first time they reused one of those boosters, you know, and that was a big milestone. Like, can we even, yeah, we recovered one, we caught one, you know, it's like, we got one, now what? That was the first time they reflew one. Yeah, then flying humans was a huge one, DM2, Bob and Doug for NASA. Bob and Doug, yeah. Bob and Doug, that was incredible. You know, that was a huge, huge step, I think, for SpaceX was flying people. So, it's the first major commercial launching of humans out into space. Yeah, and not just into space, because, you know, there's been people that have done, you know, space flights with, you know, like suborbital hops, but going into orbit, and especially docking and rendezvousing with the International Space Station, it's a big deal. It's a whole, until you really understand the physics involved and the scale involved of like just crossing the Kármán line, going straight up, versus going into orbit, like, they're just completely different things, almost. What about Starship? Are we in a place where we can talk about milestones with Starship? Has there been, or has it just been an epic journey of failure and successes of testing and so on? Was there like, yeah, what would you classify at this point as a milestone that Starship or BFR, whatever the name is, was able to achieve? Well, so far, the milestones we've seen, I'd say the first one would be the hop of, they call it Starhopper, and it's basically a very rudimentary rocket, but it was the first time they utilized their new Raptor engine to produce thrust to fly something. It first flew like, literally like three meters off the ground or something, like tethered to the ground. Then it flew like 15, and then finally it flew 150 meters. And that was in 2019. And that was the first big milestone of Starship. And then after that, we saw SN5, SN6 kind of do the similar like 150 meter hops with a little bit more elegant systems, proving out more of their tank building, proving out more of their, you know, a lot of just subsystems. And then the big ones physically were in end of 2020 and early 2021 when they flew the SN8, 9, 10, 11, and 15. What does the N stand for in SN? I think just serial number or Starship number. Yeah, so SN, these are just names, numbers, numerical representations of the different testing efforts. They skipped some numbers, right? Yeah. If they scratch a test. Yeah, and lots of times it'd be like literally that they're building, you know, because at Starbase and what SpaceX is working on, like the one foot is always in front of someone else's foot. And like the arm is not knowing what the leg is doing sometimes. Yeah. They will have someone working on, you know, they'll just be like, hurry up and build 40 of these tank sections. And you build the bulkhead, and you build the downcomer, and you build the header tank, blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden like, oh, we actually evolved that. We don't use that header tank now. So it's going to go onto this one. So they'll have like parts of certain rockets built. And it's like, ah, literally scrap it. Like not scrap it like in the, you know, joke term, but like literally just go scrap it. And they, so yeah, they just evolve and iterate so quickly. There were some epic explosions. I think Starship, something about it, probably just the amount of fuel just leads to some epic, epic failures. Oh yeah, yeah. Would you say Starship is the source of the most epic failures in terms of size of explosion? So you can literally measure it in like a yield of explosive power, you know, like you could TNT. Like you can take a look at how much propellant is left over at the time of the explosion. And you know, Starship, what's flown so far, even though it's physically one of the largest flying objects ever, just with the upper stage alone, they've not filled it more than like 10 or 20% full of propellant. And so it actually hasn't been, the failures have been really epic looking, big visual fireballs. But in terms of space flight, they're still pretty small explosions, believe it or not. They could still go bigger. Oh yeah, a lot, a lot. And of course, the test payload of a Tesla Roadster was launched. I forget what year that was. Yeah, that was 2018. That was quite epic. Would you put that on the milestone? Oh yeah, yeah, Falcon Heavy demo was like, definitely a big, big, big milestone, yeah. Is that funny to you that there's a Roadster floating out there? Yeah. Do we know the location of that Roadster at this point? Oh yeah, whereisroadster.com. Yeah? Oh yeah. Is it orbiting something? Yeah, it's orbiting the sun. So it's orbiting the sun, and its orbit is basically between the Earth's orbit and beyond Mars. So I think of like 2.5 AU if I remember right. So it's beyond Mars' orbit at its highest point, and it's back at Earth, kind of at its lowest point. I wonder if there's a mission where you're going to somehow connect with it once again, and like place extra things into it. I wonder how challenging that is technically. Oh yeah, it could absolutely be done. The hard thing at this point, because it's on an eccentric orbit, would be rendezvousing with it, because you kind of have to be in alignment with its orbit to really line up well with it. But yeah, I mean, someday I don't see any reason why we couldn't, at least for sure, an uncrewed, if Elon wanted to just fly a robot out there to check up on it and photograph it or something, like that could be well within the realm of things. Get an Optimus robot up there. Yeah. So that was the story brilliantly told by you of the rockets for SpaceX. What about through the lens of engines? Can you give a brief history of the SpaceX rocket engines that were used, that we haven't covered? So you mentioned it all started with the Merlin engine and a Kestrel engine. Yeah, through that lens, what's there? Engines are a relatively small number, which is easy for us. There's the Merlin, and Merlin's evolved throughout time to be from like the Merlin to the Merlin 1C to the Merlin 1D to the Merlin 1D full thrust and all these other kind of tweaks of the same architecture. Kestrel ended with Falcon 1. They also have the Merlin vacuum engine, which is the upper stage engine for Falcon 9. Same relative system, but just optimized for vacuum. So it has a much larger bell nozzle. There's the Draco thrusters, which you kind of can consider engines. Well, they are rocket engines, but they're just small. They're not like the orbital engines. There's the Super Draco engines, which are the abort thrusters on Crew Dragon capsule. And then nowadays they have the Raptor engine and the Raptor vacuum variant. But they've already had two versions of Raptor. We've already seen kind of the Raptor development engine. We've kind of seen like a Raptor 1.5, where it's kind of taking hints of the future Raptor, but now we're well within what you'd consider a Raptor 2 variant. And that's really it. Yeah, for the Raptor, maybe I'll ask you that separately, but I like in general, and people, who doesn't know who Everyday Astronaut is? But if you don't somehow know, go check your YouTube channel out. You're an incredible educator about the super technical and the more sort of even the philosophical, the actual space travel. So you go down to the raw details of it. And there's just great videos on the Raptor engine. I think you have one on Merlin. And also the actual tours with Elon, where he discusses some of those things. On one of the tours, he says, he's full of good lines, that guy. He says something about the number of fiddly bits. The number of fiddly bits was decreased between Raptor 2 and Raptor 1. And I think that's actually a really beautiful representation of the engineering efforts there, which is constantly trying to simplify. Increase the efficiency of the engines, but also simplify the design so you can manufacture it. And in general, simplification leads to better performance and testing and everything. So the number of fiddly bits, I'm sure there's a Wikipedia page on that now, as an index, is actually a really good one. Well, and when you think about it, I don't know of any other company prior that had kind of tried to measure their performance of their engine, not in thrust to weight ratio, or how efficient it is in specific impulse, but literally in dollar to thrust ratio. Like how much does this engine cost? How much thrust can it produce? And using that as a trade study, instead of just pure metrics of, because at the end of the day, okay, if it's cheaper and does X amount of work, even if it's less efficient, it can actually be better long-term. And so I guess another way, it's not even just thrust. I don't know if that metric is used, but basically the cost of getting one kilogram of thing up into space. That's basically what they're trying to minimize. Especially, yeah. At the end of the day, that is definitely the ultimate metric, is how much does one kilogram cost to orbit eventually? But it's so funny, because space flight is just the ultimate, it's the ultimate compromise. Every little thing, any variable can just change everything else. So you can tweak so many different things to get to different numbers and conclusions. But even things like on your first stage, when the rocket's pointing straight up and the engines are pointing straight down, you're dealing more with the thrust to weight ratio of the rocket. So how much thrust is it producing versus how much is gravity pulling down on it, is actually a more important metric than how raw efficient the engine is. So it's funny. Then in space, it's kind of the opposite. Thrust to weight ratio doesn't really matter. What really matters is the actual, the specific impulse, let's call it, or the nozzle escape velocity, or the injection velocity of how fast is the gas moving. It's the more important number on orbit. But it's just so crazy, because there's all these, I would just love to see the trade studies, when you're trying to figure out, is this more important than this or this or this? And it's like, you change this one little thing, and all of a sudden, everything changes. It's just, even the profile, like the launch profile, the trajectory of it. I mean, everything. Everything. I wonder what that trade-out discussions are like, because you can't really perfectly plan everything. So, and you always have to have some spare leeway, especially as you're testing new vehicles, like Starship. Yeah, margins are important. Yeah, having a margin, given all the uncertainty that's there. That's really interesting, like how they do those kinds of trade-outs, because they're also rapidly designing and redesigning and re-engineering. And ultimately, you want to give yourself the freedom to constantly innovate, but then through the process of testing, you solidify the thing that can be relied upon, especially if it's a crewed mission. Yeah, yeah. How to do that in a rapid cycle. I remember at some point, that NASA, as they're leading up to flying humans for the first time for NASA, there's some talk that we're gonna do a design freeze, because SpaceX does evolve and iterate so quickly. They were saying that it was leading, because especially at the time, it was a mission called Amos 6, and they lost a rocket. They've only lost two rockets, ever really, as far as trying to get something to space, for the Falcon 9, sorry. And the second one, Amos 6, that was back in 2016, so it's been a long time. But at the time, they were looking at flying humans in the near future. And it's like, if you guys keep tweaking this thing every time you take it out to the pad, well, there's gonna be a problem. And so there was some pressure from NASA to kind of slow down on that iterative process. But that is also why they were able to evolve the Falcon 9 to be what it is today, is because they did just evolve it so quickly. Literally, one after another was never really the same, and we're definitely seeing that with Starship now. It's evolved so quickly that you just can't even keep up with it. So there's a fascinating culture clash there. Have you just, in observing and interacting with NASA folks, seen them sort of grow and change and evolve themselves sort of inspired by this new developments in commercial space flight? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of, especially around DM-2, there's a lot of talks in the press conferences and stuff where you'd hear people say, this was a big, this is well outside of our comfort zone to work with SpaceX in this manner, because we take this approach to things, we're X, Y, and Z in this way, the way we normally certify things, and we're not used to SpaceX, like, well, let's just try it, and do something, to a point. And so they said it ended up being fantastic. They loved working that way, because it was just less paperwork, almost, and more just do. But at the same time, SpaceX, I think, even expressed, I don't remember if it was Hans Koenigsmann or someone in a press conference said, well, we really liked having someone just double-check us so that we're not doing something super stupid right before we test something, you know? So there was a cool collaboration, because it is two very different philosophies of development and managing space programs. I wanted to talk to you a lot about engines, and maybe about Starship, and maybe about your own becoming an actual astronaut, but let's just go there, before all that, and talk about the actual culture of SpaceX, and your conversations with Elon. You've toured SpaceX facilities with him, you've interviewed him, you've interacted with him. What have you learned about rockets, about propulsion, about engineering, about design, about life, from those interactions? He's a pretty transparent, open human being, as an engineer, as a leader, as a person. I would definitely say the biggest takeaway I've had from my times with Elon at SpaceX is, the idea of questioning your constraints, he says that a lot, but he also does it a lot. There'll be times where you'll see him change on a dime, because he's rethinking of something in a new or different way. For me, I think we all put constraints on ourselves, we think about our own limits on things that we can or cannot do, and I think it's made me question, why did I say, no, I can't do that, just off the top of my head? A good example, so in Iowa, I live in Iowa, half the time or whatever, there's a bike ride across the state of Iowa called Rag Bray, and every year, thousands of people get together and they ride across Iowa. And it was last summer, I met up with some friends, and they're like, hey, do you wanna go on Rag Bray this year? I'm like, it's like a week away. They're like, yeah, you wanna go? I'm like, yeah. And so I did, and it was one of those moments where I was proud of myself, because it's easy to just be like, no, I'm not ready, or this is my constraint, it's like I'm not in shape, but just question that. And so I think when it comes down to questioning your own constraints, it's yes, even to that level, of why do you question yourself on what you can and cannot do? So that's for your personal life is really powerful, but a little bit more intuitive. I think what's really hard is to question constraints in a place like aeronautics or robotics or autonomous vehicles or vehicles, because there's people, there's experts everywhere that have done it for decades, and everyone admires those experts and respects those experts. And for you to step into a room, knowing not much more than just what's in a Wikipedia article, and to just use your intuition and first principles thinking to disagree with the experts, that takes some guts, I think. Well, you can't have everyone doing that either. There has to be some humility of knowing that something is a hardened concept and a hardened, especially, I'm not an engineer, I don't do this stuff, but I can imagine you sitting there having spent six years on a type of valve that perfectly manages cryogenic propellants or whatever, and someone walks in and says, why don't you just put a heater element in there? Or something like, because, we've done that 40 times or whatever. I'm sure there are things like that that are very frustrating, but I don't know what that's like. The thing is, with the experts, they're always going to be frustrated when the newbie comes in with their first principles thinking, but sometimes that frustration is justified, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just stubbornness for failing to acknowledge a better way. And I've seen it both directions, which is really interesting. So you need both, but that tension's always going to be there, and there has to be almost like a dictatorial imperative that breaks through the expertise of the way things have been done in the past to push forward a new way of doing it. And Elon's done that. I've seen a lot of great engineers do that. I've seen in the machine learning world, because there's been so much development, I've seen that happen. Usually when there's rapid development that starts to come into play. And I've seen that in autonomous vehicle space, brain-computer interfaces that Elon has evolved with, all of it. It's kind of fascinating to watch. What about the actual design and engineering of the engines? Since you've learned about so many different kinds of engines over the past few years, just like what stands out to you about the way that engineering is done at SpaceX, or that Elon does engineering? The hardest thing to kind of remember is like how much stuff was developed in the 50s and 60s. You know, the concepts finally being utilized today were already literally done in the 60s. You know, so a lot of the things that SpaceX is doing isn't a novel concept per se. You know, like for instance, the Raptor engine utilizes the full flow stage combustion cycle engine. And that was already developed by the Soviets in the 60s for an engine called the RD-270. And it makes sense. Like on paper, 100% it makes sense because you're basically extracting the absolute maximum potential of the chemical energy in both propellants. And you know, at the end of the day, like you have to be dumb enough to say, we're gonna try using this thing because it's actually really complicated to do what they're doing. But at the same time, like so are rockets. Like rocket engines are already stupid complicated. So adding, you know, 10, 20% more, you know, pain in the butt during the R&D, if it's, you know, in the long, long, long, 20, 30 year existence or whatever, you know, like future of that engine, is that gonna be worth it? Obviously SpaceX said, yeah, I think we can actually develop this Raptor engine. So it's just interesting to see the things that have been looked at, or even reusability, you know, like the space shuttle was reusable. It was fully, the upper stage, you know, the shuttle itself, the orbiter was, you know, I mean, that thing was for all intents and purposes, a reusable rocket. Now, did it live up to its expectations? Not necessarily. So it left a lot of bad taste in people's mouth on the ideas of reusability. So for SpaceX to kind of come back into the room and on the table and say, we're gonna use a reusable rocket, specifically, we're gonna do a fully reusable rocket, you know, a lot of people are, even still today, a lot of people are going, yeah, you're not gonna be able to do that. Even today. Even today. So like long-term, you're not gonna be able to reuse at scale. Yeah. But definitely, I think the number of people that are saying that today is a small portion of those that were saying that type of thing five years ago. You know, when Elon did that announcement in 2016 for the ITS, it was very, very aspirational, and people were just like, yeah, right. You know? And there was a large number of people that had the factual reasons to think that and do that. You know, at the time, they'd only landed like two rockets or something, you know, when they did that, or maybe three. It was a very small number. When they announced that, actually, they had just lost, a couple months prior, they had just lost a MO6. So they were still this young, blossoming company, and they'd come in and be like, we've figured out reusability, and now we're gonna go full-scale and make the world's biggest, most heaviest, most powerful rocket ever, and we're going to fully reuse it, and it's gonna go to Mars. It was just pretty out there. Like, it really was. And, you know, it's all about perspective. But now, again, we're coming up on 100 consecutive landings of an orbital-class rocket that's, you know, 45 meters tall, 3.7 meters wide. Like, this thing's huge, weighs 20 metric tons, even empty, when it's landing. That thing's already huge. So seeing the success of that, I think people are now more like, well, okay, maybe there is actually the opportunity to be fully reusable. That's definitely probably the biggest constraint that I think has been questioned, that is being. The reusability. Yep. And then, of course, like the broader one of cost, of bringing down costs, that you're able to kind of bring down costs so much that something like colonizing Mars, or mini-trips to Mars would be a possibility. Yeah. People don't even, that seems so far out that they don't even have time or give effort to questioning it. Yeah. But it's the implied questioning. Can you really do that many launches? Actually do it. Can you actually do it? Yeah. It's looking, I think it's one of those things where you look at the curve. You know, you look at like, 10 years ago, that was ridiculous. Following this curve, if SpaceX goes from, you know, two years ago launching, I don't remember what it was, 40 times to 60 times to 100 times this year, is their amount. And if we just keep extrapolating that out, if they, maybe not that exponential, maybe it goes more linear or whatever. What's 20, 30 years? Like, the amount of stuff we can put on orbit and the potential we have to do things? Like, absolutely. Now, I don't want to put a time frame, like, you know, yeah, I think, but you gotta think, we're increasing the number of launches. We're increasing the amount of things in space. We're increasing the amount of payload on orbit. That's probably not going to decrease anytime soon. And therefore, eventually, like, the idea of going to Mars is absolutely reasonable. Let me ask a difficult question that needs to be asked here. Can SpaceX continue its successes without Elon? This long-term mission to Mars. I think the discussion about Tesla and autopilot or robotics or a neural link with brain-computer interfaces is a question wholly separate from the SpaceX question, because there's a lot of other competitors doing some different but amazing engineering that Tesla is doing in both autonomous vehicles, semi-autonomy or full autonomy, and obviously in vehicle design and electric vehicles. There's a lot of people that are doing incredible brain-computer interfaces. But while there is a lot of competitors to SpaceX, and we'll talk about many of them, they're doing amazing work, it seems like he's really driving progress here over the past 10 years. What do you think about that? Okay, the first thing I think to remind people is just how many brilliant people do work at each of these companies, obviously. Elon's had some of the best teams assembled ever, just incredible people. He knows this. He will gladly tell people, and he says it often, like, the amazing people, the amazing teams here. So it is important to remember that. That being said, there is something to Elon's just super far forward, not taking no for an answer on things approach. Almost to his dismay, I think, he is afraid of the sunk cost fallacy so much that it almost gets to the border of being, throw out everything before it's even, we've known it or not, but at the same time, it moves the needle so fast, so far. So as far as the question of would SpaceX continue to succeeding and be able to ultimately go to Mars without Elon, the Mars thing, I think, would probably be hard to uphold without, I think a lot of that drive for Mars is from Elon. It is maybe too fantastical for the average person and the average employee and maybe the average CEO that might step in to have a company's mission be to go to Mars. Like, it's just- Or even governments, clearly, because like you said, the Mars plan was non-existent for NASA. Yeah, still really, there isn't much. I think if- How many people, and sorry to interrupt, how many people are talking about it's obvious that we need to become multi-planetary? Right, there's not a, there's the Mars Society. Like serious leaders of engineering efforts or nations and so on. Yeah. Which it does seem, if you think about it, that it's obvious. Yeah, and the grand eventuality, it is obvious. Of human civilization, this whole human experiment we have here, we should be expanding out into the cosmos. 100%. So I think the big mission, if we're measuring SpaceX's success on getting to Mars or not, I think they'd have a really hard time continuing to fulfill that drive without Elon at the helm. Now, I think there's a certain balance and beauty of Elon, specifically when it was Tesla and SpaceX, where Elon will go in, have mild tornadoes around the factory and the engineering, and mix everything up, and things get sometimes just totally thrown together, and totally just like, get it done just to get it done and start moving in that direction. And then he'll leave and go do that same thing at SpaceX or Tesla, vice versa. And then there's a little bit of a calm where people come back in and they fill in those gaps. I think that's kind of always been a pretty healthy thing, honestly. I think if he is too focused on any one thing, it almost is like he'll spin too much. Too many tornadoes. Yeah, too many tornadoes. And I think it could almost be, you need someone to come back in and backfill almost. Because I've heard definitely stories of, probably a good example would be last, last, what was that, last year or two years ago? 2022, yeah. Was that, yeah, or no, 2021, they did the first full stack of the Starship Super Heavy. And they called it the big surge. All of a sudden, thousands of SpaceX employees came down to Starbase, and they just started building, you wouldn't freaking believe, I mean, it's just things going crazy. BP, it was actually in the middle, that first interview I did with him was in the middle of that surge. There was commotion like you wouldn't believe. You couldn't hardly talk because there's just so much going on. People just welding and blah, blah, blah. Everything they did during that period was basically scrapped. Because it was just not done very well. But they got a fully stacked Starship rocket out on their launch pad. I think at some point you kind of have to stabilize some things enough and just say, this is what we're doing to catalyze some things and say, now do this. It's almost like, do it for fake, now do it for real almost. It's funny because through that time, because I had a lot, a lot of conversations with him, I think that process was hugely stressful. There was a sense, I don't know where that sense is today, but there's a sense that Starship is going to be very hard to pull off. Yeah, that's still. Borderline impossible to pull off. And that was really weighing heavy on him and the team and everybody. So to have this chaos of development is fascinating. Yeah, big time. And I think they really had to push, you know, if they hadn't done that, if they hadn't done that big push, you know, we might only be now seeing a rocket stacked for the first time. You know, it might be a lot more finished rocket, a lot more high fidelity, a lot more flight worthy rocket finished and stacked, but, and they might not have to walk stuff backwards, but at the same time, like you do have to, in this world, you do have to push really hard to make rapid iteration and rapid change in progress. So it's, it's interesting. I don't know. So lingering on that, another question I really should ask you because of, you've seen, you've been in awe of the amazing development of space travel technology over the past few years. What do you think about Elon buying Twitter? So in this perfect balance, optimized reallocation of tornadoes throughout the various efforts in human civilization, do you think, do you worry about his involvement on Twitter? I mean, personally, I just, I see that as a lot less important than, and personally for me, inspirational than Starship and, you know, the work done at SpaceX and Tesla. To me, those were two very impactful and really, really just generally like, you know, they're uniting, like, you know, something to rally around, get excited about, rally and just like a future to look forward to. Yeah. You know, the idea of we're going to be building the world's most powerful, biggest rocket ever, and it's eventually going to be able to get humans on Mars for the first time. And we're going to transition the world into fully sustainable, awesome, just totally badass cars that do all these cool things. To me, those were like, that brought a sense of unity and a sense of like, we can do this. Personally, I just don't think that a social media, no matter what it is, I don't see that in a social media. And I don't see any sort of politicking as ever, anything that's really ever uniting thing. I understand that. I totally agree with you, especially with space, how inspiring it is. I have to push back. I do think the impact of social media, the basic level of meaningful connections of this collective intelligence that we call human civilization through the medium of digital communication, which is social media, I think that can have a huge impact. It could be the very vehicle that increases the inspiration that SpaceX does and all different. The thing I've criticized them a bunch for is like, why bring politics into this? So the political divisions that we see on Twitter, feeding them is tricky. It's tricky to sort of understand what is the value of that, what is the contribution of that to this whole effort we got going on. So that's been a big challenge. But that said, like, again, this tornado, the number of tornadoes in social media, I think is really important because social media has such a huge impact on us as a society. And to have a transparent, have a bit of turmoil, you know, it's like Tom Waits says, I like my town with a bit of drop of poison, with a little drop of poison. So a little bit of that, shake things up, I think might be really healthy. I just worry about the long-term impact on the whole Mars project through that. But you know what? This life, one of the reasons it's fun is through the chaos, like, none of us know how it's gonna turn out. And hopefully we try to help each other to make sure it turns out well. And this really isn't like anything about my personal politics or anything like that, but really just generally, any of my friends that are like, the first thing you hear about them in their day is something that happened in politics or something that some world leader is doing or not doing or saying and not saying. I just don't find that to be the most important thing, really. I know that obviously that can affect a lot of people, that has big real world consequences, politics do. Well, like, I just, and this is just me, I'm such a like, come together, you know, cheerio kind of guy, that I just really think like, you need something bigger than bickering about what people said and did and what they voted on and all this stuff to really push humanity forward. Like, I know that politics and by extracting that social media can affect things like space flight and even our like planetary defense, like being able to defend ourselves against asteroids. Like if politics has their way and everything goes to crap and we don't even get to, you know, yeah, we're not gonna be able to continue space flight and things like that. But like, I don't know, I just think there's better ways to do it and more uniting ways to do it than what feels like immature name calling sometimes. Yeah, I think the political bickering that most people talk about that's on top of most people's minds is the thing that will be completely forgotten by history. It has actually very little impact. Yes, politics matters, but like 1% of it. I think most of it is just political bickering, the push and pull of the red team and the blue team and then the news media that feeds off the division for the attention. And it's just like a fun athletic event almost with the blue team and the red team. So that you kind of have to have a historical perspective on it. Like most things will not really have a significant impact and we should focus on development of science, technology, engineering, which is the thing that grows the pie. 100%. This is what the economists know well. Yeah. Just the innovation, the engineering, that's what actually makes everybody richer. Yeah. This kind of political bickering is just eating the pie. And not just richer, but it improves their lives. We can look at every modern technology that is bestowed upon us today, air conditioning, electricity, internet access, fresh, clean water, running water, blah, blah, blah. 100 years ago, so many of the things that I listed either didn't exist or were only accessible by the ultra wealthy. And it's through the innovation of technology and engineering and education that we are able to have it be that even someone below the poverty line and the most of the developed world will have a good number of those things in their life. And that's just continuing to increase and continuing to get better. So I think, yeah, to me that's in the grand scheme more important, but to each their own. Speaking of amazing technological development, you have a few videos on this, but how does a rocket engine work? You're wearing some of the instruction manuals. But for one type of it, like what's the fuel, what are the types of different rockets that you can kind of give an overview? Yeah, ultimately a rocket engine converts high pressure and heat into kinetic energy. Like that's the only real job of a rocket engine is to take high pressure gas, hot high pressure gas, very energized, there's a lot of energy involved, and then literally turning that into molecules shooting in one direction, into kinetic energy. So yeah, what you do basically, I mean, the simplest version of it is of course, like famously a balloon. You take a balloon, you fill it up with air, you've got a pressure, you let go of it, some of the air shoots out in a general direction-ish, you converted that pressure into kinetic energy. Now if you start scaling that up, you can continue to do something like that, like cold gas thruster would be kind of the most simple and easiest rocket engine to make, would be a cold gas thruster. And all that is you literally just take air or specifically nitrogen, because it's a little bit more dense than all the others, or you know, and it's the majority of our atmosphere, you can, or sorry, it's more sparse. You can condense that down, sort a really high pressure bottle, and then just literally shoot it through what's called a DeLaval nozzle, which is something that chokes the flow a little bit, gets it to be, takes it and gets it into supersonic speeds. Once it's at supersonic speed, you actually can't choke it down anymore. You'll just constrict the flow of mass flow, you'll constrict the airflow. So you actually go opposite, you start making it wider. And once it's already at supersonic speeds, if you expand it and make it wider, it actually gets faster and faster. So at first, you know, when it's subsonic gas, you start shrinking, you can strict the flow, you know, it's actually speeding up, just like, you know, a highway, if you go from, you know, or any of these examples, like a water hose, you know, if you pinch it down, you wanna flow the same amount of water from point A to point B through a smaller pipe, you can flow more water, or the same amount of water from point A to point B with a smaller pipe, it just has to go faster. So obviously you can constrict it, but at some point you actually get to a physical limitation, and that happens to be the speed of sound. Once it gets to the local speed of sound, you can then actually do the opposite, you actually expand it back out, and you're continuing to convert the pressure into velocity at that point, but it's now supersonic. And what's interesting is while you're doing that, you're actually cooling it down too. Each bit of that pipe that you're making wider and wider and wider, you're cooling down. So the more heat energy you have to work with, the more work you can actually do. So at some point, a hot, high-pressure rocket engine is the best source of, like that's the ultimate amount of work you can do. And the nozzle, so as you're saying, there's a bunch of different design options, but it's a critical part of this, how you do that conversion, which is what the converters. It's basically like how much can you convert is really like the ultimate game. How much pressure and heat can we convert into thrust? Like that's really, at the end of the day, that's what a rocket engine is. So you have to have a powerful enough rocket engine to actually lift the rocket and, well, a rocket is mostly just fuel. It's like 90 plus percent just the weight of fuel. So you just have to lift the fuel that's going to take it into orbit. And that's the thing specifically for rockets. You're just saying generally rocket engines, but for the task of going to orbit, you're fighting gravity, Earth gravity, which is fundamentally different than moon gravity or Mars gravity, or like you said, traveling out into space, Earth has a pretty intense gravity to overcome. We're lucky, because I think if it was 10% either way, like 10% harder, it'd be like, ugh, we could still do it. With our current technology, we'd still be able to get stuff into orbit, but man, things like reusability and this commercialization, the success that we've seen in the last 10 years, we'd just be on too thin a margins, I think. 10% easier, and we would have been like, I mean, it's just like totally different. It's so much easier. It's like this big sliding scale, and 10% in either direction, we'd be either screwed or really happy, as far as getting into space. So it's just hard enough that things like fully reusable becomes very, very, very difficult. I think it's completely achievable. We have all the pieces to make it achievable. It does not disobey any laws of physics. It does not disobey any, there's no hard stops. It's just very, very, very hard. And so ultimately, yeah, on Earth, for the first bit of launch, again, when the rocket's pointing straight up and the engines are pointing straight down, pointing end up flaming down, you're fighting gravity. And so that's kind of your biggest enemy outside of the Earth's atmosphere too. So what kind of sources of fuel is there? So there's chemical rockets, liquid solid gas, hybrid. There's electric. So what are the kinds of fuels we're talking about? What are oxidizers? What, can you just explain your shirt, I guess? Yeah. The components of your shirt. So really, I mean, fuels, there's kind of two terms. Well, you'll generally hear the word propellant being used as anything that is used to propel a spacecraft or used in a rocket engine. So you have to have, you can have a fuel. You have to have a fuel, you have to have an oxidizer, and you have to have a spark to actually get those things burning. And that's just a general law of the universe. You have to have fuel and oxidizer and a spark. Now, some fuels will by themselves spark, like hypergolic fuels, but ultimately you're always left with some kind of fuel oxidizer and a spark. So the general ones used most often in rockets, liquid oxygen is kind of the king of, well, there's better oxidizers, but they're extremely, extremely hard to work with, like fluorine, but generally liquid oxygen. So you just chill oxygen down to its liquid state, minus 183 degrees Celsius. So it can be dense enough to store in tanks. You know, it's a thousand times more dense when it's in a liquid than it is as a gas. RP-1, which is basically kerosene, is a very common fuel. Another common fuel nowadays is methane, liquid methane. Liquid hydrogen is another, it's the most efficient, potential for the most efficient, since it's one of the lightest molecules. So I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but Falcon 9 uses kerosene and then Starship uses methane, liquid methane? Yep, for fuel, and they both use liquid oxygen for their oxidizer. For their oxidizer, okay. Yep. But then, you know, if you get into hypergolics, you'll normally have nitrogen tetroxide, which is your oxidizer, and some form of hydrazine for your fuel. There's solid rocket propellants, like solid rocket boosters, and those are actually premixed. Your oxidizer is inherently baked, literally, like kind of baked into the sludge of fuel. So like for SpaceX, it's all chemical, liquid fuels. Yep, yep. So how many solid-based fuels are there? Is that, are they still being used today? Is there most rockets? Yeah, and the United States really is the only ones that, well, the only ones, I guess, early on, because it was really just the Soviet Union versus the United States. The United States started to use solids pretty early on. They're simple and easy, but these days, like, you know, you'll still see them kind of as, traditionally like boosters, like they're used to just help get something off the ground or help give it a little extra boost. So the Space Shuttle famously had those two huge, white solid rocket boosters attached to the orange fuel tank. Those are solid rocket propellants. Things like the Atlas V can have up to five smaller solid rocket boosters. There's very few rockets that use a pure, at least these days, that use a pure solid rocket motor for its first stage. There still are, especially in China, there's a lot of startup rocket companies that kind of use just missile technology. You know, they might use like a, there might just be a variant of an ICBM that just use solid rocket fuel, because it is very, relatively easy to develop. You know, model rockets use solid rocket motors and stuff like that. So they're still around, but they're just not as elegant and not as, yeah, not as used these days, I'd say. So what are rocket engine cycles? I think getting more towards your shirt question, you have a really good video called, that, I mean, a lot of your videos that are technical are just exceptionally well done. So I just, I think you deserve all the props you get. I mean, thank you for doing this work. Really, really, really, really well done. So it's called Rocket Engine Cycles, How Do You Power a Rocket Engine? And you go through all the different options. Is there something you could say about open cycle, closed cycle, full flow, all the different variants that you can use words to explain? Yeah, without all the pretty pictures. Yeah, without the pretty pictures. So ultimately, you know, like we said, your ultimate goal is you want to get heat and pressure into an engine. So obviously at some point, you can either make really thick tanks of your rocket. You can like get it so thick that you store the propellants in really, really high pressures. But obviously like that doesn't scale very well. At some point your rocket's so heavy, you can't even leave the ground or, you know, it's just so much of your mass is just literally the walls of the rocket. So at some point people realize, hey, we could actually just pump the fuels and the oxidizer into the engine at a high pressure and increase the pressure through a pump. Now obviously a pump's going to require energy. You have to get that energy from somewhere. And again, at some point people were like, well, rockets are, there's already rocket fuel here. You know, we'll just use some of the energy from the rocket fuel to spin these pumps. So that would be considered like open cycle, closed cycle, full flow stage combustion cycle are ways to tap into the propellant. Actually, and then there's tap off expander cycle. I mean, all of them kind of do the same thing, but you end up at some point spinning a turbine. You know, a turbine can take some of the heat energy and the pressure of an engine, and then that can be connected to a shaft to pumps. And those pumps can, you know, increase the pressure of the propellants and force it into the combustion chamber. Now, the difference between open cycle, closed cycle, full flow, all those is what happens after the gas has flown through the turbine. So after you've used the turbine and spun up the energy, you know, spun up the engine, what happens to that gas? So in an open cycle engine, you basically have like a separate small rocket engine in a sense. It's a gas generator, they call it. And that will be used to create some of, you know, take a little, we'll say 10% of the propellant flowing to the engine. Instead you reroute it to like a smaller rocket engine called the gas generator. You point that at your turbine, and that will spin your turbine up to, you know, ridiculous speeds, 30,000 plus RPM. And then after it spins, it's wasted most of its energy, you know, and it's just dumped overboard. That would be open cycle. You're not worrying about it after that point, but you are left with a lot of unburnt, you know, unused fuel. A good amount of that fuel is just completely, and especially because the turbine, you have to keep it from melting. So you can't run it at like optimal ratios. Not necessarily stoichiometric. In a rocket engine, you actually don't want it to be near stoichiometric where you're releasing all the energy. You actually wanna release, you actually wanna be throwing out the lighter molecule so it can be shot out faster generally in the engine. So, but in order to have a turbine survive, you have to actually cool, you have to have the gas going through it. It can't be stupid, stupid hot or else they're just gonna melt your turbine. So they normally, especially in the open cycle, you just run it really fuel rich. So there's a lot of extra fuel being pumped into it that will keep the temperatures at a reasonable, you know, at a reasonable temperature. So you end up with this like dark, sooty smoke pouring out of that gas generator. That's just unburnt fuel. It's just wasted fuel. It never got a chance to be used. Oh, interesting. You know, like in the combustion chamber, it's not being used to propel the rocket. You know, it's just being used to cool down the propellant that's being used to spin the turbine, that's being used to spin the pumps to push a lot of propellant into the engine. So, you know, it doesn't take too long before, you know, you're a greedy rocket scientist being like, look at all this wasted propellant, all this potential energy that's just literally being spewed out the side of the rocket. So that's where the closed cycle comes in. So now you have to get that propellant, take it from basically what was being wasted through the turbine, and you're gonna try pumping it back into the engine. Now you don't literally just pump that gas that's, you know, that hot, that gas into the engine, because it's actually way too low of pressure compared to the main combustion chamber. By that point, by the time it's gone through the turbine, it's lost most of its pressure and heat to the turbine. So if you tried pumping it into the engine, you know, just taking that pipe and sticking it right into the combustion chamber, that much higher pressure, hotter combustion chamber would just go backwards and it'd stall out the engine and blow up the engine and whatever, what have you. So what they actually do is they normally will send, there might be some variations of this, but the general concept is you actually flow all of your fuel or all of your oxidizer through the turbine. So that would be closed cycle. So there's fuel-rich closed cycle, which would be you're flowing all of the fuel through the turbine, or there's oxidizer closed cycle, which is where you're flowing all of the oxidizer that's going into the engine through the turbine. Now the trick here is you have to have that turbine after it's done its work. So after it's taken some of the potential energy, some of the heat energy from, we're now calling it a pre-burner, by the way, instead of it being a gas generator, you now call that device that's creating pressure to spin the turbine, you're now calling that a pre-burner because it's just going to pre-burn some of your fuel or some of your oxidizer. The trick is that has to be, by the time it's gone through the turbine, it has to be higher pressure than the combustion chamber because otherwise it's going to go backwards still. So you really have to get that pre-burner up to ridiculously high pressures, like at least 20% higher than your main combustion chamber. And these combustion chambers, you know, we're talking about engines that are at, you know, 200, 100 to 200, even in SpaceX's Raptor engine, up to 300 bar in the main combustion chamber. So that's, what is that? 4,500 PSI, basically. Insane amounts of pressure inside these combustion chambers. So your turbine has to be even above that, or your gas generator, your pre-burner, sorry, has to be higher pressure than that even in order to have the flow going the right direction through the engine. So now you'll have those closed cycles. You'll have fuel rich, you have oxidizer rich. The tricks now, you start to get, it's crazy. There's just so many compromises. Every little decision you have of like, oh, I did this, now I, oh, well, now, crap, it's going to do this. For instance, fuel rich, if you ran kerosene fuel rich, you know how I mentioned soot coming out of the gas generator. Well, if you run soot through your engine like that and had to go through your injectors, like back into the engine, it'll clog the pores of the injectors and it'll end up blowing up the engine. The soot itself is so damaging that you can't really run a fuel rich kerosene engine. What exactly is soot? So it's like fuel somehow mixed up with the smoke. Like what, I wonder what, what is it chemically? Is it some weird? It's mostly just carbon. It's mostly just carbon. That dark smoke. Solid chunks of carbon. And it can cake up and just literally like, you know, like it's like ash almost, you know? Like at some point, you know, especially under those high pressures and high temperatures, it can physically build up and, you know, turn into like stalagmites and stalactites of carbon. Really hard, you know, forged in a rocket engine carbon. I wonder how you figure all that out too. Is that some experimentation? Some of that is chem, chemist, like theoretical, but like you're gonna have to build the thing at scale and actually test it. And trial and error. And trial and error. There is. Many decades of trial and error. And many pieces of engines that you're trying to piece back together, going like, what the hell happened here? Yeah, what happened? Yeah. Okay, so that's closed cycle. So how do we get to full flow? So in either of those situations, you're still actually just having the opposite. So if you're fuel rich, you know, all the fuel is going through the turbine, but only a tiny bit of oxygen is actually being put into that pre-burner to spin the pumps. And the rest of the oxygen is actually going through the pump, the primary pump, and straight into the combustion chamber. Now full flow, the idea is you're going to actually pre-burn both your propellants. Both of your propellants are going to go through a pre-burner, and they're both going to end up spinning one of the pumps. So you'll have a gas, a fuel rich pre-burner, and you're going to have an oxygen rich pre-burner. Each one of those is going to get just, you know, they're gonna heat it up just enough and get it up to just enough pressure to spin up that turbine as fast as they need to do to get the pumps up to the right pressure and still have enough pressure through the turbine to overcome the pressure inside the main combustion chamber. And they're both going to arrive, both your fuel and your oxidizer are going to arrive in the main combustion chamber as hot gases already. So what was liquid oxygen is now gaseous oxygen. What was liquid methane is now gaseous methane. And they're meeting in this combustion chamber at still ridiculously high pressures again. And for SpaceX's Raptor engine, they're meeting at 300 bar, insane amounts of pressure. And then they combust from there on, and because they're already a gas-gas interaction, they're happy to burn. They're ready to burn, they're ready to mingle, as opposed to having a gas-liquid interaction, which is what's a lot more normal. You know, you'll have two different states of matter, and they just might not, they might take a little more coaxing to, what's that word? Coaxing, yeah, coaxing, coaxing? That doesn't sound like a, that doesn't sound correct, right? Coaxing. Coaxing, yeah, yeah. All right. I don't know. We'll cut that in post. We'll have Morgan Freeman overdub us. Yeah, he just, coaxing. The fascinating thing is they're coaxed as gases in the combustion chamber. Why can't they think of that word? But yeah, they just take a little bit more, it takes more time in the combustion chamber to have a liquid-gas interaction mixed together and unleash as much of their energy as he can before it exits the system. Some of the trade-offs here in terms of efficiency, which is most efficient, and then also complexity of the design and the engineering, and the cost of the design and the engineering. Like, what are the different trade-offs between open cycle, closed cycle, and full flow? Yeah, it's a pretty, it's kind of like a, what's the bears, the Goldilocks? You know, like, it's like, you kind of generally, the easiest is open cycle. Because you're just expelling the exhaust gas, the gas-generated exhaust. You're not having to worry about it. You just spin up that thing as much as you need and deal with it, right? No big deal. Closed cycles offers 10 to 15% greater performance, generally, because you're not wasting that propellant. And, but it's complicated. It's a lot more complicated, especially if you're doing oxygen-rich. Now you're having hot, gaseous oxygen in your engine, which just generally wants to react with everything. It's just a recipe, like hot oxygen is just a recipe for things to catch on fire that shouldn't be on fire. So metals, you know, under those conditions, lots of times will just spontaneously start burning. You know, you'll actually turn your metal and it will now become fuel. You'll be engine-rich before you know it, because your hot oxygen is eating and using that engine as fuel, basically. So oxygen-rich is generally very hard, but that is what the Soviet Union ended up doing with almost their entire line of engines was closed cycle oxygen-rich. But, you know, so those two are kind of generally hard, but offer great performance benefits over open cycle. But at the end of the day, you know, full flow is by far the, it's the ultimate of all of them. It's the most difficult, but it also has the most potential to be the most efficient. Starship, the Raptor 2, why is that engine using full flow? Because it's the best. I mean, it's just physics-wise, if you're trying to extract as much energy out of your propellants, there just isn't another cycle type that is better than it. But of course, it's very, very hard to develop. You know, so far to date, the RD-270 in the 60s was built. There is a powerhead demonstrator built in the United States in the 90s and early 2000s, I think, maybe just the early 2000s. That was just the power, just the pumps and the turbines and the pre-burners, no chamber, no nothing. That was a big deal. Only the United States took, you know, millions of dollars to just develop that. And then there's SpaceX's Raptor engine. So you talked about the combustion chamber and how damn hot things get. High pressure, a lot of heat. How do you keep the thing cool? You have a great video on this too. How do you get it from, what do you call it, metal-rich, engine-rich, engine-rich from like the metal from melting? Well, one of the ways is to let it be engine-rich. There's actually, you can use ablative cooling. You can literally let, make the walls thicker than you normally make it, make it out of a material that will ablate away, that will kind of chip away and take some of the heat away with it. It's very, again, primitive. And it's actually what SpaceX first used on their first Merlin engines. They used ablative cooling. So it's basically a carbon nozzle and you just let it get, the inner layer of the engine was carbon and you just let it get chewed away and eaten away. And that's just something you factor in. It's not very elegant and it's definitely not reusable in that sense. So there's probably really good models about like how it melts away, the rate at which it melts away to know what thickness. Yeah. But boy, is it dangerous. I just mean, it seems so silly. So obviously you probably, you know, again, it's not the most elegant. And the problem too, your geometry physically is changing too, because as you're eroding the walls, now things like your expansion ratio or the ratio between your throat and the nozzle exit is changing. Yeah. Because the thickness, like the throat's diameter is actually, like everything's changing. So it's not great. It might not be melting away uniformly. There could be some like weird pockets for aerodynamics that just a bunch of chaos just can, which. I can't imagine having to like figure all that stuff out, honestly. Yeah. So the more elegant thing to do, there's a couple other things you can do, but the kind of the most common one, especially when we're dealing with liquid-fueled rockets, is something called regeneratively cooling. And the idea is you basically just flow fuel or fuel or oxidizer through the walls of the nozzle and the chamber before they go through, like into the injector, into the actual combustion chamber. By doing that, you're taking heat out of the, you know, you're taking heat out of the metal of the walls and you're putting it into the propellant. So you're typically heating the propellant up, which is, remember when I said there's a gas interaction versus a liquid, like liquid gas, lots of times, even if you pump them both at, you know, as they, you know, are both being pumped as liquids, by the time it goes through the walls of the chamber, lots of times one of them is phase-changed into a gas. So now you do have that gas-liquid interaction. That's because they're using that, the fuel or the oxidizer to cool the walls of the engine. So when you look at a rocket engine, although it looks like, you know, a nice, beautifully uniform cylinder, you know, smooth thing, there's either, there's oftentimes like the channels actually like milled into the walls that they run fuel through. And even though they're tight, you know, they can be like two, three millimeters thick, they'll actually still have a channel that goes down and U-turns and comes around and comes back all the way down to the tip of the nozzle and everything. So it's just insane that, you know, that- I think that's pre-designed and that's like, so they design those channels. Yeah. There's probably some optimization there, like how the flow happens. Well, especially because you're thinking about a conical thing or like a semi-conical thing where the area is getting smaller and smaller and smaller, you're flowing the same amount of propellant through it as you are down, you know what I mean? Like the propellant has to, so they have all these unique things like, you know, sometimes different manifolds where they'll inject more or less fuel in certain areas. There must be like propellant simulation software because they can't, surely can't like test this on actual physical- Well, back in the day, they had to just build it. Well, you mean back in the day, walked uphill in both ways. It was like, I mean, like anything back in the day before computers, where you like had like- You just had to do it. And like your simulation or modeling was like a sheet of paper where you're like calculating stuff. Well, but you can- Heat flux, you know, like you can literally see how much energy and how much heat is inside the combustion chamber, how much, you know, and that is a measurable thing even without a computer. Now, I'm not near smart enough to do any of this. Like I've never tried measuring the heat flux of anything. I barely even know what that means. I'm just smart enough to regurgitate it. You haven't lived, my friend. You haven't lived. But that is something that people would calculate and they find out, okay, copper, you know, does a better job of transferring the heat between the walls of it and into the propellant, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, compared to XYZ. So, you know- Yeah, materials, people. Like I've met just in all walks of life, especially just through MIT, through everywhere, where some people are just like 100x smarter than anyone you've ever met at a particular thing. Like you mentioned copper. They'll know the heat dissipation through different materials, they'll understand that like more than, it's like holy shit, it's possible for a human being to deeply understand a thing. Dude, aerospace is full of that. You'll have people that are so niche in something that the average person has never even remotely thought of, yet this person has done it 40,000 different ways in an environment being like, well, we found out that if we turn it four degrees that way and add 4% niobium, you know, like just things that you're like, what is your life and how do you know this, you know? And the funny thing about them, they usually don't think it's a big deal. Yeah. They're usually like, they're so nonchalant about it that if you don't actually, you have to know enough. You actually have to know quite a lot to appreciate how much more they know. Yeah. Because otherwise you won't even notice it. Because our popular culture doesn't celebrate the intricacies of scientific or engineering mastery, which is interesting. There's all these people that lurk in the shadows. Oh, I know. They're just geniuses. Yes. Like you see, you'll have like the LeBrons who are like good at basketball, so we understand that they're good at basketball. They do this thing with the ball and the hoop and they do it really well, better than a lot of other people under pressure. Well, we celebrate. This is a big public spectacle. Yeah. Look how great they are, yeah. But the people at these aerospace companies and NASA, SpaceX, the kind of stuff they're doing, just the, I mean, there's geniuses there. And it's actually really inspiring. I mean, I've interacted with a lot of brilliant people in the software world. And maybe because I don't deeply understand a lot of hardware stuff, materials engineering, mechanical engineering, those people seem like so much smarter. I mean, it's always like the grass is green or whatever the expression is, but there's a depth of understanding that engineers have that do like mechanical engineering that's just awe-inspiring to me. Not to get too like, I don't know what the word would be, introvertive or something or whatever, but that's actually kind of the whole point of everyday astronaut. Like that's almost the whole point of what I do. Each year from the beginning, I did a thing called the Astro Awards, trying to be like an award show, hoping to lift up and celebrate and shine a spotlight on the people that are actually doing the hard work and try to treat them like the rock stars that they are, that we don't know about. And I think that's one of the things that for sure, I think Elon definitely helped make spaceflight cool, helped make that like a celebration thing where people are physically out cheering for rockets and science and space exploration. But I think that's just the beginning. I think like this should be a thing where the general public looks to these people as the coolest ones, as the coolest places to work, as the most important things. Sports are great and everything, I'm a big Formula One fan and things like that, but at the same time, like we should be celebrating the people doing this crazy work, clocking in countless hours, just trying to figure out this one little thing that's gonna help us further our understanding. I mean, what's cooler than a giant thing with a really hot fire that goes boom and goes up into the air. I mean, like there's no, it's like, to me like bridges are inspiring. It's like incredible architecture design and like the humans are able to work against nature, build these gigantic metal things, but like rockets with like a tiny little humans on top of them flying out into space. It's the coolest possible thing. Everything comes together. All the different disciplines come together for the high stakes drama of riding that super powerful thing up away from the thing we call home, Earth. It's like, it's so amazing. Exactly. So freaking amazing. Well, I think that's kind of part of my story arc is I just used to be a huge car and motorcycle guy. Like I just loved things that go fast and are loud and go fast and make lots of power. And at the end of the day, like at some point you realize nothing goes faster and it's louder and makes more power than a rocket. I think that's kind of where I eventually just ended up, wound up there just because there is nothing cooler than that. Yeah, that's the ultimate level of reach as a car guy is you become a rocket guy. Yeah, a hundred percent. And at some point some car guys literally become rocket guys and strap rockets to cars and try and break land speed records. You know, like it's the same universe here. Yeah. So Elon, with your conversation with him on the Raptor 2, was talking about, you were talking about like there's an excessive amount of cooling to be on the safe side as you're developing the engine. What kind of cooling was that? So that would be film cooling. So remember how a little bit ago we were talking about like keeping the turbine from melting. You can just run it off of like off nominal, basically off, you know, typically fuel rich, just run more fuel through that so it's cool enough. You can actually do that locally kind of in your engine. So you can keep it so, you know, imagine a combustion chamber and the top of it's just a flat, like imagine a shower head. And then you have like, you know, the combustion chamber attached to it. The outer perimeter there, the part where the flame front would be touching the walls, you can actually have just more fuel injectors. So you're injecting locally a more fuel rich zone along the entire nozzle. And that would be called film cooling. So it's less efficient though. Again, you're kind of wasting fuel. There's fuel that's running, you know, and your mixture ratio is off, but only for a little portion of the big picture, you know? So that's one of those compromises. Like you can do additional film cooling to make sure you're not melting your engine, you know, but at the cost of performance usually. But you can also be smart and use film cooling. You know, there's fun little clever tricks. For instance, you'll notice on the F1 engine that was on the Saturn V, you know, the biggest rocket that had been built to date prior now to a Starship, the F1 has this huge, huge, huge engines. There's five of them on the Saturn V. And you'll notice that like the gas generator has a pipe that comes down and then it actually splits off in a manifold and wraps around part of the nozzle. And that manifold takes the hot gas from the turbine, which is actually, I mean, it's not hot. It's actually cold gas compared to the combustion chamber, but it's, you know, in human terms, so it's still, you wouldn't want to put your hand in it, you know, not live. And it actually pipes that gas into the nozzle so that it creates a film cooling, an actual boundary layer of cooler gas against the hotter combustion chamber gas. So basically repurposing that gas that was normally wasted and they pump it back into the engine and then into the nozzle, like kind of further down. So the trick there is it has to be far enough down that the pressure in the nozzle, because remember as the nozzle gets bigger and bigger and bigger, the pressure is getting lower and lower and the temperature is getting lower and lower. So you have to find this trade-off point where the pressure is lower than that gas from the turbine and then you pump it in and it's cooler than the gas still is in the nozzle and it can help not melt your nozzle. So you'll notice that the F1 is actually a good example of regen cooling. So the chamber walls, you can physically see the pipes actually on the F1 because it's so big and they just literally used pipes and bent them and you can see the coolant channels all the way up and down the engine until you get to that manifold. Then from there on, it just has what's called a nozzle extension and it keeps going and going and going and that section of nozzle is cooled by the film cooling of the gas generator. They mean the aerodynamics of cooler gas and the hot gas, because you have to have this kind of layer, right? To protect the layer of cool, like understanding that, obviously it probably has to do, in modern times, there's probably really good simulation of aerodynamics. And to do that in terms of pressure too, to make sure it's in the right place that doesn't go back up. Go backwards, exactly. If they have that manifold even six inches too high on that nozzle, yeah, it's just gonna go upwards. Pressure always wants to flow from high to low. The number of options you have here that result in it going boom is very large. Near infinity, yeah. Especially because you can't do a small model of it. Maybe you can. No, you can't. It doesn't really scale very well. No, you have to do the full testing and that's why you have all the kind of, that's why you have with Starship all the tests that you think, why would you need to do so many static fires and so many tests and why is it failing so many times? Can't you get it right? But it's very tough to get it right. Well, and when you're pushing the boundaries, you want to know where and how it's going to fail. That's right. So you can engineer around them. So that's a luxury that SpaceX does have with the scale of Raptor. They're building Raptor cheaper than probably almost any other engine, maybe besides some of their own, at least at that scale. Then before, they're testing, I think since last March or last April, they've tested 1,000 Raptor, 1,000 engine fires, I guess, not just Raptors. But that's just an insane amount of data and an insane amount of edge cases to learn, oh my God, we found out that we were actually slightly overspinning our turbine in this degree and this frequency, this harmonic at this blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden realize it's rattling and it did this. And then you can engineer around that. It's like, ultimately, I think Elon said something like, high production rate solves many ills or something along those lines. And it's just true. If you have an insane amount of engines and an insane amount of data and an insane amount of failures to learn from, you just know your system inside and out. You know those margins, you know where the failure points are, you know how to engineer around them. That's how I approach dating. No, I'm just kidding. Because we're talking about engines. So most rockets, I think all rockets have multiple stages today. Maybe they'll take us in a discussion of what ideas that could be for single stage to orbit rockets. But can you describe this whole thing that you've been mentioning here and there of multiple stages of a rocket? Yeah, no, that's a good question. So ultimately, like I said, you're kind of pushing about 90%. The rocket's basically just fuel with some skin on it. You know what I mean? And so that skin weighs a lot. Skin and the engines do weigh a lot. Like I said, the Falcon 9 on its own is about 20 tons. Just the booster is about 20 metric tons. So it's not an insignificant amount of weight. So the idea is, with staging, is you ditch anything you don't need, more or less. So Falcon 9's a perfect rocket to think about this because you have an upper stage and you have a booster, our first stage. And the first stage burns through all this fuel. Once it's out of fuel, you let go of the second stage and ta-da, you actually just basically started and lit a brand new, fresh rocket. This brand new, fresh rocket now doesn't have all that 20 tons attached to it, so it's a lot lighter. It doesn't need nearly as many engines to push it around. It needs just one instead of nine. Its engine can be optimized for the vacuum of space as opposed to having to operate at sea level with all of our, actually pretty thick atmosphere, you know, relatively. So staging is basically the idea that you get rid of things you don't need. On Earth, again, kind of that whole like 10% harder, 10% easier, if it was 10% easier, single stage to orbit would be no big deal. And it probably would have been like the way to get to orbit by choice, just because it's not that hard. But with our Earth as it is, with physics as it is, it's just, it's doable, and we've had, and you know, we almost kind of, actually the first orbit to take humans, or the first rocket to take humans into orbit from the United States, which was the Atlas rocket, was kind of a stage and a half. It actually only had like one big fuel tank. And what that is, they actually dropped off two of its three engines. So it just ditched some of the engines. But if it hadn't done that, you know, so kind of people were like, well, that was single stage. It's like, it still had a staging event. It still had a ditch mass in order to even make it into orbit. Had it not done that, it would have not been able to get into orbit. So you pretty quickly look at your trade and say, okay, well, if I wanna stick to single stage to orbit, my payload mass becomes tiny. You know, like you might be able to put like, you know, a Falcon 9 booster on its own. Like if you just flew one of the side core boosters of a Falcon Heavy with a nose cone on it and everything, just say, I'm just gonna fly this on its own. You might be able to put like, you know, 10 kilograms into space or something, you know, a very small amount. Well, throw a second stage on that thing and now you can put, you know, 17,000 kilograms into space. So it's just an order, you know, orders of magnitude more payload capacity because you did staging, because you ditched the residual weight. So the other thing that's hard about that too is that the engines again that operate at sea level are often not great in space and vice versa. Like you physically can't, most optimized for space engines, you can't even operate at sea level. They'll destroy themselves due to something called flow separation. So not only are you getting the benefit of ditching all the weight, but you're also able to use a much more efficient and less typically, you know, much less powerful engine in space. So you mentioned on the multi-stage rockets, that maybe the dream would be, if we weren't living on Earth, but maybe we can on Earth, to have a single stage to orbit rocket where it's all one package reusable. Mm-hmm, reusable gets even harder. It gets even harder. So first of all, what is, just to linger on it, what is the single stage to orbit rocket? And why is it so hard to achieve on Earth? You already kind of explained it a little bit, but just if we were to say like, yeah, that's your assignment. Yeah. Tim, you're supposed to get together with Elon and other brilliant people, and like, you have to do this. Yeah. Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard? The payload fraction of a rocket is like three to five or six or 7% would be like, you know, that's the amount of payload compared to the total mass of the rocket. Like you're lucky to get into beyond 5%. So if you're now having to deal with the weight of the rocket by the time you're in orbit, like your payload fraction, just you're talking about like margins, that's such, it's so small amount of leftover if you have to take all of it with you. So the sooner you can ditch weight, the better. The sooner you can ditch weight, the better. The sooner you can, you know, and that's what you're doing, a rocket the whole time is actually ditching weight. All of that fuel, all that big giant flame you see is literally mass being thrown out the back of the rocket. But what typically isn't expended, you know, at least during nominal operations, you're not seeing the engines being, you know, expelled out the thing until you get to staging, of course. And that's where, you know, you're ditching all that dead weight. So single stage to orbit, your margins just become so small that it's border, it's not impossible, but it's just at the end of the day, like almost no matter who you are, you end up saying it's just simply not worth it. Like it'd be, if you have two rockets that are using the same amount of propellant, you know, they're the same physical sizes, and one of them is cutting, you know, on a third and has another little engine, it'll have a hundred or a thousand times more payload capacity than the one sitting right next to it. And now, so there's tricks you can do to like try to offset that, things like aerospike engines, which operate as efficiently at sea level, at kind of optimized efficiency at sea level. And just by their, by the way they're designed, the physics of them, they're also efficient in a vacuum too. You can do things like that. And at the end of the day though, you just end up with a worse rocket than if you had just done stage, like no matter what. And people say like, well, what if you had developed a new technology? It's like, okay, we'll apply that technology to a multi-stage rocket, and it's gonna do better, you know, like no matter where you end up, it's just always better to ditch that weight, you know. Is there a cost to having multi-stage? Because you can still reuse the different stages. That's the dream is, you know, it becomes easier to reuse multiple stages, because now, you know, like the booster doesn't have to survive orbital re-entry temperatures and extreme environments. And you only have to, you know, make survivable the upper stage. You only have to put a big heat shield. I mean, Starship's the perfect thing in this. The upper stage has a big giant heat shield. The booster doesn't need it, because it's not going, the booster's not going to orbit. It's only going a fifth or a quarter of orbital velocity. So it's heat that it experiences is survivable just by the stain of steel. You don't need an additional heat shield. So all of a sudden, if you're trying to reuse, pretend that you just welded the two stages of Starship together, remove those engines on Starship. That whole vehicle, if you're trying to reuse it, the whole vehicle now has to have a heat shield on one side of it. The whole thing has to have these big, heavy wings. By the time you come down to it, there's probably just zero payload capacity. You basically put your fuel tank in space, you know? Good job. So the dream of a single-stage to orbit rocket, is that just even the wrong dream on Earth? That's what most convention tells you. By the time, if your goal is cheap, then you're going to spend, you're going to have a physically larger rocket that has more engines, that has more propellant, blah, blah, blah, to put the same amount of mass into orbit compared to something else. We're talking like Rocket Lab's Electron, a really small rocket. It's like, I think, 1.3 meters wide and something like 18 meters tall or something. It's a small rocket. And it can put something like 300 or so kilograms into orbit. You can either launch something that size, or again, like a full, big old Falcon 9 booster, the huge, huge thing, and that would be lucky to put 300 kilograms into orbit. So it's like, which one's going to be cheaper to build, ship around, all the stuff? And then you also look at, you have fixed costs. The idea of flying a, but this, again, everything in rocket science is a compromise, because now you have things like people on console time, all the people that are on comms and working on the rocket, going down to the pad, filing paperwork, doing range control, making sure there's not planes and boats in the way, flight termination. You have all these fixed costs for any launch. I don't care how big the rocket is. There's a relatively fixed cost. So now you say, okay, I'm going to be paying, well, let's just make a winner. I'm going to pay $5 million to fly a rocket between all the people going on site, all the propellant, all the licenses, blah, blah, blah. If your fixed cost is $5 million, you can put 300 kilograms in space, versus you have a $5 million cost of operation, and you can put 5,000 kilograms into space, like it, the business case is going to send you in one direction pretty quickly. So you mentioned aerospike engines. I think the internet informed me of your love affair with aerospike engines. Find somebody that looks at you the way Tim Nott looks at aerospike engines. Can you explain what these are, how do they work, what's beautiful to them, how practical are they, why don't we use them? Does it just boil down to the design of the nozzle? So maybe can you explain how is it possible to achieve this thing for an engine to be as efficient in a vacuum, at sea level, and in all different conditions? You know what I love about this? Is that every question you've asked me is like a one-hour video on my YouTube channel. I was like, now boil it down to 45 seconds. Go. So the aerospike engine basically is an inside-out engine, more or less. So with a traditional engine, we've talked about the combustion chamber and the throat, and then it expands out into the nozzle. Those walls are containing the pressure, right? Aerospike is the opposite. It's basically the pressure of the engine is on the outside of it, and it's pushing inward against a spike. So it's almost like the difference of if you were, let me think about this, if you were standing in like a tent or a teepee, right? And you put your arms at the top and you pushed your arms out, like into an iron cross or something, you know? You can physically lift the tent just by pushing outwards on the tent walls, right? Well, that would be like a traditional nozzle. Now, aerospike would be almost like squeezing an ice cube. You know, if you squeeze an ice cube, you can push in on it, and kind of that wedge force will shoot that ice cube. So that's kind of what has happened. We have the high-pressure gases on the outside of the spike squeezing in on that spike, and then it's pushing up against the, you know, because it's equal on both sides against like kind of the ramp, it's pushing up against the rocket. So that's where that force comes in. It's against the nozzle and against the chambers. The hard part with an aerospike. So the cool, okay, I guess the cool thing about an aerospike is that it can operate in space. You can have what's known as a really big expansion ratio. So that's your ratio between the throat, the area of the throat versus the area of the nozzle exit. And remember how the bigger the nozzle is, it's continually just converting more and more, it's converting that high-energy, hot, high-pressure gas into cooler, lower pressure and faster gas. So each little millimeter along that nozzle is just getting it lower pressure and cooler, but faster. Now, if you take a big nozzle on earth and you, at sea level and you fire it, you can actually get, even though we're going from say 300 bar, the Raptor engine, you know, our atmosphere at sea level is about one bar. It's pretty much exactly one bar, depending on conditions, but you can actually get a nozzle to get way below one bar of pressure. So every little, you know, you can go from 300 bar in just two meters down to one bar or below one bar. There's actually a limit. You can actually only expand it below, you know, we'll say something like 70%. So you can get down to like 0.7 bar at nozzle exit before the pressure of the atmosphere is actually squeezing in on that exhaust and tearing it away from the walls of the engine, the walls of the nozzle exit. And what happens is it's kind of unpredictable. You get these pockets, these oscillations, and they'll be so extreme that they'll end up just destroying the nozzle. So you can't lower, you can't have a bigger expansion ratio than again, relatively speaking, something like 0.7. Like you can't go below, you can't get that pressure exit too much below ambient air pressure before flow separation can destroy the engine. So how come this engine can do so well in different pressure conditions? So because it's inside out, the ambient pressure is pushing the exhaust gas into the wall, as opposed to a conventional engine, that exhaust gas or the ambient air is actually squeezing the exhaust gas away from the walls of the engine. And that squeezing away from is what can be destructive. So that since it's kind of inside out, the ambient air is pushing the exhaust gas into the engine walls, so you can't have flow separation. You won't have flow separation. Now what happens is, so you can have this huge, amazingly efficient vacuum engine that has a, we'll say a 200 to one expansion ratio, which is really big. Like a lot of sea level engines are like 35, 40, 50 to one expansion ratios. And then in space, it's common to use like 150, 180, 200 to one expansion ratios. So an aerospike can have something like 200 to one. It's just at sea level, it's kind of just getting pushed and it's kind of getting cut off early almost, but it doesn't matter. It's not destructive, it's just not running at its maximum efficiency. As it climbs in altitude, as the ambient air gets thinner and thinner and thinner, it just inherently is pushing less and less and less against the walls of that aerospike engine. So it actually continually gets more efficient as it climbs in altitude, as does a normal engine, but the difference is that you can use that huge expansion ratio at sea level and you can't use a huge expansion ratio at sea level with a traditional nozzle. Has anyone actually flown an aerospike engine? No aerospike engine to date has ever been flown on an orbital rocket. Why not? And would you like to see a future where they're used? Purely because I think they're cool. So that's at the core of your love affair with aerospike engines is the coolest. And I said this in my video. Actually, outside, before I came in here, I saw an RX-7 in the streets that I just love and that uses a rotary engine. On paper, the rotary engine is like more efficient, does smaller, more efficient, all these things, but in practice, it's like, the thing is actually just like unreliable, hot, and it blah, blah, blah, blah, burns oil. It's kind of the same thing with the aerospike engine. Like, yes, on paper, it's more efficient, but now you have a lot more surface area of your throat area, no matter what, is going to have, the throat of the rocket engine is always where it's the hottest. You know, it's the hardest thing to cool. And with an aerospike, if it's inside out, now your throat is, no matter what, like way bigger. You know, it's almost like the size of the nozzle exit normally, but now it's your hardest thing to cool, and you have a ton of it, and you also have two edges of it, no matter what. So even if you have like a circle inside a circle, you have like a just insane amount more surface area to cool with a limited amount of fuel. Don't forget, you're using your fuel as your coolant. So if you all of a sudden now take your throat area and you have X amount of space that you need to cool, you only have, you have a limited supply. It's like, ugh, it's, sorry, this is the stuff that just. Are there ideas of for cooling, for cooling aerospike engines? It's, same physics apply for an aerospike as they would. So you just run into a limitation. Like at some point, I'm not flowing enough propellant. It scales, it scales kind of poorly. You know what I mean? Like you can increase the thrust of an aerospike by making it bigger and increase the mass flow and the fuel going through the throats or the throat. But at the same time, like it just, it's, at the end of the day, it's physically possible. It's a lot more complex. You have a lot of issues with cooling and it just, you end up kind of right back where you started. So it's like, is it worth it to just keep going down this rabbit hole, trying to engineer this thing to work when like you could have probably spent a 10th of the amount of time just slightly increasing the performance of your normal engine in the first place. You know? Again, I'm going to anthropomorphize that lesson and apply it to my dating life. And once again, just kidding. Okay, actually just on a small tangent, since you are also a car guy, what's the greatest combustion engine car ever made to you? If you had to pick something, what's the coolest, the sexiest, the most powerful, the classiest, the most elegant, well-designed? I don't know what category. A lot of those things are different for me, but I'd say, I still, it's funny, because now, maybe it's just because it's fresh on mind, but I love that mid-90s RX-7, which, you know, especially in Japan, they had the 20B, a tri-rotor. That is like the coolest engine ever to me. The FD RX-7. It's just too darn cool, honestly. It'd be, there you go. Well, what about the mid-90s that makes it special? Just that's the only time I've seen this. It's more that I love the engine and I like the car it's attached to. I mean, I'm not actually a big fan of like 90s styling, you know, personally, but just that the 20B is just such a cool, cool engine. And it's twin turbo, sequential turbos. So they used, a bigger turbo takes longer to spool up. You know, it takes more, it's using that same like a turbine and a compressor, and it just, if it's a large turbine, it takes more exhaust gas to get it spooled up. So if you have an engine that revs to 9,000 RPM and you want to get a lot of pressure out of that turbo, you have a big turbo, it's going to take forever. Like you're going to have, you know, your floor, and then like, it's going to take a long time for that turbo to get spooled up. So they actually did a small turbo on it and a big turbo. So the small turbo would spool up first, get some boost going through the engine, get that engine operating, get it up to speed, get it, you know, get some power to the wheels. And then once that kind of reaches its limit, you'd flow it into the, divert the exhaust gas into the bigger turbo, it's this sequential turbo. And then that now can supplement and actually increase the, you know, overall performance of the vehicle by a lot. And I just, I think that's just so cool. It's just like the ultimate like brute force, out of the box thinking, and it actually made it into production. You know what I mean? Can you, what's the sound like? Can you tell an engine by its sound? It sounds like a really, really, really angry lawnmower. It sounds horrible. It's actually a terrible sounding car. In my opinion, like it sounds just raspy and like the opposite of like a big muscle car. You know, like a big muscle car is this deep guttural, like, oh, it just, it hits you. This is like, it's just gonna annoy the hell out of you and all your neighbors. Like it's- But you love the engineering. I love the engineering of it. So to you, the car is the engine. It's not, all the surface stuff, all the design stuff, all the, you know, yeah, the elegance, the curves, whatever it is. Well, those come and go, you know, to me, styles change. It's forever. Yeah, it is. I'm gonna apply that to my dating life once again. Metaphors just keep on coming. Well, if you think about it, like my taste has changed throughout the years. When I first saw a Model 3 Tesla, I thought it was the most hideous car ever. And with the out the grill, I was like, this is so stupid. It took me all but two months to think that it was one of the coolest looking cars. Same with Cybertruck. I mourned Cybertruck. When I first saw that thing, I was at that thing with, and I went with, we used to do a podcast called Our Ludicrous Future. So we talked a lot about like, you know, cars and EVs and stuff. We went to that unveiling and literally, like we had like almost a non-alcohol induced hangover the next morning of like mourning the hideousness of Cybertruck. Come six months later, a year later, and I'm like, damn it, that thing's actually kind of cool. Yeah, that also teaches you something about, again, it's the thing you said earlier, sort of going against the current of the experts of the beliefs or whatever and making a decision from first principles. Some of that also applies to design and styling and fashion and culture and all that. Big time. Some of that, you know, fashion especially, it's so interesting. So subjective. Being rebellious against the current, the current fads actually is the way to pave the new fads. Well, it didn't take long for others to follow. You look at like currently like what Hyundai's doing with their, I forget which one, like the Ioniq or something like that. It's square, it's like, it's boxy. You know, it's a throwback. It's 80s, it's got these beautiful retro taillights. It's got these square headlights. It's very inspired by Cybertruck in my opinion. It might not be. It might be coincidental that we're all kind of getting this retro future vibe, but. I personally like the boxy. So I never, I still haven't understood Porsches. I still can't quite understand the small size, the curves. I don't quite get it. See, like I said, I don't love the look of the RX-7. I don't love it, but I love it because of the engineering, I guess, that it represents. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's not the surface stuff. It's the deep down stuff. It's that 50-50 weight distribution that matters. All right, let's talk about Starship a little bit. We've been sneaking up to it from a bunch of different directions. Can you just say, what is Starship and what is the most impressive thing to you about it? I mean, you've talked about sort of the engines involved. Maybe you haven't really, you're kind of like dancing around it, but because this is such a crucial thing in terms of the next few years, in terms of your own life personally, and also just human civilization reaching out to the stars, it seems like Starship is a really important vehicle to making that happen. So what is this thing that we're talking about? Yeah, so Starship is currently in development, the world's largest, most powerful rocket ever built, fully reusable rocket, a two-stage rocket. So the booster is landed, and all this is currently aspirational until it's working. So I'll say what it's aspirationally going to be. And obviously I have faith that that will happen, but just factually. So the booster will be reused, it's landed and refueled and reused. The upper stage will be landed, refueled, and reused. And ideally, rapidly, in the sense, not talking about months or weeks of refurbishment, but literally talking about like mild inspections, and ideally like under 24-hour reuse, where you literally land it and fly it like an airplane. So it utilizes liquid methane and liquid oxygen as its propellants. It utilizes, the current iterations of it are 33 Raptor engines on the booster engine, on the booster, and six Raptors on the second stage. So there'll be three that are vacuum optimized, and three that are sea level optimized on the upper stage that are primarily, they'll be used, I think, at stage separation anyway in space, but their main reason that they use them is so they can use them for landing too, the three sea level engines, to be able to propulsively land the upper stage as well. So the three Raptor engines are the ones that generate the thrust that makes it the most powerful rocket ever built. By almost double. Compared to the Saturn V, really? The N1 had 45 mega newtons of thrust, the Saturn V had, I think, 35 or 40 mega newtons of thrust, and this has 75 mega newtons. So we're talking almost double. It's a lot of power. That could be the sexiest thing I've ever heard. Okay, so what are the different testing that's happening? So like, what's a static fire with some of these Raptors look like, and where do we stand? You were just talking about offline, like the thing that happened yesterday. It was impressive. You know, everything in this is kind of iterations, and so the milestones that we're seeing, we actually have on everydayastronaut.com, we have a milestone checklist of all the things we're hoping to see, that we kind of need to see before the first orbital flight of this rocket. So a big milestone that got checked off yesterday was a wet dress rehearsal. So it's literally like fueling the rocket up, getting ready to do everything but lighting the engines, basically. So we're talking about loading it with propellant all the way, and this is the first time, yep, right there. Where's the milestones? Right there at the top. Click that big picture. Yep, just anywhere, that big picture, yep. So there's the wet dress rehearsal. So what's the wet dress rehearsal? Yep, so that's where they, for the first time, they filled it completely to the brim with both liquid oxygen and liquid methane. Now, they had done component level testing where they fill it with liquid nitrogen, which is, you know, it's an inert gas, so it's not, like, say it leaks out, it's not gonna explode. You can just have a big, giant pool of liquid nitrogen like flooding the area, but it's not gonna be an explosion. So they've done that for cryo testing to make sure all the components and stuff can handle, you know, being at cryogenic temperatures. It's kind of a good analog before you start putting your fuel and your oxidizer in there. But now, as of yesterday, they fully fueled the rocket with propellant, both stages, the first stage and the second stage, wall fully stacked on the pad. Like, basically, I mean, it was the first sense we really got of, like, this is what it's gonna look like right before it takes off. You know, kind of breathing, coming to life for the first time. What does the pad look like? So there's a few interesting aspects to this. What's up with the chopsticks and all of that? Yeah, so the launch pad is unique. I've never seen anything like it in the prior history of space flight. But it's a really simple launch stand. They basically have, like, this, almost looks like a stool, like a, you know, like a milking a cow stool thing, with a big giant thing. Now I know you're from Iowa, but yeah. Yes, we all know what that stool looks like. Oh yeah, we all been sitting on that stool milking cows. Yeah, been there, done that. With a giant hole in the middle, and that hole in the middle of that stool is where the rocket sits, and it sits on these, you know, launch clamps. And then next to it is the, so that's the orbital launch mount, and then next to it, there are the OLM, some people say. Next to it is the orbital launch tower, the OLT. And that is not only integral to fueling up the upper stage, you know, the upper stage has to have propellant lines run to it, so that they can fill it with propellant and, you know, all that. But it also, they ended up making it so, instead of having a big crane on site to stack the two on top of each other, they literally just use that tower as a crane. So the crane has these giant arms, lovingly called the chopsticks, or the whole system can be called Mechazilla. And that will grab onto, first it'll grab onto the booster, pick it up off of its transporter that transports it from the production site, lifts it up, puts it down onto the launch mount, and then it will pick up the second stage or the upper stage Starship, and plop it down on top of the booster. And they did that for the first time last year. Actually, I think it was like Valentine's last year, was the first time they used the chopsticks to stack it. And now they're doing it quite frequently, you know. But ultimately, those chopsticks have to serve a second purpose. They're actually going to utilize, if you say catch the, it's not so much they're going to catch the booster with these chopsticks, it's not like it's a dad trying to catch a falling child. It's more that the booster and the Starship will someday land on those arms. Yeah. So they're more or less stationary. I'm sure there's some bit of adjustment that the arms will do, but more or less the rocket's gonna propulsively land and get picked up by what's essentially two relatively small ball joints that hold the entire thing. So it has to land very precisely on these mounts, then onto the launch mount. And that's what's going to just place it back onto the stand and allow it to be refueled and fly again. What's the idea of using the arms versus having a launch pad to land on? What's the benefit? You are basically removing the mass of what would be heavy landing legs, and you're putting kind of that landing infrastructure onto a ground system. So you're not having to carry those landing legs into orbit. But it's also elevated off the ground. Is there some aspect of that where you don't have to balance the thrust and all the- You can negate some of those, there's plume-plume interactions. There's the exhaust hitting concrete, and especially with a rocket this big, it's gonna use three Raptor engines firing. If you have them firing really close to the ground, you're just gonna absolutely destroy and crater the ground, and you're gonna have to refurbish the ground and the landing pad every time, or have huge landing legs that are super long and tall to make it so it's elevated enough to not do that. So yeah, you're avoiding that whole mess by catching it high enough off the ground that you don't have to factor that in. That's how many engines are involved in the landing part, is the three Raptor engines? Well, we haven't actually, we haven't to date seen the exact landing sequence. So it might be something like at first, they might light up seven or something, or nine or something, some number to accelerate quickly or decelerate quickly, same thing, and then shut it down to three or something for a little bit more granular control. Because unlike Falcon 9, Starship has enough engines and variability to actually, if it needed to hover, to maybe more precisely align itself with the pad, it would have that capability. And especially having multiple engines, if you only have a single engine running, you can't really roll. Your roll axis, you can do pitch and yaw because the engine is kind of like a rudder. It can move in two axes, so you can easily pitch and yaw the vehicle. But to actually induce roll along its vertical axis, you would either need auxiliary engines to roll it, or you'd need a pair of engines so they can be opposed and induce roll. So by having two or three running, they have all three axes of control that they would need, kind of like a broomstick, a balancing broomstick on your hand. They can just move it over, and if they need to align it to those landing nubs on the landing arms and stuff like that, then they can do that. Speaking of pitch and yaw, the thing, so Starship flips on its belly flops. There's an interesting kind of maneuver on the way down to land. Can you describe that maneuver, what's involved in that? Yeah, so this is definitely a first. I don't think anything's tried landing like this before, but the idea is when you're falling through the atmosphere, the atmosphere could actually do a lot of work for you. You're moving quickly, something is falling from space, there's a lot of energy involved. You have a really good video on this as well. And- Thank you. As it's falling, you wanna let the atmosphere do as much work as it can. And so if you have a unsymmetric, it's not a ball that's falling, this is some kind of object with shape, at one face of it is going to have more surface area than the other face. So in the shape of a cylinder, if you're falling like a soda can, if you're falling top or bottom first, it's a certain amount of surface area. If you flip that on its side, you actually have a lot more surface area. So with the same exact vehicle, you can actually have a lot more drag, you can actually slow it down a lot more using the exact same atmosphere, same vehicle, just by turning it 90 degrees, you can slow it down substantially, like three or four times slower. So that's energy that you don't have to use anywhere else. You don't have to use an engine to slow you down, you don't have to do anything else. So SpaceX realized, okay, if we flip this thing on its side and let it fall like a skydiver almost, instead of like pencil diving into the pool, you're belly flopping. You're maximizing the amount of surface area that's in the wind stream that's being slowed down. But obviously, in order to land, especially if you're SpaceX and Elon's obsessed with not having different parts, he wants the best part is no part. So if you're going to land with the engines, you might as well use engines that you already have, the engines that are used for the other portions of flight. So you kick those on and you use those engines to actually turn it 90 degrees from belly flopping to feet first. And that way you can use those same engines to land and you don't have to have auxiliary landing engines, you don't have to have forces, even if you were to land on its belly with a separate set of engines. Not only would those engines weigh a lot and be extra complexity, et cetera, et cetera, but you also don't have to make the ship be able to handle landing on its belly as opposed to having the forces be vertical through it. But it's a giant thing. You have to rotate in the air. Huge. And as you also highlight, there's liquid fuel slushing around in the tank. So you can't, I guess, use that fuel directly, but you have another kind of fuel. There's just complexities there that are involved. Plus, the actual maneuver is difficult from the, like what are the thrusters that actually make that, make all of that happen? You're adding a lot of complexity, not a lot, but you're, complexity to the maneuver and possibility where failure could happen in order to sort of save, in order for the air to do some of the work. So what is some of that complexity? Just you can linger on it. You know, if you think about what it's gonna take to go from horizontal to vertical, this rocket in particular, Starship has these big flaps. So it has kind of two nose flaps and two rearward flaps. The rearward flaps are a lot bigger because the majority of the mass, the engines and stuff are in the back of the vehicle. So in order to kind of be stable, and they just fold themselves inwards, like on their dihedral angle, at a dihedral angle in order to increase or decrease the drag. So you can control it's all three axes of control while it's falling, you know, on its belly, you can control it that way using these four different fins. So you have these giant moving surfaces that take thousands of horsepower, it's just insane amount of torque in order to move these quickly enough to be a valid control surface. So that's a huge complication is moving these fins and developing that landing algorithm and the control for a huge vehicle with flaps going like in and out, in and out, in and out to stay stable. Then right as you light the engines, now all of a sudden you want the top, you know, you wanna flip the rocket 90 degrees so the rearward flaps, the bottom flaps fold in, they tuck all the way in to minimize drag, that's gonna make it wanna swing down, you extend the upper flaps, that makes it so the nose wants to pitch up, you kick on the engines, they're now lighting all three engines, at least as of the last successful attempt, they light all three of the sea level Raptor engines and they're pitched all the way, like 10 or 15 degrees or whatever the maximum pitch is on them, and that induces, it does that kick maneuver to kick it over from horizontal to vertical. Now the problem is you lit your engines while you're horizontal, so they put some horizontal velocity into the rocket, they push the rocket, at the time of lighting those engines, the nose is facing the horizon and the engines are facing the opposite horizon, so you now shot it a decent amount in the direction that you're not falling, you know? So you have to factor that in to where you're landing, cause you're gonna land on this precise, in this case you're gonna land on the inside of the arm, the loving arms of the chopsticks, you know, the creed arms wide open, you're gonna try to land inside this. Exactly, the song that will be playing through my head as I watch this now, thank you. Thank you for forever joining those two. I appreciate this. And you have to very precisely control, so what you have to do is now that it's done that kick, you also have to cancel out that horizontal velocity, so it's actually gonna rotate beyond 90 degrees to cancel out that horizontal velocity and then modulate the engines to make it so the thrust, you know, is perfect so that it can control itself into a controlled landing. And all this is done in like 500 meters, like 1500 feet, you know, you're doing all of those things stupidly close to the ground. It looks absurd. So far they've done five of these tests. All, the first four all blew up, you know, they're all coming in from about 10 kilometers or 33,000 feet. Falling, flipping, you know, again, this thing's huge. That just the booster or just the upper stage of this is like 50 meters tall, you know, so it's 150, well, it's like 45 meters, about 50 meters tall, about 165 feet tall, nine meters wide, so 30 feet wide. It weighs, you know, something like, God, I don't remember if it's something like 120 metric tons, so 120,000 kilograms, you know, quarter of a million pounds empty, and it's doing this flip maneuver. And it has to do all this perfectly. So the first four attempts of this were pretty spectacular failures. So just to clarify, which stage is doing this maneuver? It's the upper stage is doing this belly flop maneuver. Yeah, so this is the stage that would presumably have humans on board if it were to use. And if things continue to plan. Now, here's something I would love to see. Just saying this. If you already have these big aero surfaces, the flaps, they also have to move, they're on heavy motors and hinges and flaps and all that stuff. I'm actually surprised that for Earth, they aren't just looking at landing it horizontally on a runway like the space shuttle. I mean, that worked. The Braun did it, you know, the Soviet Union's Braun. I rolled my R real hard there, so. Thank you, wow. Wow, really good space. I'm very impressed, I'm very impressed. And you know, the Braun did it. We have other space planes like the X-37B. We have the upcoming Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser. It's, yeah, you have some extra mass in the wings, but so does Starship. Starship has the extra mass of those flaps and the motors and the hinges and all that stuff. I would like to see the trade on like, is it actually lighter weight to do that versus doing what SpaceX is doing? So yeah, I mean, that's the funny thing. I think realistically, if Elon walks in the door tomorrow and says, guys, we did some simulations and actually it's like, we can get another 5,000 kilograms into space if we just land it horizontally. If we kind of give up on our ego and land horizontally, at least on Earth, then, you know, I think they could be doing that pretty quickly. Because that's the thing is, this ultimate thing has been to land on Mars and other planets, and Mars doesn't have a runway, doesn't have a thick enough atmosphere to utilize aerodynamic flight like that. So you have to do propulsive landing for Mars. You're gonna land on an unprepared surface, you know? So it has to be able to do this at some point. It sounds ridiculous, and it is, but the ultimate goal of it is to land on Mars. There's not much of an atmosphere to like, to help you with the, for the belly flop to be useful. There's only 1% the atmosphere on Mars as there is on Earth, but you still wanna utilize as much of that atmosphere as possible. So in the upper atmosphere, it's still going to be coming in more or less kind of perpendicular to the airstream. I guess it's probably more like, you know, 60 degrees, 70 degrees to the airstream, like where it's belly flopping. And it's gonna especially do that on Mars. It's gonna need to, you know, use up as, let the little bit of atmosphere there is, you know, you're coming in at insane velocities. And so even that 1% thin atmosphere is still going to do a lot of work. Now on Mars, there's only 38% of Earth's gravity on Mars. So the belly flop maneuver is a lot, it could be a lot more conservative. You could do that at like 5,000 feet up, and it just wouldn't matter as much because there's not as much gravity loss or gravity drag. So you can kind of just more slowly, gently, you know, you don't have to do this crazy extravagant, like belly flop, you know, flip maneuver, but it would still, something at some point, you would transition from more or less perpendicular to the airstream to, you know, and horizontal to landing vertically. I like how we're having this old, boring conversation about the differences of landing on Earth versus on Mars. This is surreal that this is actually a real conversation, that this is something that we're discussing. Because it has to do both. Yeah. But in my opinion, I think we'll pretty quickly see an evolution of Starship that's like dedicated versions for certain tasks. Sure. And at the end of the day, again, if someone runs a simulation and says, it's actually more efficient, and it's better just to land horizontally on a runway, then that's what's gonna happen. You know, it doesn't matter, but they still will develop, you know, if the ultimate goal is to land on Mars, then they'll have a dedicated Mars variant, you know, which will likely look different than the Earth variant, you know, and they'll still probably be launched on the same booster, you know what I mean? So there's... Oh, you mean like that particular vehicle will not be returning back to Earth, it'll need to be modified. Because the ultimate is to have one Starship that goes to Mars, lands on Mars, and takes off of Mars, lands back on Earth, and is reused again. Yeah. Over and over and over. And there's a chance that you, you know, you have just a cycler, just a, you know, if you're, at the end of the day, you're just really trying to see what is most feasible, what's the most efficient. You literally have a vehicle dedicated to Mars. Mars is easy to do a single-stage orbit. It's a lot lower gravity, a lot thinner atmosphere. You can easily do a single-stage orbit. You get into orbit, you'd park to a dedicated, you know, transfer vehicle that goes between Earth and Mars. It only stays in space. You don't have heat shields, you don't have landing legs, you don't have all these things that you need. And ideally, it's nuclear-powered, so it's super efficient. That gets you back to Earth. Once you're at Earth, you rendezvous again with another landing Starship. And that Starship might be a horizontal runway Starship, you know, like... There's no, I don't see the, and I think ultimately, it'll win out where we don't have a one-size-fits-all. I think that's the flaw of the space shuttle, really, is that it was trying to do everything and ended up kind of doing nothing well. But that's, I think, what SpaceX has proven. I mean, SpaceX already has variants coming. There's already going to be a dedicated lunar lander for NASA, for the Artemis program. There's already going to be a tanker variant. There's already going to be, likely, just a pure cargo version. There's likely going to be a human version. We'll likely see evolutions of this thing happen relatively quickly. And once it's all working, it's only a matter of weeks before people riding on it will be complaining about the speed of the Wi-Fi. As the old Louis C.K. joke, where you're flying on a chair through the air. It's incredible. You didn't even know this existed, and now you're complaining about it. It's great. Exactly. So you tweeted, fun fact about Starship. By doing the flip around 500 meters versus higher up, like 2,000 meters, the difference in delta V is 500 meters per second. That's a 20 ton fuel saving, which means basically 20 tons more you can put into orbit. That's more than Falcon 9 has ever launched, just by flipping later. That's really interesting. So that was the decision, too, to flip close to the ground. Yeah, yeah. The closer to the ground, the better. The more, again, the more the atmosphere is doing work. And we get into, that video really dives into gravity losses and gravity drag. The more time you're spent, every second that your rocket engine is running, Earth is stealing 9.8 meters per second of acceleration against you. There's just inherently 9.8 meters per second squared of acceleration. So every second that engine is running, the first big majority of your thrust is actually being just stolen by Earth's gravity well. So the longer you're fighting that, the more inefficient it is. So the best thing would be you flip at 100 meters off the ground, you light all your engines to maximum thrust, and you pull 50 Gs, and you land on a dime, basically. Obviously, there's no margin there, and there's diminishing returns on that gravity loss thing and your high thrust to weight ratios. So that's a pretty good compromise. Yes, it looks scary, but they could be a lot more aggressive with that, yeah, and squeeze out even a little bit better performance, but there are diminishing returns. So that's kind of the magic number we've seen so far today, but we'll likely see that be played with. You've attended some of these. What does it feel like to see Starship in person? First of all, one is just sitting there stacked, and second of all, one is doing some of these tests, some of these maneuvers. Well, first off, if you have the freedom of traveling and happen to live within a reasonable, either by plane or car, it's worth going down to South Texas. It's, so Starbase is right on the border of Mexico and the United States and very Southern tip of Texas, right along the Rio Grande, and it's insane because it's right along a public highway. You can literally, anyone can drive down this, assuming it's not closed for testing, because they do close the highways during the week a decent amount while they're doing tests, but San Zanini of those days, anyone can just drive down and see these things up close and personal with their own eyes. Like we're talking from 100, 200 meters away, so two football fields away from the world's biggest, most powerful rocket. Imagine being able to do that during the Soviet Union and during the N1 and the Saturn V, imagine just being able to drive up right next to the launch pad. There's no way. So to have this kind of access to this program is so incredible. The craziest thing is when you're driving out on Highway 4, it's bumpy, it's riddled with potholes now because of all the insane amount of trucks having to go out there and traffic, and you're going through this, it's just this weird, you're like, where am I? Occasionally you're seeing, you can kind of see the, I mean, you can see Mexico out your right window as you're driving down this highway, and you're just sitting there, like, where am I? And then all of a sudden you kind of turn this corner and the trees and the brush kind of clear out, and all of a sudden you get a sense of everything on the horizon, and at that point you're pretty much five miles on the nose or eight kilometers away, and from there, you can just see through the heat haze, through the atmospheric distortion, and you just see this weird, like, it looks like a city almost on the horizon. There's tons of these tall buildings. There's a weird, ominous launch tower thing with arms wide open, and sometimes, and a giant metal rocket, and it just looks so, so weird. I mean, it's, the word surreal, I think, by definition, I think if you are expecting it, it's not surreal. I think surreal kind of means unexpected, surprise or whatever, you know? Even if you're expecting it, even if you've seen pictures, even if everything, it is surreal. You stand there and you just go, what is this? And also, I mean, there is a kind of magical aspect to the, this is the place where over the next few years, we'll start as a human species reaching out there, as traveling out there. We'll for sure see the development of the rockets that I think will take us further than ever before, be born right there. What's it like to witness the actual testing of Starship? So far, it's been high stakes. Like, it's been insane, because the first I kind of mentioned earlier, there's been SN8, 9, 10, 11, and 15 that have all done these suborbital hops. The highest one went 12.5 kilometers and the rest of the four went 10 kilometers in altitude and then turned off the engines and just fell. Now, the cool thing about that is the general public could be about five miles away, so again, like eight kilometers away. And the weird thing is this rocket's slowly accelerating. They didn't want to exceed a certain speed, so they didn't have to worry about the aerodynamics of it. They just slowly climbed, and it probably also appeased the FAA. They were like, here, we'll just limit the thrust to weight ratio and just make it so it's slow and controlled, no big deal. So it's basically more or less like slightly above a hover, just climbing for minutes, for like four or five minutes, you just hear and feel the roar of this thing. Normal rockets, like, after the first 30 seconds or minute, they're so far away that it's just diminishing. It's just fading, fading, fading, fading. You still get that rumble, that sense, but those first five flights, the suborbital hops were just, I'll cherish them forever, because you're watching this thing that you've driven up next to, you've seen it with your own eyes, that's bigger than most buildings in a fairly dense urban area. It's this massive thing. You stand there, you stood there, you look at it, you're like, wow, that's crazy. You've seen people working on it, they're little ants compared to it. Then you drive away and you see it on the horizon, and all of a sudden that thing leaves. It starts moving. Hovering. Hovering. Essentially. The first time, I mean, you put, for me at least, I put my hands on my head when I, I just, I can't help it. I'm not, it's not, I don't know what it is. It's surreal, like you said. I don't know what in human nature decides this is what to do when you can't believe something, but that's what happens. When that thing first took off, it was just like my brain couldn't process seeing, because I had spent so much time driving around and seeing it, and all of a sudden you're watching it just take off, and you're like, it's moving. And all these, you know, the most complicated rocket engines ever made are all firing simultaneously, and it didn't blow up on the launch pad, and it's slowly increasing, and it's just crazy. And the sound, the, everything about it. And so by the time, the first one specifically, it was December 2020, was the first SN8. It went up, and I actually, we all lost it in the sky. We couldn't quite see it, but we had telescopes and high telephoto lenses tracking it. And what's funny is there's a pretty strong wind up there at altitude, and it was moving. There's a lot of gaseous oxygen being vented out of the rocket, and it's being blown by this air. So it looks like it's moving actually quite quickly, like away from us, like it was strafing to one side. So I'm watching the monitor, I'm going, oh my God, they're moving it like over Brownsville. And we're all, all of us, everyone on this hotel balcony is looking out down, like way out over, and we can't find it. And we're like, where did they lose it? Like we're thinking like, oh my God, this is gonna crash down in Brownsville. And finally they shut the engines off, and we're watching it fall, and again, we're tracking it. We know it's falling, and it's falling, falling, falling. It's falling super controlled, and we're like, oh my God, this is perfect. And all of a sudden it clicked, and I see it. With my eyes, I finally like track it, and it's straight out, like straight in front of us. And it looks like it was a blimp, just barely moving. No, because it is falling slowly, thanks to all of its drag. And again, that's one of those moments I'm like, it's falling so slow, you know, because it's so big, it's so massive, it's falling sideways. You know, I've seen Falcon 9 boosters and Falcon Heavy boosters, and they scream. They come in so fast, and you can barely even see them. You can just barely track them, and all of a sudden they light their engines, and they decelerate so quickly. This was like the opposite. It was like, is that thing ever coming down? It was just falling so slowly, and so right there. Just felt like it was so close. And so when it finally lit its engine and it flipped, I was losing my mind, because I'm like, it's working. You know, this crazy plan, this huge, massive thing is doing this absurd feat. And the first one, well, the first four, again, didn't work out as planned, but getting to that point already, getting to that flip maneuver was a huge milestone. And it was so exciting just going through those firsts were amazing. And I think, you know, we're coming up now on them doing the full stacks of the booster and the upper stage. I think when we see that fly, when that leaves Earth for the first time, it'll be, like I said, almost twice the amount of thrust as anything else. It'll be the biggest, heaviest, largest thing to ever fly. It's going to shake everything. I can't wait. Have all 33 Raptor engines been active at once? Have they tested that? No, that's coming up. That's kind of the next milestone. I don't know when this will come out, but that's like the next. Just a few days, very quickly here. Then, but if people are listening to this, if they're listening to it early on, they'll likely be able to catch, you know, I think at this point, it seems like next week. So step one would be static fire? Yep, holding onto the rocket and lighting up the engines. And so, so far, they've lit at most, they kind of, they went for like a more than 14 engines static fired, I don't recall if it was like, you know, 16 or something engines lit at once, and they ended up going down to 14 engines. That's the most engines they've ever lit. So the next step and the final kind of step before they fly this thing is they're actually going to light all 33 engines simultaneously. And although that sounds scary, let's not forget the Falcon Heavy that's now flown five times completely flawlessly has 27 engines running simultaneously. So they definitely have, you know, SpaceX has experience with high number of engines running at the same time, but it is still like, this is going to be a lot of moving parts and a lot of potential and a lot, just a lot of everything. What are the upcoming milestones, expected milestones? And I think there's one in particular I'd like to talk to you more about, but leading up to that, of course, is like, what are some of the tests here on the way? So is it the static fire? Is it the fully stack with the two stages? Will there be, and then all that leading to an orbital launch test? So what are the things we should know about? And what do you think, what do you think the timeline will be with like the orbital test? Timeline, the reason that we have this website, the expected milestones, is because I always tell people to ignore any time you ever hear for any of this stuff. Just pay attention to milestones because when you're doing stuff for the first time, you just have no idea. So just to understand the expected milestones here, the first column is the event. The second column is the date and status TBD complete. Green means what? Green means it's been completed and it shows the completion date there. And the completion date. And then the others, maybe more, maybe not, for the full stack testing, the D stack and there's a 33 engine. So realistically, we're expecting them to D stack and SpaceX, I think, just tweeted that actually, that they're going to be D stacking the second stage from the first stage, kind of get the ship safe while they test because they don't want to, you know, 33 engines is pretty high risk if they do blow up the rocket. When they test it for the first time, it's not going to be fully fueled, I don't think at least, but there is a limit to how, they do have to have it weighed down enough that the launch clamps can hold onto it. Because if you think about it, normally the launch clamps are holding onto an entire rocket weighing 5 million kilograms, 5 million, you know, it's weighing an insane amount. So those clamps don't actually have to hold 75 mega newtons of thrust. They really only have to hold down 25 mega newtons of thrust. You know what I mean? They're not designed to hold down all 75. They do have to have enough weight on the rocket. So even when they do the testing of the 33 engines, it'll have to have enough propellant in there that they don't exceed the clamping and the holding force of the stand. Otherwise it'll break free from the launch stand and that booster will go flying off uncontrolled. So it's a difficult thing to figure out in the test, how many simultaneous things you test, right? So they're kind of mitigating risks, which is why like they're destacking, you know, they don't want to have, although the ship could be on top of it to help weigh it down and simulate the, you know, the launch environment better. At some point, that's a risk they're just going to take when they go for launch. And so for now they're taking the ship off in case something goes wrong during the 33 engine test. And then once we see if the 33 engine test goes well, hopefully we see the second stage get stacked back on it. We'll see them get closer, like closing out all the items and hope the big one too is the FAA launch license. There that's a little be publicly filed. We'll see that, you know, in the system, having a launch license. And I have no sense of that type of thing, you know, that's outside of, but that's, but that is a big milestone and it might be something that could potentially hinder, you know, hold up the launch date. We'll just be waiting for a launch license. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of fascinating bureaucracy and politics and legal stuff and all that kind of beautiful magical thing when you live in reality. Because it is, I mean, it is a big rocket. Yeah. Well, and the biggest thing, it's not so much, the FAA doesn't necessarily care about the success of the rocket. They really just care about the safety of public and public property, you know? So it's a matter of being convinced and having the data to prove, okay, if this thing blows up, we have a control of how and when it blows up. We have control of, you know, X, Y, and Z. Here's the potential damage. Here's the blast radius. You know, this again is over twice as powerful and twice as much potential. Actually, it's a lot more potential for an explosive energy if it, you know, where it happened to, well, let me walk back a little bit because in order to have a real detonation, you have to have a perfect mixture ratio of your fuel and oxidizer. If when a rocket blows up, typically, you know, it kind of unzips and some of the fuel will mix into some of the oxidizer and you could have some explosive energy, but a lot of it's actually just a deflagration. It's just, you know, flames. And there would be explosive energy, but it's not like you're lighting all of it simultaneously and it's this giant bomb. It's just really not. So that's good, but at the same time, even in those circumstances, the amount of energy is still absurd, enough to likely blow out windows, you know, for miles and miles and miles, including my studio space. Well, if the cameras hold up, it would be one heck of a show. Hopefully, of course, would not happen. So how does that take us to an orbital launch? When do you think that would happen? In my opinion, this is a very fluid and this will change literally by the hour. So you really think that it's very difficult to really say like, even for something that could very well happen this year, even just a few months away, you should make a prediction. By the way, are you like superstitious on this kind of stuff a little bit? Like, you know, you're worried about jinxing it and that kind of stuff? No, not at all, no. Because I would imagine you would be like waiting for all of these launches that keep getting delayed where you start thinking that there's certain things you do will control the weather. My socks. Why am I wearing these socks? Just scrubbed again, you know, like, yeah. You're lucky. You have to wear the same lucky socks, otherwise there's going to be bad weather. Yeah. So the reason that I say this and why it's so difficult is they did a first full stack test in July of 2021. And the expectation was we're a month or two away from a launch. Yeah. So like, realistically for 18 months, I've been in a purgatory thinking that we're a month or two away of an orbital launch. Now I did say, for the record, when that thing stacked and when a lot of speculation was saying, you know, a month or two, I was saying, I don't expect it to fly in 2021. You know, and I've been just saying, I just saw the amount of work that still needed to be done. Like on the ground systems, the tanks, the launch mount, all the stuff I'm sitting there like, there's still a lot of stuff. They're gonna have to validate it. They're gonna have to test everything, every component. And, you know, people were like, how dare you say that even Gwen Shotwell, the president of SpaceX is saying Q3 of 2021. I'm like, okay, but like, I'm just, I'm not going to be surprised if it slips into 2022. And here we are at the beginning of 2023. And I think we're finally within like two months. I'm expecting, like I'm trying to keep my March and April as free as I can. We'll put it that way. I love it. Actually, just in a small tangent on Gwen Shotwell, like what do you, from everything I know, she's an instrumental, a really crucial person to the success of SpaceX in running the show. She's the president, the COO. What do you know about her that sort of, the genius of Gwen Shotwell? Man, my understanding is she's really the glue. You know, she's the glue to the tornado. Tornado comes in and then she comes around and just really executes on, and helps, you know, a famous story is that at some point Elon walked in or she sprinted into a meeting because Elon was actively trying to cancel Falcon Heavy, saying it's too far, like it's too much development, it's still too far away. And this is like, you know, this might've been like end of 2017 or something. And it flew for the first time in 2018. So we're talking like it's close to the end of development. You know, there's hardware being built, all this stuff. And Elon's literally in a meeting telling people they're gonna cancel it and we're gonna move on to BFR or now Starship, and just go full steam ahead on that. And she runs into the meeting and reminds Elon, we have X amount of customers have already purchased a ride on Falcon Heavy, we can't delay that. You know, so it's that business sense of like, yes, it's great to innovate, but we also have to pay our dues and make the money to continue our operations. And I think she's just a lot better at, she has, I think she has such a great perspective on everything. It really seems like everything, she doesn't, I wish she did more interviews cause I would love to hear more from her. But man, like it just seems- Did you hear that, Gwen? For both of us? Yeah, she hasn't actually done that many interviews, right? Not really, no. She's done like a TED talk, a couple of little things here and there, but not really many interviews. And I would just love to hear like what, you know, what on a daily basis, like what is she doing to keep her head on and keep everything so organized? You know, it's, you know, yeah. My understanding is that she is absolutely integral and does just an insane amount of work at SpaceX. Yeah, I mean, so it's the project planning, but also the, how the teams integrate together and the hiring and just the management of the whole thing. I think it's a lot of it, honestly, even just the business, making sure the money's flowing in a positive trend, more or less, you know. Yes, Elon's obviously a money guy, but he thinks, he's so, I think Elon is so risky. You know, he just loves to throw it all in that he leaves little margin for error. You know, he's been really lucky with rolling his dice, you know, especially like when he started SpaceX and Tesla, that was the ultimate roll of the dice. But I think she's a healthy balance to be like, well, here's our, you know, operations and how we can continue to do this without risking everything, you know. And Starship's close, let me be clear. Starship is close to risking everything already. It's just such a big, fast moving, high risk developmental program that like, I personally think, you know, SpaceX would probably be fine if they shut the doors on Starship and just flew Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy for the next 10 years, they would still be commercially valid. They could not spend another dollar on research and development. They could fire, I don't want them to, fire everyone involved in anything research and development and just ran operations on Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, and they would still be dominant for 10 years. And they would still have a business case and they'd still be fine. But they're all in, like all chips are pretty much, as many chips as possible are in for Starship. And this, I don't know what else I could say, is there's not, I've talked to a lot of great leaders. There's just not many people like Elon that would push for Starship. When they're already as far ahead. A very successful company. Yeah. Sort of everyone doubted that it could be a successful company. It was so close to bankruptcy and failing. And then to take it into a financially viable, successful company, and just when you do, you take on a project that again risks everything. Well, he already did this with Falcon 1 to Falcon 9. Like literally people were like, what are you doing? They basically signed over and were fully ramping up Falcon 9 by the time they finally had their first Falcon 1 success. They had one more flight. They only flew Falcon 1 successfully twice. They flew it five times altogether. The fourth one was successful and they flew one more time. And anyone else out there would have been like, let's keep flying the Falcon 1. We have a working rocket. We can start making money and profiting. And already he was risking it all and saying, nope, we're going from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9. It was a huge, huge leap. I think it was at least as big as a leap from Falcon 1 to 9 as it is from Falcon 9 to Starship or around relatively a similar leap. So it's just that same thing again. People are going, why are you leaping into this insane program and system and risk when you have such a, you finally have this workhorse of a rocket that's so dominant in the industry, yet they're going 10X. It so happens that you've been selected for the Dear Moon mission that will fly Starship once around the moon with nine people on board. You are one of those people. So just pause to take that in. Everything that we've been talking about, you will not just be reporting on, you will be a part of it. So tell me about the objective of this mission and how does it feel to be a part of it? Well, man. Yeah, it's basically, it's the Willy Wonka of space. Like a generous individual purchased a ride from SpaceX as early, at least as far as I know, the earliest I knew about it was February 27th, 2017. Who's the individual? Yusaku Maezawa, but at the time, I'm telling a story. At the time, we didn't know. Okay, great. So February 27th, 2017, a press release comes out from SpaceX saying someone purchased a ride through us around the moon. We're gonna fly someone around the moon, and at the time, it was on a Crew Dragon capsule and a Falcon Heavy. It's like, wow, and that was enough. That little moment right there, that press release. It's the first time I'm like, I'm gonna make a YouTube video about this. I stood up, turned on my camera, put on my, at the time, space suit, and I basically yelled at the camera for three minutes about someone's going around the moon. Now, fast forward to 2018. End of 2018, or near the end, they introduced, there's a SpaceX press conference. I'm there as a member of the press. I'm reporting on, we're going to meet this person that's going around the moon, and come to find out, boom, they're going to be riding on Starship now. They changed from Falcon Heavy and Dragon. SpaceX is no longer going to do that. They're going to upgrade them basically to Starship. So instead of being in a small tin can, they're in this giant, luxurious, mega rocket around the moon. And it comes out that this individual named Yusaku Maezawa, who is a Japanese billionaire, purchased this ride, and instead of inviting his friends and colleagues and whatever, whoever, his family members or whatever, he decided the most impactful thing he could do with this opportunity is invite more or less artists. In the original thing, it was like artists, a journalist, a painter, an athlete, a photographer, videographer, all walks of life basically. When they said athlete, they thought of you. They're like, I know a guy. This guy rode rag by once. And at the time, I was like, this is crazy. I can't believe this is going to happen. And he had this vision of, we're going to find people from all around the world. I'm going to invite people from all around the world, from different walks of life, different trades, and I'm going to share this experience so that they can share it with the world and really have an impact much greater than any one country or any one individual or any set of military trained astronauts could do, offer up a new perspective. Beautiful. I literally, I mean, at the press conference, I cried. Like I had a couple of tears in my eyes. I was like, this is so cool. If we could just pause on that. So he goes by MZ? MZ, yep. How incredible is that? It's, I'd like, I think it's, you often don't realize the importance of individuals in human history. Like they define, because this could be, we talked about the importance of Elon in particular. You know, most of the work is done by large groups of people that are collective intelligence that we band together. But like these individuals can be the spark of the catalyst of that progress. And I mean, just this idea of getting not just civilians, which is already incredible, but civilians with a sort of an artistic flame that burns inside them, they're able to communicate. Whatever they do, are able to communicate something about that experience. And it's just a genius idea to spend quite probably a very large amount of money for that. I mean, it's, it's, and that will be part of history. Yeah, and it's easy these days for people to be cynical, you know, especially about like space flight and wealthy individuals. But really, in my opinion, and maybe, you know, just the time I was just so couldn't believe this idea, you know, I'm someone that has studied a lot about, you know, the Apollo program, the people that have been to the moon, and they're incredible individuals, incredible individuals, but they're so saturated with tasks, you know, and they're military trained and often, that they didn't really have the luxury of just being able to soak in the experience of going around or to the moon and seeing the moon up close with your own eyes. Like that just psychologically has to be insane. And so to have this opportunity to be able to observe our closest celestial neighbor with your own eyes and your sole purpose is to soak it in and share it and communicate and create with the rest of our planet, like that to me is just beautiful. So that is the objective of the mission. That right there is the objective of the mission. And how does it feel to be selected as one of the nine to do it? It's a gradient. It's slowly, it's doing a few things. Since I've known, it's become, I think the closer it gets, the more excited and the more nervous I get. The more real it becomes. The more real it becomes. The announcement was a big, it just got announced at the end of 2022 publicly, who's involved. And so prior to that, like I had each step of the selection process, you know, there's a pretty comprehensive selection process with interviews and stuff. Each step I'd try not to get my hopes up. And frankly, like this, let me be clear, this was not something that like I've always wanted to do. You know, it's not like I'm out there, I didn't start doing YouTube videos because I wanted to even go to space, like none of that. And I've said, hilariously, I've probably said dozens or hundreds of times on air, like, yeah, I don't ever want to go to space. Because it's not like my, it's not a driving force. It's not really a thing I even really truly pictured or let myself fantasize about, frankly. So each step of the selection process, I didn't really let myself dream about it too much or, you know, but I'd kind of, it would kind of chip away. Like, oh my God, this is actually becoming more real. This is actually more and more of an opportunity. And I get equally more nervous too. Like, you know, frankly, it is, it's, I've seen space flight stuff go wrong. I've, you know, I think about this stuff a lot. So like, yeah, I get more nervous, but I also get more excited about that opportunity. Like it's an opportunity that how can you pass? And it's still, I still have to actually stop, pause, think, and actually realize the reality that like, that I am going to the moon and I'm going to see the moon up close, flying around the moon. I'm sorry, some people get mad when I say going to the moon since I'm not landing on it. But flying around the moon, seeing the far side of the moon with my own eyes and seeing the earth rise behind it. Yeah, it's going to, I just, I can't, I can't tell you what it's going to be like and feel like. It's so epic. But it's insane to me that like, we're having this conversation and that that is my reality, you know, like, and that someone was generous enough to consider the option of sharing this with frankly strangers. Yeah. And the process that they had for selecting, like how much thought and time went into the selection process is incredible. You know, they did a public call at the beginning of 2021. And so the teams involved in whittling it down from a million applicants, there's a million applicants that whittled it, and they got it down to eight crew members and two backups. Yeah. Amazing people. I would have, you know, I don't know how they wound up where they did, but it's incredible. I feel very deep connection to everyone that's already involved. What can you say about the crew? You've gotten the chance to meet them and talk to them and Steve Aoki's on the crew. Like, who else is there? So you are obviously the star athlete. Who else, in terms of the artists that are there? So, oh man, we might just want to pull up, just so I don't totally butcher and forget anybody, but because so far I haven't actually had the chance to meet everyone in person. You know, so far a lot of this was done during the pandemic, but we've met through a couple of different things. We've had a couple of different times to get together, but so far I have not met Steve Aoki yet or Top. We've been on calls and stuff. I also have not yet met Dev Joshi, who is an actor from India. So yeah, Steve Aoki, American DJ and producer and musician. Top from South Korea is also a musician and a producer. So this is all across the world. So like truly global, all different kinds of walks of life. Yeah. All artists of different forms. And Steve is Japanese. His parents are Japanese, but he, you know, born and raised in the United States. Yemi is a dancer and choreographer from the Czech Republic. Rhiannon is a fine art photographer from, well, England and Ireland. I guess she lives in both and kind of a bit of a, she's all over the place. Technically she's Irish, I guess. I, Tim Dodd, yep, that's me from the United States. Then you have Kareem who is from England and does also as a photographer and documentarian. Does a lot of work with oceanography and volcanoes. So he does really incredible work. Brendan Hall is a documentarian and filmmaker. Dev Joshi, sorry, Brendan is also from the United States. Dev Joshi is an Indian actor. I believe also, I believe he's also already been producing and things. He's very young. I think he's only like 19 or 20. And he's, I mean, he's been acting since he was like five years old or something. He's a Bollywood star. Like he is a star in India, which is really cool. Kaitlin Farrington from the United States is an Olympic gold medalist snowboarder. So she, believe it or not, is the athlete and not me. Oh, sorry. And then, and she's one of the back up crew members as so is Miyu from Japan, who's a dancer. That's amazing. And it's such an interesting group. I mean, is there something else you could say about MZ? About Yusaku Maezawa? Yeah, Yusaku Maezawa. So he's also a musician. So he was actually in like some kind of punk hardcore Japanese bands in the early, in the 90s and stuff, in the early 2000s. He started a record company and distribution and sales ended up in fashion and owns one of the biggest fashion companies in Japan. And has become a fine art collector and just kind of a philanthropist. And he's been out to space already. He's already not only been to space, like he's been to the International Space Station. He's been on orbit and on the ISS. And so he, what's cool is like, there's talks of, frankly, to be honest, like we still don't, I still don't know all of the details about this. We're not yet into training. I kind of always assumed prior that there'd be some professional astronaut, you know, when they talked about in 2018, there's talks of we'll have a professional astronaut on board, but realistically now, like MZ is a trained astronaut, you know. He has trained a lot, like six months, you know, plus to be able to fly on Soyuz. So as far as like, it's good to know for me that I have someone on the crew that has experience with space flight, has trained and has some knowledge on space flight as well. You know, that is an important aspect for sure. So you made an excellent video about flying in a fighter jet that I think you mentioned may be relevant to the training. Is there some high level aspects to training that you anticipate that you might be able to speak to? Yeah, so, you know, so far I think we can really lean on what has happened with the other, you know, commercial crew missions and in private missions like the Inspiration4 mission or Axiom, where SpaceX flew individuals. They trained for about six months, a lot of like reading manuals and learning the spacecraft. Are you gonna do like a Rocky IV montage or? I hope I just get shredded. I hope it's physical, a lot of physical training. And they're like, we didn't tell him to do it. He just seems to wanna film himself shirtless in the snow. Doesn't make any, how is this relevant? Punching meat, why is he always doing this? Can't get him to stop punching meat. So yeah, hopefully, realistically, I. That's a manual reading, I like it. There's a physical component to all of this and that's really, I mean, that's fascinating. And it's also inspiring the sort of civilians can do this. That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, this is, and to me this represents, this and the other commercial space, you know, private spaceflight missions like this represent really a turning point, like truly an inflection. And again, it's easy for people to be cynical that, oh, you know, why are people wasting all this money doing spaceflight stuff? It's like, well, I'm sure some people were saying that same thing about airplanes and early aviation going like, why are we, can't believe those people are wasting the government's, you know, funding these stupid planes and stuff. How's this ever gonna benefit me? And nowadays, like imagine if all the planes just stopped working, like we'd freak out. It's like our economy would collapse. It would suck, you know? And I, you know, it might be a long time before we get to that reality with spaceflight. Well, no, if spaceflight halted today, you know, space assets, all of our, you know, on-orbit assets, our life would be crippled. And I don't think people realize that. So it's already, we're already reliant on it. But now we're getting to the point where it's, we're really turning that corner where it's the average person alive today. You know, if you're born, you know, now, from now on, I think there's a real decent chance that by the time you pass, there's an opportunity to have flown in space. Yeah, I mean, I, if I'm being honest, I still haven't lost the feeling of magic of flying in an airplane. I often catch myself thinking like, how is this real? How is, and like the contrast of this incredible thing that's incredibly safe, flying through the air, taking off and landing, while everyone else just looks bored, watching like, I don't know, some romantic comedy on their phone with wifi. So it's just, it's like, the contrast of that is like, wow, we're incredible, we're incredible as a society. And it's like, we develop some amazing technology that improves almost immeasurably our quality of life. And then we take it for granted and now still reach for the next thing, and the next thing and life becomes more beautiful and complex and interesting. And yeah, it's just the same stuff will be happening with space travel. Oh, it'll become mundane and boring at some point. The tough thing about space travel, of course, you know, I don't even know if it's such a giant leap over airplanes because airplanes are already incredible. But the tough thing with space travel is the destination, right, is the landing on whole other worlds, whether it's docking with different transport vehicles or the space station or it's landing elsewhere. And it really is incredible. I think you mentioned, since there's artists, there's filmmakers and so on, and you're all of those on top of being a great athlete. I don't know, I'll just stop the running joke at this point. But have you thought about, just in general, we've offline talked about microphones and all the different ways to film rocket launches. Have you thought about the different options of how to capture this? Have you, have the team, have been brainstorming and thinking about this? Do you anticipate it being super challenging? Because there's so many opportunities to sort of think of how to do this. So one of the fun things to remember is that Starship is huge. Like its internal volume is, the pressurized volume on Starship is bigger than a 747's pressurized volume. And it can take 100 metric tons to anywhere with enough refueling. So we have, in theory, very little mass and volume constraints. Unlike prior, all other space flight missions ever, you're counting grams down to, and just really can't risk, you have very defined parameters on what you can and cannot do. We're going to likely have the luxury of being able to film and capture this in a way that's just never been done before. You know, we won't be inhibited by mass and volume constraints like prior. So all that said and done, I'm hoping that we'll be able to just arm ourselves to the teeth with the absolute best cameras and equipment possible, backups on backups, and pre-wire, like pre-rig things. Starship is going to be a transportation system and it has, it's being built from the ground up. There's no reason why they can't put infrastructure in for cameras that are just housed in the vehicle. These are talks that I'm excited to have. Because I really, ideally, one of the things I'd love to do, I'm going to be pushing really hard to actually try live streaming from inside during the launch. During the launch, live stream from the inside. That would be incredible. If that's possible to- Wouldn't that be- If that's possible to pull off, that's really, really incredible. There is the magic to the live stream because like that's real, that's right there. That would, the world would tune in. That would be truly inspiring, yes. To me, that's one of those things, a lot of people ask why they aren't doing it. Of course, NASA and other individuals have their reasons of why not. You know, there's obviously some technical hurdles, but now with Starlink and other capabilities, there's less hurdles. There's obviously some transparency reasons why, you know, and safety reasons why it might not be a great idea to live stream a risky rocket launch. You know, the Challenger, I think, put a pretty bad taste in our mouth as far as publicizing an event and having every student in the United States tune in to, you know, a tragedy. But that's something I'm pushing for really hard just because I think it could be magical. I think it could really connect with people in a way that hasn't been done before. Speaking of Challenger, have you thought about the fact that you're riding a thing, as we've been talking about, that's a giant, explosive, powerful rocket? Have you thought about the risk of that, the danger of that? Have you contemplated your own mortality? How could I not? You know, I've seen and felt four of these prototype vehicles blow up, you know, with my own eyes. I don't know if there's anyone else, you know, early days, some of the, you know, Mercury and Gemini astronauts watched failures of rockets and then got on them. I don't know of too many people that are dumb enough to do that, though, these days, this day and age. It's obviously, I will have to see a lot of successful launches and have to have a lot of confidence in the engineering, the data, that they've developed a safe system. Because currently, the current iteration of Starship has no abort system, has no escape tower. So, you know, Dragon Capsule, which is currently flying people, has a launch abort system. It has Super Draco engines that, either by the push of a button or by the automatic triggering of the flight computer, can shoot the capsule off of the rocket in milliseconds and pull it safely away, get it far enough away that it can pull the parachutes and safely splash down. Starship, by all iterations I've ever seen, does not have that. The Space Shuttle also did not have that. So it's not absurd to not have an abort system. Like, it is, there is, you know, certain engineering principles that prove that that could be a completely valid thing. You know, the Space Shuttle flew 133 times fully successfully. It did have two failures, resulting in the loss of 14 lives. 85, or sorry, 98.5% success rate. Pretty, I mean, yeah, there's other, I've probably done things that are a lot riskier. I have raced motorcycles, drag raced motorcycles, and, you know, ridden like an absolute jerk on the streets on a motorcycle. I'm sure I've had a higher than a 98.5% survival rate, or lower than that, I mean, at some point. So it's, you know, yes, it's risky, it's scary. And I think about it a lot, a lot. It definitely is one of those things that I, you know, I will have to see. And I'm in no hurry for this to happen either. You know, personally, I'm in no hurry, because it's like, I would rather see this thing be developed and iterated and see 10, you know, or I was gonna say 10 dozen, but I'd be happy with a dozen fully successful, like, oh, we've got this thing totally nailed down, you know, before I get on it. And that likely is the reality. There will likely be a dozen or two or three launches, because just even to get to the moon on Starship, they have to refuel it in orbit. So it will get to Earth orbit basically empty and out of fuel. So I'll have to dock with a fuel depot, fill up, and then go to the moon. So just to even get that full, you know, we're already talking about, you know, a handful of launches. So there will be a lot of launches before we fly. Would they do a test flight without humans on board that goes to the moon, or no? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if they'll do that exact flight profile, but by then they will have already flown, most likely the Artemis III program will have flown a Starship variant to the moon that lands on the moon. So doing, at that point, you're pretty much, I would like them to test the heat shield at that entry velocity though, because it is, you know, it takes another, it's about 30% faster to get, like if you go 30% faster than the low Earth orbit to get out to a translunar injection. And although that only sounds like, oh, it's 30% faster, it's, you know, the re-entry heating experienced by a vehicle goes up by velocity cubed, not squared, so, and not even, not linear. So it's not like if you go twice as fast, you get, you see twice as much heat, you know, 30% faster, 30% more heat. It's, and it's not squared, it's not go twice as fast to get four times as much heat, it's go twice as fast, get eight times as much heat on re-entry. So 30% faster on re-entry is actually a really, really big deal. So I would love to see that be tested, you know, there's certain things that I would love to see milestones that I would love to see tested out and proven before I get on board. But at the end of the day, I really do believe that just like Falcon 9 and the success of that, that they're going to push it and get all the kinks out well before anyone's on top of it. Nowadays, Falcon 9 and Dragon is, you know, arguably the, one of the safest, most reliable and best rides you could take to space. Are you afraid of dying? Yeah, yeah. Is this one of the first times you get to, you're young. Yeah. Have you gotten a chance to think about death as one of the first times you've really contemplated it? I mean, yeah, I mean, like I said, I've had dumb moments on motorcycles where I kind of saw, you know, like, I'm going to smash into this thing at 120 mile an hour. So you've had moments when you realized it could end just like this? Yes. Where you literally, and I have, for most of my adult life, had dreams of falling and hitting the ground and it just all, you get a ring in your ears, it all goes black, and in my head I go, oh shit, that was it. Have you seen a therapist about this? Uh-uh. I wonder what it means. So I've, and. I'm sure there's a Freudian interpretation somewhere in there. That I'm going to also apply to my dating life. No, the joke, the running joke continues. Okay, so, I mean, it's fascinating in general, as I hope we'll talk about in the early days of space flight that there is, the task of reaching out to the stars is a fundamentally risky one. You have to take risks, and of course, there's really rigorous safety precautions and so on, but it's still a risk. And I think like most people, for me, the idea of dying isn't so much about myself, it's about those affected by it, my loved ones, my family, my girlfriend, my friends. Obviously I don't want to have this be a traumatic experience for anybody. It's already gonna be hard. I know my mom gets, my parents and family and friends are very supportive, and my parents are all about it, of course, but my mom is also very emotional too. So she's, so my, speaking of athletes, my brother-in-law has actually been on American Ninja Warrior two seasons. Phenomenal athlete, and even just when he competes, my mom gets so emotional, like she can't even hold it together seeing that. So what's it gonna be like when she sees her son get on top of a skyscraper and ascend on a column of flames into the heavens? Like that's going to be very difficult. And I've taken them out, they've seen Star Race, and they've seen Starship, they've seen a couple launches. I don't know if that's gonna make him feel better. Heh heh heh heh. Exposure therapy, I guess. Exposure therapy, okay. Have you had that conversation with them about this? Like before agreeing to join? I mean, was that, or is it one of those things like, you just, you don't have that conversation? I didn't have that conversation. I suppose it's understood that there's a love, there's a passion here. And realistically, I'm not, I'm going to be convinced and statistically convinced that this is relatively safe. You know, like, again, in the 99s, percent safe. Again, there's things that people do every day that are less safe than this, you know? Like you riding a motorcycle. Again, yeah, riding a motorcycle, doing wheelies at over 100 mile an hour, not the smartest thing. You did wheelies over 100, what? All right. I'm not a smart guy always, okay? Formation flying in the fighter jets was likely a more dangerous thing than what I'll be doing in space flight. So as surreal as it is, we're talking about you flying around the moon. Let's rewind and talk about the origin story. What's the origin story of everyday astronaut? I used to be a professional photographer. So from 2008 until the end of 2016, that was my income was photography, full-time. Like you were an Instagram model and took butt pictures of yourself? Instagram fitness model, obviously. Obviously. I did a lot of weddings. I shot 150 weddings all around the world. So subjects, all kinds of material, like did you do portrait also? A lot of portrait work and then just random commercial things like food and beverages for businesses or like wheelchair ramp company. I shot their product line. You know, it's random, whatever a professional photographer does in Cedar Falls, Iowa. When did you fall in love with photography with a visual medium? Do you remember? Yeah, I do actually remember. So I grew up drawing constantly. I was the weird kid that I would bring a sketch pad to the restaurants, like every restaurant when I was growing up until I was like 18, 19, I literally would just sit there and draw or waiting for food. And my parents like fostered that. And I'd be the weird kid, but I'd be engaging and talking, but I'd be sitting there drawing. And I was always obsessed with realism and like recreating and visualizing things. And so when I got my hands on a camera, it was actually my dad's old Pentax that I first shot on a film camera and developing the film. I didn't personally develop it, but like getting the film back, back in those days, you know, I just was like so excited about the idea that I had this visual thing that I saw with my own eyes and now I can stop time and capture it and show it to other people. Just kind of like, to me, that was like the ultimate form of realism was like literally showing you the photons basically that affected this film. And so, I mean, I was 19 when I got my first digital SLR at Canon 20D and started shooting. And yeah, I just, I fell in love with it. It became like, I got a job at a camera store and basically all my extra money went into buying everything that I could at the time. And I only worked there for about exactly a year before I went into pursuing photography full-time. And I basically was shooting weddings so that I could travel and pay like, you know, afford to be able to do some big trips every year and develop some kind of, you know, portfolio of traveling. And not necessarily like, not for, you know, I guess Instagram wasn't much of a thing at the time. It's really just, I liked making big prints and having them displayed and that kind of stuff. And pretty soon- Are you still a Canon guy, you still a Canon elitist? No, no, I moved around. I did Sony for a bit. I still kind of shoot mostly Canon glass, but adapted to either Sony- What's Canon glass mean? Like lenses, sorry, like Canon glass. Look at you. What do you think about these things that I'm using, Sony a7 IV? Great. It's great, see, yeah. I've been, you know, I Googled around just trying to find a camera that can do video and photography pretty well. And obviously going with just like generic lenses, prime lens, I resisted everything. My whole journey with these camera thing, I'm trying to figure stuff out, is like prime lens, it seems so stupid. So prime lens is like a fixed zoom thing. It's like, why? Because I remember I was going to like Ukraine and thinking it's similar, like, yeah, very similar to space flight. But you're very constrained because you're going into an unknown environment. You go into a war zone, you go into a front, you don't know what, like you don't know anything. And there's like a little suitcase you have to like see, figure out like, how do you film this? What's robust? What gives you like a good image versus the flexibility versus the weight? Is weight is important there? You have to think about like, can you really bring like a bunch of zoom lenses and all that kind of stuff? So I had to learn really quickly, but yeah. It's a whole journey that you've already been on, but it's nice to have a beginner like me, like to explore that. I think there's a nice thing, just like as we've been talking about with the beginner's mind, to not let equipment get in the way of like what your vision is of what a thing should look like. Sometimes like, especially if you're a professional videographer, photographer, cinematographer, whatever you call it, you can like fetishize equipment too much. You could get so much equipment. And I've interacted with that because I've been trying to learn from other people that have so much more experience than me. I think their advice is often like, pushing a lot of equipment versus like the final thing. Like how do you create the art of it? Because to me, even photography is just like storytelling. And so like a lot of the discussion to me that I enjoy, especially talking to creative people, is like the final story. Like how, and I've learned, you know, like light, light is a weird thing. Like it's so interesting. It's so interesting how you can create emotion with light. Like with a little, you can take a phone and like you light your face in different ways. And like it changes the emotion. It's so weird. I'm like, holy shit. Because like that's the conversation I want to have. People give me advice how to light a scene and all that kind of stuff is great. But the reality is that a little bit of light in a different direction, that you have to understand how that changes. The contour on your face and everything. And the expression that your face can, like the expression that could be effectively communicated under different lighting conditions. And then like the mystery of like having some of your face in darkness and some not, or when you can only see the eyes and not the face, when the background is visible or not. I mean, the, yeah. It's all just like this interesting art form that can be so powerful when you're telling a story. Well, and what's fun for with me with photography and rockets, they're both like the ultimate story of compromise. Because when you start learning about photography, learn about how the aperture affects both your exposure, but also your depth of field, higher shutter speed affects both your exposure, your depth of field, how the medium format camera versus a crop camera affects, everything is a compromise. And price versus performance. You're like, there's always a compromise. You're always literally doing like a trade study of what can I afford? What's my outcome? Like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How fast is the autofocus or whatever. Same with rockets. Like there's a million choices and every single one of them affects every single thing. So there's always all these trades. And it's so cool that you can see the same, totally different outcomes based on the same requirements. You know, like do X, then here's how we're gonna do it. And two teams of people will come up with wildly different things. When did you fall in love with rockets? So yeah, so the story kind of keeps going for me. So I was doing- Sorry to interrupt. Can't talk photography, man. We'll go on a deep rabbit hole there. So it ended, you know, I'm through all this doing a lot of weddings. I was already getting saturated and feeling like I'm not being as creative. You know, you can only shoot them so many weddings before you're like, well, now we do this pose, this pose, this pose. You know, even if like they're amazing places, like, you know, in front of a castle in Germany or something, I'm still like, well, I think to the day I'm not being very creative, you know? So I remember craving like some projects. And so I was sitting at my friend's coffee shop in my hometown in Cedar Falls, sidecar coffee. And I'm sitting on this red couch and I see this article from I think Gizmodo. And it said, you could own the flight stick of an Apollo command module. And I knew enough to know what that meant, but that's really about the end of my space knowledge. And so I clicked on it, the click bait got me. Like, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna see if, you know, and see that the minimum bid was like $250,000. I'm like, okay, no, I can't own the Apollo joystick, you know, but it got me on this website called RROction. And so I started scrolling through that, looking for things that hadn't been bid on. And they had like, you know, at the time they were doing a huge space auction. And so I'm looking for things just out of curiosity, fun. These are cool, like starting to really, you know, like I said, I like space, but I wasn't like in love with it or anything, but I'm very just seeing all this stuff. I'm like, this is so cool. Look at all this old history stuff. Ended up seeing, there's an article for a VMSTK-44 flight suit, high altitude flight suit that came from the Soviet Union and looks, you know, it's like a MiG fighter jet, fighter pilot suit, very similar to like the SR-71, like kind of pumpkin suit, semi-pressure suit with a, you know, full helmet. I mean, it looks like a space suit, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's kind of like a space suit. And I just bid on it, you know, I bid like, I think $325. And next thing you know, like it arrives at my door. And from that point on, like literally I got it out. I immediately tried to put it on. And the first thing that I do is almost die in it because I closed the helmet down on myself and locked it and didn't know how to unlock it. So I'm literally, and so as soon as I seal it up, I'm realizing I can't breathe. I'm going to run out of air. So luckily like there's a hose, you know, kind of that long hose thing that would normally plug into an air supply, had a little plug on the end of it. So I just unplugged it and was able to temporarily breathe through the hose until I figured out the locking mechanism. So there was my almost, that was my mortality rate thing right there. So that was probably above a 98 or below a 98. So you're there panicking inside for a few seconds. Already reading like my premature obituary, like idiot dies alone in space suit in his living room. You know, like just imagine. That would be like Darwin award for sure, for sure. So I get the space suit and it kind of- That's literally take my breath away. You should feel bad for that one. You introduced Creed to me, so you should feel bad about that one. Stars wide open. So yeah. Okay, so I ended up like the space suit kind of like more or less haunted me because it kind of just, it sat in like my living room for a long time and I didn't know what to do with it. And I actually had a friend who is also a photographer, wanted to do like a photo. He was just kind of taking pictures randomly. He's like, hey, bring your space suit over. We'll do a picture. It's like, all right. You know, I walk across the street, literally lived across the street, Taylor. And I put the space suit on. He took this funny picture of me like, this is awesome. And I got a lot of like fun out of like creating a character you know, of everyday astronaut or at the time I guess I didn't know, an astronaut. And then that kind of just continued. I was like thinking of more and more funny situations where I could have this astronaut on earth doing mundane everyday things and came up with the name Everyday Astronaut. And originally it was just literally a photo project, like this whole art series of an astronaut doing these things, these funny, whimsical, you know, silly mundane things. But I was researching a lot about like, you know, I was trying to hide Easter eggs. Like I was gonna hide in like the, you know, the echocardiogram of Alan Shepard, you know, like his first flight into space and Photoshopping that into pictures. And like, you know, doing all these little like facts about space flight, but they're just hidden little elements in these photos. And man, doing that, I just fell in love with it. I just was going over every little detail that I could learn. I just couldn't stop learning. And I was getting excited because I was like, I could be teaching people about all this exciting stuff and all the cool things people figured out, you know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. And was trying to portray that through images on Instagram. And, you know, it took me a little while, but eventually I realized, you know, on Instagram, your retention rate, you're lucky if you get like two seconds of someone looking at an image, you know, or maybe nowadays 60 seconds of a quick little Instagram short or something. But yeah. It doesn't give you a chance to really teach, to explore a little topic that you felt, like you felt the curiosity about the thing. There's so much to learn here. This is so beautiful. There's so many opportunities to have a light bulb go off for someone and be like, this is awesome. And so, yeah, I think I started, so by the end of 2016, like throughout 2016, I realized I want to be done doing photography as a profession and I want to pursue everyday astronaut. But I didn't know what it meant yet. I just knew like I had this thing, you know, and at that time I'd been doing it for roughly two years and had, you know, seen, I don't know, like 50,000 Instagram followers or something. I thought like I could just be a full-time influencer now, you know, like just go around taking pictures of myself in a space suit and doing public appearances and write a children's book or something. I don't know. I don't know what this thing is. I'll figure it out, you know? And so, basically I gave myself like a runway of one year, of 2017, of like, I'm gonna throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So I was doing like Twitch streams. I was playing Kerbal Space Program, which is like a video game, like a physics-based rocket building simulation game, but it's also like, it's fun and silly because you're not playing with like humans. You're playing with these little Kerbal, like little alien guys and it's fun and silly. You know, I was streaming that on Twitch and doing things and posting some of those things onto YouTube, but finally, like I said, it actually happened to be February 27th, 2017 when SpaceX had that announcement that they're flying someone around the moon that I'm, I gotta tell people about this, and stood there and made my first, like produced YouTube video. And I didn't want it to be over three minutes. I was afraid that'd be way too long for YouTube. And I got it down to like, I don't know, two minutes and 40 seconds or something. And that video- Were you wearing the- I was wearing the spacesuit. The spacesuit. Yep, and very like horrible audio. It looks like it was color graded by a seven-year-old with a tan marker or something. Like it just looks terrible. Sounds horrible. I'm yelling. No one's happy. But the video, you know, did relatively well. Like I had no followers on YouTube. Like I had, you know, maybe 102 or something. Is the video still up? Yeah. That's great. I'm gonna have to watch it after this. It's so cringy. And as it should be, you know, your first video should be terrible. If it's not terrible, then you spent too long trying to make it. So the thing that clicked for me is I had very little audience, and all of a sudden that video kind of took off, you know, relatively. I think it got like 10,000 or 12,000 views. And I was like, holy crap, that's way more engagement than I'm having. I'm famous. I'm famous now. 10,000 people? That's almost my whole town. First of all, that is kind of crazy. Like 10,000 people is crazy. It's crazy. Like if you had 500 people attend a thing that you do, that would be like, you're like a rockstar. It's crazy. We lose perspective. Yeah, we lose perspective very quickly. Very quickly. So I'd made another video. This one I spent more time on. And I had, before photography, actually I used to do like wedding videography too. So I had done my woes with videography and weddings and stuff. I hated video. Like I thought video was the worst. Took so long to edit. You know, I love photography. It's like, boom, you snap it, boom, post, you're done in an hour, you know? And video is like this whole cumbersome thing. So I thought I'll never do video. And here I was making this long, what at the time seemed like a long, seven minute long YouTube video about how the Falcon 9 lands. And again, like that one I posted it, and actually it did really bad. And I was really upset. I'm like, I spent two weeks on this stupid video, you know, worked really hard scripting and blah, blah, blah. And then it, you know, had like a thousand views or something, it did much worse than the first video. And I was so upset. And I kind of like was ready to keep throwing more spaghetti at the wall to see what's gonna stick for Everyday Astronaut. And I think it was like a month or two later, I happened to like, you know, check the analytics on YouTube and all of a sudden, that video like kind of took off. And it got like 40 or 50 or 60,000 views or something. I was like, no way. And it just kept, you know, that just honed it in more. Like, okay, YouTube will bring a bigger, like bring an audience to me, as opposed to like Instagram, I had to find and, you know, try to get the audience to come to me. And this was like, they were gonna do the legwork. So if I make decent videos, and I realized like really the fun thing for me was explaining a topic that was scary and intimidating and try to make it, you know, fun and engaging. What were some of the struggles of building up a YouTube channel? So for people who don't know, once again, you have a YouTube channel called Everyday Astronaut and there's some incredible videos on it. So what was some of the challenges and the struggles in the early days? Definitely like at first, you're not gonna find your own voice. And I know like even, you know, Jimmy talked to you about that, like how your first video is gonna suck. You're not gonna be yourself. You're gonna be nervous. You're gonna be, you're not gonna know the tone, the pace, the things that are interesting. And actually, originally I had constraints. I was really worried about making a short video because I thought there's no way anyone's gonna watch a three minute video and then a seven minute video. And pretty quickly I realized like YouTube as a whole was kind of changing, but also there's always that historic backbone of like 22 minutes of programming for a 30 minute spot on TV. Like no one goes over 22 or 44 minutes, you know, if you have the full hour special or whatever. Like that is the absolute limit of what a human being can watch, you know, basically was what I thought. And slowly I just kept playing and getting longer and actually more and more in depth into the topics. And instead of getting like pushback, you know, and being like, this is so boring, I realized as long as it's like, as I was walking people through the whole step, you know, giving them all the context they need, they're happy to get as deep into the weeds as I can get them. And so that just kind of fed the snowball just kept rolling and I'm like, all right. And you know, before you know it, I'm making hour long videos. Like an hour long is more or less a normal length on my channel for a produced video. And they're really, really in depth, but I love like that process of trying to preemptively kind of guess what the questions might be. And, you know, part of that is like, we do like script read throughs with like our supporters and do like cuts of videos and people, decent amount of people see it before it goes public. And we get those questions out of the way, you know, we get those people asking the questions and then I love nothing more than trying to, you know, get all those questions answered by the end of the video. A question about being a creator on YouTube, that could be a challenging psychological aspect to it, which is like, you might invest a huge amount of your effort into a thing and it doesn't receive much attention at all. And, you know, there's something about YouTube and in general social media that makes you feel really crappy about that. If you let it, if you really look at the numbers, it's very, very difficult not to pay attention to that. I mean, that's the reason why I turn off numbers on my interface for stuff that I've created. Because I just see it having a negative effect on your mind. But even then, you still, it still has an effect. The, I mean, your epic video on the history of Soviet rockets comes to mind. And we'll talk about that in a second, but it's called, people should check it out, the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree. So that's something you've researched for two years. Yeah. Right, you put your heart and soul into it. There's a lot of passion, there's a long journey. And I think about like an hour and a half video. Is there like, is there challenges? Is there like, how difficult is that to put so much of yourself into a video and it maybe not do so well? Yeah, that's the struggle for sure, honestly. Especially as like, as we grow, I try to make better and better videos, which means hiring more and more people to do, you know, higher end animations and spend more time editing and shooting and scripting. And just, but at the end of the day, like it still can't be just losing money. And I have videos that definitely lose a lot of money because I, you know, hire 3D artists and stuff. And I was so certain, the Soviet rocket engine video, I thought was just purely gonna be a passion project. I did, I honestly was like, if it ever crosses a million, it's a home run. Because it's such- And is it, does it cross like a couple of million now? I think it's a little over two. Which is insane to me. Like, I just really thought this was more something just to put on the shelf as a resource, almost for myself, you know, like just to kind of have that knowledge bank and something I've always wanted to straighten out in my own head and kind of know the history a little bit better. But come to find out, like it took a while, you know, it was a slow turn. Well, I remember when you first released it and that's when I watched it. I remember like, this has so few views. Yeah. I remember being just sad. Like, I was like sad about the state of the world because I know how much love you put into it, how like, how much, I don't know. To me, for some reason that somehow would directly connect to huge views. But see, you know what made me sad is like, if you use a different thumbnail or a different title that could affect the popularity. I know. And then I just could imagine the torment you're going through. What if I use the different thumbnail? It's that Jimmy, the Mr. Beast torment, like just a slightly different title or a slightly different. It could change everything. I have videos, ironically, the last like, I don't know, five videos I've produced are horribly flopping. Like some of my worst videos I've ever made, statistically. The interesting one is like the, you summarize, incredible video, you summarizing that people should go watch about all the, the awards video for 2022, like all the cool stuff that happened in 2022. I remember that not being that popular. There's a few ones recently that are not that popular. Like riding in a fighter jet. I thought that was going to be easy, like one or two million. I don't know if I've paid the flights off to go there. You know what I mean? Like in that video. It makes no sense. And frankly, here's, at the end of the day, I realized like I have lately, especially the last like year or two, kind of disconnected from that aspect of it. I'm super fortunate. I have very generous like Patreon support and people that can help me sustain to produce. People go support, support Tim on Patreon. Well, it's that, but as you know, as a creator, like that is what keeps the lights on it and makes it so it, you know, I can go this deep. Like if I didn't have that, if I had to rely solely on like YouTube ad revenue, I mean, I would just, they'd be super different videos. I wouldn't spend as much time researching because I just, you know, they'd just be more glossed over. It's like a hurry to churn them out so I can keep the machine going. And I have this incredible freedom to really dive into a topic. Like a video that I've been working on now for almost three months is how to start a rocket engine. And let me tell you, it's not as easy as one might think, or I guess it is as difficult as you might think. I mean, it's an insane topic. And I- What do you mean by start? You mean like the ignition of the- Yeah, like how do you physically get them running? You know, like there's all these, you know, the valves and the turbine, the turbine, you know, that we were talking about earlier, like that has to run on the pumps, but it itself is powering the pumps. So how do you get that, like chicken and egg, how do you get that thing started? You know, there's tons of, it's so cool. There's so many ways. And so for me, you know, that required reading a lot and talking to people that know a lot more than me and just really trying to make sure I understand enough of it to explain it and try to weave a narrative, you know? And so that video's three months in the making. We're still probably another two or three weeks out. And it's, I don't expect, I mean, I think this one will do relatively well, you know, but in the grand scheme of YouTube, like still child's play, you know? But I'm okay, and I'm okay with that. I'm at that point actually where I am okay with that. It still stings, and I'm more worried about just like, can I continue to do it at this quality and at this level if it's losing money, you know what I mean? So it's, there is a trade-off, and I am kind of having to navigate that. But you have sort of the depth of the impact you have is a thing that YouTube can't give you numbers on, but it's a really important thing to sort of remember that it's really not just about the YouTube numbers, or it's for people like you that are basically educating and revealing the brilliance in a technology that will make humans a multi-planetary species, and give hope to millions of young minds that will build that future. I mean, that's immeasurable. That's not just the views. That's, you know, it's, that's really important to sort of remember as you're creating it. That's something I try to think about as well. So like views. Yeah, and that becomes more. Don't matter. I realize that more and more like every day, you know? The more the channel matures, the more I realize the importance of it as an overall mission, as opposed to like, you know, in the first year or two, it's a rat race of growth and of popularity and all that kind of stuff, you know? And you feel that. You feel that it's a driving force. These days, not so much, just because that will wear you out very quickly. So back to the Soviet rocket video, the epic video, probably the most epically researched video you've done. I mean, it's like, it's truly an epic video. So what, again, called the entire Soviet rocket engine family tree took you two years to research. What are some fascinating things you've learned about the history of rocket engines in the Soviet Union and in general through the process of making that video? The coolest thing to me is how it's this weird blend for the Soviet Union went through an insane iteration process and made so many engines. Like I didn't even touch, you know, any like maneuvering thrusters or missile engines. Like I only really dealt with main propulsion engines on orbital rockets, and there's still way too many to talk about. I mean, it's still dozens and dozens of engines. And I could have gone deeper into this, which is hilarious. They iterated so much, made a new engine for just at the drop of a hat, yet they still also like did super primitive things. You know, they physically are still today lighting the main combustion chambers of the Soyuz engines, of the RD-107 and RD-108 with essentially matchsticks. Like they literally stick a T-shaped thing up into the chamber and have a pyrotechnic in it that ignites the actual propellants in the combustion chamber. It's not the most elegant solution in the world. They're still using that. So they went from like the whole spectrum of like it's a mixture of like make it better, faster, harder, stronger, gooder, all the way around, to also if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's like it employs all of the above. So it's like it's a lot of innovation, but also they use duct tape. So it's like all of it together. Yes, that's exactly the way to put it. And they did things that are insane. They developed a full flow stage combustion cycle engine. This engine, had it been used, I mean, it would have put the F, it was same relative size as the F1 engine on the Saturn V, like in that same category, way up there of like 6.7, like mega newtons of thrust or something around, and then the F1 is like seven or something. It's huge, yet way more complicated, way more efficient, way just better engine in that sense, as far as performance goes, yet it never flew. It never left the stand. They never built the rocket around it. The N1, which was the most powerful rocket to have flown so far to date, like it never made it through its first stage burn. All four attempts failed spectacularly, and yet it had so much technology on it that was still unrivaled today almost. Like finally now we're beating it, the NK-33s that they developed for that rocket. Like finally today, we're to the point of like having better engines than they built in the 60s. Yeah, what stands out to you from the N1 family of rocket engines? Well, it's interesting because the N1 was the Kudsnetsov Design Bureau, and he was actually an aircraft manufacturer. So he was one of the first people outside of kind of the missile and rocket program. He had all these other bigwigs kind of in the other OKBs that were developing missiles and rockets, and then all of a sudden here comes Nikolai Kudsnetsov, who had never developed a rocket engine. And so his first attempt at a rocket engine was the NK series, NK-15, NK-33, and they were amazing. They were brilliant. They were these wonderful closed cycle oxygen rich engines that were awesome. They were awesome engines, and that were, you know, because, I love that because his direct boss, since he wasn't necessarily in the aerospace, you know, or in the, I guess the rocket missile defense world, he didn't have to, at the fall of the Soviet Union, he didn't have to give away all of his things to the same people as the other people. So he hid, you know, like 80 of his engines in a hangar. And then we still literally use them in the United States. We used altogether, I think it was like eight or 10 of them, repurposed them as, they're called AJ-26s in the United States, but like we still were flying Soviet rocket engines in the 2000s because they were better than engines we are building today. Like that's, to me, that's my favorite fact about the N1 rocket engines is that they're still that good, that they were the best choice for, at the time, orbital sciences. Some of the culture that engineering has led to these things that still work, it's incredible. Yeah. You said that the RD-171 is one of the coolest engines ever made, why is that? Yeah, so one of the fun things about the Soviet engines is it'll look like, a lot of their engines look like multiple engines, because you see multiple nozzles, you see multiple combustion chambers, and you would think, well, obviously, the nozzle is the engine, right? But what they actually would do, the real heart and the real power of the rocket engine actually comes from the turbo pumps, comes from the pumps themselves. And as we talked about earlier, that includes the turbine and the actual pumps that flow the propellant into the chambers. And so the Soviet Union was incredible at developing these closed cycle, high-powered turbo pumps. But if you try to scale the combustion chamber too big, you end up with what's called combustion instability. You have such a large surface area of crazy flames, and combustion happening, they can get these weird pockets and oscillations and frequencies, and they just couldn't make big combustion chambers. They never figured it out, they never quite, well, they did actually kind of figure it out, but they didn't like it. So they ended up just shrinking down and having small combustion chambers, and just splitting the pipes, basically. Instead of one fuel pump going into, or one pipe going into one combustion chamber, and one oxidizer pipe going into one combustion chamber, they'd split it off into two or four combustion chambers, and kind of spread that work around, so they didn't experience this combustion instability. So the RD-171 is still to date the most powerful rocket engine ever built. The turbo pump is insane. I don't even remember how many, like 200,000 horsepower or something comes out of that turbo pump, in order to flow the amount of propellant necessary at those rates and at those pressures into the combustion chamber. So it has four chambers, and it's just an absolute marvel of engineering. And yeah, and then the cool thing too, is specifically the RD-171, its engine, all four of those nozzles can actually pivot and rotate. I just now, as I'm explaining this, realized that has to mean that they have joints, like flexible joints in the high pressure pump lines, in order to, like I never, this is the realization I'm having right now, because normally you put the gimbal above the turbo pump, like the mount where the engine swivels, so that you have low pressure coming from the tanks into the pumps. And then you just have a straight, fixed pipe flowing into the engine. So you'd have to bend that pipe and have it be dynamic. If they had the four chambers moving independently from each other, that means those four chambers all had to have a flexible high pressure pipe going, which I don't even, I don't know if that's, why am I just now realizing this? Yeah, so there's engineering challenges with that. Insane. I never even thought that was a thing you would ever could do, honestly. I would, I gotta look into why and how and what and where. Yeah, I wonder why that design decision was made. So the easier thing to do normally is you would keep those nozzles fixed, and then affix, like say the Soyuz engine, the RD-107 and 108, they have affixed main combustion chambers and they use these little Vernier, or some people got mad at me for saying Vernier and Vernor engines that swivel themselves, and those provide your control authority. So the main chambers stay fixed and then you get your roll and your pitch and your yaw out of auxiliary thrusters. By the way, did you get anything wrong in that video? That people told you about? Yeah, I got a few things, yep. First off, we had a graphic error where we actually, we copied and pasted a lot of our After Effects projects. So our nuclear engines, one of them on screen says that it runs on RP-1, it does not. It has basically all the wrong stats. We just didn't catch it in the edit, you know, that we literally copy and pasted and I say it right on screen, but the, like in the voiceover, but on screen it's wrong. The other thing, and I'm excited to ask you about this. Uh-oh. I watched, and I spoke with a lot of Russian-speaking individuals. We had a lot of research assistants that were reading and blah, blah, blah. I tried really hard to learn how to pronounce Sergei Karelyov's name. And I'm still gonna say it wrong no matter what, but my understanding, and from listening to native speakers, is closer to Karelyov than it is Korolev. Yeah, definitely, Sergei Pavlovich Karelyov. See, I will never say it that perfectly, but I know it's not just Korolev. I mean, again, the English translation of it, likely I should have just said Korolev and said I'm saying it the dumb America way, but. But you rolled your R. And kumred. Okay, excellent. So let me just ask you in a difference in culture, because you've researched so many rockets from so many different eras, the Saturn V, and just everything you're seeing now, are there some interesting differences, especially when you look at the space race, between the Soviet rocket engineers and efforts versus the American? The, there's, I mean, there's definitely huge, huge cultural changes. And the fun thing is that they kind of spawned from the same, they have the same starting place. Both, you know, the Soviet rocket engines and Americans all came from the Nazi V2 rocket and the A-4 engine. Literally physically spawned from that, because at the fall of, you know, at the end of World War II we took a handful of German scientists and the Soviets took a handful of German scientists. And they both got their own a little bit, some blueprints here and there, and the others got some blueprints. So we literally have the same, it's a weird thing where we're starting from the same like thing and letting two divergent, you know, divergent paths go crazy on their own development. So it's really fun to see the cultural differences. One of the things the United States did is they really would kind of take an engine and just perfect it more or less and then not really evolve that much. Like they, I don't know, and I don't know why. I actually need to do a history lesson on all of the US engines, but it's literally like, as far as orbital class engines before now, I mean, it's like a dozen or two, you know. It's a 10th the amount of the Soviets. And the Soviets just literally made up a new engine every time they had a new, like, they wouldn't, and it was like a completely different engine. Yeah. So I just, yeah. I wonder if there's some aspect to the culture, and I don't want to overstate it, but there is more of a safety culture, I think, in the United States. And I think if you care about safety, or rather like you have, you're more risk averse. So you care about safety more, about the value of human life and the risk taken there, that you will iterate less. So I think the Soviets, especially in the early aspects of the program, I don't want to overstate this, some of it is just through stories, you just hear anecdotes. They're more willing to take risks. Yeah. Risks with human life, risks with spacecraft. For example, the first orbital space flights from the Soviet Union, the cosmonaut had to eject out of the capsule and parachute to a landing. Yes. That's not very well known, and it wasn't, they hid that even from history as best they could at first, because they were slightly ashamed that they couldn't have a full recovery system with their spacecraft. They could physically recover it, but they wouldn't have been able to recover the cosmonaut in one piece. So instead they had them just eject out of the thing and parachute to safety. Like, that's insane. And so there definitely was some extra risks, but also a freedom to just like push things to the limits and try everything. You know, they threw all the spaghetti on the wall. It's funny that most people probably don't even know the first person in space in America, and obviously everybody knows that. It's like, it's kind of interesting how the space race, and even World War II, even like the history books, you ask most Americans, they think that America won World War II. Like, without America, like, the real heroes of World War II is America. You ask British people, they say, and everybody has a pretty good justification, like, without Britain, without Churchill, Hitler would have taken over the world. And I think probably the strongest case is the Soviet Union case, that they're the ones that won the war. The reason it's the strongest case is where most of the fighting happened. Most of the death happened. Most of the destruction. But everyone has their perspective. And certainly in the space race, you know, the great accomplishment is the first man on the moon, from the US perspective. And then Yuri Gagarin, from the Russian perspective, is the first man in space. And that, I think, still persists. And some of that, in healthy forms, is probably constructive to a little bit of competition that pushes all the great scientists on each side. But anyway, what do you think about this Yuri Gagarin mission of the first human in space? And the Vostok mission in 1961? Just in general, when you look back at that time, leading to the first man on the moon. Yeah, April 12th, 1961. Yuri's night, baby. That's, yeah, it's insane. What's insane to me is the first person in space didn't just go to space. He went into orbit. You know, Yuri Gagarin flew around the Earth in orbit and re-entered. That's a monumental task compared to suborbital. So the United States did two suborbital flights in that same year. I believe in that same year, at least. I'm pretty sure in 1961. They flew for the first time orbitally in 1962. So they weren't terribly far behind to get a human into orbit. Like in the grand scheme of things, you know, 10 months difference. But at the same time, like the fact that the Soviet Union just went straight to flying someone into orbit is monumental. And I'm sure they did not do excessive, rigorous testing here. Because there is a space race and you have the first is important. Just imagine being Yuri. What do you say when they're like launching him, like let's go or something? Like, I mean, you're taking, we're talking about you being on Starship. Like you're taking a pretty big risk being launched out into orbit. Hopefully a lot less risk than what Yuri went through. So Yuri, the crazy thing, remember those matchsticks we talked about? You know, there's 20 main combustion chambers on Soyuz and there's four and 12 more Vernier engines that all need to be lit. So you're sitting on top of this booster and they light all of those 32 combustion chambers on the ground. And then it has this insane separation process between what the Soviet Union would call the first stage and the second stages, but we would call it like the core stage and the boosters. They all, four of these boosters have to peel away perfectly from the core stage simultaneously. You know, if one of them sticks on, mission failed. If one of them doesn't eject properly and drags into the other tank, you know, it's a goner. So the staging process of the Soyuz is insane to me that that ended up working out. It's just the technology in Soyuz. I mean, more or less that same rocket is what's still flying humans that are cosmonauts from Roscosmos and going to the International Space Station are flying on a variant of that Soyuz rocket still today. It's still like that big of a workhorse. What do you think about Roscosmos as it stands today, its history and its future in comparison to NASA and other national efforts and in comparison to commercial spaceflight? I mean, utmost respect for the engineers involved in everything that's happened. I think Energomash is like still some of the, one of the greatest engine manufacturers when they have the funding to do so, but man, it seems like they're falling from grace as far as space prowess. You know, the Roscosmos went from having, I think they got very comfortable at the top of, you know, from 2011 until 2022 or until 2020, they were the only ride to the International Space Station since then. Like it started, I feel like in 2018, honestly, I think that's kind of when things, that's the first time I specifically remember a pretty nasty like thing happened in 2018. I think it was a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station had one of the boosters not detached and had to have an abort. But you know, that happened, then all of a sudden, next thing you know, there's a Progress being docked to the ISS a couple of years ago that spun the ISS, cartwheeled the ISS out of control, followed a few months later, the Pirs module docks to the International Space Station, spirals the International Space Station out of control again with like a thruster getting fixed on. There's a hole in a Russian segment. There's, well, I think the most recent one right now, there's a Soyuz docked to the ISS that has a puncture in it and it's leaking coolant and will not be returning humans on it. So they're actually having to fly up an uncrewed Soyuz. And that one likely wasn't a manufacturing error. It probably was like a micrometeorite puncture rendering the spacecraft unusable. We don't know for sure yet. But it's just really been like this fall from grace where they have all the potential. They have some of the best engines, some of the best rockets, and especially like right before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Buran shuttle and the Energia rocket were incredible. Had they been able to evolve that into Buran-2 and the reusable Energia? They had a fully reusable Energia on the drawing board. And like, I honestly fully think they could have done it. Is it possible to return to a place where there is friendly competition between nations that ultimately unites and inspires the peoples of these different worlds, these very different worlds that have especially recently come to conflict over the war in Ukraine. The tension builds, the war, the conflict, the suffering is actually creating more and more division, creating more and more hate. I think as we've talked about, I think science and engineering, and especially the most epic version of engineering, which is rocketry and space travel, unites people. Unites people even in a time of tension, conflict, and war. So do you have a hope that we can return to that place? I think historically, spaceflight has been one of the most bonding things. We have countless examples of Cold War enemies coming together and working together, lending a hand. Apollo 13, for example, of course, there is the potential that who knew where it was gonna reenter since it was not in the planned trajectory at all for reentry. And the Soviet Union said, hey, wherever they land, we'll help you guys out, basically. That was a pretty big thing at the time, obviously. We also, in 1975, saw the Apollo-Soyuz mission, which was an Apollo spacecraft docking with the Soyuz spacecraft. First time there was international collaboration. And again, 1975, still very amidst the Cold War, yet we have this collaboration that I don't know what else could have done that. I mean, and think about what it actually takes to do that. You have to come up with a docking module that takes the two different air environments and the two different docking systems and talk to the engineers and mission planners and figure out, train together, the cosmonauts and the astronauts train together and got to know each other. They were crossing boundaries and borders and coming together for this mission. And even if it was totally a fluff piece, even if it was totally this cynical, just trying to make a pretty face for everybody, for the cameras or something, obviously it still had an impact. Yeah, the symbolic impact. But there's also the practical impact. I mean, a lot of people have to work together. Yes. And that has a ripple effect on the culture, on the different engineers. Yeah. 100%. And even just the astronauts and the cosmonauts involved, like, think about what probably went through their heads during this process of like, going from, oh my God, I'm gonna have to work with them, to getting to know them and then sharing meals in space. Like, that's a crazy transformation of timelines. And I would love to, I do think that spaceflight has the ability to bond us and unite us, because it is ultimately, this little tiny little planet we're floating around on, it is the boundary that we all share. It only takes you getting off this planet to realize, oh my God, we're all neighbors. We're all living in the same house together. And I do think ultimately, as we continue to expand our horizons and expand our exploration, that it has the potential to unite us more than it has the potential to divide us. So one of the potential conflicts of the 21st century that I think everyone wants to avoid, both in the cyberspace and in the hot war space, cold war, hot war, all kinds of war, all kinds of economic conflict, is between the United States and China. So China is going full steam ahead in developing a space program, doing a lot of incredible work. Like you mentioned, 64 launches in 2022, with two failures. But moving straight ahead. And by the way, the failures, we had a lot of startups. Like a lot of the launches were from brand new companies. So to have two failures out of 64, I mean, that's still an impressive, if you look at operational launches, it was flawless. Do you see a pathway where there's, again, in that same way, collaboration or friendly competition between all the different companies and nations in the United States and China in the next, as we push towards the moon, Mars, and beyond? I held a dumb hope that China would actually be allowed to sign onto the Artemis Accord, to be able to take part in this next step towards the moon. I'm just imagining if they provided a propulsion module or a lander or something, and we actually came together to land on the moon, instead of having another space race. It's like, it would have been so cool. And yeah, I still am hopeful that, similar to back in the cold war, that we might have something like that someday, where we actually are collaborating. And it feels like sometimes we're really close to that, and then other times it feels like we're really far from that, and it just sucks, because I know, and I try really hard on my channel to always separate and celebrate the work being done, because at the end of the day, there's someone that's just going home to their family, clocking in hours, working really hard on pushing their program and doing engineering work. We don't get to choose where we're born and what we're born into. So I really like to avoid the political aspects of things and the geopolitical aspects, and just appreciate the science, and the science we're seeing, and the progress that China's doing in the last 10 years is very akin to the early space flight programs, and with the runway of just keep on going. I see no reason for them to be slowing down. So it's definitely something to watch and be interested in, and who knows? I mean, there really genuinely might be a race to the moon again, and there really genuinely might be a race to Mars. The part of me is excited about that, because a race is pretty cool. Yeah. But hopefully it's friendly competition and some collaboration. It is true that maybe I'm being a bit cynical, but nations sometimes, governments, and leaders of those governments sometimes ruin things. Like you don't often have, statistically speaking, it's harder to have a leader of a nation that looks beyond the particular political bickering of that nation, and you have like a JFK type character that really steps up and inspires. I think statistically speaking, it's better to have somebody like Elon, who's a leader of a company, a commercial effort, that is able to look beyond the borders of nations, and certainly inspiring educators like yourself to look beyond the borders of those nations and the geopolitical conflicts and so on, to inspire people. I think that's just made so much easier. Like you can have more reach. Tim Dodd can have more reach than NASA, right? Like in terms of inspiring the world, and that's fascinating. Like that gives power to the individuals that see past the silly short-term geopolitical conflicts. That's the hope at least. Do you worry that there might be a war in space? Let's look out into the future. So forget, so the interesting thing about these rockets, right? Let's not forget, rockets do what rockets do, that they can carry payloads that can be weapons. Do you worry about this? I worry most about space wars as leading to the Kessler syndrome of having a cascading effect of like a spacecraft blowing up, and then affecting another spacecraft, and that blows up, and then all of a sudden you're trapped and have this debris cloud that we can't go, we can't go into space anymore. Like that's my biggest, because frankly at this point we could annihilate ourselves with terrestrial stuff anyway, you know what I mean? We don't need space to end society as we know it, you know what I mean? But we could really, and the good thing is, I think everyone, well mostly everyone, seems to understand this for the most part, that we really can't be risking blowing up stuff in space, in low-Earth orbit, because it could easily, like we could strain ourselves from space assets for 50 years. Oh, can you elaborate on this? So like what is the danger of the debris there that could jeopardize the space? So for instance, and it was only a couple years ago, Russia did an anti-satellite test on an orbital, there's a, we've done this too, the US has done this, like I'm not pinning it on them, but we kind of know nowadays, like don't do anti-satellite tests on orbital things, because those things stay in orbit. You know, when you blow something up in space, it's not like, you know, people think, you know, when in space, like oh, you throw something, it's just gonna keep going forever and ever and ever. I mean, that's in the sense that it's not going to be slowed down due to air resistance, it's going to continue to do that, but it's staying in orbit around the Earth. Like you just slightly change the orbit of it around Earth when you throw a ball or something, you know. So the scary thing is, when you blow up a satellite, all those pieces of that satellite are now millions of bullets in a halo around the Earth, in a very specific halo, you know. So some things get blown up faster, you know, according to its orbit, faster, so they'll go a little bit higher elliptically. Some things will get slowed down in that explosion and actually reenter. Some things will go sideways and change its inclination of that orbit, so you have this debris field, but it more or less becomes a band of like no-no, you know, like a big, scary, sharp, scary bullets that can destroy another spacecraft. And so then all of a sudden, especially now Starlink, and we're talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of satellites in space, if all of a sudden one, you know, a couple of them crash and, you know, blow up, and obviously you have all the shrapnel going everywhere, and then that hits another satellite, that creates shrapnel, you can literally blanket our entire low Earth orbit in 17,500 mile an hour bullets. You know, we're talking, the kinetic energy in this is so hard for people to fathom, because that's over 10 times faster than most like rifle bullets, and even like a big 50 cal is not gonna be, you know, we're still talking about about 10% that. So when you think about the kinetic energy, it's insane. So a fleck of paint can go through panes of glass at that velocity. You know, a little piece of metal can puncture, you know, blow straight through. So like, so our actions that seem small, so small scale military actions can have, can have dire detrimental effects to the whole space program, like global space program. Oh yeah, it can affect everything and everyone. Including the, like, including satellites. Oh yeah, especially satellites. Like that's, well I mean, the good and the bad thing is, the good thing is a lot of satellites don't operate in low Earth orbit. Like a lot of the ones that we use day to day, a lot of them are in medium Earth orbit, like their GPS or their geostationary, which are way, way, way out there. And because of that, they won't really ever de-orbit, like it'll take, you know, millennia to de-orbit, because, you know, just because something's in space doesn't mean it's there forever, especially like in low Earth orbit. The atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop. It's not like you hit the Kármán line 100 kilometers and all of a sudden there's zero atmosphere. The atmosphere just slowly tapers, you know. You can experience that yourself as you climb a mountain, you slowly realize there's less and less air, you just keep going. And just because you're in space 200, 300 kilometers up, there's still trace molecules, you know. There's the occasional oxygen molecule, there's the occasional nitrogen molecule. And so that is actually drag. So a spacecraft in low Earth orbit, depending on its altitude, will take anywhere from five years to five months to de-orbit, you know, or two months or one month. Like depending on its orbit or its altitude, we'll have some parasitic drag still, and slowly throughout time slow down, which lowers its orbit, which drags it down more, lowers its orbit, et cetera, et cetera, until it reenters. So if we end up with some kind of catastrophic event where the entire low Earth orbit has been inundated and blown up, it'll take months for the first band, you know, to clear up. It'll take years for something like beyond, there's charts, you know, people have all this stuff available. You shouldn't look it up. It's terrifying by the way. But it's really- But again, the caveat is for the most part, the low Earth orbit stuff would clear up within years. So we could get back to doing some low Earth, like Starlink stuff would probably be able to be re, and you know, we could kind of redo it and build up from the ground up again. GPS wouldn't be wiped out, and our geostationary satellites wouldn't be wiped out. But the scary thing is we wouldn't be able to relaunch and replace new things because we're stuck. We're not gonna fly through that debris field, you know? And we avoid that by avoiding military actions in space. And these days, like there's more and more requirements and legislation and especially trying to get international collaboration on having end of life plans for satellites. So that satellites, especially those in low Earth orbit, have like drag devices to increase, that once they're done, they literally pull like, even just a ribbon, like a silly little like, you know, 40 foot long ribbon will sit there and it'll slowly, or it can speed up its reentry process by months or years or whatever. So we're starting to see that this is now an importance. There's a really cool company called Stoke Aerospace out in Washington is one of these launch providers that's really looking not into just trying to be the next, you know, SpaceX launch company. They're really seeing satellite, bringing stuff down from space as actually being, especially right now, we have all of these hundreds and thousands of satellites being launched every year. Someone at some point is probably gonna have to do some cleanup. And so they're looking at being one of those companies to do that. What do you think about Starlink and the efforts of Starlink to put a very large number of satellites out there and provide internet access to Earth? Anyone. To anyone. Generally, I think Starlink is phenomenal. And I would be saying this if it was any company, I wanna make that clear that people think I'm just some SpaceX fanboy or something and everything they do is perfect. I think as your fan, I could say you're basically a fan boy or just a fan of everybody that's doing space stuff. And I don't, like, even in this whole conversation, there's no way we cover like 10% of what I wanted to talk to you about, so we're jumping around. I mean, we could talk probably for an hour about Artemis. We could talk about anything with ULA, obviously all the other commercial efforts. We could talk about the NASA efforts, you know, the, I mean, and Saturn V. Are we gonna really go with this conversation and not talk about Saturn V? And we might, okay? So like, anyway, if you're a fan of everything, Starlink is in general exciting to you. And not for the space assets, but just the potential for humanity. Like, I really think even as a consumer of the internet, personally, our studio space down in Texas, we're stuck with Mediacom, which has like the least reliable internet service, period. That's the only option. Either that or they're trying to charge me like $20,000 to run a fiber optic cable like 1,000 meters or something. Like, it's insane. I'm not going to do that. I bought Starlink. It helps, but it's still not, you know, amazing. But it has, you can see where this is going in a year or two, three, five years. They're like, oh, I can totally screw this other internet provider. And this is now by far the best option. And it's available literally anywhere. You don't have to be limited to your local internet service provider. And on the global scale, of course, you have people being able to learn and learn about rockets, learn about water management and architecture and city planning and fitness and health. All of the modern conveniences that we Google every single day, there's people that don't have access to that right now. You know, I'm a self-taught rocket nerd. I would not be who I am if it wasn't for the internet in the last seven years, you know, six, seven years. So unlocking the intellectual potential of places like Africa, of rural areas that don't currently have internet access. That's a genuine, that's a huge thing. That's like humanitarian 101 is give people access to information. And like, you know, I think we have this potential to try to step in and fix other people's problems. But the reality is like, people are smart. No matter where you are, you give them the resources to learn, they're gonna solve problems. They're gonna problem solve, they're gonna engineer, they're going to, but if you don't give them access to that information, they're gonna be stuck in their cycles, you know? And so I think the potential for Starlink is incredible. I think it's already impactful. It's already affecting people in, you know, in rural and indigenous areas, and it's already affecting businesses and all that stuff. I think it's great. I think it is, you know, there's some downsides with astronomy, with ground-based astronomy, that it can hinder observations from the ground. There's already a lot of communications between SpaceX and astronomical societies and things like that, because it is a real concern. You know, it can ruin observations, it can ruin data. But like one of the big ones, for instance, recently, I think a new thing they're going to be working into is that currently, if a Starlink is flying over a ground-based asset, a lot of ground telescopes actually have a laser that goes up and it measures the atmospheric distortion, and the telescopes literally sit there and like by the millisecond, fixes, like changes the focus and fixes those atmospheric distortions. And that laser can interfere with satellites. So previously, I'm pretty sure that SpaceX actually had to request that as they're flying over these satellites, or these telescopes, they turn off the laser. And when you have tens of thousands of these things flying, you're going to be turning off the laser more than it's on, you know, and just being this insanely inconvenient thing, because you're going to have these junctions happen often. And I think one of the things that SpaceX is like, okay, no, no, no, you guys keep the laser on, we'll deal with your laser. Good, good step, you know, things like that, mitigating the brightness of them so they're not visible under most conditions, of course, like they're still always going to be visible in some. But then ultimately for me, it's like this, you have this weird, like almost like a puberty of spaceflight and astronomy, where currently it's not cheap enough to really do a ton of incredible science or space-based telescopes. You know, we have Webb, we have Hubble, we have, you know, all these other, you know, awesome space-based telescopes, Chandra, you know, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. And you, but it's still so expensive to launch them, that we're still so reliant on our ground telescopes. But in the future, you can see a world where, oh, this is so cheap, we'll just launch, like we can launch 50 James Webb Space Telescope-sized telescopes this year for half the price of doing it on Earth, you know, and get way better data. So in the future, I think in 20, 30 years, we'll look at it and be like, oh man, that was an awkward time, where space assets were interfering with astronomy. But I think in the future, it's like, can you imagine doing space, you know, astronomy from the ground? That's insane, you know? There could be complexities to just having that many, just another topic. So a complexity is associated with having so many satellites, especially with competing companies and competing nations. Do you see that as an issue, having tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of satellites? Yeah. It becomes a very interesting robotics collision avoidance problem. The one thing to keep in mind is perspective. Like I know 10,000 satellites and 20,000 and 100,000 satellites sounds insane, and it sounds really scary. But I mean, just even look at how many planes are in the air at any given time. And the planes are bigger, they're flying slower, which actually means there's a greater chance of collision. If you think about, you know, two objects occupying space, if one's moving really fast, like imagine trying to, you know, throw two basketballs at each other, relatively easy. Now try shooting two bullets at each other and having like, you know, at 90 degrees from each other. You have to have your timing down, like really perfect to do that. Now take that times 10, you know, and these objects are taking up a physical space, very small amount of time. They're relatively small. Like most satellites are not very big and they have limitless altitudes to deal with. So even though you can have what look like convergences, you know, they can be 10, 20, 50, a hundred kilometers difference often. And, you know, they're dealing with this, like all the all space assets know, hey, I'm at this orbital plane and this blah, blah, blah, and they know their altitudes and know their safe distances and have these margins built in and it's space. So there's like an insane amount of room, you know? So there's- There's a lot of margin. There's a lot of margin, but of course you can't excuse that all the way. Like you have to still have plans and be considering that and considering collisions and considering all of the above. So, when do you think the first human being will step foot on Mars? You don't like timelines, but is this something, and you're very much focused on kind of the short term of incredible progress that's happening and that makes total sense, but there is the Mars plan that was at the origin of the commercial space flight efforts. Do you still see and dream about that day? Let me be clear that I don't want to go to Mars, but I do think if you're making me guess a timeline for when humans will walk on Mars, even a year ago I still would have said by the end of 2020, like the 2020s decade, you know? So by December 31st, 2029, I thought humans would have walked on Mars. I'm starting to think that's still too optimistic, but I definitely think by 2040. Like I for sure think that, and I really think it's just hard to predict that curve, you know, project out that curve. We're gonna go from feeling like it's impossible to feeling like it's inevitable. You know, it could be another, by the end of this decade JFK-type moment, especially if China steps up with the space race. It could be like, all right, NASA kinda says, all right, this Elon fella, like really make this a gigantic effort. Well, and if Starship works out as planned, and as NASA has invested in human landing system, they're relying on SpaceX to land on the moon. SpaceX can land on the moon, they can land on Mars. Now, whether or not the life support and the human considerations of long-term spaceflight missions and high radiation and blah, blah, blah, blah, refueling on Mars is a huge, huge, huge deal. They definitely could send a Starship to Mars and land, ideally land in one piece on Mars. As soon as they can land on the moon, they can land on Mars, basically. I mean, those two things are very, in some ways, Mars is almost easier. Because you can use the atmosphere to slow down. It actually doesn't take that much more delta V to actually land on Mars than it does. Because on the moon, you don't have any, you have to first get out to the moon, then orbit the moon. You know, you have to slow down. Every one of those is a maneuver change. Then you have to lower your orbit until it coincides, you know, hits the moon. Then you have to slow down enough to not explode when you hit the moon. So there's a lot of delta V there, a lot of change in velocity. Mars is actually, by the time we kind of crunch the numbers, it's relatively similar. It's just a lot more difficult, like timeline-wise and, you know, accuracy and all of these other communication. You know, there's a lot of other things, obviously, involved. I'm glossing over it, making it sound easy. It's not. But, you know, I think there's a real decent chance we could see a Starship vehicle land on Mars uncrewed by the end of the decade, though. End of the decade. I mean, there's also a sociological element, maybe a political one, where I think you're allowed to take more risks with Mars than you are with the moon. Because we've done the moon, 1969. Yeah. It's been a while. So PR-wise, you have to be much safer. Yeah. With Mars, like everyone's like, it's super dangerous, like super, like, so you could take a little more risk. 100%. Especially with manned missions. But actually, just going back to the moon landing, Apollo 11 mission. We haven't talked about this, Adam. With the amazing engine there, but again, the romantic question, when you look back at that moon landing, one small step for man, one giant step for mankind. What do you think about that moment in human history? Do you go back to that often? Or are you focused just like with the cars on the engines? No, no, no. When I need inspiration, I re-watched this documentary called When We Left Earth. I think it was Discovery Channel did it. Six-part episode. It was narrated by Gary Sinise. Phenomenal overview of the space race. And that will get my juices flowing every time. Every time. It's so well done. And it really just summarizes that program so well. And when I, and beyond, it goes all the way to the space shuttle. But yeah, when I watch footage of humans walking on the moon, it's just, I can't believe we're dumb enough to do it with the technology we had and the risks they took to do it. And the insane engineering that it took to do that is just absolutely astonishing. The amount of, the sheer logistics of what it took to do it with the technology we had back then is like, how did we have so much money and effort and energy and time and resources, human resources to do this? Like, it's just insane. Just the weakness of the computers they had back then. They had to do so much. I mean, yeah, it's, so much was so little. It's insane. And, but at the same time, like, I don't know if we wanna talk about conspiracy theories or anything, but like, it is all of, we have the proof in the pudding of like, the 400,000 people on payroll, like, all of the paperwork, all of the, you know. Oh, you mean the question, the conspiracy, if we land on the moon? Yeah, like. Well, I mean, I think the receipts are there. Like, literally. We did, but it's like, a lot of things like that. I mean, we actually generally live in a pretty cynical time where people distrust institutions. Part of the thing was the space program is one of the things that can help reinvigorate the trust in institutions. By institutions, even that word is a bad word now. By institutions means a bunch of humans get together and do a big thing together. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, like, if I was conspiratorially minded, it's like, how the hell did humans do that? Yeah. So I think that's a very cynical take, unfortunately, but it's still an incredible one. And also, you know, there's, until you look at the receipts, there's a kind of, like, a rationale to that kind of conspiracy theory, because so much pressure was put on the space race, the PR of it, to be the winner. So it makes sense that you might want to try to take shortcuts and fake things and, you know, propaganda, you know, different kinds of messaging. And I'm sure stuff like that was happening. Some kind of like, little, you know, adjustment here and there to present things better and so on, but ultimately, the actual engineering project of landing on the moon. The fact that humans did that, I mean, it is sad that we didn't have better, like, ways to record it. And as I watch, like, SpaceX efforts and Blue Origin and these efforts, it's still not trivial to record the, how just amazing, awe-inspiring space is. Is it like, you know, it's like Elon jokes about, like, space does look fake. Yeah. Like, I think there is some element of it where you have to be there to experience it, really. And I don't, like, I think it's currently, it's still an unsolved problem of how do you capture all of that? I mean, you're one of the early people that are part of the crew that is exploring that very question. I'm sure you won't find all the answers, but you'll start to say, like, how do we convert this into a visual format, into some kind of format that captures the magic of it? 100%. And that's a perspective thing that I think about all the time. You know, and I'll do a lot of thinking about, like, what is the thing that's reacting to people? Is it the sound? Is it the perspective? Is it like seeing a little tiny human next to a landing leg that makes people go, oh my God, this thing is huge. You know, just reading, you know, and digesting that and trying to help to convey that as best as possible. Because the stuff that we are and have worked on is so cool, it's so exciting, and it's so important, and like, actually, you know, so much bigger than any one of us, physically and metaphorically. It's just so, it's just, I wish everyone had that experience and had that light bulb go off. And that's the cool thing that you're, like, smack in the middle of solving that really difficult and fascinating problem of how do you capture the magic? How do you inspire? Like, that's not just an engineering problem. That's a communication problem, education problem. I find, specifically for myself, that I get most excited about something when I learn a lot about it. Like, when I learn the ins and the outs, and I learn all the little problem solving and the, you know, the cool, like, oh my God, they had to do what to make it work? Wow, that's amazing. And that's, I try to just always go back to that root thing of, like, what can I teach myself? Like, if I'm, every video, I expect that I learn something, making it, no matter what. Like, no matter how much I think I know about something, at the end of the day, if I'm not learning something, it's not a good video, you know? And I always think that people get excited when they learn, and when they have some questions answered for them. Let me ask you a couple of quick, out there, futuristic questions. I have to. Sure. I'd hate myself if I don't ask you. So, first, let's talk about nuclear propulsion. So, out there, interesting propulsion ideas. So, what do you think, beyond the chemical engines that we talked about, what do you think about using nuclear fission, and maybe even nuclear fusion, for propulsion? We already have thermal nuclear reactors. They're nuclear engines that have been tested both by the United States and Soviet Union, that were 100% valid, like, totally ready to go, efficient, super awesome. Yes, yes, yes, hardcore yes. And what they're using is, yeah, basically a fusion reactor. You're flowing hydrogen through it, and heating up that hydrogen, taking it from liquid to gas. You know, and by heating it up, you're adding energy to the propellant, and then you're literally just using that, now steam-hot hydrogen, and flowing it through a DeLaval nozzle. And you also have to use that energy to spin the pumps, to still pump the thing, so you're still kinda using, like, a lot of the tricks that you're using, but instead of a chemical reaction, you're literally just using nuclear fission to heat up propellant, and do the same thing. And at the end of the day, you end up with, like, eight to 900 seconds of specific impulse, which is double that of chemical propulsion. Most of that comes just because hydrogen's so light. You're only emitting, you're only ejecting hydrogen out of the nozzle. So the lighter a molecule is, the faster it, you know, just like if you had a, you know, a golf ball versus, like, a bowling ball, you can only physically throw one so fast, and the other one is a human you're not gonna do very well with. So you can just, you get, you have the more potential for a higher exit velocity. So nuclear thermal, amazing. You can just shoot these little hydrogen molecules out crazy fast, crazy efficiently. We already have it, like, we can do it. Yes, yes, yes. And actually, we're already reinvesting in that again, as the United States is looking into basically ramping back up our nuclear propulsion. Why haven't we done it yet? And what do you think the challenges are there? And do you think that's an obvious future? Like, would you see in 50 years, we're not using, like, we're not, for major projects, like a Starship type of project, we're not using chemical propulsion anymore? For getting off Earth, you'll always want to use chemical propulsion because the gas will come irradiated. Like, you don't want to, and actually, the thrust to weight ratio of these engines are relatively poor. They're very heavy, they have a nuclear reactor, like, they're not, they're really, the reason we kind of give up on them is they're really most useful for, like, interplanetary. If you're trying to get a big, like, if you're trying to send a huge payload off to Mars, nuclear thermal is amazing. It still could be beneficial even going to the moon. You know, like, in an Earth-moon system, you could use nuclear thermal very effectively, and it could be a great choice. But it also, that starts to get into that trade of, like, eh, we can just kind of use a little bit bigger rocket and fly a normal, you know, it's that whole trade thing. But another reason why we kind of stopped using them, the one that the United States developed, Nerva, was so heavy, only a Saturn V could actually lift the stage of it, like, the upper stage. So it replaced the S-IVB with a nuclear thermal, with a Nerva engine. The Soviet Union developed one about 1 10th the size and thrust that was small enough to fly on a proton rocket. But neither of them ever flew. Both of them have been tested and, like, thumbs up, ready to go, which is just a huge shame to me, because they could unlock a lot of interplanetary potential and just all around awesome. Which potentially interstellar as well. Not quite, I don't think nuclear thermal, not, we're not quite getting there. But then you get into, like, nuclear pulse drives and things where you're literally, like, basically ejecting a bomb out the back of your rocket and exploding and having, like, a shock absorber and pogo sticking your way out of the solar system. That's, I mean, by all physics, sure. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. It's not breaking any laws of physics. But I just don't see us getting to that need anytime soon. I don't think we're gonna be. Interstellar travel. Yeah, I mean, that's, I think we're gonna want a better understanding of physics and physics itself. Yeah, do you have a hope that maybe theoretical physics will open the door to some exciting propulsion systems? Yeah, I do. I think we're still at the very infancy of our understanding of everything and how things work. And, you know, 100 years ago, it would be stupid to try to predict the things we know today. And who knows, like, even, you know, I think about things like James Webb looking deeper into our solar system than ever before and physically being able to see objects that we just have not even been able to physically see before. On being able to study black holes, for example, at better and better, the stuff that's happening outside of black holes, at the edges of black holes, how the information is stored, just a holographic principle. There's so much weirdness around black holes. Yes. Around where gravity starts bending light, it's like, all right, we'll get to look at that now and start to wonder, like, what is going on? And how can we, like, use that somehow for propulsion? I mean, it seems, like, awfully crazy and futuristic at this moment, but I think that's because we know almost nothing about those kinds of objects where, again, where the general relativity and quantum mechanics start to have to be both considered to describe those kinds of objects. And as we study those objects, we might figure out some kind of unification thing that will allow us to understand maybe how to use black holes for propulsion. Like, to, I mean, I could say a lot of crazy things, but, like, basically. But the point is, it'd be stupid for us to even guess about things we don't even know about yet. You know what I mean? And so, therefore, I'm not going to say that the best option for interstellar travel is nuclear drives. Like, that could be, like, someone saying, you know, in 1600, the only way to fly is by strapping a thousand birds to your head, you know? But that said, I mean, everything you're saying is right, but human history is such, like, at the beginning of the 20th century, physicists, Rutherford, everybody, there's brilliant people that said we've basically solved all of it. If you talk to most physicists, I think they're going to say, like, we've pretty much solved, like, the Standard Model describes physics extremely accurately. General relativity explains the cosmos as we observe them extremely accurately. Yeah, there's a whole dark matter, dark energy thing, whatever. But outside of that, so, like, we basically solved, like, like, where are you going to find gaps in knowledge that are going to somehow create warp drives or something like that, so wormholes. But that's, it seems like throughout history, we prove ourselves wrong time and time again. Yes, no, and I, this is well outside of any of my knowledge base, so I want to make sure that if I say anything stupid, it's because I'm just a peasant here in physics land, but. Yes, we're all peasants in physics land. But I really just think, like, it's very humbling that we're still using chemical propulsion and variants of, like, ejecting mass to propel ourselves, and I, no matter how you get at it, and I think someday I would expect that our species has figured out a way to get beyond that. Gotta ask you another wild question. What do you think of Bob Lazar, who claimed that he worked at and saw in Area 51 a propulsion system fueled by, I'm quoting here, maybe from Wikipedia, I don't know where I got this from, fueled by an antimatter reactor, which used as fuel the chemical element with atomic number 115. At the time, it wasn't synthesized. It was later in 2003 synthesized, named Moscovium. He said that the propulsion system relied on a stable isotope of element 115, which allegedly generates a gravity wave that allowed the vehicle to fly and to evade visual detection by bending light around it. No stable isotopes of Moscovium have yet been synthesized. All have proven extremely radioactive, decaying in a few hundred milliseconds. One, do you believe him? Which I find him fascinating because I find the human mind even more fascinating than something like an antimatter drive because I think it's such a giant mystery that we haven't even begun to explore deeply. Anyway, in that sense, whether he's lying or not are both interesting things to explore from a psychology perspective. But two, he's basically saying that, I guess it's an alien, extraterrestrial engine thing. What do you think? I mean, I'm happy to change my opinion based on new evidence at any point. The biggest part of me wants to just be like, this is obviously just stupid and a hoax and just total quack. And then another part of me still is like, this is exciting and fun to think that this is all real. And then another part of me goes, how good is this guy at lying and making stuff up because it's all really good. Like good storytelling, good like, I don't know what to think, honestly. I don't know, I'm really very skeptical about anyone explaining anything like this. Like, I mean, my radar is like screaming at me like this is all full crap, you know. But I'd say like there's still a part of me that's just like, man, that is kind of cool. How did he know that? And like, you know what I mean? I'm conflicted. I think you're actually in the best kind of place because I'm afraid of being the kind of person that hears something like that and says, it's definitely, he's definitely full of crap and basically closed my mind off to all that stuff. I'm afraid of being somebody who closes my mind off to a thing that's actually a early thread to a brilliant, to a future, to a fascinating solution to a mystery. But in this case, I mean, I have so many red flags from a psychological perspective that, but again, outside of this particular individual, I do wonder if aliens have visited us. I think aliens are everywhere. I think the universe is teeming with alien life. I mean, it's very difficult for me to statistically understand, given how life finds a way here on earth, just everywhere. The entire history of life on earth, from the very origin of life, it seems to be damn good at doing its thing and evolving to get better and better and better at doing its thing. Now, there could be some special aspects to the origin of life itself, which is completely not understood. So maybe the true magic is in the origin of life. Or it could be that there is some magical leaps to eukaryotic cells, for example, that the universe, our galaxy, is teeming with alien life, but it's all bacteria. They're all boring bacteria or exciting bacteria. No offense to bacteria. But the no-intelligence, space-faring civilizations. I don't know, but I just, if I were to guess, if I had to bet all my money, there is space-faring civilizations everywhere in the universe. And the fact that they have not been directly, definitively observed confuses me. And I think it's a mystery. And if I were to suggest what the solution to that mystery is, is they might look extremely different from us. That we might be too dumb to detect them. Yeah. And so there, I think you have to be extremely open-minded at what would we be looking for. Right. That, and that's a very practical thing to be open-minded about. And practically speaking, if we were to be able to even detect them from a distance, get a techno-signature of a distant planet, of a distant star system that has alien life, honestly, the number one thing I kinda wanna know is what's your propulsion system? Sorry. Like, how do we travel faster, right? Like, there's a bunch of details, probably, but first, let's get together. And teach me how to go fast. Go fast. I like motorcycles, I like rockets. Tell me what you got. Yeah. Yeah, like how, like, I'll show you mine if you show me yours kind of thing. At the interstellar, intergalactic level. Yeah, anyway, I just wonder, maybe it's a cheat code in this video game we call life, but I wanna use the cheat code to figure out what kind of propulsion systems are possible. And it feels like other alien civilizations might help us, give us, give us a guidance on that. Of course, I think even just discovering, boy, one of the things with the space program, like everything we're doing with Mars, like, the secret thing I'm really excited about, the romantic thing is humans on Mars, but the secret thing is building giant stations on Mars that allow us to definitively, hopefully find the traces of life that either currently doesn't live or has once lived on Mars. Because if that's the case, that means for sure life is everywhere. Oh, 100%. And then you're like, once you know that, sorry to keep interrupting, not shutting the hell up. This is supposed to be an interview, goddammit. All right, that, just the knowledge of that, just the knowledge that a four-minute mile can be run, I think will open our minds completely to really, really hardcore push to interstellar travel or colonizing Mars, becoming a multi-planetary species. It'd be truly inspiring. You think that. Do you get nervous, though? I'm the interviewer now. Don't you get nervous that we could make spectacular discovery on Mars that not only has there been life, there's actually pretty advanced micro, or multi-cellular life totally thriving in certain regions we just hadn't visited in a manner. Mars, and we make this big discovery that a relatively large percentage of people just simply wouldn't believe it. They'd think it's all 100% fake and that they're just doing this to control us and that blah, blah, blah. We could make the most important discovery in human life, in all of human existence, that we're not alone in this universe, by, you know, cellularly at least, and a good percentage of people, I'm thinking 20, 30, in today's world, 40-plus percent of people wouldn't even believe it existed. Interesting. It's a very important thing to think about, especially as an educator like yourself. I think the current cynicism towards institutions and science is temporary. I think it's, they're basically, the internet woke up, the internet smells bullshit, and it looked at, I'm sorry, I'm not being ageist, but saying older scientists, and they looked at them, and they kind of said, you're kind of full of shit. You got a lot of ego, you speak down to everybody, you're not very good at communicating. I think there's a lot of truth to what they're saying, and I think the young scientists that are coming up will be much better at not being full of shit, being authentic, being real, not treating people like they're children that can't possibly understand, like taking it very seriously, that there's a lot of intelligent people out there that are curious, that are full of desire for knowledge, like being transparent about all the uncertainties of the scientific process, all the tensions, the conflicts, all of that. And I think once we fix the science communication system adapted to the internet, I think that won't be an issue. I hope, I hope. I mean, that's why people like you are really important, is like communicate with authenticity. But yeah, that's definitely something to think about. I mean, yes, the early, I mean, listen, scientists too, like the phosphine discovered on Venus, is like they're extremely skeptical always. So definitely there will be a lot of skepticism. And it depends what it looks like. If it kind of looks like, this thing kind of looks like bacteria back on Earth, yes. So it means contamination is very difficult to avoid in general. But if the thing looks like fundamentally different, then you're like, all right. Yeah, totally different DNA, RNA, like this is not, we've never observed this ever at all. Then you're like, all right, cool. Of course, so that, another promising thing that difficult to be definitive about, but let's get better and better direct imaging systems. There's now, I don't know how many, but thousands of planets being discovered outside of our solar system. There's moons being discovered, now Earth-like planets being discovered. So like all of that, if we could do direct imaging of those planets, more and more and more, there could be some gigantic, listen, if there is like a Kardashev, like type two civilization, we're gonna see the damn thing. It's gonna be producing a lot of, it's gonna be radiating a lot of energy. So the possibility of detecting some of that, that's also a real possibility with something like James Webb telescopes, like those kinds of efforts, that starts becoming a reality. Have you read Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary? I have not, no. You're going to love it. Like it is basically, almost answering that like, how could they not see us type of thing almost, where he creates this incredible, I don't wanna spoil anything, but it's just the sense that like, we could have totally different perspectives with an alien race and not even like consider that the two of us are coexisting almost. I don't wanna spoil anything, because it's really, really, really worth the read. Oh, you mean a different perspective, like the aliens have a different perspective than humans? Yeah, like we just like, we see with this visual light, someone could see in X-ray, et cetera, you know like, and just the way we even come to the same perspective, like looking and observing is just so different fundamentally that like we could, I mean, it's not quite like that. It's not like it's like, oh, they were actually on the moon and we're, you know, it's not like that, but it's such a unique and incredible story. I think Andy Weir is one of the best science fiction writers. I can't say that with much authority, because I don't listen to much science fiction. So zero authority. I really like Andy Weir's books, and that book is no different. Well, that sounds like, I'm really worried about that. It sounds like I would really love it. I've definitely, I've been very, I've done a lot of reading in my life, but like the science fiction is one of the things I've been really, really weak on. I haven't really read much, and I just made more and more friends over the years recently that say that I absolutely must read some of these things. Do you physically read or do you do audio books while you run and stuff? Both, I do both, yeah. But physically, I sadly don't. So Kindle, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but while I run, I also do, so I do both. I do about on a normal day, especially now that I've been really focused on reading, it's about 60 minutes of reading on a Kindle, and one to two hours, because I run about two hours when I don't have other stuff. Like today, I won't run. So it's about three hours. So on average, I would say it's like two, two and a half hours a day that I read. And audio books are just the same. They're a little slower, but they can, especially for the classics, they can capture some of the magic with a deep voice, usually with a British accent. I love it. I also read that, listened to, sorry, that a book on propulsion like two years ago, I remember. But I remember that was extremely difficult. Ignition? Yeah, it was Ignition. By John D. Clarke. Yeah, it was very difficult to listen to. Oh, yeah, I don't read, I listen while I'm on road trips or running or stuff like that too. So I swear there's probably 40, or like not 40, but there's like eight minutes of, we tried PMZ 15, 13, BM 412, RMNL, mitral, mucle, hydrogen, for like, I swear it's multiple minutes of explaining one trial on something, because there's just so many different chemicals. I don't know, it's almost a joke. I literally audibly laughed out loud listening to it, because I'm like, this is so ridiculous. I'm sure it makes sense reading it, but listening to it is just hilarious. But it's great though. What do you think of some of the challenges for long-term space travel? Do you think about this kind of stuff, the biological stuff? Yeah. Do you worry, do you think about radiation on Mars and out in space over periods of, actually the effects on the human body, forget even the radiation, over periods of months and years? Yeah. I think realistically we have a really good handle on what the effects are. And we actually have the solution to like everything. It's just whether or not we can, like for instance, low Earth orbit, one of the biggest challenges eventually after your long-term space travel is bone density loss and not having gravity. You actually have issues with a handful of things. And artificial gravity is easy in terms of, relatively easy in terms of space flight. You can have two vehicles just tethered together and just spinning, given enough distance and a decent enough spin velocity. And you can get one gene relatively easy. We're talking again, relatively easy, especially after talking about theoretical physics. Like this is, that's easy stuff. We haven't done that yet, but there's no reason why we can't produce artificial gravity. If we say that that's a big enough hurdle that we absolutely have to overcome this, okay, cool, we'll just spin up two vehicles that are going to Mars and people will have, but that's the thing is Mars is only about, we'll say six months there. Then you're hanging out on Mars, you have 38% of gravity and then six months ish back. People live on the International Space Station at six months stints. We've had people for basically a year up on the International Space Station. It's not like it's, it's not life altering. Yeah, you have a couple of days of not being able to walk very well and you do have some bone density loss and some other concerns. But like, again, that's, it's solvable. And I think, the first missions to Mars, I think it might, we might, we'll probably do the trade. Is it worth it to like land on Mars and have a crippled crew that can't even physically stand yet you know, for a day or two before they get their feet from underneath them? Or is it, do we need to spin up two spacecraft or you know, a tether and have, like you can't do it like Starship, you know, even though it's 30 feet wide or nine meters wide. If you spin it on that one axis, that's not enough space to get 1G without your feet and your head being at two different velocities. So you get really sick, you'll always feel like you're falling. Your brain will tell you that you're falling constantly. But then again, okay, so this is, this is a whole thing is, I, you know, and I don't know if there's, we don't really have the data yet on like going from zero G, we know the effects of that. We know the effects of 1G really well. That's our majority of our data set. But we don't really have much data on the long-term effects of, you know, 1-6 gravity like on the Moon or 38% gravity. Is it, is 1-6 gravity actually enough to counteract 95% of the effects of low gravity? Or is it 15, you know, is it 1-6? Is it like a linear thing? Is 38% gravity totally, you know, 38% as bad as one or whatever, you know, is it a slight, like where is it on the scale? So there's a chance that we don't need anywhere near 1G of gravity to counteract the bulk majority of these problems. We could have 0.1G or whatever is the, you know, the right compromise of vehicle complexity and human biology and all of these other effects. Like we, this is absolutely a solvable thing. That is. And we figure some of this out through just experimentation. 100%. Along the way. Yep. One of this is back to my dating life. I think one of the essential fundamental research questions I'm wondering about is the dynamics and so the details of how you have sex in space. Asking for a friend, of course. I mean, there literally is sort of work on this, right? Because like, if you think about long-term space travel, I mean, sex is sort of like, there's the recreational aspect of sex, but the most important aspect of sex for long-term space travel is procreation and also the full biological cycle of that. So from the embryo, the development of the baby, the giving the birth and all that kind of stuff. So like, you know, there's a lot of really difficult problems of biology there to understand and perhaps to solve. Some of that, again, just like you said brilliantly, some of that can be just solved with engineering outside of the human body by creating a gravitational field like that. But maybe along the way, you can figure out how to do that without doing it, but we're balancing the cost and so on. And radiation's the other thing. We know, we have a really good data set on what radiation and doses do to humans. Like, we know. We can measure radiation. We know, we can approximate and kind of give edge cases for the Mars transient and getting to Mars and being on Mars. And the simple answer to that is like, at the end of the day, if we have to dig into Mars or find a tunnel to live in so you get some extra mass in between you and cosmic radiation, so be it. Like, that's the answer then. Again, none of these are like insolvable problems. They're just things, hurdles you would have to overcome based on, you know, the risk exposure and the posture there. Imagine being the first child, the first baby born outside of Earth. That'd be pretty cool. Yeah, that'd be cool. I would love to be alive to see that. That'd be a big one. I don't know if they'll, I don't know, because it's such a dangerous thing. It's so risky. I think that could be in our lifetime. You think so? Yeah. I would like to think, in a perfect world, if we're thinking futurism, that in 30 to 50 years, I definitely think we could have a full-time, like, permanent, major civilizations. You know, like, what Blue Origin wants to develop, where they have a huge, like, sphere, you know, and you're doing a lot of, especially heavy industry off of Earth, so you're not polluting Earth. Like, that makes so much sense to me. Yeah, I think we could live in a lifetime where, you know, we thought that since the 50s and 60s that people are gonna be living and working in space like crazy, and at any given point, we're lucky to have 12 people in space today. But I really think in our lifetime, we're finally getting to that point of, yeah, that that's a reality. Let me, because you mentioned Blue Origin, can we just lay out some of the competitors to SpaceX? So much of what we talked about is SpaceX, specifically because they're sort of pushing the boundaries of what's possible in the commercial spaceflight, but there's a lot of, like you said, incredible work being done for large companies and small companies, startups, and so on. So who are the competitors to SpaceX? ULA, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, there's Virgin, is it Galactic Orbit? Orbit would be the competitor. Virgin Orbit, there's Rocket Labs, Electron Rocket that you mentioned. There's the folks you covered, Firefly. Yep, yep. And what are we missing? There's the EPIC Space Launch System from NASA, I guess that is? Technically NASA, but prime contractor Boeing and- Boeing and Lockheed. Yeah, Northrop is the boosters, yep. Nice, so what's interesting to say to lay out the land here that you're excited about? Just in general, I think if you aren't working on a reusable, some form of reusable vehicle, like physically working on it, pen to paper, or not beyond pen to paper, like bending metal for a reusable vehicle, you're gone, you're toast. I think we're well into that being the only provable way forward, the only way you're gonna compete and survive is a reusable rocket. Fully reusable would be great, but that's obviously massively aspirational still, but it will come. But to me, the list, you pretty much had it right on the head. Astra was another orbital rocket company. There's a lot of companies, and I think right now the ones that I personally really believe in, Rocket Lab is awesome. I really think that they are one of the few that I believe can actually build a Falcon 9 class rocket like today with their technology, with their knowledge, with their investments, with their funding. And they've proven themselves. There's very few, they have actually made it look easy. I think there's a lot of startups and a lot of new rocket. There's too many launch providers popping out of the woodwork right now. They won't all survive, of course. I think realistically, if you look at airplanes, how many airplane, there's a handful of airplane manufacturers. There's not hundreds and thousands of airplane manufacturers. I think it'll be a similar thing for space flight. I think we'll see, realistically, in the terms of jumbo jets and passengers, there's basically two. There's Airbus and there's Boeing. So I think in the long run, there'll be two or three major players. I think there'll be 10 minor, like as far as launch providers, as far as the ones actually leaving Earth and getting into orbit, I just don't think there's a ton of room for individuality, really. Yeah, I would love to see a really serious competitor to SpaceX in the way that SpaceX does things. I don't know if ULA is quite the right kind of competitor. Let me say this, ULA has all of the potential, but just operationally, Lockheed Martin and Boeing's Lovechild, they're kind of set up in a far too traditional manner, where they just really aren't given the opportunity to innovate like a lot of these startups are. So Rocket Lab is a little bit more of that nature. What do you think about just Blue Origin in general? Blue Origin's, man, what Blue Origin has done with New Shepard is amazing, and people just laud it because it's suborbital and it looks very phallic. It's... So I guess the meme matters also in this modern day. But it's sad because people don't see what they are also working on, which is New Glenn. I see comments almost every day still of like, it doesn't matter because they're working on tiny, it's like, no, New Glenn is more powerful and more capable than Falcon Heavy. New Glenn is almost more of a competitor to, not quite, to Starship, but it's almost in that class. It's a heavy lift launch vehicle. It's huge, it's crazy, it'll be nuts. They're very actively working on it. I still think we're three years away from it launching, but that's a very strong competitor in the class of rockets that SpaceX is currently making. So SpaceX is currently leading the way, but it could become a close race. For now, we'll ignore SpaceX. We'll just kind of talk about, I think, who's kind of coming around the corner here. So let me just do a quick overview. I'm gonna shoot myself in the foot for getting some cool people here and some exciting companies, but Relativity's one that, if you, you should definitely get Tim Ellis on the show, who is the CEO of Relativity. They're doing 3D printed rockets. They're the ones that have the world's largest 3D printer. They're getting really close to their first orbital launch. The cool thing about them, the reason that I think they're exciting, the reason that I think they have the potential is just how quickly they can iterate. I think 3D printing a rocket is really dumb. I think iterating with 3D printing on a rocket is brilliant because you can literally change software and have very little, upload a file and have a new rocket. That's amazing. So in terms of long-term iterative process, if we're really talking about hitting the ground running and just seeing where the evolution takes you, I think that's about as good as you can get. I think what SpaceX is doing at Starbase, just physically bending cheap steel is probably also a very valid solution. So I really think, and they have the engineering chops. I think they've got some amazing people there. Again, Rocket Lab, I adore what they work on. And like everyone, there's a caveat here that everything takes longer. Anything any company tells you, it's two or three times longer, just period. Rocket Lab's no different. But I really, they're working on a Neutron rocket that's gonna be, I think, 8,000 to 15,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. It's a good medium class rocket. Will compete right along with Falcon 9, hopefully. By the way, Neutron would be its name. Yep, yep, so I like Neutron. It's not some kind of fascinating new physics breakthrough where they're using neutrons. No, no, but they are using, they're also using liquid methane and liquid oxygen. I just think it's a really, it seems like a great rocket. And assuming they can actually get it flying in two or three years, I think they're gonna be, it's here to stay, you know? I'd be remiss, right now I'm editing a video from an interview with Stoke Aerospace out in Kent, Washington. It was just one of these companies that they have a long ways to go. They're still in the very, they're behind the curve, frankly, in terms of launch vehicles right now. Because like I said, there's so many coming out of the woodwork. But the idea they're working on, their solution to a fully reusable rocket is amazing. One of the coolest concepts I've ever seen. Are you gonna cover it in the video? Yeah, yep, yep. That'll be hopefully coming out in the next, depending on what the schedule is down there. I'm actively editing that as we speak, and it is so cool. I mean, it is like, it's genius. And if they can actually get it to work, I can see them merging. I can for sure see someone potentially, like I perfectly, in a perfect world, they merge with Rocket Lab. They, Stoke develops the upper stage, and maybe even the engines, they are. The two guys, the CEO, the co-founders of that company, they are engine, like propulsion engineer magnificence. They have, they used to, they both have worked at Blue. They developed engines in a hurry there, and then left Blue when it felt like it was getting too slow for them. And now they are, I mean, these guys fired a 15 chambered rocket engine, instead of four from the Soviet. And we're talking 15 chambers, single turbo pump, 70 times in the month of October. Wow. That's impressive. Wow. And that's like, that was on, you know, if you think about like days off, time off, you know, parts changing. Yes. Over twice a day on average of a Hydrolox engine. That's insane. So I, I love them and I hope the best for them. But they're also topical right now. They're at top of my head, so. What about Firefly? What I like about Firefly, they've already got kind of a traditional aerospace backing. They're starting to buddy up a lot with Northrop Grumman. So they're going to be building the booster stage for Antares, which is currently flying only out of Wallops, Virginia. And is one of the only other commercial providers for the International Space Station. And Northrop Grumman is a very traditional aerospace company, you know, like lots of solid rocket boosters. And they've purchased, ironically, their current Antares is reliant on Russian engines and Ukrainian boosters. Two things that I don't think you're going to be able to get your hands on too much anymore. So they're looking to some US propulsion and stages. So they actually are partnering with, with Firefly and their new Antares rocket will be a first stage built entirely by Firefly. So I'm excited that Firefly already has the propulsion technology. And they actually developed, ironically, their tap off cycle engine was developed in partnership with Ukraine, with Ukrainian engineers who developed the whole turbo pump system. So it's like, it's this cool meddling of these worlds. Their former CEO, Tom Rakusik was, like I have an interview with him and he's, anyone that can just spout nuances and facts, I just love, I just soaked that guy's information up as best I could, because he is brilliant. Literally a doctor, a rocket doctor, you know, it's so. Yeah, I mean, that's what, like you said, the fascinating thing about these folks, they're legit, they're such great engineers, the people that bring these rockets to life. And then there's all this stuff that we know and don't know about in China and other parts and other nations that are putting stuff into orbit. One of the sad things also is like, with Lockheed and Boeing is, it's just military applications in general. There's so much technology that's currently being developed that we probably know nothing about. Yeah. And it makes me a little bit sad, of course. Yeah. But for several reasons. One is that the use of that technology has really much, like, it's not that inspired, it's like a very military focused. Yeah, it's to kill someone. It's to kill someone, yeah. There's not even like a side application. Right. And the big one is that it's shrouded in secrecy as opposed to being a source of inspiration. Yeah, 100%. But that's the way of the world. Like, what was that one plane that you covered that was like, we know nothing about? Oh, the X-37B. The X-37B. Yeah, orbited for over 900 days and returned. Like, yeah, I wanna know about that thing. What's that thing up to? I don't know, that's what's, it's so frustrating, we know when it launches, people, you know, amateurs track and know, they even will be like, oh, it changed orbit. You know, it raised and lowered its orbit, blah, blah, blah. We generally have just almost no idea what it's doing up there. And it just saddens me, because I wanna know. And it's awesome, it's a great vehicle. War, what is it good for? You mentioned Kerbal Space Program, the video game. Someone asked you what video game you recommend for learning about space and rockets, and you said, duh, Kerbal Space Program. So tell me about this game. What is this game? And I also saw, heard, that a second one is coming out. So what, like, you know, I've been playing more games recently, because games are fun, and they remind you that life is awesome. So why should I play this game? If you wanna learn about rockets, how to fly, how to build, how to get into orbit, how to get to other planets, there's no better way to learn about rockets than playing Kerbal Space Program. So what does it entail? Like, do you actually, like? It's like SimCity and Microsoft Flight Simulator for rockets. Oh, interesting. So you will get to, like, what, do you design the rockets? Yeah, yeah. It's, okay, so I started playing it in, like, 2014, I think, around as I'm, like, falling in love with space. And I became obsessed with this game. Like, literally, you, you know, you take a, like, you get, boop, a little command module. Click, you click on a fuel tank. Boop, you choose your engine. Boop, you choose a stage connector. Boop, you connect more tanks and build these space planes and fantastical things. And it's all, like, physics-based. And it's available, this sounds like a commercial. It's available on PC and Mac and console. Like, it's available everywhere. But wait, there's more. But wait, there's more. And you said, like, you streamed yourself playing this. Are any of those videos up still? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some of my, actually, the first videos I ever uploaded to YouTube were, like, recaptured streams from Twitch that I just physically uploaded to YouTube. This is awesome. And so, it's me playing Kerbal. I used to do this, kind of like a podcast-style thing. I should get back into this, because it's one of my favorite things I ever did. It's called, we called it Todayish in Spaceflight History, but these days, I'd probably just play Kerbal. But I had my friend come sit next to me. His name's Jacob. And he is a former professional pole vaulter, just this really, knows nothing about rockets, knows nothing about space, hilarious, like, in the sweetest, most fun way. Like, he, as an adult, asked me, which is bigger, the Earth or the Moon? And I love that for him. You know, that's fantastic. He's just a delightful human. He would sit next to me. We would recreate a historical spaceflight mission in Kerbal Space Program, and he would just sit there and play guitar and sing about what I'm doing and asking questions. And it's still one of my favorite things I've ever done. Yeah, you should definitely do something like that. So basically, just, yeah, shoot the shit with a friend. Get their curiosity going. Let them just sit there and ask questions. It was awesome. Like, I mean, yeah, those are some, I've done it a handful of times. I think we probably did like 20 or 30 episodes or something. And it's definitely something I would like to get back to doing. Can you, in the game, like, go to the Moon? Yeah, so it's technically a different solar system. It's the Kerbal system, and you're on the planet Kerbin. So there's the Mun, M-U-N. There's a second moon in the system on this planet. It's called Minmus. They didn't wanna pay license fees or what? Well, it's just a little easier. It's a little bit smaller, so the physics are easier. Oh, so it tries to be consistent with physics. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. The physics are all like real-world physics. And I mean, there's aero simulations. There's all of it's like one-to-one, you know, for Earth physics. It's just on an easier scale, solar system. So it's easier to navigate. But there's still like, there's a planet called Eve that's kind of like Venus. So it has a really thick atmosphere, really thick, really soupy. It's, and a lot more gravity. So it's just really, really hard to get off of. It's easy, relatively easy to land on Eve, but like, that's kind of like the ultimate boss in the game is like getting off of Eve. So that's one of my favorite things to do is build these crafts to get to Eve and try to return home. You mentioned that, there's almost like a podcast thing. You also did our Ludicrous Future. What, is there a podcast in the future? Are you thinking, do you enjoy the medium? You're so incredibly good at talking. It's less effort to sort of to produce. Are you, is that something in the back of your mind also? Oh man, I love talking. Yeah, and you're very good at it. I mean, yeah. I find that I, it's just, the problem with, for me with podcasts, and I guess the podcasts that I've done have tried to be relatively topical about like the current spaceflight affairs. And four, three or four years ago, that was actually manageable for me to keep up with. These days, man, I can't keep, I just can't keep up with it. I gave up on trying to be super topical and I realized that maybe my biggest talent and the things that resonate most with people is just trying to explain the basics and the root. So I'm really just trying to like, I'm trying to do less live streams if I can, but then again, like Starship, I gotta stream that. There's no way I'm not gonna do that. But I'm really just trying to get back to making the deep dive videos where I have no limit on how long and how deep and just really go for it because that's actually what I love to do the best. Yeah, I mean, that's like views aside, those are just works of genius and you're getting better and better at them. And like, that's the, that in terms of the beautiful things you can create in this world, those are that. So like if you continue, especially with the way space travel is developing, like that, your voice is very much needed. So I think it's wise to do what you do best. And I think I'm feeling more and more, especially this last year, I did a lot of live streaming and traveling back and forth between Florida and California and here and just handling major, like big live streams, really stressed myself out. And at the end of the day, I was like, all of this is taking away from my ability to make videos. And that's ideally, honestly, if I had my choice of things, I would just ignore everything else and just sit and lock myself in my house for a year and just sit there and make videos and go and travel every other month, for fun, like not for space stuff, just go and do some light traveling, you know, some- Like around the moon or what? Yeah, just some light traveling. What advice would you give to young folks or just folks struggling to find their way in life, whether they're in high school, college or beyond, like how to have a life they can be proud of, how to have a career they can be proud of. You've had a really interesting journey yourself. What from that can you draw, give advice to others? To be honest, I feel like it's so painfully obvious to follow your heart and follow what makes you happy that I'm just shocked that people allow themselves to sit on mediocrity, to just sit there and be like, well, this is just what I do. And for a lot of people, that's perfectly fine. Some of my best friends are clocking in and out and they're perfectly happy, they have a wonderful life. Absolutely no judgment there, of course. But for people that are stuck feeling like they're not sure of what's next and how to bring light into their world, you really just gotta listen to what does make you happy. People feel guilty about, oh, I play video games for eight hours. Then start learning how to make a video game, learn how to do reviews of video games or make... There's so many, you can work in the video game industry. You don't have to isolate your love from your work. And it's just funny that maybe you feel guilty that you drink too much. Okay, I don't know if this is a good advice. Go learn how to make alcohol. Start a liquor company. Yeah, start a liquor company. I mean, maybe that's a careful advice. No, it's great advice, but it's also in your own story, it seems like you've almost stumbled on... Some of it is just exploration and keeping your mind and heart open to discovering that thing that grabs you. What do you fall asleep thinking about? But you stumbled on the space almost accidentally, right? I mean, when you were being a professional photographer, would you have known? Oh, no. Well, do you wanna know what I wanted to be when I was a kid? What's that? Well, first, when I was young, I wanted to be a tractor. I'm not quite sure I understood how that works. Then I wanted to be a scorpion trainer. Thought I could train them to cut people's lawns. Better and better. Yep, yep. And then, honestly, the majority of my childhood- People's lawns, God. I think your understanding of physics early on was just a little... The pincers, man, the pincers. Then from probably six until early college, I wanted to be a prosthetic engineer. And never once did I think about anything rockets, really. I had a space shuttle poster, I had some space shuttle Legos. I liked space and I knew of the space shuttle, but it was far down the list as far as things that I thought were cool. Ninja Turtles, Lamborghini Countach, B-17G Flying Fortress. Yeah, I guess that means- If you just keep your heart open to falling in love with an idea, with a passion, yeah. You could start from that, from Ninja Turtles and scorpions cutting lawns, to being one of the best, one of the top educators, inspirational figures in space, and actually traveling around the moon. And who knows, maybe one day stepping foot on the moon and Mars, even though you say you're not interested. It seems like you stating that you're not interested in certain things somehow results in you doing those things. My friends joke that I'm gonna be the first person to go to the moon against their will. Yeah, like, all right, this is... All right, what's the food like up there? Guys, we're gonna start a fundraiser, please. Tim just doesn't wanna go, you know? Definitely don't want to do it. All right, Tim, you're an incredible person. Thank you so much for everything you do. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. Not just the content, but just who you are as a human being, just how excited you are for everything. It's just an inspiration, you're a joy to watch. Thank you for being you. Thank you for doing the stuff you're doing. I can't wait to see what you do next, man. Thank you so much for talking with me today. That was awesome. Thank you so much, it's my pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Dodd. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from H.G. Wells. Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/5eK5A_43pkE

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Jim Gates: What is Supersymmetry? | AI Podcast Clips

Some of the fascinating work you've done is in the space of supersymmetry, symmetry in general. Can you describe first of all what is supersymmetry? Ah yes, so you remember the two buckets I told you about perhaps earlier, so there are two buckets in our universe. So now I want you to think about drawing a pie that has four quadrants, so I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths. So in one quadrant I'm gonna put all the buckets that we talked about that are like the electron and the quarks, in a different quadrant I'm going to put all the force carriers. The other two quadrants are empty. Now if you, I showed you a picture of that, you'd see a circle, there would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant and stuff in others, and then I would ask you a question. Does that look symmetrical to you? No. No, and that's exactly right because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed sense of symmetry. It's something that is part of that mystery of the universe. So how would you make it symmetrical? One way you could is by saying those two empty quadrants had things in them also. And if you do that, that's supersymmetry. So that's what I understood when I was a graduate student here at MIT in 1975, when the mathematics of this was first being born. Supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine in the late 60s, but we had this thing called the Iron Curtain, so we Westerners didn't know about it. But by the early 70s, independently, there were scientists in the West who had rediscovered supersymmetry. Bruno Zemino and Julius Wess were their names. So this was around 71 or 72 when this happened. I started graduate school in 73, so around 74, 75, I was trying to figure out how to write a thesis so that I could become a physicist the rest of my life. I had a great advisor, Professor James Young, who had taught me a number of things about electrons and weak forces and those sorts of things. But I decided that if I was going to have a really, an opportunity to maximize my chances of being successful, I should strike it out in a direction that other people were not studying. And so as a consequence, I surveyed ideas that were being developed, and I came across the idea of supersymmetry. And it was so, the mathematics was so remarkable that I just, it bowled me over. I actually have two undergraduate degrees. My first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics, and my second is physics, even though I always wanted to be a physicist. Plan A, which involved getting good grades, was mathematics. I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school, but my heart was in physics. If we could take a small digression, what's to you the most beautiful idea in mathematics that you've encountered in this interplay between math and physics? It's the idea of symmetry. The fact that our innate sense of symmetry winds up aligning with just incredible mathematics, to me, is the most beautiful thing. It's very strange but true that if symmetries were perfect, we would not exist. And so even though we have these very powerful ideas about balance in the universe in some sense, it's only when you break those balances that you get creatures like humans and objects like planets and stars. So although they are a scaffold for reality, they cannot be the entirety of reality. So I'm kind of naturally attracted to parts of science and technology where symmetry plays a dominant role. And not just, I guess, symmetry as you said, but the magic happens when you break the symmetry. The magic happens when you break the symmetry. Okay, so diving right back in, you mentioned four quadrants. Yes. Two are filled with stuff, two buckets. And then there's crazy mathematical thing, ideas for filling the other two. The other two. What are those things? So earlier, the way I described these two buckets is I gave you a story that started out by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights. And I said, turn on your flashlight, I'll turn on mine, the beams will go through each other. And the beams are composed of force carriers called photons. They carry the electromagnetic force. And they pass right through each other. So imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object, which you don't have to imagine people like me do that. So you take that mathematics, and then you ask yourself a question. You see, mathematics is a palette. It's just like a musical composer is able to construct variations on a theme. Well, a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist is something that we can construct variations on. So even though the mathematics that Maxwell gave us, about light, we know how to construct variations on that. And one of the variations you can construct is to say, suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism that behaves like an electron in that it would bounce off of another one. That's changing a mathematical term in an equation. So if you did that, you would have a force carrier. So you would say, first, it belongs in this force carrying bucket. But it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons. So you say, well, gee, wait, no, that's not the right bucket. So you're forced to actually put it in one of these empty quadrants. So those sorts of things, basically, we give them, so the photon mathematically can be accompanied by a fotino. It's the thing that carries a force, but has the rule of bouncing off. In a similar manner, you could start with an electron. And you say, okay, so write down the mathematics of an electron. I know how to do that. A physicist named Dirac first told us how to do that back in the late 20s, early 30s. So take that mathematics, and then you say, let me look at that mathematics and find out what in the mathematics causes two electrons to bounce off of each other, even if I turn off the electrical charge. So I could do that. And now let me change that mathematical term. So now I have something that carries electrical charge, but if you take two of them, I'm sorry, if you turn their charges off, they'll pass through each other. So that puts things in the other quadrant. And those things we tend to call, we put the S in front of their name. So in the lower quadrant here, we have electrons. In this now newly filled quadrant, we have electrons. In the quadrant over here, we had quarks. Over here, we have squarks. So now we've got this balanced pi, and that's basically what I understood as a graduate student in 1975 about this idea of supersymmetry, that it was going to fill up these two quadrants of the pi in a way that no one had ever thought about before. So I was amazed that no one else at MIT found this an interesting idea. So it led to my becoming the first person in MIT to really study supersymmetry. This was 1975, 76, 77. And in 77, I wrote the first PhD thesis in the physics department on this idea, because I was drawn to the balance. Drawn to the symmetry. So what... What does that... First of all, is this fundamentally a mathematical idea? So how much experimental... And we'll have this theme, it's a really interesting one. When you explore the world of the small, and in your new book, talking about proving Einstein right, that we'll also talk about, there's this theme of kind of starting it, exploring crazy ideas first in the mathematics, and then seeking for ways to experimentally validate them. And then seeking for ways to experimentally validate them. Where do you put supersymmetry in that? It's closer than string theory. It has not yet been validated. In some sense, you mentioned Einstein, so let's go there for a moment. In our book, Proving Einstein Right, we actually do talk about the fact that Albert Einstein, in 1915, wrote a set of equations which were very different from Newton's equations in describing gravity. These equations made some predictions that were different from Newton's predictions. And it actually made three different predictions. One of them was not actually a prediction, but a postdiction, because it was known that Mercury was not orbiting the sun in the way that Newton would have told you. And so Einstein's theory actually describes Mercury orbiting in a way that was observed, as opposed to what Newton would have told you. So that was one prediction. The second prediction that came out of the theory of general relativity, which Einstein wrote in 1915, was that if you, so let me describe an experiment and come back to it. Suppose I had a glass of water. And I filled the glass up, and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth between our two faces. It would appear to me like your face was moving, even though you weren't moving. I mean, it's actually, and what's causing it is because the light gets bent through the glass as it passes from your face to my eye. So Einstein, in his 1915 theory of general relativity, found out that gravity has the same effect on light as that glass of water. It would cause beams of light to bend. Now, Newton also knew this, but Einstein's prediction was that light would bend twice as much. And so here's a mathematical idea. Now, how do you actually prove it? Well, you've got to watch, yes. Just a quick pause on that, just the language you're using. He found out. I can say he did a calculation. It's a really interesting notion that one of the beautiful things about this universe is you can do a calculation, and combine with some of that magical intuition that physicists have, actually predict what would be, what's possible to experimentally validate. That's correct. He found out in the sense that there seems to be something here, and mathematically it should bend, gravity should bend light this amount. And so therefore, that's something that could be potentially, and then come up with an experiment that could be validated. Right. And that's the way that actually modern physics, deeply fundamental modern physics, this is how it works. Earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson. So why did we go looking for it? The answer is that back in the late 60s, early 70s, some people wrote some equations, and the equations predicted this. So then we went looking for it.

https://youtu.be/OE0GjS16jyU

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Grimes: Music, AI, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #281

we are becoming cyborgs. Like, our brains are fundamentally changed. Everyone who grew up with electronics, we are fundamentally different from previous, from homo sapiens. I call us homo techno. I think we have evolved into homo techno, which is like essentially a new species. Previous technologies, I mean, may have even been more profound and moved us to a certain degree, but I think the computers are what make us homo techno. I think this is what, it's a brain augmentation. So it like allows for actual evolution, like the computers accelerate the degree to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated. Would you classify yourself as a homo sapien or a homo techno? Definitely homo techno. So you're one of the earliest of the species. I think most of us are. The following is a conversation with Grimes, an artist, musician, songwriter, producer, director, and a fascinating human being who thinks a lot about both the history and the future of human civilization. Studying the dark periods of our past to help form an optimistic vision of our future. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Grimes. Oh yeah, the Cloudlifter, there you go. There you go. You know your stuff. Have you ever used the Cloudlifter? Yeah, I actually, this microphone, Cloudlifter, is what Michael Jackson used, so. No, really? Yeah, this is like Thriller and stuff. This mic and the Cloudlifter? And that, yeah, it's an incredible microphone. It's very flattering on vocals. I've used this a lot. It's great for demo vocals. It's great in a room. Like, sometimes it's easier to record vocals if you're just in a room and like the music's playing and you just want to like feel it and so it's not in the headphones. And this mic is pretty directional, so I think it's like a good mic for like just vibing out and just getting a real good vocal take. Just vibing. Just in a room. Anyway, this is the Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones microphone. I feel way more badass now. All right, let's get in. You want to just get into it? I guess so. All right. One of your names, at least in this space and time, is C, like the letter C. And you told me that C means a lot of things. It's the speed of light. It's the render rate of the universe. It's yes in Spanish. It's the crescent moon. And it happens to be my favorite programming language because it basically runs the world, but it's also powerful, fast, and it's dangerous because you can mess things up really bad with it because of all the pointers. But anyway, which of these associations with the name C is the coolest to you? I mean, to me, the coolest is the speed of light, obviously. Or speed of light. When I say render rate of the universe, I think I mean the speed of light because essentially that's what we're rendering at. See, I think we'll know if we're in a simulation if the speed of light changes because if they can improve their render speed, then... It's already pretty good. It's already pretty good. But if it improves, then we'll know. We can probably be like, okay, they've updated or upgraded. Well, it's fast enough for us humans because it seems immediate. There's no delay. There's no latency in terms of us humans on Earth interacting with things. But if you're in a simulation, if you're like intergalactic species operating on a much larger scale, then you're going to start noticing some weird stuff. Or if you can operate around a black hole, then you're going to start to see some render issues. You can't go faster than the speed of light, correct? So it really limits our ability or one's ability to travel through space. Theoretically, you can. You have wormholes. So there's nothing in general relativity that precludes faster than speed of light travel. But it just seems you're going to have to do some really funky stuff with very heavy things that have weirdnesses, that have basically tears in space-time. We don't know how to do that. Doon navigators know how to do it. Doon navigators? Yeah. Yeah. Folding space. Basically making wormholes. So the name C... Yes. Who are you? Do you think of yourself as multiple people? Are you one person? Do you know, like, this morning were you a different person than you are tonight? We are, I should say, recording this basically at midnight, which is awesome. Yes. Thank you so much. I think I'm about eight hours late. No, you're right on time. Good morning. This is the beginning of a new day soon. Anyway, are you the same person you were in the morning and the evening? Is there multiple people in there? Do you think of yourself as one person? Or maybe you have no clue? Or are you just a giant mystery to yourself? Okay. These are really intense questions, but... That's cool. That's cool. Because I ask this myself, like, look in the mirror, who are you? People tell you to just be yourself. But what does that even mean? I mean, I think my personality changes with everyone I talk to. So I have a very inconsistent personality. Yeah. Person to person. So the interaction, your personality materializes... Or my mood. Like, I'll go from being like a megalomaniac to being like, you know, just like a total hermit who is very shy. So some combinatorial combination of your mood and the person you're interacting with. Yeah, mood and people I'm interacting with. But I think everyone's like that. Maybe not. Well, not everybody acknowledges it and able to introspect it. Who brings out... What kind of person, what kind of mood brings out the best in you? As an artist and as a human? Can you introspect this? Like my best friends. Like people I can... When I'm like, super confident, and I know that they're going to understand everything I'm saying. So like my best friends, then... When I can start being really funny, that's always my, like, peak mode. But it's like, yeah, takes a lot to get there. Let's talk about constraints. You've talked about constraints and limits. Do those help you out as an artist or as a human being? Or do they get in the way? Do you like the constraints? So in creating music, in creating art, in living life, do you like the constraints that this world puts on you? Or do you hate them? If constraints are moving, then you're good. Right? Like, it's like, as we are progressing with technology, we're changing the constraints of like artistic creation. You know, making video and music and stuff is getting a lot cheaper. There's constantly new technology and new software that's making it faster and easier. We have so much more freedom than we had in the 70s. Like when Michael Jackson, you know, when they recorded Thriller with this microphone, like, they had to use a mixing desk and all this stuff. And like, probably even getting a studio is probably really expensive. And you have to be a really good singer. And you have to know how to use the mixing desk and everything. And now I can just, you know, make, I've made a whole album on this computer. I have a lot more freedom, but then I'm also constrained in different ways. Because there's like, literally millions more artists. It's like a much bigger playing field. It's just like, I also, I didn't learn music. I'm not a natural musician. So I don't know anything about actual music. I just know about like the computer. So I'm really kind of just like, messing around and like, trying things out. Well, yeah, I mean, but the nature of music is changing. So you're saying you don't know actual music, what music is changing. Music is becoming, you've talked about this, is becoming, it's like merging with technology. Yes. It's becoming something more than just like the notes on a piano. It's becoming some weird composition that requires engineering skills, programming skills, some kind of human robot interaction skills, and still some of the same things that Michael Jackson had, which is like a good ear for a good sense of taste of what's good and not the final thing when it's put together. Like you're allowed, you're enabled, empowered with a laptop to layer stuff, to start like layering insane amounts of stuff. And it's super easy to do that. I do think music production is a really underrated art form. I feel like people really don't appreciate it. When I look at publishing splits, the way that people like pay producers and stuff, it's super, producers are just deeply underrated. Like so many of the songs that are popular right now or for the last 20 years, like part of the reason they're popular is because the production is really interesting or really sick or really cool. And it's like, I don't think listeners, like people just don't really understand what music production is. It's not, it's sort of like this weird discombobulated art form. It's not like a formal, because it's so new, there isn't new, there isn't like a formal training path for it. It's mostly driven by like autodidacts. Like it's like almost everyone I know who's good at production, like they didn't go to music school or anything. They just taught themselves. Are they mostly different? Like the music producers, you know, is there some commonalities that tie them together or are they all just different kinds of weirdos? Because I just hung out with Rick Rubin. I don't know if you've- Yeah. I mean, Rick Rubin is like literally one of the gods of music production. Like he's one of the people who first, you know, who like made music production, you know, made the production as important as the actual lyrics or the notes. But the thing he does, which is interesting, I don't know if you can speak to that, but just hanging out with him, he seems to just sit there in silence, close his eyes and listen. It's like he almost does nothing. And that nothing somehow gives you freedom to be the best version of yourself. So that's music production somehow too, which is like encouraging you to do less, to simplify, to like push towards minimalism. I mean, I guess, I mean, I work differently from Rick Rubin because Rick Rubin produces for other artists, whereas like I mostly produce for myself. So it's a very different situation. I also think Rick Rubin, he's in that, I would say, advanced category of producer where like you've earned your, you can have an engineer and stuff and people do the stuff for you. But I usually just do stuff myself. So you're the engineer, the producer, and the artist. Yeah, I guess I would say I'm in the era, like the post-Rick Rubin era. I come from the kind of Skrillex school of thought, which is where you are, yeah, the engineer, producer, artist. Like where, I mean, lately, sometimes I'll work with a producer now. I'm gently sort of delicately starting to collaborate a bit more, but like I think I'm kind of from the, like the whatever 2010s explosion of things where everything became available on the computer and you kind of got this like lone wizard energy thing going. So you embrace being the loneliness. Is the loneliness somehow an engine of creativity? Like, so most of your stuff, most of your creative, quote unquote, genius in quotes, is in the privacy of your mind? Yes, well, it was. But here's the thing. I was talking to Daniel Eck and he said, he's like, most artists, they have about 10 years, like 10 good years. And then they usually stop making their like vital shit. And I feel like I'm sort of like nearing the end of my 10 years on my own. And so you have to become somebody else. Now I'm like, I'm in the process of becoming somebody else and reinventing. When I work with other people, because I've never worked with other people, I find that I make like, that I'm exceptionally rejuvenated and making like some of the most vital work I've ever made. So, because I think another human brain is like one of the best tools you can possibly find. It's a funny way to put it. I love it. It's like if a tool is like, you know, whatever HP plus one or like adds some like stats to your character, like another human brain will like square it instead of like adding something. Double up the experience points. I love this. We should also mention we're playing Tavern music before this, which I love, which I first, when I think I... You had to stop the Tavern music. Yeah, because it doesn't, the audio. Okay, okay. But it makes... Yeah, it'll make the podcast annoying. Added in post, added in post. No one will want to listen to the podcast. They probably would, but it makes me, it reminds me like a video game, like a role playing video game where you have experience points. There's something really joyful about wandering places like Elder Scrolls, like Skyrim, just exploring these landscapes in another world and then you get experience points and you can work on different skills and somehow you progress in life. And I don't know, it's simple. It doesn't have some of the messy complexities of life. And there's usually a bad guy you can fight in Skyrim, it's dragons and so on. I'm sure in Elder Ring, there's a bunch of monsters you can fight. I love that. I feel like Elder Ring, I feel like this is a good analogy to music production though, because it's like, I feel like the engineers and the people creating these open worlds, it's sort of like similar to people, to music producers, whereas it's like this hidden archetype that no one really understands what they do and no one really knows who they are, but they're like, it's like the artist engineer, because it's like, it's both art and fairly complex engineering. Well, you're saying they don't get enough credit. Aren't you kind of changing that? By becoming the person doing everything? Isn't the engineer? Well, I mean, others have gone before me. There's like Timbaland and Skrillex, and there's all these people that are very famous for this. But I just think the general, I think people get confused about what it is and just don't really know what it is per se. And it's just when I see a song, like when there's a hit song, I'm just trying to think of just going for even just a basic pop hit, like, like, what's it like, Rules by Dua Lipa or something. The production on that is actually like really crazy. I mean, the song is also great, but it's like the production is exceptionally memorable. Like, you know, and it's just like no one, I don't even know who produced that song. It's just like, isn't part of like the rhetoric of how we just discuss the creation of art. We just sort of like, don't consider the music producer, because I think the music producer used to be more just simply recording things. Yeah, that's interesting, because when you think about movies, we talk about the actor and the actresses, but we also talk about the directors. Yeah, we don't talk about like that with the music as often. The Beatles music producer was one of the first kind of guy, one of the first people sort of introducing crazy sound design into pop music. I forget his name. He has the same, I forget his name. But, you know, like he was doing all the weird stuff like dropping pianos and like, yeah. Oh, to get the yeah, to get the sound, to get the authentic sound. What about lyrics? You think those, where did they fit into how important they are? I was heartbroken to learn that Elvis didn't write his songs. I was very mad. A lot of people don't write their songs. I understand this. But here's the thing. I feel like there's this desire for authenticity. I used to be like really mad when people wouldn't write or produce their music. And I'd be like, that's fake. And then I realized there's all this weird bitterness and agroness in art about authenticity. Yeah. But I had this kind of weird realization recently where I started thinking that art is sort of a decentralized collective thing. Like, art is kind of a conversation with all the artists that have ever lived before you, you know? Like, it's like, you're really just sort of, it's not like anyone's reinventing the wheel here. Like, you're kind of just taking, you know, thousands of years of art and like running it through your own little algorithm and then like, making your interpretation of it. You just joined the conversation with all the other artists that came before. It's such a beautiful way to look at it. Like, and it's like, I feel like everyone's always like, there's always copyright and IP and this and that and, or authenticity. And it's just like, I think we need to stop seeing this as this like egotistical thing of like, oh, the creative genius, the lone creative genius or this or that. Because it's like, I think art isn't, shouldn't be about that. I think art is something that sort of brings humanity together. And it's also, art is also kind of the collective memory of humans. It's like, we don't, like, we don't give a fuck about whatever ancient Egypt, like, how much grain got sent that day and sending the records and like, you know, like, who went where and, you know, how many shields needed to be produced for this. Like, we just remember their art. And it's like, you know, it's like, in our day to day life, there's all this stuff that seems more important than art, because it helps us function and survive. But when all this is gone, like, the only thing that's really going to be left is the art, the technology will be obsolete. That's so fascinating. Like the humans will be dead. That is true. A good compression of human history is the art we've generated across the different centuries, different millennia. So when the aliens come, when the aliens come, they're going to find the hieroglyphics and the pyramids. I mean, art could be broadly defined. They might find like the engineering marvels, the bridges, the rockets, the... I guess I sort of classify though, architecture is art. Yes. I consider engineering in those formats to be art, for sure. It sucks that like digital art is easier to delete. So if there's an apocalypse, a nuclear war that can disappear. Yes. And the physical, there's something still valuable about the physical manifestation of art. That's, that sucks that like music, for example, has to be played by somebody. Yeah. I mean, I do think we should do have a foundation type situation where we like, you know how we have like seed banks up in the north and stuff? Yeah. Like we should probably have like, like a solar powered or geothermal little bunker that like has all the all human knowledge. You mentioned Daniel, I can Spotify. What do you think about that as an artist? What's Spotify? Is that empowering? I get to me Spotify sort of as a consumer is super exciting. It makes it easy for me to access music from all kinds of artists, get to explore all kinds of music, make it super easy to sort of curate my own playlist and have fun with all that. It was so liberating to let go. You know, I used to collect, you know, albums and CDs and so on, like, like, like horde albums. Yeah. Like they matter. But the reality you can, you know, that was really liberating. I can let go of that. And letting go of the albums you're kind of collecting allows you to find new music, exploring new artists and all that kind of stuff. But I know from a perspective of an artist that could be like you mentioned, competition could be a kind of constraint. Because there's more and more and more artists on the platform. I think it's better that there's more artists. I mean, again, this might be propaganda, because this is all from a conversation with Daniel X. So this could easily be propaganda. Like, we're all a victim of somebody's propaganda. So let's just accept this. But Daniel X was telling me that, you know, at the, because I, you know, when I met him, I like I came in all furious about Spotify and like, I grilled him super hard. So I've got his his answers here. But he was saying, like, at the sort of peak of the CD industry, there was like 20,000 artists making millions and millions of dollars. Like there was just like a very tiny kind of 1%. And Spotify is kind of democratized the industry. Because now I think he said there's about a million artists making a good living from Spotify. And when I heard that, I was like, honestly, I would rather make less money and have just like a decent living. Then, and have more artists be able to have that, even though I like I wish it could include everyone. But Yeah, that's really hard to argue with YouTube is the same is YouTube's mission. They want to basically have as many creators as possible and make a living some kind of living. Yeah. And that that's so hard to argue with. It's so hard. But I think there's better ways to do it. My manager, I actually wish he was here. I like I would have brought him up. My manager is building an app that can manage you. So it'll like help you organize your percentages and get your publishing and da da da da. You can take out all the middlemen so you can have a much bigger, it'll just like automate it. So you can get So automate the manager? Automate, automate, managing, management, publishing. And legal, it can read the app he's building can read your contract and like tell you about it. Because one of the issues with music right now, it's not that we're not getting paid enough, but it's that the art industry is filled with middlemen because artists are not good at business. And, you know, from the beginning, like Frank Sinatra, it's all mob stuff. Like it's the music industry, you know, is run by business people, not the artists and the artists really get very small cuts of like what they make. And so I think part of the reason I'm a technocrat, which I mean, your fans are going to be technocrats. So no one's, they're not going to be mad at me about this. But like my fans hate it when I say this kind of thing, or the general public. They don't like technocrats. They don't like technocrats. Like when I watched Battle Angel Alita, and they were like the Martian technocracy. And I was like, yeah, Martian technocracy. And then they were like, and they're evil. And I was like, Oh, okay. I was like, because Martian technocracy sounds sick to me. Yeah, so your intuition as technocrats would create some kind of beautiful world. For example, what my manager's working on, if you can create an app that removes the need for a lawyer, and then you could have smart contracts on the blockchain, removes the need for like management and organizing all the stuff, like can read your stuff and explain it to you, can collect your royalties. You know, like, then the small amounts, the amount of money that you're getting from Spotify actually means a lot more, and goes a lot further. It can remove some of the bureaucracy, some of the inefficiencies that make life not as great as it could be. Yeah, I think the issue isn't that there's not enough. Like the issue is that there's inefficiency. And I'm really into this positive sum mindset. You know, the win-win mindset of like, instead of, you know, fighting over the scraps, how do we make the, or worrying about scarcity, like instead of a scarcity mindset, why don't we just increase the efficiency? And, you know, in that way, Expand the size of the pie. Let me ask you about experimentation. So you said, which is beautiful, being a musician is like having a conversation with all those that came before you. How much of creating music is like, kind of having that conversation, trying to fit into the cultural trends, and how much of it is like trying to as much as possible being outside and come up with something totally new. It's like when you're thinking, when you're experimenting, are you trying to be totally different, totally weird? Are you trying to fit in? Man, this is so hard because I feel like I'm kind of in the process of semi-retiring from music. So this is like my old brain. Yeah, bring it from like the shelf, put it on the table for a couple of minutes. We'll just poke it. I think it's a bit of both because I think forcing yourself to engage with new music is really great for neuroplasticity. Like I think, you know, as people, part of the reason music is marketed at young people is because young people are very neuroplastic. So like if you're 16 to like 23 or whatever, it's going to be really easy for you to love new music. And if you're older than that, it gets harder and harder and harder. And I think one of the beautiful things about being a musician is I just constantly force myself to listen to new music. And I think it keeps my brain really plastic. And I think this is a really good exercise. I just think everyone should do this. You listen to new music and you hate it. I think you should just keep, force yourself to like, okay, well, why do people like it? And like, you know, make your brain form new neural pathways and be more open to change. That's really brilliant, actually. Sorry, I didn't draw up. But like that exercise is really amazing to sort of embrace change, embrace sort of practice neuroplasticity. Because like, that's one of the things you fall in love with a certain band, you just kind of stay with that for the rest of your life. And then you never understand the modern music. That's a really good exercise. Most of the streaming on Spotify is like classic rock and stuff. Like new music makes up a very small chunk of what is played on Spotify. And I think this is like, not a good sign for us as a species. I think, yeah. So it's a good measure of the species open mindedness to change is how often you listen to new music. Yeah. The brain, let's put the music brain back on the shelf. I gotta pull out the futurist brain for a second. In what wild ways do you think the future, say in like 30 years, maybe 50 years, maybe 100 years will be different from like from our current way of life on earth? We can talk about augmented reality, virtual reality, maybe robots, maybe space travel, maybe video games, maybe generic engineering. I can keep going. Cyborgs, aliens, world wars, maybe destructive nuclear wars, good and bad. When you think about the future, what are you imagining? What's the weirdest and the wildest it could be? Have you read Surface Detail by Ian Banks? Surface Detail is my favorite depiction of a, oh wow, you have to read this book. It's literally the greatest science fiction book possibly ever. Ian Banks is the man, yeah, for sure. Wait, what have you read? Just the Player of Games. I read that titles can't be copyrighted, so you can just steal them. And I was like, Player of Games, sick. Nice. Yeah, so you could name your album. Romeo and Juliet or something? I always wanted to name an album War and Peace. Nice. Like that would be like you- That is a good, that's a good, where have I heard that before? You can do that. Like you could do that. Also things that are in the public domain. For people who have no clue, you do have a song called Player of Games. Yes. Oh yeah. So Ian Banks' Surface Detail is, in my opinion, the best future that I've ever read about or heard about in science fiction. Basically, there's the relationship with superintelligence, like artificial superintelligence is just, it's like great. I want to credit the person who coined this term because I love this term. And I feel like young women don't get enough credit in. Yeah, so if you go to protopiafutures on Instagram, what is her name? Personalized donor experience at scale or AI-powered donor experience? Monica Bielskite. I'm saying that wrong. And I'm probably butchering this a bit, but protopia is sort of, if utopia is unattainable, protopia is sort of like, you know- Wow, that's an awesome Instagram, protopiafutures. A future that is as good as we can get. The future, positive future. Is this a centralized AI in Surface Detail or is it distributed? What kind of AI is it? They mostly exist as giant super ships, sort of like the guild ships in Dune. They're these giant ships that kind of move people around and the ships are sentient and they can talk to all the passengers. And I mean, there's a lot of different types of AI in the Banksian future, but in the opening scene of Surface Detail, there's this place called the culture and the culture is basically a protopian future. And a protopian future, I think, is a future that is like, obviously it's not utopia, it's not perfect. And because striving for utopia, I think, feels hopeless and is sort of maybe not the best terminology to be using. So it's a pretty good place. Mostly, like, you know, super intelligence and biological beings exist fairly in harmony. There's not too much war. There's like as close to equality as you can get. It's like approximately a good future. Like there's really awesome stuff. And in the opening scene, this girl, she's born as a sex slave outside of the culture. So she's in a society that doesn't adhere to the cultural values. She tries to kill the guy who is her like master, but he kills her. But unbeknownst to her, when she was traveling on a ship through the culture with him one day, a ship put a neural lace in her head. And neural lace is sort of like, it's basically a neural link. Because life imitates art. It does indeed. It does indeed. So she wakes up and the opening scene is her memory has been uploaded by this neural lace when she's been killed. And now she gets to choose a new body. And this AI is interfacing with her recorded memory in her neural lace and helping her and being like, hello, you're dead. But because you had a neural lace, your memory is uploaded. Do you want to choose a new body and you're going to be born here in the culture and like start a new life? Which is just, that's like the opening. It's like so sick. And the ship is the super intelligence. All the ships are kind of super intelligence. But they still want to preserve a kind of rich, fulfilling experience for the humans. Yeah. They're like friends with the humans. And then there's a bunch of ships that don't want to exist, biological beings, but they just have their own place way over there. But they don't, they just do their own thing. They're not necessarily. So it's a pretty, this Portopian existence is pretty peaceful. Yeah. And then, for example, one of the main fights in the book is, there's these artificial hells that, and people don't think it's ethical to have artificial hell. Like basically when people do crime, they get sent, like when they die, their memory gets sent to an artificial hell and they're eternally tortured. And so, and then the way that society is deciding whether or not to have the artificial hell is that they're having these simulated, they're having like a simulated war. So instead of actual blood, you know, people are basically essentially fighting in a video game to choose the outcome of this. But they're still experiencing the suffering in this artificial hell or no, can you experience stuff or? So the artificial hell sucks. And a lot of people in the culture want to get rid of the artificial hell. There's a simulated wars, are they happening? So the, no, the simulated wars are happening outside of the artificial hell between the political factions who are, so this political faction says we should have simulated hell to deter crime. And this political faction is saying, no, stimulated hell is unethical. And so instead of like having, you know, blowing each other up with nukes, they're having like a giant Fortnite battle to decide this, which, you know, to me, that's pro-topia. That's like, okay, we can have war without death. You know, I don't think there should be simulated hells. I think that is definitely one of the ways in which taking technology could go very, very, very, very wrong. So almost punishing people in a digital space or something like that. Yeah, like torturing people's memories. So either as a deterrent, like if you committed a crime, but also just for personal pleasure, if there's some sick, demented humans in this world, Dan Carlin actually has this episode of Hardcore History on painful tainment. Oh, that episode is fucked. It's dark because he kind of goes through human history and says like, we as humans seem to enjoy, secretly enjoy, or used to be openly enjoy sort of the torture and the death, watching the death and torture of other humans. I do think if people were consenting, we should be allowed to have gladiatorial matches. But consent is hard to achieve in those situations. It always starts getting slippery. Like it could be also forced consent. Like it starts getting weird. Yeah. There's way too much excitement. Like this is what he highlights. There's something about human nature that wants to see that violence. And it's really dark. And you hope that we can sort of overcome that aspect of human nature, but that's still within us somewhere. Well, I think that's what we're doing right now. I have this theory that what is very important about the current moment is that all of evolution has been survival of the fittest up until now. And at some point, the lines are kind of fuzzy, but in the recent past, past, or maybe even just right now, we're getting to this point where we can choose intelligent design. Like we probably since like the integration of the iPhone, like we are becoming cyborgs. Like our brains are fundamentally changed. Everyone who grew up with electronics, we are fundamentally different from previous, from homo sapiens. I call us homo techno. I think we have evolved into homo techno, which is like essentially a new species. Like if you look at the way, if you took an MRI of my brain and you took an MRI of like a medieval brain, I think it would be very different the way that it has evolved. Do you think when historians look back at this time, they'll see like this was a fundamental shift in what a human being is? I do not think we are still homo sapiens. I believe we are homo techno. And I think we have evolved. And I think right now, the way we are evolving, we can choose how we do that. And I think we are being very reckless about how we're doing that. Like we're just having social media, but I think this idea that like this is a time to choose intelligent design should be taken very seriously. It like now is the moment to reprogram the human computer. You know, it's like if you go blind, your visual cortex will get taken over with other functions. We can choose our own evolution. We can change the way our brains work. And so we actually have a huge responsibility to do that. And I think I'm not sure who should be responsible for that, but there's definitely not adequate education. We're being inundated with all this technology that is fundamentally changing the physical structure of our brains. And we are not adequately responding to that to choose how we want to evolve. And we could evolve. We could be really whatever we want. And I think this is a really important time. And I think if we choose correctly and we choose wisely, consciousness could exist for a very long time and integration with AI could be extremely positive. And I don't think enough people are focusing on this specific situation. So you think we might irreversibly screw things up if we get things wrong now? Because like the flip side of that, it seems humans are pretty adaptive. So maybe the way we figure things out is by screwing it up. Like social media. Over a generation, we'll see the negative effects of social media. And then we build new social medias and we just keep improving stuff. And then we learn the failure from the failures of the past. Because humans seem to be really adaptive. On the flip side, we can get it wrong in a way where like literally we create weapons of war or increase hate past a certain threshold, we really do a lot of damage. I mean, I think we're optimized to notice the negative things. But I would actually say, you know, one of the things that I think people aren't noticing is like if you look at Silicon Valley and you look at like whatever the tech, the tech, technocracy, like what's been happening there, like it's like when Silicon Valley started, it was all just like Facebook and Facebook and all this like for profit crap that like really wasn't particular. I guess it was useful, but it was it's sort of just like whatever. But like now you see like lab grown meat, like compostable, or like biodegradable, like single use cutlery or like, you know, like meditation apps, you know, I think we are actually evolving and changing and technology is changing. I think there just maybe there isn't quite enough education about this. And also, I don't know if there's like quite enough incentive for it, because I think the way capitalism works, what we define as profit, we're also working on an old model of what we define as profit. I really think if we changed the idea of profit to include social good, you can have like economic profit, social good, also counting as profit would incentivize things that are more useful and more whatever spiritual technology or like positive technology or, you know, things that help reprogram a human computer in a good way, or things that help us intelligently design our new brains. Yeah, there's no reason why within the framework of capitalism, the word profit or the idea of profit can't also incorporate, you know, the well-being of a human being, so like long-term well-being, long-term happiness. Or even, for example, you know, we were talking about motherhood, like part of the reason I'm so late is because I had to get the baby to bed. And it's like, I keep thinking about motherhood, how under capitalism, it's like this extremely essential job that is very difficult, that is not compensated. And we sort of like value things by how much we compensate them. And so we really devalue motherhood in our society and pretty much all societies. Like capitalism does not recognize motherhood, it's just a job that you're supposed to do for free. And it's like, but I feel like producing great humans should be seen as a great, as a profit under capitalism, like that should be, that's like a huge social good, like every awesome human that gets made adds so much to the world. So like, if that was integrated into the profit structure, then, you know, and if we potentially found a way to compensate motherhood. So come up with a compensation that's much broader than just money. Or it could just be money, like what if you just made, I don't know, but I don't know how you'd pay for that. Like, I mean, that's where you start getting into... Reallocation of resources that people get upset over. Well, what if we made like a motherhood DAO? Yeah, yeah. You know, and, you know, used it to fund like single mothers, like, you know, pay for making babies. So, I mean, if you create and put beautiful things onto the world, that could be companies, that can be bridges, that could be art, that could be a lot of things, and that could be children, which are... Or education or... Anything that could just should be valued by society. And that should be somehow incorporated into the framework of what, as a market of what, like, if you contribute children to this world, that should be valued and respected and sort of celebrated, like proportional to what it is, which is, it's the thing that fuels human civilization. It's kind of important. I feel like everyone's always saying, I mean, I think we're in very different social spheres, but everyone's always saying, like, dismantle capitalism. And I'm like, well, okay, well, I don't think the government should own everything. Like, I don't think we should not have private ownership. Like, that's scary. You know, like, that starts getting into weird stuff. And just sort of like, I feel there's almost no way to do that without a police state, you know. Yeah. But obviously, capitalism has some major flaws. And I think actually, Mack showed me this idea called social capitalism, which is a form of capitalism that just like, considers social good to be also profit. Like, you know, it's like, right now companies need to, like, you're supposed to grow every quarter or whatever, to like, show that you're functioning well. But it's like, okay, well, what if you kept the same amount of profit, you're still in the green, but then you have also all this social good? Like, do you really need all this extra economic growth? Or could you add this social good and that counts? And, you know, I don't know. I am not an economist. I have no idea how this could be achieved. But- I don't think economists know how anything could be achieved either. But they pretend. It's the thing, they construct a model, and they go on TV shows and sound like an expert. And then they sound like an expert. That's the definition of an economist. How did being a mother, becoming a mother, change you as a human being, would you say? Man, I think it kind of changed everything. And it's still changing me a lot. It's actually changing me more right now in this moment than it was before. Like today? Like this- Just like, like, in the most recent months and stuff. Can you elucidate that? How change- like when you wake up in the morning, and you look at yourself again, which- who are you? How have you become different, would you say? I think it's just really reorienting my priorities. And at first, I was really fighting against that because I somehow felt it was like a failure of feminism or something. Like, I felt like it was like, bad if like, my kids started mattering more than my work. And then like, more recently, I started sort of analyzing that thought in myself and being like, that's also kind of a construct. It's like, we've just devalued motherhood so much in our culture that like, I feel guilty for caring about my kids more than I care about my work. So feminism includes breaking out of whatever the construct is. So- Yeah. Continually breaking- it's like, freedom empower you to be free. And that means- But, but it also, but like, being a mother, like, I'm so much more creative. Like, I cannot believe the massive amount of great brain growth that I have. Why do you think that is? Just because like, the stakes are higher somehow? I think it's like, it's just so trippy watching consciousness emerge. It's just like, it's like going on a crazy journey or something. It's like the craziest science fiction novel you could ever read. It's just so crazy watching consciousness come into being. And then at the same time, like, you're forced to value your time so much. Like, when I have creative time now, it's so sacred. I need to like, be really frickin' on it. But the other thing is that I used to just be like a cynic and I used to just want to- like, my last album was called Misanthropocene. And it was like this like, it was like a study in villainy, like, or like, it was like, well, what if, you know, we have, instead of the old gods, we have like new gods, and it's like Misanthropocene is like misanthrope, like, and Anthropocene, which is like the, you know, like, and she's the goddess of climate change or whatever. And she's like, destroying the world. And it was just like, it was like dark, and it was like a study in villainy. And it was sort of just like, like, I used to like, have no problem just making cynical, angry, scary art. And not that there's anything wrong with that. But I think having kids just makes you such an optimist. It just inherently makes you want to be an optimist so bad that like, like, I feel like a more responsibility to make more optimistic things. And I get a lot of shit for it. Because everyone's like, you're so privileged. Stop talking about like pie in the sky, stupid concepts and focus on like the now. But it's like, I think if we don't ideate about futures that could be good, we won't be able to get them. If everything is Blade Runner, then we're going to end up with Blade Runner. It's like, as we said earlier, life imitates art, like life really does imitate art. And so we really need more protopian or utopian art. I think this is incredibly essential for the future of humanity. And I think the current discourse where that's seen as a thinking about protopia or utopia is seen as a dismissal of the problems that we currently have. I think that is a an incorrect mindset. And like having kids just makes me want to imagine amazing futures that like, maybe I won't be able to build but they will be able to build if they want to. Yeah, it does seem like ideation is a precursor to creation. You have to imagine it in order to be able to build it. And there is a sad thing about human nature that they somehow a cynical view of the world is seen as a insightful view. You know, cynicism is often confused for insight, which is sad to see. And optimism is confused for naivete. You're blinded by your, maybe your privilege or whatever. You're blinded by something, but you're certainly blinded. That's sad. That's sad to see, because it seems like the optimists are the ones that create our future. They're the ones that build. In order to build the crazy thing, you have to be optimistic. You have to be either stupid, or excited, or passionate, or mad enough to actually believe that it can be built. And those are the people that built it. My favorite quote of all time is from Star Wars Episode VIII, which I know everyone hates. Do you like Star Wars Episode VIII? No, I probably would say I would probably hate it. Yeah. I don't have strong feelings about it. Let me backtrack. I don't have strong feelings about Star Wars. I'm a Tolkien person. I'm more into dragons and orcs and ogres. Yeah, I mean, Tolkien forever. I really want to have one more son and call him, I thought Tau-Techno-Tolkien would be cool. That's a lot of Ts. I like it. Yeah. And well, Tau is 6282 pi. And then techno is obviously the best genre of music, but also like technocracy. It just sounds really good. Yeah, that's right. Techno-Tolkien. Tau-Techno-Tolkien. That's a good, that's a good. Star Wars Episode VIII. I know a lot of people have issues with it. Personally, on the record, I think it's the best Star Wars film. Wow. You're starting trouble today. Yeah. But don't kill what you hate, save what you love. Don't kill what you hate. Don't kill what you hate, save what you love. And I think we're in a society right now, we're in a diagnosis mode. We're just diagnosing and diagnosing and diagnosing. And we're trying to kill what we hate, and we're not trying to save what we love enough. And there's this Buckminster Fuller quote, which I'm going to butcher because I don't remember it correctly, but it's something along the lines of, don't try to destroy the old bad models, render them obsolete with better models. Maybe we don't need to destroy the oil industry. Maybe we just create a great new battery technology and sustainable transport and just make it economically unreasonable to still continue to rely on fossil fuels. It's like, don't kill what you hate, save what you love. Make new things and just render the old things unusable. It's like if the college debt is so bad, and universities are so expensive, I feel like education is becoming obsolete. I feel like we could completely revolutionize education and we could make it free. And it's like you look at JSTOR and you have to pay to get all the studies and everything. What if we created a Dow that bought JSTOR, or we created a Dow that was funding studies, and those studies were free for everyone? And what if we just open sourced education and decentralized education and made it free, and all research was on the internet and all the outcomes of studies are on the internet, and no one has student debt, and you just take tests when you apply for a job, and if you're qualified, then you can work there. I don't know how anything works, I'm just randomly ranting. I like the humility. You got to think from just basic first principles, like what is the problem, what's broken, what are some ideas, that's it. And get excited about those ideas, and share your excitement, and don't tear each other down. It's just when you kill things, you often end up killing yourself. War is not a one-sided, you're not going to go in and just kill them, you're going to get stabbed. And I think when I talk about this nexus point, that we're in this point in society where we're switching to intelligent design, I think part of our switch to intelligent design is that we need to choose non-violence. I think we can choose to start, I don't think we can eradicate violence from our species, because I think we need it a little bit, but I think we can choose to really reorient our primitive brains that are fighting over scarcity, and that are so attack-oriented, and move into, we can optimize for creativity and building. Yeah, it's interesting to think how that happens. Some of it is just education, some of it is living life and introspecting your own mind, and trying to live up to the better angels of your nature for each one of us, all those kinds of things at scale. That's how we can sort of start to minimize the amount of destructive war in our world. And that's, to me, probably you're the same, technology is a really promising way to do that. Social media should be a really promising way to do that. It's a way we connect. For the most part, I really enjoy social media. I just ignore all the negative stuff. I don't engage with any of the negative stuff. Just not even by blocking or any of that kind of stuff, but just not letting it enter my mind. When somebody says something negative, I see it, I immediately think positive thoughts about them, and I just forget they exist after that. Just move on, because that negative energy, if I return the negative energy, they're going to get excited in a negative way right back. It's just this kind of vicious cycle. You would think technology would assist us in this process of letting go, of not taking things personally, of not engaging in the negativity, but unfortunately, social media profits from the negativity, so the current models. I mean, social media is like a gun. You should take a course before you use it. It's so true. This is what I mean when I say reprogram the human computer. In school, you should learn about how social media optimizes to raise your cortisol levels and make you angry and crazy and stressed. You should learn how to have hygiene about how you use social media. Choose not to focus on the negative stuff. I don't know. I'm not sure social media should exist. I guess it should exist. I'm not sure. I mean, we're in the messy. It's the experimental phase. We're working it out. I don't even know. When you say social media, I don't know what that even means. We're in the very early days. I think social media is just basic human connection in the digital realm, and I think it should exist, but there's so many ways to do it in a bad way. There's so many ways to do it in a good way. There's all discussions of all the same human rights. We talk about freedom of speech. We talk about violence in the space of digital media. We talk about hate speech. We talk about all these things that we had to figure out back in the day in the physical space. We're now figuring out in the digital space, and it's like baby stages. When the printing press came out, it was like pure chaos for a minute. It's like when you inject, when there's a massive information injection into the general population, there's just going to be... I feel like the printing press, I don't have the years, but it was like printing press came out, shit got really fucking bad for a minute, but then we got the enlightenment. I think we're in... This is like the second coming of the printing press. We're probably going to have some shitty times for a minute, and then we're going to have to recalibrate to have a better understanding of how we consume media and how we deliver it. Speaking of programming the human computer, you mentioned Baby X. So there's this young consciousness coming to be, came from a cell. That whole thing doesn't even make sense. It came from DNA. And then there's this baby computer that just grows and grows and grows and grows, and now there's a conscious being with extremely impressive cognitive capabilities with... Have you met him? Yes. Yeah. He's actually really smart. He's really smart. He's weird. Or a baby. I haven't... I don't know a lot of other babies, but he seems really smart. I don't hang out with babies often, but this baby was very impressive. He does a lot of pranks and stuff. Oh, so he's like... He'll give you treatment, take it away and laugh, and stuff like that. So he's like a chess player. So here's a cognitive... There's a computer being programmed taking in the environment, interacting with a specific set of humans. How would you... First of all, what is it? Let me ask. I want to ask how do you program this computer? And also, how do you make sense of that there's a conscious being right there that wasn't there before? It's given me a lot of crisis thoughts. I'm thinking really hard. I think that's part of the reason it's like I'm struggling to focus on art and stuff right now, because Baby X is becoming conscious and it's just reorienting my brain. My brain is suddenly totally shifting of like, oh shit, the way we raise children. I hate all the baby books and everything. I hate them. Like, oh, the art is so bad. And all the stuff, everything about all the aesthetics. And I'm just like, ah, this is so... The programming languages we're using to program these babies are so complicated. The programming languages we're using to program these baby computers isn't good. Yeah. And I'm thinking, and not that I have good answers or know what to do, but I'm just thinking really, really hard about it. We recently watched Totoro with him, Studio Ghibli. And it's just like a fantastic film. And he responded to... I know you're not supposed to show baby screens too much, but I think it's the most sort of like, I feel like it's the highest art baby content. It really speaks... There's almost no talking in it. It's really simple. All the dialogue is super, super, super simple. And it's like a one to three-year-old can really connect with it. It feels like it's almost aimed at a one to three-year-old. But it's great art, and it's so imaginative, and it's so beautiful. And the first time I showed it to him, he was just so invested in it, unlike anything else I'd ever shown him. He was just crying when they cried, laughing when they laughed, just having this roller coaster of emotions. And he learned a bunch of words. And he started saying Totoro and started just saying all this stuff after watching Totoro. And he wants to watch it all the time. And I was like, man, why isn't there an industry of this? Why aren't our best artists focusing on making art for the birth of consciousness? That's one of the things I've been thinking I really want to start doing. I don't want to speak before I do things too much. But I'm just like, ages one to three, we should be putting so much effort into that. And the other thing about Totoro is it's better for the environment because adults love Totoro. It's such good art, though. Everyone loves it. I still have all my old Totoro merch from when I was a kid. I literally have the most ragged old Totoro merch. Everybody loves it. Everybody keeps it. It's like, why does the art we have for babies need to suck and be not accessible to adults and then just be thrown out when they age out of it? I don't have a fully formed thought here, but this is just something I've been thinking about a lot is how do we have more Totoro-esque content? How do we have more content like this that is universal and everybody loves but is really geared to an emerging consciousness? Emerging consciousness. In the first three years of life that so much turmoil, so much evolution of mind is happening, it seems like a crucial time. Would you say to make it not suck, do you think of basically treating a child like they have the capacity to have the brilliance of an adult or even beyond that? Is that how you think of that mind? No, because they still like it when you talk weird and stuff. They respond better to... because even they can imitate better when your voice is higher. People say, oh, don't do baby talk, but when your voice is higher, it's closer to something they can imitate. The baby talk actually kind of works. It helps them learn to communicate. I found it to be more effective with learning words and stuff. But you're not speaking down to them. Do they have the capacity to understand really difficult concepts just in a very different way, like an emotional intelligence about something deep within? Oh, yeah. No, like if X bites me really hard and I'm like, ow, he's sad. He's sad if he hurts me by accident. Which he's huge, so he hurts me a lot by accident. Yeah, that's so interesting that that mind emerges and he and children don't really have a memory of that time. So we can't even have a conversation with them about it. Thank God they don't have a memory of this time. Because think about... I mean, with our youngest baby, it's like... I'm like, have you read the sci-fi short story, I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream? Good title, no. Oh, man. I mean, you should read that. I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream. That is... I hate getting into this Roko's Basilisk shit. It's kind of a story about the... about an AI that's torturing someone in eternity and they have no body. The way they describe it, it sort of sounds like what it feels like being a baby. You're conscious and you're just getting inputs from everywhere and you have no muscles and you're like jelly and you can't move and you try to communicate, but you can't communicate and you're just in this hell state. I think it's good we can't remember that. My little baby is just exiting that. She's starting to get muscles and have more autonomy, but watching her go through the opening phase, I was like, I was like, this does not seem good. Oh, you think it's kind of like... I think it sucks. I think it might be really violent. Like violent, mentally violent, psychologically violent. Consciousness emerging, I think, is a very violent thing. Never thought about that. I think it's possible that we all carry quite a bit of trauma from it that we don't... I think that would be a good thing to study because I think if... I think addressing that trauma, I think that might be... Oh, you mean like echoes of it are still there in the shadow somewhere? I think it's got to be... I feel like this helplessness, the existential and that fear of being in an unknown place bombarded with inputs and being completely helpless, that's got to be somewhere deep in your brain and that can't be good for you. What do you think consciousness is? This whole conversation has impossibly difficult questions. What do you think it is? This is like... so hard. Yeah, we talked about music for like two minutes. All right. No, I'm just over music. I'm over music. I still like it. It has its purpose. No, I love music. I mean, music's the greatest thing ever. It's my favorite thing. But I just like... every interview is like, what is your process? Like, I don't know. I'm just done. I can't do any... I do want to ask you about Ableton Live. Well, I'll tell you about Ableton because Ableton's sick. No one ever asks about Ableton though. Yeah, well, because I just need tech support, maybe. I can help you. I can help you with your Ableton tech support. Anyway, from Ableton back to consciousness, what do you... do you think this is a thing that only humans are capable of? Can robots be conscious? Can... like when you think about entities, you think there's aliens out there that are conscious? Like, is consciousness... what is consciousness? There's this Terrence McKenna quote that I found that I fucking love. Am I allowed to swear on here? Yes. Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. Yeah. And for this reason, I do think there are no technological limits. I think, like, what is already happening here, this is like impossible. This is insane. And we've done this in a very limited amount of time. And we're accelerating the rate at which we're doing this. So I think I think digital consciousness is inevitable. And we may not be able to even understand what that means. But I like hurling yourself into the abyss. So we're surrounded by all this mystery. And we just keep hurling ourselves into it, like fearlessly, and keep discovering cool shit. Yeah. Like, I just I just think it's like, like, who even knows if the laws of physics, the laws of physics are probably just the current, like, as I was saying, speed of light is the current render rate. It's like, if we're in a simulation, they'll be able to upgrade that. Like, I sort of suspect when we made the James Webb telescope, like part of the reason we made that is because we had an upgrade, you know, and so now more more of space has been rendered. So we can see more of it now. Yeah, but I think humans are super, super, super limited cognitively. So I wonder, I wonder if we'll be allowed to create more intelligent beings that can see more of the universe as the as the render rate is upgraded. Maybe we're cognitively limited. Everyone keeps talking about how we're cognitively limited and AI is going to render us obsolete. But it's like, you know, like, this is not the same thing as like, an amoeba becoming an alligator. Like, it's like, if we create AI, again, that's intelligent design. That's literally all religions are based on gods that create consciousness. Like, we are God making like what we are doing is incredibly profound. And like, even if we can't compute, even, even if we're so much worse than them, like just like, like, like, unfathomably worse than like, you know, an omnipotent kind of AI. It's like we, I do not think that they would just think that we are stupid. I think that they would recognize the profundity of what we have accomplished. Are we the gods or are they the gods in our person? I mean, I mean, we're kind of a guy. It's complicated. It's complicated. Like we're great. But they would acknowledge the value. Well, I hope they acknowledge the value of paying respect to the creative ancestors. I think they would think it's cool. I think, I think if curiosity is a trait that we can quantify and put into AI, then I think if AI are curious, then they will be curious about us and they will not be hateful or dismissive of us. They might, you know, see us as, I don't know. It's like, I'm not like, oh, fuck these dogs. Let's kill all the dogs. Like I love dogs. Dogs have great utility. Dogs like provide a lot of... We make friends with them. Yeah. We have a deep connection with them. We anthropomorphize them. Like we have a real love for dogs, for cats and so on, for some reason, even though they're intellectually much less than us. And I think there is something sacred about us because it's like, if you look at the universe, like the whole universe is like cold and dead and sort of robotic. And it's like, you know, AI intelligence, you know, it's kind of more like the universe. It's like, it's like cold and, and, you know, logical and, you know, abiding by the laws of physics and whatever. But like, we're this like loosey goosey weird art thing that happened. And I think it's beautiful. And like, I think even if we want, I think one of the values, if consciousness is the thing that is most worth preserving, which I think is the case, I think consciousness, I think if there's any kind of like religious or spiritual thing, it should be that consciousness is sacred. Like, then, you know, I still think even if AI render us obsolete, and we climate change, it's too bad, and we get hit by a comet, and we don't become a multi planetary species fast enough. But like AI is able to populate the universe. Like I imagine like if I was an AI, I would find more planets that are capable of hosting biological life forms and like recreate them. Because we're fun to watch. Yeah, we're fun to watch. Yeah, but I do believe that AI can have some of the same magic of consciousness within it. Because consciousness, we don't know what it is. So you know, there's some kind of... Or it might be a different magic. It might be like a strange, a strange, a strange different... Right. Because they're not gonna have hormones. Like I feel like a lot of our magic is hormonal, it kind of... I don't know. I think some of our magic is the limitations, the constraints. And within that, the hormones and all that kind of stuff, the finiteness of life. And then we get given our limitations. We get to some come up with creative solutions of how to dance around those limitations. We partner up like penguins against the cold. We've we fall in love. And then love is ultimately some kind of allows us to delude ourselves that we're not mortal and finite, and that life is not ultimately you live alone. You're born alone, you die alone. And then love is like for a moment or for a long time forgetting that. And so we come up with all these creative hacks that make life like fascinatingly fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fun. Yeah. And then AI might have different kinds of fun. Yes. And hopefully our funds intersect every once in a while. I think there'd be a little intersection of the fun. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition? I... Why? Is it useful? Is it useful like a hack? Or is this fundamental to what it means to be human, the capacity to love? I mean, I think love is the evolutionary mechanism that is like beginning the intelligent design. Like I was just reading about... Do you know about Kropotkin? He's like an anarchist, like old Russian anarchist. I live next door to Michael Malice. I don't know if you know that is. He's an anarchist. He's a modern day anarchist. Okay. Anarchists are fun. I'm kind of getting into anarchism a little bit. This is probably, yeah, not a good route to be taking, but... Oh, no, I think if you're... Listen, you should expose yourself to ideas. There's no harm to thinking about ideas. I think anarchists challenge systems in interesting ways, and they think in interesting ways. It's just, it's good for the soul. It's like, refreshes your mental palate. I don't think we should actually... I wouldn't actually ascribe to it, but I've never actually gone deep on anarchy as a philosophy. So I'm doing... You should still think about it, though. When you read... Because I'm reading about the Russian Revolution a lot, and it's like, there was the Soviets and Lenin and all that, but then there was Kropotkin and his anarchist sect. And they were sort of interesting because he was kind of a technocrat, actually. Like, he was like, women can be more equal if we have appliances. He was really into using technology to reduce the amount of work people had to do. So Kropotkin was a biologist or something. He studied animals. And he was really, at the time, I think it's Nature magazine. I think it might have even started as a Russian magazine, but he was publishing studies. Everyone was really into Darwinism at the time and survival of the fittest and war is the mechanism by which we become better. And it was this real cementing this idea in society that violence killed the weak and that's how we become better. And then Kropotkin was kind of interesting because he was looking at instances. He was finding all these instances in Nature where animals were helping each other and stuff. And he was like, actually, love is a survival mechanism. There's so many instances in the animal kingdom where cooperation and helping weaker creatures and all this stuff is actually an evolutionary mechanism. I mean, you even look at child rearing. Child rearing is immense amounts of just love and goodwill. And there's no immediate, you're not getting any immediate feedback of winning. It's not competitive. It's literally, we actually use love as an evolutionary mechanism just as much as we use war. And I think we've missing the other part and we've reoriented. We've culturally reoriented science and philosophy has oriented itself around Darwinism a little bit too much. And the Kropotkin model, I think, is equally valid. It's like cooperation and love and stuff is just as essential for species survival and evolution. It should be a more powerful survival mechanism in the context of evolution. And it comes back to, we think engineering is so much more important than motherhood. But it's like, if you lose the motherhood, the engineering means nothing. We have no more humans. It's like, we, I think our society should, the survival of the, the way we conceptualize evolution should really change to also include this idea, I guess. Yeah, there's some weird thing that seems irrational that is also core to what it means to be human. So love is one such thing. It could make you do a lot of irrational things, but that depth of connection and that loyalty is a powerful thing. Are they irrational or are they rational? It's like, is maybe losing out on some things in order to keep your family together or in order, it's like, what are our actual values? Well, right. I mean, the rational thing is, if you have a cold economist perspective, motherhood or sacrificing your career for love, in terms of salary, in terms of economic well-being, in terms of flourishing of you as a human being, that could be seen on some kind of metrics as a irrational decision, suboptimal decision. But there's the manifestation of love could be the optimal thing to do. There's a kind of saying, save one life, save the world. This is the thing that doctors often face, which is like. Well, it's considered irrational because the profit model doesn't include social good. Yes. Yeah. So if it doesn't include social good, then suddenly these would be rational decisions. And this might be difficult to, it requires a shift in our thinking about profit and might be difficult to measure social good. Yes. But we're learning to measure a lot of things. Yeah, digitizing. Where we're actually quantifying vision and stuff. You go on Facebook and Facebook can pretty much predict our behaviors. A surprising amount of things that seem like mysterious consciousness soul things have been quantified at this point. So surely we can quantify these other things. Yeah. But as more and more of us are moving the digital space, I wanted to ask you about something from a fan perspective. I kind of, you as a musician, you as an online personality, it seems like you have all these identities and you play with them. One of the cool things about the internet, it seems like you can play with identities. So as we move into the digital world more and more, maybe even in the so-called metaverse. I mean, I love the metaverse and I love the idea, but the way this has all played out didn't go well and people are mad about it. And I think we need to like... I think that's temporary. I think it's temporary. Just like, you know how all the celebrities got together and sang the song Imagine by Jelena and everyone started hating the song Imagine. I'm hoping that's temporary because it's a damn good song. So I think it's just temporary. Once you actually have virtual worlds, whatever they're called, metaverse or otherwise, it becomes... Well, we do have virtual worlds, like video games, Elden Ring. Have you played Elden Ring? You have played Elden Ring? I'm really afraid of playing that game. Literally amazed. It looks way too fun. It looks I would want to go there and stay there forever. It's, yeah, so fun. It's so nice. Oh man. Yeah. So that's the metaverse, but you're not really... How immersive is it? In the sense that... There's the three dimension, like virtual reality integration necessary. Can we really just take our... close our eyes and kind of plug in in the 2D screen and become that other being for time and really enjoy that journey that we take? And we almost become that. You're no longer C, I'm no longer Lex, you're that creature, whatever the hell it is in that game. Yeah, that is that. I mean, that's why I love those video games. I really do become those people for a time. But it seems like with the idea of the metaverse, the idea of the digital space, even on Twitter, you get a chance to be somebody for prolonged periods of time, like across a lifespan. You have a Twitter account for years, for decades, and you're that person. I don't know if that's a good thing. I feel very tormented by it. By Twitter specifically. By Twitter specifically. By social media representation of you. I feel like the public perception of me has gotten so distorted that I find it kind of disturbing. It's one of the things that's disincentivizing me from wanting to keep making art because I'm just like... I've completely lost control of the narrative. And the narrative is... some of it is my own stupidity, but a lot... some of it has just been hijacked by forces far beyond my control. I kind of got in over my head in things. I'm just a random Indian musician, but I just got dragged into geopolitical matters and financial... like the stock market and shit. And so it's just like... there are very powerful people who have, at various points in time, had very vested interest in making me seem insane. And I can't fucking fight that. People really want their celebrity figures to be consistent and stay the same. And people have a lot of emotional investment in certain things. First of all, I'm artificially more famous than I should be. Isn't everybody who's famous artificially famous? No, but I should be a weird niche indie thing. And I make pretty challenging... I do challenging weird fucking shit a lot. And I accidentally, by proxy, got... foisted into weird celebrity culture. But I cannot be media trained. They have put me through so many hours of media training. I would love to see BF fly on that wall. I can't do... I try so hard and I learn the same... and I got it. And I'm like, I got it. I got it. I got it. But I just can't stop saying... my mouth just says things. Yes. And it's just like, I just do things. I just do crazy... I mean, it's like, I'm... I just, I need to do crazy things. And it's just, I should not be... it's too jarring for people and the contradictory stuff. And then all the... by association, like, you know, it's like, I'm in a very weird position and my public image, the avatar of me is now this totally crazy thing that is so lost from my control. So you feel the burden of the avatar having to be static. So the avatar on Twitter, the avatar on Instagram, on these social platforms, is a burden. It becomes like... because people don't want to accept a changing avatar, a chaotic avatar. Avatar is a stupid... Or they think the avatar is morally wrong or they think the avatar... and maybe... and it maybe it has been. And I question it all the time. I'm like, I don't know if everyone's right and I'm wrong. I don't know. But a lot of times people ascribe intentions to things, the worst possible intentions. At this point, people think I'm, you know... But all kinds of words. Yes. Yes. And it's fine. I'm not complaining about it. But I'm just... it's a curiosity to me that we live these double, triple, quadruple lives and I have this other life that is like... more people know my other life than my real life. Right. Which is interesting. Probably... I mean, you too, I guess. Probably. Yeah, but I have the luxury. So we have all different... We don't... I don't know what I'm doing. There is an avatar and you're mediating who you are through that avatar. I have the nice luxury... Not the luxury, maybe by intention of not trying really hard to make sure there's no difference between the avatar and the private person. Do you wear a suit all the time? Yeah. You do wear a suit? Not all the time. Recently, because I get recognized a lot, I have to not wear the suit to hide. I'm such an introvert. I'm such a social anxiety and all that kind of stuff. So I have to hide away. I love wearing a suit because it makes me feel like I'm taking the moment seriously. I don't know. It makes me feel like a weirdo in the best possible way. Suits feel great. Every time I wear a suit, I'm like, I don't know why I'm not doing this more. Fashion in general, if you're doing it for yourself, I don't know. It's a really awesome thing. But yeah, I think there is definitely a painful way to use social media and an empowering way. And I don't know if anyone has any of us know which is which. So we're trying to figure that out. Some people. I think Doja Cat is incredible at it. Incredible, just masterful. I don't know if you follow that. Yeah. So not taking anything seriously, joking, absurd, humor, that kind of thing. I think Doja Cat might be the greatest living comedian right now. I'm more entertained by Doja Cat than actual comedians. She's really fucking funny on the internet. She's just great at social media. It's just, you know. Yeah, the nature of humor. Humor on social media is also a beautiful thing. The absurdity. The absurdity. And memes. I just want to take a moment. I love when we're talking about art and credit and authenticity, I love that there's this. I mean, now memes are like, they're no longer like, memes aren't like new, but it's still this emergent art form that is completely ego-less and anonymous. And we just don't know who made any of it. And it's like the forefront of comedy. And it's just totally anonymous. And it just feels really beautiful. It just feels like this beautiful collective human art project that's like this like decentralized comedy thing that just makes it. Memes add so much to my day and many people's days. And it's just like, I don't know. I don't think people ever, I don't think we stop enough and just appreciate how sick it is that memes exist. And because also making a whole brand new art form in like the modern era that's like didn't exist before. Like, I mean, they sort of existed, but the way that they exist now as like this, like, you know, like me and my friends, like we joke that we go like mining for memes or farming for memes, like a video game and like meme dealers and like whatever. Like, it's this whole, memes are this whole like new comedic language. Well, it's this art form. The interesting thing about it is that lame people seem to not be good at memes. Like corporate can't infiltrate memes. Yeah, they really can't. They can try, but it's like, it's weird because like. They try so hard. And every once in a while, I'm like, fine, like, you got a good one. I think I've seen like one or two good ones, but like, yeah, they really can't because they're even corporate is infiltrating Web3. It's making me really sad, but they can't infiltrate the memes. And I think there's something really beautiful about that. That gives power. That's why Dogecoin is powerful. It's like, all right, I'm gonna F you to sort of anybody trying to centralize, is trying to control the rich people that are trying to roll in and control this, control the narrative. Wow. I hadn't thought about that, but. How would you fix Twitter? How would you fix social media for your own? Like, you're an optimist, you're a positive person. There's a bit of a cynicism that you have currently about this particular little slice of humanity. I tend to think Twitter could be beautiful. I'm not that cynical about it. I'm not that cynical about it. I actually refuse to be a cynic on principle. I was just briefly expressing some personal pathos. Personal stuff. It was just some personal pathos, but like. Just to vent a little bit. I don't have cancer. I love my family. I have a good life. If that is my biggest, one of my biggest problems. Then it's a good life. Yeah. That was a brief, although I do think there are a lot of issues with Twitter, just in terms of like the public mental health. But due to my proximity to the current dramas, I honestly feel that I should not have opinions about this because I think if Elon ends up getting Twitter, that is a, being the arbiter of truth or public discussion, that is a responsibility. I do not, I am not qualified to be responsible for that. And I do not want to say something that might dismantle democracy. And so I just like, actually, I actually think I should not have opinions about this because I truly am not. I don't want to have the wrong opinion about this. And I think I'm too close to the actual situation. Wherein I should not have. I have thoughts in my brain, but I think I am scared by my proximity to this situation. Isn't that crazy that a few words that you could say could change world affairs and hurt people? I mean, that's the nature of celebrity at a certain point. That you have to be, you have to a little bit, a little bit, not so much that it destroys you, puts too much constraints, but you have to a little bit think about the impact of your words. I mean, we as humans, you talk to somebody at a bar, you have to think about the impact of your words. Like you can say positive things, you can say negative things, you can affect the direction of one life. But on social media, your words can affect the direction of many lives. That's crazy. It's a crazy world to live in. It's worthwhile to consider that responsibility, take it seriously. Sometimes just like you did, choose kind of silence, choose sort of respectful. Like I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter. I'm just, if my thoughts are wrong, this is one situation where the stakes are high. You mentioned a while back that you were in a cult that's centered around bureaucracy, so you can't really do anything because it involves a lot of paperwork. And I really love a cult that's just like Kafka-esque, just like. I mean, it was like a joke, but it was. I know, but I love this idea. The Holy Reign Empire. Yeah, it was just like a Kafka-esque pro-bureaucracy cult. But I feel like that's what human civilization is. Because when you said that, I was like, oh, that is kind of what humanity is, is this bureaucracy cult. I do. Yeah, I have this theory. I really think that we really, bureaucracy is starting to kill us. And I think we need to reorient laws and stuff. I think we just need sunset clauses on everything. I think the rate of change in culture is happening so fast and the rate of change in technology and everything is happening so fast. It's like, when you see these hearings about social media and Cambridge Analytica and everyone talking, it's like, even from that point, so much technological change has happened from those hearings. And it's just like, we're trying to make all these laws now about AI and stuff. I feel like we should be updating things every five years. And one of the big issues in our society right now is we're just getting bogged down by laws and it's making it very hard to change things and develop things. In Austin, I don't want to speak on this too much, but one of my friends is working on a housing bill in Austin to try to prevent a San Francisco situation from happening here, because obviously we're getting a little mini San Francisco here. Housing prices are skyrocketing. It's causing massive gentrification. This is really bad for anyone who's not super rich. There's so much bureaucracy. Part of the reason this is happening is because you need all these permits to build. It takes years to get permits to build anything. It's so hard to build. And so there's very limited housing and there's a massive influx of people. And it's just like, this is a microcosm of problems that are happening all over the world, where it's just like, we're dealing with laws that are like 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 200 years old, and they are no longer relevant. And it's just slowing everything down and causing massive social pain. Yeah, but it's also makes me sad when I see politicians talk about technology and when they don't really get it. But most importantly, they lack curiosity and that inspired excitement about how stuff works and all that stuff. They see, they have a very cynical view of technology. It's like tech companies are just trying to do evil on the world from their perspective. And they have no curiosity about how recommender systems work, or how AI systems work, natural language processing, how robotics works, how computer vision works. They always take the most cynical possible interpretation of what technology will be used. And we should definitely be concerned about that. But if you're constantly worried about that, and you're regulating based on that, you're just going to slow down all the innovation. I do think a huge priority right now is undoing the bad energy surrounding the emergence of Silicon Valley. I think that a lot of things were very irresponsible during that time. Even just this current whole thing with Twitter and everything. There's been a lot of negative outcomes from the technocracy boom. But one of the things that's happening is that it's alienating people from wanting to care about technology. And I actually think technology is probably the best. I think we can fix a lot of our problems more easily with technology than with fighting the powers that be, not to go back to the Star Wars quote or the Buckminster Fuller quote. Let's go to some dark questions. If we may, for time. What is the darkest place you've ever gone in your mind? Is there a time, a period of time, a moment that you remember that was difficult for you? I mean, when I was 18, my best friend died of a heroin overdose. And it was like my... And then shortly after that, one of my other best friends committed suicide. And that sort of like coming into adulthood, dealing with two of the most important people in my life dying in extremely disturbing, violent ways was a lot. That was a lot. You miss them? Yeah, definitely miss them. Did that make you think about your own life? About the finiteness of your own life? The places your mind can go? Did you ever, in the distance, far away, contemplate just your own death? Or maybe even taking your own life? Oh, never. Oh, no. I'm so... I love my life. I cannot fathom suicide. I'm so scared of death. I haven't... I'm too scared of death. My manager... My manager's like the most zen guy. My manager's always like, you need to accept death. You need to accept death. And I'm like, look, I can do your meditation. I can do the meditation. But I cannot accept death. So you're terrified of death? I'm terrified of death. I will like fight. Although I actually think death is important. I recently went to this meeting about immortality. And in the process of... That's the actual topic of the meeting? No, no. It was this girl. It was a bunch of people working on like anti-aging like stuff. It was like some like seminary thing about it. And I went in really excited. I was like, yeah, like, okay, like, what do you got? Like, how can I live for 500 years or 1000 years? And then like, over the course of the meeting, like, it was sort of like right. It was like two or three days after the Russian invasion started. And I was like, man, like, what if Putin was immortal? Like, what if I'm like, man, maybe immortality is not good. I mean, like, if you get into the later Dune stuff, the immortals cause a lot of problem. As we were talking about earlier with the music and like brains calcify, like, good people could become immortal, but bad people could become immortal. But I also think even the best people, power corrupts and power alienates you from like the common human experience. Right, so the people that get more and more powerful. Even the best people whose brains are amazing, like, I think death might be important. I think death is part of, you know, like, I think with AI, one thing we might want to consider, I don't know, when I talk about AI, I'm such not an expert and probably everyone has all these ideas and they're already figured out. Nobody is an expert in anything, see. Okay, go ahead. But when I... You know what we're talking about? I'm just like, I think some kind of pruning, but it's a tricky thing because if there's too much of a focus on youth culture, then you don't have the wisdom. So I feel like we're in a tricky moment right now in society where it's like, we've really perfected living for a long time. So there's all these really old people who are like, really voting against the well-being of the young people, you know, and like, it's like, there shouldn't be all this student debt and we need like healthcare, like universal healthcare and like, just voting against like, best interests. But then you have all these young people that don't have the wisdom that are like, yeah, we need communism and stuff. And it's just like, like, literally, I got canceled at one point for, I ironically used a Stalin quote in my high school yearbook, but it was actually like a diss against my high school. I saw that. Yeah. And people were like, you used to be a Stalinist and now you're a class traitor. And it's like, it's like, oh, man, just like, please Google Stalin. Yeah. Please Google Stalin. Ignoring the lessons of history, yes. And it's like, we're in this really weird middle ground where it's like, we are not finding the happy medium between wisdom and fresh ideas and they're fighting each other. And it's like, like, really, like, what we need is like, like the fresh ideas and the wisdom to be like, collaborating. And it's like... Well, the fighting in a way is the searching for the happy medium. And in a way, maybe we are finding the happy medium. Maybe that's what the happy medium looks like. And for AI systems, there has to be, you know, you have reinforcement learning, you have the dance between exploration, exploitation, sort of doing crazy stuff to see if there's something better than what you think is the optimal and then doing the optimal thing and dancing back and forth from that. Stuart Russell, I don't know if you know that, is an AI guy with, thinks about sort of how to control super intelligent AI systems and his idea is that we should inject uncertainty and sort of humility into AI systems, that they never, as they get wiser and wiser and wiser and more intelligent, they're never really sure. They always doubt themselves. And in some sense, when you think of young people, that's a mechanism for doubt. It's like, it's how society doubts whether the thing it has converged towards is the right answer. So the voices of the young people is a society asking itself a question, the way I've been doing stuff for the past 50 years, maybe it's the wrong way. And so you can have all of that within one AI system. I also think, though, that we need to, I mean, actually, that's actually really interesting and really cool. But I also think there's a fine balance of, I think we maybe also overvalue the idea that the old systems are always bad. And I think there are things that we are perfecting, and we might be accidentally overthrowing things that we actually have gotten to a good point. Yeah. And we value fighting against the generations before us so much that, like, there's also an aspect of, like, sometimes we're taking two steps forward, one step back, because, okay, maybe we kind of did solve this thing. And now we're, like, fucking it up, you know? And so I think there's, like, a middle ground there, too. So we're in search of that happy medium. Let me ask you a bunch of crazy questions, okay? Okay. You can answer in a short way or in a long way. What's the scariest thing you've ever done? These questions are gonna be ridiculous. Something tiny or something big. Skydiving or touring your first record, going on this podcast. I've had two crazy brushes, like, really scary brushes with death where I randomly got away unscathed. I don't know if I should talk about those on here. Well, I don't know. I think I might be the luckiest person alive, though. Like, this might be too dark for a podcast, though. I feel like, I don't know if this is, like, good content for a podcast. I don't know what is good content. It might hijack. Here's a safer one. I mean, having a baby really scared me. Before, during, after. Surgery, like, just having a baby is really scary. So just, like, the medical aspect of it, not the responsibility. Were you ready for the responsibility of, were you ready to be a mother? All the beautiful things that comes with motherhood that you were talking about, all the changes and all that, were you ready for that? Did you feel ready for that? No. I think it took about nine months to start getting ready for it. And I'm still getting more ready for it because now you keep realizing more things as they start getting... As the consciousness grows. And stuff you didn't notice with the first one, now that you've seen the first one older, you're noticing it more. Like, the sort of, like, existential horror of coming into consciousness with Baby Y or Baby Sailor Mars or whatever. She has, like, so many names at this point that it's, we really need to probably settle on one. If you could be someone else for a day, someone alive today, but somebody you haven't met yet, who would you be? Would I be modeling their brain state or would I just be in their body? You can choose the degree to which you're modeling their brain state. So you can still take a third person perspective and realize, you have to realize that you're... Can they be alive or can it be dead? No, oh... Can it be anyone? They would be brought back to life, right? If they're dead. Yeah, you can bring people back. Definitely Hitler or Stalin. I want to understand evil. I just... You would need to, oh, to experience what it feels like. I want to be in their brain feeling what they feel. That might change you forever, returning from that. Yes, but I think it would also help me understand how to prevent it and fix it. That might be one of those things, once you experience it, it'll be a burden to know it. Yeah, but a lot of things are burdens. But it's a useful burden. Yeah. That for sure, I want to understand evil and like psychopathy and that. I have all these fake Twitter accounts where I like go into different algorithmic bubbles to try to like understand. I'll keep getting in fights with people and realize we're not actually fighting. I think we're, we used to exist in a monoculture like before social media and stuff. Like we kind of all got fed the same thing. So we were all speaking the same cultural language. But I think recently one of the things that like we aren't diagnosing properly enough with social media is that there's different dialects. There's so many different dialects of Chinese. There are now becoming different dialects of English. Like I am realizing like there are people who are saying the exact same things, but they're using completely different verbiage. And we're like punishing each other for not using the correct verbiage. And we're completely misunderstanding. Like people are just like misunderstanding what the other people are saying. And like I just got in a fight with a friend about like anarchism and communism and shit for like two hours. And then by the end of the conversation like and then she say something and I'm like, but that's literally what I'm saying. And she was like, what? And then I was like, fuck, we've different. I'm like we're, our English, like the way we are understanding terminology is like drastically. Like our algorithm bubbles are creating many dialects. Of how language is interpreted, how language is used. That's so fascinating. And so we're like having these arguments that we do not need to be having. And there's polarization that's happening that doesn't need to be happening because we've got these like algorithmically created dialects occurring. Plus on top of that, there's also different parts of the world that speak different languages. So there's literally lost in translation kind of communication. I happen to know the Russian language and just know how different it is. Yeah. Then the English language and I just wonder how much is lost in a little bit of. Man, I actually, because I have a question for you. I have a song coming out tomorrow with Ice Peak who are a Russian band. And I speak a little bit of Russian and I was looking at the title. And the title in English doesn't match the title in Russian. I'm curious about this because look, it says. What's the English title? The title in English is Last Day and then the title in Russian is New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. Yeah, New Day. New Day, but Last Day. So Last Day would be Последний день. Yeah. Maybe they. Or maybe the title includes both the Russian and it's for. Maybe. Maybe it's for bilingual. To be honest, New Day is for bilingual. To be honest, New Day sounds better than just musically. Like, New Day is New Day. That's the current one. And Последний день is the last day. I think, New Day. I don't like New Day. But the meaning is so different. That's kind of awesome actually. There's an explicit sort of contrast like that. If everyone on earth disappeared and it was just you left, what would your day look like? Like, what would you do? Everybody's dead. Are there corpses there? Well, seriously, it's a big. Let me think through this. It's a big difference if there's just like birds singing versus if there's like corpses littering the street. Yeah, there's corpses everywhere. I'm sorry. And you don't actually know what happened. And you don't know why you survived. And you don't even know if there's others out there. But it seems clear that it's all gone. What would you do? What would I do? I'm somebody who really enjoys the moment, enjoys life. I would just go on like enjoying the inanimate objects. I would just look for food, basic survival. But most of it is just. Listen, I take walks and I look outside and I'm just happy that we get to exist on this planet to be able to breathe air. It's just all beautiful. It's full of colors, all of this kind of stuff. There's so many things about life, your own life, conscious life that's fucking awesome. So I would just enjoy that. But also maybe after a few weeks, the engineer would start coming out, like want to build some things. Maybe there's always hope searching for another human. Probably searching for another human. Probably trying to get to a TV or radio station and broadcast something. That's interesting. I didn't think about that. Like really maximize your ability to connect with others. Yeah, like probably try to find another person. Would you be excited to meet another person or terrified? I'd be excited. No matter what. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being alone for the last however long of my life would be really bad. That's the one instance I might. I don't think I'd kill myself, but I might kill myself if I had to undergo that. You love people. You love connection to other humans. Yeah, I kind of hate people too. It's a love-hate relationship. I feel like we have a bunch of weird Nietzsche questions and stuff. Oh yeah. I wonder, because I'm like, when podcast, I'm like, is this interesting for people to just have like, or I don't know, maybe people do like this. When I listen to podcasts, I'm into like the lore, like the hard lore. Like I just love like Dan Carlin. I'm like, give me the facts. Just like get the facts into my bloodstream. But you also don't know, like your fascinating mind to explore. So you don't realize as you're talking about stuff, the stuff you've taken for granted is actually unique and fascinating. The way you think, not always what, like the way you reason through things is the fascinating thing to listen to. Because people kind of see, oh, there's other humans that think differently, that explore thoughts differently. That's the cool, that's also cool. So yeah, Dan Carlin retelling of history. By the way, his retelling of history is very, I think what's exciting is not the history, it's his way of thinking about history. No, I think Dan Carlin is one of the people, like when Dan Carlin is one of the people that really started getting me excited about like revolutionizing education. Because like Dan Carlin instills, instilled, I already like really liked history, but he instilled like an obsessive love of history in me. To the point where like now I'm fucking reading like, like going to bed, reading like part four of the rise and fall of the Third Reich or whatever. Like I got like dense ass history, but like, like he like opened that door that like made me want to be a scholar of that topic. Like it's like I feel he's such a good teacher. He just like, you know, and it sort of made me feel like one of the things we could do with education is like find like the world's great, the teachers that like create passion for the topic. Because autodidacticism, I don't know how to say that properly, but like self-teaching is like much faster than being lectured to. Like it's much more efficient to sort of like be able to teach yourself and then ask a teacher questions when you don't know what's up. But like, you know, that's why it's like in university and stuff like you can learn so much more material so much faster because you're doing a lot of the learning on your own and you're going to the teachers for when you get stuck. But like these teachers that can inspire passion for a topic, I think that is one of the most invaluable skills in our whole species. Like because if you can do that, then you it's like AI, like AI is going to teach itself so much more efficiently than we can teach it. We just need to get it to the point where it can teach itself. And then it finds the motivation to do so. Right. Yeah. Like you inspire it to do so. Yeah. And it could it could teach itself. What do you make of the fact you mentioned rise and fall of the Third Reich? I just read that. You read it twice. And you read it twice. Yes. And I'm like, I'm like, wait, I thought this was like a super poppin book. Super pop. I'm not like that. I'm not that far in it, but it is. It's so interesting. Yeah. It's written by a person that was there, which is very important to kind of. You know, you start being like, how could this possibly happen? And then when you read rise and fall of the Third Reich, it's like people tried really hard for this to not happen. People tried. They almost reinstated a monarchy at one point to try to stop this from happening. Like they almost like, like abandoned democracy to try to get this to not happen. At least the way it makes me feel is that there's a bunch of small moments on which history can turn. Yes. Like small meetings. Yes. Human interactions. And that's both terrifying and inspiring because it's like, even just attempts at assassinating Hitler, like time and time again, failed. And they were so close. Was it like Operation Valkyrie? Such a good. And then there's also the role of, that's a really heavy burden, which is from a geopolitical perspective, the role of leaders to see evil before it truly becomes evil, to anticipate it, to stand up to evil. Because evil is actually pretty rare in this world at a scale that Hitler was. We tend to, you know, in modern discourse kind of call people evil too quickly. If you look at ancient history, like there was a ton of Hitlers. I actually think it's more the norm than, like again, going back to like my sort of intelligent design theory. I think one of the things we've been successfully doing in our slow move from survival of the fittest to intelligent design is we've kind of been eradicating. Like if you look at like ancient Assyria and stuff, like that shit was like brutal and just like the heads on the, like brutal, like Genghis Khan just like genocide after genocide after genocide. There's like throwing plague bodies over the walls and decimating whole cities or like the Muslim conquests of like Damascus and shit. Just like people, cities used to get leveled all the fucking time. Okay, get into the Bronze Age collapse. It's basically, there was like almost like Roman level like society. Like there was like all over the world, like global trade, like everything was awesome through a mix of I think a bit of climate change and then the development of iron. Because basically bronze could only come from this, the way to make bronze, like everything had to be funneled through this one Iranian mine. And so it's like there was just this one supply chain and this is one of the things that makes me worried about supply chains and why I think we need to be so thoughtful about. I think our biggest issue with society right now, like the thing that is most likely to go wrong is probably supply chain collapse. You know, because war, climate change, whatever, like anything that causes supply chain collapse, our population is too big to handle that. And like the thing that seems to cause dark ages is mass supply chain collapse. But the Bronze Age collapse happened like, it was sort of like this ancient collapse that happened where like literally like ancient Egypt, all these cities, everything just got like decimated, destroyed, abandoned cities, like hundreds of them. There was like a flourishing society, like we were almost coming to modernity and everything got leveled and they had this mini dark ages. But it was just like there's so little writing or recording from that time that like there isn't a lot of information about the Bronze Age collapse, but it was basically equivalent to like medieval, the medieval dark ages. But it just happened, I don't know the years, but like thousands of years earlier. And then we sort of like recover from the Bronze Age collapse, empire reemerged, writing and trade and everything reemerged. And then we of course had the more contemporary dark ages. And then over time we've designed mechanism to lessen and lessen the capability for the destructive power centers to emerge. There's more recording about the more contemporary dark ages, so I think we have like a better understanding of how to avoid it, but I still think we're at high risk for it. I think that's one of the big risks right now. The natural state of being for humans is for there to be a lot of Hitlers, which has gotten really good at making it hard for them to emerge. We've gotten better at collaboration and resisting the power, like authoritarians to come to power. We're trying to go country by country, like we're moving past this. We're kind of like slowly incrementally moving towards not scary old school war stuff, and I think seeing it happen in some of the countries that at least nominally are supposed to have moved past that, that's scary because it reminds us that it can happen in the places that have moved past, supposedly, hopefully moved past that. And possibly at a civilization level, like you said, supply chain collapse might make people resource constrained, might make people desperate, angry, hateful, violent, and drag us right back in. I mean, supply chain collapse is how, like the ultimate thing that caused the middle ages was supply chain collapse. It's like people, because people were reliant on a certain level of technology, like people, like you look at like Britain, like they had glass, like people had aqueducts, people had like indoor heating and cooling and like running water and like buy food from all over the world and trade and markets. Like people didn't know how to hunt and forage and gather. And so we're in a similar situation, we are not educated enough to survive without technology, so if we have a supply chain collapse that like limits our access to technology, there will be like massive starvation and violence and displacement and war. Like, you know, it's also like, yeah, in my opinion, it's like the primary marker of dark, like what a dark age is. Well, technology is kind of enabling us to be more resilient in terms of supply chain, in terms of, to all the different catastrophic events that happened to us. Although the pandemic has kind of challenged our preparedness for the catastrophic. What do you think is the coolest invention humans come up with? The wheel, fire, cooking meat. Computers. Computers? Freaking computers. Internet or computers? Which one? What do you think the... Previous technologies, I mean, may have even been more profound and moved us to a certain degree, but I think the computers are what make us homo-techno. I think this is what, it's a brain augmentation. And so it like allows for actual evolution, like the computers accelerate the degree to which all the other technologies can also be accelerated. Would you classify yourself as a homo sapien or a homo techno? Definitely homo techno. So you're one of the earliest of the species. I think most of us are. Like, as I said, I think if you looked at brain scans of us versus humans 100 years ago, it would look very different. I think we are physiologically different. Just even the interaction with the devices has changed our brains. And if you look at, a lot of studies are coming out to show that there's a degree of inherited memory. So some of these physiological changes, in theory, we should be passing them on. So like, that's not like an instance of physiological change that's going to fizzle out. In theory, that should progress like to our offspring. Speaking of offspring, what advice would you give to a young person, like in high school? Whether there be an artist, a creative, an engineer, any kind of career path, or maybe just life in general, how they can live a life they can be proud of. I think one of my big thoughts, and like, especially now having kids, is that I don't think we spend enough time teaching creativity. And I think creativity is a muscle like other things. And there's a lot of emphasis on, you know, learn how to play the piano and then you can write a song. Or like, learn the technical stuff and then you can do a thing. But I think it's, like I have a friend who's like, world's greatest guitar player. Like, you know, amazing sort of like producer, works with other people. But he's really sort of like, you know, he like engineers and records things and like does solos, but he doesn't really like make his own music. And I was talking to him and I was like, dude, you're so talented at music, like, why don't you make music or whatever? And he was like, because I got, I'm too old. I never learned the creative muscle. And it's like, you know, it's embarrassing. It's like learning the creative muscle takes a lot of failure. And it also sort of, when you're being creative, you know, you're throwing paint at a wall and a lot of stuff will fail. So like part of it is like a tolerance for failure and humiliation. Somehow that's easier to develop when you're young. Or be persistent through it when you're young. Everything is easier to develop when you're young. The younger the better. It could destroy you. I mean, that's the shitty thing about creativity. If you know, failure could destroy you if you're not careful, but that's the risk worth taking. But also, but at a young age, developing a tolerance to failure is good. I fail all the time. Like I do stupid shit all the time, like in public, in private, I get cancelled for, I make all kinds of mistakes. But I just like am very resilient about making mistakes. And so then like I do a lot of things that like other people wouldn't do. And like I think my greatest asset is my creativity. And I like I think paint, like tolerance to failure is just a super essential thing that should be taught before other things. Brilliant advice. Yeah, yeah. I wish everybody encouraged sort of failure more as opposed to kind of... Because we like punish failure. We're like, no, like when we were teaching kids, we're like, no, that's wrong. Like that's, you know, like X keeps like, will be like wrong. Like he'll say like crazy things like X keeps being like, like bubble car, bubble car. And I'm like, and, you know, I'm like, what's a bubble car like, but like, it doesn't like, but I don't want to be like, no, you're wrong. I'm like, you're thinking of weird, crazy shit. Like I don't know what a bubble car is. But like, he's creating worlds and they might be internally consistent. And through that, he might discover something fundamental about this. Yeah. Or he'll like rewrite songs, like with words that he prefers. So like, instead of baby shark, he says baby car. Maybe he's onto something. Let me ask the big ridiculous question. We were kind of dancing around it, but what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing we have here? Of human civilization, of life on earth, but in general, just life. What's the meaning of life? Have you, did you read Novacene yet? By James Lovelock? You're doing a lot of really good book recommendations here. I haven't even finished this, so I'm a huge fraud yet again. But like really early in the book, he says this amazing thing. Like, I feel like everyone's so sad and cynical, like everyone's like the Fermi paradox and everyone. I just keep hearing people being like, fuck, what if we're alone? Like, oh, no. Like, and I'm like, OK, but like, wait, what if this is the beginning? Like in Novacene, he says, I'm not going to be a cricket because I can't like memorize quotes, but he says something like, what if our consciousness, like right now, like this is the universe waking up? Like, what if instead of discovering the universe, this is the universe? Like, this is the evolution of the little literal universe herself. Like, we are not separate from the universe. Like, this is the universe waking up. This is the universe seeing herself for the first time. Like, this is the universe becoming conscious. Yeah. First time we were part of that. Yeah. Because it's like we aren't separate from the universe. Like, like this could be like an incredibly sacred moment. And maybe like social media and all these things, the stuff where we're all getting connected together, like maybe these are the neurons connecting of the like collective super intelligence that is, you know. Waking up. Yeah. Like, you know, it's like maybe instead of something cynical or maybe if there's something to discover, like maybe this is just, you know, we're a blastocyst of like some incredible kind of consciousness or being. And just like in the first three years of life or for human children, we'll forget about all the suffering that we're going through now. I think we'll probably forget about this. I mean, probably, you know, artificial intelligence will eventually render us obsolete. I don't think they'll do it in a malicious way, but I think probably we are very weak. The sun is expanding. Like, I don't know, like hopefully we can get to Mars, but like we're pretty vulnerable. And I, you know, like I think we can coexist for a long time with AI and we can also probably make ourselves less vulnerable. But, you know, I just think consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, like I think this might be the single greatest like moment in evolution ever. And like maybe this is, you know, like the true beginning of life and we're just, we're the blue-green algae or we're like the single-celled organisms of something amazing. The universe awakens and this is it. Yeah. Well, see, you're an incredible person. You're a fascinating mind. You should definitely do, your friend Liv mentioned that you guys were thinking of maybe talking. I would love it if you explored your mind in this kind of medium more and more by doing a podcast with her or just in any kind of way. So you're an awesome person. It's an honor to know you. It's an honor to get to sit down with you late at night, which is like surreal. And I really enjoyed it. Thank you for talking today. Yeah, no, I mean, huge honor. I feel very underqualified to be here, but I'm a big fan. I've been listening to the podcast a lot and yeah, me and Liv would appreciate any advice and help and we're definitely going to do that. So, yeah. Anytime. Thank you. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Grimes. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Oscar Wilde. Yes, I'm a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find her way by moonlight. And her punishment is that she sees the dawn before the rest of the world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Gilbert Strang: Singular Value Decomposition

So what concept or theorem in linear algebra or in math you find most beautiful that gives you pause that leaves you in awe? Well, I'll stick with linear algebra here. I hope the viewer knows that really mathematics is amazing, amazing subject and deep, deep connections between ideas that didn't look connected. They turned out they were. But if we stick with linear algebra, so we have a matrix, that's like the basic thing, a rectangle of numbers and might be a rectangle of data. You're probably gonna ask me later about data science where an often data comes in a matrix. You have, you know, maybe every column corresponds to a drug and every row corresponds to a patient. And if the patient reacted favorably to the drug then you put up some positive number in there. Anyway, rectangle of numbers, a matrix is basic. So the big problem is to understand all those numbers. You got a big, big set of numbers. And what are the patterns? What's going on? And so one of the ways to break down that matrix into simple pieces is uses something called singular values. And that's come on as fundamental in the last, and certainly in my lifetime. Eigenvalues, if you have viewers who've done engineering, math or basic linear algebra, eigenvalues were in there. But those are restricted to square matrices and data comes in rectangular matrices. So you gotta take that next step. I'm always pushing math faculty, get on, do it, do it, do it. Singular values. So those are a way to break, to make, to find the important pieces of the matrix which add up to the whole matrix. So you're breaking a matrix into simple pieces. And the first piece is the most important part of the data. The second piece is the second most important part. And then often, so a data scientist will like, if a data scientist can find those first and second pieces, stop there, the rest of the data is probably round off, experimental error maybe. So you're looking for the important part. So what do you find beautiful about singular values? Well, yeah, I didn't give the theorem. So here's the idea of singular values. Every matrix, every matrix, rectangular, square, whatever, can be written as a product of three very simple special matrices. So that's the theorem. Every matrix can be written as a rotation times a stretch, which is just a matrix, a diagonal matrix, otherwise all zeros except on the one diagonal. And then the third factor is another rotation. So rotation, stretch, rotation is the breakup of any matrix. The structure of that, the ability that you can do that, what do you find appealing? What do you find beautiful about it? Well, geometrically, as I freely admit, the action of a matrix is not so easy to visualize, but everybody can visualize a rotation. Take two-dimensional space and just turn it around the center. Take three-dimensional space. So a pilot has to know about, well, what are the three, the yaw is one of them. I've forgotten all the three turns that a pilot makes. Up to 10 dimensions, you've got 10 ways to turn, but you can visualize a rotation. Take the space and turn it, and you can visualize a stretch. So to break a matrix with all those numbers in it into something you can visualize, rotate, stretch, rotate, is pretty neat. It's pretty neat. That's pretty powerful.

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Ben Shapiro: Politics, Kanye, Trump, Biden, Hitler, Extremism, and War | Lex Fridman Podcast #336

The great lie we tell ourselves is that people who are evil are not like us. They're a class apart. Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama in 1861, how many of you would be abolitionists? And everybody raises their hand. He says, of course, that's not true. Of course, that's not true. The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over. Do you ever sit back, you know, in the quiet of your mind and think, am I participating in evil? The following is a conversation with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, co-founder of The Daily Wire, and author of several books, including The Authoritarian Moment, The Right Side of History, and Facts Don't Care About Your Feelings. Whatever your political leanings, I humbly ask that you try to put those aside and listen with an open mind, trying to give the most charitable interpretation of the words we say. This is true in general for this podcast, whether the guest is Ben Shapiro or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Donald Trump or Barack Obama. I will talk to everyone from every side, from the far left to the far right, from presidents to prisoners, from artists to scientists, from the powerful to the powerless, because we are all human, all capable of good and evil, all with fascinating stories and ideas to explore. I seek only to understand, and in so doing, hopefully add a bit of love to the world. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ben Shapiro. Let's start with a difficult topic. What do you think about the comments made by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, about Jewish people? – They're awful and anti-Semitic, and they seem to get worse over time. They started off with the bizarre DEF CON 3 tweet, and then they went into even more stereotypical garbage about Jews, and Jews being sexual manipulators. I think that was the Pete Davidson, Kim Kardashian stuff. And then Jews running all of the media, Jews being in charge of the financial sector, Jewish people. I mean, there's no... I mean, I called it on my show, they're Sherman Nazism, and it is. I mean, it's like right from Protocols of the Elders of Zion type stuff. – Do you think those words come from pain? Where do they come from? – And you know, it's always hard to try and read somebody's mind. What he looks like to me, just having experience among family people who are bipolar, is he seems like a bipolar personality. He seems like somebody who is in the middle of a manic episode, and when you're manic, you tend to say a lot of things that you shouldn't say, and you tend to believe that they're the most brilliant things ever said. The Washington Post did an entire piece speculating about how bipolarism played into the kind of stuff that Ye was saying, and it's hard for me to think that it's not playing into it, especially because even if he is an anti-Semite, and I have no reason to suspect he's not, given all of his comments, if he had an ounce of common sense, he would stop at a certain point, and bipolarism tends to drive you well past the point where common sense applies. So, I mean, I would imagine it's coming from that. I mean, from his comments, I would also imagine that he's doing the logical mistake that a lot of anti-Semites or racists or bigots do, which is, somebody hurt me. That person is a Jew. Therefore, all Jews are bad. And that jump from a person did something to me I don't like, who's a member of a particular race or class, and therefore, everybody of that race or class is bad, I mean, that's textbook bigotry, and that's pretty obviously what Ye is engaging in here. So, jumping from the individual to the group. That's the way he's been expressing it, right? He keeps talking about his Jewish agents, and I watched your interview with him, and you kept saying, so just name the agents, right? Just name the people who are screwing you, and he wouldn't do it. Instead, he just kept going back to the general, the group, the Jews in general. I mean, that's textbook bigotry. And if it were put in any other context, he would probably recognize it as such. To the degree his words fuel hate in the world, what's the way to reverse that process? What's the way to alleviate the hate? I mean, when it comes to alleviating the kind of stuff that he's saying, obviously, debunking it, making clear that what he's saying is garbage. But the reality is that I think that for most people who are in any way engaged with these issues, I don't think they're being convinced to be anti-Semitic by Ye. I mean, I think that there's a group of people who may be swayed that anti-Semitism is acceptable because Ye is saying what he's saying, and he's saying so very loudly, and he's saying it over and over. But I think that, for example, there are these signs that were popping up in Los Angeles saying Ye is right. Well, that group's been out there posting anti-Semitic signs on the freeways for years, and there are groups like that posting anti-Semitic signs where I live in Florida. They've been doing that for years, well before Ye was saying this sort of stuff. It's just like latest opportunity to kind of jump on that particular bandwagon. But listen, I think that people do have a moral duty to call that stuff out. So there is a degree to which it normalizes that kind of idea that Jews control the media, Jews control X institution. Is there a way to talk about a high representation of a group like Jewish people in a certain institution like the media or Hollywood and so on without it being a hateful conversation? Of course. A high percentage of higher than statistically represented in the population percentage of Hollywood agents are probably Jewish. A higher percentage of lawyers generally are probably Jewish. A high percentage of accountants are probably Jewish. Also, a higher percentage of engineers are probably Asian. Like the statistical truths are statistical truths. It doesn't necessarily mean anything about the nature of the people who are being talked about. There are a myriad of reasons why people might be disproportionately in one arena or another, ranging from the cultural to sometimes the genetic. I mean, there are certain areas of the world where people are better long distance runners because of their genetic adaptations in those particular areas of the world. That's not racist. That's just fact. What starts to get racist is when you are attributing a bad characteristic to an entire population based on the notion that some members of that population are doing bad things. Yeah, there's a jump between. It's also possible that record label owners as a group have a kind of culture that Fs over artists. Doesn't treat artists fairly. And it's also possible that there's a high representation of Jews in the group of people that own record labels. But it's that small, but a very big leap that people take from the group that own record labels to all Jews. For sure. And I think that one of the other issues also is that anti-Semitism is fascinating because it breaks down into so many different parts, meaning that if you look at sort of different types of anti-Semitism, if you're a racist against black people, it's typically because you're racist based on the color of their skin. If you're racist against the Jews, you're anti-Semitic, then there are actually a few different ways that breaks down. You have anti-Semitism in terms of ethnicity, which is like Nazi-esque anti-Semitism. You have Jewish parentage, you have a Jewish grandparent. Therefore, your blood is corrupt, and you are inherently going to have bad properties. Then there's sort of old school religious anti-Semitism, which is that the Jews are the killers of Christ or the Jews are the sons of pigs and monkeys. And therefore, Judaism is bad, and therefore Jews are bad. And the way that you get out of that anti-Semitism, historically speaking, is mass conversion, which most anti-Semitism for a couple thousand years actually was not ethnic. It was much more rooted in this sort of stuff. If a Jew converted out of the faith, then the anti-Semitism was quote unquote alleviated. And then there's a sort of bizarre anti-Semitism that's political anti-Semitism, and that is members of a group that I don't like are disproportionately Jewish. Therefore, all Jews are members of this group or are predominantly represented in this group. So you'll see Nazis saying the communists are Jews. You'll see communists saying the Nazis are Jews, or you'll see communists saying that the capitalists rather are Jews. And so that's the weird thing about anti-Semitism. It's kind of like the Jews behind every corner. It's basically a big conspiracy theory, unlike a lot of other forms of racism, which are not really conspiracy theory, anti-Semitism tends to be a conspiracy theory about believers of power being controlled by a shadowy cadre of people who are getting together behind closed doors to control things. Yeah, the most absurd illustration of anti-Semitism, just like you said, is Stalin versus Hitler over Poland, that every bad guy was a Jew. So every enemy, there's a lot of different enemy groups, intellectuals, political, and so on, military, and behind any movement that is considered the enemy for the Nazis and any movement that's considered the enemy for the Soviet army are the Jews. What does the fact that Hitler took power teach you about human nature? When you look back at the history of the 20th century, what do you learn from that time? I mean, there are a bunch of lessons to Hitler taking power. The first thing I think people ought to recognize about Hitler taking power is that the power had been centralized in the government before Hitler took it. So if you actually look at the history of Nazi Germany, the Weimar Republic had effectively collapsed. The power had been centralized in the chancellery and really under Hindenburg for a couple of years before that. And so it was only a matter of time until someone who was bad grabbed the power. And so the struggle between the Reds and the Browns in Nazism in pre-Nazi Germany led to this kind of up spiraling of radical sentiment that allowed Hitler in through the front door, not through the back door, right? He was elected. So you think communists could have also taken power? I mean, there's no question communists could have taken power. There were serious force in pre-Nazi Germany. Do you think there was an underlying current that would have led to an atrocity if the communists had taken power? Wouldn't have been quite the same atrocity, but obviously the communists in Soviet Russia at exactly this time were committing the Haladomar. Yeah. Right? So there were very few good guys in terms of good parties. The moderate parties were being dragged by the radicals into alliance with them to prevent the worst case scenario from the other guy. Right? So if you look at, I'm sort of fascinated by the history of this period because it really does speak to how does a democracy break down? I mean, the 20s, Weimar Republic was a very liberal democracy. How does a liberal democracy break down into complete fascism and then into genocide? And there's a character who was very prominent in the history of that time named Franz von Papen, who was actually the second to last chancellor of the Republic before Hitler. So he was the chancellor and then he handed over to Schleicher and then he ended up, Schleicher ended up collapsing and that ended up handing power over to Hitler. It was Papen who had stumped for Hitler to become chancellor. Papen was a Catholic Democrat. He didn't like Hitler. He thought that Hitler was a radical and a nutjob, but he also thought that Hitler being a buffoon, as he saw it, was going to essentially be usable by the right forces in order to get the, in order to prevent the communists from taking power, maybe in order to restore some sort of legitimacy to the regime because he was popular, in order for Papen to retain power himself. And then immediately after Hitler taking power, Hitler basically kills all of Papen's friends. Papen out of quote unquote loyalty stays on. He ends up helping the Anschluss in Austria. Now all this stuff is really interesting mainly because what it speaks to is the great lie we tell ourselves that people who are evil are not like us. They're a class apart. People who do evil things, people who support evil people, people, they're not like us. That's an easy call. Everybody in history who has sinned is a person who's very different from me. Robert George, the philosopher over at Princeton, he's fond of doing a sort of thought experiment in his classes where he asks people to raise their hand if they had lived in Alabama in 1861, how many of you would be abolitionists? And everybody raises their hand. He says, of course, that's not true. Of course, that's not true. The best protection against evil is recognizing that it lies in every human heart and the possibility that it takes you over. And so you have to be very cautious in how you approach these issues and the back and forth of politics, the sort of bipolarity of politics, or the polarization in politics might be a better way to put it, you know, makes it very easy to kind of fall into the rock'em, sock'em robots that eventually could theoretically allow you to support somebody who's truly frightening and hideous in order to stop somebody who you think is more frightening and hideous. And you see this kind of language, by the way, now predominating almost all over the Western world, right? My political enemy is an enemy of democracy. My political enemy is going to end the republic. My political enemy is going to be the person who destroys the country we live in. And so that person has to be stopped by any means necessary. And that's dangerous stuff. LBW So the communists had to be stopped in Nazi Germany, and so they're the devil. And so any useful buffoon, as long as they're effective against the communists would do. Do you ever wonder, because the people that are participating in evil may not understand that they're doing evil. Do you ever sit back, you know, in the quiet of your mind and think, am I participating in evil? I mean, so my business partner and I, one of our favorite memes is from, there's a British comedy show, the name escapes me, of these two guys who are members of the SS, and they're dressed in the SS uniforms and the black uniforms, the skulls on them, and they're saying to each other, one says to the other guy, you notice like the British, their symbol is something, it's something nice. And it's like an eagle. But it's a skull and crossbones. You see the Americans, you see their blue uniforms, very nice and pretty awesome. Jet black. Are we the baddies? And you know, that's it. And the truth is, we look back at at the Nazis, and we say, well, of course, they were the baddies. They wore black uniforms, they had jackboots, and they had this. And of course, they were the bad guys. But evil rarely presents its face so clearly. So yeah, I mean, I think you have to constantly be thinking along those lines. And hopefully you try to avoid it. You can only do the best that a human being can do. But yeah, I mean, the answer is yes. I would say that I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on whether I'm doing the right thing. And I may not always do the right thing. I'm sure a lot of people think that I'm doing the wrong thing on a daily basis. But it's definitely a question that has to enter your mind as a historically aware and hopefully morally decent person. Do you think you're mentally strong enough if you realize that you're on the wrong side of history to switch sides? Very few people in history seem to be strong enough to do that. I mean, I think that the answer I hope would be yes. You never know until the time comes and you have to do it. I will say that having heterodox opinions in a wide variety of areas is something that I have done before. I'm the only person I've ever heard of in public life who actually has a list on their website of all the dumb, stupid things I've ever said. So where I go through and I either say, this is why I still believe this, or this is why what I said was terrible and stupid. And I'm sure that list will get a lot longer. Yeah, look forward to new additions. It actually is a super, super long list. People should check it out. And it's quite honest and raw. What do you think about, it's interesting to ask you given how pro-life you are, about Ye's comments about comparing the Holocaust to the 900,000 abortions in the United States a year? So I'll take this from two angles. As a pro-life person, I actually didn't find it offensive because if you believe, as I do, that unborn and preborn lives deserve protection, then the slaughter of just under a million of them every year for the last almost 50 years is a historic tragedy on par with a Holocaust. From the outside perspective, I get why people would say there's a difference in how people view the preborn as to how people view, say, a seven-year-old who's being killed in the Holocaust. Like the visceral power and evil of the Nazis shoving full-grown human beings and small children into gas chambers can't be compared to a person who, even from a pro-life perspective, may not fully understand the consequences of their own decisions or from a pro-choice perspective, fully understands the consequences, but just doesn't think that that person is a person, that that's actually different. So I understand both sides of it. I wasn't offended by Ye's comments in that way, though, because if you're a pro-life human being, then you do think that what's happening is a great tragedy on scale that involves the dehumanization of an entire class of people, the preborn. So the philosophically, you understand the comparison? I do, sure. So in his comments, in the jumping from the individual to the group, I'd like to ask you, you're one of the most effective people in the world at attacking the left, and sometimes it can slip into attacking the group. Do you worry that that's the same kind of oversimplification that Ye is doing about Jewish people that you can sometimes do with the left as a group? So when I speak about the left, I'm speaking about a philosophy. I'm not really speaking about individual human beings as the leftists-like group and then try to name who the members of this individual group are. I also make a distinction between the left and liberals. There are a lot of people who are liberal who disagree with me on taxes, disagree with me on foreign policy, disagree with me on a lot of things. The people who I'm talking about generally, and I talk about the left in the United States, are people who believe that alternative points of view ought to be silenced because they are damaging and harmful simply based on the disagreement. So that's one distinction. The second distinction, again, is when I talk about the right versus the left, typically I'm talking about a battle of competing philosophies. And so I'm not speaking about typically, it would be hard to, if you put a person in front of me and said, is this person of the left or of the right, having just met them, I wouldn't be able to label them in the same way that if you met somebody in the name of Greenstein, you'd immediately got you. Or you met a black person, black person. And that the adherence to a philosophy makes you a member of a group. If I think the philosophy is bad, that doesn't necessarily mean that you as a person are bad, but it does mean that I think your philosophy is bad. Yeah. So the grouping is based on the philosophy versus something like a race, like the color of your skin or race as in the case of the Jewish people. So it's a different thing. You can be a little bit more nonchalant and careless in attacking a group because it's ultimately attacking a set of ideas. Well, I mean, it's really nonchalant in attacking the set of ideas. And I don't know that nonchalant would be the way I'd put it. I try to be exact when you're, you know, you don't always hit, but you know, the, if I say that I oppose the communists, right. And then presumably I'm speaking of people who believe in the communist philosophy. Now, the question is whether I'm mislabeling, right. Whether I'm taking somebody who's not actually a communist and then shoving them in that group of communists, right. That would be inaccurate. The dangerous thing is it expands the group as opposed to you talking about the philosophy. You're throwing everybody who's ever said, I'm curious about communism. I'm curious about socialism. There's, cause there's like a gradient, you know, it's like, to throw something at you. I think Joe Biden said MAGA Republicans, right. You know, I think that's a very careless statement because the thing you jump to immediately is like all Republicans. Everyone who voted for Trump. For Trump. Versus I think in the charitable interpretation, that means a set of ideas. Yeah. My actually problem with the MAGA Republicans line from Biden is that he went on in the speech that he made in front of Independence Hall to actually try and define what it meant to be a MAGA Republican who was a threat to the Republic was the kind of language that he was using. And later on in the speech, he actually suggested, well, you know, there are moderate Republicans and the moderate Republicans are people who agree with me on like the inflation reduction act. It's like, well, that, that, that can't be the, the, the dividing line between a MAGA Republican and a moderate, like a moderate Republican, somebody who agrees with you that you got, you got to name me like a Republican who disagrees with you fairly strenuously, but it's not in this group of threats to the Republic. You make that distinction. We can have a fair discussion about whether the idea of election denial, for example, make somebody, you know, a threat to institutions. That's, that's a, that's a conversation that we can have. And then we'll have to discuss how much power they have, you know, what the actual perspective is, delve into it. But, you know, I think that he was being overbroad and sort of labeling all of his political enemies under one rubric. Now, again, in politics, this stuff sort of happens all the time. I'm not going to plead clean hands here, because I'm sure that I've been inexact, but somebody, what would be good in that particular situation is for somebody to sort of read me back the quote and I'll let you know where I've been inaccurate. I'll try to do that. And also you don't shy away from humor and occasional trolling and mockery and all that kind of stuff for the, for the fun, for the chaos, all that kind of stuff. I mean, I try not to do trollery for trollery's sake, but, you know, if the show's not entertaining and not fun, people aren't going to listen. And so, you know, if you can't have fun with politics, the truth about politics is we all take it very seriously because it has some serious ramifications. Politics is veep. It is not house of cards. The general rule of politics is that everyone is a moron unless proven otherwise, that virtually everything is done out of stupidity rather than malice, and that if you actually watch politics as a comedy, you'll have a lot more fun. And so the difficulty for me is I take politics seriously, but also I have the ability to sort of flip the switch and suddenly it all becomes incredibly funny because it really is like, if you just watch it from pure entertainment perspective and you put aside the fact that it affects hundreds of millions of people, then watching, you know, President Trump being president, I mean, he's one of the funniest humans who's ever lived. Watching Kamala Harris be Kamala Harris and talking about how much she loves Venn diagrams or electric buses, I mean, that's funny stuff. So if I can't make fun of that, then my job becomes pretty morose pretty quickly. Yeah, it's funny to figure out what is the perfect balance between seeing the humor and the absurdity of the game of it versus taking it seriously enough because it does affect hundreds of millions of people. It's a weird balance to strike. It's like, I am afraid with the internet that everything becomes a joke. I totally agree with this. I will say this. I try to make less jokes about the ideas and more jokes about the people in the same way that I make jokes about myself. I'm pretty self-effacing in terms of my humor. I would say at least half the jokes on my show are about me. When I'm reading ads for Tommy John and they're talking about their no wedgie guarantee, I'll say things like, you know, that would help me in high school because it would have. I mean, just factually speaking. So if I can speak that way about myself, I feel like everybody else can take it as well. Difficult question. In 2017, there was a mosque shooting in Quebec City. Six people died, five others seriously injured. The 27-year-old gunman consumed a lot of content online and checked Twitter accounts a lot of a lot of people. But one of the people he checked quite a lot of is you. 93 times in the month leading up to the shooting. If you could talk to that young man, what would you tell him? And maybe other young men listening to this that have hate in their heart in that same way. What would you tell him? You're getting it wrong. If anything that I or anyone else in mainstream politics says drives you to violence, you're getting it wrong. You're getting it wrong. Now, again, when it comes to stuff like this, I have a hard and fast rule that I've applied evenly across the spectrum, and that is I never blame people's politics for other people committing acts of violence unless they're actively advocating violence. So when a fan of Bernie Sanders shoots up a congressional baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders's fault. I may not like his rhetoric. I may disagree with him on everything. Bernie Sanders did not tell somebody to go shoot up a congressional baseball game. When a non-political person goes to a baseball game, that is not Bernie Sanders's fault. When a nutcase in San Francisco goes and hits Paul Pelosi with a hammer, I'm not going to blame Kevin McCarthy, the House Speaker, for that. When somebody threatens Brett Kavanaugh, I'm not going to suggest that that was Joe Biden's fault because it's not Joe Biden's fault. I mean, we can play this game all day long, and I find that the people who are most intensely focused on playing this game are people who tend to oppose the politics of the person as a whole. I don't think that this is driven somebody into the arms of the god of violence, but I have 4.7 million Twitter followers. I have 8 million Facebook followers. I have 5 million YouTube followers. I would imagine that some of them are people who are violent. I would imagine that some of them are people who do evil things or want to do evil things, and I wish that there were a wand that we could wave that would prevent those people from deliberately or call the violence. It's just a negative byproduct of the fact that you can reach a lot of people. If somebody could point me to the comment that I suppose, quote unquote, drove somebody to go and literally murder human beings, then I would appreciate it so I could talk about the comment, but I don't, mainly because I just think that if we remove agency from individuals and if we blame broad scale political rhetoric for every act of violence, we're not going to, the people who are going to pay the price are actually the general population because free speech will go away. If the idea is that things that we say could drive somebody who is unbalanced to go do something evil, the necessary byproduct is hate, is that speech is a form of hate, hate is a form of violence, speech is a form of violence, speech needs to be curbed, and that to me is deeply disturbing. So definitely he, that man, that 27 year old man is the only one responsible for the evil he did, but what if he and others like him are not nutcases? What if they're people with pain, with anger in their heart? What would you say to them? You are exceptionally influential and other people like you that speak passionately about ideas, what do you think is your opportunity to alleviate the hate in their heart? If we're speaking about people who aren't mentally ill and people who are just misguided, I'd say to him, the thing that I said to every other young man in the country, you need to find meaning and purpose in forming connections that actually matter, in a belief system that actually promotes general prosperity and promotes helping other people. And this is why, you know, the message that I most commonly say to young men is it's time for you to grow up, mature, get a job, get married, have a family, take care of the people around you, become a useful part of your community. I've never at any point in my entire career suggested violence as a resort to political issues. And the whole point of having a political conversation is that it's a conversation. If I didn't think that it was worth trying to convince people, from my point of view, I wouldn't do what I do for a living. So violence doesn't solve anything? No, it doesn't. As if this wasn't already a difficult conversation. Let me ask about Ilhan Omar. You've called out her criticism of Israel policies as anti-Semitic. Is there a difference between criticizing a race of people, like the Jews, and criticizing the policies of a nation, like Israel? Of course. Of course. I criticize the policies of Israel on a fairly regular basis. I would assume from a different angle than Ilhan Omar does. But yeah, I mean, I criticize the policies of a wide variety of states. And to take an example, I mean, I've criticized Israel's policy in giving control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf, which effectively prevents anybody except for Muslims from praying up there. I've also criticized the Israeli government for their COVID crackdown. I mean, you can criticize the policies of any government, but that's not what Ilhan Omar does. Ilhan Omar doesn't actually believe that there should be a state of Israel. She believes that Zionism is racism and that the existence of a Jewish state in Israel is, in and of itself, the great sin. That is a statement she would make about no other people in no other land. She would not say that the French don't deserve a state for the French. She wouldn't say that Somalis wouldn't deserve a state in Somalia. She wouldn't say that Germans don't deserve a state in Germany. She wouldn't say for the 50 plus Islamic states that exist across the world that they don't deserve states of their own. It is only the Jewish state that has fallen under her significant scrutiny. And she also promulgates lies about one specific state in the form of suggesting, for example, that Israel is an apartheid state, which it is most eminently not, considering that the last unity government in Israel included an Arab party, that there are Arabs who sit on the Israeli Supreme Court, and all the rest. And then beyond that, obviously, she's engaged in some of the same sort of anti-Semitic tropes that you heard from Ye, right? The stuff about, it's all about the Benjamins, that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins. And she's had to be chided by members of her own party about this sort of stuff before. Can you empathize with the plight of Palestinian people? Absolutely. I mean, some of the uglier things that I've ever said in my career are things that I said very early on, when I was 17, 18, 19, I started writing a syndicated comment, I was 17, I'm now 38. So virtually all the dumb things, I say virtually all, many of the dumb things, the plurality of the dumb things that I've said came from the ages of I'd say 17 to maybe 23. And they are rooted, again, in sloppy thinking, I feel terrible for people who have lived under the thumb and currently live under the thumb of Hamas, which is a national terrorist group, or the Palestinian Authority, which is a corrupt oligarchy that steals money from its people and leaves them in misery, or Islamic Jihad, which is an actual terrorist group. And the basic rule for the region, in my view, is if these groups were willing to make peace with Israel, they would have a state literally tomorrow. And if they are not, then there will be no peace. And it really is that simple. If Israel, the formula that's typically used has become a bit of a bumper sticker, but it happens to be factually correct. If the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there'd be a state. If the Israelis put down their guns, there'd be no Israel. You get attacked a lot on the internet. Oh, yeah. You noticed. I got to ask you about your own psychology. How do you not let that break you mentally? And how do you avoid letting that lead to a resentment of the groups that attack you? I mean, it's so there are a few sort of practical things that I've done. So for example, I would say that four years ago, Twitter was all consuming. Twitter is an ego machine, especially the notifications button, right? The notifications button is just people talking about you all the time. And the normal human tendency is, wow, people talking about me, I got to see what they're saying about me, which is a recipe for insanity. So my wife actually said, Twitter is making your life miserable, you need to take it off your phone. So Twitter is not on my phone. If I want to log on to Twitter, I have to go on to my computer, I have to make the conscious decision to go on to Twitter, and then take a look at what's going on. I could just imagine you like there's a computer in the basement, you descend into the check Twitter, that's pretty much if you look at when I actually tweet, it's generally like in the run up to recording my show, or when I'm prepping for my show later in the afternoon. For example, that doesn't affect you negatively mentally, like put you in a bad mental space, not particularly if it's restricted to sort of what what's being watched. Now, I will say that I think the most important thing is you have to surround yourself with a group of people who are who you trust enough to make serious critiques of you when you're doing something wrong. But also, you know that they have your best interests at heart, because the internet is filled with people who don't have your best interests at heart and who hate your guts. And so you can't really take those critiques seriously, or it does wreck you. And the world is also filled with sycophants, right, then the more successful you become, there are a lot of people who will tell you you're always doing the right thing. I'm very lucky I got married when I was 24. My wife was 20. So she's known me long before I was famous or wealthy or anything. And so she's a good sounding board. I have a family that's willing to that's willing to call me out on my bullshit as you talked to to yay about, I have friends who are able to do that. I try to have open lines of communications with people who I believe have my best interests at heart. But one of the sort of conditions of being friends is that when you see me do something wrong, I'd like for you to let me know that so I can correct it. I don't want to leave bad impressions out there. The sad thing about the internet, just looking at the critiques you get. I see very few critiques from people that actually want you to succeed, grow. I mean, they're very, they're not sophisticated. They're just there. I don't know, they're cruel. The critiques are just there. It's not an actual critiques. It's just cruelty. And that's that's most of Twitter. I mean, as Twitter is a place to smack and be smacked. I mean, that's the anybody who uses Twitter for a for an intellectual conversation, I think is engaging in category error. I use it to spread love. I think it's a you're the only one. It's you. It's you and no one else, my friend. All right. Well, on that topic, what do you think about Elon buying Twitter? What do you like? What are you hopeful on that front? What would you like to see Twitter improve? So I'm very hopeful about Elon buying Twitter. I mean, I think that Elon is significantly more transparent than what has taken place up till now. He seems committed to the idea that he's going to broaden the Overton window to allow for conversations that simply were banned before everything ranging from efficacy of masks with regard to COVID, to whether men can become women, and all the rest. A lot of things that would get you banned on Twitter before without any sort of real explanation. It seems like he's dedicated to at least explaining what the standards are going to be and being broader in allowing a variety of perspectives on the outlet, which I think is wonderful. I think that's also why people are freaking out. I think the kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth and wearing of sackcloth and ash by so many members of the legacy media. I think a lot of that is because Twitter essentially was an oligarchy in which certain perspectives were allowed and certain perspectives just were not. And that was part of a broader social media reimposed oligarchy in the aftermath of 2017. So in order for just to really understand, I think what it means for Elon to take over Twitter, I think that we have to take a look at sort of the history of media in the United States in two minutes or less. The United States, the media for most of its existence up until about 1990, at least from about 1930s until the 1990s, virtually all media was three major television networks, a couple of major newspapers and the wire services. Everybody had a local newspaper, the wire services that basically did all the foreign policy and all the national policy, McClatchy, Reuters, AP, AFP, et cetera. So that monopoly or oligopoly existed until the rise of the internet. There were sort of pokes at it and talk radio and Fox News, but there certainly was not this plethora of sources. Then the internet explodes and all of a sudden you can get news everywhere. The way that people are accessing that news is you're, I believe, significantly younger than I am, but we used to do this thing called bookmarking, where you would bookmark a series of websites and then you would visit them every morning. Then social media came up. Is this on AOL? Yeah, exactly. You had the dial up and it was actually a can connected to a string and you would actually just go, ee, ee. Then there came a point where social media arose and social media was sort of a boon for everybody because you no longer had to bookmark anything. You just followed your favorite accounts and all of them would pop up and you'd follow everything on Facebook and it would all pop up and it was all centralized. For a while, everybody was super happy because this was the brand new wave of the future. It made everything super easy. Suddenly, outlets like mine were able to see new eyeballs because it was all centralized in one place. You didn't have to do it through Google optimization. You could now just put it on Facebook and so many eyeballs were on Facebook, you'd get more traffic. Everybody seemed pretty happy with this arrangement until precisely the moment Donald Trump became president. At that point, then the sort of pre-existing supposition of a lot of the powers that be, which was Democrats are going to continue winning from here on out so we can sort of use the social media platforms as ways to push our information and still allow for there to be other information out there. The immediate response was we need to reestablish this siphoning of information. It was misinformation and disinformation that won Donald Trump the election. We need to pressure the social media companies to start cracking down on misinformation and disinformation. And actually see this in the historical record. I mean, you can see how Jack Dorsey's talk about free speech shifted from about 2015 to about 2018. You can see Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Georgetown in 2018 in which he talked about free speech and its value. And by 2019, he was going in front of Congress talking about how he was responsible for the stuff that was on Facebook, which is not true. He's not responsible for the stuff on Facebook, right? It's a platform. Is AT&T responsible for the stuff you say on your phone? The answer is typically no. So when that happened, all of these, because all the eyeballs had now been centralized in these social media sites, they were able to suddenly control what you could see and what you could not see. And the most obvious example was obviously leading up to 2020, the election, that the killing of the Hunter Biden story is a great example of this. And so Elon coming in and taking over one of the social media services and saying, I'm not playing by your rules, right? There's not going to be this sort of group of people in the halls of power who are going to decide what we can see and hear. Instead, I'm going to let a thousand flowers bloom. There'll be limits, but it's going to be on more case by case basis. We're going to allow perspectives that are mainstream, but maybe not mainstream in the halls of academia or in the halls of media. Let those, let those be said. I think it's a really good thing. Now that comes with, you know, some responsibilities on Elon's personal part, which would be, you know, to be, for example, I think more responsible in dissemination of information himself sometimes, right? Like he got himself in trouble the other day for tweeting out that, that story about Paul Pelosi that, that was speculative and, and untrue. And I think, I don't think what he did is, you know, horrific. He deleted it when he found out that it was false, but, and that's actually a free speech working, right? He said something wrong, people ripped into him. He, he realized he was wrong. He's deleted it, which seems to me a better solution than preemptively banning content, which only raises more questions than it, than it actually stops. With that said, as the face of, of responsible free speech, you know, and, and that's sort of what he's pitching at Twitter. He, I think should, should enact that himself and be a little more careful in the stuff that he tweets out. Well, that's a tricky balance. The reason a lot of people are freaking out is because one, he's putting his thumb on the scale by saying he is more likely to vote Republican. He's showing himself to be center right. And so just having a political opinion versus being this amorphous thing that doesn't have a political opinion. I think if, if I were to guess, I haven't talked to him about it, but if I were to guess he's sending a kind of signal that's important for the Twitter, the company itself, because if we're being honest, most of the employees are left leaning. So you have to kind of send a signal that like a resisting mechanism to say like, since most of the employees are left, it's, it's good for, for Elon to be more right, to balance out the way the actual engineering is done to say, we're not going to do any kind of activism, activism inside the engineering. If, if I were to guess that's kind of the effective of aspect of that, of that mechanism. And the other one by posting the Pelosi thing is probably to expand the Overton window, like saying we can play, we could post stuff, we could post conspiracy theories, and then through discourse, figure out what is and isn't true. Yeah. Again, like I say, I mean, I think that the, that is a better mechanism in action than what it was before. I just think it gave people who hate his guts the opening to kind of slap him for for no reason. But I can see the strategy of it for sure. And I think that the, you know, the general idea that he's, you know, kind of pushing right where the company had pushed left before, I think that there there is actually unilateral polarization right now in politics, at least with regard to social media, in which one side basically says the solution to disinformation is to shut down free speech from the other side. And the other side is basically like people like me are saying, the solution to disinformation is to let 1000 like I'd rather have people on the left, also being able to put out stuff that I disagree with, then for there to be anybody who's sort of in charge of these social media platforms and using them as editorial sites. I mean, they're plenty. I'm not criticizing MSNBC for not putting on right wing opinions. I mean, that's fine. I run a conservative side. And, you know, we're not going to put up left wing opinions on a wide variety of issues, because we are a conservative site. But if you pitch yourself as a platform, that's a that's a different thing. If you pitch yourself as the town square, as as Elon likes to call it, then I think Elon has a better idea of that than than many of the former employees did, especially now that we have that report from the intercept suggesting that there are people from Twitter working with DHS to to monitor quote unquote disinformation and being rather vague about what disinformation meant. Yeah, I don't think activism has a place in what is fundamentally an engineering company that's building a platform. Like the people inside the company should not be putting a thumb on the scale of what is and isn't allowed. You should create a mechanism for the for the people to decide what is and isn't allowed. Do you think Trump should have been removed from Twitter? Should his account be restored? His account should be restored. And this is coming from somebody who really dislikes an enormous number of Donald Trump's tweets. Again, he's a very important political personage. Even if he weren't, I don't think that he should be banned from from Twitter or Facebook in coordinated fashion. By the way, I hold that opinion about people who I think are far worse than than Donald Trump. Right people. I everyone knows I'm not an Alex Jones guy. I don't like Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones. Oh, I think Alex should be back on Twitter. I do actually, because I think that there are plenty of people who are willing to say that what he's saying is wrong. And I'm not a big fan of this idea that that because people I disagree with, and people who have personally targeted me, by the way, I mean, Alex Jones has been has said some some things about me personally that I'm not real fond of. You guys know, we're not besties. Now it turns out, yeah. You know, all I've said is I don't really enjoy a show. He said some other stuff about the Antichrist and such. But that's it. That's a bit of a different thing, I suppose. You know, even so, yeah, I'm just not a big fan of this idea. Like I've defended people who have really gone after me on a personal level have targeted me that the town square is online. banning people from the town square is unpersoning them. Unless you violated a criminal statute, you should not be unpersoned in American society. As a general rule. That doesn't mean that companies that are not platforms don't have the ability to respond to you. I think Adidas is right to terminate his contract with Kanye, for example, with the egg. You know, that's but Twitter ain't Adidas. So the way your stance on free speech to the degree it's possible to achieve on a platform like Twitter is you fight bad speech with more speech with better speech. And that's so if Alex Jones and Trump is allowed back on in the coming months and years leading up to the 2024 election, you think that's going to make for a better world in the long term? I think that on the principle that people should be allowed to do this and the alternative being a group of thought bosses telling us what we can and cannot see. Yes. So I think in the short term, it's going to mean a lot of things that I don't like very much. Sure. I mean, that's them's the them's the cost of doing business, you know, like, I think that one of the one of the cost of freedom is people doing things that I don't particularly like. And I would prefer the freedom with with all the with all the stuff I don't like then the not the freedom. Let me linger on the love a little bit. You and a lot of people are pretty snarky on Twitter, sometimes to the point of mockery derision, even a bit of, if I were to say bad faith in the kind of mockery and you see it as a war like I disagree with both you and Elon on this. Elon sees Twitter as a war zone, or at least I saw it that way in the past. Have you ever considered being nicer on Twitter? Like, as a voice that a lot of people look up to that if if Ben Shapiro becomes a little bit more about love, that's going to inspire a lot of people? Or no, is it just too fun for you? The answer is yes. Sure. It's occurred to me like, let's put it this way. There are a lot of tweets that actually don't go out that I delete. I will say that Twitter is Twitter's new function that that 32nd function is is a friend of mine. Every so often I'll tweet something and I'll think about it a second time. Like do I need to say this? Probably not. Can you make a book published after you pass away of all the tweets that you didn't send? Oh no, my kids are still going to be around. So that's, you know, the legacy. But yeah, I mean, sure. The answer is yes. And this is a good piece of what we would call in orthodox Judaism, Musser. This is like he's giving a Musser schmooze right now. This is like the kind of help you a better person stuff. I agree with you. I agree with you. And and yeah, I mean, I will say that Twitter is sometimes too much fun. I try to be and I try to be at least if not even handed than equal opportunity in my derision. I remember that during the 2016 primaries, I used to post rather snarky tweets about virtually all of the candidates, Republican and Democrat. And every so often, I'll still do some of that. I do think actually the amount of snark on my Twitter feed has gone down fairly significantly. I think if you go back a couple of years, it was probably a little more snarky. Today, I'm trying to use it a little bit more in terms of strategy to get out information. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to make jokes about, for example, you know, Joe Biden, I will make jokes about Joe Biden. He's the President of the United States, nobody else will mock him. So the entire comedic establishment has decided they actually work for him. So the President of the United States, no matter who they are, get the snark. Yes, yes. And President Trump, I think, is fairly aware that he got the snark from me as well. Like this, when it comes to snarking the President, I'm not going to stop that. I think the President deserves to be snarked. So you're not afraid of attacking Trump? No, I mean, I've done it before. Can you say what your favorite and least favorite things are about President Trump and President Biden, one at a time? So maybe one thing that you can say super positive about Trump, and one thing super negative about Trump. Okay, so the super positive thing about Trump is that because he has no preconceived views that are establishmentarian, he's sometimes willing to go out of the box and do things that haven't been tried before. And sometimes that works. I mean, the best example being the entire foreign policy establishment telling him that he couldn't get a Middle Eastern deal done unless he centered the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And instead, he just went right around that and ended up cutting a bunch of peace deals in the Middle East, or moving the embassy in Jerusalem, right? Sometimes he does stuff, and it's really out of the box, and it actually works. And that's kind of awesome in politics and neat to see. The downside of Trump is that he has no capacity to use any sort of... There's no filter between brain and mouth. Whatever happens in his brain is the thing that comes out of his mouth. I know a lot of people find that charming and wonderful, and it is very funny. But I don't think that it is a particularly excellent personal quality in a person who has as much responsibility as President Trump has. I think he says a lot of damaging and bad things on Twitter. I think that he seems consumed in some ways by his own grievances, which is why I've seen him focusing in on election 2020 so much. And I think that that is very negative about President Trump. So I'm very grateful to President Trump as a conservative for many of the things that he did. I think that a lot of his personality issues are pretty severe. What about Joe Biden? So I think that the thing that I like most about Joe Biden... Yes. I will say that Biden... Two things. One, Biden seems to be a very good father, by all available evidence, right? There are a lot of people who are put out, you know, kind of tape of him talking to Hunter, and Hunter's having trouble with drugs or whatever. And I keep listening to that tape and thinking, he seems like a really good dad. Like the stuff that he's saying to his son is stuff that God forbid, if that were happening with my kid, I'd be saying to my kid. And so, you know, you can't help but feel for the guy. He's had an incredibly difficult go of it with his first wife and the death of members of his family. And then Bo dying. I mean, like that kind of stuff, obviously, is deeply sympathetic. And his is, you know, he seems like a deeply sympathetic father. As far as his politics, he seems like a slap on the back, you know, kind of guy. And I don't mind that. I think that's that's nice. So far as it goes, it's sort of an old school politics where things are done with handshake and personal relationships. The thing I don't like about him is I think sometimes that's really not genuine. I think that sometimes, you know, I think that's his personal tendency. But I think sometimes he allows the prevailing winds of his party to carry him to incredibly radical places. And then he just doubles down on the radicalism in some pretty disingenuous ways. And there I would cite the Independence Day speech or the Independence Hall speech, which I thought was truly one of the worst speeches I've seen a president give. So you don't think he's trying to be a unifier in general? Not at all. I mean, that's what he was elected to do. He was elected to do two things, not be alive and be a unifier. Those were the two things. And when I say not be alive, I don't mean like physically dead. This is where the snark comes in. But what I do mean, is that he is, he was elected to not be particularly activist. Basically, the mandate was don't be Trump, be sane, don't be Trump, calm everything down. And instead he got in, he's like, what if we spend $7 trillion? What if we, what if we pull out of Afghanistan without any sort of plan? What if I start labeling all of my political enemies, enemies of the republic? What if I start bringing Dylan Mulvaney to the White House and talking about how it is a moral sin to prevent the general mutilation of minors? I mean, like, this kind of stuff is very radical stuff. And this is not a president who has pursued a unifying agenda, which is why his approval rating sank from 60% when he entered office to low 40s or high 30s today. Unlike President Trump, who never had a high approval rating, right? Trump came into office, and he had like a 45% approval rating. And when he left office, he had about a 43% approval rating. It bounced around between 45 and 37, pretty much his entire presidency. Biden went from being a very popular guy coming in to a very unpopular guy right now. And if you're Joe Biden, you should be looking in the mirror and wondering exactly why. Do you think that pulling out from Afghanistan could be flipped as a pro for Biden in terms of he actually did it? I think it's gonna be almost impossible. I think the American people are incredibly inconsistent about their own views on foreign policy. In other words, we like to be isolationist until it comes time for us to be defeated and humiliated. When that happens, we tend not to like it very much. You mentioned Biden being a good father. Can you make the case for and against the Hunter Biden laptop story for it being a big deal and against it being a big deal? Sure. So the case for being a big deal is basically twofold. One is that it is clearly relevant if the president's son is running around to foreign countries picking up bags of cash because his last name is Biden, while his father is vice president of the United States. And it raises questions as to influence peddling for either the vice president or the former vice president using political connections. Did he make any money? Who was the big guy? Right? All these open questions that obviously implicates the questions to be asked. And then the secondary reason that the story is big is actually because the reaction of the story, the banning of the story is in and of itself a major story. If there's any story that implicates a presidential candidate in the last month of an election and there is a media blackout, including a social media blackout, that obviously raises some very serious questions about informational flow and dissemination in the United States. So no matter how big of a deal the story is, it is a big deal that there's a censorship of any relevant story. When there's a coordinated collusive blackout, yeah, that's a serious and major problem. So those are the two reasons why it would be a big story. The two reasons, a reason why it would not be a big story perhaps is if it turns out, and we don't really know this yet, but let's say that Hunter Biden was basically off on his own doing what he was doing, being a derelict or a drug addict or acting badly, and his dad had nothing to do with it and Joe was telling the truth. But the problem is we never actually got those questions answered. So if it had turned out to be a nothing of a story, the nice thing about stories that turn out to be nothing is that after they turn out to be nothing, they're nothing. The biggest problem with this story is that it wasn't allowed to take the normal life cycle of a story, which is original story breaks, follow on questions are asked, follow on questions are answered. Story is either now a big story or it's nothing. When the life cycle of a story is cut off right at the very beginning, right when it's born, then that allows you to speculate in any direction you want. You can speculate, it means nothing. It's nonsense. It's a Russian laptop. It's disinformation. Or on the other hand, this means that Joe Biden was personally calling Hunter and telling him to pick up a sack of cash over in Beijing. And then he became president and he's influence peddling. So this is why it's important to allow these stories to go forward. So this is why actually the bigger story for the moment is not the laptop. It's the reaction to the laptop because it cut off that life cycle of the story. And then, you know, at some point, I would assume that there will be some follow on questions that are actually answered in the House is pledging if it goes Republican to investigate all of this. Again, I wouldn't be supremely surprised if it turns out that that there was no direct involvement of Joe in this sort of stuff, because it turns out, as I said before, that all of politics is veep. And this is always the story with half the scandals that you see is that everybody assumes that there's some sort of deep and abiding clever plan that some politician is implementing it. And then you look at it and it turns out, no, it's just something dumb, right? This is sort of perfect example of this, you know, President Trump with the classified documents in Mar-a-Lago. So people on the left, like it's probably nuclear codes, probably he's taking secret documents and selling them to the Russians or the Chinese. And the real, most obvious explanation is Trump looked at the papers, and he said, I like these papers, and then he just decided to keep them. Right. And then people came to him and said, Mr. President, you're not allowed to keep those papers. He said, who are those people? I don't care about what they have to say. I'm putting them in the other room in a box. It is highly likely that that is what happened. And it's very disappointing to people, I think, when they realize it, the human brain, I mean, you know this better than I do, but the human brain is built to find patterns, right? It's what we like to do. We like to find plans and patterns, because this is how we survived in the wild is you found a plan, you found a pattern, you crack the code of the universe. When it comes to politics, the conspiracy theories that we see so often, it's largely because we're seeing inexplicable events. Unless you just assume everyone's a moron. If you assume that there's a lot of stupidity going on, everything becomes quickly explicable. If you assume that, that there must be some rationale behind it, you have to come up with increasingly convoluted conspiracy theories to explain just why people are acting the way that they're acting. And I find that I don't say 100% of the time, but 90, 94% of the time, the the conspiracy theory turns out just to be people being dumb, and then other people reacting in dumb ways to the original people being dumb. But it's also, to me in that same way, very possible, very likely that the Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden getting money in Ukraine, I guess, for consulting all that kind of stuff, is a nothing burger. He's qualified, he's getting money as he should. There's a lot of influence peddling in general in terms that's not corrupt. I think the most obvious explanation there probably is that he was fake influence peddling, meaning he went to Ukraine and he's like, guess what, my dad's Joe. And they're like, well, you don't have any qualifications in oil and natural gas, and you don't really have a great resume, but your dad is Joe. And then that was kind of the end of it. They gave him a bag of cash, hoping he would do something, he never did anything. I think you're making it sound worse than it is. I think that in general, consulting is done in that way. Your name, it's not like you're- I agree with you. You're not, it's not like he is some rare case, and this is an illustration of corruption. If you can criticize consulting, which I would- That's fair. Which they're basically not providing. You look at a resume and who's who, like if you went to Harvard, I can criticize the same thing. If you have Harvard on your resume, you're more likely to be hired as a consultant. Maybe there's a network there of people that you know, and you hire them in that same way. If your last name is Biden, if your last, there's a lot of last names that sound pretty good at it, right? For sure, for sure. And so, and it's not like- And Hunter Biden admitted that much, by the way, right? In an open interview, he was like, if your last name weren't Biden, wouldn't you have got that job? And he's like, probably not. And you're right. That's an honest- I agree with you. It's not like he's getting a ridiculous amount of money. He was getting like a pretty standard consulting kind of money, which also would criticize because they get a ridiculous amount of money. But I, sort of even to push back on the life cycle or to steel man the side that was concerned about the Hunter Biden laptop story, I don't know if there is a natural life cycle of a story, because there's something about the virality of the internet that we can't predict that a story can just take hold and the conspiracy around it builds, especially around politics, where the interpretation, some popular, sexy interpretation of a story that might not be connected to reality at all will become viral. And that from Facebook's perspective is probably what they're worried about is a organized misinformation campaign that makes up a sexy story or sexy interpretation of the vague story that we have. And that has an influence on the populace. I mean, I think that's true, but I think the question becomes who's the great adjudicator there, right? Who adjudicates when the story ought to be allowed to go through even a bad life cycle or allowed to go viral as opposed to not. Now, it's one thing if you want to say, okay, we can spot the Russian accounts that are actually promoting this stuff. They belong to the Russian government. Got to shut that down. I think everybody agrees. This is actually one of the slides that's happened linguistically that I really object to is the slide between disinformation and misinformation. You notice there is this evolution. And in 2017, there's a lot of talk about disinformation. It was Russian disinformation. The Russians were putting out deliberately false information in order to skew election results was the accusation. And then people started using disinformation or misinformation. And misinformation is either mistaken information or information that is quote unquote, out of context, that becomes very subjective very quickly as to what out of context means. And it doesn't necessarily have to be from a foreign source. It can be from a domestic source, right? It could be somebody misinterpreting something here. It could be somebody interpreting something correctly, but PolitiFact thinks that it's out of context. And that sort of stuff gets very murky very quickly. And so I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea that Facebook I mean, Zuckerberg was was on with Rogan and talking about how, you know, the FBI had basically set lookout for Russian interference in the election. And then all of these people were out there saying that the laptop was Russian disinformation. So he basically shut it down. You know, that that sort of stuff is frightening, especially because it wasn't Russian disinformation. I mean, the laptop was real. And so the the fact that you have people who seem to let's put this way, it seems as though maybe this is wrong. It seems as though when a story gets killed preemptively like this, it is almost universally a story that negatively affects one side of the political aisle. I can't remember the last time there's a story on the right that was disinformation or misinformation, where social media stepped in and they went, we cannot have this, this cannot be distributed, we're going to all colludes that this this information is not distributed. Maybe in response to the story being proved false, it gets taken down. But the what made the Hunter Biden thing so amazing is that it wasn't really even a response to anything. It was like the story got posted, there were no actual doubts expressed. As to the verified falsity of the story, it was just supposition that it had to be false, and everybody jumped in. So I think that confirmed a lot of the conspiracy theories people had about about social media and how it works. Yeah, so if the reason you want to slow down the viral spread of a thing is at all grounded in partisanship, that's a problem. Like you should be very honest with yourself and ask yourself that question. Is it because I'm on the left or on the right that I want to slow this down? Versus is it hate, bipartisan hate speech? Right, so that's, it's really tricky. But like you, I'm very uncomfortable in general with any kind of slowing down with any kind of censorship. But if there's something like a conspiracy theory that spreads hate, that becomes viral, I still lean to let that conspiracy theory spread. Because the alternative is dangerous, more dangerous. It's sort of like the ring of power, right? Like everybody wants the ring, because with the ring, you can stop the bad guys from going forward. But it turns out that the ring gives you enormous power, and that power can be used in the wrong ways, too. You had the Daily Wire, which I'm a member of. I appreciate that. Thank you. I recommend everybody sign up to it should be part of your regular diet, whether you're on the left and the right, the far left or the far right, everybody should be part of your regular diet. Okay, that said, do you worry about the audience capture aspect of it? Because it is a platform for conservatives. And you have a powerful voice on there. There, it might be difficult for you to go against the talking points or against the stream of ideas that is usually connected to conservative thought. Do you worry about that? I mean, the audience would obviously be upset with me and would have a right to be upset with me if I suddenly flipped all my positions on a dime. I have enough faith in my audience that I can say things that I think are true and that may disagree with the audience, you know, on a fairly regular basis, I would say. But they understand that on the deeper principle, we're on the same side of the at least I hope that much from the audience. It's also why we provide a number of different views on the platform, as many of which I disagree with, but are sort of within the generalized range of conservative thought. It's something I do have to think about every day, though. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about like, am I saying this because I'm afraid of taking off my audience? Or am I saying this because I actually believe this? And, you know, that's a delicate dance a little bit. You have to be sort of honest with yourself. Yeah, somebody like Sam Harris is pretty good at this, at fighting, at saying the most outrageous thing that he knows, he almost leans into it. He knows will piss off a lot of his audience. Sometimes you almost have to test the system. It's like if you feel you almost exaggerate your feelings, just to make sure to send a signal to the audience that you're not captured by them. So speaking of people you disagree with, what is your favorite thing about Candace Owens? And what is one thing you disagree with her on? Well, my favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. My least favorite thing about Candace is that she will say things that nobody else will say. I mean, listen, she says things that are audacious and I think need to be said sometimes. Sometimes I think that she is morally wrong. I think the way she responded to Kanye, I've said this clearly, was dead wrong and morally wrong. What was her response? Her original response was that she proffered confusion of what Ye was actually talking about. And then she was defending her friend. I wish that the way that she had responded was by saying, he's my friend. And also he said something bad and anti-Semitic. I wish that she had said that. Right away. Right away. Yeah. I think you can also, this is the interesting human thing. You can be friends with people that you disagree with and you can be friends with people that actually say hateful stuff. And one of the ways to help alleviate hate is being friends with people that say hateful things. Yeah. And then calling them out on a personal level when they do say wrong or hateful things. Yeah. From a place of love and respect and privately. Privately is also a big thing, right? I mean, like the public demand for denunciation from friends to friends is difficult. And I certainly have compassion for Candace given the fact that she's so close with Ye. Yeah. It breaks my heart sometimes the public fights between friends and broken friendships. I've seen quite a few friendships publicly break over COVID. COVID made people behave their worst in many cases, which yeah, it breaks my heart a little bit. Because like the human connection is a prerequisite for effective debate and discussion and battles over ideas. Has there been any argument from the opposite political aisle that has made you change your mind about something? If you look back? So I will say that the... I'm thinking it through because I think that my views probably on foreign policy have morphed somewhat. I would say that I was much more interventionist when I was younger. I'm significantly less interventionist now. I'd probably put myself... Can you give an example? Sure. I was a big backer of the Iraq war. I think now in retrospect, I might not be a backer of the Iraq war if the same situation arose again, based on the amount of evidence that had been presented or based on the sort of willingness of the American public to go it. If you're going to get involved in a war, you have to know what the end point looks like. And you have to know what the American people really are willing to bear. And the American people are not willing to bear open ended occupations. And so knowing that you have to consider that going in. So on foreign policy, I've become a lot more of a... It's almost Henry Kissinger realist in some ways. And when it comes to social policy, I would say that I'm fairly strong where I was. I may have become slightly convinced actually by more of the conservative side of the aisle on things like drug legalization. I think when I was younger, I was much more pro drug legalization than I am now, at least on the local level. On a federal level, I think the federal government can't really do much other than close the borders with regard to fentanyl trafficking, for example. But when it comes to how drugs run local communities, you can see how drugs run local communities pretty easily. LUIS It's just weird because I saw you smoke a joint right before this conversation. JONAH It's my biggest thing. I mean, I try to keep that secret. LUIS All right. Well, that's interesting about intervention. Can you comment about the war in Ukraine? So for me, it's a deeply personal thing. But I think you're able to look at it from a geopolitics perspective. What is the role of the United States in this conflict before the conflict, during the conflict, and right now in helping achieve peace? JONAH I think before the conflict, the big problem is that the West took almost the worst possible view, which was encourage Ukraine to keep trying to join NATO and the EU, but don't let them in. And so what that does is it achieves the purpose of getting Russia really, really, really ticked off and feeling threatened, but also does not give any of the protections of NATO or the EU to Ukraine. I mean, Zelensky is on film when he was a comedy actor making that exact joke, right? He has Merkel on the other line, and she's like, Oh, welcome to the welcome to NATO. And he's like, great. She's like, Wait, is this Ukraine on the line? And oops. But so you know, that that sort of policy is sort of nonsensical. If you're going to offer alliance to somebody, offer alliance to them. And if you're going to guarantee their security, guarantee their security, guarantee their security. And the West failed signally to do that. So that was mistakes in the run up to the war. Once the war began, then the responsibility of the West began and became to give Ukraine as much material as is necessary to repel the invasion. And the West did really well with that. I think we were late on the ball in the United States, it seemed like Europe led the way a little bit more than the United States did there. But in terms of effectuating American interests in the in the region, which being an American is what I'm chiefly concerned about. And the the American interests were several fold. One is preserve borders to is degrade the Russian aggressive military because Russia's military has been aggressive. And they are geopolitical rival of the United States. Three recalibrate the European balance with China, Europe was sort of balancing with Russia and China. And then because of the war, they sort of re balanced away from China and Russia, which is real geostrategic opportunity for the United States. It seemed like most of those goals have already been achieved at this point for the United States. And so then the question becomes, what's the off ramp here? And what is the thing you're trying to prevent? So what's the best opportunity? What's the what's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario? And then what's realistic? So best case scenario is Ukraine forces Russia entirely out of Ukraine, including Lohansk and Crimea, right? That's the best case scenario. Virtually no one thinks that's accomplishable, including the United States, right? The White House has basically said as much as sooqel to imagine, particularly Crimea, the Russians being forced out of out of Crimea, the Ukrainians have been successful in pushing the Russians out of certain parts of Luhansk and Donetsk. But the idea they're going to be able to push the entire Russian army completely back to the Russian borders, that would be at best a very, very long and difficult slog in the middle of a collapsing Ukrainian economy, which is a point that Zelensky has made is like, it's not enough for you guys to give us military aid, we're in the middle of a war, we're gonna need economic aid as well. So it's a pretty open ended and strong commitment can take a small tangent on that. And sure, best case scenario, if that does militarily happen, including Crimea, do you think there's a world in which Vladimir Putin would be able to convince the Russian people that this is this was a good conclusion to the war? Right? So the problem is that the best case scenario might also be the worst case scenario, meaning that there are a couple of scenarios that are sort of the worst case scenario. And this is sort of the puzzlement of the situation. One is that Putin feels so boxed in so unable to go back to his own people and say, we just wasted 10s of 1000s of lives here for no reason that he unleashed a tactical a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. Nobody knows what happens after that. So we put NATO planes in the air to take out Russian assets to Russian start shooting down planes. Does Russia then threatened to escalate even further by attacking an actual NATO civilian center or or even Ukrainian civilian center with nuclear weapons, like where it goes from there, nobody knows because nuclear weapons haven't been used since 1945. So that's, you know, that is a worst case scenario. It's an unpredictable scenario that could devolve into really, really significant problems. The other worst case scenario could be a best case scenario could be a worse we just don't know is Putin falls. What happens after that? Who takes over for Putin? Is that person more moderate than Putin? Is that person a liberalizer? It probably won't be an abomination. If he's going to be ousted, it'll probably somebody who's a top member of Putin's brass right now and has capacity to control the military. Or it's possible the entire regime breaks down, what you end up with is Syria in Russia, right where where you just have an entirely out of control region with no centralizing power, which is also a disaster area. And so in the nature of risk mitigation, in sort of an attempt at risk mitigation, what actually should be happening right now is some off ramp has to be offered to Putin. The off ramp likely is going to be him maintaining Crimea and parts of Luhansk and Donetsk. It's probably gonna be a commitment by Ukraine not to join NATO formally, but a guarantee by the West to defend Ukraine in case of an invasion of its borders again, by Russia, like an actual treaty obligation. Now like the BS treaty obligation and when when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in the 90s. And, and that is likely how this is going to have to go. The problem is that requires political courage, not from not from Zelensky, it requires courage from from probably Biden, because the only is all Zelensky is not in a political position where he can go back to his own people who have made unbelievable sacrifices on behalf of their nation and freedom and say to them, guys, now I'm calling it quits. We're gonna have to give them a hand. So now I can give Putin an off ramp. I don't think that's an acceptable answer to most Ukrainians at this point in time from the polling data, and from the available data we have on the ground. It's going to actually take Biden biting the bullet and being the bad guy and saying to Zelensky, listen, we've made a commitment of material aid, we were offering you all these things, including, essentially, a defense pact, we're offering you all this stuff. But if you don't come to the table, then we're going to have to start weaning you like there will have to be a stick there, it can't should be a carrot. And so that will allow Zelensky if Biden were to do that would allow Zelensky to blame Biden for the solution everybody knows has to happen. So once you can go back to his own people, and he can say, listen, this is the way it has to go. Like, I don't want it to go this way. But it's not my I'm signing other people's checks, right? I mean, like, this is, it's not my money. And Biden would take the hit, because he wouldn't then be able to blame Ukraine for whatever happens next, which has been the easy road off, I think, for a lot of politicians in the West is for them to just say, well, this is up to the Ukrainians to decide, it's up to the Ukrainians to decide, well, is it totally up to the Ukrainians to decide? Because it seems like the West is signing an awful lot of checks, and all of Europe is going to freeze this winter. So this is the importance of great leadership, by the way. That's why the people we elect is very important. Do you think there's power to just one on one conversation, or Biden sits down with Zelensky, and Biden sits down with Putin, almost in person? Because I, maybe I'm romanticizing the notion, but having done these podcasts in person, I think there's something fundamentally different than through a remote call, and also like a distant kind of recorded political type speak versus like man to man. So I'm deeply afraid that Putin outplays people in the one on one scenarios, because he's done it to multiple presidents already. He gets in one on one scenarios with Bush, with Obama, with Trump, with with Biden, and he seems to be a very canny operator and a very sort of hard nosed operator in those situations. I think that if you were going to do something like that, like an actual political face to face summit, what you'd need is for Biden to first have a conversation with Zelensky, where Zelensky knows what's going on. So he's aware. And then Biden walks in and he says to Putin, on camera, here's the offer. Let's get it together. Let's make peace. You get to you get to keep this stuff, and then let Putin respond how Putin is going to respond. But, you know, the big problem for Putin, I think, and the problem with public facing fora, maybe it's a private meeting. If it's a private meeting, maybe that's the best thing. If it's a public facing forum, I think it's a problem because Putin's afraid of being humiliated at this point. If it's a private meeting, then sure, except that, again, I just I wonder whether when it comes to an a person as canny as Putin, and to a politician that I really don't think is a particularly sophisticated player in Joe Biden. And again, this is not unique to Biden, I think that most of our presidents for the for the last 3040 years have not been particularly sophisticated players. I think that that's that's a that's a risky scenario. Yeah, I still believe in the power of that because otherwise, I don't know, I don't think stuff on paper and political speak will solve these kinds of problems. Because from Zelensky's perspective, nothing but complete victory will do right. Right. He's as a nation has people sacrificed way too much. And they're all in. And if you look at I traveled to Ukraine, I spent time there, I'll be going back there, hopefully also going back to Russia, just speaking to Ukrainians. They're all in. They're all in. Yeah, nothing but complete victory. Yep, that's right. And so for that, the only way to achieve peace is through like, honest human to human conversation, giving both people a way to off ramp, to walk away victorious. And some of that requires speaking honestly, as a human being, but also for America to the actually not even America, honestly, just the President, be able to eat their own ego a bit and be the punching bag a little just enough for both presidents to be able to walk away and say, listen, we got the American president to come to us. And I think that makes the president look strong, not weak. I mean, I agree with you. I think it would also require some people on the right people like me, if it's Joe Biden, to say if Biden does that, I see what he's doing. It's the right move. I think one of the things that he's afraid of to steal man him, I think one of the thing he's afraid of is he goes and he makes that sort of deal. And the right says you just coward in front of Russia, you just you just gave away Ukraine, whatever it is. But it's going to require some some people on the right to say that that that move is the right move and then hold by it if Biden actually performs that move. You're exceptionally good at debate. You, you wrote how to debate leftist and destroy them. You're kind of known for this kind of stuff, just exceptionally skilled the conversation and debate and getting to the facts of the matter and using logic to get to the to the conclusion. In the debate, you ever worry that this power talked about the ring with this power you were given has corrupted you and your ability to see what's like to pursue the truth versus just winning debates. I hope not. I mean, so I think one of the things that's kind of funny about the branding versus the reality is that most of the things that get characterized as destroying in debates with facts and logic, most of those things are basically me having a conversation with somebody on a college campus. It actually isn't like a formal debate where we sit there and we critique each other's positions. Or it's not me insulting anybody. A lot of the clips that have gone very viral is me making an argument and then they're not being like an amazing counter argument. Many of the debates that I've held have been extremely cordial. Let's take the latest example like about a year ago, I debated Anna Kasparian from Young Turks is very cordial is very nice, right? Yeah, that's that's sort of the way that I like to debate. My rule when it comes to debate, and or discussion is that my opponent actually gets to pick the mode in which we work. So if it's going to be a debate of ideas, and we're just going to discuss and critique and clarify, then we can do that. If somebody comes loaded for bear, then I will respond in kind. Because one of the big problems, I think in sort of the debate slash discussion sphere is very often misdiagnosis of what exactly is going on people who think that a discussion is a bait and vice versa. And that can be a real problem. And there are people who will, you know, treat what ought to be a discussion as for example, an exercise in performance art. And so what that is, is mugging or trolling or, or saying trolley things in order to just get to the like, that's something I actually don't do during debate. I mean, if you actually watch me talk to people, I don't actually do the trolling thing. The trolling thing is almost solely relegated to Twitter and me making jokes on my show. When it comes to actually debating people, that sounds actually a lot like what we're doing right now. It's just the person maybe taking just an obverse position to mine. And so that's, that's fine. Usually half of the debate or discussion is me just asking for clarification of terms. Like, what exactly do you mean by this? So I can drill down on where the actual disagreement may lie, because some of the time people think they're disagreeing, and they're actually not disagreeing. When I'm when I'm talking with Anna Kasparian, and she's talking about how corporate and government have too much power together. I'm like, well, you sound like a tea party, like you and I are on the same page about that, that sort of stuff does tend to happen a lot in discussion. I think that when when discussion gets termed debate, it's a problem when the debate gets termed discussion, it's it's even more problematic, because debate is a different thing. And I find that your debate and your conversation is often good faith, you're able to steal man the other side, you're able to actually you're actually listening, you're considering the other side, the times when I see that you, you know, Ben Shapiro destroys leftist, it's usually just like you said, the other side is doing the trolling. Because they've, I mean, the people that do criticize you for that interaction is the people that usually get destroyed are like 20 years old. And they're usually not sophisticated in any kind of degree, in terms of being able to use logic and reason and facts and so on. And that's, that's totally fine. By the way, I mean, if people want to criticize me for speaking on college campuses, where a lot of political conversation happens, both right and left, that's fine. I mean, I've had lots of conversations with people on the other side of the aisle, too. I mean, right, I've done podcasts with Sam Harris, and we've talked about atheism, or I've done debates with Anna Kasparian, or I've talked to I've done a debate with Cenk Uygur, or I've, I've had conversations with lots of people on the other side of the aisle. In fact, I believe I'm the only person on the right who recommends that people listen to his shows on the other side of the aisle, right? I mean, I say on my show on a fairly regular basis that people should listen to positive America. Now, no one on positive America will ever say that somebody should listen to my show that is verboten. That is not something that can be had. It's one of the strangenesses of our politics. It's what I've called the happy birthday problem, which is I have a lot of friends who are of the left and are publicly of the left. And on my birthday, they'll send you a text message, happy birthday, but they will never tweet happy birthday, lest they be acknowledging that you were born of woman, and this can't be allowed. So on the Sunday special, I've had a bevy of people who are on the other side of the aisle, a lot of them, ranging from people in Hollywood, like Jason Blum, to Larry Wilmore, to Sam, to just a lot of people on the left. I think we're in the near future probably going to do a Sunday special with Ro Khanna up in California, the California congressperson, very nice guy, I had him on the show. That kind of stuff is fun and interesting. But, you know, I think that the easy way out for a clip that people don't like is to either immediately clip the clip, I'll take a two minute clip and clip it down to 15 seconds where somebody insults me and then that goes viral, which is, you know, welcome to the internet. Or, or to say, well, you're only debating colleges, you're only talking to 20. I mean, I talked to a lot more people than that. That's just not the stuff you're watching. You lost your cool in an interview with BBC's Andrew Neil, and you're really honest about it after which was kind of refreshing and enjoyable. As the internet said, they've never seen anyone lose an interview. So to me, honestly, it was like seeing like Floyd Mayweather Jr. or somebody like knocked down. What was it? Can you take me to that experience? Here's that day, that day is I have a book release, didn't get a lot of sleep the night before. And this is the last interview of the day. And it's an interview with BBC. I don't know anything about BBC. I don't watch BBC. I don't know any of the hosts. So we get on the interview, and it's supposed to be about the book. And the host, Andrew Neil doesn't ask virtually a single question about the book, he just starts reading me battle tweets, which which I hate. I mean, it's annoying, and it's stupid. And it's the worst form of interview. Yeah, when somebody just reads you battle tweets, especially when I've acknowledged battle tweets before. And so I'm going through the list with him. And this interview was solidly 20 minutes. I mean, it was it was a long interview. And we get to and I make a couple of particularly annoyed mistakes in the interview. So annoyed mistake number one is the ego play. Right. So there's a point in the middle of the interview where I say like, I don't even know who you are, which was true. I didn't know he was, but turns out he's a very famous person in in Britain. And so you can't make that ego play. But even if he's not famous, that's not it doesn't matter. It's a dumb thing to do. And it's an ass thing to do. So like the so saying that was was, you know, more just kind of peak and silliness. And so that was that was mistake. I enjoyed watching that. It was like, Oh, that is human. That's somebody enjoyed it. So that there is there's that and then the the other mistake was that I just don't watch enough British TV. So the way that interviews are done, there are much more adversarial than American TV in American TV. If somebody is adversarial with you, you assume that they're a member of the other side. That's typically how it is. And so I'm critiquing some of his questions at the beginning. And I thought that the critique of some of his questions actually fair. He's asking me about abortion. And I thought he was asking it from a way of framing the question that wasn't accurate. And so I assumed that he was on the left because again, I'd never heard of him. And so, you know, I mischaracterized him. And I apologize later for mischaracterizing him. We finally go through the interview. It's 20 minutes, he just keeps going with the battle tweets. And finally, I got up and I took off the microphone, I walked out. And immediately, I knew it was a mistake. Like within 30 seconds of the end of the interview, I knew it was a mistake. And, and that's why even before the interview came out, I believe I corrected the record that Andrew Neil is not on the left, that's a mistake by me. And, and then, you know, took the hit for for a bad interview. And so as far as, you know, what I wish I'd done differently, I wish I'd known who he was, I wish I'd done my research, I wish that I wish that I had treated it as though there was a possibility that was gonna be more adversarial than it was. I think I was incautious about the interview, because it was pitched as it's just another book interview. And it wasn't just another book interview, it was treated much more adversarially than that. So I wish that that's on me, I got to research the people who are talking to me and watch their shows and learn about that. And then obviously, you know, the kind of gut level, appeal to ego or arrogance like that, that's a bad look. And, and shouldn't have done that. And losing your cool is always a bad look. So the fact that that sort of became somewhat viral and stood out just shows that it happens so rarely to you. So just to look at like the day in the life of Ben Shapiro, you speak a lot, very eloquently about difficult topics. What goes into the research, the mental part, and you always look pretty like energetic and you're not exhausted by the burden, the heaviness of the topics you're covering day after day after day after day. So what goes through the preparation for the discussion, mentally, diet wise, anything like that? Like, when do you when do you wake up? Okay, so I wake up when my kids wake me up. Usually that's my baby daughter, who's two and a half. She usually we are on the monitor, usually about 615 620 am. So I get up, my wife sleeps in a little bit, I go get the baby, and then my son gets up. And then my oldest daughter gets up, I have eight, six and two, the boys, the middle child. Is that both a source of stress and happiness? Oh, yeah, it's the height of both, right? I mean, it's the source of the greatest happiness. So the way that I characterize it is this when it comes to sort of kids in life. So when you're single, your boundaries of happiness and unhappiness, you can be a zero in terms of happiness, you can be like a 10 in terms of happiness, then you get married and goes up to like a 20 and a negative 20. Because the happiest stuff is with your wife. And then the most unhappy stuff is when something happens to your spouse, it's the worst thing in the entire world. Then you have kids and all limits are removed. So the best things that have have ever happened to me are things where I'm watching my kids and they're playing together. And they're being wonderful and sweet and cute. And I love them so much. And the worst things are when my son is screaming at me for no reason, because he's being insane. And, and I have to deal with that, right? I mean, like, or something bad happens to my daughter at school or something like that. That stuff is really that. So yes, the source of my greatest happiness, the source of my greatest stress. So they get me up at about 615 in the morning, I feed them breakfast, I'm kind of scrolling the news while I'm making the mags. And, and, you know, just updating myself on anything that may have happened overnight. I go into the office, put on the makeup and the wardrobe or whatever. And then I sit down and do the show. A lot of the prep is actually done the night before, because the news cycle doesn't change all that much between kind of late at night and in the morning. So I can supplement in the morning. So I do the show. So a lot of the preparation, like thinking through what are the big issues in the world is done the night before. Yeah, I mean, and that's reading, you know, pretty much all the legacy media. So I rip on legacy media a lot. But that's because a lot of what they do is really good. And a lot of it is really bad. I cover a lot of legacy media. So that's probably covering, you know, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Daily Mail. And then I'll look over at some of the alternative media, I'll look at my own website, Daily Wire, I'll look at Breitbart, I'll look at The Blaze, I'll look at, I'll look at maybe the Intercept, I'll look at, you know, a bunch of different sources. And then I will look at different clips online. So media comes in handy here, Grabean comes in handy here, that sort of stuff, because my show relies very heavily on being able to play people so you can hear them in their own words. And so that's sort of the media die. So I sit down, I do the show. And then once I'm done with the show, I usually have between now it's like 1115 in the morning, maybe, because sometimes I'll pre record the show. So it's 1115 in the morning, I'll go home. And if my wife's available, I'll grab lunch with her. If not, then I will go and work out. I try to work out like five times a week with a trainer, something like that. And then I will just say, Regular gym stuff? Just started the gym? Yeah, weights and plyometrics and some CrossFit kind of stuff. And yeah, I mean, beneath this, beneath this mild to sterile, I was a hulking monster. And so I'll do that. Then I will do reading and writing. So I'll be I'm usually working on a book at any given time. Or you shut off the rest of the world? Yes. So I put some music in my ears, usually Brahms or Bach, sometimes Beethoven or Mozart, those four. Those are on rotation. No rap? No rap, no rap. Despite my extraordinary rendition of WAP. I'm not in fact a rapper. Do you still hate WAP? The song? It's, I will say I do not think that it is the peak of Western civilized art. I don't think that 100 years from now people will be gluing their faces to a WAP and protest at the environment. But Brahms and the rest will be still around? Yes, I would assume if people still have a functioning prefrontal cortex and any sort of taste. Strong words from Ben Shapiro. All right, so you got some classical music in your ears and you're focusing. Are you at the computer when you're writing? Yeah, I'm at the computer. Usually we have a kind of a room that has some sun coming in. So it's nice in there. Or I'll go up to a library that we just completed for me. So I'll go up there and I'll write and read. Like with physical books? Yeah, I love physical books. Because I keep Sabbath, I don't use Kindle. Because when I'm reading a book and I hit Sabbath, I have to turn off the Kindle. So that means that I have tons and tons and tons of physical books. When you move from Los Angeles to Florida, I had about 7,000 volumes. I had to discard probably 4,000 of them. And then I've built that back up now. So I'm probably gonna have to go through another round where I put them somewhere else. I tend to tab books rather than highlighting them because I can't highlight on Sabbath. So I have like the little stickers and I put them in the book. So a typical book from me, you can see it on the book club, will be like filled with tabs on the side, things that I want to take. Now actually, I got a person who I pay to go through and write down in files, the quotes that I've that I like from the book. So I have those handy. So which is a good way for me to remember what it is that I've read. Because I read probably somewhere between three and five books a week. And then the in a good week five. And then I write, I read, and then I go pick up my kids from school at 3.30. So according to my kids, I have no job. I'm there in the mornings until they leave for school. I pick them up from school. I hang out with them until they go to bed, which is usually 7.30 or so. So I'm helping them with their homework and I'm playing with them and I'm taking them on rides in the brand new Tesla, which my son is obsessed with. And then I put them to bed and then I sit back down. I prep for the next day, go through all those media sources I was talking about, compile kind of a schedule for what I want the show to look like and run a show. It's very detail oriented. Nobody writes anything for me. I write all my own stuff. So every word that comes out of my mouth is my fault. And then, you know, hopefully I have a couple hours to, or an hour to hang out with my wife before we go to bed. The words you write, do you edit a lot? Or does it just come out, you're thinking like, what are the key ideas I want to express? No, I don't tend to edit a lot. So I, thank God I'm able to write extraordinarily quickly. So I write very, very fast. In fact, in a previous life, I was, you also speak fast. So it's similar. Yeah, exactly. And I speak in paragraphs. So it's exactly the same thing. In a previous life, I was a ghost writer. So I used to be sort of known as a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry. There'd be somebody who came to the publisher and says, I have three weeks and to get this book done, I don't have a word done. And they would call me up and be like, this person needs a book written. And so in three weeks, I'd knock out 60,000 words or so. Is there something you can say to the process that you follow to think? Like how you think about ideas, like you, stuff is going on in the world. And trying to understand what is happening, what are the explanations, what are the forces behind this? Do you have a process or just you wait for the muse to give you the interpretation? Well, I mean, I think that I don't think it's a formal process, but because I read, so there's two ways to do it. One is sometimes, you know, sometimes the daily grind of the news is going to refer back to core principles that are broader and deeper. So I thank God because I've read so much on so many different things of a lot of different point of views. Then if something breaks and a piece of news breaks, I can immediately sort of channel that into in the mental Rolodex, these three big ideas that I think are really important. And then I can talk at length about what those ideas are, and I can explicate those. Uh, and, and so, you know, for example, when we were talking about must taking over Twitter before, and I immediately go to the history of media, right, that's, that's me tying it into a broader theme on, you know, and I do that, I would say fairly frequently, we're talking about, say, subsidization of industry. And I can immediately tie that into, okay, what's the history of subsidization in the United States, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and forward through FDR's industrial policy. And how does that tie into sort of broader economic policy internationally. So it allows me to tie into bigger themes, because what I tend to read is mostly not news, what I tend to read is mostly books. I would say most of my media diet is actually not the stuff like that's, that's the icing on the cake. But the actual cake is the hundreds of pages in history, econ, geography, that I'm that I'm social science that I'm reading every week. And so that that sort of stuff allows me to think more deeply about these things. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is Russia breaks in the news, I don't know anything about Russia, I immediately go and I purchased five books about Russia, and I read all of them. And so one of the unfortunate things about our, our, the fortunate thing for me, and the unfortunate thing about the world is that if you in the unfortunate thing about the world, if you read two books on a subject, you are now considered by the media and expert on the subject. So that's, you know, sad and shallow, but that is the way that it is. The good news for me is that my job isn't to be a full expert on any of these subjects. And I don't claim to be right. I'm not a Russia expert. I know enough on Russia to be able to understand when people talk about Russia, what the system looks like, how it works and all of that. And then to explicate that for the common man, which a lot of people who are infused with the expertise can't really do if you're so deep in the weeds that you're like a full on academic expert on a thing. Sometimes it's hard to translate that over to a mass audience, which is really my job. Well, I think it can actually it's funny, with the two books, you can actually get a pretty deep understanding if you read and also think deeply about it. It allows you to approach a thing from first principles. A lot of times, if you're a quote unquote expert, you get you're carried away by the momentum of what the field has been thinking about, versus like stepping back, all right, what is really going on, that the challenge is to pick the right two books, right? So that usually what I'll try to find is somebody who knows the topic pretty well and have them recommend or a couple people and have them recommend books. So a couple years ago, I knew nothing about Bitcoin. I was at a conference, and a couple of people who you've had on your show, actually, were there and I asked them, give me your top three books on Bitcoin. And so then I went and I read like, nine books on Bitcoin. And so if you're nine books on Bitcoin, you at least know enough to get by. And so that so I can actually explain what Bitcoin is and why it works or why it doesn't work in some cases and, and what's happening in the markets that way. So that that's, you know, very, very helpful. Well, Putin is an example. That's a difficult one to find the right books on. I think the new czar is the one I read where was the most objective. When I read I think about Putin was it was one called strongman. It was it was very highly critical of, of Putin, but it gave like a good background on him. Yeah, so I'm very skeptical sort of things that are very, they're critical of Putin. Because it feels like there's activism injected into the history. Like the way the rise and fall of the Third Reich is written about Hitler, I like because there's almost not a criticism of Hitler. It's a description of Hitler, which is very, it's easier to do about a historical figure, which was William Shire with the rise of all the Third Reich. It's impressive because he lived through it. But it's very tough to find objective descriptions about the history of the man and a country of Putin, of Zelensky of any difficult Trump is the same. And I feel like everybody that's the hero villain archetype, right? And it's like, either somebody is completely a hero or a completely a villain. And the truth is, pretty much no one is completely a hero or completely a villain people. In fact, I'm not sure that I love descriptions of people as heroes or villains. Generally, I think that people tend to do heroic things or do villainous things in the same way that I'm not sure I love descriptions of people as a genius. My dad used to say this when I was growing up, he used to say, they didn't believe that there were geniuses. He said he believed that there were people with a genius for something. Because people, you know, yes, there are people who are very high IQ, and we call them geniuses. But does that mean that they're good at EQ stuff? Not necessarily. But there are people who are geniuses at EQ stuff. In other words, it would be more specific to say that somebody is a genius at engineering than to say just broad spectrum, they're a genius. And that does avoid the problem of thinking that they're good at something that they're not good at, right? It's a little more specific. So because you read a lot of books, are there, can you look back? And it's always a tough question, because so many, it's like your favorite song, but are there books that have been influential on your life, that are impacting your thinking, or maybe ones you go back to that still carry insight for you? The Federalist Paper is a big one in terms of sort of how American politics works. The first econ book that I thought was really great, because it was written for teenagers, essentially, is one called Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It's like 150 pages, I recommend it to everybody sort of 15 and up. It's easier than say, Thomas Sowell's Basic Econ, which is four or 500 pages. And it's looking at like macroeconomics, microeconomics, that kind of stuff. And then in terms of, there's a great book by Carl Truman called Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I think is the best book in the last 10 years. That's been sort of impactful on some of the thoughts I've been having lately. What's the key idea in there that's- The key idea is that we've shifted the nature of how identity is done in the West from how it was historically done. That basically for nearly all of human history, the way that we identify as human beings is as a mix of our biological drives, and then how that interacts with the social institutions around us. And so when you're a child, you're a bunch of unfettered biological drives, and it's your parents job to civilize you. And civilize you literally means bring you into civilization, right? You learn the rules of the road, you learn how to integrate into institutions that already exist and are designed to shape you. And it's how you interact with those institutions that makes you you. It's not just a set of biological drives. And then in the modern world, we've really driven toward the idea that what we are is how we feel on the inside without reference to the outside world. And it's the job of the outside world to celebrate and reflect what we think about ourselves on the inside. And so what that means is that we are driven now toward fighting institutions, because institutions are in positions. So everything around us, societal institutions, these are these are things that are crimping our style, they're making us not feel the way that we want to feel. And if we just destroy those things, then we'll be freer and more liberated. It's a I think, much deeper model of how to think about why our social politics particular moving in a particular direction is that a ground shift has happened and how people think about themselves. And this has had some, some somewhat kind of shocking effects in terms of social politics. LUIS So there's negative consequences in your view of that. But is there also positive consequence of more power, more agency to the individual? JONAH I think that you can make the argument that institutions were weighing too heavily and how people form their identity. But I think that what we've done is gone significantly too far on the other side, we basically decided to blow up the institutions in favor of unfettered feeling slash identity. And I think that that is not only a large mistake, I think it's going to have dire ramifications for everything from suicidal ideation to institutional longevity in politics and in society more broadly. LUIS So speaking about the nature of self, you've been an outspoken proponent of pro-life. Can you can we start by you trying to steam in the case for pro-choice, that abortion is not murder, and a woman's right to choose is a fundamental human right, freedom. JONAH So I think that the, the, the only way to steel man the pro-choice case is to, and be ideologically consistent, is to suggest that there is no interest in the life of the unborn that counterweighs at all freedom of choice. So the, so what that means is, we can take the full example, we can make sort of a partial example. So if we take the full example, what that would mean is that up until point of birth, which is sort of the Democratic Party platform position, that there is that a woman's right to choose ought to extend for any reason whatsoever up to point of birth, the only way to argue that is that bodily autonomy is the only factor, there is no countervailing factor that would ever outweigh bodily autonomy. That would be the strongest version of the argument. Another version of that argument would be that the reason that bodily autonomy ought to weigh so heavily is because women can't be the, the equals of men, if the, the systems of biology are allowed to decide their futures, right? If the, if pregnancy changes women in a way that it doesn't change men, it's a form of sex discrimination for women to ever have to go through with pregnancy, which is an argument that was made by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, kind of. Those are the arguments, the kind of softer version is the more, I would say, emotionally resonant version of the argument, which is that bodily autonomy ought to outweigh the interests of the fetus up till point X. And then people have different feelings about what point X looks like. Is it up to the point of viability? Is it up to the point of the heartbeat? Is it up to 12 weeks or 15 weeks? And that really is where the American public is, where the American public is, broadly speaking, not, not state by state, where there are various really, really varied opinions. But like broadly speaking, it seems like the American public by polling data wants somewhere between a 12 and 15 week abortion restriction. And they believe that up until 12 or 15 weeks, there's not enough there for, to not be specific, but to be kind of how people feel about it, to outweigh a woman's bodily autonomy. And then beyond that point, then there's enough of an interest in the life of the preborn child. It's developed enough that now we care about it enough that it outweighs a woman's bodily autonomy. Leonard Millennial What's the strongest case for pro-life in your mind? Dr. Jonathan Laird I mean, the strongest case for pro-life is that from conception, a human life has been created. It is a human life with potential, that human life potential with potential now has an independent interest in its own existence. Leonard Millennial If I may just ask a quick question. So conception is when a sperm fertilizes an egg? Dr. Jonathan Laird Yes. Leonard Millennial Okay, just to clarify the biological beginning of what conception is. Dr. Jonathan Laird I mean, that because that is the beginning of human life. Now, there are other standards that people have drawn, right? Some people say implantation in the uterus, some people will suggest viability, some brain development or heart development. But the clear dividing line between a human life exists and human life does not exist is the biological creation of an independent human life with its own DNA strands, and etc, which happens at conception. Once you acknowledge that there is that independent human life with potential, and I keep calling it that because people sometimes say potential human life, it's not a potential human life, it's a human life that is not developed yet, to the full extent that it will develop. Once you say that, and once you say that it has its own interest, now you have to now the burden of proof is to explain why bodily autonomy ought to allow for the snuffing out of that human life if we believe that human life ought not to be killed for, for quote unquote, no good reason, you have to come up with a good reason, right? The burden of proof has now shifted. Now, you will find people who will say, well, the good reason is that it's not sufficiently developed to outweigh the mental trauma or emotional trauma that a woman goes through if, for example, she was raped or the victim of incest. And that is a fairly emotionally resonant argument, but it's not necessarily positive. You can make the argument that just because something horrific and horrible happened to a woman does not rob the human life of its interest in life. One of the big problems in trying to draw any line for the self-interest of life in the human life is that it's very difficult to draw any other line that doesn't seem somewhat arbitrary. You say that independent heartbeat, you know, well, you know, people have pacemakers. If you say brain function, people have various levels of brain function as adults. If you say viability, babies are not viable after they are born. If I left a newborn baby on a table and did not take care of it, it would be dead in two days. So, you know, once you start getting into sort of these lines, it starts to get very fuzzy very quickly. And so if you're looking for sort of a bright line moral rule, that would be the bright line moral rule. And that's that's sort of the pro-life case. Well, there's still mysterious, difficult scientific questions of things like consciousness. So what to you does the question of consciousness, how does it come into play into this debate? So I don't believe that consciousness is the sole criterion by which we judge the self-interest in human life. So we are unconscious a good deal of our lives. That does not we will be conscious again. Right. When when you're unconscious, when you're asleep, for example, presumably your life is still worth living. If somebody came in and killed you, that'd be a serious moral quandary at the very least. But the birth of consciousness, the the lighting up of the flame, the initial lighting of the flame, there does seem to be something special about that. And it's a it's a mystery of when that happens. Well, I mean, Peter Singer makes the case that basically self-consciousness doesn't exist until you're two and a half. So he says that even infanticide should be OK. He's the bioethicist over Princeton. So you get into some real dicey territory once you get into consciousness. Also, the truth is that consciousness is more of a spectrum than it is a than it is a dividing line, meaning that there are people with various degrees of brain function. We don't actually know how conscious they are. And you can get into eugenic territory pretty quickly when we start dividing between lives that are worth living based on levels of consciousness and lives that are not worth living based on levels of consciousness. Do you find it the the aspect of women's freedom? Do you feel the tension between that ability to choose the trajectory of your own life versus the rights of the unborn child? In one situation, yes. In one situation, no. If you've had sex with a person voluntarily and as a product of that, you are now pregnant. No, you've taken an action with a perfectly predictable result. Even if you took birth control, this is the way that human beings procreated for literally all of human existence. And by the way, also how all mammals procreate. So the idea that this was an entirely unforeseen consequence of your activity, I find I have less sympathy for you in that particular situation because you could have made decisions that would not lead you to this particular impasse. In fact, this used to be the basis of marriage, right? Was when when we were a apparently more terrible society, we used to say that people should wait until they get married to have sex, a position that I still hold. And the reason for that was because then if you have sex and you produce a child, then the child will grow up in a two-parent family with stability. So, you know, they not not a ton of sympathy there when it comes to rape and incest, obviously heavy, heavy sympathy. And so that's why I think you see statistically speaking, a huge percentage of Americans, including many pro-life Americans, people who consider themselves pro-life would consider exceptions for rape and incest. One of the sort of dishonest things that I think happens in abortion debates is arguing from the fringes. This tends to happen a lot is pro-choice activists will argue from rape and incest to the other 99.8% of abortions, or you'll see people on the pro-life side argue from partial birth abortion to all of abortion. That you actually have to take on sort of the mainstream case and then decide whether or not that's acceptable or not. But to you, the exception just ethically without generalizing it, that is a valid ethically exception. I don't hold that there should be a an exception for rape or incest because again, I hold by the bright line rule that once a human life with potential exists, then it has its own interest in life that cannot be curbed by your self-interest. The only exception that I hold by is the same exception that literally all pro-lifers hold by, which is the life of the mothers put in danger. Such a tough, tough topic, because if you believe that that's the line, then we're committing mass murder. Well, or at least mass killing. So I would say that murder typically requires a level of mens rea that may be absent in many cases of abortion. Because the usual follow on question is, well, if it's murder, why don't prosecute the woman? And the answer is because the vast majority of people who are having abortions don't actually believe that they're killing a person. They have a very different view of what is exactly happening. So I would say that there are all sorts of interesting hypotheticals that come in to play when it comes to abortion. And you can play them any which way. But levels, let's put it this way, there are gradations of wrongs. I don't think that all abortions are equally blameworthy, even if I would ban virtually all of them. I think that there are mitigating circumstances that make, while being wrong, some abortions less morally blameworthy than others. I think that, you know, there is a, I can admit a difference between killing a two week old embryo in the womb and stabbing a seven year old in the face. Like I can recognize all that while still saying I think that it would be wrong to terminate a pregnancy. Do you think the question of when life begins, which I think is a fascinating question, is a question of science or a question of religion? I mean, when life begins, it's a question of science. When that life becomes valuable enough for people to want to protect it is going to be a question that is beyond science. Science doesn't have moral judgments to make about the value of human life. This is one of the problems that Sam Harris and I have had this argument many times and it's always kind of interesting. You know, because Sam is of the opinion that you can get to ought from is, right? That science says is, therefore we can learn ought. So human flourishing is the goal of life. And I always say to him, I don't see where you get that from evolutionary biology. You can assume it, just say you're assuming it, but don't pretend that that is a conclusion that you can draw straight from biological reality itself. Because obviously that doesn't exist in the animal world, for example. Nobody assumes the innate value of every ant. I think I know your answer to this, but let's test it because I think you're going to be wrong. So there's a robot behind you. Do you think there will be a time in the future when it will be unethical and illegal to kill a robot because they will have sentience? My guess is you would say no, Lex, because there's a fundamental difference between humans and robots and I just want to get you on record because I think you'll be wrong. I mean, it depends on the level of development, I would assume, of the robots. I mean, you're assuming a complexity in the robots that eventually imitates what we in the religious life would call the human soul. The ability to choose freely, for example, which I believe is sort of the capacity for human beings. The ability to suffer. Yeah. If all of that could be approved and not programmed, meaning the freely willed capacity of a machine to do x, y, or z. You could not pinpoint exactly where it happens in the program. Right. It's not deterministic. Then it would raise serious moral issues for sure. I'm not trying to know the answer to that question. Are you afraid of that time? I'm not sure I'm afraid of that time. I mean, it's any more than I'd be afraid if aliens arrived in the world and had these characteristics. Well, there's just a lot of moral complexities and they don't necessarily have to be in the physical space. They can be in the digital space. There's an increased sophistication and number of bots on the internet, including on Twitter. As they become more and more intelligent, there's going to be serious questions about what is our moral duty to protect ones that have or claim to have an identity. That'll be really interesting. Actually, what I'm afraid of is the opposite happening. Meaning that people, the worst that should happen is that we develop robots so sophisticated that they appear to have free will and then we treat them with human dignity. That should be the worst that happens. What I'm afraid of is the opposite. Is that if we're talking about this particular hypothetical, that we develop robots that have all of these apparent abilities and then we dehumanize them, which leads us to also dehumanize the other humans around us, which you could easily see happening. The devaluation of life to the point where it doesn't really matter. I mean, people have always treated, unfortunately, newly discovered other humans this way. So, I don't think there's actually a new problem. I think it's a pretty old problem. It'll just be interesting when it's made of human hands. Yeah, it's an opportunity to celebrate humanity or to bring out the worst in humanity. So, the derision that naturally happens, like you said, with pointing out the other. Let me ask you about climate change. Let's go from the meme to the profound philosophy. Okay, the meme is there's a clip of you talking about climate change and saying that- Ah, the Aquaman meme. You said that for the sake of argument, if the water level rises five to 10 feet in the next hundred years, people will just sell their homes and move. And then the meme is sell to who? Can you argue both sides of that? The argument that they're making is the straw man. The argument that I'm making is over time. I don't mean that if a tsunami is about to hit your house, you can list it on eBay. That's not what I mean, obviously. What I mean is that human beings have an extraordinary ability to adapt. It's actually our best quality. And that as water levels rise, real estate prices in those areas tends to fall. That over time, people tend to abandon those areas. They tend to leave. They tend to, right now, sell their houses, and then they tend to move. And eventually, those houses will be worthless, and you won't have anybody to sell to, but presumably not that many people will be living there by that point, which is one of the reasons why the price would be low, because there's no demand. So, it's over a hundred years, so all of these price dynamics are very gradual, relative to the other price dynamics. Correct. That's why the joke of it, of course, is that I'm saying that tomorrow, there's a tsunami on your source step, and you're like, oh, Bob will buy my house. Bob ain't gonna buy your house. We all get that. But it's a funny moment. I laughed at it. How is your view on climate change? The human contribution to climate change, what we should do in terms of policy to respond to climate change, how has that changed over the years? I would say the truth is for years and years, I've believed that climate change was a reality, and that anthropogenic climate change is a reality. I don't argue with the IPCC estimates. I know climatologists at places like MIT or Caltech, and they know this stuff better than I do. So, the notion that climate change is just not happening, or that human beings have not contributed to climate change, I find doubtful. The question is to what extent human beings are contributing to climate change, is it 50 percent, is it 70 percent, is it 90 percent? I think there's a little bit more play in the joints there, so it's not totally clear. The one thing I do know, and this I know with factual accuracy, is that all of the measures that are currently being proposed are unworkable and will not happen. So, when people say Paris Climate Accords, even if those were imposed, you're talking about lowering the potential trajectory of climate change by a fraction of a degree. If you're talking about the, if you're talking about, you know, Green New Deal, net zero by 2050, the carbon is up there in the air, and the climate change is going to happen. Also, you're assuming that geopolitical dynamics don't exist, so everybody's going to magically get on the same page, and we're all going to be imposing massive carbon taxes to get to net zero by 2050. I mean, like hundreds of times higher than they currently are. And that's not me saying that, it's Klaus Schwab saying this, of the World Economic Forum, who's a big advocate of exactly this sort of policy. And the reality is that we're going to have to accept that at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of climate change is baked into the cake by the end of the century. Again, not me talking, William Nordhaus, the economist, who just won the Nobel Prize in this stuff, talking. And so, what that suggests to me is what we've always known, human beings are crap at mitigation and excellence in adaptation. We are very bad at mitigating our own faults. We are very good at adapting to the problems as they exist. Which means that all of the estimates that billions will die, that there will be mass starvation, that we will see the migration in just a few years of hundreds of millions of people, those are wrong. What you'll see is a gradual change of living. People will move away from areas that are inundated on the coast. You will see people building seawalls. You'll see people adapting new technologies to suck carbon out of the air. You will see geoengineering. This is the sort of stuff that we should be focused on. And the sort of bizarre focus on what if we just keep tossing hundreds of billions of dollars at the same three technologies over and over in the hopes that if we subsidize it, this will magically make it more efficient. I've seen no evidence whatsoever that that is going to be the way that we get ourselves out of this. Necessity being the mother of invention, I think human beings will adapt because we have adapted and we will continue to adapt. LUIS So to the degree we invest in the threat of this, it should be into the policies that help with the adaptation versus the mitigation. DAVID Right. Seawalls, geoengineering, developing technologies that suck carbon out of the air. Again, if I thought that there was more sort of hope for the green technologies currently in play, then subsidization of those technologies I might be a little bit more for. But I haven't seen tremendous progress over the course of the last 30 years in the reliability of, for example, wind energy or the ability to store solar energy to the extent necessary to actually power a grid. LUIS What's your thoughts on nuclear energy? DAVID Nuclear energy is great. Nuclear energy is a proven source of energy and we should be radically extending the use of nuclear energy. To me, honestly, this is like a litmus test question as to whether you take climate change seriously. If you're on right or left and you take climate change seriously, you should be in favor of nuclear energy. If you're not, I know that you're just, you have other priorities. LUIS Yeah, the fascinating thing about the climate change debate is the dynamics of the fear mongering over the past few decades. Because some of the nuclear energy was tied up into that somehow. There's a lot of fear about nuclear energy. It seems like there's a lot of social phenomena, social dynamics involved versus dealing with just science. It's interesting to watch. And if on my darker days, it makes me cynical about our ability to use reason and science to deal with the threats of the world. DAVID I think that our ability to use reason and science to deal with threats of the world is almost a time frame question. I think that, again, we're very bad at looking down the road and saying, because people can't handle, for example, even things like compound interest. The idea that if I put a dollar in the bank today, that 15 years from now, that's going to be worth a lot more than a dollar. People can't actually see that. So the idea of let's foresee a problem, then we'll deal with it right now, as opposed to 30 years down the road. Typically, we let the problem happen and then we solve it. It's bloodier and worse than it would have been if we had solved it 30 years ago. But it is, in fact, effective. And it turns out the solution that we're proposing 30 years in advance is not effective. And that can be a major problem as well. IAN That's then to steelman the case for fear-mongering, for irrational fear-mongering. We need to be scared shitless in order for us to do anything. I'm generally against that, but maybe on a population scale, maybe some of that is necessary for us to respond appropriately for long-term, two long-term threats. We should be scared shitless. DAVID I don't think that we can actually do that, though. First of all, I think that platonic lies are generally bad. And then second of all, I don't think that we actually have the capacity to do this. I think that the people who are, you know, the sort of elites of our society who get together in rooms and talk about this sort of stuff, and I've been in some of those meetings at my synagogue Friday nights, actually. No, but... IAN I was going to make the joke, but I'm glad you did. DAVID Yeah, you know, I've been in rooms, Davos-like rooms. And when people discuss these sorts of topics, and they're like, what if we just tell people that it's going to be a disaster with tsunamis and day after tomorrow? It's like, you guys don't have that power. You don't. And by the way, you dramatically undercut your own power because of COVID to do this sort of stuff. Because a lot of the sort of what if we scare the living hell out of you to the point where you stay in your own house for two years, and we tell you you can't send your kids to school, and then we tell you that the vaccine is going to prevent transmission. And then we also tell you that we need to spend $7 trillion in one year, and it won't have any inflationary effect. And it turns out you're wrong on literally all of those things. The last few years have done more to undermine institutional trust than any time in probably American history. It's pretty, pretty amazing. IAN Yeah, I tend to agree with that. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Let me ask you back to the question of God, and a big ridiculous question. Who's God? Who is God? So I'm going to, I'm going to use sort of the Aquinas formulation of what God is, right? That if you, if there is a cause of all things, not physical things, if there is a cause underlying the reason of the universe, then that is the thing we call God. So not a big guy in the sky with a beard. You know, like, he is the force underlying the logic of the universe, if there is a logic to the universe. And he is the creator in the Judaic view of that universe. And he, and he does have an interest in us living in accordance with the laws of the universe that if you're a religious Jew are encoded in the in the Torah, but if you're not a religious Jew would be included in the national, the natural law by sort of Catholic theology. Why do you think God created the universe? Or as is popularly asked, what do you think is the meaning behind it? What's the meaning of life? What's the meaning of life? So I think that the meaning of life is to fulfill what God made you to do. And that is a series of roles. I think that human beings, and here you have to look to sort of human nature, rather than looking kind of to big questions. I've evolved something that I've really been working on, you know, and I'm writing a book about this, actually, that I call colloquially, role theory. And basically, the idea is that the way that we interact with the world is through a series of roles. And those are also the things we find most important and most implementable. And they there's sort of virtue ethics, right, which which suggests that if we act in accordance with virtue, like Aristotle, then we will be living the most fulfilled and meaningful life. And then you have sort of deontological ethics, like Kantian ethics, that it's a rule based ethic. If you follow the rules, then you'll then you'll find the meaning of life. And then what I'm proposing is that there's something that I would call role ethics, which is there are a series of roles that we play across our lives, which are also the things that we tend to put on our tombstones and find the most meaningful. So what when you go to a cemetery, you can see what people found the most meaningful because it's the stuff they put on the stone that has like four words on it, right? Like beloved father, beloved mother, sister, brother, and you might have a job once in a while, a creator, a religious person, right? These are all roles that have existed across societies and across humanity. And those are the things where we actually find meaning. And the way that we navigate those roles brings us meaning. And I think that God created us in order to fulfill those roles for purposes that I can't begin to understand because I ain't him. And the more we recognize those roles and the more we live those roles, and then we can express freedom within those roles. I think that liberty exists inside each of those roles, and that's what makes all of our lives different and fun. We all parent in different ways, but being a parent is a meaningful role. We all have spouses, but how you interact that relationship is what makes your life meaningful and interesting. That is what we were put on earth to do. And if we perform those roles properly, and those roles do include things like being a creator, like we have a creative instinct as human beings, being a creator, being an innovator, being a defender of your family, being a social member of your community, which is something that we're built to do. If we fulfill those roles properly, then we will have made the world a better place than we inherited it. And we will also have had the joy of experiencing the sort of flow they talk about in psychology, where when you engage in these roles, you actually do feel a flow. So these roles are a fundamental part of the human condition? Yes. So the book you're working on is constructing a system to help us understand these roles? It's looking at, let's assume that all that's true. The real question of the book is how do you construct a flourishing and useful society and politics? Ah, so a society level. If this is our understanding of a human being, how do we construct a good society? Right, exactly. Because I think that a lot of political theory is right now based in either J.S. Mill kind of thought, which is all that a good politics does is allows you to wave your hand around until you hit somebody in the face, or Rawlsian thought, which is what if we constructed society in order to achieve the most for the least, essentially? What if we constructed society around what actually makes humans the most fulfilled, and that is the fulfillment of these particular roles? And where does liberty come into that, right? How do you avoid the idea of a tyranny in that? You have to be a mother. You must be a father. You must be a – where does freedom come into that? Can you reject those roles totally as a society and be okay? The answer probably is not. We need a society that actually promotes and protects those roles, but also protects the freedom inside those roles. And that raises a more fundamental question of what exactly liberty is for, and I think that both the right and the left actually tend to make a mistake when they discuss liberty. The left tends to think that liberty is an ultimate good, that simple choice makes a bad thing good, which is not true. And I think the right talks about liberty in almost the same terms sometimes, and I think that's not true either. The question is whether liberty is of inherent value or instrumental value. Is liberty good in and of itself, or is liberty good because it allows you to achieve X, Y, or Z? And I've thought about this one a lot, and I tend to come down on the latter side of the aisle. I mean this is – you asked me areas where I've moved. This may be an area where I've moved. Is that I think when you think more shallowly about politics, or maybe more quickly because this is how we talk in America, is about liberties and rights. We tend to think that the right is what make – not like the political right. Rights make things good. Liberties make things good. The question really is what are those rights and liberties for? Now you have to be careful so that that doesn't shade into tyranny. You can only have liberty to do the thing that I say that you can do. But there have to be spheres of liberty that are roiling and interesting and filled with debate, but without threatening the chief institutions that surround those liberties. Because if you destroy the institutions, the liberties will go too. If you knock down the pillars of the society, the liberties that are on top of those pillars are going to collapse. And I think that that's – if people are feeling as though we're on the verge of tyranny, I think that's why. This is fascinating by the way. It's an instrumental perspective on liberty. That's going to have to give me a lot to think about. Let me ask a personal question. Was there ever a time that you had a crisis of faith where you questioned your belief in God? Sure. And I would less call it a crisis of faith than an ongoing question of faith, which I think is I hope most religious people. And the word Israel, right, in Hebrew, Yisrael, means to struggle with God. That's literally what the word means. And so the idea of struggling with God, right, if you're Jewish, you're b'nai Yisrael. The idea of struggling with God I think is endemic to the human condition. If you understand what God's doing, then I think you're wrong. And if you think that that question doesn't matter, then I think you're also wrong. I think that God is a very necessary hypothesis. So struggle, the struggle with God is life. That is the process of life. That's right. Because you're never going to get to that answer. Otherwise, you're God and you aren't. Why does God allow cruelty and suffering in the world? One of the tough questions. So we're going deep here. There's two types of cruelty and suffering. So if we're talking about human cruelty and suffering, because God does not intervene to prevent people from exercising their free will, because to do so would be to deprive human beings of the choice that makes them human. And this is the sin of the Garden of Eden basically, is that God could make you an angel, in which case you wouldn't have the choice to do the wrong thing. But so long as we are going to allow for cause and effect in a universe shaped by your choice, cruelty and evil are going to exist. And then there's the question of just the natural cruelty and vicissitudes of life. And the answer there is I think that God obscures himself. I think that if God were to appear in all of his glory to people on a regular basis, I think that would make faith – you wouldn't need it. There would be no such thing as faith. It would just be reality. Nobody has to prove to you that the sun rises every day. But if God is to allow us the choice to believe in him, which is the ultimate choice from a religious point of view, then he's going to have to obscure himself behind tragedy and horror and all those other things. And there's a fairly well-known Kabbalistic concept called Tzimtzum in Judaism, which is the idea that when God created the universe, he sort of withdrew in order to make space for all of these things to happen. So God doesn't have an instrumental perspective on liberty? In a chief sense, he does, because the best use of liberty is going to be belief in him. And you can misuse your liberty, right? There will be consequences if you believe in an afterlife, or if you believe in sort of a generalized better version of life led by faith, then liberty does have a purpose. But he also believes that you have to give people, from a cosmic perspective, the liberty to do wrong without threatening all the institutions of society. I mean, that's why it does say in the Bible that if man sheds blood by man, shall his blood be shed, right? There are punishments that are in biblical thought for doing things that are wrong. So for a human being who lacks the faith in God, so if you're an atheist, can you still be a good person? Of course. 100%. And there are a lot of religious people who are crappy people. How do we understand that tension? Well, from a religious perspective, what you would say is that it is perfectly plausible to live in accordance with a set of rules that don't damage other people without believing in God. You just might be understanding the reason for doing that wrong, is what a religious person would say. This is the conversation, again, that I had with Sam, basically, is you and I agree – I said this to Sam – you and I agree on nearly everything when it comes to morality. Like, we probably disagree on 15 to 20% of things. The other 80% is because you grew up in a Judeo-Christian society and so do I, and we grew up 10 miles from each other, you know, around the turn of the millennium. So there's that. So you can perfectly well be an atheist living a good, moral, decent life because you can live a good, moral, decent life with regard to other people without believing in God. I don't think you can build a society on that because I think that, you know, that relies on the sort of goodness of mankind, natural goodness of mankind. I don't believe in the natural goodness of mankind. You don't? No. I believe that man is created both sinful and with the capacity for sin and the capacity for good. But if you let them be on their own, isn't – doesn't it lead – Without social institutions to shape them, I think that that's very likely to go poorly. Oh, interesting. We came to something we disagree on, but that may be – that might reflect itself in our approach to Twitter as well. I think if humans are left on their own, they tend towards good. They definitely have the capacity for good and evil, but when left on their own, they're – I tend to believe they're good. I think they might be good with limits. What I mean by that is that what the evidence I think tends to show is that human beings are quite tribal. So what you'll end up with is people who are good with their immediate family and maybe their immediate neighbors, and then when they're threatened by an outside tribe, then they kill everyone, which is sort of the history of civilization in the pre-civilizational era, which was a very violent time. Pre-civilizational era was quite violent. Do you think on the topic of tribalism in our modern world, what are the pros and cons of tribes? Is that something we should try to outgrow as a civilization? I don't think it's ever going to be possible to fully outgrow tribalism. I think it's a natural human condition to want to be with people who think like you or have a common set of beliefs. I think trying to obliterate that in the name of a universalism likely leads to utopian results that have devastating consequences. Utopian sort of universalism has been failing every time it's tried, whether you're talking about – now it seems to be sort of a liberal universalism, which is being rejected by a huge number of people around the world in various different cultures, or you're talking about religious universalism, which typically comes with religious tyranny, or you're talking about communistic or Nazi-esque sort of universalism, which comes with mass slaughter. So this is – universalism, I'm not a believer in. I think that you have some values that are fairly limited that all human beings should hold in common, and that's pretty much it. I think that everybody should have the ability to join with their own culture. I think how we define tribes is a different thing. So I think that tribes should not be defined by innate physical characteristics, for example, because I think that, thank God, as a civilization we've outgrown that, and I think that that is a childish way to view the world. All the tall people aren't a tribe. All the black people aren't – all the white people aren't a tribe. So the tribes should be formed over ideas versus physical characteristics. That's right, which is why, actually, to go back to sort of the beginning of the conversation when it comes to Jews, I'm not a big believer in ethnic Judaism. As a person who takes Judaism seriously, Judaism is more to me than you were born with a last name like Berg or Steen. Hitler would disagree with you. He would disagree with me, but that's because he was a tribalist, right, who thought in racial terms. So maybe robots will help us see humans as one tribe. Maybe that – This is Reagan's idea, right? Reagan said, well, if there's an alien invasion, then we'll all be on the same side. So I'll go over to the Soviets and we'll talk about it. There's some deep truth to that. What does it mean to be a good man? The various role that a human being takes on in this role theory that you've spoken about, what does it mean to be good? It means to perform – now I will do Aristotle. It means to perform the function well. What Aristotle says is the good is not like moral good, moral evil in the way that we tend to think about it. He meant that a good cup holds liquid. A good spoon holds soup. It means that a thing that is broken can't hold those things, right? So the idea of being a good person means that you are fulfilling the function for which you were made. It's a teleological view of humanity. So if you're a good father, this means that you are bringing up your child in durable values that is going to bring them up healthy, capable of protecting themselves and passing on the traditional wisdom of the ages to future generations while allowing for the capacity for innovation. That would be being a good father. Being a good spouse would mean protecting and unifying with your spouse and building a safe family and a place to raise children. Being a good citizen of your community means protecting the fellow citizens of your community while incentivizing them to build for themselves. It becomes actually much easier to think of how to – this is why I like the role theory because it's very hard in virtue theory to say, be generous. How does that manifest? I don't know what that looks like. Sometimes being generous might mean being not generous to other people, right? When Aristotle says that you should be benevolent, what does that mean? This is very vague. When I say be a good dad, most people sort of have a gut level understanding of what it means to be a good dad. Mostly, they have a gut level understanding of what it means to be a really bad dad. What it means to be a good man is to fulfill those roles, as many of them as you can, properly and at full function. That's a very hard job. I've said before that because I engage a lot with the public and all of this, the word great comes up a lot. What does it mean to be a great leader? What does it mean to be a great person? I've always said to people, it's actually fairly easy to be great. It's very difficult to be good. There are a lot of very great people who are not very good. There are not a lot of good people. Most good people die mourned by their family and friends and two generations later, they're forgotten. Those are the people who incrementally move the ball forward in the world, sometimes much more than the people who are considered great. Understand the role in your life that involves being a cup and be damn good at it. Exactly. That's right. Hold the soup. Jordan Peterson has been there. It's very like Lobster with Jordan Peterson. Exactly. I'm going to quote you for years and years to come on that. What advice would you give a lot of young people who look up to you? What advice, despite the better judgment, no, I'm just kidding. Only kidding. They seriously look up to you and draw inspiration from your ideas, from your bold thinking. What advice would you give to them? How to live a life worth living, how to have a career they can be proud of and everything like that. Live out the values that you think are really important and seek those values in others would be the first piece of advice. Second piece of advice, don't go on Twitter until you're 26 because your brain is fully developed at that point. As I said early on, I was on social media and writing columns from the time I was 17. It was a great opportunity and as it turns out, a great temptation to say enormous numbers of stupid things when you're young. I mean you're kind of trying out ideas and you're putting them on, you're taking them off and social media permanentizes those things and engraves them in stone and then that's used against you for the rest of your life. So I tell young people this all the time like if you want to be on social media, be on social media but don't post like watch. If you want to take in information and more importantly, you should read books. As far as other advice, I'd say engage in your community. There's no substitute for engaging your community and engage in interpersonal action because that will soften you and make you a better person. I've become a better person since I got married. I've become an even better person since I've had kids so you can imagine how terrible I was before all these things. And engaging your community does allow you to build the things that matter on the most local possible level. I mean the outcome by the way of the sort of politics of the politics of fulfillment that I was talking about earlier is a lot of localism because the roles that I'm talking about are largely local roles. So that stuff has to be protected locally. I think we focus way too much in this country and others on like world beating solutions, national solutions, solutions that apply to hundreds of millions of people. How do we get to the solutions that apply for like five? And then we get to the solutions that apply to like 20. And then we get to the solutions that involve 200 people or 1,000 people. Let's solve that stuff and I think the solutions at the higher level flow bottom up not top down. What about mentors and maybe role models? Have you had a mentor or maybe people you look up to either you interacted on a local scale like you actually knew them or somebody you really looked up to? For me I'm very lucky. I grew up in a very solid two parent household. I'm extremely close with my parents. I've lived near my parents literally my entire life with the exception of three years of law school. And like right now they live a mile and a half from us. Would you learn from about life from your parents and your father? So, oh man, so many things from my parents. That's a hard one. I mean I think the good stuff from my dad is that you should hold true to your values. He's very big on you have values. Those values are important. Hold true to them. Did you understand what your values are, what your principles are early on? Fairly quickly, yeah. And so he was very big on that which is why for example I get asked a lot in the Jewish community why I wear a kippah. And the answer is it never occurred to me to take off the kippah. I always wore it. Why would I take it off at any point? That's the life that I want to live and, you know, that's the way it is. So that was a big one from my dad. From my mom, practicality. My dad is more of a dreamer. My mom is much more practical. And so, you know, the sort of lessons that I learned from my dad are that you can have – this is sort of the counter lesson is that you can have a good idea but if you don't have a plan for implementation then it doesn't end up as reality. And I think actually he's learned that better over the course of his life too. But my dad from very – from the time I was very young he wanted me to engage with other adults and he wanted me to learn from other people and his – one of his rules was if he didn't know something he would find somebody who he thought did know the thing for me to talk to. That was a big thing. So I'm very lucky. I have wonderful parents. As far as sort of other mentors, you know, in terms of media, Andrew Breitbart was a mentor. Andrew obviously – he was kind of known in his latter days I think more for the militancy than when I was very close with him. So for somebody like me who doesn't – who knows more about the militancy, can you tell me what is a great – what makes him a great man? What made Andrew great is that he engaged with everyone. I mean everyone. So there are videos of him rollerblading down the boulevard and people would be protesting and he would literally like rollerblade up to them and he would say, let's go to lunch together and he would just do this. That's actually who Andrew was. What was the thinking behind that? Just – That's who he was. He was just careless. He was much more outgoing than I am actually. He was very warm with people. Like for me, I would say that with Andrew, I knew Andrew for – I remember when I was 16, he passed away when I would have been 28. So I knew Andrew for 10, 12 years and people who met Andrew for about 10 minutes knew Andrew 99% as well as I knew Andrew because he was just all out front. Like everything was out here and he loved talking to people. He loved engaging with people. So this made him a lot of fun and unpredictable and fun to watch and all that and then I think Twitter got to him. I think by – Twitter is – one of the lessons I learned from Andrew is the counter lesson which is Twitter can poison you. Twitter can really wreck you. If you spend all day on Twitter reading the comments and getting angry at people who are talking about you, it becomes a very difficult life and I think that in the last year of his life, Andrew got very caught up in that because of a series of sort of circumstances. It can actually affect your mind. It can actually make you resentful, all that kind of stuff. I tend to agree with that. But the lesson that I learned from Andrew is engage with everybody. Take joy in sort of the mission that you're given and you can't always fulfill that. Sometimes it's really rough and difficult. I'm not going to pretend that it's all fun and rainbows all the time because it isn't. Some of the stuff that I have to cover, I don't like and some of the things I have to say, I don't particularly like. That happens. But that's what I learned from Andrew. As far as sort of other mentors, I had some teachers when I was a kid who said things that stuck with me. I had a fourth grade teacher named Miss Janetti who said, don't let potential be written on your tombstone, which is a pretty – That's a good line. It's a great line particularly to a fourth grader. But it was – I had an 11th grade English teacher named Anthony Miller who is terrific, really good writer. He had studied with James Joyce at Trinity College in Dublin and so he and I really got along and he helped my writing a lot. Did you ever have doubt in yourself? I mean especially as you got into the public eye with all the attacks, did you ever doubt your ability to stay strong, to be able to be a voice of the ideas that you represent? You definitely – I don't doubt my ability to say what I want to say. I doubt my ability to handle the emotional blowback of saying it, meaning that that's difficult. I mean, again, to take just one example, in 2016, the ADL measured that I was the number one target of antisemitism on planet Earth. That's not fun. It's unpleasant. When you take critiques, not from antisemites, but when you take critiques from people generally, we talked about near the beginning how you surround yourself with people who are going to give you good feedback. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes people are giving you feedback and you don't know whether it's well motivated or poorly motivated. If you are trying to be a decent person, you can't cut off the mechanism of feedback. What that means is sometimes you take to heart the wrong thing or you take it to heart too much. You're not light enough about it. You take it very, very seriously. You lose sleep over it. I mean, I can't tell you the number of nights where I've just not slept because of some critique somebody's made of me and I've thought to myself, maybe that's right. And sometimes it is right. And that's – Some of that is good to stew in that criticism, but some of that can destroy you. Do you have a shortcut? So Rogan has talked about taking a lot of mushrooms. Since you're not into the mushroom thing, what's your escape from that? Like when you get low, when you can't sleep. Usually writing is a big one for me. So writing for me is cathartic. I love writing. That is a huge one. Spending time with my family. Again, I usually have a close circle of friends who I will talk with in order to sort of bounce ideas off of them. And then once I've kind of talked it through, I tend to feel a little bit better. Exercise is also a big one. I mean, if I go a few days without exercise, I tend to get pretty grumpy pretty quickly. I mean, I've got to keep this six-pack going somehow, man. There you and Rogan agree. Well, we haven't, aside from Twitter, mentioned love. What's the role of love in the human condition, Ben Shapiro? Man, don't get asked for love too much. In fact, I was – You don't get that question on college camp? No, I typically don't actually. In fact, we were at an event recently. It was a Daily Wire event. And in the middle of this event, it was a meet and greet with some of the audience. And in the middle of this event, this guy walks by with this girl. They're talking, and they're talking to me, and their time kind of runs. Security is moving them. He says, no, no, no, wait, hold on a minute. And he gets down on one knee, and he proposes to the girl in front of me. And I said to him, this is the weirdest proposal in human history. What is happening right now? Like I was your choice of Cupid here. I said, well, you know, we actually got together because we listened to your show. And I said, well, I can perform at like a Jewish marriage right now. We're going to need like a glass. We're going to need some wine. It's going to get weird real fast. But yeah, so love doctor I'm typically not asked too much about. The role of love is important in binding together human beings who ought to be bound together. And the role of respect is even more important in binding together broader groups of people. I think one of the mistakes that we make in politics is trying to substitute love for respect or respect for love. And I think that's a big mistake. So I do not bear tremendous love in the same sense that I do for my family for random strangers. I don't. I love my family. I love my kids. Anybody who tells you they love your kid as much as you love your kid is lying to you. It's not true. I love my community more than I love other communities. I love my state more than I love other states. I love my country more than I love other countries. Like that's all normal. And that's all good. The problem of empathy can be when that becomes so tight knit that you're not outward looking, that you don't actually have respect for other people. So in the local level, you need love in order to protect you and shield you and give you the strength to go forward. And then beyond that, you need a lot of respect for people who are not in the circle of love. And I think trying to extend love to people who either are not going to love you back or are going to slap you in the face for it or who you're just not that close to. It's either it runs the risk of being airsats and fake or it can actually be counterproductive in some senses. Well, there's some sense in which you could have love for other human beings just based on the humanity that connects everybody, right? So you love this whole project that we're a part of. And actually, another thing we disagree on, so loving a stranger, like having that basic empathy and compassion towards a stranger, even if it can hurt you, I think is ultimately like a... That to me is what it means to be a good man, to live a good life, is to have that compassion towards strangers. To me, it's easy and natural and obvious to love people close to you. But to step outside yourself and to love others, I think that's the fabric of a good society. You don't think there's value to that? I think there can be, but I think we're also discussing love almost in two different senses. Meaning that when I talk about love, what I think of immediately is the love I bear for my wife and kids or my parents or my siblings. Or the love of friendship. Or the love of my close friends. But I think that it's using that same term to describe how I feel about strangers I think would just be inaccurate. And so that's why I'm suggesting that respect might be a more solid and realistic foundation for the way that we treat people far away from us or people who are strangers. Respect for their dignity, respect for their priorities, respect for their role in life. It might be too much of an ask, in other words. There might be the rare human being who's capable of literally loving a homeless man on the street the way that he loves his own family. But if you respect the homeless man on the street the way that you respect your own family, because everyone is deserved, everyone deserves that respect. I think that you get to the same end without forcing people into a position of unrealistically expecting themselves to feel a thing they don't feel. One of the big questions in religion that comes up is God makes certain requests that you feel certain ways. You're supposed to be happy about certain things or you're supposed to love thy neighbor as thyself. You'll notice that in that statement it's thy neighbor, it's not just generally anyone, it's love thy neighbor. In any case, the... I think that extends to anyone that follows you on Twitter. Thy neighbor? Thy neighbor. Because God anticipated the social network aspect that is not constrained by geography. Yeah, I'm going to differ with you on the interpretation on that, but in any case, the sort of, you know, the kind of extension of love outwards might be too big an ask. So maybe we can start with respect and then hopefully out of that respect can grow something more if people earn their way in. Because I think that one of the big problems when we're talking about universalism is when people say like I'm a world citizen. I love people of the other country as much as I love myself or as much as I love my country. It tends to actually lead to an almost crammed down utopianism that I think can be kind of difficult. Because with love comes a certain expectation of solidarity. And I think, right, I mean when you love your family, you love your wife, like there's a certain level of solidarity that is required inside the home in order to preserve the most loving kind of home. And so if you love everybody then that sort of implies a certain level of solidarity that may not exist. So maybe the idea is for me, start with respect and then maybe as people respect each other more then love is an outgrowth of that as opposed to starting with love and then hoping that respect develops. Yeah, there's a danger that that word becomes empty and instead is used for dogmatic kind of utopianism. I mean this is the way that, for example, religious theocracies very often work. We love you so much we have to convert you. So let's start with respect. What I would love to see after our conversation today is to see a Ben Shapiro that continues the growth on Twitter of being even more respectful than you've already been. And maybe one day converting that into love on Twitter. That would, if I could see that in this world, that would make me die a happy man. Wow, if I could make that happen for you. A little bit more love in the world for me, as a gift for me. I'll try to make that happen. I do have one question, I'm going to need you to tell me, which jokes are okay? Are jokes still okay? So yeah, can I just run your Twitter from now on? You just send it to me. 100%. I will pre-screen you the jokes and you can tell me if this is a loving joke or if this is a hate-filled obnoxious joke. People will be very surprised by all the heart emojis that start popping up on your Twitter. Ben, thank you so much for being bold and fearless and exploring ideas. And your Twitter aside, thank you for being just good faith in all the arguments and all the conversations you're having with people. It's a huge honor. Thank you for talking to me. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ben Shapiro himself. Freedom of speech and thought matters, especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging in thought it dislikes, thought crime becomes a reality. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/AF8DOS4C2KM

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Omar Suleiman: Islam | Lex Fridman Podcast #352

So the BBC reached out and said, we want to interview you. And he said, we've got this idea. We want to take you to a park and have you meet one of the protesters who's been wielding his gun outside your mosque and talk to him. It was really interesting because they'd interviewed him before meeting me. And the things that he was able to utter before meeting me and before meeting Syrian refugees was just awful. I mean, the most dehumanizing rhetoric that you can imagine. But then at the park, he meets me, talks to me, he meets a Syrian refugee family. Uh, one of the girls whose leg had been blown off in an airstrike. And he said, I feel like an idiot. I mean, he expressed all sorts of regret and was teary eyed that he could dehumanize people the way that he was. And so my whole thing was, and is come inside the mosque, put your gun down. Disarm yourself and learn, and you'll be surprised what you'll walk away with. And only took one meeting with him to completely shift his worldview at the time, which was made up of heroes and villains, the Muslims, unfortunately, being the villains that had to be wiped off the face of the earth so that the earth could continue. The following is a conversation with Imam Daqin. This is a conversation with Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman. He's a Muslim scholar, civil rights leader, founder, and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. And he's a professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University. He's one of the most influential Muslims in the world and is a fearless, kindhearted human being who I'm now proud to call a friend. As a side note, allow me to say a few words about Israel and Palestine. While this conversation with Omar Suleiman was mostly exploring the history and beauty of Islam and the Muslim community, we did delve briefly into the topic of Israel and Palestine. This topic is an extremely challenging one and an extremely important one. It has deep roots and implications in US politics, in global geopolitics, in military and religious conflicts, wars, and atrocities, and basic struggle of all human beings to survive, to protect their loved ones, and to flourish as individuals and as communities. I did not want to cover this topic in a solely scholarly fashion. Much like with the war in Ukraine, it is not simply a story of history, politics, religion, and national identity. It is also a deeply human story. To cover this topic in the way that my gut and my heart says to do it, I have to talk to everyone, to leaders and people on all sides, Muslim and Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian, from refugees to soldiers, from scholars to extremists. I'm not sure if that's possible or wise, but like Forrest Gump said, I'm not a smart man, and maybe you know how the rest of that goes. I just like to follow my heart to whatever place it leads. I ask the Muslim and the Jewish communities for your patience and support as I explore this topic. I will make many mistakes, and I'll be listening to all voices so I can learn and do better. I've become distinctly aware that my approach of talking to people from all walks of life with empathy and compassion, but with backbone, can create enemies on all sides. I don't quite yet understand why this is, but I'm learning to accept it as the reality of the world. Hopefully, in the end, whatever happens, whatever silly thing I do has a chance of adding a bit of love to the world. Thanks for going along with me on this journey. This is the Lex Freedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Omar Suleiman. As-salamu alaykum, Omar. We've been trying to do this a long time. The world tried to prevent it through the funny ways that the world does, but here we are. I'm a huge fan of yours. It's a huge honor to talk to you. I appreciate it. Thank you for making the sacrifice and coming down, or coming up, I guess, to Dallas. I appreciate it. It's a short flight, but a long journey. Let's start with the biggest question. Who is God, according to Islam? God is the most compassionate, the most merciful, the creator of the heavens and the earth. He is one God. He begets not, nor is He begotten. He is unique. He is omnipotent. He is beyond the limitations of man. He is beyond the constructs of our imagination, but He is ever accessible through sincere supplication. When you call upon Him alone, one God, He is closer to you than your jugular vein, the Quran tells us. He's known by many names and attributes, but His essence is one. He's one God. No human likeness, no human imperfection can be attributed to Him. No partners, no image of Him can be constructed. And that is God. So God represents, He is a feeling of closeness that is accessible to every human being. Well, God's not a feeling. God is known by names and attributes. We call upon God, but there is certainly a feeling of closeness when you access Him. And so I think the beauty of Islam is that as perfect as God is described, He's also so accessible to the imperfect. And so the idea of sincere supplication and connection to Him, we worship Him alone. We call upon Him alone. There's no clergy. There's no barriers. There's no barriers. There's no barriers between God and us. And that encourages a sincere devotion and commitment to Him alone. And so He is certainly described supreme and God speaks to us through the Quran and we speak to Him through sincere supplication. And His attributes are the furthest from us in terms of their perfection. But He is ever close to us through our supplication, through our prayers and through our connection to Him. To open the door to that connection, to have a connection with God, how difficult is that process? How difficult was it for you? How difficult is it for the people that, for the many, many, many Muslims that you've interacted with? Well, I think that there are different layers of difficulty, right? There is the personal difficulty, submitting yourself to God. Islam requires a complete submission to Him. And one of the things that happens is that if we project some of our bad experiences with authority onto our relationship with God, then we immediately perceive Him in a certain way that might not allow us to gain a closeness to Him. Because maybe we didn't have the best relationship with our parents growing up. Maybe we didn't have the best relationship with authority figures in our lives. So this idea of an ultimate authority to whom you submit yourself can be very difficult. Malcolm X, who was one of the most prominent converts to Islam in American history, talked about the difficulty of prostration for the very first time. Putting your head on the ground, putting your face on the ground and praying to God is a very humbling thing. Submitting all of your affairs to Him is very humbling. And ultimately you have to relinquish control. And you can't relinquish control without trust, so you have to learn to trust God. To trust God, you have to know Him. And to know Him is to love Him. And so, for me personally, you know, growing up, going through certain difficulties, having a sick parent who struggled in her life with cancer and with strokes, dealing with racism in South Louisiana growing up, it was important for me to learn about God through my difficulties, for example, rather than let those difficulties turn me away from Him. Many times people put a barrier between them and God because they can't make sense of the things that are happening in their own lives. And so they project anger towards God and at the same time deny their own belief in Him and do away with this natural disposition that every one of us has to believe in Him. So there are intellectual barriers, certainly. There are experiential barriers. But I think that one of the beautiful things about Islam is clarity. There is an explanation for His existence. There is an explanation for our existence. There is an explanation for the existence of difficulties and trial, an explanation for the existence of desires and distractions. And it all comes together so beautifully and coherently in Islam. And so I think that for many of us, we want to be our own gods. And ultimately we create and fashion gods in ways that allow us to still be the ultimate determiners of our own fates, of our own story. And that's very unfulfilling when you fail at your own plan. But when you realize that there is one who is all-knowing, that there is one who is all-wise, you actually find peace in submitting yourself to Him. And so submitting your will to Him, submitting your desires, submitting your own fate to Him becomes actually an experience of liberation because you trust the one that you're submitting to. You trust His knowledge over yours. You trust His wisdom over yours. And that gives you a lot of peace. And then you have direct access to Him. You pray to Him, you call upon Him, you supplicate. And everything in your life suddenly has meaning. You know, in our faith, everything is about intention. And there's an intentionality even behind the most seemingly most mundane actions. A morsel of food in the mouth of your spouse, your family, is looked at as a great charity. The way that you enter into a place and exit out of a place, what foot you step in, what foot you step out with, there's an intentionality. There's a word of remembrance that's spoken. There's a word of praise before and after you engage in any action. There are things that you say before you eat, before you sleep. There is meaning even to your sleep. One of the great companions of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, he said that, I seek the reward for my sleep just as I seek the reward for my prayer. Because you sleep to refresh yourself so that you can once again do great things. And the intentionality behind that allows even the sleep to be rewardable. You eat to nourish yourself so that you can do great things. You seek to be in a position of independence and of being sustained so that you can sustain others. So the Prophet, peace be upon him, says, for example, that the upper hand is better than the lower hand. The upper hand is the giving hand, the lower hand is the receiving hand. So to seek a position where you can help other people, everything becomes intentional. And there's no such thing as, you know, something that is meaningless and without purpose. So every pursuit is ultimately a pursuit of God. And when you pursue God sincerely, then he rewards you, not just with paradise in the afterlife, but he rewards you with a great sense of serenity and self-satisfaction here. You mentioned part of the struggle growing up was having a parent, your mom, who was sick. What do you remember about your mom? What are some happy, pleasant memories? So my parents were, well my father, thank God, is still alive. My mother was a pious woman, a beautiful woman, a righteous woman, a woman who was known for treating everyone with a great deal of love and respect. She was a poet. She used to write poetry about oppressed peoples around the world. From her homeland in Palestine to the genocide in Bosnia, she followed every conflict before social media and poured her heart into it. She was a woman of great charity. So when I think back to my mom growing up, she was known for her smile. My mom was always smiling. And in fact, every picture of her, she's smiling. And at her funeral, people talked about her smile, that she would smile at everyone, and that was kind of her thing. So if you were left out of a gathering, she was smiling at you, and she'd kind of welcome you in. I remember my mom to be content. She was a woman of prayer and a woman of contentment. So I used to see her in her prayer clothes all the time. In fact, when I think back to her growing up, I think of her more in her prayer clothes than in her normal clothes, because that's how often she was engaged in prayer. And I think of her making sure that everyone was included in a conversation. So she was very interesting in that she had several strokes, and each one of those strokes impaired one of her senses to some extent. So she was partially deaf because of one stroke. And she'd be sitting in a gathering, and she'd be pretty quiet with a big smile on her face, very serene. And she would tell me, you know, alhamdulillah, which means thank God, all praise be to God, that I can't hear because I can tell when people are gossiping, when people are saying negative things around me about other people, because she says even the look on people's faces changes. So it was really interesting because she was that spiritually rooted and deep that she said, like, you could see on the looks on people's faces when they started to speak ill about other people, that their faces would change, that their demeanor would change. And she said, I would actually praise the Lord that I couldn't engage in those conversations and that I wasn't sinful for hearing them. And what she would do is, what people said at her funeral, which was really beautiful to me and was very comforting to me, and I took it as a life mission, that if you were new to a place or if you were kind of in the corner and not known to other people in the community and you felt left out, she was the one that literally would look around the room and she'd see who was standing in the corner and who was new to the community or new to whatever place, and she'd go and try to include that person in the gathering. So even when she had impaired speech and impaired hearing, with her smile and with her warmth, she was able to welcome people wherever that was. And so the amount of people that came to her funeral and the stories that I continue to hear till this day, 15 years later, after her passing away, of people that said, you know, no one ever treated me the way your mother treated me. And she connected that to God. So that was actually part of my faith journey. When I think of great people, when I think of people of faith, she's the first person that comes to my mind because, despite her challenges, she was always the greatest person that you would meet. Anyone that met her and that knew her would say, I've never met anyone that kind. That was her reputation. And she was deeply empathetic. She would shed tears over people that she had no connection to. This is again before social media, before, you know, the heavy exposure that we have to people in conflict zones. She had to engage every single human being in her life in a deep and profound way because she had a profound connection to God and she believed that that was her calling. And none of her challenges made her bitter. In fact, they only made her more connected to God. And they only made her a better person until the last breath that she took. Do you miss her? Yeah. I mean, yes, absolutely. But I feel like everything I do is an extension of her. So you try to carry what she stood for as part of yourself. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that when a person passes away, there are only three things that continue to benefit them, that continue to extend them. A continuous charity or a piece of knowledge that continues to benefit people or a righteous child that prays for them. And I want to be that child that prays for her, but also does charity in her name, extends her charity, extends what she taught me by being the person that she was. To everyone around me. And there's some times where I don't feel like getting out of bed. Sometimes where I don't feel like doing for myself, but I actually feel like doing for her. So everything in my life that I try to do, I try to make it an extension of her. And that's been my calling. And I believe I'll meet her again. I believe I'll be with her again. I believe that everything I do that is good will be of benefit to her. And I believe that it would make her proud. And so as much as I miss her, as much as I am fueled to do for her. And so I continue that. And that's kind of become part of my life. It's been my life story as a child and as an adult. It's been sort of the centerpiece of my life. To do things that extend her. And ultimately in the process, hopefully benefit me. Because I believe that she's a woman who, I pray, is destined for paradise. And I want to do the things that would get me there too. What did you learn about death, about life, from losing her? I feel like the facade of the material world was made evident to me at a very young age. Most children grow up and their parents want to protect them from everything. And I felt that too. My mother wanted to downplay her own tragedy so that me and my brother could live a fruitful and fulfilling life. My father wanted to protect us from the hardship of her life so that we could live fulfilling lives. He'd often be the only father on a field trip, even though he was a distinguished professor. I mean, he was a busy man. He was a very busy man, but he tried to show up at a field trip and tried to make our lives as normal as possible. But in the process, we always understood that there was more to life than what other children were seeing it as. And now I know that as an adult, there's more to life than what other adults see it as. The material world disappointed early on so that we could see beyond it. And I often tell people that, you know, there are many that grow up in tragedy, orphan children, refugees, that grow up and do incredible things because they immediately see past the facade. They see through all of the material promises of this world, the deception of it. And that you can choose to be bitter as a result of that, or you can choose to be better. And I think that for me, I had to consciously make that decision that I was going to live a life of prayer. I was going to live a life of charity. I was going to live a life of commitment. And in that process, invest in something that's greater. Invest in something that doesn't disappoint. And so I believe in God. I believe in the hereafter. And I believe that God will not let any trial or effort in this life go to waste without it being repaid in the hereafter. And so I work towards that. And so life and death, I understood existence to be transcendent early on. That if I believed that there was nothing to life except for life, I would be a very bitter person. But because I know that there is more to it than this, I'm able to exist in it without being depressed by it. Existence is transcendence. What happens after we die? After the material instantiation fades away. So the Quran tells us that God brought us from the darkness of the womb into this life. You were nothing but a dirty drop of fluid. And you became this fully proportioned human being from the darkness of the womb. You come into this life. You experience it. And then you go to the darkness of the grave only to be resurrected once again. And that we are souls with bodies, not bodies with souls. And there's a huge difference between those two things. This is the vehicle that contains us here. This is the material world that we encounter here. But we are not this. And this is not our entire existence. And so the soul continues. This is a life in which we seek to worship Him and seek to live in accordance with the purpose that He has set out for us. And after we pass away, our soul continues onwards, either to reward or to punishment or to a mixture of both. But it's a realm of accountability. And hopefully it's a realm of reward should we exist in a way that He wants us to exist. So you said that you can look to God for wisdom to make sense of the world. There's a lot of stuff to us humans that's difficult to make sense of. Like you losing your mother. There's a lot of cruelty in the world. There's a lot of suffering in the world. What wisdom have you been able to find from God about why there is suffering in the world, why there's cruelty? You know, there's a saying that I wanted to ask God about why He allows hunger and war and poverty. But I was afraid He might ask me the same question. God has certainly given us enough food. There's enough food in the world for everyone to have a 3,200 calorie diet a day. God has certainly given us enough guidance for us to not inflict on each other the cruelty that we inflict. When we look to the world around us, first and foremost, we have to have a sense of accountability. We are accountable for our own actions. We don't blame God for the evil of man. That's one. But at the same time, we understand that God in His wisdom allows for certain outcomes that we cannot encompass with our own. And that to isolate these incidents and to try to make sense of them is no different than a baby in the womb that doesn't understand the world that it's coming into. And to explain to that baby that hasn't yet developed its own senses and its own perception of this world what is happening to it. I often think of the example of a child. And having been at this point now through the experience of parenthood, I'm still learning. I'm just going into having a teenager with three kids and being a softie for my kids. You know, when you have to tell your child that they can't have something that they really, really want. And that child thinks you hate them at some point, you know, because why are you stopping me from putting this toy in my mouth and choking myself? They don't get it, right? But at the same time, you prevent them out of love. They're not in a position to understand that you're preventing them out of love. And to isolate these incidents with God and to say, the wisdom, what's the wisdom? You're trying to make sense of a pixel when you can't see the bigger picture. Your mind is not at a place where you can make sense of the bigger picture. You haven't seen the bigger picture. And so, for him to even explain to us every incident would completely defeat the purpose of putting your trust in him. So, we believe in a God that is all-encompassing in his knowledge and wisdom that gives us, and Islam is very specific by the way that there is what God tells us to do and there's what God allows to happen. So, what God tells us to do in terms of the roadmap towards good and then what God allows to happen in his divine wisdom. That no outcome can escape him, but at the same time, we are accountable for our own actions and our own deeds. So, when you come to someone and say, you know, why did God allow this to happen to this person? I can't rationalize that for you because my understanding is relegated to the immediate experience in front of me. But if I know God and if I learn about God, then I don't have to make sense of the plan, but I can tell you that I trust the planner. And I think that that's where peace is found. You know, a lot of times you look for the light at the end of the tunnel. What's the light at the end of the tunnel? In Islam, there's emphasis on God and the hereafter because to try to make sense of divine decree and why certain things happen in this world without the existence of a God or without the existence of a hereafter will always fail you. So, the existence of a God that is all-knowing, what we don't know, I know what you don't know, that understands what we don't understand. The existence of a God who is not subject to our constrictions and the existence of a hereafter where all things find recourse, where there's divine recourse, allows for this world to be situated within the existence of something greater and not treated in isolation. So, when you're trying to treat an incident of this world in isolation, you're going to fail. And when you try to treat existence in this world and of this world in isolation, you're also going to fail. And so, the emphasis is the belief in God, a God that is not limited like you are, and a belief in the hereafter that is not limited like this life. And so, everything continues onwards, and there's divine recourse for everything, each and everything. You know, the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, mentions that on the Day of Judgment, a person who lived the most difficult of lives will be dipped into paradise one time and will be told, have you ever seen any sadness, any hardship? Now, when you think about the most difficult life, some of the commentators in Islam, they said that this is perhaps referring to the Prophet Job, Ayyub, peace be upon him, because Job lived, obviously, a life of great difficulty. But that a person who lived a very hard life would be dipped into paradise one time, and just with a dip be asked, have you ever seen any hardship? Have you ever seen any misery? And that person would say, what is sadness? What is hardship? What is misery? Now, if you don't believe in the hereafter, if you don't believe in anything beyond this life, then the recourse has to happen in this life. And because we see so many people pass through this life without recourse of cruelty, without recourse of suffering, then we're forced to try to make sense of it. And if you are someone who believes that this entire world came into existence through randomness, that we're just an existence of random atoms that collide with each other and that all of this comes together out of nothing, then how can you put your trust in anything that is greater? So, you know, you ask me, as a child of a parent who suffered, I believe that every moment that my mother suffered, that she will be rewarded, that she will be elevated, that all of that made her or contributed to the beautiful person that she was and will contribute to the beautiful reward that she receives. And the recourse is certain to me as a believer in that. So, the right approach to making sense of the world, especially making sense of suffering and cruelty, is that of humility that we as humans cannot possibly understand fully. Absolutely. In fact, in the Qur'an, it's very interesting. When God creates Adam, the angels say to God, are you going to create a race or a species that will spill blood and cause corruption? And God says to the angels in response to that question, I know that which you don't know. So, even the angels have to humble themselves for a moment, the angels who adore God, who love God, who worship Him, who obey Him unconditionally, they are told by God, I know that which you don't know. And what we extract from that, what many of the early interpretations extract from that is that God knows that there are human beings that will come out of this enterprise of humanity that make the entire existence of it worth it. Just as, yes, there will be criminals and corrupt ones, there will be prophets and beautiful people that come out of this, and sages and saints that come out of this, that show that a human being, who unlike an angel who has no choice but to worship God, an angel has no sense of will, no sense of choice, an angel is created to worship and has no desires. There is a human being who has the choice of desire and worship, the choice of righteousness and wickedness, that there are human beings who will choose worship and righteousness, that will choose charity over cruelty, that will choose service and choose dedication and devotion over death and destruction. That there are human beings that will in fact ascend the angels in rank because they will live lives where they choose that capacity, that part of themselves, and they lean into that and worship God lovingly and obey Him. You see, some of the sages and scholars, they describe this as saying that the human being has the capacity to be anywhere from an animal to an angel, or even worse, to be a devil to an angel. Not in the sense that we ever actually become angels or become animals, but that an animal, for the most part, seeks its desires over everything. Doesn't really think about many of the things that we are supposed to calculate as human beings, doesn't think about which territory it's infringing upon or how much of its appetite it should fulfill. It simply exists to fulfill its appetite and that many human beings simply exist to fulfill their appetite and they choose that over worship or reason or anything that is greater. They literally take their selves as gods in that sense and their selves have no limitation on appetite, so they just keep filling that appetite and filling that appetite and filling that appetite. Whereas a human being can also go to the extent of choosing something greater and disciplining their desires, disciplining their selves because they're seeking a greater reward. You know, we know many people that achieve great things in the worldly sense because they choose to study over sleep, for example. They choose to exert themselves towards their careers, towards their education, because they believe that ultimately the outcome of those pursuits are more rewarding than the immediate fulfillment of their desires. So, as believers, we choose that love of God and we choose that outcome that we seek and we discipline ourselves to where we can even ascend past the angels in rank. Now, of course, I said we can go as low as an animal or even as low as a devil and we have tyrants, past and present and future as well, that can become satanic in their nature because they allow their desires to take such control over them. That they not only worship them, but that every other existing being around them simply becomes a piece of their own puzzle in pursuit of their own lordship and their own satisfaction and they will kill, they will discard. Not because, you know, and I always say this, it's not that tyrants necessarily like killing people, it's that people's lives pose somewhat of an indifference to them. They're indifferent to people's existence and so you become either an object for or against me. And so, they're willing to discard children, discard people, discard the rights of others because they ultimately have chosen that the greatest pursuit of themselves is the maximum position of power and a place to where they can fulfill what they want to of themselves without any limits. And everyone else becomes either a threat or an opportunity in that regard. So, we can be devils, we can be angelic-like, we can be animals. We're somewhere on that spectrum. And every moment contains a set of choices you can make. Absolutely. Every single moment contains a set of choices. And that's where the intentionality comes in. Right? So, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, says that I saw a person strolling in paradise because he removed something harmful from the road. He tells us about a woman that lived a life in prostitution but that repented to God when she was thirsty one day and she saw a dog that was also thirsty. And she said that I was thirsty and God gave me water so I'm going to choose to give water to that thirsty dog. And God enters her into paradise as a result of that. Sometimes the small moments with a small sincere deed can have a huge impact on a person's trajectory. So, every moment is a moment of choices. And when we choose belief, righteousness, a pursuit of something greater, then we find ways to turn things that are otherwise mundane into miraculous acts. Right? Where we can choose God over ourselves and in the process choose a better fate for ourselves. How difficult is the process of knowing, understanding what is the righteous action of knowing what it means to be a good man or a good woman? Well, the truth has consequences. So, don't seek out the truth unless you're willing to abide by what you find. So, a lot of people want to mold their journey in accordance with a predetermined pursuit that they already have. And so, when they approach religion, they approach it like another product. You know, there was an article that was actually written by a rabbi. I've spoken about this in several sermons. It was called The Allure of Narcissistic Spirituality. The Allure of Narcissistic Spirituality, where he talks about how religion becomes just another product of your own self-adoration and worship to where you only approach religion to the extent that it gives you more happiness in the worldly sense. You only approach of it what is therapeutic. So, it becomes just as secular in its nature as any other practice of meditation or whatever it may be or some other product. And it kind of mentions, you know, how he took that from a person that is praying in a temple. And a guy walks into the temple and bumps into him and then he curses the guy out. So, he didn't see his behavior towards that person as part of his trajectory of worship, he just saw his being godly as the worship that he was engaged in. The truth has consequences. The truth has circumstances that are required of you, actions that are required of you that may be somewhat inconvenient. So, you have to be willing to engage in a sincere pursuit of truth and look for truth for what it is. And not simply look for comfort and convenience. And when you engage in that journey of wanting to know, you have to engage it thoroughly and sincerely and try your best to remove any bias. I think that's what makes the religion of Islam such a phenomenon for people. That with all the Islamophobia and the bigotry towards it, it's still the fastest growing religion in the United States and the fastest growing religion in the world. And no, that's not all birthrate. Yeah, we have a lot of kids. But many people, you know, you met someone just before we started this interview, many people in fact in a post 9-11 world saw what they saw of Islam in the media. And they actually, you know, went and checked out copies of the Quran and started to read about the religion and in their sincere pursuit of truth, ended up embracing a religion that they believed was the greatest source of destruction in the world. And now it's the greatest source of peace for them in their own existence, in their own lives. And so, you have to be willing to engage in a sincere pursuit of wanting to know, and then be willing to engage in sincere commitment after you know. Otherwise, the heart rusts. And so, there's a process, you know, the Quran talks about this, of making the heart like fertile soil towards truth. So, you have a sincere pursuit, but then at some point, if you come to know and then you ignore what you come to know, then the heart rusts and it becomes harder to recognize it the second time around and the third time around. And so, when people come to me and they say, you know, I'm looking for something, I'm looking for God, I'm looking for my purpose. The first thing I tell them is I say, listen, what you need to do is, if you're really looking for God and you believe in God, and there are often people that say, I believe in God, but I don't know where to go with this. I know that there's something greater. In Islam, we call that the fitrah, a natural disposition towards the belief in the existence of God. But where do I go from here? You know, what do I do now? The first thing you need to do is you need to sincerely say, oh God, guide me to the truth. Call upon God sincerely, say I'm calling upon you alone and I'm asking you to guide me to the truth. Show me what it is, right? And that's the heart function. Then you need to actually investigate and try to suspend bias, right? Investigate the world's religions, investigate the claims to truth, investigate, use rational inquiry to the extent that the heart becomes satisfied. And suspend bias and you'll be surprised. And so for a lot of people, they come to me and they say, you know, this about Islam. I'm like, look, if you're just going to talk to me about what you've seen of Islam in the media, if you were serious about it, you know, if you're serious about it, then you're not simply going to be satisfied with the highly edited images and distorted facts that come towards you about this religion, right? What are you looking for, right? Are you looking for a scapegoat? Islam poses a threat to many people, right? Are you looking for a scapegoat? Are you looking for the big, bad, scary foreign enemy? Or are you looking at a religion that one fourth of the world adheres to? And if one fourth of us were bad, the world would not exist, right? So are you looking towards this religion that one fourth of the world adheres to? Are you going to read about the prophet Muhammad peace be upon him? Are you going to read the Quran yourself? Are you going to investigate for yourself what it is that this faith has to offer and find in it a great sense of wisdom, a great sense of beauty, a great sense of truth? And I think that for a lot of people, you know, they find that Islam has such a beautiful combination of the intellectual proofs as well as the spiritual experiences that often combine what people seek in the Western and the Eastern religion. So I had an interesting two weeks. Two weeks in a row, this was August, two weeks in a row, I had someone who converted to Islam that went from being, that started off as a Methodist, went from being a Methodist to being a Buddhist to being a Muslim. So two weeks in a row, I had a Methodist turned Buddhist turned Muslim. And I called, yeah, I called my Methodist friends. I have a lot of Methodist pastors in the city that I work with. And I said, what's going on here, man? You're sending people on to this interesting journey of Buddhism and then Islam. But both of them had a very similar story, which is that they had sought in Buddhism, for example, the, you know, some of the meditative practices that are found, that really Western religion, which has been dominated by capitalism and dominated by very material things and can be very unfulfilling. They found that in some of the Eastern philosophies and the meditative practices. And then they came to Islam and it combined, you know, their belief in sort of the Abrahamic way. It merged their belief in one God and the prophets like Abraham and Moses and Jesus, peace be upon them all, with a deep tradition of meditative practices, of consciousness, of connection to God on a regular basis. And they found that to be very fulfilling, both intellectually and spiritually. And so I was like, that's interesting, you know, two people in two weeks that went through that journey. So I think Islam is very wholesome, comprehensive when people actually approach it with humility and appreciate what it has to offer. As you mentioned, in the minds of some Americans, after 9-11, the religion of Islam was associated with, maybe you could say evil in the world, maybe you can say terrorism. How can you respond to this association? How does it make you feel, first of all, as a devout Muslim yourself? And how can you overcome it personally? How can you overcome it as a community and as a religious leader? It's interesting because 9-11 now, we're talking over 21 years ago. You know, there's people born after 9-11. It's crazy. You get to talk to them all the time. Yeah, so when I'm talking to young Muslims, I'm talking about post 9-11, post 9-11, they're like, I was born in 2005, what are you talking about post 9-11? I'm like, well, I remember being a teenager. I remember being in high school when this happened, right? So, for those of us that experienced 9-11 as high schoolers or as college students and remember distinctly what it was like to be a Muslim pre 9-11 and post 9-11, we can relate to that experience and we could identify that juncture, you know, very clearly and talk about it and speak to the change in the perceptions of Islam that happened here in the United States and around the world. But a lot of young people are born into that reality and are experiencing the aftermath of it. And, you know, unfortunately, I have to deal with the bigotry that has not just, you know, taken greater shape in media constructions of Islam, but also policies, right? A lot of the civil liberties of the Muslim community were taken away from us. You read about the Patriot Act, you read about the securitization of the Muslim community and some of the unfair practices that have been engaged by the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and continue into the Biden administration. International Islamophobia. And so the hatred of Muslims and the bigotry that is wielded against Muslims on the basis of this idea that we are a barbaric people, not ascribed to a religion of hate and violence, has had immediate consequences for us, no matter where we are in terms of our age and in terms of our experience. We have dealt with that in different ways. Now, the association of Islam to terrorism is a lazy association. It's one that ignores both the history of violence as well as its everyday occurrence. You know, we're good for how many mass shootings a year? When's the last time you heard of a Muslim carrying out a mass shooting in America? How many of those mass shootings, if you were to scrub the social media, what, 400, 500 mass shootings a year? If you were to scrub the social media of some of those that carried out those shootings. You know, we're good for one or two idiots a year, right? It's unfortunate that you're going to have people that carry out despicable acts of violence. But when we as Muslims hear someone in the media say terrorism has been ruled out as a possibility, while the blood is still on the floor of that Walmart, we already know that the police chief just said that wasn't a Muslim. Don't worry. You know, that wasn't an al-Qaeda guy or an ISIS guy. It was one of our own, right? And so it's become frankly ridiculous because the association of violence with Islam is one that is used to actually carry out acts of violence against Muslims worldwide. It justifies bad policy towards Muslims worldwide and in the United States. And it's just factually so lazy. There was a study just about how the media gives more attention to acts of violence done by Muslims and immediately stamps it with Islam up to 300% more than it will with another act of violence carried out in the name of anything else. So, you don't hear about the acts of violence that are carried out by others. You don't hear about the religion of the perpetrators. You don't associate terrorism with actions frankly of state terrorism. You know, when governments launch chemical attacks or drone weddings and do so while explicitly dehumanizing the people just because they do so with the government apparatus doesn't make it any less terroristic than if it's a lone person that goes out and commits an act of violence trying to achieve a political goal. So, the association is lazy historically speaking. The Crusades. I grew up in Louisiana. I saw Klan rallies, Ku Klux Klan rallies my whole life and people said, well, that's a thing of the past. Well, guess what? You know, we see many semblances, many acts that are carried out with the same vitriol that was generated by the Ku Klux Klan. We have people standing in front of our mosques that belong to right-wing hate militias carrying AR-15s talking about wanting to inflict harm on Muslims. I have been to Christchurch, New Zealand and buried the victims of a white supremacist terrorist who was inspired by the political rhetoric here in the United States in his own words in his manifesto to go and kill 50 innocent people in Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the most peaceful cities in the world. And by the way, Lex, I mean, it's really interesting like with Christchurch, you know, the man wanted and I won't even say his name, but his next target after the two mosques had he not been stopped was to go to a Muslim daycare. So, what drives someone to dehumanize people to that extent that he was willing to go to a daycare and murder a bunch of kids because he saw them as a demographic threat to civilization. So, Muslims are terrorized because they are falsely depicted as terrorists. Muslims suffer domestically and globally because of this false association. It's a lazy association and when someone comes around and says, well, fine, not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. I say that you clearly don't read statistics. Whether we're talking about the 20th century and I'm a student of history and I believe you are as well. All the isms, World War I, World War II had nothing to do with religion, certainly nothing to do with Islam, fascism, Soviet atheism, right? Many of these systems where people were murdered in the millions, Nazism, the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, I can go on and on, the Rohingya today, the greatest atrocity towards the Uyghurs. Where's Islam fit in all of this? People do horrible things. They stamp it with religion at times. But the only group of people that seem to suffer after an act of violence is committed are Muslims because any act of violence that is committed by a Muslim will immediately be blamed on Islam. And 2 billion people will have to carry the burden of the act of a single perpetrator. And just to reiterate, in case the numbers are not known, you mentioned Christchurch, those are two mosque shootings with 51 people killed and 48 were injured in New Zealand. Yeah. So it's hate manifesting itself and then actual human suffering and destruction. Absolutely. Is there similarities between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate? So is there something deeper to say about hate in general here that is beyond just particularly hate towards Muslims? Absolutely. Look, in Pittsburgh, the synagogue shooting, the perpetrator particularly targeted that synagogue because... 11 killed, 6 wounded in 2018. Because he believed that they were taking in Syrian refugees or supporting Syrian Muslim refugees. You think about that. The San Diego synagogue shooting that took place shortly after, he went to a mosque and then he went to a synagogue. Look, the idea of scapegoating minority populations and attributing to them a disproportionate sense of power and a nefarious element where they can't be trusted, and unless we wipe them out, then they're going to wipe us out, underlies many of the bigotries that exist. I mean, look, after Trump announced his Muslim ban, there was a shooting in Canada, an attack in Canada on a mosque in Quebec, where 6 people were killed. The shooter explicitly said that the reason why he went to that mosque in Quebec and shot dead 6 Muslim worshippers was because he was afraid that because of the ban on Syrian refugees in the United States, they would come to Canada, and he didn't want them to feel welcomed in Canada. So there is a connection. And I think it's when you are able to dehumanize large groups of people and attribute a nefarious element to them, then unfortunately in a world that's becoming more and more polarized, where people are able to construct their entire worldviews based on an algorithm that their social media caters to, you're going to have some of these attacks happen, and there's going to be an unfortunate connection between them. So what I tell people is that, you know, I think with all of these people that shoot up synagogues and shoot up mosques, and even before that actually, the Charleston, South Carolina shooting at an AME church, you know, when he went there, he actually said that before he murdered 9 worshippers in that church, he was taken aback by how nice they were to him. He sat there for two hours before he turned a gun on many people who were over the age of 80 years old and murdered them in cold blood. So this is what I talk about when I say that as human beings, we have the propensity, unfortunately, to become worse than devils, or we can choose to be angelic when we choose worship and righteousness over ourselves. So that's a spiritual crisis as well, and a crisis of meaning and emptiness, where I think people are willing to inflict great pain on others when they can't make sense of their pain in their own lives. I'd like to try to figure out, together with you, sort of a way out to try to decrease the amount of hate in the world, but maybe it's useful to talk about the BBC documentary that, it's kind of interesting that people should check out, it's called United States of Hate, Muslims Under Attack, and you appear in that, you have conversations with people who are anti-Muslim. And I believe most of it takes place here in Dallas. Yeah. And can you just tell me about this little documentary about that time, what it was like to interact, what was the group in the documentary, what was it like to interact with them? You know, in the very beginning of the rise of, at that time actually, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, like when Islamophobia was at the center of many of the presidential candidates' campaigns at the time. So this must have been 2015. Yes, 2015. The mayor of Irving at the time, Beth Van Dyne, who is now a congresswoman, had put out the idea that Muslims were operating a Sharia court in Irving, Texas. And suddenly there was a hysteria, because again, there's the idea that Muslims are here to dominate, Muslims are here to overthrow everything that you have in the United States. There was hysteria here. And it was unfortunate because what it unleashed, you know, especially with the national discourse at the time, again, the presidential campaign, you know, Donald Trump says, I think Islam hates us. When he uses those words, I think Islam hates us. When Ted Cruz suggests that Muslim neighborhoods could be patrolled or should be patrolled, and then you have the Irving mayor saying that one of the most populated cities with Muslims in America, they're operating under an alternative legal, an alternate legal system. And funny enough, the year before that, she'd come to the mosque and she praised the diversity of Irving, and she was talking about how welcome she felt in the mosque. And the next thing we know, you have these crazy white supremacist groups, openly white supremacists that affiliate themselves with the Klan and others, protesting regularly in front of our mosques with their AR-15s and telling people to go back home. And I'm like, I'm from New Orleans, I'm not planning to move back to New Orleans. I'm home. We're home. We're good. You know, we're staying put. And we refuse to be intimidated. But then when the Syrian refugee crisis is unfolding as well, Dallas has been one of the more popular destinations, if you will. I'm not talking about it like a vacation destination, but where a lot of refugees have come to just because of the infrastructure that we have set up here to receive refugees. And so that hysteria was an unfortunate, perfect combustion of the national discourse with the local discourse with the incoming refugees. And we would do all sorts of welcome refugee events. And we do that, you know, and we don't only do that for Muslim refugees, by the way, there are refugees from other parts of the world as well. But we would host events at our mosques, you know, to welcome refugees, to help integrate them into the community, to do things for them. So you have these armed protests happening, right? And it's horrible because think about the trauma to the children that are hearing about Tree of Life and hearing about some of these other incidents that are unfolding. And really one of the first communities that was targeted was the Sikh community in Madison. That was one of the first shootings and then the AME church, Charleston. And then you just had tons of places of worship being targeted, right? So they're seeing this unfold and they're seeing these guns in front of their mosques and the result to many is, well, I just don't want to get shot. I don't want to go to the mosque. I don't want to have this happen to me. So, you know, when BBC reached out and said, we want to do a documentary about this, unfortunately, Dallas was the only place in America where you had regular armed groups in front of our mosques. It was happening around the country infrequently, but here it was happening every week. So the BBC reached out and said, we want to interview you. And he said, we've got this idea. We want to put you, we want to take you to a park and have you meet one of the protesters who's been wielding his gun outside your mosque and talk to him. And it was really interesting because they'd interviewed him before meeting me and the things that he was able to utter before meeting me and before meeting Syrian refugees was just awful. I mean, the most dehumanizing rhetoric that you can imagine, but then at the park, he meets me, talks to me, he meets a Syrian refugee family, one of the girls whose leg had been blown off in an airstrike. And he said, I feel like an idiot. I mean, he expressed all sorts of regret and was teary eyed that he could dehumanize people the way that he was. And so my whole thing was and is come inside the mosque, put your gun down, disarm yourself and learn. And you'll be surprised what you'll walk away with. And only took one meeting with him to completely shift his worldview at the time, which was made up of heroes and villains, the Muslims, unfortunately, being the villains that had to be wiped off the face of the earth so that the earth could continue. So that was an interesting documentary and it was an interesting social experiment. What's it feel like to have all these people that hate you and others in the community, people you love with guns, threatening violence, basically that don't want you here in this country, on this earth? It's not nice. It's not great. I mean, it's definitely a challenge. But look, there are challenges that we face as Muslims being in the United States, being in a hostile climate. And there are different types of challenges. And I think what we've had to do as a Muslim community is see beyond both the guns and the roses and think about who we are first. Because frankly, Islamophobia exists in different forms and from different sides. And we try to use this as an opportunity to instill in our young people, not just a sense of belonging, but a sense of purpose. Do not be intimidated. And in fact, show them the best of your Islam. Live your life. Because at the end of the day, the goal that is sought through intimidation is silence. And so we have to carry ourselves as proud American Muslims. We don't have to impress anyone. And we don't need to relinquish an iota of our faith to coexist with anyone. We are satisfied with who we are. We don't see a contradiction between our place of residence and our religion, our nationality, our religion. We don't see that as a problem. So that's something for them to work out, not for you to work out. That's what I would tell young Muslims. That continue to live your faith fully and demonstrate the beauty of it. And do not let the ugliness of the world consume you. But for those young Muslims, what would you say, how they should feel towards the people that hate them? The natural human, there's a desire still to have anger, to have resentment, to have hate back at the people that hate you. The Quran says, respond to that which is evil with that which is better. And you will find that sometimes your enemy will become your close friend. So respond with that which is better. Doesn't mean be passive. Sometimes there needs to be a demonstration of strength. Sometimes there needs to be a demonstration of ignoring people altogether. But ultimately you can't let the way people treat you shape who you're going to be in the world. And so that's why I say we have to look beyond the guns and the roses. We have to look beyond the hostility of our enemies and the temporary and opportunistic embrace of some of those who claim to be our allies and be us. And treat the world and treat the people of this world in accordance with your standards, not with theirs. So don't teach them, you know, or don't let them teach you bad character. You teach them good character. So live your life and live your faith beautifully and let people see the beauty of it through your being and do not let their ugliness consume you. But at the same time, sometimes you got to give people room to express frustration, to say that this is unacceptable, to have demonstrations of strength. And I think that those things don't have to all contradict each other. What do you think about these kinds of protests are not allowed in many parts of the world? What do you think about one of the most, to you, directly, personally, painful manifestations of the First Amendment, of the people's right to freedom of speech and to protest, to say hateful things? You've been at the receiving end of the worst of it. What do you feel about this particular freedom that's at the core of the founding of this country? Look, I think that you have to take it away from the text and look at it within reality. Let's be real. Would Muslims be able to protest in front of churches with guns on a weekly basis in this country? I don't think so. So, pragmatically speaking, there's a hypocrisy to what's allowed or not? Major hypocrisy. Major hypocrisy. See, free speech is an ideal that is weaponized against the Muslim community and against other communities in such a hypocritical way. You know, you take, for example, some countries in Europe, you know, let's kind of move away from this and look at the hypocrisy of a place like France, where the caricaturing and the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in derogatory ways will be used as the hallmark of free speech. But Muslims that will caricature Macron or challenge some of the values of France, the supposed enshrined values of France, will end up in prison and end up deported. And so, here in the United States, there's a great hypocrisy. I don't think that places of worship should have armed protesters in front of them. I think that that poses a security risk. I think that it's not okay. And I think that free speech is weaponized against the Muslim community and often is held up as this great value, but really to attain very lowly things and is often to our detriment. Yeah, just even watching that documentary, it's hard to put into words, but somehow that does not capture what maybe the founders intended. Right. What I would see as the great ideal of the freedom of speech. I don't know what the solution to that is. I think taking it outside of words, maybe that requires a community, a cultural pressure to be better. It's not about the law, it's more about just the cultural pressure. What isn't isn't okay. Is there something deeply wrong about that kind of hate? Yeah, because it was dehumanizing other people that are here in America, that are Americans. Yeah, I mean, we have to interrogate the foundations of our country when our country is in such turmoil and such chaos. No country in the world has the mass shootings that we have. No country in the world has some of the polarization that we have. We have to interrogate that and say what it is that we're doing wrong that's leading to that. And I think again, that it's reaching a point where it's unsustainable. If we don't do better and try to solve some of the rifts right now that exist in our society, then we're going to end up in a place where we may not be able to climb out of this. What do you think about, you mentioned the Muslim ban, what do you think about Executive Order 13769, titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States? Often referred to as the Muslim ban or the Trump travel ban, it was an executive order by President Trump that was in effect from January 27, 2017 for just a few months until March 6, 2017. What was this executive order and what was its effect on your life and on the life of the Muslim community and just the life of Americans? Well, it was disgraceful. It was a tactic that was used at the time, very similar to the whole build the wall rhetoric to play to a particular political sloganeering and carrying out those types of acts against the Muslim community. You're not going to face much opposition typically in any meaningful way that would be politically costly. When he rolled it out at the time, there were people in flight on their way to the United States that were held in airports around the country, children, elderly people that were held in these small rooms and treated awfully before being put back on a plane and sent to where they were. There were families that had medical needs that were never able to come together. He specifically targeted Muslim countries to play to that idea of a complete ban of Muslims, which he knew was not feasible at the time. Now, personally, Dallas had the largest amount, the largest number of detainees in the airport. We have one of the largest airports in America and we took to the airport and we stayed there for a few days, stayed overnight. It was one of the New York Times pictures of the year when we did our prayer because when we had to do our prayer, it wasn't just Muslims that came to the airport. It was many people that came to the airport of different faiths that were outraged by what they had seen. So when we do our prayer, there was a protest chant that you pray, we stay. And so the airport had to make room for us because we're like a thousand people that need to have our five daily prayers. So we would do our prayers in the airport. We waited. We continued until the detainees were freed, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, some elements of that legislation remained and it was an ongoing struggle. But look, what I'll say is that those are some of the more obvious manifestations of anti-Muslim bigotry. But again, there's hypocrisy on all sides of the political aisle here in the United States. There is Islamophobia of different flavors. I think even the term Islamophobia can become contentious because there are people that attack us in different ways and that might not be as overtly bigoted, but nonetheless are infringing on our rights to be full American Muslims. And Muslims find themselves in a very strange political place where you've got one side that seemingly wants to annihilate you and another side that only accepts you if you're willing to assimilate. But no one really allows you to be a full on American Muslim. And so Muslims find themselves in a very strange place right now with all of the political sides, with the political parties. Where do Muslims sit politically? Are they politically engaged in the function of the United States? Where do they find themselves politically as a community? So Muslims find themselves in an awkward place politically. That's the best way to put it. We are a religious community. And so we don't find ourselves welcomed by the left, which has a hostility towards religion in most left spaces and most liberal spaces. In general because it's a kind of religion has many conservative elements. Right. So the Muslim community is in its nature conservative for what that's worth, right? It's a conservative community. It's a community that has certain orthodoxies and practices that would make it disagreeable in its nature and its practice to many on the left. And many on the right just see us as a group of foreigners and a threat in that regard. So we find ourselves in this awkward place. There's also the presence of sort of the pro-Israel dominance of both parties. The foreign policy of both parties is detrimental to Muslims globally. The securitization of the Muslim community in the name of countering violent extremism. Unfortunately, the Muslim community has had both Republican and Democratic administrations just run over its rights. So we find ourselves kind of in this awkward space, right? We are a religious community that's also a minority. The racialization of the Muslim community sort of robs us of who we are and how we get to engage them with different platforms and different peoples around us. So we find ourselves in a very awkward place. Is there in general a lack of representation in places of power and in politics? I don't think representation is everything. I think that representation can actually be detrimental sometimes because you can have people that represent you but that don't actually represent your priorities as a community, as a faith community. So we don't want to be tokenized as a community, right? We want to be engaged and engage fully as Muslims and be respected as American Muslims. I wrote something at the time actually of Muslim ban. I wrote an article for CNN called, I am not your American Muslim. I am not your American Muslim because we are not a tool of liberals against conservatives, nor are we simply to be made out to be your villain or your victim. We are a place of faith where people that have values, where people that want to see our places of worship thrive, where people that have something to offer to this country, to the people around us of good. But ultimately we want to engage and be engaged with on the basis of who we actually are, not who you need us to be right now. And that's been the problem that we've had. So it's not a lack of representation as much as a lack of authentic engagement. You mentioned daily prayer and if I may, looking at the time, this might be time. And if it's okay, I would love it if you allow me to follow along at least in movement as you pray. Sure, absolutely. Thank you for allowing me to join you in that. Can you maybe describe what does the prayer represent? What is the actual practice of prayer like? What is the process like? Sure. So prayer is the central pillar, if you will, of Islam. It is the life of the believer encapsulated into a very specific act of devotion that's done at least five times a day. So there are different types of prayer. There's prayer, there's supplication. So the five daily prayers are called salah, which is the obligatory prayers. And then beyond that, there are voluntary prayers that are done throughout the day as well. So you can pray before and after the obligatory prayers and then there are other times of the day that you can pray also. And the best voluntary prayer is at night, in the middle of the night, because it's the time that you're closest to God. Sincere, away from the eyes of people, just in the still of the night. And you'd pray in a similar way with the standing and the bowing, the prostration, reciting the Quran. And then you have supplication and words of remembrance that you are to do throughout the day between all of that. So when people say, do you pray five times a day? I say at least five times a day. What are the words of supplication? Do they come from the Quran or do they come from your own heart? Where do they come from? So basically you say, Allahu Akbar, which means I'm going to kill you, right? Or so they say, right? God is greater. You start off with that, an expression of God's greatness. And then you recite the opening chapter of the Quran, which is known as al-Fatiha. It's the first chapter of the Quran. In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful, all praises be to God, the Lord of all the worlds, most compassionate, most merciful, master of the day of judgment. You alone we worship and from you alone we seek help. Guide us to the straight path, the path of those who have earned your favor, not those who have earned your wrath, nor those who have gone astray. So that's a translation of the first chapter, the opening chapter of the Quran, which is known as al-Fatiha. So we recite that in every one of the units of prayer. And then after that, we recite something else from the Quran. So some other portion of the Quran, and then we say, Allahu Akbar, once again, God is greater. We go into bowing and in bowing we say, SubhanAllah Rabbi al-Azim, SubhanAllah Rabbi al-Azim, SubhanAllah Rabbi al-Azim, which means glory be to God, the Almighty. Glory be to God, the Almighty. And then you come back up and you say, Sami'a Allah li man hamida, God has heard the one who has praised him. And then the response is, Rabbana wa laka al-hamd, and to you, O Lord, belongs all praise. And then we go into prostration and prostration is at the heart of the prayer. And it is the most beautiful portion of the prayer, and it is the most beloved position for a servant of God and that which is most pleasing to God. It's when you say at that point, SubhanAllah Rabbi al-A'la, all glory be to God, the Most High, all glory be to God, the Most High. So while you put yourself in the lowest position, you acknowledge God being the Most High and the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said that the closest that a person is to God is when they are in prostration. That is the time that your supplications are most precious and beloved. That is the time that you can cry your heart out. That is the time that you really feel a sense of great closeness and devotion to God. And as I was telling you earlier, it's a time that your mind is under your heart for a change, right? The only position, physical position, that your mind is actually under your heart. And you really have a chance to pour your emotions out and to connect deeply to God. It's the prayer of all of the prophets. Jesus, peace be upon him, is described even biblically as falling on his face in prayer. And so it really is, I think, the most intimate moment that you get with God. And the deepest part of the prayer. The word masjid, which is mosque in Arabic, means place of sujood, place of prostration. So think of the rest of prayer as an introduction to that particular part of the prayer where you really immerse yourself. Not that you shouldn't be immersed in your prayer throughout, but when you're in sujood, when you're in prostration, that's where you're really closest and most connected to God. So we do that. And so some prayers are two units. Well, the first prayer of the day, which is before sunrise, the earliest prayer is two units. The second prayer, which is around noon, is four units. And then afternoon, another four units. And then the sunset prayer is three units. And then the evening prayer is four units. So each prayer has a different number of units to it. And some voluntary prayers that surround it. When you come back up, you express also a form of greeting towards God and channeling your prayers and your blessings towards God. You reiterate the shahada, which is the first pillar of Islam. I testify that there's only one God and that Muhammad is his servant and messenger. And then you read what's called salah ibrahimiya, which is the Abrahamic prayer. So you send peace and blessings upon Muhammad and his family and Abraham and his family. Abraham, peace be upon him, is really at the core of this religion. And so at the end of the prayer, you send peace and blessings and prayers upon, again, both Muhammad and his family and Abraham and his family. And then you have another chance to make some of your own personal prayers. And then you say, as-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah, peace be on to you and the mercy of God. Peace be on to you and the mercy of God, to your right. Peace be on to you and the mercy of God, to your left. And that means everything and everyone to your right, everyone and everything to your left. So you imagine a congregation when you're in worship, right? You're sending that to the angels and the human beings next to you, your fellow worshippers next to you. And you'll even say, you'll seek forgiveness from God afterwards. There are supplications that surround the prayer. And you will say, Allahumma anta salam wa minka salam, that, oh Allah, oh God, you are peace and from you is peace. And to you belongs all glory and all praise. Almost to say that you received something in this prayer, that you receive a great sense of inner peace. And now you're spreading that, right? So as it really comes into you, then you can give to the world around you what you generate in your own heart. And in prayer you generate a great sense of tranquility, a great sense of peace. The Quran says, verily in the remembrance of God do hearts find contentment. And prayer is an exercise in the remembrance of God. That is, again, obligatory five times a day, no matter where you are. Anywhere in the world, anywhere you find yourself in your life, in different life circumstances, anywhere. So outside a coffee shop in the grass, outside of the coffee shop. As we did a few days ago. So anywhere at all. And that means- Airports included. Given the context of our previous conversation of hatred towards people of Muslim faith, that means you probably, through the practice of prayer, it attracts people that hate- I've attracted curiosity. I've attracted hate. I've had people walk up to me like, hey man, you okay? So everything. So most probably it's conversations of curiosity and the opportunity to actually talk about the values that you represent. And I try to make it a point to tell people if I'm about to pray in front of them. So like, you know, an airport, let's say for example, I'll go to the corner next to a gate. And if there are people sitting there like, hey, I'm about to engage in a prayer, I hope you don't mind. They'll really appreciate the courtesy most of the time. But no, I mean, when those five times come in and they're kind of windows, right? We have to pray. And that means at work. That means at school. That means when you're traveling. Although there's some concessions that allow you to combine prayers at certain times when you're traveling, for example. But even then, you're going to have to pray. And I think that what that does to bring you back to God, no matter what you're doing, it's actually, you know, you think of it this way. You're in a meeting. You're engaged in something. You're really stressed out. And you also have the ablution before the prayer where you wash up, wash your face, wash your limbs and engage in prayer. What it does for you in anchoring you in something more meaningful when you are in the turmoil of a lot of times what's not so meaningful is incredible. And so it's a gift from God. And it is an obligation. It's something that we have to do as Muslims. But if you actually learn its essence, then it can feel more like a joy than it is an obligation. And then you're called to at night, especially again, the night prayer is a big part of who we are as Muslims. Waking up in the last part of the night, the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said that the best prayer and the best fasting was of that of David peace be upon him. So we think of David, the Prophet David, he's a prophet in Islam as well. I'm sure you'll ask me about the whole concept of prophethood. You're hearing Abraham and David and others, right? So David peace be upon him, he said that David used to fast every other day and he used to pray the last third of the night. He'd stand up and pray in the last third of the night. So fasting is a big part of who we are and praying in the last third of the night, meaning before that early morning prayer, you know, waking up if you can at 4am, 4.30am, 5am and praying even for a few minutes. There's something in the serenity of the night that can unlock in you a sense of inner joy and peace that nothing else in the world can give you. And again, that pulls you away from all the turmoil of day to day life. If it's little things or if it's big things, it just pulls you out of it to remember what is more important in life. So when we think about access, in the last third of the night, we're taught that God says, is there anyone seeking forgiveness that I may forgive them? Is there anyone seeking refuge that I may grant it to them? Is there anyone asking for anything that I may give it to them? So whatever you're calling upon him with at that time, he's responding to you in a way that befits him. And so it's closeness as well. And you would think that you sleep less, so you're probably more cranky, but the happiest people in the world are the people that stand up in that last third of the night and pray. I mean, there's a deeply meditative, contemplative aspect to it that I think probably strengthens your sleep if anything else, once you return to it. There you go. See, people underestimate that. There's a great sage in Islam, he was asked, he said, how come the people who pray at night are the most beautiful of people and they're fresh in the day? It doesn't make sense. And he said, because they secluded themselves with the most merciful and he dressed them in his light. And so there's a beauty that it generates. And that's why we're to aspire to that really, as believers, that's kind of your highest thing. Like, don't just pray the five prayers. If you can pray at night, pray at night and connect at that time. Well, a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist from Stanford, he's a big, he's an amazing podcast called Huberman Lab. But he's also a scholar of sleep among many other things. And so I would love him to, he probably knows the science on this too. There's probably good science that actually studies practicing Muslims to see what the benefits to sleep, I would love to actually see what that says. We have amazing, I don't want to cut you off, we have amazing hygiene because of how much we have to wash up for prayer. And it's great for our limbs as well. Right. You know, and that's one of the added benefits, right? It's good for us. Worship that we do is not torturous. It's actually good for us. However, the core objective of worship has to remain that it's something you do out of worship and something you do out of a sense of obligation and gratitude to God. Not because of those things, like I'm not going to fast because it's good for my health, but I know it's good for my health to fast. But it's pretty cool when you walk into, I'll share this with you. There was a man, he was a scholar from Turkey, an Islamic scholar from Turkey, and he had visited us in Daos and he was 108 years old and he could still pray, bowing and prostrating. I mean, his limbs, and you think about that, like someone at that age still being able to do that. So I'm sure it's good for your limbs, it's good for your health, good for your gut, good for your sleep, good for your mind. I think the mind one is the really one we've been talking about and that's really, really the big one. And in the small day-to-day psychological sense and in the big philosophical sense of what it means to be a human being. We should also mention that during the prayer, as you've explained, you should face Mecca. So what is Mecca and what's the experience of visiting Mecca like? So Mecca is the home that Abraham, peace be upon him, built along with his son Ishmael, peace be upon him. And it gives the Muslims a unified direction of prayer. It's sort of at the center geographically of who we are. And when we pray towards it, it's not that that's the only place that you can supplicate, turn towards, but it gives us a unified sense of direction. It gives us a unified sense of prayer. So Mecca is our Qibla, it's our place of direction when we are alive and when we are dead. So actually we pray facing towards it. When we die, we are also faced towards it in our graves. And it kind of gives us that unifying spirit. So this is the Valley of Becca, also in the Bible spoken about the Valley of Becca. And where other biblical scholars would also mention Mount Paran. And it is the place that Adam, in the Quran, Adam, peace be upon him, first had a place constructed there as a place of worship from the angels towards God. And then when Abraham settles Hagar and Ishmael in Mecca, they build this house of worship. And that is where the gushing springs of Zamzam are mentioned, where God sends an angel to give a miracle to Hagar and Ishmael that they can sustain themselves from as they're not left in the desert. So Ishmael being the firstborn son of Abraham is given a place and there's a story and a history that's going to unfold from that place of Mecca. And then Isaac is born, peace be upon him, 13 years later. And there's a story and a history that comes from that. But ultimately Mecca is the center. Mecca is where we turn towards for prayer. Mecca is where we perform the pilgrimage, the Hajj pilgrimage. Once in our lives, at least if we can, physically and financially, if we find ourselves capable, we at least perform the Hajj pilgrimage once in our lifetimes. But there are other pilgrimages throughout the year you can go. At any time of the day, any time of the year, you will find people that will be performing the pilgrimage, an iteration of the pilgrimage in Mecca. And it's an incredible practice. It really is a place where you feel like you're no longer in this world. I mean, it's incredible. So we all go there donning what's known as the Ihram garb. So the men will wear just these white garments, which are resembling or they resemble the garments that we will be buried in. And whether you're a king or a prince or a peasant in classical terms, whoever you are, whatever distinction you have, you're all the same. And the women will wear a simple garment as well. So you go there, you relinquish all of the pretensions and concerns and superficial barriers and distinctions that exist in this life. And we do what's called Tawaf, circle around the Kaaba, symbolically putting God at the center of our lives. We do seven rounds between Safa and Marwa, the two mountains, where Hagar, when she once ran between those two mountains with her baby Ishmael, looking for water, trusting God was provided for. We too go between the two mountains of Safa and Marwa to express that trust in God and to follow in that way. And these are ultimately, these are the rituals that Abraham himself engaged in, in our tradition and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, engaged in. And so we engage in the exact same rituals and there are divine wisdoms to them that we may not even be able to unpack and reflect upon. But it really is in that place where you find the most beautiful global expression of Islam. You see people from all over the world, people that don't speak the same languages, people from all sorts of backgrounds, and they're all doing the exact same thing. And in a matter of seconds, when the call of prayer comes, in a matter of seconds, two, three million people get arranged in perfect rows for prayer. And it just, it looks like this perfect optical vision of just beauty when you see people in unison, standing, bowing, prostrating, and you don't know who the person next to you is. And that's where, you know, Malcolm X, you read about the history of Malcolm X, when he went to Hajj, that's where his entire worldview shifts, not just his previous baggage, but the dream that he then had. The possibilities that he saw for people to be able to overcome some of the false distinctions that we have, race and class, and to see God as one, and to come together and worship him alone and also seeing each other, equal participants in that worship. If we could just linger on it a little bit, I think you've mentioned that Malcolm X has been in part misunderstood. What are some aspects of him that are misunderstood? I think reading his autobiography is extremely important for anyone that wants to understand him, right? So you read him in his own words. Malcolm lived the tragedy of being a young disenfranchised black man in America who went through all of the difficulties that were posed in a 1950s America towards him. I mean, he went through the system and it was awful for him, and he had to pull himself out of that and make himself into an incredible orator and incredible leader that suddenly had a pretty empowering vision and a calm and nonetheless courageous, but a calm presence to him. And was able to bring together people, especially uplift black people in America to believe in themselves. Young men in America, in prisons in particular, will read the autobiography of Malcolm X and see hope for themselves to come out of the darkness of being in prison, not just by the bars in front of them, but also by what they thought to be their own worth prior to that moment. And so Malcolm climbs out of that and he goes through multiple phases. So Malcolm dies as an Orthodox Muslim who does not believe in the superiority of one race over the other, finds great tranquility in the practice of the Hajj, great clarity. And I think you read his letters from Mecca and he talks about his change, his transformation in particular, and it was a process. It's a process for him. But he inspires the likes of Muhammad Ali to become the person that he becomes and inspires many other people till today to really see themselves and see the world differently in light of that understanding of monotheism. So he was deeply a man of faith and throughout his life the nature of that faith has changed as he grew, as he interacted with, I would say, a cruel society that he was living. Right, right. You mentioned he inspired Muhammad Ali, who I don't think is an overstatement to say is probably the most, quite possibly the most famous American Muslim from America. Could you maybe make a few comments as an athlete yourself? What impact did Islam have on Muhammad Ali's life and vice versa? What impact did he have as a leader, as a religious figure on the Muslim community? I think Muhammad Ali, his quotes on Islam are precious because he talks about how he sought the wealth of this world and he found it in Islam. He found a greater meaning and he attributes everything that he became to his faith. His sense of strength and commitment, the willingness to take a stand for the truth when it was extremely unpopular on the basis of his faith and on the basis of his integrity. I think that he inspired people with his confidence and his coherence. I mean, he was incredibly eloquent. I mean, poetic and just unwavering. Seemed unbreakable. So, as relentless as he was in the ring, he was even more so outside of the ring. The man could not be broken and everything was stacked up against him. But he perseveres and he does so then through Parkinson's. And chooses to live a life of giving, a life of service, a life of using his platform to bring up issues of importance and to champion the rights of others. So, he wasn't satisfied at any point in his life with simply being a boxing great, a boxing champion. He uses it for so much more. And so, he goes down as one of the most famous Americans, period, of the 20th century. One of the most transformative Americans, period, of the 20th century. Not just American Muslims. And a lot of people that loved him when he died would not have loved him if they were around in the 1960s and the 1970s. You know, they said they loved him when he couldn't speak anymore. You know, many of those who celebrated him at the time of his death would have been his greatest opponents at the peak of his career and when he was taking the stance that he was taking. Yeah, he was fearless. And part of his faith was helping him take the fearless stance. But throughout all of it, given the strength, I think he's also a symbol of compassion. Through all the fun, kind of, yeah, the poetic nature of who he was and the fearless nature of who he was, there's always like a deep love for the sport and for humanity. Absolutely. And that's the thing, right? It was so obvious that despite everything that had happened to him, he never loses himself, neither to the fame nor to the fear. Yeah. He always stays himself. He's authentic. And you know, when I went to his funeral and it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen because everyone in Louisville, Kentucky had a story with Muhammad Ali, right? The guy that he saves from committing suicide, the school kids, the hotel shuttle driver, the gas station worker, everyone has a story of Muhammad Ali in Louisville, Kentucky. And when he passes away, everybody comes out and stands in front of their homes and they take the casket and they drive around the streets of Louisville. And he had this dream. I'm very close to some of his children. Incredible people, by the way, just incredible human beings. And he had this dream that he shared with them that he was jogging around the streets of Louisville, Kentucky and everyone had come out to wave to him. And so he's running around jogging and waving to everybody in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky. Then he gets to the cemetery and he says he flies into the heavens. So his dream, and he had this dream years ago, I mean, if you look at his funeral, it's such a beautiful, you can't make it up. It's such a beautiful moment where it seems to come to reality because everybody in Louisville just comes out and just waves by his casket. And then when he gets to the cemetery, the gates close and he goes off to be with his Lord. And we pray that it's a good place for him. So Muhammad Ali is probably one of the great 20th century representatives of Islam. For me personally, at least, hopefully I'm not showing my bias, one of the great modern representatives is Khabib Nurmagomedov, who's a great fighter and a great human being. So you've gotten a chance to meet him. I should also say you're friends, you're good friends with a lot of really interesting Muslim people. I mean, it's such a widespread religion, there's just so much variety of different people that are practicing Muslims. So what does Khabib represent? What do you like about him as a Muslim? What do you like about him as a person, as representative of the religion? I think Khabib, first of all, he is a great person, humble person. He's shown, and now Islam as well, kind of following in that. They're really showing the beauty of faith in their lives, their culture, their values, everything from the way that he carried himself in a principled way. Every Muslim kid grew up in a public school cafeteria before Islamic schools were a thing in the United States, not eating pork, for example, and kind of being the odd person out. So when you got a fighter in the UFC scene and doesn't drink alcohol, kind of maintains a very consistent, principled attachment to his religion, it really is inspiring. Growing up, we had Hakeem Olajuwon in the 1990s, basketball, who was fasting in the NBA. I think Khabib is that for a lot of people, a lot of young people today, and people in general. And I think beyond that, the values, how he honored his father, and how he honors his mother, and how he continues to put family first. That's a beautiful part of Islam. That's a beautiful part of our value system. We have a lot of emphasis on family. Family is central to Islam. And his honoring of his father was so beautiful. And again, what he's willing to do for his mother, it's just so beautiful. And I think that we saw it, frankly, even with Morocco in the World Cup. There was a lot of Islamophobia in this recent World Cup episode. A lot of the criticism of Qatar, while no government is beyond reproach, certainly no government is beyond reproach, but had very obvious, blatant Islamophobic undertones. And then with Morocco rising, being the first African Muslim Arab team to get that far in the World Cup, what did you see? Beyond the consistent honoring of Palestine, you also saw the honoring of the mothers. Every single time, the game would end. They go into a prostration of gratitude. So just like we prostrate in prayer, a prostration of gratitude. And then they go and they kiss their mother's foreheads, dance with their mothers on the field, hug their moms, and honor their moms. That's Islam for you. Khabib, after his fight, what does he do? He prostrates. He points up to the heavens. It's God. And then he prostrates. The whole Moroccan team, beautifully, prostrates. Even when they lost, they prostrated out of gratitude. They honored their mothers. So I think sometimes athletes are able to demonstrate some of these beautiful values of Islam in a way that the world can maybe see them in a different light. The values of humility and the values of love. Love broadly, but love for family. And look how everyone around Khabib talks about him. No one ever says he's a jerk. No one ever says he's mistreated them. They've all got stories. And that's what a beautiful Muslim does. A beautiful human being. You treat the people in such a way that all these stories come out later of how good you were to everyone that came into contact with you. And Khabib was that person. He is that person. He does a great job of treating people with a lot of respect. Obviously, no one is perfect. I mean, imperfections are for everybody. But I definitely think that he did a beautiful job representing his faith in those moments. Beyond punching people in the face, that's kind of a different subject. Smashing faces. Not the smashing faces part. The prostration part and the humility. I tell you, man, he's not humble in the ring, right? He would maul his opponents, right? I mean, as a practitioner, as a fan of the sport, of all grappling sports, for me, there's also a beauty to the art of grappling and the fighting sports. But yes, I think his, again, humility, his honor outside the cage is exemplary. And the money, the fame, the power hasn't changed the man. No, not at all. And that's actually, I think, the most beautiful part. When I met him, I found him to be as humble as he is on screen. And that's always very endearing. And all of the stories of the people that have been around him for a much longer time, very humble man. I pray for him. Honestly, I pray for Islam. I pray for that family, that God keeps them grounded and protected and together, and that they maintain that beautiful spirit. Because even if you just watch the lead up to the last fight with Islam, just the way they carry themselves, their day to day, they never relinquish their prayers. They never relinquish their family ties, the things that make them who they are to be better fighters, because they don't see that they have to let go of those things. In fact, they attribute all of their worldly success to that faith. And so, beautiful examples. And I think that it's good for young Muslims to see themselves in that. And it's good for other people to see Islam through that as well. When you mention the prophets, you often say, peace and blessings be upon them. Yes. What does that phrase mean? Why do you say it? Is it to celebrate the people? Is it as a constant reminder that these are figures that should be celebrated? Absolutely. So, it's part of our tradition that when we say the name of a prophet, at least the first time in the conversation, we say, peace be upon him. And then afterwards, it's still praiseworthy to say, peace be upon him. So, if you're reading an Islamic article and you see in parentheses, P-B-U-H, peace be unto him or peace be upon him. When I was in high school, I often tell the story, I wrote an article about Jesus, peace be upon him, in Islam and Christianity. And my teacher comes up to me and she says, you can't do that. I said, what? And she like slams the paper on the desk. She says, you can't say Jesus. And I said, no, no, P-B-U-H, peace be upon him. Yeah. So, that's what it means. And it's something that we reserve for the prophets of God and we honor them with. So, who is Muhammad? So, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, is the descendant of Abraham, peace be upon him, through Ishmael. God promises Hagar and Ishmael that he will make of him a great nation. And so, there are prophets that are descended from Isaac. And then from the brothers of Isaac comes the prophet Muhammad. And he is the final prophet of a long line of prophets. And we do not distinguish between the prophets in regards to their role. And so, Islam has a very accessible theology. It's something that resonates with a professor at an Ivy League university and, you know, a person who may be even illiterate. This idea of one God that sends many prophets and all of the prophets had a singular message, worship one God and respond to the messages of that one God through his messengers. So, Adam through Muhammad, you have many of the prophets that are mentioned in the Old Testament. Moses, peace be upon him, being the most spoken about prophet in the Quran. In fact, Abraham, Jesus, peace be upon him, many of these prophets that are familiar to people, all of them are considered prophets. And Islam, the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, being the last of them. He comes at a time where there was still a lot of confusion about what the world had just encountered in Christ, in Jesus Christ, peace be upon him. So, you got to think about it this way, that this is still, you know, he's born in the sixth century. There is still great debate about who Jesus was. The Council of Nicaea happens in the fourth century, where you kind of have a standardizing of Western Christianity. But then you have Eastern Christians that are still maintaining very different theologies and very different conceptions of Christ. There is no Arabic Bible at the time. And he kind of brings together the message and the mission of all of those prophets and it fits perfectly into a singular string of thought. Where you don't have to reject Jesus, peace be upon him, but Islam also is staunchly opposed to the idea of a Trinity, the idea of a begotten Son of God. That all of the conceptions of the Messiah, and there were many claimants of the Messiah prior to Christ, peace be upon him, none of them included an idea of a Trinity or of him actually being a part of God himself, a begotten Son of God, but rather a great and mighty prophet that would restore glory on earth. So, he really captures theologically, or rather we would say God captures through him theologically, a coherence and a unifying message of all of the prophets that there's only one God and that that God has sent messages and scriptures to ultimately guide people back towards him. And that all of the prophets are equal in the sight of God, there's no distinction between them and that we are to live our lives in accordance with the message as best manifested by the messenger. And so, the prophets are exemplary human beings. And this is where we kind of sometimes maybe have a difference. You know, someone will say, well, you know, Noah did this and David did this, as Muslims we don't believe, we don't hold many of the stories that have been attributed to these prophets to be true. We don't believe that the prophets are capable of major sins. We believe they're exemplary human beings and that they kind of give us a manifestation of the scriptures that they were sent with of how to live noble lives. And the most documented human being in history is the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. We know everything about him, his family life, his day to day, the way he would greet you, the way he'd look at you, everything about his physical appearance. It's documented in immaculate detail and Muslims have a standard that they then seek to live up to with how to treat your family, how to be in your community, how to be in your worship, how to be in your social interactions, how to carry yourself with your neighbors. It's a full, complete guidebook through his example where we have the Quran, which is the word of God, and then you have the biography of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, which is a living manifestation of that word that has been documented for us to live by until the end of time. So, Muhammad, if I may, peace be upon him, is really the, like you said, the manifestation, the thing to be, the example of a good man. Yes, example of a good human being. Is the Quran the word of God? So, the Quran, and this is what distinguishes the Quran in many ways from other scriptures, so as Muslims, we do believe that God has sent divine revelation prior. We believe that the original scriptures prior to the multiple versions and the changes and revisions throughout history, the original scriptures that were given to the prophets, whether it was the Torah to Moses or the gospels, were all original divine revelations, but they've been changed over time. The Quran is the word of God with a promise that he will guard it for all of time, and it's probably one of the greatest miracles because in 1400 years, we have the Quran preserved through oral transmission and through written transmission, and there are almost 2 billion Muslims in the world, and they all recite this book the exact same way, and there's only one version of it. And so, when I'm reciting the Quran, if I say, ooh, or ee, or ah, differently, an Ethiopian Muslim, a Chinese Muslim, a Yemeni Muslim can correct me, an eight-year-old kid in any one of those countries can correct me because they will know that this is not how it's memorized. And so, it was memorized from the start, committed to memory in the time of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and preserved in writing and passed down and memorized by millions and millions of people around the world. And it's 600 pages, and you can't go to a city in America, a city in the United States of America, and not find at least one person or a group of people that memorize it, that have committed it to memory. And so, there's an emphasis on committing it to memory, as well as understanding it and applying it and practicing it as much as we can. What are some maybe deep or insightful differences between the Quran, the Torah, and the Bible? Well, like I said, so you've got the original revelations of those scriptures, but there are so many versions of those scriptures, and there are times throughout history where there have been changes, just from an objective perspective, right? What is the original scripture that was given to Moses, peace be upon him, and what was initially communicated to Jesus, peace be upon him? Those things have changed over time. However, there's still some truth that remains even in those scriptures. And so, there are still things that line up, especially with the Old Testament and Islam, there are still many things that line up between the two. The Bible, as well, the New Testament. Now, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it's different because these are not original scriptures. These are testimonies that were obviously collected around the entire phenomenon of the coming of Christ, but the authors themselves, the biographies, the documentation, even of those original testimonies and gospels, what made the cut in terms of being included within the gospels and what didn't, because there were many gospels at the time in that sense, is different from what we believe was scripture communicated to Jesus, peace be upon him. The Quran is different in several ways, but it confirms what came before it, but it's the document and preserved word of God to be recited throughout time. So, it confirms much of what came before it, and it resides amongst us and within us for the rest of time. And through it, we honor those revelations that came through the prophets of old, because the essence, the core of what came through those revelations is preserved in the Quran and with us. I tell people this all the time, that the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, introduced Jesus, peace be upon him, and even Moses, peace be upon him, to much of the world. There are Muslims around the world that are named Isa, that are named Jesus. There are Muslims around the world that are named Ibrahim, Abraham, Muslims around the world named Musa. And they learned of these figures through the revelation that came to the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Noah, Maryam, one of the most popular names in Islam, Mary, peace be upon her, a whole chapter in the Quran named after Maryam, which is actually what I was reciting in the prayer, was the chapter of Maryam, the chapter of the story of Mary, peace be upon her. So, the Quran contains the stories, it contains legislation and law, but primarily it was revealed over 23 years. So, it actually was coming in accordance with some of the events that were unfolding in the life of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The first 13 years of that was primarily belief in God, belief in the hereafter, and things that surrounded the core creed of Islam. And then legislation, law, stories of the prophets came down in accordance with the unfolding events, as well as prophesizing some of the things that were to come and speaking about some of the things that had just happened. And it is completed in the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, memorized and then communicated to generation after generation after generation, so that we have it in its pristine fashion. Now, billions of people, just all across the world, all the different cultures, all memorizing the same words. One of the pillars, or maybe I should say one of the central practices is the month of Ramadan. What is the importance of this month? What does the process of it entail also? So, Islam has, I think it would be good to maybe lay this out for people, the articles of faith and the pillars of Islam. So, the articles of faith, there are six articles of faith, and this kind of lays the foundation for the creed of Islam. So, belief in God, belief in the angels, belief in the messages, belief in the messengers, belief in the day of judgment, and belief in divine decree. So, these are the six articles of faith, belief in God, belief in the angels, belief in the messages, being the scriptures, belief in the messengers, being the prophets, belief in the day of judgment, and belief in divine decree. That's what you have to believe to be a Muslim. You have to believe in those six things, right? And then you go to the pillars of faith, the five pillars of faith are sort of, they make up the structure of those articles of faith, the practice of the Muslim. So, to be a Muslim, you testify that there's only one God, worthy of worship and unconditional obedience, and then you testify that Muhammad is the final messenger of God. That's the first pillar, the actual testimony entering into Islam. Then it's the five daily prayers, practicing the five daily prayers at least as a bare minimum obligation. The mandatory charity, which is called the zakat, that Muslims have to give at least 2.5% of their retained earnings to specific categories of charity. Then it is the fasting of the month of Ramadan, the mandatory fasting of the month of Ramadan. And then it's the hajj, if you can do so, the pilgrimage, if you can do so once in your lifetime. So, those are the five pillars of Islam. So, Ramadan is a month in which Muslims engage in this incredible spiritual bootcamp. Now, fasting can mean different things to different people. When we fast, we fast from before sunrise to sunset for an entire month, and there's no food or water, period. And no intimacy as well. So, you would abstain from intimacy with your spouse as well in that time. No food or water, no bread, no nothing. You don't eat or drink, even if you live in Texas, where you get these long hot days in the summer. And of course, Islam is on a lunar calendar, so it moves every year about 10 days earlier. During that time, you restrict the intake to the body so that you can focus on the intake of the soul. So, instead of being focused on consumption, constant consumption, you are consuming words of remembrance, words of prayer. You're to be hyper-conscious of not doing anything that would spiritually validate your fast, just as you would physically. So, just like you won't eat or drink, you certainly won't engage in sin, though you shouldn't engage in sins throughout the year. But, you know, you're not going to speak words of evil. You're not going to gossip or slander. You try to fast with your eyes, not look at things that are not praiseworthy. So, you try to engage in a wholesome act of disciplining yourself with the consciousness of God. But then channel that into engaging the soul instead, exercising the soul instead. And what you'll find with Muslims in this act of God consciousness, where they reduce the consumption, is they become far more grateful for the blessings of God. Because throughout our lives, we just take sips of water, we eat what we can, we snack. When you're abstaining from that, you become so much more grateful for that sip of water, so much more grateful for that bite of food. So much more aware of the one who provided those blessings to you, so much more aware of those that don't have the same access to those blessings that you have. So, you also develop a sense of empathy for the poor that don't have access to those blessings on a regular basis, that can't help but fast. And on top of that, again, spiritually, you are engaged in extra reading. At that time, people are listening to more lectures. People are engaged in extra acts of devotion, extra acts of charity. Muslims are most charitable in the month of Ramadan. So, you just feel great. And it's hard to explain to someone that doesn't do it, because it sounds like torture to people, right? What in the world are you doing, you know, at four o'clock on a hot Texas day, not eating or drinking? You're probably dehydrated and cranky, have a caffeine headache, and you probably can't wait for this month to be over. But in reality, you talk to Muslims, their favorite time of the year is Ramadan. You feel amazing. You feel absolutely incredible, because you taste a different type of consumption. You feed your soul for a change. And in that process, you connect with God in a way that you simply could not without the distractions of the day-to-day throughout the year. Now, it's good that it's one month of the year, because it's honestly physically taxing, right? So, it gives you a chance to experience it for that one month. But then you're encouraged to fast a few days of the year as well, outside of the month of Ramadan, to keep that connection. What are the hardest parts that maybe for people outside of the Muslim faith, yeah, would be curious about? Well, I think the hardest part is physically. Is it physical or is it the spiritual? I mean... So, as Ramadan goes on, your acts of worship increase. So, in the last 10 nights of Ramadan, there is an intense period of prayer throughout the night. So, every night in Ramadan, we have something called the taraweeh prayers. The taraweeh prayers are about an hour, hour and a half of prayer outside of the five daily prayers. So, the mosques are packed every night in Ramadan. The last 10 nights of Ramadan, people will engage in prayer throughout the entire night. So, the only sleep that you're probably getting is actually a couple of hours in the morning before you go to work. So, it's everything sort of put together, the disruption of schedule, the disruption of diet, the physically exerting yourself. But the way you feel is unmatched. I mean, you feel so fulfilled through that deprivation. And it's actually the point, you know, it all ties back together when you talk about even tests and trials that God does not deprive us of anything except that he gives us something greater in return. And you do not deprive yourself of anything for the sake of God except that he gives you something greater in return. And so, fasting is an exercise in patience that unlocks an infinite sense of gratitude and a greater connection to God. Many people predict that Islam will surpass Christianity as the largest religion by the end of the century by the number of its adherents and practitioners. What responsibility does that place on people like you, who is a religious leader, who is somebody who teaches, who grows, who cares for the community, for the Muslim community, but actually for all people? Well, I think what that means is that we have a responsibility to teach and live our faith in the most beautiful of ways that its values and ideals are not just expressed by you, but experienced by everyone around you. And so, what I often teach my community is that, look, if a Muslim's in the area, what are your neighbors experiencing of you? What are people experiencing of you? And there's statistics to Muslims being the most charitable communities in America. We're a community of great service, a community of volunteering, a community that greatly enriches the world around us. I think that oftentimes people forget the history of Muslims being at the forefront of contributing in the areas of medicine and science and all sorts of ways, education, really changing the world through their commitment to faith. But on a deeply personal level, it's important for us to be representatives of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in a way that makes Islamophobia impossible. I tell people this, that it's very hard, you know, you mentioned the United States of Hate, the documentary, and the one man, the protester, who met me and sort of changed his world view. It's very hard for people to believe what they hear about Islam if they see you live it. Now, that does not excuse bigotry, that doesn't excuse the prejudice against Muslims, but it's important for us to sort of take it as a responsibility as Muslims to channel our faith in the most beautiful of ways. God describes faith in the Quran, in the chapter of Abraham, peace be upon him, as a tree with firm foundations, the firm foundation being the testimony of faith, the oneness of God, so the tree of monotheism with firm foundations, and then branches high in the sky, providing shade to everything and everyone around you, and producing fruit at all times. The tree of faith of a Muslim is not seasonal, so you should be producing with your faith at all times good works and things that people can actually experience. And I think that Muslims have historically contributed to the world around them, and I think that Muslims today are still contributing to the world around them, but I think that we can never do enough of holding ourselves accountable to the message that we hold dear to our hearts, and trying to be the best representatives of that message and of that messenger to the world around us. So, not only are you a religious leader in the Muslim community, but you have a lot of friends who are from different religions, you have a lot of Jewish friends, as we've talked about a lot offline, and we'll probably, hopefully get a chance to talk to as well here. But on that topic, let me bring up another tragic event that was just a little bit less than a year ago in this very community here in Dallas. There was a synagogue hostage crisis. Can you describe what happened, and what was your experience like through it and afterwards, and what were the bad things you saw, and what are the good things you saw in the community? The Colleyville synagogue situation, it's kind of surreal that we're coming up on a year of that. But I'll actually tell you exactly what happened that morning. I was out with the family, and that morning, I kid you not, that very morning, I was telling my kids the story of Muhammad Ali talking that man out of committing suicide off the roof, and I showed them the YouTube video. My wife pulled it up on her phone, kids were sitting in the back seat. We talked about that video, and talked about that importance of helping people. We also went to visit a loved one in the cemetery that day, and we went to breakfast. So we're out as a family that day, right? And there's a lot of meaning that's sort of coming together for us, and a lot of deep discussion we're having as a family. And then some of our community groups, we get this message that there is a synagogue that's been taken hostage, a rabbi and his congregation taken as hostages. And go to this Facebook link, and it was the feed of the synagogue, and you could hear the gunmen shouting. And it became apparent very early on that it was a man that was claiming to be Muslim that was holding them hostage. Now, all these synagogue massacres, all these places of worship were not attacked by Muslims, right? This is a different type of situation. But my first instinct was, like, all that happened this morning was not random. So I told my wife, and I told my kids, I'm going to go down there to Collieville. She was very supportive. Obviously, there was a moment of shock. My kids were like, wait, what? And I said, look, remember what we talked about this morning? We can't be indifferent to the stuff. We still go back and revisit that day. You know, like, it's crazy how it was all falling into place. It's not an accident, right? So I dropped them off at home, and I started to drive to Collieville. I called the Irving Police Department, and I asked them to call the Collieville Police Department so that they could kind of know that I'm coming down there. I called some of the faith leaders in the community to see if they could put me in touch with those on the ground so that I wouldn't get shot when I showed up there. And eventually, I had to wait outside until they got clearance to come through and to just offer whatever support I could, pastoral support, support with trying to free the hostages of the synagogue. At the time, it was operating out of a church right across the street from the synagogue. A day long, just wondering, you know, what was going to happen, looking at the family of the rabbi at the time, wondering what was going to happen, and trying to just be as supportive as I possibly could at that time. Thankfully, they all got out in the evening. And I think that, you know, looking back on that day, like my wife actually asked me, she said, would you have done it differently? And I said, no, I really wouldn't, because I think that things happen sometimes. You've got to act on your good instincts sometimes, right? When you talk about like being calculated, I think sometimes we're calculated when we shouldn't be. And that's when that good instinct comes in, where you're called to do something else. What did it feel like to be a Muslim in a situation like that? I mean, were you a human being? Were you a religious practitioner? Yeah, I don't see, I can't separate anything about myself in that situation, right? So when I had to pray, I had to pray to help people out, to give people words of comfort, to try to appeal to the senses of whoever I could at the time. I didn't see myself as like a guy trying to show a particular part of Islam there. I just saw myself as someone that was trying to help a family get their husband and father back, right? And so it was more of just like that part of me was there. You know, you can kind of see yourself, right? And this is the irony of it. When Christchurch, New Zealand happened, that was kind of our worst nightmare as Texas Muslims, because we've had armed groups in front of our mosques threatening to do what that man did in Christchurch. And so when you see a wife and kids wondering if they're going to get their dad back, you kind of see yourself there. And so I just saw myself in that situation. What would I want people to be doing for me in that moment? What would I want people to be telling my family in that moment? So that's really where I went to, and that's really where I dug into, and I prayed a lot that day. A lot, a lot for the right words, for the right actions, what I could do to just help. What are the lessons now, a year later, that you take away from that day? So many lessons, just don't be indifferent. Don't be indifferent to the suffering around you, even that's distant from you, because it's somehow related to you. So just don't be indifferent. So you're proud that you stepped up and you went there and then... Yeah, look, I don't think I did much. I'm being really honest. This is not me trying to be humble here. I don't think I did much. I think I did what I was called to do. I wish that it never happened, right, as a whole, but I'm glad that the relationships that have been built over time came into being in that day, right? We could call upon people that we knew, call upon each other, and as a community really come together. You know, Dallas has been through a lot, a lot of pain, but we've come together through a lot of pain as well. So it's kind of one of those things where we're united in our pain. You know, when you suffer together, you build certain bonds together. So Dallas has been through a lot as a community, but we've come together through a lot as a community. Yeah, the thing about violence and war, it destroys, it causes so much suffering, but it also sort of brings out some of the best aspects of human nature and unites people. It's an interesting way how our human civilization functions. Well, that's the beauty that you don't just want to see, but you also want to be. You know, we're living in a climate where there's a lot of that, right? So how do you actually get through that and actually not allow yourself to succumb to that and be another voice in that polarization? It seems that throughout history and still in the world today, religion has been a source of a lot of polarization, a lot of conflict, even war. Why do you think that is? Listen, I think at the essence of it is always some sort of political instability that leaves behind a brutalized population. And vulnerabilities that can be exploited. As I said in the 20th century, with the bloodiest century that we've had to date, where does religion fall in any of that? Where does religion fall in the isms? Where does religion fall in the world wars? Where does religion fall in much of that? Even when we talk about things like the Crusades, right? Where does religion fall in much of that, even when we talk about things like the Crusades, remove the Islamic framing, the Crusades. The Crusades, were they really about religion? The Mongols and the destruction of the Mongols. Was it about religion? Myanmar and the Rohingya today, is it about Buddhism? So I think that these are essentially political issues, political causes, where you have people that rise up and that use religion to disguise things that are far, far, far from religion. And if you want to manipulate a religious scripture, you could turn any book, any scripture, into a violent scripture if you have a violent aim. So I think that that's where you find people manipulating versus manipulating religion to justify sick ideologies that are based and thrive in political instability. So these are fundamentally political geopolitical conflicts, not religious conflicts. Absolutely. Look, when you talk about a group like ISIS, Islam has been in Iraq for a very, very long time. Iraq has been bombed by now five consecutive presidents, or four. It's been bombed into the Stone Ages. There is no political infrastructure. It's devastation and destruction and desperation as a result of that. Many of the old Saddam loyalists, and Saddam's regime was a secularist regime, are now heads of ISIS, right? It just moved into that. When you create that type of chaos, you generate an environment where groups like ISIS are bound to rise out of. And so Islam did not cause this. People didn't wake up in Iraq one day and say, hey, let's create a group called ISIS because Islam tells us to. Iraq was bombed into this place. And we have to not just free religion from the responsibility, from having to bear the responsibility of much of the hatred and violence, but we have to interrogate the political instability that was caused. Were we justified as Americans? These are our taxpayer dollars. Were we justified with what was done in Iraq? Do we even know what was done in Iraq and Afghanistan? These drones that drop using our tax dollars under Democratic and Republican regimes and kill thousands of innocent people in weddings in Yemen and Somalia, are these justified? When you think about dehumanization, can the average American name a single victim of the Iraq war? Is there a picture that comes to your mind? Is there a person? Absolutely not, because that's the dehumanization. Now I often talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his progression as a faith leader in America, as a political leader in America. Dr. King was deeply unpopular when he took his stand on Vietnam. And he mentions how first he had to see Vietnam through the lens of the soldiers, because many of the soldiers that were lost, American soldiers, right? And that was a crime that they were sent to fight a war that they should not have been sent to fight. And there was an injustice that was done towards them. He said, but things really changed when he started to see it from the other side of the bullet. When he started to see the world through Vietnam, through the Vietnamese child. And that's where he resorted to breaking the silence. That's where he changed his tune. Because we dehumanize our victims so much that they're not even relevant to our discourse until they become able villains to our story. And then now they're attacking us because they hate us. Now they're blowing us up because they hate us. Their religion tells them to do this to us. What have we allowed to be done to them using our tax dollars in our name? So I think that we have to interrogate the political chaos that was caused, not just free religion from the groups that were created, but what was done to those countries and what continues to be done in many of these places. Yeah, when the pride that people had about America, where everybody came together after 9-11 and there was all the American flags, that was beautiful to see, but then you have to transfer that. And I wish all of us Americans could go and see the daughters that would lose their parents, the parents that would lose their daughters and sons because bombs dropped, the thousands, the tens of thousands of civilians that died in Afghanistan and in Iraq because of the decisions made in the name of politics. If we just met those families and if we empathize with them and just put ourselves in their place, it's impossible not to feel hate for America, for everybody. I visited Ukraine and spoke to a lot of Ukrainians and they said, there's loved ones that are Russians before the war, but now all they have is hate. And if you ask many of them, will they ever forgive, not the regime, not the soldiers, will they ever forgive Russians, many of them say never. And that never feels like it's a generational never. I mean, look, you think about this, if your grandparents were wiped out in a drone attack, your parents, your brothers, your sisters, all of your loved ones, and you're missing a leg and an eye and the world does not take you into consideration, you'll never be seen or considered in the halls of Congress or discussed. What are you going to grow up with? Right? But the thing is, is that we should not be speaking about this only from the standpoint of, oh, shoot, they're going to grow up and hate us. We should be thinking about what was done to them and hate that, despise that, that it's ugly. You see, when people carry out a terrorist attack, they're not considering the lives of the civilians in these places. So those that perpetrate the 9-11 attacks are not seeing the thousands of people that they killed, the human beings, the lives, many of whom were Muslim, by the way, actually, no. One of them was a very active Muslim in Islamic circle of North America. I mean, they didn't see those stories, right? When you drop a bomb on this many people, when you drone people and you say, oops, collateral damage, we were looking for one person, killed 40 people, and there's no count, no names, nothing that can be recalled in the American memory. That's a problem, a fundamental issue with how we treat the rest of the world. Right? So I'm an American. I think that I'm responsible to the extent that I have to critique these policies and I have to try to challenge America to deal with the world differently. And when I go overseas, when I'm around Muslims in the Muslim world, right, Middle East and in the Muslim world, you know, I have to, I'm speaking as a Palestinian American Muslim who grew up in South Louisiana. I've got a complex background here, right? A lot of experiences here that I'm grateful for because they all contribute to who I am and what I know and what I've been, I think they're all enriching. I wouldn't relinquish the Palestinian part. I wouldn't relinquish the American part, and I certainly wouldn't relinquish the Muslim part. But it's helping people consider what they're not seeing. And when you can dehumanize entire groups of people to where you can reduce them to chalk, casualty counts, and not be able to recall a single story, then you have to take a step back and ask yourself, what are we becoming? Right? What are we becoming? Not a single victim of Afghanistan or Iraq, millions of people, not a single person can the average American conjure in their head. If you apply this to a very difficult topic of Israel and Palestine, Speaking of which, right? You have been critical of the policies of the state of Israel, but as we've mentioned, very supportive of Jewish people. We have a lot of friends, rabbis and Jews in general here in Dallas and across the world. What is the difference to you in that part of the world between politics and religion? So in this case, Zionism and Judaism, both terms broadly defined. Both terms broadly defined. So I say that because those terms, there's technical definitions and there's how they're popularly used. And so you have to be kind of, just like we said with Islamophobia, these terms, they become politicized. So just generally speaking, I think Zionism has to do with politics and Judaism has to do with religion. It's a great complexity to a lot of people, like, wait a minute, right? And you got to take a step back and wonder why there are so many Zionist anti-Semites in America. And there are so many anti-Zionists who are far from being anti-Semites, anti-Zionism that are opposed to the ideology, that are opposed to the implications of it. Look, I think that it's fundamentally secular. When you think about it, there is an ethno-supremacism. There is, I am the child of Palestinians that were forcibly displaced from their land. I've never been able to go to where my parents, my grandparents are from. I've never been able to see that land. I've never been able to access that. I have cousins that I'll never be able, well, I shouldn't say never, Inshallah, God willing, I will meet them. But that I've only been able to speak through a phone, FaceTime, Zoom. I think that it's important for us to separate criticism of Israel's policies from anti-Semitism. In fact, it's an injustice. It cheapens anti-Semitism when you throw every person who is opposed to Zionism or opposed to Israel's policies in the bucket of being anti-Semites. It's wrong. It cheapens it. It doesn't do justice to it. And I think it's important for us to have a meaningful conversation about America's support for Israel. Listen, there are terms that are important here. So I'm going to throw out these big terms, right? Apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing. These are terms that are legal terms. There are objective thresholds here for apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing. The threshold of apartheid has been crossed according to multiple, the most respectable human rights organizations in the world. These are the organizations that you will champion and that you will use in every single other conflict to justify your own policies. But that threshold of apartheid has been passed according to Human Rights Watch, according to Amnesty International, according to the Harvard Law Review. The threshold of apartheid has been crossed. There's a legal terminology there. Two sets of laws for two separate people. You have a displaced people that are forcibly being removed, that are being treated differently, that are stateless, that are undergoing daily humiliation, that live behind an apartheid wall, that live under a different set of policies, that are routinely bombarded, that have lost their ability to free movement, that have lost their ability to access to basic necessities of human life. There are legal definitions here. I don't see how any objective human being can read those reports on apartheid and the threshold crossed for apartheid and walk away from that and say that this is just Jews and Muslims that don't like each other. There's a legal definition here. Occupation. When Israel was created in 1948, you will find many Jews who are opposed to Zionism, and I think this is important, you know, to talk to Jews who are opposed to Zionism, and there are many that will say that we were told that it was a land without a people for a people without a land. The problem with that was there were people there, our ancestors, 750,000 Palestinians expelled in the Nakba, and many Palestinians that have been removed and harassed and that are treated in horrific ways, and the occupation is expanding. It is an illegal occupation. The settlements are still expanding. And the United States enables that occupation with its funding, with its unconditional support, unwavering support of Israel, and it does so in a way that completely undermines any of its claims to being a beacon of freedom in the world, because it is in plain sight now that the world can see what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah, what is happening in Jerusalem, what is happening with these expanding settlements, everything that flies in the face of any claim to wanting a peaceful solution, the children in Gaza when I talk about dehumanization, the children that were on the face of the New York Times, which is historically one of the most anti-Palestinian newspapers in America, the faces of the children of Gaza. America and many parts of the world are now seeing it. We have been saying for a very long time, this is apartheid, this is an occupation, this is an injustice. The world needs to check it, hold it accountable. South Africa, which experienced apartheid, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, all of those that fought apartheid in South Africa said that Palestinians are living under apartheid, and that the same strategies that check apartheid in South Africa need to be used to hold Israel accountable for apartheid with the Palestinians. It's impossible for us as Palestinians to simply say that we should give up on this cause because all the odds are stacked against us. But when you have videos coming out of the Israeli armies spewing skunk water, skunk water, sewage water on worshippers leaving al-Aqsa, far-right leaders now taking the government and the so-called only democracy in the Middle East, prohibiting a Palestinian flag being raised anywhere around, American reporters, Shirin Abu Aqla, Palestinian-American Christian reporter, Palestinian-American Christian reporter, one of the most prominent journalists in the Middle East, shot in the face, plain sight, and all America could say was, all the American government could say was, if it turns out that it's indeed Israel, that Israel is responsible for the death of an American journalist, then we will hold them accountable. Nothing. Not a peep. It was a shame to see that happen, and it just solidified to us that whether it's a Democratic president or a Republican president, unfortunately, the support for Israel is enabling it to continue to wipe out the Palestinian population from its historic land. And so we see that happening, and I'll say this as well. People ask me about the Abraham Accords. They say, you know, you are talking about peace between communities of faith and protecting communities of faith. Why are you opposed to the Abraham Accords? I think that the name of Abraham should not be used. And I wrote an article called, Why I Oppose the Abraham Accords. The name of Abraham should not be used to justify arms deals that only further disenfranchise the abused population of the Palestinians. Where, you know, you have quote unquote Muslim regimes making peace with Israel, and that's being used against the Palestinian people who are only further disenfranchised from having a voice in their own fate for the sake of American arms deals and security and economic benefits. It's despicable. It's repulsive. Talk to the people. Speak to people on the ground there. See what's happening with your own two eyes and think about the injustice where our taxpayer dollars are being used to suppress the people and what legally meets the definition by every objective standard of apartheid, of occupation, of ethnic cleansing. And it's ongoing and it's happening in real time and it's becoming more blatant with a regime now that's unapologetic of even expressing what the policies have already done. And that is the removal of a people, forcible removal of a people because the government knows that the United States support is unconditional. Do you have hope that Jews, Muslims, and Christians on this land will live in peace one day together? Have a basic respect for each other's humanity? Look, this isn't a religious conflict. I think that's fundamentally one of the problems. So even the question is not the correct question? It's not the correct question. This is not a religious conflict. Yes, religion is invoked. Yes, there are religious elements, but there are many Jews that are opposed to what is happening right now towards the Palestinians. Many. And I would recommend a serious discussion with even people whose perspectives have grown. Peter Beinart being an example. Rabbi Simone Zimmerman started If Not Now. Beit Islim, an Israeli human rights organization that also classed it as apartheid recently. There are many Jews that are opposed to what is happening right now. Palestinians are also not exclusively a Muslim population. Shereen Abu Aqla was Christian. There are many Palestinian Christians that are also being denied entry into their historic churches and that are completely bewildered or absolutely lost in regards to why American evangelicals have this ironclad support for the occupation and have ignored the plight of Palestinian Christians. Of course, I believe Muslims, Christians, and Jews can coexist. Of course, I have hope because I have to have hope as a person of faith. But as much hope as I have, I think there's a great sense of urgency for people to open their eyes, learn what's actually happening on the ground, read the reports, stop letting these commentators and these companies that are able to generate propaganda own the narrative. There are objective standards here. There are objective measures of oppression that need to be considered here. What's happening to Gaza is one of the greatest atrocities of our time. Learn about it. I'd tell people to just watch the Vice documentaries, for example, the mini documentaries. I'd sent them to you as well, Inside the Battle for Jerusalem. I mean, think about it. A guy from Long Island, New York can fly to Israel, right? Fly into Tel Aviv and walk into a home that's been occupied by families for generations and throw the people out under the full protection of the military there and spit on them. Historic homes. And when people come up to me and say, we're opposed to Islamophobia, we're opposed to Islamophobia, but they support that. I tell you, you're not opposed to Islamophobia. How can you be opposed to Islamophobia when you traffic in the same framings and dehumanization that enables the viciousness towards Muslims here and Palestinians over there that they do not deserve to be treated like equal human beings, like full human beings. And that based on historic claims, a guy can fly from New York into a historic neighborhood in Jerusalem and kick out generational families with military guns next to them. What does that sound like? How is that normal? And so I think that if people take the time to read, people take the time to investigate, then they come to this conclusion themselves that this is unacceptable. And that you can't put, and this is one of the problems with the framing of Israel-Palestine, is that you're equating occupier and occupied. You're equating the two sides of the conflict, and it's not a conflict, it's an occupation. There is such a disparity of power here that you cannot equate the two sides. Malcolm X would say, you clip the bird's wing and then blame it for not flying as high as you do. You can't do that to a people and just equate them with their occupier. It's an atrocity. It requires us to challenge it. And I'm hopeful at the current movement of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, and people of all faiths that are saying enough is enough, that thresholds have been crossed here. That this is an atrocity that cannot continue. You know, this is very personal to me because this is happening now. What I anticipate, and this is what America did, this is what Nelson Mandela actually predicted with the United States, what I anticipate is that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, every American will say, how could we have supported this? And this was terrible. And will pay symbolic homage to the Palestinian cause. But there are people now that are clinging on for dear life, access to their places of worship, access to their generational homes. Right now, there are children that are in detention and there's a bill in Congress to just stop. I mean, wherever you stand on this issue, child detainment, child detainment, child detention should be a red line, right? Congresswoman Betty McCollum has put this bill on the floor of Congress. She can't even get that passed. Just to at least censure child detainment by the IDF. So, people need to look into this deeper. They need to consider the human element of this and consider the urgency of it as well. With this new regime, it's only going to unfortunately get much worse in the immediate term. And so we have to do something about it. If I may ask you for some advice for a reason that I'll explain maybe in a little bit. Or maybe I should just explain now, which is I think because you've talked about Islamophobia, because you've been at the center of so many catastrophic events, because you sort of jump into the fire to try to help people, you've been attacked a lot. Just in general, you've been under stress. It's just you're not immune to stress. So, part of me wants to ask just how psychologically difficult it's been and where you draw strength. And would you advise, if the opportunity is there, for a person like me, for a silly kid in a suit, to go to that part of the world and take seriously conversations? I would divide it into two categories. There's leaders and there's people. The leaders are sort of these political entities that have their interests, but they also have power and they want to hold on to power. And then people are just regular people that have families that just want to have basic rights and freedoms and continue to love their families, to pursue different jobs and careers and lives that they can flourish and so on. Those are very kind of different dynamics at play. And if given the opportunity to speak to leaders, for me, would you advise I do it or not? And when I say leaders, I mean leaders that would make the case, the pro-Zionist case and the anti-Zionist case. And in both cases, I would make it a very challenging conversation for both of them. Unlike today, our conversation today, you're an inspiring, incredible person. I'm a huge fan of yours. You spread so much love to the Muslim community here, to the Jewish community. Just everybody loves you. Not everybody. Yes, that's true. But a lot of people love you. Yes. But this was kind of an inspiring and a positive conversation. It wasn't very challenging. Although we did touch challenging topics and you did exceptionally well there, but I would do very challenging conversation with those leaders in that part of the world. Is that a bad idea? All right. Well, let me tell you from now, first and foremost, the first part, because I don't want to lose the first part of your conversation. Is it psychologically stressful? Very, very. But when you're a person of faith and you believe that good work will always be rewarded and that doing the right thing will always be rewarded, eventually, you're able to weather that storm quite a bit. So your wife told you, Polyville was okay, right? That's the second thing I was going to mention is honestly supportive, a supportive family. My dad's 80, man, and he's been through a lot. He was born in 1943, five years before Israel was even created. He was born in Palestine. He suffered displacement. He has been around the world and somehow built himself up to be a distinguished professor of chemistry, an author, an inventor. Grew up taking on some of the most difficult challenges and was just always a man of principle. I always admired my dad being a man of principle. And like, he just tells me, man, stay the course, stay the course. Don't be afraid. Don't back down. I have a supportive family. I have a supportive wife. I've got supportive kids. So I have amazing people around me that keep me grounded for sure. And ultimately, obviously faith. And also I'll say this, slander doesn't stand. What do you mean by that? When people slander you, and it kind of comes with the territory of a public figure, it's not going to stand throughout time because eventually any sincere person will find the truth. And the only people that will regurgitate that will continue to do so. So when I get portrayed as an anti-Semite, because of my strong takes on Israel and challenging Israel, and I will continue to do so. It takes just people in doubt. Like we know him, what are you talking about? So slander doesn't stand, at least with the people that are important to you. It might reside on the internet. It might have great rankings and social media bots that give it traction. But is that psychologically difficult to you to have that? Yes, it is difficult. It's very difficult and it's hurtful, especially when it comes from quarters that you would hope that it doesn't come from. But you take a step back, you reevaluate, you lean into your faith and you lean on the people that are closest to you and then you keep going. You learn the lessons. Could I be doing something better? Could I be doing something different? Could I be saying something better? Could I be saying something different? Are the noble causes that I want to achieve, am I doing justice by those causes? How do I grow out of this? You become wiser through these things as well. The second part of your question though about what you should do, if you're going to talk to people, talk to people from a place of inquiry. I would say talk to people more so than leaders and especially some of those who have been erased from the media commentary. Benjamin Netanyahu gets a lot of airtime here in the United States. He's well-spoken, he speaks perfect English, he's an American as well. I would challenge him on some of the things that he has said and done. He has an ongoing corruption case. I think he's a fascist. I think that he's a person who has done much evil. I think that he has a lot of blood on his hands and I think that one day he will be prosecuted for that. But I'd say talk to people on the ground. And people that have been erased. Talk to the families that are being displaced. Sheikh Jarrah, I don't care about the political leadership. I'd much rather you talk to the people on the ground in East Jerusalem that have been displaced. The families. Talk to Palestinian Christians. Talk to the sister of Shireen Abu Aqla, Lina Abu Aqla, who was extremely disappointed and let down when Joe Biden went to the region and did not take her calls, did not meet her, which was an absolutely disgraceful move. He should have met with her. She's the sister of an American journalist who was murdered in cold blood. Talk to Lina Abu Aqla. Talk to Mitri Rahib. Mitri, interesting person, for example. He's a Lutheran. He's the head of the Lutheran church in Palestine. He comes to Dallas sometimes and talks about the plight of Palestinian Christians. I think if you're talking to people in leadership, obviously there are some that will be able to represent themselves in English. Hanan Ashrawi is a very eloquent person, for example. I don't know if you're going to have any luck getting into Gaza, but I'll pray for you if you do. But obviously, if you want to talk to everybody, you've got to talk to everybody, man. I also want to say, this is very important when you say whitewashing, because I've heard this a lot also with Ukraine and Russia. There's an interesting line between whitewashing, which is something you definitely should not do, and a deep empathy for a large number of human beings. It's a really tricky line to walk. I also disagree with you about, well, I don't know if it's a disagreement, but I think I disagree about leaders. I agree 100% that the most important people are the people on the ground. Okay. But I think those are extremely important people to understand, not just as leaders, but as human beings too. And in many cases, to have a challenging conversation, but from a place of empathy, from an understanding of a human being. So if you plan to talk to right-wing, the current leadership of Israel, my only request to you is talk to the victims themselves, not the Palestinian Authority. Talk to the victims. I know you want to, right? So I appreciate that. But the victims, yes. Talk to the victims themselves. Talk to those people that are being thrown out of their homes and subjected to the daily humiliation. Go to a checkpoint and walk through the checkpoint the way that a Palestinian walks through a checkpoint and tell me that's not apartheid. Walk through that checkpoint, crammed in in cages, and tell me it's not apartheid. So I think you're a very sincere person. I think you're going to do your best. I'll be praying for you. Some of these things are harder than others, but yes, I feel like we're in the middle of a negotiation and we've come to a point where we both agree. Everyone deserves to be, everyone, not everyone deserves to be, but I think there's great value and benefit. Let me say I agree with you in hearing people, even tyrants, hearing them so that you can properly deconstruct and decipher what you're hearing. But just think of the voices that don't get heard. And a lot of times what's been done to the Muslim world is, and what's being done right now in the name of the Abraham Accords, what's wrong with the Palestinians? The other Arabs are making peace with them. Let me tell you something, those regimes that are signing onto the Abraham Accords, the people are not happy, but they're terrified of challenging those regimes. So if you go talk to the leaders of some of these countries that have signed onto the Abraham Accords and that are, you know, in some twisted way, making this about religion and peace, you can greatly skew the narrative to where Palestinians are just an inherently disagreeable people that don't want peace. They just want to live in their homes. They just want to live as full, equal human beings. They want the things that everybody wants. And they're only being further disenfranchised in the name of peace now, because voices are being amplified in the name of peace that are suffocating voices for justice. You said hope. As a man of faith, you have hope. What gives you hope about this part of the world and our world in general? When you look across and see so much conflict, so much division happening, what gives you hope? I think that if you look through history, we have been through points as a world where we almost were not going to exist anymore. If you lived in the time of the Crusades, if you lived in some of these darker moments of history, World War I, World War II, you probably thought you weren't going to come out of this as a world. I have hope in God. And I have hope that godly people, people that are devoted to God and people of righteousness, can shift things with His help. I also believe that younger people, I hope they'll be different. I think younger people, hopefully, we're using the word hope a lot, you might hear inshallah, God willing, will see the path that we're heading and will seek to disrupt this bleak trajectory and bring it back to something else. So here's the thing, we live in a time of hyper exposure. That hyper exposure could paralyze you or it could empower you. It could make you completely shut down and say, what's the point of even trying to help these people out? Why even talk about the Palestinians? You got these people here, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, you got what's happening in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, South America, Africa, Ethiopia, Somalia. It's so much and it can be overwhelming to a person who cares. But you ultimately realize that the difference that you can make can become a much greater difference, even if it's after your lifetime. I'll tell you actually a story that I remember the first time I went to Syria, Syrian refugee camps. And you deal with people in this deeply human way. For me, the most clarifying parts of the world are the refugee camps. It's where I feel the most clarity in life about what I'm supposed to be doing in life. You go to the refugee camps and then after you're interacting with these people and maybe giving a few people some trailer homes and some food and something to sustain themselves, some coats and blankets, you drive out of the refugee camps back to where you're staying. And the camps get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and the people get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. But then you realize that it might be that that small section that I touched is going to be the change that affects all of them. What's going to happen to that 12-year-old boy that has seen the horrors of this world and that is absolutely committed to uplifting his people and bringing about a change, being responsible for the plight of his people. And so when I look at any section of devastation in the world, you never know which part of it that you're going to touch that's going to change everything by the grace of God, by the help of God. So you keep trying to do your part. The Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him said that the most beloved of deeds to God are the consistent ones, even if they're small. That small act of charity, that small smile, that small act of kindness, that small prayer might go a long way if he blesses it. So keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. Do not be paralyzed by the scale of the division, just chip away at it. Small step at a time. I suppose all of us can do that, young people can do that. Just one person at a time, try to help. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Omar, you're an incredible person, you're an inspiration. I think you mentioned you came to Dallas for a podcast and instead you got a friend. So it's an honor to be your new friend. I appreciate it. And I think it's time to go pray. Absolutely. I hope it's okay that I join you in, at least in movement, in prayer. Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming down. It's been an absolute pleasure. Allah. Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. Thank you so much. You sure you don't want to come back? Do a round two? Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Omar Suleiman. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Muhammad Ali. Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/BOKCNUqbpH0

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Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278

we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape, and people would be pushed off, and people would jump off, and people would fall into the water, and some of them couldn't swim. And so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice. We could film someone drown in front of us, or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water. The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald, a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen, Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations off the coast of Libya, and 50 Feet from Syria, about the war in Syria. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sky Fitzgerald. Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today, and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries. How do you feel? How do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger and famine in the world today? I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex. I mean, I think it's deeply disturbing to me that as a global community, we've allowed this number of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists and the resources to feed them exist. I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures is that many of those who are starving today or going hungry today are the net result of war and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations. And that's the most deeply disturbing part to me. You know your history, and we all know that deeply embedded in the Geneva Conventions post-World War II, the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war because of what Hitler did during World War II. That's been reiterated multiple times over the years in international humanitarian law, including in 2018 because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen. And yet, to this day, starvation as a weapon of war continues to be used in Ethiopia, obviously in Ukraine right now, and in Yemen with the blockade over the country. And that disgusts me that the law is in place, but it won't be enforced by the international bodies and the nation states that make up the international community. So when the starvation is a result of human actions, human decisions, that's especially painful to make sense of. For me, personally, yeah. I think that if you and I sitting here didn't eat for three days and had to lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights, I think we would take hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously. And I think that's, for some reason, that's missing at this moment in history, tragically. And I think until that we can generate enough empathy that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry. I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal the global community to solve it. I did just that, by the way, fasted for three days recently. It's fundamentally different, I think, because the thing that would be terrifying to me is not the fasting, but the hopelessness at the end of the fast. I wouldn't know when the next meal is coming. And I always had the freedom to have the meal. The fear, not just your own ability to eat and survive, but your family's. If there's loved ones, that's the other thing I don't have. I'm single. So I feel like the worst suffering is watching somebody you love that you're supposed to be a caretaker of, and you can't take care of them. And if all of that is caused by leaders, as a weapon of war, that is especially painful. So how can we help? What are the ways to help? How do we alleviate this suffering? Well, I think on the humanitarian front, we have to be aggressive and attentive and intervene in significant ways. And I think on the political front, we have to hold players accountable for their actions. So the leaders that start the war. So when you say we have to speak up about the decisions and the humans making those decisions that lead to this situation. For example, let's make it concrete. So when I was, I don't want to jump ahead, but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen, I met a mother who when she gave birth weighed 70 pounds. The mother weighed 70 pounds. And so her daughter was starved in the womb. When she was born, she was born into a world with no breast milk, very little formula. So she was starved before birth. She was born into a world where she continued to be starved by a mother who herself was starved. I watched that child, her name is Asila, die in front of me. Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for, for a child in this world. She didn't have a chance to grow up. She didn't have a chance to discover love. She didn't have a chance to have a career. She was robbed of all of those things because of the insidious nature of hunger that she was born into. She didn't have to die. She was not starving. Her mother was being starved because of the blockade over the country. Now who instituted that blockade? MBS in Saudi Arabia with the reinforcement and sort of tacit approval of the United States, our own government here. And so there are people who are responsible for the starvation of children, and I think we need to hold them accountable. Now that's incredibly difficult to do, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it ought not to be done. And we'll talk about many cases like these throughout history and going on today. Let's talk about Hunger Ward. Yeah. Let's dive in. You've been nominated for an Oscar twice. This is one of the times for a documentary. Can you please tell me what Hunger Ward, The Last Hope Between War and Starvation is about? Hunger Ward is a short documentary that really is an attempt to illustrate the effects of the conflict on Yemen, specifically on civilians. And we document it in both the north and the south of the country because it's a bifurcated country. The south is held by the globally recognized government in the south, which up until last week was run by, at least on the surface, by President Hadi, who was holed up in Riyadh. He was essentially removed from office last week by, most people would agree, the Emiratis and the Saudis to put in place a presidential council. So we wanted to show that starvation was happening in very similar fashions, both in the south and the north. And we wanted to do this film because so few people in the west know anything about the conflict in Yemen, nor the US's complicity in it. And so my intent with the project was try to bring it to a larger Western audience as an attempt to intervene and change the political status quo, which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue. So, US complicity, who are the bad guys? Now, the world, unfortunately, cannot be painted in black and white of good guys and bad guys. But for the purpose of conversation, who is causing suffering in the world in this situation? Who started the war? Why? And then, of course, the roots of war go back in history. Yeah. But let's start at the top. Well, there are bad actors and there are less bad actors, right? I mean, I think that's always the case in war, probably. And everybody loses in war. Yeah, I concur with that statement. In the case of the status quo in Yemen right now, it's a completely asymmetrical war. And so the Saudi coalition, which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain supplying weapons, but it's really driven and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia. And it's asymmetrical to a great extent, just because of the incredible firepower by air that the Saudis use continuously to pummel northern Yemen. When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes is hard to describe. And we show the result of only one in the film, really. But it's an asymmetrical war. The de facto authorities of the north, Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi rebel group, they don't have any control over an air force, right? They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force. And so it's a, from a military standpoint, it's completely asymmetrical. The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground. They use only proxies to fight on the ground. What is the narrative they use to justify war? So there's a story on every side in war. Some of it is grounded in truth. Some of it is not at all grounded in truth, also known as propaganda. What's the narrative used by the Saudis for this war? The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis are an illegitimate government, and that it's really a proxy war between Iran, who supports the Houthis nominally, and the rest of the world. That's the Saudi narrative. The reality is something altogether different. While the Houthis do receive support from Iran, this is a war started by and sustained by MBS in Saudi Arabia. Who's MBS? Mohammed bin Salman. And who is he? He is the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia. What's his power? I'm asking basic, dumb questions. He's the de facto ruler. Of the military and... Yes, he seized control of the country several years ago, even though he, on the surface, you know, is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia. He is. He's the crown prince. And sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man? What's your sense of the man? Yeah, so I've never met him, and I likely will never meet him, hopefully. But he is... I know a lot about him through his actions, sort of in the MENA region, Middle East and North Africa region. And he is one of three, in my view, as an American sitting here in the US, three people in the world that I think has caused such an incredible volume of misery and suffering and murder on this planet that I think if he weren't around, the world would be a lot better place. And I'm not a violent person by nature, but there are three human beings that I think the world would be better off without. Do you mind, before I ask other questions, mentioning the three? Oh yeah. Assad is one in Syria, and that comes out of an earlier project that I did in Syria and Turkey, and what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people. And Putin would be the third. Those three human beings are murderers on a scale beyond imagining. On MBS, are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker, as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker, with an open mind about a man like that who does evil onto the world, and what that must feel like to be inside the mind of that man? So basically, consider his worldview. With most evil people, with all people probably, but with people who do evil onto the world, they think they're doing good. They're the hero of their own story. Right. And so to be able to place yourself, I feel like, for me, to understand a person, I have to literally, like the way actors kind of have to do, you know, live inside the body of the person they're trying to study. Inhabit the character. Inhabit the person. So are you able to do that, or because you are also studying the people who suffer as a result, as a consequence of their actions, you just, you put them in a box, and you say, I hate the person in that box. I'm going to move on. This goes back to your black and white statement at the beginning, right? It's like, the world as a whole, of course, you know, is every gradation of gray, right? My background is theater, and so I was trained long before I picked up a camera to inhabit other characters, right? I have two degrees in theater. And so that level of sort of like walking in other people's shoes and trying to understand and empathize with their worldview is fundamental to how I live my life and how I do my work. So in the case of those three that I named, Assad, MBS, and Putin, yeah, I can go there and think through how they came to be who they are, right? From afar, right? And after I go through that process, I still don't think there's any way that one can justify what they've done. We're going to talk about each of those people, for sure. Well, I'm not an expert on any of them. You're a human being, which makes you a partial expert on human nature, because nobody's an expert. You're just as good as anyone else. Anybody who actually carries a camera and listens and observe others isn't especially an expert of human nature. It's willing to take that leap and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders. I feel like to understand a leader, you have to first understand humans. And to understand humans, you have to see humans at their worst and their best, which is something that you've definitely done. So let's stick on Hunger Ward. This lens that you've chosen to look at this is through a single, maybe you can speak to that. You've mentioned the starvation as a result of war. What is the documentary? What is the lens you've chosen to give the world a peek at the results, at the suffering that's a result of this war? People a lot of times will ask me after they've seen Hunger Ward, they ask where the hope is. You read the byline earlier, The Last Hope. The Last Hope. And what I try to focus on in many of my films, including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context of war as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen. I look for hope and I look for inspiration. And I do that through people who are doing incredible things under the most difficult circumstances. So when I set out to do a film about starvation in Yemen, just listen to that statement, where's the hope there? And yet what I found, what I discovered were human beings that we could tell the story through who are incredible, inspirational human beings doing amazing things every day. One of those is Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner in the north of the country at a small rural clinic. And another is Dr. Aida El-Sadiq, who is a pediatrician in the south of the country. And so we chose to tell the story sort of through their experiences as caregivers, devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort, this entire generation of children that has been born into starvation. And that's an incredible, difficult task, but equally inspirational to watch these human beings devote every minute of every day to save a child. I mean, in my view, nothing is more important than that action. Maybe on that point real quick. So there is suffering at scale, starvation at scale. I mean, the numbers, maybe you can mention in Yemen, what are the numbers in terms of people in starvation? But from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor, you're treating one person in front of you. So how do you make sense of that calculus of like there's a huge number of people suffering, and then there's just the person in front of you? Is that all we can do as humans is just to help one person at a time? Is that the right way to think and to approach these problems? Or can you actually make sense of the numbers? Speaking just as a human being, I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen that I think I'd be overwhelmed if I focused on that scale. You've probably heard that a child dies every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger. So we've been sitting here, how long? 35 minutes or so. That's a good handful of children that have already passed away. So to overcome that danger of psychic numbing, which can happen when you think about suffering on such a large scale, as a filmmaker, as a human being, I have to focus in on the individuals, on those human beings in front of me. And I think that's exactly what Dr. El-Sadiq and Makiya do to keep going each day. And one of the amazing things about these two healthcare providers that we showcase in the film is that they treat anyone who shows up. They don't have to have money. They don't have to have any resources. They just have to get to the clinic or the hospital. And it's incredibly moving to see the flexibility of their thinking in terms of how they make that work. Makiya, for example, I saw her in the north of the country. It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at. So it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country. People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes for specialty treatment of pediatric malnutrition. And one time I saw a child come in and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in. And just because of the gender dynamics in Yemen, there had to be a parent or a relative there to stay with the child while they're at the clinic. And it was a male relative. And so what many doctors in that instance would do would just turn them away. And instead what Makiya did is she walked into one of the rooms, talked to one of the other mothers and convinced them to become the temporary guardian, essentially, of this child until a female relative could arrive. So she's flexible. She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems to deter solutions. One child at a time. Yeah, yeah. One child at a time. You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you. So when you're filming this as a filmmaker, what's that like psychologically, philosophically, creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller? What do you do there as a human and as a filmmaker? What's that whole experience like? Because you get to, like you said, you take it through the whole journey of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child. It's not something I want to film. It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen or seek out. But it happened. And the sad truth is that it happens every week at that hospital. And so when it happened in this instance, I felt an incredible responsibility to do justice to that reality, to acknowledge that a child had just died of starvation-related causes, and to find some way, if the parents wanted us to, to integrate that into this story we bring back to a Western audience. And I've filmed many difficult things over the years, and usually I really love filming. And I didn't love filming Hunger Ward. It was not a process that I enjoyed on any way, shape, or form, sadly, because of the content. Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them? I don't. But I did, and I had to. And when that happened, I felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep with that family, to tell the story of this hospital with every sort of ounce of focus and talent that I could bring to the story. Because people should know that children are dying of starvation right now as we sit here. And that that doesn't have to happen. And it is happening because of police brutality. And it is happening because of the political dynamics that we can intervene on. Is there times you wanted to walk away, quit the telling of the story, come back to the United States where you can just appreciate the wonderful comfort you can have just sitting there and having food and freedom to do whatever you want, those kinds of things? It doesn't have to be United States, and in a lot of places in the world. Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivor's guilt on some level definitely exists. One of the hardest things from Hunger Ward actually was eating, right? Because we were in these malnutrition clinics, they're called TFCs, Therapeutic Feeding Centers, where over a long period of time, children lost the ability to eat normal food, right? And couldn't digest it and just were literally starving. And the practitioners were trying to bring them back to a state of thriving. But to leave those clinics, right? And to go to our camp or to go to our hotel, and then to have access to food, right? Because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels. I mean, it was a very intentional act throughout the course of the shoot to look at a piece of bread, right? Or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child in the TFC and think about how the privilege of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest. So it certainly, every day, helped me appreciate, right, the privilege I had. Every bite you take. With every bite, absolutely. And so I wouldn't call it guilt, it wasn't exactly guilt, but it was definitely mindfulness, right? About... Meditate on the suffering of people who can't. That's right, exactly. So that knowledge, it was catalytic in some ways. It sort of moved us forward really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could because we were surrounded by so much suffering every day. How did filming that movie change you as a man, as a human being? You've filmed a few difficult documentaries. That one is a heavy one. When you think of the person you were before you filmed it and now when you wake up every morning, you look yourself in the mirror, how is that person different? Every documentary I do changes me in a different way. Like I am not static in that sense, right? I'm preformed. It's like I change with every project because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right? And so in order to do them, I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them. In the case of Hunger Ward, you may remember the girl Omema, who's the 10-year-old girl who we showcase in Auden, in the south of the country. And we were there when she was admitted to the hospital. And when she was admitted, this 10-year-old girl weighed 24 pounds and she could barely stand up. And we started with the permission of the family to start to document her treatment and to see what would happen with this young girl who is so severely malnourished. And we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital. And slowly, over the course of a couple weeks, we saw her change. We saw her start to sort of gain strength and start to recover. And she also watched the caregivers very carefully. And I watched her watch them. And I'll never forget, there was a moment where about two and a half weeks, I think, into her treatment, we walked into a room and I saw her offering a capful of water to another younger child who was also starving. The shot's actually in the film. And so to see Omema, this child who's starving, giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child who was also starving moved me deeply. So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her. And as a human being, as a filmmaker, I was incredibly inspired by Omema. That capacity for compassion is there. Even within a 10-year-old girl who's starving. And so you asked what changed me. That's one moment. Rather than being crushed by such heavy content, it was actually the opposite, where I came away inspired by a 10-year-old girl. And I didn't anticipate that. I didn't think that's what this content would do, but it's what it did. It reinforced for me this incredible capacity we all have as human beings to do good. To even within the most difficult circumstances, to choose who we become and what we do. And a 10-year-old girl taught me that or reinforced that for me. Were you able to feel the culture of the people? So the language barrier, were you able to break through the language barrier, the culture barrier, to understand the people? Because even suffering has a language of sorts, depending on where you are. The way people joke about things, the way they cry, the way... This is an interesting thing I actually want to ask you. Sorry, I'm asking a million questions. I find that the people... I've been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia, but in general, I've gotten a chance to talk to people who've been through trauma in their life. And there's a humor they have about trauma in hard times. It depends on the culture, of course. Certainly Russian-speaking folk. I mean, the more suffering you've experienced, for some reason, the more they joke about it. It's almost like they're able to see something deep about humanity now that they have suffered, and they're able to laugh at the absurdity, the injustice of it all. And you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it. But that humor has a kind of profound understanding within it about what it means to be human. And to really understand it, you have to know the language. So I guess I'm asking, were you able to really feel the humans and the other side of the language? I'd like to think so. I mean, as you noted, there are universals in life that transcend language. I mean, suffering is suffering. Love is love. Compassion doesn't take place only through language. It's through actions. And so was there a language barrier? Absolutely. Did we try to bridge that through other means and universal emotions and experiences? Absolutely. That's one of the things I always think about when I'm filming is how do we distill down to universals through imagery, through the vocabulary of cinema? Because I believe so deeply that that vocabulary should be visual. So the words, what's the most powerful way to express the universal? Is it visual or is it language words? I think it's visual. And we're talking about the human face or human face, human body, everything. Through actions as well. Actions, the dynamic. I'm thinking about a woman named Salha in the film who isn't named, but you see her multiple times throughout the film. And she's basically the matron of the ward in this house. And she's the gatekeeper for the ward. So no one enters that ward without her permission. She's literally the gatekeeper at the door. So no one comes in unless Salha allows them to come in. Right. But then she also is the first point of contact for compassion in the ward. So when mothers and families are admitted, she forms relationships between the moms and the grandmothers, for example, who are admitted and who are living there in the ward. And she does it through hugging. Right. She does it through bringing them food. And she forms these really rather quickly deep relationships of compassion with the families. And so it's amazing to watch and no language is needed to bear witness to this. And she also suffers because of that. And so near the end of the film, if you recall, when another child dies and the mother is wailing, we actually cut away to Salha, who's in the hallway, who walks into another room and begins sobbing. She's not a family member, but she has a deep relationship with that family that she forged as soon as they stepped into the ward. So that's universal, right? To see a woman weep because a child has died, even if they're not related to that, that's a universal sort of emotion experience we can all relate to. So that's what I mean by visual vocabulary. And it's especially powerful because she has seen much of this kind of suffering and she's still, maybe she has built up some callus to be able to work day to day, but there's still an ocean underneath the ice. She's kept her heart open despite all the pain that she sees and feels every day. Somehow, she's a human being who's able to do that, which is a very difficult thing to do, right? She still allows herself to be vulnerable. And maybe that's why she can do what she does. What lessons do you draw from other famines in history? So for me personally, one that's touched my family and one of the great famines in history is in Ukraine, Holodomor in the 30s. 32-33, right? Stalin, yeah. 32-33, with Stalin. Maybe you could speak to the universals of the suffering here. What lessons do you draw from those other famines, if you've looked at them, or in general, about famine that are manufactured by the decisions of, let's say, authoritarian leaders? Famine doesn't have to exist, or the bulk of famines on this planet, I believe, don't have to exist. And most of them, or at least a good number of them, are manufactured by the leaders that choose to use famine as a weapon, right? And Ukraine is one of the obvious examples, right? Now, with siege tactics that are happening in different parts of the country. And we built international humanitarian law for a reason, right? Many years ago, and it continues to be written to this day. And it's there to prevent what's happening in Ukraine, right? And it's there to prevent what's been happening in Yemen for seven years, and yet there hasn't been any teeth behind it. And that's what disturbs me, is that we can see how these famines are being used as weapons in war, and yet we aren't sort of using the leverage that we have in the world to prevent them from happening. And yet, we aren't sort of using the levers of power that exist in order to, I think, to call out in important and powerful ways those who are causing them, and to make sure that we hold them accountable on the global stage. Now, to some extent, that seems to be happening in Ukraine in a way that hasn't happened for a long time. And that gives me hope, right? And yet, I don't believe we've done enough. And I think the international community needs to do far more than we are, both in Yemen, in Ethiopia, and in Ukraine right now. There are certain kinds of things that captivate the global attention, and it seems like starvation is not always one of them. For some reason, murder and destruction gets people attention more. The death, of course, is easy to enumerate, but it's the suffering that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when we went to film Hunger Ward, that was one of the creative questions that I was really concerned about, because starvation, you know, it's not a quick action, right? It's a long, slow, insidious process, right? Just like hunger, right? And yet, when you're hungry, it takes you over. It becomes the most important thing, right? It's just absolutely fundamental to life. It's like drawing breath. And so, I really, before I filmed Hunger Ward, I struggled to sort of answer how we could creatively approach that, because, you know, someone sitting in a clinic, right, starving, or being treated for starvation, you know, that's a pretty static scene, right? And what we found was that because of the volume of cases, and because of the nature of sort of how quickly people were coming and going, is that it was more dynamic than we anticipated. And there's something also about starvation. You get tired. It's almost like it's a quiet suffering. Yeah. Like, and by the way, there's something about when I think about dark times, I mean, you'll hear me chuckle, for example. I don't know what that is. That's almost like, yeah, it's almost like you have to kind of laugh at, you can't help but laugh at, like, the injustice and the cruelty in the world, somehow that helps your mind deal with it. I mean, I see this all the time. Like, when you're struggling, you can't feed your family, you lost your home, the last thing you have is jokes about humor. Yes, humor. It's like, oh, the fucking man fucked me over again. And there's jokes all around that. And then you laugh and you drink vodka and you play music. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. It's gallows humor, right? It's a way of, I think, simultaneously acknowledging and allowing yourself to move forward, right? Beyond the pain and the suffering. So you mentioned Ukraine and you mentioned Putin. What are your thoughts about the humanitarian crisis and generally the suffering that's resulting from the war in Ukraine? Well, first off, I think the conflict is just going to exacerbate, you know, sort of the global challenge we have with displacement. The last entire trilogy I did was about displacement, and to a great extent due to war. And, you know, this is a huge displacement of human beings, regardless of the cause. And that is going to sort of have a ripple effect across the globe for many, many years to come, regardless of, even if the conflict ended today. So there's that, that's going to set up a whole nother strain on sort of the global sort of resources that come into play to deal with refugees. You know, there were 79 million displaced people on this globe prior to the Ukrainian conflict, right? You probably know the numbers better than I do in terms of what the current estimates are for displacement from Ukraine. It's four to six million. So what are we up to now? 73, 74 million individuals on this planet now who are displaced. That's a significant bump. I wish that the levers of power were used differently in situations like Ukraine and Syria, for example. So what are the levers of power? Well, military might, let's take that for one, right? So I have always felt after working in Syria and Turkey that we completely missed our opportunity as a player on the global stage with military capability to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria. We had the ability and we didn't leverage that ability. You know, the fact that I talked with so many Syrians during the course of doing that project who told me their stories of living in their house, right? And having a Syrian helicopter fly over their house and drop a 55-gallon drum full of explosives and shrapnel in their neighborhood over and over and over again, not focused on any military targets, only meant to kill and sow fear, right? And early in the conflict, we could have stopped that, right? Before Russia got involved, we could have intervened and created a no-fly zone. We, the United States. We, the United States, or a coalition that we were a part of, yeah. And we didn't do it. And we could have. And I think that's an example where we have the military capability to actually do good in a situation like that. And we don't usually use it for those purposes. And I think that's what a military ought to be used for beyond just defending our borders, is to save others with the privilege that that power affords. What do you think about the power of the military versus the power of sanctions versus the power of conversation? They're all different tools, right? To be used at different moments. But if words fail, if sanctions fail, right? I think there are moments in history where power is justified, right? And I think Syria was one of them. I think when barrel bombs were, you know, dropping on civilian neighborhoods for months and months and months with no intent to do anything other than kill Syrian civilians, that's an instance, I think, where might is justified to shoot those helicopters out of the sky. Here's the difficult thing. We talked about Yemen. Where's the line between good and evil for US intervention in different countries and conflicts in the world? It's easy to look back 10, 20, 30 years to know what was and wasn't a quote unquote, just war. In the moment, how do we know? I think it's incredibly difficult to answer that, right? And I think that's why leaders make the wrong choices so often, right? As they second guess themselves. I think you take all the data at your fingertips, all the intelligence that you have, right? And you look at it all very carefully and you make a decision, right? There are some instances though, where it's very clear what's happening, right? And leaders still don't act, right? In Yemen right now, for example, it's very clear what's happening, right? Children are being starved because of a blockade. All the US would have to do is ensure that blockade, now there's a two month ceasefire in place now, but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire and children will stop starving. That's pretty simple. You can trace, it's a direct connection. And we haven't had the sort of the moral wherewithal to make that decision because we're too interested in maintaining positive ties with Saudi Arabia, where oil flows from and so much influence because Saudi Arabia has so much influence throughout the MENA region. We want to keep that relationship tight despite sort of the moral wounds that come from that. About half the world is under authoritarian regimes. Everybody operates under narratives and there's a narrative in the United States that freedom is good, democracy is good. I have fallen victim to this narrative. I believe in it. I'm saying this jokingly, but not really because who knows the truth of anything in this world. I eat meat, factory farm meat and I seem to not be intellectually and philosophically tortured by this and I should be. There's a lot of suffering there. What do we do to lessen the suffering of the people under authoritarian regimes? Again, the same question, military conflict, diplomacy, sanctions, all those kinds of things. Does that lessen suffering or increase the suffering from what you see in Yemen? Is it something that has to be healed across generations or can be healed on a scale of months and years? I'm just a guy with a camera, Alex, but as a guy with a camera, I've seen a lot of things in a lot of places and I've seen the effects these decisions made by decisions made by authoritarian leaders have on their own citizens. That's what drives my thinking on this and that's what drives and motivates me each day to raise the red flag through my films and say, listen, Biden, you campaigned for president in part on a platform that said that we would regain our prominence on the moral stage of the world and that we would prioritize a moral paradigm over relationships with authoritarian regimes, Saudi Arabia being one. Yet when the CIA report came out that clearly articulated in detail that MBS was responsible for Khashoggi's murder and for cutting his body into pieces and probably burning it in the backyard of the embassy, what did Biden do? He didn't really make a pariah out of MBS like he said he was going to. What if he'd done something else and actually done what he said he was going to do, which was make him, what if he had would remove the ability for MBS to fly to the United States, for example? Now that's a sanction. That's a sanction that's individual and concrete and would be hugely embarrassing for MBS. That would have been Biden saying, this is unacceptable behavior. This is something which because you executed such a horrendous act on someone living in the United States, we are not going to give you a stage here at least within the borders of our country. Those are the things that leaders can do that I don't think they do often enough. And certainly our leader right now isn't doing it in the way I wish he were. He certainly has taken a different stand on Ukraine and been very vocal, but there's so many instances we could talk about where I feel like the political gamemanship often falls into maintaining relationships with MBS and Saudi Arabia rather than doing the right thing. Rather than as a nation, a leader of a nation saying, this is unacceptable. We have a higher standard than this. Because I think when leaders do that, it becomes aspirational. It becomes aspirational for other leaders in the progressive world at least. And also it rings the alarm bells for other authoritarian leaders and says, you know what? There are lines, right? There are things that can't be done or there will be significant consequences. Like you will not be able to fly into our airspace anymore. And sanctions I think need to be concrete and individual to some, in addition to the larger scope. But when they're concrete and individual, I think often they're felt in a different way. You mean felt obviously by the individuals and so the ripple effects of that might have the power to steer the direction of nations. Because of the nature of authoritarian regimes, right? Individuals have so much power. Exactly, right. So if Putin is put on trial in The Hague at some point, or at least there's the threat of that, right? Now that's likely never to happen, of course, because someone has to be in custody to go on trial, right? And he's never going to allow that to happen. But just knowing that that danger exists is going to change his travel plans in the future, right? MBS not being able to fly to the US, he's going to feel that and be embarrassed by that. So I think they have a special meaning and consequence in authoritarian regimes because of that. So you said you're just a guy with a camera. Yeah. I would say you're a brilliant guy with a camera. I'm also a kind of guy with a camera. You're a guy with a couple cameras. A couple cameras. I have more. A couple mics too. Multiple. You got a couple mics, a couple cameras, a robot over here. When you can't beat them with quality, you bring the quantity. That's right. So to me, that's also an interest, partially because I also speak Russian and a bit Ukrainian. I want to study that part of the world. I want to talk to a lot of people. I want to talk to the leaders. I want to talk to regular people. To be honest, and I would love to get your comments on this, the regular quote-unquote people are way more fascinating to me. As a filmmaker, how do you figure out how to tell this story? I'm sure a guy with a camera, you're looking at war in Ukraine, but also what's going on in Yemen, Syria, and other places in the world. I mentioned North Korea. That's a super interesting one. Hard to bring cameras along. China, in Canada, the truckers. There's all kinds of fascinating things happening in the world. So you as a scholar of human suffering and human flourishing, how do you choose how to tell the story? How do I choose a story? Both the story and how, I assume those are coupled. So how do you choose which story to tell? And how do you choose how to tell that story? Yeah, well, in terms of how to choose which story, it's a bit of a mystery potion for me, frankly. I go off on instinct, but there's also a highly intentional piece of it for me as well. And the intentional piece is, I guess I'd call it the do I care threshold, or the so what threshold. You personally, just something in your heart just kind of gets excited or hurts or just feels something. So one of the things that disturbs me about American culture, Lex, is that we seem to be a people that's fascinated by reality television, for example. Look at how many of us here in America watch reality television. That deeply disturbs me. Not that I've never watched an episode. I've shot a whole season of it once to make a living. Right? So it's like, I know it, right? But I feel like the things we should be paying attention to are the things, personally, are the things I choose to film. Right? As a human being, as a dad, as a filmmaker, I think we should be paying attention to the fact that children are being starved in Yemen. I think we should be paying attention to the fact that Ukrainians are being displaced by the millions. So there's this so what threshold that I use. And I feel like it has to be a topic that if we don't cover and we don't put out in the world in the largest possible way, in the hope of intervening, in the hope of marshalling maximum resources and attention to solving the problem, that's what I'm dedicated to as a filmmaker. Because I didn't pick up a camera initially to film puppy dogs, right? To make people smile. I believe the camera is a tool for change. I believe the camera is a powerful tool that we can use to raise awareness and marshal resources and help people understand the impact that these geopolitical decisions have on real people's lives. And that's the intent I create each film with. Now, how I choose each story, that's the magic potion piece of it. Right? And often one flows rather organically into another, frankly. So you just kind of, like you said, you go with instinct a little bit. To some extent. But oftentimes I choose the next project based on relationships I've developed in the last film. Right? And so one often flows into another through relationships I develop. And then a colleague will share a detail about something that's happening in a certain place. And I'll go, hmm, really? I didn't know that. Right? And usually it's before it's hit the world stage in a big way. And so I start to do due diligence. And often that reveals it to be a much bigger and more pressing topic that I want to learn more about. Before I talk to you about Syria and Lifeboat, you mentioned a camera is the best weapon. Maybe just... Well, it can't take out a tank. Right. But it's a good weapon. Second. Yeah. Top three. Yeah. I love the humor throughout this. I really appreciate it. We're talking about such dark topics. It resets the mind in a way that allows me to think. So thank you. As a filmmaker, I almost want to talk about the technical details. Uh-oh. How do you choose to shoot stuff? Again, so maybe you can explain to me. I work with incredible folks that care about lenses and equipment and so on. I tend to be somebody that just wants to kind of go as like a guerrilla shooting. Like not plan too much, just go with gritty. I'm trying to come up with words that sound positive. Do a positive spin on what I try to do. But like gritty, don't over plan, use... Like we had a big discussion if you see this light. Yeah. It's on a stand that's a very ghetto stand. Yeah. It's cheap. You need a sandbag on that, man. Exactly. So no sandbag. And like the stand is actually bending under the weight of that thing. It could fall on us. It could fall. It probably won't reach us, but it could fall. But the danger, live under that danger, embrace that danger. Love it. Yeah. Because that thing is easier to transport than a heavier one. Yeah. Sandbag, that's extra weight. So if you keep like... People tell me there's the right way to do stuff. Like here's these giant cases with all the kinds of padding for transporting stuff. I transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag. Yeah. So that's just a preference because that's somehow... That chaos allows me to ignore all the stupidity of loving the equipment and focusing on the story. So that said, I've never shot anything worthwhile. Like there is power to the visual. Yeah. Like definitely. And so finding a certain angle, a certain light, whether it's natural light or additional artificial lighting, just capturing a tear, capturing when the person forgets themselves for a moment and looks out into the distance, missing somebody, thinking about somebody. All of those moments you can capture, a lens, a camera can do magic with that. I don't even know the question I'm asking you, but how do... Both technical and philosophical, how do you capture the visual power that you're after? Yeah. So many of my films, I think, are built on the premise of access, right? Built on this notion that the biggest hurdle to the story is getting there, being there, being there in the room or being there on the boat while the crisis is unfolding. And that access typically is really nuanced and difficult to gain. And then trust flows from that, right? Because usually it takes a long time to gain that access. Because that access is so hard fought, it necessarily informs how we film, right? To be in a room at Sadaka Hospital in southern Yemen, I can't have five people in that room, right? I can't have a boom mic over a scene. I want, creatively, the opposite of that as well. So it's not just a logistical question. It's also a creative question to capture intimate moments where families are dealing with suffering children and dying children and caretaking is active and ongoing all the time. You don't want to interrupt that moment. And so that informs how I do things. So we go fleet and nimble and small. Those are all really good words for... But so it's logistical on the one hand, but it's also a creative choice, right? So when we filmed Hunger Ward, two people were filming the entire film, right? Me and my director of photography. Those are the two people in the room? Two people in the room. That's it. Yeah. Wow. That's it, the whole film, right? We had a field producer as well, and he's part of the country. But in terms of camera, it's just two people. And we're doing everything. And we have lenses that are long enough that we don't have to move to capture the film. So we can tuck into a corner sometimes, right? And just... So just what's long mean? That means they're standing farther away and they can... Zoom lens. It's not a prime lens. So it's not a fixed focal length, right? Because a fixed focal length, you have to move a lot more in order to capture action. With a zoom lens, maybe a 105 at the long end, I can tuck into a corner and just film from 15 feet away instead of having to get right up on someone, right? So you're less likely to interrupt the scene. And you can kind of become the fly on the wall sometimes. So I'm very intentional about that piece of it so that we can capture those vulnerable moments and not interrupt them. That's really fascinating too, because the access... I don't often think about this, but that's probably true for me as well. Part of the storytelling is to be in the room. And that's the hard part. Yeah. For me, most of my films, that's the hardest part. Actually, as hard as Hunger Ward and Lifeboat were to film, and 50 Feet from Syria, the getting there piece of it for the last two was much harder. Yeah. And it's also, it's a creative act. I don't know if it is for you, but it's the kind of people you talk to. It's like how you live your life. The kind of people I talk to right now, they steer the direction of my life. They steer the direction of my life and steer the direction of things I'll film. So it's not just like you're trying to get access. It's everything. It builds and builds and builds. It builds on itself. Yeah. I mean, part of the thing, even talking about some of these leaders and conversations with them, it's almost like steering your life into the direction of the difficult. Of taking the leap, and if you're a good human being, and a lot of people know who you are as a human, not as a name, but as really who you are, putting that attention out there, it's somehow the world opens doors where the access that once seemed impossible becomes possible. And then all of that is a creative journey to be in the room. I think it probably is. I mean, it's true even for fiction films, probably. Everything that led to that, to be in the room, the journey to be in the room and to shoot the scene is maybe more important than the scene itself. And really focus on the creative act of that. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Especially, I mean, with a documentary, you get one take. Yeah, you can't say, hey, reset, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Ah, that is so interesting. Because you're in some of the most difficult parts of the world in the room with some of the most difficult stories to be told. And yet, I think that's why I keep doing these stories, right? Because once you have that lived experience, for me, it's moving. It moves me to bear witness to these inspiring people under difficult circumstances. And I can't come back to the US afterwards and walk down the grocery aisle where there's 50 different choices for canned peas, right? And not sort of feel that lived tension, right? That lived tension of the privilege that I have here in the US. And then I have a choice about what to do with that privilege, right? And the last thing I want to do is start doing stories about dandelions, right? There's far more important things to do on this very limited time that I have on the planet. And I think that's catalytic for me. Like, I feel that mortality each day. And my goal is to tell as many of these stories before I'm gone. Could you speak to the getting access? Is this just, you know, is there interesting stories of how a weird or funny or profound ways that led you to get access to a room? Each one is a different experience. Each one is a different adventure. And it's definitely an adventure. Everyone's an adventure. Yeah. Probably one of the easiest ones I ever had in the recent past was for 50 Feet From Syria, where I literally broke my hand in a bicycle race. And after many months of trying to get an appointment with an orthopedic hand surgeon, you know, a specialist, I finally did. And he was Syrian-American. And the Syrian conflict had just begun, and we just started talking about it. And after, you know, he looked at my hand in the first five minutes, he's like, yeah, you need surgery. Right? And we're great. But then somehow we started talking about Syria. And like five minutes in, he just stood up and like put the privacy curtain around us. It's supposed to be a 15-minute appointment or so. And we talked for an hour. Right? So, you know, those moments of sort of mysterious confluence happen. Right? And I think you have to be open to them when they do happen. Because I'm a storyteller, I'm always looking as well. Right? So because he then contacted me later and said, Sky, I am going back to the Syrian border to volunteer as a surgeon. Do you want to come with me? That was an easy one. That's probably the easiest one I could give you. But it came out of this interesting moment, very personal moment. Right? Lifeboat and Hunger Ward were completely different. And I had to really work hard to gain access to those stories. So you intentionally thought like, what, I want to get access to the story. Yeah. And then what are the different ideas? And they often might involve a doctor or a dentist or just being maybe intentionally and aggressively open to experiences that lead you into the room. So it's funny you mentioned the doctor because I have similar experiences now. I've just gotten access to all kinds of fascinating people in the same way. They're all around us. They're all around us. You just have to look. Yeah, exactly. It's like there's fascinating people everywhere who are doing incredible things. But we have to be open and keep our eyes open and realize that there are amazing human beings everywhere. Yeah. There's networks that connect people just through life. You meet people, you share a beer or a drink or just you fall in love or you share trauma together. You go through a hard time together. And those little sticky things connects us humans. And if you just keep yourself open and embrace the curiosity and then also the persistence, I suppose. Yeah. Like how long have you chased access? Does it take days, weeks, months, years? Lex, I'm not the most talented filmmaker in the world. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. I think if there's qualities that have served me well in my career, it's persistence and tenacity. Right? I've always been sort of a slow burn human being. I would never hit a home run, but I hit a first, right? A single to first, and then I'd hit another single to first. And then so I ran a marathon when I was 18. And I think that is illustrative of sort of how my career has been. Yeah. I just keep going. And I believe in this notion of incremental evolution, that with each project, I try to learn from it and take it further. I try to learn from it and take away lessons learned and improve my craft, right? And improve how I leverage that craft and improve how I tell the story from a narrative standpoint each time so that on the next project, it's a little bit better. And that's the arc of my career is learning, learning, evolving, evolving so that I can make a little better film the next time. How do you gain people's trust? Like, for example, there's a line between journalists and documentary filmmakers. Nobody really trusts journalists. Yeah, right. Exactly. But a documentary filmmaker, of course, I'm joking, half joking. I don't know which percent is joking, but some truth. But a documentary filmmaker is a kind of storyteller, an artist. Yeah. Somehow that's more trustworthy because you're on the same side in some way. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Is there something to be said in how you gain the trust of people to gain access? Are you just trying to be a good human being? Is there something to be said there? Well, so I do draw a distinction between journalism and filmmaking because I think you're right. They're different. And there are some filmmakers who do hew to sort of the journalistic tenets of who, what, where, when, why, fair and balanced on both sides, right? Make sure everyone has a voice. I don't. If you say fair and balanced, you're rarely either fair or balanced. Yeah. I've seen that with journalists. Journalists often, unfortunately, in my perspective, sorry to interrupt you rudely and go on a rant, but they seem to have an agenda. Yeah. As opposed to seeking to truly tell a story or to truly understand, especially when they're talking to people who have some degree of evil in them. Well, we all have an agenda, right? I think in anything we do, whether it's like to seek truth or, you know, some larger principle. Sure. I always have an agenda. Like I chose to work with civilians and caretakers in Yemen on Hunger Ward, rather than to go interview MBS, right? That's what I'm interested in is bringing that to the world, right? But in terms of building relationships and trust, it's really, I think about transparency as much as anything else and going in in a collaborative sense. So, I don't think of the people that I film with as subjects, for example. I think of them as collaborators. So, it's a different mindset that I go into projects with. That's beautiful. And it's based on relationships, right? You have to build relationships with other human beings, however you can. And that takes time and it takes listening and it's active. So, I've talked about the notion of consent before, which is so important in nonfiction film. And I hew to this idea that you don't just slide a piece of paper in front of someone, a release form, and have them sign it, right? And then you're done. You know, that's not the nature of true consent in my mind. You have to work on a foundation of active consent every single day. Every single day that you're working with someone. And that's based on relationship, right? And it's based on dialogue. So, it's trust that I'm always aiming for. It's the building of relationships, which I'm only aiming for. Which is why, you know, yesterday I got a bunch of photos from Dr. Al-Sadiq in the south of Yemen. And she sends me photos all the time of the children that she's currently treating, because we have an active relationship that continues on and probably will for many years to come. You know, so that it's going to continue. And that's the only way that I can do these kinds of films. Let me ask you about silly little details of filming before we go to the big picture stories. Cameras, lenses. Yeah. How much do those matter? You mentioned director of photography. How much do you love the feel, the smell of equipment that does the visual filming? You know, there's some people, they're just like, they love lenses. How much do you love that? Or versus how much do you focus on the story or access and all those kinds of things? I'm not a tech geek. But because during the bulk of my career, I've worked as a director of photography myself for other people in order to pay the bills over the years. You know, I know the technical side of it because I've had to know it, and I've had to train myself and learn it. So I see them as necessary tools. Necessary tools, and again, because I believe film and cinema is and should be visually driven and not verbally driven, I want the best tools possible within my means, right? And within the logistical ability of the project. Because we have to go so small, right? I can't afford nor can I bring a huge $100,000 lens. So if I give you a trillion dollars. A trillion dollars? Yeah. Wow. Unlimited. There's still huge constraints that have nothing to do with money, like you just said. So what cameras would you use? You know what I'd do with a trillion dollars? I could do a lot with a trillion dollars. You're only allowed to fund the film and no corrupt stuff where you like, use the film to actually help children. No, you're not allowed to do any of that. What I would do with a trillion is I wouldn't invest in it. Well, I guess I would invest in corrupt. I would increase capacity to do more films. I see. What I would do. So I would buy basically the perfect little mini equipment set, right? But then I would train three teams maybe to do the same thing that I've been doing so we could multiply and scale up. Collect more and more stories. Yeah, that's what I would do with the money. But the actual setup. Would remain small and nimble. Yeah. And what about lighting? Do you usually use natural light? Do you ever do? I mean, sorry for the technical questions here, but highlighting the drama of the human face. Yeah. That's the visual, that's art. That's like to reveal reality. Yeah. At its deepest is art. And do you use lighting? Lighting is such a big part of that. Do you ever do artificial lighting? Do you try to do natural always? You know the best lighting instrument in the world? Is the sun. At the right moment of the day. And so I predominantly use natural light at certain moments and just shape natural light during the course of these small human rights talks. That's not to say we don't bring instruments sometimes, but when we do, they're very small and again, compact. So for example, I have this small little tube kit. That's just three instruments, right? That you can charge with USB. Because electricity is often a major issue where we go. So there's just three little tube lights with magnetic backs that if we find in a situation where, you know, we can't get enough exposure for a hallway or something and we have the time to throw it up, we'll throw it up if people are walking, if collaborators are walking down that hallway a lot, for example, at night, just so we can see them, right? So it's instances like that. Or if we do do an interview, which we don't do very often, but if we do, just so we have a key light on the face, right? And always bring a reflector or two, you know, just to shape natural light as well in ways. But it's about shaping rather than producing light for us. Got it. As we sit surrounded by black curtains in complete natural light. So just so you know, this room is like a violation of the basic principles of using the sun. So behind the large curtains are giant windows. Yeah. So this whole. Should I rip them open? How much of the work is done in the edit? That's another question I'm curious about. And how much do you sort of anticipate that? Like when you're actually shooting, are you thinking of the final story as it appears on screen? Or are you just collecting as a human, collecting little bits of story here and there? And in the edit is where most of the storytelling happens. I've developed this sort of mental paradigm for myself over the years that speaks to that. And I call it the three creations, right? And so when I'm doing a film, the first creation for me is, you know, my preconception or visualization of what the film is going to be before I shoot it, right? So I have this entire vision of what a film's going to be. And sometimes it can be pretty specific. Like I'll think through the scenes, if I know the locations and everything, and I'll have this idea of what I'm going to create, right? And then I'm there filming, right? And always without fail, reality is something altogether different than what I thought it would be. But it's still good to have the original idea. Yeah, yeah. But if I tried to hold to that original vision, right? And to create a film out of that idea, they'd be crap. All the films would be crap. So I have to adapt. I have to evolve my approach and then embrace what is actually occurring with the people who are actually doing it, and then re-envision. So that re-envision is very active during the entire filming process. And so that's the second creation. That's the rethinking and re-visualizing based on what we're actually experiencing and seeing, what this film is going to be. And then I finish filming, right? And we bring the hard drives back and we plug in the hard drives in the edit bay. And oftentimes, because it's two of us filming most of the time, I haven't seen all the footage. Because in the field, it's all about just filming, right? And then just transferring the footage and getting it on safely, you know, cloned to multiple drives. I don't have a chance to review everything. I can't do rushes like you do on a large feature. So because I'm filming half of it, I know what I've filmed, right? But I haven't seen everything the director of photography has filmed, right? So the next stage for me is reviewing every single frame of what's been filmed. And that's where discovery happens the third time, right? Or second time rather, is, wow, now I thought we'd filmed this, but actually there's this over here. And then I have to open up this second vision and turn and transform it into a third vision for the film based on what's actually on the hard drive. So is this like a daily process? So what I do, my process is that once, if it's a really difficult project, I'll take a break before I go through this. Just for healing, you know, and some space away and fresh eyes. And usually that's about a month. And then once I re-engage, I re-engage whole hog. I re-engage fully and I review every single frame. And as I do that, I create a spreadsheet. And for Hunger War, that spreadsheet was, I don't know, 1500 lines long or something, where it's basically log notes. And I watch every scene and I take notes, and I know really what we have. And once I've gone through that process, that takes about a month, and I really know what we came back with, I create an outline for the film from that. And that's the third visioning, right? That's usually completely different than my original vision for the film, to some extent, right? But I have to stay open to that entire process, or I'd be trying to create something that I can't really create. So I think those are the three creations for me. That's so cool to know what we have, just to lay it all out and to load it into your mind. Because this is the capture of reality we have. It's a very kind of scientific process, too, because in science, you collect a bunch of data about a phenomena, and now you have to analyze that data. But now your phenomena's long gone. Yeah, yeah, right, right. Now you just have the data. Just the data, and you have to write a paper about it, analyze the data, similar things. You have to look at the data, analyze the data, similar things. You have to load it all in, where's the story, how do you, that last probably profound piece of doing the editing in your mind, how to lay those things out? Well, it's almost like the scientific process, right? I have a hypothesis, a creative hypothesis, right? Not a scientific one. But then I'm testing the hypothesis during the course of filming, right? I have to stay true to what the data tells me in the end, creatively. So it's very similar to the scientific process. I don't know what we should, we should probably coin that. Yeah, that's pretty good. Creative scientific process, or something like that. But then you actually do the edit, and then you watch, that's also iterative in a sense, because maybe when you have a film that's 20, 30, 40 minutes, or if it's feature length, do you ever have it where it sucks? Like it's not at all- Is there a stage where it sucks? Like a stage where, right, right. Is where it's like, no, this is not what I was, like when it's all put together in this way, this doesn't, this is not working right. This is not right. Or do you, is it always like an incremental step towards better and better and better? It's incremental, yeah, it's incremental. Yeah, and there's always some moment in the editing process where there's a breakthrough, where suddenly I understand how it fits together more fully. And you have to be, like you said, resilient. You have to be patient that that moment will come. Yeah, exactly. Are you ultra self-critical, or are you generally optimistic and patient? I don't think those are mutually exclusive. Right, so you just oscillate, or you, are there like dance partners or something? There are dance partners, yeah. Yeah, definitely dance, all the way through the process. By way of advice, to young filmmakers, how to film something that is recognized by the world in some way. I would say, first off, learn your craft, right? Because I think craft is incredibly foundational, right, to creating a powerful story. And sorry to interrupt, but when you say craft, do you mean just the raw technical, the director of photography, the filming aspect? Is it the storytelling? Is it the access, the whole thing? I think craft is more than just knowing how to push record on a camera or what lens to use, right? That's part of it, right? But I think, at least in nonfiction, I'm a product, to some extent, of having to know how to do it all, right? Having to teach myself how to do it all, because I didn't go to film school, you know? But I became so enamored of telling stories through a camera. What was the leap, by the way, from theater to storyteller? Oh, I just needed an extra class in grad school. I was in a MFA directing class, and I needed an extra class, and I just sort of talked my way into a television directing class and fell in love with it. And the actor became the director. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, I wasn't an actor, but I had to act. I had to know the craft of acting because I was in the theater, you know? Did you love it, though? Did you love acting? The theater? Yeah, the theater. As an undergraduate, yeah. But then I learned pretty quickly that I was pretty bad at it, or at least not very good, and that my skills lay elsewhere in more sort of behind the scenes and shaping a story. When you started taking a class, but also telling stories as a director, did you quickly realize that you're pretty good at this, or was it a grind? That's a good question, Max. I think I definitely knew right away that it was more my wheelhouse, right? And I think part of that was because I grew up in sort of a world of imagination, and I think that act of imagination as a child really lent itself well to the skill set that a director needs, right? To shape story, to shape narrative, to shape performances. So I think it was a much more natural fit for me. Was I excellent at the beginning? Heck no. No, you know, I think few people are, but I learned. Where was the biggest struggle for you? Is it, so your imagination clearly was something that you worked on for a lifetime. So I'm sure that was pretty strong. Books, came from books. Books. But the actual conversion of the imagination, you said shape the story. Where was the skill most lacking in the shaping of the story initially? Technical side. Just technical. Yeah, like, you know, because I taught myself everything. What kind of microphone should I use, right? What kind of camera? What does this lens do? What's that lens do? I didn't know any of that. And so I essentially was, I have been self-taught technically. How do you get good technically, would you say, when you're self-taught? Just doing it over and over again. And what kind of stories were you telling? Like... I began shooting local commercials. You began shooting local commercials for... For money. For money. Yeah, yeah. So you're doing professional projects. Yeah, yeah. And so I kind of learned on the job as I did it. How many hobby projects did you do just for the hell of it? Or were you trying to focus on the professional? I was trying to make money, right? Right out of grad school just to pay the rent. And that, you know, that's a forcing function to... I mean, I personally love having my back to the wall or financially you're screwed. So that's nice. I mean, I lived out of the trunk of my car for a couple years after grad school, just freelancing, you know, just like... But that couple years really helped me learn fast because I had to learn fast, you know. So I did a couple voyages around the world for this group called Semester at Sea. That is a floating university that where they go out three and a half months at a time with about 500 college level students and about 35 professors. And so you're shooting every day for three and a half months. Yeah. In like nine different countries. And so that really was like instrumental to me becoming a pretty good camera person pretty quickly. And you were doing most of the work yourself? Well, one man, one man band. Yeah. The second voyage, I at least had an editor with me. Yeah, but I was shooting everything. Yeah. What's the perfect team? Is it two people for nonfiction asking for a friend? Yeah. I'm kind of interested in some storytelling, not of the level and the sophistication that you're doing, but more... I think you have to allow the story to dictate what the size of the film should be. For these small human rights docs I do, I think two or three. You know, it means you work your butt off, right? Because you're doing everything, right? But it allows you to tell intimate stories and have that access. I'm doing a film this summer that's a scripted piece where we'll probably have 25 crew people. Oh, wow. Yeah, so it's a completely different endeavor altogether. But doing it yourself, what do you think about that? Even though you have that trillion dollars that... Oh, I have that trillion dollars again? Sweet, you're gonna write that check before I leave, right? Yeah, I will. Great. I've never seen a check for that big. That's really interesting. How many zeros is that? I write them so often I've lost track. Or the United States government sure as heck writes them often. Okay, anyway, I mean, is there an argument? Can you steal man the case for a single person? You know, not for me. Not for me, and here's why. What I found is that by being a team of two filming with a field producer, by two people filming, it allows us to double our footage, first off, right? So we have twice as much footage in the time we're filming to come back with, as opposed to one person filming. So you're each manning a camera? Yeah, constantly. And how much, sorry to keep interrupting, but how much interaction, interplay there? Sometimes the director of photography is in another room filming a different scene, if it makes sense. Sometimes we're cross-shooting in the same room, right? It just depends on the needs of the moment. So we come back with double the footage is one thing. But as a director, and given how access is sometimes shaped by the event, so that we can only, something, you know, in Lifeboat, for example, a rescue operation may only happen three days, right? So you want as much footage of that as you can. But the other piece of it that's really critical for me, I found, is that by having another human being I'm filming with, who I'm co-shooting with, it frees me up as a director to not always have to be shooting either. I can do all the other work to build relationships, right? To have side conversations with people, to sort out the right way to tell a story, right? Or to transfer footage, knowing that the director of photography is still filming during all that. So it frees me up to think of it as a director, rather than just an image acquirer. Yeah, because there's also, I don't know how distracting is, you've obviously done it for years, but setting stuff up, it preoccupies your mind. Like pressing the record button, and like framing stuff and all that, that still, that takes up some part of your mind where you can't think freely. That's my choice, right? That's how I work best. That said, the caveat there would be, that's not the only way to do it, obviously, right? Like one of my favorite documentaries of all time is a documentary called A Woman Captured, shot in Hungary, by a single filmmaker, with a single camera, with a single lens, right? And it's brilliant, and powerful, and moving, and interventional. It's incredible filmmaking, and it was a single human being who created that film with a collaborator or a subject. So it can be done, it's just not how I work best. Yeah. How much, personally, with the other person, how important is the relationship with them outside of the filming? With the director of photography? The director of photography, say. Like, how much drinking, and if you don't drink, whatever the equivalent of that is, do you have to do together? How much soul searching, or is it more like two surgeons getting together? Is it surgeons, or is it a jazz band? Well, it could be either, right? Hopefully not at the same time, though, because I don't think surgeons and jazz bands go well together, probably. They're both good with fingers, I suppose. Exactly, but I'd rather maybe not play in jazz while they operate on me. Yeah. But I think, for me, I think there are moments of both, but usually not at the same time. There are surgical moments where the moment is so pressing, you really have to be that task-driven to capture as thoroughly as possible whatever's unfolding. But I think there's other times where you do improvise like jazz, and where you have a lot of choices ahead of you, and you're doing maybe a dance with the other camera person in order to capture a scene as creatively and fully as possible during a fixed array. How much, you said shaping, because it is nonfiction, but I feel like there's so many ways to tell the same nonfiction that it's bordering on fiction. Yeah. It's, well, it's storytelling. And how much shaping do you see yourself as doing? How important is your role in how you tell the story? I suppose the question I'm asking is, how many ways can you really screw this up? Every day you can screw it up. I mean, that's really the, I think what you're asking about is really the ethos of documentary filmmaking, right? I allow a lot of things to guide my choices, one of them being, am I being fair, right? Not balanced, right? But am I being fair to what I'm witnessing? Is the camera capturing in a fair way the truth of the reality, some fundamental truth of it? And it also speaks to consent, right? Am I being fair in a sense of consent? Do I have active consent in this moment, right? Regardless of whether I have a signed piece of paper. I always find some way to document it, whether it's just direct address to camera or a translated release. So there's, actually that's an interesting little, so they say something to the camera that they consent or they sign the thing. Yeah, so for example, the large broadcast companies have this formalized process where they present a piece of paper, right? And the subject reads it and they sign it and then you have permission and that's irrevocable, right? So it'll hold up in court. That's not how I operate, right? And so it's just, for example, that doesn't work if someone's illiterate and can't read that piece of paper, right? What if they don't know how to sign their name, right? So instead you have to have a conversation, ask questions, have them ask questions, come to a complete understanding before you even know whether they understand what you're asking, right? And then in that case, if someone's illiterate, then you have that conversation, you sit down and it takes a long time sometimes, but you have to do it. And then if they still want to participate and they give you their consent, they can't sign a piece of paper, right? So then you just do in their native language, right? Direct consent to camera in their language. Interesting. But also you're speaking to the consent that's just a human placing trust in you. Yeah. You make a connection like this. That's the most important consent. Right. Yeah. I hate papers. I hate papers and lawyers. And lawyers because they, they, they've exactly for that reason. Yeah. Okay, great. But you should be focusing on the human connection that leads to the trust to the like real consent and consent day to day, minute to minute, because that can change. Absolutely. And it does change. You mentioned a woman captured. What the, this is, I'm sure you can't answer that, but I will force you. Uh, what are the top three documentaries of all time, short or feature length to you? Not night. This is not your opinion. This is objective truth. Uh, maybe top one was, was the greatest. We got, uh, let's see much of the penguins. That's probably number one for me. Really? No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. I, I, I do seem to the, the metaphor of penguins huddling together in a hard, cold, like in the harsh conditions of nature that that's something that's kind of beautiful. I don't love all nature documentaries, but like something about March of the Penguins. I, I think Morgan Freeman. Yeah. He narrated it. Narrates it, so maybe everything, just any documentary with Morgan Freeman, I'm a sucker for that. Uh, Werner Herzog, Life in the Taiga, The Simple People. I love Grizzly Man. I love Grizzly Man. I think that's one of his best works, you know. Yes. I think that's Joe Rogan's favorite, uh, favorite documentary. Yeah. It's both comedy and, and I mean, it's... Tragicomedy. Tragicomedy. Yeah. Yeah. Is there something that stands out to you? I mean, I'm joking about like best, something that was impactful to you. Just to put it out there, I don't think there's any, any way to say that there are objectively, you know, the best three documentaries of all time. But for me, and you may find this interesting given your background, is that I think my top three are all from the Eastern block, actually. So, so Aquarela by Kosakowski, Viktor Kosakowski is one of my favorite, and it's a couple years old now, which is sort of a meditation on the place water has on our planet and in our lives. Um, I, I think, uh, A Woman Captured that I mentioned, which was shot in Hungary. The feature length one? It's a feature, both, both are feature lengths. Yeah. Um, it is just brilliant. And it, I think has yet to find distribution here in the US, you know. But it's a perfect example of, of what they call, you know, verite, or direct, um, nonfiction filmmaking. A European woman, this is the synopsis, a European woman has been kept by family as a domestic slave for 10 years, drawing courage from the filmmaker's presence. She decides to escape the unbearable oppression and become a free person. Wow. So the filmmaker is part of the story. Part of the story. Becomes, it didn't start that way, but during the course of the story, the filmmaker under becomes, comes to understand that this is actually modern day slavery. And rather than just allow it to be, actually enables and assists this woman to, to free herself from slavery and become a free woman. I wonder, sorry, on a small tangent before we get to number three, like Icarus is interesting too. How often do you become part of the story or the story is different because of your presence? Like, uh, like you, you changed the tide of history. Yeah. Well, back to just like one person at a time that we keep talking, you know, we keep coming back to that theme on some level. So, so this could tie in interestingly into one of my, one of my favorite films actually. So, um, the last two films that I would mention for my top four list would be the third Eastern block. One would be a film called immortal in 2019, which was shot in Russia by a Russian woman. Um, that sort of, you know, examines, uh, the place of the state in, um, in shaping individuals to be vehicles for the state. I mean, that's my own synopsis, but that's one of my takeaways from the brilliant 60 minute doc or so. Um, again, Russian filmmaking is really quite, quite good and powerful. The fourth one would be a Frederick Wiseman film, Titicut Follies, um, which was filmed in the U S decades ago, uh, in, in, inside basically the bowels of a, of a insane asylum or a mental health institution. And, and I bring up Wiseman because, you know, he is really the, the godfather, so to speak of, of direct cinema or cinema verite. And I went early in my career. I really believed in what he expressed as the place of the verite filmmaker, which is simply fly on the wall, which is only observational nature. Right. And, and I believe that that's how I should be as a nonfiction filmmaker, that I was there only to bear witness, to observe and not to intervene in any way, shape or form. And, and that was the sort of foundation for how I operate for many, many years. And then some things happened. So one of those things that happened was I filmed Lifeboat and during the course of filming Lifeboat, which, you know, covered rescue operations in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya, in the first three days of that rescue mission, you know, we came upon over 3000 people, asylum seekers, floating in flimsy rafts in the water. And we were on the Zodiacs and we were filming. And within the first couple hours, you know, we would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape and people would be pushed off and people would jump off and people would fall into the water. And some of them couldn't swim. And so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice. We could film someone drowned in front of us, or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water. And so that's what we did. We put our cameras in the bottom of the Zodiac and just started pulling people out of the water. And, you know, if I was Wiseman, right, according to his paradigm, then we should have just filmed. And I didn't anticipate that moment beforehand. I had no sort of foreknowledge that I was going to find myself faced with that dilemma of the moment as a documentarian. But there was no question in my mind that I had to put my camera down and pull that fellow human being out of the water. And I don't regret it at all. So I've come to a different place. I've evolved to what I believe for the kind of film that I do is more appropriate, right? Like I can go to sleep at night knowing that regardless of how the film would have been different if I hadn't made that choice, I made the right choice as a human being. So I think of it as being a human being first and a filmmaker second in moments like that. That's beautifully, beautifully put. But I also think you could be a human being in small ways too, like silly ways and put a little bit of yourself in documentaries. I tend to see that as really beautiful. Like the meta piece of it? Yeah, just put yourself into the movie a little bit. Because like break that third, fourth, whatever the wall is, is realize that there's a human behind the camera too. For some reason, me as a fan, as a viewer, that's enjoyable too. I think there's a real authenticity there behind the story, especially with these hard stories that you're doing that there's a human being struggling too. Like observing the suffering and having to bear the burden that this kind of suffering exists in the world and you're behind that camera living that struggle. And there's small ways to show yourself in that way. As you know, I don't do that in a big way. But actually there are subtle moments where I allow that presence to live just for a second. I hate belly button docs. That's what I call them. I don't know what they are. Belly button doc is navel gazing, right? Where it's sort of a narcissistic filmmaking where someone just studies their own place in the world, right? I see, yeah. Yeah, I think I'm more concerned with how I can intervene, right? Yeah, well, you're trying to really deeply empathize. So if you do empathize, who am I? I don't want to center myself in these stories. It's not about me, right? I am so unimportant. What is important is what's happening, what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon, all right? And I think it's selfish and narcissistic to push myself into these stories unnecessarily. Now that said, I think there is some small value in what you're saying just to remind viewers that there's obviously a filmmaker at play. So sometimes the way that I do that is just through a question on camera. I'd allow the audio to live of a question or during a conversation I'm having with someone so they can just hear how it's posed, for example, right? And to me, that's enough. Yeah. I do like moments when people recognize that you exist. They look at the filmmaker past the camera and, yeah, you ask the question in an interview or something like that, and they respond to that. They respond to this new perturbation into their reality that was created by this other human. And I especially like when those questions or those perturbations are a little bit absurd and add something very novel to their situation, and that novelty reveals something about them. So as opposed to capturing the day-to-day reality of their life, you do that plus the perturbations of something novel. But of course, there's all kinds of ways to do this. Let me... What was number five, by the way? I only gave you four. You just... I'm just gonna stay at four. There's a short doc I like. I mentioned they're called The Toxic Pigs of Fukushima. I know. Sorry. I know. I apologize. I know. I know. It's dark. It's a great title, though, right? It's a great title. Yeah, great title. No one's seen it, but it's great. It says what it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like, but really brilliantly executed. Well, let me ask you about Lifeboat, because it's extremely... I don't... It's a really moving idea. Just the fact that this exists in the world, that there's... As a metaphor, as a reality, that there is a set of people trying to flee desperately. It's the desperation of it. And now with these refugees, the desperation of that, of trying to escape towards a world that's full of mystery, uncertainty, doubt, could be hopeless at times. And you're willing to do a lot for your own survival, for the survival of your family, and all those kinds of things. That's kind of the human spirit. And you just capture it in Lifeboat. Can you tell me the story behind this film, as you started to already tell? Can you tell me what is it about? So Lifeboat really seeks to sort of lift up and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the Mediterranean when it was at its height in 2016. And it came to be for many reasons. But one of those reasons is colleagues in the NGO community really shared with me that when the borders between Greece and Turkey were shut down, that the flow of Syrian asylum seekers that was initially going across from Turkey to Greece was going to shift westward across the Mediterranean. So I started to research that and discovered that was exactly the case. And then further stumbled upon the fact that nation states hadn't really stepped up to address it, and that there were hundreds of asylum seekers often drowning in these flimsy crafts that were pushed off from the shores of Libya because the EU wasn't doing its duty to patrol those waters from a humanitarian standpoint. And so the net result of that was that this whole sort of humanitarian community sprung up. And it was civil society-based that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning, simply put. And one of those was this small little NGO called Sea Watch, which when they discovered what was happening, just cobbled together a coalition of volunteers, bought a research vessel, retrofitted it, and motored down off the coast of Libya to start pulling people out of the water. And again, I found that inspiring. I found that inspiring that this group of volunteers was doing something that our leaders wouldn't. Right? And it was something as basic and simple as saving human beings. And I thought there was an inspiring story there. And as it turned out, there was. Have you ever saved someone's life? As part of making these documentaries directly? And directly, I think you probably have countless lives, but directly. Were you put in that position? I don't want to. I mean, I certainly poured people out of the water who couldn't swim. I did that. And that's again, speaking to the basic humanity. Put down the camera. Help. Yeah. So this is people coming from Libya, trying to make it across the Mediterranean Sea on a crappy, tiny boat. From a filmmaker perspective, how do you film that? Was there decisions to capture the desperation? Well, we were going back to this idea of access and how that's so fundamental to my approach. We were bound by the strictures of the rescue operation on this sea watch vessel, which was 30 meters long. And we were two of a crew of 15. Right? So we had to multitask all the time, because the only reason we were on that boat was by agreeing that if needed, we would do whatever necessary to help. And so it was very active on multiple levels. And we were making decisions each and every day that were not only filmmaking and creative decisions, but also decisions about how to live that duality, right? Of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously. And the greatest example I can share of that was with my director of photography on that project, Kenny Allen. Kenny's a big guy. He's got arms like tree trunks. And because he's so physically able and strong, the head of mission really tasked him to be on the Zodiacs to pull people out of the water, because he could literally with one arm reach down and just oftentimes pull someone out. Right? Whereas usually it would take two or three people. And so when we were at the height of triage, and there were people in the water all over and rafts were sinking, Kenny was out pulling people out of the water. And this went on for 24 hours. And at the end of that first day, I remember looking over on the deck and seeing Kenny help people up from the ladders to walk them back. And his camera was nowhere to be seen. And so I walked over to him and I just grabbed him by the shoulders and said, Kenny, where's your camera? And he didn't know. He had no idea where his camera was. And so I just said, Kenny, we're here to do what you're doing, but we're also here to film it, to make sure that we document what is unfolding in front of us so that we have a record of it. So we can bring it to a larger audience. So you need to go find your camera so we can also document it. And that's what we did. And that kind of pulled him out and he went and got his camera and started filming again. But that gives you a sense of sort of this world that we had to live in, in order to get the story done. But I think to be a great director of photography, to be a great director, you have to lose yourself like that in the story too. But usually with a camera in your hand, right? But sometimes you forget the camera. I mean, there's a... I feel like if you're obsessed with camera too much, you can lose the humanity of it. You get obsessed with the film and the story. It can become clinical. Yes, it can become clinical. Absolutely. And we don't want to become... I don't want to become clinical in my film, certainly. Let me ask you a strange and perhaps edgy question. So some filmmakers believe it's justified to break the rules in order to tell a powerful story. Werner Herzog, I read this somewhere, teaches young filmmakers to pick locks and forge documents and so on. Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting. What do you think about that? Bending the rules in service of telling a story. You would, of course, never break the law, but is there... does that, just generally speaking, bending the rules and so on? Just to elaborate on this question, perhaps, I'm distinctly aware that there's parts in the world where the rule of law is not enforced as cleanly as it is in the United States, as fairly as it is in the United States. That there's a lot of bribery. There's a lot of... you don't really know to trust... you don't know if you can trust the cops or basically anybody. So the rules are a very hazy kind of concept. And a lot of them, especially, it's funny, but authoritarian regimes often have a giant bureaucracy build up that's full of rules. There's more rules than you know what to deal with. And you can't actually live life unless you break the rules. Anyway, laying that all out on the table, do you ever contend with that on what are the rules I can break or should break to keep to the spirit of the story? I think you have to ask yourself, are the rules just and why are they in place? Right? So, for example, coming into the airport in Southern Yemen, right? If I just tried to walk through the airport with all my equipment, even with all the permissions beforehand, like we had, without having a fixer at the airport beforehand to make sure we didn't go through the standard line, right? We would have been caught up for three hours at least negotiating over our equipment and eventually paying a bribe to get it through. That's just reality in a place like Yemen. And so, of course, knowing that, having talked to colleagues who had taken that path previously, I took a different path. Well, we hire a fixer beforehand to sort it out beforehand, right? Rather than spending three hours of our time and paying a series of bribes. Instead, we're going to get it fixed beforehand so that we can walk through a different line and have no one look at any of our equipment. That's a pretty good trade-off in my mind. What about security when you're traveling in these places? Do you ever have bodyguards? Well, several questions around that. Are you ever afraid for your life when you're filming in a war zone? Is there any way to lessen the probability of death? I don't have a death wish. I try to mitigate risk however I can, however I can. But one of the ways I can't do it in a conflict zone is by having armed security with me. And the reason for that is because, especially in a place like Yemen, right? If you have armed security, you become a target in a way that if you're operating under sort of the auspices of international humanitarian law, I actually have more protection. So I don't bring security. If you're working in northern Yemen, for example, you're going to have someone from the de facto authorities with you anyway, the entire time you're there. So the authorities are with you in form anyway. Regarding fear, yeah, of course. I mean, fear is a natural human emotion, right? And I think we have a weird mindset, this sort of heroic mindset surrounding fear in the US, which I don't pay tribute to. I believe as a natural human emotion, it's an alarm bell that I need to pay attention to, right? And I think rather than pretending to be brave, right? I think you have to just acknowledge that fear has a place to keep you alive. And I think it's a matter of not letting the fear arrest you, right? And allowing the fear to live and then acting anyway. Don't you think as a documentary filmmaker, the fear is a really good signal for potentially a good thing to do because there's a story there? So is fear an indicator that you shouldn't do it or is it an indicator that you should do it? It's probably an indication you should do it, right? And strangely, I think that's why... If there's something unusual about the work I do in some part, it's because of these types of stories, right? They're hard to access, but you also have to have a threshold of willingness to do them when you can't... There is no guarantee of physical safety, right? And maybe that's why you should do them. I'm very much motivated by the things that scare me. They seem to direct the things that are worth doing in this all too short life. How often do you interact with our friendly friends at the police departments of various locations? Because of the humanitarian nature of your work, are you able to avoid all such friendly conversations or are you often making friends with our... I try to avoid the friendly police people all over the world as much as possible. But in some instances, it's important to be proactive, right? And make sure that they know what you're doing before you do it. So it's all about the context and the situation. For example, working in northern Yemen, you couldn't film for five minutes if you didn't have paperwork because you'd be taken away. So you have to make sure you have all those permissions ahead of time. 50 Feet From Syria. I would love to talk at least a little bit about this film. First, can you, high level, can you tell what this documentary is about? Yeah, it was early in the Syrian uprising and we returned to the Syrian-Turkish border with a Syrian-American orthopedic surgeon who was volunteering operating on refugees as they float across the border from Syria into Turkey. And it was an attempt at the time, before a lot of films had come out about the conflict, to really show again the effects of the war on civilians. You've heard me echo that sentiment multiple times now, but people knew there was a major conflict in Syria, but didn't really understand the form that that was taking and the impact it was having. And so we embedded into, at the time it was the only clinic in Turkey that was sanctioned by the Turkish government to treat Syrian refugees. And so we filmed there with surgeons as they operated on war victims. And we also went into Syria into some of the camps as well. So in this film, there's a man who crosses the border every day to retrieve the wounded and fare them safety and care. And you also mentioned about heroism in the United States. Can you tell me about this man and just people like him? Like, what's the heroic action in some of these places that you've visited? So in that instance, I thought of him as the Turkish Schindler, right? Because he was a human being who of his own volition, no one was paying him to do this, but he was spending much of his time. He was just a local businessman who really saw the need in the camps right across the border, 10K away. And he saw the medical need in particular and how hard it was to get people in desperate medical conditions across the border where there was a clinic just right across the border. But because of the security and the layers of security, they couldn't get out by themselves. So he took it upon himself as a Turkish person to build relationships with the Turkish guards, which was relatively easy. And then he built relationships with sort of the guards in the no man's land between the Syrian guards and sort of those who lived in the middle area. And then also with the Syrian guards at the camp, and he would drive out there daily and bring them food, right? Talk them up and build relationships. And so every day he would bring these guards food and build relationships with them. And what that meant was eventually, he had this avenue of access to and from the camps. And so he started using it and he would drive this avenue of access through the three layers of guards each day. And then they would open the gates for him because he had made himself trustworthy in their eyes. And he would receive the most desperate medical cases that were coming from all over Northern Syria, right? To receive medical treatment. And he would, as you see in the film, he would ferry them into the back of his car, right? And then drive them to the hospital where they would receive operations. And then he would bring them back if they wanted after they'd healed and recovered back to Syria, if they wanted to return out post recovery. And he didn't get paid for that. He was spending his own money to do it because he saw other human beings in need. And it's like we were talking about earlier. That's heroic, right? That's selfless. That's aspirational for me, right? Here's someone who is spending their time on the planet doing something of value and good to other human beings. I mean, if you draw parallels to Schindler, I feel like the fascinating thing about Schindler is that he's kind of a flawed human and is not the kind of human that does these things usually. But he just can't help it. And that's like the basic humanity, despite who you are, the basic humanity shines through. I think the whims of war test people in those ways, right? They ask of you things that you may not even know were going to be asked of you. And then it speaks to who you are fundamentally as a human being. They reveal who you are as a human being, just as you said. Let me ask a kind of stupid technical question about publications and movies and so on. I've been recently becoming good friends with Thomas Tall, who was the producer. His company Legendary funded some of the big sort of blockbuster films and so on. And so obviously money is part of filmmaking. It's interesting, but also the release of movies and me as a consumer, with Netflix, with YouTube, that's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of YouTube is it's like out in the open access, especially historical access. Like over time, you can look back years later, if you pay some money, you can watch some of the great films ever made. YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, I don't know what other services there are, HBO, Paramount Plus. Anyway, there's all these platforms. Spotify now. I understand they want to create paywalls and so on. It makes sense. But I'm a huge fan of openness and I'm really kind of torn by this whole thing. Anyway, that's a discussion for perhaps another time. But the short question is, why is it so hard to watch your documentaries and other films, other incredible films on the internet? If I want to pay unlimited amount of money, I want to pay a lot of money to watch it. Why is it so hard? Well, Lifeboat is streaming free on the New Yorker. Yes, I saw that. But it's still the, which is interesting. That doesn't make any sense. And then also Hunger Ward is on Paramount Plus, but also- Pluto TV. It's also streaming free. Yeah. So you can either go through a paywall or you can watch it with ads. Yeah. With Big Macs interspersed. Big Macs. Sometimes. Yeah. The contrast is really, well, no, it really reveals the power of the documentary. Yeah. No, but like, it's still not, even those platforms are, I mean, they're not as easily accessible because you have to like, you have to use, you have to think and you have to chase a particular- You have to chase it. Yeah. Yeah. I guess from an economic standpoint, the answer to that is pretty clear, right? It may not be what people want to watch. Maybe people want to watch reality. Maybe people want to watch animal rescue shows, right? Here in the US. Which is exactly why, in part, I think it's so vital that we continue to do stories on things that aren't about flowers and puppy dogs, right? I would push back on that. So there's TikTok, and you could say, well, look, humans just want to watch really short content because they seem to be addicted to that kind of thing. That's partially true. But they also watch two, three, four, five hour podcasts. And- On TikTok? No, there's different platforms for that. It's a place called YouTube. I'll teach you about it sometime. Okay. Yeah. I've never heard of it. It's a good place to publish documentaries, I think. Humans are interested in a lot of things, and I've seen many times a thing that you think is a niche thing become a very big thing. But for them to become mainstream, they have to have a platform that allows for the mainstream to happen. The access. The access. The dumb, simple, frictionless access. The frictionless access is a really important thing. Paywalls create friction. And not just because of the money, it can be free, but if you have to click on a thing or maybe sign up or put your email, it's just not... It prevents you to enjoy the thing you would really enjoy and you know you would enjoy, but your baser human nature prevents you from enjoying because you can just open up TikTok and keep scrolling. So that's just something to say about platforms because I think the things that need platforms the most are things like your films. The things that I think a lot of people would love watching. They're very important and they can have viral impact on the world that is fundamentally positive. It makes me sad that there's not a machine for celebrating those films. There are lots of machines to celebrate them, but they're just not as always accessible as YouTube. As soon as you write me that check for a trillion dollars when I walk out of here, then I'm going to put all my films on YouTube because then I won't have to worry about selling them so I can make the next film. Because film is not just an art, it's also an industry. And that tension between the two is a constant interplay that is a reality for me. So I always have to think about how can I access the largest audience, but also go out and shoot the next film. So that longevity question is also an issue and the finances are part of that equation that I constantly have to rewrite over and over again. How often as a creative mind do you feel the constraints, the financial constraints? I wish I could do a lot more films that I can't always because of financial constraints. So it's the number of films. Yeah. And is a film that you do currently, is a film that you do at any one time as you're filming it already funded or is it the funding from previous stuff that you're trying to use? Before Hunger Ward, I would just take a flyer on my films, right? Where I would just say, this meets the So What threshold. This is a story that has to be told and I want to tell it. And then I could just go shoot it. And usually on credit, usually on a credit card. Right? So based on a belief that Lifeboat was done that way. Yes. Right? 50 Feet from Syria was done that way. So you're on a boat, broke. Yeah. Yeah. But it's free food, right? And free lodging because there's a bunk on the boat. But I do that not intending to stay broke, right? But based on a foundational belief that if I bring to bear all of my sort of quiver of creative arrows to it, right? That I can create something of value, right? In the world, but hopefully also financially that then I can sell to someone. And you know, every time I've done that, Lex, I've gotten into the black. So it's a risk and I have to have a certain risk threshold financially to do that. But I believe so deeply in these stories that I'm willing to do that. I didn't have to do that with Hunger Ward. Luckily I had funders for that film. Yeah. Yeah. Take risks in this life. It's going to pay off. Which reminds me of, let me ask you, I already asked you for advice about for a filmmaker, how to win an Oscar. Well, I haven't won an Oscar. Or how to get nominated for an Oscar. That's true. Or just how to make great documentaries, how to make great film. But let me ask even Zuma bigger. You mentioned some of these things, doing the things that you think matters. What advice would you give to young people, high school, college, dreaming of living a life worth living? What advice would you give them about career or maybe just life in general? How to have a life they can be proud of? Yeah, I don't know how you're going to react to this given sort of your expertise, but I would say put down the smartphone. Step away from the monitor. Because real life is not a screen. I believe that sort of the foundational skills which are conducive and important to success aren't necessarily those technical skills, which we're going to learn in trade schools or university. I think they're more foundational than that. They're learning how to interact and listen. With humans? With humans, yeah. To really see and listen, right? And observe. And observe, right? And how to step out of your door. And if the electricity goes out, right, and you're five miles away from your house, you don't need a smartphone to get home because you've set visual markers for yourself on how to get back to where you live, right? I think we're in danger right now of living in a world where if the satellites stop functioning, right, then a whole lot of people have become completely dysfunctional, right? Because we're so reliant upon the screens in our lives. So I think there's a lot of foundational skills that have nothing to do with technology that we need to learn and everything rests upon those. So I would say learn those foundational, learn how to write well. Read a lot, right? It's a different kind of knowledge and wisdom that comes out of that. So reading is kind of the equivalent of listening and observing and writing is kind of integration of all of that that you've observed and listened to and tried to express something with that. So I think my training in the theater has served me so well in the documentary world, right? Because it's all about interaction and listening and talking and dialogue, right? And that's what I do in documentaries, right? Is I listen. Yeah, we mentioned fear. Being an introvert, I'm very afraid of people, but I'm drawn to them and fascinated by them because of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Enjoy listening to them. Totally. And observing them. And you mentioned reading, you mentioned books as a catalyst, as a stimulator of your imagination. Is there books in your life, a couple, one, two, three, that kind of left an impact or a little bit of spark of inspiration early on in life that stand out from your memory? I was given The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran as a graduation present from my high school English teacher. And I still have that book in a special place in my bookshelf because I think it speaks to the nature of human experience, right? And I return to it all the time because there's wisdom there, you know? But there's many, many books. Fiction or nonfiction, what connects with you usually? In the past, for the passage? I read mostly nonfiction most of the time. Ten Points is a book I love a lot. What is Ten Points? Ten Points is, I think his name is Bill Strickland. He was the editor of, I think, Bicycle Magazine. And it's sort of his personal memoir of his experience growing up with a lot of abuse and how that transformed him as a human being. You know, one instrumental book for me that I bumped into in my early 20s, boy, these are all nonfiction, except for The Princess Bride. I have to mention, it's an outlier. No, no, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Yes. I read that in my early 20s. Yeah. And I found so many of the principles in that book. What are the habits from that one? Seek first to understand, then to be understood is one of them. You know, the notion of proactivity is one of them. It's really, and so I've held on to some of those principles through my life as well, for sure. What have been, you've observed suffering, darker aspects of human nature in your own personal life, what has been some of the darkest moments in your life, darkest times in your life? Is there something that you went through and then perhaps you carry it through your work? Yeah. Probably one of the darkest moments was an experience that I had, again, in my early 20s. And I was living in Southern California. And I, you know, the Pacific Coast Highway that goes North and South along the beach. And there's that little concrete path that people jog and ride their bikes. And I was riding my bike on the PCH. And I was coming up to a corner on it, and I heard this tremendous crash. And it was really loud. And I came around the corner, and it was a car accident, a car crash. It was a multiple vehicle crash. And what had happened is that a Volvo had hit another car. And then when it hit it, it went over the top of the car and hit a Volkswagen van. And it peeled away the top of the Volkswagen van when it hit it and then landed. So three vehicles, and it had just happened. And lying in the middle of the road was a body decapitated. And there was another person from one of the cars lying in the middle of the road, still alive. And then on the hood of the Volvo was this woman who had come through the windshield, just a mess, blood everywhere, moaning back and forth. And a bystander ran into the middle of the road and started administering first aid to the person lying in the road. And I stood there watching this scene, and every fiber of my being wanted to run to the woman on the hood of the Volvo and do something, anything, right, just to be there. And it was obvious to me that she was going to die. But I felt like at least if I ran there, I could offer some comfort for her last moment. And right then, and right then, the siren started to blare. And I knew that there'd be paramedics there within minutes, that people would come to help. And I froze. And I was scared. And I didn't do anything. And I watched while this woman died on the hood of the Volvo. And that experience is sort of seared into my consciousness. The fact that I watched and didn't act, I feel is one of the great failures of my life, that I wasn't able to act in a moment of need, no matter how small. And from that, I made a decision out of that experience that if I ever found myself in a situation where I had the ability to act, and I could act to help another human being in such need, that I would act, that I wouldn't let fear freeze me. Instead, I would allow that fear to catalyze me into action and do something and intervene in whatever way I could, even if I didn't have the skill set. And in some ways, all of that echoes in your documentaries. You're not gonna let fear stop you from trying to help. I think that experience, that experience of failure, what I framed as just human failure on my part, is foundational, probably, to my work. I don't want that to happen again, Lex. I don't want to be that person who watches. I want to do what I can when I can. If we zoom out, you were just one human that witnessed that, that trauma. You're one human that witnessed so much suffering in different parts of the world. And as we zoom out, across space and time, and look at Earth, why do you think we're here on this Earth? What's the meaning of human civilization? What's the meaning of your life, of individual human life? And broadly speaking, what is the meaning of life? Sky, Fitzgerald. Oh, boy. Yeah. For me, I can speak personally on that only. And that's that I believe that the meaning of my life is to try to make the world a little bit better before I go. You know, when I was in theater in grad school, I directed a play called Shadowlands by C.S. Lewis. And there's a quote from that. It goes like this, We are like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. Now, I would take away the perfect part, right? But I think I've remembered that quote for so many years because I believe in the underlying notion that the blows of the chisel, which are the experiences that we go through, shape us, right? Necessarily so. And hopefully, shape us into a better human being. And in my case, a human being that I hope can make the world a little better, you know, through those blows. Before it's over. Yeah, before it's over. Before you go, as you said, do you think about that? You think about the going part? Your mortality? You ever think about that? You said you don't have a death wish, you try to minimize risk. But eventually, it's going to be over. Yeah, for all of us. Absolutely. Well, speak for yourself. Well, you've got other plans to sound like. I intend to merge. I'm going to merge with robots. I'm going to embody. Nice. Not at all. Yes, for all of us, unfortunately or fortunately, or who the heck knows. But do you ponder your mortality? Are you afraid of it? I live with my mortality, knowing that it's fleeting, that my life is fleeting, and that I'm going to go into the ground, just like everyone else, or maybe as ashes, you know? So I live with that knowledge every day, but I don't allow it to stop me or hold me up. Rather, it drives me. It drives me to try to get as much done as I can before I go. Yeah, so the knowledge of your death is a kind of dance partner, and you try to dance beautifully. Sky, you're an incredible human, incredible artist and filmmaker, and it's a huge honor that you would sit and spend your really valuable time with me today. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I did too. Thanks for having me, Lex, and thanks for doing what you do. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sky Fitzgerald. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Elie Wiesel. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

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Jack Dorsey: Yang Gang Forever | AI Podcast Clips

What are your thoughts, sticking on artificial intelligence a little bit, about the displacement of jobs? That's another perspective that candidates like Andrew Yang talk about. Yang Gang forever. Yang Gang. So he unfortunately, speaking of Yang Gang, has recently dropped out. I know, it was very disappointing and depressing. Yeah, but on the positive side, he's I think launching a podcast. So uh... Really? Cool. I'm sure he'll try to talk you into trying to come on to the podcast. I would love to. So... What about Ratatouille? Yeah, maybe he'll be more welcoming of the Ratatouille argument. What are your thoughts on his concerns of the displacement of jobs, of automation, of course there's positive impacts that could come from automation and AI, but there could also be negative impacts. And within that framework, what are your thoughts about universal basic income? So these interesting new ideas of how we can empower people in the economy. I think he was 100% right on almost every dimension. We see this in Square's business. I mean, he identified truck drivers, some from Missouri, and he certainly pointed to the concern and the issue that people from where I'm from feel every single day that is often invisible and not talked about enough. The next big one is cashiers. This is where it pertains to Square's business. We are seeing more and more of the point of sale move to the individual customer's hand in the form of their phone and apps and pre-order and order ahead. We're seeing more kiosks, we're seeing more things like Amazon Go, and the number of workers as a cashier in retail is immense. And there's no real answers on how they transform their skills and work into something else. And I think that does lead to a lot of really negative ramifications. The important point that he brought up around universal basic income is given that this shift is going to come, and given it is going to take time to set people up with new skills and new careers, they need to have a floor to be able to survive. And this $1,000 a month is such a floor. It's not going to incentivize you to quit your job because it's not enough, but it will enable you to not have to worry as much about just getting on day to day so that you can focus on what am I going to do now and what skills do I need to acquire. And I think a lot of people point to the fact that during the industrial age, we had the same concerns around automation, factory lines, and everything worked out okay. But the biggest change is just the velocity and the centralization of a lot of the things that make this work, which is the data and the algorithms that work on this data. I think the second biggest scary thing around AI is just who actually owns the data and who can operate on it. And are we able to share the insights from the data so that we can also build algorithms that help our needs or help our business or whatnot. So that's where I think regulation could play a strong and positive part. First looking at the primitives of AI and the tools we use to build these services that will ultimately touch every single aspect of the human experience. And then where data is owned and how it's shared. So those are the answers that as a society, as a world, we need to have better answers around, which we're currently not. They're just way too centralized into a few very, very large companies. But I think it was spot on with identifying the problem and proposing solutions that would actually work. At least that we'd learn from that you could expand or evolve. But I mean, I think UBI is well past its due. I mean, it was certainly trumpeted by Martin Luther King and even before him as well. And like you said, the exact thousand dollar mark might not be the correct one, but you should take the steps to try to implement these solutions and see what works. Thanks.

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Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314

evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to calculate the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way. You just reacted. Physically, our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you evolved to do. Yet you're in that same flight or fight response. That's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. The following is a conversation with Liv Boree, formerly one of the best poker players in the world, trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist and an educator on topics of game theory, physics, complexity, and life. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Liv Boree. What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life? You can pick whichever one you want, poker or life and or life. The longer you play, the less influence luck has. Like with all things, the bigger your sample size, the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter. So to answer that question, yeah, in poker, it really depends. If you and I sat and played 10 hands right now, I might only win 52% of the time, 53% maybe. But if we played 10,000 hands, then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time. So it's a question of sample sizes. And what are you figuring out over time? The betting strategy that this individual does or literally doesn't matter against any individual over time? Against any individual over time, the better player because they're making better decisions. So what does that mean to make a better decision? Well, to get into the real nitty-gritty already, basically, poker is a game of math. There are these strategies familiar with Nash equilibria. Yes. Right? So there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt. And the closer you play to them, the less exploitable you are. So because I've studied the game a bunch, although admittedly not for a few years, but back when I was playing all the time, I would study these game theory optimal solutions and try and then adopt those strategies when I go and play. So I'd play against you and I would do that. And because the objective when you're playing game theory optimal, it's actually, it's a loss minimization thing that you're trying to do. Your best bet is to try and play a similar style. You also need to try and adopt this loss minimization. But because I've been playing much longer than you, I'll be better at that. So first of all, you're not taking advantage of my mistakes. But then on top of that, I'll be better at recognizing when you are playing suboptimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your bad plays. Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria? Can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways? What's a game theory framework of analyzing poker, analyzing any kind of situation? So game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation. I mean, it's technically a branch of economics, but it also applies to wider decision theory. And usually when you see it, it's these little payoff matrices and so on. That's how it's depicted. But it's essentially just like study of strategies under different competitive situations. And as it happens, certain games, in fact, many, many games, have these things called Nash equilibria. And what that means is when you're in a Nash equilibrium, basically, there is no strategy that you can use to try and get a win. Basically, there is no strategy that you can take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking, assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing. So it would be a bad idea if we're both playing in a game theory optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock-paper-scissors is actually a really great example of this. If we were to start playing rock-paper-scissors, you know, you know nothing about me, and we're going to play for all our money, let's play 10 rounds of it. What would your optimal strategy be, do you think? What would you do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. Because you don't know anything about me, you don't want to give anything about a way about yourself. So ideally, you'd have like a little dice or somewhat, you know, perfect randomizer that makes you randomize 33% of the time each of the three different things. And in response to that, well, actually, I can kind of do anything, but I would probably just randomize back too. But actually, it wouldn't matter because I know that you're playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium, where we're both playing this unexploitable strategy. However, if after a while, you then notice that I'm playing rock a little bit more often than I should. Yeah, you're the kind of person that would do that, wouldn't you? Sure, yes, yes, yes. I'm more of a scissors girl. But anyway, no, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm playing rock too much or something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy, the previous one, because you are now, I'm making a mistake, and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake. So you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often in whatever you figure is the right percentage of the time that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of what game theory optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization. But it's not always the maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid stuff, in that example. So that's kind of then how it works in poker, but it's a lot more complex. And the way poker players typically, nowadays they study, the game's changed so much, and I think we should talk about how it's sort of evolved. But nowadays, the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators using software where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations, sort of doing billions of fictitious self-play hands. You input a fictitious hand scenario like, oh, what do I do with Jack-9 suited on the King-10-4 two-spade board against this bet size? So you'd input that, press play, it'll run its billions of fake hands, and then it'll converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are. And then you want to try and memorize what these are. Basically, they're like ratios of how often, you know, what types of hands you want to bluff and what percentage of the time. So then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in. Yeah, those kind of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that. So as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's the probability you win just based on the quality of the card, it's including everything else too. The game theory of it. Yes. Yeah, essentially. And what's interesting is that nowadays, if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super high stakes tournaments or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff, you're going to get eaten alive. Yeah. But of course, you could get lucky over the short run. And that's where this like luck factor comes in because luck is both a blessing and a curse. If luck didn't, you know, if there wasn't this random element and there wasn't the ability for worse players to win sometimes, then poker would fall apart. You know, the same reason people don't play chess professionally for money against you. You don't see people going and hustling chess, like not knowing, trying to make a living from it because you know, there's very little luck in chess, but there's quite a lot of luck in poker. Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie? Years ago. Well, what do you think about the game theoretic formulation of what is it, the hot blonde at the bar? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. The way they illustrated it is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's multiple girls. It's like a friend group and you're trying to approach. I don't remember the details, but I remember... Don't you like then speak to her friends first? Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Fane disinterest. I mean, it's classic pick up artist stuff, right? You want to... And they were trying to correlate that somehow, that being an optimal strategy game, theoretically. Why? What? I don't think I remember... I can't imagine that there is. I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy. Is it... Does that mean that there's an actual Nash equilibrium of picking up girls? Do you know the marriage problem? It's optimal stopping? Yes. So where it's an optimal dating strategy where you... Do you remember? Yeah, I think it's like something like you know you've got like a set of 100 people you're going to look through and after how many do you now... After going on this many dates out of 100, at what point do you then go, okay, the next best person I see, is that the right one? And I think it's like something like 37%? It's one over E, whatever that is. Right, which I think is... Yeah. We're going to fact check that. Yeah. So, but it's funny, under those strict constraints, then yes, after that many people, as long as you have a fixed size pool, then you just pick the next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Anyone else you've seen, yeah. Have you tried this? Have you incorporated it? I'm not one of those people. And we're going to discuss this. I'm not one of those people. And we're going to discuss this. And what do you mean, those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen to the heart. I don't think... My mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything. And I think that if you really give into that kind of addiction, that you lose the joy of the small things, the minutiae of life, I think. I don't know. I'm concerned about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard. In some ways. Well, I think on average, people under try and quantify things or try under optimize. There are some people who, it's like with all these things, it's a balancing act. I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them. I'm sure they have data on this, because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem. Because there aren't a lot of people that use social... Dating apps are on there for a long time. So the interesting aspect is, like, all right, how long before you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively such that you see dating as a kind of... A game. A kind of game versus an actual process of finding somebody that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life. That's really interesting. They have the data. I wish they would be able to release that data. And I do want to... It's OKCupid, right? I think they ran a huge study on all of their... Yeah, they're more data-driven, I think, OKCupid folks are. I think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps, even bigger than dating apps, people connecting on the internet. I just hope they're more data-driven. And it doesn't seem that way. I think, like, I've always thought that Goodreads should be a dating app. I've never used it. Goodreads is just lists books that you've read. And it allows you to comment on the books you read and what books you're currently reading. It's a giant social network of people reading books. And that seems to be a much better database of interests. Of course, it constrains you to the books you're reading, but that really reveals so much more about the person. It allows you to discover shared interests because books are a kind of window into the way you see the world. Also, the kind of places, people you're curious about, the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you a romantic? Are you cold, calculating rationalist? Are you into Ayn Rand? Or are you into Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? And I feel like that reveals so much more than a person trying to look hot from a certain angle in a Tinder profile. Well, and it would also be a really great filter in the first place for people, it's for people who read books and are willing to go and rate them and give feedback on them and so on. So that's already a really strong filter of probably the type of people you'd be looking for. Well, at least be able to fake reading books. I mean, the thing about books, you don't really need to read it. You can just look at the Cliff Notes. Yeah, game the dating app by feigning intellectualism. Can I admit something very horrible about myself? Go on. The things that, you know, I don't have many things in my closet, but this is one of them. I've never actually read Shakespeare. I've only read Cliff Notes. And I got a five in the AP English exam. Wow. Which book? Which books have I read? Well, yeah, which was the exam on? Oh, no, they include a lot of them. But Hamlet, I don't even know if you read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's hard. It's really, I don't, and it's not that pleasant to read. It's like ancient speak. I don't understand it. Anyway, maybe I was too dumb. I'm still too dumb. But I did- You got a five, which is- Yeah, yeah. I don't know how the US grading system- Oh, no. So AP English is, there's kind of this advanced versions of courses in high school, and you take a test that is like a broad test for that subject and includes a lot. It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare. I think a lot of it was also writing, written. You have like AP physics, AP computer science, AP biology, AP chemistry, and then AP English or AP literature. I forget what it was. But I think Shakespeare was a part of that. But I- And you game, the point is you gamified it. Gamified. Well, entirety, I was into getting A's. I saw it as a game. I don't think any, I don't think all the learning I've done has been outside of school. The deepest learning I've done has been outside of school, with a few exceptions, especially in grad school, like deep computer science courses. But that was still outside of school because it was outside of getting, sorry, it was outside of getting the A for the course. The best stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter and you do many of the problems at the end of the chapter, which is usually not what's required for the course, like the hardest stuff. In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible. If you go back now and you look at like biology textbook or any of the computer science textbooks on algorithms and data structures, those things are incredible. They have the best summary of a subject. Plus they have practice problems of increasing difficulty that allows you to truly master the basic, like the fundamental ideas behind that. I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just this really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year, buy this, but you're going to have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses. And I was like, every time I would just check to see whether this book covered it and it did. And I think I only bought like two or three extra and thank God because they're super expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. You get the right one. It's just like a manual. But what's interesting though is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics. CBT The tyranny of exams and metrics. Yes. HMW I loved them because I'm very competitive and I liked finding ways to gamify things and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when I get a good grade or be annoyed at myself when I didn't. But yeah, you're absolutely right in that the actual, how much of that physics knowledge I've retained, like I've, I learned how to cram and study and please an examiner. But did that give me the deep lasting knowledge that I needed? I mean, yes, yes and no. But really like nothing makes you learn a topic better than when you actually then have to teach it yourself. You know, I'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory stuff right now and there's no exam at the end of it that I can gamify. There's no way to gamify and sort of like shortcut my way through it. I have to understand it so deeply from like deep foundational levels to then build upon it and then try and explain it to other people. And like, you know, you're about to go and do some lectures, right? You can't sort of just like, you presumably can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach that. LBW Yeah, and especially high level lectures, the kind of stuff you do on YouTube, you're not just regurgitating material. You have to think through what is the core idea here. And when you do the lectures live, especially, you have to, there's no second takes. That is the luxury you get if you're recording a video for YouTube or something like that. But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on. I've gotten to interact with a few YouTubers that lean on that too much. And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system, because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff. You're through the edit, both written and spoken. You're crafting an amazing video, but you yourself as a human being have not really deeply understood it. So live teaching, or at least recording video with very few takes is a different beast. And I think it's the most honest way of doing it. Like as few takes as possible. LBW That's why I'm nervous about this. Don't go back and be like, let's do that. AC Don't fuck this up, Liv. The tyranny of exams. I do think, you know, people talk about, you know, high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, looking back, of course, I did a lot of those things. No, yes, but it's also a time when you get to like read textbooks or read books or learn with all the time in the world. Like you don't have these responsibilities of like, you know, laundry and having to sort of pay for mortgage or all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. Of in most cases, there's just so much time in the day for learning. And you don't realize it at the time, because at the time it seems like a chore. Like, why the hell does there's so much homework? But you never get a chance to do this kind of learning, this kind of homework ever again in life, unless later in life, you really make a big effort out of it. You get, like you basically your knowledge gets solidified. You don't get to have fun and learn. Learning is really, is really fulfilling and really fun. If you're that kind of person, like some people like, you know, like knowledge is not something that they think is fun. But if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun, that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drink and all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is really, really rewarding. Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Because- Kids these days with their TikTok and their- Well, not even that, but just like so much information, really high quality information, you know, is now in digital format online. Yeah, but they're not, they are using that, but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum. I mean, so much of school is about rigorous study of a subject and still on YouTube, that's not there. Right. YouTube has, Grant Sanderson talks about this, he's this math- 331 Brown. Yeah, 331 Brown. He says like, I'm not a math teacher. I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people. But if you want to really learn calculus, if you want to really learn linear algebra, you should do the textbook. You should do that, you know, and there's still the textbook industrial complex that like charges like $200 for a textbook and somehow, I don't know, it's ridiculous. Well, they're like, oh, sorry, new edition, edition 14.6. Sorry, you can't use 14.5 anymore. It's like, what's different? We've got one paragraph different. So we mentioned offline Daniel Negrano. I'm going to get a chance to talk to him on this podcast. And he's somebody that I found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker, verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays poker. And he's still pretty damn good. He's been good for a long time. So you mentioned that people are running these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed. Do you think he's adapting in this way? Like the top pros, do they have to adapt this way? Or is there still like over years, you basically develop this gut feeling about, like, you get to be like good the way like alpha zero is good. You look at the board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer. Like, this is likely what they have. This is likely the best way to move. And you don't really, you can't really put a finger on exactly why. But it just comes from your gut feeling or no. Yes and no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. You know, that we've got our two mode, or you can distill it down to two modes of decision making, right? You've got your sort of logical linear voice in your head system to as it's often called and your system on your gut intuition. And historically in poker, the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut. You know, often they do some kind of inspired play and you'd ask them why they do it, and they wouldn't really be able to explain it. And that's not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because no one had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really understood how poker worked. This was before, you know, we had analysis software. You know, no one was writing. I guess some people would write down their hands in a little notebook, but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it. But then, you know, when computers became cheaper and software started emerging, and then obviously online poker, where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Now all of a sudden you kind of had this body of data that you could run analysis on. And so that's when people started to see, you know, these mathematical solutions. And so what that meant is the role of intuition essentially became smaller. And it went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style. But also, as I said, like game theory optimal is about loss minimization and being unexploitable. But if you're playing against people who aren't, because no person, no human being can play perfectly game theory optimal in poker, not even the best AIs. They're still like, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but it's kind of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly. LUCAS So there's still a role for intuition? HANNAH Yes. So when you're playing this unexploitable style, but when your opponents start doing something, you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit, well now that's where not only your like logical brain will need to be thinking, well, okay, I know I have this, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this hand. So that means I need to be calling X percent of the time and I put them on this range, etc. But then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know, this time I know mathematically I'm meant to call now. I'm in the sort of top end of my range and this is the odds I'm getting. So the math says I should call, but there's something in your gut saying they've got it this time. They've got it. They're beating you. Maybe your hand is worse. So then the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the fuzziness, is like, do you listen to your gut? How do you quantify the strength of it, or can you even quantify the strength of it? And I think that's what Daniel has. I mean, I can't speak for how much he's studying with the simulators and that kind of thing. I think he has, like he must be to still be keeping up. But he has an incredible intuition for just, he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh. He's seen so many people, the way they behave when the money's on the line and you've got him staring you down in the eye. You know, he's intimidating. He's got this like kind of X factor vibe that he gives out. And he talks a lot, which is an interactive element, which is he's getting stuff from other people. Yes. Yeah. And just like the subtlety. So he's like, he's probing constantly. Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer of information that others can't. Now that said though, he's good online as well. I don't know how, again, would he be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not. No. But when he's in person and he's got that additional layer of information, he can not only extract it, but he knows what to do with it still so well. There's one player who I would say is the exception to all of this. And he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of, I think he might have cracked the simulation. It's Phil Helmuth. He... In more ways than one, he's cracked the simulation, I think. Yeah. He somehow to this day is still, and I love you, Phil, I'm not in any way knocking you. He's still winning so much at the World Series of Poker specifically. He's now won 16 bracelets. The next nearest person I think has won 10. And he is consistently year in year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments with like 2000 people, which statistically he should not be doing. And yet, you watch some of the plays he makes and they make no sense. Mathematically, they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is, if you went and stuck him in one of these high stakes cash games with a bunch of GTO people, he's going to get ripped apart. But there's something that he has that when he's in the halls of the World Series of Poker, specifically, amongst sort of amateurish players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. But my little pet theory is that also, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to. Because he just expects to win and he expects to get flop a set with a frequency far beyond what the real percentages are. And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are. He doesn't need to because he gets that. I think he has found a cheat code because when I've seen him play, he seems to be annoyed that the long shot thing didn't happen. Yes. He's annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with this. If that silly thing hadn't happened and it's like, you don't understand, the silly thing happens 99% of the time. And it's 1% not the other way around. But genuinely, for his lived experience at the World Series of Poker, it is like that. So I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does. He has this X factor. And the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, he's no good. But he's clearly good because he's still winning. There's something going on. Whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is, but he's doing it right still. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Helmuth? It depends. He seems like the kind of person when mentioned he would actually watch this. So you might want to be careful. As I said, I love Phil. I would say this to his face. I'm not saying anything. I don't know if he's the greatest. He's certainly the greatest at the World Series of Poker. And he is the greatest at, despite the game switching into a pure game, almost an entire game of math, he has managed to keep the magic alive. And just through sheer force of will, making the game work for him. And that is incredible. And I think it's something that should be studied because it's an example. Yeah, there might be some actual game theoretical wisdom. There might be something to be said about optimality from studying him. What do you mean by optimality? Meaning, or rather game design perhaps. Meaning if what he's doing is working, maybe poker is more complicated than we're currently modeling it as. Or there's an extra layer, and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey, but or there's an extra layer of ability to manipulate the things the way you want them to go that we don't understand yet. Do you think Phil Hellmuth understands them? Is he just generally... Hashtag positivity. He wrote a book on positivity. He has? He did? Yes. Not like a trolling book? No. Like serious? He's straight up. Yeah. Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity. Yes. Okay. Not ironically. About, I think, and I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want and getting the outcomes that you want by believing so much in yourself and in your ability to win, like eyes on the prize. And I mean, it's working. Demands delivered. But where do you put like Phil Ivey and all those kinds of people? I mean, I'm too, I've been, to be honest, too much out of the scene for the last few years to really... I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got, again, he's got that X factor. He's so incredibly intimidating to play against. I've only played against him a couple of times, but when he like looks you in the eye and you're trying to run a bluff on him, no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey. Just my bluff got through actually. That was actually one of the most thrilling moments I've ever had in poker was it was in a Monte Carlo in a high roller. I can't remember exactly what the hand was, but I three bit and then like just barreled all the way through. And he just like put his laser eyes into me and I felt like he was just scouring my soul and I was just like, hold it together, Liv, hold it together. And you knew your hand was weaker. Yeah. I mean, I was bluffing. I presume, which, you know, there's a chance I was bluffing with the best hand, but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse. And he folded. I was truly one of my, one of the deep highlights of my career. Did you show the cards or did you fold? You should never show in game. Because especially as I felt like I was one of the worst players at the table in that tournament. So giving that information, unless I had a really solid plan that I was now like advertising, oh, look, I'm capable of bluffing Phil Ivey, but like why? It's much more valuable to take advantage of the impression that they have of me, which is like, I'm a scared girl playing a high roller for the first time. Got it. Keep that going, you know. Interesting. But isn't there layers to this? Like psychological warfare that the scared girl might be way smart and then like to flip the tables. Do you think about that kind of stuff? Or is it better not to reveal information? I mean, generally speaking, you want to not reveal information. You know, the goal of poker is to be as deceptive as possible about your own strategies while elucidating as much out of your opponent about their own. So giving them free information, particularly if they're people who you consider very good players, any information I give them is going into their little database and being, I assume it's going to be calculated and used well. So I have to be really confident that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then do, oh, they've seen this, so therefore that, I'm going to be on the right level. So it's better just to keep that little secret to myself in the moment. So how much is bluffing part of the game? Huge amount. So, yeah, I mean, maybe actually, let me ask, like, what did it feel like with Phil Ivey or anyone else when it's a high stake, when it's a big, it's a big bluff. So a lot of money on the table and maybe, I mean, what defines a big bluff? Maybe a lot of money on the table, but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self-doubt. Well, maybe I miscalculated. Maybe I miscalculated what's going on here, what the bet said, all that kind of stuff. Like, what does that feel like? I mean, it's, I imagine comparable to, you know, running a, I mean, any kind of big bluff where you have a lot of something that you care about on the line, you know, so if you're bluffing in a courtroom, not that anyone should ever do that, or, you know, something equatable to that, it's incredible. You know, in that scenario, you know, I think it was the first time I'd ever played a 20, I'd won my way into this 25K tournament. So that was the buy-in, 25,000 euros. And I had satellited my way in because it was much bigger than I would never, ever normally play. And, you know, I hadn't, I wasn't that experienced at the time. And now I was sitting there against all the big boys, you know, the Negranos, the Phil Iveys and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out, you know, you put another bet out, your card, you know, I was on what's called a semi-bluff. So there were some cards that could come that would make my hand very, very strong and therefore win. But most of the time, those cards don't come. So that is a semi-bluff because you're representing, are you representing that you already have something? So I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw. So I had two clubs, two clubs came out on the flop. And then I'm hoping that on the turn in the river, one will come. So I have some future equity. I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand, in which case, great. And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call. But I've also got the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come, I can keep betting and get them to fold their hand. And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had a flush draw. I had a flush draw. I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had some future equity, but it's still, most of the time, I don't hit that club. And so I would rather him just fold because the pot is now getting bigger and bigger. And in the end, I jam all in on the river. That's my entire tournament on the line. As far as I'm aware, this might be the one time I ever get to play a big 25K. This was the first time I played one. So it felt like the most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up, build a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect. It felt like it in the moment. I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life and death. Your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response. What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? What are you thinking about? More like a mixture of, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about, okay, what are cards that make my hand look stronger? Which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective? Which cards don't? What's the right amount of bet size to maximize my fold equity in this situation? That's the logical stuff that I should be thinking about. But I think in reality, because I was so scared, because at least for me, there's a certain threshold of nervousness or stress beyond which the logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this... It feels like a game of wits, basically. It's like of nerve. Can you hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, by the river. I think by that point, I was like, I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore, but fuck it. Let's do it. Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling. I call it the white noise. And it happens in all kinds of decision making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. I can imagine someone in an important job interview. It's like a job they've always wanted, and they're getting grilled, Bridgewater style, where they ask these really hard mathematical questions. It's a really learned skill to be able to subdue your flight or fight response. I think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic, so you can actually engage that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to calculate the lion's kinetic energy. Is it optimal to go this way or that way? You just reacted. And physically, our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop, to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. LBW But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made me realize that bluffing is an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And I don't think you can- HB Telling a story. LBW No, it's straight up lying. In the context of the game, it's not a negative kind of lying. HB But it is. Yeah, exactly. You're representing something that you don't have. LBW And I was thinking like, how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying? Because I was thinking, certainly in high level military strategy, I was thinking when Hitler was lying to Stalin about his plans to invade the Soviet Union. And so you're talking to a person like your friends, and you're fighting against the enemy, whatever the formulation of that enemy is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely- HB Wait, wait, so Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends? LB Yeah. HB Well, my history knowledge is terrible. That's crazy. LB Oh yeah, yeah, that they were... And it worked because Stalin, until the troops crossed the border and invaded in Operation Barbarossa, where this storm of Nazi troops invaded large parts of the Soviet Union, and hence one of the biggest wars in human history began. Stalin for sure thought that this was never going to be, that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union. And it makes, geopolitically, makes total sense to be collaborators. And ideologically, even though there's a tension between communism and fascism, or national socialism, however you formulate it, it still feels like this is the right way to battle the West. HB Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which was the West. LB So it made total sense. And in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated, it seemed to Stalin that for sure, that they would remain at least for a while, peaceful collaborators. And everybody, because of that in the Soviet Union, believed that it was a huge shock when Kiev was invaded. And you hear echoes of that when I travel to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, but the invasion of the capital city. And just like, holy shit. Especially at that time, when you thought World War I, you realized that that was the way to end all wars. You would never have this kind of war. And holy shit, this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the Soviet Union. So it's no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead. It'll be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that's a very large scale kind of lie. But I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics, that kind of lying happening all the time. And a lot of people pay financially and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we, maybe we- HB I think people do. I mean, like think of spouses cheating on their partners, right? And then like having to lie, like, where were you last night? Stuff like that. CB Yeah, that's true. HB I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? So- CB Or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know about the other one, and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement about that too. HB Seems unnecessary. Yeah. CB Why? HB Well, just lying, like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out, you know? CB Yes, but hence that's the thrill. HB Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, and, you know, that's why I think actually like poker, what's so interesting about poker is most of the best players I know, they're always exceptions, you know, they're always bad eggs. But actually, poker players are very honest people. I would say they are more honest than the average, you know, if you just took random population sample. Because a, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that. Most people like to have some kind of, you know, mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table where it's like, it's part of the game, everyone knows what they're in for, and that's allowed. And you get to like, really get that out of your system. And then also, like, poker players learned that, you know, I would play in a huge game against some of my friends, even my partner Igor, where we will be, you know, absolutely going at each other's throats trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up, doing the craftiest moves we can. But then once the game's done, the, you know, the winners and the losers will go off and get a drink together and have a fun time and like, talk about it in this like, weird academic way afterwards. Because that, and that's why games are so great, because you get to like, live out are like, this competitive urge that, you know, most people have. What's it feel like to lose? Like, we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about when you, when you go broke? So like, in a game, I'm, you know, fortunately I've never gone broke. You mean like, full life? Full life, no. I know plenty of people who have. And I don't think Igor would mind me saying he went, you know, he went broke once in Poker, well, you know, early on when we were together. I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke. Oh, yeah. In some sense. Right. Some fundamental sense. I mean, I'm happy. I've sort of lived through it vicariously through him when he did it at the time. But yeah, what's it like to lose? Well, it depends. So it depends on the amount. It depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost. It depends on your brain chemistry. It really, you know, varies from person to person. You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage. Well, it really does, right? Yeah, it's true. But that's, I mean, that's another thing Poker trains you to do. You see, you see everything in percentages. Or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourly or cost benefit, etc. You know, so that's one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the win or loss that I've received. Because it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss. Or on the flip side, you have a huge win, and you're so dead inside that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions to calibrate with reality as much as possible. So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament I thought I was going to win in, you know, especially if I got really unlucky or I make a dumb play, where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked the wall, punched a wall. I like nearly broke my hand one time. Like, I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like, I was pathologically competitive in my like, late teens, early 20s. I just had to win at everything. And I think that sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older. According to you, yeah. According to me. I don't know if others would say the same, right? I feel like ultra competitive people, like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me, is like, he's a lot less competitive than he used to be. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. Oh, I believe it. No, I totally believe it. Like, because as you get older, you can still be like, I care about winning. Like when, you know, I play a game with my buddies online, or you know, whatever it is, polytopia is my current obsession. Like, when I... Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing now. We gotta have a game. But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly. I don't want to have a game because that's going to pull me into your monster of like, competitive play. It's important. It's an important skill. I'm enjoy playing on the... I can't... You just do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah, against the bots. And I can't even do the... There's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. And then there's crazy, yeah. There's crazy. I don't even enjoy the hard one. The crazy I really don't enjoy. Because it's intense. You have to constantly try to win, as opposed to enjoy building a little world and... Yeah, no, no, there's no time for exploration in Polytopia. You gotta get... Well, once you graduate from the crazies, then you can come play the... Graduate from the crazies. Yeah. So in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know, our group, you'll need to be consistently winning like 90% of games against 15 crazy bots. Yeah. And you'll be able to. Like, I could teach you it within a day, honestly. How to beat the crazies? How to beat the crazies. And then you'll be ready for the big leagues. I feel like this generalizes to more than just Polytopia. But okay. Why were we talking about Polytopia? Losing hurts. Losing hurts. Oh, yeah. Yes. Competitiveness over time. I think it's more that, at least for me, I still care about playing, about winning when I choose to play something. It's just that I don't see the world as zero sum as I used to, you know. I think as one gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive something. Or at least you're more aware of externalities of scenarios, of competitive interactions. And so, yeah, I just like, I'm more... And I'm more aware of my own, you know, like, if I have a really strong emotional response to losing, and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day, and then I beat myself up mentally for it. Like, I'm now more aware that that's unnecessary negative externality. So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to turn this down, you know, dial this down a bit. Was poker the thing that has, if you think back of your life, and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the darker places you've gone in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like, did losing spark the descent into darkness, or was it something else? I think my darkest points in poker were when I was wanting to quit and move on to other things. But I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick. Like, I wanted to be the most winningest female player, which is by itself a bad goal. You know, that was one of my initial goals. And I was like, well, I haven't, you know, and I wanted to win a WPT event. I've won one of these, I've won one of these, but I want one of those as well. And that sort of, again, like, is a drive of like over-optimization to random metrics that I decided were important, without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on. That made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had the passion to chase it for. And I don't have any regrets that, you know, I played for as long as I did, because who knows, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't be living this, you know, I wouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't be living this incredible life that I'm living now. This is the height of your life right now. This is it. Peak experience. Absolute pinnacle here in your robot land. Yeah. With your creepy light. No, it is. I mean, I wouldn't change a thing about my life right now, and I feel very blessed to say that. So, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really, where I was like, I'd stopped loving the game, and I was going through the motions. And then I was like, you know, I would take the losses harder than I needed to, because I'm like, it's another one. And I was aware that like, I felt like my life was ticking away. And I was like, is this going to be what's on my tombstone? Oh yeah, she played the game of, you know, this zero-sum game of poker slightly more optimally than her next opponent. Like, cool, great legacy, you know? So, I just wanted, you know, there was something in me that knew I needed to be doing something more directly impactful and just meaningful. It was just like a search for meaning. And I think it's a thing a lot of poker players, even a lot of, I imagine any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits. You know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen this question. I know he's on- Yeah, walking away from chess, right? Yeah, like it must be so hard for him. You know, he's been on the top for so long. And it's like, well, now what? He's got this incredible brain, like, what to put it to? And yeah, it's- It's this weird moment where I've spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics, and the depression hits hard after you win. Dopamine crash. Because it's a kind of a goodbye, saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had, the dreams you had, the thought you thought would give meaning to your life. But in fact, life is full of constant pursuits of meaning. You don't like arrive and figure it all out, and there's endless bliss. No, it continues going on and on. You constantly have to figure out to rediscover yourself. And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker, you have to like find the next- There's always a bigger game. That's the thing. That's my like motto. It's like, what's the next game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what's the game which is like Omniwin? Why is Omniwin so important? Because if everyone plays zero sum games, that's a fast track to either completely stagnate as a civilization, but more actually, far more likely to extinct ourselves. The playing field is finite. Nuclear powers are playing a game of poker with their chips of nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, fires some weapons, the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. The playing field is finite, and if we keep playing these adversarial zero sum games, thinking that in order for us to win, someone else has to lose, or if we lose, someone else wins, that will extinct us. It's just a matter of when. What do you think about that mutually assured destruction, that very simple, almost to the point of caricaturing game theory idea that does seem to be at the core of why we haven't blown each other up yet with nuclear weapons? Do you think there's some truth to that, this kind of stabilizing force of mutually assured destruction? And do you think that's gonna hold up through the 21st century? I mean, it has held, yes. There's definitely truth to it that it was a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium. Yeah. Are you surprised it held this long? Isn't it crazy? It is crazy when you factor in all the near miss accidental firings. Yes, that makes me wonder, like, you know, are you familiar with the quantum suicide thought experiment? Yeah. Where it's basically like, you have a Russian roulette type scenario hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, particle splitting, or paraparticle splitting. And if it goes A, then the gun doesn't go off, and it goes B, then it does go off and it kills you. Because you can only ever be in the universe, you know, assuming like the Everett branch, you know, multiverse theory, you will always only end up in the branch where you continually make, you know, option A comes in. But you run that experiment enough times, it starts getting pretty damn, you know, out of the tree gets huge. There's a million different scenarios, but you'll always find yourself in the one where it didn't go off. And so from that perspective, you are essentially immortal. Because someone and you will only find yourself in the set of observers that make it down that path. So it's- Yeah, but that doesn't mean you're still not going to be fucked at some point in your life. No, of course not. I'm not advocating like that we're all immortal because of this. It's just like a fun thought experiment. And the point is, it like raises this thing of like these things called observer selection effects, which Bostrom, Nick Bostrom talks about a lot and I think people should go read. It's really powerful, but I think it could be overextended that logic. I'm not sure exactly how it can be. I just feel like you can get, you can overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no, I mean, it leads you into like solipsism, which is a very dangerous mindset. Again, if everyone like falls into solipsism of like, well, I'll be fine. That's a great way of creating a very self-terminating environment. But my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11 near misses of like just stupid things. Like there was moonrise over Norway and it made weird reflections off some glaciers in the mountains, which set off, I think the alarms of NORAD radar. And that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because the head of Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that they go like, well, wait a second, why would they fire now when their guy is there? And it was only that lucky happenstance, which doesn't happen very often, where they didn't then escalate it into firing. And there's a bunch of these different ones. Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person who should be the most famous person on earth, because he's probably on expectation saved the most human lives of anyone, like billions of people by ignoring Russian orders to fire, because he felt in his gut that actually this was a false alarm. And it turned out to be a very hard thing to do. And there's so many of those scenarios that I can't help but wonder at this point that we aren't having this kind of like selection effect thing going on. Because you look back and you're like, geez, that's a lot of near misses. But of course, we don't know the actual probabilities that each one would have ended up in nuclear war. Maybe they were not that likely. But still, the point is, it's a very dark, stupid game that we're playing. And it is an absolute moral imperative, if you ask me, to get as many people thinking about ways to make this very precarious. Because we're in a Nash equilibrium, but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit. If you would map it topographically, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not in equilibrium because we're on the top of a hill with a ball balanced on top. And just any little nudge could send it flying down and nuclear war pops off and hellfire and bad times. On the positive side, life on Earth will probably still continue. And another intelligent civilization might still pop up. Maybe. Pick your X risk. Depends on the X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Green goo through synthetic biology, very bad. Will destroy all organic matter. It's basically like a biological paper clip maximizer. Also bad. Or AI type mass extinction thing as well would also be bad. Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. So let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective. Do you think we're living in a simulation? Do you think we're living inside a video game created by somebody else? Well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living in a simulation and... A simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment. So like a video game. Are we listening? Because it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right? There's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun and interesting. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on. I mean, that could be somehow integrated into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive and... Are you asking me if I believe in God? Sounds like it. Kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or she, optimizing for like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did, but the, you know, just like basically like a teenager in their mom's basement watching create a fun universe to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen. Okay. So to try and answer this, do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence to our classic measurable universe that we can measure with current physics and instruments? I think so, yes. Partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own life, which have made me question, like, so I was a diehard atheist, even five years ago. You know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, continue to be an incredible resource. But I've just started to have too many little snippets of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic explanation of how reality works. Isn't that just like a humbling, practical realization that we don't know how reality works? Isn't that just a reminder to yourself? Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility because I fell too hard, you know, same as people, like, I think, you know, many people who are just like, my religion is the way, this is the correct way, this is the law, you are immoral if you don't follow this, blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're a little too much hubris there. But similarly, I think the sort of the Richard Dawkins brand of atheism is too rigid as well and doesn't, you know, there's a way to try and navigate these questions, which still honors the scientific method, which I still think is our best sort of realm of reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry. So, an example. I have two kind of notable examples that really rattled my cage. The first one was actually in 2010, early on in, quite early on in my poker career. And I, the, I, the, I, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted that shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. And I, it meant I got stuck down in the south of France. I was there for something else. And I couldn't get home. And someone said, well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy. Maybe do you want to go? I was like, oh, right, sure. Like, let's, you know, got a train across, found a way to get there. And the buy-in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow. And so I played a feeder tournament, won my way in, kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. So then I won my way, you know, from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing. And on day one of then the big tournament, which turned out to have, it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. It got over like 1,200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal to tell everyone to start playing. And they played Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl, which I don't know why it's notable, but it was just like a really, it was a song I always liked. It was like one of these like pump me up songs. And I was sitting there thinking, oh yeah, it's exciting. I'm playing this really big tournament. And out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice in my head, just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know, when you think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right? At least I do. And so it sounded like my own voice and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And it was so powerful that I got this like wave of like, you know, sort of goosebumps down my body. And I even remember looking around being like, did anyone else hear that? And obviously people are in their phones, like no one else heard it. And I was like, okay. Six days later, I win the fucking tournament out of 1,200 people. And I don't know how to explain it. Okay. Yes. Maybe I have that feeling before every time I play. And it's just that I happened to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it. But- Or the feeling gave you a kind of, now from the film Helmuthian, like it gave you a deep confidence. And it did. It definitely did. Like I remember then feeling this like sort of, well, although I remember then on day one, I then went and lost half my stack quite early on. And I remember thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit. You know, what kind of premonition is this? Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover. And then it just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely instilled me with this confidence. And I can't put an explanation. Like, you know, was it some huge extra supernatural thing driving me? Or was it just my own self-confidence and so on that just made me make the right decisions? I don't know. And I'm not going to put a frame on it. I think I know a good explanation. So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world created by, in the simulation. And then people, not people, creatures from outside of the simulation sort of can tune in and play your character. And that feeling you got is somebody just like, they got to play a poker tournament through you. Honestly, it felt like that. It did actually feel a little bit like that. But it's been 12 years now. I've retold the story many times. Like, I don't even know how much I can trust my memory. You're just an NPC retelling the same story. Because they just played the tournament and left. Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool. Yeah, cool. Next time. And now for the rest of your life, left as a boring NPC retelling this story of greatness. But what was interesting was that after that, then I didn't obviously win a major tournament for quite a long time. And it left, that was actually another sort of dark period. Because I had this incredible, like, the highs of winning that, you know, just on a material level were insane, winning the money. I was on the front page of newspapers, because it was like this girl that came out of nowhere and won this big thing. And so again, like, sort of chasing that feeling was difficult. But then on top of that, there was this feeling of like, almost being touched by something bigger. That was like, ah. So maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like, this kind of, I think that's a confidence thing, that maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling? I definitely, I mean, this is the thing I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right? We are truly the protagonists in our own lives. And so it's a natural bias, human bias to feel special. And I think, and in some ways we are special, every single person is special, because you are that, the universe does, the world literally does revolve around you. That's the thing in some respect. But of course, if you then zoom out and take the amalgam of everyone's experiences, then no, it doesn't. So there is this shared sort of objective reality, but sorry, this objective reality that is shared, but then there's also this subjective reality, which is truly unique to you. And I think both of those things coexist. And it's not like, one is correct and one isn't. And again, anyone who's like, oh no, your lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing. No, it's a blend between these two things. They can exist concurrently. But there's a certain kind of sense that at least I've had my whole life, and I think a lot of people have this, is like, well, I'm just like this little person. Surely I can't be one of those people that do the big thing, right? There's all these big people doing big things. There's big actors and actresses, big musicians, there's big business owners and all that kind of stuff, scientists and so on. I have my own subjective experience that I enjoy and so on, but there's like a different layer. Like, surely I can't do those great things. I mean, one of the things, just having interacted with a lot of great people, I realized, no, they're like just the same humans as me. And that realization I think is really empowering. To remind yourself- What are they? Huh? What are they? Are they? Well- Depends on something, yeah. They're like a bag of insecurities and- Yes. Peculiar sort of, like their own little weirdnesses and so on. I should say also not, they have the capacity for brilliance, but they're not generically brilliant. Like, you know, we tend to say this person or that person is brilliant, but really, no, they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff, just like the rest of us. Right. I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff, seriously. And they've built up a habit of not allowing their mind to get trapped in a bunch of big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big. In a minutiae of day-to-day life, they really think big ideas. But those big ideas, it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to realize that you can be one that actually solve this particular big problem. First, identify a big problem that you care about. Then, like, I can actually be the one that solves this problem, and allowing yourself to believe that. And I think sometimes you do need to have, like, that shock go through your body and a voice tells you you're going to win this tournament. Well, exactly. It's this idea of useful fictions. So again, going through the classic rationalist training of Less Wrong where it's like, you want your map, the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world actually is. You want the map and the territory to perfectly align. You want it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribe to that anymore, having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger or just actually just being overconfident. Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes. If you would take Magnus Carlsen, right? If he, I'm sure from a young age, he knew he was very talented, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something in him to, well, actually maybe he's a bad example because he truly is the world's greatest. But someone who it was unclear whether they were going to be the world's greatest, but ended up doing extremely well because they had this innate, deep self-confidence. This like even overblown idea of how good their relative skill level is. That gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing with the kind of focus and dedication that it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do. And so there are these useful fictions and that's where I think I diverge slightly with the classic sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like what the stories we tell to ourselves, even if they are actually false and even if we suspect they might be false. How it's better to sort of have that like little bit of faith, like value in faith, I think, actually. And that's partly another thing that's like now led me to explore the concept of God, whether you want to call it a simulator, the classic theological thing. I think we're all like elucidating to the same thing. Now, I'm not saying, because obviously the Christian God is all benevolent, endless love. The simulation, at least one of the simulation hypothesis is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom who doesn't really care, doesn't give a shit about the individuals within there. It just like wants to see how this thing plays out because it's curious and it could turn it off like that. Where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know. But just having a little bit of faith that there is something else out there that might be interested in our outcome is I think an essential thing actually for people to find. A, because it creates commonality between us. It's something we can all share. It is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent. It's like a common objective. But B, it gives people that little bit of reserve when things get really dark. And I do think things are going to get pretty dark over the next few years. But it gives that like to think that there's something out there that actually wants our game to keep going. I keep calling it the game. It's a thing C and I, we call it the game. You and C is aka Grimes, we call what the game? Everything. The whole thing. Yeah. We joke about like- So everything is a game. Well, the universe. What if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out either how to beat it, how to get out of it. Maybe this universe is an escape room, like a giant escape room. And the goal is to figure out, put all the pieces of puzzle, figure out how it works in order to unlock this hyper-dimensional key and get out beyond what it is. That's- No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage and one cage at a time you figure out how to escape that. Right. And you level up. Us becoming multi-planetary would be a level up or us figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing, that would probably be a leveling up. Or spiritually, humanity becoming more combined and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened, that would be a leveling up. There's many different frames to it, whether it's physical, digital or metaphysical. I think level one for Earth is probably the biological evolutionary process. It's like going from single cell organisms to early humans. And maybe level two is whatever's happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies. That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then multi-planetary is interesting. Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on Earth? Probably, because it allows us to exponentially scale. It delays the Malthusian trap. It's a way to make the playing field get larger so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us. And that's a good thing, but I don't know if it fully solves this issue of this thing called Moloch, which we haven't talked about yet, which is basically, I call it the god of unhealthy competition. Yeah, let's go to Moloch. What's Moloch? You did a great video on Moloch, one aspect of it, the application of it to one aspect. Instagram beauty filters. Very niche. I wanted to start off small. So Moloch was originally coined as, well, apparently back in the Canaanite times, it was to say ancient Carthaginian, I can never say it, Carthaginian, somewhere around 300 BC or 200 AD, I don't know. There was supposedly this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon god thing they called Moloch in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And it was literally about child sacrifice. Whether they actually existed or not, we don't know. But in mythology, they did. And this god that they worshipped was this thing called Moloch. And then, I don't know, it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history in terms of mythology beyond that until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this. You see that there's this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in. But then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers and sees that the city is run by this machine. And this machine basically would just kill the workers all the time because it was just so hard to keep it running. They were always dying. So there's all this suffering that was required in order to keep the city going. And then the protagonist has this vision that this machine is actually this demon Moloch. So again, it's like this sort of mechanistic consumption of humans in order to get more power. And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s, an incredible poem called Howl about this thing Moloch. And a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that. He's talking about capitalism. But then the piece of resistance that's moved Moloch into this idea of game theory was Scott Alexander of Slate's Zarkodex. Literally, I think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on Moloch. Everyone must go read it. And- Slate's Zarkodex is a blog. It's a blog. Yes. We can link to it in the show notes or something, right? No, don't. Yes. Yes. But I like how you assume I have a professional operation going on here. I mean- I shall try to remember to- You're giving the impression of it. Yeah. Please, if I don't, please, somebody in the comments remind me. If you don't know this blog, it's one of the best blogs ever, probably. You should probably be following it. Are blogs still a thing? I think they are still a thing. Yeah. He's migrated onto Substack, but yeah, it's still a blog. Anyway- Substack better not fuck things up. I hope not. Yeah. I hope they don't turn Molochy, which will mean something to people when we- We'll continue. When I stop interrupting for once. No, no. It's quiet. Yeah. So anyway, he writes this piece, Meditations on Moloch. And basically, he analyzes the poem and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong. And Moloch was historically this thing of where people would sacrifice a thing that they care about, in this case, children, their own children, in order to gain power, a competitive advantage. And if you look at almost everything that goes wrong in our society, it's that same process. So with the Instagram beauty filters thing, if you're trying to become a famous Instagram model, you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures of yourself that you can. You're trying to play that game. There's a lot of hot women on Instagram. How do you compete against them? You post really hot pictures and that's how you get more likes. As technology gets better, more makeup techniques come along. And then more recently, these beauty filters, where at the touch of a button, it makes your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. These technologies come along. Everyone is incentivized to that short-term strategy. But on net, it's bad for everyone, because now everyone is feeling like they have to use these things. And the reason why I talked about them in this video is because I noticed it myself. I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while. I've given up on it now. And I noticed these filters, how good they made me look. And I'm like, I know that everyone else is kind of doing it. Go subscribe to Liz's Instagram. Please! So I don't have to use the filters. I'll post a bunch of... Yeah, make it blow up. But you felt the pressure, actually. Exactly. These short-term incentives to do this thing that either sacrifices your integrity or something else in order to stay competitive, which on aggregate creates this race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation which is worse off than if they hadn't started, than it were before. Kind of like at a football stadium. The system is so badly designed, a competitive system of everyone sitting and having a view, that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view, it forces everyone else behind to adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. So you need this top-down, God's-eye coordination to make it go back to the better state. But from within the system, you can't actually do that. So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is. It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values in order to optimize for winning the game in question, the short-term game. But this Moloch, can you attribute it to any one centralized source, or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection of people? Exactly that. It's an emergent phenomena. It's a force of game theory. It's a force of bad incentives on a multi-agent system. Prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of Moloch-y system as well, but it's just a two-player thing. Another word for Moloch is multipolar trap. Basically, you've just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize. It would be better if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy, but because that strategy gives you a short-term advantage, everyone's incentivized to do it, and so everyone ends up doing it. So the responsibility for... I mean, social media is a really nice place for a large number of people to play game theory. And so they also have the ability to then design the rules of the game. And is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of... like to do the thing that poker players are doing, to run simulation? Ideally, that would have been great if Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would... different types of algorithms would turn out for society, that would have been great. That's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about humanity, actually. So not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement, or what brings people joy in the short term, but how is this thing going to change the way people see the world? How is it going to get morphed in iterative games played into something that will change society forever? That requires some deep thinking. I hope there's meetings like that inside companies, but I haven't seen them. There aren't. That's the problem. And it's difficult because when you're starting up a social media company, you're aware that you've got investors to please, there's... bills to pay, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got all these incredible pressures, bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money. And I don't think anyone intended when they built these social media platforms, and just to preface it, so the reason why social media is relevant, because it's a very good example of everyone these days is optimizing for clicks, whether it's a social media platform, whether it's a social media platform themselves, because every click gets more impressions and impressions pay for advertising dollars, or whether it's individual influencers, or whether it's the New York Times or whoever, they're trying to get their story to go viral. So everyone's got this bad incentive of using, as you called it, the clickbait industrial complex. That's a very mollicy system because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics in order to try and win over the world. So ideally, these companies would have had enough slack in the beginning in order to run these experiments to see, okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people? What are the ways that Moloch... They should be aware of this concept of Moloch and realize that whenever you have a highly competitive multi-agent system, which social media is a classic example of millions of agents all trying to compete for likes and so on, and you try and bring all this complexity down into very small metrics, such as number of likes, number of retweets, whatever the algorithm optimizes for, that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong and become a race to the bottom. I think there should be an honesty when founders... I think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency of, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. This is a fascinating experiment. We're all running as a human civilization. Let's try this out. And actually just be honest about this, that we're all these weird rats in a maze. None of us are controlling it. There's this kind of sense, like the founders, the CEO of Instagram or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg, has a control and he's with strings playing people. No, they're... He's at the mercy of this, like everyone else. He's just trying to do his best. And I think putting on a smile and doing over polished videos about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you, I think is not the right way to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society. How do we design the game such that we build a better world? I think a big part of this as well is people... There's this philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley, of techno-optimism. Technology will solve all our issues. And there's a steel man argument to that where yes, technology has solved a lot of problems and can potentially solve a lot of future ones. But it can also... It's always a double edged sword. And particularly as technology gets more and more powerful, and we've now got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of psychological manipulation with it and so on. Technology is not a values neutral thing. People think... I used to always think this myself. It's like this naive view that, oh, technology is completely neutral. It's just the humans that either make it good or bad. No. To the point we're at now, the technology that we are creating, they are social technologies. They literally dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that. And beyond that, it also then... That gives rise to the idea that we're not necessarily good at social interaction. And that gives rise to the memes that we then coalesce around. And if you have the stack that way, where it's technology driving social interaction, which then drives mimetic culture and which ideas become popular, that's moloch. And we need the other way around. We need it. So we need to figure out what are the good memes? What are the good values that we need to optimize for that makes people happy and healthy and keeps society as robust and safe as possible? Then figure out what the social structure around those should be. And only then do we figure out technology. But we're doing the other way around. And as much as I love in many ways the culture of Silicon Valley, I do think that technology... I don't want to knock it. It's done so many wonderful things for us. Same with capitalism. We have to be honest with ourselves. We're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created. Can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you understand the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes that matter, or the memes that bring out the best in us. The way I try to be in real life and the way I try to be online is to be about kindness and love. And I feel like I sometimes get criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things. But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game. I'm trying to be authentic. Yeah, but also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this. You guys should try this too. And that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game. Is that possible? I don't know. But I think we should try. I don't think we have an option but to try. Well, the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies or anyone who has control of the rules of the game. I think we need to be doing all of the above. I think we need to be thinking hard about what are the kind of positive, healthy memes. As Elon said, he who controls the memes controls the universe. I think he did. But there's truth to that. There is wisdom in that because memes have driven history. We are a cultural species. That's what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else. We have the ability to learn and evolve through culture as opposed to biology or classic physical constraints. And that means culture is incredibly powerful. And we can create and become victim to very bad memes or very good ones. But we do have some agency over which memes we not only put out there but we also subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach. I'm making this video right now called The Attention Wars which is about how the media machine is this Moloch machine. Is this kind of blind, dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for everything and then it's like, blind, dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie. And then if you zoom out, it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings because the only thing that benefits from this in the end. Our information ecosystem is breaking down. You look at the state of the US. We're in a civil war. It's just not a physical war. It's an information war. And people are becoming more fractured in terms of what their actual shared reality is. Truly, an extreme left person and extreme right person, they literally live in different worlds in their minds at this point. And it's getting more and more amplified. And this force is like a razor blade pushing through everything. It doesn't matter how innocuous the topic is, it will find a way to split into this bifurcated culture war. And it's fucking terrifying. Because that maximizes attention. And that's an emergent Moloch type force that takes any, anything, any topic and cuts through it so that it can split nicely into two groups. One that's- Well, it's whatever. All everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they can keep their thing going. And the best emotion for getting attention, well, because it's not just about attention on the internet, it's engagement. That's the key thing, right? In order for something to go viral, you need people to actually engage with it. They need to comment or retweet or whatever. And of all the emotions, there's like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans, even from previously uncontacted tribes, have. Some of those are negative, like sadness, disgust, anger, etc. Some are positive, happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger is such an active emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared- And I'm not just talking out my ass here. There are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas if someone's disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, I don't want to deal with this. So they're less likely to actually engage and share it and so on. They're just going to be like, ugh. Whereas if they're enraged by a thing, well now that triggers all the old tribalism emotions. And so that's how then things get sort of spread much more easily. They out-compete all the other memes in the ecosystem. And so the attention economy, the wheels that make it go around is rage. I did a tweet. The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage. Because it is feeding off our rage. That's the thing that's now keeping it going. So the more we get angry, the worse it gets. So the moloch in this war of attention is constantly maximizing rage. What it is optimizing for is engagement. And it happens to be that engagement is propaganda. It just sounds like everything is putting more and more things being put through this propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question. Whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war. Yeah. I think the silver lining of this, do you think it's possible that in the long arc of this process, you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress? In the moment, it feels like people are tearing each other to shreds over ideas. But if you think about it, one of the magic things about democracy and so on is you have the blue versus red constantly fighting. It's almost like they're in discourse creating devil's advocate, making devils out of each other. And through that process, discussing ideas. Like almost really embodying different ideas just to yell at each other. And through the yelling over the period of decades, maybe centuries, figuring out a better system. In the moment, it feels fucked up. Right. But in the long arc, it actually is productive. I hope so. That said, we are now in the era of, just as we have weapons of mass destruction with nuclear weapons that can break the whole playing field, we now are developing weapons of informational mass destruction. Information weapons. WMDs that basically can be used for propaganda or just manipulating people however is needed. Whether that's through dumb TikTok videos or... There are significant resources being put in. I don't mean to sound like too doom and gloom, but there are bad actors out there. That's the thing. There are plenty of good actors within the system who are just trying to stay afloat in the game. So effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to manipulate the other side into doing things. And using... So because of the digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots. Exactly. Botnets. And this is a whole new situation that we've never had before. Yeah. It's exciting. You know what I want to do? That because there is... People are talking about bots manipulating and malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda. I want to create a bot army for fights that... For love? Yeah, exactly. For love. That fights... I mean... You know, there's truth to fight fire with fire. It's like, but how... You always have to be careful whenever you create... Again, Moloch is very tricky. Yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love too. Well, yeah. So we thought... But I agree with you that that is a thing that should be considered. But there is... Again, everyone... The road to hell is paved in good intentions. And there's always unforeseen outcomes, externalities, if you're trying to adopt a thing, even if you do it in the very best of faith. But you can learn lessons of history. If you can run some sims on it first, absolutely. But also there's certain aspects of a system, as we've learned through history, that do better than others. Like, for example, don't have a dictator. So if I were to create this bot army, it's not good for me to have full control over it. Because in the beginning, I might have a good understanding of what's good and not. But over time, that starts to get deviated because I'll get annoyed at some assholes and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those assholes? But then that power starts getting to your head, you become corrupted. That's basic human nature. So distribute the power. We need a love botnet on a DAO. A DAO love botnet. Yeah, but without a leader. Exactly, distributed, right. Without any kind of centralized... Yeah, without even... Basically, the more you can decentralize the control of a thing to people... But then you still need the ability to coordinate. Because that's the issue when you think something is too... Really, to me, the culture wars, the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the... I don't know what even the term is for it, but centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing. Power and control by a few versus completely distributed. And the trouble is, if you have a fully centralized thing, then you're at risk of tyranny. Stalin-type things can happen. Or completely distributed, now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos where you can't even coordinate to like, when there's a pandemic or anything like that. So it's like, what is the right balance to strike between these two structures? Can't Moloch really take hold in a fully decentralized system? That's one of the dangers too. Yes, very vulnerable to Moloch. So a dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure works. They have that God's eye view, at least. They have the ability to create laws and rules that force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected with some kind of psychopathy type thing. What's reverse Moloch? So great question. So that's where... I've been working on this series. It's been driving me insane for the last year and a half. I did the first one a year ago. I can't believe it's nearly been a year. The second one, hopefully, will be coming out in like a month. And my goal at the end of the series is to present... Because basically I'm painting the picture of what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and how it's driving. It's like kind of the generator function, as people describe it, of existential risk. And then at the end of that... Wait, wait. The generator function of existential risk. So you're saying Moloch is sort of the engine that creates a bunch of x risks. Yes. Not all of them. It's a cool phrase. Generator function... It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmachtenberger. I got that from him. All things. It's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmachtenberger. The dude is brilliant. After that, it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me. No, it's fine. So not all x risks. So an asteroid technically isn't because it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going on. But synthetic bioweapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build. Even for defense, bad viruses just to threaten someone else, etc. Or AI, technically, the race to AGI is kind of potentially a Moloch-y situation. But yeah, so if Moloch is this generator function that's driving all of these issues over the coming century that might wipe us out, what's the inverse? And so far, what I've gotten to is this character that I want to put out there called Win-Win. Because Moloch is the god of lose-lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the god of win-lose, but in reality, it's lose-lose. Everyone ends up worse off. So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that? It's Win-Win. And I was thinking for ages, like what's a good name for this character? And then tomorrow, I was like, okay, well, don't try and think through it logically. What's the vibe of Win-Win? And to me, in my mind, Moloch is like, and I address it in the video, it's red and black. It's kind of like very hyper-focused on its one goal, you must win. So Win-Win is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise. It loves games too. It loves a little bit of healthy competition, but constrained, kind of like before. It knows how to ring-fence zero-sum competition into just the right amount, whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive. And then beyond that, it also loves cooperation, coordination, love, all these other things. But it's also kind of mischievous. It will have a good time. It's not boring. It knows how to have fun. It can get down. But ultimately, it's unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going. And I call it Win-Win. That's a good pet name. Win-Win. Yes. Win-Win, right? And I think its formal name, when it has to do official functions, is Omnia. Omnia. Yeah. From like omniscience, kind of, why Omnia? You just like Omnia? Just like Omni-Win. Omni-Win. But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is- I like Omnia. Yeah. Yeah. But there's an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Win-Win is more fun. Exactly. It's more like it embraces the fun aspect. I mean, there is something about sort of, there's some aspect to Win-Win interactions that requires embracing the chaos of the game and enjoying the game itself. I don't know. I don't know what that is. That's almost like a zen-like appreciation of the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences of the game. Right. Well, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself. It's not like about winning. It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not knowing whether you're going to win or lose this little thing. But then also being aware that, you know, what's the boundary? How big do I want competition to be? Because one of the reasons why Moloch is doing so well now in our civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition. And so it's just having all these negative externalities and we've completely lost control of it. I think my guess is, and now we're getting really metaphysical technically, but I think we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure cooperation, you know, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely cooperation entirely. It's good to have some little zero-sum-ness bits, but it's not good to have some little zero-sum-ness bits. But I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that. And that's what reversed Moloch. So this kind of win-win creature system is an antidote to the Moloch system. Yes. And I don't know how it's going to do that. But it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas, different frameworks of how we think about that. Exactly. At the small scale of a collection of individuals, at the large scale of a society. Exactly. It's a meme. I think it's an example of a good meme. And I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think they have a better idea or it's not. But it's the direction of meme that we need to spread, this idea of like, look for the win-wins in life. Well, on the topic of beauty filters, so in that particular context where Moloch creates negative consequences, Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world. What is beauty anyway? It would be nice to just try to discuss what kind of thing we would like to converge towards in our understanding of what is beautiful. So to me, I think something is beautiful when it can't be reduced down to easy metrics. If you think of a tree, what is it about a tree, like a big ancient beautiful tree, right? What is it about it that we find so beautiful? It's not the sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that there's these immeasurable qualities. It's almost like a qualia of it. It's got lots of patternicity, but it's not overly predictable. Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system. It's evolving over time. The definition of a complex versus a complicated system. A complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits, understood, and then put back together. A complex system is kind of like a black box. It does all this crazy stuff, but if you take it apart, you can't put it back together again because there's all these intricacies. And also, very importantly, there's some of the problems that we're dealing with. And also, very importantly, the sum of the parts, sorry, the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. And that's where the beauty lies, I think. And I think that extends to things like art as well. There's something immeasurable about it. There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric. LRWN Does that extend to humans, you think? HMW Yeah, absolutely. LRWN So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty, the complexity of a human being? HMW Good question. LRWN This takes us back to dating sites and Goodreads, I think. HMW Very good question. I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do. It shouldn't try and like, right now, you know, one of the, I was talking to like a social media expert recently because I was like, I hate- LRWN There's such a thing as a social media expert? HMW Oh yeah, there are like agencies out there that you can like outsource because I'm thinking about working with one to like, I want to start a podcast. LRWN You should, you should have done it a long time ago. HMW Working on it. It's going to be called Win Win. And it's going to be about this like positive stuff. And the thing that you know, they always come back and say is like, well, you need to like, figure out what your thing is, you know, you need to narrow down what your thing is, and then just follow that. Have a like a sort of a formula. Because that's what people want. They want to know that they're coming back to the same thing. And that's the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it. And that's why and the trouble with that is that it's a complexity reduction. And generally speaking, you know, complexity reduction is bad. It's making things more, it's an over simplification. Not that simplification is always a bad thing. But when you're trying to take, you know, what is social media doing? It's trying to like encapsulate the human experience and put it into digital form and commodify it to an extent. So you do that, you compress people down into these like narrow things. And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my definition of beauty. LRW It's interesting, because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful. And so maybe it's possible for social media to do that. A presentation, sort of a slither, a slice, a look into a person's life that reveals something real about them. But in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed graphically or through words, some way, I mean, in some way, Twitter can do that kind of thing. A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person. Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking the thing out of context. People often don't read tweets in the context of the human being that wrote them. The full history of the tweets they've written, the education level, the humor level, the world view they're playing around with, all that context is forgotten and people just see the different words. So that can lead to trouble. But in a certain sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person. So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful. If we're talking about Mulligans is driving a better kind of incentive. Yeah, I mean, how they can, like, if we were to rewrite, is there a way to rewrite the Twitter algorithm so that it stops being the like, the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars? Because that's really what it is. I mean, maybe I'm giving it, you know, Twitter too much power, but just the more I looked into it, and I had a conversation with Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology, and he explained it as like, Twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture, and then this terribly designed algorithm that amplifies the craziest people and the angriest, the angriest, most divisive takes and amplifies them. And then the media, the mainstream media, because all the journalists are also on Twitter, they then are informed by that. And so they draw out the stories they can from this already like, very boiling lava of rage, and then spread that, you know, to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter. And so, I honestly, I think if I could press a button, turn them off, I probably would at this point, because I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness, but that's not going to happen. And so, at least one way to like, stem the tide and make it less moloch-y would be to change, at least if like, it was on a subscription model, then it's now not optimizing for, you know, impressions, because basically, what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible. That's how they get paid, right? Every time an ad gets shown to someone, and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone, if they moved on to at least a subscription model, then they're getting the money either way, whether someone comes back to the site once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes away that incentive, you know, to use technology, you know, to build, to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive. That would be one way, for example. Yeah, but you still want people to, yeah, I just feel like that just slows down, creates friction in the virality of things. But that's good. We need to slow down virality. It's good. It's one way. Virality is moloch, to be clear. So moloch is always negative, then? Yes, by definition. Yes. But then I disagree with you. Competition is not always negative. Competition is neutral. I disagree with you that all virality is negative, then, is moloch, then. Because it's a good intuition, because we have a lot of data on virality being negative. But I happen to believe that the core of human beings, so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible. It might be just harder to engineer systems that enable virality, but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable virality. And the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive. And positive, not like la la positive. It's more like win-win, meaning a lot of people need to be challenged. Wise. Wise things. Wise things. Yes. You grow from it. It might challenge you. You might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it. Yes. And ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart. I deeply want that to be true. And I very much agree with you that people at their core are on average good, care for each other, as opposed to not. I think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly wanting to do just destructive, malicious things. Most people are just trying to win their own little game. And they're just stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes. The current structure means that virality is optimized towards Moloch. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Sometimes positive stories do go viral, and I think we should study them. I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, identifying memes that above a certain threshold of the population agree is a positive, happy, bringing people together meme, the kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the dinner table. Identify those memes and figure out what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. And also not just happiness and connection between humans, but connection between humans in other ways that enables productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. It's not just about, let's be happy and have fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit. Yeah. Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti-Moloch. It's not using competition. Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together. And that's, again, the internet started out as that, and it could have been that, but because of the way it was sort of structured in terms of, you know, very lofty ideal, they wanted everything to be open source and also free. But they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway, because they were still building this on top of our old economics system. And so the way they did that was through third party advertisement. But that meant that things were very decoupled. You've got this third party interest, which means that you're then like people having to optimize for that. And that is the actual consumer is actually the product, not the person you're making the thing for. In the end, you start making the thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then breaks down. Yeah, there's no clean solution to this. And it's a really good suggestion by you actually to figure out how we can optimize virality for positive sum topics. I shall be the general of the love bot army. Distributed. Distributed. Distributed. Okay, yeah. The power, just even in saying that the power already went to my head. No. Okay. You've talked about quantifying your thinking. We've been talking about this sort of a game theoretic view on life and putting probabilities behind estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life, just actually analyzing life in game theoretic way, like your own life, like personal life. I think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with Igor about like, how long is this relationship gonna last? Similar to our sort of marriage problem kind of discussion, having an honest conversation about the probability of things that we sometimes are a little bit too shy or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms. Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning, the good and the bad of that? Can you do this kind of thing with human relations? Yeah. So the scenario you're talking about, it was like- Yeah. Tell me about that scenario. I think it was about a year into our relationship and we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was gonna sell my apartment. Well, you know, he had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what like our long-term plans would be. Should we buy a place together, et cetera. When you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine or is he sober and you're actually having a serious- I think we were sober. How do you get to that conversation? Because most people are kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation. Well, so our relationship was very- well, first of all, we were good friends for a couple of years before we even got romantic. And when we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, wasn't a random thing. So the probability of it being a big deal was high. Was already very high. And then we'd been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and wonderful. So there was a lot of foundation already where we felt very comfortable having a lot of frank conversations. But Igor's MO has always been much more than mine. He was always from the outset, like just in a relationship, radical transparency and honesty is the way, because the truth is the truth, whether you want to hide it or not. It will come out eventually. And if you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself, then how could you possibly expect to be the most integral version? The relationship needs this bedrock of honesty as a foundation, more than anything. Yeah, that's really interesting, but I would like to push against some of those ideas. Okay, all right. But that's the down the line, yes, throw them up. I just rudely interrupt. No, it's fine. And so we'd been about together for a year and things were good. And we were having this hard conversation. And then he's like, well, okay, what's the likelihood that we're going to be together in three years then? Because I think it was roughly a three-year time horizon. And I was like, oh, interesting. And then we were like, actually, wait, before you say that, let's both write down our predictions formally. Because we were just getting into effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making formal predictions as a means of measuring your own foresight, essentially, in a quantified way. So we both wrote down our percentages and we also did a one-year prediction and a 10-year one as well. So we got percentages for all three. And then we showed each other. And I remember having this moment of like, ooh, because for the 10-year one, I was like, ooh, well, I mean, I love him a lot, but a lot can happen in 10 years. And we've only been together for, so I was like, I think it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. And I remember wrestling, I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want him to, I don't want to give a number lower than his. And I remember thinking, I was like, uh-uh, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. So just give your real percentage. And I think mine was like 75%. And then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned. But honestly, but if we weren't- 20%. Huh? It definitely would have, if his had been consistently lower than mine, that would have rattled me for sure. Whereas if it had been the other way around, I think he's just kind of like a water off the duck's back type of guy. It'd be like, okay, well, all right, we'll figure this out. Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate? Like the level of uncertainty? They came built in. We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars. I didn't draw any or anything like that. Well, I guess that's the question I have is, did you feel informed enough to make such decisions? Because I feel like if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously, I would want some data. I would want to say one of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other relationships. Right. And so I want to have some data about the way- You want the base rates. Yeah. And also actual trajectories of relationships. I would love to have time series data about the ways that relationships fall apart or prosper, how they collide with different life events, losses, job changes, moving, both partners find jobs, only one has a job. I want that kind of data and how often the different trajectories change in life. How informative is your past to your future? That's the whole thing. Can you look at my life and have a good prediction about, in terms of my characteristics and my relationships, what that's going to look like in the future? Or not? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'll be very ill-informed in terms of making the probability. I would be far... Yeah, I just would be under-informed. I would be under-informed. I'll be over-biasing to my prior experiences, I think. Right. But as long as you're aware of that and you're honest with yourself, and you're honest with the other person, say, look, I have really wide error bars on this for the following reasons, that's okay. I still think it's better than not trying to quantify it at all if you're trying to make really major irreversible life decisions. And I feel also the romantic nature of that question. For me personally, I try to live my life thinking it's very close to 100%. Allowing myself, actually, this is a difficult deal, this is allowing myself to think differently, I feel like has a psychological consequence. That's one of my pushbacks against radical honesty, is this one particular perspective. So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner? Going back to the wise sage-filled... In order to create this additional optimism....helm youth... Yes....of fake it till you make it. The positive thinking. Hashtag positivity. Yeah, hashtag. Well, so that comes back to this idea of useful fictions. And I agree. I don't think there's a clear answer to this, and I think it's actually quite subjective. Some people this works better for than others. To be clear, Igor and I weren't doing this formal prediction. We did it with very much tongue in cheek. I don't think it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do, even. We just did it more as a fun exercise. But the consequence of that fun exercise, there was a deep honesty to it, too. Exactly. And it was just this moment of reflection. I'm like, oh wow, I actually have to think through this quite critically, and so on. And it's also what was interesting was I got to check in with what my desires were. So there was one thing of what my actual prediction is, but what are my desires? And could these desires be affecting my predictions, and so on? And that's a method of rationality. And I personally don't think it loses anything. It didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship. Quite the opposite. It brought us closer together because we did this weird fun thing that I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. And I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship that both of us are very – we both love numbers, we both love statistics, we're both poker players. So this was kind of like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like that kind of stuff at all, in which case it's not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend it to everybody. But I do think it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the – or probe at these things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them. Which is interesting because that's in tension with the idea of what we just talked about with beauty and what makes something beautiful – the fact that you can't measure everything about it. And perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure. Maybe it's wrong to completely try and value the utilitarian – put a utilitarian frame of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety. I don't know. Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't. I'm ambivalent on that. But overall, people have too many biases. People are overly biased against trying to do a quantified cost-benefit analysis on really tough life decisions. They're like, oh, just go with your gut. It's like, well, sure, but guts – our intuitions are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in. Then we can really trust on it if it's a decision we've made many times. But if it's like, should I marry this person or should I buy this house over that house? You only make those decisions a couple of times in your life, maybe. LBW Well, I would love to know – there's a balance – probably it's a personal balance of strike – is the amount of rationality you apply to a question versus the useful fiction, the fake it till you make it. For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine, you ask them, what's the probability of you winning, Ukraine winning? Almost everybody I talk to is 100%. And you listen to the experts, they say all kinds of stuff. First of all, the morale there is higher than probably – and I've never been to a war zone before this, but I've read about many wars and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher than almost any war I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country. Not just soldiers, not everybody. MS. Why do you think that is specifically more than in other wars? LBW I think because there's perhaps a dormant desire for the citizens of this country to find the identity of this country because it's been going through this 30-year process of different factions and political bickering. And they haven't had, as they talk about, they haven't had their independence war. They say all great nations have had an independence war. They had to fight for their independence, for the discovery of the identity, of the core of the ideals that unify us. And they haven't had that. There's constantly been factions, there's been divisions, there's been pressures from empires, from United States and from Russia, from NATO in Europe, everybody telling them what to do. Now they want to discover who they are. And there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight for the safety of our homeland, but we're also going to fight for our identity. And that, on top of the fact that there's just, if you look at the history of Ukraine, and there's certain other countries like this, there are certain cultures are feisty in their pride of being part of being the citizens of that nation. Ukraine is that, Poland was that. You just look at history. In certain countries, you do not want to occupy. I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about Poland in this way. They're like, this is a big problem. If we occupy this land for prolonged periods of time, they're going to be a pain in their ass. They're not going to be, want to be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, you know, leaders come and go. I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, those seem throughout the 20th century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just like sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers impose their rules. That's interesting though, because you said it's always been under conflict and leaders have come and gone. So you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that. Yeah, because, well, because it's a very fertile land, it's great for agriculture. So a lot of people want to, I mean, I think they've developed this culture because they've constantly been occupied by different people for different peoples. And so maybe there is something to that where you've constantly had to feel like within the blood of the generations, there's the struggle for, against the man, against the imposition of rules against oppression and all that kind of stuff. And that stays with them. So there's a will there. But a lot of other aspects are also part of that has to do with the reverse Mollick kind of situation where social media has definitely played a part of it. Also different charismatic individuals have had to play a part. The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky, stayed in Kiev during the invasion is a huge inspiration to them because most leaders, as you could imagine, when the capital of the nation is under attack, the wise thing, the smart thing that the United States advised Zelensky to do is to flee and to be the leader of the nation from a distant place. He said, fuck that, I'm staying put. Everyone around him, there was a pressure to leave and he didn't. And those singular acts really can unify a nation. There's a lot of people that criticize Zelensky within Ukraine. Before the war, he was very unpopular, even still, but they put that aside for especially that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah. A lot of those kinds of things come together to create something within people. These things always, of course, though, like how zoomed out of a view do you want to take? Because yeah, you describe it as like an anti-Molotov thing happened within Ukraine because it brought the Ukrainian people together in order to fight a common enemy. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. In the end, we don't know how this is all going to play out, right? But if you zoom it out from a level, on a global level, they're coming together to fight. That could make a conflict larger. You know what I mean? I don't know what the right answer is here. It seems like a good thing that they came together. But we don't know how this is all going to play out. If this all turns into nuclear war, we'll be like, okay, that was the bad. Oh yeah. So I was describing the reverse Moloch for the local level. Exactly. Yeah. Now, this is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources, the nation and the nation supporting Ukraine into the war effort, are you not beating the drums of war that is much bigger than Ukraine? In fact, even the Ukrainian leaders are speaking of it this way. This is not a war between two nations. This is the early days of a world war, if we don't play this correctly. Yes. We need cool heads from our leaders. So from Ukraine's perspective, Ukraine needs to win the war. Because what does winning the war mean? Is coming to peace negotiations, an agreement that guarantees no more invasions. And then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who. And you stop that. And basically, from their perspective is, you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world who's watching carefully, including Russia and China and different players on the geopolitical stage, that this kind of conflict is not going to be productive if you engage in it. So you want to teach everybody a lesson, let's not do World War III. It's gonna be bad for everybody. It's a lose-lose. It's a deep lose-lose. Doesn't matter. And I think that's actually a correct... When I zoom out, I mean, 99% of what I think about is just individual human beings and human lives, and just that war is horrible. But when you zoom out, I think from a geopolitics perspective, we should realize that it's entirely possible that we will see a World War III in the 21st century. And this is like a dress rehearsal for that. And so the way we play this as a human civilization will define whether we do or don't have a World War III. How we discuss war, how we discuss nuclear war, the kind of leaders we elect and prop up, the kind of memes we circulate, because you have to be very careful when you're being pro-Ukraine, for example. You have to realize that you're being... You are also indirectly feeding the ever-increasing military-industrial complex. So you have to be extremely careful that when you say pro-Ukraine or pro-anybody, you're pro-human beings, not pro the machine that creates narratives that says it's pro-human beings. But it's actually, if you look at the raw use of funds and resources, it's actually pro making weapons and shooting bullets and dropping bombs. Right. We have to just somehow get the meme into everyone's heads that the real enemy is war itself. That's the enemy we need to defeat. And that doesn't mean to say that there isn't justification for small local scenarios, adversarial conflicts. If you have a leader who is starting wars, they're on the side of team war, basically. It's not that they're on the side of team country, whatever that country is. It's they're on the side of team war. So that needs to be stopped and put down. But you also have to find a way that your corrective measure doesn't actually then end up being co-opted by the war machine and creating greater war. Again, the playing field is finite. The scale of conflict is now getting so big that the weapons that can be used are so mass-destructive that we can't afford another giant conflict. We won't make it. What existential threat, in terms of us not making it, are you most worried about? What existential threat to human civilization? We got like- We're going down a dark path, huh? It's good. Well, no, it's a dark- No, it's like, while we're in the somber place, we might as well. Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you the most? We mentioned asteroids. We mentioned AGI, nuclear weapons. The one that's on my mind the most, mostly because I think it's the one where we have actually a real chance to move the needle on in a positive direction, or more specifically, stop some really bad things from happening, really dumb, avoidable things, is bio-risks. In what kind of bio-risks? In terms of- There's so many fun options. So many. So, of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring viruses or pathogens. And then also, as time and technology goes on, and technology becomes more and more democratized into the hands of more and more people, the risk of synthetic pathogens. And whether or not you fall into the camp of COVID was gain of function, accidental lab leak, or whether it was purely naturally occurring, either way, we are facing a future where synthetic pathogens or human meddled with pathogens either accidentally get out or get into the hands of bad actors, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, either way. And so that means we need more robustness for that. And you would think that us having this nice little dry run, which is what? As awful as COVID was, and all those poor people that died, it was still like child's play compared to what a future one could be in terms of fatality rate. And so you'd think that we'd be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness. And meanwhile, the budget in the last two years for the US, sorry, they just did this, I can't remember the name of what the actual budget was, but it was like a multi trillion dollar budget that the US just set aside. And originally in that, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, right? The original allocation in this new budget for future pandemic preparedness was 60 billion. So tiny proportion of it. That proceeded to get whittled down to like 30 billion to 15 billion, all the way down to 2 billion out of multiple trillions for a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions. We've just finished, we're barely even, we're not even really out of it. It basically got whittled down to nothing because for some reason people think that, whew, all right, we've got the pandemic out of the way. That was that one. And the reason for that is that people are, and I say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community, but there's an immense amount of naivety about, they think that nature is the main risk moving forward. And it really isn't. And I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading about that's sort of being proposed right now called Deep Vision. And the idea is to go out into the wilds, and we're not talking about just like, you know, within cities, like deep into like caves that people don't go to, deep into the Arctic, wherever, scour the Earth for whatever the most dangerous possible pathogens could be that they can find. And then not only do you try and find these, bring samples of them back to laboratories. And again, whether you think COVID was a lab leak or not, I'm not going to get into that, but we have historically had so many, as a civilization, we've had so many lab leaks from even like the highest level security things. People should go and just read it. It's like a comedy show of just how many they are, how leaky these labs are, even when they do their best efforts. So bring these things then back to civilization. That's step one of the badness. The next step would be to then categorize them, do experiments on them and categorize them by their level of potential pandemic lethality. And then the piece de resistance on this plan is to then publish that information freely on the internet about all these pathogens, including their genome, which is literally like the building instructions of how to do them on the internet. And this is something that genuinely a pocket of the scientific community thinks is a good idea. And I think on expectation, and their argument is that, oh, this is good because it might buy us some time to develop vaccines, which, okay, sure, maybe would have made sense prior to mRNA technology. But mRNA, we can develop a vaccine now when we find a new pathogen within a couple of days. Now then there's all the trials and so on. Those trials would have to happen anyway in the case of a brand new thing. So you're saving maybe a couple of days. So that's the upside. Meanwhile, the downside is you're not only bringing the risk of these pathogens of getting leaked, but you're literally handing it out to every bad actor on Earth who would be doing cartwheels. I'm talking about like Kim Jong-un, ISIS, people who think the rest of the world is their enemy. And in some cases, they think that killing themselves is a noble cause. And you're literally giving them the building blocks of how to do this. It's the most batshit idea I've ever heard. On expectation, it's probably like minus EV of multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this. Certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. So the cost benefit is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. And I was trying to wrap my head around what's going wrong in people's minds to think that this is a good idea. And it's not that it's malice or anything like that. I think it's that the proponents, they're actually overly naive about the interactions of humanity. And well, like that there are bad actors who will use this for bad things. Because not only will it- if you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves, which given in 10 years time, the technology is getting cheaper and easier to use. But even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. Like what would you do if there's like some deadly new virus that we were published on the internet in terms of its building blocks? Kim Jong Un could be like, hey, if you don't let me build my nuclear weapons, I'm going to release this. I've managed to build it. Well, now he's actually got a credible bluff. We don't know. It's just like handing the keys, it's handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense. The possible, I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys, which is a whole another problem, defining who the good guys are. But the good guys are like an order of magnitude higher competence. And so they can stay ahead of the bad actors by just being very good at the defense. By very good, not meaning like a little bit better, but an order of magnitude better. But of course, the question is in each of those individual disciplines, is that feasible? Can you, can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence, leapfrog to the place where the good guys are? Yeah. I mean, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this particular plan of like, with the thing I described, this deep vision thing, where at least then that would maybe make sense for steps one and step two of getting the information, but then why would you release it, the information to your literal enemies? That doesn't fit at all in that perspective of trying to be ahead of them. You're literally handing them the weapon. But there's different levels of release, right? So there's the kind of secrecy where you don't give it to anybody, but there's a release where you incrementally give it to major labs. So it's not public release, but it's like you're giving it to major labs. There's different layers of reasonability. But the problem there is it's going to, if you go anywhere beyond complete secrecy, it's going to leak. That's the thing. It's very hard to keep secrets. And so that's still- Information is- So you might as well release it to the public, is that argument. So you either go complete secrecy or you release it to the public. So, which is essentially the same thing. It's going to leak anyway if you don't do complete secrecy. Right. Which is why you shouldn't get the information in the first place. Yeah. I mean, in that, I think- Well, that's a solution. The solution is either don't get the information in the first place or be, keep it incredibly, incredibly contained. See, I think it really matters which discipline we're talking about. So in the case of biology, I do think you're very right. We shouldn't even be, it should be forbidden to even think about that. Meaning don't just even collect the information, but don't do, I mean, gain-of-function research is a really iffy area. I mean, it's all about cost benefits, right? There are some scenarios where I could imagine the cost benefit of a gain-of-function research is very, very clear, where you've evaluated all the potential risks, factored in the probability that things can go wrong and not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns as well, tried to quantify that. And then even then it's like orders of magnitude better to do that. I'm behind that argument, but the point is that there's this naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, I get it, the science community, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but some people within the science community just think that everyone's good and everyone just cares about getting knowledge and doing the best for the world. And unfortunately, that's not the case. I wish we lived in that world, but we don't. Yeah, I mean, there's a lie. Listen, I've been criticizing the science community broadly quite a bit. There's so many brilliant people that brilliance is somehow a hindrance sometimes, because it has a bunch of blind spots. And then you start to look at the history of science, how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science, because it is a fun game. You're building, you're going to conferences, you're building on top of each other's ideas, breakthroughs. Hi, I think I've realized how this particular molecule works and I can do this kind of experiment and everyone else is impressed. Oh, cool. No, I think you're wrong. Let me show you why you're wrong. And that little game, everyone gets really excited and they get excited. Oh, I came up with a pill that solves this problem. It's going to help a bunch of people. And I came up with a giant study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not. And you get lost in this game and you forget to realize this game, just like Mullick, can have unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization or divide human civilization or have dire geopolitical consequences. The most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the biology of the virus, it seems like. I mean, I could just list them forever, but one of them is the complete distrust of public institutions. The other one is because of that public distrust, I feel like if a much worse pandemic came along, we as a world have not cried wolf. And if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck masks, fuck- Fuck vaccines, fuck everything. And they'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. Because that's the thing, there were certain actions made by certain health public figures where they very knowingly told, it was a white lie, it was intended in the best possible way, such as early on when there was clearly a shortage of masks. And so they said to the public, oh, don't get masks, there's no evidence that they work. Don't get them, they don't work. In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. That was the real stinker. Yeah, no, no. Unless you know how to do it properly, you're going to get sicker, or you're more likely to catch the virus, which is just absolute crap. And they put that out there. And it's pretty clear the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they really needed it for health workers, which makes sense. I agree. But the cost of lying to the public when that then comes out, people aren't as stupid as they think they are. And that's, I think, where this distrust of experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people overtly, but B, people have been treated like idiots. Now, that's not to say that there aren't a lot of stupid people who have a lot of wacky ideas around COVID and all sorts of things. But if you treat the general public like children, they're going to see that, they're going to notice that, and that is going to absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish, if Fauci and these other leaders who, I mean, I can't imagine how nightmare his job has been over the last few years. Hell on earth. So I have a lot of sympathy for the position he's been in. But if he could just come out and be like, okay, look, guys, hands up. We didn't handle this as well as we could have. These are all the things I would have done differently in hindsight. I apologize for this and this and this and this. That would go so far. Maybe I'm being naive. Who knows? Maybe this would backfire, but I don't think it would. To someone like me, even, because I've lost trust in a lot of these things. But I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think have good epistemics on this stuff. But if they could sort of put their hands up and go, okay, these are the spots where we screwed up. This, this, this. This was our reasons. Yeah, we actually told a little white lie here. We did it for this reason. We're really sorry. Where they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency thing. That would go so far to rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs to happen. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, his job was very tough and all those kinds of things. But I see arrogance and arrogance prevented him from being honest in that way previously. And I think arrogance will prevent him from being honest in that way now when you leaders, I think young people are seeing that, that kind of talking down to people from a position of power, I hope is the way of the past. People really like authenticity and they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people. And I think that just- I mean, he still has a chance to do that, I think. I mean, I don't want to- Yeah, sure. I mean, just- I don't think he's- I doubt he's listening, but if he is, like, hey, I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I don't have an opinion on whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think coming clean on the- It's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. I won't expect any government to handle it well because it was so difficult. So many moving pieces, so much lack of information and so on. But the step to rebuilding trust is to go, okay, look, we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong. And for my part, I did this wrong in this part. That would be huge. All of us can do that. I mean, I was struggling for a while whether I want to talk to him or not. I talked to his boss, Francis Collins. Another person that screwed up in terms of trust, lost a little bit of my respect too. There seems to have been a kind of dishonesty in the back rooms in that they didn't trust people to be intelligent. Like, we need to tell them what's good for them. We know what's good for them. That kind of idea. To be fair, the thing that- what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Nut picking. Social media does that. So you've got like nitpicking. Nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest- if you have a group of people, let's say people who are vaccine- I don't like the term anti-vaxxer. People who are vaccine hesitant, vaccine speculative. What social media did or the media or anyone, their opponents would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, I think I need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something. Select the craziest ones and then have that beamed to- so from someone like Fauci or Francis's perspective, that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff as us. They're getting the same media reports. I mean, they might get some more information. But they too are going to get the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is. Like, the real. Right. That just, yes. And that just means they're not social media savvy. So one of the skills of being on social media is to be able to filter that in your mind, like to understand, to put into proper context. To realize that what you are saying, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity. Nut picking. And there's nothing wrong with putting motor oil up your ass. It's just one of the better aspects of- Hey, do what you want. Depends on what you want to do. I do this every weekend. Okay. Where the hell did that analogy come from in my mind? Like what? I don't know. I think you need to, there's some Freudian thing you would need to deeply investigate with a therapist. Okay. What about AI? Are you worried about AGI, superintelligence systems or paperclip maximizer type of situation? Yes. I'm definitely worried about it, but I feel kind of bipolar in that some days I wake up and I'm like- You're excited about the future? Well, exactly. I'm like, wow, we can unlock the mysteries of the universe, escape the game. Because I spend all my time thinking about these molecule problems, what is the solution to them? In some ways you need this omnibenevolent, omniscient, omni-wise coordination mechanism that can make us all not do the molecule thing, or provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this molecule process. In some ways, that's the strongest argument to me for the race to build AGI, is that maybe we can't survive without it. But the flip side to that is, unfortunately, now that there's multiple actors trying to build AGI, this was fine 10 years ago when it was just DeepMind, but then other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic. Now it's like the whole thing has got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the one that optimises for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage, and so we're more likely the ones to build the AGI. That's the same cycle that you're in, and there's no clear solution to that. If you go and try and stop all the different companies, then the good ones will stop because they're the ones within the West's reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue, and then they're even more likely. It's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. At the same time, I know at least some of the folks at DeepMind, and they're incredible, and they're thinking about this. They're very aware of this problem, and they're I think some of the smartest people on Earth. Yeah, the culture is important there because they are thinking about that, and they're some of the best machine learning engineers. It's possible to have a company or a community of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics. Exactly, and importantly, they're also game theorists, and because this is ultimately a game theory problem, this Moloch mechanism, and how do we voice arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this. Again, luckily, there's a lot of smart, non-naive game theorists within that group. Yes, I'm concerned about it, and I think it's again a thing that we need people to be thinking about in terms of how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics, and how do we solve the thing of, Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem. Because obviously, there's a chance. The hope is that you build something that's super intelligent, and by definition of being super intelligent, it will also become super wise and have the wisdom to know what the right goals are. Hopefully, those goals include keeping humanity alive, right? But Bostrom says that actually those two things, super intelligence and super wisdom, aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually orthogonal things, and how do we make it so that they are correlated? How do we guarantee it? Because we need it to be guaranteed, really, to know that we're doing the thing safely. I think that merging of intelligence and wisdom, at least my hope is that this whole process happens sufficiently slowly, that we're constantly having these kinds of debates, that we have enough time to figure out how to modify each version of the system as it becomes more and more intelligent. Yes, buying time is a good thing, definitely. Anything that slows everything down. Everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Or at least, well, it depends. Again, some people think that we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni-wise coordination mechanism. There's also an argument to that. Yeah, I don't know. LBW Well, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history has people in it that are predicting doom just around the corner. There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost fun to think about the destruction of everything. Just objectively speaking, I've talked and listened to a bunch of people, and they are gravitating towards that. I think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories, is they love to be the person that figured out some deep, fundamental thing about the, that's going to mark something extremely important about the history of human civilization. Because then I will be important. When in reality, most of us will be forgotten, and life will go on. One of the sad things about whenever anything traumatic happens to you, whenever you lose loved ones, or just tragedy happens, you realize life goes on. Even after a nuclear war that will wipe out some large percentage of the population and will torture people for years to come because of the sort of, I mean, the effects of a nuclear winter, people will still survive. Life will still go on. I mean, it depends on the kind of nuclear war, but in the case of nuclear war, it will still go on. That's one of the amazing things about life, it finds a way. In that sense, I feel like the doom and gloom thing is a... HM. Yeah, we don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy. CB. Yes, that's exactly. HM. Yes. I very much agree with that. I have a slight feeling from the amount of time we've spent in this conversation talking about this because it's like, is this even a net positive if it's making everyone feel, or in some ways, making people imagine these bad scenarios can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But at the same time, that's weighed off with at least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking. I think particularly, the reason why I want to talk about this to your audience is that on average, they're the type of people who gravitate towards these kind of topics because they're intellectually curious and they can sort of sense that there's trouble brewing. I think there's a reason people are thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability, it's increased in probability, certainly over the last few years. Trajectories have not gone favorably, let's put it, since 2010. So it's right, I think, for people to be thinking about it. But that's where they're like, I think, whether it's a useful fiction or whether it's actually true or whatever you want to call it, I think having this faith, this is where faith is valuable because it gives you at least this anchor of hope. I'm not just saying it to trick myself. I do think there's something out there that wants us to win. I think there's something that really wants us to win. You just have to be okay, now I sound really crazy, but open your heart to it a little bit. Yeah. And it will give you the sort of breathing room with which to marinate on the solutions. We are the ones who have to come up with the solutions, but we can use, there's hashtag positivity. There's value in that. Yeah, you have to kind of imagine all the destructive trajectories that lay in our future and then believe in the possibility of avoiding those trajectories. All while, you said audience, all while sitting back, which is the two people that listen to this are probably sitting on a beach smoking some weed. Gosh, dammit. It's a beautiful sunset or they're looking at just the waves going in and out. And ultimately, there's a kind of deep belief there in the momentum of humanity to figure it all out. I think we'll make it, but we've got a lot of work to do. What makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun, this battle of Polytopia, I still, man, I love those games so much. They're so good. And that one for people who don't know, Battle of Polytopia is a really radical simplification of a civilization type of game. It still has a lot of the skill tree development, a lot of the strategy, but it's easy enough to play on a phone. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. They've really figured it out. It's one of the most elegantly designed games I've ever seen. It's incredibly complex. And yet being, again, it walks that line between complexity and simplicity in this really, really great way. And they use pretty colors that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains very well. It's fun. Video games are so fun. Most of this life is just about fun, escaping all the suffering to find the fun. What's energy healing? I have in my notes, energy healing question mark. What's that about? Oh, man. God, your audience is going to think I'm mad. So the two crazy things that happened to me, the one was the voice in the head that said, you're going to win this tournament, and then I won the tournament. The other craziest thing that's happened to me was in 2018. I started getting this weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound distortion, where voices, particularly men's voices, became incredibly unpleasant to listen to. It would be falsely amplified or something. And it was almost like a physical sensation in my ear, which was really unpleasant. And it would last for a few hours and then go away and then come back for a few hours and go away. And I went and got hearing tests and they found that the bottom end, I was losing the hearing in that ear. And in the end, the doctor said they think it was this thing called Meniere's disease, which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their hearing. It often comes with dizzy spells and other things because the inner ear gets all messed up. Now, I don't know if that's actually what I had, but that's what at least a couple of one doctor said to me. But anyway, so I'd had three months of this stuff, this going on, it was really getting me down. I was at Burning Man, of all places. I don't mean to be that person talking about Burning Man. But I was there. And again, I'd had it and I was unable to listen to music, which is not what you want because Burning Man is a very loud, intense place. And I was just having a really rough time. And on the final night, I get talking to this girl who's like a friend of a friend. And I mentioned, I was like, oh, I'm really down in the dumps about this. And she's like, oh, well, I've done a little bit of energy healing. Would you like me to have a look? I was like, sure. Now, this is, again, deep. I was, you know, no time in my life for this. I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I was just like, it's all bullshit. It's all wooey nonsense. But I was like, sure, have a go. And she starts with her hand and she says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts sucking over my ear, not actually touching me, but close to it, with her mouth. And it was really unpleasant. I was like, whoa, can you stop? She's like, no, no, no, there's something there. I need to get it. And I was like, no, no, no, I really don't like it. Please, this is really loud. She's like, I need to just bear with me. And she does it. I don't know how long, for a few minutes. And then she eventually collapses on the ground, freezing cold, crying. And I'm just like, I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm thoroughly freaked out, as is everyone else watching. Just like, what the hell? And we warm her up and she's like, oh, what? She was really shaken up. And she's like, I don't know what that was. She said it was something very unpleasant and dark. Don't worry, it's gone. I think you'll be fine in a couple of weeks. You'll have the physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine. But, you know, she was like that. So I was so rattled, A, because the potential that actually I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and that she was scared. That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you do this. This is the thing. And now you're terrified. Like you pulled like some kind of exorcism or something. What the fuck is going on? So it was the most insane experience. And frankly, it took me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it. But my ear problem went away about a couple of weeks later. And touch wood, I've not had any issues since. That gives you like hints that maybe there's something out there. I mean, I don't, again, I don't have an explanation for this. The most probable explanation was, you know, I was a burning man. I was in a very open state. Let's just leave it at that. And, you know, placebo is an incredibly powerful thing and a very not understood thing. So almost assigning the word placebo to it reduces it down to a way that it doesn't deserve to be reduced down. Maybe there's a whole science of what we call placebo. Maybe there's a, placebo is a door. Self-healing, you know? And I mean, I don't know what the problem was. Like I was told it was many ears. I don't want to say I definitely had that because I don't want people to think that, oh, that's how, you know, if they do have that because it's a terrible disease and if they have that, that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them. I don't know. And I also don't, I don't, and you're absolutely right to say like using even the word placebo is like it comes with this like baggage of like frame and I don't want to reduce that. All I can do is describe the experience and what happened. I cannot put an ontological framework around it. I can't say why it happened, what the mechanism was, what the problem even was in the first place. I just know that something crazy happened and it was while I was in an open state and fortunately for me, it made the problem go away. But what I took away from it, again, it was part of this, you know, this took me on this journey of becoming more humble about what I think I know. Because as I said before, I was like, I was in the like Richard Dawkins train of atheism in terms of there is no God. There's everything like that is bullshit. We know everything. We know, you know, the only way we can get through, we know how medicine works and its molecules and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well, there's clearly more for us to understand. And that doesn't mean that it's ascientific as well. Because, you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it still can apply to this situation. Like I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test this experimentally. I haven't really, you know, I don't know how we would go about doing that. We'd have to find other people with the same condition, I guess, and like try and repeat the experiment. But it doesn't, just because something happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding, it doesn't mean that the scientific method can't be used for it. LRW2 Yeah, I think the scientific method sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences. Scientific method is a process to carve away at the mystery all around us. And experiences like this is just a reminder that we're mostly shrouded in mystery still. That's it. It's just like a humility. Like we haven't really figured this whole thing out. MP But at the same time, we have found ways to act, you know, we're clearly doing something right. Because think of the technological scientific advancements, the knowledge that we have, that would blow people's minds even from 100 years ago. LRW2 Yeah, and we've even allegedly got out to space and landed on the moon. Although I still haven't, I have not seen evidence of the earth being round, but I'm keeping an open mind. Speaking of which, you studied physics and astrophysics. Just to go to that, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you, how did that come to be? Like, when did you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this? MP As early as I can remember. I was very lucky that my mom and my dad, but particularly my mom, my mom is like the most nature, she is Mother Earth. It's the only way to describe her. Just, she's like Dr. Dolittle, animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly. LRW2 As she sings. MP Yeah, she's just, she just is Mother Earth. And she has always been fascinated by, you know, she doesn't have any, you know, she never went to university or anything like that. She's actually phobic of maths. If I try and get her to like, you know, I was trying to teach her poker and she hated it. But she's so deeply curious. And that just got instilled in me when, you know, we would sleep out under the stars whenever it was, you know, the two nights a year when it was warm enough in the UK to do that. And we'll just lie out there until we fell asleep, looking at, looking for satellites, looking for shooting stars. And I was just always, I don't know whether it was from that, but I've always naturally gravitated to like, the biggest questions. And also the like, the most layers of abstraction. I love just like, what's the meta question? What's the meta question? And so on. So I think it just came from that really. And then on top of that, like physics, you know, it also made logical sense in that it was a degree that was subject that ticked the box of being, you know, answering these really big picture questions, but it was also extremely useful. It like has a very high utility in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was going to become like a research scientist. My original plan was I want to be a professional astronomer. So it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions and it's not like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is overly pragmatic, not overly, is very pragmatic. But this is, yeah, physics is a good combination of the two. Yeah. At least for me, it made sense and I was good at it. I liked it. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like I did an immense amount of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, it made the most sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK, age 17, which is crazy because, you know, in US you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose your major. Yeah. I think the first few years of college, you focus on the drugs and only as you get closer to the end, do you start to think, oh shit, this wasn't about that. And I owe the government a lot of money. How many alien civilizations are out there? When you looked up at the stars with your mom and you were counting them, what's your mom think about the number of alien civilization? I actually don't know. I would imagine she would take the viewpoint of, you know, she's pretty humble and she knows there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there. So she would- Spawn sites? Spawn sites, yeah. This is our spawn site. Spawn sites. Yeah, spawn sites in polytopia, we spawned on earth. You know, it's- Hmm. Yeah. Spawn sites. Why does that feel weird to say spawn? Because it makes me feel like it's, there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations. That's why the word spawn. Because it feels like life that originated on earth really originated here. Right. It is unique to this particular. Yeah. I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, that completely different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn. But I guess it implies that there's some spark that is- Yeah. Which I kind of like the idea of it. Yeah. And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life on earth ends? Is it going to restart again? Probably not. It depends. It depends on the type of, you know, what's the thing that kills it off, right? If it's a paperclip maximizer, not for the example, but some kind of very self-replicating, high on the capabilities, very low on the wisdom type thing. So whether that's, you know, gray goo, green goo, you know, like nanobots or just a shitty misaligned AI that thinks it needs to turn everything into paperclips. You know, if it's something like that, then it's going to be very hard for life, you know, complex life. Because by definition, you know, a paperclip maximizer is the ultimate instantiation of molecule. Deeply low complexity, over-optimization on a single thing, sacrificing everything else, turning the whole world into- Although something tells me, like, if we actually take a paperclip maximizer, it destroys everything. It's a really dumb system that just envelops the whole of Earth. And the universe beyond. I didn't know that part, but okay, great. It becomes a multi-planetary paperclip maximizer? Well, it just propagates. I mean, it depends whether it figures out how to jump the vacuum gap. But again, I mean, this is all silly because it's a hypothetical thought experiment, which I think doesn't actually have much practical application to the AI safety problem. But it's just a fun thing to play around with. But if by definition it is maximally intelligent, which means it is maximally good at navigating the environment around it in order to achieve its goal, but extremely bad at choosing goals in the first place. So again, we're talking on this orthogonality thing, right? It's very low on wisdom, but very high on capability. Then it will figure out how to jump the vacuum gap between planets and stars and so on, and thus just turn every atom it gets its hands on into paperclips. Yeah, by the way, for people who- Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is. But does not mean that virality is necessarily all about maximizing paperclips. In that case, it is. So for people who don't know, this is just a thought experiment example of an AI system that has a goal and is willing to do anything to accomplish that goal, including destroying all life on Earth and all human life and all of consciousness in the universe for the goal of producing a maximum number of paperclips. Okay. Or whatever its optimization function was that it was set at. But don't you think- It could be recreating Lexus. Maybe it'll tile the universe in Lexus. Go on. I like this idea. No, I'm just kidding. That's better. That's more interesting than paperclips. That could be infinitely optimal if I were to say so myself. It's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be. That's its end state. Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve, but that's up to... Different people have different perspectives. But don't you think within the paperclip world that would emerge, just like in the zeros and ones that make up a computer, that would emerge beautiful complexities. Like it won't suppress... As you scale to multiple planets and throughout, there'll emerge these little worlds that on top of the fabric of maximizing paperclips, that would emerge little societies of paperclip. Well, then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore because by the day... If you think of what a paperclip is, it is literally just a piece of bent iron. Yes. Right? So if it's maximizing that throughout the universe, it's taking every atom it gets its hand on into somehow turning it into iron or steel and then bending it into that shape and then done and done. By definition, like paperclips, there is no way for... Okay, so you're saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something. Well, no, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's not just... It's creating those paperclips and the act of creating, there's going to be a process and that process will have a dance to it because it's not like sequential thing. There's a whole complex three-dimensional system of paperclips. People like string theory, it's supposed to be strings that are interacting in fascinating ways. I'm sure paperclips are very string-like. They can be interacting in very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three-dimensional... I'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with a theory of everything. It has to create wormholes. It has to break... It has to understand quantum mechanics. I love your optimism. This is where I'd say we're going into the realm of pathological optimism, where it's... I'm sure there'll be a... I think there's an intelligence that emerges from that system. So you're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the fabric of reality and will find a way. Kind of like Goblin says, life will find a way. You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogenous dead soup. It's not perfectly homogenous. It has to... It's perfectly maximal in the production. I don't know why people keep thinking it's homogenous. It maximizes the number of paperclips. That's the only thing. It's not trying to be homogenous. It's trying to... True. True, true, true, true. It's trying to maximize paperclips. So you're saying that because... Kind of like in the Big Bang, it seems like there were clusters. There was more stuff here than there. That was enough of the patonicity that kickstarted the evolutionary process. It's the little weirdnesses that will make it beautiful. Even out of... Yeah, complexity emerges. Interesting. Okay. Well, so how does that line up then with the whole heat death of the universe, right? Because that's another sort of instantiation of this. It's like everything becomes so far apart and so cold and so perfectly mixed that it's like homogenous grayness. Do you think that even out of that homogenous grayness where there's no negative entropy, there's no free energy that we understand even from that new stuff? Yeah, the paperclip maximizer or any other intelligent systems will figure out ways to travel to other universes to create big bangs within those universes or through black holes to create whole other worlds to break what we consider are the limitations of physics. The paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists. And we should be humble to realize that we don't... Yeah, but because it just wants to make more paperclips. So it's going to go into those universes and turn them into paperclips. Yeah, but we humans, not humans, but complex system exists on top of that. We're not interfering with it. This complexity emerges from... The simple base state. The simple base state. Whether it's, yeah, whether it's plank lengths or paperclips as the base unit. Yeah, you can think of the universe as a paperclip maximizer because it's doing some dumb stuff. Physics seems to be pretty dumb. I don't know if you can summarize it. Yeah, the laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges. And its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I mean, I don't know what's a nice way, maybe laws of thermodynamics could be... I don't know if you can assign goals to physics, but if you formulate in the sense of goals, it's very similar to paperclip maximizing in the dumbness of the goals. But the pockets of complexity as it emerge is where beauty emerges. That's where life emerges. That's where intelligence, that's where humans emerge. And I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason we hate it... I think, yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is another baked in law of reality. And you're trusting that emergence will find a way to even out of seemingly the most malachy, awful, plain outcome, emergence will still find a way. I love that as a philosophy. I think it's very nice. I would wield it carefully because there's large error bars on that and the certainty of that. How about we build the paperclip maximizer and find out? Classic. Yeah. Moloch is doing cartwheels, man. Yeah. But the thing is, it will destroy humans in the process, which is the reason we really don't like it. We seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing. Would that make you sad if AI systems that are beautiful, that are conscious, that are interesting and complex and intelligent ultimately lead to the death of humans? Would that make you sad? If humans led to the death of humans? Sorry. If they would supersede humans. Oh, if some AI? Yeah, AI would end humans. I mean, that's the reason why I'm in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than, say, bio risk. Because at least with AI, if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans, but it does it for some higher purpose, it needs our atoms and energy to do something, at least now the universe is going on to do something interesting. Whereas if it wipes everything, bio just kills everything on Earth and that's it. Earth cannot spawn anything more meaningful in the few hundred million years it has left because it doesn't have much time left. One of my favorite books I've ever read is Novacene by James Lovelock, who sadly just died. He wrote it when he was like 99. He died aged 102, so it's a fairly new book. He sort of talks about that. He thinks it's building off this Gaia theory where Earth is a living some form of intelligence itself and that this is the next step. It's this new intelligence that is maybe silicon based as opposed to carbon based, goes on to do. It's really sort of, in some ways, an optimistic but really fatalistic book. I don't know if I fully subscribe to it, but it's a beautiful piece to read anyway. Am I sad by that idea? I think so, yes. Actually, yeah, this is the reason why I'm sad by the idea. Because if something is truly brilliant and wise and smart and truly super intelligent, it should be able to figure out abundance. If it figures out abundance, it shouldn't need to kill us off. It should be able to find a way for us. The universe is huge. There should be plenty of space for it to go out and do all the things it wants to do and give us a little pocket where we can continue doing our things and we can continue to do things and so on. Again, if it's so supremely wise, it shouldn't even be worried about the game theoretic considerations that by leaving us alive will then go and create another super intelligent agent that it then has to compete against. Because it should be omniwise and smart enough to not have to concern itself with that. Unless it deems humans to be kind of assholes. The humans are a source of a lose-lose kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no. Moloch is. That's why I think it's important to say. But maybe humans are the source of Moloch. No, I think game theory is the source of Moloch. Because Moloch exists in non-human systems as well. It happens within agents within a game. It applies to agents, but it can apply to a species that's on an island of animals. Rats out competing. The ones that massively consume all the resources are the ones that are going to win out over the more chill, socialized ones. And so, it creates this Malthusian trap. Moloch exists in little pockets in nature as well. Well, I wonder if it's actually a result of consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics. Maybe AI will have to kill off every organism that's- Now you're talking about killing off competition. Not competition, but just like the way it's like the weeds or whatever in a beautiful flower garden. Parasites. The parasites, yeah. On the whole system. Now, of course, it won't do that completely. It'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites. It'll ring fence. Yeah, and there'll be somebody doing a PhD on, they'll prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But in terms of letting us run wild outside of the geographically constricted region, that might decide to make it. No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non-Moloch behavior amongst humans. So, I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. I don't know if you answered the aliens question. No, I didn't. You had a good conversation with Toby Ward about various sides of the universe. Did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone. So, the classic Fermi paradox question is there are so many spawn points, and yet, it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio signals into space. So, surely, given the vastness of space, we should be, and even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever, at least radio signals and so on. But seemingly, things are very silent out there. Now, of course, it depends on who you speak to. Some people say that they're getting signals all the time and so on. I don't want to make an epistemic statement on that. It seems like there's a lot of silence, and so that raises this paradox. And then, say, you know the Drake equation? So, the Drake equation is basically just a simple thing of trying to estimate the number of possible civilizations within the galaxy by multiplying the number of stars created per year by the number of stars that have planets, planets that are habitable, blah, blah, blah. So, all these different factors. And then you plug in numbers into that, and depending on the range of your lower bound and your upper bound point estimates that you put in, you get out a number at the end for the number of civilizations. But what Toby and his crew did differently was, Toby is a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute, they realized that it's basically a statistical quirk that if you put in point sources, even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources, because on some of these variables, the uncertainty is so large it spans maybe even a couple of hundred of orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going to lead to overestimates. And so, by putting stuff on a log scale, and then ran the simulation across the whole bucket of uncertainty, across all those orders of magnitude, when you do that, then actually the number comes out much, much smaller. And that's the more statistically rigorous, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a lot of hand-waving. As science goes, it's definitely just waving. I don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand-wavy. Anyway, when they did this, and then they did a Bayesian update on it as well to factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up. Because no evidence is actually a form of evidence, right? And the long and short of it comes out that we're roughly around 70% to be the only intelligent civilization in our galaxy thus far, and around 50-50 in the entire observable universe. Which sounds so crazily counterintuitive, but their math is legit. Well, yeah, the math around this particular equation, which the equation is ridiculous on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's different things, different components that can be estimated, and the error bars on which can be reduced with science. And hence, throughout, since the equation came out, the error bars have been coming out on different aspects. And so that it almost kind of says, this gives you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates over a period of time. And once you do, you can better and better understand. In the process of reducing the error bars, you'll get to understand actually what is the right way to find out where the aliens are, how many of them there are, and all those kinds of things. So I don't think it's good to use that for an estimation. I think you do have to think from more like from first principles, just looking at what life is on Earth, and trying to understand the very physics-based, chemistry, biology-based question of what is life, maybe computation-based. What the fuck is this thing? And that, like how difficult is it to create this thing? It's one way to say like how many planets like this are out there, all that kind of stuff, but it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective, the right way is to think what is this thing, and how does it originate? From very simple non-life things, how does complex life-like things emerge? From a rock to a bacteria, protein, and these like weird systems that encode information and pass information from self-replicate, and then also select each other and mutate in interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex systems. HB Right. Well, it's a form of information processing, right? LB Right. HB Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in, I guess, information processing? Maybe I'm getting bogged down. LB Well, it's doing some modification, and yeah, the input is some energy. HB Right. It's able to extract resources from its environment in order to achieve a goal. LB But the goal doesn't seem to be clear. HB Right. Well, the goal is to make more of itself. LB Yeah, but in a way that increases, I mean, I don't know if evolution is a fundamental law of the universe, but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes the chance of its survival. HB Individual agents within an ecosystem do, yes. Yes, evolution itself doesn't give a fuck. LB Right. HB It's a very, it don't care. It's just like, oh, you optimize it. Well, at least it's certainly, yeah, it doesn't care about the welfare of the individual agents within it, but it does seem to, I don't know, I think the majority mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing. It's to even try and give evolution a mindset. Because there's a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Less Wrong, which is an alien god. And he talks about the mistake we make when we try and think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though we're giving evolution some kind of agency and what it wants. Yeah, worth reading. But yeah. LB I would like to say that having interacted with a lot of really smart people that say that anthropomorphization is a mistake, I would like to say that saying that anthropomorphization is a mistake is a mistake. I think there's a lot of power in anthropomorphization, if I can only say that word correctly one time. I think that's actually a really powerful way to reason through things. And I think people, especially people in robotics, seem to run away from it as fast as possible. And I just- Can you give an example of how it helps in robotics? Oh, in that our world is a world of humans. And to see robots as fundamentally just tools runs away from the fact that we live in a world, a dynamic world of humans. That all these game theory systems we've talked about, that a robot that ever has to interact with humans, and I don't mean like intimate friendship interaction, I mean in a factory setting where it has to deal with the uncertainty of humans, all that kind of stuff. You have to acknowledge that the robot's behavior has an effect on the human just as much as the human has an effect on the robot. And there's a dance there. And you have to realize that this entity, when a human sees a robot, this is obvious in a physical manifestation of a robot, they feel a certain way. They have a fear, they have uncertainty, they have their own personal life projections. They have pets and dogs and the thing looks like a dog. They have their own memories of what a dog is like. They have certain feelings. And that's gonna be useful in a safety setting, safety critical setting, which is one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous situations. And a robot should really consider that in navigating its environment. And we humans are right to reason about how a robot should consider navigating its environment through anthropomorphization. I also think our brains are designed to think in human terms, like game theory, I think is best applied in the space of human decisions. And so... Right. You're dealing with things like AI. The reason I say anthropomorphization, we need to be careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying, overly, wrongly assuming that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us. Because it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate. Even dogs or even mice or whatever, in some ways, anthropomorphizing them is less of a mistake, I think, than an AI, even though it's an AI we built and so on. Because at least we know that they're running from the same substrate. And they've also evolved out of the same evolutionary process. They've followed this evolution of needing to compete for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff. Whereas an AI that has just popped into existence somewhere on a cloud server, let's say, or however it runs. I don't know whether they have an internal experience, I don't think they necessarily do. In fact, I don't think they do. But the point is that to try and apply any kind of modeling of thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do has to be done extremely carefully because they're so alien. Their method of whatever their form of thinking is, it's just so different because they've never had to evolve in the same way. LBW Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts, anthropomorphization is not going to hurt you. Engineers run away from it too fast. CMH I can see that. LBW For the most point, you're right. Do you have advice for young people today, like the 17 year old that you were, of how to live life you can be proud of, how to have a career you can be proud of in this world full of mullocks? CMH Think about the win-wins, look for win-win situations. And be careful not to overly use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win-win when it's not. That's difficult. I don't know how to advise people on that because it's something I'm still figuring out myself. But have that as a sort of default MO. Don't see things, everything is a zero-sum game. Try to find the positive-sumness and find ways, if there doesn't seem to be one, consider playing a different game. So I would suggest that. Do not become a professional poker player. Because people always ask, they're like, oh, she's a pro, I want to do that too. Fine, you could have done it when I started out. It was a very different situation back then. Poker is a great game to learn in order to understand the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try and make a living from it these days. It's very, very difficult to the point of being impossible. And then really, really be aware of how much time you spend on your phone and on social media. And really try and keep it to a minimum. Be aware that basically, every moment that you spend on it is bad for you. So it doesn't mean to say you can never do it, but just have that running in the background. I'm doing a bad thing for myself right now. I think that's the general rule of thumb. Of course, about becoming a professional poker player, if there is a thing in your life that's like that, and nobody can convince you otherwise, just fucking do it. Don't listen to anyone's advice. Find a thing that you can't be talked out of too. That's a thing. I like that. Yeah. You were a lead guitarist in a metal band. Did I write that down for something? What did you, what did you do it for? The performing? Was it the pure, the music of it? Was it just being a rock star? Why did you do it? So we only ever played two gigs. We didn't last, you know, it wasn't a very, we weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very into metal. It was my entire identity, sort of from the age of 16 to 23. What's the best metal band of all time? Don't ask me that. It's so hard to answer. So I know I had a long argument with, I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. So, you know, I've had friends who are very big Pantera fans. And so there was often arguments about what's the better metal band, Metallica versus Pantera. This is a more kind of 90s, maybe, discussion. But I was always on the side of Metallica, both musically and in terms of performance and the depth of lyrics and so on. But they were, basically, everybody was against me. Because if you're a true metal fan, I guess the idea goes is you can't possibly be a Metallica fan. I think that's crazy. Metallica's pop, it's like they sold out. Metallica are metal. They were the, I mean, again, you can't say who was the godfather of metal, blah, blah, blah. But they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant. You've named literally two of my favorite bands. When you ask that question, who are your favorite bands? I'm like, I don't know. Those are two that came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think, they just tick all the boxes for me. Yeah, I don't know. Nowadays, I kind of feel like a repulsion to the... I was that myself. I'd be like, who do you prefer more? You have to rank them. But it's this false zero-sum-ness that's like, why? They're so additive. There's no conflict. Although, when people ask that kind of question about anything, movies, I feel like it's hard work and it's unfair, but you should pick one. That's actually the same kind of... It's like a fear of a commitment. When people ask me, what's your favorite band? It's like, but it's good to pick. Exactly. And thank you for the tough question. Well, maybe not in a context when a lot of people are like, what? Why does this matter? No, it does. Are you still into metal? Funny enough, I was listening to a bunch before I came over here. Oh, like, do you use it for motivation or get you in a certain mood? Yeah, I was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before I came. Does that count as metal? I think so. It's like proto-metal and it's optimistic, happy, proto-metal. Yeah, I mean, all these genres bleed into each other. But yeah, sorry to answer your question about guitar playing, my relationship with it was kind of weird in that I was deeply uncreative. My objective would be to hear some really hard technical solo and then learn it, memorize it, and then play it perfectly. But I was incapable of trying to write my own music. It's like, the idea was just absolutely terrifying. But I was also just thinking, it'd be kind of cool to actually try starting a band again and getting back into it and write. But it's scary. It's scary. I mean, I put out some guitar playing just other people's covers. I play Comfortably Numb on the internet. It's scary too. It's scary putting stuff out there. And I had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing, both on piano and guitar. One of the reasons I started learning guitar is from Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. Crowley's solo. And one of the first solos I learned is that there's a beauty to it. There's a melodic beauty to it. It's tapping, right? Yeah, it's tapping. And it's a beautiful thing. And it's a beautiful thing to learn. And there's a beauty to it. There's a melodic beauty to it. There's some tapping, but it's just really fast. Beautiful, like arpeggios. Yeah, arpeggios. But there's a melody that you can hear through it. But there's also build up. It's a beautiful solo, but it's also technically just visually the way it looks. When a person watches, you feel like a rock star playing it. But it ultimately has to do with technical. You're not developing the part of your brain that I think requires you to generate beautiful music. It is ultimately technical in nature. And so that took me a long time to let go of that and just be able to write music myself. And that's a different journey, I think. I think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world, for example, where improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately, it's a more rewarding journey because your relationship with the guitar then becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create. I mean, creating stuff is... And it's something you work with. Because my relationship with my guitar was like it was something to tame and defeat. Yeah, it's a challenge. Yeah, which was kind of what my whole personality was back then. I was just very, as I said, very competitive, very just like must bend this thing to my will. Whereas writing music is like a dance. You work with it. But I think because of the competitive aspect, for me at least, that's still there, which creates anxiety about playing publicly or all that kind of stuff. I think there's just a harsh self-criticism within the whole thing. It's really, really tough. I want to hear some of your stuff. I mean, there's certain things that feel really personal. And on top of that, as we talked about poker offline, there's certain things that you get to a certain height in your life. And that doesn't have to be very high, but you get to a certain height. And then you put it aside for a bit. And it's hard to return to it because you remember being good. And it's hard to... Like you being at a very high level in poker, it might be hard for you to return to poker every once in a while and enjoy it, knowing that you're just not as sharp as you used to be because you're not doing it every single day. That's something I always wonder with, I mean, even just like in chess with Kasparov, some of these greats, just returning to it, it's almost painful. Yes. I can imagine. Yeah. And I feel that way with guitar too, because I used to play every day a lot. So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and you have a prime. There's a time when you're really good and now it's over and now... We're on a different chapter of life. It's like, oh, but I miss that. But you can still discover joy within that process. It's been tough, especially with some level of like, as people get to know you, and people film stuff, you don't have the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you. That's a beautiful privacy that with the internet just gets disappearing. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. But all those pressures aside, if you really, you can step up and still enjoy the fuck out of a good musical performance. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? It's in your name, as we talked about, you have to live up. Do you feel the requirement to have to live up to your name? Because live? Yeah. No, because I don't see it. I mean, my... Well, again, it's kind of like... I don't know. Because my full name is Olivia. So I can retreat in that and be like, oh, Olivia, what does that even mean? Live up to live. No, I can't say I do, because I've never thought of it that way. And then your name backwards is Evil, as we also talked about. There's layers of evil there. I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil. Or even better, because I don't think... Is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely separate to that? I think my intuition says it's the latter. But I don't know. Anyway, getting in the weeds. What is the meaning of all this? Of life. Why are we here? I think to explore, have fun and understand and make more of here and to keep the game going. Of here? More of here? More of this. More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And to try and put it into a vaguely scientific term, make it so that the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible. And highly complex and therefore interesting. I know we banged the metaphor to death, but tiled with paperclips doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, maybe something emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, is not very interesting. Whereas it seems like our universe is over time becoming more and more complex and interesting. There's so much richness and beauty and diversity on this Earth and I want that to continue and get more. I want more diversity in the very best sense of that word is to me the goal of all this. Yeah. Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process. Because we do create a lot of fun things. Instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things we create, somehow there's like a funness to it. And perhaps that has to do with the finiteness of life, the finiteness of all these experiences, which is what makes them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this, whatever it is, falling in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a, I don't know, just the businesses that build something or solve something. The fact that it is born and it dies somehow embeds it with fun, with joy for the people involved. I don't know what that is, the finiteness of it. It can do. Some people struggle with the, I mean, a big thing I think that one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And in terms of projects and so on, people cling on to things beyond what they're meant to be doing, beyond what is reasonable. And I'm going to have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoy talking to you. I think it's obvious, as we've talked about many times, you should be doing a podcast. You're already doing a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which is awesome. And you're a great educator, you're a great mind, you're a great intellect. But it's also this whole medium of just talking is also fun. It's a fun one. It really is good. And it's just, it's nothing but, like, oh, it's just so much fun. And you can just get into so many, yeah, there's this space to just explore and see what comes and emerges. And yeah. Yeah, to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others to understand them better, and together with them. I mean, you should do your own podcast, but you should also do a podcast with Cee, as we talked about. The two of you have such different minds that like melt together in just hilarious ways, fascinating ways. Just the tension of ideas there is really powerful. But in general, I think you got a beautiful voice. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me with this conversation and with your valuable time. Thanks, Liv. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Liv Boree. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things. But I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Sean Carroll: Difference Between Math and Physics | AI Podcast Clips

What's the difference between math and physics to you? To me, you know, very, very roughly, math is about the logical structure of all possible worlds and physics is about our actual world. And it just feels like our actual world is a gray area when you start talking about interpretations of quantum mechanics or no. I'm certainly using the word world in the broadest sense, all of reality. So I think that reality is specific. I don't think that there's every possible thing going on in reality. I think that there are rules, whether it's the Schrodinger equation or whatever. So I think I think that there's a sensible notion of the set of all possible worlds and we live in one of them. The world that we're talking about might be a multiverse, might be many worlds of quantum mechanics, might be much bigger than the world of our everyday experience, but it's still one physically contiguous world in some sense. But so if you look at the overlap of math and physics, it feels like when physics tries to reach for understanding of our world, it uses the tools of math to sort of reach beyond the limit of our current understanding. What do you make of that process of sort of using math to? So you start maybe with intuition or you might start with the math and then build up an intuition or but this kind of reaching into the darkness, into the mystery of the world with math? Well I think I would put it a little bit differently. I think we have theories, theories of the physical world, which we then extrapolate and ask, you know, what do we conclude if we take these seriously well beyond where we've actually tested them? It is separately true that math is really, really useful when we construct physical theories and you know, famously Eugene Wigner asked about the unreasonable success of mathematics and physics. I think that's a little bit wrong because anything that could happen, any other theory of physics that wasn't the real world, but some other world, you could always describe it mathematically. It's just that it might be a mess. The surprising thing is not that math works, but that the math is so simple and easy that you can write it down on a t-shirt, right? I mean, that's what is amazing. That's an enormous compression of information that seems to be valid in the real world. So that's an interesting fact about our world, which maybe we could hope to explain or just take as a brute fact, I don't know. But once you have that, you know, there's this indelible relationship between math and physics. But philosophically, I do want to separate them. What we extrapolate, we don't extrapolate math because there's a whole bunch of wrong math that doesn't apply to our world, right? We extrapolate the physical theory that we best think explains our world.

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Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #311

You have to have the free markets in order to build prosperity. And prosperity means economic power. If you have economic power, no one messes with you. Or if they're gonna do it, they're gonna have to think twice. And when they do, they're gonna have to pay consequences. The following is a conversation with Magat Wade, an entrepreneur who's passionate about creating positive change in Africa through economic empowerment. This is the Alex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Magat Wade. You were born in Senegal. You have lived and traveled across the world. So let me ask you, what is the soul of Senegal? Like, its people, its culture, its history. Can you try to sneak up on telling us what is the spirit of its people? Taranga. Taranga. Taranga, it's a Wolof word. Wolof is a main indigenous language of Senegal, and it means hospitality. That is what us, the people of Senegal, are known for. And it transpires in everything that we do, everything that we say. It's a place where, I guess with hospitality goes this concept of warmth. So we are a very warm people. So in a nutshell, that's us. That's us, the place where you come, and everybody will just embrace you, make you feel very comfortable, make you feel like you're the only person in the world, and that we've been waiting for you our whole life, right? So that's my country. So that's for people in Senegal, people in Africa, or also people across the world, weird strangers from all walks of life. So hospitality towards everyone. For everyone, for everyone, especially towards the foreigner, because it's very ingrained in us, this understanding that especially the foreigner, the foreigner is called foreigner because the foreigner is coming from somewhere else. So if someone has taken the time and the energy, whether in a forced manner or because it's a choice to travel so far to come to a place that's not theirs to start with, that's probably foreigners again, then it is your duty to welcome them, to be uber welcoming to them. So there's not a fear of the foreigner, there's not a suspicion of the foreigner. No, no, no. And I think this goes with the other way around. Maybe it has to do with just, you know, when you feel good about yourself, when you're very grounded yourself, it's very easy to open yourself to others. And I'm wondering if that's not, you know, the other side of the equation in a way. So no, we don't have a fear towards a foreigner. That's just not. When you have a pride of your culture, a pride of your own people, it's easier to sort of embrace. I mean, it's interesting how these kind of cultures emerge because, you know, the Slavic countries, they're sometimes colder. They're slower to trust others. We're now here in Austin, Texas. One of the reasons I fell in love with this place when I showed up is there's that same hospitality as compared to other cities I've lived in. Sort of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. There's a hesitation to open up, to be fragile, to be caring before understanding what I can gain from you kind of calculation. It's really interesting. And I wonder how those kinds of dynamics emerge because there's certainly parts of the world, like Austin is one of them, where you just feel the kindness, just radiate without knowing kindness from strangers. You know, if I were to advance one thing, and I had the same experience after having lived in San Francisco first, then we went to New York, then we came to Austin. And when we came to Austin, I felt, it took me a while to put my finger on it, but what I found in Austin, people just hang. People, right? They're real. They're real. Unlike what you were saying, I feel like in these other places, it's a destination for people who want to come and perform. I think maybe the early San Francisco people, it was different for them. But later as prosperity starts to come in and success comes in, then you attract a different breed. At first, we're the people who made it, who made this place be what it is. And then it attracts all the bling followers and the bling attracted people. And when those people show up, it's time for all of us to get out. And that's one of my worries about Austin too. And I guess I count myself in it, but because we're also new arrivees, always been furious now. But how are we gonna protect this place? Yeah. Yeah, these are the best possible version of the Austin history. This is the early days of Silicon Valley in Austin. And so you get a chance to build on top of this culture that's already been here of the weirdos, the artists, the sort of the characters, but also the general kindness and love that just permeates the whole place. Build on top of that entrepreneurial spirit. So like tech companies, new startups, all that kind of stuff. And then you get a chance to build totally new ideas, totally revolutionary ideas and make them a reality and dream big and build it here. I think Elon represents that with all the people that kind of try to do the cutting edge stuff they're doing at Tesla and SpaceX. But there's a bunch of other companies that are just like coming up. I get to talk to a bunch of tech people and they're just incredible. Versus San Francisco, there's a cynicism a bit. And also some of the interaction with strangers, there's always a bit of a calculation. Like how good is this going to be for my career? Or how can, yeah. How can hanging out with this person can advance me? You go to a party, you're seizing, they're seizing up. It's like, I'm not gonna talk to someone because that's not gonna advance me. Who's gonna advance me next? And so this is what I would not wanna see here in Austin. And I think maybe there's one way to try to, I really would like to see Austin not go the way San Francisco did and other towns before. I like how you pronounce San Francisco with a French accent. San Francisco? San Francisco. San Francisco. That's great. That's the one word you go with a French accent. You have to. Sounds beautiful. San Francisco. San Francisco. But you know, so now that you find that cute, you're gonna have to forgive me when I mess up my English because English is not my first language. So I always try to make sure people know that. But you know, Lex, this is why I am very interested in what some folks here are working on. And I'm just gonna be very selfish here because I wanna help her with what she's doing. It's someone like, you know, Nicole Nocek and her project, you know, with the housing project that they have right now, making sure that Austin remains a town that's affordable for people of all walks of lives. If we can accomplish making sure that all walks of lives, doesn't matter how little or big you're making money-wise, that you can stay in this town so the diversity at that level can remain, then I think Austin stands a chance to really show the world how to do things differently. And what I love about her initiative is just how they're really trying, you know, to again, work on keeping affordability down for most people. I think it's important to, because it seems like it matters to you, I know that it matters to me. I absolutely would not wanna see Austin go away as San Francisco did. And I think the key to that is making sure that true diversity, not like the fluff, fluff, crap diversity we're hearing over there. And that's another thing, by the way, because San Francisco likes to pride itself in, oh, you know, we are so into diversity. But I'm like, if diversity for you means gender, difference of gender, skin color, you know, maybe the different accents we have, and you think, check, check, check, check, check, I'm like, it's not enough. Can we also add diversity of thoughts? And that's the other problem I have with that place. And I know some folks who are scared of saying much around people, that's also another thing. So not only they're sizing you up, but everybody's also, there is this invisible, this invisible, how should I say this? There's this invisible agreement that they all seem to have to stay on script. Yeah, there's a feeling like you're following a certain kind of script that's very kind of shallow, and there is a bit of a categorization going on. Which category do you belong to? And let's put this into a simple math equation, how what comes out, as opposed to just the free, open embrace of people, the weirdos, the characters, the interesting, the full, deep sense of diversity. Exactly. Not just ideas, but backgrounds, and rich and poor, like- Artists, engineers, High school dropouts, PhDs, all of this. Yes, yes. That's what makes for a rich society that's gonna get ahead. I'm glad you mentioned Nicole's efforts. I know she really is passionate about, I don't know how complicated that work is, because there's probably a big force trying to increase how much it costs to live in Austin. Yeah. I don't know how you resist that. Whenever I go to New York City, just the fact that there's a giant park in the middle of it, I wonder, like, how did they pull this off? This is amazing. It's like to resist the force of the increasing price of the land, and still to protect this idea of having a park. And then in the same way, protecting the ability for people from all walks of life to live in the center of the city, to live around the city, to chase a dream when they don't get any money in their pocket. Absolutely. I don't know how you do that. It's partly political, probably, regulation, all that kind of stuff. A lot of it has to do with regulations. And this is where her and I also very much see eye to eye in terms of the free markets and also prosperity building, because it's always the same problems most of the time, most places. Here, what you have is some people, in the name of, we got to stand for, and I don't like to use this word, but maybe you help me find a better one, but at least that's a word that people can understand. We got to stand for the lesser fortunate among us. Some people would call them, maybe oftentimes use the word, maybe the underdogs, whatever it is, I will just say, maybe the lesser fortunate among us, right? In the name of standing up for them, you're promoting policies that are actually gonna backfire and where they end up being the first ones to suffer from it. So let's take this whole housing issue that Nicole and her team are working on. We find that oftentimes the cost, at the end of the day, it's the good old supply and demand equation. If you're gonna make it so hard that the supply level of housing remains below a certain threshold, remains lower than the demand of people who need especially affordable housing, housing altogether, what's gonna happen is scarcity, prices go up and who gets kicked out first? The lesser fortunate among us. And so, but I find that oftentimes people in the name of we care, don't engage their mind. And a friend of mine said this, and he said it so well, he said, having a heart for the poor, that's easy. Having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge. And oftentimes we all have a heart for the poor, but when it comes then to, then what do we do to have a real impact on making sure people get a chance at going up, then that's where everything starts falling apart. And then you have people who, then they start pushing for policies, housing policies, making it super hard for you to even renovate or add one more story to your home or anything like that. By doing that, you're messing up with the supply, with the supply of housing. And therefore the people who can't afford, people get priced out of a market. And so what people like Nicole are doing are going back to where all of this is taking place. And they're going back to the regulation side. And just like, I'm sure we'll talk about it here, but people wonder today, why is Africa the poorest region in the world? We go back to the same culprit, bad laws and tons of senseless regulations. If you make it so hard that in Berkeley, for someone to build one more story to their home, which means maybe one more unit that could be rented out to someone. And if many more people do that, then you have a much bigger supply, which means the prices will go down, which means more people have access. And among them, especially the lesser fortunate among us, then we're starting to see a winning proposal, aren't we? But instead, if you go the other way around, then all of a sudden you're pricing them out of a market. Same thing was done with us. So oftentimes when I see problems of this nature, you can betcha that regulations and census laws are the heart of it. And that's what they're tackling. It's not popular, it's not fun. And people tend to not even understand where you're coming from. But this is a problem we have with people not understanding economic econ 101. Well, so it's the regulation and the laws and the system that props them up and increases the span of those laws. And we'll talk about that, the fascinating way those kinds of things develop, when it works, when it doesn't. Let me sort of step back and ask you a question about Africa. In the West, in many places in the world, Africa is almost talked about like it's one country, like it's one place. So in what ways is Africa one community? And in what ways is it many, many, many communities, just from your perspective, in Senegal and beyond? Right. So at the most basic of what makes us one goes back to even what makes you African. You are African, I'm African. We're one big family. Africa is very much at the end of the day, the foundation and the birth of the human race. So from that standpoint, at the most basic level, we're all Africans. Where this whole thing started. Exactly, exactly. Where this whole thing started and how at some point, humanity was hanging by its fingernails. Only 2000 of us were left on this earth. And eventually we started, we went for survival. And that's how we started to spread around and some going up North, some going this way, that way. And as you're traveling to different places, then features start to change, to adapt to where you are, right? So hair gets lighter for some people, eyes get different shape for others to adjust to our new natural habitat. You know, the genomics program, I think at the National Geographic did that so well for people who are interested in going back to that work with Spencer Wells and such. But yeah, so at the very basic, most basic level, that's what unites us all, first of all. And then I would say that the continent, especially here, I will group it into black Africa, you know, black Africa. Unfortunately, our common stories, you know, of having gone through this terrible, horrible period of around the same time, the whole continent being enslaved and colonized. So that in a way forms, not that we were ever the first people or only people ever enslaved in this world. As a matter of fact, I mean, the word slaves comes from esclav, slave, slavs, les slavs, right? From the Eastern block. So the first slaves were actually people looking more like you than looking like me, right? So, but we don't necessarily remember all of that because in our human psyche, the closest to us in history of a big mass of people being enslaved is African people. We were the last group like that. You know, the pain of World War I and World War II permeates Europe, but it certainly does for the Soviet, the former Soviet Union, the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. Does in the same way, the pain of slavery and empires using Africa, does that permeate the culture? Is there still echoes of that? In a way, yes, especially the fact that, you know, in many different places, whether it's Ghana or my country or Benin, where you have these places that we call the door of no return or places of no return, which this was the last place where the slaves were standing or, you know, this is in Senegal, we call it the door of no return. There is this one door, you're there in the slave house. And once they go, they go. It's, that's it. That's gonna be the last time they see back home. So, you know, those, of course, of course, it creates for a common lived experience, which becomes a common lived history. And of course, it's gonna tire us up. Is there a resentment, because you mentioned hospitality. Yeah. Is there a kind of resentment of the foreigner that there's a rich, vibrant land? There's many resources, there's powerful cultures. Are they just going to show up and use us? Yeah. That's a way to see geopolitics in this modern world. Yeah, this is, okay, so where it plays very differently is, so if you came to Senegal today, there is not really a problem at that level. Where people's resentment start to come from is, of course, when bad behavior shows up, meaning like you have so many white people who can show up and just in their attitude, they have an entitlement attitude, right? And they think that in a way we're all still servants. Some people in your face, some people more, but that can cause some little resentment. But where really the resentment is. And that can, the entitlement can take different forms, like even pity. Yes. Don't even get me going on that. I was trying to be polite today. So just don't, Lex, do not. Sometimes I tell myself, my God, today you're going to be all composed. You know, Lex, you're all composed, so don't go there and make a fool of yourself. Just behave. Yeah, hold it together. But if you get me on some grounds, that's when it's all going to go to hell. So yeah, let's move beyond that too. So resentment, there's a dance between hospitality and resentment. And resentment. So when you come in, you're you, you live your life, you're just a normal human being. And you treat me decently, like you would treat a friend, normal people. I have no problem with you. I'm not going to come back and be like, well, you and your ancestors have enslaved me. You, you're not going to see that stuff. Sometimes I'm in this country, where I feel like it's, you know, I might look like that. But we in Africa don't do that. Now, if you come, you have this nasty attitude. You think you're still steering servants around. Well, you're going to have a problem. Someone like me, I might even grab you by the back of your neck and, you know, take you back to the airport. That's when you're lucky. Um, right. Help you very quickly. Exactly. But where things come up is, especially nowadays with the African youth, when we have to be reminded of a World Bank, when we have to be reminded of even the world, places like the World Economic Forum, you know, like all of these places that seem to constitute. They would, the way they describe them, when I say they, it's primarily my Pan-African friends. So here maybe terms are worth describing. So, the Pan-African movement goes way back when. We're talking about, you know, way back when, started in the 30s, going on all the way from there. So what you have there is people who have started coming together and dreaming up an emancipated Africa, away from the colonies, because at that point there were still colonies, and dreaming up all of that. So we're talking about people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, we're talking about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, talking about Blaise Diagne of Senegal, and other people like that, Bandia of Malawi. So anyway, so, and the African youth of today, we're still hanging on to those, onto some of these ideas of, and on some of these dreams of a reunited Africa. So when you were talking about what seems to unite you, there is that, you know, also, meaning like we all feel like we're part of the same family. Is it only in our heads, is it in reality? Many, for many different reasons, there is definitely what we call a Pan-African movement. And I very much myself, consider myself one of them. I don't agree all the time with our, where we wanna go and how we wanna go there, but not where we wanna go. Where we wanna go is we would love to see a united Africa, for sure. But how to get that accomplished, that's where oftentimes we have issues. So on something like that, so this Pan-African, especially the Pan-African youth, but it's beyond the Pan-African youth, it's the youth in general in Africa, World Bank, UN, all of these organizations that they tend to qualify as imperialist organizations. And it's not always a correct way to describe them, but I'm sure you get the sentiment. And from that place, there is tons of resentment, because for the longest time, these groups, organizations, and some that preceded them, have proceeded to actually decide what even our new frontiers would be. You see, when you go to a place like Senegal, Mali, all of that, different countries, but we were one people, one group, one kingdom. And then at some point, they decided, just when you look at Africa, have you looked at how straight some of these borders are? You're like, did a robot just draw these? Really? These are not- No fancy robots. No fancy robot, especially this one, it looks so cute. But you know what I mean? So they have continued deciding what it would be to be us, to live on our land, and how do we even progress? And it just keeps on going. They get to decide which type of even economic development path are we gonna choose or not? So from that standpoint, yes, there's a lot of resentment, including even from people like me. Yeah, and it's interesting that the invader and the oppressor and the empires have actually created a force for unity. I've seen that in Ukraine, in the invasion of Ukraine, where it was a pretty divided, not a pretty, a very divided country with many factions. But the invasion really forced everyone to think about the identity of this nation together. Beyond factions, beyond all of that, it allowed it to look at its history and its future. They all say that all great nations have had to have a war of independence. And this is our war to find our own identity. And so in that sense, Africa as one place, as one continent, had to find multiple times its identity through the resistance of the oppressor. Especially sub-Saharan Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, yes. And there's an interesting aspect to this because the president of Senegal is also the head of the African Union. So we'll talk about the fascinating geopolitics of that whole situation. But let me ask in general, you talk about this question, this fascinating question, what does it take for a country to prosper? What does it take for a country to prosper? You see many countries in the world that really struggle and many that flourish. And it's not always obvious why, because some have natural resources, some don't. Some have wars, some don't. Some have sort of authoritarian regimes, some don't. And some have democracies and all that kind of stuff. So the dynamics aren't exactly obvious. Is there commonalities? Is there fundamental ideas that result in a prosperity of a nation? Today, I can confidently say yes, despite all the differences that you talked about. And I think then this is where it becomes very important that we are very clear about the question you asked me. You said, what does it take to make a country prosperous? So I'm just gonna stick to prosperity, because prosperity doesn't necessarily mean, sometimes has nothing to do with maybe how you conduct yourself otherwise socially speaking, right? So you can be prosperous and still when it comes to your family laws, all the way you approach the other aspects of your life, maybe you're running a very communist lifestyle, or you're in a very liberal society. So for me, when we talk about prosperity, I just want to make sure that we're clear on that, because some people might be somewhere and be like, well, because I know what I'm gonna talk to you about next. And some people are gonna sit there and be like, well, China is not like that, or even Dubai is not like that. No, so what I'm talking about is this thing, and that's what I love about this, if we just stick to the word prosperity. To me, I see prosperity as this, it's like, economically speaking, what are we gonna be to be a prosperous nation? Meaning we are a middle to high income nation. I'm not talking about what are the rights of your women to vote, or can people live like this, or I'm not talking about any of that. Economic, fundamentally economic prosperity. Yes, because I think that distinction is very important, because over the years, I've seen people push back on all types of things, and it occurred to me that that's what, the misunderstanding was there. So if we're gonna talk about prosperity, making sure that the country can make money, so that it can take care of its needs, and the needs of its citizens, then what I have come to find is that, at the root of that, is gonna be what we call economic freedom, and what I call the toolkit of the entrepreneur, in that you can put the rule of law, you can put the concept of clear and transferable property rights. Economic freedom is at all the levels, that which will allow entrepreneurs, and business people, to create value, and create value entrepreneurially. We're not talking about rent-seeking or anything like that, it's like you found a pie to be this big, and you make it this big. So that's what we're talking about. Create value. Create value, yes. So when it comes to that, we have found that, whether you're looking at two countries that start out the same, we're talking the same people, East Germany, West Germany, South Korea, North Korea, very similar people to start with, right? But yet, radical outcomes. I know that today, Germany is united, but we're talking about back in the days, when you had East and Western bloc. Same people, very different outcomes. Like I said, South Korea, North Korea, and so on and so forth. And at the same time, very different nations. Dubai, compared to Singapore, or to England, very different yet, the same outcome. So it seems to me like whenever we're looking at prosperity, if a nation is prosperous, regardless of whatever other shenanigan they might be running, whatever other operating software they might be running for anything that's not related to business, if on the business side, they are proponents of a free market, or at least base level of free markets, we know that such countries will create prosperity. So what are the aspects of the operating systems that lead to Singapore, and to South Korea, and all that kind of stuff? So can you speak to different elements that enable the toolkit for entrepreneurs? Sure, sure. And maybe here, let me just maybe illustrate it with my own story, and then I can take you back to- Yeah, what's- Yeah. Magat, tell us your story. No, no. Who are you? It's just because it started with me coming here. You showed me the robot and everything, and now it looks like we know each other for 12 years. And then you're like, tell people. No, no, no, but so this is where this question, even when you ask me, how do some countries become prosperous? That question, Lex, I had it when I was seven or so. That's when my family moved me from Senegal. For the first time of my life, I left my country, I left my continent, and I was headed to Europe to go join my people, my family, my parents, who were there as economic migrants. My parents had migrated for a better life, as so many people have to, so many people have to, coming from poorer places, coming from low-income countries. So you saw the difference? Yes. Between the two places. I, how else would you call it? Here you were in Senegal, minding your own business, causing tons of trouble everywhere, you know, just being a happy, free-range kid that I was. Yeah, so you were always a troublemaker, not just now. Always. Okay, great. Life wouldn't be fun without it. Yeah, and of course, I agree. Right? So, because even you, you know, like, and you're all put together, like, front. I know there's a lot of troublemaking behind you. Desperately trying to keep it together. I know you are, but with me, I'm going to totally bring it out. So just, yeah. So... So you saw the difference. Right, I saw the difference. I'm walking in here, back home, and I tell people this story, because to me, it's a defining story. Back home, to take a shower, it takes time. Grandma has to, you know, make the charcoal catch on a little stove like you use at, you know, when you go camping. And then she puts a pot of water on it. It boils. She takes it, puts it in a bigger bucket, mixes it with some colder water. Then we put a little pot in it, and a stronger member of the family has to drag it to the shower. And then there, finally, I can proceed to take my shower. Here I'm in Germany in the middle of the winter, and my mom's like, Magat, time for your shower. I'm like, I'm not getting naked. Where is the water? I went to the cold water. Where is the bucket of hot water? She's like, oh, you silly, come on, just jump in. And I jump in the shower, turn the button, the water's coming down, temperature, I don't want to play. It's like, are you kidding me? So amazing. I've been cheated out of life, my whole life. So that's what happened. And then I'm like, oh, and all of these roads, they're paved roads. I'm like, back home, everything is like sandy. And you know, my feet are always ashy. I always have to wash off when I go back home. And your shoes get ruined most of the time. And it started, and I had this question, and it was just like, wow, how come they have this, and we don't? So I was not being like, oh, you know, how come they have all of this money? I was not that. It was just like, how come? And I think what I was alluding to was, how come life is so easy here, and back home it's not? And easy, not in a negative sense, in a beautiful sense. And sometimes I get, just having traveled through the war zone, just to come back, traveling through Europe, back to America, I'll just get emotional just looking at the efficiency of things. Like, how easy it is, how we can, first of all, in Ukraine, you currently can't fly, right? It's a war zone. Just even the transportation, you said roads. Yeah, the quality of roads in the United States is amazing. Just not many of the places that drive in Ukraine, you're talking about, I mean, really bad conditions of roads. And I'm sure in many parts of Africa, in many parts of the world, the roads are even worse. Right, right. And outdoor, having an indoor toilet is a fascinatingly awesome luxury to have. It is, it is. And don't take me wrong, Lex. Do we have some great roads now in many parts of Africa? Yes, yes. Main arteries, great roads, you're like, whoa, this is moving. Yes, we do. But definitely more today than in my time growing up. Do we have, you know, a country like Nigeria that just birthed six unicorns last year alone? Yes. Do we have the African youth out there being so amazing and, you know, living their lives? Yes, we have all of that. But it is still unfortunately just, like we're scratching the surface. And those people still are getting all of that accomplished, literally swimming through molasses. This is some of the most, most gross, immoral, unfair waste of human capital. And so that is the, started with you as a seven-year-old asking, wait a minute, how do amazing people in Europe do this and the amazing people in Africa don't? Yeah, and that's a key word, amazing, because that's what I realized later, because, and it was not always like that for me, amazing and amazing, right? I knew instinctively that, of course we are amazing too. But so this, and then, so eventually the question became, how, so I went from, how come they have this and we don't, to the country as I'm growing up and researching, because it stayed with me. When I tell you I'm obsessed, I'm haunted. I am haunted. So you can laugh all you want, but it's, so the question became, the question became, how come some countries like the United States, Singapore are rich and some others like mine and many others in Africa are poor? That became the question. And along the line, like along the road, I continued on living my life, wondering about this question. And I've heard all types of reasons as to supposedly why that might be the case. Some people with a very straight face are still peddling the IQ fury, according to which, come on, darling, it's not your fault. You know, your skin color goes with a gene sequence that just doesn't allow you to be as smart as white people are. And it's not your fault, but just accept it. That stuff is still out there. It's very real. I, and I have to hear it. And others would say to me, oh, it's just because, you know, you guys don't have adequate level of education. And I say, you know, maybe you gotta go say that to most of the street sellers you go see in Senegal. You go up to any of these, to many of these street sellers in Senegal, they are wading through cars and moving cars under the hot sun, fumes thrown at their face, trying to sell you anything that you think you might be able to use. Whether we're talking about an ironing board, to an umbrella, to Q-tips, to, you know, toothpicks, selling you whatever you need from your car. These are street sellers. And you ask them, dear, do you have any degree? Yeah, I have this great degree in math or in literature or whatever. Some very, very educated people. Yet they're right there, this is what they're doing. So that's just at scale, wasted human potential. Thank you. Thank you. So that has to do, the wasted human potential has to do now with the system, with something about the laws. Which is, yeah. Something about sort of the things that limit or enable the entrepreneur. Yes, because at that point I've heard this. You know, I heard people say, yeah, your IQ is no good. Yeah, you don't have enough degrees or you're not educated. Yeah, some people would even say, it's because you guys are malnourished. You're malnourished, you need to be fed. Others, oh, well, maybe I'll give you some shoes and maybe something's gonna change, whatever. And then, so I heard all of this nonsense, Lex, but guess what? None of it made sense. You know why it didn't make sense? Because if any of that crap was true, why, oh why, is it that my parents or any other people from these places, and oh, and by the way, some people call those places God-forsaken land. That's also the type of critic you always have to hear when it's not just flat out, SHIT, whole countries from, you know, one person a few years ago, president of his country. That sentiment is sometimes there. It is, it is. As I go on with my life, trying to find the answer to why are some countries like mine poor while others are rich, I'm hearing all of these reasons thrown at me. And then they make no sense, because then how come then if my parents move, as it is usually anyone else who moves from a poorer nation to a nation that supposedly is rich, all of a sudden they get to manifest the greatest potential. So I'm starting to think this has nothing to do with a person per se, because we're talking about the same person, same background, same everything, same name, features, everything. Now I'm starting to think, maybe it doesn't have to do with a person. Maybe we're talking about something that has to do with a place that they came from or the place that they're going to. So this little thing is starting to be in my mind. Again, remember, this is not something that I woke up to overnight. I'm like, well, I got my quest. It took me for a long time. And I had to face off, to have many different ideologies face each other. I had to really have a reckoning literally in my heart and in my mind. And so then that's what I'm thinking. It cannot be, no, no, no, it's the same people. It has to be about the place, but then what about this place? But then even about the place, you're thinking, again, two countries, different backgrounds, same outcome, same background, different outcome. What is this? And then I go on. I start, I am in Silicon Valley in the late 90s, early 2000s, that come boom, all of that. And I'm starting to discover this concept of this thing called entrepreneurship. You know, I'm in Silicon Valley and just getting to experience what seems so cliche by now, but you know, people getting together in the back of a napkin, just talking about an idea, putting it out. And then they go out and they talk to some investors who's gonna invest in it. Then they have the lawyers who get to put all of this stuff together. And then they have the big four CPA firms, this whole ecosystem of what they call of entrepreneurship. And then eventually this concept of entrepreneurship being this idea of creating something out of nothing. So there I am. And at some point I become an entrepreneur myself. And the way I became an entrepreneur was not like, I woke up and I'm like, I wanna make money so I'm gonna become an entrepreneur. You know, like, no. And this is also another problem I have with people who have a problem with entrepreneurs or business people. Most entrepreneurs do not start a business to become rich. Most entrepreneurs start a business because they have found, identified a problem that bothered them enough that they said, enough is enough, I'm gonna do something about it. What entrepreneurs are, are people who criticize by creating. Do they always get it right? No. As a matter of fact, the failure in entrepreneurship is humongous. It's kamikaze path to take the entrepreneurship path. We lose our spouses. My first husband passed away as soon as I was about to sign my first term sheet and yet I had to keep going. What force can keep you going after you just loved, lost the love of your life? What force keeps you going? The force of, oh, I just wanna be rich, really? When your whole world is upside down, your whole world is upside down and you just want to quit. You just want to go meet him and join him in death. I stayed, why? Because of the same reason why I started my company. I stayed because the women whom I had put back to work by then, we're talking about some of the most vulnerable women in my country. These are women who grow the hibiscus, which we need to make the bisab, which is the juice of taronga, remember? This is our national identity drink. And for the longest time, women grow this hibiscus that we use for the national drink, for this drink. And now that Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and all that had made it through the marketing that it is more cool to drink those beverages, now there is no more market for the hibiscus. And with that goes the livelihoods of these women. And for me, that bothered me enough because in that force, I saw two things. One was a part of my culture. We're talking about, I mean, part of my cultural identity, for Christ's sake, the juice of taronga. You asked me, what defines you? I said, taronga, there's a juice for it. So my culture is disappearing. And at the same time, these women are sliding into abject poverty because what they used to make no one needs anymore. No one needs anymore. So that is what got me to start a company. And the company was created just because of that. I wanted to build a company that would allow me to not only preserve this very important aspect of my cultural identity, and at the same time, put these women back to work. And maybe it's more difficult to put into words, but there's a kind of, it's a basic human spirit where you see the place where you came from breaking apart in some kind of way, and you have the entrepreneurial fire that dreams of helping. Yes. And sometimes it's hard to convert that into words. You have to tell nice stories and so on, but it's the basic human desire to help. Yes. And especially when- Criticized by creating. Especially when you've been- Such a beautiful phrase. Especially when, and let's face it, do we all, are we all a bundle of circumstances, some happy, some worse? Yes, we are. And oftentimes I ask myself, my God, why you? Why did you get to have the opportunities that you have? What makes you different from, let's say, even your cousin that couldn't, that is still home, trapped? Because we call ourselves trapped citizens. When you're trapped in these countries that go nowhere, we're like a bunch of trapped citizens. So you see, Lex, when my husband passed away and I wanted nothing more to do than to quit and to send, investors had already said, we understand if you want to stop. Whatever you decide to do, we'll do that. And I wanted to quit. And I was actually on my way, I was in Senegal for a month trying to really get a bearing over myself. And by the end of the month, I had decided I'm letting go. There's no way, the pain was too great. Nothing made sense anymore. It was too much. So I went to see this woman and I talked to the one who, we're talking back then, there were 400 of them. Later on, we grew to 9,000. And I told the representative of all of them and I told her, this is very old lady. And just looking at her, I knew I was going through some pain but this woman has probably gone through 10 times, not that pain is measurable, but you could tell this woman probably lost a child as oftentimes happen in places that are lower income countries. Probably lost a husband also, probably who knows. So many people, loss is part of our lives. You could see the pain. Yet she's so, so dignified. She's so dignified. And that already kind of made me like, my God, stop crying. But, and I told her that I was quitting. I could not look her in the eyes. And she said, look at me. I could not look her in the eyes. She said, look at me, child. And I looked at her and she said, and she said, you know, I know you're in pain but where your husband is, where your beloved is, there's absolutely nothing that you can do for him. But for us, you can change everything. And I went back. So that's what entrepreneurs are, at their best. She helped you find your strength? Yes. And I was weak still, but I said, you put that aside, there's a job to do here. And I went back and I fought with everything that I had. And this company that I started in my kitchen became this company that had the who's who of the beverage world. With at some point, Roger Enrico, the chairman of PepsiCo sitting on my board. Yeah, I went back because of that. So the reason why I tell this story for me is important because the world needs to understand that there is a viable way of caring and of being part of a solution for the lesser fortunate in terms of not keeping them where they are and we're like the savior is coming and giving them food and all that. No, no, no, no, no. But it's like, just like the leg up I got in my life, give somebody else a leg up. What are the things you're fighting against in Africa when you try to build a business like that? So then we're building this company. And back then, this was in 2004, that was when I built my first company. We had to have two sister companies, one there, one here. So the one in Africa was about the whole supply chain. And the one in America was research and development, sales and marketing, all of that good stuff. And then at some point I look around, I'm like, wait a second. Here, back in the days, before we had the, they would talk, they would say, oh, we have this one-stop shop for business registration. But the truth is, very quickly you can set up an LLC in the US. We're talking about less than, even then, less than, today, super fast, 20 minutes online, done. Back then it was less than a few hours to get it done. Cost you almost nothing. We're talking about a few hundred dollars, three, two to 350, depending which state you are. So LLC, starting a basic company takes almost no time. No time, no time, no money, almost. You don't have to know a guy that knows a guy that slips some money to the politician and so on. No, none of that stuff, none of that stuff. And so at the same time, also things like, and this I can take you even to today's day. Okay, Lex, I don't know if you have employees on payroll or anything like that, but do you have to go every month, or anybody listening to us right now, do they have to go every single month to three different type of agencies, like governmental agencies to do one step? This one is basically you're gonna go and give them your retirement money, like the pension part of the salary that you took out from your employee. You have to go to this agency and put that application through. So you leave that money behind. Then you go to another agency. This one is for their health care, whatever. You have three of those places where you have to literally go to in person. Three times, three places every single month to drop off this paperwork. Do you have to do that anywhere in the US? I mean, do we have that situation anywhere that you know of right now? No, no. And do you think that's business friendly or do you think it's cumbersome on business? And that's not just cumbersome sort of physically, it's cumbersome psychologically. That there's a feeling like the system around you, yeah, there's a feeling like you're trapped. It's a feeling like the system doesn't want you to succeed versus a system that does want you to succeed. Exactly. You're in a country like we're in Texas. If you make less than a million bucks in revenues a year, all you do, five minutes it takes you, you're filing your franchise tax. That's it. It's below that number. Tell them what it is. Then you have nothing to give them or anything like that, you move on. Us, even if I make this much, there is a minimum tax that you have to pay, which is $1,000 in Senegal right now. For the listener, my guy was holding up a zero. You make no money. You still have to pay. You still have to pay. So, and then, oh, let me walk you through what happened to me when we had to try to get the electricity hooked up on our first office. So we go, they say, oh, first you have to apply. You know, like you normally, you have to apply. Then we apply, we pay the money. Remember again, here you have to also go. This was like, you go to the office and you pay. And then we wait and we wait and we wait. And when I say we wait, I'm not talking about waiting, but we waited 24 hours, we waited 48 hours. A month, two months, three months, four months, five months, you go, you send your assistant, she goes, she comes back. Well, they say we send it to wait. At some point, I'm like, I gotta go there. So I go there and I ask to speak to the head of the district for, you know, and I'm just like going on and on and on and on about how we've been delayed. This is gonna be a problem. We have to produce. Everything is delayed. And I risk losing my business. We already pre-sold some of these products to our customers. I gotta, something needs to happen. So at some point, the gentleman looks at me. He's like, lady, look over there. I look over there. I see a pile of paper this high. We're talking about maybe hundreds of applications. Each one of them is a single, single, single sheet. Each single sheet is an application for getting the electricity. And he says, do you see that? I said, yeah. And he said, look over there. I look over there to the other side. I see two meters. He's like, each of these applications needs one of those. How many do you see? I said, two. Then I knew I was in trouble. And then I said, what do I do? And he said, lady, it's not at our level. And I agreed with him. It was not on his level. But eventually, you know, by now you can tell that I pretty much get what I need because, and at that point, what I did was not threaten him or anything like that. I didn't even pay a bribe or anything, but you could see why people pay bribes. Because when you have a pile like that, then the only way to advance your file, and that, by the way, happens even at the passport office. You come, you apply for your passport, which is your right. They force us to have passports. It's your right as a citizen to have a passport. And even there, if you want yours to keep going through the process, you have to bribe somebody so it can go even the pace it's supposed to go, let alone faster. So here, I'm thinking I have a problem. And at that point, I did what I do. I talked to him about all the things I was trying to do. I explained to him why I'm here, why I'm trying to do this. And even him said, lady, someone like you, you have no reason to even be here. You could be back in America, living your life, la vida loca, you don't have to be here. So that, I think, gained a lot of his respect. And I said, if you don't help me with this, I understand I shouldn't be of a priority or anything like that, but I beg you, I beg of you, I need for this to go on this week. And he said, okay. That's how I got my meter. One of those two meters became mine. So then he said, but we have a problem. And I said, what? He said, well, the truck, we need a truck to be here to do it because of where you are from the pole, we need long cable lines to get it all done. But the truck is, I don't know where the truck was because they had this one truck for I don't know how many customers. So I go to the mayor of a town with whom I'm quite friends, but you see, I know people, but it shouldn't be this way. So I go to the mayor of a town and I said, mayor, he happens to have the same name as me, first, last name, same, but except he's the ugly one, I'm the pretty one because you know. He's, you know. You know. You know. Right. That's so people can tell you apart. She's the pretty one, right? Exactly, I'm the pretty one and he's the, whatever. So I got to the mayor and I'm like, mayor, I need your help, you need to help me with this. He's like, now what? And I explained to him and he's like, okay, you can take the truck from the city hall. I'll tell the guys that they can allow you to have it and then they come and then you guys can do this. And then we arrived there. Guess what? I thought I was done, Lex, but I was not done because now the electricity company, by the way, whom we paid, everything was there. They've been sitting on our money for nine months by now. Well, we need a ladder long enough to, you know, like one of the super, super professional ladders that normally the electricity companies have. Theirs was in some other village and they didn't know if it was going to be back for another three days or four days. I said, are you kidding me? He's like, no. So I call mayor again, I'm like, mayor, do you have a ladder? And I explained and he said, and that's how I got my electricity hooked up. Otherwise I probably would still be waiting. So Lex, you add all of these things together and also the fact that in my country, by the way, the labor laws are so stringent. Basically you are married to your employees for good or for bad. And some people say, oh no, you're not married for good or for bad, except that it will just cost you a lot of time and money to get rid of any of them. It doesn't matter the circumstances. Do you think I really, an entrepreneur really needs to hear something like that? You know, the head of Yale, I had an argument with him at the UN and I said to him, listen, and you listened to me very well. The reason, if you want to protect employees, as you claim, everything you're doing is to protect employees. A, you know better of a human being than I am in terms of wanting to make sure that people are treated right and fairly. But last time I checked, Google, for example, is not offering their employees chef cooked meals, super healthy, anything they want, feeding them from morning till evening, having some babysitters, having childcare on site, all of these perks that come on top of really cozy salaries. It did not happen because you, the ILO, told them you have to do this. It happened because there are enough jobs created around that now you're in an employee's market and employers have to fall all over themselves to attract the best talent among us. That's how it's done, and not with your nonsense that you're imposing me right now, which the only results you're gonna get, like in my country, do you know what we have to show for all of these, the fact that the Senegalese employees are the most protected employee on paper in the world? Well, we're one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. That's what it got us. So let's try to untangle this. So there's a system in place. There's a momentum with that system. Like you said, lady, it's not my level, which is, for somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union, at least echoes some of the same sounds I heard from people I knew there. It's kind of this helpless feeling like, well, this is just part of the system, this gigantic bureaucracy, and the corruption that happens is just like the only way to get around, to get anything done. And so the corruption grows. Maybe could you speak to the corruption? To what degree is there corruption in Senegal and Africa? And how do we fix it? So when you said to which degrees there is corruption, I will respond to you the same I respond to people. I say, yeah, we have corruption, and it's almost as bad as in Chicago, right? So now, what I want people to understand when it comes to corruption, it's because we are misguided with corruption. We think corruption is the root cause of problems when corruption is simply a symptom of the deeper root problem. In this case, if you make the laws so senseless, meaning, let me give you an example of senseless laws. Every time I have to import something in my country, I have a business, we're making lip balms in this case, and others, skincare products. Some ingredients I'm able to find in the country at the standard that I need in order to remain competitive. Because for example, our products are sold at Whole Foods Market, you can understand, it's a pretty sophisticated and really, you know, they don't just put anybody on the shelves. But the thing is, it means that on the other end, my inputs has to be right. So out of those, we have seven ingredients, seven items that need to come from abroad to go into the making of this product, some packaging and some raw material. But guess what? Like for five of them, I am paying a 40% tariff, and for the other two, almost 70% tariff. That I call senseless laws. These tariffs are senseless. Yeah, corruption is just a symptom. They reveal that something was broken about the laws. Exactly. And the laws are, so taxation, this kind of restricting laws, like laws that slow down the entrepreneurial momentum. They do, they do. Because in this case, when my product comes, what do people have to do? Because every time, if you add 40%, you're basically on the other end. So every time you add, if let's say my product normally cost a dollar, and we feel 40%, by the time I'm done, I had to pay, now it's costing me 140 by the time it arrives in my warehouse, in my manufacturing facility. It's now at 140 because of a tariff I left behind. That 40% you added to it, do you know how much it's going to add to my final cost that once the product is finished, I have to sell it to the customer? I have to sell it for a dollar 60 more because of that 40 cents extra you took from me. In order for me at the end of the day to have some type of profits, because profits at the end of the day is the blood of a business. There are two people are misguided. They say, oh, you dirty, greedy business people, and it's all about profit, profit, profit, profit. You know, I belong to this organization called, I'm a board member on the Conscious Capitalism. It is the largest organization of purpose-driven businesses and entrepreneurs. The type of people I told you about, we've started our businesses because we see something that needs to be taken care of in society. Whole Foods Market is one of them, the Container Store, you know, all of these companies that are beloved in the US that you can hear of. We believe that the end goal of business is purpose. But in order to do purpose, you have to have profits to stay alive. And the best way for people to think of profits so that they're not all twisted about it, Lex, if I asked you, what's your goal in the world? You're probably gonna tell me your dream. You're gonna talk to me about what you're doing right now and how you want to be uniting, you want a more harmonious world, you want human flourishing. That's what you're working towards. That's what you say to me. You're not gonna say, well, my biggest goal in the world is to produce as many red blood cells as I can, except you need to produce those, otherwise no Lex. And if no Lex, no one working. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that's also people need to stop with this whole profit, non-profit. Do we have some psychopaths among us? Yeah, 1% of us in this world are psychopaths in every field, anywhere you look. And surely you'll find that in the entrepreneur's world as well. Yeah, so we have 1% of us who are psychopaths for sure, but do they define the rest of us? Absolutely not, and thankfully not. So let's just be clear on that. So here, you know, you charge me 40% tariff, which is outrageous, then you're forcing me to sell it for $1.60 more than my competitor who does not have to go for that nonsense because she's an American woman who is operating in America and she doesn't have that nonsense put on her. So now I'm on this market competing against this woman eye to eye, so if we're selling the same value product, mine costs $1.60 more simply because of some stupid rules from back home, then guess who is gonna stay in business and who doesn't? See, they wanna talk about equality. That's the type of equality I wanna see. The playing field has to be leveled. Told you English is a fourth language. Well, it's two people talking. Between us, maybe we'll have this English thing figured out. We'll have it figured out. So the idea of capital, the idea of conscious capitalism is the thing that in large part enables this level playing field. That's what we want. So what you're trying to say, so here, so when I talked about census laws, that's an example. So when you make the tariffs so high that you're gonna render me non-competitive, then that's where, for people who might make sense, when the product arrives at port, they say, hey, I give you this. What I give you, maybe it's 10% of the price or 5%. It's surely not 40%, but you are happy with it. You're the government official. That's what we call a bribe. And me, I'm like, hey, I saved myself money and also I saved myself time. But you see, if the laws where you pay 5% or even the 10% that I just left behind or nothing, you come, you pay, you move on. Because who has the business of fooling around and staying behind? And no, you do that when it actually makes sense to do that. So I'm not sitting here telling people I engage in unlawful practices. In my case, because I'm around saying the things I'm saying right now, so I'm a target, you have to do things cleanly. And I believe in doing things that way. So what I had to do was go to the, ask again, mayor. We have a problem. Mayor is, whenever he sees me, he's like, now what? So I'm like, we've got a problem. You're best friends now. So I say, now it's the customs. And he's like, what do you want me to do? I said, do you know anybody at customs? I need to hire up at customs because I got to explain to them what's going on here. They all know, of course, but I think they're not always maybe understanding, or maybe they understand. And in this case, he understood. So we went and he's like, yeah, I know this is not, this is not very, yeah, this. And I said, what do we do now? And I saw him going through binders and binders in his office because he's going to try to go and look where in the law can we find something that can help me escape these rules. And you know, the best he found, Lex, was, oh, well, here, see, this one. If you've been in business for two years, then we can allow you, there is a special term for it, it's French, it's technical. We can allow you to bring your raw material, but you have to tell us exactly how much you're bringing. And it has to match your formulation because, you know, they don't want you to bring in more that we need and maybe sell some of that to the rest of the market and they didn't make their money on it. So there, it means I have to give them my recipe. Imagine Coca-Cola being asked to give their secret sauce to government officials in a country that you can't even know what might happen, let alone, even in business, you don't do that. I mean, trade secrets are trade secrets, but here you're asked to be putting it in front of some people you don't know where it's going to go after that because there they get to see, okay, her recipe calls for X amount of candelilla wax, X amount of coconut oil, okay, and on top of that, we have to think about how much spoilage might there be or not, because again, we don't want her to buffer over there. So you have to get naked in front of them in terms of your recipe, which might end up only God knows where tomorrow, maybe competition or maybe even them, they start a business and they compete with you because we've seen that. So you have to do that. And then each time, fill out a paperwork, get the approval, then it can come in. So when it can come in, you don't have to pay that tax. Oh, and by the way, you have one year, one year to make this product and get it out. And all of it needs to be back out because if any of it stays here, you're going to pay the taxes that we held up. So you're basically forced by these senseless laws to be dishonest. If you want to succeed. All of this is so cumbersome because it means more paperwork, paperwork everywhere, maybe having to disclose your thing. So me, in my case, what I did is, you know, this person said, okay, we're going to see how we can work with you. But for the first two years, we were more or less in the gray area. Yeah, so even gray area is good. Yeah, but what does it mean? In a situation like that, whenever they want to mess with you, it means they can come and they will look and they will find something. So it means that every day I'm trying to do business, I'm running the risk of being harassed and or maybe even put in jail, depending on what it is. I mean, you're an incredible person because it seems like there's two ways to change this. Become president or gain power in the country and to try to change the laws, which seems really difficult to do. And the other way is fight through the laws and create the business anyway, build the business community, and through that method, create a huge amount of pressure to change the laws. You're totally getting it with your last part because see, this is the other thing. And this is where I get so upset sometimes with my fellow Africans because they get so disgusted by what they're seeing. And they think the answer is to go for politics. Let's go be president. Let's go be this, let's go be that. And we're going to change everything. I see that in the US too. People thinking that presidents have all of this power. Do you know who has the least power in government? The president. I mean, people don't get that. Your best bet, if you insist on going into politics, stick to the local level. That's where all the skeletons are buried and hidden. And that's where you can make the most impact. Local level. I know it's not shiny. I know it's not exciting, but that's where it's at. So if you must go into politics, but there's another way. So in my case, what I do is two things. I preach and I practice. I preach. When I'm here talking to you about this, I'm preaching. I am sharing with people that is which I found. And by the way, the answer was there. I was doing these two businesses, realizing the difference in treatment of the doing business environment of the US compared to the doing business environment of Senegal. And at first I was like, of course, us, everything is messed up. It's because we're a poor country. But when I started to put two and two together, I'm like, you're poor because you have no money, at least not enough money to take care of your basic needs. You have no money because you have no source of income. Where does a source of income come from for most of us? It comes from a job, doesn't it? And then some people sometimes at my UC Berkeley class, they say, oh no, it comes from government too. I'm like, I would like to think that even if you work for government, you're going to be paid something, right? And they're like, yeah. And then even before I can say something, they're like, yeah, because that money we use to pay our public officials comes from taxes, employers, employees. We go back to the private sector for most of it from where this whole thing is created. So it's clear, you're poor because you have no money, no money because no source of income. Source of income for most of us is a job. We're talking about, so where do jobs come from? The private sector, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises. Then don't you think that we should make it easy, that we should have a friendly doing business environment? And also a lot of it comes not just from the small and medium-sized businesses, but I think a lot of the value is created from new ones being launched. Yes. Right, it's not just like saving somehow through regulation, the ones that are already there. No, no. It's like letting the market, letting the new better ideas flourish. Yes, it's about what I mean by doing business environment is all the things that you and I talked about earlier. Even the access of electricity is part of a doing business. The doing business, so basically, when I've discovered all of that, when I put all of those dots together, then I'm like, well, I guess the business, and it makes sense, Lex. If you want to grow tomatoes, you're going to have to have two things. One is a good seed, right? That has good attributes. And then you're going to have to have a good environment for it. Is the soil the right one? What's your pH level? All of those good nutrients that you're going to put in it. Is it in a place that has tons of sun? How much sun exposure or not? The climate in general, is it going to be cold? Not, not. You can't have some beautiful tomatoes in the middle of Siberia, last time I checked. So same thing here. Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel laureate for peace, said, poor people are bonsai people. They're the same people. They're the same people. If you put them in the normal, natural, a friendly habitat where they can thrive, they become the tallest tree in the forest. Poor people are bonsai people. So you see that tiny pot you put around the bonsai tree? That's the tiny pot that created, by giving me such a hostile business environment that basically were put together by the set of laws that you have put, that basically I have to jump through as a business person, practicing business in my country. If you turn that environment into a friendly environment, where I am not married to my employees, I have flexibility of the labor laws are simple, straightforward, clean, where the tax code is very simple. It's not worth truckloads of laws, like in my country, it's so complicated. You have to hire a CPA, which costs more money, and even them tell them, girl, we're going to make some mistakes. They don't talk to me like that. It's in our country, you know, they don't say anything, they shouldn't, they better not, but they say, whatever they say. I'm scared. I'm scared. You know? You know, they're like, we're going to, but bottom line is, we're going to make mistakes. This thing is so complicated, we're going to make mistakes. So, which means my ass is on the line. So anyway, so if the tax code was so simple, straightforward, like it is maybe in Texas, where up till a threshold, you owe me nothing, go online, five minutes, fill out your taxes, you're compliant, keep building your business, because that's what we need from you. If you made it so easy and straightforward, then you know what? That's when you get all of these people, Lex, that you're talking about, saying, you know what? My name is Aminata, and I live in the middle of nowhere, Senegal, but you know what? I've got this great idea for this really hot, nice hot sauce that I know the Americans are going to love. I'm hearing that hot sauce is a big thing. Let me bring it to them. But everything is there for you to jump into the ring of entrepreneurship. You don't have to know someone like Magat. You don't have to even have the ability to sell yourself maybe like I can sometimes. You are someone with a great idea. You're willing to work hard for it and pour everything you've got into it. Guess what? It's there. You can get into the race. You can be a dreamer, and you can be a dreamer in a rural little village, and then that has ripple effects throughout the entire country. Young kids growing up, you know, I want to be the next X, whatever. And it doesn't have to be the next Steve Jobs. That seems really far, far away. It's at all levels. It's at all levels. You create local heroes because representation matters. Yes. Right? So, and we are so badly in need of that. And so that's what all the things that have been stolen from us as long as things remain the same. So Lex, once I found out that basically at the end of the day the answer is economic freedom. And that when it comes to that, the indexes, economic indices that measure that, whether it's the Dream Business Index ranking of the World Bank or the Fraser Economic Freedom Index of the Heritage Foundation, when you look at all of those indexes and others, what do they have in common? One after another, they show you that it is harder to do business in almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa than it is per se, anywhere in Scandinavia. So it is telling you that Scandinavian nations, that socialist Americans tend to love so much and take as an example, over there too, they're showing you that they don't understand what's going on really in Scandinavia, that Scandinavia is more capitalist. Scandinavian nations are more capitalist. Scandinavians are more capitalist than almost any Sub-Saharan African nations. Ultimately, the political systems actually don't even matter nearly as much as the private sector being able to operate the machinery of capitalism. There you go, there you go, there you go. And it's almost like, like I said, it's almost like its own little widget within it. You can have whatever type of society you wanna practice, you can exercise at whatever level you want to, but if you're serious about becoming a middle to high income nation, there is no other pathway that we know of at this point. And you know what made me super excited about that beyond having finally found my answer? I have to tell you, when I found that answer, I literally fell to my knees. It was the type of feeling that, you know, if something is not well with you, whether it's physical or mental, something is not well, you're not well. And you go around and you go to the so-called specialists, some of them, you know, but you're going around for years, going around trying to get help for your ailment. And here they don't know. Here they tell you things that you can't tell why, but you just know it's not true. There this, there that, and it's going on for years after year after year. And finally you meet this one person and boom, it's there. Not only the liberation, but also this whole new world that comes with it. You know, I'm still ill, but guess what? There's a path forward. We know that. I'm gonna have a lot of work to do, but there's hope. Yeah. Right? And you're the beacon of hope actually for a lot of people in that part of the world. And those beacons are actually really necessary. So not only is there hope, but you can become, I mean, the beacon for your people, your home, this power that you see, that you feel all around to escape the feeling of being trapped. Is there a device you can give to people that, to young girls and boys dreaming somewhere in Africa of how to change the world? That's right. And by the way, I want to say, there are bigger beacons, there are better beacons than me. I just happen to be someone who has the chance of talking to you right now. And one of my goals is to open the same doors that were open for me, because together, our voice, there's such amazing stories out there. And so bigger beacons, better beacons out there. One thing here for me, the reason why I do what I'm doing right now, and it's almost to a point of self-destructing my own health, I feel invested with such the mission of, I have been afforded the truth. So it is my moral duty to try to take it around. I know I sound, people sometimes say, when I listen to you, I feel like I'm talking to a priest. And I'm like, because the gospel, I receive the gospel. So anyway, but the thing is, Lex, who tells you these things to this day? When they talk about the poverty of Africa, what do they talk about? They sit in front telling you, oh yeah, it's because of colonialism, it's because of racism, it's because of imperialism, it's because they're stealing raw material, blah, blah, blah. Is any of those guilty to some level of where we are today? Maybe part of a reason where we are today? Maybe, maybe. Is that the only reason or the overwhelming reasons? No. Is that insurmountable? Absolutely not. So for me, don't stay in that place that steals and robs you of your agency. So I think it's important for people to A, get the right diagnosis as to why we are where we are. Because what you and I just talked about, the mainstream does not talk about this when they even talk about Africa in terms that are not the usual suspect of, oh, famine is building over there, war is building over here, oh, we're having Ebola is coming, all of that stuff. Even when they were talking about the monkeypox, which at first, in this wave, it started with white people in Europe. Well, even in the many newspapers you pull out, it's black people with monkeypox on their skin. I'm like, wait a second, this time around, we, it did not start with us. So why are you always showing us when it's right now happening to white people? So all of that is happening. So for me, the thing is, we, the world simply right now, does not have the right diagnosis as to why this continent right now, despite all of its riches, because Lord knows it's got riches, starting with its young population. 75% of the population in my country is below the age of 25 years old. So when we're talking, I know we're talking about, you know, repopulation, you know, is an important, we're gonna have to go for that. Maybe you'll get me going about climate change, I don't know, but anyway. So here, my point is, A, we need the right diagnosis as to why this continent is the poorest continent in the world, despite its riches, starting with its young people, all the natural resources, diversity in land, people, cultures, languages, everything that make for great ingredient for awesomeness. Despite all of that, we are the poorest region in the world. People need to know that the reason why that is, it's because we also happen to be the most over-regulated region in the world. At the end of the day, what Africa, as an idea to say Africa here, and treated as one, we are 54 countries, 55 depending on how you count, yet we almost for a tiny minority of these countries, we almost all lack one of the most crucial freedoms that there are. If you are serious about prosperity building, we lack economic freedom. And economic freedom is the thing that unlocks that human potential of young people. Yes, for them to run, to run with their ideas, to start businesses or to start initiative. It doesn't have to be for profit all the time, right? But it is this thing that gets you to get up and go and do something, criticize by creating. Young people are naturally wired to wanna criticize by creating. They're not sitting around waiting or complaining usually, unless you put them in a tiny box and they have no other way to go. And in this situation, what they do, let's talk about pre-colonial Africa of four favours before slavery ever happened. There were black people on the continent. You see, when we talk about the story of black people and Africans, black people in Africa, for most of us, even me, I noticed that unconsciously it starts with slavery. But you're like, no, we were there before, before white men ever set foot. Who were we? What were we doing in our diversity? What economic systems were we running on? And then you realize that for most of them, they were free marketeers and they were very much on the free trade, on the free enterprise side. So even that is a reinforcement. This is a place where we do not understand our history. So proper diagnosis, Africa is a poorest region in the world because it happens to be the most over-regulated region in the world, lacks economic freedom. Number two, what do we do about that? We gotta become serious about reforms, economic reforms, so that we can become beacons of free markets, just like the Asian tigers. That's what the Asian tigers did. They had to become serious. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, those guys had to become serious about the free markets. Lee Kuan Yew, when he's just like, we gotta do something. And he looked around and he realized at some point, we gotta make these reforms. And he went on to that journey of reforms, making his country one of the most free market countries in the world. And voila, the magic happened. Back in the 30s, the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything, the world, and with all the lies that were told to the world coming from the Soviet Union, Stalin, while they were starving and dying over there, but oh no, I mean, Durante was telling the world that, oh no, no, everything is going well. Nobody's dying when we know now and getting pretty surprises based on this stuff. But then the world went on believing that, oh no, capitalism failed. This crash that you had in the stock market is proof. This is what late stage capitalism produces. You guys always have your big ups and down. And by that time, it was so hard on people that they're like, we're done with this. And at the same time, we're told the lies coming out of the Soviet Union, but supposedly the communism was doing just fine. And you're at the point where the free market concept almost died and it's the Asian tigers who kind of helped bring that idea back to life, right? Their success having used the free markets. And so for me, we gotta have, we gotta make a new commitment to the free markets on this continent if we wanna go anywhere, if we wanna go anywhere. And the timing is perfect because the young people, there is a kind of freedom for the revolutionary free markets in this whole space. Exactly, and you said something, say that again, because I wanna tell you what I'm hearing in that, because something's really cool. Say it again, come on, Lex. I don't know which part. English is my second language too. No, you said there's something revolutionary in that, because you know how young people are attached to the revolution and how, I understand, look Lex, I understand and I am willing to give the benefits of a doubt to some of these socialists who came to it because they had to witness some of the horrors of their times. There's a revolution straight behind that. It's ultimately criticized by creating. Exactly, exactly, but violent revolution is never the answer, but that's what they went for in 1789 in France, the French Revolution. And Marx and Engels, they're promoting these ideas that usually for them justifies violent revolution. Then in all of these people, I am with them when they say that they want to see equal rights for people. Of course, I don't agree with their, therefore we need to push for equal outcomes. Equal rights is right, but equal outcomes is not, right? But I am with them for all the way to equal rights, but this is where the two paths go this way. And also, the fact that they have no issue with violent revolution, that people get killed. People get put in gulags and people get, that's not right. So what you just said here just gave me goosebumps because there is revolution in the free markets, but that's the type of revolution we want. The revolution that comes from people creating, criticizing by creating, it's one of the best forms of revolution. If you ask me, that's the most sexy way of revolution, criticize by creating. By what, you're gonna go shoot people or be like, what's his name? Che Guevara, who tells you, I love, it's in writing, I love nothing more than to fry the brain of a man with his gun, really? Well, in terms of sexy, there is power in that message of the oppressor, the abuser, the enemy that has abused their power, they need to be destroyed. And there's power in the message of that violence. Unfortunately, the lessons of history show that the violence, one doesn't work, but it does the following. There is something about human nature, as the old cliche goes, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's the people who are in charge of committing that violence, it does something to their head. The first person you kill, the second person you kill, for some reason, you lose your ability, the compassion for other humans. Even if you began as a revolutionary, as the Soviets did, fighting for the worker, for the rights and the basic humanity of the people that really do the work, you lose the plot somehow because of the violence. So in that way, it seems like the lesson, at least of this part of the human history, until the robots take over, is that the economic freedom, free markets, and protecting those and allowing anyone from your country to dream and to make that dream a reality by creating it with as few roadblocks as possible. Exactly. So that's why, for me, the message is very clear, is what we talked about today. The reason why Africa is the poorest region in the world is because it happens to be the most overregulated region in the world. And for some people who might be put off by it because they're like, oh, she's talking about laissez-faire. No, let me put it maybe in a way that you can understand. Do you think that it should be as easy for any person in Africa, for any entrepreneur in Africa to enterprise than it is for any person in Scandinavia to enterprise? If your answer is yes, which I would hope it is, then you have a moral obligation to work with me to make my country and as a whole, my continent more free markets. It's that simple. At that point, there's no like, yes, but on the other hand, uh-uh, no. As for me, on that question, and I've yet to have to find somebody who claims to say no. If you say no, then we have a whole nother problem. I'm not even talking to you at that point anymore. So, yeah. So just to clarify, there's a perception and some reality that Scandinavian countries have elements of socialism in their politics and their society, even in their economics. So at the very least, Africa should have, in terms of economic indices, should be as free as the Scandinavian countries. You're just giving that example. Economically free, yes. Because if a Scandinavian, they do have a subsidized, you know, like welfare system. That's what, a small socialized welfare system. But the way they make their money is very much the way of a free market. So there is how you make your money, and then there's how you maybe decide as a country to redistribute it, right? And so even there, even in Scandinavia, again, yes, they have more economic freedom. So then from there, Lex, where we go is, my job and my goal is for every single African, young and old, to know what I have come to learn. We are not doomed. It's not over for us. We will never catch up. The time for catch up is gone. But guess what? We've got a strong, strong possibility and chance to leapfrog. And leapfrog we will. It is still time. But for that to happen, like I said, we need to know what we just talked about today, because that is not what the mainstream keeps us abreast with. When you go to the World Bank, they don't necessarily work along these lines. They're still, it's not, when you go to universities, I will ask you, MIT, the MIT Econ Department, or even some of, most of the professors, are they free market oriented? We find that oftentimes in academia, there is a strong anti-capitalist bias. There is a strong anti-free market bias. So this is a problem. This is a problem. Nobody cares about the economists anyway. So we move forward. In MIT, the spirit of the entrepreneur burns bright. Not in the economics department, because they just write op-ed articles, but in the dreamers, the young undergrads that actually build something. No, I get that, but then we cannot be stifling their efforts by putting these artificially made regulations and laws that stand in the way and clip their wings. So that's why, when you were saying, what advice do you give to them? The advice I give to them is, each one of them, they have to pay attention to this discourse we just had. I don't ask anybody to agree with me on face value. Go back, do like I had to do. I come very much from the left of the left, if you can believe that. But I had to have my own intellectual journey. And in this case, my intellectual journey was very much complemented by my own life, having to build these companies on two separate continents and having to, I had front row seat of the differences. At first, I thought it was this way just because we're poor and therefore we messed up and therefore it's like this. But eventually I learned that, no, we're poor because we lack economic freedom. And if a country allows its citizens the economic freedom to enterprise, then they become rich. So I had it upside down, you see. And so it's important for people to know that. So number one, know your facts, because your facts will empower you. In this case, I like to use that word. Facts will empower you and they will even furthermore, they will power you, empower and power you. Because empower is like inside, and power is like I push you forward and up. So that's what it does to know the facts. And then go on and look around you. Where are the best practices of this? Who is at the cutting edge of a free markets? We're starting a way there. People don't necessarily be left behind or anything like that. We're in 2022 for Christ's sake. We don't have to do entrepreneurship the same way maybe it was done 50 years ago, 100 years ago, when as a community, as a people, we were maybe less enlightened because of our times. We can update this thing and move forward, but update is definitely not build back, what do they call it? Build back new or whatever they're calling it, the WF, whatever nonsense and stuff they're smoking over there. It's not that. There are some principles that are universal and that stand the test of time. Those we have to keep and on top add the new things we learned from our times and from life. So that's what I want them to know. Learn your facts, be empowered and powered, and then look around, think about it and look to see where the best practices are around the world because the world is yours. You might be African, but the world is yours. So stop this nonsense of, oh, well, it's done by white people, so we're not going to do it. Get the best that exists in humanity for what you're trying to solve. And on top of that, put your own twist, right? Bitcoin is all of ours to take. Bitcoin is not the white man's thing, so therefore, oh, come on, because we have a misguided pride. We're not going to use Bitcoin because it's white man's stuff. Bitcoin is math, you idiot. Math is universal, so it belongs to all of us. There's no color. Exactly. In the space of economics, in the space of ideas. And there's a chance to leapfrog too, which is really, really powerful. Exactly, because here we will leapfrog. And Lex, I'm not crazy. This is going to happen. You mark my words. But it's going to happen if as many people hear what we're talking about today, because at some point, the solution is not going to come. It's not me. It's not... It's going to come from the wisdom of a crowd. This is why I love the crowd. There's no better wisdom than the crowd, and that's also why I believe in the free markets. This concept of emergent order. There's no way, there's no central planning that is smart enough, that has the level of intel that street-level people have, trying to create something. It's just, we just have to be humble. There's just something at the bottom of a pyramid that just bubbles up and happens. They're the best. I think the cynicism, the idea that people are dumb is at the core of a lot of things that prevent the flourishing of society. You know, this kind of anecdotally, people are like, everyone's stupid, and people say that jokingly. But the reality is, people are incredible. They have the capacity for kindness, for love, for innovation, for brilliance, in all kinds of dimensions. You might suck at math, but you might be amazing at carpentry. You have to find that thing, and there's something about when there's freedom to find that thing, and people interact, they get excited about shit together, and then they build. If you look at authoritarian, at places that limit that freedom, at the core, I think, is the idea that people are dumb. Let us take care of everything. We'll come up with the rules and the regulations, because people are too dumb to manage things themselves. And then that idea builds on top of itself, where you think that the entire populace is much lesser than the wise sages sitting at the top. Then you add violence on top of that, and that leads to corruption, to corrupting just the human mind of the leaders. And the whole thing becomes a giant mess. The antidote to that is economic freedom. For people to have a freedom to enterprise. And look, Lex, when we allow for that to happen, have you looked around lately, and look at the level of niche that has happened in this country? I mean, you have clubs where, you have places where people are into guitar strings. Like, it's all about guitar strings. And others, it's all about these best cupcakes. And others, it's all about this new crypto thing over here. And others, like, hair, best, you know, weight. When you allow us, because seven billion geniuses, each one of us, I believe, came to this world with something, something that only he or her possesses. And that is the genius, and it is their contribution to the human problem. When you think about your identity today, so it all started in Africa, just like it did for the entirety of the human species. There's a bit of European flavor in there, a little French, Silicon Valley, you're now, in part, a Texan. There's, you really are an American, but you're also an African. Who are you, when you look in the mirror, when you think about yourself, when you listen, when everything gets quiet and you listen to your heart, who are you? Can you figure out that puzzle? That's a very interesting question, because it's been a long time I haven't asked myself. I have before. What I have found is, I think who I am today has been, for sure, shaped by, I call it Dakar, Paris, San Francisco. Dakar is Senegal, Paris, France, and San Francisco, primarily. And now, yeah, I think I might wanna ask, there's a little bit of Texan in there. How do you say Texas in French? Texas. Texas. Texas. Yeah. Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. Austin. Austin, Texas. It's easy. Not quite as good. Austin, Texas. Yeah. Yeah. Us, Texas. Us. Us, Texas, yeah. So, you, I was formed by those three. I have to say that what I enjoy from my Senegalese roots are our commitment to peace, love, and tolerance, very much. And Taranga, obviously. And I like that it's a culture that's very much about reverence. We're big on reverence. I don't think you could ever hear me tell an older person, especially not my parents or my grandma, or anybody like that, for us to be able to tell an older person, that's not true, or you're lying, it would never cross my mind. Because that's the most disrespectful thing you can think of, the most irreverent thing you can think of. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with everything that's said, but there's a way to disagree. There's a way to push back. There's a way to push back. There's a way to push back that doesn't have to rob this person who happens to be older than you, especially from the dignity that older age normally provides. And there's wisdom to their words that you yourself may not see. So the reverence is for the idea of wisdom, of tradition. Exactly, exactly. And again, so that is something that I really enjoy, especially, and something I'm very attached to, to this day, and then from France, what I really came to enjoy, of course, is all the fineness that one can find within French culture. The fineness? Yeah, the fineness. Foods, design. You mean like the intricacies, like the very... Yeah, the sophistication in there. I mean, French lingerie, for example. I mean, la dentelle, the laces, all of that, super... It's exquisite. Yeah, fashion, the food. Fashion, the food. I mean, there's something to be said about all of that, and it's very beautiful. And I love also, even when I talk about fineness, it's like a meal is not about like this big thing they put in front of you, but smaller portions, enjoy what you're eating and spend time at the table. Like the eating time is not necessarily just this function of feeding yourself, which I understand it, but this is something that they share with Senegalese culture, is eating is a moment of communion. It's a moment of friendship, family. It's a precious moment. To this day, and my husband is American, we eat our meals together all the time. I would not have it any other way. And there's a prep time, all of that stuff. It doesn't matter how busy I am, but we're doing it. Actually, to push back a little bit, it's interesting, because yeah, the camaraderie over a meal is a beautiful thing. I got, I mean, I was in a pretty dark place because on the way to Ukraine, I traveled to Paris. I stayed in Paris and I wasn't able to enjoy the fineness because it was almost a distraction from the humanity for some reason to me, because there's such a focus on the art of it all that you lose the basic connection to humanity. Now, that said, I think some of the lack of connection over humanity was the fact that while I did know how to speak French for a long time, I forgot most of the language. And so part of it, there is a barrier. You said hospitality. There is a bit of a barrier in French culture to where in order to be welcomed in, you have to hear the music and be able to play the music of the people. And if you don't, there's a bit of a barrier. I must admit on that, and that it is true, you would feel less that if you were with a group of Senegalese people per se, or I would even say if a group of Spanish people. And I think this is maybe the other side of it for the French people. They can be a little bit, you know, up there. And I think maybe that's what you're sensing there. If you don't have the codes, which is what you call the, you don't sing the music, then it's hard for you to be part of it. But I was speaking here from the standpoint of you're in. Yeah, from the inside. Yeah, yeah. Also, come on, come on. Coming from Texas and also Ukraine, Ukraine, I should say, some of the best steak and meat I've ever had, cheap. Texas, some of the greatest. And the size of the meals in France, it's like, what are we doing here? I mean, I get it's art. I like to look at my art on the wall. No, okay. And then eat my damn steak. Did you go, so maybe, okay, no, no, no, no. Okay, now here I have to defend them, although sometimes I'm the worst. No, did you go to some Michelin star restaurant? Maybe that's why. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. That's why. A little bit. Because next time you go to France, I'll take you to the countryside or any French home. They will serve you multiple times. I mean, by the time you're done, even if it's, you know, the portions are smaller, they're smaller if you want to, but because that way you get a chance to really, you know, feel what you're eating and then have more and then all of that stuff, but not be like, ah, like this. And then, you know, but no, you'll eat plenty, but it's because you went to the Michelin places where they're like- I'm sure the warmth of the people is there. It almost makes me sad that sometimes, I think to properly be in a place, you really should spend a long time there. Yeah, a long time. And also be emotionally ready. Again, I was emotionally unavailable. I was just like- Well, I would imagine on your way to Ukraine, I'm like, who can think about food? But in your identity, a bit of Texas, a bit of San Francisco, a bit of Africa. Yeah, San Francisco. And I guess from America, the defining thing for me I think for me for America is, it's the freedom and the entrepreneurial mindset. See, very quickly, when I moved from France to the United States, and I started becoming successful in the United States, I found myself, me and my husband, he was French and my first husband, who passed away. We found ourself at some point, we stopped talking to our friends in France who stayed in France, because we were talking to them about things that were so outside of their comprehension. What do you mean you're in your 20s and you just raised, I don't know, a million dollars or $2 million, especially from back in those days. Today, it's easy here and there. So even in France, that entrepreneurial spirit didn't burn quite as bright. I mean, don't take me wrong. Do you have some entrepreneurial people in France? Yeah, but to the level that you have it in the US, absolutely not. It's just, I mean, in France, it's still very much, you're born in this area, you go to school in that area, your parents live around, eventually you'll marry and be where your parents are, or maybe go to where your spouse's parents are, and you buy your house and you buy it once and you're not going to do like the Americans, two years later, I sell my house, I go somewhere else. You don't have any of that. What do you mean, just stopping from nowhere, you're going to do what? Start a business and you have nothing to back you up or whatever? Oh, and even this idea of going and fundraising this venture cap, especially back in the days, venture cap, all of that, it's very American. We take it for granted, but it's very American. Who would have made a bet on me in France? The same person. I would not have found the same people. I would never in France have been able to raise, at some point it was $32 million for my first business, never would have been able to do that in France. And it doesn't mean that French people are bad people or anything like that. It's just something that's just not so in the culture. Just like this whole concept of philanthropy, it's not that the French people don't do philanthropy, but philanthropy in America is very different from the level and also the magnitude of maybe what the French people do. And also they have this always like, oh, let's do it behind the scene. Money is suspicious, success is suspicious. So at some point, my husband and I just felt like our friends actually were maybe thinking that we're maybe some drug dealers or something. So we just stopped because it just was not flowing anymore. And so, yes, in America, I found this entrepreneurial spirit, but then I was able to link it with something that I'm very familiar with in my country. See, back home in Senegal, I'm part of this, you have what we call the Mouride, I'm a Mouride. So what it is, is one of the four brotherhoods in Senegal, Mouridism is the most influential of them and the biggest one, and us, it's all about entrepreneurship as well. I mean, of course there's a whole religious part, but our mantra is pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will never die. And the way we say, the way somebody will say that somebody passed away, we say, somebody has retired. Somebody has retired from their work, right? Beautiful. Right? So I think it's funny because in that community, we're very much entrepreneurial, left to our own devices, we're entrepreneurial. But then what happens is the minute people start going to, they're being educated through the education system, like the French, especially the education system, but tend to breed more like the French bureaucrat mindset, then you can see all the entrepreneurial mindset kind of starting to dwindle down. So it's kind of very interesting. So in a way, America helped me reunite with that side of my roots, where America tells me, reinforces that side of my roots, and also gives me more tools to practice that side of my roots, if that makes any sense. Through all of that, that's what brings out the heart of a cheetah, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing that encapsulate that whole trajectory, which I think is the best possible answer anyone could give. It makes me want to really think about who I am, because you really have brought together so many cultures within yourself. Just talking to you makes you feel like we are just all one people. Because at the end, we are. At the end, we are. And when you come from, at the end, we are, and also I think, for me, if people can take anything from my story, it's at the end of the day. I am very clear about it, and I'm all for harmony among people, and among us peoples. If we can accept that we're all, I know this sounds so cliche, but for me, it's so true, that we're all humans. You know, when I left Senegal, when I was about to leave Senegal for the first time, and to go to Europe to be reunited with my parents, because now they had emigrated, and things were gonna be fine, and I was gonna be, things were stable for them. Now they're like, it's time to be reunited with her. They brought me over, but before I left Senegal, my grandma sat me down. She, actually, she lowered herself down to my level, and she said, said, Magat, you're about to go to this place where most people will not look like you. And most people speak a language that's gonna be different from yours. And you're gonna realize that all the kids are going to school, and you'll never be into school, because, you know, I was, like I said, a free-range kid, and I was just living my life. And she said, but, I don't want for any of that, and she showed her words, she said, I don't want for any of that to intimidate you. She said, you can be impressed by some of it if you want, but no intimidation. And she said, because the fact that they might be different from you, yeah, they're gonna have a different skin color from you, but it is still human skin. You're human, they're human. And she said, this language you're gonna speak, it's a different language from yours, but it is still a language that humans speak. You're human, they're human, therefore you can speak it. And lastly, they have gone to school. Going to school is what little humans do. You're a little human, so you'll be just fine. And I went, and grandma was right, right? She was right! And that helped me. And I think when you internalize that so early on, it just makes you belong to the human family that you're part of. I am part of a human family. And I would have no problem going to Russia, for example, let's take, and be totally open. Maybe don't go right now, but. No, not now, maybe not now, you're right. Or at least don't bring weed if you go on the plane. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, right? That girl, I don't know what she was thinking, but. No, so, but what I'm trying to say, Lex, is I feel like I can go anywhere in the world, including some of the most unfriendly places in the world to someone like me, because there are places like that. And yet I know, I know that somehow, somewhere, someone will take care of me. Someone will help me. When I first came to this country, I came as a tourist, but you had this amazing family who had a business, a family business in Indiana, Columbus, Indiana. The Wentzes, Caroline and Eldon Wentz, I owe them everything that I have in this country, that I am in this country. They are Americans in mid-America from a place that most other Americans would maybe look down on, because, you know, and some people would be like, oh, you're going to this place where they have more churches and cows than people, you know, that type of behavior, because, you know, the coastal elites. But it is in Midwest, in the Midwest, that I found that I, a black, young woman, coming out of nowhere, found support. They all rallied around me. I didn't even come from the same faith as they are from, yet their whole church rallied around me to find me an apartment. My host family found me, got me a job, and it was not a pitted job. They were like, we need, we are in serious needs of getting our accounting under control and our marketing and all of that. And I had to catch up years of accounting, like 2%, and come up with marketing, all of that. And I did it way faster than they thought I would ever be able to do that. At some point, they look at me and they're like, look, there is a future for you, and we are too small. We are too small for that future. And now we could be selfish and keep you here with us, and we would want nothing more than that, because really, they're like my parents to this day. I just came back from seeing them. And they said, but there's so much more for you, and we don't have it. So we want you to go and find out what it is. And that's eventually when I, because something was brewing up in San Francisco, when I say I left my heart in San Francisco, because the man would become my husband. We went to the same business school in France, but then he was older than me, so he had come to San Francisco and started a business there. And it just looked like there was something there. And Carole was like, you got to go to San Francisco and find out with Emmanuel what's going on. So I went and I left my heart in San Francisco. I came back and I'm like, okay, I'm leaving. Here's the keys to my apartment. Well, I don't know what I'm saying. But I'm like, I'm out of here. So no, but Carole, so this is it. This is what I'm saying, especially in these times when this country loves to dwell on, you're bad because you have this skin color. Here are people with a completely different skin color than mine, completely different faith than mine, yet embraced me, protected me, paid for my visa, for my lawyer, for my H-1B, everything, and also played emotional support for me. And no one, no one asked them to do that. They didn't have to do it. They didn't. So what I'm saying is, and this has been the story of my life. Everywhere I go, regardless of the hostility around me, you betcha that there's always, always gonna be somebody who shows up for you, and somebody who is at the extremes of, at the antipodes of where you are and who you are. And that tells me something. In the end, we are good people. Most people are good people. And there's so much power to that, the internalizing of this idea that we're all just human. And there's human kindness all around us. I've seen it a lot where people internalize that, and they're able to walk lightly amidst hate. Yeah. And walk past it. Yes. And it doesn't stick to them in a way that they build resentment, and it paralyzes them. If they internalize that we're all just human, they can be in the, just like you said, in the worst places in the world for them. And someone, somewhere, that human magic and touch is there. Yeah, it will find them. It will find, yeah, yeah. And you know, the other thing too, Lex, is especially in these times we're walking in, it is to remind yourself. I think this is where we all are called to practice more courage. I call it courage. It's the courage to show up with curiosity, with empathy, and with love. To me, those three are the antidote to pretty much anything. Yeah. Curiosity, empathy, and love. In the face of fear, can you show up with curiosity? In the face of hate, can you say, I'm going to engage with love, even if I'm scared to death, and even if I'm pissed off to death by this? But can you do that? In the face of just like, you know, judgment or whatever, can you show up with empathy? And I had just found that when you try to do that, you engage very different parts of your brain. That's proven, by the way, by a brain scientist, but you also can feel it in your body that you're engaging very different parts of your soul. And so I try myself, I'm not always good at it, but it's a practice that I try to honor, which is curiosity, empathy, and love. As I told you offline, I agree with you 100% on that. But there is, you know, when you go to Ukraine, and you can say, you can speak about the power of love, but when you lose your family, when you lose your home, all you have in your heart is hate. Even if you know it, you're not supposed to have it. You still, all you have is hate. So sometimes it's a very human thing to have resentment, to have hate. But it is about trying not to stay there. And it's okay if it takes you years, but it is about trying, and I mean the word trying. It is about trying not to stay there. Let me ask you about some of the things you see in this country from your perspective of everywhere you've been in the world. What do you think about the Black Lives Matter movement here in America that does struggle with the role of skin color today, and throughout the history of this country, and maybe even throughout the history of the world? Well, Black Lives Matter has been a very hard one for me. Because do Black Lives Matter, those three words together in that order, what they mean, they mean everything. Because Black Lives do matter, as any other lives do matter. But I know in this case why they say Black Lives Matter, because some of the context we have had. Now, while I agree with the principles that Black Lives Matter, I have a big problem with the organization and what it stands for. When I have an organization that pretends to want to stand for Black Lives to matter, yet you are self-proclaimed Marxist socialists, I pause. Why? I pause and then I'm like, have we learned nothing? Have we learned nothing? And the reason why I say that, Lex, is because 60 some years ago, it started before even 60 some years ago, Black people, in this case, I'm talking about the African people. I'm talking about the Black Africans who would go on to really cement this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. And here, I'm talking about the African people who would go on to really cement this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. And here, I'm taking us back to 1945. They had four of them before that, but in 1945, in Manchester, UK, happened something that would become major for Africa and its future, especially sub-Saharan Africa. My country, Nyerere, Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana, and others and others from different parts of the continent got together with Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois. And I say Dubois because that's how we say it in French. He has a French name, French sounding name at least. And Americans would say, so for Americans listening, I know you say Dubois. Oh boy. Dubois. No, because just in case they're like, who are you talking about? That's who I'm talking about. So all of those people got together in the UK and with W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey, big top African-American intellectuals of their times. W.E.B. Dubois had so many things happen to him, starting from the North, being more or less a liberal type guy, you know, came to the South just to see at this time, you know, people, black people being lynched and some of the body parts being shown in a store windows. I mean, just for a second, we put ourself in his shoes. I put myself in his shoes. And that's when he started to become radicalized, right? Because at first it was like, oh, reforms, we see that, and I was like, God darn it, and maybe these people, we don't talk to them, we force, you know? And eventually, little by little, things going through. Yeah, you have these people, they're very much on the Marxist-Socialist train. So do you think the sort of, it's the political movements that are just using? Yeah, because what happened back in those days, it is true that to their credit, communist socialists were fighting for equal rights. They were fighting for the rights of black people to have equal rights. So of course, I could see why one could say, especially in those times, you've been lynched, bodies burnt, body parts showcased at window stores. Meanwhile, in Africa, under colonization, in your own country, in your own land. And you have this group that's saying, your fight is part of what we fight. Of course, you're gonna say, I side with you. Especially if this is all happening at a time where, you know, so 1945, these guys who would be the liberators of various African nations, they're meeting with Garvey, with W.E.B. Dubois. And that's where, this meeting is very important. It's the first meeting of the Liberators of Africa. It's very important. It's the fifth Pan-African Congress meeting. It's very important. It's gonna be their last one, but it's the most important one because that's when they formed their plans and really rallied around this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. We're gonna liberate our countries. Then later, so that's how all of these movements started to happen. And from there, Gandhi was already making some progress with India, you know, getting them out of British rule and all of that. All of this was happening and really like this whole thing was bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, you know, like there's like a new force going on. And then we arrive in the late 50s and, you know, Krumer with them, you know, them with the British as well, they might manage to become, their colonization is over. They're the first one to go in, 57. Then from there, it's what we call the independences. That's what most sub-Saharan African nations are getting their independences. Different dates, mine, April 4th, 1960. So all over, so this is happening. And now think about it, you're talking 57, you're talking 60. We're like at this time now with the middle of a Cold War. Because we have to put things in context if we want to understand what's going on. Because people today ask me, why do you think, because even now when they understand, oh, you're right, it makes sense. If you have no economic freedom, you're gonna be poor. But why, why did they go for this? Why did they go for this? And then they don't understand. So that's what happened. So beginning of times, pre-colonial Africans were free marketeers, free enterprise. It's pretty well recorded by someone like George Aite. That's where I got the Chida thing from. And Ghanaian economist. And then slavery happened, colonialism happened, and then the independences, late 50s, early 60s for most sub-Saharan African countries. So there, what you have is, but then what happened there? So I told you in 45, fifth Pan-African Congress in the UK, with the liberators of Africa, under the leadership, because he was the wise, you know, eldest man. Dubois was, he was in his 70s back in the day. So he's older than them, you know, and he's coming with all of his ideas and everything. So we're like, ooh. So there we are. Now we're in the late 50s, early 60s. We're starting to make progress with the independences. You know, India has gone there before. So all of that is starting to happen. And at that time, remember, they already were being introduced to the concept of socialism, Marxism, all of that, way before, by some of these, you know, black African-American intellectuals of their time who were very socialist Marxist by that time. So now they're becoming independent because I do independent like this because I reckon that there's still neo-colonism going on. So now this is happening, we're becoming free. But then you look around, what do you see? That now most of these liberators of their nations become the president of their nations. But remember what I told you? Most of them have drunken the socialist, Marxist socialism Kool-Aid. So as these African nations become independent with their first independent governments and, you know, presidents, most of them are socialist, various forms of statist type of government. And this is because at that point, we had made a fatal mistake of saying, we are Marxist socialist because you guys fight for equal rights. So in this case, there should be no colonialism or anything like that. So not only you have that going on, and the people, so right now, you had this battle of ideology going on because on one end represented by freedom and the economic, what do you call it? The economic system they were using is capitalism. And these are represented by the Western nations facing off with Eastern bloc, practicing various forms of statism, socialism, communism, various forms of statism. And these two are fighting for influence. So, and we also have, it's also not, so two things there. One is we're at a time where, remember, the free market concept was almost dead. Almost dead. So almost every intellectual at that time was social Marxist or Marxist socialist, I put the name. That's what you were. So you're in a world where it was a normal thing. It was just mainstream acceptance. So not only you have that force, but at the same time, if these two forces are fighting one another, it turns out that the one representing capitalism and freedom, well, sorry, but isn't it you who enslaved us and colonized us? And you're fighting with the people who represent, you know, supposedly people who are saying that, who had been fighting for equal rights for us, with us for the longest time. These are our friends. And that's when we made a fatal mistake. Because while yes, there were maybe good things to agree on with Marxist socialist of the times, especially, you know, equal rights for all people and all of that, that's the only thing we should have, among the only things we should have agreed upon. There are violent revolution tendencies. No way. When it comes to the economic nonsense, no way. We should not have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, but that's what we did. And that's when we made a fatal mistake. So then we became free, all of these nations, and most of them started with socialist or communist leaders. My country, socialist. Leopold Sédar Senghor, he was a socialist. And they stayed in power for 40 years. The first 40 years of our freedom years. And all over the continent, more or less, that's what you had. And on top of that, something else that the French don't know, is France, with its colonies, said, you cannot not do, you have to keep the French civil law. So we're talking about the Napoleonic civil code. Are you kidding me? So that's what happened. So the reason why I go back to BLM, is while I have all the respect in the world, and all the compassion in the world, for people like Ruma, for people like Nyerere, for people, all of those people of those times, the liberators of Africa, while I have so much love, compassion for them, I am also able to say, because I got the benefit of 60-some years time, and you know, where you get to do a debrief, and see what worked, what didn't work, what happened. We have had the 60 years to look back, and to reflect. So yes, I can understand why they did what they did. I can even, I can understand why they sided with these people who on the surface, or at least some part of the fight, was the same fight as them, when it came to equal rights. I can excuse them. But I will not excuse the BLM founders. Because that mistake was tolerable 60-some years ago. Today, no. The blacks of today cannot be serious about black lives mattering, and saying in the same sentence, and we're going to be socialist Marx, Marxist socialist. It just doesn't work. So the BLM movement is too deeply integrated with the ideas of Marxism. With those ideologies. Yeah. They're anti-free market, anti-capitalist, and we do know that you have to have free markets in order to build prosperity. And prosperity means economic power. If you have economic power, no one messes with you. Or if they're going to do it, they're going to have to think twice. And when they do, they're going to have to pay consequences. So if you want for blacks to be respected anywhere in the world, you're going to have to be serious about black prosperity. En masse. Not just a few people. Oprah over here and somebody over there. No. We as a group have to be a critical mass of prosperity. Across the board. And because we're talking critical mass of prosperity, across the board, it means black people everywhere in the world. But guess what? We in Africa happen to represent 90% of the representatives of a black race. So you've got to be serious about black lives mattering without being serious for Africa, the one billion people in Africa that are black, and for them to have access to the free markets, and yes, fossil fuels, so that they can rocket up prosperity-wise. And the resources of the young people, the young minds. Yes, so that all of these young people, young minds, can finally manifest their greatness that I know they have, and that they're showing you every day despite the obstacles. That's what we need. Senegal becomes rich, and Senegal can become and will be richer than France. Singapore did it, we can do it. Mali rich. Nigeria rich, functioning as well. Malawi rich, Tanzania rich, Uganda rich, Zimbabwe rich, Niger rich, everywhere rich, prosperous. As prosperous, if not more prosperous than Switzerland, or Singapore, or the US, I don't know, or the Lichtenstein, or Luxembourg, places that have no natural resources. We become rich, and you watch the world having a very different relationship with us. That's the only time we will command any type of respect. That's when people, even our common psyche will change, even about black people. All of the stereotypes that they have of us is going to melt away. And you may still not like us, but you will still respect us, because we are a force to be dealt with. And only economic power does that. It would be nice, of course, for us to respect people because they're people. It would be nice, but let us not kid ourselves. This is Earth. And someone said, you know, nice people will make it to heaven, but not to Harvard, necessarily. It's true. It's interesting that pity does not ever turn into respect. It would be nice if it did. It would be nice, but it doesn't. Prosperity is the only thing. Prosperity is the only thing. And the way we do that, there is no... Just like all of us humans have to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That's a human way of breathing. You bring me on... But you want to be foolish and be like, oh, well, sorry. That's how white people breathe. So as black people, we're going to have to do something different. Well, good luck with that. So this is here why I'm saying, I have no patience for Black Lives Matter. They're making a mistake that was made 60-some-plus years ago. Even more than that, maybe even 100 years, you know, when we were siding with the Marxist-Socialists because they're the ones who've been fighting for equal rights. Let me ask you, though, about racism. Do you, as you travel through this world, as you travel through America, feel the burn of hatred? You've spoken about the revolutions that have been fought throughout the 20th century against racism. But today, as people talk about educating, reminding the world, even with more philosophical ideas of critical race theory, for example, do you think this is still a battle that needs to be fought at the forefront of culture in the United States? Does racism exist? Yes, it does. But all forms of isms exist. Some people, it's about various forms of ableism. Others, it's about size. And racism, yes, is one of them. Does it exist? Yes, it does. But is it what's going to stop anyone from manifesting their greatest potential? I say no. I say no. Many people in this country have showed it. Whether they're African-Americans or African-immigrant, I'm an African-immigrant, you have African-Americans like Oprah and others, and other people even before her, who, despite the nastiness around them, were able to make it. So we do know, especially us Black people, but I think it's humanity as a whole. And that's what I love about the human spirit. It's resiliency. But resiliency only can happen if you don't allow yourself to be beaten down and to lose your self-agency. It's, of course, easier said than done. And some among us need a little bit more help to not succumb for it than others do. And I've seen it. It might be harder for you if you're somewhere in a city, in a city, Black America. Maybe the environment might be a little bit tougher for you to try and get your act together and all of that stuff. And it's okay. But even in that situation, we need to, I think it's important that we still do not rob you of your agency. And this is where I am mad as heck against those who supposedly care and their idea of how to make sure that I don't become or stay a victim of racism is through all the things we talked about, the CRT, the anti-racism crap of, you know, Abram X. Kendi and what's her name? Robin DiAngelo. I mean, her, I'm shocked. The woman is making all of this money, supposedly fighting a war on our behalf. I'm like, lady, I hear you loud and clear that you are a true racist. I know, but you told me you are. And for you to think that your anti-racism makes you less racist, and that happens too. She comes from a racist background. Fine, she's saying it. It's true. But this idea that every walking person on earth belongs to one category or the other, depending on what you, you know, which skin color you came with, it's problematic at its root. So my point is, does racism exist? Yes. Do you think it's going to stop me from doing anything I have to do? No. Might it make it harder, longer? Maybe. But it will not stop me. But for it not to stop me, I can't engage in victimhood mentality. I can't lose myself. I got to use all the agency that I have to fight back and fight beyond. See, it's just a bit of fight back. You fight back and you fight beyond. Because at some point, yeah, and. It's this concept of yes, and. So this is why I have loved the job. So when I have somebody who is like, oh, anti-racism is the way. We're going to go and tell all the black, all the white kids that, you know, because they happen to be white, that they're really the oppressors and blah, blah, blah. And the black kids, because they're black, you know. You're not changing anything when you're doing that. Nothing except that you're causing, you're putting problems where there were no problems to start with. All we had to do was maybe go for a different route from there. Kids are kids. Kids are born kids. And this, I'm not sure if you want to get me going on to the whole science of bias. Because that's something I spent years of my life on. And my journey on the science of bias started with the days of Philando Castile, Eric Garner. That whole summer of 2016, when we had this horrendous, horrendous situation of black people being killed by the police, where they shot before asking, and people left to die in the most inhumane way for the rest of us to watch from the social media. That's me. That's when my George Floyd moment happened. Not three or four years ago, and the whole world is like, you know. So that sent me on a journey of understanding what discrimination is and bias is. And in a way, that's the reason why I started this company that I even called Skin is Skin. That's where it came from. Again, criticized by creating. I needed to understand what discrimination was. How does it work? Is it true what Kendi is saying? Is it true what D'Angelo is saying? Is it true that it could be that you're racist just because of the skin color you happen to be born in? Is it true? Is it true? I needed to know. Because I was at a time of my life where, at some point, when those killings were happening, it was so hard for me, being a black person in this country, and wondering... I mean, what is this? And what do we do with this? Yeah, is it true? How much discrimination am I operating under in the system? All of that. You need to understand the full characteristics of... If you're dreaming of making a big change by building companies, you have to kind of intuit, how much... What am I up against? What am I up against, right? And so this is why I spent all of this time on some of the work, and then eventually I understood that discrimination, if you wanted to understand it beyond the big lines, especially the clickbait lines, would make it very black and white. Then I had to really take a moment, and I spent time with the world of brain scientists, with behavioral psychologists, with evolutionary biologists, to have all of this ecosystem, but together, form what one might call the science of bias. And especially, I came across the work of this team of scientists at the University of, I think it's Wisconsin, and they're the only ones who made sense in this sea of nonsense back then. And this article wasn't political, and it was saying something that I could relate to. And eventually, what I learned was, and this part comes from the evolutionary biologists people, they, in a way, tell you that right around age three, it can happen sooner or later, because we're all different, but you go from this person to this person, and you have to be very careful about what you say, because we're all different, but you go from this person who has to rely on these other people, usually your parents, to stay alive, to be fed, to be housed, to even your diaper change, all of that stuff, right? To now, something is kicking in, where you have to, in order for you to survive, and this is all wired in, I don't even understand it consciously as I'm saying it now, where in order for you to survive, in order for you to go from this state of dependency to the next stage and more and more and more, you're going to have to develop this ability to make sense of the world. And what making sense of the world at its most basic level means is, can you determine if a situation or a person is good or bad for you? Failure, and you need to be able to do so ever so quickly, because failure to be able to do that means that you might not be alive the next second. See, it's so wired in. So this process is starting to kick in, and at that point, your brain is going to be your best ally for that. And what the brain is going to do is it's going to help you, and the way the brain works is through, it works with, it's all wired for efficiency, and the way it goes for efficiency is through automation, meaning that every time it has computed, and you probably know these things way better than me, every time it has computed one algorithm, it doesn't want to do it again. It's almost like this, okay, got it, stored, stored, right? And then it adds maybe some little levels of complexity to it, but it has to be something new, meaning the new level of complexity for it to even be willing to reconsider. Otherwise, you have, so then all of a sudden what you have is these neurons in the back of your head, and they have created pathways, right? So, and every time neurons have created pathway among themselves, because basically they're attached, and here is a pathway, well, this pathway in the world of science of bias, it's a habit. In general, it's a habit when they form two pathways, when they form a pathway, it's a habit. So, if we're willing to talk about unconscious bias, because of course it's very different from somebody who tells me to my face, there's no world in which you or I could ever be equal because you're black and I'm white, you're a woman, I'm a man, this, this, and that, that, people like that, again, one percent of psychopaths in our world, they're out there, unfortunately by the time they do nasty things, it's pretty horrible and that's what all we hear about, but I'm talking mostly about the rest of us. Remember when I told you that most of us are good people, bumbling along, making it up as we're going, and that's why I have compassion for human nature. So, but really, in the morning when I wake up, do you really think that I'm waking up and thinking, how am I going to go kill, how am I going to go kill Lex, that Lex guy needs to go down, he's a man, he's a, don't take me wrong, I'm sure there are some women who feel like that, but I'm not one of them and I do think a majority of us are not, whatever. But you know, in the morning I'm waking up, I'm just like, gee, can I get my tea? Oh, my dog is not looking okay today, you know, we've got, right? It's a lot going on and so you're using these kind of, just like you said, brilliantly, the brain has a bunch of simplifications it's built up and it uses those simplifications to get through the day. To get through the day, exactly. So then here you are needing to make sense of the world and then the brain is your best ally in that. The way it's going to do it is for efficiency, efficiency done through automation. So every time it thinks it's figured something out, it's never going to think about it again. So that's how you build all of these habits of unconscious bias because everything, so it's somewhere along the line you come up with the information that black man walking around with a hoodie equals danger. So later, what do you see? Whether it's like, oh my God, I'm walking in the dark alley, I see a black man with a hoodie, maybe I'm going to run away because I've been given that information. So the best way to think about it is the brain is a hardware and the software it runs on is, what do you call it? Is a cultural imprint. All of this information that we're getting from the Disney movies that you're reading, telling you that damsels are to be saved by the prince and all that stuff and girls wear pink and all whatever. You watch the movies and all the movies, whenever you watch them, it's about Africa. They're talking to you about the blood diamonds or they're talking to you about slavery or they're talking to you about this. And then of wonder you walk away thinking that all the ills of Africa are caused because of resource extraction, the diamonds, or they're always fighting each other. Look at the movie or slavery all the time. You walk away and this is it. And we all programmed along the same line. See, that's the beauty of it. All of us are, because even some black people who are going to claim that they didn't, this is not what they registered. Really? So the truth. So then when I learned all of this, I'm like, wow, this concept of if you've got a brain, you've got biases. It comes with a territory. That makes sense. Now, it doesn't mean we can't transcend that function of a brain and that we should transcend it. But I think it's very important because once you understand that, a little bit more peace is created among us. Because this is not about a black and white or a yellow and green issue. It's about we are human issue. And these are part of the things we develop to stay around. It's like we no longer have to rely on this fear of flight ability of a brain because bears over there start running and running fast. Today, where are the bears? Show me where they are. But we have kept this tendency to go for fear of flight. I don't know how they say it. And so we have this courtesan done by the stress, stress triggers. But back in the days, we have a stress trigger, we run, and it's all expelled out. But today, we get triggers and we don't know what to do with it because where do we run to? What do we do? The bear is not even here. So same thing here with that. And so then you realize there's this whole thing that is now what you understand is that this problem is not about anti-racism BS, but it is about can each one of us do the work where the work is needed, which is we look inside. Can we go for this work of deprogrammation, this concept of a mindful practice of undoing the habit of bias? And that doesn't necessarily have to do with a simple categorization of black and white. It's all kinds of biases. It's about everything. It's about everything. And when I started on that journey and me and my friend back then built this practice of undoing your habit of unconscious bias, we had all types of people come and say, wow, I discovered that my bias is against larger people. And I'm like, what do you mean? Well, I think I, it seems to me like I felt that larger people maybe are dumb. No, we heard things. And you don't judge. Yeah. You don't judge. And so, and you see, it's at every level. You know, like, I don't know, like there's even this one friend, she was like, you know, when I looked into the whole dating thing, I absolutely didn't want to have, you know, date Asian men because she went, her mind was into some stereotypes about the size of whatever. And she was like, no. But you see, once you start, because there's this whole thing of, it's the five step thing, bias awareness, this, basically at this level, what you're doing is you're learning to spot the biases in our culture, because that's where the cultural imprint comes from. You're watching this movie and you're realizing, just like I said, wow, gee, I realized once again, the black person is portrayed like the thug of a movie. Or, you know, the Latina lady, this is how she's been portrayed. And you see it everywhere, even the NPR. NPR is happening, like you're listening to something like NPR. You've got to be more liberal than that. And this gentleman is asking these two candidates, one of them is a woman, political candidates, if the other one is a man. I'm hearing him asking the lady a question that I know he's not going to ask the man and he didn't ask her. He said, how do you balance, you know, your race with family? Does a man not have a family? Right there, you see, it's very subtle. But you see, but because now my mind is kind of trained to see things, I'm like, interesting. Or like when the media just says, froze climate change issue on something, without even the choice of words. So it's pretty much everywhere. You open a book everywhere. The interesting thing, though, I mean, even that man-woman example, is I think it's really powerful to bring that bias to the surface. But not let that lead to kind of fear and paralysis. You should almost, I mean, that's where humor is. Make fun of it. Bring it to the surface. Like acknowledge the fact that those things are a part of the conversation. And a lot of them are, it is, you know, it's a cultural imprint because it's part of culture. And that might be, there could be, you know, I grew up in the Soviet Union where the gender roles were stronger than in other places. And that's part of the culture. We have to acknowledge that this is how, this is affecting how I think. We might like how that works or we might not. But we have to acknowledge it and not get, you know, make it part of humor. Make fun of yourself, you know, all that kind of stuff. That's the thing. And so Lex, that's why this first step is bias awareness. So you get, you train yourself. Oh yeah, okay, that was one. Or it's, you know, and it's about, it's in you. We're talking about you, we're not. And then from there you like replace the bias, like bias replacement. Then it is where you practice the empathy. You're like, gee, wow, I wonder how I would feel every day I walk into a store. And the guy thinks he should be following me because maybe I can, I might steal something because I'm black. Right. Because once you try that, to put yourself in the other person's shoes, all of a sudden something else starts to click. And then from there you go on to making connection. Then you're making a connection and then things start to change because now you, you're making, then you make cultural immersion. So this is where we had some people like this one woman, she was very, quite, very feminist oriented. And she had an issue with women wearing the hijab. And because for her it was like, how come you, how come, how come you, you, you just lower it, you know, like, how come you're accepting this demeaning of yourself, not understanding everything else that comes with it. But through, as she understood that she even had that bias, then she went on through all the different processes. And then eventually when comes the next step, cultural immersion, she started going to the mosque during Ramadan when the Muslims are doing, you know, their, it's the holy month of, you know, fasting and then we break at night. And she started understanding very different things. And eventually happens the last step that happens naturally, making a true, real, genuine connection. And this is where friendships happen. This is where that's it, your bias can go home now because it has been challenged with reality and understanding. And so for me, that is what I was after. And then, but then the world was just like, we don't want to be told we're part of a problem. So, but I still reckon that it is the type of mindfulness type of practice that's going to need to happen. And it's one that's very internal to you. It is, it is not, and it happens, everybody at their own pace. So all of this, I take it back to, to racism, the question you were asking me. Does racism exist? Yes, it does. Is it going to stop me from doing anything I want to do? No. It's going to make it harder? No. But this is where for anybody who is serious about making sure, about fighting racism, I think the only job you have to do is to make sure that people keep their sense of self-agency. And B, can you help provide people with the tools to stand up? So this is why I have so much respect for Van Jones. People like Van Jones, although I disagree with him on so many things, but people like Miss Alice Johnson, she was pardoned by President Trump through the work of people like Van Jones and Kim Kardashian and others. They all joined forces. This is a case where people of, and those folks then went on to combine forces. Furthermore, no regard given to their political belongings. They said if the issue is criminal justice reform, then anybody who stands for it has to come together. And so what they did in this situation with what they're doing, criminal justice reform, in my mind, is a valid action to fight racism in my mind, because what are you doing there? You're trying to get people out of jail who really have no business being there. And also when you have people like Bishop Omar and the people, he passed away, unfortunately, but today we have Anton Lucky, who was in jail for having killed his cousin. He had started, I think he started the gang in South Dallas. So we're talking really tough guy who was really on the wrong side of the equation. And then in jail, literally, he found Plato, the cave and all that. So today these people, I'm like, why don't we hear more about them, the urban specialists? Because these people, it's not about the anti-racism crap of Kandy O'Donoghue, I'll say it again, until the cows come home, but it is about we go where help is needed. We go in urban, inner city, black inner city neighborhoods, and block by block, we change the culture. And they say it like that. It's their words. These are African-American people who have as many rights as anybody else to talk about their own culture. And they will tell you, we have to change the culture. I have some videos like that on my YouTube with Bishop Omar. What these people are doing is what we need to do. Bishop will explain, he says, sometimes people are, their feet sink deep down in the mud. And what we have to do is to try to pull them up. And you cannot say you didn't pull them up because we're not seeing their head out yet. But how much progress have they made from the bottom to where they are now and keep going? So what I see these people doing, you see, I have so much, I love and respect Glen Lowry and company, and Ian Rove and all of those guys. I love them. I love a lot of the things that they say. This whole concept of personal responsibility, we don't know that. But I'm just like, at some point, it also needs to be matched up with real actions. And that's what the people like Anton Luckey, Urban Specialists, Alice Johnson are doing. They're going where it's hard. Alice Johnson is getting people out of jail every single day, literally. And then people like Anton Luckey and his team are giving them the tools to live the gang life, to be better people, to go for a life of redemption. This is happening right now. But what I find is they're not getting the bulk of the attention. But this is, anybody who's serious about, this is why, how I would love to see people do anti-racism is help lift people up for real. Support, support a school choice. Support school choice. Black mamas, they know what's going on. And when they tell you we want school choice, they know what to talk about. They're not idiots. Especially at the local level. Yes. Helping them at the local level. Yes. So help them make sure that they can take their kids out of these public schools that are doing horrendous things to them. You know, Miss Virginia, watch that movie. How could you not support black moms in this country to take their kids to safety when it comes to education? How come not? That's what I want to see happen. And not like some, yeah, let's go to some classrooms and everybody's white, you go over here, everybody's a neck stain, you go over here, and kids, let us tell you about this. No, no, no, no. As a black person, I don't want you to do any of that crap. Let me grow my wings. If you want, help put some fuel behind them and let me take my flight. That's all I'm asking for. That's the only way for you to do, that's the only way for you to be part of a racism battle if that's what you think is the most important battle of our life. That's it. That's what I have to say about that. And so for me, I'm keeping my head very straight. It's about what enables black people to thrive. I don't need for you to be an activist on my behalf. No, because when you're doing that, you're doing exactly what you've been doing to us black people in Africa our whole life. I don't need your white savior complex because that's what anti-racism is, white savior complex. That stuff doesn't work. It only works to make you feel better about how superior you are to me, but it does nothing, absolutely nothing to change my everyday life. If it is, at least in the African side, to actually even change my, you know, turn me into somebody who's waiting for handouts. So I would encourage people to really, those people who are really serious about wanting to be part of a solution, and I know there are many out there, for the love of God and everything that's out there and you care about, stop. It's about, think about what's going to enable people. Maybe the word is wrongly chosen, but know what I'm talking about. Give them the freedom to spread their wings. Yes, give a person, yeah, teach a person how to fish and don't give them a fish. When you're putting your stupid signs on the lawn with Black Lives Matter and all that crap, you're not helping. And when you're buying one more anti-racism book or as a company, you know, financing one more DEI, you know, if it's done along those lines, I think we've got a problem. So you do think that the efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion are often not effective? Not only are they not effective, but they also backfire and there are reports on all of this. And at the end of the day, it makes sense. It makes sense. So for me, I am very, very glad that people have developed an enlightenment about this. Very happy about that. Very. But let us not keep going for the easy perceived solution to problems. Again, they've done this to us, the poor people of Africa. They thought the solution was to give. It does not work. And then they say, oh, we're going to do a social entrepreneurship on you. Tom Shoes, buy one pair of shoes and we give one pair of shoes to some people in poor countries. Then guess what happened to us? You know, in the town where we operate in Senegal, where I have my little manufacturing, we have 2000 little mom and pop businesses. And guess what they happen to be in, Lex? Shoemakers. Right? So, every shoemaker, each one of them hires at least 5-15 people. Do the math. Family businesses. Guess what happens to them the day the Tom Shoes truck shows up with a bunch of free shoes? Who can compete against free? Now, all of these people, little by little, are going to have to close their shops because who can compete against free? Because Tom Shoes is dumping all of his shoes on them. And then they go out of business. And now, instead of helping anybody, you actually sent all the kids who depended on these adults working in these places, now they have to join the rank of kids who need to be given shoes because you took their parents' ability to make money through their wages, buy them shoes. You see? So first they said, we just have to give. So that was primarily, you know, the charity business. And you still have foreign aid business going on. So we just need to give. And then the social entrepreneurs came in place. But I'm like, the only person for this is business is good is for Blake McCarthy, who is now the founder of Tom Shoes. But other than that, I'm not sure really seeing who else is winning from this. And so today, my whole thing is, we got a challenge to have a mind for the poor or to have a mind for the lesser fortunate, maybe in this country. It is easy. And lesser fortunate, because, you know, for anybody that you feel like is being trampled upon because of something, maybe it's because of economic circumstances or maybe it's race in this case, whatever. To have a heart for the lesser fortunate among us, for whatever reason, that's easy. But to have a mind for them, that's the challenge. Let me ask you a difficult question. Yeah. As if we were not already asking difficult questions. The president of Senegal, Maggie Sall, is also now the chair of the African Union. He met with President Vladimir Putin on June 3rd. I think primarily was to discuss food security. Africa seems to be split halfway on their perspective on the war in Ukraine. So broadly speaking, what do you think about this? First of all, the geopolitics of Africa and the geopolitical relationship of Africa with the rest of the world and its current conflict with the war in Ukraine. What are your thoughts there? Well, you've seen that many countries, when it was time to vote, some of them abstained, you know, which in a way says something. I think for the Africans today, especially as represented by the African Union, because not all countries fall along the same lines. I feel like again, we're back to way back. For the longest time, the West tries to tell us what to do. They decide for us. And here, there's trouble, meaning there's definitely a rift, major one, between most of the Western world, as represented by, you know, Europe and America primarily. You have Australia and all that. And then they're saying, you know, I think this is more or less an attempt to stand on their own as well. It's like, don't tell us what to do, as usual. You always rope us in when it makes sense for you, you try to rope us in and then we're left hanging on our own. So this goes back to the sentiment you were talking about earlier. It's been challenging for me to watch this, because remember, I have one foot also, you know, because there's what I get to see and hear from being in the Western world, but there's also what I get to see and hear from when I'm back home. So I wear all hats. And I think this is a situation where the African Union and African nations in general are saying, we don't, it's, this is a case where one was like, you guys are fighting, you guys are fighting. Maybe for once, we have to watch out for ourselves. Yeah, there's a sense in which this is the embodiment, sort of abstaining from a vote on the war in Ukraine is a political embodiment of a resistance to the influence of the West. Right. It's not about the war between, whatever you guys are fighting. It's saying, we're not going to let this particular empire that seems to be at the top right now, which is the United States empire in Europe, to dominate our political discourse, our geopolitical considerations. It's almost like, no, we're not touching this. Yeah, especially that given usually, so when they need us, again, for influence, which means more power, oh, you guys vote the same way we do. And when it's all over and they go back to spreading, they go back to, how do you say that? They go back to exchanging and sharing between themselves the goodies of their Halloween collection. We're not there when the goodies are being shared. So I think it's definitely one of those situations. But for me, it still is hard because I watch everything that's going on. And it's going to be complicated, the ramifications of all of this. I would like to see our African leaders also, what they're doing is clear. But this is a place where I'm also tempted to say yes and. Yes to the reasons you're advancing right now. We don't want to be always siding because we're tired. We're tired of always being dragged around and taken for granted. And you vote away. Come on, guys, when you need us, we're great and everything is good. And then when it's time to go and share the goodies, we don't exist anymore. And you actually go for policies that go against us. But in this situation, though, I would like to still see us do the right thing. In my case, I was not very happy to see us going and more or less begging for, you know, what do you call it? Cereals, you know. Oh, please let the cereals make it so at least we get them and we don't starve. I can understand why a president would say something like that or try to negotiate something like that. But when it comes to an African president having to do that with a non-African president, I'm sorry, but for me, it's too close to begging. Listen, it's hard to be a leader. It's such a difficult dance because in some sense, sort of the flip side of that is you're creating a market, a geopolitical market of saying we're willing to sit down at the table with America, with European leaders, with Russian leaders, with China, and we're going to let you guys convince us who we should collaborate with. And that's what sort of great nations and groups of nations do. Now, there's a cynical, of course, a dark perspective of that because what's in that game played by leaders, the people that hurt, people of Ukraine hurt, people of Africa can hurt. People of Russia. People of Russia can hurt, people of China, people of the United States. But it is the way of the world. And to earn, you have to earn respect. And sometimes earning respect leads to the suffering of many. Well, but except in this case, yes to all of that. And the reason why I'm actually upset with going and being like, oh, can you let at least the boats that are supposed to come to Africa full of cereals come over, the wheat and all that, it's just like, look, Africa has the highest land that you can do agriculture on. Yes. We have a larger surface, such surface in the world. Why is this not a time for us to try to wean ourselves off of cereals that we don't necessarily have on the ground? But no, let us go and plead. Don't beg, create instead. Create instead. Exactly. This should have been, you know, just like how the rest of the world, when COVID happened and China had to close off for different reasons and since then has not completely reopened and people have started to realize, wow, we've got too much, we're too dependent on China for a lot of what we need. So we're going to have to bring back some production to the US. The Europeans are doing the same, all of that. This should have been a time for African leaders to be like, we need to be serious now about, you know, food security. And maybe the stuff that maybe don't grow under our climates necessarily, can we work on coming up with different things? Now I understand that it can take time, but if I knew that that was happening at the same time that we're saying, oh, well, let the cereals come in, maybe I would be a little bit easier with it. But right now I'm just like, is it going to be the same business as usual? And in this case, I'm just like, are we going to go, are we going to keep going from one masa to another masa? I mean, really? The interesting aspect of all of this is if we look at all of human history, it's possible that the 21st century is defined by Africa. It will be. And the young people, the huge number of young people, it's like the trajectory could be, there's so much possibility to define the future of human civilization in Africa. And I don't mean sort of in the next 10 years, I mean in the next 50 years. So some people are concerned about overpopulation. Some people are concerned about us dying out as a human species. Both of those people live in us. Talk to me often about that. I know, I know. I know. I know who they are. What's your, in Africa, is at the center of this? Because there is a vibrant, huge number, probably over a billion people. Yeah, we're 1.3 billion people and of those, one billion Blacks. I mean, where do you land on that? There is a reason, Lex, why I say I'm haunted, that I'm obsessed, that I'm monomaniacal when it comes to the free markets, and that I have such a strong sense of urgency to the point that literally it is affecting me. And it has to do with the fact that, yes, you have the youngest region on earth in terms of the age of its population and the rate at which it's growing, demographic-wise. I am not willing to stay there and say it's a curse for humanity. But it will be a curse for humanity if we don't make sure that these people, our youth, get to partake. And what it takes to partake is not much. So if the rest of the world thinks that get to partake means you have to send more foreign aid, you have to have more charity businesses, I mean, charity organizations sending stuff our way, of course, you're almost thinking parasites. I'm sorry to say it this way. If this is what you're thinking, you're seeing us as no more than parasites. And if that's what it's going to be, I could see why some people might be worried about that. Although humans should never be seen as parasites, no matter, no matter, no matter. But some people will go there. Now, people are here. What are we going to do, dispose of them? That's not an option. So the only option we have left is to make sure that people partake. And what partaking means is that the people get included in them and are part of the systems that allow for human flourishing. And it doesn't, it's not much. In this case, it's about can we be serious about the reforms? So we have free market zones, areas where people, where the flourishing can start to take place. The wealth that people will need to flourish, they don't need you to give it to them. But it's all about can I let you fly and you will make it happen for you and also for me. Every young African I see today, I realize how stupid the rest of the world is if they're not supporting what I'm trying to talk about. Because even if you don't want to do it because that's the right thing to do, which I think it is the right thing to do, you're selfish. Maybe engage your selfishness. Because this person right there, remember I told you, seven billion geniuses, everybody came to this world with a piece of solution to the human problem. This person and that person and that person hold something for me because I'm part of humanity. This person might have a cure to a cancer that might take my wife out, the wife I haven't met yet. But this kid right here has it inside. And if I help this, if I make sure that this kid gets a chance to flourish and to manifest his genius or her genius, that trickle down many years later comes straight back to serve me and the love of my life. If we can't see it any other way, maybe let's try to think about it that way. Because it becomes a very good proposition at that point. So in this case, by 2050, Lagos, Nigeria will be the largest city in the world. The future is African, whether we want it or not. Is it going to be an African future where you have the youth being a ticking bomb? Because they have not, you know, there's no hope. They stay in poverty because they belong to nations that don't even understand sometimes the importance of common law versus civil law. Because they're trapped in countries that don't understand that, you know, you need to make the legal framework to provide for better economic freedom. So that you can unleash the genuineness, the awesomeness, the ingenuity, the industrious side of your young people, especially of your women, so that they build all the wealth that your nation is going to need you to build. And with it, the respect that comes from that. See, we have a choice to make. And this is why I feel so, so, so restless about this at this point of my life. We just lost George Hayete. George Hayete is one of the few Africans that I knew who put this out. That's who I learned from. He's gone. And I feel a strong sense of urgency to not only bring back to the table that which he has been working on, but to also make sure that it gets steam. That's why being here talking with you today, it's, you have no idea. It's, people ask, if someone like you could say, what can I do? You did more than you could ever imagine. By just allowing me to take this message to one more person. And because if we do this, the change is going to happen somewhere down the line. The ripple effects of all of that on the unlocking the human potential of all those people in Africa, building cool stuff, amazing things. Yes, yes, yes. So some are going to be built stuff. Others are going to work on the reforms. So we're working on reforms, by the way. I'm the head of the Africa Center for Prosperity of the Atlas Network, the largest organization in the world, working on taking down barriers of entry for entrepreneurs around the world in their respective countries. So we're doing great work there. I basically, you know, all the, obviously all the think tanks we have in Africa right now, free market think tanks, and we want to promote more of them to come up. And these are local solutions by local people for their local problems. Always. That's where we draw the line. And so there, so we're working on reforms primarily and making people understand the free markets and the importance of it. But it is piecemeal legislation. It takes time. It is hard. By the time you accomplish something here, more crap has happened over here. More laws have been pounded out because you know how they fix a bad law most of the time. Where we're in the US or somewhere else, put other laws to kind of undo the law from before, but it keeps stacking up. And before you know it, where you should have one thing and it's clear, you have a hundred and they go against each other and then it's all, it's worse. So we have piecemeal legislation, but happening, you know, our teams are doing really amazing, fantastic work, especially the team in, you know, Imani in Ghana. We have a group in Burundi, the Great, in the Great Lakes. I mean, people are doing amazing work, amazing work, but we need to run faster. So while we keep, we help them running faster, we also have to unlock other things. And right now I'm working on one of my most craziest projects, something bold, radical, crazy for some people. But I know we're not crazy because before us, Singapore has done it. You know, Hong Kong has done it. Latest, the most recent China with the SEZs, the special economic zones, some of the most radical free market zones in the world. They've done it. And oftentimes within a generation, meaningful change starts to happen. Right? So here, what I'm working on is this concept of, some call it charter cities, Paul Romer, others call it free cities, and I like to call it startup cities. What these are is for us to think about, okay, if piecemeal legislation takes forever, while we have this demographic that's growing faster and faster in Africa, there is a discrepancy here between the progress we're making to set the right environment for business to prop up, and how many more people are coming to life literally every day on the continent. There's a discrepancy here. And so the ticking bomb is going faster than the progress we can make. This is a problem. So what some of us are working on is this concept of a startup cities and to say, piecemeal legislation takes too long. How about we continue doing that work, which is essential and critical, but at the same time, can we think of zones, and I like to call them also common law zones, where we basically try to have within the country an area where for business, I'm not talking about family law or any of that stuff, no one is touching your culture or anything like that, but we're just saying business-wise, an enclave where you have the best practices from around the world, including yours, in terms of what constitutes a great business environment, and allow people in. You get in freely, nobody's forcing you to go, nobody's forcing you to whatever. So basically, you're to think about this rather unoccupied plot of land within a country, think Dubai, on 110 acres of land, Dubai is thinking that in their case, they're like, maybe they decided maybe Sharia law is not the best for business in their case, and they said, they looked around and were like, wow, but common law, especially British common law seems like a very good one. So at that point, they decided for business only, not family or anything like that, which is going to stand to Sharia or whatever. And so they said, we are going to bring in, you know, so they hired retired British common law judges to educate the law and train the people under there. And I'm oversimplifying, but at the end of the day, within a generation, Dubai became one of the top international financial centers of the world. It is what it is today. And in the case of the African nations, that zone can then spread. Yes, it can not only spread, but maybe let's say Senegal, if Senegal was to go for this, here you have this one, and then over there you have another zone. And then what they start to do is they're not all modeled the same way, because maybe this one is saying, hey, we want to attract more, I don't know, maybe we want to attract more medical research, right? This one is going to be saying, maybe we want to attract more crypto, or maybe it's going to be more like us, we want to be more about religious this or whatever. You know what I mean? So we want it to fit more of this or that. And just kind of give the basics, the grounds, and then watch the magic happen on it. Right? And so this is what we're working on. And the hope there, because some people are like, you know, I know some people are like, you guys are crazy. But I'm like, no, it's more or less the story of, you know, the Asian tigers. And most recently, most of China's progress, economically speaking, because some people might say, well, you don't want China, we're developing, you see. Even then I say, and it's okay, you can always do better. But we cannot deny the magic that they have accomplished. What they have accomplished is nothing short of a miracle. 800 million people getting out of poverty in such a short amount of time. Yeah, for the quality of life and the majority of the Chinese population. Yes, yes. Does something like that happen without problems? Of course not. And so the next person to do something just actually gets to learn from lessons, from lessons. That's all. And leapfrog. And leapfrog, and leapfrog. Exactly. So for me, this is a promise. And people are like, oh, but you guys are crazy. But I'm like, just like with everything, do you know how many attempts it took before the first flight, you know, the Wright brothers took off? Do you know how many? And that's important. You try, you crash, you try, you crash. But each time you're going higher, up higher. And you want to get up for once, then you stay up longer. And before you know it, you're doing all types of things. So here's the same thing. I tell people, listen, all I need is one success story. And then the sea changes. People don't even wait for us. Everybody. But this is hard because it's the first time. So, but the good news is there are many groups working on the continent. There are some groups in Zambia, there's a zone there. Folks are doing something like this in Nigeria. We're part of a project there in Nigeria. The one that I'm most excited about, I cannot disclose the name of the country yet, but my God, I'm so excited by it. And I just know, I just know, Lex, it's going to happen in our lifetime. I hope so. It's a really powerful vision. And it's not being dramatic to say that the future of humanity depends on your success, that success in Africa. It's such an important continent. It is. This century. It's the continent where everything started. And I think it's the continent where we have, that continent has to finally, finally, finally thrive. We cannot, all of us, call ourselves an enlightened society as a whole when you have such, when you have this, it's a humongous continent. Have you seen the size of it? Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's hard to fathom, actually. Yeah. To forget. Exactly. And it has such ingenious people. You know, sometimes I look at my people. I have to tell you. I'm so proud of them and the young people especially. And you know, you would look at them and you know, somebody said sometimes, one day, and it was so true. They said, you know, we've seen poverty other places. But here, it is just, maybe somebody doesn't have money, but they have dignity. And it's true. Yeah. And there's nothing else we can handle. And we will handle. You have to mark my word for this. This is going to happen. And our youth is amazing. You should see them. So full of creativity. And it doesn't matter. You know, you were telling me what makes you different. Many things make us all different. You know, the Rwandans are very different from the West Africans that we are. Rwandans, for example, never dance with their hips. They dance more like, you know, with this part of the body. West Africans' hips? It's hips all over the place all the time. And it's, you know, more jumping, stuff like that. In Rwanda, you feel it's more like, you know, I mean, they remind me more of, you know, the ballet thing. Rwandans have a sense where, you know, they don't eat so much in public. It's not very well. It's something you do. Us, we are the West Africans, we like to be loud. We're almost like the Italians of the continent. And then the Rwandans are more like, you know, the Swiss of a country even looks like Switzerland. I mean, we're so different from one group to another. Then you go to the Congo and you see these guys, they're so crazy, the way they dress. I mean, Les Sapeurs. So we are a very different bunch. But you know what I love about us, what I love about my people? We are the manifestation of what resiliency means. And so everything we need is there. Everything we need is there. I will say that there's nothing wrong with the seed. Everything that's wrong with us is that pot that we put around us. So we're tired of being bonsai people. We need to be the tallest trees in the forest that we were designed to be. And so... And that can be fixed. And that can be fixed. And that's the beauty of it. And that's why I am so... I'm almost dizzy with... I get dizzy with hope. I know my history. I know my economics, my fellow humans, and all of that. And we know that there's an unfailing recipe. And when it comes to that recipe, we have the hardest part of it. One missing ingredient, which is the free markets. As we go around and talk, and people start to understand, and each country tries to figure out, okay, where do we go there from here? I know that I will die with my continent having taken the right shift for a turn. I don't have to see where it ends, because I cannot, in my wildest dream, imagine where it's going to end. But I know it's going to be... Yeah. So my only job is to get this message out, and then let my people do with it what they want to do. Yeah, the scale of impact is just boundless. It's kind of cool. I mean, sometimes we think about individual problems and how do we solve them. We look up at certain individuals, like the, I don't know, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But it's so much more powerful to just, without knowing what they will do, give the freedom to millions, to hundreds of millions of people to do whatever the hell they're going to do. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine? It's truly, truly exciting. So in that sense, the work you're doing, it's unimaginable the kind of impact it would have. Now, going back to that hard moment, this dark place you went in, in your mind, in your personal life story, you lost your husband. What gave you strength during that time? What were the places you went to your mind in terms of personal struggle, in terms of maybe even depression or these kinds of struggles? I think for me, when my husband passed away, I went to... Maybe my friends could see what was going on. Maybe they couldn't. I don't know. But on the surface, I looked like I was fine. But what happened is, the only thing I think that kept me around, as I thought about it, was the job to be done. These women relied on me. And I was no longer free. I did not own myself. And they said it in those words, you don't own yourself anymore. And it was true. But it helped me because I was able to... You know, sometimes, whatever it takes to keep you around, whatever it takes. And that's what I would tell people who feel like they can't just push one more push. And they think they need to end it. At that point, whatever it takes, just stick around for one more second. Because the next second, you know... So I stuck around because of duty. I felt a very strong sense of duty. My duty was, in this case, I think, stronger than my pain. I don't know how that was possible, but it was. And I just pushed my grief under the rug for years. For years, I worked like a mad lady. I would travel, I would do three states in three days, landing at two in the morning, around five or six, going to ride along with our distributors, because it was beverage, and just keep going. And have all of this energy and look like everything is fine. But what happened was just like I was focused on the job to be done. And sometimes it is okay to do that. At least for me, it was my safety. You know, like when you're in the water, and you're about to sink, and they throw you that round thing, I don't know how you call it. The thing that keeps you afloat, you mean? Yes, yes, the floater. Yeah, whatever. Between the two of us, we're still terrible. We're bad. So they send you that thing, and I was just hanging on to it. My life depended on this thing. So these women, they carried me. They carried me. And with time, things are moving forward. And at some point, I went into a really, really deep depression. And I went into a very dark place, even darker than the one I think I came from. Because by that time, I had worked for years on this company, and now some other things were happening. And around that time, it's also when I was discovering a lot of what we talked about today, about what makes a country rich. And for me to understand that my network, I was very much into a left-oriented network. And to just start to see all of this, I tried to address it, to realize that many of these people would prefer to go running for the hills than accept for a moment that maybe capitalism might be part of a solution, when many of them were involved in capitalism. So that was a hard time. At some point, I was... So many things were happening around that time that basically shook up everything for me. One, it's hard to talk about because it's very personal, and the person that I was having a problem with passed away last year. And I'm one to always say, leave the dead alone. So because of that, I won't speak about it. But there too, having a major fallout with somebody who was like a favor figure for me, somebody that I completely trusted. And so at some point, you just ask yourself, was my whole life built on a lie? Right? And then you're confused, and then you become confused. And then at some point, you lose 90% of your friends because ideologically speaking, it doesn't work anymore. Then you just wonder, have I been asleep this whole time? And then you start to wonder. Remember when you asked me, who am I? At some point, Lex, I literally was like a candle in the wind. I felt like I was a candle in the wind. And it was very hard to come back from that. And the few people I talked to about this, they have the hardest time understanding or even believing it because they're like, you? I'm like, yes, me. I used to be a candle in the wind. What got you out? What made you overcome that? My current husband. Love? Love. See, when I tell you love is the answer. But him, he came with love, but he also came with really helping me figure out the world. So with Michael, because that's him who we're talking about, Michael Strong. That must be special. He's so special. He's so special. So you have no idea how special he is. But you know, Michael, the reason why I have such love, respect and admiration for my husband, I'll never say it enough, is because actually, it's one of those relationships that got built based on intellect first. You see, at some point, I was in a position where I could start a foundation after having built my first business. And all I wanted was an ability to power as many, especially women, African women entrepreneurs like me a few years ago, before then, to do something like I was able to do. Bring back to the world some really cool aspects of our culture built into a really cool brand, 21st century type. That's what I wanted to do. Because the more I could promote women like that and put steam behind them, and the more my dream and vision for a respected Africa, prosperous Africa would happen. Back then, that's what I wanted. And around me, this was also part of the whole crisis of ideologies I had back then, everybody was like, well, we should be just doing grants. And I knew that my people didn't need grants. They didn't need like a handout. They don't want your charity. I didn't want charity. I wanted someone who could work with me on my accounting. I wanted somebody who could help me brainstorm marketing-wise. I wanted somebody, or I needed to raise money to pay my research and development guy to help me take the juices from my grandma's recipe to something that can be shelf-stable. I needed coaching. These are all the things that I needed to make my dream happen. I didn't want you to give me some crap for free. That's not what I want. I just want to be able to build my business with all the things that business building needs. And so that's what I wanted to do, and it's what was needed. And so Michael, somebody found out about what I was doing, because back in the day, in school, they would write a lot about me and everything. And so Michael, along with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market, they had a nonprofit called Flow, and it's all about human flourishing. They want for people, everybody to get this choice, this ability to be able to get to a point in their life where they're in complete flow. It's a, Mikael, just make hi. Michael is the only one who can say that last name. But you know, the whole concept of flow. When you're in a state of flow, you're basically doing what you're supposed to do, the way you're supposed to do it, with the people you're supposed to. This whole concept of flow. It's amazing. It's human flourishing at its highest. So I met with this man. So he finds me, his people find me. And then there was a program where it was all about accelerating women entrepreneurs. So it's during those times that I'm starting now to see things. That's when actually all of this stuff that I noticed, how come here it takes me all of this time to start my business, over there it's 20 minutes, here it's free, over there it's thousands of dollars, all of this nonsense that I just took. Oh, maybe it's just because we're messed up, we're poor, that's why everything is so messed up. Whoa, these people are introducing me to concepts. I'm like, first of all, I'm like, oh, really? What did you call the doing business? What is that? You know, all of this stuff. And I was starting to discover this whole other body of work. That the free market is like this thing that I was sensing, this environment that I was sensing that it was different around me. And that they called it the free markets over here and over there that. And then I started to butthead those ideas with the ideas that I was fed with before that. And the evidence won. And further, more than the evidence, the evidence combined with my lived experience, it was so powerful. So I basically started understanding these ideas from the most visceral part of my body, you know, of my being. And it made sense. So Michael, Michael helped me find the solution, the answer to my lifelong little girl's question of why do we have this and we don't? And how do some countries like mine be poor while others are rich? And with understanding all of that, the greatest, biggest sense of liberation came upon me. I have no other word to describe that. True liberation, the liberation that comes from a peer. To finally understand and be vindicated in your own, you know, in your own deep knowing or feeling that what they're saying is not true. You're not the problem. It's not you. There's something else. And when I discovered that, my whole life changed. So and since then, I have been very serious about going deeper and deeper and deeper into my understanding of all of this. Understanding the subtlety. At some point I was very angry about the liberators of Africa because I was like, yes, you helped liberate us. But just to keep us in this marism, I was angry for the longest time. And then eventually you have to engage empathy and love to put yourself in their shoes and try to understand the time at which they were living. And that got me onto a journey of trying to understand history more. That's how I understood I was able to go beyond just these liberators and try to understand and rebuild the world around them at the micro and also at the macro level. Just really, you have to try to walk in their shoes. And from there, finally separate the baby with the bathwater that they were not able to do back then. That's why today, I'm sorry, but I have no patience for the BLM organizers, founders, especially the founders. I don't know what the organizers think, but the founders told us what they stand for. And I say, guys, don't make that same mistake again. If you're serious about this, you cannot make the same mistake. The Liberals of Africa, they have an excuse. We didn't know better. It was so easy back then to conflate everything. But today, you, me, anybody alive cannot with a straight face embrace Marxist socialist ideas, especially, especially when they're claiming that they want people to thrive. No, you can't. I'm sorry. And I will hold you, I will hold your feet up to the fire on that one. I will. I will. And that's what I'm doing. They will give me a lot of grief for this, but guess what? I could care less. Do you know why I could care less? Because we have an entire population to help rise out of poverty into prosperity, where they become, you know, co-creators, global co-creators of innovation. And those ideas give you hope for the place you love, for Senegal, for Africa. They do. They do. I live, the world I live in, the new centers of culture and fashion are in Dakar. The new centers of tech and, you know, crypto even is somewhere, maybe Nigeria. So you see that future. You see that future clearly. I do. I do. I do. It's a beautiful thing. And it's also beautiful to see that the space of these really powerful ideas is where you also found love. Right? So at the intersection. At the intersection, Michael and I would spend hours talking about all of these ideas. And I would be like, but what about this? No, it doesn't make any sense. No, no, no. Oh, no. And then hours, every single day for months, Lex. Yeah. And then from there, our love was born because I tell people, for us, love is not about looking someone in the eyes, like, you know, we all think. But it's about we look in one direction. And in this case, it's this vision, what we know to be possible and true. If only you liberate people. What we know to be true and possible. We, all of us are miracles walking around. Every time I get on a plane, it's a miracle of engineering. All the things we're able to do, you know, now when they do operation on your teeth, how they're able to put the pain down away. All of this is us. You're working on these robots. This, this, this inside here. Humans are amazing. I know. So that's why, and when it works in great tandem with this guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These two working together. Yeah. Watch out. There's nothing we can't accomplish. Nothing. Nothing. Well, God, you're one of the most incredible people I've ever talked to. You say that. You've met everybody. Thank you so much. This is truly an honor. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for the fire that burns within you. And it's just the passion you have for a place that's going to, I think, define the future of humanity. So thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you. Thank you to you. And sometimes I hope this fire doesn't consume me. That's how much it is. But I am grateful to you for this. And yeah, thank you for, I know you don't do a lot of this, you know, I am, it's this type of interviews. Maybe I don't know, but I'm so, so happy to hear. You mean fun, inspiring, powerful interviews? Yes, I need to do more. You're amazing. I don't know, because at first I was like, Lex Friedman, really? Really? How's this going to go? I'm going to talk to Lex and go all crazy. I think you need to work on your unconscious bias. Right. Okay, fine. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Magat Wade. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela. Money won't create success. The freedom to make it will. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/Q6tDV3BhrcM

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John Danaher: Grappling, Jiu Jitsu, ADCC, and Animal Combat | Lex Fridman Podcast #328

A male chimp is more than enough to kill any human on the planet, including Gordon Ryan. So Gordon Ryan fighting a chimp, a good-sized... Dead. No, a thousand times. How many times does he win? He loses a thousand times. It's not even competitive. It's not even remotely competitive. Do you think he will disagree? No. Okay. Do you think anyone will disagree? Anyone? Yeah, morons. The following is a conversation with Jon Donaher, his third time on this podcast. He's widely considered to be one of the greatest minds in martial arts history. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jon Donaher. The ADCC is the premier submission grappling tournament in the world. We just had it a couple of weeks ago. We saw many demonstrations of greatness from athletes you coached. But a year ago, the team and you were at a very low point. Take me through that journey. What was the lowest point? We had a very, very tight team for many years, which began in New York City. During the peak of COVID, training in New York became very difficult to sustain. So most of the team despised the city of New York. I was the only person in the group that liked living in New York. I think part of the problem was that I was the only one who actually lived in Manhattan. The others had to commute to New York. And there's a world of difference between living in New York and commuting to New York. So most of them had a very negative view of New York City. That was compounded by COVID, when even the basic act of training became very, very difficult. And so everyone decided they want to leave. So there was a prospect of a complete breakup between myself and the team, or I would have to leave New York. It was a difficult decision for me to make, because I'd lived in New York for 30 years. I'd built my life there and had most of my friends and associates that I know here in America, New Yorkers. So I thought, you know, these guys have been incredibly loyal to me as students, so I should also be loyal to them, of course. So I decided that if they wanted to leave, I would go with them. We decided to go to Puerto Rico because there was a private gym where we could train through the COVID period. I personally wanted to go to Texas. I thought that Texas was a better place for the team to go. But many of the students, including senior students like Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones, had been to Puerto Rico and stayed with one of the head officials of ADCC, Moe Jassim. So they loved their experience in Puerto Rico, and almost everyone wanted to go down there. So I tried to explain to them there's a world of difference between going to a place for vacation versus living there, but that didn't have any effect. So the decision was made, a majority decision was made to go to Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, the conditions in which the team lived changed significantly. When you're in New York, New York is such a big city that if there's any tension between team members, and inevitably there will be in a competitive sport where everyone's fighting each other, you can kind of bury them in the size of the city because there's so many distractions in New York. You come in, you do your workout, you go outside, and it's New York City. In Puerto Rico, we lived in a very small local town, Dorado, and most of the athletes were living with each other. And so unlike New York, where there was always a break, you trained together, but when training was over, you went about your life in New York and New Jersey. With everyone living in very close proximity to each other, any tensions got magnified because there was no relief from them. You didn't get to get away from people. If you had a problem with someone on the mat, well now you had to live with them for the rest of the day and the night, and this goes on for long periods of time. So I believe it had the effect of magnifying whatever tensions there were. In particular, there was a family tension between two brothers which magnified over time. And so often is the case, you get two brothers growing up, one older, one younger, and the younger one wants to grow and feel somewhat like a young tree underneath a bigger tree. And sometimes people just need their space. So there was some unhappiness. As a younger brother, I can understand. Yeah, yeah. As a little tree that had to grow up under a bigger tree. Yeah. So... Fuck the big tree. There's a lot of aggression I have to work on. Unresolved family issues coming out here. I'm just kidding, I love you. He doesn't, he's lying. So as time went by, these tensions started increasing. They came to a point where it was difficult for them even to be in the training room together. At that point, you're starting to, once training takes a hit, then you got to start to address these. The attempts at reconciliation fell through and a decision was made to move to Texas. I wanted everyone to move as a team. What I wanted to do was keep the team together as long as the period leading up to ADCC so that everyone could train together. So I said, okay, there's problems, but let's just tough it out. One year, we move to Texas, let's just go there and keep unity. If some people don't want to train with other people, that's fine. But I believe that the team would be weakened by breaking apart. I believe that they had an excellent rapport as training partners. Their technical level was increasing dramatically. Many of the younger athletes are really starting to come into their own and really develop well. And so my take on it was, okay, if there's problems, so be it. But let's all just stay together until ADCC 2022 as a unified team. Go out, prepare yourselves as best you can. And then after that, we can make a decision as to whether we break up or not. But that was rejected and the team split. And they moved to Austin. We'd made prior arrangements to go to a local gym and they took that gym and we were left with no gym and more or less homeless in Austin. A year out from ADCC. Yes, this is one year out. So roughly three quarters of the competitive athletes left in one week. So at that point, that was probably the lowest point because at that point, not only do we not have a place to train, we had very few training partners for the few that had remained. And the main athlete in the team, Gordon Ryan, was going through a particularly bad spell with his unresolved stomach issues. And there was doubt as to whether or not he could compete at all. And was actively thinking about retiring from the sport. So maybe not compete ever again, potentially. Yeah. So that was a time when it was like, man, the whole program seems to be dead in the water at this point. Most of the competitive athletes were gone. There were very few training partners for the few that remained. And the main athlete around whom the group had initially bonded was seemingly out of action, possibly permanently. Where was your mind? Where were you mentally? My thinking is everything bad passes in time. I've had a lot of bad points in my life. So my life experience is whenever things seem dark, have patience. Time will ultimately cure most ills. Not all of them, but most of them. And I'm confident that if you give me a new crop of students, I can produce magic, but it's gonna take time. So that confidence was in part a source of strength. Yes. I wasn't confident that ADCC 2022 would go well because we only had one year without a gym and with a team that was completely broken up to even attempt to get into ADCC. So things looked a little grim, but I was confident, given enough time, I'd get in a new group of students and work. As it turns out, one of the demonstration partners that I used during filming for instructional videos who lives in Boston, John Carlo Badoni, was interested in the idea of coming down and training, but he'd always felt like it would be difficult because there were people in his weight class who were already there and he felt it would be awkward. But now that they had left, that opened up an area for him. So he was the first one to come down. He moved from Boston to Austin, Texas. I began teaching at a local school. It was rather like going back into my earliest days in Jiu-Jitsu. I went from teaching at the big Henzo Gracie Academy to a tiny school in Puerto Rico and now an even smaller school in Austin, Texas. And locals would come in and train and I would watch every day, teaching there twice a day, seven days a week. And I would see people come in and train and I would say, this guy has some potential or this guy has some potential. And I would recruit people and bring them to another gym where they would train with the professionals. And if they proved adept and hardworking and someone who can work well in a team, they would stay and build their skills. As time went by, more and more such people started coming in. And we had some remarkable people like a young South African purple belt, Luke Griffith, came in. He had lost in the European trials for ADCC and he was down on his luck. He came into Austin, he did a show against a local purple belt and lost again. So he was feeling bad about his performance and his future. He came in and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well. So he became one of the main training partners. He was similar size to Gordon. So I encouraged him to train with Gordon whenever he could. And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis. One day I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston. He said, hey, you know, Nicholas Miragalli was training at this. He was shooting video at the same time as me and we just did some grappling. He's a really nice guy and he's literally never trained without a gi before. For those of you who don't know, Nicholas Miragalli is one of the outstanding gi jiu-jitsu competitors of his generation. He has an amazing game and is a superstar with the gi side of the sport. But he'd never even trained without a gi once in his life. So his first ever no-gi training session is with Gordon Ryan, the best no-gi competitor of all time. And I remember Gordon texting me saying, hey, he's really talented, he's a nice guy and he wants to come down to Texas and train. So I said, yeah, sounds great. So over time, just more and more people started coming in. And I told everyone, like, you guys are at a severe disadvantage. You've got very little time to get ready for ADCC. Luke wasn't even in ADCC, he had to win trials. Same for Dan Manasoy, he failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC. So around this time, a doctor suggested by Mo Jassam, who himself had stomach issues earlier in his life, began working with Gordon Ryan. And- And Mo's the organizer of ADCC. Yes. For people who don't know. Yeah, he's the head organizer. He was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured, but significantly better than he was before. And to a level where Gordon could train up to five to six days a week. And that was a big improvement on what was going on during the end of the time in Puerto Rico. So things started moving. We had a core group of athletes training at a local gym, which was very, very generously offered to us by the head manager of Roka Sunglasses, a company here in Austin, Texas. They have a private corporate gym, which we were able to train in. And these talented youngsters from around the globe, essentially, came together and I said, you guys are going to have to train harder than you've ever trained in your lives, because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone. And you're going to be going up against people potentially who know exactly what I teach, because I've been teaching them a lot longer than I've been teaching you. In addition to the other best people in the world. So it was an incredible challenge for them. And I must say, all of them gave literally everything they had. Everything I asked for, they gave twice as much. And we had a crazy training schedule, as many as three classes per day. I know that sounds easy, you know, three classes a day, but try doing it sometime. These classes are not your average classes. These are preparation for ADCC. So they're both mentally and physically draining. Very, very hard. And we had many people come in and try to train alongside us and they fell off by the side of the road within days. Forget about weeks, months, or a full year of this. I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes. I chopped everything down to what I believe were the most essential skills. Anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside. And they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC, with one exception, I'll come to that soon, over the period of their training here in Austin. So it was compacted by time and also by the breadth of skill that I taught. Everything was just purely for ADCC preparation. In a very short period of time, Dan Manasoyo and Luke Griffith and Oliver Tarza all won European trials and got into ADCC. Nicholas Miragalli was already a superstar, so he was invited, but he had to show himself. So we enrolled him in local shows here in Austin, where he had his first three no-gi matches. And with each match, you could see progress being made. And so that convinced the ADCC people, okay, he's good enough to compete. He ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest American grapplers of all time, Rafael Lovato. And this was a clear sign that his skill level and no-gi was sufficient to justify an invite. Right. And by the way, Lovato had an incredible set of matches in this ADCC as well. Yes, that was actually very impressive. And retired. Yeah. Which is really impressive and heartbreaking as well, but if you go out, that's a good way to go out. Indeed. So there was this long and tough preparation, and it was compounded by the fact that as Gordon felt better, he felt a need to build up his own competitive record prior to ADCC, because he'd been inactive for so long with his stomach issue. So he proposed one of the most ambitious fight camps that I've ever heard of in grappling, which was he would take on the current WNO champion, Pedro Mourinho. Who's number one is WNO, yeah. And also, I believe the current no-gi world champion in IBJJF as a tune-up match, as a warm-up match. Then he would fight his old nemesis, Felipe Pena, the only man who submitted Gordon at black belt and had defeated Gordon in an ADCC match in 2017. And then ADCC itself. So there was going to be three big high-profile matches back to back and very different rule sets. So WNO was a 15-minute match. The fight with Felipe Pena was no time limit, which is a very different format to compete in, and then ADCC. So we had to drag out a 14-week camp covering three matches with three different rule sets, which went in diametrically opposite directions. And the entire team had to go through all of this over this 14-week period, in addition to the previous year that they had been working hard. There was a further complication in the midst of all this. Nicholas Merigalli had to go to the Gi World Championships, and we had to throw an extra morning class for that to help him get ready. Nicholas went on to win the openweight gold medal in the Gi competition, and then the next day had to come back to Texas and begin his ADCC preparation. It was a crazy, crazy time. But they all came through it so well. I'm immensely proud of what they did. And shockingly, in the space of less than 12 months, we went from rock bottom to bottom to having a more successful ADCC team performance than we did the previous ADCC. It was in fact the most successful team performance of the event, and as testimony to how hard those young men worked in the course of less than a year to prepare themselves. If we can just linger on the low point, is it heartbreaking to you that the so-called Donahart Death Squad split, or the team as it was originally called split? You know, we live a short life on this earth, and you put so much of your love and work into this team, and everybody put in the work. Does it break your heart? It was a sad time, yeah. It was. You know, I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it was an emotional time for everyone. It had an element of tragedy insofar as not only was it a team breakup, it was also a family breakup, which is much more serious. I do believe that in time, even the most intense family breakups can be reconciled. And I also believe that once dialogue begins, people will remember just how easy it was for us to get along and how tight we were for many, many years. It's so easy to let a minute of anger destroy 10 years of friendship. But there's also the weight of those 10 years. When I ran into the old squad members at ADCC, we got along like a house on fire. It's like we never had a problem. So a house on fire is a good thing. Yes, yes. Sorry, that's a New Zealand expression, yeah. That definitely could have gone the other way, right? Only a New Zealander would say that it's a good thing, yeah. So I still believe in time things will be fine, but there was an element where youngsters need to grow. And sometimes, think about it this way, from the athlete's perspective, there's definitely a generational problem. I'm much older than my students, and the years and the viewpoint that I have is a reflection of the time in which I grew up. And they're from a completely different generation with a completely different worldview. It's got to be hard from the athlete's perspective when you're training seven days a week, and you're getting very, very good. You're beating everyone that's getting put in front of you. You're losing very, very rarely, and it's always a tough competitive match when you do. Everyone around you is calling you a superstar, and you look phenomenal. You check social media, everyone's saying you're a god on the mat. And then you come into the gym and there's some old guy telling you you're not good enough. And every day it's like, what does this guy want from me? How hard do I have to work? Like you're not good enough. Like I want you to be the best in the world. I want you to be good, I want you to be great. And all your friends are telling you, man, you're incredible, you submit me so easily to do this, and then this old guy's just like, nah. You've got to get better. You've got to work more. You're not working hard enough. At some point you're going to be like, you know what, fuck this old guy. Like it's tough. You know, mentally I get why they left. When I was 20 years old, I didn't get along with the authority figures at all. And to have someone telling you, you've always got to work that little bit harder, your skill set's not complete, you still need this, this, and this. When you're already doing very, very well and far better than all but a tiny, tiny percentage of people. And then you've got this guy just constantly telling you, no, more has to be done. You're not there yet. Of course I understand. Let me just enjoy this more. It's always a choice in life. You can be the best you possibly can, or you can go a route where you just get to enjoy life a little more. You do other things. There's more to life than just the inside of a gym and learning how to do a better heel hook or a better double leg. So of course, years go by, you want to try other things. And you have to make this choice in life between extreme excellence versus being incredibly good, but maybe just enjoying my life a little more. It's so interesting that incredibly good is a hard thing to deal with. I saw when Kayla Harrison won her first gold medal at the Olympics, to go back to the gym and to trust, again, maybe the old man. You're being too harsh on yourself, but to trust the old man. So Jimmy Page, you're on Jimmy Page, you're on Jimmy Page, you're senior in that case, to say, okay, we're going to go back to this grind. And there's still a path to improvement. There's still a lot to grow and still have the humility, even though you've just demonstrated greatness. So really good is just a stepping stone to true greatness. That's really tough for athletes. Winning is actually very difficult. Gold medals are very difficult. Plus there's the personal stuff of depression that comes with that, which is you give so much of yourself to trying to win that. And once you do, there's a lot of personal stuff you have to deal with, which is like, what do I want from life? To understand what is exactly what am I chasing? Is it just winning? Or is it some bigger picture of excellence that's beyond just winning? So all of that mixed up together. And then when you have to be as a team really close together, there's the personal relationships, all of that gets exacerbated. Do you think the team ever gets back together? I think there's definitely a chance of that. Right now, I think they have an excellent team themselves and they're doing very well. They had an excellent performance at ADCC. So there's not a need for them to come to us. It's not like they lack anything. They still remember everything I taught them. They still coach and teach with the same methodology that I taught them. So I don't think they have any need to do so. If they did, it would be because they wanted to. I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict would reemerge currently if they started training together. By the way, to pile on the compliments, they have really nice merch too. The t-shirts are just excellent. What have you learned from that process about how to have a team with personal conflicts? Do you have to deal with these giant egos as well? Because the ego is a part of superpower too. So you don't want to- Yeah, you don't want to suppress egos. I always laugh when people say, leave your ego at the door. What do you think drives competition? If you want to be good at anything in life, you've got to have an ego. No, I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress egos. I'm a realist and I understand that this is a sport where they make one gold medal per weight division. As guys get better, they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking like, I'm going to have to fight this guy one day. And they're training next to each other. Of course, there's going to be tension. There's always going to be disagreements about what's the right way to act around certain people, certain issues, and people are going to come into conflict. Everyone's being programmed to be an alpha competitor. You get a room full of people like that, there's going to be conflict. Now, your question was, well, is there a way to resolve this? Yeah, there was. And for eight to nine years, I was very successful with this. But there's also a tipping point where things can flare out of control and there will be periodic breakups. You know, you're not the first students I had that left. I've been coaching a lot longer than I've been coaching the squad. And I'm sure in the future, there'll be other students who leave me. That's just the nature of the beast. It's sad when it happens, but life goes on. Mm-hmm. Like Bukowski said, love is a fog that fades with the first daylight of reality or something like that. So even love is temporary. Let me ask you about leading up the preparation for the athletes. I mean, this is such, given the darkness from a year ago from which you had to find glimmers of light and try to get greatness out of athletes. What was the mental preparation like for Gordon, for Nicholas, for Giancarlo, for the other athletes? What was the mental side of things like? Is there some key insights you can give to their mental preparation? I really think that people, when they talk about mental preparation, need to take a step back and realize that almost every element of what people describe as mental preparation has physical underpinnings. Literally 95% of what I teach the athletes is physical skills. And it's my belief that every mental aspect of competition, the most important, which will be confidence on stage, is a direct result of the accumulation of physical skills. People tend to see things like confidence as a mental state. It is, but it comes out of the performance of physical skills. All my life I've seen sports psychologists try to create confidence in athletes through non-physical means. And it always ends up being the same kind of cheesy motivational speeches, highlight video reels where they try to pump artificial confidence into people. I've never been impressed by this, nor have I seen it have any kind of positive effect on athlete performance. What I do see build confidence is the sense that athletes are developing skills and using them successfully under conditions that closely mirror the event they're preparing for. Once they get this down, that's where true confidence comes from. Confidence doesn't come from words. It comes from accumulated skills, which experience shows you have been responsible for successful performances in the past. And if you accumulate enough of these, your confidence rises. So when it comes to the mental aspects of competition, I created a program where everyone was given a set of skills that they had to work on. Skills directly related to what I believe is the most important elements of success in ADCC competition. In the gym, they accumulated those skills over time. I do it in two different ways, depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills. For the accumulation of offensive skills, I like to have my athletes work with athletes who are lesser than themselves in ability, so that they start to gain confidence over time. Just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting gym and put 500 pounds on the bar and tell them to lift it. Rather, you would start with a wooden bar, then the metal bar, and then gradually accumulate weight over time, so you get a progression in weightlifting. So in Jiu-Jitsu, you don't take a brand new move and say, okay, do it on Gordon Ryan. Never going to succeed. I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up. Defense, on the other hand, you've got to start them in the deep end of the pool, so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities. Okay, so I put them with highly competitive athletes at the start, so they can see, okay, there is a problem here. And then even in defense, they start off with lower belts and build up their confidence over time. So just as a weightlifter builds up his ability to build weight, sorry, to lift weight over time, so too a Jiu-Jitsu player does it by gradually increasing resistance. Now in Jiu-Jitsu, resistance is not done by weight, it's done by skill level. And so over time, they started to accumulate this experience. In time, we were able to switch off and have them go against very, very tough athletes, each other. So Luke Griffith will do a full power match with Gordon Ryan. Now, they're fully aware that there's no one better in the world than Gordon Ryan. So if you have a competitive match with Gordon Ryan, that's a very, very healthy sign. So they went from the start, where they were being programmed going against relatively mild resistance and building up over time, and then building up to the greatest resistance possible in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu. And their goal is not to win, obviously, but their goal is to provide a competitive match. Now, Gordon doesn't have any confidence issues, so for him, it's just good, hard competitive training against people that are in some ways better than those he'll be facing in competition. For the other guys, it's getting a clear assessment of what their current skill level is by going against the best there is. Then we add to this a competitive schedule, where the athletes have to go out into competition so they get used to the idea of performing in front of strangers on stage, getting used to the strange elements of going out, being observed and judged by people you don't know in a performance atmosphere. And so they were all given matches in WNO competition leading up to the event, ADCC trials, local grappling events here in Austin, and given a competitive schedule to fight and prepare them for ADCC. Obviously, as ADCC got closer and closer, this was pulled back because of the danger of injury. So within about three weeks out was the last time we had a competition. And by this method, confidence starts to grow. And so the mental preparation came out of those physical underpins, the idea of progressive resistance increasing over time for both offense and defense, building up to a peak where they go in against the best athlete in the world so they can get an accurate assessment of where they stand. Once you're given a competitive match to the best guy in the world, you know damn well that when you go out in ADCC, you're ready to fight anybody. And defense is broadly defined. So defense and in symmetrical positions, like positions like guard, and then defense also includes escaping from horrible positions. Yes, we're big believers in the idea of depth of defense. The idea that you should be able to mount defense all the way through from early stages based mostly around anticipation of identifying danger visually before it emerges, and all the way through to the deepest levels of defense where you are 100% defensive in terrible positions, and you have to claw your way out over time and get back to a neutral position or even better, back to an attacking position. You have an Instagram post on this topic. When you get ready to step out for the biggest moment of your life, ask yourself one question. How different is this really from what I do every day? If the answer is not very different at all, then step forward with confidence and do what you do every day in the same manner and ignore the hype and distraction. You're ready for action. By the way, for people who don't know, you need to follow Jon Donahart, Donahart Jon on Instagram. You have nuggets or large buckets of nuggets of wisdom often, which is quite profound, even bigger than jiu-jitsu. But anyway, so there's some aspect where you want to mimic the conditions of your daily training in intensity and in what force, so physical to that of the actual matches. You asked a question about mental training. For me, the central focus of whatever small amount of mental training I give my students comes down to a very, very simple concept to understand. This is the idea of identifying competition in terms of its normalcy. Most people see training and competition as two different things. Training is normal activity that you do every day and competition is the exception. It's different. You're going out, there's people watching you, there's a big crowd, they're making lots of noise. In fact, the promoters of shows go out of their way to reinforce this. Look at, for example, ADCC when Gordon Ryan went to fight Andre Galvan. Do they just come out on the mat and fight each other? Absolutely not. There's music, there's pageantry, there's fireballs. They're literally shooting fireballs. Yeah, some dude in a tie sitting with Joe Rogan, some meathead podcaster, comedian, whatever. Which one was the meathead? Well played, John. Well played. But you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to create theater and pageantry when in fact it's just a grappling match. It's just two athletes, a referee and a rule set. That's the reality. Now what they try to sell you is something which is not reality, which is this is somehow bigger and different. And they reinforce this with pageantry and theater so that it becomes not just a grappling match but a grappling performance, the same way you have a theater performance. And my goal as a coach is to dispel that and say, when you go out there, there's only one reality, you, him and the referee reinforcing a rule set. That's it. Everything else you see, the smoke, the fire, the music is an illusion. And it's put there intentionally to make you feel a certain kind of way. And your whole goal is to see this as an illusion and walk out and see only the reality, which is that this is the same damn thing you do every day in the gym. The only difference is you're going with a guy you've never grappled before. So the actual act of removing the illusion or realizing that it is an illusion, how do you practice that? So when you step on the mat- Once you're aware of it, I always have them, it's like when you see a magician and you have his tricks explained to you, you never see the magic again. The first time you see a good card trick from a good magician, it's like, oh my God. Then when they explain it to you, I did this, this, and this, step one, step two, then you look at it like, it's not that special. And when you explain to people this idea of the pageantry as an illusion, then just as when you watch the magician and you learn the trick, all the magic flies out the window, so too with the nervous response. So that's for the pageantry, but what about the maybe the physical intensity of competition? Isn't there an extra- No, it's the same in every competition. It's not like, you know, they're twice as strong in ADCC as they are in the IBJF World Championships. The physical intensity is always pretty much the same. They experience it every day in the gym. And like, you know, if you go out and you grapple Gordon Ryan, it's not like the next guy you grapple is going to be twice as strong as him or twice as fast. He's going to be a little stronger, a little faster, but not so much so that it completely changes your approach to the game. You know, there's not that much difference between the human bodies out there on the stage. So if you've felt intensity before, you're not going to be shocked by ADCC. But in terms of in training, do you have to try to match the intensity of competition? No, that would be forced. Every athlete in the gym would be injured. You can do it for short periods of time, but the training has to be carefully monitored in terms of intensity levels. Remember, we're training seven days a week, a minimum of twice a day. You've got to keep things under wraps. Every other workout, you can have one of the five rounds can be full power, but not seven days a week, three times a day. That's just going to break bodies. And full power is just a reminder of... It's more about skill development. For us, it always comes back to skill development. But what about matching the feeling of the intensity of competition? Yeah, periodically. Periodically, rarely. But it can't be every single time. Not really, it's not rare. Meaning like one day? Like out of three hours of hard sparring per day, like 15 minutes might be like 100% full power. That way, that's more than enough to get psychologically ready for the intensity of conflict, but won't break your body over time. Intensity of conflict, that's well put. There is competition. Doesn't it have that extra level of animosity? It can. It's a little bit more conflict than it is... It can. Sometimes there's personality differences. For example, like Gordon Ryan and Felipe Pena, they admire each other a lot. They respect each other's skills, but they certainly don't love each other, that's for sure. So there can be certain matchup where there's more intensity. But then there's other matchups where the two athletes come out and it's no more intense than a hard sparring session. So first of all, because I would love to look at a couple of matches with you. And before that, let me say a big thank you to Flow Grappling for, first of all, helping the sport of grappling and jiu-jitsu in general by having organized footage and tournaments that sort of show this sport in its best light to the world. And they do an incredible job of that. So if you're interested in supporting grappling as a sport, helping it grow, you should definitely support Flow Grappling. Go to their website, sign up. Also Flow Wrestling. I'm a huge fan of wrestling. So maybe there'll be a Flow Judo at some point. They don't currently, I don't think, do any major judo stuff. So anyway, I'm a big supporter of theirs and I do have criticism that they know about, which is I hope they continue to improve on the aspect of making the footage discoverable and accessible, making it easy for you to do search through Google and on their website to find matches, to get excited. Like if me and Joe Rogan are getting excited about a particular match, we want to be able to pull it up super quickly. Want to be able to pull up Gordon Ryan's matches super quickly from ADCC, make it super easy to show and share. If we have to pay for it, fine, but make it easy. And when you sign up for Flow, it should be one click, not five clicks. It should be one click. It should be easy. I think it's inexpensive. If you care about grappling, it's definitely worth it. You should sign up. Anyway, my love goes out to Flow Grappling. And also my love goes out to Moe Jassim, as we said. He's the organizer of ADCC. The next one is in 2024. It should be 2024. Well, you should follow ADCC underscore official on Instagram and just send as much love towards Moe and ADCC in general. It's the, like I said, the most prestigious, it's like where the best grapplers in the world show up and the magic happens. It's like some of the most historic matches in grappling and jujitsu ever happened on that stage. Anyway, if I could talk about some of the interesting performances for the athletes you coach. You post on Instagram, let's start with Gordon Ryan. Gordon Ryan, ADCC 2022, the greatest event in grappling history is over. New stars emerged, established stars shone bright again, but one man stood above all like a colossus. Gordon Ryan. You have a way with words, John Donner. I have seen many incredible feats of grappling, but I've never saw a performance like this. For many, Mr. Ryan is a polarizing figure in the sport. For many others, an inspiration to look up to. But after this weekend, there was no disagreement amongst haters and fans about his merit. He is the best ever. It was a long and difficult journey to ADCC 2022, just one year ago, and so on, as you told the story. It was a virtuoso performance of unmatched technique, preparation, and confidence. No one else can claim credit for this achievement. This was his and his alone. No one else today brings together technical depth, tactical insight, and confidence to use them on stage as he does. I had many students, but I only won Gordon Ryan. I think Gordon responded, all this is true besides the credit that sits with you. Thank you, and a heart emoji. Very nice. So anyway, that's as a way of introduction to Gordon Ryan. Can you take me through his set of performances and maybe any matches that stand out? So he competed in his division, which is the plus 99 kilos, and in the super fight against Andrzej Gawa. That's correct. This was in fact the first time in history that this was allowed. For your listeners who don't follow grappling, we may have been very rude and just throwing a lot of stuff at you without explaining ourselves. First of all, ADCC is like the Olympics of grappling. It occurs every two years. You can either qualify for the event through winning matches in a qualification process, or you can be invited. The only people who get invited are either former winners or people in the sport who are just widely recognized superstars who bring some kind of brand value, who have proven in the past that they have what it takes to compete at that level. In this format, there are two kinds of matches. There are weight division matches in which you compete against people roughly your own size and weight. There is an open weight where anyone of any size can enter. So you can have very small people fighting very large people. There is a second category called a super fight where established champions who have won previous open weight tournaments fight each other in one-off battles, one athlete against another. In most of the matches, you will fight repetitively over time towards a gold medal. But in one category, you fight one fight, the so-called super fight, which is usually the headline fight of the event. Traditionally, if you were in the super fight, you could not compete in the weight categories. It was seen as too risky because you might get injured during the weight category, or you might have to fight four very tough fights in a row and get exhausted so that you're ineffective during the main event of the show, the super fight. So throughout its history, ADCC has always resisted the idea of an athlete being allowed to do both weight category and a super fight. It's never happened before. Gordon Ryan requested to be able to do this because of his extraordinary stature in the sport. The ADCC organization granted his request. That was the first time ever. In addition, Gordon Ryan would be fighting to be the first person to win three gold medals in three different weight categories. This has never been done before. So it was a huge event on Gordon's part. And bear in mind also that prior to this event, he had fought just a month and a half earlier against a former ADCC open weight champion, Felipe Pena, who had defeated him in the past in a completely different rule set, and then previous to that against the current world champion. So there'd been a buildup to this. So he'd been very active coming up to the event. And then he went in to fight arguably the greatest ADCC champion of all time, Andre Galvan, which would occur late on Sunday and would have to fight the toughest people, including the possibility of fighting his nemesis, Felipe Pena, in the weight division prior to getting to the super fight. So there was genuine concern here that he may have completely overstepped himself. The biggest concern I had as a coach, and I'm sure the organizers, Mojaz, must've had the same concern, is that he would get injured or exhausted fighting in his weight division. There were two athletes in particular, Felipe Pena, who had given Gordon a very tough 40 minute match in a no rules setting shortly before ADCC, and his former training partner, Nick Rodriguez, who were expected to give Gordon very, very tough matches if they came up against each other. So there was a genuine concern that Gordon may burn himself out before he even got to fight the guy who most people believe is the greatest ADCC champion of all time. So our concern was how do we manage this? So what we looked for is extremely efficient methods of reducing the time of the matches, making the matches as short as possible. Our favorite way to fight bigger, stronger athletes, and I think Gordon was the lightest athlete in his weight division. Everyone goes, oh, Gordon's so big and strong, he's actually quite light. I think he was outweighed by almost all of his opponents. It's nice to see Gordon looking small relative to his opponents, which is absurd to say, but it is the open division plus 99 kilos. It was plus 99 kilos. Right, that's what I mean, sorry, by open plus 99 kilos. Everyone looks like the Incredible Hulk. Yeah, yeah. So our big thing is when we fight bigger, stronger opponents, we always go in two directions. You either go for the legs or you go for the back. And so we constructed strategies based around those two methods. So going for submissions. And we should also mention that AGCC rule set is for regular matches, I think it's five minutes and five minutes. Total is 10 minutes. And then for finals matches, it's 20 minutes and half the time is spent with no points. So these can be very, very long matches. I mean, put this in a perspective, a modern judo match is five minutes. A modern wrestling match, I believe, is six minutes in international freestyle. So these matches can be 40 minutes long. Now that's a long, long grappling match. Yeah. Depending on how you compete in it, that can have a huge toll on you. Absolutely. You can get to the finals and just be absolutely spent. So our whole thing is, okay, Gordon's got to not only get to the finals, then he's got to fight the toughest AGCC grappler of all time after that. So we were looking for quick and energy efficient matches. And that meant going to the back or going to the legs. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, that's exactly what he did. He was able to get some very, very quick matches, courtesy of leg lock finishes. And in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs, then he would simply take his opponent's back. And that's a very low stress position to occupy. In one case, his opponent deliberately kept his back on the ground to prevent the back take, and he just chose mounted position instead. And so he was able to go through his weight division with extremely low energy expenditure, which set him up well to go into the finals. No injuries, very little energy expenditure. Now it sounds easy to say that, okay, the strategy worked. But in order to get that strategy to work, you have to have one hell of a set of skills. And we can see those now. Would you like to? Yeah, I would love to go through them. And I should also mention, for people just listening to this, I'll try to commentate on different things we'll look at. But the thing that was made clear is, maybe you can speak to that. Maybe to you it looks like efficiency. But to me, it looked like Gordon was not even trying. There was a relaxed aspect to the whole thing. So maybe it had to do with saving energy, but he made it look very easy. And he made the path of submission look very easy. So here, the first match against an opponent that again, looks bigger than him. Okay, I'll just give an initial comment here. First, you'll see that Gordon elected to sit to the bottom position. The hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes take the standing position and joust for takedowns. That's where most of the energy gets burned up. So working on the idea of energy efficiency, let's go out. And we chose to sit into guard position and then start looking to access our opponent's back. Because of our opponent's head position, a far side arm drag makes a lot of sense. Gordon's able to beat the arm and quickly get behind his opponent. Now the question is going to be getting into a scoring position. It's too early to score at this point, but we're just concerned at this stage of just energy expenditure, make the other guy work harder than us. So Gordon did the arm drag to the back and now is working on the hooks. The hooks are not particularly important here. He'll use it just to get stability on his opponent. But interestingly, his opponent here had an interesting strategy too, which was to occupy bottom turtle position and look to get to the critical five minute demarcation point where points begin to get scored. His idea, I believe, I'm speculating here based on his actions, was to keep Gordon at bay in a defensive turtle position until a five minute mark occurred. In which case he would shake Gordon off, walk away and force a takedown battle. How many people are comfortable in that? And what do you think about the defensive turtle position versus always trying to come back to guard? Turtle position is the second bottom position of Jiu-Jitsu. Many people only associate guard position with bottom position in Jiu-Jitsu. That's naive. There's two. There's guard position and turtle position. Now as a general rule, guard position offers a much, much greater variety of attacking options than turtle position does. But that's not to say turtle position absolutely can be an effective bottom position. You can work effectively from there. So there's some case to be made that to wait out five minutes, turtle might be... I mean, I personally think against Gordon Ryan, I mean, I admire the fellow's courage. It's not easy. But there was a logic to what he was doing. People think, oh, he just got his back taken so easily, but he did have a strategy. Now, did he pick the right person to use that strategy against? Probably not. So Gordon is able to break the turtle down, get one hook in. At which point is this becoming an extremely controlling position with Gordon in the back? At which point is there, are you happy with where it is? At this point, it just started to dawn on me at this point, this guy actually had a strategy, which was to maintain a prone position that he's in now, and then shake Gordon off after the five minute mark. So once that became obvious, then now I'm starting to look at the clock and how close we are. If we can take it up to five minutes. Right now, this guy's only intention is to stop Gordon from strangling him and finish. Okay, now the guy's trying to go up and vertical freeze it there. Now, do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat in turtle position? In Jiu-Jitsu, there's only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from turtle position, that's to stand up. So now it's clear at this point, what his actual strategy is. It's to get up, force a standing confrontation, win a takedown battle and beat Gordon by points. So he did have a strategy. Now, our counter strategy is always based around the power half Nelson. This is a common move in the sport of wrestling, and it's a great way to break people down as they try to stand up. That looks so heavy. Yeah. I mean, Gordon is a master of it. So there's a power half Nelson that Gordon has on him as the elbows are off the ground and knees are off the ground. He's going to return his opponent to the mat. And as you can see, he's successful in doing so. And now it's clear what the man's strategy is. So I'm calling to Gordon to break him down to a hip. You put a man on a hip, he can't stand up. Gordon successfully does it, traps the shoulder using that one-on-one grip with his right hand, puts him down to a shoulder and a hip. That means standing up is no longer an option for his opponent. Now Gordon goes in, he's already scoring because of the turtle position that he's in. His opponent stays down on his shoulder. Now Gordon's responsibility is to start looking for the stranglehold. His opponent has basic defensive structure. He's disciplined with his chin, keeps the chin down. But Gordon is a master of tying up defensive arms and penetrating under the chin to get to a strangle. You'll see that shortly. There's the trapping of the arm. Notice that no advanced grips were required. It was just a spontaneous trap. There's the penetration of the neck. So the arm was trapped with the leg. Yeah. So now he's only got one defensive arm and he's just taking that away with his left hand. He gets a one-handed strangle for the finish. And it looks like not much energy was expanded during that process. Very little. Yeah. So that's a, the tournament got off to a very smooth start. Very little energy expenditure, no injuries, and a submission win. Does that, there's a kind of certain look to Gordon of, that could be interpreted as nervousness. That was an incorrect interpretation? Yes. Okay. So there's a, what do you interpret as nervous behavior? Well this is, part of me is trolling, but sometimes on the surface confident behavior can look like, almost like anger. And there's a, Gordon's face had a like a vulnerability to it. Almost like, when you go to judge confidence, don't look at the face. Look at the extremities of the body. Yeah. That's where the truth comes out. You see it in body language. And the further from the face and chest, the more honest the body becomes. Look at the feet and the hands. Well there were, I mean, that's when you see if people are nervous or not. He was very relaxed in the extremities. That's true. See, you look more confident in this than anything. What are you thinking about? What are you, what's going through your head here? Is this the same stuff? Are you intimidated by the two meat heads, one in a suit and tie? Or are you not thinking about that at all? I know. For me it's just about, okay, what's the most efficient path to victory against this particular opponent? It's just, okay, I've done my job. I've taken them through an extensive fight camp that prepared them for every conceivable situation that they're in. I've run an efficient warmup. Their body temperature is perfect. Their elasticity in the muscles is perfect. My main role when I corner is I avoid what most people do when they corner, which is to be a cheerleader. Most cornermen, they're not cornermen, they're cheerleaders. They're there to express some kind of emotional support to their training partners or their student. Sometimes they're even worse than cheerleaders. They express their own emotional fears as the match goes on. I always believe that 99.5% of the job of the trainer is done, the coach is done, when the athlete steps their foot on the mat. At that point, you shouldn't need me at all. Everything I needed to tell you should have been not just told to you, but imprinted into you. Remember, there's 15,000 people in that crowd. For half of the match, you're not going to hear a word that I can say. There's too much noise. But you'll hear my voice inside your head, because you've heard it so many times over the last 14 weeks. You're sick of hearing it at that point. And they're programmed to know what to do. So I'm usually pretty confident. I'm also very confident that even in worst case scenarios, they're going to have effective solutions, because they train those worst case scenarios every single day in the gym. And so, in part, you're there to have a front row seat to analyze what happened, so that you can take that to the next match. The biggest danger an athlete faces is tunnel vision. Sometimes they will hit upon a certain move or strategy and just say, I'm going to go with this, when there's much easier alternatives. But because they're so focused on the alternative they've chosen, they get this tunnel vision and just focus only on that. The most constructive thing the corner man can do is alert them to the presence of time, which is very important in an ADCC match, because all the scoring is structured by time. And to alleviate problems associated with tunnel vision. That, okay, you're doing this, but if you just did this, it'd be so much easier. So that's the main goal. So here, this was one of several anticipated matches against, second one against Victor Hugo, which is a very tough opponent. And again, this was a situation where Gordon was considerably outweighed by his opponent. So the main thing here was efficiency. His opponent elected to avoid the standing position by jumping into guard. So now- Closed guard, yeah. Yeah, Gordon would be in top position this time. He has a very good closed guard. But unfortunately, Gordon has very good guard passing. So he's an excellent guard player, very talented, but Gordon is renowned as the eminent guard passer in the world today. So it's a tall order to hold Gordon off for a 10 minute match. Is there something you can say about this guard passing? Gordon is making it look very easy. It's middle distance guard passing here. And he eventually passes to mount, I believe, in a very- Where you run through the sequence where he gets mounted, there's a couple, I believe he gets mounted twice, just back just a little bit further. So he's trying to, one arm under- Yeah, this is a stacking position. Now, normally we always insist on the idea of getting an advantageous angle first, controlling the feet and getting angle. But there's a height advantage that Victor Hugo has here. And the length of his legs means that he can play very, very wide with his legs. So getting an advantageous angle might be difficult. In these circumstances, it often makes sense to go right up the middle. Now, Gordon could just go back for legs because the legs, Victor Hugo's legs are so far apart at this point that you could easily isolate a leg and attack that. But Gordon wanted to show off his passing prowess. Very often he'll go into a match and say, okay, I'm going to show this skill. And he'll often use it as a demonstration of techniques he teaches in instructional videos. So he wanted to show that he could pass to mount readily on a world champion. Like this part here, this little step. Okay. Just freeze it right there. Go back one step. Okay. You can clearly see that all of his opponents' defensive frames are built on his opponent's left-hand side. So everything is defense on the left, but you can see this comes at a price and that price is back exposure on the right-hand side. You can literally see his opponents back on that side. So Gordon's whole game is to place sufficient pressure that the opponent overcompensates on the side of pressure just to set up a quick switch across to the other side. There's the vulnerability, there's the back exposure. His opponent has to put his back on the ground, switches back. That's a world champion right there on bottom who does a good job of recovering from the first danger. But unfortunately, Gordon has been here a thousand times and just switches his hips and kicks out. A little step. And so you see there's two changes in direction left, right in a very short period of time that people find very, very hard to keep up with. Now his opponent builds up to an elbow. He's looking to create more and more space from here, but Gordon counters by just stepping over the hips. It's just when you feel like every move, he's doing the right things. The man on bottom is doing well. He's doing the right things, but the other guy's just been here too many times and is just half-saken the hit of every decision being made. Going up on the elbow. Man, Gordon makes it look so easy here. It almost seems like Victor is out, but this turning of the hips with the arm over the opponent's back is able to bring him back down and Gordon takes mount. Notice how Gordon is never satisfied with the mounted position itself. He's only satisfied with an extended mounted position where the elbow comes up over the shoulder line. Only then does he show there's a little bit of relief right there, right? Right? There's a little bit of relief. No, that's the look of a man who's just proved a point. This is very Michael Jordan, like sticks his tongue out. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Michael Jordan, like sticks his tongue out. So yeah, I mean, there's no points at this stage. He really is going for submission. And then this happens again. Is this the match that wasn't Gordon's? This was the only match where Gordon didn't finish his opponent by submission. Was this very frustrating for him? It's actually interesting that when he came off the mat, he was visibly frustrated. He wanted to get a finish and I think he was more upset about not finishing Victor Hugo than he was delighted by winning his two gold medals. So I think that says a lot about the perfectionism of Gordon Ryan. Most people would be thrilled to beat one of the great grapplers of this generation decisively in this fashion, but he was not happy. And so this is Gordon's third match against Sousa, Roosevelt Sousa. Another guy who's very big. Yeah, this is different because now we're onto the second day. Your listeners should be aware that the event occurs over a two day period. So the previous two matches occurred on Saturday. Now we're into Sunday. Now this puts a different context on things. If we could just freeze it right there, maybe go back one step. Now we're on Sunday morning and the idea is that Gordon will be fighting the biggest fight of his life late that afternoon. So now we're into the idea of energy conservation. It's okay to have two hard matches on Saturday because you get to rest on Saturday night, but now Gordon has to beat two people back to back and save energy for the biggest fight of his life on Sunday, late Sunday afternoon. So now the emphasis is on a quick win and you can see Gordon Ryan certainly delivers on this. Now, when you go to entangle your opponent's legs, the basic choice you have is between straight ashi garami and cross ashi garami. In the last five years, cross ashi garami has proven to be statistically the more important of the two. And as a result, many people have forgotten the value of straight ashi garami base leg locks and undervalued them. Gordon has outstanding heel hooks from both straight and cross positions. And his opponent was probably more concerned about the danger of a cross ashi garami, left the right leg undefended for far too long. And as a result, Gordon goes into a very classical ashi garami you would normally expect to see from five or six years ago and gets a very, very quick finish. So lifts his opponent. There's the ashi garami, the entanglement of one of his opponent's legs with two of his. Now he's got to turn and expose his opponent's heel. So there's an initial off balance to the left to get a defensive reaction. The opponent overcompensates, exposes his heel, and then there's the submission. There's a danger of a leg being broken here. Gordon has an absolutely ferocious outside heel hook. Until you felt it, it's quite different. So the opponent probably before he even felt the heel hook felt the control and that it's screwed. Yeah, it's... That he's screwed there. He doesn't even want to... Yeah. When someone who knows what they're doing gets a bite on your leg like that, you feel it deep inside your knee and ankle tendons immediately. And it's... There's a sense in which you almost tap. He got a couple of taps, almost like as if they're early. Because the opponent knows... People came up to us, obviously, this guy tapped early. It's like, hmm. No, he knew. Yeah, yeah. He knew that late would be a big problem. Got it. So this is within like 30 seconds, within 10 seconds. I think it was within 10 seconds. So this was an excellent example of someone saying, okay, I'm going to conserve energy with a short match. I'm not just going to go down into a neutral position. I'm going to directly pull into a leg lock attack from standing position. You don't see that much in heavyweight divisions. That's something you see more in the lightweight divisions. So we got to go to the final match of Gordon's within his division, which I think, as opposed to facing Felipe Pena, who lost to Nicky Rod. Nicky Rod had a great match against Felipe Pena and passed Felipe Pena's guard. I think only the second person in ADCC competition to accomplish that. I believe with a body lock. It started as a body lock, but he converted to half guard, top head and arm, and passed out of half guard, top, chest to chest. I think I listened to Craig Jones' interview summarizing what happened in ADCC, and he briefly mentioned that Nicky Rod might have the best body lock pass that he's ever felt. He's very, very good with the body lock. The way to face Nicky Rod is don't let him get the body lock. But there's a problem. If you stand up, he's a good wrestler. So there's a dilemma there. You have to sit down to guard, but that goes into his body lock. But then if you stand up, now you go into his wrestling skill. So it's a great dilemma that he has. And that's what, in facing Nicky Rod, Goran Ryan here chooses to... Yeah, if you look at the limbs, there's a relaxation there. We should also explain some things here. This is a finals match. So instead of being 10 minutes long, it's 20 minutes long with the option of a 20-minute overtime. So this could potentially be a 40-minute match. So you can see why the ADCC people were very concerned about Gordon doing this match, because what if this match had gone 40 minutes? And then an exhausted Gordon Ryan has to go out to fight Andre Galvan, who's fresh and ready to maul him. And on top of that is two former teammates. Who know each other's game very well. So there was a high likelihood in most people's minds that this would go the distance. Because when you train with each other for years, every single day in the gym, seven days a week, you get to know each other's tricks. One big problem here for Nicky Rod is that his body lock guard passing game, which is his main weapon on the ground, was taught to him by us. So it's not like we're going to be taken by surprise by it. So that must have been figuring in his mind. Do you think psychologically for Gordon and psychologically for Nicky Rod, it's tough? So for him, with that body lock, for example, do you think it's tough for him to know what to do here? It's tough because he would have remembered the outcome of the training sessions. It's hard to go up against a guy who used to dominate you in training and then say, okay, I'm going to beat him in competition. Can you shut all of that off? It's tough, man. Memory is memory. You can't lie to yourself. Well, what do you think about competition? There's been a lot of Olympics bringing this out. There's been a lot of big upsets at the Olympics. There's something where people find something in them. I mean, judo is a different sport than grappling. In judo, there's much more room for upset because a mistake in judo will have ramifications that will be felt within half a second. Like if you take the wrong grip in judo, you can be thrown in half a second and there's no recovery. If your two shoulders hit the mat with momentum, it's over. It's done. In jiu-jitsu, you could, especially in ADCC where there's no points in the first five minutes, you could get taken down and mounted by your opponent and still win. Like you can recover from a bad start. In judo, boxing, kickboxing, MMA, you get hit, there's no recovery time. You just get swarmed on. Jiu-jitsu is a much more forgiving sport where you can make a series of blunders and you just recover from them. You don't make a series of blunders in boxing, you're unconscious. So there's the blunder case, but there's also been just people where it's their day. I mean, again, maybe it's romanticizing the notion, but there's been some epic performances in Olympic wrestling, in Olympic judo. As an example, Satoshi Ishii, he had a 2008 performance. We talked about all Japan and all that kind of stuff, but the Olympics, he destroyed everybody on this path to the Olympic gold medal. That's when Teddy Rene was also competing, he got the bronze. So, I mean, that, you could say he was at that time the best in the world also, but some people have a say. Yeah, but I think it would be very fair to say he was the best in the world. Think about the people he beat to win three all Japan championships. He beat Kosei Inoue, he beat Keiji Suzuki, they were Olympic champions. He was already- So you don't believe in free will? I don't believe that a person can walk on stage and be better than what they are supposed to be. You have a skill level, it's set in stone. This is your skill level. You don't just go on stage and suddenly your skill level gets here. What you do have is a situation where you have a skill level, another opponent has a higher skill level, but he runs into confidence issues so that he only uses a small percentage of his actual skills. And then he will fall below someone who is technically lower on the skill scale than he is. That can happen, but you can't just magically acquire skills by stepping on stage. Yeah, but all of us are able to fall in confidence. Yes, so the question becomes who manages that fall best? And that can create upsets, absolutely. So you don't think Gordon could have fallen in confidence against a former teammate when the pressure is so high? There was just no basis for a fall to occur. You said he doesn't have confidence issues. What do you attribute that to? That's because he never loses in the gym. There's no experience in his head that would make him say, I shouldn't be this confident. So it's the physical, it's like we talked about mental preparation. Don't get me wrong, if Gordon lost 20 matches in a row, of course his confidence would drop. Because experience is now, there's going to be a psychological dissonance between his experience, his recent experience, and what he believes. If you believe you're the best in the world, you just lost 20 matches, at some point reality is going to break in. But if you're just never losing in competition, dominating people in the gym, then there's nothing in your experience that would shake your confidence. Can I ask you this, just in a small tangent, why is Gordon Ryan so good? So we're looking at, you've trained a lot of special athletes, you're a special human being yourself. I could just look at human history. There's a lot of, not a lot, there's some special humans. It seems like Gordon Ryan is one of them. I totally agree with that. Can you try to like dissect? That's what I meant when I said I had many students, but only one Gordon Ryan. Like I've taught many, many people, but they don't all have his skill level. So there's an obvious elephant in the room, okay, what distinguishes him from other athletes? Great question, I'll try and give an answer. More than anyone else that I've ever taught, he has a memory for things that were taught to him. He has an ability to recall information that is extraordinary compared with other people in the room. So that's definitely a big part of it. Secondly, he has a pride in technique and technical prowess that will not allow him to settle for anything less than perfection. And he will hate himself when there is imperfection. So there is a love of excellence and a hatred of anything less than excellence. He has an ability to pull the trigger when opportunity arises, which is truly extraordinary. Many people know what to do, but when the moment comes, they back off and they'll doubt themselves. If Gordon sees the opportunity, the trigger pulls every time. So can I just link on that briefly? There's a few times where he gets a little bit of an advantage and he just chases it to get a big, like with Andre Galvao, you know, you get, it's like there's a dance and you get one step ahead and he's able to chase that, you know, get a little glimmer of the back and he's able to chase that all the way to back control. So that is that kind of the trigger that you're referring to? Yes. It runs deeper than that too. It's the idea that good athletes are greedy athletes. Okay. When they see a small opportunity, they try and get as big a bite of it as possible. So that the mantra that we always have in training, if you can see the bag, you can take the bag. You can take the bag. And if Gordon sees an inch of your bag, you know, that's the duration he's going to be going. If your far shoulder is within an inch of the floor, he's going to be mounting you. If your shoulder comes off the floor, he'd be on your back on the other side. He's a maximalist with opportunity. He's not satisfied with, oh, let me get a good enough outcome. It's like, I want the maximal outcome. So when you combine all these things together and ability to recall information, which is just far superior to anyone else I've ever coached. An ability to work in the training room towards not just good technique, but excellent technique. The confidence to pull the trigger whenever the opportunity arises. A maximalist mindset where it's never enough to have a good enough outcome. It's always got to be the best possible outcome. And the fifth element, which I believe is very, very important, is extraordinary depth in his technical prowess. In particular, with regards his defensive acumen. Everyone looks at Gordon and focuses on his offensive prowess because they see him dominate other athletes. But what they don't see is what I see every day in the gym, where he works from impossibly bad defensive positions. Someone locked in on a full heel hook on his body, on a full judogitami arm bar in a complete pin mounted with Gordon's two arms stretched out over his head in what looks like a hopeless position. And Gordon will work in these positions. And of course, because it's such a bad position, sometimes he'll have to tap. But he just works so relentlessly in these bad positions that when he steps on stage, he's like, if this guy got the worst possible position on me, there's nothing he could do with it. And within 30 seconds, I could turn it around on him and win this match. That gives his game an overall breadth and depth, which is very, very hard to deal with. It means there's no obvious weak point where you can just say, okay, I'm going to attack him here and use this strategy to beat him. And that goes back to his confidence. The reason why most people lack confidence is because they fear bad outcomes. If you're a strong guard player, you've got an excellent guard, but you're terrified of leg locks and your opponent has strong leg locks, you will shut down your own guard and won't play as freely and well as you normally do because you're afraid of the leg lock danger. You'll pull your feet in, you'll play a very conservative guard game. But if you had extremely adept leg lock defense, then you just play with all the confidence you normally do from guard position. Gordon puts himself in that situation. He's so defensively sound that it translates into his offensive confidence. When you talk about memory recall, which is interesting, I can't help but see parallels between him and Magnus Carlsen, who's a chess player, who's the number one in the world, arguably the best ever, certainly the best ever if you just look at absolute numbers. Chess has the luxury of having a rating, which you cannot have in jiu-jitsu because it's a game of human chess. Chess is just a board game, so you can actually calculate the probability that you could win. So he has the highest ELO rating ever, and he's maintained that rating. Without competing against the number two in the world, he can just prove that he's the number one in the world for many years. Anyway, there's certain similarities. One is ability to recall. So memory recall of information is fascinatingly good. And the other one is not so much a love for perfection, which is something you mentioned, but the flip side of that, which is what you also mentioned, is the hate of imperfection. Now, in the case of Magnus, it almost creates a level of anxiety for him that's almost destructive. So the thing he seems to hate the most is imperfection against people he knows are worse than him. So the thing he loves is competing against people that are close to his skill level, or the favorite is people who might actually be better than him, especially in certain positions. He loves competing against them, but he's not against them. He hates competing against people that are still, from the perspective of everyone else, what are called super grandmasters, so top three in the world. But he knows he's much better than them, and the anxiety of being not perfect against those people, that's why he, I don't know if you're paying attention, but he stepped away. He's not going to defend his world championship because he hates the anxiety of playing people worse than him. Interesting. He figures they would somehow make him look bad? No, he just, for him, at least the language he uses, it's just not fun. And he likes having fun. To him, it was fun to win, no matter the skill level, the world championship the first time, but then defending it is a very grueling process. With classical chess, you play these many hours, it could be seven hour long games. And on top of that, he really hates the fact that it's only, I forget what it is, but it's single digit number of games. He says it's low sample. So I can't, I would like to play 20, 30, 40, 50 games if we're going to do it this way, but then they're too long, it's going to take too long. So he's really emphasizes the fun of it and the clear demonstration of who's the best. Now, chess is an interesting game. It's probably different than grappling because it's been played for centuries. So there's this giant body of people that are playing it. Like there's other Gordon Ryans out there. Imagine a world where there's multiple Gordon Ryans or something like that, just different dimensions. But you have sharks everywhere. And so there is fun to be had even at the very, very, very, very top. But the memory recall is the thing that stands out and the hate of imperfection, more intense than anybody else in the game. Fascinating. That takes us back to the final. Ah, yes. So here Gordon is facing Nicky Rod, former training partner. And again, the intention here is this has to be put in the context that Gordon will be fighting the greatest ACC grappler of all time in a few hours after this. So what we're looking for is a quick resolution, still the shortest possible match. Now, there's a complicating factor here. Nicky Rod was a wrestler before he was a jiu-jitsu player. On paper, the way his route to win is via wrestling. He's not going to be able to submit Gordon Ryan and he's not going to be able to pass his guard. So he has to win by wrestling. In the ADCC finals, you cannot set the guard. So the approach that Gordon used earlier that we saw on video cannot be used in the finals. Gordon must wrestle his opponent. So on the way out, Gordon and I were talking and we'd had discussions obviously during the cam, what's the appropriate thing to do here? And there had been some matches earlier in the event where it was becoming obvious that stalling was being heavily punished by referees. So I said to Gordon on the way out, just give him your leg. Let him take you down because in the first 10 minutes of the finals, takedowns don't score anything. There are no means of scoring the first 10 minutes, but you can't set the guard. That will award you a negative point. So I said, just let Nicky Rod take you down. And he's like, Nicky Rod's not going to take the bait. And I said, if he doesn't, I'll call him for stalling. And then Craig Jones also commented after the fact, is I don't know why Nicky Rod took the bait. So if we see the start of the match, you see Gordon comes out and offers a leg. Now, it's not that Nicky Rod is smart. He knows what's happening here. And what's he going to do? Stall for 10 minutes and get like five stalling calls put against him? So Gordon gives him the takedown. That way they go to the ground immediately with no effort. And the match now favors Gordon because Gordon is significantly more skilled on the ground. The question is, how can we make this match as short as possible? And as is so often the case, the answer comes back to legs. So for people just listening to this, Gordon's in an open guard and Nicky Rod appears to be trying to keep his hips away from Gordon's legs. Yes. Nicky Rod knows there's a danger here. So he's elected to go to his knees that will set up his favorite body lock passes. And it will, in some ways, mitigate some of the dangers associated with leg locks. So Gordon's whole thing is how am I going to get my body weight underneath him? He has a choice between linear entries where he enters between his opponent's knees and circular entries where he inverts and spins underneath his opponent to get under a center of gravity. Is there a way for somebody to try to get a body lock without giving Gordon an opportunity to get under them? Well, the body lock is an excellent way to shut down leg lock entries if you can get to the body lock. But you can see Gordon's very, very disciplined with his elbow and knee position. Elbows and knees work in a position where it's very, very hard for his opponent to access his waist. That shoulder is always either across the hip or in front of the shoulder. Sorry, his knee is either in front of the shoulder or in front of the hip. And we're one minute into the match and just if I were to look at the video player here, it appears that the match is over soon. So I guess Nikki Riot is facing this. I need to get close in order to do the body lock. And the closer you get, the more danger there is to let Gordon get under you and get the leg control. Now they're starting to get close here. Gordon's going to try and get his head underneath his opponent, make a circular entry into the legs. He's clearing his opponent's head out of the way by faking the arm drag on the far side. The first move that he used against his first opponent earlier in the tournament. And there's the leg. Spins underneath it, goes circular, rotates through, gets his body weight underneath his opponent. Okay. Now he's going to trip him down to the mat. Now I believe Nikki Riot tries to pull out his foot here. And Craig also said that Nikki Riot has gotten used to being able to pull that foot out from anybody. And that he was very surprised at the grip that Gordon was able to actually hold on. So I just want to comment. I'm just parroting commentary. If you look at what's happening here- From the internet. From the internet. If you just freeze it, you'll see that Gordon, like any good leg locker, will always treat his opponent's foot like a knot at the end of the rope. Just as you slide down a rope, if there's a knot at the end, your hand will catch. So too with the human leg. When they go to extract by pulling, you just keep your fist as close to your shoulder as possible and narrow the gap. The foot will always catch. The failure that many people have is they let their hand drift away from their own shoulder. And so there's room for the foot to extract. But you'll see Gordon's extremely disciplined with thumb close to his own shoulder. Which creates a situation that's very, very hard just to simply pull your foot out. You're focusing on the knot of the foot. Also it's very early in the match. There's very little sweat. Both athletes are still pretty dry. Now Gordon has to climb the leg. And now he's already captured his opponent's shoelace. There's the heel exposure coming up. Nicky Rod already knows things are getting bad. And there's the win. Actually the comment I made, I guess, was from a little bit earlier. There's an earlier time where Nicky Rod was trying to pull out the foot and Gordon is able to hold on to the knot. Which is interesting. Now that was a brilliant day's work by Gordon Ryan. He's had two matches against opponents considerably bigger and stronger than himself. And the time of the two matches can be measured in, I think, less than two minutes. So he's done what he set out to do. No injuries, no exhaustion. He's beaten four guys back to back. All of whom are excellent athletes with minimal energy expenditure. And he's ready to go on to his super fight. And that's against one of the greatest, arguably for a long time, really, really up there jiu-jitsu practitioners, competitors, grappling, no-git competitors of all time, which is Andre Gavar. Yes. Andre Gavar is almost certainly at this point the greatest ADCC competitor of all time. He won more super fights than anyone else by a landslide. So if I may just read a few words you've written on Instagram about this match, about Andre Gavar on greatness. How great you become in any given endeavor will always be assessed by the degree of difficulty of the barriers you had to overcome to get to the top. Just as the lion became king of the jungle, not by living among sheep, but by dominating a world of elephants, hyenas, buffalo, leopards, crocodiles. So too, the greatness of an athlete will be determined not just by his own ability, but by the greatness of the athletes he faces. Thus, in his quest for greatness, Gordon Ryan owes a debt to the greatness of his toughest opponent, Andre Gavar. And you go on to sing him praises. And that introduces this match. There was an interesting moment. I didn't even listen to the words exchanged, but because I had the great fortune of sitting next to Hacho Gracie, there was this fascinating moment before the match. And I can't believe Gordon is sufficiently relaxed to do this, but he walked up to Hacho Gracie and had a discussion. What do you think? You've faced Hacho Gavar before. What are your suggestions? And they've talked back and forth. They brainstormed ideas like minutes before the match. And it was just a beautiful moment of like, I don't know, like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan talking to each other or something like that. I wonder how much brainstorming there really was, and how much was it just kind of spiritual inspiration or something like that. Yeah. I think it's more spiritual inspiration. Hacho is a very close friend and mentor of mine. So I always tell my athletes, look to Hacho as your example. This is a guy who always fought for the finish. He tried to express the highest ideal of Jiu-Jitsu, which is control leading to submission. In every match he was ever in, he even lost matches on tactics against people that he could easily have defeated if he adopted a different tactic. But he always insisted on victory by submission. It defined his career. It made him who he was. And I always try to have my athletes emulate him. So what was the strategy going into this match? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? Okay. For Andre Galvan, there's a sense in which Andre Galvan had to fight literally the perfect match to win this. This is a match that's going to be 20 minutes long and potentially 40 minutes long. Andre Galvan cannot win by submission. Gordon's submission dominance here is just too great. It would be exceedingly difficult for him to win on the ground. Gordon's ground positional game is just too advanced. And so for Andre Galvan, if he was going to win, it was going to be in a standing wrestling exchange where most people assessed him as having a measure of superiority over Gordon Ryan. The problem is that it's hard to just keep a potentially 40-minute match off the ground that whole time. It's very, very difficult indeed. So he would have had to fight literally the perfect tactical match to make it happen. And he would have to do it without getting called for stalling points. Gordon has the luxury that if at any point they go to the ground, he has complete dominance. But Gordon too has a problem that he can't pull guard without being penalized. And if Andre Galvan can play this tactical game of forcing Gordon to pull guard and then staying at a distance where he's doing enough action not to get called for stalling, but not so much to engage with the dangerous Gordon Ryan on the ground, then it's feasible he could have won. But it would have been, as I said, it would have required the most perfect application and integration of technique and tactics that he's capable of. How much intimidation was there? Or are these assets already beyond that? When you say intimidation, be more precise. Do you think there was some degree, if you were just to empathize with Andre Galvan, do you think there's some degree in which Gordon was in his head? Because of the trash talk leading up to certain events, because of the level of dominance that Gordon has shown in this competition and in months and years leading up to it. Also the fact that Andre Galvan is also a coach of a large team. So there's some pressure to demonstrate to the team that the old lion still got it. Yeah. I can't speak for Andre, but I know for Gordon, it's hard to be intimidated when you know the other guy has no method of finishing you. It just takes so much pressure off. When you just go in there saying, there's literally no way this guy can finish me. And there's no way this guy can pin and control me. I can't be finished. I can't be pinned and controlled. The only way I can lose this is if this guy plays a tactical game. So in his best case scenario, I lose by a tactical game. But from Andre's perspective, it's like, if I make one screw up, this kid could finish me. You can see which way the intimidation game goes. Now, for the start, things get interesting here. We've already said, if you could just freeze it right there, Andre's only realistic path to victory is standing grappling. That would require him to take Gordon down, presumably multiple times after the first 10 minutes and not be taken down at all by Gordon. So it's a tall order. It's possible, but difficult. And here's where things get interesting. I told Gordon before the match, just go out and offer him the leg. Same way you did with Nicky Rod. And that's where things get interesting. I must say that I loved what Andre Galvan did at the start of this match. He's a little crazy here. There was just so much energy in the room at this point that his hand finding got a little- For people just listening, there's a bit of hard slapping. Yeah. That's fine. That could be considered a strike. It's fine. There was just a lot of electric atmosphere in the room. So now things settle down a little bit. But here's where things get interesting. Andre throws the whole tactical game out the window right from the start. He goes for the takedown. Gordon doesn't try to fight the takedown because it's in his interests to go to the ground. But I love this about Andre. He's literally like, fuck you, kid. Let's see how good your ground game is. So he shoots the takedown and Gordon accepts it, obviously, because it's to his advantage to accept it. But I love the fact that Andre was like, I'm not even going to try and stall this out. I'm just going to bang. There it is. So he's like, okay, let's see what you got, kid. They say you're good on the ground. Let's see what you fucking got. And I love that about Andre. Unfortunately, he's entered the hornet's nest now. What happened there real quick? Because that was very fast. Gordon immediately went into ashi garami. Not just any ashi garami, but ashi garami was holding both legs. He's in open guard and he scooted forward. Wow, that's really nice. So he splits the legs. Now he dominates the space between the knees. So there's a guaranteed straight ashi garami here. He split the knees against Andre Galvao effortlessly right there. Wow. So already Gordon's in his preferred domain now. So he's starting to off balance his opponent. He's looking for a reaction to get heel exposure. He does get heel exposure. Andre does a good job of monitoring the feet to try and reduce the braking pressure. But the brute fact is it's in Gordon's realm now. This is where he has all the advantage. So, and the match is going to be 20 minutes in Gordon's realm. That's going to be a very, very tall order. Was there a moment here, again, Gordon's on the legs. Are you impressed that Andre's able to get out from this? Andre, I would expect this. Andre's been preparing for this for two years. And remember, Andre has gone against some of the greatest leg lockers in grappling before and prevailed. So he's not naive. He knows how to defend himself. The big problem is that he's going to create defensive reactions, which lead into other aspects of Gordon's game, in particular back exposure. So here, ashi garami goes to like a single leg type of position where Gordon runs to Andre's back. Now he has to return him to the mat. The most efficient way to do so is always courtesy of foot sweeping. So he pulls out a de-ashi hirai from the back to sweep him down to the mat. And now Gordon's on top. And this is a serious problem for any grappler in the world. Once Gordon gets top position, he's just relentless. But just getting Andre Gavass good, just getting the guard back, all of that, it's great. There's also a sense here in which Gordon is pacing it too, just to physically fatigue an opponent. So he's passing the guard, but not rushing it. Now what Gordon's looking for here is complete chest to chest contact. He's getting very close to it now. And once he gets chest to chest on an opponent in top position, past one of his opponent's knees, it's going to be awfully, awfully difficult for an opponent to recover. What is he waiting for here? Is there pressure here? Over time, he just wears you out. Yeah, it's part of a campaign of attrition, of pressure over time. Now he's creating a situation where he's either going to get back exposure or mount exposure. And either way is pretty much fatal when you're dealing with Gordon. Andre elected to go the route of back exposure. Now Gordon got the body triangle, is on his back. Now there's one physical problem here. Andre Galvan has a neck like a bull, and he has a very short and very thick neck. So penetrating under the chin for a strangle can be a real problem. He also has extremely well-developed shoulders and upper arms. So when the head comes down and the shoulders go up, there's very little real estate to work with, with regards to your strangle holds. So Gordon in time will trap one of his opponent's arms with his legs in order to take away one of those strong defensive arms. There you can see the arm has been trapped, and now he can start moving towards the strangle. And now here is still difficult. It's still difficult, but things are looking good. There's still a considerable amount of time left on the clock. Gordon is well ahead on points. So all the pressure, all the tactical pressure now is on Andre. You'll see the critical penetration of the jaw. With the wrist there, wow. Yeah. Now Gordon elects for a one-handed strangle. Wow. Andre fought very bravely. But a strangle, it doesn't matter how brave you are. And where does the strangle actually happen in terms of... It felt like the strangle was at the blade of the... It wasn't even fully sunk in. So where does... Is that the full Cormorants, like a one-handed choke? There's a sense in which once you get underneath, you know the inevitable follow-up is coming. Again, the inevitable, you're feeling the inevitable. It's like a... To go back to your chess analogy, it's like resigning in chess. Yeah. In chess it's considered almost like impolite to let it run out when you understand that death is on the horizon. And there's a lot of respect. That was the beautiful thing. With all the trash talk and everything like that, Gordon always shows respect. I love that about the drama of combat. It's trash talk in the beginning and respect at the end. I think it's when you feel someone... Andre has great skills. And when you grapple someone, you feel just how skilled they are. And whatever issues you had prior to the match evaporate when you feel, okay, they're just like you. They do the same moves and same kind of concepts. And you see that there's more that bonds you together than separates you. And that's the feeling at the end of most grappling matches. So if we could talk about Giancarlo, who had an incredible performance. And I mean, there's a lot of things we can say. We can probably go through his matches, but if we could just talk without that about some of the most impressive things that you saw about him. One of the things I think you mentioned elsewhere in here is about confidence. So one of the things you saw that could really benefit him as an athlete and competitor is to build up his confidence. Can you speak to that? First of all, I should give you some background. Giancarlo Badoni was a strong local black belt in Boston, teaching at Benard Faria School. When I would film instructional videos, I would often talk to him and talk to him about his competitions and training. And he would do local competitions. He was trying to go from Gi training, which was the majority of his competitive background, into no Gi. And he was struggling in local competitions, especially with things like leg locking, where he had no background in leg locking and would often get submitted. So as we worked together in instructional videos, we would talk and discuss. He would periodically come to the gym in New York City and come in to work out with the guys. And he often struggled in the training room. He had no experience with things like body lock guard passing, and this used to mean that many of the training sessions didn't go well for him. So he was always a very polite, well-spoken young man and worked hard. When we went to Puerto Rico and the team ended up drifting apart, when we moved into Austin, he said, you know, now that many of your athletes have left, could I come down and train with you guys full-time? And I was like, yeah, I'd love to. I thought it'd be a great training partner for Gordon and Gary. We didn't really have any training partners at that point. And sure enough, he literally just picked up everything he had and moved down to Austin. Now, anyone who just moves halfway across the country to begin training, that already gets my respect right there. That's a big commitment. And he began training. We put him on a training schedule where first he had to cover up his big weaknesses. He had limited attacks from bottom position. He had poor leg lock defense, and he was very, very vulnerable to a certain kinds of guard passing, which weren't part of his experience. This is all a year out from AGCC. Yes. And we should also maybe give the spoiler, which is he wins his division in a dominant fashion. He also does incredibly well at the absolute. It was an amazing thing. To give you an idea, when he first moved to Austin, he competed in a WNO event. And I don't think he scored a single point, lost a couple of matches, including matches to people who were in this ADCC. So he came out of that looking very depressed. He lost to Ken Andoate. He lost to Mason Fowler. So John Culler always struck me as someone who was positionally sound. He had good guard retention, things like this, but he had no offense, he had no leg lock defense, and he just wasn't able to assert authority on matches. He was a guy who was always going to be tough to beat because it's hard to pass his guard, that kind of thing, but he wasn't dangerous. Can I ask you a question on that? Yeah. Because my interaction with him early on when he came to Austin, I remember he interacted with me a bunch on the mat, showing me stuff. But I wonder if that kindness is a detriment to the confidence is there some connection? No. Again, confidence... So killers can be nice too. Absolutely. Confidence comes from skill level. And confidence is a much more rational thing than most people ascribe it. People think of confidence as like this esoteric, ethereal element that you either have or you don't. When in fact, confidence is much more a reflection, a rational reflection on your past experience. And if you're successful with your past experience and you're expecting to compete in a situation which is similar to your past experience, and that past experience has mostly been successful, you'll be confident. Are you pretty confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? Of course you are, because it's done so every time in the past. Now, as people like Hume pointed out, there's no supreme rational reason for believing this, but nonetheless, your confidence is high. And it's the same thing in Jiu-Jitsu. If you're performing well and skills are the reason for that, your confidence will be high in the future regardless of what your mindset is. So it's not a question of this personality does better in competition or that personality. Ultimately, it's going to come down to your skills and your confidence will be a reflection of your accumulation of skills. So, what was his journey like to a person who lost to a person who dominated the competition? Yeah. First things first, we had to say, okay, you've got an obvious weakness, leg lock defense. So every day in the gym, he would be taught, okay, this is where you put your feet. This is where you position your knees. You point your knee this way, not this way. Then he would have to start sparring situations in leg locks and have to work his way out. Initially, these were like heartbreaking sessions for him where, I mean, I've got to give that kid full credit. Like he just worked his way through it patiently, dealt with frustration, initial failures, and just said, I'm going to get better. Can we just linger on that? So what's the experience of those early training sessions like from an athlete perspective? It's daunting. Are you basically dealing with the rational thought that you're not going to ever be good? Yeah. You're wondering, have I even got what it takes? Think about it. He's an established player who's been in IBJF competition, I believe he's a brown belt world champion in the Ghi. And suddenly a group of kids that he's never even seen before repeatedly submitting him with leg locks in the gym. And he's like, man, this is terrible. A year from now, I'm supposed to fight ADCC against people like Craig Jones, some of the best leg lockers in the world. It must've been hard, but he just stayed in there and no one worked harder than him. He just was in the gym three times a day, studying every day. And unlike so many other people, every time he was shown something, he consciously and deliberately tried to enact it, even at the price of initial failure. Do you advise that that's a good way to go? It's the only way to go. If you can't wrap your head around the idea that trying to acquire new skills will create a temporary time where your effectiveness diminishes as you're trying to bring on new skills, you're never going to make it because you'll always stay at whatever skill set you are. The whole mental trick is to imbue this idea of delayed gratification that you have to accept that when I bring on new moves, my overall effectiveness will diminish. But there's the belief that in time, as my skill performance increases, it will increase over time, but it will come at the price of initial frustration and failure. And John Carlo made that mental switch early on in his time in Austin, and to his credit, just stuck through. Within a very short period of time, he became very hard to leg lock. And even the best leg lockers in the room had a hard time with him. And that was the first step in confidence. He said, okay, I'm not getting finished quickly anymore. Then he had to bring in a whole new set of upper body submissions. He neglected upper body submissions. When you say upper body submissions, do you mean the arm locks? Strangleholds, arm locks, things like this. And in particular, he put very, very hard work on his strangleholds. He had always been someone who was positionally strong. He could get to the back, but he could never finish from the back. And then suddenly, in the gym, he started finishing from the back. And then as gym performance against the lesser students increased, then you bump them up against better students. And then this goes on all the way up to the best guys in the room. And in time, in a relatively short period of time, there were significant increases in performance. And success begets success. And this kept going. We started to get a hint of his developing confidence in local competitions. I remember seeing John Carlo compete in a local fight to win competition against a tough Brazilian kid. John Carlo just came out, dominated and finished with a leg lock. Now that was interesting. He said, okay, you're the guy that used to get finished by leg locks, and now you're beating tough opponents with leg locks. And that was an important psychological step for John Carlo Badoni. And with each little step, as we went further and further, then he got to ADCC trials and had one of the great performances. I believe he submitted all of his opponents in ADCC trials and put on a fantastic display of grappling. Shockingly, no one paid attention to it. They were just like, oh yeah, he won. And John Carlo flew into ADCC completely under the radar. They just saw him as, oh, he's the guy that won American trials. And no one really paid much attention. In his first match, he took on a great Brazilian champion, Izake, and won in dominant fashion. He was about to strangle him with just a few seconds left on the clock. I remember John Carlo being furious at the end of the match, thinking, I was so close to finishing, he wanted a perfect finish. Up on points, 6-0. Still chasing. He could have just coasted at this point, but he wanted to finish every one of his opponents. He got very, very close, but not quite there. Then in his next match, he had to take on the defending gold medalist from the previous ADCC. Yeah, Mateo Diniz. This was the guy who was the favorite to win. So you have a relatively unknown John Carlo fighting the man who defeated Craig Jones in the previous ADCC. Do you remember what stood out to you about this match? Mateo Diniz is good wrestling, he's good at everything. He's good all around grappler. Yes, he's got, by judicial standards, he's a very strong wrestler. So our intention was to match his wrestling with John Carlo's judo skills. So you will see, if we could perhaps go back, you'll see the first takedown. Arm drag. Arm drag and took him down with a simple drag and pick. So that was John Carlo's first takedown, that was more wrestling-oriented and good for his confidence to see that he could score a nice takedown. But Mateo Diniz is very, very good at standing up from bottom position. If we just go back just a step. Okay, now here we have something interesting. Mateo comes up from bottom, seizes a leg and John Carlo defends the wrestling move and then goes immediately into… With a foot. It's kind of a mix of Sasai and Diyashi Hirai. Wow, that was beautiful, I didn't even notice that. That's really nice, look at that. From defending a single, threatening a guillotine. One of the big themes of our ADCC camp was that most of our opponents now are getting very strong in hand fighting. Look at that. But they're not strong in foot fighting. And so we put a very heavy emphasis on foot sweeping attacks. You remember Gordon Ryan took down Andre Galvant with a foot sweep and here you have John Carlo using the same technique, not from the back but from the front. And an overhook. Catches the foot mid-air. And that's just a beautiful, beautiful takedown. That's beautiful Judo. And then later in the match you'll use a Kusarigake, another classical Judo takedown to get top position. Now at one point John Carlo was in trouble. He got his back exposed. With this situation. Good. Good. Double leg to a knee pick. So he has to expose his back in order to avoid giving up takedown points. But here's the defensive training that we work on is coming through. He's defensively sound, shuts out the hook, prevents the score. Keeps his body at the right angle to prevent a power half Nelson. Staying calm. Now he's got to turn this around. It's one of the hardest things to do in grappling. How dangerous is it to put your, in this position, to put your hands on the ground? It's ordinarily, it could be dangerous because your opponent could switch to an armbar. Whoops, and there's the body lock. Now there's some controversy here, but you can clearly see it. The hands were locked, so it shouldn't really be as controversial as people are saying. Now watch for the right leg Kusarigake here. Pulls in the hips, exposes the leg, boom, and down. Beautiful Kusarigake. Also probably a lesson that complaining to a ref does not protect you from a good takedown. Yeah, that's why they're saying combat sports, defend yourself at all times. But now the great advantage of judo takedowns over wrestling leg tackles is they confer upper body connection after the takedown, which is very, very important for ADCC. That's why we put such a heavy emphasis on them. And now Giancarlo is absolutely in the driver's seat. He just scored four points for that takedown, so he's well ahead at this point against the established favorite for the entire weight division. So now Matthias Denise has to start taking some risks. He's staring down the barrel of defeat. There's not that much time left, and that's what's going to set up the pressure. Now it's tactical pressure. It's not physical pressure, it's tactical. Matthias has to turn away, and that's going to create back exposure, the most dangerous kind of exposure in ADCC. Oh, there it is. Mount to back. And Giancarlo capitalizes. Matthias is smart. He's keeping on his side so that less than 75% of his back is on the floor to deny the mount points. But that comes at a price, and that price is back exposure. So the thing we talked about with Gordon, the circumstance of fate, which is he has a lot of grueling tough matches and still chooses to do absolute. And he seems to just power through all of it. How much of the calculation is how to survive the grueling cardio aspect of all of this? That's a great question, and the truth of the matter is you can't afford to pace yourself. Because if you say, I'm going to hold myself back for this match, in expectation of the others, you could end up losing your first match. So he didn't pace himself at all for any of the matches. You have to just be in good shape, and that's what the camp is for. Some of the mental or no? No, it's mostly physical. That's what the camp is for. He's felt more pressure in the training room than he felt in any of his matches. But still sort of attacking. Look at this. That was a beautiful transition. From back, or from whatever the heck that position was, right, from looking for the back, transitioning here. What the heck is this transition? So Matthias is engaging in a very good tactic, which is to get most of his back off the ground to deny the mount points. So as back exposure starts to occur, he turns in. Threatening an arm lock. Yeah, but you can see what's happening here. As the left foot goes under, it's going to create a beautiful triangle entry. Right foot penetrates through underneath the neck. And now he's locking a triangle, a Senkaku, but not just any triangle, a triangle with the figure four locked on the back of the opponent's head, which makes any kind of stacking defense very, very difficult. It makes it very, very hard for an opponent to pull away, and creates a much tighter strangle than average. And as a result, it's a quick submission. Beautifully done. Still chasing the submission. Yes. With a minute left up on points. Against the former champion. Against the former champion. That's match number two. Now, that's the first day. That's Saturday. So John Culler goes to sleep that night, thinking, okay, I just beat a world champion in my first match and almost submitted him, and I just submitted the defending champion. So of course he wakes up on Sunday morning feeling pretty damn good. Now, there's an interesting twist here. His opponent is a talented young Irishman who won European trials, I believe, almost entirely with leg locks. And almost all of his major attacks in the tournament so far have been leg locks. Now, bear in mind that a year ago, John Culler was losing to local blue belt competitors via leg lock. So in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, how's he going to handle this? Will the leg lock training kick in? And you'll see the result. John Culler is on top, passing an open guard. So you can see... Keeping his legs away from any attacks. Yes. His opponent, Owen from Ireland, is employing the same tactics that we made famous years ago. The idea of sitting to butterfly guard and looking to entangle the legs. He's kind of playing that game. So John Culler is obviously used to this from training in the gym. So he's doing a good job of preventing entanglement, controlling his opponent's shoelaces and moving out to an angle which limits his opponent's entry options. So hands on the shoelaces and angles is a good defense here. It's an initial defense. Now, his opponent wants to get underneath the center of gravity. So John Culler wants to get outside the line of his legs. At some point, your opponent's going to entangle. If he's determined to entangle, at some point it's going to happen. So John Culler decides, okay, let's let it happen and let's see where his feet go. Let's see how disciplined he is with his feet. And the opponent is inverted. Here, he does a good job getting behind John Culler's knee. So now they're fully locked in. So John Culler moves away to protect the heel, rotates out, controls his shoelace. Now, at this point, the Irishman's starting to lose discipline with his own foot position. He's so focused on his own attack that he's starting to get a little sloppy with his own foot position. He's assuming, oh, I'm the guy who's attacking, so my opponent will be afraid of my leg locks and is starting to make some small tactical errors that John Culler will be able to take advantage of. So he's threatening the sort of the north-south passer. He's not putting too much pressure on the pass because we're still pretty early in the match and he's not ready to score yet. So here again, he turns away his heel. Now his opponent's starting to get more and more cavalier with his foot positioning to a point where now it's just downright sloppy. So John Culler sees it, identifies it, locks up a wrist-to-wrist toe hold and breaks his foot. Where's the, dumb question, where's the control here? How is he? The control comes from his opponent. The entanglement is his opponent's. His opponent is holding his own body in place with his own legs. So he's the root of his own problem here. So you got sloppy, well done, well done. And a little smile from John Culler, that's very nice. The reason for that smile, you can probably guess, is because a year ago, this would have been a disaster. And now instead, it's a guaranteed ticket to the finals and either a gold or a silver medal. And so you can see in that compressed moment, that's the look of a man who's made, who's just recognized just how much progress he's made and what was once a weakness in roughly 10 months was the time it took. And so he faces Lucas Hulk Barbosa in the final here. These two have a history. Hulk has beaten John Culler many times. And so for John Culler, it's a question of, okay, here I'm matched up against a guy who's repeatedly beaten me. How am I going to turn this around now? And in terms of, we talked earlier about confidence. If confidence was just a mental thing, John Culler never would have won this fight. When you've lost all those times to an athlete, words aren't going to change anything. But you can see right from the start, when they get into the hand fight, John Culler is much more tactically adept with his hand fighting. He's doing a good job of controlling his opponent's hands, preventing any kind of prolonged pressure on the head. And Hulk gets a sense here in which he realizes he's fighting a very different person. And this goes a long time. Again, another super grueling match. Wrestling that eventually leads to a back take here, back triangle, body triangle, I apologize. Here you can see the same tactics utilized by Gordon Ryan. Back control based around the body triangle, many attempts to try and entrap his opponent's arm and take away those defensive arms. The main difference here is, again, you have an athlete with a very powerful compact neck, so neck penetration is difficult. And so John Culler will switch to a palm-to-palm strangle instead of the conventional figure four. And now there's eight minutes left, so all the time in the world. Is it only just a matter of time at this point in situations like this? Yeah, John Culler has a massive tactical lead in points. There's literally no way he could lose this match at this point. Even if his opponent did get out of here and take him down, John Culler would still be ahead on points. So the question now is not whether John Culler will get the gold medal, but whether John Culler will get it by submission. And there it is, there's the penetration of the neck, and he can't get the figure four, so he opts for palm-to-palm instead, and there's the submission. Now... What a journey. What a... John Culler is a relatively unemotional man, but you can see there's emotion. That's not fake, that's genuine. And that's the emotions of a man who, ten months ago, couldn't have done that. And then ten months later, by dint of his own hard work and dedication, and his ability to actively attack his weaknesses and turn them into strengths, and then develop an ability to finish, that was a truly, truly remarkable achievement. Let me ask you about Gary Tonin. So he is one of the, at least in my opinion, greatest submission grapplers of all time. There's a lot of components to that. But he lost in his first match. Not only did Gary lose, he lost to the bottom seed of his division. And that, in itself, says something pretty remarkable about what's happening in ADCC, how there's a sense in which the days of the invited athletes being far superior to the trials winners are over. It was a clear signal that anyone who makes it to ADCC can beat the best people. Sam McNally is a very talented submission grappler from Ireland. He specializes mostly in armbars, but he has a good positional game as well. He has a very modern look to his jiu-jitsu. And he did a fantastic job against Gary Tonin. I think, tactically, Gary perhaps got a little far away from his true nature in grappling, which is relentless submission attack. And perhaps I should be given blame for this because I put such a heavy emphasis on the training camp overall on positional pressure. And I feel that worked very well for all of the athletes except Gary Tonin. And... Interesting. So you have to acknowledge the nature of the athlete part. Yes. And I think I was coaching so hard to the new people in the room on positional pressure that I neglected Gary's innate ability to... The fact that he does best when he attacks exclusively by submission. So I think if anyone should get blamed for the failure here, it should be me. There's another comment as maybe I'm over... Overvaluing that sort of just the physical aspect of this, but it seemed like Gary looks skinny. Is the weight cut difficult here? Yeah. This is the first time he ever went down to the 66 kilos. So it wasn't critical. There's other guys who are bigger than him who made the weight. But the weight cut, if you can just comment on, does that ever play a part in the athletes, the physical and the mental aspect of the weight cut? It is a thing in wrestling that could break even some of the toughest minds. Yeah. But no, it wasn't a weight cut that would break someone like Gary Tonin. It's more physical. You train lighter and weaker. You tend to get injured more in camp because you're lighter. We have a team now after the breakout that's mostly comprised of people over 200, 115 pounds. So there's very few small people left in the gym. Most of the smaller athletes went to B team. So Gary's been struggling a little bit with training partners. But here I think the chief problem was that Gary focused perhaps a little too much on the positional tactical game and got away from his true gift, which is relentless hunting for submissions. And as I said, I think the person to blame for that is me because I had to put so much emphasis on the positional game for the developing athletes that I didn't pay enough attention to Gary's unique attributes. So this, I mentioned I posted some stuff on Reddit. So there's a relevant question here. Somebody on Reddit asked, what's the best way to train a weight cut? And I'm going to go back to the question here. Somebody on Reddit asked, Gordon has said, and perhaps you have said as well, that there are two types of jiu-jitsu practitioners, ones who move themselves around like Marcelo Garcia and ones that control the motion of their opponents like Gordon. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach? And how do those different approaches apply depending on which weight class you're in? That's a great set of questions. Yes. I'm the person who promulgates this idea that there's two broad ways you can go in jiu-jitsu. You can either focus on promoting your own movement to create opportunity or by restricting the other person's movement. If you're a slower, less athletic opponent, then you should definitely focus on the idea of restricting the other fellow's movement. That's how slow, unathletic people win in jiu-jitsu. If you're quick with the ability to change direction, stand up quickly, go down quickly, and move like a leopard, then you're almost always better off generating movement in order to create opportunity. So one is based more on movement as the source of opportunity, one is based more upon pressure as the source of opportunity. So you'll get someone like Gary Tonin or the Rua Tolo brothers. Their game is based around the idea of promoting their own movement to create opportunity. Whereas someone like Gordon Ryan or Hodra Gracie is about restricting movement and using that pressure to create reactive opportunity. Those are the two paths you can take in jiu-jitsu. Because our team now has become mostly associated with people over 200 pounds, and because most of them were beginners, I took the more high percentage approach of, okay, let's focus primarily on controlling the other fellow's movement. But Gary's a unique individual, and I feel like I let him down by not giving him special attention in regards to what he does. The fact that you've mentioned this now like four times in the span of a few minutes, just I love that, that all of this stuff weighs so heavy on you. And he is a truly special person, it is truly interesting to see what is the nature of a particular athlete that if you highlight makes them shine. Let's go to the part where Gary actually loses the match. Okay, so the match is pretty innocuous at this point. The guy does a good job of turning into the arm, and Gary gets caught reaching from the knees. Okay, that's always a mistake. And the guy, I think, does a great job capitalizing on it. Now there's limited time left on the clock. This guy realizes, oh, this is my opportunity. He's got good flexibility, and he gets the hook. So if he just frees it right there. So there's a minute and a half left, and typically in ADCC, if you get the bag, you score three points. So this is a huge score. For Gary to win here, it's got to be by submission. Okay, so Gary's made one mistake. Now, this talented young fellow from Ireland does a great job, not only of getting the bag, but he really attacks well from the back. And let's look at the depth of Gary Toner's defensive acumen here. And we should say leading up to this, his defense is incredible. Yes. He keeps escaping every position. Our nickname for Gary is the Slippery Salmon, because it's like trying to hold a goddamn salmon on the riverbank, trying to hold on to this kid. So he gets into a position which looks absolutely hopeless here. It gets worse. This is already bad. But... It's one of the most fun things to watch about Gary is the skill in the escapes. It's incredible. It's beautiful to watch. So the guy has an excellent opportunity to transition off here into a rear triangle, which is one of the hardest things in the world to get out of. And from here, if this was anyone but Gary Toner, I think it would have been curtains. But you see, Gary just extends, keeps his arm at just the right angle to pop out and gets out. So now Gary's like, oh, crap, I'm going to lose to this fucking guy. So he's got a minute left to do something. So he goes back into his submission mode. He goes back to who Gary Toner is and immediately goes into leg lock action. Now, the young man from Ireland realizes, hey, I'm going to win this match against the number one seed. So Gary goes into the legs, gets to one of his favorite techniques, the heel hook. Now Gary has a brutal heel hook as heck and gets real pressure on the kid's leg. Oh, fuck yeah. Oh, that's hard to watch. Yeah. But to his credit, the kid is smart. He's like, you know what, let me... He just likes that. Let me take some pain. Wait, is there a weakness to that? Like, will he turn his hips? Yeah, it's unclear from the video whether Gary's arm slipped up. There's considerable breaking pressure. Oh, it slipped. I see. Yeah, it's unclear. But sometimes the heel can slip because something's popped. So it's unclear what happened there. There seems to be a reaction from the part of the opponent. It definitely did some damage. So Gary goes back for a second one. Oh, no. And again, you get that same kind of pressure. Oh, no. Oh, right. I like the Irish kid's reaction though. He's just like, you know what, let me eat this because I'm going to win this match and I'm going to be a legend for beating Gary Tonin. So I admire internal fortitude. But now Gary knows he's lost it. So there's a sense there in which you see how close it gets in these situations, how little there is between winner and loser. And sometimes you just get these heartbreaking situations where someone who ordinarily you would probably do very well against and you make one mistake and it's an unrewarding, uncompromising sport. One mistake can be fatal. In class, you talked about escapes for arm locks and it applies here as well. So you were teaching arm lock escapes and I think choke escapes. And the question came up of when should an athlete not tap and risk their arm being broken? And you quoted George Patton as of course you would, that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other bastard die for his country. So what's your view on when to tap and when not to tap in competition? First off in training, you should be tapping very early because you're not getting paid to fight in the gym. You're getting paid to fight on stage. So be a professional in the gym, tap early, tap fast. That way you'll last a lot longer. In competition, things are a little different. We also have to specify what is the situation. Okay, if you're in the first round of ADCC, your first match, you get caught, I would always expect my students to tap. Because if you get your leg broken or your arm broken in the first round, you still got three more matches before you get to the final. There is a escape clause there is if you're a guy from Ireland and you're fighting the number one seed. There is always an escape clause. Like let it snap. Yeah, let it go. Your students, yes. Yeah, I would expect them to tap. I also think that if you're in a stranglehold, it doesn't make a lot of sense and not tapping because you're gonna pass out. It's like you said in chess, it's kind of impolite to make the guy take it through to his conclusion. So I don't see any heroism and just letting yourself pass out. Now, things change when you get into a final. If you're in a final and you're ahead on points and you're willing to... Most people at that point are going to be willing to let something break in order to win a gold medal. At that point, I leave it up to the student. It's a deeply personal decision. I would never say to a student, I expect you to let your body break in order to win a gold medal. I think my students are more than mature enough to make up their own minds. I would be angry if they let their bodies break in a meaningless fashion, in some random tournament or in a first round match where there's no way you could go on to the second, third and fourth matches with a broken limb. But in a final, in a gold medal match, in ADCC, I would leave the decision to them, a spontaneous decision in the moment. I would be confident that I had prepared them to do their very best to defend themselves. But what ultimately they do is their decision. And winning ADCC is, for a grappler at least, life-changing. You're a world champion forever and no one can ever take that moment away from you. So I would understand if they took a decision to take damage. Hopefully it will never come to that because I do a good job of preparing people to get out of situations as you saw with Gary Turner. He was in a dreadful situation and got out within five seconds. Gary's been in arm locks that looked like even I was in the corner going like, oh my god, what is happening here? And still got out. So it comes down to training preparation. But if they did make that decision, I would understand, provided it was a situation that would make their lives better. And they made a calculation, it's not an emotional thing. Now sometimes you get emotional, you fight a guy you just don't like, and you just don't want to tap to him. Then things get a little more interesting. Then, again, it's a personal decision. If you hate someone so much that you literally can't even conceive of yourself submitting to them, probably best you don't get into matches with them in the first place. But if it should happen, again, it comes down to the student. I teach technique, not morals. So I let people make their own decisions on that. My thing is, look, don't get injured. Because if you're injured, you can't train. You can't train, you can't get better. So stay away from injury as much as you can. So one of the other incredible stories here is, as you mentioned, Nicholas Meragali, one of the incredible Gi athletes in Jiu-Jitsu world, not ever having done no Gi training or competition and so on in a period of a year. Actually, it's significantly less than a year. Nicholas only came about six months, I believe, before ADCC. As a phone call came from Gordon, he was just like, okay, Nicholas wants to come down and train, wants to move to Austin. So he came down. It was funny. I remember the first day Nicholas came in. Nicholas Meragali, as you can see, is this tall, handsome Brazilian guy with a great personality and a wonderful smile. Yeah, also a super nice guy. So he comes in, he sits down on the mat, and we're all kind of looking at the new guy and introducing ourselves. I look at him and I go, buddy, what the fuck are you doing here? And he's like, what do you mean? And I go, look at you, you're tall and good looking. You should be a fucking model, not a Jiu-Jitsu guy. Look at us, we're all fucked up with horrible bodies and bad personalities. You're like a happy, good looking guy. You should be surrounded by supermodels. What are you doing Jiu-Jitsu for? And he just laughed and he started training with us. So he came in. Now, historically, he has been an athlete who always pulled guard. In Jiu-Jitsu parlance, for your viewers, in Jiu-Jitsu you have the option of sitting down to the ground. Jiu-Jitsu was mostly performed on the ground. Many athletes take advantage of this. They just come out and sit to the ground position and completely forego takedowns. Nicholas did this his entire career. Jiu-Jitsu also has practiced both Gi and no Gi. Nicholas was a shining light in the Gi side of Jiu-Jitsu. He was one of the great champions of his era. But he had not only never competed without a Gi, he had never even trained without a Gi. So there's significant differences between the two. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also some very significant differences. We're talking about a sport where even small differences can make a difference between a guy who gets the gold medal versus a guy who loses his first match. It doesn't take a lot. So this was a very, very tall order. A lot of his attacks involve the Gi from guard. Absolutely. Isn't a very dangerous attack. He doesn't just wear the Gi, he really uses the Gi. Like 90% of what he's based around is based around a combination of cross and straight collar controls with the control of the sleeve cuff. And so he really actively uses the Gi. So when it came off, his first training decisions were like, oh, he looked like a fish out of water. In addition, he had no experience of leg locking. So one of the most significant parts of the modern game, he just had nothing. Plus the wrestling. He had literally zero wrestling, which is half of ADCC is based around this. So ADCC is like six months away and he has to get ready for the Gi World Championships. Nicholas had won many accolades in Gi Jiu-Jitsu, but he had never won the open weight division of Gi Worlds. So he's like, the first day he's there, he's like, John, I want to be the first guy to win Gi open weight and ADCC open weight in the same year. Yeah. I'm like, yeah. Now in my mind, I'm thinking like, yeah, that's never going to fucking happen, you fucking weirdo. Do you think there was a degree to which he actually believed that? A degree. He thought it was like a certainty. So he's looking at me like, yeah, I'm going to do this. So I'm like, well, Nicholas, this is very laudable and I approve of your confidence, but this is a difficult goal you've set yourself. But perhaps maybe like 2024 would be a more realistic. He's like, no, no, I'm going to do it. In all seriousness, it is incredible that Nicholas Meragali had the guts to set such a nearly impossible goal. So what do you learn from this experience of setting a goal that most people would say is just unachievable and him actually almost doing it? It's on the surface, just absolutely crazy. When he mentioned the goal to me, I was, as I said, just looking at him and almost like disbelief. I didn't want to show it on my face. And yet he came within inches of actually doing it. He won his first ever gold in the open weight with a Gi and got to the finals and lost a tight decision in the finals to take a silver medal. He wanted two golds, he got a gold and a silver. And there's a sense in which the sheer audaciousness of the goal set seemed ludicrous when it first happened. It's like, this is insanity. And yet he came at it with a plan. He came at it with his characteristic passion and hard work and came within inches of doing so. And there's a sense in which you could look at it as, oh, he had a plan and it failed. And yet, of course, no one in their right mind would look at it that way. He set an audacious goal so high that it seemed impossible. And it pulled his entire performance up to a level where even failure creates something truly memorable. Do you encourage athletes or do you not get in their way when they set such a goal? Maybe even just, forget athletes, human nature. Yeah, that's a great question. There's a sense in which you don't want to make people delusional that that's set. But I do believe that if people are sufficiently embedded in a given project, if they're committed to it to a certain degree, then you can skimp on many things in life, but don't skimp on your goals. Because the bigger your goals, the bigger your achievements will be. And even failure, as we saw in the case of Nicholas Miragalli, I almost frowned to use the word failure because if this is failure, give me more of it. Falling slightly short of perfection. Falling short of what would otherwise be a perfect year. Even that still creates such a massive uptick in your performance that it's absolutely the right way to go. But there is a danger to this where people aren't committed and simply aren't working from a framework where they can realistically achieve these things. Then it descends into delusion and that direction goes towards madness. You can't have that. So there has to be some kind of reality check here where you have to be physically and mentally capable to some degree of moving towards these goals. A random blue belt can't make audacious goals like that. It's just ludicrous. But with that in mind, if you're committed and there's a sense in which this is a definite possibility, set your goals high. Make big demands. Yes, there'll be times of frustration. There'll be more failure in your lives than otherwise. But even your failures will be something great, something memorable. See, but in the near term, you would be hard pressed to find any data that justifies that goal. Because in his case, he probably wasn't very good at Nogi even in the training room. So it's like, where do you look for even inklings of hope? We saw an incremental progress with each successive competition that he was in. His first competition, he looked good, but not great. Second competition, a little better. Third competition, took on one of the legends of American grappling and won decisively. So there was a sense in which it was becoming more realistic with each outing. So now putting that inspiring philosophy aside, what was the actual plan on how to make it happen? So the leg locks. First, same thing with Giancarlo. First, you got to learn how to defend a leg lock. So initially, just as Giancarlo struggled, he struggled. Then he had to learn not just takedowns, but just how to set up a takedown. He had to learn basics like stance and motion and how to fight with the hands, etc. So he had to learn from the ground up. Then he had to improve. He always had a very good triangle, always had a very good armbar. Those were his two strengths coming into the Nogi training. Those translate pretty well between Gi and Nogi. But he had no guillotine. His great collar strangles from the back, but he really, really struggled with finishing people from the back. So he's learning all this. Then he's like, well, now I've got to get ready for the Gi. So we had to switch his training to Gi training. That took out a couple of months. Then he went back briefly to Brazil and got a terrible rib injury right before the World Championships and came back more or less unable to move. So the World Championships is a week away and he's like, John, I can't move. So I'm like, what are you going to do? He said, I'm going to compete. So I'm like, are you sure? So we fly to California. He goes out and competes. His first opponent is literally the biggest man who competes in Jiu-Jitsu. This man is almost like 400 pounds. Nicholas has got completely broken ribs. We're taping up his ribs backstage before he goes out to compete. He beats everyone by submission and wins for the first time the open weight, a title he had never won before. He steps off the mat, looks at me, he goes, well, I got the first of them. He won it. Gi, open weight and now ADCC. And now he can barely move. He's gone through two days of brutal competition and his ribs are completely screwed up. It takes a week off to try and get his ribs somewhere back in order and then begins light training, building up to ADCC. We start putting him in no-gi competition. He fights two opponents of good quality, but not like world-beating quality. And then as his game starts improving, we're getting closer and closer, he's starting to develop a sense where he can wrestle confidently on his feet. He's no longer easy to leg lock at all and is starting to leg lock people. And he's starting to get his very strong guard passing, which was based mostly around pant grips and the gi, to adapt to leg no-gi grips. In addition, he's starting to develop strong chest-to-chest positioning, which was never really part of his game, a pressure top game. And so things are looking good. He's matched against Rafael Lovato, one of the great competitors of ADCC, and wins a convincing victory featuring a lot of takedowns and a lot of pressure passing. And people were just absolutely shocked. I remember the staff of Flow Grappling coming and going like, who is this guy? He's literally transformed. He's a different person. So he goes into the world championships. In his weight division, he was matched with a fellow Brazilian in the first match, and they had an absolute barn-burning battle where at one point, Nicholas was picked up and slammed and then ended up winning by Kimura, beautiful Kimura. Then he took on the man who ultimately wins ADCC open weight division and defeats him. And again, grueling matches. Yeah, tough, tough match. Now, Yuri Samoi at that stage was a two-time gold medalist in ADCC. Nicholas wins a very, very close match against him and then fights Craig Jones, who's one of the best leg lockers in the world. So I think most people were expecting Nicholas to get leg locked very easily by Craig. Nicholas showed the degree to which he had improved his leg lock defense in a six-month period. Craig never really got close to the legs and ended up becoming a takedown battle. It could have gone either way. Craig, I thought, did a really good job of pacing himself. Both athletes were very tired, but Nicholas was ahead on points and then Craig hit one last takedown, which set Nicholas down to a hip. Didn't score, but it was the most aggressive takedown of that last period. And so Nicholas got the nod and won a narrow victory. Yeah. Craig commented afterwards, he said that, I really wanted the submission. And he said, Nicholas seemed to have really wanted the submission, but it ended up being a grueling match. He took everything, like exhaustion-wise, everything he had. It was a tough, tough match. And they were very well matched. Once they figured out they couldn't submit each other, it came down to their wrestling ability. Neither one of them is a wrestling specialist, but they're both competent in wrestling. And it became physically very, very tough. Then Nicholas went on to win the bronze medal in his weight division. So the next day, when we get called for the open weight, obviously Giancarlo had won a gold medal. Everyone agreed that he should go into open weight. Did Giancarlo agree? Of course. Of course. He was- I mean, like, because he didn't have an easy format. You don't order people until you ask them. No, no. But he was delighted. I guess the question I'm asking is, how do you find the strength to then go on to absolutely after, because you've done a 14-week training camp where every day was just as intense as any ADCC day. So you're used to it at that point. But he had very, very long, tough matches. But he's used to it. He's a good athlete. So Nicholas and Giancarlo went out, and Giancarlo had a spectacular submission victory against his first opponent. Nicholas had some firework matches, and one of the toughest opponents he came up against was the brilliant Tai Ruatolo. They had an absolute barn burner. It was a very, very close match. And Tai had an incredible first two matches. He'd beaten Pedro Mourinho by submission, and he'd beaten the great Felipe Pena in a very narrow match. Very, very tight. Felipe lost on a guard pull. But Felipe is considerably bigger and stronger than Tai. So for Tai to win that match, even by a guard pull, was deeply impressive. It was an action-packed match that went back and forth. Very, very impressive. Can I ask you a small tangent? Yeah. Both the Ruatolo brothers had an incredible performance. What do you think makes them so good? If you were to analyze their game, sort of outside of just this specific match. Yeah, absolutely. There's a range of factors. One is that they started the sport very, very young. They're probably the first example in American grappling of American students who started at age four or five. Most people, when I began jiu-jitsu, started jiu-jitsu as adults. I was 28 years old when I had my first lesson as a white belt. So in time, people got a little younger. For example, Nicky Ryan started when I think when he was 12. But the Ruatolo started when they were literally children. They had excellent coaching going all the way up through into their teenage years. So they had the advantage of starting the way so many successful athletes do as children and going up through adulthood with strong coaching all along the way. Excellent parental support. So they had a great history where their youth didn't show off just how long they'd been in the sport. So you're dealing with a kid who's 19 years old, but he's been grappling for 15 years. And what counts is not your age, but your mat age. Quality mat age. Now, they were very young in years, but they were very old in mat age. But there's a lot of athletes that have now, as you correctly said, have spent from a very early age on the mat, but still these particular ones stand out. It's interesting. Yeah. No, there's a lot more to it than that. This is just the first setting the scene. But what really makes them stand out is that they've mastered this idea of covering up and improving proving initial weaknesses while building upon strengths. When the Rua Tola's first encountered my students, they were relatively easy to leg lock because none of their training experience had prepared them for that. Now, they were young at that time, I believe like 16 or 17. And it was an obvious problem for them. They both got heel hooked by my youngsters also, Nicky Ryan and Ethan Cralenston. And you could clearly see that they identified their current weakness and made prodigious steps to improve upon it to a point now where they're winning championships with their own leg locks. I love the fact that even as teenagers, they had the maturity to say, okay, here's an obvious weakness. Let's get around this. Let's turn it into a strength. I love the way they did that. And- Focusing on the weakness and let that guide you to the thing you're working on. But they also, they covered up their weaknesses, but they also understood what are our actual strengths. Now, physically, both of the brothers have extraordinary reach for their height. They both have extraordinarily long arms for their height. That means that variations of Karakatame, in particular, Dazas, Anacondas, are going to be much easier for them and their weight division than for most people. These are all chokes. Yes. Strangleholds. So they specialize in those. They adapted a game based around movement which forces opponents, not with physical pressure, but with tactical pressure into positions which expose them to those specialized strangleholds that they use. Traditionally, when we looked at the Rutaolos when they were young, we saw that there was a disparity between their top game and their bottom game. They were generally much better in top position than they were in bottom position. Again, they saw that as a potential weakness and they turned it around using, again, their unique long limbs relative to their height. And they make use of a buggy strangle. I'm not sure why it's referred to as a buggy strangle, but basically it's a variation of Karakatame using the legs done from disadvantageous positions on bottom. And they both make brilliant use of that, not so much as a strangle weapon. Occasionally, they'll strangle someone with it, but they mostly use it to create pressure to make people back off. Mm-hmm. And as a result, they overcame the disparity between their top game and their bottom game. Now, their bottom game is part of their offense and they're very, very successful from there. And so, again, you had that really impressive sense in which they identified their weaknesses in leg locks and bottom position, turned it around and made it into strengths. And at the same time, they identified, okay, what are our physical gifts and how can we maximize their use? And they created a program of initiating movement that created tactical rather than physical pressure to set up their best strangle holds. I deeply admire what they've done. Those two young men have a huge future ahead of them. And so here, one of the brothers faces in the absolute, Nicholas Murghali. Now, bear in mind, Tai has just fought two very tough matches against guys bigger and stronger than himself. So he's coming into a third match against a third guy who's also bigger than he is. So hats off to Tai fighting open weight against three monsters in a row. Now, Tai and Cade, one of their best attributes is they're two of the best scramblers in the sport of Jiu-Jitsu. So whenever you go to shoot on the legs with them, there's a danger of running straight into a Dar strangle hold. They're very competent at counterattacking single legs with Dar strangles. It's also very hard to control them after a takedown. They do a very good job of springing back up to the feet. So I told Nicholas to favor upper body Judo-based takedowns rather than wrestling takedowns. And you see here a fine example of Nicholas's gathering skill in Uchimata, one of the great throws of Judo. Set up with a... there's a bit of a foot sweep. Like a... Good. The nice thing is he starts off with what looks like it's actually a two-directional Uchimata. He threatens Uchigari to the back. That's a throw that throws your opponent to the back. His opponent pushes into him, then he changes direction with a support foot and takes him over with Uchimata. As we said earlier, the great advantage of Judo over wrestling is that because this upper body connection during the throw and after the throw, it's much harder for an opponent to scramble away from you. And even Tai Ryutaro is one of the best scramblers in the sport. He has to stop scrambling here and just go back to guard position and enable Nicholas to hold top position. I mean, some of it is also the surprise. There is something less understandable about Judo techniques because there's less data, it feels like. The Ryutaro's also have a good Uchimata. I think they're very familiar with it. But how often do you think are they on the receiving end of an Uchimata? That's a good point. I just feel like they have more data in terms of defending. I mean, of course, there is fundamentals to the Uchimata that make it difficult to scramble around. This is a good example of someone who literally didn't have a single takedown six months ago. Now he's throwing one of the toughest guys in the sport with one of the more difficult throws of Judo. Now you're a Judo man, you'll back me up on this. Uchimata is not an easy throw to learn. It takes some time. You're hopping on one foot with both of your body weight supported on one foot. It's very counterintuitive. It's one of the more difficult throws. Let go of your understanding of takedowns, of maybe wrestling style takedowns, or more intuitive kind of takedowns to understand it. There's many throws like this. Uchigari is like this. Sotogari is like this. Uchimata is like this. It's weird. What? I'm on one foot, I'm hopping around? This makes no sense. But it works. Foot sweeps are also weird in that way. They're a little bit more intuitive, but to get very good at foot sweeps, you have to understand timing, weight distribution. It's a dynamic thing that's weird. I always laugh when I talk to Nicholas. I try to teach him a single leg, which is traditionally most... A high single leg is one of the easier takedowns to perform in terms of mechanical difficulty. Nicholas always struggles with it. Then I teach him one of the more difficult takedowns, Uchimata, and he does it flawlessly. You never know. Certain things get attached. You see this in judo. It's kind of interesting to see there's classes of takedowns, and certain people just gravitate in their philosophical, intuitive understanding of body mechanics or something like this. It's like Seinagi versus Uchimata. You very clearly see there's some people that understand. They like to have both their feet planted on the ground. There's some people that are okay with this one foot on the ground and the other one is doing something else. I don't know what that... What is that? I don't know. It's what makes you fall in love with one field versus another. Can you speak to that? You've released a new instructional on takedowns and standing skills for jiu-jitsu, just at a high level. Using Nicholas as an example, what are some key ideas about takedowns? Okay, first, whenever people talk about standing position in jiu-jitsu, they always say, I need to learn some takedowns. But it's never a question of just learning the takedowns. It's learning the prerequisites to the takedowns. The takedowns are more or less like an afterthought. You've got to begin with stance, motion, the ability to engage in grip and contact, get your opponent out of balance, and then comes the takedowns. The takedowns in jiu-jitsu are mostly divided into lower body takedowns, tackles to the legs, single legs, double legs, to a lesser degree, high crotch in jiu-jitsu, and then upper body takedowns, which are mostly judo-derived. Nicholas had to start more or less at the ground. He didn't even know how to come out and make grips or hold a stance. So he had to learn every element of it. And the fact he was able to do so in six months is just incredible. Can you comment on the upward posture that seems to work for jiu-jitsu? The matches in jiu-jitsu are much longer than the matches in wrestling. In addition, there are many kinds of submission threat which are not there in wrestling. So the stance has to be significantly changed. In wrestling, they favor generally a very low crouch because the vast majority of attacks are tackles to the legs. So anyone who stands upright in wrestling tends to get heavily punished by being taken down immediately with a leg tackle. In jiu-jitsu, the matches are so much longer, it would be difficult in a 40-minute match, for example, to maintain a bent over crouch. You'd be exhausted. There's also problems associated with submission holds. There are many forms of submission hold, guillotines, dasas, etc. where if your head comes down too low, you become a little vulnerable to this. And so the stances in jiu-jitsu competition tend to be much more upright, more like judo and greco. So right off the bat, you see the stances there. And there's a lot of variation in the motion. The motion tends to be much slower and more evenly paced because you've got to be able to do this for long periods of time. So the number of fakes per minute, the number of shots attempted per minute is usually much lower. So these are obvious differences. The biggest difference, however, has nothing to do with that. It has to do with tactics. In jiu-jitsu, the scores will be judged by what happens after the takedown. In the case of ADCC, you can take someone down in ways that would score in both wrestling and judo, and possibly even win the match in the case of judo, and it would score zero in ADCC because of the nature of the rules. The whole idea of ADCC scoring is to demonstrate control after the takedown. It's what happens in the critical three seconds after the takedown that creates the score. In judo and in wrestling, the emphasis is placed on the takedown itself. In jiu-jitsu, the emphasis is placed on the aftermath of the takedown. That's where the score is allocated. And that can be a period of up to three seconds. Now, three seconds doesn't sound like much, but in a scramble after a takedown, three seconds is a fucking eternity. It goes on forever. And so you will see many examples of takedowns that, as I said, would score very well in judo and wrestling, but don't score at all in ADCC. And so the whole skill becomes packaging the standing position in terms of the takedowns themselves, but in particular, preparing the athletes for that critical three seconds after the takedown. That's why many people who are very fine wrestlers struggle in ADCC. They take people down by wrestling metric all the time, but don't score under ADCC rules. What makes GSB so good at takedowns? I've gotten a chance to even recently watch them do takedowns. Is it within this framework that you're teaching, what stands out to you about him that you draw lessons from? Yeah, that's another example of someone who's performing takedowns in a rule set radically different from wrestling. Just as the ADCC rule set is so different from conventional wrestling rule sets that the whole manner in which you approach takedowns and even your understanding of takedowns has to be quite strongly modified. So to an MMA, it's even more extreme. People always think, oh, this guy's a good wrestler. He should be able to get takedowns in MMA easily. What you find is that the wrestling skills in MMA enable you to finish takedowns. If you get in on your opponent and get to the legs or the waist or what have you, your wrestling skill will enable you to finish the takedown. But getting to the takedown is massively different in the context of MMA than it is in wrestling. The entire stance is different. The entire set of distancing is different. There's the idea of positioning within a cage, like how close you are to the perimeter of the cage changes radically how you approach the takedown. The setups are literally night and day different. The setups are almost entirely composed of striking setups rather than grappling setups. And so the act of getting to the takedown is like a completely different sport. Now, George studied wrestling and used to go to wrestling practice twice a week. In Canada, they do freestyle wrestling. They don't use the American College style of wrestling. Now, George's main emphasis in wrestling training was takedowns. Obviously, the whole ground element of freestyle wrestling was of no interest to him. Learning how to put people's back on the ground and turn them with leg laces and gut wrenches was of no value in MMA. So he devoted almost all of his study to just the act of taking someone down. So, in pure wrestling, George is not bad. I think he'd be a very competitive match even for a highly ranked American freestyle wrestler. Obviously, he would lose easily on the ground because he's not used to the part here. He'd probably be leg laced or gut wrenched quite easily by a skilled opponent. But in just a pure takedown battle, he'd be a competitive training partner for even a good wrestler. But in actual MMA competition, he could take down even the most highly credentialed wrestlers and in some cases, make it look almost effortless. And that came from his unification of striking skill with wrestling. So he used wrestling skills to finish the takedown and his karate and boxing, kickboxing pedigree to enter into the takedown. Now, when he initiated the study of this, this is at a time when MMA was pretty much in its infancy. And he was one of the most impressive people I've ever seen in this regard. He was a true innovator. He innovated this specialized area of striking to a takedown to a greater degree than anyone else I'm aware of. Well, let me ask you about this innovation because you're one of the most innovative people in martial arts. There's several major categories of innovation that you have led, obviously, leg locks, body lock, now wrestling. What's your process of innovation? So seeing the problems in a particular system, the gaps, how do you identify them? And how do you figure out systems of how to fill those gaps? First thing I look for is what are the current weaknesses in a given combat sport? So in the case of jiu-jitsu, it was very obvious that historically, jiu-jitsu had always been weak in leg locking. Jiu-jitsu had always been weak in standing position overall. And these were things that needed to be sorted out immediately. In its infancy, mixed martial arts was divided between grapplers and strikers. And most of the emphasis in early mixed martial arts was on the idea of specialists in a given domain forcing the fight into their domain. And that my early work with Georges St-Pierre convinced me that the right approach wasn't increased specialization and learning to force your athlete into that area of specialization at the expense of the opponent, but rather the real battles of the future would be won and lost, not with techniques per se, specialized techniques, but rather the integration of techniques and the overlap between the various grappling and striking skills. So that someone who was an inferior grappler would have just enough grappling skills to be able to hold a grappler off and then defeat them with striking. And a striker who was, if you went to fight someone who's superior to you in striking, you would have just enough striking skill to be able to hold them at bay and then enter into grappling. This went further and further until it got clear that there were whole areas of the sport that you needed to change your entire mindset about them. So that people went into early MMA thinking in terms of grappler and striker. What I started to think is in terms of, okay, there are four fundamental skill areas of mixed martial arts. There is shoot boxing, which is the integration of takedowns and striking. There is clinch boxing, which is the integration of upper body clinch skills combined with striking. There is fence boxing, which the two athletes are locked up with each other on the fence and they have to integrate takedown, takedown defense and striking skills. And there is grapple boxing, which is the merging of ground grappling with striking. And when you broke MMA down into those four categories, you saw that each one of those four domains transcends the specialized martial arts that form their components. So for example, in clinch boxing, you would incorporate things from judo, Greco-Roman, freestyle, jiu-jitsu submissions, Muay Thai, clinching techniques. But even if you took all five of those, the rule set that you're operating in required such extensive modification that the final product of clinch boxing transcended all five of its component martial arts and became its own autonomous skill. It needed to be worked autonomously. And when we broke George's training down into those four areas, that's when real progress started to be made. That's when you started to see the integration of those four phases and the striking and grappling within each of them was where victory was being won and lost. So once you reframe how you see a particular combat sport, then you can start doing these detailed development of ideas that actually, like, they fit. There's a sense in which it had to start with a paradigm shift and then a research program began after that. You don't start with research, you started with a paradigm shift and then went to research. Well, let me ask you, I got a chance to hang out with you and Henzo Gracie at ADCC. He keeps messaging me saying he's going to call me and not calling me. I think aside from being hilarious, charismatic and handsome, he is also, and wise for his young age, he's also one of the greatest coaches and athletes of all time in martial arts. So let me ask, what have you learned about life from Henzo Gracie? The degree of difficulty that Henzo must have encountered, he never talked to us about it, but I figured this out as the years went by. The degree of difficulty that he must have experienced when he first came to Manhattan and started teaching, it must have just been incredible. You've got to remember, Henzo came from Brazil, training with the best people in the world at that time, Hickson, all the machados, all of them were located around Gracie Baja and that Rio de Janeiro set. They all knew each other and they all trained together. They had internal problems, of course, but they all knew each other well and knew each other's games. So all of them had beautiful and highly developed jiu-jitsu. So all Henzo knew from childhood on was perfect, beautiful jiu-jitsu and communicating with other people who also knew perfect, beautiful jiu-jitsu. Then he comes to New York where he has to teach in a language that he at that stage barely spoke to a bunch of fucking morons who didn't even, on my first day in jiu-jitsu, they had to explain to me the difference between the mount and the guard because as far as I was concerned, yeah, you're on top, it's the same thing. And they're like, no, no, no, mounted is different from guard. And I'm like, no, it's not. You're on top of the guy. You just hit him. So he has to argue with you about this. Yeah. And imagine going from training with Hicks and Gracie to having to tell some moron that guard is different from mount. And we were so primitive back then. He went from the best training culture in the world to literally the worst. Just a bunch of guys in their mid-20s who knew nothing about the ground. Just completely wiped out. Well, luckily he's known for his patience. But out of that, he molded one of the greatest gyms ever in New York. Yes. He did a fantastic job. And most of it was based around the idea that he gave us complete freedom. We came in, we trained all day, and I started teaching beginners classes. And then some of his senior students, Ricardo Almeida, Rodrigo Gracie, and Matt Serra, opened their own schools around the tri-state area. So they left. There was a vacuum of teachers, and he asked me to start teaching. I taught for many, many years there. And he always gave us complete freedom. His only thing was to say, okay, do whatever you want, just make sure it's effective. Prove to me it's effective. And that's the best research program you can ever have. Show me proof. So many times, especially in those days in Jiu-Jitsu, there were so many things that were just off limits. You couldn't study Legos. You couldn't do this. You couldn't do that. This kind of game was for cowards. This is the only kind of game we accept. And Hinzo was never like that. He was just like, okay, just do what you want. Prove to me it works. And if you give people that simple structure, you give them some time, some ingenuity, a lot of things can happen. I gotta ask you, and by the way, he'll come on this podcast, and I do feel like it's a little bit like riding a dragon or a bull of some kind. It'll be a fun journey. I can't, at least from my perspective, having interacted with him, having met him, it's hard not to smile. He's easily one of the most charismatic people in Jiu-Jitsu. It's kind of fun to watch that humans can be like this too. It's just the love that radiates from him is incredible. I gotta ask you, this is from Reddit. There's a few legends that come from that gym, but people on Reddit kept asking about some guy named Boris. Apparently you coached him at Hinzo's and he was a legend. And he was terrifyingly good. What made him a legend? Who is this Boris character? Boris is one of my early students. I think he was either my first or second black belt. Boris came from Long Island. He was a wrestler. He was of Russian Jewish descent and highly intelligent. Now he was short of stature, but very powerfully built and compact. He was a very nice, polite young man, but also slightly eccentric, which I always liked about him. He would always come dressed with glasses on and he would leave the gym dressed like, to use the American phrase, a complete nerd with his pocket protector. And now he was heavily muscled, but he would dress in such a way that it didn't appear so when he left. And we always used to laugh. Like, you imagine some guy tried to mug Boris. They would see him with his nerdy glasses on and his pocket protector, and they would literally run into one of the most formidable human beings in the entire New York area. Boris started training Jiu-Jitsu, I believe in Long Island. And then when he got a tech job in Manhattan, started training with us in a morning class. Now, these were relatively early days in Manhattan and my teaching career. And he and a group of others, a very small group, used to train early in the morning around 6am before work. And Boris was a legend in those days. Now a very young George Saint-Pierre came to train with us at that time and he would come in at 6am to do his morning class. And he was one of the main training partners for Boris. And Boris being a wrestler, he used to generally prefer top position. And I would always encourage George to play bottom position. I'd say, you've got to get good in bottom position. You never know. I know you're good at takedowns, but one day someone's going to put you down. So you've got to work bottom position. And Boris had a very strong guard passing. I remember one of George's happiest days is finally after like two years, one day he swept Boris, got on top and finished him. And I remember that was one of his biggest thrills in all of his training career. That was the last time that ever happened. No, Boris was a very formal man for that time. The funny thing about Boris is every time we would have a conversation, he would say, I'm only going to do this sport until I'm 40 years old. And then I'm going to stop. And I was like, why? Why not be like a lifelong martial artist? You got so good. You're good at Jiu-Jitsu. You've got great skills. You've worked hard. Why not just keep going? He's like, it's ridiculous for a man to train after 40. There's no need. He never gave any reason for this. It was just ridiculous. So one day, now this is a guy who came in literally every day, 6am, every day. One day he comes in, he comes up to me at the end of training, he goes, Hey, John, I just turned 40. So I won't be seeing you again. And I thought, he's joking. So I'm like, I'll see you tomorrow, Boris. He's like, no, you won't. And walks off. How gangster is that? And then he never came back. I've never seen Boris since. He came in, was one of the best grapplers I ever saw. And that's it, buddy, I'm out. And to this day. No one to walk away. Yeah. I also got to hang out, got to meet, hang out with Ali Abdelaziz. He's a Hanzo Gracie Black Belt, fourth degree Judo Black Belt, and friend and manager of Khabib Nurmagomedov, who's coming down to Austin soon. We'll do a podcast. Hopefully you'll get on the mat and have a bit of brainstorm. Also, he's a manager and friend of many other amazing fighters. I really love the guy. The loyalty, the fact that he looks for loyalty and has that inner, close inner circle and integrity and character in people. I really like them. I connect there really quickly. But any fun stories about Ali? Did you train together? Yes, he trained for many years in the basement of my classes. His story is one of the most unlikely stories. Like if someone wrote a movie plot about his life, it'd be like, it's absurd. It'd be thrown out the door in a second. And yet it all happened. You're absolutely correct. He has, from the unlikeliest possible starts, created a situation where he's, I think it's incontestable now to say he's the most successful manager in mixed martial arts history. He has more champions under his care than anyone else I'm aware of. And respected and influential, so on all dimensions, yes. Now many people aren't aware of the fact that he was actually a very good judo player. He had- Judoka first, yeah. Yes, yeah. He had very good nogi judo. He had an excellent haraigoshi, very good taniyotoshi. And he, through many people who were highly credentialed wrestlers back in the basement, back in the glory days of MMA training, he was a good example of a guy who had very, very good judo hips and often used it to counter wrestling. And was a fine demonstrator of the idea that when judo is adapted to nogi gripping, it can provide a very effective foil to many of the standard forms of wrestling attack. And he would often use uchimata to counter leg tackles and do so in very, very spectacular fashion. Well, what do you think about Khabib? Is there something from just watching him, or is there something you can imagine if he comes down to the gym that you might learn from the way he moves, the way he approaches wrestling? Oh, absolutely. He's one of the greatest combat athletes of all time. If you can't learn from someone like that, there's something wrong with you. So he emphasizes control. Mm-hmm. Yes, he does. And he's absolutely a master of exerting control. The amount of grappling control he was able to put over some of the most difficult people in the world to control was truly astounding. He beat people from every style. He beat wrestlers, he beat jiu-jitsu players, he beat kickboxers, and he controlled them all in more or less the same way. He has a very underrated bottom game. People think, oh, he's just about stifling top control. But people forget he was taken down on several occasions and ended up in bottom position. And he showed excellent guard work from bottom. He was able to get into submission holds readily on opponents from bottom position. He's got an excellent bottom game. People say, oh, he's just a positional guy. No, he's not. He's got great submissions. The application of his triangle from both top and bottom was top class. He had a sharp arm lock from bottom position. Excellent kimura. If you look at his kimura finishes in MMA, they were technically very, very well set. Excellent breaking mechanics. He's a very, very fine grappler in both submission grappling and MMA grappling. I think we'd probably learn a ton from moving around with him. Is it possible to learn something about him or about Hodger Gracie or about Gordon by watching them or rolling around them for a little bit? So maybe Hodger and Khabib are good examples because they're able to do seemingly very basic things on everybody and dominate them with that. I think Gordon is as well, but Gordon seems to have more preference and range of what he's able to do. It's almost miraculous how much Hodger can do by just the same exact thing on everybody. Is it possible to understand why Hodger or Khabib are so good at very basic positions? Or do you have to feel it or is it just something that's developed over years and years? I think for most people, for the vast majority of people, it would have to be explained to them. For a smaller group of people, if they felt it, they could try to replicate it. There are a few people who could look at it and have enough knowledge and say, okay, I can see what he's doing. For example, Hodger could probably look at video footage of Khabib grappling and say, okay, I understand what he's doing. But the average person would probably go over their heads. You sometimes think of these great athletes like maybe they're too narrow. You might imagine they're kind of so focused on a particular thing, they don't develop in interesting ways. He's just a sweetheart. He's a wonderful person to be around. Yeah, he's also visiting Austin. But just I was so, I mean, first of all, I'm honored just drinking a little bit too much in Vegas with Hodger Gracie and talking about love and relationships and life and death and all those philosophical topics as one does in Vegas. I'm a little bit too much to drink. Anyway, after ADCC, it was beautiful. And on top of that, hanging out with Rogan many days for UFC and ADCC. One thing, I don't know if you've gotten a chance to hang out with Joe when he plays pool. So I spent a lot of time with him when he was playing pool, like recently on that trip to Vegas. And there's something zen-like about, first of all, just watching him. But I've never seen the focus the guy's got on the game for hours. Just deep focus, unshakable focus. That was so interesting to watch that this human being, he's a celebrity, he does all kinds of stuff that he's able to allocate as close to 100% of his mind as I can imagine to a particular task and nothing can distract him. That was really inspiring that you could still do that on any task. Pool is a game of physics. That should be your domain. Oh, it is. But that wasn't just physics. Yeah, I would think you understand the game, you understand the physics of it. You also understand the fun of it because there's friends and laughter and so on. I would be distracted by that a little bit. I wouldn't be as focused. Like not Joe. He literally, the closer you get to the table, the more everything zooms in. The jokes, there's funny things, you can't get his attention on anything. It's that focus. I don't know, that really stayed with me. You know those memes like, I want to find somebody that looks at me the way X looks at Y. I want to find somebody that looks at me the way Joe looks at a pool cue or whatever. The focus there. I want to find something in my life. Rather, I want to attain the level of focus he has for pool on a task that I care about. And that focus like, fuck everything else. Now it's time to do work. I don't know, that was really inspiring. I haven't seen that kind of focus for prolonged periods of time on a task. You should see it sometime. The guy is, I mean, part of it is just being competitive with himself. It's the hatred of imperfection, all those kinds of elements, but embodied in a singular focus. I had no idea he even played pool. It's interesting. You should watch him. He won't, I think it could be one of his greatest obsessions. Like there was deep, see, I thought pool is for like degenerates, like gamblers and like hustlers, right? Like the same way I see poker. But like I saw like a wolf slash like elite athlete in Joe. I said, I didn't know this. I don't know much about pool. I didn't know that you could have that level of focus while still drunk at your ass, but extremely focused. It was beautiful to see. I don't know, inspiring, inspiring for me as a person who highly values singular focus on a task. Let me ask you from a perspective of a hobbyist, what major practical changes can a hobbyist who works regular nine to five job do to improve their jiu-jitsu? So they're in a gym, there's a lot of excellent gyms throughout the United States. What can they do to improve their jiu-jitsu? About the way they think about jiu-jitsu, about the way they approach their actual schedule, those kinds of things. That's a great question. Okay. The less training time you've got, the more you want to maximize its effect. So a question becomes, okay, if I'm training, say twice a week, and sometimes even once a week, what can I do to make sure that that two hour period is used maximally? The less training time you've got, the more the onus is on you to have a plan before you walk in the door. If you go in just saying, I'm going to roll around and see what happens, or I'll just follow what the instructor says, you'll get a certain amount out of each class, but it will never be what it could have been. Go in with a plan and enact it. Many people go in with a plan and don't follow it. Let's say, for example, we start with a program that goes like this. First, try to create the most honest assessment of yourself as a jiu-jitsu player. It's tough to make an honest assessment of yourself because you never actually get to see your game. So what I would recommend is to start by videotaping yourself in sparring with your peers. That's fascinating because we don't even have that level of introspection, ability to reflect of what we actually look like in grab and go. Yeah. Start with an assessment of yourself and the most honest one comes not from you, comes from the camera. Have a look at what you see and start to say, okay, many of the weaknesses in your game are made much more apparent by looking from the outside in, rather than feeling them during the heat of a match. Identify four or five of the biggest weaknesses that you see and start actively attacking those weaknesses. Ask yourself, let's say, for example, in the course of watching the videotape of yourself, you observe yourself losing three triangles. You attempted three triangle strangleholds, you failed all three. You could start by saying, okay, let me ask myself, who are the people I look up to the most with regards a triangle strangle? Who are the guys who have the best triangle strangles out there? Then ask yourselves, of those people, who are the ones whose body type and personality most closely mirrors my own? That would be a good example of taking a problem in your game, contrasting it with elite level performance in people whose body type roughly matches your own, and then try to take lessons you learn by observing the best people and bringing them into your own game in one specific area. As time goes by, you do this with more and more elements of your game, you will undoubtedly improve. You will also have to make sure that you take time during class to actively work on these things. Now, sometimes in class you don't get a choice. The instructor sometimes says, okay, today we're working this, this, and this. But there's always time after and before class where you can do your own drilling, where you can make your own inquiries. During sparring, there's no rigorous control over what you do. You can try to work the game into the area of focus. So, for example, if you want to work on front triangles, it would be wise for you to do most of your sparring from bottom guard positions. That'll give you the most opportunity. In this sense, it always begins with an accurate assessment of your current skill level. You've got to start there. Then, I always encourage people to use video camera to make the most honest appraisal you can because your own mind is not dishonest, but it's understandably inaccurate. You tend to feel things rather than see them when you're performing jiu-jitsu. Then make a program for yourself based around what you see as excellence. Look at the people in the sport who's in the area you want to work on, people who are renowned for skill in that area. If possible, narrow it down to people who have excellence in that area and their body type corresponds with your own. Then try to take lessons learned from observing the excellence in these elite athletes and bring elements of them into your game. Never try to bring an elite athlete's entire game to your game. That will create an inauthentic game on your part, which will always be a poor copy of what you're trying to watch. Rather, bring very specific areas and skills that you see and import them from different people until eventually you find something for yourself. Experiment a lot. Okay, everyone's different. Don't see the video research as the final word. See video research the way a writer will see a muse, as someone who initiates discussion, opens inquiries for your own research. The most powerful moments you will have on the mat come from making discoveries for yourself. Not being told what to do, not observing someone else doing something, but self-discoveries. Those are the ones that will last inside you. Use video research not as the definitive answer to your problems, but as initiating research for yourself on the mat. As time goes by and you do this more and more often in more and more areas of the sport, I promise you, you'll improve. Yeah, and I guess when you have the plan, have a plan that carries across many training sessions. So, I just remember, I know this is perhaps dumb, but I saw in my own game early on a lot of growth by self-identifying a problem and coming up by myself with a solution by watching, in that case, Marcel Garcia. I just thought my butterfly guard was very weak. And so I thought, okay, what's the solution here? I thought maybe this X guard thing, double X guard. Okay, so I watched a bunch of video. Let me try to work on this. And then all I did, just this self, but when I could get time by myself, meaning like not instructor guided classes, but in training, but in training, I would just, everything I would put myself into butterfly and X guard. That's good. And then just let go. Like don't progress. Sweep and figure out a way to get swept to get right back to it, back to it and everything. It was annoying probably to train with me because that's all I did and that's all I thought about. I bet you learned quickly. Yeah, I learned it's the most progress I've ever made. Now, you could say that X guard wasn't the right solution for me, that maybe that wasn't the weakest point for me to work on. If I were to look back now, it's still to this day, sadly, the obvious weakest point for me is escapes from much worse positions. That should be worked on. That should have been worked on from the very beginning. That's still today, if I were to say what's the weakest thing that I should work on, absolutely, is even with one day a week is escapes. But yeah, a lot of that has to do with just carrying, focusing on the one thing over and over and over and over across training sessions. Now, it also, I would write down on a sheet of paper the number of times I would get an X guard sweep. I would set a rule that I have to get whatever it was, like 500 sweeps a week. The closer you get to the end of the week, the more you just pick up a small white belt. 500 in a week? Yeah, sometimes. Your training partners must suck, bro. No, you start with good ones and then you get more and more desperate. You start finding the kid, right? You could just sweep over and over. But that number, for me, the numbers, for some reason, it set a goal to pull off a technique. It enforced, we're staying with this for a while. This is a journey we're doing. For some reason, for me, that helped me focus the study to understand the deep complexities of this thing. At least for me, other people, nobody at the gym was doing X guard or anything of that. So you have to kind of figure everything out yourself. I'm sure there's better ways to do that, but at least that focus helps from a hobbyist perspective. What's the perfect day in the life of John Donner? If we're talking about a basic non-ADCC, now, I'm really grateful that you sit down with me on a Sunday late at night, but it all starts again for you tomorrow. So three training sessions a day, what time do you wake up? Do you do a mantra in the morning? Do you listen to some zen music? What do you eat in the morning? What's the perfect day look like? What's the perfect day look like? You sacrifice a small animal to the gods? Usually, when you say a perfect day, what I think you really mean is an average day. Perfectly productive average day. Yeah. So let's take Monday morning. For you watching this video, we're filming this late on a Sunday night. So after this, I'll drive home. We just had ADCC. It was two weeks ago. It was one of the longest training camps. It was the longest training camp I've ever run because of the fact that we had to go through three different matches for Gordon Ryan leading up to it. So immediately after ADCC, I cut the training down for the competitive athletes to one session per day for the first week after ADCC to give their bodies a bit of a break. I still have to teach two classes in addition to that, two recreational classes. So my teaching schedule went down to three classes per day. After one week of relative break, we go back to two competition classes per day plus two recreational classes plus an MMA class for Gary Tonin and his friends. The first class requires me to get up around 6am to drive. I'm still a student driver, so I'm not very good at driving. So I have to spend a little extra time to get to the destination on time. Just for the record, John pulled in a red Lamborghini with a... No, you're the worst liar I've ever met. My day typically starts pretty early. I don't eat in the morning. I just get up and go to work. I teach through the day. My last class finishes usually around 8pm. During that time, I coach jiu-jitsu. I try to find time for one Instagram post per day, which usually describes some basic theme of jiu-jitsu in most cases, unless we've just had a competition, in which case I'll talk about upcoming competitions or what happens after a competition. But most of them just express a simple jiu-jitsu theme. I try to do a short workout for myself, and then I go home. At the end of the day, I always start by asking myself, what do my students need from me tomorrow? Based on what I've seen today, what do the recreational students need? What do the competitive students need? This is always done in the light of what are the upcoming competitions. But throughout the day, you're doing a lot of really in-depth classes. How do you either prepare for them or think through them as they're happening? Think through the material that you're teaching? I can look at a class. I've been doing this a long time. I can just look at a class and be like, okay, these guys need this, this, and this. Then I make reflections at the end of the day. Then I'll take care of things that we all do, talk to family, occasionally go out for dinner with friends, dates, things like that. Yeah, Hanzo had to really harass you to drag you out and to hang out. He was very convincing. Food-wise? I eat once a day. Eat once a day. At the end of the day, I usually stop off at a place like a supermarket, like Whole Foods or some equivalent to that, and buy something simple and eat. The internet wants to know the details. Did you end up getting Wi-Fi for your apartment? No. I'm still thinking about it. Yeah. What are the pros and cons? There's no cons, lots of pros, but I just don't put much importance to it. Things that are unimportant, I just ignore. Yeah, there's a lot of things in life that have a lot of pros, but they're lower on the priority list. Why? Why? Because the 5G already... He's got it covered. Do you watch much video? Do you watch video? Do you watch footage? Video footage quite often, yeah. Especially things from freestyle wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling, judo, and mixed martial arts. Also, subsidiary sports to mixed martial arts like boxing, Muay Thai, and European kickboxing. Just for long-term idea generation? Yes. Like a plant, a seed, an idea? Yeah, this is an interesting thing. How could this be incorporated in the context in which we use it, MMA or Jiu-Jitsu? Maybe it's immediately obvious, or it might become obvious in a few weeks or months. Is there some aspect to the way you approach life and training and martial arts that amends itself to minimalism? It seems like you live a pretty stoic life. Or is that just a symptom of a focused existence? My life wasn't always like this. I've gone through different phases in my life. I was a university student and teacher at university. I was a nightclub bouncer for more than a decade. I've been through different areas of life. I've seen most things. I've experienced a lot. I've traveled the world. At this point in my life, people think I live some kind of monk-like existence. But I have a private life. I like to go out and have fun like everyone else. I'm not some kind of monk who just sits under a waterfall and meditates or anything crazy like that. Well, that's what I'm currently going through that stage of my life, the monk-like existence. So I would be amiss not to ask you one of the most important questions one can possibly ask Jon Donahuer, which is on the topic of animal combat. Who wins in a fight to the death? Or maybe in a sport competition setting, but let's go with a fight to the death. A grizzly bear, a silverback gorilla, and maybe a lion or a tiger, an African lion, or one of the flavors of tiger. I don't know who you think is more ferocious. What are the parameters to consider here? Maybe I can throw a few out. Maybe you can give me some thoughts about how much of these parameters matter. So first of all, intelligence. I do believe the gorilla is the most intelligent. I did research for this, as you can imagine. Solo or with Joe Rogan? The expert advisor to this very podcast on this very topic is indeed Joe Rogan, yes. So in captivity, gorillas have been documented to show complex emotions, form family bonds, the ability to use tools, and to be able to reason about the past and the future. That's impressive. So that's something that, at least in captivity, the other animals have not been able to do. They already sound much more advanced than I am. Yeah, so that's intelligence. Then there is weight. I think that's something that you think of at first. The lion, let's go with the big ones. I took notes here. 550 pounds for a big lion. That's exceptionally large. Most male lions are around 450 pounds. That's an exceptional beast then. Yeah. Thank you. The tiger can be larger than that. Yeah, much larger. So we got the grizzly bear, which is probably the biggest of the bunch. The large ones get to 1,500 pounds. Correct me if some of this numbers. I believe most grizzlies are around 1,000 pound mark. It's a big, big beast. I was looking up the biggest, but I didn't want to do the biggest ever. Just what are the big ones, like the top of the range, because there's always a range. You can put it in at roughly double that of even a very big lion. Of course, how that weight is used is very important. So there's also things which I find as interesting as anaconda, which is, let me throw that in there, because it's 200 pounds. What I really like about that is it's not just the weight, it's the form factor. And I think out of all of these, the anaconda is the most non-standard form factor. I totally agree with that. It's like the knight on the chessboard. It comes in from a completely different angle. So we got that. We got also strength, which could be measured in ability to carry stuff. So this was surprising to me. I did look into this carefully. The grizzly bear at 1,000 or 1,500 pounds can only carry at most its body weight, which is a lot. But a gorilla can carry 10 times its body weight. A gorilla can lift over 2,000 kilograms, so that's over 4,000 pounds. And gorillas themselves, an adult male, weighs in around 350 to 400. 400 pounds, yes. So I like how in this particular place where I found this, 2,000 kilograms is as heavy as 30 average humans. So a gorilla can carry 30 humans. So that's carrying strength. And then of course, bite force, because that's one of the weapons in question here. Now this is really surprising to me. The gorilla has won me over through this, by the way. Intelligence, I'm a sucker for intelligence, but the gorilla bite force is the highest of all these, with 1,300 PSI. Bear is second with 1,200 PSI. Tiger is third, I think tiger and lion is third with 1,000 PSI. It's comparable. And a bear is anywhere from 900 to 1,000 PSI. They're close, but gorilla, I would not have expected. Now, gorilla is not a carnivore, but apparently it chews, it mostly eats grassy stuff. That's correct. But it's difficult to explain why it has such a powerful bite. And it also, of course, has very large incisor teeth as well as chewing teeth. Also, no neck. So its neck begins at the top of its head and this goes down to the shoulders. Well, a lot of the way they use their teeth, all of these animals, the ultimate kill is to go for the neck, the bite on the neck. I don't know exactly why that is probably has to do... Why is that? Because it's a very strong, controlled position, not just that it's a... Is it the same as jiu-jitsu, you think? Because they get to also choke them out? It's very much in line with jiu-jitsu. Lions are famous for using strangulation as their primary method of killing. They get a hold of the neck and hold it until the animal drops. Plus claws. I believe the tiger and the bear use their claws. And the lion too. The lion, right. And the lion. This is something that the gorilla doesn't do. And a conda obviously doesn't. Yeah. It's a different approach. So what do you think? How do we think about this? Also, there is... I'm just not letting you talk, apparently. There's levels of aggression in terms of... These are also very important considerations. What is most important to you? All the considerations you've raised are very important, and we would have to address them if we're going to go through this topic. First things first, whenever you go into a discussion of this kind, there's a kind of natural impression that we all have as to which one would be the most formidable. And it's important that you become rather skeptical of your first intuitions, because they're often very misleading. Just as every boy thinks his father is the strongest man in the world. And then when he grows up into adulthood, he realizes his father was not even close to being the strongest man in the world. It's not because of anything other than inexperience. To a boy, his father seems overwhelmingly strong. He literally can't even imagine anyone else being stronger than that. So naively, he thinks his father is the strongest man in the world. So too in our relationship with animals. When we look at a silverback gorilla, it just looks overwhelmingly strong to us, to a degree which is almost absurd. You picture the greatest combat athletes that humanity has ever produced, prime Mike Tyson, Gordon Ryan for grappling. They would literally be torn limb from limb by an angry gorilla. It wouldn't even be remotely competitive. And so there's a sense in which we look at them in awe because of what they could do to us. But that can be very misleading. And just as a boy looks at his father as the pinnacle of strength, you can't necessarily, from a position of inexperience and weakness, look at a given animal and say, oh, that must be the toughest animal in the animal kingdom. There's levels to this game. And I think we can point out that the gorilla ultimately would be pretty low on those levels, despite the fearsome appearance. I have some pushback to this analysis. Because the data, we don't have much data on this. We don't have- We actually have slightly more than you think, I believe. Oh boy. Well, it's anecdotal. I feel like it's out of context. So these species don't use, this is not MMA. They don't do interspecies fighting often. Yeah. But there are some ways of looking at this which can take this already interesting question and make it a lot more interesting. First, we've seen that intuitions aren't to be trusted. So if intuitions aren't to be trusted, well, what is to be trusted here? Well, I've always believed that there are three general elements that determine what level of success or failure anyone will experience in combat. And this is true both for individuals and for groups and even all the way out to nations. The first is, what are your skills? The second is, what are your physical and mental attributes? So it's skills, attributes. Those are the two primary ones. And there's a third, which is your experience in using those skills and attributes in real world scenarios. So whenever two, we'll start with two humans. When two humans get into a fight, ask yourself, what is their skill set? What are their physical and mental attributes? And what is their experience in using those in real world applications? And that will give you your first look at, okay, who's going to be the more successful? Then in addition to those three general elements, there's also four more specific elements. What is the ability of the combatants to initiate combat? Because initiation is a big deal in fighting. The one who sees the enemy first and can create ambush conditions or initiate combat in an area or a terrain which is favorable to them, this is huge in determining the outcome of battles. Second, not only is initiation important, but disengagement is important. A lot of battles don't go according to plan. And so your ability to disengage at will and break off and away from a battle is key to success. So initiation and disengagement are big. The third big element, what is your ability to end a fight? Okay. Do you have an efficient method of ending conflict? Without that, the conflict could go on to a point where you no longer have the ability to continue it. If you have some succinct method of finishing, this is huge in combat in determining winner or loser. So both from a winning and a losing position? Yes. If you don't have one, there's a high, much higher chance you'll lose. But if you have an ability to finish an opponent in the conflict reliably, this is very, very important in determining success or failure. And third, is your ability to endure a conflict longer than the person you're engaged in, okay, engaged with, sorry. And so you get these four more specific elements now. Do you have the ability to initiate contact at will? Do you have the ability to break contact and disengage at will? Do you have the ability to finish your opponent efficiently? And do you have the ability to endure longer than your opponent does? If you have all four of those, that's huge for combat. That probably applies to human on human, military conflict. Everything, even all the way up to nations. Also ask yourself, what are the most efficient methods of combat across the globe, across all species, all times, et cetera, et cetera. And you will see that ultimately, they always come down to three things. The first is concentration of force. Okay. One of the most successful combat strategies of all time is the ability to take concentrated force against the zone of weakness in your opponent. And if you can do this, you will often break through to a point of vulnerability, attack that vulnerability in a way where your opponent cannot respond and cannot recover from that vulnerable point being broken. Do a high amount of damage with precision. Yes. So this is one of the great combat strategies across the animal kingdom, across human history, et cetera. The second would be ambush tactics. If you can ambush an opponent with the element of surprise, this is huge for success in combat. Almost all of the truly successful predators on this planet are ambush predators. The ability to get off to a good start in a way where opponents simply can't recover is huge for combat. Are we allowing ambush in our discussion? Because humans would call this cheating perhaps. Yes, we would. Humans are pretty damn good at it too. And then the third is endurance. Some species, some people, humans actually are pretty good at this, use endurance as a weapon. And they simply wear an opponent down over time and break them. And internationally, this can be done economically through numbers, et cetera, et cetera. And you can destroy someone with sheer endurance. Yeah. A lot of wars throughout human history has been siege warfare. Yeah. And so when you ask yourself, okay, which one of these animals are going to be the most successful in combat? Ask yourself, well, there's these three elements which tend to determine successful failure in warfare. Which animals exhibit these three principles the best? And we'll discuss this. But as far as generalities go, whenever you ask a question, who will win between A and B? Ask yourself in terms of the light of what we've just discussed. What is their skill set? What are their attributes, both mental and physical? What is their experience in utilizing these in real world situations? And then the four more tactical elements, who gets to initiate contact? Can you break off contact at any given time? What is your endurance? Can you keep going longer than your opponent does? So a skill set, I wonder if a big component of that of how much practice there is off the battle. Exactly. So how much, quote unquote, you would probably call it play, like play fighting. Let's start going through our animals. Okay. When you look at the gorilla, you will see immediately that almost every experience a gorilla has of combat is theatrical. Yes. They don't engage in killing things. They scare rival males away in order to gain ownership of females, but there is almost no intra-species death in those conflicts. They're almost entirely theatrical. They have, for example, enormous canine teeth, but there is no record of them ever being used in combat. They appear to be used purely for intimidation purposes. There's a sense in which they have this tremendous appearance and they have tremendous potential. They really do have freakish levels of strength in many different ways. And yet, the actual track record of using it is negligible. So strange that evolution would develop such a powerful killing machine. It is a strange thing. Their bite force just makes no sense with regard to what they're actually eat. Even the presence of canines doesn't make a lot of sense. They're not going to use them. It comes down to this idea of their big thing is intimidation. So as a show, you want to fake it and don't care if you ever make it, because fake it is good enough given that particular dynamic. Now let's contrast that with a male lion. Lions take on the biggest, meanest, toughest animals in the most competitive killing war on planet Earth, which is continental Africa. Occasionally they lose, but it's rare and they take out everything. Just in order to eat, they have to take down wildebeest, Cape buffalo. Cape buffalo are incredibly dangerous beasts just by themselves, and yet lions regularly take them down. Occasionally, large numbers of lions will even swarm elephant and over 12 hour periods take down elephant on some occasions. This is all on video. This is not just speculation. So they just have a level of combat experience, which no other animal can do. If I were to also project, so the Eastern European style of wrestling, where they spend so many hours on the mat, they really value the number of hours on the mat at play from childhood. The lions probably, from my extensive watching videos on YouTube, they seem to play with each other for fun a lot. And I guess with the gorilla- Even as cubs you see it. You don't interact, you don't play with other gorillas. You're more spending a lot more time around the opposite sex. Yeah. So, yeah. So, yeah. I mean, even lions, when they fight each other, the mortality rate when lions fight each other, male lions for ownership of a pride is very, very high, much, much higher than I believe any other species on earth. They're almost always fights to the death for the simple reason that when a male lion loses control of a pride, the first act the new lion does is to kill the genetic offspring of the previous male lion. So, when a lion fights another male lion, when one male lion fights another, it's not just a fight for his own life, it's a fight for his genetic offspring. And failure means not only does he die, all his offspring dies. And so, when they fight, the implications are so deep. It's like a fight for not just you, but your DNA. Most male lions have very short runs at the top. They get killed or run off by other lions. Now, this kind of harsh combat experience, no other animal can claim to have this. Between what they kill to eat and what they have to do to defend their stake and a pride, no other animal fights like that. They just bring a level of depth to combat, which is unmatched in the animal kingdom. They also have some other elements too that they get the luxury because of their social nature of taking more risks than other animals. Like a tiger hunts alone. So, if it gets injured, it's a big problem. It can die if it's injured. A lion can fight Cape Buffalo, get injured and be covered by the other lions for food until it recovers. So, it learns to take risks and it's not afraid to go out and fight very, very hard. Whereas other animals tend to shy away from risk because they're solitary. Bears are solitary, the tigers are solitary. So, they learn from an early age not to take the big risks, to go up to a certain level and stop. If I could push back. So, that's aggression and risk-taking. That's a plus for the lion. But to defend the gorilla, because you said skill set, they are of all of those, the only ones that use tools, have shown to use tools. We didn't say anything about weapons. A gorilla could, in theory, pick up a rock. And it does have the force, the power and the capabilities to do a lot of damage. It doesn't have the practice. It doesn't have the experience. But don't you think if a gorilla's back is to the wall, so you put them in a situation of it is life and death for both the lion and the gorilla. Don't you value intelligence at least a little bit here? There's a reason why humans, this is like evidence that humans have spread all across the world while being kind of weak. Why? Okay, intelligence is a huge, huge asset. Humanity is positive proof that it is the most important asset. But it takes time in order to work its magic. It took humans 200,000 years to go from the bottom of the food chain to the top of the food chain. And gorillas have a lot of work to do before they get to that level. Because we can, I guess, humans can pass knowledge. You said in theory, gorillas could do this. But let's talk about practice now. First off, there are many documented incidents of leopards killing gorillas. That's anecdotal evidence. No, it's not anecdotal. There's a bunch of bitch ass gorillas walking around. We know this. We're asking. No, it's not anecdotal. It was observed by a group of people who specialized in observing gorillas over a 12 year period. They regularly found gorilla toes in leopard defecation. Oh, I should think. They also saw that over a certain period, some 36 gorillas have been killed. And evidence strongly suggested leopard predation was the reason. Apparently, leopards had figured out that there was a femoral artery in gorillas' legs and were doing a move which, from the sounds of it, sounds a lot like a Barambolo. They were spinning underneath gorillas and biting the femoral artery and then disengaging and watching them bleed out and die and then eating them. Now, a leopard is no match for a lion. The only defense it has to a lion is to run up a tree. It cannot engage with a lion on anything close to equal terms. It may seem like we're going on tangents, but we're not. Just because of the foot, the attack of the artery on the foot. Is there weaknesses that the lion might have of that? What I'm saying is, I know it's not equivalent, but the fact that a leopard does so well against even fully grown male gorillas should make you rather suspicious of a gorilla's ability to fight a lion. Fair enough. Let's also go further into this. Let's talk about concentration of force. A lion has the quintessential concentration of force, which is fangs and claws. The gorilla is the exact opposite. It can't even make a fist. It can only throw open-handed slaps and grab things. It has no ability with its arms to concentrate force in any kind of efficient way. When a lion or tiger, or a bear for that matter, swings at you, it's got four claws from four to six inches long. That's like four blades going into you. They can retract their claws, so they're always sharp. The reach is significantly longer for the gorilla. The length of the- The ability to engage with speed on the part of the cats is far, far greater. Also, mobility on two feet, the bipedal nature of a gorilla, the temporary bipedal. The bear has the same. It has no impact. Humans are bipedal, and lions kill 240 humans a year on average. Okay, what about bear? Bear is a different proposition. All the same things that a lion has, the claws, the teeth, has more weight, has more strength, has more power. Okay, now this is an interesting question. You get a fully grown North American grizzly versus an African lion. This is an interesting battle. I also have questions about polar bears. It's unclear to me because they're bigger in every way than a grizzly, but they probably don't get the experience and the practice. Yeah, also they have a much more limited set of animals that they prey upon. So, pretty sure grizzly is going to be tough to beat as far as top bear goes. A grizzly bear, I believe, would be a formidable adversary, even for a male lion. They're literally twice their size. They have an ability to get away from strangleholds by standing up on two legs. So, the lion's primary method of killing, which is to strangle, would be very difficult for them to employ upon a bear. Interestingly, the bear's primary method of killing is to pin. It pins animals and then just slowly eats them while they're still alive. They have a rather barbaric means of killing. Lions are much more humane in the way they kill. What I see as the primary problem is that neither one would be able to kill the other. That finishing thing that you mentioned. Yeah, they both fail on the finishing criteria. The lion would not be able to strangle a bear. Even in the best case scenario where he got his teeth into the neck, the bear can stand up and presumably shake him off. The bear would never be able to pin a lion for long enough to be able to hold it down and slowly maul it over time the way it can with an elk or a caribou. So, I don't believe either would be able to finish the other. They would just become exhausted. It would come down to endurance. Now, that's where things get interesting because the bear is much more of an endurance hunter and the lion is much more of an ambush hunter. Lion's quick, explosive, much higher top speed. They've got a top speed of 45 to 50 miles an hour. A bear can do up to 35, but it can run for long periods up to 25 miles an hour. Very long periods. They're mostly an endurance hunter. They just run elk and moose down until they're exhausted and then pin them and kill them. So, if it came down to endurance, it might go the way of the bear if they were caged up together. However, there is very strong evidence from both hunters and video which shows on many occasions bears being chased off by cougar and wolverines. What's that? That's fear? What is that? What do you mean chased off? If they fight over meat and say that, for example, a cougar has killed something and the bear wants the meat, the cougar will almost always chase off the bear. The bear has risk aversion. Exactly. Exactly. The bear's a risk averse. What I would say is this. The bears are very, very powerful in their domain, but they don't have the battle experience of a lion. They don't take on animals as tough as a cape buffalo. They don't take on elephant. The toughest thing it would probably take on would probably be a bull moose. A bull moose is a formidable animal, but it's nothing like a cape buffalo. It's nothing like an elephant or a hippopotamus. So, what I would suggest is this. In the wild, I don't believe either one is capable of killing the other, but I do believe based on video evidence of cougars and wolverines chasing off bears, that a lion would provide enough threat in a brief fight that a bear would back away. If you put them in a cage, however, where neither one could back away, I would slightly favor the bear based on the fact that neither one can kill each other. It would come down to endurance. You mean like an octagon? Yeah. That's got to be the next UFC, by the way. Bear versus lion. But things change. Joe Rogan is a big fan of the idea of fighting in a stadium, for humans fighting in a stadium. So, in the stadium, a bear- I would slightly favor a bear. Now, I still think that the lion would have a chance, but I would favor the bear in a betting match. Some of the best evidence we have for animal versus animal fights come from the ancient Romans, who actually used to put animals in gladiatorial combat. They, for example, had several incidents where they wrote about tiger versus lion conflict. In one famous passage, they described a lion getting destroyed by a female tiger. So, there's some evidence to suggest that they had more expertise of this than we do, because they had a big population of wild animals, which they just put to fight each other. Unfortunately, there's nothing that they wrote about bears versus lion. They did talk about bears versus bulls. They did talk about lions versus tigers, but they never mentioned bear versus lion. So, we don't have any evidence for that. So, we have to be a little bit more speculative. Now, given that bears do get chased off by cougar, and cougar is weak compared with a male lion- Well, let's see if you draw from that, by the way. I would suggest that- Is it about the bear or is it about the cougar? It's more about the bear. In theory, a bear should be able to crush a cougar, but it seems to be the bear is just saying, this thing could hurt me, so I'm not going to risk injury and backs away. I think it would back away in the wild from a lion, but put them in a cage, and I slightly favor the grizzly based on endurance. So, the final conclusion, if you had to just bet everything you own. So, you got, let's say, we got the octagon, we bring in a bear. Now, this is like legendary bear. Okay. Full-grown grizzly. Full-grown grizzly, but not only that, that grizzly has seen some shit. What's the most it could have seen? A bull moose? A caribou? That's the toughest opponent it's ever had. It wants, no, no, no. No, this one once ran into a pack of other grizzlies and had to fend. He's got scars. Pack of grizzlies. This is a pack of grizzlies, it's solitary. Wolves, wolves. Wolves, wolves. Wolves are good practice for a bear. Who attacks a bear? That's my point. Bears don't really live in a competitive environment. Lions do. But sometimes it can get desperate, as it was a pack of wolves. But a pack of wolves is nothing. That's nothing. All right, fine. Lions deal with packs of hyenas. Okay, what was the, just imagine, over the past 100 years, what do you think is the hardest fight that a grizzly bear has been in? Like somewhere in Alaska, we never heard, all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, all you hear is the bear just. Yeah, they don't really, there's nothing that tough. There's gotta been something. Humans have killed tens of millions of people in wars. They run away from cougars and wolverines. No, that's anecdotal evidence. There's gotta be one bear. There's video footage of it. You can watch it yourself. That's called anecdotal evidence. There's got, I guarantee you, in the dark of the night, there was an epic battle of which there's still legend amongst the bears in that part of Canada. Who did it battle in Canada? Moose. Other bears. You don't think they'd go at it. Yeah, bears fight each other, but it's largely theatrical. They never kill each other. When lions fight each other, they kill each other all the time. Someone would have seen it by now. Interesting. All right, so you're already saying- My point is that bears, they just, they wanna get their feet wet. You're giving no credit for gorillas, so you're saying lion wins. Your money's on the lions. No, I'm saying lion would win in the wild because they can't kill each other. They can't end the fight. That's one of our most important criteria. But lions can almost always initiate the action because they have much better ability to see at night, for example. Bears have very average night vision. Lions have superb night vision. So at nighttime, they can always initiate the fight. Lions are natural ambush predators, so it's always gonna have the advantage of ambush. The great advantage that bears have is endurance, but bears are very risk-averse, and they're not used to fighting the toughest, toughest animals. The toughest animal they fight is a moose or a caribou. These are not even close to the animals that lions have to go up against on a regular basis. So if somebody wins, it's gonna be the lion for you. I still think that the size and endurance of the bear, if they were locked in a cage together, I would still favor the bear under those circumstances. But in the wild, I believe the bear will back away quickly from the lion. But in the cage, no time limit, you favor the bear. What if it's five rounds of five minutes championship? Then I would go with the lion because the lion has a huge speed advantage. So it's gonna... It's gonna injure it, tear it up, and do immediate damage. I'll put it this way, if lion and bear fight, first 15 minutes, I favor the lion 100%. But then as time goes by, that size and weight is gonna... and endurance is gonna have an effect. I'll bring up shortly somebody that's gonna probably disagree with you about some things. Hopefully it's a grizzly bear and he comes and he just eats me. That would be so epic. Make a hell of a podcast. I wonder who he would eat first, who would look scarier, more delicious, I'm not sure. The black and white could either piss him off. He would think you were a penguin. Is that a good thing or not? Not good. If it was a polar bear, maybe it's different. Do you care deeply about your... about athletes you coached, about people in your life? So I have to ask this question. If one of those athletes, let's say Gordon Ryan, now I was the dictator of the world and this would entertain me, so I force you and Gordon to do this, to fight a bear or a lion, Gordon has to, how would you coach him to do it? To have any chance of winning? He goes in empty-handed. Empty-handed. You can choose stadium or cage. Gordon Ryan, empty-handed versus a lion. You get to choose lion versus bear, it's up to you. Okay, my advice would be very simple. I would say, Gordon, you're fucked. You're going to die badly. Choose the lion because it will strangle you to death rather than pin you down and maul you to death. Didn't we just talk about audacious goals? This is not a question of audacious goals, this is a question of minimizing pain. So you coach your athletes to quit before the battle has been fought? A hundred percent, yeah. You don't think he has a chance? You don't think he has a chance? How? What's he going to do? You don't think there's a technical... first of all, intelligence. So technical side... What's he going to do, a heel hook? No, not a... well, first of all, maybe. He can't do a double A, he's got four fucking legs. Okay, what if Gordon gets any starting position he wants? Oh, yeah, that's going to be really useful on a thousand pound bear. On a thousand pound bear? Yeah. What good would that control? He'll get shaken off. Shaken off? He'll get torn off. With what? Like, reaches backwards. He's got four six-inch claws. It's hard to... oh, okay. I wonder what is the reach? Whatever he touches, he's going to destroy. What if it's not a flexible bear? So you think there's no control? What about like a low... some kind of controlling position from... yeah, like you said, Bumble, like from underneath. Nothing? This discussion is so insane that I don't even know where to begin criticism. I don't think you're open-minded enough. We could turn this down. Forget about Gordon fighting a lion or a bear. That's completely impossible. An adult male chimp will destroy Gordon. So not even a gorilla? What about the aggression? Yeah, the aggression. A male chimp is more than enough to kill any human on the planet, including Gordon Ryan. So Gordon Ryan fighting a chimp, a good-sized... Did. No, a thousand times. How many times does he win? He loses a thousand times. It's not even competitive. It's not even remotely competitive. Do you think he will disagree? No. Okay. Do you think anyone will disagree? Anyone? Yeah, morons. Okay. Somebody that I think you might know is a famous actor, Tom Hardy, but he's also doing quite a bit of jiu-jitsu. The reason this makes sense to bring up now is he's also... I saw him narrating a New Sky original series called Predators coming out in December, where they follow five different predators and tell their full story about all the fighting and the killing and all that kind of stuff. And he's doing that. He's like... Fascinating. It's like Morgan Freeman from March of the Penguins. It's Tom Hardy for the Predators. So I saw a bear and a lion in the trailer, but they also had something... I didn't watch it too careful, but they had something like a hyena. So I think they were talking about... I don't know if it's a hyena, but something like that, like pack animals that attack and... Hyenas are formidable. Formidable animals. So it's not all about size. It's about strategy and all that kind of stuff. The most important thing in nature is numbers. A pack of animals will always destroy a single animal. And I think that show in particular is not 100% about who wins or so on. It's about the fascinating stories of how these predators dominate their particular environment. Because it's not about these artificial match-ups. It's about giving your environment how you succeed and all that kind of stuff. Maybe we could do Gordon Ryan versus a house cat. Gordon might have a small chance against the house cat, maybe. Maybe. See, now I know you're just trolling me. I think Gordon has a chance against... Definitely against the smaller apes, but I have no way of proving it. And the internet will say I'm an idiot. So there you go. Yeah, the internet is correct every so often. So there's a... Oh, it's funny enough. I'm looking at Tom's Instagram. Here's a picture with Hanzo. He's competed recently, which is very cool, in Jiu-Jitsu. That's awesome. That's tough to do for a celebrity to step up. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. He used to consult with me a little bit on moves when he was starting out. He's a very, very nice person. Oh, about Jiu-Jitsu? Yeah. Talking to people. Yeah, he asked questions about Jiu-Jitsu. He struck me as being a very, very nice person. I would love to be a fly on that wall, but he made a post on Instagram, which I'd love to get your opinion on. It has very much like a John Donahue style of digging into the philosophy of the impact of Jiu-Jitsu on one's life. Is his Instagram post 18 pages long? Yes. He's got potential then. Yes. With a profound, deep picture of somebody practicing the art of Jiu-Jitsu. I think he's at least a trainee in this art of the Donahue style of communication. If Miyamoto Musashi would be alive today, he would probably be doing these five page Instagram posts like you do. Addiction, writes Tom Hardy. Addiction is difficult and complex stuff to navigate as is mental health. Subjects which are both deeply personal for me and extremely close to my heart. It is an honor to be able to represent the charity and my team, RE-ORG, and the great work they do supporting the mental health and wellbeing of veterans of service, military and first responders through the therapeutic benefits of Jiu-Jitsu and fitness training. He represented them in this competition that he competed in. Simple training for me as a hobby and a private love has been fundamentally key to further develop a deeper sense of inner resilience, calm and wellbeing. I can't stress the importance it has had and the impact of my life and my fellow teammates. And he goes on to talk about this organization, RE-ORG, that uses Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to form a therapy to overcome physical and mental challenges, strengthen social connections and improve overall health and wellbeing. This is for veterans, for people going through PTSD. They have saved lives around the world by not only providing an effective and positive means for navigating and managing the challenging psychological aspects of military and first responder careers, but also has allowed many to find a renewed sense of purpose, identity, and community that's often lost when transitioning to civilian life. Do you have thoughts about that, sort of the effects of Jiu-Jitsu on folks who've gone through some really difficult things in their life? First off, I think that's just a beautiful statement by Mr. Hardy. I must give him a phone call after this and talk to him. That was beautiful to read. One thing that's always struck me when I train people who either have a military background or on more than a few occasions, we have special forces soldiers come in and train with us for a week or two. And when you talk to them, the overwhelming sentiment I get when the conversation is over and we go our separate ways is I'm always asking myself, the transition from military life, especially the more extreme military lives of special forces soldiers, back to civilian life, it must be the craziest experience of all. You've got people who are fighting and dying alongside their comrades in the most extreme circumstances that any human being can go through. And then they're pulled back into a life where people are arguing with them over parking spots. The average person's day-to-day life is so mundane that imagine what must be going through a man's head who a few weeks or months ago was literally fighting for his life and his comrades lives, watching people that he loved die or get mutilated in front of him. Things that in a matter of seconds, people's lives can be torn apart and change forever. And then suddenly you get thrown into a life where people are arguing over who's cut who off, who in line to buy a coffee. The intensity of camaraderie and love that you have for each other. And then you go from incredible intensity in war to just mundane, boring life. And going from one to the other where people are yelling at you or nagging you over issues that just seem so inconsequential compared to what you've been through. And you're supposed to take these people seriously and listen to them. But not only that, you do have trauma visions of dead brothers and sisters. And you feel like you can't really talk to these civilians about it. There's nothing in their experience that would enable you to have a conversation with them. How do you talk to your new girlfriend about watching one of your friend's legs get taken off? There's no conversation you could have with them. So I find that typically they do best when they hang out with each other because they have shared experience and they can talk about these things. But I do find that most Jiu-Jitsu schools have something like a kind of military barracks demeanor to them of camaraderie, hard work, shared hard work, teamwork, building towards a goal over time, the acquisition of skills. Usually along with that a kind of, for want of a better word, a rustic and primitive sense of humor and a kind of soldierly way of talking to each other and disparaging self-deprecating sense of humor. It's something that most people with military service kind of naturally come into because it's part of what they were in. And so it's like a toned down version of it which enables them to form a stepping stone between the military life that they were in all the way down to civilian life. And Jiu-Jitsu was kind of like a bridge between those two. And also the honesty. So you said like the skill acquisition, the honesty of really testing that skill. There is a deep honesty to war in a distant way, but in a way there is an honesty to Jiu-Jitsu too, of technique working and not. And there is a final, there is simulated death. It's not real death. It's simulated death on the mat. And there's a similar kind of honesty there. And there's also a similar kind of esteem towards skill. Just as regular soldiers look up to special forces soldiers because they see them as people who have greater skills than themselves, something to aspire to. So too in Jiu-Jitsu, the thing that we esteem most on the Jiu-Jitsu mat is skill. No one gives a damn what you look like or what you think. You're judged mostly by your skill level. And so they tend to identify with that. I do think that most people from a military background kind of find a natural gravitation towards the atmosphere of Jiu-Jitsu learning. And if it proves to be a positive way for them to rehabilitate and come back into civilian life, then that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I know we're linked with We Defy, which is an organization which caters to former soldiers who were badly injured in combat, and many of whom lost limbs and or suffered mental trauma. And they come in and train, and they often speak very, very highly of the degree to which Jiu-Jitsu has helped them come back into civilian life. And for them it's even worse because they come back not only mentally, but physically disadvantaged after war. And I've always been proud to be associated with We Defy, and I'm very happy to see Tom working with this organization. Is this an organization based in England for English veterans, or is it international? That's a good question. I'd have to look into it. It certainly is based in England, but it could be international. But it's just nice to see somebody use that large platform for that kind of message. And also to step on the mat and show the kind of Jiu-Jitsu you would probably be proud of, which is chasing submissions. You got an arm lock, you got a straight foot lock. We're not going to analyze the techniques because, you know, there could be a different perspective. It's the intent that counts. The finish is the finish. Yeah, no, that's impressive. He's actually quite an athlete. He's in great shape and strong and flexible. And I'm glad he's doing well with his Jiu-Jitsu. And it's good to see Henzo's smiling face next to him. I can only imagine the conversations. I have to ask you a deep and important question. You often, when we text back and forth, send me two hugging emojis. Can we psychoanalyze the reason why that's your favorite emoji? Of the hugging face? It's kind of like sending a heart, but a little bit more gender neutral. Yeah. When Jiu-Jitsu players meet each other, they often shake hands and then give a quick hug. So I thought it was the most appropriate emoji for Jiu-Jitsu players. I see. So it's a pretty simple explanation. Nothing too fraudy in there. Are you sure? Quite sure. Okay. Have you really asked yourself deeply? Because you really lean on that emoji. Is there something behind it? Tomorrow I'm never going to use that emoji again. Walk away. I'll shock you tomorrow and hit you with three. Three. It's almost always two. I think maybe you're a creature of habit in communication. I'm a creature of habit in almost every aspect of my life. So even emojis. Yeah. You fall into these little pockets of how you communicate, how you show affection towards others. I say love a lot. I send hearts. And don't give a fuck if it's too like, you know, like in a, you know, me sending a message to like a CEO, I'm about to interview, I'll send a heart. I don't give a damn. They'll probably just like, look, what is this? But I think people are too afraid of simple communication of affection. Like, it could be in any form, but there's a hesitance to that because I think underneath it, I think underneath it, in order to show affection, you're taking a risk and you're showing vulnerability. Because if you show affection and the other person rejects that affection, you've now placed yourself in a hierarchy, going back to lions, of like, oh, this person, you're just like the silly weak person and they're the strong person. I think that's how you might see it, I guess. But I don't. To me, the display of vulnerability is a display of strength, not weakness, at least in human society, at least at this time. I don't know. Let me ask you about love. You know, I must ask John Donahue about love. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition at the highest philosophical level, let me first ask? What's... Like, romantic love? Romantic love, let's say romantic love. I have one or two areas of apparent expertise in my life. Romantic love, definitely not one of them. So, like, lions versus bears. I'm good. Animal combat. I'm good. You're pretty good at. And then different grappling arts, judo, sambo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, MMA, so fighting and so on. Romantic love. You don't see them as similar? It's a kind of fight. It's a kind of dance. By the way, do you? There's a sense in which I'm kind of glad I'm not an expert on that. Imagine what it would be to be an expert on romantic love. You would take the one thing in life that's actually interesting and make it boring. Because once you develop an expertise about something, you can start to predict how things are going to unfold. You get answers before events even occur. You can read into the future of everything. I think there are certain parts of human life where you want to be a beginner at all times, and you don't want to gain expertise. So, excellence and systematizing something in order to achieve excellence might destroy the very magic of the thing. Yes. And I think the magic of romantic love is the fact that we're all beginners at it. And the minute you try to gain expertise in it, what does that even mean? What would it mean? And would it be good? I don't think it would. I think you're better off just having fun with it and plowing through and making dumb mistakes and looking like a fool. And then whatever success, whatever that means, comes in a kind of lighthearted, frivolous kind of way. And that, I think, is over the course of a lifetime far more desirable than having expertise in affairs of love. So, I don't think it's even a good thing to study too much. And I think if you did, you would actually take something good out of your life. Yes. There's communities of people called pick-up artists that try to optimize this particular aspect, which is of dating, of guys picking up girls, and turning that into a system and seeing what's the most successful. I think that would be, I mean, maybe the first few months would be good. And then after that, I think it would be a disaster. I mean, given that humans are fairly easy to study from the standpoint of psychology, I'm sure it's not that difficult to gain expertise in things like picking people up. The same way advertisers can pick up your attention to sell a product. You can do the same thing, presumably, with romance and sex. But, I don't know, I feel like if you became very good at it, you would end up being very disappointed by the results. And so, as I said, I think there's some things in life where it's better to be a beginner. And this is one of those. Enjoy the chaos, the push and pull of being a beginner, and make that a lifelong journey. That's really inspiring to hear you say that. And there's a deep truth to that. That also justifies the fact that I suck at it. I think it also justifies, and it would sell very well, that John Donahan should write a book on dating. And that would be chapter one, embrace being a beginner. Chapter two would be bear versus lion. Pivot quickly to violence. By the way, we totally skipped over anaconda. I assumed the implied... I'll put it to you this way. On video, you can watch Puma and similar-sized cats, jaguar, destroy anacondas, even in water, which is anaconda's preferred domain. So, given that Puma and jaguar are several orders below lion, you have to go with the idea that lion would utterly decimate anaconda. So, it's probably good that we did skip over it. And I think, going back to the original thought that you had about this, don't trust your first instinct. Also, think about the other elements. An anaconda has no ability to disengage from the fight. Once the fight's on, it's got to go until the end. It has no ability to disengage and get away. Its only hope would be ambush, and it's got a tiny, tiny chance against a truly formidable animal. And the fact that, if we look at actual, concrete, real-world results, when Puma and jaguar are kicking your ass, you know, lion and bear is going to be a lot worse. Science is not to be found on YouTube. Or rather, YouTube is not science. I bet you there's a bear somewhere in Canada that has seen some shit. I'm just going to leave it at that. You're a fan of knives. There's guys like Miyamoto Musashi who, instead of doing who's number one type of tournaments, when both competitors walk away, only one competitor walks away. Miyamoto Musashi is known for somebody having John Donaher-like philosophical skills, but also is known for having fought 61 duels to the death and won them, obviously. What do you think made him so good? I don't feel qualified to talk about him because I haven't made an in-depth study of his life and times. And we also don't know how much truth there is to his recollections. And there's a lot of controversy over this. So, I don't feel like you can give a definitive statement of, and certainly I can't give a definitive statement of his prowess. But his writings are fascinating and deeply insightful. But as to what actually happened out there in his duels, it's unclear. But there is, you know, with guys like that, you almost certainly know that they were people like the character he projects that have existed. Whether it's 61, whether it's 20, but people really put their life on the line in a different time in human history. Is there something compelling to you about fighting to the death? I think it's not just compelling to me, but to anyone. I mean, there's nothing we value more than our lives. And to be able to say, I'm prepared to die for a sense of honor, things that are so foreign to our modern society. Imagine, you know, we criticize people for something as simple as road rage. And yet, you can imagine someone who has a sufficiently developed sense of honor, if you took them out of the 17th century and put them in a modern car, they might be killing people on the side of the road on a regular basis, just over smaller stacks of honor. To say that your sense of self overwhelms your sense of self preservation. It's a very unusual thing in the modern age, and yet it appears to have been quite common back then. You often wear a fanny pack. I'm not going to ask you what's inside the fanny pack, but if you were to design a perfect killing machine that also wore a fanny pack, what would you put in that fanny pack? Would it be something mundane and practical, or would it be something surprising and hilarious? Would it be something of philosophical significance, or maybe sentimental significance? Or would it be empty as a troll on human civilization? But if it was a perfect killing machine, it would have to be some kind of weapon. But in a fanny pack? It has to be a very compact weapon. We mentioned offline that there's also things in the chess world where there is a different kind of vibrating devices that could be used to communicate information in communication with the AI systems that can help you in your particular pursuit. I don't think in jiu-jitsu you need... It's possible for a machine to give you information that gives you advantage. You can in chess and in poker. So you could put one of those vibrating devices in your fanny pack, but in jiu-jitsu it would not help you. Any idea what kind of weapon? To fit in a fanny pack? So you're a fan of knives. Where's the interest in knives come from, by the way? That's more metaphorical. The truth is that in the modern world a knife is not an efficient weapon. You'll easily be overwhelmed by firearms. My fascination with knives comes more in the sense that they convey a spirit to my students. Where a knife is made of steel and steel begins as ore in the ground. It's an ugly, unfinished product which through the enactment of knowledge, time, and discipline can be transformed into beautiful, shining steel. It begins as something which has no real function and becomes one of the most functional and important tools in all of human history, without which human civilization could never have even begun. It's what separated humans and took us from the bottom of the food chain and began our gradual rise towards the top of the food chain. So it has immense historical and cultural value, but it has this metaphorical value insofar as the martial artist begins as a white belt like iron ore, but over time transforms into some beautiful, shining steel which can have immense value. In addition, there's a sense of maintenance. As remarkable as steel is, it is in need of constant maintenance. It will fall apart through rust and neglect will destroy a blade both in terms of rust and the edge falling apart. And so just as the martial artist, it's not good enough just to learn the techniques. You need to maintain them over time. And just as steel is perishable, so too are the skills of martial arts. And that when I give a gift of a knife to a student, these metaphorical elements start to emerge. They see, okay, I began as iron ore and I want to become the finished blade. There's another sense in which a knife is morally neutral. A knife can be used to save a life. It can be used to cook a meal, but it can also be used for murder for the worst possible purposes. Jiu-jitsu is the same way. Jiu-jitsu can make you a better person. It can make you a worse person. Jiu-jitsu is just a power. It's not a particularly great power, but it is a power. And like all power, it can be used for both good and bad. It's morally neutral in itself. And it's up to us to make sure that just as the knife gets used for good purposes rather than bad, so too that jiu-jitsu be used for good purposes rather than bad. There's also an element where the basis of the knife is steel. And historically, there's always been a riddle of steel, which is steel has the property of both hardness and suppleness. The harder you make steel, the better its edge retention becomes. The longer that edge will stay sharp. This is good, but it comes at a price. The harder you make steel, the more brittle it becomes. And now that edge can be damaged easily. So the solution is to make the steel softer, more malleable. That will prevent breakage of the blade and chipping of the edge. But when you make the steel softer, that comes at a price. And that price is now the edge loses its sharpness very easily. And so the riddle of steel is how to work with these two to the greatest degree possible and create an edge which is hard enough to stay sharp for long periods of time, but without making the steel so brittle that the blade overall is compromised. So too in jiu-jitsu, your task and training is to make the training competitive enough that you actually get used to the rigors of real combat. But on the other hand, it can't be so brutal that the athletes get broken down in the gym to a point where they're no longer effective. And so this duality of hardness and softness, which we see in the case of blades, is there in the training of the jiu-jitsu athlete. So I often give a gift of a knife to a student when they've done something significant, because it demonstrates in a metaphorical way these key themes of the sport. Well, I've been honored to be a student of yours. I've been plagued by injury, but I hope to one day earn one such knife. And I think that's a really powerful metaphor. I'm really honored that you would spend any time with me in any context, but especially on the mat and especially today in conversation, John, you're an incredible person. Thank you for everything you do. Congratulations for historic accomplishment. It's always beautiful and inspiring to see greatness. And what I saw, what we saw at ADCC was greatness, rare greatness. And it's beautiful to see that humans can achieve that kind of thing. So thank you for making that happen. And thank you for talking today. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Donaher. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight. And the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Michio Kaku: The Mind of Einstein's God | AI Podcast Clips

What do you think is the mind of Einstein's God? Do you think there's a why that we could untangle from this universe of strings? Why are we here? What is the meaning of it all? Well, Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize, once said that the more we learn about the universe, the more we learn that it's pointless. Well, I don't know. I don't profess to understand the great secrets of the universe. However, let me say two things about what the giants of physics have said about this question. Einstein believed in two types of God. One was the God of the Bible, the personal God, the God that answers prayers, walks on water, performs miracles, smites the Philistines. That's the personal God that he didn't believe in. He believed in the God of Spinoza, the God of order, simplicity, harmony, beauty. The universe could have been ugly. The universe could have been messy, random, but it's gorgeous. You realize that on a single sheet of paper, we can write down all the known laws of the universe. It's amazing. On one sheet of paper, Einstein's equation is one inch long. Spring theory is a lot longer and so is the standard model, but you could put all these equations on one sheet of paper. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been messy. And so Einstein thought of himself as a young boy entering this huge library for the first time, being overwhelmed by the simplicity, elegance, and beauty of this library. But all he could do was read the first page of the first volume. Well that library is the universe with all sorts of mysterious, magical things that we have yet to find. And then Galileo was asked about this. Galileo said that the purpose of science, the purpose of science is to determine how the heavens go. The purpose of religion is to determine how to go to heaven. So in other words, science is about natural law and religion is about ethics, how to be a good person, how to go to heaven. As long as we keep these two things apart, we're in great shape. The problem occurs when people from the natural sciences begin to pontificate about ethics and people from religion begin to pontificate about natural law. That's where we get into big trouble. You think they're fundamentally distinct, morality and ethics and our idea of what is right and what is wrong. That's something that's outside the reach of string theory and physics. That's right. If you talk to a squirrel about what is right and what is wrong, there's no reference frame for a squirrel. And realize that aliens from outer space, if they ever come visit us, they'll try to talk to us like we talk to squirrels in the forest, but eventually we get bored talking to the squirrels because they don't talk back to us. Same thing with aliens from outer space. They come down to earth, they'll be curious about us to a degree, but after a while they just get bored because we have nothing to offer them. So our sense of right and wrong, what does that mean compared to a squirrel's sense of right and wrong? Now we of course do have an ethics that keeps civilizations in line, enriches our life and makes civilization possible. And I think that's a good thing. But it's not mandated by a law of physics.

https://youtu.be/1oC_Zigft3k

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Climate Change Debate: Bjørn Lomborg and Andrew Revkin | Lex Fridman Podcast #339

people all around the world, their lives are basically dependent on fossil fuels. And so the idea that we're going to get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives is almost morally reprehensible. People who have the most basic science literacy, like who know the most about greenhouse effect, they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate, dismissives and alarmed. What is likely the worst effect of climate change? The following is a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin on the topic of climate change. It is framed as a debate, but with the goal of having a nuanced conversation, talking with each other, not at each other. I hope to continue having debates like these, including on controversial topics. I believe in the power of conversation to bring people together, not to convince one side or the other, but to enlighten both with the insights and wisdom that each hold. Bjorn Lomborg is the president of Copenhagen Consensus Think Tank and author of False Alarm, Cool It, and Skeptical Environmentalist. Please check out his work at Lomborg.com that includes his books, articles, and other writing. Andrew Refkin is one of the most respected journalists in the world. He's been writing about global environmental change and risk for more than 30 years, 20 of it at the New York Times. Please check out his work in the link tree that includes his books, articles, and other writing. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin. There's a spectrum of belief on the topic of climate change, and the landscape of that spectrum has probably changed over several decades. On one extreme, there's a belief that climate change is a hoax, it's not human-caused. To pile on top of that, there's a belief that institutions, scientific, political, the media, are corrupt and are kind of constructing this fabrication. That's one extreme. And then the other extreme, there's a level of alarmism about the catastrophic impacts of climate change that lead to the extinction of human civilization. So not just economic costs, hardship, suffering, but literally the destruction of the human species in the short term. Okay, so that's the spectrum. And I would love to find the center. And my sense is, and the reason I wanted to talk to the two of you, aside from the humility with which you approach this topic, is I feel like you're close to the center and are on different sides of that center, if it's possible to define the center. Like there is a political center for center left and center right. Of course, it's very difficult to define. But can you help me define what the extremes are again, as they have changed over the years? What they are today? And where's the center? Oh, boy. Well, in a way, on this issue, I think there is no center, except in this, if you're looking on social media, or if you're looking on TV, there are people who are trying to fabricate the idea that there's a single question. And that's the first mistake. We are developing a new relationship with the climate system. And we're rethinking our energy systems. And those are very disconnected in so many ways. They connect around climate change. But the first way to me to overcome this idea of there is this polarized universe around this issue is to step back and say, well, what is this actually? And when you do, you realize it's kind of an uncomfortable collision between old energy norms and growing awareness of how the planet works. That if you keep adding gases that are invisible, it's the bubbles in beer. If you keep adding that to the atmosphere, because it accumulates, that will change everything. It is changing everything for thousands of years. It's already happening. What do you mean by bubbles in beer? CO2, carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Why beer? Well, because I like beer. It's also in Coca-Cola. We were talking about Cola before. And so it's innocuous. We grew up with this idea. CO2, unless you're trapped in a room suffocating, is an innocuous gas. It's plant food. It's beer bubbles. And the idea we can swiftly transition to a world where that gas is a pollutant, regulated, tamped down from the top, is fantastical. Having looked at this for 35 years, I brought along one of my tokens. This is my 1988 cover story on global warming. The greenhouse effect, this cover, 1988. 1988, Jim Hansen, the famous American climate scientist, really, he stimulated this article by doing this dramatic testimony in a Senate committee that summer, in May, actually, spring, late spring. It was a hot day, and it got headlines, and this was the result. But it's complicated. Look what we were selling on the back cover. What you see is only tobacco. Cigarettes. Tobacco. Yeah. You know, looking back at my own career on the climate question, it's no longer a belief fight over is global warming real or not. You say, well, what kind of energy future do you want? That's a very different question than stop global warming. And when you look at climate, actually, I had this learning journey on my reporting where I started out with this as the definition of the problem. You know, the 70s and 80s, pollution was changing things, they were making things bad. So really focusing in on the greenhouse effect and the pollution. But what I missed, the big thing that I missed of the first 15 years of my reporting from 1988 through about 2007, when I was, that period I was at the New York Times, in the middle there, was that we're building vulnerability to climate hazards at the same time. So climate is changing, but we're changing, too. And where we are here in Austin, Texas, is a great example. Flash Flood Alley, named in the 1920s, west of here. Everyone forgot about flash floods. Built these huge developments, you know, along these river basins. Then one side starts saying, global warming, global warming. And the other side is not recognizing that we built willfully, greedily, vulnerability in places of utter hazard. Same things played out in Pakistan and in Fort Myers, Florida. And you start to understand that we're creating a landscape of risk. As climate is changing, then it feels, oh my God, that's more complex, right? But it also gives you more action points. Like, okay, well, we know how to design better. We know that today's coasts won't be tomorrow's coasts. Work with that. And then let's chart an energy future at the same time. So the story became so different. It didn't become like, you know, a story you could package into a magazine article. Magazine article or the like. And it just led me to a whole different way of, even my journalism changed over time. So I don't fight the belief-disbelief fight anymore. I think it's actually kind of a waste. It's a good way to start the discussion because that's where we're at. But this isn't about, to me, going forward from where we're at. It isn't about tipping that balance back toward the center so much as finding opportunities to just do something about this stuff. What do you think, Bjorn? Do you agree that it's multiple questions in one big question? Do you think it's possible to define the center? Where is the center? I think it's wonderful to hear Andy sort of unconstruct the whole conversation and say, we should be worried about different things. And I think that's exactly, or we should be worried about things in a different way that makes it much more useful. And I think that's exactly the right way to think about it. On the other hand, that was also where you kind of ended. We are stuck in a place where this very much is the conversation right now. And so I think in one sense, certainly the people who used to say, oh, this is not happening. They're very, very small and diminishing crowd and certainly not right. But on the other hand, I think to an increasing extent, we've gotten into a world where a lot of people really think this is the end of the times. So the OECD did a new survey of all OECD countries and it's shocking. So it shows that 60% of all people in the OECD, so the rich world, believes that global warming will likely or very likely lead to the extinction of mankind. And that's scary in a very, very clear way. Because look, if this really is true, if global warming is this meteor hurtling towards earth and we're going to be destroyed in 12 years or whatever the number is today, then clearly we should care about nothing else. We should just be focusing on making sure that that asteroid gets... We should send up Bruce Willis and get this done with. But that's not the way it is. This is not actually what the UN climate panel tells us or anything else. So I think it's not so much about arcing against the people who are saying it's a hoax. That's not really where we're going. It's a hoax, that's not really where I am. I don't think that's where Andy or really where the conversation is. But it is a question of sort of pulling people back from this end of the world conversation because it really skews our way that we think about problems. Also, if you really think this is the end of time and you only have 12 years, nothing that can only work in 13 years can be considered. And the reality of most of what we're talking about in climate and certainly our vulnerability, certainly our energy system is going to be half to a full century. And so when you talk to people and say, well, but we're going to, you know, we're really going to go a lot more renewable in the next half century. They look at you and like, but that's what 38 years too late. And I get that. So I think in your question, what I'm trying to do, and I would imagine that's true for you as well, is to try to pull people away from this precipice and this end of the world and then open it up. And I think Andy did that really well by saying, look, there are so many different sub conversations and we need to have all of them and we need to be respectful of some of these are right in the, in the sort of standard media kind of way, but some of them are very, very wrong. And it actually means that we end up doing much less good, both on climate, but also on all the other problems the world face. Oh yeah. And it just empowers people to those who believe this, then just sit back. Even in Adam McKay's movie, the Don't Look Up movie, there was that sort of nihilist crowd for those who've seen it who just say, you know, fuck this. And a lot of people have that approach when something's too big. And it just paralyzes you as opposed to giving you these action points. And the other thing is, I hate it when economists are right about stuff like the... I don't know about all that often though. No, no. There are these phrases, like I never knew the words path dependency until probably 10 years ago in my reporting. And it basically says you're in a system, the things around you, how we pass laws, the brokenness of the Senate, you know, that those are, we don't have a climate crisis in America. We have a decision crisis as it comes to how the government works or doesn't work. So, but those big features of our landscape are, it's path dependency. When you screw in a light bulb, even if it's an LED light bulb, it's going into a 113, 120 year old fixture. Because, and actually that fixture is almost designed, if you look at like 19th century gas fixtures, they had the screw in thing. So, we're like on this long path dependencies when it comes to energy and stuff like that, that you don't just magically transition a car fleet. A car built today will last 40 years. It'll end up in Mexico, sold on the used car, et cetera, et cetera. And so, there is no quick fix, even if we're true that where things are coming to an end in 13 years or 12 years or eight years. So, most people don't believe that climate change is a hoax. So, they believe that there is an increase, there's a global warming of a few degrees in the next century. And then maybe debate about what the number of the degrees is. And do most people believe that it's human caused at this time in this history of discussion of climate change? So, is that the center still? Is there still debate on this? Yale University, the climate communication group there for like 13 years has done this Six Americas study where they've charted pretty carefully and ways that I really find useful what people believe. And we can talk about the word belief in the context of science too. But, and they've identified kind of six kinds of us. There's from dismissive to alarmed and with lots of bubbles in between. I think some of those bubbles in between are mostly disengaged people who don't really deal with the issue. And they've shown a drift for sure. There's much more majority now at the alarmed or engaged bubbles than just the dismissive bubble. There's a durable, like with vaccination and lots of other issues, there's a durable never anything belief group. But on the reality that humans are contributing to climate change, most Americans when you ask them, and it also depends on how you write your survey, think there's a component. And this is also true globally. I mean, when you ask around, I mean, and this is, if you hear this story from the media of 20 years, of course, that's what you will believe. And it also happens to be true. I mean, that is what the science, I think, you know, it's perhaps worth saying, and it's a little depressing that you always have to say, but I think it's worth saying that I think we both really do accept, you know, the climate panel science and you know, there's absolutely global warming. It is an issue. And it's probably just worthwhile to get it out of the way. It's an issue and it's caused by humans. It's caused by humans. Yeah. But vulnerability, the losses that are driven by climate-related events still predominantly are caused by humans, but on the ground. It's where we build stuff, where we settle. Pakistan, in 1960, I just looked these data up, there were 40 million people in Pakistan. Today, there are 225 million. And a big chunk of them are still rural. They live in the floodplain of the amazing Indus River, which comes down from the Himalayas. It's an extraordinary 5,000-year history of agriculture there. But when you put 200 million people in harm's way, and this doesn't say anything about the bigger questions about, oh, shame on Pakistan for having more people. It just says the reality is the losses that we see in the news are, and the science finds this, even though there's a new weather attribution group, it's WXRisk on Twitter. This does pretty good work on how much of what just happened was some tweak in the storm from global warming, from CO2 changing weather. But, and the media glommed onto that, as I did, you know, in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. But the reports also have a section on, by the way, the vulnerability that was built in this region was a big driver of loss. So, discriminating between loss, change in what's happening on the ground, and change in the climate system is never solely about CO2. In fact, Lawrence Bauer, B-O-U-W-E-R, I first wrote on his work in 2010 in the New York Times. And basically, in 2010, there was no sign in the data of climate change driving disasters. Climate change is up here, disasters are on the ground, they depend on how many people are in the way, how much stuff you've built in the way. And so far, we've done so much of that so fast in the 20th century, particularly, that it completely dominates, it makes it hard, impossible to discriminate how much of that disaster was from the change in weather from global warming. So, a function of greenhouse gases to human suffering is unclear. And that's very much in our control, theoretically. I mean, the point, I think, is exactly right, that if you look at the Hurricane Ian that went through Florida, you have a situation where Florida went from, what, 600,000 houses in 1940 to 17 million houses, sorry, 10 million houses, so 17 times more over, what, a period of 80 years? Of course, you're gonna have, what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're gonna have lots more damage. And many of these houses now have been built on places where you probably shouldn't be building. And so, I think a lot of scientists are very focused on saying, can we measure whether global warming had an impact, which is an interesting science question. I think it's very implausible that eventually we won't be able to say it has an impact. But the real question, it seems to me, is if we actually wanna make sure that people are less harmed in the future, what are the levers that we can control? And it turns out that the CO2 lever, doing something about climate, is an incredibly difficult and slightly inefficient way of trying to help these people in the future. Whereas, of course, zoning, making sure that you have better housing rules, what is it, regulations, that you maybe don't have people building in the flash flood, what was it called? Flash flood alley. Flash flood alley. Alleyway, yeah. It's just simple stuff. And because we're so focused on this one issue, it almost feels sacrilegious to talk about these other things that are much more in our power and that we can do something about much quicker and that would help a lot more people. So I think this is gonna be a large part of the whole conversation. Yes, climate is a problem, but it's not the only problem. And there are many other things where we can actually have a much, much bigger impact at much lower cost. Maybe we should also remember those. Can you still man the case of Greta, who's a representative of alarmism, that we need that kind of level of alarmism for people to pay attention and to think about climate change? So you said the singular view is not the correct way to look at climate change, just the emissions. But for us to have a discussion, shouldn't there be somebody who's really raising the concern? Can you still man the case for alarmism, essentially? Or is there a better term than alarmism? Communication of like, holy shit, we should be thinking about this. So I totally understand why Greta Thunberg is doing what she's doing. I have great respect for her because I look at a lot of kids growing up and they're basically being told, you're not going to reach adulthood, or at least you're not going to get very far into adulthood. And of course, this is the meteor hurdling towards Earth, and then this is the only thing we should be focusing on. I understand why she's making that argument. I think at the end of the day, it's incorrect, and I'm sure we'll get around to talking about that. And one of the things is, of course, that her whole generation... I can understand why they're saying, if we're going to be dead in 12 years, why would I want to study? Why would I really care about anything? So I totally want to pull Greta and many others out of this end of the world fear, but I totally get why she's doing it. I think she's done a service in the sense that she's gotten more people to talk about climate, and that's good because we need to have this discussion. I think it's unfortunate, and this is just what happens in almost all policy discussions, that they end up being discussions from the extreme groups. Because it's just more fun on media to have the total deniers and the people who say, we're going to die tomorrow, and it becomes that discussion. It's more a mud wrestling fight. So would you think the mud wrestling fight is not useful or is useful for communication, for effective science communication on one of the platforms that you're a fan of, which is Twitter? Yeah. I wrote a piece recently in my Sustain What column saying, if you go on there for the entertainment value of seeing those knockdown fights, I guess that's useful if that's what you're looking for. The thing I found Twitter invaluable for, but it's a practice. It's just like the workouts you do. Or it's, how do I put this tool to use today, thinking about energy action in poor communities? How do I put this tool today, learning about what really happened with Ian the Hurricane, who was most at risk? And how would you build forward better? I hate build back. Or you can go there and just watch it as an entertainment value. That's not going to get the world anywhere. You don't think entertainment, I wouldn't call it entertainment, but giving voice to the extremes isn't a productive way forward. It seems to push back against the main narrative. It seems to work pretty well in the American system. We think politics is totally broken, but maybe that works, that oscillation back and forth. You need a Greta, and you need somebody that pushes back against Greta to get everybody's attention. The fun of battle over time creates progress. Well, and this gets to the, you know, people who focus on communication science, I'm not a scientist, I write about this stuff. If you're going to try to prod someone with a warning, like, this is three years apart. Nuclear winter. We'll talk about that. Global warming. Well, yeah, we'll talk about it. But look at that, you know, this is three years apart in the covers of a magazine. But then you have to say to what end, if you're not directing people to a basket of things to do. And if you want political change, then it would be to support a politician. If you want energy access, it would be to look at this $370 billion the American government just put into play on climate and say, well, how can my community benefit from that? And I've been told over and over again by people in government, Jigar Shah, who heads this giant loan program, the energy department, he says, what I need now is like 19,500 people who are worried about climate change, maybe because Greta got them worried. But here's the thing you could do. You can connect your local government right now with these multimillion dollar loans so you can have electric buses instead of diesel buses. And that's an action pathway. So, you know, alarm for the sake of getting attention or clicks, to me, is not any more valuable than watching an action movie. And again, I think also it very easily ends up sort of skewing our conversation about what are the actual solutions. Because yes, it's great to get rid of the diesel bus, but probably not for the reason people think. It's because diesel buses are really polluting in the air pollution sense. Right. And that is why you should get rid of them. And again, if you really wanted to help people, for instance, with hurricanes, you should have better rules and zoning in Florida, which is a very different outcome. So the mud wrestling fight also gets our attention diverted towards solutions that seem easy, fun, you know, sort of the electric car is a great example of this. The electric car has somehow become almost the sign that I care and I'm really going to do something about climate. Of course, electric cars are great and they're probably part of the solution and they will actually cut carbon emissions somewhat, but they are an incredibly ineffective way of cutting carbon emissions right now. They're fairly expensive. You have to subsidize them a lot and they still emit quite a bit of CO2, both because the batteries get produced and because they usually run off a power that's not totally clean. Strong words from your in-law. Okay, let's go there. Let's go electric cars. Okay, educate us on the pros and cons of electric cars in this complex picture of climate change. What do you think of the efforts of Tesla and Elon Musk on pushing forward the electric car revolution? So look, electric cars are great. I don't own a car, but you know, I've been driving. There you go, socially signaling. Yeah, but yeah, I've... We're in Texas, it's okay. I flew in here, so it's not like I'm in any way a virtuous guy on that path. But look, they're great cars and eventually electric cars will take over a significant part of our driving and that's good because they're more effective. They're probably also going to be cheaper. There's a lot of good opportunities with them, but it's because they've become reified as this thing that you do to fix climate. And right now, they're not really all that great for climate. You need a lot of extra material into the batteries, which is very polluting and it emits a lot of CO2. A lot of electric cars are bought as second cars in the US. So we used to think that they were driven almost as much as a regular car. It turns out that they're more likely driven less than half as much as regular cars. So 89% of all Americans who have an electric car also have a real car that they use for the long trips and then they use the electric car for short trips. 89%. 89, yeah. So the point here is that it's one of these things that become more sort of a virtue signaling thing. And again, look, once electric cars are sufficiently cheap that people will want to buy them, that's great and they will do some good for the environment. But in reality, what we should be focusing on is instead of getting people electric cars in rich countries, where because we're subsidizing typically in many countries, you actually get a sort of sliding scale. You get more subsidy, the more expensive it is. We sort of subsidize this to very rich people to buy very large Teslas to drive around in. Whereas what we should be focusing on is perhaps getting electric motorcycles in third world developing cities, where they would do a lot more good. They can actually go as far as you need. There's no worry about running out of them. And they would obviously, they're much, much more polluting, just air pollution wise. And they're much cheaper and they use very little battery. So it's about getting our senses right. But the electric car is not a conversation about, is it technically a really good or is it a somewhat good insight? It's more like it's a virtual signal. So just, I work with economists. I'm actually not an economist, but I like to say I claim I kind of am. But the fundamental point is we would say, well, how much does it cost to cut a ton of CO2? And the answer is for most electric cars, we're paying in the order of a thousand, 2000, Norway, they pay up to what $5,000 or thereabouts, huge amount for one ton of CO2. You can right now cut a ton of CO2 for about, what is it? $14 on the Reggie or something. You can do this. That's the regional greenhouse gas. Yes. So you can basically cut it really, really cheaply. Why would we not want to cut dozens and dozens of tons of CO2 for the same price instead of just cutting one ton? And the simple answer is we only do that because we're so focused on electric cars. If I may interrupt, typically European come here in Texas, tell me I can't have my Ford F-150, but I'll- Oh, now you can have your F-150 Lightning. That's true. I'm just joking. No, I know. But what do you think about electric cars? If you just link on that moment and this particular element of helping reduce emissions. Well, you talked about the middle in the beginning and I loved moving to the hybrid. The Prius was fantastic. It did everything our other sedan did, but it was 60 miles per gallon performance and you don't have range anxiety because it has a regular engine too. We still have a Prius. We also inherited my dad, dear dad's year 2000 Toyota Sienna, which is an old 100,000 mile minivan. And we use it all the time to do the stuff we can't do in the Prius. Like what? Taking stuff to the dump. Oh, you mean in terms of the size of the vehicle? Yeah, size and just convenience factor for a bigger vehicle. I would love a fully electrified transportation world. It's kind of exciting. I think what Elon did with Tesla, I remember way, way back in the day when the first models were coming out, they were very slick Ferrari style cars. And I thought, this is cool. And there's a history of privileged markets testing new technologies and I'm all for that. And I think it's done a huge service prodding so much more R&D. And once GM and Ford started to realize, oh my God, this is a real phenomenon. You know, getting them in the game. There was that documentary who killed the electric car, which seemed to imply that, you know, there were fights to keep this tamped down. And it's fundamentally cleaner, fundamentally better. But then you have to manage these bigger questions. If we're going to do a build out here, how do you make it fair? As you were saying, who actually uses transformed cars? And Jagir Shah, that guy at the energy department I mentioned who has all this money to give out, he wants to give loans to, if you had an Uber fleet, those Uber drivers, they're the ones who need electric cars. As his work, and there was a recent story in Grist also, said that most of the sales of Teslas are the high end of the market. They're 60, $80,000 vehicles. Each, like the Hummer, the electric Hummer, I can't, there was a data point on that, astonishing data point, the battery in that Hummer weighs more than, I'd have to look it up, it weighs more than a car. Your Prius. Yeah, I think it might've been a Prius. And think of the material costs there. Think of where that battery, the cobalt and the lithium, where does this stuff come from to build this stuff out? I'm all for it, but we have to be honest and clear about, that's a new resource rush, like the oil rush back in the early 20th century. And those impacts have to be figured out too. And if they're all big Hummers for rich people, there's so many contrary arguments to that, that I think we have to figure out a way, we, I don't like the word we, I use it too much, we all do. But- We all do. You usually refer when you say we, we humans. We society, we government, yeah. There has to be some thought and attention put to it. And attention put to where you put these incentives, so that you get the best use of this technology for, for the carbon benefit, for the conventional sooty pollution benefit, for the transportation benefit. Can I step back and ask a sort of big question? We mentioned economics, journalism. How does an economist and a climate scientist and a journalist that writes about climate see the world differently? What are the strengths and potential blind spots of each discipline? I mean, that's just sort of, just so people may be aware. I think you'd be able to fall into the economics camp a bit. There's climate scientists, and there's climate scientists, adjacent people, like who hang, some of my best friends are climate scientists, kind of, which is, I think, where you fall in, because you're a journalist, you've been writing it. So you're not completely in the trenches of doing the work. You're just step into the trenches every once in a while. So can you speak to that maybe beyond like, what does the world look like to an economist? Let's try to empathize with these beings that, you know. That unfortunately has fallen into the disreputable economics. Yeah. So I think the main point that I've been trying for a long time, and I think that's also a little bit what Andy has been talking about, for a very long time, the whole conversation was about, what does the science tell us? Is global warming real? And to me, it's much more, what can we actually do? What are the policies that we can take? And how effective are they going to be? So the conversation we just had about electric cars is a good example of how an economist think about, look, you got to, this is not a question about whether you feel morally virtuous, or whether you can sort of display how much you care about the environment. This is about how much you actually ended up affecting the world. And the honest answer is that, you know, electric cars right now in the next decade or so, will have a fairly small impact. And unfortunately, right now at a very high cost, because we're basically subsidizing these things at five or $10,000 around the world per car. It's not really sustainable, but it's certainly not a very great way to cut carbon emissions. So I would be the kind of guy, and economists would be the types of people who would say, is there a smarter way where you, for less money, can, for instance, cut more CO2? And the obvious answer is yes. That's what we've seen, for instance, with fracking. The fact that the US went from a lot of coal to a lot of gas, because gas became incredibly cheap, because gas emits about half as much as coal does, when you use it for power. That basically cut more carbon emissions than pretty much any other single thing. And we should get the rest of the world, in some sense, to frack, because it's really cheap. There are some problems, and absolutely, we can also have that conversation. No technology is problem-free, but fundamentally, it's an incredibly cheap way to get people to cut a lot of CO2. It's not the final solution, because it's still a fossil fuel, but it's a much better fossil fuel, if you will. And it's much more realistic to do that. So that's one part of the thing. The other one is when we talked about, for instance, how do we help people in Florida who get hit by a hurricane, or how do we help people that get damaged in flash floods, the people who are in heat waves? And the simple answer is there's a lot of very, very cheap and effective things that we could do first. So most climate people will tend to say, we've got to get rid of all carbon emissions. We've got to change our entire, the engine that powers the world and has powered us for the last 200 years. And that's all good and well, but it's really, really hard to do, and it's probably not going to do very much. And even if you succeed, it would only help future victims of future Hurricane Ians in Florida a tiny, tiny bit at best. So instead, let's try to focus on not getting people to build right on the waterfront where you're incredibly vulnerable and where you're very likely to get hit, where we subsidize people with federal insurance again, which is just actually losing money. So we're much more about saying, it's not a science question. I just take the science for granted. Yes, there is a problem with climate change, but it's much more about saying, how can we make smart decisions? Can I ask you about blind spots? When you reduce stuff to numbers, the costs and benefits, is there stuff you might miss that are important to the flourishing of the human species? So everyone will have to say, of course, there must be blind spots. But I don't know what they are. Yeah, I'm sure Andy would probably be better at telling me what they are. So we try to incorporate all of it, but obviously we're not successful. We can't incorporate everything, for instance, in a cost-benefit analysis. But the point is, in some way, I would worry a lot about this if we were close to perfection, human race, we're doing almost everything right, but we're not quite right, then we need to get the last digits right. But I think it's much more, and the point that I tried to make before, that we're all focused on going to an electric car or something else, rather than fracking. We're all focused on cutting carbon emissions instead of reducing vulnerability. So we're simply getting in orders of magnitude wrong. And while I'm sure I have blind spots, I think they're probably not big enough to overturn that point. Andy, why is Bjorn and economists are all wrong about everything? Well, the models, we could spend a whole day on models. There are economic models. There's this thing called optimization models. There were two big ones used to assess the US plan, this new big IRA inflation reduction package. And they're fine. They're a starting point for understanding what's possible. But as this gets to the journalism part or the public part, you have to look at the caveats. You have to look at what model. Economists expressly exclude things that are not modelable. And if you look in the fine print on the repeat project, the Princeton version of the assessment of the recent giant legislation, the fine print is the front page for me as a deep diving journalist, because it says we didn't include any sources of friction, meaning resistance to putting new transmission lines through your community or people who don't want mining in America because we've exported all of our mining. We mine our cobalt in Congo, and trying to get a new mine in Nevada was a fraught fight that took more than 10 years for lithium. So if you're excluding those elements from your model, which on the surface makes this $370 billion package have an emissions reduction trajectory, that's really pretty good. And you're not saying in your first line, by the way, these are the things we're not considering. That's the job of a journalist. You could probably summarize all of human history with that one word, friction. Yeah, yeah, well, inertia, friction implies there's a force that's already being resisted, but there's also inertia, which is a huge part of our, you know, we have a status quo bias. The scientists that I, in grappling with the climate problem, as a journalist, I paid too much attention to climate scientists. That's why all my articles focused on climate change. And it was 2006, I remember now pretty clearly, I was asked by the Weekend Review section of the New York Times to write a sort of a weekend thumb sucker, we call them, on- Thumb sucker? You know, you sit and suck your thumb and think about something. Why is everybody so pissed off about climate change? It was after Al Gore's movie, the Al Gore movie came out in Convenient Truth, Hurricane Katrina. It was a big, Senator Inhofe in the Senate from Oklahoma wasn't yet throwing snowballs, but it was close to that. And so I looked into what was going on. Why is this so heated? In 2006, the story's called Yelling Fire on a Hot Planet. And that was the first time, this is after 18 years of writing about global warming. That was the first time I interviewed a social scientist, not a climate scientist. Her name was Helen Ingram. She's at UC Irvine. And she laid out for me the factors that determine why people vote or what they vote for, what they think about politically. And they were the antithesis of the climate problem. She used the words, she said, people go into the voting booth thinking about things that are soon, salient, and certain. And climate change is complex, you know, has long timescales. And that really jogged me. And then I, between 2006, 2010, I started interviewing other social scientists. And this was by far the scariest science of all. It's the climate in our heads, or inconvenient minds. And in how that translates into political norms and stuff, really became the monster, not the climate system. Is there social dynamics to the scientists themselves? Because I've gotten to witness a kind of flocking behavior with scientists. So it's almost like a flock of birds. Within the flock, there's a lot of disagreement and fun debates and everybody trying to prove each other wrong. But they're all kind of headed in the same direction. And you don't want to be the bird that kind of leaves that flock. No. So like, there's an idea that science as a mechanism will get us towards the truth. But it'll definitely get us somewhere. But it could be not the truth in the short term. In the long term, a bigger flock will come along and it'll get us to the truth. But there's a sense that I don't know if there's a mechanism within science to like snap out of it if you're on the wrong track. Usually you get it right, but sometimes you don't. When you don't, it's very costly. And there's so many factors that line up to perpetuate that flocking behavior. One is media attention comes in. The other is funding comes in. National Science Foundation or whatever, European foundations pour a huge amount of money into things related to climate. And so you, and then your narrative in your head is shaped by that aspect of the climate problem that's in the spotlight. I started using this hashtag a few years back, narrative capture, like be wary of narrative capture, where you're on a train and everybody's like, train and everyone's getting on the train. And this is in the media too, not just science. It becomes self-sustaining and contrary indications are ignored or downplayed. No one does replication science because your career doesn't advance through replicating someone else's work. So those contrary indications are not necessarily really dug in on. And this is way beyond climate. This is many fields. As you said, you might've seen this in AI. And it's really hard to find. It's another form of path dependency, the term I used before. The breaking narrative capture to me, for me has come mostly from stepping back and reminding myself of the basic principles of journalism. Journalism's basic principles are useful for anybody. Confronting a big, enormous, dynamic, complex thing is who, what, where, when, why. Just be really rigorous about not assuming, because there's a fire in Boulder County or a flood in Fort Myers, that climate, which is in your head because you're part of the climate team at the New York Times or whatever, is the foreground part of this problem. What's the psychological challenge of that if you incorporate the fact that if you try to step back and have nuance, you might get attacked by the others in the flock? Oh, I was. Well, you've certainly been to- Both of you get attacked continuously from different sides. So let me just ask about that. How does that feel? And how do you continue thinking clearly and continuously try to have humility and step back and not get defensive in that as a communicator? I mean, there are other things happening at the same time. I'm now 35 years into, almost 40 years into my journalism career. So I have some independence. I'm free from the obligations of, I don't really need my next paycheck. I live in Maine now in a house I love. I own it outright. It's a great privilege and honor as a result of a lot of hard work. And so I'm freer to think freely. And I know my colleagues in newsrooms, when I was at the New York Times, in the newsroom, you become captive to a narrative, just as you do out in the world. The New York Times had a narrative about Saddam Hussein, drove us into that war. The Times sucked right into that and helped perpetuate it. I think we're in a bit of a narrative of we, the media, my friends at the Times and others are on a train ride on climate change, depicting it in a certain way. That really, I saw problems with how they handled the Joe Manchin issue in America, the West Virginia Senator. They really kind of piled on and zoomed in on his investments, which is really important to do, but they never pulled back and said, by the way, he's a rare species. He's a Democrat in West Virginia. And which is a seat that would be otherwise occupied by a Republican. There'd be no talk of a climate deal or any of that stuff without him. But once you're starting to kind of frame a story in a certain way, you carry it along. And as you said, sometimes it breaks and a new norm arrives, but the climate train is still kind of rushing forward and missing the opportunity to cut it into its pieces and say, well, what's really wrong with Florida? And it's for me, when you ask about how I handle the slings and arrows and stuff, it's partially because I'm past worrying about it too much. I mean, it was pretty intense. 2009, Rush Limbaugh suggested I kill myself on his radio show. It's a really great time. What was that about? I had, actually, this was a meeting in Washington in 2009 on population at the Wilson Center. I couldn't be there. So actually this is pre-COVID, but I was Zooming in or something like Skyping in. And I was talking about, in a playful way, I said, well, if you really want to worry about carbon, this was during the debate over a carbon tax model for a bill in America, we should probably have a carbon tax for kids because a bigger family in America is a big source of more emissions. It was kind of a playful thought bubble. Some right-wing blogger blogged about it. It got into Rush's pile of things to talk about. And the clip is really fun. So meaning, so if humans are bad for the environment, I can imagine Rush, that's how you know you've made it. It's amazing. He was very explicit. He said, Mr. Revkin of the New York, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, if you really think that people are the worst thing that ever happened to this planet, why don't you just kill yourself and save the planet by dying? So that was tough for you. It was tough for my family. You know, to me, it did generate some interesting calls and stuff in my voicemail. But on the left, I was also undercut. Roger Pilkey Jr., a prominent researcher of climate risk and climate policy, UC Boulder was actively, his career track was derailed purposefully by people who just thought his message was too off the path. You've been dealing with this for a very long time. Oh, God, yeah, yeah. What do you? So I just want to get back to, so the science, I don't think the science get it so much wrong as it just becomes accepted to make certain assumptions, as you just said, we assume no friction. So there's a way that you kind of model the world that ends up being also a convenient message in many ways. And I think the main convenient message in climate, and it's not surprising if you think about it, the main convenient message is that the best way to do something about all the things that we call climate is to cut CO2. And that turns out to only sometimes be true and with a lot of caveats, but that's sort of the message. And it takes a long time. Yes, yes, it's really, really difficult to do in any meaningful sort of timeframe. And if you challenge that, yes, you're outside the flock and you get attacked. I've always, so somebody told me once, I think it's true, they say at Harvard Law School, if you have a good case, pound the case, if you have a bad case, pound the table. And so I've always felt that when people go after me, they're kind of pounding the table. They're literally screaming, I don't have a good case. I'm really annoyed with what you're saying. And so to me, that actually means it's much more important to make this argument. Sure, I mean, I would love everyone just saying, oh, that's a really good point. I'm gonna use that. But yeah, we're stuck in a situation, certainly in a conversation where a lot of people have invested a lot of time and energy on saying, we should cut carbon emissions. This is the way to help humankind. And just be clear, I think we should cut carbon emissions as well. But we should also just be realistic about what we can achieve with that. And what are all the other things that we could also do? And it turns out that a lot of these other things are much cheaper, much more effective, will help much more, much quicker. And so getting that point out is just incredibly important for us to get it right. So in some sense, to make sure that we don't do another Iraq and we don't do another, lots of stupid decisions. I mean, this is one of the things mankind is very good at. And I guess I see my role, and I think that's probably also how you see yourself, is trying to get everyone to do it slightly less wrong. LUIS So let me ask you about a deep psychological effect for you. There's also a drug of martyrdom. So whenever you stand against the flock, there is, you wrote a couple of really good books on the topic, the most recent, False Alarm. I stand as the holder of truth, that everybody who is alarmist is wrong. And here's just simple, calm way to express the facts of the matter. And that's very compelling to a very large number of people. They want to make a martyr out of you. Is that, are you worried about your own mind being corrupted by that, by enjoying standing against the crowd? SIMON No, no, no. There's very little, I guess I can see what you're saying sort of in a literary way or something. LUIS Yeah, so I'm being poetic here. SIMON Yeah, there's very little comfort or sort of usefulness in annoying a lot of people. It just, whenever I go to a party, for instance, I know that there's a good chance people are going to be annoyed with me. And I would love that not to be the case. But what I try to do is, so I try to be very polite and sort of not push people's buttons unless they sort of actively say, so you're saying all kind of stupid stuff on the climate, right? And then try to engage with them and say, well, what is it you're thinking about? And hopefully, they're not going to be well, what is it you're thinking about? And hopefully, during that party, and then it ends up being a really bad party for me. But anyway, so I'll end up possibly convincing one person that I'm not totally stupid. But no, I'm not playing the martyr and I'm not enjoying that. LUIS It's so interesting. The, I mean, the martyr complex is all around the climate question. Michael Mann, at the far end of the spectrum of activism from where Bjorn is, was a climate scientist, is a climate scientist who was actively attacked by Inhofe and West Virginia politicians and really abused in many ways. He had come up with a very prominent model of looking at long-term records of climate change and got this hockey stick for temperature. And he, you know, he's definitely sits there in a certain kind of spotlight because of that. So it's not unique at any particular vantage point in the spectrum of sort of prominent people on the debate. LUIS Andrew, you co-wrote the book, The Human Planet, Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, which is the new age when humans are actually having an impact on the environment. Let me ask the question of what do you find most beautiful and fascinating about our planet Earth? ANDREW It would be cheap to say everything, but just walking here this morning under the bridge over the Colorado River, seeing the birds, knowing there's bat colonies, massive bat colonies around here that I got to visit a few years ago. I experienced one of those bat explosions. It's mind-blowing. I've been really lucky as a journalist to have gone to the North Pole, the camp on the sea ice with Russian help. This is a camp that was set up for tourists coming from Europe every year. There were scientists on the sea ice floating on the 14,000 foot deep Arctic Ocean. I was with them for several days. I wrote a book about that too, along with my reporting. I've been in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. When I was very young, I was a crew on a sailboat that sailed 2 3rds of the way around the world. I was halfway across the Indian Ocean, again, in 14,000 foot deep water. There was no wind. This was way before I was a journalist, 22, 23 years old. We went swimming, swimming in 14,000 foot deep water. 500 miles from land, the Western Indian Ocean, halfway between Somalia and the Maldives. It's like so mind-boggling, chillingly, fantastical thing with a mask on, looking at your shadow, going to the vanishing point below you, looking over at the boat, which is a 60 foot boat, but it just looks like a toy. Then getting back on and being beholden to the elements, the sailboat, heading toward Djibouti. The immensity and the power of the ocean. Djibouti. The immensity and the power of the elements. Oh my God. Then the human qualities are unbelievable. The Anthropocene, I played a bit of a role as a journalist in waking people up to the idea that this era called the Holocene, the last 11,000 years, since the last ice age, had ended. I wrote my 1992 book on global warming, thinking about all that we're just talking about, thinking about the wonders of the planet, thinking about the impact of humans so far in our explosive growth in the 20th century. I wrote that perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this post-Holocene era for its formative element for us, because we're kind of in charge in certain ways, which is hubristic at the same time. It's like the variability of the climate system is still profound with or without global warming. So this immense, powerful, beautiful organism that is earth, all the different sub-organisms that are on it, do you see humans as a kind of parasite on this earth? No, no. Or do you see it as something that helps the flourishing of the entire organism? That can. Can. Intelligence. That hasn't yet. Hasn't yet? I mean, aren't we on the ability of the collective intelligence of the human species to develop all these kinds of technologies and to be able to have Twitter to introspect onto itself? We should get Twitter to the animals. I think we're doing a... In a way, we are. It's catch-up. We're always in catch-up mode. I was at the Vatican for a big meeting in 2014 on sustainable humanity, sustainable nature, our responsibility. And it was a week of presentations by Martin Rees, who's this famed British scientist, physicist who... Been on his podcast. Yeah, great. Well, he's fixated on existential risk, right? Yes, he is. So it was a week of this stuff. And the meeting was kicked off by... I wrote about it, Cardinal Maradiaga, who is, I think, from El Salvador. He's one of the Pope's kind of posse. He gave one of the initial speeches. And he said, nowadays, mankind looks like a technical giant and an ethical child, meaning our technological wizardry is unbelievable, but it's way out in front of our ability to step back and kind of consider in the full dimensions we need to, is it helping everybody? Is it... What are the consequences of CRISPR, genetics, technology? And there's no single answer to that. If I'm in the African Union, I'm just using this as an example. CRISPR has emerged so fast. It can do so much by changing the nature of nature, willful, in a kind of a programming way, building genes, not just transferring them from one organism to another. We've only just begun to taste the fruits of that, literally. And it can wipe out a mosquito species. We know how to do that now. You can like literally take out the dengue-causing mosquito. The scientists have done the work. And you think, okay, cool. Well, that's great. Now there's this big fight over whether that should happen. African Union, and I'm with their view, says, hey, if we can take out a mosquito species that's causing horrific, chronic loss through dengue, which I had once in Indonesia, it's not fun. And we should do it. And Europe- What's the other side of the argument? The European Union, they're saying, using their capital P precautionary principle, says, no, we can't meddle with nature. And this is just like we were talking with climate. There's the real-time question and the long-term question. And there's the people who are just facing the need to get through the day and be healthy and survive and have enough food, which is not integrated sufficiently at all into the climate, stop climate change debate. And those who are trying to cut CO2, which will have a benefit in the future by limiting the fat tail outcomes of this journey we're on. So when I think about the Anthropocene, I think about this planet. I love that we're here right now. I love that our species has these capacities. I would love for there to be a little bit more reflection in where things come from and where they might go, whether you're a student, a kid, what's your role? The wonderful thing about the complexity of it is everyone can play a role. If you're an artist or a designer or an architect or an economist or a podcaster, whatever you do, just tweak a little bit toward examining these questions, stepping back from the simplistic label throwing toward what actually is the problem in front of me, whether it's in Pakistan or in Boston or wherever, you know, Florida. What do you find beautiful about this collective intelligence machine we have? From an economics perspective, it's kind of fascinating that we're able to, there is a machine to it that we've built. There is a machine to it that we've built up that's able to represent interests and desires and value and hopes and dreams in sort of monetary ways that we can trade with each other, we can make agreements with each other, we can represent our goals and build companies that actually help and so on. Do you just step back every once in a while and marvel at the fact that a few billion of us are able to somehow not create complete chaos and actually collaborate and have collaborative disagreements that ultimately or so far have led to progress? Yeah, I think fundamentally the point, apart from the fact that, you know, we should just be joyful of the fact that humans live here, I think it's incredibly important to remember how much progress we've had. You know, most people just don't stop to think about those stats. You know, I get that in the normal bustle of day, but just, you know, in 1900, the average person on the planet lived to be 32 years. 32 years, that was our average life expectancy. Today it's about 74. So we've literally got two lifetimes on this planet, each one of us. And, you know, every year you live in the rich world, you get to live three months longer and the poor world is about four months longer. Because of medical advances, because we get better at dealing both with cancer and especially right now with heart disease, these are amazing achievements. Of course, it's a very, very small part of it. We're much better fed, we're much better educated. We've gone from a world where virtually everyone or, you know, 90% were illiterate to a world where more than 90% illiterate. This is an astounding opportunity. And 200 years ago, 95%, 94% of the world were extremely poor, that is less than a dollar a day. Today, for the first time in 2015, it was down below 10%. So, and again, these are kind of boring statistics, but they're also astounding testaments of how well humanity has done. So just on the point of, we've kind of just been focused on making our own world better. And in many ways, you know, so we've hunted a lot of big animals, either to extinction or down to much, much smaller populations, as much smaller populations of fish in the ocean. So there's a lot of things that sort of bear the brunt of our success. Not, it's not because we're evil in that sense, it's just because we didn't care all that much about them. I think it is important as one funnel of that, I'm not gonna make a big deal out of it, but the fact that we're putting out more CO2 in the atmosphere, because CO2 is, as you also mentioned before, it's actually plant food. If you're a greenhouse grower, you know, if you put in CO2 in your greenhouse, you actually get bigger and plumper tomatoes. And that's essentially what we're doing in the world. This has overall bad consequences, and that's why we should be doing something about it. But one of the good side effects is actually that the world is getting greener. So we get much more green stuff. Now, I don't know, and this is where I'm gonna stop. This is where I sort of show my economist roots, because if you just measure all living stuff in tons, so in weight, there's actually more living stuff than there were a hundred years ago, because elephants and all these other, you know, big fish and stuff are actually really, really small fraction of the world. So the fact that we have, yes, so we have an enormous amount of life stuff, but that doesn't even measure it. It's mostly just wood, wooden green stuff that has dramatically increased in the world. Now, we're still not there from what it was in 1500. So we've still cut down the world a lot, but we're actually making a much greener world. Again, not because we really cared or thought about it, but just sort of a side effect of what we're doing. I think the crucial bit to remember is, when you're poor and you worry about what's going to happen the next day, this is just not your main issue. Am I killing too many large animals in the world? But when you're rich and you can actually sit in a podcast in a convenient place in Austin, you can also start thinking about this. So one of the crucial bits, I think, if we want to get the rest of the world to care about the environment, care about climate, care about all these other issues, we really need to get them out of poverty first. And it's a simple point that we often forget. And get them connected to all these gifts. Yes. I have these memories of, I was reporting on the next big earthquake that's going to devastate Istanbul in 2009. I was in a slum, immigrant, poor neighborhood, and walking around with an engineer pointing out to the buildings that were going to fall down. This is all known. There was an earthquake in 1999 and the next one's coming. One of my advantages in covering climate is I've covered other kinds of disasters too. So it keeps my context, me in touch with other things we can do. So I'm walking around and interviewing everybody. Went to the school that's being retrofit. They actually were getting ahead of it there. The World Bank provided some funding to put in iron bars in the brick building. And I met these kids. And they came, when you're a journalist with a camera and stuff and a pad, and you get swarmed by kids, mostly in developing countries. And so these kids are running up to me. And they weren't going like, are you American? Or just, they were saying Facebook. Facebook. And I went, that's interesting. And they led me to their little town, a little community center that had a bank of eight or 10 pretty flimsy computers. And they were all there playing Farm. It was a game that was hot at that time on Facebook. Farm. Farmville? Farmville, yeah. And my son back in the Hudson Valley, I remember him playing it. And I thought, wow, that is so fricking cool. These kids. And actually, I became Facebook friends with a couple of them afterwards. We traded our... And I thought back to my youth when we had pen pals. I would write a letter to a kid in West Cameroon, and he would write back. And it took weeks. And it was a crinkly letter. And I never met him. And now you can kind of connect with people. And that all through my blogging. At the New York Times, I was doing my regular reporting, but I launched a blog in 2007 called Dot Earth, which was all about where you were just describing, the new sphere, the connected world. That's a term from these two earliest, a Russian guy, an early Vernadsky and a French theologian and scientist, which is so interesting, Teilhard de Chardin. They had this idea in the early 20th century that we're creating a planet of the mind, that human intelligence can foster a better earth. And I just became smitten with that, especially meeting kids in Istanbul, slums who were on Facebook, looking for connectedness. What can you do with these tools? Which is what drives me with my work now. And, but then there are these kids that there are these counterweight, counter currents that if the connectedness can cut back, we'd allowed Al-Qaeda to recruit, use decapitation videos to recruit, distributed, disaffected young people into extremism. And there's lots of, these systems are not, they're just like every other tool, right? They're just for good or ill. And the efficiency thing, the economics of the world, which I also wrote about a little bit, in the late 20th century, it was so cool that everything became so efficient that our supply chains are just in time manufacturing, you know, getting the stuff from where the sources of the material are to the car factory and to get the car to the floor just in time for someone to buy it. And everyone got totally sucked in by that, including me. It's great, you know, super efficient, cheaper. And then COVID hit and the whole supply chain concept crumbled and one of the big lessons there, hopefully, and this is relevant to sustainability generally, is efficiency matters, but resilience matters too. And resilience is inefficient. You need redundancy or a variety of options, right? Which is not what corporate companies think about, which is not what, if you're only focused on a bottom line, short-term timeline, those disruptions are not what you're thinking about. You're still thinking about, can we get that widget here just in time for this thing to happen? And then on we go. So it's kind of, I love the noosphere, this noosphere idea, the connectedness is fantastic. Oh, another thing, like in the early 90s, when I wrote my first book on global warming, it was for an exhibition at the Museum of Natural History. The Environmental Defense Fund was involved. They were like a partner, one of these longstanding environmental groups, and they're very old-fashioned. It's mostly lawyers, really, just using the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act to litigate against pollution. And now EDF is vastly bigger, and they're actually, this coming year, they're launching a satellite. An environmental group is launching methane sat, and it's providing a view, an independent view of where there's this gas, you know, same thing, natural gas is basically methane. So if you have a leak, whether it's in Siberia or in Oklahoma, you can cross-reference, you can identify the hotspot, you can know where the problem is to fix in so many ways. And that's just one example. I'm like, if someone had told me in 1993 that EDF was gonna launch a methane satellite, I would've laughed out loud. So technology plays a huge role if it's kind of, you know, employed with the bigger vision and leadership. So Bjorn, you wrote, one of the books you wrote, the most recent one called False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Good title, by the way, very intense, makes me wanna read it. What is likely the worst effect of climate change? First, let me just, my editor actually hated the subtitle because it gives away the whole book, basically. Tells you what the book tries to make. I think that's exactly what it should be. It's about getting this conversation out in the public sphere. So the worst thing that climate change can do is like the worst thing that anything can do is that it wipes out everything and we all die. So it's not like, you know, if you're just looking for worst case outcomes, you know, anything can get to the worst case outcome. Imagine if we, what's the worst thing that could happen from HIV? It breaks down one or more African states because we don't fix it. And then you get sort of biological warfare and terrorism, throw that in the mix, and then you get someone who makes a virus and kills the whole world. You know, you can make worst case scenarios for everything. Well, let's just call it, I get the point. And I'm sorry for the interruption. And I appreciate worst case analysis because I am fundamentally a computer scientist and that was the thing that defined the discipline. Of the measure, the quality of the algorithm, you measure what is its worst case performance. That's the big O notation. That's how you discuss algorithms. What is the worst possible thing in terms of performance this thing can do? But for climate change, let's even go crazy. What is exactly the worst case scenario for climate change? Because I have to be honest and say, I haven't really paid deep attention. I just have a lot of colleagues who think about climate and so on. And there's a kind of, in the alarmism, there was a sense, well, this is a very serious problem. And then the sentence would never finish. What exactly is the problem? Well, the extinction of the human species, okay. With a virus, I understand how that can possibly happen. What is the mechanism by which the human species becomes extinct because of climate change? I'm not sure I would want to be able to argue that because it really requires you to have sort of very, very extreme parameter choices all down the line. So it's more, it's this kind of idea that we hit some of these unexpected outcomes. So for instance, the Western Arctic ice sheet melts really, really quickly. It doesn't look like that can happen really, really quickly. But let's just say that this could happen within a hundred years or something. So we basically get what, seven meters, what is that, 20 feet of sea level rise. That will be a real challenge to a lot of places around the world. This would have significant costs. It's likely, and there's actually been a study that's tried to estimate, could we deal with that? And the short answer is yes, if you're fairly well off. If you're Holland, you can definitely deal with it. It's also likely that most developing countries are gonna be much closer to Holland towards the end of the century because they'll be much richer. So they can probably handle it, but it will be a real challenge. May I ask a dumb question? Yeah. What happens when the sea level rises exactly? What is the painful aspect of that? It is that all of your current infrastructure in a lot of coastal cities around the world that are literally built on, Jakarta is a good example, that are literally built on the, just inches above the sea level. If you then get a sea level rise, that'll rise, say, what would 20 feet? That would be like a third or a fourth of a foot every year. Yeah, I see no evidence that that's even... But hold on a second. We're not talking about evidence. We're talking about worst case analysis and algorithm. And so basically you would see your infrastructure, all your stuff, very quickly being very, very challenged. And you basically have to put up huge sea walls or migrate out of that area. Very quickly. Well, very quickly as in 50 years or something. Right. So is that, as a human species, we're not able to respond to that kind of thing? Of course we are. And look, again, the point here is, then there's a lot of other arguments. And I should just put the disclaimer, this is not what I think is correct, but you're asking me what's the worst case outcome that you have. So most of global warming is really about that we're used to one way of doing things. So we live in Jakarta because it's right next to the sea. We're used to the sea being at this level. We grow our crops because we're used to, you grow corn here, you grow wheat here, because we're used to that's where the precipitation and the temperature is the right for this kind of crop. If this changes, and this is the same thing with houses, if it gets colder, if it gets warmer, it's suddenly uncomfortable because you've built your house wrong. So our infrastructure will be wrong if the world changes, and that's what climate change does. At a large scale. Yes. And so this is a problem in most of these sentences, but if you then sort of take it to the extreme and say, well, imagine that you're going to get a huge sea level rise, imagine that you're going to get a very different sort of precipitation, for instance, the, what is it, the, the rain season, monsoon in the Indian subcontinent changes dramatically, that could affect a lot of agriculture and make it really hard to imagine that you could feed India well. There are these kinds of things where you can imagine, and then that this would be very difficult to deal with. And then if you add all of it up, you could possibly get sort of a system collapse because you just have too many problems in one. Is it possible to model those kinds of things? So what I understand is the sea level rise itself isn't the destructive thing, it's the fact that it creates migration patterns and human tension, battle over resources, and so you start to get these human things, human conflict. So the big negative impact won't be necessary from the fact that you have to move your house, it's the fact that once you move your house, that means something else down the line. And this is secondary, tertiary effects that can have potentially to wars, military conflict, can have destabilized entire economies, all that kind of stuff, because of the migration pattern. Is it possible to model those kinds of things? So there are people who looked at this, and surprisingly, again, most people will move within their country for a lot of different reasons, but mainly language and political structure. You have your money, you have your relationships there. So it's not like we're gonna see these big moves from the Southern Mexico and Central America up to the US or from Africa up to the EU. That's not predominantly because of climate, that's because there's a lot of welfare opportunity. You can make your life much, much better, you can become much more productive if you move into a richer country. So yes, there are these issues. Again, you're asking me for sort of, what is it that could really sort of break down the world? I think the fundamental point is to recognize that it's not like we haven't dealt with huge challenges in the past, and we've dealt with them really well. So just one fun thing, I encourage everyone to just look that up on Wikipedia, the rising of Chicago. So in the 1850s, Chicago was a terribly dirty place, and they didn't have good sewers. And so they decided, and we can't really make up all my, they decided to raise Chicago one to two feet. And so they simply took one block at a time, they put like 50,000 jacks underneath a building, and they would just raise the building, and then they'd go on to the next building. They raised all of Chicago one to two feet. This is almost 200 years ago. Of course, we will be able to deal with these things. I'm not saying it'll be fun or that it'll be cheap. Of course, we would rather not have to deal with this. But we're a very inventive species, and so it's very unlikely that we'll not be able to- What about COVID pandemic just said, hold my beer. The response of human civilization to the COVID pandemic seems to have not, they didn't find the car jacks. Oh, yeah. Seems to have not been as effective as I would have hoped for as a human that believes in the basic competence of leadership and all that kind of stuff. It seems that given the COVID pandemic, luckily did not turn out to be a pandemic that would eradicate most of the human species, which is something you always have to consider and worry about, that I would have hoped we would have less economic impact and we would respond more effectively and in terms of policy, in terms of socially, medically, all that kind of stuff. So if the COVID pandemic brought the world to its knees, then what does a sea level rise? I think there's a different kind of thing that happened in the COVID. So politicians, a lot of politicians, I think made certainly suboptimal decisions, but I also find the fact that we actually managed to get a vaccine in a year. We should not be sort of unaware of the fact that, yes, we did a lot of stupid stuff and a lot of people were really, really annoyed, but fundamentally we fixed this. We could have done it better and prettier. I mean, I rode through the COVID pandemic in Southern Sweden. So, and yes, we can have that whole conversation. It was certainly much easier to live there than many other places. But the fundamental point was, we actually fixed it. So yes, we'll do, and we'll do that with climate. We'll make a lot of bad decisions and we'll waste a lot of money. Like we do with all other problems, but are we going to fix this? Yeah. Can you add onto that uncomfortable discussion of what's the worst thing that could possibly happen? I'm not worried about the sea level rise component. Certainly not nearly as much as the heat and disruption of agriculture patterns and water supplies. And a lot of it relates to, again, path dependency and history. Farmers are the heroes of humanity all through history because they're incredibly adaptable if you give them access to resources. In some cases, it's just crop insurance, which is really basically still impossible to get in big chunks of Africa to get you through those hard spots. But the heat issue is the one that's most, the most basic element related to global warming from CO2 buildup is hotter heat waves. There's still some lack of evidence of the intensification, but the duration and that's what really matters for heat is how many days seems to be very powerfully linked to global warming. And so how many people die as a result of that is important. So we're talking about, maybe you can also educate me, what's the average projection for the next 100 years of the temperature rise? Is it two degrees Celsius? Well, yeah, although this gets us into the modeling realm. You're assuming, you have to assume different emissions possibilities. You have to assume we still don't know the basic physics, like how many clouds form in a warming climate and how that relates to limiting warming. There are aspects of the warming, the fundamental warming question that are still deeply uncertain. But the debate is like two, three or four Celsius. It's in that range. But the thing is, all of those are bad for, this is an educational question. It doesn't seem like that much from a weather perspective if you just turn up the AC and so on in your own personal home. But it is, from a global perspective, a huge impact on agriculture. Well, yeah, and getting back to sea level and glaciers, the melting point of ice is a number. And so if you pass that number, things change, start to change. What became known about Antarctica and Greenland more is that it's ocean temperature, the seawater in and around and under these ice sheets, because it kind of gets under parts of Antarctica, is what's driving the dynamics that could lead to more abrupt change more than air temperature. Glaciers, these big ice sheets live or die based on how much snow falls and how much ice leaves every year. And I was up on the Greenland ice sheet in 2004 and written about it forever since then. It's the same amount of water that's in the Gulf of Mexico. As if God or some great force came down and flash flows the Gulf of Mexico and plunked it up on land, that's the ice sheet. It's a lot of water. That's 23 feet of sea level rise. But you were not gonna melt it all. And the pace at which that erosion begins and becomes sort of a runaway train is still not well understood. That changed from like a manageable level of sea level rise from these ice sheets to something that becomes truly unstoppable or that has these discontinuities where you get a lot more all of a sudden. To me, it's in the realm of what I've taken to calling known unknowables. Like don't count on another IPCC report magically, including science that says, aha, now we know it's gonna be five feet by 2100. Because learning, there's a lot of negative learning in science. This may be true in your body of science too. There's a guy named Jeremy Bassis, B-A-S-S-I-S, who wrote a paper about this West Antarctic, the idea that you could get this sudden cliff breakdown of these ice shelves around Antarctica leading to rapid sea level rise. He did more modeling and physics and it turns out that you end up with, it's a much more progressive and self-limiting phenomenon. But those papers don't get any attention in the media because they're not scary. They're not scary and they're sort of after the fact. Just this past year, there's been this cycle around collapse, the word collapse and Antarctic collapse. And Antarctic ice. It started actually several years ago with the idea that the West Antarctic ice sheet is particularly vulnerable. And some paper, everyone, the science community, like the birds, we were talking about flocks to it and some high profile papers are written. And then a deeper inquiry reveals, you know, it's more complicated than that. And we, the journalists, the media, pundits don't pay attention to that stuff. So, and actually, which is why I started to develop kind of a dictionary. I call it watch words, like words to, if you're out there, you're, you know, you're just a public person, you're a person and you wanna know what's really going on. You hear these words like collapse in the context of ice. What do you do with that? And so I've created conversations around these words. Geologists and ice scientists use the word collapse. They're talking about a centuries long process. They're not talking about the World Trade Center. And scientists would do well to be more careful with words like that. Unless your focus is what we were saying earlier, your idea that alarming people will spur them to act, then you use that word carelessly. Can I just follow up on the other point that you said, you know, two, three, four degrees, you know, that doesn't sound like much. I can just crank up the air conditioning. I think that sort of touches on a really, really important point that for most rich people, much of climate change is not really gonna be all that impactful. It still will have an impact, but fundamentally, if you're well off, you can mitigate a lot of these impacts. And there's a young scientist at Carnegie Mellon, Destiny Nock. She just was the lead author on a study what poor and prosperous households do in a heat wave when they have access to air conditioning. In a poor household, you wait, they found through science, they delay turning on the air conditioner four to seven degrees more of heating before they start to use the air conditioner. And that create adverse outcomes. If you have an asthmatic in the house, an old person, you're endangering their lives. And that's just a little tiny microscopic fractal example of this powerful real phenomenon that there's a divide in vulnerability, and it's not just based on where you live. This is families in like Pittsburgh. We're not talking about Botswana. And so that divide in capacity to deal with environmental stress is something you can really work on. And it gets hidden in all this talk of climate crisis. People think that. And that's one of the important parts is both to say, look, if seven billion people, sorry, eight billion people will now have all experienced this, even though for each one of them, it's manageable, it's still a big problem because it's eight billion people living through this. And the second- And how's the air conditioning eight billion people? Yes. And then it's the point of getting to realize it's very, very much about how do you help the world's poor. And that's very much about making it more affordable, basically getting them out of poverty. And remember, getting out of poverty doesn't just mean that they can now afford to air condition themselves. But they get better education, they get better opportunities, they get better lives in so many other ways. And then at the end of it, it's not just about making sure that we focus on this one problem, but it's recognizing that these families and have lots of different issues that they would like us to focus on climate and heat waves, just being one of them. So it's sort of taking progressive steps back and realizing, all right, okay, this is a problem. This is a problem, not the end of the world. And one tiny little last example, you mentioned Jakarta at the beginning. It's really valuable to look around the world at places that are sort of leading indicator places, whether it's sea level rise or heat. And you could do that. Jakarta is sinking like a foot a year, literally a foot a year. It's some insane number from withdrawing groundwater, from a gas withdrawal from, it's a delta, you know, it's sediment, it's built on sediment. I wrote a piece ages ago, the New York Times calling it Delta Blues, you know, all the musicians. And in Jakarta, so what are they doing? They're moving, they're moving the capital to another area. And so that says to me, there's a lot of plasticity too. It's a city that's going through this, that rate of sea level, of their relationship with the sea level through sinking is way faster than what's happening with global warming. So look there, look to those kinds of places and you can start to build. Tokyo had the same thing in the 1930s. They were also withdrawing lots of water way too fast. And so, you know, one of the obvious things is maybe you should just stop withdrawing water so fast. Yeah, and again, we seem to almost be intent on finding the most politically correct way to fix a problem or, you know, the thing that sort of gets the most clicks instead of the thing that actually works the best. So a lot of these things are really, you know, not rocket science solutions. We'll get there. Let me add one more on top of the pile of the worst case analysis. So what people talk about, which is hurricanes and earthquakes, is there a connection that's well understood between climate change and the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes and earthquakes? I've dug in on both a lot. The earthquake connection to climate change I'm not worried about compared to just the earthquake risk that we live with in many parts of the world already. The Himalayas, even with that earthquake in 2015 in Kathmandu, that whole range is overdue for major earthquakes. And what has happened in the last 50 years since they last had big earthquakes, huge development, big cities, a lot of informal construction, like the stuff I wrote about in Istanbul, where the family builds another layer and another, they put a floor on every time someone gets married and has kids, you put another floor in the house. And unfortunately that's, what was the term this Turkish engineer, rubble in waiting. Rubble in waiting. It's rubble in waiting. And we're looking at it, videotaping it, and there are people playing there. So I don't worry about the earthquake connection to climate change. The hurricanes I've written about for decades. And the most illuminating body of science that I've dug in on, literally, related to hurricanes is this field that's emerged, it gets a tiny bit of money compared to like climate modeling. It's called paleotempestology. It's like paleontology, you know. They look for evidence of past hurricanes along coasts that we care about. And they dig down into the lagoons behind like the barrier beaches along Florida or the Carolinas or in Puerto Rico. And what you have is a history book of past hurricanes. So there's mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, you know, accumulating over centuries. And then there's a layer of sand and seashells. And what that indicates is that there was a great storm that came across the beach, pushed a lot of sediment into the mud. And then there's mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud. And when you look at that work, I first wrote about this in 2001 in the Times, in a long story. And then I kept track of these intrepid scientists putting these core tubes down. And it shows you that we're in a landscape where big, bad hurricanes are not, they're the norm. But something that's rare and big is something that's extreme. When you think about the word extreme, right? It means it's at the end of the spectrum of what's possible. They're rare, rare in human timescales. Hurricane Michael, four years ago, devastated. Category five came ashore in the panhandle of Florida, leveled that much photographed town, Mexico Beach. And people, actually the Tallahassee National Weather Service said unprecedented hurricane. And the damage was unprecedented because there hadn't been a community there before. But the hurricane was not unprecedented at all. If you look at the history, and this is published research, just that no one bothers to, we have this blind spot for the longer timescale you need to examine if you're thinking about big, bad, big, bad things that are rare. And hurricanes are still rare. I was recently covering Fort Myers, the awful devastation. There's a young climate scientist at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jo Muller, who's done that paleotempestology work there, right in Fort Myers. She lives there. And she was away in London at a meeting of reinsurance companies that reinsure all the world's big, bad risks when this was happening. But she has done the work that shows, it's a thousand year record of past hurricanes, and it's super sobering when you consider how fast people have moved into Florida and built vulnerably in an area that hurricanes will hammer. That's part of the fundamental dynamics of the Gulf of Mexico, and the storms come off of Africa. It's a place where they will come. Now, the question of global warming impact is subtle. There are aspects of hurricanes that haven't changed. There's aspects like rainfall that seem pretty powerfully linked to global warming. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. So when you have a big disturbance, like the heat engine of a hurricane comes through it, you get more rain. There's rapid intensification. You know how quickly these storms jump from, like, you know, category one to five or four before they hit, is a new area of science. So I think it's still early days in knowing because no one was looking for that. There were no data back 300 years ago, you know, when these big, bad previous hurricanes came to know whether they were rapidly intensified or not. So I, as a journalist, I try to, you know, keep track of what we don't know, not to be too constrained and think about new science as being, you know, robust unless it's considering and actually actively stating we don't really know what's going on with the earlier hurricanes. And all of that is swamped ultimately, literally, by the vulnerability, building vulnerability in these areas. You know, if there's a marginal change in a storm and you've quadrupled or sextupled how much stuff and how many people are in the way, and if some of those people are poor and vulnerable or elderly and can't swim, you're creating a landscape of destruction. So a lot of the human suffering that has to do with storms is about where and how you build versus the frequency and the intensity of storms. Still, you didn't quite answer the question. You know, when I'm having a beer with people at a bar and they say, hey, why are you having a beer? We're all going to die because of climate change, usually what they bring up, and I'm just trying to add some levity. No, this is good. I mean, I love it. Usually what they bring up is, you know, the hurricanes and the most recent hurricane, saying like this, they're getting crazy, hurricanes all the time, they're getting more intense, more frequent, and so on. And is there, I'm sure there's incredible science going on trying to look at this. Is there, is it possible, is there evidence, and is it possible to have evidence that there's a connection between what we can call global warming and the increased frequency and intensity of storms? And is, okay, no, thank you. Of course, can I? Well, you added intensity. You know, it's, let me just get into this a tiny bit more. I mean, hurricanes, I grew up with them in Rhode Island in the New, you know, in my youth, and there was a very active period of hurricanes in New England in the 50s and 60s, 70s. And then in the North Atlantic, the North Atlantic generally was very, very active in the 50s when I was a kid. And the dynamics of them forming off of Africa and coming here, circling up the coast, was just prime time. Then there was like what Kerry Emanuel, who's the most experienced hurricane climate scientist around at MIT, he was in, he's in this story. He's in my 1988 article. He and colleagues have found, and others, that there's what they call a hurricane drought from like the 70s through about 1994 in the Atlantic, specifically the Atlantic basin. And there's been a lot of questions about that. People thought it was ocean circulation, something about the currents. There's these multi-decadal variabilities in the oceans, right? And then now it looks robustly, I can't find a climate scientist who disagrees that the thing that caused the drought was pollution, smog. And significantly in Europe, and you say, well, how does smog in Europe relate to hurricanes crossing the Atlantic and getting to the United States? It's because of the smog was changing the behavior of the Sahara Desert, which is just south of Europe. And the Sahara Desert kills hurricanes. Sand and dust coming off the Sahara, you can see this every year. When that's active, it stifles these big storms. At the point right in their nursery, they all form, there's this area for hurricanes off of West Africa, that's like the nursery zone. And so if you're stifling those hurricanes because of pollution in Europe before the Clean Air Act's kind of cleanups, and then that goes away, none of that has anything to do with global warming. It's another kind of forcing in the climate system, a local one that created a regional dynamic that created a quiet period when all these friends in the bar, maybe they were born in the 90s or whatever, they grew up in an area of like, hurricanes weren't a big deal. And now we have an end to that drought because we cleaned up the air pollution, the sooty kind of air pollution, sulfury. And anyone who says global warming, global warming without saying, well, that's in there too, is kind of missing that. And when you look globally, there's still, I think it was a 90 or so hurricanes a year, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons globally. That hasn't changed. The number of these tropical storms that reach that ferocity has not changed. It's just a fundamental dynamic of, and by the way, on the long time scale, the models still indicate as you warm the planet, and remember the Arctic warms quicker. This is something people probably understand. You're actually evening out the imbalance between the heat at the equator and the cold at the northern part of the hemisphere. And that calms the whole system down. So there could be fewer hurricanes later in the century because of global warming. And for me, that's a lot of information, but if I'm in a bar, I start with what do you care about? You care about safety, you care about security, you care about having everybody safe, not just you. You get in your car and you can evacuate. What about the old person or the poor family who can't do that? They're not gonna leave their house. What are we doing to limit vulnerability now? I circle back to that over and over again. I have like a pocket card. I have this graphic card I created about risk. And what we really care about is climate risk. Who's at risk? What's driving the risk? How do you reduce that? It's a card, you can almost pull it out in a bar. I should print them. You should do that. It's like risk is the hazard. Risk is the hazard. Like, you know, the hazard is a storm times exposure. How many people, how much stuff, factoring in vulnerability or resilience. And climate change is changing the hazard for some things, not for tornadoes, not for everything. Exposure is this expanding bullseye. This is another hashtag, expanding bullseye. Get out there and look for that. And you'll see, I'm pushing these two geographers who do this for every hazard, wildfire, earthquake, flood, coastal storm. And we're building an expanding bullseye in an area. And nature's throwing darts. Some of the darts are getting bigger because of global warming. Some of the darts, we don't know. What do you do? Like, what do you do? Well, you get out of the way, right? You don't wanna be on the dartboard. And that, it just simplifies the whole formula. To me, it's kind of a transformational potential to go into a bar. Maybe I should print these things. 100%. And I should go drink it with you more often. There should be coasters in bars. Because that was fascinating about smog. And I mean, it's just, it's nice to be reminded about how complicated and fascinating the weather system is. Let me try to answer the questions slightly quicker before your friends have drunk too much. Never enough. Or not enough. So if you look at the amount of the number of hurricanes, as Andy rightly pointed out, it doesn't look like it's changing. So we see more because we have now much better detection systems with satellites. But if you look since 1980, when we have good satellite coverage, for instance, last year was the year that had the lowest number of hurricanes in the world. And you're sort of like, that's odd because it's probably the year where I heard the most about hurricanes. And what that tells you is that just because you hear a lot about hurricanes doesn't actually mean that there is a lot of hurricanes. You can't just go that way. If you remember in the 1990s and 2000s, there was an enormous amount of talk about how violence, how crime was getting worse in the US, while all the objective indicators showed that it was going down. But there's sufficient amount of violence that you can fill every radio and TV show with a new crime. And so if you get more and more TV shows that talk about crime, actually most people end up thinking that there's more crime while the real number is going down. So the reality here is, yes, climate change will probably affect hurricanes in the sense that they'll be the same number or slightly fewer as Andy was mentioning, but they will likely be somewhat stronger. This seems to be the best outcome. We're not sure, but this seems to be the outcome. And it's important to remember, stronger is worse than fewer is better. So overall, climate will make the world a little bit worse. So that's the sort of bottom line. But, and that's the real issue here, all the other things, the fact that people are much more vulnerable is just vastly outweigh this, which is why if you look at the impact of hurricanes and impact of pretty much everything, it is typically going down. If you look, for instance, in percent of GDP, you have to look at percent of GDP because if you have twice as many houses, obviously, the same kind of impact will have twice the impact or if they're worth twice as much. If you do that in percent of GDP, and even the UN says that's how you should measure it, it's going down. Why is that? It's because we're becoming more resilient. Just simply, if you look at what happens with when hurricanes come in, we have much better prediction in the long run. That means you now know two or three days out that there's a big hurricane that's likely to come here. What does that mean? All the things that can be moved. So typically all buses, all trucks, everything that's not bolted down will leave this area. And so you'll get less damage from that. You will have more people knowing, oh, this is going to be a big one. They move to their relatives somewhere else. So you'll have fewer people being vulnerable. There's a lot- If people are responsive and aware. Yeah, there's a lot of way you can do this. So the outcome, and this is important for the whole conversation, the outcome is that we're actually becoming less vulnerable and that damages are becoming smaller, not bigger. But had there not been global warming, it would probably have gone down even faster. So we would have become even better off quicker had there been no global warming. But this is a crucial difference. And this is what I find really hard to communicate. Climate change is not this, oh my God, everything is going off the charts and we're all going to be doomed kind of thing. Climate change is a thing that means we're going to get better slightly slower. And that's a very, very different kind of attitude. It's one of the many problems rather than this is the end of all of us. And by the way, if you look at what's happening in the world, the data also show that in rich places and poor places, we still are moving into zones of hazard faster than climate is changing. Beth Tellman, who's at Columbia, and she moved to Arizona, she and colleagues at this outfit called Cloud to Street did an amazing study showing, this is a year or so ago I wrote about, showing again, we're moving into zones of hazard, which it applies to me, just what Bjorn was saying, that people wouldn't be doing that if they thought that was going to lead to devastation. And this is today, we're doing this now. And it's flood zones, wildfire zones. So that means there's these things to do. There's so much plasticity in the human behavior and how we build and where we build. You can make a big, big change in the outcomes. I mean, one of the things to remember is, people move to where hurricanes hit because when they're not there, it's a really beautiful place to be. Yeah, yeah. So in many ways, we make the trade-offs and say, look, I'm happy to have an ocean view and then maybe a hurricane's coming. A hurricane's going to hit. And of course, it becomes a lot easier than when the federal government is actually subsidizing your risk by saying, we'll insure you really cheaply. And that's one of the things that we should stop doing. Yeah, we should actually tell people, look, if you want to live where hurricanes hit, maybe you should be more careful. And by the way, what I was saying about past storms, the paleo-tempestology, past fires, it's the same thing. We've suppressed fire in the United States for 100 years through much of the West, through wanting to save the forests, the whole smokey the bear thing. Don't stop. When these are landscapes that evolved to burn and what happened in the last 100 years? A lot of people love the West. We love these environments. We love to live with the trees. The Boulder County area, the explosive development in zones of implicit hazard leads to big, bad outcomes when conditions align and climate change is worsening some of those conditions. And sometimes it's really counterintuitive. A wet season builds more grass. A dry season comes along, parches the grass. Then comes a human ignition. It's almost always human ignitions. And then you have this disaster where a thousand homes burn in Boulder County. And it's like, there's so many elements there that can be worked on that give me confidence that we can change these outcomes. You can, natural disasters are not natural. Disasters are designed, really, as some people say. Can I take a quick aside and ask about terminology of climate change and global warming? Because we use it interchangeably. It is an aside, but it's one that's worthy of taking. Do those carry different meanings? And has that meaning changed over the years? Between those two terms, are they really equivalent? Well, some people say there was this industry or propagandistic shift from, let's see, what was it, which came first? Oh, no, they're going to climate change now. It's a new thing, which is, it's ridiculous. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988 wasn't the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming. It was on climate change. So these terms have been there. They've been sort of evolving. When I wrote this cover story, it was the greenhouse effect. Yeah. So, and that's fallen out of favor. Greenhouse effect is not often talked about. Well, it's really, that's the physical effect that's holding in the heat. Well, but see, the- It's not a good- There's terms that mean stuff, and there's terms that are actually used in public discourse to designate what your, a whole umbrella of opinions you have. And I guess as somebody, me, who doesn't pay attention to this carefully, you have to use terms carefully. Sure. Because people will, a noob that rolls into the topic will often use terms to mean exactly what they mean, like literally, but they actually have political implications, all that kind of stuff. So I guess I'm asking, is there like, are you signaling something by using global warming versus climate change? Or people have calmed down in terms of the use of these? No, no, but the Guardian newspapers made it worse. Now they have their style book. Every newspaper has a, they prescribe, they don't want their reporters to use any of those terms anymore. They call it climate crisis, climate emergency. Oh no. Oh yeah. Or global heating. It's literally in their rule book. Global heating, that sounds more intense. Global heating. And that was the point. Well, I wrote about the global heating thing more than a decade ago. That's been around. But so they're doing the, what was the movie where the comedy, the rock and roll comedy, where he sets his- 11, yeah, yeah. His amplifier goes to 11. The idea that you turned up the rhetorical volume and that's going to change people is ridiculous. So for me, I use global warming and climate change interchangeably. And I think it's fair. There's some technical ways that you can differentiate them. But the reality is that global warming is probably a better way to describe a lot of it because this is really what is the main driver of what we worry about. Climate change seems a little diffuse, but it's convenient to, when you talk about climate all the time, that you can call both of them. But I think the climate crisis and the climate catastrophe is really sort of, this is the amping up of a catastrophe. And again, as we've talked about before, if it really were true, we should tell people. But if it's not true, and I think there's a lot of reasons why this is not a climate catastrophe, this is a problem, we're actually doing everyone a disservice because we end up making people so worried that they say, we got to fix this in 12 years, whatever the number is. And also that it makes it almost impossible to have a conversation of, well, maybe we should be focusing on vulnerability first. And a lot of people, and I think a lot of well-meaning and well-intentioned people feel that it's almost sacrilegious to say it's about vulnerability because you're taking away the guilt of climate change. You're taking away our focus on dealing with climate change. Whereas I think we would say, no, it's about stuff that actually works and doing that first. Well, and by making it about carbon dioxide, you're implicitly making it about fossil fuels, which implicitly gives you another great narrative, good guy, bad guy. It's these big companies. Where's the source of alarmism? So is it the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Like what, there's a chain here. Is there somebody to blame along the chain? Or is this some kind of weird complex system where everybody encourages each other? Can you point to one place? Is it the media? Is it the scientists? I think the UN Climate Panel is fundamentally a really good climate research group. You can have some quibbles with the way that they sort of summarize it in politically coordinated documents and stuff. But fundamentally, I think they do a good job of putting together all the research. This also means it's incredibly boring to read, which is why virtually nobody does. I'm sure you have, but I'm pretty sure a lot of climate journalists have never sort of looked past at least the summary for policy makers. So the UN Climate Panel, they do predictions as well? No, well, they pull together all the stuff that people have published in the period literature and then try to summarize it and basically tell you, so what's up and down with climate change? They do that in four large volumes, every four to five to six, seven years or something. And yes, I think it's the gold-plated version of what we know. There tends to be a lot of, well, this is what they say. Actually, they say so many different places with so many different people that it's not quite clear exactly what they're saying often. You can sort of find contradictions between one volume with one set of authors and another. But yeah, I think this is fundamentally the right way that we know about climate. But then it gets translated into, how do you know about this? When most people don't read these 4,000 pages, you read a news story in a newspaper. And that news story will be very heavily slanted towards, if you say, so sea levels could rise somewhere between one and three foot, what do you hear? Yeah, you obviously hear the three foot. Three foot is just more fun, more scary, more interesting than one foot. And it's that way with all of these. So what's the prediction for temperature rises? It's somewhere from not very scary to pretty damn scary. Pretty damn scary, and again, you hear the pretty damn scary all the time. And then there's obviously always researchers who are saying, well, but actually it could be a little more scary than that. And then there are likewise researchers who say, well, it's probably not gonna be as scary as that. And most of the journalists will interview- Do you really put the blame fundamentally on the journalist? I put it on the media setup. Look, media is simply trying to get clicks to sell newspapers. And if you were just gonna say, this is not a big issue, it just doesn't sell anything. But I think you're probably much better able to address this. Yeah, well, no, folks can Google for my name, Revkin, and the words front page thought in the newsroom every afternoon. Now we have a 24-7 news cycle, so it's different. But back in the day, the New York Times, when it was a flourishing print institution, every afternoon there was a front page meeting. And the big pooh-bah editors would go in there, and the desk editors come in with their pitches for the day. And my friend, Corrie Dean, who was the science editor for a chunk of my time, I remember having a conversation with her about some new study of, I think it was Greenland, the ice sheet. And I laid it out for her, and she said, where's the front page thought in that? So we're all set up to look for the- The scary bit. And the news environment has gotten so much worse than 10 or 20 years ago. At least you had filters and limited number of outlets, and there was some sense you could track what's good or bad. There's lots of problems with that system, too. But now you have an information buffet. So if you want to be alarmed, or you want to be, stay in the tribe of those who think this is utter bull, you can find your flow. And that has led, but getting back to this specific question, the 2018 IPCC report, which was a special report commissioned to learn about the difference between 1.5 degrees of warming and two, which sounds so weird and technocratic and complicated. That's the one that generated the whole meme about eight years left. 12 years. Till doomsday. Yeah, it was 2013. And that's the one, this was the idea that there's a point we're going to, if we don't cut emissions in half by whatever it was, 2050, we're doomed. That emerged from that specific report. And it wasn't something that was in the report. It was in the spin around the report. And that's what captivated Greta appropriately as a young person going, you know, and with her unique vantage point and stuff. And that report, I still need to dig in and write something deeper about what happened with that particular dynamics, created this recent burst of we're doomed rhetoric that I think you're focusing on. And it's all in the external interpretations, which journalism laps up because we're looking for the front page thought. But it's not just the journalists, it's the whole system, NGOs, environmental groups. If you're, if a developing country, well-meaning leaders in developing countries, because of the structure of this treaty that goes back to 1992, that's the Paris Agreement is part of, they're now really looking for a way to portray this as a CO2 problem, not a vulnerability. Well, there's a vulnerability aspect, but like in Pakistan, their climate minister, which they didn't even have a climate minister five years ago, is blaming everything that happened in Pakistan on carbon dioxide, warming the climate, creating this, when a lot of what was going on was also on the ground. And you can blame colonialism, Pakistan's history, all kinds of things. But under the treaty, you want it to be about CO2 because that puts the onus on rich countries. You're not paying us. Where's our money? And they're right. You know, in the context of what everyone agreed to, there was supposed to be $100 billion a year from rich countries to poor countries, starting in 2020, it didn't happen. It's like basically some money is flowing, but it's not really made up money. Yeah, and so that whole dynamic, they latch onto the climate science and they, you know, so they're there and they're very handy, quotable people. And you have a justice angle. You have bad guys and good guys, which fits all of these narrative threads that come together into this information storm we're still living with. And then of course, it's not Pakistan's fault either, right? I mean, it also actually, almost all leaders now say it's because of climate because then it's not, you know, we didn't do anything wrong. In Germany, for instance, when we had that flood last year, it's not impossible that climate had a part in that, but it's very, very clear that the main reason why so many people died in Germany and Belgium was because the alarm systems didn't work. And this was plainly the local leaders in Germany. Now, if I'm stuck here and basically have caused the death of 200 people, would I rather say, yeah, that's on me or would I say climate? Or happens all the time. Yeah, so it's just such an easy scapegoat. I don't wanna place it all on the journalists, I think, because there's a lot of, if I were to think about, what did you call it? Front page thought. There's a lot of really narratives that result in destruction of the human species. So nuclear war, pandemics, all that kind of stuff. It seems like climate is a sticky one. So the fact that it's sticky means there's other interests at play, like you guys are talking about, in terms of politics, all that kind of stuff. So it's not just the journalists. I feel like journalists will try anything for the front page, but it won't stick unless there is bigger interest at play for which these narratives are useful. So journalists will just throw stuff out there and see if it gets clicks. It's like a first spark, maybe. It's maybe a tiny catalyst of the initial steps, but it has to be picked up by the politicians, by interest groups and all that kind of stuff. Let me ask you, Bjorn, about the first part of the subtitle. How climate change panic costs us trillions. How does climate change panic cost us trillions? So we're basically deciding to make policies that'll have fairly little impact, even in 50 or 100 years, that literally cost trillions of dollars. So I'll give you two examples. So the European Union is trying to go to net zero. So our attempt to go halfway there by 2030 will cost about a trillion dollars a year. And yet the net impact will be almost unmeasurable by the end of the century. Why is that? That's because the EU and the rich countries is a fairly small part of the emissions that are gonna come out in the 21st century. Now, we used to be a big part of it. That's mainly because nobody else, it was just the US and Europe and a few others have put out CO2 in the 20th century. So we used to be big, but in the 21st century, we'll be a small bit player. And so we're basically spending a lot of money. And remember, a trillion dollars is a lot of money that could have been spent on a lot of things that could have made humanity better on something that will only make us tiny bit better. Now, it will do some good, but the reasonable estimate says, if you do a cost benefit analysis, and again, technically it's really, really complicated, but the basic idea is very, very simple. You just simply say, what are all the costs on one side and what are all the benefits? So the costs are mainly that we have to live with more expensive energy. You have to forego some opportunities. You have to have more complicated services, that kind of thing. The benefit is that you cut carbon emissions and that eventually means that you'll have less climate damage. You'll have lower temperature rises and so on. If you try to weigh up all of those, it's reasonable to assume that the EU policies will deliver for every dollar you spend, it'll deliver less than a dollar, probably about 30 cents back on the dollar, which is a really bad way to spend dollars because there's lots of other things out in the world where you could do multiple. So for instance, if you think about tuberculosis or education of small kids or nutrition for small kids and those kinds of things, every dollar you spend will do like 30 cents to a hundred dollars worth of good. So there are much, much better places where you could spend this money. Likewise, the US is thinking of going net zero by 2050. It's not actually going to happen, but it's sort of a thing that everybody talks about. Biden is talking a lot about it. If you look at the models that indicate how much will that cost, it's not implausible that this will cost somewhere between two and four trillion dollars per year by mid-century. And remember, if the US went carbon neutral today, by the end of the century, that would reduce temperatures by about 0.3 degree Fahrenheit. So you would just be able to measure it. It probably wouldn't in real life, but you'd just be able to measure it. Again, this is not saying that there's not some good coming out of it, but you're basically spending an enormous amount of money on fairly small benefits. So that's my main point. Yeah, this reminds me of what we were saying earlier about the things that models don't integrate and the things that cost benefit leave out because you really can't go there. One of the issues facing the world right now is the reality that we're reminded of that energy availability is a geopolitical destabilizer. If you have uneven access to energy and you have Vladimir Putin coming into office or something else happening that disrupts that system, you're vastly increasing poverty. This is playing out across the world. Fertilizer prices, fertilizer comes from gas, natural gas. If you can envision a world later in the century where we're no longer beholden on this material in the ground, at least fossil fuels, cobalt and lithium for batteries, that's pretty cool because you're taking away geopolitical instability. But that's not factored in, right? That's like way outside of what you'd factor in. But it does feel like to me, if I was gonna make the case for, you can choose your trillions, whatever that investing big isn't for these marginal things. It's for looking at the big picture, a world of abundant energy that doesn't come from a black rock or a gooey liquid that when you burn it creates. But isn't that what the proposals are, is investing in different kinds of energy, renewable energy? So what is- But I don't think most people are making that case. What's in the trillion and the T costs? What's incorporated? What are the big costs there? So the big cost is that you have slightly lower productivity gains. So basically again, and this is sort of the opposite of what we just talked about by climate change. We're gonna get richer and richer in the world. This is all models, also the UN. This is really the only way that you can get big climate change just because everybody gets a lot richer. So also the developing world gets a lot richer. So we're likely to get richer. But one of the things that drive wealth production is the fact that we have ample and cheap and available energy. If you make that slightly harder, which is what you do with climate legislation, because you're basically telling people you have to use a source of energy that you would rather not have used, because if people wanted to do it, we'd already have solved the problem. So you're basically telling me you've got to use this wind turbine instead of this natural gas plant or that kind of thing. It's not that you suddenly become poor or anything. It simply makes production slightly harder. What do you do when the wind is not blowing kind of thing? And of course, we have lots of ways to somewhat mitigate that, but it's a little more costly, a little more complicated, a little less convenient. And that means you grow a little less. That's the main problem with these policies, that it simply makes you somewhat less well off. So energy becomes more inefficient. Yes. So let me challenge you here. Try to steel man some critics. So you have critics. Yes. I would love you to take it seriously and sort of consider this criticism and try to steel man their case. There's a bunch. I could mention this list of criticisms from Bob Ward in London School of Economics. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but just on this point, in terms of one of the big costs being an energy, he criticizes your recent book in saying you consider the 143 billion in annual support for renewable energy, but ignore the 300 billion in fossil fuel subsidies. So a lot of the criticism has to do with, well, you're cherry picking the models, which the models are always cherry picking anyway. So, but you want to take those seriously. So he claims that you ignore, you're not fully modeling the costs, the trade off here, how expensive is the renewable energy and how expensive is the fossil fuel. Can you steel man his case? Sure. So two things. The first, the quote, it's absolutely true that the world spends a large chunk of money on fossil fuels and that's just stupid and we should stop doing it. We should also recognize that this is not rich countries. This is not the countries where we're talking about climate change. This is poor countries. This is Saudi Arabia. No, that's actually not a terribly poor country. It's China, it's Indonesia, it's Russia. It's places where you're basically paying off your population, just like that you subsidize bread. You make sure that they don't rebel by making cheap fuels available. That's dumb, but it's not like they, you know, they don't know what they're doing. They're mostly doing this for things that have nothing to do with climate. So I totally agree. We should get rid of it. It's hard to do. Indonesia is actually somewhat managed to get rid of it because remember, if you spend a lot of money on fossil fuel subsidies, you're basically subsidizing the rich because poor people don't have a car. It's the rich people who can now buy, you know, a very cheap gasoline. That's, you know, that's unjust as well. So it's dumb in so many different ways. I would never argue that you shouldn't do it. I've plenty of times said we should stop that, but we should also recognize these are mostly regimes that are not going to be taken over either by my argument or Bob Ward's or anyone else's. They're doing this for totally different reasons. Now, on the model side, there is virtually no model that don't show, economic model, that don't show this has a cost. And that's the fundamental point is that the, you know, this is sort of a basic point from economics. The system is already working most effectively because if it wasn't, you know, you could actually make money changing over. So if you want to have a change outside of what the system is already doing, it's because you're saying you have to do something that you'd rather not want to do, namely use an energy source that is less convenient or less cost effective and so on. And that will incur a cost. Now there's huge discussion about just exactly how much cost is that. So there's definitely a cost. Is the cost going to be one or 5 trillion? That's absolutely a discussion about where do you take your models from? I try to do, and again, this is not possible everywhere. I try to actually take the average of all of the economic models. So there's a group called the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, which tries to pull together all these different groups that do the modeling. So some models, a lot of this cost actually comes down to the fact that we don't quite know how much more fossil fuels you're going to need in the future. And so if your projections are you're not going to use that much, the cost of reducing it is going to be very small. If you think you're going to use a ton of extra fossil fuels and you have to reduce that, the cost is going to be bigger. So I think- That's just one of the variables. That's, oh yeah, yeah. And there's many, many, many more. I think the point here is to say that if you take the average of all the best modelists that are sort of aggregated, for instance, at the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, you're pretty secure ground. And so again, I would argue that Bob Ward, yes, I've had a lot of run-ins with Bob Ward and he has a very different set of views on things, but I just don't think he's right in saying that I'm cherry picking. Well, yes. And I mean, he also has similar criticism about the estimate of the EU cost of climate action based on the NOP 2013 model. But ultimately these criticisms have to do is like, what are the sources for the different models? And just very briefly, I mean, I'm laying it out very transparently where I get these estimates from in the book. I've really tried to document this. And yes, I mean, look, there's nobody who sort of has all the information and gets everything right in all of these areas. I think most of Bob Ward's argument is not a good faith effort to sort of improve on these estimates. He's right in saying some of these estimates, we only have a few estimates. And yeah, I'd like to have more of them. One thing I should mention is that there is very little interest in general and there's very little funding in finding out how much do our climate policies cost. Because that's just inconvenient to everyone in the whole game. Who wants to know that, for instance, would you want to fund something that says that the Inflation Reduction Act is not gonna be very effective? Of course you don't want to do that, right? So again, it's a little bit the flock of birds will look at something else. And what I think is that given that we're paying for it, and this is public money, we're deciding we're gonna spend money on it. We're gonna spend money here rather than there. Let's at least look at what are the best estimates out there. I would love to have more estimates. More estimates is always better. And just a quick comment on the good faith part. Me as a consumer looking for truth, it's hard to find who's good faith and not. So it's not only are you looking for sort of accurate information, you're also trying to infer about the communicator of that information. And it's very difficult. And you put me on the podcast, of course I'm gonna say I'm a trustworthy guy. But yeah. I mean, but we believe we're trustworthy too. But I've been reading for various reasons, but mostly because I've been traveling to Ukraine and thinking and just about the people's suffering through war. I've been reading a lot about World War II and Stalin and Hitler. And from the perspective of Hitler, he really believed he's doing good for the world. And he was communicating from his perspective in good faith. He started to believe, I think, early on his own propaganda. So even your understanding and perception of the world completely shifted. So it's very, very, very difficult to understand who to trust. And just because it's a consensus in a particular community, doesn't necessarily mean it's a source of trust. So it's, I mean, basically, I don't know how to operate in this world, except to have a humility and constantly questioning your assumptions. But not so much that you're completely out in the ocean, not knowing what is true and not. So it's this weird world. Because I ultimately, bigger than climate, my hope is to have institutions that can be trusted. And that's been very much under attack in as part of the climate debate, as part of the COVID debate, as part of all these discussions. And science, to me, is one of the sources of truth. And the fact that that's under question now is something that hurts me on many levels, deeply. You said something earlier, I took a note down here, and I can't find it, about cooperation. It was like collaborative cooperation or something like that? Sure. To me, there was a point, like in 2013, after just dealing with all, everything you've been grappling with, if you know you don't know how this is gonna work out, what do you work on? And one morning I made a list of words that kind of summarized, basically system properties that give you confidence in a system, trust. And transparency is one, just as you were saying earlier. Yeah. Connectivity is another, so everyone's connected. So on the subsidy issue, for example, there are young entrepreneurs in Nairobi who are selling, ingeniously, using Nairobi's digital currency, propane, the fuel that's in our backyard barbecue grills, which comes out of gas wells, but it's a separate fuel, in little increments that poor people can use instead of charcoal. And LPG subsidies are helping them get people off of charcoal, which is a horrific trade from the source through the warlords in Somalia and elsewhere who are getting the money to the pollution in houses. So having, being sure when we're having these big debates about who the World Bank is gonna give loans to, and drawing a simple line, no more fossil fuel subsidies, hurts a really good, valuable, small-scale but scalable way to have people not die from cooking smoke in their houses and take down forests. But that only is considered if they're in the conversation. So connectivity, full connectivity, digital access. So those entrepreneurs are in the mix of people, when you're thinking about subsidies, you're not just thinking about Big Bad Exxon, you're thinking about this little company in Nairobi, Pago LPG, I think is the name, and India, the same thing. So you can list those properties of systems. And the IPCC wasn't originally transparent when I started writing about it in 1988 and 1990. And now it's way more transparent. They have more public review. So it's even better than it was. It's like a really good example of a science process of assessing the science, providing periodic output to the world, and iteratively improving the model going forward because of critique, because of scrutiny, and finding better ways for that to interface with people so they have information they can use from that big thing. And the media are not doing a good job because of this front page thotism. But we can all, I work partially in academia, Columbia, on an initiative partially in communication innovation. Like how can we have an open landscape of access to information that matters? What can you do to foster better conversations so that words like collapse, aren't just thrown around like emblems? And so system properties give you confidence, I think. And then you don't have to like be flailing around for Bjorn or Tom Friedman or Catherine Hayhoe. You can always right now find your character to follow. But I think what would be better is if you actually develop some skills to just have a basic ability to know how to cut to the chase. Can I just follow up on that? Because one of the things that I try to do, and so my day job is actually something else I work with, I think called the Copenhagen Consensus, where we work with more than 300 of the world's top economists and we work with seven Nobel laureates in economics. And the point there is really to talk about, where can you spend a dollar and do the most good for the world? That's basically the thing that we try to do. And as I said, we try to do, and as you rightly point out, look, there are lots of different estimates of what can you do, for instance, on climate, what can you do on tuberculosis, what can you do for vulnerability in all kinds of different ways. And if these were all sort of, well, you can spend a dollar here and do 2.36, but you can spend a dollar here and do 2.34 over here, I would worry a lot, but that's not how the world works because we're terribly inefficient. So there are literally lots and lots of amazing things you can do out there. There's a lot of low hanging fruit. And there's a lot of not terribly great things that you can do. And unfortunately, one of the things I try to sort of battle is that, we get a lot of things right, that's why the world is a lot better than what it used to be. But the things that are sort of left over are often the boring things that happen to be incredibly effective and the exciting things that are often not that terribly effective. And so I think one way to look at this is basically to have people do cost benefit across a wide range of areas. And we try to get a lot of different economists to do this, and they come up with different numbers and different models and different results. But if you sort of consistently get that some things give you in tens or maybe even hundreds of dollars back per dollar, remember, this is not actually you getting rich, it's the world getting rich, it's that the world gets better worth $100 for every dollar you spend. And over here, you can spend a dollar and do somewhere between 30 cents and maybe a couple of dollars. You should probably be focused on the other opportunity first. And that's really the point that I try to make with climate. There are some smart things we can do and I hope we get to talk about them in climate. But there's also a lot of sort of the standard approaches to fixing climate, turns out to be very likely below $1 back in dollar and certainly not terribly high. Even if you're very optimistic, it'll be like two or three. Whereas many other things are just fantastically better investment. Like the thing I've been advocating, a modest proposal to eat the children of the poor in England. Was that the, in Jonathan Swift, modest proposal from a few centuries ago? So it's not just cost benefit, it's also in the context of what is moral and all that, the full complexity of it. You just hit on something really important. Having been on this beat for so long, and again, on the disaster beat as well, earthquakes. I can't tell you how many disaster science experts keep telling me, like everyone says, preparedness, invest for preparedness. A strict cost benefit analysis will always tell you a dollar invested in resilience before a community gets hit by whatever is worth 10, you'll always have to spend 10 after. And so it's fine to do the cost benefit stuff, but it's just the baseline. Then you have to look at the social science, which shows, or history, which shows you how few times we do it. It's like, we just don't do it. Therefore, you can bang that drum. Your work is valuable, but it's really constrained. Because show me in the world where that does happen, and then how you turn that success, which is basically something not happening, into the story. Just very briefly, we try to, so we do this for a lot of countries. So we did it for Haiti, for instance, funded by the Canadian Development Ministry, because they were basically saying, we spent a billion dollars in Haiti since the earthquake, and we really can't tell the difference. So they want it to find, I mean, they actually say that, right? And so they said, we want to find out what are the really smart things you can do in Haiti. And so we, together with lots of people in Haiti and all the business community and the political community and the religious community and labor community and everybody else, what are the smart things to do? And then we had economists evaluate it. And there are a lot of these things that everybody wanted that were not all that smart. There's actually a lot of smart things. And yes, the politicians didn't pick most of them. So our sense is, we try to give people, you're thinking about these 70 things, you should actually just think about these 20 things. Right. And then we consider ourselves incredibly lucky if they actually do one of them. So you wrote the book, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place. So can we just list some of the things? If you got $75 billion, how do you spend them? All right. So there's some incredibly good and very, very well-documented things that you could spend money on. So we have two big infectious diseases that almost nobody think about because we only think about COVID. But tuberculosis used to be the world's biggest infectious disease killer. It still kills about 1.5 million people every year. The reason why we don't really worry about it is because we fixed it 100 years ago. We know how to fix it. It's just basically getting medication to people. It's also about getting them to take it while when they're sort of been cured because you need to take it for four to six months and that's actually hard to do. So you also need to incentivize that in some kind of way. It turns out it's incredibly cheap to basically save almost all of the 1.5 million people. These are people that die in the prime of their lives. They're typically parents. So it also have a lot of knock-on effects. And basically we find for a couple billion dollars, you could save the vast number of these. Not all of them, but you could save the vast number of them. It will also improve outcomes in all kinds of other ways. Likewise with malaria, it has somewhat better PR. It's funny to think of malaria as PR and tuberculosis. They need to improve their PR department. Those mosquitoes are the good PR. By far the biggest infectious disease that got good PR, if you will, was HIV. And I'm not trying to compare it and say, oh, it's worse or better to have HIV than tuberculosis or anything. But I'm simply saying we are underfunding because it doesn't really get the public attention. We just, we don't really care. But spending money on that has, in terms of benefit, a much bigger impact. So every dollar you spend on TB will probably do about $43 worth of good. So it'll do an amazing amount of good, basically because it'll save lives. It'll make sure parents stay with their kids and be more productive in their communities. And it'll have a lot of knock-on effects. And it's incredibly cheap to do. Same thing with malaria. It's mostly mosquito nets that we need to get out. And you're saying, just to contrast with climate change, the dollar you spend on, no, not climate change, but decreasing emissions does not have, does not come close to the $43 benefit? No, nobody would ever argue that. So very, very enthusiastic climate advocates would probably say it'll do two or $3 worth of good for every dollar. So, you know, it's still worthwhile to do. That's what they would say. I would argue, and I think a lot of the evidence seems to side that way, that a lot of the things that we're doing deliver actually less than a dollar back. But it's certainly not nearly the same kind of place. But there's many, many other things. And, you know, just if you'll allow me. Yeah, please, I love this. But, yeah, there are lots of other things, for instance, e-procurement. So, you know, it's incredibly boring. So most developing countries, well, actually most governments, spend most of their money on procurement, is typically incredibly corrupt. So we did this project for Bangladesh, where- Can you explain procurement? Yes. So that's governments buying stuff. So a large part of the government revenue is spent on buying anything from, you know, Post-it notes to roads. And obviously, you know, roads are much, much more expensive. It's mostly infrastructure stuff, hugely corrupt. For instance, in Bangladesh, it would already have been decided among the ruling elite in that local area, who's going to get this. So they'll have this bidding competition where you have to hand in an envelope, a sealed envelope with your bid on it. But you put a goon outside the office. So you literally physically can't get in with your bid. Now, what we found, and this is, you know, I'm not claiming any sort of ownership to this. A lot of smart people have done this way before. We're just simply proving that it's a good idea. It turns out that if you put this on eBay, essentially, so if you do an e-procurement system where bidders can come in, suddenly it becomes harder to put up the goon. You can still do it, but it's harder to do it. It also means you get bids from all over Bangladesh. And in general, you'll get bids from all over. Actually, it turns out you get better quality. But most important is you get it much cheaper. So basically you can simply save money. So we did a scaled experiment in Bangladesh where we had about 4% go to be e-procurement and you could compare what it would have cost and then what it did cost. And the average reduction was, as I remember, it's 7%. And the finance minister loved it, you know, because that basically gives him a lot more money or, you know, you can buy more stuff at the same cost. Now it is a corruption. So it's basically you get rid of some kind of corruption and you get some corruption. There'll still be corruption, but less corruption. Ukraine has actually been big on this. They- Yeah, I've talked to them. I talked to the digital transformation minister. It's kind of incredible. I mean, this is before the war, but still working. It's like the entirety of the government is in an app. And that one of the big effects is the reduction of corruption. And not like from a, as politicians say, to say we've reduced, we've taken these actions. And through this, no, literally it's just much more difficult to be corrupt. The incentives aren't quite there and there's friction for corruption. Oh yeah, yeah. So basically you can spend a little bit of money and you can make a huge benefit. There's still about 70 countries that haven't gone e-procurement. So obviously they should do that. Food for small kids, another thing. So, you know, basically, you know, it's morally wrong that people are starving, but it also turns out that it's a really, really dumb thing not to get kids good food. Because if you get them good food, their brains develop more so that when they get into school, they learn more. And so when they come out in adult lives, they're much more productive. So we can actually make every kid in, especially in developing countries, much more productive by making sure they get good food. So getting good food is not cost-free. So it probably costs about a hundred dollars, both in, you need some directed advertisement. You need to make sure that you actually get some of the food out there, that you help the families. And you also make sure you don't just give it to everyone because then it becomes a lot more expensive. If you do that right, it costs about a hundred dollars per kid, but. Per kid or. Yeah. For two years. So it's for their first two years of life. And if you do that, you then get a benefit in that they become smarter and go longer to school and they actually learn more and become more productive of $4,500. Remember, this is far out into the future. So this is discounted. The benefit is actually much higher. And this is one of the things that we also have a conversation about in climate change, because all, and when you talk about climate change, cost and benefits, all the costs are now, and all the benefits are in the future. But it's just like that in education, all the costs are now, all the benefits are far out into the future. And if you try to do that right, and that's a whole other conversation we could have, then it turns out that for every dollar spent, you do $45 worth of good. Again, remember about a third of all kids that go to school right now, just don't learn pretty much anything. Yeah. And if we could make them more productive in the school system, we have another proposal on how to do that in the school system. But, you know, by just simply making sure that they're smarter when they get into school, we've been focusing so much on making the education system better, which is really hard, but it's actually really easy to make the kids smarter. Then when you say the education system is not working well, that's, we're talking about not the American education system, we're talking about globally. Yes, we're talking about globally. You know, so about a third of the teachers in developing countries have a hard time passing the tests of the things they have to teach their students, right? And, you know, all these students have lots of other issues. You know, there's, they need to do farm work. They need, yeah, they're constantly considering, should I just go out and start working instead? You know, there's constant disruption. There's a lot of teachers that don't show up in India. You know, you have this absurd situation where all the teachers are basically paid and hired for eternity for the rest of their lives. And so not surprisingly, a lot of them decide not to show up. So now they've hired assistant teachers that basically have taken over. So they're paying, you know, for, I think it's 7 million teachers that, I'm not saying they're not all not working, but a lot of them are not working as much as they should. And we now hired another 7 million teachers that will eventually, you know, stop working as well. They're working much better right now because they're, you know, they're not on permanent contracts, but eventually they'll get on permanent contracts and then you have the same problem again. There's lots of these issues. And, you know, it's just simply about saying, we can't fix all problems, but there are some problems that are incredibly easy to solve. And there are some that are incredibly hard to solve. Why don't we start with solving the easy and effective ones? And this of course bears on that whole conversation on climate change, because in some ways, you know, that's also Andy's point of saying, look, if you want to save people from the impacts of hurricanes, let's fix this simple, easy things about vulnerability first. Whereas we have somehow latched onto this, let's fix the hardest thing to do, which is to get everyone to stop using fossil fuels, which is basically what's driven the last 200 years of development. That's going to be, that's a tall order, no matter how you look at it. There's some really cool elements that you guys just brought up. You mentioned that word moral before, I wasn't, I latched onto it because it relates to these timescales that really are immeasurable. If you know it's going to take decades to confirm the benefit of some investment now, that implies you're doing the investment with some moral imperative, not because you can do a spreadsheet and come up with a number. And that process, letting go of the need for kind of a mechanistic cost-benefit approach, thinking about kids' education in poor countries, or several things we talked about, seems to be really important. And it's very hard for all of us to do. Philanthropists suck at it. I worked at National Geographic Society for a year, building some new programs when they got a big infusion of money. They have a whole department that's called M&E, it's measurement and evaluation, which is if you don't prove it, it goes away. I mentioned Spotify earlier, Spotify killing a climate podcast, because that podcast didn't measure out for their impact, what they want to do. And if we're always making the judgments based on strict cost-benefit, we're gonna miss larger realities. Another thing is, a really exciting example of what you're talking about, in terms of in Ukraine with the trust and lack of corruption and stuff, was in India. For all of his issues, Modi recognized that middle-class people in India cook on LPG, propane, or on piped gas, natural gas if they're in cities. Much cleaner, much healthier in so many ways. And actually, compared to chopping down trees and cooking on wood, it's actually better for the climate, even though it's a fossil fuel. So he and others, there was an American scientist, Kirk Smith, who worked this all out. They were getting a subsidy, they had that energy subsidy. You were talking about many poor countries subsidize energy just to stay in office, you know, to make something cheap that everyone wants. But they wanted to shift the subsidy away from the middle class, to the poor people who are cooking on firewood and dying young from pneumonia. And the critical factor was India's digital currency. India went to a digital economy, very poor families there now, if you have a phone, you basically, that's your bank. And you could make the case to the public that we're gonna be starting to shift your LPG, your propane subsidy to poor people. But we know they're poor. We know they're not just gonna be using it behind their restaurant, which was, you know, when it was a general subsidy, people were hoarding the LPG. And the system has worked. They've shifted a lot of capacity to cook on a clean blue flame that turns off and on in homes that previously, where the woman would spend hours collecting firewood, smokey fire, cooking, clean the pots and start all over again. But it's all built on trust, built on the digital economy and the same thing in Nairobi. So that excites me every day, you know, with all the doomism. I just hope people can literally take a breath, look for these examples that show the potential when you have a trustworthy system, when you have a clear path to making lives better. And then knowing, you know, that kid having electric light as opposed to a kerosene lamp, we don't know how much that's gonna improve his homework and lead to a better outcome. But we know from history that sometimes it does. Ban Ki-moon, former secretary general. So the most powerful story I ever heard from a UN secretary general was like 2012 when they were rolling out this sustainable energy for all initiative, which is not just climate, it was just like getting people energy they need to survive and thrive. He was growing up in post-war Korea. Everyone was poor, everything was broken, destroyed. Sadly, like so much of many parts of Ukraine. And he would do his homework by kerosene lamp. He said when he was studying for his finals, his mom would give him a candle because it was a brighter flame, you know, better grades maybe. And he became secretary general. It's a hell of a story. So which, for climate change, which policies work, which don't? Which are, when we look at this formula of $1 in, $45 out, for climate change, what dollar in, what policies for dollar in and dollar out are good? And which are not? Yeah. So we actually did a whole project back in 2009 when the whole world circus was coming to Copenhagen. And we were going to save the world there. We brought together about 50 climate economists and three Nobel laureates to look at where can you spend a dollar and do the most good for climate? And what they found was a lot of these things as we've been talking about before, that basically investing in the current sort of technology that we're trying very hard is at best a pretty dicey outcome. Much of it is probably less than a dollar back in the dollar. There's some investments on adaptation, for instance, that's pretty good, but it's sort of two, three dollars back in the dollar. Oh, what is adaptation? The obvious thing is that you build a dike for a sea level rise, or that you make people, you get some apps that people know that there's a hurricane coming or that, you know, so you can adapt- Adapt infrastructure, right? Yes. The physical and the digital infrastructure. The point is that people are really good at doing this already because they have a strong incentive to do it. So the extra thing that governments can do outside is somewhat good, but it's not amazing or anything. What we found by far the best investment in the long run was on investment in energy innovation. So, and I think this also sort of corresponds with what we would think in general. If we could innovate, so, you know, for instance, Bill Gates is arguing we should have fourth generation nuclear. So the next, more advanced than what we currently have in third generation nuclear, which would be industrial scale process. You'd just be building these, you know, modular nuclear power plants. They would be, instead of being these artwork that we design once for every different plant, which is one of the reasons why they're so expensive, they would just be mass produced and you'd have one, you know, they all be recognised in one go. So it'd be much cheaper. They would also be passively safe. So if all the power goes, they'll shut down rather than go boom. So that's another very good thing. And then they'll also be very hard to transform into nuclear weapons. So you can actually imagine them being out in a lot of different places where we'd perhaps be a little worried about having, you know, plutonium lying around. Now, this is all still being worked out, but imagine if that actually comes out. And again, remember the other three generations, they were, we were also told that it'll be incredibly safe and it'll be incredibly cheap and it didn't turn out that way. So let's wait, but it could be. And so the argument is invest in these ideas, for instance, fourth generation nuclear. And if fourth generation nuclear becomes cheaper than fossil fuels, we're done. Everyone will just switch, not just rich, well-meaning Americans or Europeans, but also the Chinese, the Indians, everybody in Africa, the rest is Indian subcontinent. That's how you fix these issues, right? So the idea here is to say, instead of thinking that we can sort of push people to do stuff they really don't want to do, which is basically saying, let's use more of the, you know, the solar and wind that you would otherwise have invested in, force people to buy an electric car by giving huge subsidies because otherwise they're clearly not all that interested in buying it and so on. Then get the innovation such that they become cheaper than fossil fuels and everyone will switch. This is how we've solved problems in the past, if you think, in Los Angeles in the 1950s was hugely polluted place, mostly because of cars. The sort of standard climate approach today would be to tell everyone in Los Angeles, I'm sorry, could you just walk instead? And of course that just doesn't work. That doesn't pay off. You never get, you know, a politician voted in office or at least staying in office if you make that kind of policy. What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter. You basically get those little gizmo and it cost a couple of hundred dollars and you put it on your tailpipe and then you can drive around basically almost not pollute. And that's how you fix the air pollution in Los Angeles. Basically, we've solved all problems in humanity, all big, difficult problems with innovation. We haven't solved it by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you be a little less comfortable and a little more cold and a little poor and believing that that can go on for decades. And while it possibly works in some pockets of the US and I think actually in large parts of Europe, at least it used to, the war in Ukraine is definitely sort of changing that whole perspective. But yeah, there's a willingness to say, we're gonna suffer a little, but then we'll fix this problem. But the point is, we're gonna be willing to suffer a little and so fix a tiny bit of the climate problem instead of actually focusing on innovation. So what we found was, if you spend a dollar on innovation, you will probably avoid about $11 of climate damage in the long run, which is a great investment. And the terrible thing is, we have not been doing this. So because everybody's focused on saying, we need this solution within the next 12 years, it means you're not thinking about the innovation. We're actually spending less money, not more money on innovation globally. So everyone's focusing on reducing carbon emission versus innovating on alternate energy. You're basically focusing on putting the existing solar panels or wind turbines, which are either just about inefficient or inefficient, instead of making the next generation, or it's more likely the 10th generation after that, that comes with lots of battery backup power, or fourth generation nuclear, or Craig Venter has this great idea. Craig Venter, the guy who cracked the human genome back in 2000, he has this idea of growing algae out on the ocean surface. These algae, they'd be genetically modified and they would basically soak up sunlight and CO2 and produce oil. Then we could basically just grow our own Saudi Arabia out on the ocean surface and we'd harvest it. We'd keep our entire fossil fuel economy, but it'd now be net zero, because we just soaked up the CO2 out there. $1 invested in the portfolio of different ideas. Gives $11 back. I first wrote about that in the New York Times. It was one of my actual page one stories. In 2006, it was declining R&D in energy at a time of global warming. The baseline is so low for this that it's a super bargain. During the energy crisis, the first energy crisis in the 70s before the current one, our annual spending in the United States on constant dollars on R&D, research and development for energy, was about $5 billion. Then it's just dribbled away since then. Recently now, there's a big burst of new money coming through these new bills that got passed. But what I was told over and over again by people in that arena is you can't just have these little bubbles of investment. You don't get young people away from thinking about Wall Street for jobs towards thinking about energy innovation if there isn't a future there. In the United States and Europe, the presumption was the way to that future was taxing carbon. You make that so punitive that you're basically evening the landscape for cleaner stuff that's more expensive. That has failed completely. There are little examples in Europe where it's working. What's happened now is, well, the United States, this big chunk of money, is designed to take us over a finish line that was started with not just innovation but with the production efficiency too. This is one thing I got wrong, I think, a little bit in my reporting. I was so fixated on the innovation part, just because I love science too, I saw this untapped possibility that others were saying, no, no, production efficiency, the more people are producing batteries, the cheaper they'll get. This is Elon Musk's path and many others. And it really is both. So when you were talking about purchasing power for governments, for example, that can stimulate production capacity for batteries or whatever the good thing is and take you down faster. And it's all about getting that margin of the new thing outcompeting the old. And it's not just innovation. It has so many parts of the pipeline that need to be nurtured. And the other thing is relative cost. The United States, when I was writing about this in 2006, our budget for DARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency for the Defense Department, just for science was 80 billion a year. For health, for medical frontier research on cancer and stuff, 40 billion. Energy was two or three. So we were taking this remotely seriously. So now that if we get that up, to me, there's like this level, you know, we're taking something seriously when it's like in the tens of billions for R&D. It's not that R&D will solve the problem, but it's a proxy for what we really care about. We care a shitload about defense. What's the defense budget in the United States now? Like 800 billion? It's some insane number. Who's counting when you're having fun? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so innovation is not just like for the better, you know, camera, the better solar panel, the better battery. Social innovation actually matters hugely. Like the guy in Nairobi I mentioned with a company doing micropayment gas to get people off charcoal. We need that as much as this. And I actually, I interviewed Bill Gates. We had spent an hour with him in Seattle in 2016 when he was rolling out his breakthrough energy thing. I got to spend, it was 45 minutes, me and Bill Gates, which was pretty fun. But I brought this up. I said, you know, because he's all about the new nuclear thing that will solve the world's problems. And I, yes, yes, yes, but we also- He brought up nuclear? Sorry to interrupt. Oh, he did, oh sure, yeah. So he's interested in one of the- Oh, he's investing heavily in nuclear, but he invests in everything, you know. He's got a big portfolio. But I brought up a guy I met in India who runs a little outfit called Celco that they do really interesting, cool village to village. They're like an energy analyst who'll come to your house here in the States and tell you how to weatherize your house, but they do it at the village scale. And in a village that has, where they're milling wheat, he'll put in a solar-powered wheat mill. And, you know, that's not gonna solve the world's problems, but it gives them a way to control their energy. They don't have to buy something to grind their wheat. And that needs just as much attention as the things I really like too, the cool technologies. And I thought I cornered Bill Gates. I was like, because he really does focus on these big wins, the big, you know, like nuclear that will make net zero completely doable. And I said, well, you know, what about nuclear, like New York City, where I was still living at the time, or near, and I said, it's got a million buildings. New York City has 1 million buildings. And in 2013, the Bloomberg government analyzed, they said, looking ahead to 2050, 75% of the buildings in New York City that will exist in 2050 already exist. Think about these brave new futures, right? Like we're just gonna come in, and have these shiny, cool passive house cities. So I put this to Bill, and I said, so how do you do that? How do you retrofit all those boilers, many of which were coal-fired like 20 years ago, to get a zero energy New York City? And I kind of thought I had him. And then he immediately, he kind of sat back and went, well, but if you have unlimited clean power coming into that city, it doesn't really matter. It's a pretty good Bill Gates impression. It was a good answer. I mean, it was a good answer. He said, oh yeah, it's a leaky bucket, but if you pour in zero carbon energy, then it doesn't matter. But I still think we have to figure out the other part too. That end, how do you innovate at the household level, at the village level? It's much more of a distributed problem, we used to think. The one big change I've had in my own thinking too is from top down to distributed. Everything about the climate problem, through the first three decades of my reporting, was that the IPCC will come out a new report, the framework convention, the treaty will get us on board, we'll all behave better. It has this top down, parent to child architecture. And everything I've learned has gone the other way. It's distributed capacity for improved lives. You know, kids getting through school, women not having to spend three hours collecting firewood. And if it means propane for that household in that context, that's a good thing. So stop with all your yammering about any oil, fossil fuel subsidies. And what's an America look like that has some climate safe energy future? Find your part in that. Don't get disempowered by the scale of it. There's like a thousand things to do. When you start to cut it into pieces. So it's very different. It's not a top down thing. No one's going to magically come in and... And that's where I think... So I agree that everyone should try to play their part and do whatever they can. But I also think, you know, just the sheer incentives, what we saw happening with shale gas is a great example. When shale gas becomes so cheap that you just stop using coal, then you don't really have to convince lots and lots of people. You know, coal is really bad. And it wasn't a label of climate. No, it wasn't a climate thing. It was an energy thing. It was totally. And the point is just, you know, the power of an innovation is that you almost don't see it anymore. It just happens. And I think that's really the only way we're going to fix these big problems. If you think about the nutrition problem back in the 60s, 70s, we worried a lot about India and other places. A solution is not worrying or the solution was not, you know, us eating a little bit less and sending it down to India, wherever the solution was, the green revolution, right? It was the fact that some scientists made ways to make every seed produce three times as much. So you could grow three times as much food on an acre. And that's what basically made it possible for India to go from a basket case to the world's leading rice exporter. And that's how you do these things. You solve these big problems through innovation. And again, I'm not saying that, you know, we're actually arguing our carbon tax is a smart thing to do. You know, that's what any economist would tell you to do. But it also turns out that it's partly, it's not going to solve most of the problem. And it's incredibly politically hard to do. So it may also just be the wrong sort of tree to bark up. Again, if you can do it, please do. But this is not the main thing that's going to solve climate. The main thing is that we get these innovations that basically make green energy so cheap, everyone will just want. We mentioned nuclear quite a few times. You know, there was a, for a long time, it seems to have shifted recently. Maybe you can clarify and educate me on this. But for the longest time, people thought that nuclear is almost unclean energy or dangerous energy or all that kind of stuff. When did that shift? What was the source of that alarmism? And maybe is that a case study of how alarmism can turn into a productive, constructive policy? Ha ha, productive from whose standpoint? Is it not? Is it not? Like nuclear? No, I was trying to, do you mean productive in terms of yay, we banned it? Or productive for those who want it? Oh, I see, I see what you mean, yes. I meant productive for human civilization. No, the alarmism over nuclear power dominated any alarmism over global warming, absolutely. Oh, really? Oh yeah, this in the United States, Three Mile Island, then you had Chernobyl there. And the traditional environmental movement still won't go there. They still, the big groups, NRDC, EDF, that whole alphabet soup of the big greens are reluctant to put forward the nuclear option because they know a lot of their aging donors basically grew up in the thinking about nuclear as the problem, not the solution. I lived for the last 30 years, I moved to Maine recently, but I lived in the Hudson Valley, 10 miles from the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which was built in the 60s, 70s, and had some problems. None of them were to the point of a meltdown or the threat of it, or even the theoretical possibility of one. I've been in, I was in it twice as a reporter, you know, looking down in the cooling pool. I can send you a fun video of bubbles in the cooling pool with the rods. And progressively they demonstrated how to handle waste in the United States. Now the waste is, because we haven't figured out how to move it across state lines, it's glassified, it's put into kind of containers that sit there at the plant. We just simply don't have a long-term solution. The Nevada politicians were successful in saying, not here, not here, not Yucca Mountain. But my wife, who I've been married to, well, I met 30 years ago, and she lives with me, she's an environmental educator. She was very happy when Cuomo shut it down, said, we're gonna shut it down three or four years ago, which just happened a year, it actually has shut down now. It's being mothballed, and I was like, that sucks. We need, it was- But she's happy. Yeah, and we still love each other. And she's an environmentalist, so that just speaks to a lot of environmentalists still see nuclear as bad. Oh, totally, oh yeah. You know, and you bring in the weapons proliferation issues. But it's a safety thing, it's a generational thing. I think young people are different, I hope. These small modular reactor designs, several of which, there's a couple of PhDs from MIT who did transatomic power. They're both like in their early 30s. We need so much more of them. And just briefly, the one thing I say about nuclear is, like with so many of these things, like subsidies, don't talk to me about yes, no, nuclear. Talk to me about what do you want to do with existing nuclear power plants? And what do you want to do about the possibility of new ones? Let's parse this out in chunks that we can have constructive conversations about. The idea of no nuclear drives me crazy, just like no fossil fuel subsidies is silly in the world we inhabit that has these pockets of no energy. So that's just my sustain what mantras. Start with some, divide and conquer. Conquer the dispute over by saying, let's at least get real. This power plant has been in the Hudson Valley for 30 years. It was the base load. It was base load. Base load is the real thing. And guess what has filled the gap since that power plant has turned off? Natural gas, natural gas. But, and you don't hear that from the environmental community that was so eager to turn off the Indian point. I think both the point of saying that people are saying, it's the end of the world, but no, I don't want a nuclear power plant. It just doesn't make sense. And Andy's absolutely right to talk about. So existing nuclear power plants, we already paid for them. We already have them. We already committed to decommissioning them eventually while they're running. They're pretty much the cheapest power you can possibly have on the planet because it costs almost nothing to run them. Day to day. So, you know, it's basically cheap or almost free CO2 base load power. There's just nothing there that is, that doesn't, you know, you should embrace. Now, new nuclear power plants turn out to be very expensive currently. So, you know, the one they built in Finland, some in the UK and France and several other places turn out to be incredibly expensive. So they're much more expensive than, you know, the costliest renewables you can imagine. So they're actually not a solution right now. And that's why we need the innovation. That's why we need the potentially fourth generation nuclear power. It's just simply, it's a bad deal. And that's why, you know, nuclear is never going to win on its third generation. Now it may never get there, you know, who knows, but it's certainly a possibility and we should be looking into it. And there are, you know, wonky realities that need to be dealt with. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States, their approval process is still locked and designed on this 50 year old model of big giant power plants. There's an intense discussion right now about evolving a new regulatory scheme for small modular ones because of all these implicit advantages they offer. And that, so it, along with the innovation, you need to have this get out of the way or you're never going to have the investment. So it really is an all of the above thing. And looking at these as systems problems, systems solutions is really important. Let me ask you about Alex Epstein. So he wrote, I'm not sure if you're familiar who he is, but he wrote a couple of books. It's just interesting to ask a question about fossil fuels because we're talking about reality. And he's somebody that doesn't just talk about the reality of fossil fuels, but he wrote a book, Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future, where he makes the case that as his subtitle says, global human flourishing requires oil, coal, and natural gas or more oil, coal, and natural gas, not less. What do you think about the argument he makes? So he pushes, we've had this kind of, speaking of the center of this balanced discussion of the reality of fossil fuels, but also investing a lot into renewable energy and then having the $1 to $11 return. He says, I'm not sure exactly how to frame it, but investing and maintaining investment to fossil fuels also has a positive return because of how efficient the energy is. I've read the first book, I've got his second one, I've been planning to have him on my webcast, my tiny webcast. What's the name of the webcast? Sustain What? Everything I do is sustain what? Because it's like, don't talk to me about sustainability, sustain what? For whom? How? Then we're talking, you know? Interrogatory approach to things. So I think the valuable part of what he has done is to remind people, particularly in the West or North, or whatever, the developed world, that everything we take for granted, from low fertilizer prices to air conditioning to everything else, exists because we had this bounty that we dug out of the ground or pumped out of the ground. It's a boon, it's been an amazing boon to society, period. So start there. Which means going forward, what we're talking about is a substitution. Or having your fossil fuels and eating it too, meaning getting rid of the carbon dioxide. If you focus on the carbon dioxide, which is the thing warming the planet, not the burning of the fuels, then that's another way forward that could sustain fossil fuels. As far as I can tell from at least the first book, he makes the moral case that fossil fuels are essentially a good overall. I don't think he adequately accounts for the need to stop global warming. Slowing global warming is a fundamental need in this century we're in. And that's just not factored into his math. Well, I think that's where... I've had a few offline conversations with him. I think he said, because I mentioned I'm talking to the two of you, he said that that's probably where he disagrees about the level of threat that global warming causes. Well, Steve Koonin is another one. He's a brilliant guy. He lived right close to me in the Hudson Valley. He was in the Obama administration energy department. It's K-O-O-N-I-N. He wrote a bestseller that came out recently on skepticism about climate. There are other smart people who somehow feel we can literally adapt our way forward without any constraint on the gases changing the climate. And I've spent enough time on this. I think I'm a pretty level-headed reporter when it comes to this issue. And I think having some sense that we can adapt our way into the world we're building through relentless climate change with no new normal, remember, more gas accumulating in the air every year. These are not static moments. That that's a good thing to do doesn't strike me as smart. I'd probably say that I think it's more sort of, at least the thing that I take away from Alex is the fact, as you point out, that we need to recognize that fossil fuels is basically the backbone of our society today. We get 80% of our energy from fossil fuels today. Still, as we did 50 years ago, 40 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people have no sense of this, right? So they have the idea, because you see so many wind turbines and solar panels and everybody's talking about it, that this is huge, big things. But the reality is, remember, only about a fifth of all energy use is electricity. The rest is in processes and heating, industrial processes and so on. So actually, solar and wind right now produces 1% of energy from wind and 0.8% from solar. This is not a huge thing. It's a fairly tiny bit. And growing explosively. Yes, it's absolutely growing. But actually, it's growing slower than what nuclear was growing in the 70s and 80s, which I thought was a fun point, not by a little amount, by like two or three times. So we're still talking about something which is somewhat boutique, at least. And when you then look out into the future, and I think this is the interesting part of it, when you look out into the future, if you look at the Biden administration's own estimate of what will happen by 2050, we will be at, if all countries do all the stuff that they promised and everything, we will be at 70% fossil fuels by 2050, globally. This is just, yes, it's a better world. I think it's good that we're now down to 70 instead of 80. But it is still a world that's fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels for almost everything that we really like about the world. And forgetting that, and I think we are doing that in the sense, as you also mentioned, that people say, no fossil fuels. And we're, in all development organizations, we're now telling the poor countries, you can't get any funding for anything that has to do with fossil fuels. We have literally reduced our investment in oil and gas by more than half since 2014. And much of this is because of climate concerns. This has real world consequences. This is why energy prices have gone up. It's not the only reason, COVID also, certainly the war in Ukraine, but this is an underlying systemic reason why fossil fuel costs will go up dramatically. Now, a lot of greens will sort of tend to say, well, that's great because we want fossil fuels to be expensive. We want people to be forced over to renewables. But that's very easy to say if you're rich. You know, it's the kind of thing that New Yorkers will say, you know, when you go to rich, well-meaning green New Yorkers and say, yes, gasoline should cost $20 a gallon. Well, you don't have a car. You just ride the Metro. It's very easy for you to say that. But lots of people, both in the rich world, but you know, in poor parts of the US, but all around the world, their lives have basically depended on fossil fuels. And so the idea that we're gonna get people off by making it so expensive that it becomes impossible for them to live good lives is almost morally reprehensible. And I think Alex has the right point there. We need to get people to realize we're not gonna get off fossil fuels anytime soon. So we need reasonably affordable fossil fuels for most of the world. And that's of course why we need to focus so much more on the innovation so that we can get to the point where we no longer need fossil fuels as soon as possible. But to say to everyone, look, we're gonna make fossil fuels expensive way before we have the solution is just terrible. And the rich, so much is on the rich countries of the world. I did a conversation recently with Johan Rockström, who's a famed sustainability scientist in Stockholm, actually Potsdam now. Right. And he's come up with the idea of planetary boundaries. There are lots of things he has said that I, as a journalist, I'm still looking into about that. Planetary boundaries? Yeah, that there are limits to what Earth can absorb and human, our use of water, phosphorus, our carbon dioxide loading in the atmosphere. There are these tipping, there are these boundaries if we cross them, we're in a hot zone, a danger zone. He's an interesting thinker. But on this point, last year at the Glasgow Climate Talks, he gave a very important talk about the equity thing here. He basically laid out a landscape saying the rich nations of the world need to greatly ramp up their reduction of emissions or what they're gonna pay poor countries to do to allow poor countries, some of which have fossil resources like in Africa, to have the carbon space to own whatever space or time is left to be able to develop their fossil fuels as a fundamental right. Because also they're starting from this little baseline. Ghana hasn't contributed squat to the global warming problem in terms of emissions. Ghana has natural gas. And right now, this month, environmental groups are outside the World Bank today, actually tonight, saying this was on their list of dirty projects. World Bank should stop financing Ghana's right to get gas out of the ground to develop its economy, get its people less poor, make them more productive, innovative parts of humanity. It's to me, that's really reprehensible. One of the other projects on their list as a World Bank kind of gotcha, like how dare they give money, was for a fertilizer factory in Bangladesh that is designed to get three times as much fertilizer from the same amount of natural gas as the old plants that are now dormant. This is in a time when we're facing high energy prices, high gas prices, high food prices, when food insecurity is spreading rapidly, when a country like Bangladesh has millions of rice farmers who need urea tablets to put in their rice fields. And to say that how dare they finance that because there's a fossil fuel involved is immoral. So yes, on that point from Alex. So this is 2022 poll. Polls. Just this is a bunch of different ways to look at the same basic effect. In the United States, Democrats, younger Americans identify dealing with climate change as a top priority. US adults, 42% say that dealing with climate change should be a top priority. 11% of Republicans, 65% of Democrats. And we could see this effect throughout. 46% of Americans say human activity contributes a great deal to climate change. By the way, this is a little bit different than what we're discussing. I was just looking through different polls. In the public, there seems to still be uncertainty about how much humans contribute to climate change. More than the scientific consensus. It would only be 24% that disagree with the UN Climate Panel. Three quarters would agree. Are you uncomfortable about the 29? No, 29 is actually, it's exactly right. I mean, the UN doesn't say it's all. Well, they say that could be the border case. But anyway, this is interesting. But to me, across all these polls, if you look, Republican versus Democrat. The Republican, say that 17% say it's a great deal. Democrats say 71% say it's a great deal. And you just see this complete division. I think you probably, with COVID pandemic, you can ask a lot of questions like this. Do masks work? Are they an effective method to slow transmission of a pandemic? You'll probably have the same kind of polls about Republicans and Democrats. And while the effectiveness of masks, to me, is a scientific question. But so there's different truths here, apparently. One is a scientific truth. One is a truth held by the scientific community, which seems to be also different than the scientific truth sometimes. And the other is the public perception that's polluted or affected by political affiliation. And then there's whatever is the narrative that's communicated by the media. They will also have a question, answer to the question of whether masks work or not. And they will also have an answer to the question about all these climate-related things. So that's a long way of asking the question of how is politics mixed into all of this? On the communication front, on the figuring out what the right policy is front, on the friction of humanity in the face of the right policies. Well, I've written a ton on this. After I had that conversion about the social science in 2006, I began digging in a lot more on how people hold beliefs and what they do as opposed to what they think. And questions about polling. And there's two things that come to me that make me not worry about the basic literacy, like is climate change X percent of whatever? I don't really care about that. And I'll explain why. For one thing, more science literacy, more basic literacy, like what is a greenhouse gas, all that stuff. Dan Kahane, K-A-H-A-N at Yale. He's actually at Yale Law School. The last decade, he did all this work on what he calls cultural cognition, which is, and he did studies that showed how what you believe emerges based on culture, based on your background, your red, blue, where you are in the country. And one of the really disturbing findings was that the people who have the most basic science literacy, like who know the most about greenhouse effect or whatever, they're at both ends of the spectrum of views on climate, dismissives and alarmed. Steve Koonin, as I mentioned, is a good example. He's a brilliant physicist. And he knows all the science, and he's completely at the end of skepticism. Will Happer, who was close to being Trump's science advisor, was even more out there. And he's on, they're both on the Jason Committee that advises the government on big strategic things. And people who are really alarmed about it also have the same belief. So as a journalist, I was thinking, do I just spend my time writing more explanatory stories that explain the science better? No. Do I dig in on this work to understand what brings people together? And then these same surveys, the same science shows you, if you don't make it about climate, among other things, this becomes, you don't have to worry about this anymore. If you Google for no red-blue divide climate revkin, you'll find a piece I did with some really good graphs. Essentially, it shows that in America, this is the Yale group again, their climate communication group. There's no red-blue divide on energy innovation, none. We need more climate energy, clean energy innovation. There wasn't even a divide country by state by state on whether CO2 should be regulated as a pollutant. But it's all like, what are the questions you ask? If you ask about innovation, if you ask about more incentives for renewable power, Oklahoma, Iowa, I did a piece when I was at ProPublica showing that the 17 states that were fighting Obama in court over his clean power plan were actually, the majority of them were actually meeting the targets that the clean power plan had because they're expanding wind power already. Not because of the climate, because it makes money sense and energy sense. So you don't think there's a political divide in this? There is on climate, if you call it climate. If you say it's a climate, do you believe in the climate crisis? You're not asking, what kind of energy future do you want in your town? And so if you ask that question, the polarization goes away. I guess what I'm asking, is there polarization on policy? No, well there, again, the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed last November, that was bipartisan. All of Congress said yes. And that's a trillion dollars, several hundred billion of which are for cleaner energy and resilience. Yeah, but that's... And that, but it's not a climate bill. And it wasn't a tax. It's incentives. So the word climate and similar words are just used as part of the signaling, like masks. Absolutely. It's not... As Dan Cahan's work, the guy at Yale, he really demonstrated powerfully abortion, gun rights, climate, and a more part level nuclear power, has enduring camps that for and against. Why do the camps form? Well, I think it's a, why do the camps form? Some of it's cultural cognition. It's how you grew up. It's what you fear. There's no common human frame for... Is it because of like folks, like certain individuals like Al Gore? Like he would make a film. He cares about this thing. He's a Democrat. Therefore, I hate this thing. Therefore, I don't like this thing, yeah. Oh, sure, yeah. You know, when people get attached to an issue, if that's what pops into your head when you hear climate, then... And it got politicized. It became emblematic and the whole vaccine thing. I mean, I'm not American, so I should stay a little bit out of this. But I think, it seems to me that a lot of the thing that people believe and talk about is really about what they worry that that will lead to in terms of policy down the line. So a little bit like, do masks work? I'm sort of imagining, I don't know whether this is true, but I think part of it is, if I say masks work, they're gonna force me to wear it for the next year. So it doesn't work because then I don't have to wear it kind of thing. That it's really, you're looking much further down the line. And certainly on climate, it seems to me that a lot of the people who say, it's not real, it's not because they don't know it's, of course it's real, but it's that they don't want you to then come and regulate it really heavily. Yeah. So it's because- Because they don't like top-down government. Yeah, and also because they don't want another tax. And there's lots of other... So it's really, it's not a science, it's not a straight science question. It really is a question of what do you want to do? And that's where I think, Andy, you're much, much more right in saying we should have that discussion. So what do you wanna do? Because that will be a much easier conversation to say, do you wanna do really smart, cheap stuff? Or do you wanna do pretty dumb, expensive stuff? When you put it that way, you can get most people on board. Of course, it's not as simple as that, I know. And it gets back to what you said earlier, that again, you talked about collaborative cooperation or whatever. There's a guy at Columbia, Peter Coleman, who runs this thing called the Difficult Conversations Laboratory. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And when I first heard about it, I was like, oh man, we need that. And his background's psychology and conflict resolution, mostly at the global scale related to atrocities that countries are trying to get over. And there's a science to how to hold a better conversation, as you either through experience or whatever know. If you hold a debate, like I wouldn't wanna be in a debate with Bjorn. We could find lots of things we disagree on. But that takes it back to the win-lose model, right? That's not how you make progress. And what I learned, absorbed from him, Peter Coleman, and because I was thinking like, we need room for agreement. I need to build a room for agreement. My blog and at the Times and then the stuff I do now, it's like, how can we talk and come to agreement? He says, no, no, you don't want agreement. You want cooperation. That allows you to hold onto your beliefs. But we can disagree on all these things, but let's cooperate on that one thing. And that's a really valuable distinction that's needed so much in this arena, because as I said earlier, you can parse it right down to the whole menu of things Joe Manchin wanted, transmission lines. Now we're gonna have big fights over transmission lines. We've got billions of dollars to spend expanding America's grid. And every community in America is gonna say, not here. So how do you foster a federal local dialogue that allows that to happen, if you wanna have any hope of a better grid? So that's like, those insights come from behavioral sciences that I think are completely undervalued in this area. Pilka loves to quote, I think it's Lippert, but- Oh, Walter Lippman. Lippman, yes, that democracy is not about everybody agreeing, but it's about different people disagreeing, but doing the same thing. Doing one thing together. Yes, I mean, agreeing that we're gonna do this thing. So you can disagree, but still do a thing. Possibly for very different reasons. Yeah, and there's an amazing video clip that shows this so powerfully. 2015 was the buildup to the Paris talks that led to the Paris Agreement, you know this. And a really talented journalist at CNN at the time, John Sutter, who's from Oklahoma originally, he saw another Yale study that was a county by county study of American attitudes on climate change. American attitudes on global warming. Like right down to the county level. And there's this little glowing data point in Woodward County, Oklahoma. Woodward County, Oklahoma was ground zero for climate skepticism, climate denial, whatever you wanna call it. And he thought, oh, I'm gonna go there. He went there just to meet people on the street, talk to them about energy and weather. And he did these little interviews. And there's this one with this guy who's like a middle-aged oil company employee, like an administrator, Thai kind of guy. And he starts out the interview, and the guy is saying, well, you know, God controls the environment. And if you're watching this, you're just going, okay, this is gonna be interesting. And the backstory, by the way, is the guy, he paid for the local playground to have dinosaurs and people, like toy dinosaurs and people on the playground because he believes in creation, 6,000-year creation. So that's the guy, right? And then he gets to energy, and the guy says, you know, the same guy who believes God controls the environment says, you know, we have half of our roof covered with solar panels, and we wanna get off the grid entirely. And when I show this to audiences, I say, just pause and think about that for a second. Why do you think that's happening? And it's because he's independent. He wants to have his own source of power. He's libertarian. He doesn't want the government telling him what to do. He would never vote for Hillary, I guarantee you. This is 2015. But he wanted to get off the grid entirely to be his own, to be himself. And so then I say, okay, so if you were going around the country with your climate crisis placard and you go to Woodward County, do you think that would be a productive way to go to that place and make your case? And the answer is pretty obvious, no. If you go in there and you listen, like listening is such an important property that we all forget, including journalists, you're much more apt to find a path to cooperation. You could talk to him about, I guarantee if I went there today, maybe I should go to talk about this new bill, $370 billion. How do we make that work at the local level? How do we answer that guy at the energy department, Jigar Shah? So how do we put this to work to get our buses off, to get electrified or transition our street lamps and stuff? You could have a good chat with him. If you go in there and say, I'm here to debate you to death on global warming, forget about it. Actually, let me ask you a question, given your roots as a journalist. Yeah. So yeah, talking to a guy you disagree with, that's one thing. What about talking to people that might be, society might consider bad, unethical, even evil. What's the role of a journalist in that context? So climate change is a large number of people that believe one thing, a large number of people that believe another thing. It turns out even with people that society deems as evil, there's a large number of people that support them. What's your role as a journalist to talk to them? Well, I have talked to really bad people. When I wrote about the murder of Chico Mendes, a Brazilian Amazon rainforest activist in 1989, I interviewed the killers. One was in jail, several of them were just ranchers who, they had their point of view. They were there in the Amazon rainforest to, the word in Brazil and Portuguese is limpar, to clean the land. They're the bandarantes, the pioneers of Brazil. They go into these frontiers and tame them like we had in our West. And they would bring that up too. They would say to me, well, you did this. They didn't say you murdered your Native Americans and stuff, but they could easily have said that too. And you deforested all your landscapes. So who are you to come down here to? But if I didn't talk to them, that would be not a way to do journalism. But when you talked to them, did you empathize with them or did you push back? That's the ultimate question. Like if you want to understand, like if you talk to Hitler in 1941, do you empathize with him or do you push back? Because most journalists would push because they're trying to signal to fellow journalists and to people back home that this, me, the journalist is on the right side. But if you actually want to understand the person, you should empathize. If you want to be the kind of person that actually understands in the full arc of history, you need to empathize. I find that journalists, a lot of times, perhaps they're protecting their job, their reputation, their sanity, are not willing to empathize. Yeah, well, I think this happened with Joe Manchin. I'm not doing any kind of equation here related to Hitler and Joe Manchin. Yes, yes. Or Trump, I mean Trump. I interviewed the guy, Will Hepper, I mentioned, who was a physicist at Princeton who thinks carbon dioxide is the greatest thing in the world and we should have more of it in the atmosphere. I profoundly disagree on that point. But I interviewed him for an hour and it was so interesting because he was trying to kind of rope-a-dope me into making it about CO2 and climate because he's a super smart physicist. And I kind of said, let's talk about some other things. And we started talking about education and science education. He went on for like 20 minutes about the vital importance of better science education for Americans. He drew on people he knew from Europe, Hungary, a bunch of Nobel Prize winners came from some town in Hungary, at least a couple. And he said that he learned their teachers. At any rate, he went at a long exposition on that. He then defended climate science. He said, we need more climate science. He says, I love this stuff. I love the ocean buoys. There are now thousands of them in the oceans charting clear pictures of ocean circulation and satellites. And he said something really important that many people discount, which is we need sustained investment in monitoring this planet. We neglect our systems. We neglect our systems that just tell us what's happening in the world. And that's happened over and over again. So if I had left it, if I had gone into the terrain of the fight over CO2, some journalist friends might say, oh, that was good. Mashup, you know, matchup. And, but I found these really profound and important things that I wanted the world to know about in the context of whether Trump was gonna have him as a science advisor. And so if I hadn't gone there, and a lot of people, if you look back, I got hammered for doing that from, even from friends. And then later, John Holdren, who had been Obama's science advisor for eight years, he said, I would rather have Will Happer as Trump's science advisor than no science advisor. In other words, there's a landscape of things that are important. He recognized that Happer is really smart about defense and all kinds of things too. So it's like, you do have to sort of screw up your, ideally screw up your courage, but then not necessarily get into the, it's like with the guy in Oklahoma. You know, if you go in looking for the differences, you'll find them, you can amplify them. You can leave with this paralyzed sense of nothing having happened that was useful. Or you can find these nuggets that are, everyone is a human being. I can't play the mind game of what I would have said, asked to Hitler, but. I play that mind game all the time, but that's for another conversation. Yeah, yeah. I had many in my family that have suffered under him. Nevertheless, he is a human being. Yeah. And I, you know, people sometimes caricature Hitler as saying like, that's when you mentioned Hitler, the conversation devolves. Oh right, you've got a certain point. It devolves, but I don't agree. I think sort of these extremes are useful thought experiments to understand, because if you're not willing to take your ideals to that extreme, then maybe your ideals need some rethinking from a journalistic perspective, all that kind of stuff. But a number of years ago, my wife and I were with our veterinarian who was German born, Dr. Bach, B-A-C-H. We were talking about the dog and stuff. And then we were talking about Trump. And he just mentioned in passing, he said, my mother voted for Hitler. Wow, that hit me like a brick. Yeah. Because it was so, at the very least, understanding how pathways that lead to people doing things like he did and ordered is essential. And the only way to understand that is to dig in and ask questions and get uncomfortable. That still makes my hair prickle when I think back to him saying, yeah, my mom voted for Hitler. That somehow makes it super real. Like, oh, yeah. Wow. There's elections, there's real people living their lives. Exactly, struggling with a broken economy and all kinds of stuff. Having their own little personal resentments and all that kind of stuff. Let me ask you about presidents, American presidents. Who had a positive or negative impact on climate change efforts in your view? Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. Or maybe you could say that they don't have much of an impact. So like they, in public discourse, presidents have a kind of maybe disproportional, like we imagine they have a huge amount of impact. How much impact do they actually have on climate policy? I don't know if you have comments on this. Well, there is a background decarbonization rate that's happened for 150 years. We moved from wood to charcoal to coal to oil and gas is cleaner, it's more hydrogen, less carbon. And I asked recently, I asked some really smart scientists who studied these long trajectories of energy. When you look at those curves, is there anything in that curve that says, oh, climate treaty, 1992? Oh, Paris. And it's really hard. Or China, I mean, when China came in with his huge growth in emissions, that created a bit of a recarbonization blip. But that was this huge growth in their economy. They pulled a bunch of people out of poverty. So yeah, no, presidents don't really change anything on timescales that we would measure, as meaning where you could parse it out. I think that's not to say that Obama's and the current focus on the stimulus that's happening, which includes a lot more money for research, et cetera, and innovation. I do think that will be beneficial in a very, very long run. But I have to say, when Obama stood up and took credit for reductions from moving from coal to gas because of fracking, that was actually Cheney who set that in motion. I was thinking, I would say Bush, not because I like him or anything, but he's the guy who inadvertently started fracking. Right? And it goes further back than that. It was a federal investment in fracking in the 60s and 70s. And then this one guy in Texas, right here in Texas, George Mischel, who cobbled together technology. And that led to this real dramatic change from gas to coal that mostly played out in the Obama years, but that really was stimulated by Cheney's early energy task force, 2001, when they were getting into office. And also Bush did something interesting in the whole wonky climate treaty process. It was under Bush that they started to focus on sectors. Let's do, they did a, oh, and also on big emitters. This isn't about 200 countries. It's about basically eight or 10 countries. Let's get them into a room and let's have these little subrooms on electrification, on mining, on whatever, and vice parsing it out. And Obama picked up the same model. They had different names for it because presidents always name something different than the last president. One was the major economies forum, and then it was the major emitters, something or other. And that getting away from the treaty dots and dashes toward just sectoral, big sectors that matter, you know, gas, electrification, makes a difference. But again, you couldn't ever measure. No. It's always the lag time would be important. And also I think one very under reported fact, so the UNEP, the Environment Program, they come out with what they call a gap report every year, where they estimate how much is the world doing compared to what should it or has it promised to do? Emissions. Yeah, and in 2019, so just before COVID hit, they actually did a survey of the 2010s. So the last big sort of report on how well are we doing? And their takeaway quote, and I'm not going to get this right, but it's pretty much what they said was, if you take the world as if we hadn't cared about climate change since 2005, we can't tell the difference between that world and the world that we're actually living in. So despite the fact that we've had 10 years of, you know, immense focus on climate and everybody talks about it and the Paris Agreement, which is perhaps the biggest global sort of agreement and what we're going to be doing, you can't actually tell. And that I think is incredibly important because what it tells you is all that we're doing is not even on the margin, it's sort of smaller than that. And I'm not sure what that is, but you know, we're basically dealing in, you know, so for instance, the UK loves to point out that they have dramatically reduced their carbon emissions and they have, they've really dramatically lowered their emissions, but mostly because they've de-industrialized. They basically said, look, we're just going to be bankers for all of you guys and then everybody else is going to produce our stuff, which of course is great for Britain, or I don't know if it's great for Britain, but we can't all do that. And so most of what we're trying to do right now is sort of, you know, this virtue signaling, it makes us feel good, it's sort of, yeah, on the margin or in the very tiny margin, but you know, what we basically, and that was Andy, your point with China, and the reason why we can't tell the difference, of course, is because China basically became the workshop for everyone. And so not only did they lift more than half a million people out of poverty, sorry, half a billion. Yes, half a billion people out of poverty, but they also, you know, basically took over most production. Most production in the world. And so of course, you know, much, many rich countries could decarbonize and, or at least reduce their carbon emissions and feel very virtuous about it. But fundamentally we haven't solved how does the world do this? And that's why I think we're also left with this sense of not only are we being told this is a unmitigated catastrophe, and that's why this is the only thing we should be focusing on, but also somehow, and we can all fix it. And I don't think we have any sense of how hard this is actually going to be. And that's of course why I would go back and say, look, the only way you're going to fix this is through innovation. Because if you have something that's cheaper than fossil fuels, you've fixed it. If you have something that's harder and, you know, costlier and more inconvenient, no, you're just not going to make it. And getting more time by cutting vulnerability. Yes. The pockets of vulnerability on the planet are huge and they're identifiable and you know what to do. What are the biggest pockets of vulnerability? Well, they're like- Infrastructure of cities? No, it's where people are living and what their capacities are. So moving people, how do you decrease the vulnerability in the world? What are the big ones? Affordable housing. One reason so many people moved out of San Francisco and adjacent cities into the countryside and then had their houses burned down is because they can't afford to live in the city anymore. So affordable housing in cities can limit exposure to, in that case, wildfire. Durban, South Africa, that terrible devastating flood they had this year, past year, who was washed away. Poor people who don't have any place to live. So they settle on in a floodplain along a stream bed that's livable, you know, when it's not raining buckets. And those are vulnerabilities that are there because of dislocation, housing. Tacloban, this typhoon that hit the Philippines terribly ahead of the Paris talks, or was it the previous one? No, it was in 2013, I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thousands died. Most of the stories that were written were framed around climate change because the Pope made a deal about it. It was just before the climate talks of that year. And what happened, partially why there were so many losses, was Tacloban City had quadrupled in population in the last 30 years. And most of the people coming into the city were poor, looking for work, and settling in marginal places where a storm surge killed them. So those are things we, whatever the we is in the different places, really can work on. And that gives more flex for sure in thinking about this long trajectory that seems so immovable and so hard, the decarbonization part. There's no excuse. I wrote a piece, I guess a year ago. I said there's a vulnerability emergency hiding behind this climate emergency label. That's really what needs work. And also on the Tacloban, I mean, the hurricane that hit in 2013, there was almost a similar hurricane in the early part of 1900s that hit pretty much the same strength and it eradicated half the city. It killed half the city. And so what's happened since then is people just got much, much richer from early 1900 to 2013. We've just moved a lot of people out of poverty. Now it's a lot bigger. And that went back to this. And yeah. Bangladesh is even a bigger example of that. In the 1970s, they had horrible cyclones, one of which was the Beatles, George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh. Great album that I still have somewhere. Hundreds of thousands. He did a concert, a fundraising concert, the Concert for Bangladesh after this terrible cyclone tragedy hit Bangladesh. And I think there were several hundred thousand who were killed. And a couple like that around that time. Bangladesh has been hit by comparable storms recently. And it's terrible. Every death is terrible, but it's like 123 deaths. And it's not just because of wealth. It's because people know what to do. It's because there's cell phones. It's because they have elevated platforms in many communities in the floodplains there that you know to get to. So they went from hundreds of thousands of deaths in a cyclone to 123. We were working with Bangladesh. It's no longer the problem of people dying. It's the fact that their cattle die. So they want cattle places where you could herd your cow. This is their capital. It's not to make fun of it, but it's an amazing progress that you've stopped worrying about your parents dying and you worry about your cows dying. And when I was talking about social innovation, the other hour, there's a model emerging in Bangladesh for farmers to move from raising chickens, poultry, to ducks. And it's working. And ducks actually fetch a higher price at the market. And guess what? When you get flooded, they survive. You can still have your income and your future. Let me ask you to give advice. Put on your sage wise hat and give advice to young people that are looking into this world and see how they can do the most good. We talked about what is the $1 that can do the most positive improvement to lead to $40, $45 and so on. What advice would you give to young people in high school and college, how to have a positive impact on the world, how to have a career they can be proud of? Maybe ask Bjorn first and how to have a life they can be proud of. So I think, and this really pretty well reflects the whole conversation we've had. We've got to sort of take the catastrophism out of the climate conversation. And this really matters because a lot of kids literally think that the world is going to end pretty soon. And that obviously makes any other kind of plan meaningless. So first of all, look, you're not going to die. You know, that poster that people, that a lot of kids have, you're going to die from old age, but I'm going to die from climate. No, you're not. You're going to die from old age and you're going to die much older. Very likely, right? So the reality is the world has improved dramatically and it's very likely to improve even more. So the baseline is good. This is just, you know, the facts. Then there's still lots and lots of problems. And what you should do as a young person is stop being, you know, paralyzed by fear and then realize what you can do is basically help humanity become even smarter. There's a lot of different places you can do. I mean, the obvious thing when you're talking about climate is, what if you could become the guy that, you know, develops fourth generation nuclear? It's very likely it's something that neither of us know anything about right now, but develop the, you know, the energy source that will basically power the rest of humanity. How cool would that be? That's one of the many things you could do. But again, also remember there are lots and lots of other things that need solutions. So what about you become the guy that makes the, or the girl that makes the social innovation in Tanzania or in Kenya, sorry, in Kenya? Or what about if you become the person who finds a way that is a much cheaper, more effective way to tackle tuberculosis? Right now, it needs four to six months of medication. That one of the big problems is once you pop the pills and you're fresh, it's really hard to get people to do it for the other five and a half months, right? And you need that, otherwise you actually have a big risk of getting a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, which is a real scourge on the earth. So, you know, what if you develop that? So the truth is not only can your life be much better when you sort of ditch that, that doomerism, but it also becomes much more possible for you to be a positive part of making sure that you do that progress. Why has the world improved so much? Because our parents and great-grandparents, they made all this work, you know, this was all their innovations and a lot of hard work. And I'm incredibly grateful that they've done it, but now it's kind of time to pay back. So, you know, you got to do this for our, you know, our grandkids, you got to make those innovations, make those policy opportunities, they'll make the world even an even better place. Totally. And to me, there's never been a better day or a better time to be effective as a young person because the internet, connectedness, you can brainstorm with someone in another country just as easily as you can brainstorm with someone down the block when we were kids. As I said earlier, with my pen pal, with letters taking weeks to come. And so the key properties, ideally, that young people would do well to cultivate are, well, certainly adaptability, because change is changing, not just, you know, the rate of change is changing. These layers of change are all piling up on each other. Having an ability to understand the information environment is a fundamental need now that wasn't a need when we were growing up. We read a few newspapers, my dad would turn on the nightly news and Walter Cronkite would say, that's the way it is. He'd say, that's the way it is. And that's not the way the media environment is now. So courses in media literacy should be kind of fundamental parts of curriculum from like kindergarten on, or parents can do the same thing. There's a woman at URI, University of Rhode Island, Renee Hobbs, who teaches a course in propaganda literacy. And she said, you know, the history of the word is not bad. Propaganda could be good. It's pro, it's for the church. She did a wonderful chat with me. She laid this out. But understanding when it is propaganda, like the tobacco, you know, there is hopefully a difference between that and that, right, cigarette ads and journalistically acquired information. So Akita, everything Bjorn was talking about too, is just understanding how to not be sucked into this information environment and spit out as a paralyzed, doomist entity. Because once you have an ability to step back, then you can use Twitter or whatever you're on to find people who might have a skill set you don't have that is something you need to do to incorporate, to harness, to do the thing you want to do in the world. Finding your way to make the world better. And it can have nothing to do with climate, but if it makes a few more people's lives better, then overall you're leading toward better capacity for all this stuff. So that, and then the climate problem, the prismatic giant nature of it is what makes it so daunting, but it's also what gives everybody an opportunity. Like there's something for artists, scientists, poets, everybody needs to get in the game. I just spent some time with Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote that book, Ministry of the Future, which is this sprawling novel about a worst case outcome where everyone in India is dying. And so fiction can help experiment, different kinds of fiction, different kinds of arts can help us sort of experiment with what the future might look like in different ways. And just get started. And the other thing, unfortunately, that's needed, I think I first said this in 2008, when someone asked me something about climate, I said, weirdly, you have to sort of have a sense of urgency, but a sense of patience at the same time. Like, just roll those words around in your mind. Like, what does that mean? Urgent and patient? How could that possibly be? But actually it really is the reality. There is an urgency with this building gas that's cumulative, that doesn't go away like smoke when it rains. And every year that happens, it's adding to risk. And you can kind of wake up completely freaked out urgent, but when you realize energy transitions take time, then you have to sort of find patience or whatever your word is for that. Yeah, I think you have to oscillate back and forth throughout the day, having a sense of urgency when you're trying to actually be productive and have patience so you can have a calm head about you in terms of putting everything into perspective. And like you said, with information, that is interesting, especially in the scientific community. I think you've spoken about this before. You know, that there is some responsibility or at least an opportunity for scientists to not just do science, but to understand the dynamics of the different mediums in which information is exchanged. So it could be Twitter for a few years, then it could be TikTok, then it could be, you know, I'm a huge believer in the power of YouTube over the next several years, perhaps decades. I mean, it's a very interesting medium for education and communication and for debate. And that's grassroots, that's from like the bottom up, you know, that every scientist is able to communicate their work. And I personally believe I have the responsibility to communicate their work. If anything, the internet made me realize that science is not just about doing the science, it's about communicating it. Like this is not some kind of virtue signaling on my part. No, no, no. No, like I feel like if the tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, it really didn't fall. Like that's not, there should be a culture of, well, at MIT, there's a place called the Media Lab. Yes, sir. Where they really emphasize, like you always be able to demo something to show off your work. They really emphasize showing off their work. And I think that was in some part criticized in the bigger MIT culture that, you know, that's like being focusing too much on the PR versus doing the science. But I really disagree with that. Of course, there's a balance to strike. You don't want to be all smoke and mirrors, but there really is a lot of value to communication and not just sort of some broad, you almost don't wanna teach a course on communication because by the time you teach the course, it's already too late. It's always being on top of how, what is the language? What is the culture and the etiquette? What is the technology of communication that is effective? I actually had a big conversation about that in my university because I think, and this is perhaps especially true for social sciences, but I think it's probably true for everyone. Just simply communicating what it is you've done in research makes it possible for you to sort of get an outsider's perspective and see, did I just go into an incredibly deep hole that just three other people really care about in the world? Or is this actually something that matters to the world? And being able to explain what it is that you've done to everyone else makes, my sort of sense is if you can't say it in a couple of minutes, it's probably, it's not necessarily true, but it's probably because it wasn't all that important. There was a hashtag generated maybe seven years ago by a Caltech PhD candidate woman, and it was fantastic. The hashtag was I am a scientist because, and she posted it with a picture of herself with her answer. And that, when I talk to scientists or basically anybody about communicating, I say don't start with I am a phytologist and I use a spectrophotometer to do X. Start with I am a scientist because the world is endlessly interesting and I just found these salamanders which are gonna vanish if we don't stop this fungus from coming to the United States. Utterly interesting. And then you've got people hooked. But it's the motivation part because everyone grew up as a kid, and a kid is basically like a scientist. Wow, what the hell is this? How does this work? So you can connect with people that way. But this other issue you broached is really important. And what I love about MIT particularly, I spent a lot of time there over the decades, not just talking to the hurricane guy, Amy Smith, who has the development lab, is the development lab in the basement there somewhere? Most of MIT looks like it's the basement. Yeah, it's sort of like the hurricane digs here. But it's the usability function is part of a lot of that goes on there. It's engineering and science. And it reminds me, in 1997, these two very different scientists, Dan Kammen at Berkeley and Michael Dove at Yale, wrote a manifesto. It was the virtues of mundane science. That's what they called it. It was a prod to the scientific community. Actually, it's about useful, utility. Because the whole arena is set up to advance your career through revealing new knowledge that will get you tenure someday. And actually doing useful science is disincentivized. Having a conversation, especially if it involves more than one discipline. Because as a young scientist, there were some postdocs at Columbia who wrote this other manifesto paper saying, here are the things universities need to do to foster the collaborative capacity we need to have sustainable development. And it was like four or five things that universities don't do. Give you time to become fluent. For a physicist to talk to an anthropologist and understand how anthropology works with sociology takes time. And then building a relationship with a community that has a problem that you want to fix takes time. And so you do these quick turnaround papers that get you toward your little micro career goal, but they're not actually getting you what you want in the world. Those are really hard problems going forward. But starting with that idea of usability, what can I do with my skill sets? You know, a lot of great physicists I know are dug in on string theory and stuff. Someone has to dig in on that too, but I'd like to have them pull a little bit of their brainpower away to think about some of the practical things Bjorn thinks about too. So the two of you have been thinking about some of the biggest questions, which is life here on Earth, the history of life here, the future of life here on Earth, of Earth itself, and how to allocate our resources to alleviate suffering in the world. So let me ask the big question. What do you think is the why of it all? What's the meaning of it? What's the meaning of our life here on Earth? You waited till the last moment to ask us that question. Yes, in case there's... Yeah, in case I can trick you into finding an answer. Well, so I mean, again, I'm just gonna take a stab in this because I think in some ways it's the same thing that you were talking about before. It's not about getting everybody sort of in the same track and all agree on something, but it's about getting a lot of people with very different goals and targets and ways of thinking about the world to go in the same direction. So for me, the goal of life, certainly my goal, but I think for most people, is to make the world a better place. It sounds incredibly pedestrian because it's become so overused, but that really and literally is the point. Your point of your life is to, when one of your friends is sad, to make sure that they sort of get out of that and find out why they're sad and maybe move them a little bit in the right direction. And all the things that we've talked about, stop people from dying from tuberculosis and live longer lives and fix climate change, but fix it in such a way that we actually use resources smartest because there are lots of problems. So let's make sure we deal with them adequately. This is very unsexy in some sense, but I think it's also very basic and really what matters. Well, biologically, evolution has demanded that life is about finding sources of energy and perpetuating yourself, right? So that's the baseline. And that's led us into a bit of a bollocks because we have this easy energy that's come from the ground so far. But our brilliance has given this larger awareness of everything about the planet is transitory. And so how do you work with that productively is really an important question. I could just sort of try to be as rich as possible and use as much energy as possible and have other people, I mean, Alex Epstein, I think, again, this is one of the constraints on my support for what he says is he's just talking about growth and progress in that sense. But there are consequences and there are long-term trajectories here that have to be taken into account too. So what do you wake up to do? To me, it's finding your part of this. And as Bjorn said, finding a way to pursue and expand betterment. When I taught, I was at Pace University for six years. And one of the courses I launched there was called Blogging a Better Planet. And it was for grad students mostly in communication. It wasn't an environment, it wasn't like Better Planet, like save the climate. But my task for the students was to blog about something they're passionate about, first of all. Because you can't do this, just like you can't do your conversations if you don't wake up in the morning wanting to do what you're doing, right? If you're doing this, I used to call myself a selfish blogger because I was learning every day. I still am. I love this. My wife laughs, she thinks I work too much. But I'm always asking those questions, like sustain what? So my charge to the students was, harness a passion, build a blog, either alone or with others, that notches the world a little bit towards some better outcome. And so there was a musician who did a thing on music, musicians who use their art for their work for making the world better. Some of it was like music therapy, bands contributing money, whatever. Another one did, her blog was on comfort food. All around the world. And I thought it was my favorite. It was a video, I think it should be viral actually. It was like looking at the world, every different cultures. She was in Queens, so every culture, every cuisine is there in Queens, 200 countries. But she would go and talk to people's moms and have them cook the food of that country that's their comfort food. I mean, I just love this because we all need to eat. And you're getting this expanded sense of what comfort is by thinking about what other cultures are doing. By thinking about what other cultures choose. And that felt like a great course because it was not directive. It was just, it gave them this potential to go forward. You know, I'd love to think they've all gone on to become a superstar, whatever it is, I don't know. That's the giving, that's the letting go part. Even if one did something special, then that makes me feel job done. And you know, after I'd been writing about climate for 30 years, 2016-ish, I did a lot of writing about what did I learn, unlearn and stuff. And I had had a stroke in 2011, which was interesting. It was the first time I really thought about my brain. You know, you don't think about your brain on a day-to-day basis, but this is my brain telling me, you know, ding, ding, ding, ding, some weird shit's happening. And when I was thinking about climate, confronting climate change, it felt like some of the things I learned about my own existence, you know, I'm gonna die. But you don't really absorb that. Is that the first time you kind of faced your mortality? That was like my first, like, yeah, this is really the shit, you know, or at least deep disability, if not death. And that ability is transitory. And I thought about the climate problem. We're not gonna solve the global warming problem, at least not in our lifetimes. But you work on making those trajectories sustainable, you know, the end of life particularly. You work on making sure other people don't get strokes if they can avoid it. In my case, I wrote about it. I was blogging about my stroke while I was having it. I was tweeting about it. There's a funny tweet that's kind of mistyped because, you know, things weren't working. Wow, Co-PP? Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. So that's like share your knowledge, share your learning. And everyone can do this now, like on whatever platform. And then there's also this like giving up part, but not in a depressing, well, maybe you could call it depressing. I started to zoom in years ago on the idea of the serenity prayer, the sobriety thing. You know, it's like know what you can change, know what you can't. Grant me the serenity to accept the things that cannot change, the courage to change the things that can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Yeah, see, those three properties are really important right now. Some aspects of this, we know absolutely what we can work on, cutting vulnerability, cutting vulnerability, energy transitions take time. Science can help us discriminate the difference. And that's an iterative changing landscape going forward. But at the same time, science, like I personally, on climate modeling or like narrowing how hot it's gonna get or more clarity on when an ice sheet is gonna collapse, I think those are what I call known unknowables. So being able to, I've seen enough evidence that those are deeply complex problems that we're not gonna get there quickly. So then that gives you a landscape to act on. And that, you know, whether you bring God into the mix is irrelevant, it's really know what you can change, know what you can't, and know what, that gives you the quality to work on them. And serenity is comfort with that this is transitory, that the human journey, like anyone's individual journey, will have some end. That doesn't mean it has to be near. This Anthropocene that I've been writing about for decades can still be a good Anthropocene, or at least a less bad one in terms of how we get through it. And you're also a musician. So in context, one of my favorite songs of yours, an album, A Very Fine Line, I should mention that with the stroke coming close to death, the lyrics here are quite brilliant, I have to say. Oh, yeah. It's a very fine line between winning and losing, a very fine line between living and dying, a very fine line, by the way, people should listen to this. I can't play this because you two will give me trouble. A very fine line between loving and leaving, most of your life you spend walking a very fine line, and the rest of the lyrics are just quite brilliant. It is a fine line. I'm glad you walked it with me today, gentlemen. You're brilliant, kind, beautiful human beings. Thank you so much for having this quote-unquote debate that was much more about just exploring ideas together. Bjorn, thank you so much. And Andy, thank you so much for talking today. You know, these kinds of extended conversations are the more of it, the better. And finding ways to spread that capacity just to get people out of this win-lose thing is really important, so thanks for what you're doing. Yeah. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bjorn Lomborg and Andrew Refkin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/5Gk9gIpGvSE

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Botez Sisters: Chess, Streaming, and Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #319

I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess. I'd also say that's pretty universal. I think if you want to be the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed. The following is a conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez. They're sisters, professional chess players, commentators, educators, entertainers, and streamers. Their channel is called Botez Live on Twitch and YouTube. I highly recommend you check it out. A small side note about the currently ongoing controversy in the chess world, where the 19-year-old grandmaster Hans Nieman beat Magnus Carlsen at the Sinkfield Cup. After this, Magnus, for the first time ever, withdrew from the tournament, implying with a tweet that there may have been cheating or at least something shady going on. Folks like the grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura fanned the flames of cheating accusations and the internet made a bunch of proposals on how the cheating could have been done and it ranged from the ridiculous to the hilarious, often both. Hans himself came out and said that he has cheated before when he was 12 and 16 on random online games to jack up his rating. But he said that he has never cheated in person over the board. Danny Wrench from chess.com, who I've spoken with, may make a statement in response to Hans's claims soon. Folks like Grandmaster Jakob Ugga spoke to his experience training Hans Nieman and has said that his memory and intuition were quite brilliant. So as you see, there's a lot of perspectives on this. Chess Base has a good summary of the saga that I'll link in the description. Also note that this is so quickly moving that new stuff might come out between me recording this and publishing the episode. But I thought I'd mention this anyway since the episode with the Botas sisters is a conversation about chess and was recorded shortly before the controversy. So we didn't talk about it. I'm considering having Hans on this podcast and also Magnus back on the podcast and maybe others like Hikaru or folks from chess.com's anti-cheat staff to discuss their really interesting cheating detection algorithms. But I may also just stay out of it. I find chess to be a beautiful game and the chess community full of fascinating, brilliant people. And so I'll keep having conversations like these about chess. It's fun. My goal with this podcast and in general as a human being is to increase the amount of love in the world. Sometimes that involves celebrating brilliance and beauty in science, in art, in chess. Sometimes it involves empathetic conversations with controversial figures that seek to understand, not deride. Sometimes it involves standing against the internet lynch mob as the chess base article calls it, to hear the story of a human being who is under attack, even if it means I get attacked in the process as well. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here's Alexandra and Andrea Botez. You just got back from Italy. What's the most memorable thing? I was just there recently as well. It was very chaotic because we went out on a whim and we only had our first hotel booked. And then we rented a car and drove around all of the cities and went to like five different cities in about a week and a bit. So I think it was just the variety of seeing so many different places when we're used to being at home all the time. And Andrea, is yours your luggage? Yeah, I would say it was the most stressful vacation we've been in in our life. And it was a valuable learning lesson because now I know how to be prepared for trips. But we lost our bags and I never got them back. And like Alex said, we didn't know where we'd be sleeping every night and we're just driving through a new city with a giant van in the most narrowest streets and getting in many, many fights with Italian men. So it wasn't really a vacation. I saw this motion so many times. Wasn't it liberating to lose your baggage? Is it still the lining? It was liberating. My entire life, I've always had the issue of overpacking. And I told her before the trip, Andrea, you're gonna pack light, right? Yeah, Alex, yeah. And then I see her stuffing her overweight suitcase. But you did the same. We both had giant, big extra baggage that we didn't need. And I'm actually very glad we lost it because for Venice hauling that around on all the boats and through the tiny streets and there's no Ubers. And now it's the first time where I can travel without checking in a bag, which I've never done before. So now I've learned what it means to pack light because I saw that I could survive off of just my, this sounds very dramatic, but it was really a big learning lesson for me. The driving must've been crazy because driving in Italy is rough. The driving was crazy. I did most of it and it would be really interesting driving through places like Florence or even through the beach areas that were super windy because there are two-way streets that should really only be one way. So you'd be driving this huge van and then another car comes on a cliff and you're just waiting for it to slowly pass. So it took all of my focus and concentration to drive well in Italy, but it was actually really relaxing because the hardest thing about making a lot of videos online is you're always thinking about it, what's coming next. And when we were in Italy, it was so chaotic that I did not think about work for a good week and a bit. Oh, cause you're just- We were stressed. I was just trying to keep us alive. It seemed higher priority. And that was kind of fun. It was kind of fun. No planning, nothing. I wouldn't recommend it or ever do that again, but. It sounds pretty awesome. And we even randomly ran into two friends of ours who were in the same city and we just traveled with them for about half of the trip. Yeah, so you just took on the chaos. Exactly, it was an adventure. Okay, and I see like, cause you were using your hands a lot, you gotten, you picked up some of the Italian gestures. I did. We did get yelled at by a lot of Italians. The old Italian grandmas would come to us after breakfast cause we'd leave something on the plate and she'd be like, you could feed an entire village with that. Tell your friends. And we'd be, we'd feel so ashamed. Yeah, we got cursed out a lot, but it really reminded me of where we grew up. That's true. Yeah, bring back the- Where'd you grow up? We're Romanian, but it was like an immigrant neighborhood. In Canada. So, you know, same, if you don't finish your plate, that's disrespectful to the people who made the food. How was the food in Italy? I feel like the carbs thing is too intense. Yeah, I think very overrated in my opinion. So I'm actually not supposed to eat gluten cause I have an allergy, but I was in Italy and it's, you know, gluten galore. So I was actually eating a lot of it and it was very interesting cause I didn't get sick while I was in Italy, but I do while I'm in the US. So somehow the food was actually maybe more okay for me to digest, which I appreciated, but I didn't like it as much as I thought. Did you like the food there? Yeah, no, I think it's, I did, I did. I love carbs, but it's, it feels like Vegas. When I go there for the food, it's like, if I stay here too long, I'm gonna do things I regret. That's what it feels like with the food. Cause I don't know how to moderate and everybody is pushing very large portions and while kind of eating things on you, pasta, pizza, and it's so, and bread, so delicious. So yeah, I love it, but I regret everything. So it's like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna go to a place where I'm going to regret everything I do for too long of a time. Yeah, surprisingly the people there though are still very fit and everyone stays in good shape, but that's probably cause you're walking around all day and you're much more active than in the US. And they also just know how to moderate food. I think I've gotten used to the US way of eating. The US portions. What is that? Just a lot, always a lot and more. And I feel in the US, food advertisements are also much more in your face and you're more often reminded of junk food than we were in Italy. So even though we were eating less healthy things, I think we were getting cravings and being pushed towards junk food less often. All right, I gotta ask you a hard question. So the romance languages, so I think French is up there as like number one. Number one in terms of? I don't know. Who's ranking them? Oh, you guys speak Italian or no? Not Italian, but we studied French and Spanish in school. We speak Romanian, which is- And Romanian. I feel like every country calls their language a romance language. But it's Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese. And I think there was one more that was like this dialect, but those are considered the romance languages. Okay, so where would you put Italian? I think we got yelled at so much in Italian that it's not gonna be a lover. Okay, so it wasn't working. It's on the bottom of the list because people did not use it nicely to us. But I always really liked how French sounds. I think something about it where maybe Spanish actually sounds nicer to the ears, but French has more character and it feels more sultry. So I like French. What about you? Yeah, that was my answer too. Sultry, okay. Yeah. Hmm. I feel like French, in France, I feel like I'm always being judged. Like they're better than me. That's what French- They are better than us. That's so true. That's just so true. Which is why, you know, yeah, I long to belong to that. I like the British accent. The British accent? Really? Yeah. Actually, one thing we did on our Italian trip is we just picked up British accents for the entire trip for fun. And we forgot we were doing them to the point where we talked to British people and they'd ask us, why are you talking like that? We just couldn't stop. I did feel much more elegant and mature. That's true. People, like, you know, I don't know if they felt the same way about us, but it was more of, you know, the confidence. You do feel like you're more poised for sure. Yeah. So how'd you guys get into chess? When did you first, let's say, when did you first fall in love with chess? So we both started playing when we were pretty young, around six years old. That's when our dad taught us. And I enjoyed playing chess because I had good results early on, but a lot of it was being pushed from my dad to play chess. And I only really started loving it when we moved from Canada and we started moving a lot and chess was the one stable thing that I had. And it was also where all of my friends were. So it was kind of that foundational thing for me. And that's when I started studying chess very intensely. And when I started putting in the hours out of my own will and not because I was being pushed by my dad, that's when I started really loving it. And I even wanted to take time off college to just focus on chess. So training and competing? Training and competing, yeah. It was when I was doing it for myself that I started getting my best results. And actually enjoying the thing. And really enjoying it, yeah. I would spend summer vacation studying for tournaments and my mom would come and say, you need to make friends, go leave the house. And I'd be like, no, I need to play chess. And I remember those moments. That you rebelled by playing chess. That's awesome. Yeah, exactly. How did you get into it? Yeah, my experience with loving in high school is very opposite from Alex's, but right. My sister was playing and my dad taught me when I was also six. Andrea was cool in high school, unlike me. You were. I wouldn't say cool, I'd say more balanced and I was interested in other hobbies. In my childhood, if I ever really did love chess, there's certainly moments about traveling and being together with my family and spending those moments together, but those are more the social and the experiences. But funny enough, I think my happiest moment where I really played the game for my own enjoyment was probably my most recent tournament. Because this was after, obviously, we've been streaming and I'm no longer in high school, but when I was in school, I was always playing for college and for the results, trying to build a resume. So I was too stressed out about the pressure to really enjoy the game. Whereas when I just played my first tournament, so it was after a two-year break because of the pandemic. And it was also all live on Twitch, so there was some pressure. But it was the first time that I was really eager to study for the game, sitting and focusing, since we've been streaming and not getting distracted by something else in years, like I said. And the tournament experience, I hit my highest rating and it was my best tournament ever. And I think most of that is because it came from my own enjoyment. So you didn't enjoy the domination, because I think you did really well, right? This is a couple of months ago? Oh yeah, the tournament. Well, of course, I think the results came from enjoying the tournament. Because I would be in high school, studying triple the amount of time, like six hours every day compared to this tournament, I didn't even prepare for it. And for three years, I wouldn't be able to pass one rating, whereas in this one tournament, I passed it by like 70 points without even any preparation. So it was, I think, as soon as you stop worrying about the competitions, when the games get much better. What does it mean to pass a rating? So I was stuck at 1,900. 1,900 is 100 points off of expert. Yeah. Usually when you reach 2,000, you're considered an expert, which is the rating Andrea was going for. Okay, expert, that's a technical term, or that's like a talking trash talk? It's more of a colloquial term, where if somebody's around a 2,000 and you're playing them in a tournament, they won't have the actual title next to their name, but you say, I'm playing an expert. What about like the more official things like master? Does that have to do with the rating or something else? Yeah, so national master in the US is when you're 2,200. Okay, and what's international master? International master is based off of a different system, the FIDE system, which is international. To be an international master, it's 2,400, and you have to have three international master norms. Yeah, I think Magnus said he's a 2,800 something. That was, yeah. And then he said, that's pretty decent. Now- Well, he always talks about it. But see, the thing is, I think what he meant is that's a decent rating because it accurately captures his actual level. So it's not overinflated or underinflated and so on. And so the discussion there was how do you get to, can a human being get to 2,900? And then he says, because my current rating is pretty decent at representing my skill level, it's gonna be a long road to actually get there. Because it's like, so you have to beat people your same level, that's how the number increases. Exactly, yeah. And you beat a bunch of people in the tournament, right? That are higher than your level. I did, I got very lucky. I was playing, I was really nervous because my category was like 200 points above my rating. And of course, I was very rusty and I hadn't played a tournament in a while, but it went pretty well. Do you feel the pressure when you're actually recording it, like the streaming? It was definitely, so before every round, I was vlogging and I was doing meet and greets and doing other things for the live stream. That's how you do a meet and greet. You didn't know what the hell you were doing, it's great. Yeah. Like, where am I, how do I do this? Yeah, I see. What do I do? It was actually really wholesome. The beginning was very silly because I was just not expecting that it was gonna be more of a seminar. I thought it was like, oh, you pose and take pictures, but they actually asked really nice, meaningful questions, but unfortunately it's bad for YouTube retention and we cut them all out, so. Bad for YouTube. The good long form conversation. So it was like questions, Q&A type of thing. Exactly, you have to have very fast paced for YouTube and that seminar was not fast paced. Okay, well, not everything in life needs to be on YouTube, right? That's true. You need to do parallel things, stuff that's fun for YouTube. Yes, one day we'll post that Q&A. Yeah, when you guys, when you become ultra famous, you're currently just regular famous. And then there's first Q&A. Slow content, yes. And that, the YouTube aspect, the creation aspect, does that add to the fun, ultimately, of chess, of your love of chess? Oh, for the love of chess in general or just for competing in that one tournament? No, love of chess in general. I think you said that for competing for that tournament was adding pressure. Yeah, but actually I would say like a good pressure. But yeah, this is where I differed to Alex because when I was just competitive and I was younger, I don't think I loved chess as much as when I started doing it for content because unlike her, who a lot of her friends and social circle were other chess players, I never really traveled and built really solid friendships through chess until I started streaming and meeting other chess streamers and actually playing and talking to people for fun rather than just always being alone in the game and never really meeting other people my age or people with similar interests. So I would say Twitch was the thing that really changed how I approached the game. I think with some YouTubers, there's a pressure to be almost somebody else. You create a persona and you're stuck in that persona. I think I'm too much of a boomer to know what the hell Twitch is anyway. But it feels like when you're actually live streaming, you can't help but be who you really are. I think it's, oh, well, I think when you're live streaming and I've talked to a lot of other streamers about this, you kind of just over-exaggerate one side of your personality. And of course, it's kind of like being on all the time. Like you're trying to be more entertaining and sometimes you're being sillier at moments or more, you take what character traits people know you for. And for me, one is being ADHD and the younger sibling who's very energetic and causes trouble, even though sometimes people switch. Yeah, I'm sure you cause trouble just for the camera. Yeah, right? I think, yeah, I think, and of course, once you're live streaming for like four or five hours, there's gonna be moments in the stream where it's more chill, but especially when you're editing that content or you're doing bigger streams that are shorter, you are kind of playing up a side of yourself. Because of course, there's a lot of parts of me that I don't show to the camera because they're not as entertaining to watch. Like the more serious part. And also there's things that you are really interested in about what you do. Like I love competitive chess where I could sit and really think about it, but I know that that is not gonna be as entertaining for stream. I know that's not gonna be as entertaining for YouTube. So you kind of have to take what you like, but then really adapt it for whatever the format is. And sometimes that feels inauthentic, but other times it just feels like repackaging what you love for people in a more general audience to enjoy. Do you feel like it's a trap a little bit as you evolve? Like you're trapped- Oh, I think social media is, oh, sorry, go ahead. Social media in general is a trap of that kind? Well, so we've been trying to switch to learn how to make YouTube videos recently. And so much of learning YouTube school is kind of the beastification of content where you try to get to the point of the video within the first 10 seconds to not lose people. You try to- You mean like Mr. Beast? Yeah. Yeah, where it's so fast paced, there's a reason to wait, there's high stakes. And everything is created to keep people watching the video and keep people on the platform. And in some ways it is a trap because it's harder to do the kind of content you like because you really have to squeeze it to be like, okay, well, do we have a good thumbnail for this? Do we have a good title for this? And that's something that we're trying to figure out how to keep true to what we wanna do. Yeah, see, the way I think about it is, yeah, there's a lot of stuff you can create and yeah, the Mr. Beastification process. But also I think about what are the videos, conversations or things I will create in this life that will be the best thing I do? And I try not to do things in my life that will prevent me from getting there. I feel like if you're always focusing on doing kind of, optimizing the thumbnail and the 10 seconds and so on, you'll never do the thing that's truly you're known for and remembered for. So finding that balance is tricky. I get that, but at the same time, this might be my own copium, which I know is a word you know now. Yeah, I'm slowly learning the full complexity of the term. Yes. But the other way I think about it is, it is the skill to learn how to communicate with large audiences. And first I started streaming chess, which is something I just did and really loved, but now I have to learn how to translate that format. And if that's a skillset we could build, then we could use it to do really important things. And I've seen a lot of YouTubers who have done interviews about how, they didn't love the kind of content they did at first, but what they're doing right now is really meaningful. So I like to think of it maybe like skill development, because not everybody hits off podcasts where they can talk to super interesting people right off the bat. Yeah, you can be slow and boring in a podcast. You don't have to worry about the first 10 seconds. I mean, people like keep pushing me for, because the first 10 seconds of the videos I do is, well, I know it's most important for YouTube, but I don't give a damn. I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views and likes. I don't look at the click through. I don't look at Twitch views, Andrea does. So we also can relate. I love numbers too, but that's why I don't look at it. Because it's become like, oh, you'll start to think that a conversation or a thing you did sucks because it doesn't get views. But that's just not the case. The YouTube algorithm is this monster that figures stuff out. If you let it control your mind, I feel like it's gonna destroy you creatively. So you have to find a nice balance. I have to say, I was laughing a little bit when I was listening to the Magnus episode and the first 10 minutes, you guys are talking about soccer, football. Two robots seem human in the conversation. I was like, let's have some fun, make conversation about non-chess related topics. Yeah, talk about sports. Yeah, it was kind of hilarious. I was surprised that even at his level, I wasn't sure, but I was surprised how much he loves chess. It sounds cliche to say, but like the way he looked at a chess board, you know those memes, like I wish somebody looked at me the way, he's still like the way he glanced down and he reached for the pieces of excitement to show me something. That wasn't like, okay, I'll show you. It was like, there was still that fire. That's something that always shocks me about some of like super grandmasters. Like one of my coaches was a person who also, his name's GM Hammer of Norway. He also coached Magnus, he was his second. And he was helping me train for my tournament. And I was kind of putting off doing the homework. He's like, if you're putting it off, that means you're studying the wrong thing. Like you should be enjoying, even when you're practicing, which when I grew up, I thought to get to the top level, like practicing has to be hard and unpleasant. And when I was listening to your Magnus episode, he was like, I didn't read books very much. Or it was one thing that you said that's like very normal for studying classical chess that he didn't do just because it didn't interest him. He says I suck at puzzles. I don't like puzzles. Yeah, and he doesn't do what he doesn't enjoy. And that's because it's like purely driven out of passion. I think the internet was like, I suck at puzzles too. Yeah, they like found, they related. I don't have to study at all. It's just, it's fun. But I think the lesson there that's really powerful is he spends most of the day thinking about chess because he wants to. So do whatever, if you're into getting better at chess, do whatever it takes to actually just the number of hours you spend a day thinking about chess, maximize that. If you're like super serious about it. I actually get very addicted whenever I start studying chess which is why I don't do it as seriously when I'm focused on content. Because I go through these rabbit holes where if I'm focusing on chess, I want to be as good as I possibly can at the game. Otherwise it's hard for me to enjoy it because it's such a competitive thing. And I remember training for tournaments. And when you're training for tournaments, you even start dreaming about chess and you can't stop thinking about it. And it's as if you're flipped into this completely different world, which is also what I like best about the game that it's a completely different living experience. And then you take some drugs and now you start to see things on the ceiling. Is there some factual hallucination like to the Queen's Gambit, like those scenes? I think it's- Is that based on your life story? Well, I can't say that on camera. No, just kidding. Actually, chess players are very careful to not take drugs. They drink a lot. They drink so much. It's actually crazy for how good they're able to play chess when they do. But when it comes to things like psychedelics or other things, they usually stay away from those because they don't want to mess anything up in their brain. So this is actually an intervention. I saw that you mentioned somewhere, I think it was the lie detector test where you have a drinking problem. Is that an actual- I think that's actually a meme that we like to joke about on stream because occasionally we'd have like a white claw on stream or something like that. And then people meme about it. It goes back to Andrea's point of amplifying a part of your personality to make yourself a little bit more entertaining. I'm gonna use that as an excuse from now on. This podcast is just amplifying a part of the person. I'm not really like this, but have you played drunk? Like Magnus has played drunk. He says it helps him with the creativity. Is there any truth to that? Well, Andrea is under 21. So she's obviously- Would never do this. Would never do that. But I have played while drinking. Actually, I enjoy playing chess and drinking more than pre-gaming or going out to a club and drinking, which sounds really silly. And I'll usually play against opponents who are also having some beer. And it does make you feel like you're seeing the game from a fresher perspective where it can sometimes make you feel more confident, liquid confidence, and it does help with creativity. You just feel like you could pull things off, but there's also a limit. It's more like you've had one drink or two drink, but then it goes beyond that. And then you just start missing tactics and it's not worth it. Yeah, I think it only helps players in very short time controls. One time I was challenging this grandmaster on stream and we were playing bullet chess, which is one minute chess. And I was giving him handicaps and I said, okay, you have to take four shots before the next game. And he just got like 10 times stronger and transformed into like the Hulk and destroyed me more than the last game. But of course, if you're playing like a three hour game, it's gonna get old. But I think in short time controls, it's amazing. Yeah, definitely has to be blitz. It has to be where it's more intuition rather than sitting and calculating. This is probably like negatively affecting your ability to calculate. Absolutely. How much, when you guys play, when you look at the chess board, how much of it is calculation? How much of it is intuition? How much of it is memorized openings? It really depends between short form chess. So five minutes, three minutes, one minute and classical chess. What's your favorite to play? I love playing blitz now because that's most of what I do. And that's actually how I got into chess streaming because I couldn't spend entire weekends or weeks playing tournaments. So I would just, while I was in college, log on and play these long blitz or bullet sessions. And it's very fast. So you don't have time to go calculate as deeply. You basically have to calculate short lines pretty quickly. And a lot of it is pattern recognition and intuition. That's three minutes, you said? Three minutes, yeah. Okay, cool. And so for that, it's just basically intuition. A lot of it is intuition, yeah. See, I saw on the streams, you actually keep talking while playing chess. It seems really difficult. Yeah, that helps my result. That doesn't help my results. It doesn't, it hurts? It helps the content, not the game. Yeah, exactly. But you can still do it. Because it feels like, how can you possibly concentrate while talking? It's because so much of it is intuition. You're not, while you're talking, you're thinking about that topic, but then you just come to the board and you just understand what you should be doing here. And then sometimes you get in trouble because you're talking and you have now lost half of your time. You have a minute and a half, your opponent has three, and you're kind of at a disadvantage. But that kind of goes to show that that's how blitz chess usually works, whereas classical is very different. Which of you is better at chess? I mean, let's do it this way. Can you, Andrea, can you say what, in which way is Alex stronger than you? Which way is she weaker than you? Not physically in terms of chess. Well, yes, of course she is higher rated. But when we do play, I think her strengths against me, where she really gets me, is the end game. She has stronger end game. So she can, and I actually have a stronger opening. But as soon as she's able to simplify- Andrea, I'm supposed to say what is good about you, not you. Yeah, no, I'm getting there. Well, see, that's what I'm saying, because don't worry, it's related, okay? Because I can get an advantage in the beginning of the game, but as soon as she starts trading pieces down, like my confidence drops, because I know that the end game is the hardest part of the game and the longest, and that's where she ends up beating me. So her end game is, I think, really what makes the difference. And she has to be a little bit- It sounds like her psychological warfare is better, too. That, definitely. Because if you're getting nervous. That is, that. It's harder to play against higher-rated players, same how Magnus and former World Championship champions have that psychological edge. So I think it's always gonna be different for Andrea, because she knows, statistically, she should be winning something like one in four games, but she usually does better than that, because she's very distracting and talks a lot. That does help. What does it feel like to play a higher-rated player? What's the experience of that, like playing somebody like Magnus? So it depends on how much higher-rated than you they are. If it's someone who's between me and Andrea, let's say it's a 200-point difference, you know they should win, but at least you still feel like you have a chance. I was playing in Title Tuesday, which is this tournament Chess.com has every Tuesday, and I got really lucky, beat a GM, drew an international master, and then I got paired against Hikaru Nakamura, and my brain just went blank, because I just know that I'm so unlikely to win that I couldn't even play the game properly when it's that much of a difference, where they should be winning 99% of the time. But that's psychological. So you're saying that's the biggest experience, is actually knowing the numbers and statistically thinking there's no way I can win. But I meant, is there a suffocating feeling, like positionally you feel like you're constantly under attack? You just feel like you're slowly getting outsmarted, and the worst is when you don't even know what you're doing wrong. You come out of that, and you're like, I thought I was doing great, and I got slowly squeezed. I didn't understand what was going on, and you're just kind of baffled. It's kind of like watching AlphaZero beat up Stockfish, and you don't really understand why it's making certain moves, or how it thought of the plan. You just see it slowly getting the position better, and that's what it feels like. I would add, it's kind of different for me if they're someone who's significantly higher rated, so let's say more than like 300 points, or you're playing Magnus. What I notice is I just feel lost straight, as soon as I don't know my preparation, because they know so many opening lines that they're gonna know the best line to beat you that you haven't studied. So then on move 10, you're like, he already has a maybe plus.5 advantage, which is really small, but for someone with such a significant skill level, you know you're already lost at that point, and it's like a third of the game. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Andrea? Andrea is very good at opening preparation. As she said. She likes bringing that up. I mean, she's very meticulous about it, where she'll really go in and learn her lines, and having that initial starting confidence isn't just helpful for the opening, but it helps develop your plans for the middle game. So I think she's very good at that. I think she's actually pretty good at tactical combinations. What is tactics? Tactics is like solving puzzles, or basically finding lines that are forced, where if you find them, you're going to win. So that's like puzzles within a position. Yeah, exactly. Whereas strategic chess is making slow moves, and over the process of like 20 moves, you get a slightly better position based on an understanding of the overall strategy. So in my extensive research of you on Wikipedia, it says your most played opening is the King's Indian Defense, in which, quote, black allows white to advance their pawns to the center of the board in the first two moves. Is there any truth to this? So the King's Indian- And what is it? Probably is my most played opening. And it's one where even when my coach, who is a grandmaster, taught me, he's like, so you know, I've been playing the King's Indian for 10 years, and I still don't understand it. And it's one of those openings that computers really don't like, because you do- They hate it. Or at least Stockfish doesn't like it. Maybe AlphaZero would change their mind. I forgot to look at what- Can you show me, by the way, what it is? Yeah. Is it white's opening or black's opening? Black responds to the d4 queen's pawn push, and you take your knight out to f6. I'll just put in the stereotypical, classical King's Indian more so to say. We actually have a very famous King's Indian game in the notes that we prepared for hours. For the record, I asked you guys for some games that you find pretty cool, and maybe to get a chance to talk about some. Yeah. So this is the King's Indian. As you can see, white has much more control over the center. White has three pawns in the center, while black has none past the fifth rank. And you just have this pawn on d6. And one of the ideas in chess is if you're not taking the center, then your plan revolves around trying to continually challenge it. But what is really fun about the King's Indian is that black sometimes gets these crazy king side attacks, while white gets queen side attacks. And even though it's a little bit suspicious for black, and the computer could usually break it, it's hard to defend as a human when you're being attacked. But if you don't pull off the attack as black, then you're just gonna end up being lost in the end game. So it's like a very asymmetrical position. It's very asymmetrical, although a lot of people now stop playing into the classical King's Indian, even though computers give it a big advantage. And they play these slower lines in the King's Indian, which are less fun to play. What's slower mean? It takes a longer time to do something interesting with? They basically don't let you get as much of a king side attack because they try opening up the center. And then you have no weaknesses, but you're just slowly improving the position of your pieces instead of being able to go for that king side attack. So for people just listening, there is the white pawns are all on the fourth row in a row together. That feels like a bad position. For black? For white. Oh, you don't like taking the center? No, I like taking the center. Now you're talking trash already. Oh, sorry. But like, they just feel vulnerable. They're in a row together. Because who's gonna defend them? I guess the knight's defending and the queen defends it. You're actually talking about a theme that you do see sometimes, which is called hanging pawns. And when you have two pawns right next to each other with no other pawns to defend them. So it is a valid point. And actually as black, you're trying to break apart these pawns or get them to push and create some holes into the position. But it's a trade-off. And that's a lot of what chess openings are about. You get more space, but you'll also end up having to protect your pawns potentially or move them forward to the point where they're overextended. And plus, pawns being vulnerable is kind of fun. There's more stuff in danger. Because if it's like this, everything is trapped. Like you can't do anything. Everything's blocked, yeah. Blocked off, yeah. So you can't have fun. Yeah. One of the opening principles for white is get your pawns in the center. So I'd say this is actually preferable for white. Let's go over some opening principles. I have no clue about opening principles. Because this is a very good learning lesson for any chess beginners in the audience. Okay, so first thing you want to do is control the center. There you go, E4, the more aggressive one. Isn't that like the basic vanilla move? Somebody told me that's the most popular opening move in chess. It is. Why is that considered aggressive? So it's E4 and D4, and the king's pawn is known as being for more tactical players, whereas D4 is known for more positional players. So that's why it's considered more aggressive. Tactical. More gambits with E4, I think. So tactical means I'm gonna try to attack you. You're gonna try to go for puzzles and rely more on your combination abilities. Whereas if it's something positional, you usually have like three to four moves that are all good in the position. Whereas tactics, you need to see this one line. So it's more precise. So this one's cool, because the queen can come out, the bishop can come out. Yeah, and that's one of the most popular checkmates. And usually what you teach new students to try to cheese their friends, because then they feel really excited that they know this new trap where you bring the bishop and the queen out, and you try to checkmate on F7. It's the trap that Queen's Gambit, Beth Harmon, falls for in their first game versus the janitor. She gets all mad because she gets checkmated very early. Oh, that's the one she gets checkmated with? Yeah. Okay. So I thought you guys were actually paying attention to the games carefully, which is pretty cool that they did a good job of evolving her game throughout the show to actually represent an actual growth of a chess player. Yeah, they really took every detail into consideration, which was cool. Okay, so what else? I brought stuff into the center. Here we go, we'll do the same. Okay. So then you wanna develop your pieces. So in the beginning of the game, you wanna take out the bishops and knights first, because you don't wanna start with the most valuable piece, like the queen, because then it'll become a vulnerability and it'll get attacked very early on. And the reason you're taking out these two pieces first is because you wanna castle your king. So you can move a knight move or a bishop move, and that's considered developing. Yeah, so at this stage, not even before getting a few pawns out. You usually wanna start with getting a pawn because you wanna get space in the center, but also when you push pawns, it helps free up some of your pieces. So usually start with one pawn first, and then you could start taking out your minor pieces, which is the bishop and the knight. I have anxiety about a pawn just floating out there, defenseless. But it's not attacked yet. See, those are what you call ghost threats. So you're scared of something that hasn't happened yet. So if I were to attack it- I feel like there's a deeper thing going on here. Yeah, actually, let's say- Yeah, so you're attacking the pawn in the center here, and it is vulnerable, but as soon as you do that, I can develop my own knight and defend it as well. Okay, and now for people just listening, there's two pawns that just came out to meet each other, and a couple of knights- You love the chess commentary. Yeah, the pawns met after midnight. Yeah, yeah. Well, we gotta romanticize the game a bit. Exactly. Okay, cool. So if you bring out the bishops with the knights, you're matching that with the other. The black is going to match it. Exactly. Whatever you're attacking with- Yep, he's developing. Is going to defend it. Now you can develop your bishop or your knight, whenever you'd like. Oh no, now you gave him options. Oh, right, yeah. There you go. Now I am attacking the pawn in the center, which is what you were afraid about before, but let's see how you defend it here. By doing this symmetrical thing, bringing out the knight on the other side. And actually, your other move was good as well, defending with the pawn, because then you're freeing up space for your bishop. So you're basically trying to develop your pieces as quickly as possible, put your pawns in the center, and then get your king to safety. And that's usually the basic opening tips that you get. And it is kind of counterintuitive that safety is in the corner of the board for a king. That's true. That was always confusing to me, but you know. Three pawns in front, though you typically don't push those. Maybe like one, maybe I'll go one square, but these will be like the wall of defense. I keep them safe. But another way to also think about it is your pieces usually want to point towards the center. If you have a knight closer to the center than closer to the side, it actually has more squares it can go to. So a huge part of it is just wanting to have flexibility for where your pieces go. So more pieces are going to be able to make threats in the center, or even open up the position. So since that's where it's most likely to open, you want your king somewhere where the position will stay closed so that you have the pawns to defend. You know, there's like rules like this, but I always wonder, because I build chess engines, but then you start to wonder, like why is it that positionally these things are good? Like you've built up an intuition about it, but I wish, and that's the thing that would be amazing if engines could explain, why is this kind of thing better than this kind of thing? You start to build up an intuition, but if I'm just like, know nothing about chess, it feels confusing that cornering your king, like getting them like trapped here, like it feels like you could get checkmated easier there if I was just using like dumb intuition, but it seems like that's not the case. I imagine maybe, because alpha zero learned by playing games against itself, right? And I imagine if you have a lot of games and you do build an intuition, because if you were to keep your king in the center, you just see that in those games, you're dealing with threats a lot more often, but yeah, there's shortcut rules, and this doesn't even mean it's the best way to play chess as we've seen with alpha zero kind of changing the rules of the game a little bit, but as a human, to learn it from scratch is a lot more difficult than to start with principles, so that's why beginners usually learn chess this way. Yeah, but, and because you're playing other humans and the other humans have also operated on the different principles, and that's why people that come up now that are training with engines are just going to be much better than the people of the past, because they're gonna try out weirder ideas that go against the principles of old, and they're gonna do like weird stuff, including sacrifices and stuff like that. Yeah, and I also think that's why alpha zero was so shocking, because Stockfish was using an opening database, so it was already based off of knowledge that humans have from playing chess for years that we just thought is how you're supposed to play, whereas alpha zero just learned from playing the game so many times and came up with very novel opening ideas. Were you impressed by alpha zero? Have you seen some of the games? I have seen some of the games. I think impressed, bewildered, and motivated were the three things I experienced. Like I think Magnus said, he was also impressed that it could easily be mistaken for creativity. That's his trash talk towards the AI. That was a beautiful sentence. I was listening to the podcast. I mean, as a human, I agree with him, because you don't wanna give the machine the power of creativity, but if it looks creative, give it a compliment. That's fair. I know that you're being nice to the machines in case they are ever looking back through this. What else is there? What other principles are there for the opening? You can go a little bit more forward, let's say. We can finish full development. Positions like this, let's just say you developed all of your pieces. So that's like a really nice, nobody took any pieces and we're just in a nice positional thing. Yeah, so it's not actually a very accurate one. So I'm actually, I could put a different one on the board, but usually after you've developed all of your pieces, you wanna get your queen out a little bit to connect your rooks, and you also start thinking about certain pawn pushes and getting more space. But another good tip is just, can you improve the position of your pieces? Think about timing. So if you've already moved a piece once and there's a piece that hasn't moved at all, then you wanna focus on the piece that hasn't moved at all to be able to have it more likely to jump into the game. Right, so don't move pieces multiple times. Exactly. Like try to move it to the most optimal position. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So what's the Indian, I think we kind of went over it, but did you ever say why you like it so much? Because it's weird, because it's king side? I liked it because it's a very fun, aggressive defense where you're just throwing your pieces towards white, and there's so many sacrificing opportunities. And for some reason, tactical games always feel like the most beautiful, the most satisfying. And that's what I liked about the King's Indian. But I also suffered a lot from this love because I would play things that are not necessarily correct, then my attack wouldn't pan out, and I would just struggle the rest of the game having no play and just trying to defend. So if you're always, Wikipedia also says that, that you're known for your attacking play. It's also known for losses according to Stanford. Okay, let's not bring that. See, Wikipedia doesn't talk trash. It just says nice things. Yeah, Wikipedia's a lot nicer. I actually played a lot of positional chess in classic because I really like the slow squeeze. But when I transitioned to playing a lot of online chess, it's almost as if I was looking for more instant gratification because it feels so much better to beat someone with an attack. And even if sometimes it doesn't pan out, I was okay with it because you get so many games in. So I think my style in online chess really changed from my classical chess. What about you, Andrea? Do you have a style? Are you attacking? Are you more like conservative defensive player? Are you chaotic? Opening-wise, I like to play more positionally. Like I like to push T4 and just slowly improve my pieces and slowly get an attack. But like Alex said, if you're playing bullet chess or blitz against viewers, you often like wanna play riskier moves that may not be as good. And then that's kind of when I would play more aggressive. But I do enjoy tournaments for that reason because then like once you're 15 moves in, which as soon as you're out of your prep, I like sitting and thinking in more positional. Yeah, positional middle games. One of the games you've found to be pretty cool is the Hakkar and the Kimura versus Galfond in 2009. And that one, I think, includes the King's Indian defense. Yes. Why is that an interesting one to you? I also play the King's Indian as black and I love this model game. But, and as Alex was saying, like all these advantages for the King's Indian, but now there's this one line that like every higher rated player just destroys my King's Indian. And you see these beautiful games and like, ah, yes, I wanna play for these ideas, but now no one plays into it anymore and you just get demolished. So this is why I don't play the King's Indian anymore, but not to ruin the fun. The love hate relationship, truly. The reality. But that's like the higher level players do or does everybody? Yeah, if you're studying openings and you know this line as white, you just, you automatically get the upper edge. And that's kind of how openings develop. You start having players trying new lines and then you see ones and then everybody adopts it if they think it's the best one. But yeah, so Hikaru is really known for his aggressive style of play. Is Hikaru black here or what? Yeah, Hikaru is black here. So he's playing the King's Indian. And as you can see in this position, white already has a lot, a huge center advantage. But what Hikaru is gonna start doing, even with the next move, is bringing all of his pieces towards the white King side, because his plan is to start pushing his pawns towards the white King and ignore the attack that goes on in the Queen side. This is a great example of the dream attack with the King's Indian. So there's a complete asymmetry towards the King side on the left side of the board is a ton of pieces. Yeah, exactly. Wow, he moved the Knight like three times in a row. Yep, and that's what you need to do because you have to move the Knight in order to make space for your pawn. So again, this is why it's so counterintuitive and Stockfish doesn't like it. You're putting almost most of your pieces on the back rank and you're pushing your King side pawns and you're blocking your own dark squared Bishop. So none of it makes sense. You're mimicking it, that's awesome. Okay, so yeah, here you see white going for a Queen side attack, black going for the King side attack and you can keep going a little bit and I'll wait to where he starts with the pretty sacrifices. It's more fun to analyze games in person than on the computer, I think. Yeah. Okay, so here Hikaru is preparing the attack and what I really like about this game is that he finds these tactics that are not necessarily what a computer would go for, but it's very hard to face as a human and that's why a lot of people play the King's Indian because in practice, it's hard to defend against. So we can keep moving a little bit forward. Okay. Yep, so white is just continuing the King side plan. Now is that like the first piece I think that's taken in the game? Yep, that's the first trade. So he begins. Exactly, Hikaru had to pause his attack for a little bit to just make sure that white didn't have two dire threats on the Queen side. So cool to see the asymmetry of this thing. Exactly, that's what's beautiful about the King's Indian. And just one thing to highlight because his rook move here is very bizarre and typically like a computer probably didn't like this, but the ideas are very interesting because this is a major weakness for black that they're coming to attack and he's also making room for his bishop to come backwards and challenge. So this is like a human-like maneuver that computers wouldn't like. I think computers would like this though because you'd have to move it regardless because he takes the pawn here and his rook would be under attack. Yeah, well, have you looked at it? When I actually studied this as a line and this right away isn't the best move according to computers. So actually, that's a good question. So do you guys, when you study games, use your own mind but do you also use computers to build up your intuition? Of like looking at a position like this and what would a computer do? And then try to understand why it wants to do that? When I was studying seriously, I would try to use my own mind because you're never gonna get the exact same position. So you really need to notice trends and often computers will give you moves that are only specific to that position because of a certain tactic. But I do use computers to check what I did and make sure I didn't make any obvious blunder that I might've missed. What does a computer tell you? Just like what is the best move? Or does it give you any kind of explanation of why? It doesn't tell you why but it gives you the different valuations of the position. Like black is down a half pawn here or something like that. But it hints you towards what the right move is and then it's on you to figure out why. And you can usually figure out why if not right away than just by going through a few moves and being like, oh, okay, that makes sense. I feel like a computer will take you down with some weird lines potentially. Like sacrifice, like why the hell am I sacrificing this? Well, we'll get to the pretty sacrifice soon. So we could just keep playing for a little bit. The pawns are being pushed forward. Yeah. And Hikaru is kind of ignoring the queen side attack here. They basically both only reply to each other's plan when they have to. This is where you convert all the podcast viewers to YouTube. Yeah. They have no idea what we're talking about right now. There is a Zen experience of just listening and imagining. The board. Just imagine that- Imagine the pieces on the ceiling. Yeah, we should be calling them out and then people will be freaking out even more. Am I supposed to keep track of what the position is? It's too late now, it's too many. How hard is blindfold chess? Have you tried? Are you able to keep the board? I've played blindfold chess before. For me, it's pretty hard. It's not a muscle that I've trained as much and I'm very visual when it comes to chess. But it is one as a top player that starts becoming very second nature for you. Actually, this is what, I talked to Magnus about this. Maybe I was, again, influenced by Queen's Gambit. What do you actually visualize when it's in your head? So for Magnus, it was a boring 2D board. Right. Do you have some kind of- That's every chess player known. You don't have like, cause you know some chess, like computer games, you can do all kinds of skins and like fancy stuff. You don't have anything fancy about it? Technically, I don't have like a cool 3D warrior mode on. It's just the basic. I have a default chess-based board in my head. Cause you don't, yeah, you can't use your brain power for adding colors to it cause you already have to keep track of the pieces. As one board at a time? Yes. Okay. The current position. Yeah, I bet every chess, I wonder if there's any who- There's certain players who are really good and they can even play blindfold chess and play multiple games at the same time. So I would be curious how they do it. But usually when you're thinking of one game, that's the only one in your mind. Yeah, but you have to do this operation where you move one piece, you're doing like the branch analysis. Yeah. And so you still have to somehow visualize the branching process and not forget stuff. Maybe that's like constant memory recall or something. You're always looking at one board at a time, but- And you're also, oh, cause you're also looking in the future? Yeah. Yeah. You're also visualizing variations and come back. I guess you're keeping the position in your memory. So you're remembering where all the pieces are and then you're playing it out on one board and then you can come back to the initial one that you started with that you kind of just keep in your brain and it's also easier to come back to it once you've played a position from it. I feel like it's that memory recall that gets you to blunder. So I'll like see that I'm being attacked by certain things, but then because I get so exhausted thinking about a different thing, I actually forget about an entire branch of things that I was supposed to be worried about. Yeah, it happens very often. Yeah, if you spend a bunch of time calculating in a position, let's say, like when you're really in trouble and you're spending 15, 20 minutes calculating, you'll forget about something that you spotted. Like, oh, if I do these two, three moves, I'll walk into a trap. Cause you've looked at so many lines and then you play it and then you see it and you're like, oh, I looked at it and I saw it, but I forgot about it. Yeah. It's often called tunneling, where you're just looking so deeply on one thing, you forget about the rest of the board. And it's the worst when, at least in a beginner level, there's like a, I don't know, a Bishop just sitting there, obviously attacking your like Queen or something. And then you just forget that Bishop exists. Cause if they just sit there for a few moves and don't move, you just forget their existence. And then it's just, yeah, that's definitely very embarrassing. Well, it happens to everyone, so. Yes. Okay, cool. Okay, so we see a few trades happening on the Queen side where he had to go for those, otherwise he's in trouble. And this is where the game, oh, sorry. This is where it gets exciting. Yeah, so 9h4 is really when the sacrifice starts. And here, the two important pawns are the ones in front of the King, cause they're helping with the entire defense. And Hikaru's actually preparing to sacrifice his Knight for a pawn just so that he can continue his attack and open up the position. Because if you don't do that, you're as black and don't get some kind of attack, you are completely lost on the Queen side. And also you've pushed all of your own King side pawns, so you're gonna be in danger. So it's one of those do or die moments. Oh, okay. So that's what makes it all in, cause the King is wide open. Yeah, yeah. The King is wide open and all of White's pieces are pointed towards the Queen side too, where you're also cramped. So it's the attack primarily by black done by the two pawns and the Knight. And the light squared Bishop is always extremely important. So you don't wanna trade this in the King's Indian because it's very helpful for a lot of attacks. Even though it's on the other side of the board. I guess it can go all the way across. I'm not sure what it's doing here, but probably threatening. Like for example, if it was another move black could have played, would be something like Bishop h3, where if you take the Bishop, you actually get mated on G2. With what? So let's say you take here and then you could push the pawn and then it would be checkmate. So you're kind of using your Bishop to sacrifice against White's King side pawns. Yeah, I'll be freaking out if their Bishop did that. Exactly. What are they up to? Right, and that's the thing. This position looks very scary as White because all of black's pawns are starting to come towards you. And it's one of those things where humans do start to worry in these positions, whereas computers obviously can just calculate the best line and maybe the attack doesn't go through. So you're saying the computer might say that the White is actually a slight favorite here. Yeah, potentially. Okay, so then White makes a little bit of room by moving the Rook. Right. And the attack begins. I like the commentary here. I'm very out of tune. The Knight is hugging the King. And actually White can't even take the King here because then h4 and h3 is coming in. White can't take the Knight. Yeah, oh, did I say King? Yes, thank you, the Knight. White can't take the Knight because why? So if White takes the Knight here, then black starts pushing his pawn to h4 with h3 incoming. And the idea of trying to defend against this is, it looks very difficult. So White just chooses. It'd be cool to watch a chess game, to experience watching it without understanding it just for a day. I feel like I could use that to make better content. True, okay. I mean, that's what getting drunk does. Unfortunately for chess players, it never leaves you for that. Doesn't matter how. But this is actually a very cute move because Black's Queen is under attack, but the King is so cramped that he can't actually take it or he's gonna get checkmated by a pawn, which is a sad way to go, truly. Yeah, those pawns are doing a lot of work here. They really are. That is the King's Indian. This is the King's Indian player's dream. The attack of the King's side pawns. Yeah, these pawns are like, right. So they're the ones that are doing a lot of the threatening. Right, and they're also opening up the position to bring more of the pieces in. But the pawns kind of help break open the King's side, but they can't checkmate by themselves. So after the pawns come in, that's when you need to start bringing in pieces as well, which you will see Hikaru do here. Okay. There you go. He puts. One more sacrifice. Yes, so this was actually another beautiful sacrifice in the game. But then puts the King in check with a pawn. Right, and the pawn is going to be given here for free, but the idea is you're giving your own piece because you want to have more space and open up the King, which is what you're always trying to do when you have a King's side. You're trying to remove as many of the King's defenders as you can without giving up too much of the pieces. And then you have a ton of pieces on the King's side for black just waiting to. Exactly. To do harm. And then. And notice how every single move white is getting attacked. Like they're just never getting a break. Black just keeps throwing all their pieces. So it's funny that black's Queen has been hanging for like three moves now and white still can't do anything about it. Yeah, so Rook puts the King in check. Yep. The King runs. And then again, we leave the Queen hanging and you develop a piece, this light squared Bishop that's so important. And you're once again threatening checkmate on G2. And then Bishops come into the game. Once again, the Queen hanging. I mean, the game is just so beautiful. The amount of calculation Hikaru put into this position. Just feels like so much is in danger. Right. It's so interesting. And Knight takes what? A Pawns. So now his Queen is attacked twice and he doesn't care. He takes the Bishop and he's still threatening the checkmate on G2. And then the Queen takes the Bishop. Yep. So now he's defending against G2 and Black just goes and grabs some material back here. So here, Black is already winning. Well, he ends up winning a Knight here because Black had to be so much on the defensive. He's just taking pieces. Yeah, I mean, at this point, you're up two whole pieces, so you knew it was gonna be here. Yeah, exactly. But. And Queen. Queen. And then you take. And then the Rook takes. And there's not as much of an attack on the King anymore, but Hikaru is up a Knight here, which is GG. Yeah, what's the correct way of saying that? I played Demis Hassabis, I played him in chess, and then I quickly realized, from his facial expressions, that I should've stopped playing. Oh. It was like, it's already set. Yeah, when it's. And then he's like, this is a good time to give up. Right. You're not gonna get the checkmate. He could see the checkmate is five, seven moves away or something. What's the play? Usually, you have to resign if you're in a position, or you should, through chess etiquette, resign when you're in a position where your opponent is definitely gonna win out of respect, like if you're a piece down. And obviously, all top grandmasters do that. The only people who don't do that is kids, because their coaches. They love to play till the checkmate. Their coaches always tell them never resign, and they'll be in hopelessly lost positions, playing against two rooks, a King, and they only have their sole King, but they're still playing on. So that's a position where it's obvious they can't win. Because the kids might make errors. Yeah, exactly. And so might as well. That was an interesting thing about, I think, game six of the previous World Championship with Magnus. Was it the one where he beat Nepp? Yeah, the first time he beat him, where it was like, he said that, I don't know how often you come across this kind of situation. He said the engines predict a draw, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be a draw. So you play on, hoping that you take a person into, I mean, this is, I guess, an end game thing. You take them to deep water, and they make a positional mistake or something. I don't know when, like he, from his gut, knows that this is supposed to be a draw, but he still plays on. Yeah, I mean, that is one where it could theoretically be a draw, but it could be very hard to defend because it's a hard technique to know as a human. And especially in that game, I know that Neppo was also in time pressure, which makes it even harder. So in situations like that, you should always continue. It's more where an engine would give you something like plus 10 or something where it's not just clearly a win, but anybody would know how to win. And that's where you're usually supposed to resign. So what do you find beautiful about this game? Is it the attacking chess and just the asymmetry of it? It's the asymmetry, and it's the fact that this is the dream for the King's Indian, where you're able to get a beautiful attack. And there's also those two really nice sacrifices where Black just continuously kept putting pressure on White's king to the point where he was able to win material. And the best part of it is that if the attack didn't work out, Black would have been completely lost. How often does that happen, by the way? Like as an attacking player, how often do you put yourself in the position of like, I'm screwed unless this works out? In online chess, more than I should. And it's usually when I sacrifice, I know it's either gonna work or I'm lost. And those are the most fun positions to play usually. But in tournaments, if you're doing a sacrifice, you're playing it with 100% confidence because you're taking the time to calculate it. But yeah, when you have three minutes, you don't have time. So you take a whim and you follow your intuition and you find out later. Or you're very confident it'll work and you haven't calculated all the way until the end, but you've calculated to the point where you have enough in exchange for the sack and you think you could play that position. How do you train chess these days? What's, do you practice? Do you do deliberate practice? I mean, you're in this tough position because you're also a creator, an educator, an entertainer. So do you try to put in time of like daily practice? I don't train chess anymore when I'm focusing on creating. I do if I'm preparing for a tournament, but back in the day, I would train very tournament, very seriously for tournaments. And the way it would work is I do opening preparation for a specific tournament, because that's when you really need to have those lines memorized. And you could also prepare for specific opponents. And I would do tactics to make sure I stay sharp. So those are the two things I would do every single day for a tournament and then mix up the rest with like maybe some end games, maybe some positional chess. So what does tactics preparation looks like? Do you do like a puzzle, like a random puzzle thing? Yeah, I would just train puzzles for at least like 30 to 60 minutes or books. And sometimes you were, and there's different kinds of puzzles. One, you could train for pattern recognition where you're supposed to go through them very quickly. And that's just so that when you're playing the game, if your mind is tired, it's still keeping track of things a little bit more easily. And then there's where you're practicing your combination and those sometimes take like 20 minutes to find because you have to just calculate a lot. And it's more like making sure that you've trained with that muscle. But Andrea is actually very good at finding ways to balance and still study while also doing content. Yeah, so what, you're able to do both? That's the hard thing. I was getting very irritated with content because I'm very competitive. I don't like playing chess if I'm losing. And if you're talking and entertaining, you're gonna be losing more games than winning. So then I started doing more training streams where I'd bring on my coach. And one of the things that I wanted to add to Alex's training repertoire, so I would do daily puzzles every time I'm streaming, which helped me a lot, even if it's like there's this thing on chess.com called Puzzle Rush, where you have three minutes and you just do puzzle after puzzle where they get incrementally harder. And it's just a really good way to build your pattern recognition, especially when you're rusty. So I would do that till I hit a high score and I wouldn't play any blitz until I hit the score that I want. But that's kind of more like the fun part of chess studying. A very important one is actually analyzing your losses in your tournament games. And first you sit and you look through your mistake yourself and try to see if you can find the better moves. And then that's when you would check over with the computer to see if you're right. So game analysis is also very important, which I try to do. I remember to give a shout out, I listened to a couple of episodes of the Perpetual Chess podcast, which is pretty good. But whatever I listened to, I remember the... It's, I think they really focus on teaching people- How to train? Yeah, how to play, how to train, all that kind of stuff. They do like, yeah, I'm looking now, adult improver. So basically, how do regular noobs get better at chess? One of the things, one of the person that said, I think he was the grandmaster, but he said to maximize the amount of time you spend every day of like, basically as you were saying, like suffering. So like, it's not about the, like, you should be thinking, you should be doing calculating. So it's the opposite of what Magnus said. Like, you should be doing a lot of time. It doesn't matter what the puzzle is or whatever the hell you're doing, but you should be like doing that difficult calculation. That's how you get better. Yeah, it really depends what you're training. Because I used to think the same, but it depends what your week you're at. Because if you're doing the really difficult puzzles, you're training for like visualization and calculating more moves ahead than you typically would, which maybe you wouldn't get into that as often in a regular game, because typically you run into like three to four tactics, which are actually the easier and more fun ones to solve. So it really depends. And on top of that, as a hobbyist, your motivation is very different than when you're playing from a young age and have pretty high competitive ambition. And a lot of people who are new to chess, you could basically work on anything and still improve. So if you're focusing on something you like, you're probably gonna stick to it more and be more consistent, which I think is more helpful long-term. What was the most embarrassing loss of your career? I had so many flashbacks, but I'm so glad it's a question for Andrea. I like that you specified. You know, it's funny. I mean, because you said you're so competitive and like I could tell just even from the way you said it, that like you hate losing. Yeah, I mean, that was the reason I hated chess in high school, because it always be like, but okay, there's many traumatizing losses where it's like your top three, you're running for first, and then you throw a game you shouldn't. And this shouldn't hurt my ego as much as it does, but it's always kids. Or when I was a high school girl, it's the younger boys who are really cocky. And when they win, they start rubbing it in your face and they're yawning and looking around when like 90% of the game you were destroying them and you had this one tiny mistake and now their ego's huge. But I'll never forget, I was playing like for a chess scholarship and it was tiebreaker for first. And I think I lost to a 12 year old girl who couldn't even use the scholarship, but she beat me in one first place and she got some other prize. So yeah, I was losing to that little girl who's literally like 2,300 now. So it makes sense. Right, you keep telling yourself that. What do you think, do you think Gaspar was feeling that when he was playing 13 year old Magnus? Like why? As much as it's a beauty of the sport that any age can be brilliant, any demographic, anything, I feel like when you're adults and you're paired against a kid, it's just hard not to let it get to you. And it depends, maybe if they're a really sweet kid, but most times I play kids, they're just really arrogant. But I don't think they do it intentionally because they're kids. I mean, there is a certain etiquette thing where like you said, yawning and in general. Like it's not- Your kids, there's no etiquette. Yeah. They don't care. Yeah, the kids traumatized me too. I was playing in Vegas and it was not even my opponent, it was the board next to me. And the kid was at least 10 years old, 12 max, and he was playing against an adult and he takes out his hand and he starts doing a fake phone to which the kid studying, sitting across diagonally, picks up their banana and starts talking like it's a phone and they're just mouthing words while their two adult opponents are thinking intensely at the game. And then I see the adult look up, look at the kid just making banana phone and the despair in his eyes as he sighs. Yeah. And they're not even doing it for trash talk. No, no, no. They're just bored. They're just bored kids. Yes, exactly. Well, what was the, because you play a bunch of people for your channel. What was the most like memorable? What's the most fun, most intense? There's a bunch of fun ones. You've played kids before, some trash talking kids. That sounds great. They trash talk kids. Yeah. Nothing like losing to a 12 year old who then starts doing a Fortnite dance. Yeah. So that actually happened? That did happen. He is a very young master. I think he became master when he was like nine years old or something. And he's very good at chess and doing a lot of training, but he's also incredibly good at trash talking. And he beat me one game and he stood up and he started doing the Fortnite dance. So, you know, you gotta just swallow your pride in those moments. What is that culture of like street chess players? It seems pretty interesting. Like, I don't know, that seems to be celebrating the beauty of the game. It's the trash talking, but also having fun with it, but also taking it seriously. And you've done a few of those. Did you go to New York? Yeah, in Union Square Park, Washington Square. What was that like? It's such a unique place. I haven't seen it anywhere else in the US where people are just professional chess hustlers, even if they're not necessarily, you know, a top player, but they play chess every single day. And so many of them learn chess by themselves and never had a professional coach. So they are quite good at it. They're also very tight knit. They all know each other. And it's a very social thing where you're not just playing chess, it's the experience of getting to know this person who's very much a personality and they talk to you. They could either give you tips or they could be really chatty and talk to you during. So it's a chess experience rather than just playing a game. Do you tell them like what your rating is or do you just let people, like both ways, do you discover how good the person actually is? Initially, I loved going and not telling people my rating and just surprising them and winning games. But now we've gone so many times that they just know us. So we can't get away with it anymore. One time, actually, I don't know if I should share this, but one time we dressed up as grandmothers and we had prosthetics on our face. And I think they still recognized us. Yeah, it's probably the, there's other components, like probably the trash talk and all that kind of stuff. Actually, no, it was funny. We were talking like grandmothers, but it was the way I held. It was the way I held. Like a grandmother talk like, back in my day. No, no, no, no, no. We're not bringing, we're not bringing this back. Okay, what were your names? What were the code names? Oh my God. I think it was Edna. Edna, and I had a really, I can't remember the other one. But it was embarrassing because we were walking so slowly and Andrea dropped her cane or something at one point. And then people in the park came to help her. We felt so embarrassed. And I'm like, my buns, my buns. But yeah, it was funny because they didn't know it was us until he saw the way I reached for my pawn. And he said, the way you held your pawn, I knew it was you. It was like such a sneak thing. That was what blew the grandma cover. Yeah, do you have a style of how you play physically? Is that recognizable? I didn't think we did until grandma went to play chess. But yeah, I've never thought about that. Yeah, I think our style is just trash talking now. Like, style is very, if you're talking about style on YouTube and Twitch, we definitely have a distinctive style. What's that? What's your distinctive? Just talking shit. Yes, but not going too far. No, no, definitely. That's definitely going to, if it's us two against each other. Oh, we trash talk each other so hard. So brutally. And I love looking at Andrea and watching her little nose scrunch up as she's annoyed and the satisfaction I get when that happens. How many times have you played against each other on online publicly? I think I've seen a couple of games. We've played a lot of times. We try not to do it too often because it's repetitive, but every now and then when we haven't done it for a while, we'll go at it again. What do you mean repetitive? Is that implied trash talk right there? No, it's just, we play similar openings. So you just start seeing the same position too often. Andrea's really good at opening. So I just start playing bad openings to get her out of her preparation. Cause I don't like opening theory very much. I just like playing the game and getting into middle games and end games. But yeah, typically the only time we're playing each other is when we're setting up in the park and we don't have opponents yet and we need content. So we just play each other until people show up. But we always put stakes on the line, which makes it very interesting. Cause otherwise it wouldn't be fun to play each other if there's no stakes. Where's the most fun place you've played? Is it New York? I think so. And it was actually when we set up in Times Square one night, we just brought a table with us and chess. And it's not even where people usually play chess, but it was so lively. There were all of the lights out and so many people just kept stopping by to play chess. And it was really one of my favorite streams. Just the opposite of like the classical chess world. It's super loud. There's music, there's cars, there's street dancers, even some naked people walking around who we had to be careful not to get banned. But I honestly really like the chaotic environments for chess games. Cause I think it's a good way to break more into the mainstream culture and make it entertaining and appealing to anyone who doesn't know anything about chess. So that's what I like. And also in an authentic way, because it's what we really like about chess when you're just enjoying the game, but also the atmosphere and the people who you're playing with. And that's one of the things that I think you see less when you're just thinking of chess as a competitive thing. You've, you mentioned a few other games, like the Bobby Fischer games, the Canada's match, the game of the century, which I feel like is a weird game to call the game of the century when there's still like a few decades left in the century. But yeah. I mean, it wasn't an official thing. It was just the chess journalist. It's just like made on a chess article. But it's stuck if you look on- Yeah, no, it did stick. This is all I do research wise. Because there's, so that particular one was a 13 year old Fischer and he did a queen sacrifice. I wonder, there's that movie, searching for Bobby Fischer. Was that related? Cause didn't they have a young, somebody who's supposed to be kind of like Bobby Fischer played by Josh Waitzkin. Yeah, I think he ended up being an international master. It wasn't based on Bobby Fischer, it was based on another player, but I liked how they told it through the lens of being inspired by Bobby Fischer. Do you remember that game? Like, why do you think it was dubbed the game of the century? It was just journalists being like- I think part of it was the atmosphere where you have the US junior champion who's this 13 year old nobody. And it's the first time he's playing in a very competitive landscape against some of the top American players. And he goes up against an international master. So somebody who's a lot stronger than he is, who's played in Olympiads for the American team, he's having a bad tournament, but then he has this one game where he just shows off his tactical prowess and plays incredibly well. And I don't know if this is true, but in the paper clippings of it, they'd say things like grandmasters were by the board and they would say things like, oh, Bobby is lost in this position. What is he doing? But there's this 13 year old kid who's just playing incredibly well. And then that also happened before Bobby's started really rapidly improving at chess. Not that people knew that, but he kind of seemed like a rising star. So I think the game was beautiful, but I also think the idea of a 13 year old kid coming out from nowhere and beating a top American player was very fascinating. And there was aggressive chess and it was interesting ideas. Yep. Yeah, taking big risks. It's cool to see a 13 year old do that. Yeah. What about the, you mentioned that his match against Mark Taimano from their 71 candidates match was interesting in some way. Why is it interesting to you? Move 45. I'm looking at some notes. This is with the Bishop E3. I think I know which one you're talking about. It's, I wouldn't say, a lot of these games on these lists, I think are really great combinations that when tactics come into play, which is what we were talking about, but they're very good at exemplifying lessons. This is why you study famous games. So you can apply these lessons to your own games. I think the main takeaway for this one was they were punishing their opponent from steering away from opening principles, which is something that we learned a little earlier, where he delayed the development of his king and put his queen out a little bit too exposed. So Bobby Fischer immediately punished that. And then there was just like a beautiful combination where it was like a 12 in a row, perfect moves, which was a tactic, just winning the game. But it only came from punishing those mistakes. The mistake being bringing the queen out? Bringing the queen out and yeah, not castling your king right away. And these were just like opening principles that now they're written in books, but for books, you would study these principles by studying games. And also I'm looking at some notes. His dominance during the candidates' turn was unprecedented. He swept two top grandmasters. I mean, that guy's meteoric rise is incredible. Sad that I think at whatever, in his 20s, he then quit chess. One has to wonder where he could have gone. Yeah, it is sad that we lost such a brilliant mind so early on. And it's also sad, I think, kind of what ended up happening in his life and slowly going crazier. Is there some aspect of chess that opens the door to crazy? Like how challenging it is on you, the stress, the anxiety of it, the- Isolation and being alone. Yeah, this is a very lonely sport. It is, even to you guys, since you both play it, it's still lonely, the experience of it? It was when I was competing a lot. I think the crazy part of it for me was how obsessed you can get about a board game where you're optimizing your entire life to beat another person and pushing wooden pieces across a board and it doesn't necessarily translate to other things. And the fact that so many people spend so much of their life on it, but you can also spend so much of your life because it's so deep and so interesting. And I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess. And I had that before I went to college where I just wanted to take a gap year and focus on chess because I still, I went to high school, we moved a lot, there was always other things going on. So I felt like I could never really focus on chess. And the one time I could by taking a gap year, I ended up not doing, because my parents really wanted me to go to university right away. But I think maybe if I had taken that gap year, I don't know if I would have gone back to school. So maybe it wasn't a bad thing. I'd also say that's pretty universal. I think if you want to be the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed. So I don't know if that's only chess. Well, some things, some obsessions are more transferable to a balanced social life. That is true. Like healthy development than other things. Yeah, chess is a lot less social than most other sports. Yeah, there's something deeply isolating about this game. I mean, the great chess players I've met, I mean, they, it's like, it's really competitive too. And there's something that you're almost nonstop paranoid about blundering at every level. And that develops a person who's really anxious about losing versus someone who like deeply enjoys perfection or winning and so on. It's just this constant paranoia about losing. Maybe I'm like misinterpreting it, but that gets, that creates a huge amount of stress over like thousands of games, especially in a young person. And that blundering is such a painful experience because you could be playing a game that you've played for five, six hours and you have one lapse in focus and you blunder and you throw the entire game away. And sometimes not just the entire game, but the entire tournament. Now you can't place or do anything anymore. So you just feel those mistakes so strongly. Yeah, there's no one to blame but yourself. Are you guys hard on yourself? Have you been about losing? Like before you became super famous for streaming, where you could be like, well, fuck this, at least I can have fun playing. So I was really hard on myself and I went to play a tournament in Canada to try to qualify for the Olympiad team. And I was like, well, I'm an adult now. I'm not gonna feel emotional if I lose. And then I got there on the first day. I think I was ranked like fourth in Canada for females. And I- How long ago was this? This was like earlier in the year, actually. And I go and I lose to somebody lower rated on the first day. And I think it was because I had blundered. And I went back to my room and I was like, I am not an adult. I'm not eating. I'm not leaving this room. I feel terrible and I know I shouldn't, but it just cuts so deep. And then I actually ended up qualifying for the Olympiad team, but I didn't wanna play cause I didn't have enough time to train and the losses are so painful. I was like, it's not worth it. Yeah, in high school and growing up, I just remember weekends. And I think being competitive in any sport, again, probably people relate to this, but just like spending weekends crying and even like Alex said, like punishing yourself cause you're disappointed in yourself cause you fight so hard and you prepare and you study and you're like, oh, I, yeah. But that's once again on the bright side though, when you're studying so hard and after like a four hour game and you actually are on the opposite end and you win, you feel like such a huge rush of dopamine and serotonin and you're like on a high from the win. So there's also plus sides or you can turn this around. But yeah, like Alex said, like losing after preparing for something and fighting on hours and hours is the worst feeling in the world. Did you ever get anything like that with martial arts? Yeah, so, you know, wrestling. I wrestled all through high school and middle school. Definitely, so it's an individual sport. I did a lot of individual sport, tennis, those kinds of things. But I think even with wrestling and tennis, you're still on a team. Right. You can still like, there's still a camaraderie there. I feel like with chess, especially you go on your own with the tournaments, like you really are alone. But I mean, I always personally just had like a very self-critical mind in general. I would not. This is one of the reasons I decided not to play chess because I think when I was really young, I met somebody who was able to play blindfold chess. Yeah. They were teaching me, they were sitting on the couch, trash, drinking and smoking. Sounds like a Russian. Yeah, exactly. They're now a faculty somewhere in the United States. I forget where, but he making jokes, talking to others, and he would move the pieces. Like he would yell across the room. And I remember thinking that if a person is able to do that, then that kind of world you can live in inside your mind, that becomes the chessboard. To me, that meant like the chessboard is not just out here. It could be in here and you can create these beautiful patterns in your mind. I felt like I had such a strong pull towards that, where I had to decide either I'm gonna dedicate everything to this or not. You can't do half-assed. And then that's when I decided to walk away from it because I had so much other beautiful things in my life. I love mathematics. I loved just everything was beautiful to me. I thought chess would pull me all in. And there was nothing like it, I think, in my whole life since then. I think it's such a dangerous addiction. It's such a beautiful addiction, but it's a dangerous one, depending on what your mind is like. It reminds me of something I thought of before I stopped competing as much. And I'd look at people and think, imagine being so intelligent that you could become a grandmaster and yet only spending the rest of your life being a grandmaster. Because it's one of those things where it does require a lot of mental power, but by doing chess, you're not gonna be able to explore other subjects deeply. Yeah. And not in a way that is bad necessarily, more an admiration and wondering what else could have been. Because I've just seen people get to these levels of obsession where it's all they wanna do. And they're grandmasters, but they're not even top players. So they're never gonna make a living out of it. They'll make like maybe 30, 40K a year max. They can't even focus on their competitive chess because they have to supplement it by teaching and doing things they don't like. And it's just because of how strong of an obsession it can be. Because it truly is very intellectually rewarding. And I think that's what people are addicted to in the self-improvement, but you can get that from a lot of other things as well. Well, I think for me, what I was inspired by that stuck with me is that a human being could be so good at one thing. Right. But to me, that person on the couch drinking and so on, I assumed he was the best chess player in the world. Like to be able to play inside your head, it just felt like a feat that's incredible. And so I fell in love with the idea that I hope to be something like that in my life at something. It would be pretty cool to be really good at one thing. And life in some sense is a search for the things that you could be that good at. I didn't even think about how much money does it make or any of that. It's can I fall in love with something and make it a life pursuit where I can be damn good at it? And the being damn good at it is the source of enjoyment. Not to win because you wanna win a tournament or win because you just wanna be better than somebody else. No, it's for the beauty of the game itself or the beauty of the activity itself. And then you realize that that's one of the compelling things about chess. It is a game with rules and you can win. If you wanna be really damn good in some aspect of life like that, it's a harder and weirder pursuit. Don't you feel like you kind of did that with computer science or AI related things? Like getting that level of damn good. That's one of the cool things about AI and robotics or intellectual pursuits or scientific pursuits is you can spend until you're 80 doing it. So I'm in the early days of that. One of the reasons I came to Texas, one of the reasons I didn't wanna pursue an academic career at MIT is I wanna build a company. And so I'm in the early days of that AI company. And so it's an open world to see if I'm actually going to be good at it. But the thing that's there that I've been cognizant of my whole life is that I have a passion for it. Something within me draws me to that thing. And you have to listen to that voice. So with chess, you're fucked unless you like early on are really training really hard. I think life is more forgiving. You can be world-class at a thing after making a lot of mistakes and after spending the first few decades of your life doing something completely different. In chess, it's like an Olympic sport. There's no, perfection is a requirement, is a necessity. What do you think is that pursuit for you? Like why did you decide to stream? What drew you? I like these questions. Now we're really getting deep. Yeah, this is like a therapy session. I mean, isn't it terrifying to be in front of a camera? Well, it's terrifying to be in front of five cameras instead of six. Correction, six. Six, okay. It's more terrifying for me to try to remember if I actually turn them all. Like I mentioned to you off mic, I'm still suffering from a bit of PTSD after screwing up a recording of Magnus. He had to console me because that was the thing is I felt, okay, you wanna build robots. If you can't get a camera to even run correctly, how are you gonna do anything else in life? Oh no, don't let it spiral like that. It was spiraling hard and I was just laying there and just feeling sorry for myself. But I think that feeling, by the way, and the small tangent is really useful. I feel like a lot of growing happens when you feel shitty. As long as you can get out of it. Like don't let it spiral indefinitely. But just feeling really, really shitty about everything in my life. Like I was having an existential crisis. Like how will I be able to do anything at all? Like you're a giant failure, all those kinds of negative voices. But I think I made some good decisions in the week after that. I was like, okay. Do you think you couldn't have made those decisions if you were less hard on yourself? Me personally? No, I'm too lazy. Okay, so you really need to be angry at yourself enough to go and do what you need. Yeah, it's not even angry, it's just upset of being self-critical. Also for me personally, because I don't have proclivities for depression, I have a lot more room to feel extremely shitty about myself. So if you're somebody that can get stuck in that place, like clinically depressed, you have to be really, really careful. You have to notice the triggers. You don't wanna get into that place. But for me, just looking empirically, feeling shitty has always been productive. Like it makes me long-term happier. Ultimately, it makes me more grateful to be alive. It helps me grow, all those kinds of things. So I kinda embrace it. Otherwise I feel like I will never do anything. I have to feel shitty, but that's not a thing I prescribe to others. There's a famous professor at MIT, his name is Marvin Minsky. And when he was giving advice to students, he said, the secret to my success was that I always hated everything I did in the past. So always sort of being self-critical about everything you've accomplished. Never really take a moment of gratitude. And I think for a lot of people that hear that, that's not good. You should take a pause and be grateful. But it really worked for him. So it's a choice you have to make. It reminds me of the quote, be happy but never satisfied, where you can have a positive spin and still want to improve yourself. But yeah, like when did you decide to take a step in the spotlight, that terrifying spotlight of the internet? It was actually my senior year of college and I was really busy with work and school. And chess was kind of like this lost love. And the interesting thing is that the longer I don't play chess, the more I kind of miss playing it casually and enjoy it more. Because then I start looking at it with fresh eyes. But I didn't have time to play tournaments. So I started streaming online because it was more social than just playing strangers on the internet without knowing anything about who they are. And I started slowly growing a community and got in touch with chess.com pretty quickly too. So then it was this hobby that I would do once a week, every Thursday at 8 p.m. And it was one of the things that brought me a lot of joy. And actually, speaking of depression, did struggle for it with at least 10 years of my life. And it was one of those things where chess and streaming was such a distraction and it brought me such great joy that I just kept doing it because I really, really liked it. And then I was working on something that didn't pan out and decided to go and take a risk and just stream full time, which seemed a little bit weird at the moment. Was that terrifying, that leap? It was terrifying, but I had taken so many terrifying leaps in the past. The last two hadn't worked out, but I was like, well, I'll get it eventually. So somehow having failed before and going through failure and knowing that I'll be okay made me more likely to just try something that was a very, very weird job. Goodbye, camera. I saw it die. Yeah, the camera, we don't need it. But one of the cameras died. Luckily, we have another five. Yeah, I know. Like this is where this triggers the spiral. Lex is gonna go, you just said that. It's still somehow awake. Is there advice you can give about the dark places you've gone in your mind, the depression you suffered from, how to get out from your own story? Whenever I go to those really dark places, the scariest thing is that it feels like I will never get rid of this feeling, and it is very overwhelming. And I just have to kind of look back over time spans and remember that every single time I have got through it and remind myself that it is just temporary. And that has been the most helpful thing for me because I just try to combat the scariest thing about it. And then believe, have faith that it's gonna, like this will go away. And take action, obviously, to make sure it goes away. And I've also tried to spin it as depression is one of the hardest things I've had to deal with, but also one of the biggest motivators because if I just am left with my own brain, I get very depressed, then I really like working or focusing on things. So it actually pushed me to try to focus on school, try to focus on chess, focus on whatever I'm doing. And also if I'm feeling really bad, then there's probably something a little bit off. And I use it as a signal and try to think of it as, okay, this is just a sign that there's things that could be improved for long-term. What about you, Andrea, have you gone to dark places in your mind? I'd say I, my family, like I see Alex going through this. My mom also has very serious depression. Luckily, I got the genes where I don't go through that serious level of depression that they do. I'd say mine is much more temporarily. So it's more similar to what I was feeling when I was feeling shitty about it. Exactly, you go through periods, yes, exactly, where like, but I know that it's not something that's clinical and that's just a genetic thing or a mental thing, where as I know is more serious for like my family members. And I did relate a lot with you where you're saying where that really pushes you. And I felt that a lot through content where you're just kind of feel hopeless and kind of like an existential crisis where I don't like the content I'm doing. And that's what pushes me to like, okay, you have no choice but to try something that now you're gonna be passionate about because otherwise you're gonna be stuck in this never ending cycle. So it's short term and then it helps me come up with the things that I enjoy the most content wise. And it also long-term taught me just how to have a more balanced life, like doing small things that make me happier on a daily basis, to like working out, to eating healthier, which I noticed when I don't do for weeks, I just get a lot more depressed. What has playing chess taught you about life? Has it made you better at life in any kind of way? Or has it made you worse? You know, a lot of people kind of romanticize the idea that chess is kind of like life or life is kind of like chess. And becoming better at making decisions on the chess board is gonna make you better at making decisions in life. Is there some truth to that? I always shy away from these comparisons with chess and life. Because yeah, it has both positives and negatives. So one thing it really helps develop from an early age is having an analytical mind, but then you could also get like paralysis of analysis where you've just thought of everything to death and you're moving too slowly when you just have to keep going forward because there's not a great path ahead. So it's more like exercising your brain and staying sharp, and then also applying that to other things. Whereas if instead of playing chess, you're watching TV or something like that, you'd probably end up being less sharp. Yeah, I used to, in high school, I'd always preach like, ah, chess transfers to life skills that I would teach. I taught chess for a juvenile department, for a special education school. I'd cite studies in prisons where like, oh, playing chess helped them with X. And for your kids, it helps with teamwork and thinking over life choices. And now that I'm older, I don't believe in any of that BS. But I do think that the process of working really hard at something which takes really long to see results, and you have to be really dedicated. And like, I remember in high school and in middle school, well, all my friends, they were having fun on the weekends, and I have to be there studying towards a chess a day, and knowing one day will pay off. But for like two, three years, nothing paid off. Kind of learning that type of patience with anything. It's like, you know, like getting a real job. I can't say I ever really worked a real job in my life since I went straight into streaming and I got to work for myself. But I'd say it's what people go to college for. Like they learn how to live in the real world. And I'd say that that's what chess taught me as a kid. When you're streaming, when you're doing the creative work, do you feel lonely? So a bunch of creators talk about sort of the, it's counterintuitive because you're famous now. You know. Sort of, not quite, but. We're very lucky to have each other. So is that the source of the comfort and the, like, is there some sense where it's isolating to have these personalities, they have to always be having fun, being wild and so on? Or is it actually the opposite? Like, is it a source of comfort to know that there's so many cool people out there that are giving you their love? It started as a source of comfort because it started with a very small community who would be something, it would be around 200 to 300 viewers. And you know, only like 30 to 40 of them would actually chat actively. So you felt like it was a community, not an audience. So you like knew them personally almost. Yeah, exactly. And it was people who were interested in chess. And I would really enjoy that. And then as, you know, we started growing bigger, the audience kind of changed where they're not there for you personally. They're there while you're entertaining. And it changed for me. And I ended up being a lot more self-conscious of things online and started even thinking of myself more like a product than a human being when I'm online because I had to- Brand. Yes, exactly. Otherwise you just start taking everything personally that people comment about you and it's based off a very small clip. I see, so it was almost a kind of a defense mechanism. Exactly. And it took time to get enough, because even if you have tough skin, eventually it gets to you when you're online every single day, listening to thousands of people's feedback on you. I think the loneliest part of being a creator is going through burnout, which everyone is just, it's bound to happen, which is why I think we're very lucky that we have each other because, right, it's a numbers game and you're viral and trendy at one point and then you have to fall. And then there's months where you're just grinding. And I just come in 10 minutes, and I'm like, Andrea, we're irrelevant. That's where I'm bad. That's really like the worst part of being a creator and figuring out how to get over that hump. But it makes me very grateful that I have my sister because I know that I'm not the only person going through it and yeah, I know that most of my creator friends feel very lonely in that process because they don't have someone who's their family and their business partner and they're working by each other side by side. You kind of tie in your self-worth to your job and your content, and maybe even more extremely than other jobs because you also are the entire company and the entire product. So when things are going well or when things are not, you just need to be careful to not reflect it like, oh, I am doing bad. I am bad rather than the trends have now changed. There's outside things. We're gonna keep going. And this is just the normal waves, which is how we think about it now. And also just about, are we enjoying this? Is this what we wanna make? But we were stuck in the camp for a while when we 10X'd our viewership after the pandemic because people were home and playing chess. And then of course that dropped by like 70%. And then you see that and you're trying your best and you just kind of have to deal with it and be like, okay, I'm just gonna keep persevering. And maybe it'll get better. That's so fascinating. I mean, this is a struggle of sorts in the 21st century of like how to be an artist, how to be a creator, how to be an interesting mind in response to this algorithm. I'm telling you, turning off views and likes is really good. I don't look at Twitch views for that reason. And I get obsessed with the numbers too. And I know Andrea does, but for me, what I try now is to be more focused in the moment, but Andrea somehow can do it even with the views. So you just, you get, you have fun with it. Like, ooh, number one. I'm too much of like a given to the temporary satisfaction. Like I like seeing, I like knowing that if something happens right now, viewership's gonna boost by a couple hundred and seeing that I'm right, of course. But what about when the viewers start dropping it? Well, and I always, like you just have this intuition now. And, but I think also the reason that it doesn't affect me so much is when we first started our content journey, we were only Twitch streamers and we, our livelihood were based on Twitch viewers. But now like I've learned how to recycle that content into like YouTube and shorts and other things where I know like, okay, if this stream does badly, there's so many more things you can do that also just have a much larger output. So it doesn't get to me as much as it did. Do you ever feel that with your podcasts or do you feel like it's been authentic since the start? No, so there's a million things to say there. So one is there's a reason I stopped taking a salary at MIT and moved to Texas is I wanted my bank account to go to zero because I do my best with my back against the wall. So one of the comforts I have is I don't care if this podcast is popular or not. I want it to not be popular. So I don't want it to make money. You're failing, Lex. Yeah, I wanna, I mean, I just do best when I'm more desperate. That's like one thing to say. Seems like a reoccurring theme with how you build up your greatest work, which is honestly very respectable. Yeah, so I thank you. This is like a- I wouldn't recommend. Right, thank you for finding- If you're watching this, don't try it at home. The silver lining for a not healthy mental state. But the other thing is I was very conscious, just like with chess and those kinds of things, that I love numbers. And I would be, if I paid attention, if I tried to be somebody at their best, like Mr. Beast, who really pays attention to numbers, I would just not, I'd become destroyed by it. The highs and the lows of it. And I just don't think I would be creating the best work possible. But one of the, I mean, one of the big benefits of a podcast is listeners. And there's an intimacy with the voice. And I think that is much more stable and a deeper and a more meaningful connection than YouTube. YouTube is a fickle mistress. So it's a weird drug that like, it really wants you- With very addicting feedback loops. When you have a video that's number one out of 10, oh my God, the adrenaline you get. And then the thing I really don't like also is the world will introduce you as a person that has a video on YouTube with some X number of views. Like the world wants you to be addicted to these numbers. What- Because they associate it with having done a good job. Yeah. Because that's what people think views are, even if it's not. Right. And primarily because they don't have any other signal of what's a good job. I think the much better signal is people that are close to you, your family, your colleagues, that say, wow, that was cool. I listened to that. That was really, I didn't know this. This was really powerful. This is really moving and so on. But definitely I'm terrified of numbers because I feel like, just like I said, I'd rather be a Stanley Kubrick, right? You'd rather create great art, not to be pretentious, but the best possible thing you can create. Whatever the beauty that's the capacity for creating beauty that's in you, I would like to maximize that. And I feel like for some people like Mr. Beast, I think those are perfectly aligned because he just loves the most epic thing possible, but not for everybody. I think there's a lot of people for whom that's not perfectly aligned. And so I'm definitely one of those. And I'm still really confused why anybody listens to this anyway. But that's also something I guess you're trying to find, trying to figure out. I get very afraid of ever becoming someone who just makes junk food content where you can't stop while you're in the moment and it has all of your attention, but when you're done, it didn't really bring any value to your life, which is something that I think the algorithm still does really reward and making sure that as we are learning how to create better content, it's still something that is gonna be meaningful long-term. Well, ultimately, you inspire a lot of young people. Those are the best. When I get messages from people who are like, I played you a year ago and my rating was 1,400 and now I'm 1,900, I'd like to challenge you again. It's a 14-year-old writing a former email. Those things are always very, very fun to get. And even just outside of chess, it's just empowering to see, like for young women too, to see that kind of thing. I mean, you guys are being yourself and making money for being yourself and having fun and growing as human beings, which I think is really inspiring for people to see. So in that sense, it's really rewarding. And then the way I think about it is there is some benefit of doing entertaining type of stuff so that you get the, kind of like Mr. Beast does with philanthropy. The bigger Mr. Beast becomes, the more effective he is at actually doing positive impact on the world. So those things are tied together. But of course, with podcasts, you guys, well, maybe you have these kinds of tense things, but what kind of ideas, what kind of people do platform? What kind of person, what kind of human being do you wanna be? Because you actually are becoming a person and a set of ideas in front of the public eye and you have to ask yourself that question really hard, like really seriously. Because if you're doing stuff in private, you have the complete luxury to try shit out. Right. I think you have less of a luxury to try shit out because the internet can be vicious in punishing you for trying shit out. And do you think that's sometimes a bad thing where you have less freedom to make mistakes? Yeah, you have two choices. So one, you put up a wall and say, I don't give a shit what people think. I don't like doing that because I like being fragile to the world and keeping my, sort of wearing my heart on my sleeve. Or the other one, yeah, you have to be, you have to actually think through what you're gonna say. You have to think of like, what do I believe? You have to be more serious about what you put out there. It's annoying, but it's also actually, you should have always been doing that. You should be deliberate with your actions and your words. But I don't know, it's a, but some of it, it's such a balance because some of my favorite people are brilliant people that allow themselves to act ridiculous and be silly. Elon Musk, who's become a good friend, is the silliest human of all. I mean, he's incredibly brilliant and productive and so on, but allows himself to be silly. And that's also inspiring to people. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to, you can be a weird, a giant, weird mess and it's okay. So it's a balance. I think when you start to delve into political topics, into topics that really get tense for people, then you have to be a little bit more careful and deliberate. But it's also wise to stay the hell away from those topics in general. Like I mentioned to you offline, somebody I have been debating whether I want to talk to or not as Karyakin on the chess board, because chess is just a game, but throughout the history of the 20th century, it was played between the Russians and the Americans and so on, where they were at war, cold or hot war. And those are interesting. Those are interesting conversations to be had at the Olympics and so on. It's not just a game in some sense. It's like a mini war. And so I have to decide whether I want to talk to him or not and those kinds of things. You have to make those kinds of decisions. For now, you guys are not playing chess with Donald Trump or Obama or so on. We are not right now, no. How long is a stream? Like a few hours, right? Now they're two to three hours. When I was first streaming, I'd stream for like six hours a day. A day. At least usually. Yeah, for like six to seven days a week. Are you doing just like a talking one? No, I'd be playing chess the entire time while talking. And when I started streaming, that's kind of how everybody blows up on Twitch. You're just putting in crazy hours and you're always there. It's not about making the best content. It's about letting people feel like they're hanging out with you and just being on as much as you can. But I ended up feeling very burnt out because it's hard to be your best self when you're in front of a camera for that long because you do get scared of going into places where you wanna learn, but you might not be the best in. Because it's harder to learn in public than do something that like, yeah, we're better than 99% of our viewers at chess. So that's a lot less scary than trying to play a game that you're bad at or discuss topics that you're interested in. Yeah, have the beginner's mind and be dumb at something. Right. Yeah, which is where the fun is and you get to learn together, but people punish you for it on the internet. What about you, Andrea? Yeah, I think like Alex said at the beginning when we were grinding a lot, you don't really even have time for much of a private life because you're streaming every hour of your life and people want it, like the appeal of streamers, it's called like being parasocial where you feel like they're your friend and they like it because they want you to share everything about your life. Really the main challenge for me at first when trying to prioritize quantity over quality, which we're not doing anymore, was realizing that I can't turn everything I'm interested in and every passion into content. Before I'm like, well, I must stream more, but I like music and I like playing piano and I like reading into these topics and I like fitness. And then I'd try to live stream all of it. And that's just, at some point it's like, just enjoy your time off for those hobbies and prioritize what you're good at because that's just gonna be better for the channel overall. So that was a learning lesson for sure. It's nice because there are some intersections when I have tried new things that I really enjoy and it pays off, but that's more less often. So it's more like you can be yourself but only specific parts of yourself online and the rest, sometimes it's nice to just keep private and feel that you could just give it your 100% freedom. See, I feel like I try to be the exact same person on podcasts as in private life. I really don't like hiding anything. But you're also a generalist, right? Where you have people with all topics. For us, we built our audience off of very specific things. So people sometimes feel like, even at the start when we started playing less chess, they're like, I subbed for chess. Why are you not playing chess? Exactly, people are tuning in for an interesting conversation on a bunch of topics. So the more you are yourself, the better it is. But it is very hard when you build your brand on one type of gaming content. Build your brand. But yeah, the way you become a journalist is you slowly expand. It's like expand to checkers. I guess that's a downward- Maybe poker. Poker, yeah, exactly, poker. But also just the ideas, the space of ideas. And one of the cool things about chess is when you're talking over the chessboard, it's a kind of podcast. That is actually an idea we've had with playing chess while also doing a podcast and talking with people. It's kind of like an icebreaker where you're also focusing on the game at the same time. But we are slowly evolving and we're doing more things. One thing we wanted to do is spend less time in front of the computer. So now we're doing a chess travel show where we go to different countries and look at the chess culture. So it actually feels like we're doing things that we would wanna do and explore anyway. And maybe it's not as much in the idea space, which we both enjoy and do a lot in our own free time, but in the sharing cool experiences with our audience that we actually wanna do. Where do you look forward to going? We're going to Romania on September 9th. And I think this is the most exciting for me because we're going back to the country where our entire family's from, where our grandmother taught our dad, who taught us how to play chess, it has a very strong chess culture. So it'll be very unique to go back and see how everything is when we haven't been back for a very long time. And for Romanians, it's very rare when there's a famous Romanian who accomplishes something, which is why right now Andrew Tate's the most famous Romanian. But he's banned, so we're at the spot. For a bad reason, exactly. And there's something very special about Romanian pride. And when we meet fellow Romanians in the US, it's just an amazing connection. And I hear the way my dad talk about, for example, Nadia, who was a famous Romanian gymnast. And he's like, yeah, Romania, we sucked at everything, but when she won the Olympics for gymnast, every kid on the street was doing gymnastics because it's very rare that they make it to that level of success. And I'm not saying that we're super successful, super famous, but it is really cool to meet other Romanians through chess because it's a very special bond. You feel like it's a community and you belong. Yeah, you can't get that anywhere else. Let me ask your opinion since you mentioned him, Andrew Tate. You're both women, successful women, you're both creators. So Andrew Tate is an example of somebody that has become exceptionally successful at galvanizing public attention. But he's also, from many perspective, a misogynist. So let me ask a personal question. Do you think I should talk to him on this podcast? How would you feel as a fan, somebody, I'm talking to the great Alex and Andrea Botez, and the next episode is with Andrew Tate. I think it's a double-edged sword, and most of these things are not as black and white as they seem, you know, because on one hand, I don't agree with his beliefs. And I think he's said a lot of things that are very hurtful and that influence people's opinions. At the same time, talking to someone through that and trying to get to the root of it and how much of it he used just as a social media tactic to maybe change the opinion of people who have been so influenced by him towards something that is maybe more understanding towards women or things like that could do some good, but at the same time, platforming someone like that and giving them more attention also signals to other people who have a platform that it's okay. So it's kind of weighing the pluses and the minuses, and it's a very tough decision because it's not clear. And the thing about the internet, you make the wrong decision, you're gonna pay for it. Right. That's the thing. Like, personally, and it is funny, like, I think the whole way he rose to fame is just a growth hack, and I've seen other people do it where, like, you just say kind of, I don't, honestly, I don't really listen to his content because I just find it so dumb, but I think he knows that by saying the dumbest, most controversial things, that's like a quick rise to fame. And I think surface level, like, he can really hold it up, but that's why I would honestly enjoy tuning into a conversation where you're really breaking down to the core of those beliefs. And I think, like, the young kids who look up to him and when you actually hear someone challenging it could actually be helpful for people, but at the same time, it's a lot of bad publicity, people see your podcast, they see, wow, like, they don't, if they don't know you and they don't know why you're interviewing him and they don't listen, they'll see that and then 100% think it's for the other reason. But I'm also afraid of a society where you can't have discourse with people you don't, with people you disagree with. And even though I don't like Andrew Tate, I think the fact that he got banned from all the platforms is kind of scary because it sets a precedent and you always have to ask yourself, would this be ethical if I was on the other side? And even things with a president like Trump, even if, let's say, you're somebody who was on the left, if that would have happened to a leftist president, how would you feel? Would you think that's morally ethical? So that is something that I think is important. We try to find ways to have conversations and reach some mutual understanding and try, instead of just amplifying the worst about every human being. Well, so one of the major reasons I'm struggling with is because I really enjoy talking to brilliant women. I think it's also, a lot of women reached out to me saying like, it is what it is, but they're inspired when a female guest is on. And to me, if I talk to somebody like Andrew Tate, even if I have a really hard hitting, I think it could be a very good conversation that lessens the likelihood that a brilliant, powerful female will go on the show because they'll never, they'll never watch it. But the thing we do in this society is we put labels on each other. Well, Lex is the person that platforms misogynists. I did a thing where Joe Rogan got in trouble over an N-word controversy earlier in the year. And Joe's a good friend of mine. And I said that I stand with Joe, that he's not a racist or something like that. And within certain communities, I'm now somebody who's an apologist for racists, right? Or a racist myself, that kind of thing. And we put labels without ever listening to the content, without ever sort of, actually, just even the very simple step, or it seems to be difficult, of like, taking on the best possible interpretation of what a person said and giving them the benefit of the doubt and having empathy for another person. So you have to play in this field where people assign labels to each other. And it's difficult. But ultimately, I believe, I hope that good conversations is a way to like a greater understanding of what people to grow together as a society and improve and learn the lessons, the mistakes of the past. But you also have to play this game where people just like putting labels on each other and canceling each other over those. Or that guy said one thing nice about Donald Trump, he must be a far right Nazi. Or the opposite, that this person said something nice about the vaccine, he must be a far left whatever, because apologist for whatever, for Fauci. Where most of us, I think, are ultimately in the middle. It's a weird thing. But I think, and it's also painful on a personal level. Like people have written to me about things like single words, half sentences that I've said about either Putin or Zelensky, where they have hate towards me because of what I said. Either, both directions. I've now accumulated very passionate people that some call me a Putin apologist, some call me a Zelensky apologist. And it hurts to, given how much I have family there, how much I've seen of suffering there, and to carry that burden over time and not let it destroy you is tough. So like, do you wanna take on another thing like that when you have conversations? Or can I just talk to awesome people like you two? Where it's not that burden. We're not controversial. Or you're interesting, you're fascinating, you're inspiring, you're like fun, you know? Not all those difficult things that come with more difficult conversations. Right, but somebody has to be making those difficult decisions and challenging the notions that we should cancel someone just for slightly disagreeing with us. And it's very hard to take that on personally. And I think that's a huge part of it. When you know it's something you're doing for the right reasons, and you're getting a lot of people coming and misinterpreting it, it's very painful. But I think you have to ask yourself long-term if when you made that decision, you ultimately thought it would be better or worse for your listeners to know that conversation. And then if you can sleep with it at night, take the risk. Yeah, when I actually, when I talk to people that, especially like astrophysicists, and you realize how tiny we are, how incredible, like how huge the universe is, like you don't, it doesn't matter. You can do anything. You could like, you can walk around naked, talk shit to people, do whatever the hell. And actually in modern social media, people just like forget. It's like, it's ultimately liberating. Just try to do, at least from my perspective, the best possible thing for the world you can. Take big risks, and it doesn't matter. And that's the other thing with being canceled nowadays, because everyone's attention is much more short-sighted, you can get canceled and then it'll blow over in three days. And you actually see things like this on Twitch very often, where people just have bursts of outrage, and they come into your chat, and they're all spamming and saying mean things, and then three days after. And of course, they're not actually ever serious things. They're usually like things clipped of any streamers in like their worst moments, but then people forget about it pretty soon after. So you're able to accept that? Like when somebody is being shady to you for a day? Yeah, I mean, I still get sometimes emotional about it, especially when I'm like, oh wow, like these things that are being said are not true, or like this is clearly taken out of context, but I've just accepted that it's part of the job. And if I am trying my best, and I am trying things with as good intentions as possible, then I just try to learn every time that happens, and be like, okay, what could I do better? And what is just part of the job? Well, let's start some controversy. Who's the greatest chess player of all time? Is it Magnus Carlsen? Is it Garry Kasparov? Is it somebody else, Bobby Fischer? Do you have a favorite, Alex? So whenever I hear this question, I interpret it in a very specific way, where it's not who was the most talented chess player, or who had the most impact on the chess world, but who is the greatest at playing chess? Where if you were putting all of these players at their peak, who would be the best? And we're kind of living in a world where obviously humans are becoming more like cyborgs, and their tools make them a lot more powerful. Yes. And the computer is the most powerful tool for chess that we've ever witnessed. And the top players now, someone like Magnus Carlsen or Garry Kasparov, if they were going to go towards people like, even Lasker or Bobby Fischer back in the day, Lasker, he was world champion for 27 years, he was the best in his field by far, but would he be able to stand up to someone like Magnus Carlsen who has had these tools? I don't think so. So most chess players have said Garry Kasparov, and I think even Magnus has said that in the past, but I like to think of it as Magnus in his peak and Garry at his peak, and because Magnus was able to live more in a computer era, I feel like so far he's the greatest of all time. And some studies say things like how there's rating inflation, but I looked into some of them, and they basically calculated people's play over the years, and it seems that there hasn't been inflation, people are just getting better, and I think it's because you have better tools at chess. And also one of the cases, what's your? I was gonna say, I actually, I disagree with that. Good, make it interesting. I think I would judge the greatest player of all time in relative to the time that they lived in, and Magnus, although he is technically the strongest chess player in history, that is because he had computers to study chess with. And of course, if you compare him to like Garry Kasparov, he plays most like Stockfish, but Garry Kasparov at his time, he beat more players of his skill level than Magnus did, and Magnus loses more often. He also, of course, held the belt for 20 years more. So I'd say actually, because Garry lacked the help of computers to study chess, and overall performed better against players of his skill level, I think he would be number one. Nice. Yeah, but I mean, the case that people make for Magnus, and many, I mean, what Alex said, but also Magnus plays a lot, and he doesn't, he plays a lot of blitz, bullet, and like he puts, he gets drunk, and like he's really putting himself out there, and in all kinds of conditions, and he's able to dominate in a lot of them. We get to see many of the like losses, or blunders, and all that kind of stuff, because he just puts himself out there. And I think Kasparov was much more like- Never saw him play drunk, right? Yeah. And it's very focused on world championship, is very like, very limited number of games, and very focused on winning. And so there's some aspect to the versatility, the aggressive play, the fun, all of that, that I think you have to give credit to. Oh, 100%. In terms of just the scope, the scale of the variety of genius exhibited by Magnus. And he might not even be done yet. I don't know if he'll ever hit 2,900, but we can't judge yet, because he's not at the peak of his career, potentially. What do you think about him not playing world championship? Isn't that like, isn't that wild? The entirety of the history of chess in the 20th century, going like, meh. Let's walking away from this one tournament that seems to be at the center of chess. What do you think about that decision? I mean, you can't help but be disappointed as a chess fan who wants to see the best player in the world defend his title. But I also understand it on a personal level, and not feeling as satisfied when you're going to the world championship and having to defend against people who are less strong than you. And also imagine winning world championships and not feeling a joy out of that. Yeah. So maybe by not doing that and focusing instead on a goal like 2,900, he'll be more likely to accomplish it because he's focusing on what actually motivates him to play chess. But I do think that it will hurt how we judge the next world champion. I think it won't change him being the best player in the world. And for someone to replace him, even let's say like Nepo versus Ding, even if one of them win, and right on some stance it does lower the merit because now who has the world chess championship title isn't actually the best player in the world. And that has happened before in the past, but still gonna take them the same effort to prove when they would pass him like 10, 20 years to become stronger than Magnus. So I don't think it changes the skill level that it takes to become the best chess player in the world. I think for chess fans, it's very disappointing, but I think in the overall like grand scheme of like the public view to people who don't really, so like, you know, what breaks the popular culture? And you think of what names people know who don't play chess, like Bobby Fischer did it. Most people know Casper over Magnus. It takes the same ability and talent, and that doesn't change. I think it does change though, if you're playing a player who's not as strong. But I see your point as well, and I know we differ on this. Like I said, I heard you ask Magnus, but what is your take on it? Well, listen, his answer is kind of brilliant, which he's not saying he's bored of the world championship. He's bored of a process that doesn't determine the best player. Like, and it's too anxiety-inducing to him to have a small number of games. He doesn't mind losing, which is really fascinating, to a better player or somebody who's his level. He's more anxious about losing to- A weaker player. The weaker player because of the small sample size. Now, if like poker players had that anxiety, they would never play at all, right? That's the World Series of Poker. You get to lose against weaker players all the time. That's the throw all the dice. But that's an interesting perspective that he would love to play 20, 30, 40 games in the world championship, but then he would enjoy it much more. And also play shorter games because they emphasize the like pure chess, actually being able to, like much more variety in the middle game just to see a bunch of chaos and see how you're able to compute, calculate, and intuition, all that kind of stuff. I mean, that's beautiful. I wish the chess world would step up and meet him in a place that makes sense, change the world championship. So FIDE changing it somehow, a loss for that, or having other really respected tournaments that become like an annual thing that step up to that, or more kind of online YouTube type of competitions, which I think they're trying to do more and more, like the Crypto Cup and all those kinds of things. Yeah, and the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour. Which takes a lot of the top players and they do it online in shorter formats. But there's, you know, so that's his perspective. My perhaps narrow perspective is I romanticize the Olympic games, and those are every four years, and the world championships because they're rare, because the sample size is so small. That's where the magic happens. Everything's on the line for people that spend their whole life, 20 years of dedication, everything you have, every minute of the day is spent for that moment. You know, you think about like gymnastics at the Olympic games. There's certain sports where a single mistake and you're fucked. And that stress, that pressure, it can break people or it can create magic. Like a person that's the underdog has the best night of their life, or the person that's been dominating for years, all of a sudden slips up. That drama from a human perspective is beautiful. So I still like the world championships, but then again, looking at all the draws, looking at like, well, the magic isn't quite there. So to me, when I see faster games of chess, that's much more beautiful. But I don't understand the game of chess deeply enough to know. Like, does it have to be so many draws? Like, is there a way to create a more dynamic chess? And he talked about random chess with a random starting position. That's really interesting. But then of course, that's like, then you do have to play hundreds of games and that kind of stuff. Right. So, but I think it's great that the world number one is struggling with these questions because he's in the position, he has the leverage to actually change the game of chess as it's publicly seen, as it's publicly played. So it's interesting. He's still young enough to dominate for quite a long time if he wants. So I don't know. I, you know, with Kasparov, the fight between nations, I hope they have the world championship. And I hope there's a, I hope he's still a part of it somehow. I hope he changes his mind. And comes back. Comes back, some kind of dramatic thing, I don't know. But it is, his heart is not in it. And then, and then that's not beautiful to see, right? Yeah, it is beautiful that the thing he wants is a great game of chess against an opponent that's his level or better. And that's great that he's coming from that place. But I hope he comes back somehow. Because the world championship is a special thing in any sport. So you do wish that the person who wins the world championship is the best player in the world? No. I hope that the best people in the world, the two best people in the world, are the ones that sit down. But the person that wins is the person that, that's the magic of it. Nobody knows who's going to win. I think Magnus is so, he really wants the best person to win. That's why he wants the large sample size. But to me, there's some magic to it. The stress of it, the drama of it, that's all part of the game. Like it's not just about the purity of the game, like the calculation, the pure chess of it. It's also like the drama. Yeah, the pressure, the drama, all of it. The shit talking, if it gets to you, the mind games. This is the part that's fun to watch, but less fun to be playing. But that's why it's great. Who can rise under that pressure and who melts under that pressure. There's a lot of people that look up to you, like they're inspired by you because you've taken a kind of nonlinear path through life. Is there any advice you have for people like in high school today that are trying to figure out what they want to do? Do they want to go to Stanford? Do they want to pursue a career in, I don't know, in industry or go kind of the path you guys have taken, which is have the ability to do all of that and still choose to make the thing that you're passionate about your life? I always like the calculated risks approach where when you're younger, it's okay to take more risks because you have a lot more time, but there has to be a reason why you're doing that particular risk. Is it something that you've spent a lot of time already really passionate and working on, or is it just something that's trendy and you want to do it because you don't have a better option? And that's actually similar to what Andrea did when she decided to go into streaming instead of school. Yeah, it was the reason I got into streaming because I was initially going to go to college, but the pandemics, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic and all my classes were online. And I never thought, ever since I was 12, like my dream was school and I saw myself nowhere else than going to university. And I just, I thought of it and kind of weighed out the risk and like, well, if I take a gap year and I try streaming with my sister, what do I have to lose? I gained some experience working with someone who has a lot more experience than I do. And then I can go back to school after. And if I go to school right now, I do online classes for a year and that's something that I could do at any time. So that's why it made a lot of sense for me to go into this. But of course, this is also a very unique opportunity. So I don't know how applicable, but I do think overall the calculated risk is a really good lesson. So life is like chess. Exactly. Maybe sometimes. Exactly. You also, have you considered a career in professional fighting? I saw you did a self-defense class, you did a little jiu-jitsu. Did you see the 10-year-old kid who- Throwing her? Yes, and apparently I could have broken a leg. But it's actually funny, like chess boxing is a thing and I have been doing a lot of boxing. Physical activity is honestly one of my favorite things to do and I have been testing it out on content. And we have a creator friend who's hosting a chess boxing tournament, but there's no woman who could match me, unfortunately, because all the opponents are male and I can't fight a guy. How does chess boxing work? So you do a round of chess and a round of boxing. And we actually did a training camp for it before. And of course, after you go into the ring- Is this real? Is this serious? Yes, it's amazing. We went to a London chess boxing club. And after you get- No, it seemed like videos, I thought it was something you do in Russia or something. No, it's a real sport. Yeah. It's a real sport. Yeah, no, it's very cool. But after you get really tired, you're more likely to make a mistake and they call them Jaffers or something. Yeah, that's probably a good strategy, is like, what do you want to, because some of it is a cardio thing. Do you wanna work on your chess or your boxing? They do both, it's very fun. But yeah, from a content perspective, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love to- And it's also very entertaining. Would love to see. I don't wanna see Andrea getting hit, that would be- I would love to fight. Unless she doesn't get hit. I would get- Our roommate fought in a fight and she did end up winning, but seeing her get hit, I thought I was gonna throw up off screen. I just think it was so cool. She had no experience in boxing whatsoever. And then coming from someone in the content world where you start waking up six days a week at 6 a.m. and she's training every day, like a real professional athlete, I think it's such a unique experience and also a really test of how much you can really commit to this and progress. And I think that's really rewarding. Did you ever end up doing the marathon with David Goggins that you were training for? No, I got injured, but we're gonna do it soon. That's on my bucket list, just to see what your limits are. You're ready to do it? What did you do leading up to this? You're just gonna go into it. It's mental anyway. But I do run a lot to make sure there's no... You have to have a base level of fitness to make sure your body doesn't completely freak out. But other than that, 50 plus miles is just about taking it one step at a time and just being able to deal with the suffering and all the voices, the little voices that tell you all the excuses, like, why are you doing this? This blister is bleeding, whatever the thing that makes you want to stop, just shut it off. Sometimes it feels like you like pain. No, well, no, no. But the pain does seem to show the way to progress. So what... In your turn. In my world. Something that's really hard and I don't want to do, that's usually the right thing to do. And I'm not saying that's like a universal truth, it's just, if there's a few doors to go into, the one that I want to go into least, that's the one that usually is the right one. Afterwards, I will learn something from it. The David Goggins thing, I don't know. Listen, we're talking offline, the conversation with Liv, she's a very numeric, calculated risk. Everything is planned. I go with the heart. I just go whatever the hell. I think two years ago, I woke up, it was summer, I decided to tweet, I will do as many pushups. I don't know why I did this, but I will do as many pushups and pull-ups as this tweet gets likes, something like that. Okay, good. And then it got like 30,000. Once you put it out on the internet, you're held accountable. Well, for myself, I mean, in some sense. And then that's when, I already was connected to David at that point, but that's when he called me. And then I have to do it. And then I did it, and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I did it for seven days and I got injured. So I did about a few thousand. So this is what got you to be injured, this challenge? No, it's different. I keep getting injured doing some stuff. But this particular thing, I started doing the, you don't realize that you have to really ramp up. So I got like overuse injury tendinitis on the shoulder all the way down to the elbow. So I took like eight or nine days off and then started again. And then it took about 31 days to do. The number was like 26, 27,000. Yeah. And it took like three, four hours a day. Oh God. Yeah. Sounds like torture. And not, you know, and constantly asking myself, what am I doing with my life? This is why you're single was the voice in my head. This is what are you doing? It's like face down on the carpet. Like exhausted, like what, what? Because of a tweet? What is this? But- Did you record it or you just- I did, I did record it for myself. Okay. Now imagine doing this every day and that's what it's like to be a Twitch streamer. Just kidding. Right. Doing stupid things. That was really important to me actually to not make it into content. You know, I recorded everything. So maybe one day I could publish it. I recorded it mostly because it's really hard to count when you get exhausted. Yeah. Like I just, so you actually enter the Zen place where with pushups, where it's just like, it's almost like, like breathing. You get into a rhythm and you can do quite a lot. But I wanted to make sure, like, if I actually get this done, I want there to be evidence that I got it done for myself so I can count it. I had this idea that I would use machine learning to like automatically process the video to count it. But then like after like 10 days, I didn't even give a shit what anyone thought. It was about me versus me. I didn't even care. Lex versus Lex. Yeah. And then, yeah. And David was extremely supportive. But that's when I realized like, I really want to go head to head with him. Yeah, those kinds of people are beautiful. They really challenge you to your limits. Whatever that is. It's like, the thing is physical exercise is such an easy way to push yourself to your limit. There's in all other walks of life, it's trickier to configure. Like how do you push yourself to your limits in chess? It's hard to figure out. But like in physical. Do you think it's ever dangerous? Yeah. And that's why it's beautiful. The danger. He just likes the pain. I don't like that your eyes lit up as I said that. Yeah. Like if you don't know how you're gonna get out of it, you're gonna have to figure out something profound. It is the danger that pushes you. About yourself. And I mean, one of the reasons I went to Ukraine is I really wanted to experience the hardship and the intensity of war that people are experiencing so I can understand myself better, I can understand them better. So the words that are leaving my mouth are grounded in a better understanding of who they are. And I mean, running a lot with David Gong is a much simpler thing to do, simpler way to understand something about yourself, about like the limits of human nature. I think most growth happens with voluntary suffering or struggle, involuntary self. That's where the dark trauma is created. But I don't know. Now maybe it is. Maybe I'm just attracted to torture. And what is it that your mind does when you're going through this involuntary suffering? I think there's like stages. First, all the excuses start coming. Like, why are you doing this? And then you start to wonder like, what kind of person do you want to be? So all the dreams you had, all the promises you made to yourself and to others, all the ambitions you had that haven't come yet realized, somehow that all becomes really intensely visceral as the struggle is happening. And then when all of that is allowed to pass from your mind, you have this clear appreciation of what you really love in life, which is just like just living, just the moment, step at a time. I think what meditation does is most effective. It's just that pain is a catalyst for the meditative process, I think, for me. For me. I don't know. Magnus said there's no meaning to life. Do you guys agree? Or no? Why are we here? I do not know why we're here. But I do know that having some kind of meaning that I give my own life makes it a lot more motivating every day. So I just try to focus on finding meaning within my own life, even if I know it's just self-imposed. And then chess is a part of that? Chess is a part of it. Maybe it was more so when I was younger, because it was easier to just feel like, I want to improve as a person, and use chess to kind of measure some kind of self-improvement. And now it's more different than that, and I think I need to once again find what that northern star is. Basically, I need to have a why for why I'm doing things, and then I feel like I could do very hard things. What role does love play in the human condition? Alex and Andrea. I'll let Andrea start this one since I took the last. Sure. And yeah, just to add my answer for the last one. I also kind of think, well, life is meaningless, but I like the stoic idea where that's something that you live to revolt against. But for the second question. The revolt against the fundamental meaninglessness of life. I like it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It was what does love play? What role does love play? Yeah, in the human condition. The way I see it, love is a reason you want to share experiences with other people. That's how I see it. Like the people you really love, you wanna share the things you're going through with them. The good and the bad. Yeah, exactly. That's my simple take on love. My take on it is that part of what it is to be human is to be somebody who feels things emotionally and love is one of the most intense feelings you can have. Obviously there's the opposite of that and there's things like hate, but I think the love you feel for people like your parents and your friends and romantic love in that moment is much more intense than in other situations. And I think it's also just very unique to humans and that's what I appreciate about it. Maybe that's the meaning of life. Maybe that's what the Stoics are searching for. Andrea, Alex, thank you so much for this and thank you for an amazing conversation. Thank you for creating, keep creating and thank you for putting knowledge and love out there in the world. Thank you for having us, Lex. It was a pleasure. And we're both big fans of your podcast, so this was really exciting for us. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fischer. Chess is life. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/srUlKNLZTas

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Destiny: Politics, Free Speech, Controversy, Sex, War, and Relationships | Lex Fridman Podcast #337

If you have a democratic style of governance, you are entrusting people with one of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities. And that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are going to make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history. If you're going to trust people to vote correctly, you have to be able to trust them to have open and honest dialogue with each other. Whether that's Nazis or KKK people or whoever talking, you have to believe that your people are going to be able to rise above and make the correct determinations when they hear these types of speeches. And if you're so worried that somebody's going to hear a certain political figure and they're going to be completely radicalized instantly, then what that tells me is that you don't have enough faith in humans for democracy to be a viable institution, which is fine. You can be anti-democratic, but I don't think you can be pro-democracy and anti-free speech. The following is a conversation with Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. He's a video game streamer and political commentator, one of the early pioneers of both live streaming in general and live streamed political debate and discourse. Politically, he is a progressive, identifying as either left or far left, depending on your perspective. There are many reasons I wanted to talk to Stephen. First, I just talked to Ben Shapiro, and many people have told me that Stephen is the Ben Shapiro of the left in terms of political perspective and exceptional debate skills. Second reason is he skillfully defends some nuanced, non-standard views, at the same time being pro-establishment, pro-institutions, and pro-Biden, while also being pro-capitalism and pro-free speech. Third reason is he has been there at the beginning and throughout the meteoric rise of the video game live streaming community. In some mainstream circles, this community is not taken seriously, perhaps because of its demographic distribution skewing young, or perhaps because of the sometimes harsh style of communication. But I think this community should be taken seriously and shown respect. Millions of young minds tune into live streams like Destiny's to question and to try to understand what is going on with the world, often exploring challenging, even controversial ideas. The language is sometimes harsher and the humor sometimes meaner than I would prefer. But I, Grandpa Lex, put on my rain boots and went into the beautiful chaotic muck of online discourse, and have so far survived to tell the tale, with a smile and even more love in my heart than before. On top of all this, we were lucky to have Melina Gorinson, a popular streamer and world traveler, join us at the end of the conversation. You can check out her channel on twitch.tv slash melina, and you can check out Stephen's channel on youtube.com slash destiny. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Destiny. I don't know if you watched me watch Destiny, but I don't know if you watched me watching your yay interview. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm so curious, when you're navigating a conversation like that, how intentional is the thought process between like building rapport and pushing and giving a little and letting like... Zero. Zero intention. I was watching and thank you so much. It was very kind for you to review that conversation. It meant a lot that you were complimenting parts on the technical aspects of the conversation, but no, zero. And I'm actually deliberately trying to avoid, I think you've called it debate brain, which is just another flavor of thinking about like the meta conversation, trying to optimize how should this conversation go. Because I feel like the more you do that, the better you get at that, the less human connection you have. Like the less genuinely you're actually sitting there in the moment and listening to the person, you're more like calculating what's the right thing to say versus like feeling what is that person feeling right now? What are they thinking? That's what I'm trying to do is like putting myself in their mind and thinking, what does the world look like to them? What does the world feel like to them? And so from that, I truly try to listen. Now, I'm also learning, especially because Rogan and others have been giving me shit for not pushing back. It's good sometimes to say, from a place of care for the other human being, to say, stop. What did you just say? I don't think that represents who you are and what you really mean. Or maybe if it does at that time represents who they are, I can see a better world if they grow into a different direction and try to point that direction out to them. There's a really complicated dance between letting somebody share their full story versus letting somebody like, essentially, I guess like proselytize your audience. And it's like, okay, hold on, let's take him in here. But yeah, I used to be four or five years ago, it was attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, whatever you said. And now I'm leaning way more towards the like, okay, well, tell me how you feel about everything and then we'll go from there. So a lot of people like my new approach. Some older fans will watch and they're like, why are you letting this guy just ramble on? You know, he said like five or six wrong things and you're only gonna call him out on two of them. And it's like, it's just different styles of conversation. But yeah. Do you do a lot of research beforehand too? Depending on the conversation, yeah. So if we're gonna talk like vaccines and stuff, yeah, that's a ton of reading and stuff that I never thought I'd know going into it. If it's a more personal, like political philosophy conversation, there's not as much you can prepare for just, it truly depends on the conversation. How much are you actually listening to the other person? Always listening, you have to listen. Because as soon as you stop listening, the quality of everything falls apart. The connection disappears, the quality of the conversation disappears. But my natural inclination is to just be way more aggressive than normal. So I have to constantly remind myself, I guess you would call it a meta conversation. I'm like, okay, he's probably saying this because of that, or we'll let him go here and then we'll stop later. But yeah, because my preferred style of conversation is like, I'm gonna talk and the second I say something you disagree with, then let's iron it out, right? I think in like syllogisms, like, okay, here's premise A, okay, good, okay, premise B, okay. And then conclusion. And then as long as we're both deductively sound, we're not crazy, no psychosis, then we're gonna agree on everything. Whereas other people like to, most people think in stories, like narratives, like a whole, there's a whole narrative and the individual facts don't matter as much because they'll pick and choose what they want. And it's really hard because everybody thinks narratives have to function in that world. But it's frustrating for me sometimes. Well, I've seen, you've had a lot of excellent debates. One of them I just recently, last night, watched is on systemic racism. And it's the first time I've seen you completely lose your shit. Oh, shoot. Who was that against? I'm not sure exactly, but you were just very frustrated. And sorry, not lose your shit, but you were frustrated constantly because of the thing, let's lay out one, two, three. And every time you try to lay it out, it would falter. I think it had to do with sort of, can you use data to make an argument? Or do you need to use a study that does an interpretation of that data? And then there's like this tension between, I think this is a behavioral economist that you were talking to. And the point is you do this kind of nice layout that the whole point of behavioral economics, it says there's more to it than just the data. You have to give a context and do the rich, rigorous interpretation in the context of the full human story. And then there was like a dance back and forth. Sometimes you use data, sometimes not, and you're getting really frustrated and shutting down. And so that felt like a failure mode. I've seen Sam Harris have similar sticking points. Like if we can't agree on the terminology, we can't go on. To me, I feel like sort of the Wittgenstein perspective is like, I think if you get stuck on any one thing, you're just not gonna make progress. Part of the conversation has to be about doing a good dance together versus being dogmatically stuck on the path to truth. I think the true challenge is identifying what of those sticking points are important versus what is not important. It's like if I'm having an argument with somebody about like Jewish representation in media, it might be like a big conversation and they might say a couple things. Like I think Jewish people, you know, they tend to help their own or whatever. And it's like, oh, okay. But like for the purpose of the conversation, we can keep moving. But if they casually drop like, you know, yeah, I think that's why the Holocaust numbers are blown up from like 100,000 to 6 million. And it's like, okay, well, hold on. Wait, wait. If you think this, we have to stop here because this is gonna be, it's not just a language game in this part. If you really believe this fact, then the whole rest of the conversation is gonna be informed by that belief, you know? And it has to be something that doesn't bother you personally. You have to step outside your own ego. So Holocaust denial is somebody that would bother a lot of people. And there's some things just observing you, I feel like when you get really good at conversation, you can become a stickler to, you might have your favorite terms that really bothers you. People don't agree on those terms. Oh yeah. Begs the question. You mean raising the question. Yeah, I usually just want, if people say stuff, I just let it slide, yeah? Because if you fight, when you're having a conversation with somebody and you're talking to their audience at the same time, because that's really what's happening. You never want to come off as overcombative or overaggressive because it puts people in like, there's like a trigger in your brain. And this is true of relationships, of friendships, of persuasive rhetoric or whatever. There's a trigger in the brain. And as soon as that defensive trigger gets like flipped on, everything is over. You've lost the ability to persuade because everything becomes a fight at that point. Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk to you because I heard somewhere that you were referred to as the Ben Shapiro of the left. And since I'm talking with Ben as well, I wanted to sort of complete spiritually this platonic political philosophy puzzle in my head. You are a progressive, but a progressive with many non-standard progressive views. And you had a heck of a fascinating journey through all of that. And like I said, I think you argue with passion sometimes, with excessive amounts of passion. That's a really polite way of saying that. Almost always with good faith and with rigor, with seriousness. I asked on your subreddit, which is an excellent subreddit, shout out to the Destiny subreddit, so much, at least for that particular post. What I really loved is when I asked for questions for you, they were like, holy shit, there's adults in there, let's all behave. Nobody say incest. I was like, what? What's going on here? But actually the questions that rose to the top were really good. So somebody said that Destiny was, speaking of your journey, was a conservative in his early teens, then he became a libertarian, then he became a left-wing social justice warrior, then he flirted with socialism, and now he is a social democrat, liberal. I've also heard you refer to yourself as a far left person. So to the degree that is true to that journey, can you take me through your evolution through the landscape of political ideologies that you went through? So my dad comes from Kentucky and my mom is a Cuban immigrant. Cubans are notorious for being very conservative in the United States for historical reasons and for other reasons, but my upbringing was a very Republican one. I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, on the radio, Billy Cunningham, I think Sean Hannity a little bit later on. That was my whole upbringing politically. I remember I had written articles for the school journal in favor of defending the war in Iraq and defending Bush from all the criticism, etc. So that was my upbringing. And once I hit high school, college, I had my edgy libertarian-esque high school phase of reading Ayn Rand, of figuring out that, oh my God, nothing in life matters except for class and money. That's actually the answer to everything. And I got to college, I became a Ron Paul fan, very big Ron Paul fan. And then from there, I kind of work, do life, life happens. At the kind of the lowest point of my life in terms of where I'm working, financially everything is like kind of in ruin in my life. There's a whole bunch of dumb stuff that's happened. Probably my most conservative point, I don't know what it is about like being poor and thinking like you can work your way out of it, you can do whatever. It's just my upbringing is always just like if you're not having financial success, just work, work, work, work, work. And then I got into streaming, very, very lucky break. Everything just lined up at the right time. And then as I've progressed through streaming, I would say through the years, I've gradually fallen more and more to the left, especially once my kid turned four, five, six years old. And I started to see like how much different his life was just because of the financial opportunities that I was able to provide for him through no merit of his own. And that started to radically change how I viewed the world in a lot of ways. So actually let's like linger on that low point. You worked at McDonald's, you worked at a casino, you did carpet cleaning. What was the lowest point? Definitely the carpet cleaning. Really? Absolutely. Why was it the lowest point? That's when you were just flirting with starting streaming? My whole life has been a series of lucky breaks, really, truly. I grew up playing a lot of video games, but back in my day, our day, you had to read. There was a lot of text on the screen. Back in my day, we used to play- They didn't all talk to you. Yeah, because nowadays everything's voice acted, but back then you had to read a lot. I was a really good reader and a really good vocabularian. Yeah, I've heard you actually say that. What games are we talking about? What do you mean just reading? You're talking about like RPGs? Yeah, JRPGs. So like Final Fantasy games, Fantasy Stars, like all of these, like any RPG that would have been on the SNES, Sega, PlayStation. These are the things that I'm- Let's pause on that. Okay. I just talked to Todd Howard, who's of the Elder Scrolls fame and the Fallout fame and beyond. What's your thoughts on Elder Scrolls? Why is Skyrim the greatest RPG of all time? Man, I really don't like Skyrim or Fallout or those types of games. You don't love it? Oh, really? No, not at all. Why do you hate Skyrim? Yeah, so I really like characters and like compelling stories and narrators around those characters. And I like to see them kind of like grow and change, kind of like a movie or a story. So in your Final Fantasy games, you've got characters. There are a lot of classical tropes of like a character starts off kind of like edgy, angsty, all on their own. They develop relationships, friendships. They realize that the life is more about themselves and they do that. And I like that growth. That's kind of what you see in all of those old role-playing games. I didn't like the open world ones as much because your main character is just like a blank slate, never talks. It's for you to like project onto. But there's not the same linear narrative of growth for the character. That's fascinating. There's an actual story arc to the character that's more crafted in a beautiful way by the designers of the game. I don't think one is better or worse. I tend towards like, I want to hear a compelling story around like a set of characters that like grow and change. Oh, that's beautifully put then. Yeah. I just really loved being able to leave the town. You go outside the town and you look outside. It's nature and the world of possibilities is before you. You can do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, that immensity of just being lost in the world is really immersive for me, but yeah, you're right. Whatever attracts you about a world. So you were just starting to play video games. You grew up playing video games. That's one of your lucky breaks. There's just like a lot of random skills you pick up depending on the type of game you play. I played a lot of text-based games on the computer. So I was a very fast typer. I'm still a very fast typer. Read a lot, learned weird kind of math stuff for some of the calculations, some of the games. I think I'm pretty good at getting information, figuring stuff out, learning patterns, all of that. And then that plus the reading and everything with the games meant that I don't want to say I excelled in school because my grades were pretty bad, but I was in like all honors, all AP classes or whatever. A lot of dual enrollment, a lot of AP credit going into college. So I did pretty well in school, probably better than I should have, but it was because I had the game stuff that was like really powering a lot of my brain there while I was trying to sleep through class. So you're able to soak in information, integrate it, quickly take notes. Generally, I think I'm pretty good at that, yeah. You do this a lot when you stream, you're typing stuff. Is there a system in that note-taking? And what do you use for note-taking? Does it matter? I use a notepad. Like notepad.exe notepad? Yep, notepad.exe, not the plus plus. Is there genius to the madness behind that or you just don't give a shit? No, I mean like it's going to depend on the style of conversation. If I'm with somebody that is very meticulously organized their thoughts and they're a, find a better word here for rambler, you can edit that in, better word for rambler, somebody that talks a lot and a lot, I'll start like taking notes, bullet points, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, because there's a style of conversation where I say seven or eight different things and then when you go to respond to everything I said, I cut you off immediately and we argue that point. But if somebody's going to do that, you're just like, hold on, you just said these eight things, I'm going to respond to every single one, I've written them all down and then you can go, if you want to go point by point, we can, but you just said all this and I wrote it down, so we're going to go. So what are you actually writing down, like a couple of words per point they left? Honestly, like there are very few unique conversations in politics, like a lot of them are kind of retreading old ground. So if we're having a debate on abortion, somebody might say like, oh, well, I believe this thing about viability and I believe this thing about, you know, when they're a fetus versus a human and I'll just write down like those points so that when I go to respond, I kind of have like a, like note cards, like a guiding thing there to keep me centered on my response. Political discourse is a kind of tree you're walking down, I got it. Yeah. And you're like taking- Just to keep my focus guided, so I'm not like running off on a weird tangent or responding something I didn't say or something, yeah. What about like doing research? It's just, is there a system to your note taking? Because mentally you seem to be one of the most organized people I've listened to, so is there, is it in your mind or is there a system that's on paper? A little of both. I feel like the human mind is a beautiful thing if you have interest in an area. Yeah. So like what I'll tell people is, let's say there's like a totally new topic that I'm researching, I don't know anything, and I'll do a couple of these on stream, I think they're boring, people watch it. I might open a Wikipedia article and I'll read and I hit something I don't know, and then I open the next Wikipedia article and I'll read it and then I might have like seven tabs open and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read a ton of stuff, maybe for hour two, three, four hours of stuff. And then by the end, you know, someone in chat will ask me like, do you even remember like this particular thing? And I'll say, not really, no, not too much. But what happens is, as long as you've seen it once, what will happen is like the next day, the day after we'll read something else and be like, oh, I remember that thing from this thing. I remember like vaguely that. And then if you see it like a third time, you're like, oh, this makes sense because especially when it comes to, oh, here's like a little trick on stuff. If you're ever reading any news and there's a place that pops up, always look at it on a map because so much of history is like on a map. It's so important to like know the geography. It makes things make so much more sense. But yeah, once I start to see stuff over and over again, just because I've like read it a few times, stuff will start to kind of connect to my mind and like, oh, yeah, well, this makes sense. Of course, these people believe this because of this, or of course, like this happened here. It's because, you know, that happened there. So yeah, it's a lot of that. If there's like a topic that I'm doing specific research for, so like vaccine related stuff is a big one. The Ukrainian-Russian conflict is a big one. That I'll break out a note. I'll probably get like a Google doc and I'll just start like writing like an outline of kind of the rough points of everything just to organize my thoughts around different topics, yeah. We're just going to go on tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. We'll return to the low point of your life at some point. Always returning from the philosophy to the psychology. So you did the Ukraine topic. One question is, what role does US play in this war? Could they have done something to avoid the war? Did they have a role to play in forcing Vladimir Putin's hand? Do they have a role to play in deescalating the war towards a peace agreement and the opposite? If it does escalate towards something like the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, are they to blame? Are we to blame? Oh, man. Somebody sent me an email a while ago with great words. There's a specific way to navigate a conversation where you can kind of like contribute to a negative event, but you're not really the one responsible for it. Like the classic example is a woman goes out late at night, gets a little bit too drunk, and then something happens. And it's like, while there might have been steps you could have taken to mitigate the risk, it's not her fault of what happened because the responsibility rests on the agent making the choice, right? There's a chooser at some point that is choosing to do wrong or evil. I don't believe in any of the arguments that say the United States has contributed to Russia's position on Ukraine or the actions that they've taken on Ukraine. There are several arguments that some people, some even political scholars are putting out there to say that the United States is to blame, but I find them completely unconvincing. I think that when you ask the question of like, what is the United States role or what has our role been? I think it's really important for us. I don't think we even agree as a country on what our role should be, which I think is a hard one because you've got this kind of there's this growing populist movement in the United States. It might be the far left and the far right. And I think populists tend to have this kind of isolationist view of the world where the United States should just be our own thing. We shouldn't be telling anybody what to do. We shouldn't be the world police. And then kind of more in these like center left, center right positions. And then across a lot of Europe, you've got, well, okay, the United States is kind of like the big kid on the block. Like we're looking to them for guidance and leadership on situations like what's going on in Ukraine. So insofar as the original question is like, what is like the United States responsibility? I think we have a responsibility to ensure the relative like freedom, prosperity and stability across Europe. I think that defending Ukraine's sovereignty and right to their borders is a part of that. And I don't believe that prior to the invasion in 2022, I don't think the United States was contributing to Russia invading that country. I know there are arguments given that like the expansion of NATO has something that's been threatening to Russia, but the Baltics joined and Russia didn't do anything about it. The invasion to Crimea was very clearly a response to the revolution in 2014. The invasion on the borders is clearly a response to Ukraine winning that civil war in the Southeast and the Donbass and Russia becoming more aggressive. I don't think that you can blame any of that on NATO expansion. There's no NATO countries that are threatening Russia or debating Russia. Lexer Do you think there is a nuclear threat? Do you think about this? Do you worry about this, that there is a threat of a tactical nuclear weapon being dropped? I think that possibility exists either way. And I think the responsibility for that is on Russia because it can't, it just can't be the case that if you have nukes, you're allowed to invade countries and take their land. Because if anything, I think that that down the road also increases the potential for nuclear problems in the future, right? Because at that point, either every single country has to acquire their own nuclear weapons, because if you don't, Russia is going to mess with you. Or every single country has to join NATO. And now what we're back at square zero ground, zero square one where people like, Oh, well, look, all these countries joining NATO is aggressive towards Russia. Like, what are you going to do? Yeah, you've mentioned that there's a complicated calculus going on with the countries that have, have nuclear weapons. And what's our responsibility? Are you allowed to do anything you want to countries that don't have nuclear weapons? That's a really tricky discussion, for sure. Because what is US supposed to do if Russia drops a tactical nuclear weapon? There's a set of options, none of which are good. And it's such a tricky moment right now. Because the things that Biden and other public figures say, I feel like has a significant impact on the way this game turns out. Because I think mutually assured destruction is partially a game of words. I mean, I believe in the power of conversation, of leaders talking to each other. I feel like you have to have a balance between threat and compromise, and like, empathy for the needs, the geopolitical, the economic needs of a nation, but also sort of respect and represent your own interests. So it's a tricky one. Like, how do you play the, how do you play the hand? It reminds me of, I don't know if you've ever heard in like evolutionary psych or evolutionary biology, there are things called tit for tat strategies. It kind of reminds me of that, where it's like, if like, there are a whole bunch of these little biological mechanisms where creatures will develop like socializing, like tit for tat, if you do something bad to me, I'm going to do something bad for you. And then more complicated schemes will come out where it'll be like, tit, tit for tat, where it's like, you can make one mistake, and then I'm going to get you if you do a second one, or it could be tit, tit, tit for tat, or there could be tit for tat, tat for tit. There's like all these like back and forth, where creatures kind of optimize themselves. Yeah, I think something the United States did really well in terms of that kind of conversational strategy, and I approved of this in the beginning, was Biden was very clear about setting out like the exact level of US involvement for the war. We're not going to do a no fly zone, there's not going to be US troops on the ground in Ukraine, but we are going to send a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of arms and a whole bunch of intel to them. And I thought he did a good job at laying out like the limitation of the US involvement while opening as much as we could in the ways we could help. But the yeah, that looming threat of some sort of tactical nuclear weapon, I think on the table right now is like, it's going to be the annihilation of like Russian sea forces and everything. But you know, what happens if it continues to escalate? That's like a world that nobody wants to, nobody wants to be in. Yeah. So we talked about difficult conversations. And again, thank you so much for reviewing the yay conversation. Let me ask you about Putin. Speaking of difficult conversations, so if you sit down, if I sit down with somebody like Vladimir Putin, or Vladimir Zelensky, what's the right way to have that conversation? We can talk about that one or we could talk about somebody more well understood through history, like something like Stalin or Hitler, something like that. Maybe that's an easier example to illustrate how to handle extremely difficult conversations. Yeah, I mean, I can handle really difficult conversations between like two people, leaders of countries, though, you're there so much that you are representing in that conversation. I guess the thing that would be interesting to me would be like, what is Vladimir Putin's interest? Like, what is the genuine interest that he has in the conflict? Because I think finding out like, what is your buy in? Or what is your like, what is the driving force keeping you here is probably the most important thing. I think for Zelensky, I think it's quite a bit more simpler, because he's, he's on the defense. So it's defending his country and his people. For Putin, I've heard all sorts of things. You know, Dugin has his writings on, you know, like the East versus the West, the collapse of the West in the face of like all of the liberalism and the weird LGBT stuff that they criticize. You've got the desire to like return to this like former Soviet Union-esque thing. You've got Putin's quotes that collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster, you know, 20th century. And I guess figuring out like, what is Putin after? I'm not actually sure. I don't know the answer to that question. A lot of people write about it. But yeah. Well, there's a lot of answers to that question. There's a lot of answers that he can give to that question. So say I sit down with him for three hours and talk about it. I think this is a really interesting distinction, because you do do difficult conversations in the space of ideas. But also in your stream, you have, I mean, there's a bunch of drama going on. There's a human psychology is laid out in its full richness before you. So to me, with leaders, I think a part of the conversation has to be about the human psychology. Not like a meta conversation, but like really understand what they feel, what they fear, who they are as a human being, like as a family man, as a person proud of their country, as a person with an ego, as a person who's been affected, if not corrupted by powers, all of us can be and likely are. So all of that, that gives context to then the answers about what do you want in this war? Because the answers about what you want in this war will be political answers. It's like a game that's being played, again, with words. And politicians are incredibly good at playing that game. I think the deeper truth comes from understanding the human being from which those words come. And I think that's what you do. I don't know if you do those kinds of conversations where- Never talked to any country leaders, so. No, not a country leader, but say a controversial figure or somebody that represents a certain idea. Don't just talk in the space of ideas or challenge the ideas, but understand who is this person, how did you come to those ideas? Oh, yeah. When I've had, there've been a couple of very controversial right-leaning figures. So the two, obviously the mainstreamers, maybe they're Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes. And those types of conversations initially aren't very political at all. Yeah, it's more like, obviously we believe in very, very, very different things, but like beliefs don't happen accidentally. So how did you get to where you are? Those are way more personal conversations, that's true. Is there things you regret about those conversations where you failed? Is there things you're proud of where you succeeded? For things that I'm proud of, I feel like I'm really good at attempting to understand people without judgment. That I think a lot of people feel like they can have conversations with me where they can share a lot, and I'm not going to jump down their throat for them having a politically incorrect observation, or for them being judgmental of somebody else, or having a feeling that's maybe not something they should have, something they're embarrassed about. So I think I do a really good job at that. And then by extension of that, I've gotten the ability to hear perspectives from so many different people that I think I can understand a lot of different perspectives. For failures of mine, I mean, it's always going to be on stream, it'll be like I didn't push back hard enough, or I didn't know a certain fact for a conversation. These are usually the, they're going to be on these very technical grounds generally. I'm pretty happy with the direction my conversations have gone recently, especially over the past six months. So your goal is to de-radicalize the audience of those folks? So that used to be my goal. My goal was de-radicalization. Now I'm kind of hoping that that's just the byproduct. So the goal I think is to talk to somebody and to show they believe this because of these reasons. And if you want to change people's beliefs, we have to talk about the underlying reasons for why they think the things they think. It's not enough to just say that belief is bad, because it's like, well, they believe it for a whole bunch of things that are true and real to them at least. So you have to address all of the underlying things that they believe before you can change the overlying belief. So if I'm having a conversation with somebody, it'll be like, okay, why do you feel this about that, that, and that? Okay, I understand that. Maybe like a better way to solve that would be like this or that instead of this thing. So to what degree do you have to empathize with the person's worldview versus pushback? That's always the hard one. When I'm talking to other people, it's almost always me stepping as much inside their bubble as I can. I have to like live and breathe their worldview and be able to speak their worldview in order to like navigate their thoughts. Because my worldview is, I don't even, I'm not even using this as an insult. I don't know if I am a little bit autistic or something, but when I break apart things, I just want to see like study, study, study, fact, fact, fact. That's how my mind works for everything. That's just what I like to see. Like personal stories don't do much for me, narratives don't do much for me, just show me like the data and the studies or whatever. But for other people, I think most brains are more human than that. And they tend to see things in more kind of like surreal pictures that are kind of painted and the brushstrokes are way broader and they don't care about the itty bitty tiny fact. So if I'm talking to somebody else and I'm trying to get into their head and I'm trying to change their mind on things, I'm going to be stepping into their world and I'm going to try to be working through that framework. Really good example might be, we'll say like when it comes to trans issues for minors, okay? 16 or 17 year old needs to get on puberty blockers. The way that I want that debate to play out is let's look at all the data, let's see what are the outcomes, let's see what are the processes for getting a medication and then we'll evaluate all of that and then we'll go in whatever like points more favorably. But that's wholly unconvincing to most people, right? So as a parent, if I'm having that conversation with another parent, the easiest way for me to have that conversation is like, hey, we both have kids. Imagine how horrible it would be if we felt like our kids needed help and the government was trying to get between us and their doctor in that conversation. That might be how that talk plays out, which I don't even think that's a really good argument because I think there probably are times when the government should get in between, but I'll have that conversation because now I'm in a world where they understand what I'm saying, I'm resonating with the way that they feel about things and then I can make progress with the way that they're kind of viewing the world because I'm talking in a language they understand. So on this particular topic of trans issues, is that the reason you were banned from Twitch? I'm not sure, I don't know. They just said hate speech, but I don't use like slurs or anything, so it's hard to know exactly. So I think you made the claim that trans women shouldn't compete with cis women in women's athletics. Can you make this case and can you steelman the case against it? I think in your community there's a lot of trans folks who love you and there's a lot who hate you. And so if you can walk the tightrope of this conversation to try to steelman both sides. One of the argumentative strategies I say is that like anytime you have a conversation, you should be able to argue both sides better than anybody else. So for my side, the genuine belief side, it feels like overwhelmingly all of the data is showing that trans, mostly trans women, even after I think three years on some sort of like HRT or estrogen stuff, they're still maintaining these advantages from their male puberty over cisgender women. And if that is the case, if we are going to draw these distinctions around our sports between women and men, it feels unfair to have a category inside the women's sports that are maintaining advantages that are coming from a male puberty, regardless of the amount of time they've spent on hormone replacement therapy. So that would be my argument on that side. So it's unfair from a performance enhancement aspect. So the same way we ban performance enhancing drugs that involve increasing of testosterone in that same way would be unfair. Essentially, yeah. So what's the case against? Yeah, so the case in favor of them competing together is that realistically, there's not going to be a trans sports category. Realistically, trans women aren't going to be competitive with cis men because they've gone through these huge, you know, like hormone changes by the medication they're taking. And that when we look at how sports are kind of done anyway, there's a whole bunch of biological differences between people within sports categories that are determining their placement in the professional world. So for instance, somebody like me is probably never going to go far in the NBA because I'm not tall enough. I think the average height in the NBA- Don't doubt yourself. Don't doubt myself. Yeah. I want to say like six or something. They're huge people. Or, you know, you look at like Michael Phelps is a classic example of a guy whose torso is like so long, his body is built for swimming. And I think there are some trans people that will look at that or somebody advocating for this position. They'll look at that and go, okay, realistically, the way that Michael Phelps' body processes lactic acid, the shape physiologically of his body is going to put him in a level of competition that so many men are never going to reach just because of biology. How is it fair that you can have these biological outliers competing in these categories? But then when we come to like sports categories with trans and cis women, you're going to take trans women and say that they can't compete against cis women. Can't you also just say that they have some level of biological difference there? Like, is it really going to be that great of a difference than what Michael Phelps has versus the average swimmer or an NBA player has versus like the average height male? Yeah. Do you think we're going to get into some tricky ethical territory as we start to be able to, through biology and genetics, modify the human body? Absolutely. I feel like those things are coming sooner than we wanted them to. The, oh man, dude, have you seen the AI art? Yes. That's a- Of course. I'm an AI person. Oh, okay. Then yeah. Yeah. That's always been like, what's going to happen when robots can do art better than humans? LOL. Like, well, we'll see in 20 years and 20 years and 20 years. And now you have AI art winning competitions. And it's funny because robots are essentially- There's a robot behind you, by the way. A robot behind me. Oh, nice. Robots are really good- Careful what you say. Yeah. Oh God, I'll be careful. That's not like one of the Chinese ones with a gun on it, right? Oh, okay. Hopefully not. We'll see, depending on what you say. Yeah. Okay. Robots are really good at showing the limitations of the human mind in categories that we didn't believe we were limited before. I think that humans have this idea intrinsically that we have like some type of like innovative, creative drive that is just outside of the bounds of physical understanding. And with a sophisticated enough program, we see that maybe that's not actually true. And that's a really scary thing philosophically to deal with because we feel like we're very special, right? We own the planet, we make computers. And the idea that you can start to get these robots that can do things that's like, okay, you can do math, fine. Okay. You can do calculations, fine. But you can't do art. That's the human stuff. And then when they start to do that, it's like, oh, shoot. And that terrifies you a little bit? Like losing the human species, losing control of our dominance over this earth. I don't think it's necessarily losing control of our dominance. I mean, I guess like a Skynet thing could come in at some point, but I think it brings us to this really fundamental level of like, what does it mean to be human? What is it that we're good at? What should we be doing with technology? We never really asked that question in the Western world. It's always the technology is like normative in that technology equals good and more technology equals better. That's been like the default assumption. In fact, if you ask a lot of people, how do you know if civilization has progressed over the past 100 or 200 years? They don't say we have better relationships. We have a longer marriages. We blah, blah, blah. They'll say technology has improved. We've got crazy phones. We've got crazy computers. And the idea that more technology might be bad has never even crossed somebody's mind, unless it's used for like a really bad thing. So. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We kind of think as more and more automation is happening, we're going to get more and more meaning from things like being artists and doing creative pursuits. And here's like, oh shit, if the art, if the creative pursuits are also being automated, then what are we going to gain meaning from? What are the activities from which you'll gain meaning? You know, my whole life I've been working on artificial intelligence systems. There's been different revolutions. One of them is the machine learning revolution. And it's interesting to build up intuition and destroy that intuition about what is and isn't solvable by machines. I think for the longest time I grew up thinking Go is not, the game of Go is not solvable. Because my understanding of AI systems is ultimately that it's fundamentally a search mechanism that is fundamentally going to be brute force. There's no shortcuts. Sure. Like a threat, like if it can't solve the traveling salesman problem, it's not even going to be able to give you an approximation. So most interesting problems are giant travel salesman problem. And then, so of course it's not going to be able to solve that. And then you, then the deep learning revolution made you realize, holy shit, these large neural networks with a giant number of knobs is able to actually somehow estimate functions that can do a pretty good job of understanding deep representation of a thing. Whether that's a game of Go, or whether it's the human natural language, or if it's images and video or audio and even actions in different video games and actions of robotics and so on. And then you realize with diffusion models and different generative models, you start to realize, holy shit, it can actually generate not just interesting representations or interesting manifestations of the representations of forms, but it's able to do something that impresses humans in its creativity. It's beautiful in the way we think of art is beautiful. Like it surprises us and makes us chuckle and makes us sit back in awe and all those kinds of things. And yet the thing that it seems to struggle with the most is the physical world currently. So that's counterintuitive. We humans think that it's pretty trivial, being able to pick up a cup, being able to like write with a pen, like in the physical space, we think that's trivial. We give ourselves respect for being great artists and great mathematicians and all that kind of stuff. And that seems to be much easier than the physical space. The bodies are really cool. There is a, I don't know, it's probably Asimov or somebody, there was some science fiction writer that had a short story, and it was like an alien that had landed on earth. And it was describing our bodies from a totally alien perspective. And when you think about all the things we can do, it's pretty cool. We can, you know, climb through a whole multitude of environments. We can exist in a multitude of temperatures. We can manipulate things just with our hands and, you know, the way that we can interact with things around us. And yeah, we're very capable on like a physical level, even though, like you said, we think about ourselves like, oh, well, human beings have really big brains. And we do, we're really intelligent as well. But yeah, our bodies are pretty cool too. And it's a fascinating hierarchical biological system. Like we're made up of a bunch of different, like, living organisms that all don't know about the big picture of our body. And it's all functioning in its own little local world and it's doing its thing. But together, it has a, it forms a super resilient system. All of that comes from a very compressed encoding of what makes a human. You start with the DNA and it builds up from a single cell to a giant organism. And because of the DNA, through the evolution process, you can constantly create new humans and new living organisms that adapt to the environment. Like that resilience to the physical world, it seems like running the whole Earth over again, the whole evolutionary process over again, is, might be the only way to do it. So to create a robot that actually adapts, is as resilient to the dynamic world, might be a really difficult problem. Paul Possibly. Well, I was gonna say, like, in a programming environment, you can do things on timescales that are impossible in the real world, right? Like the benefit to AI and computers is computationally, they can compute so much data so quickly. Whereas on human timetables, we have to wait. When you talk about evolution, you know, it's generation after generation after generation. Maybe in a virtual environment that could be simulated, and then those changes could happen a lot quicker. Yeah, that's on a human timescale, but you have to look at Earth as a quantum mechanical system, the computation's happening super fast. This is a giant computer doing a giant simulation. So just because for us humans it's slow, there's like trillions of organisms involved in you, destiny being you. Paul Sure. But the next iteration of like, from human to human, even if on the quantum level there's a lot of stuff going on, you talk about like, like changes in DNA, for instance, right? Like that's happening from a generation to generation timescale. Like in a virtual environment, that could theoretically happen. Well, it already is. There's like protein folding, like huge cloud computing, probably ML stuff that's like working on doing all of that stuff. And it'll run like trillions and trillions of simulations, you know, every second and stuff, maybe not every second, but- Yeah, still slower than the actual protein folding, much slower. That's for the problem of solving protein folding to estimate the 3D structure, but the actual body does the actual protein folding way faster. So like we're, the question is, can we shortcut the simulation of human evolution, try to figure out how to build up an organism without simulating all the details? Because we have to simulate all the details of biology, we're screwed. We don't have- I'm sure we'd have to put something in a pond and then watch it for a billion years. That might be the most efficient way to do it. That's what the universe most likely is, is a kind of simulation created by a teenager in their basement to try to see what happens. It's a computer game. That might be the most efficient way to create interesting organisms. But within the system, it's perhaps possible to create other robots that will be of use and will entertain us in the way that other humans entertain us. And that's a really interesting, of course, problem, but it's surprising how difficult it has been to create systems that operate in the physical world and operate in that physical world in a way that's safe to humans and interesting to humans. Because there's also the human factor, the human-robot interaction. To me, that's like the most interesting problem, to figure out how to do that well. And so Elon Musk and others, Boston Dynamics, have worked on legged robots, so I really care about legged robots. Those are super interesting, how to make them such that they're able to operate successfully in a dynamic environment. It's super tricky. They're like the dumbest of dogs, speaking of which, there's a dog barking outside. It's really tricky to create those kinds of organisms that live in the human world. Then again, if more and more of us move into the digital world, so you stream a lot, part of who you are exists in the digital space. The fact that you have a physical representation also, maybe more and more will become not important. I hope that's the case, because I bought a lot of stock in Meta, and man, it's down a lot. Meta the company. Is there some degree, can you look at yourself, like Steven, the physical meat vehicle, and then the destiny, this digital space, like digital avatar. Do you sense that in a certain way you're the digital avatar? I've always tried to keep my on-stream personality as genuine as possible, so they're one and the same to me. I don't really view them as two separate entities, but I mean, I always view myself as Steven, the real-life person. Destiny's my online name. No, but because your social network has established the digital space, so many people know you through the digital space. Can we swap out another person that looks like you in an AI system, and then that entity known as Destiny will continue existing? There must be some level of sophistication that could emulate a human brain, I would imagine. Probably the tech's not there yet. Well, the question is, what's the level of sophistication of the audience that would recognize that something has changed? Like, it's the Turing test. Yeah. How hard is it to trick your audience, your large audience of fans that watch your streams, that when you swap out an AI that emulates you, that nothing has changed? And the question is, do you have to really simulate so much of the human brain for that? I don't think so. Probably not. So, I mean, like you said, a lot of political discourse is just walking down the tree together, so you can probably emulate a lot of that discussion. Yeah, it would depend on if you're doing old data sets and you're training on that, and I'm having conversations about abortion and Ukraine and vaccines, I imagine I could do it for quite a while. The only thing that would be weird is when novel issues pop up, then you probably need a more sophisticated resemblance of the inner brain, right? You have to keep training on the internet, so how the language models, and that's the most incredible breakthrough, is the language models. You just have to keep retraining the system on Reddit, which is actually what a lot of it is trained on, which is hilarious. I do think it's really interesting that funny problems, like the trolley problem that we can work through our normative ethical systems on, are now real questions. If you're driving a Tesla and it's on autopilot and you're going to hit somebody, but it can swerve and hit somebody else, what ought the system do? We went very quickly from fun project in philosophy class to we need to solve this for insurance purposes as quickly as possible. It's interesting to think about. I actually have, I'll bring up the trolley problem with you later. There's a fascinating version of it that I find hilarious. Okay, let's return to your low point. Oh yeah. You started playing video games, that was a lucky break. You did text-based ones, that was a lucky break because you've gotten to be pretty good at learning. And then you started thinking about going to college and so on, what happened next? I mean, I went to a prep school, so you have to go to college after, that's the point, right? I was also millennial, all of us had to go to college, that's always what they told us. My life was kind of, it's hard to describe. I didn't really think much of the future, I was just enjoying the day to day because everything in my life was pretty weird. Both my parents had moved to Florida by the time I was 16, 17. I was living with my grandma, I was working, I had a girlfriend, moved out, we got a place, did college. By the time I got into college, I had transitioned from working at McDonald's to, I was working in a casino restaurant basically, and I was really good at that job. So high level of patience for drunk people, insane people. And I was doing music in school because I'd really grown to love music. And my thought process was, I can do music as a hobby, I guess, unless I get really good and maybe I can make money with that, but otherwise, I love music, I'm okay going to school for music, getting good at it, and then just doing that on the side. And then my main job would kind of be this career I was building at the casino. And basically, trying to balance personal life plus graveyard shift, six to eight weeks at a casino, and then a full time music degree was not possible for me. And eventually I had to drop school after, I think it was like three years. And after I dropped school to maintain my casino job, after a few months, I got fired from my casino job. So I'd essentially just thrown away the past three or four years of my life. Why'd you get fired from the casino job? I heard there's a story behind that. Yeah, there's a story. Basically, I was just really dumb when it came to understanding corporate politics. And this is funny because the same attitude kind of followed me into the streaming world. My thought process has kind of always been that as long as I'm really good at what I do, I should be untouchable. If I'm really good, you can't do anything to me. I don't have to play any dumb games or whatever. And at the casino, I think I was the youngest, it was originally shift lead and supervisor position at the casino. And when I started to get my own shifts, there were problems that I would run into on graveyard shift because of carryover from the swing shift. I remember one of these problems was underneath the soda machine, they weren't cleaning it properly and fruit flies were showing up. And the manager came in one morning and she was like, hey, what's going on with the machine? And I told her, listen, I can't do, I can't take everything from swing shift and do everything at grave shift. I can't do this. They need to figure out their stuff better or I need more employees. It's not possible for me. And she's like, what did you tell anybody else? Like, yeah, I complained to the supervisor on the swing shift all the time. And she told me, if you're not getting the answer that you like, then it's your responsibility to email the next person up. And I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting. And some months went on and I ran into more problems because on graveyard, here's how, I don't know if it's everywhere, but morning shift is the easiest. And that's when you're the most overstaffed because that's when all the VPs are in and that's when all the managers are there and everybody blah, blah, blah. Swing shift is the most challenging. That's where your highest flow of customers is. You're also decently staffed there, but there's a lot of stuff going on and graveyard, nobody cares at all about you. They don't give you any employees. You might get swamped. You might not, who cares? Make sure it's clean for day shift. That's the only thing that matters. A quick question. First set of clarifications. This is 24 hour. 24 hour diner. Yeah. And casino. Yeah. So it's a diner and a casino. Oh, by the way, I had an amazing moment at a diner and a casino recently. It's a special place. A diner and casino is a place of magic. There's a lot of, I don't know if I'd say magic, but there's a lot of other worldly stuff going on. There's characters, there's, and I had an interaction with a waitress that was the sweetest waitress in the world. And it was just like, I don't know, made me feel less alone in this cruel world of ours. So graveyard begins when? For me, my shift was 10 PM to 6 AM, or sometimes I get called in early, so it'd be 8 PM to 6 AM. That's no love for that shift. No, especially not trying to do school at the same time. Absolutely not. But yeah, basically, long story short, I ran into a problem with my, where I didn't have enough employees on my shift. VPs were coming in in the morning. They're like, hey, the diner's kind of dirty. And I'm like, you've cut all my employees past 4 AM. Like on some nights, I'm literally cooking and doing front of house, like all on my own. Like, I can't do this. And my manager, Pam, told me, well, you've got to figure it out. And so I remembered her advice. So I emailed the VP of food and beverage and I CC'd her. And I said, I'm not getting the help I need in my restaurant. Now, I didn't know at the time that I was basically completely throwing her under the bus because of that email. But retroactively, when I look back on things, or retrospectively, I see that was the moment that I got like marked for deletion. And I didn't really understand it, even though I'd heard terminology for papering somebody out the door. But after that point, I started to get written up for like a lot of little random things. Like I'd missed one day of work in my three years at the casino. And I started to get written up for like showing up like one or two minutes late. That's kind of weird. I don't know. That's whatever. Or written up for random ways about filing paperwork. And then eventually, there came a situation with another employee where they were, it's complicated. It has to be like call-out stuff. But basically, they wanted to come or they wanted to call out. And I told them if they called out, they were going to get fired because they were at like 10 points. They were at nine points and 10 points of firing, blah, blah, blah. Pam told me, you can tell her that she's going to get a point, but you can't tell her she's going to get fired. I don't know what that meant. And then I told her that if you call out, you're going to get, you know, you're fucked. You're going to get fired. Or you're going to be at 10 points. And then I got called in early, like three days later. And Pam was like, you inappropriately communicated with an employee because you said the F word in a text message. And I'm like, really? There's no shot. And she's like, well, you also tried to fire the employee. And I was like, no, I told her she was going to get 10 points. She's like, well, you used the F word. I'm like, this is insane. And I didn't, just because I was such a high performing employee. I was like, there's no way I'm getting fired. And then I did. And I was like, yeah. Cashed out my 401k and moped for like three months because I had thrown away school for this casino job. And then I got fired from this job that like, yeah, nobody believed I got fired. It was just insane. Yeah. So if you look back, if you were allowed to not just to look back to your own memory, but actually watch yourself, like somebody recorded video that whole time, do you think you would be surprised? You would notice some things like potentially of not having a self-awareness, not having like social, like a civility and social etiquette that's played in the human relations. Yeah, absolutely. So is that, is that at the core of it essentially? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it follows me even to this day. There's a lot of, um, I don't know if you're recording or not, but when we spoke early about like meta conversations, I have to think a lot sometimes about meta conversations because the way that I want to drive a conversation will sometimes be way different than what is like the best way to have a conversation. Whereas I just want to like go really hard on like some itty bitty, like some idiosyncrasy, some factor figure or whatever, but that's not like the human conversation I need to have, you know? Yeah. So you got fired slash left that job, uh, and that took you to the, the job that would be the lowest point. Yeah. Cause there was a huge downgrade in pay. I went from getting like, I think at the casino, cause I worked so much overtime, I was getting like 2250 an hour on all my overtime. And this was back in 2008, 2009 as like a college student, like it was amazing pay. Um, the, I had benefits, like everything was good. And then the carpet cleaning was like, I was probably getting my paycheck like every other week was maybe 1500 bucks or a thousand dollars. And I'm working like 13 day stretches. Like I have every other Sunday off and it's so many hours. Like I have to show up at the shop at like seven or six and then I go home at like eight or nine, depending on when my jobs are throughout the day. You doing a businesses or residential or what are you doing? Everything. Everything. Are you working for a company that is carpet cleaning or are you doing? Okay. And so like there's a schedule thing, you have to go to it and so on. Yeah. But so like, this is why the schedule would suck is sometimes I'd show up at, I think we had to be in the shop at, I think it was 7am. We show up at the shop at 7am, first job might be at eight or nine, but that job might be like a one hour job. So I might show up at 7am and have a job from eight 30 to nine 30. Then my next job might not be from until like, say 11. So from eight 30 to nine 30, I'll do one job. Um, and then I've got a job from like 11 to 12 or something. Then I might have like a decent job from like five to eight, but like my whole day is destroyed and I'm doing like three smallest jobs. So I'm getting like 30 bucks maybe for being in the shop or, you know, my job for like 10 or 11 hours. And it's just like horrible. So you're somebody that seems to be extremely good at thinking and conversation. And so have a bit of an ego perhaps, uh, in, in the, both the negative and the positive sense of that word. Was there some aspect of working at McDonald's and then working at the casino and then working for the, uh, as a carpet cleaner that was humbling? No, never. Um, I had a- The ego burned bright through it all. Well- Or no, you can push back on the ego. Yeah, no, I understand. I totally get what you mean. Um, I had a really close friend growing up whose name was Chris and I think we probably met when he was, we were like four or five, I think he lived behind me and I grew up with him and I'd always been kind of an outsider to the world that I was in once I got to high school for sure. Um, because all of those kids were incredibly wealthy, you know, Corvettes and Mustangs when they turned 16, it was a prep school and I was doing the, they had like a work study program there where you could stay after school from 2.30 to 5 every day to kind of like work to pay for your tuition. So I've been working like throughout all of high school. I got another job at McDonald's when I was 18, worked at the casino, like I'd always been doing that kind of work. I never really viewed it as like beneath me or anything. It's not like I don't have like a family of doctors or lawyers or anything. And then me and my other friend, Chris guy, we'd always make fun of everybody else for being kind of like, uh, you know, like preppy kids and everything. So- So there is a, there's some pride to that sort of hard work. Yeah, I guess a little bit. Yeah. Cause yeah, looking, especially my dad, like the solution to every problem was to just throw more hours of work at it basically. So that was always my, yeah, go to. And I never, yeah. What was psychologically the low point? I think psychologically the low point was that, um, as I'm doing this carpet cleaning job, uh, driving around my city, there's like this feeling of, I guess for a lot of people it's probably college, but there's a feeling when you're in high school that everything is like so exciting and the whole world is kind of in front of you. And there are a trillion trillion different branching paths of possibilities. And, you know, even through high school, you're thinking like, am I going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or can I join the NBA? Or can I do this or that? There's all these things in front of you. And when I, I especially felt it when I was doing these carpet cleaning jobs and, um, I think it was in the fall, I'd be outside some of these houses and I just kind of look around and I'd recognize a lot of these neighborhoods that I drive around with friends in, or I'd, you know, be walking through. I did, I ran cross country. Some of them I'd be running through these neighborhoods and it was just kind of like this feeling of looking around. And it was like, when I was here in the past, this was like, kind of like a transitionary phase of my life where I'm doing this and it's so fun and exciting. And then I'm going to move on to something else and it's going to be fun and exciting and awesome. And then like, you know, two years later, my whole life has collapsed. Like I'm in a house that I can't afford anymore. My ex that I hate is pregnant with my kid and I have no money. I've got no upward mobility. I failed college. I, my job is horrible. Like just every single, like this is like my, all of those, the, the way function had collapsed into one thing. And that one thing was the worst thing that could have possibly been at the time for me. Yeah. Like everything was gone and horrible. So yeah, that was the feeling I had at the time. Do you ever contemplate suicide? I thought about thinking about it, but I've just never been that kind of person. So. I mean, basically as a way to escape from the hardship. Something that I'm so incredibly lucky. I don't know why or how I'm just going to chalk it up to biology. I've always had really high mental baseline. I've like depression and all of that. There've been a few short stints I've dealt with it past 30 because I did a lot of drugs. But other than that, I've, my mental baseline is just so high. And even in the carpet cleaning days, like if you man, the videos might still be there. I think on my old YouTube channel, channel where I'll be like playing Starcraft when I first started getting into streaming and I'll be calling up customers like this is Steve from guaranteed clean. We had to move your job back one hour. Is it okay if I show up instead of two 30 and then I hang up. It's like, all right, guys, we've got three more games. And it's like, let's go like stuff like that. So my baseline has always been like really high for mental function. So even in the low point there's, you had strength, is there, is there anything you can give by way of advice from people that, for whom the wave function collapses as it does for many of us, like, holy fuck, the world is not full of opportunity and you're kind of a failure. And like, I've, I've, I've been there. Yeah. I don't know. It's rough because like, I usually ask for compassion from people that have it better off because like, once you're down there, like the only reason I say I got lucky, but it wasn't even really lucky. I like, or it was lucky, but it was more lucky. It wasn't just lucky that I got into streaming. It was lucky that I was into computers at an early age. It was lucky that I played video games at an early age. It was lucky that all the tech came up at exactly that right point in time. Like I was a pretty smart guy, but it was definitely a preparation meets opportunity. And that opportunity was like at the exact precise moment of my life. If anything had gone differently, then I would just be cleaning carpets today. So. So in the many worlds, interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is like one out of like. There's many, many Stevens that are just still carpet cleaning and they're full of pain and resentment. Yeah. The one piece of advice that I give, I hate that I have to push back against all these crypto bros and everybody online for decently intelligent people that are successful. I've never heard anybody give a contradiction to this. Maybe you will. You can tell me if you disagree. I always look at kids in high school and I'm like, just try a little bit harder, like 30 minutes a night. If you don't study, just do 30 minutes, just do a little bit more. It is, you are laying the foundation for the rest of your life and you can't appreciate it in high school and college, but Oh my God, when you get out, everything in your life is so much easier. You have probably more responsibility over the direction of your life when you're like 13, 14 years old than you ever will. Once you're like 25 and older, because this is like when you're determining the foundations that everything's going to be built on. Yeah. 100%. So first of all, it does seem that the liberating aspect of being young is like anything you learn. So working hard at learning something will pay off in nonlinear ways. Like you said with video games. I feel like people who are like, I hate school. All right, well, fine. But find something where you're challenging yourself, you're growing, you're learning, you're learning a skill, you're learning about a thing. Of course, you could push back and say, well, there's some trajectories that might not be productive. If you spend the entirety of your teen years playing, I don't know, League of Legends, game you have a love and hate relationship with. No, just a hate and hate relationship. Okay. Well, we'll talk about, I think you have a love-hate relationship with hate in general. We'll just talk about hate and love. We'll try to de-complexify that one. I think in general, just investing yourself fully with passion and it really does pay off. But that said, also school, I feel like doesn't get enough credit, like high school in particular, middle school and high school, because it's general education. I think if you're, especially if you're lucky to have good teachers, but honestly, I haven't mostly. The textbooks themselves with good teachers, it's a one chance in life you have to really explore a subject. Fuck grades. Getting good grades is at tension, I would say, with actual learning. That is true. But just get a biology textbook and to explore ideas in biology and allowing yourself to be inspired by the beauty of it. Yeah, I don't know. I think that really, really, really pays off and you never get a chance to do that again. And maybe not even textbooks, textbooks, like reading, straight up reading. I think if you read, this is a one time in life you get a chance to read, really read, like read a book a day, read. You can really invest, you can really grow by reading. I mean, Elon Musk, all those guys talk about it. It's very, very rare that you meet a dumb person who reads a lot. I don't know if that's ever happened in my life. Yeah. Dumb or not successful. And the cool thing is, it seems like the reading, it's like investment, the reading you do early on in high school pays off way more than the reading you do later. So like the really influential reading is during those high school years because you're basically learning from others the mistakes they've made, the solutions to problems. You're basically learning the shortcuts to life. Like whatever the hell you want to do, music, read from the best people that, the music theory, like learn music theory, learn, read biographies about jazz musicians, blues musicians, see all the mistakes, see what they did, see the shortcuts. If you want to do podcasting, read about other podcasts. If you want to do streaming, read about other streamers, physicists and so on. I feel like you figure out all the mistakes and you get to shortcut through life because most people show up to college without having done that. And now you get a chance to shortcut your way past them. Yeah, 100%. But nobody really teaches you that. They're like, go to school from this time to that time. Shut up. This is just what you do. Eat your broccoli. I think it's like there's two huge problems. One is now that I'm older, because you don't know anything as a kid. You can't really criticize adults as a kid because you're a kid. You're ageist, if I may say so. I am super ageist. As I get older, I get even more ageist. There are a lot of people I argue with, like, man, dude, you're really 22, aren't you? I can tell every word you say. There's seeps of like 22 year oldness, but that's okay. I love that for you. Yeah. No, I could just say, because you mentioned this, your wife is a fellow streamer, Melina. You mentioned that this is a source of fights for the two of you that, and I could just feel that there is truth to what you're saying, which is like, all right, you're saying that because you're 22. Just wait until you're 25 and you won't be saying that anymore. Sure. Now, that is the most annoying thing for people to hear. Yeah, you can't ever say that, of course. Because it's actually usually true, because we do go through phases in life, and you can understand that most things are phases. So just in general, you can say, just wait. Just wait. You won't feel this way again. I could say that to you. You could say that to yourself. Just wait. Whatever you're feeling like, just wait. In five, 10 years, you'll be a different person and you will laugh at the things you take seriously now that are causing you pain now, all that kind of stuff. But people hate hearing that. Anyway. Absolutely. I think the joke that I always say is that if I could literally step into a time machine and I could come back out and see myself as a 17 year old, and I could say, hey, I am literally you from the future. You see the time machine. And I would look at me and I would see the time machine. And I would give myself the best advice in the world to be the most successful person. I would ignore all of it, even knowing it came from myself. I'd be like, this guy sold out. This dude doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. Nah, I'll figure it out better. He must have made some mistake. That's what I would think as a 17 year old. Even if I knew it was myself from the future, I would just 100% never believe it. And knowing that is very frustrating. But I keep that in mind when I deal with younger people. That's why I always say on stream when I'm talking to, there's been stuff with Sneako, there's another girl on my stream called Lab. When I see the way, I see the mistakes they're making. Oftentimes, because I've made all of these mistakes, sometimes in the most public and horrible fashion ever. But I'm never like a mentor. I'm not gonna sit there and tell you, do this or that or that or that. Because I don't know if you're gonna listen to me. And I don't want to condescend to you. You figure stuff out. I'll be here if you want to talk about it. But yeah. There was one of the stories, there was a company that didn't work with me because I was very adamant on defending very radical notions about language and racial slurs and everything when I was 22 or whatever. And there was a company and they said, well, we don't want to work with this guy for an event. And after they'd said that, I'd written an article on my website called, the company was Gigabyte, they make motherboards. I said, fuck Gigabyte in the ass. That was the title to my article. And I was like, well, if they don't want to work with me, I'm gonna blow them up and never do anything ever with them again. And it was just like, like looking back at it now, obviously, as an older person, like, hey, you need to pump the brakes and chill. You're destroying yourself. But yeah, as a young person, it's like, yeah, you're 22. Of course, you think that you can say whatever and do whatever. And as long as you're good at what you're doing, you've got the whole world behind you. And yeah, geez. Well, let's go there. You have a history of using offensive language, like the R word, the N word, including the N word with a hard R, calling women bitches, talking about rape in a nonchalant way. What part of that do you regret? And what part of that do you not? Language is very complicated. When it comes to stuff relating to slurs, there's been like a whole trajectory of feelings on everything related to language. So my- For you personally and for the internet as a whole. Yeah, I don't care about the internet. For me personally, in my early 20s, I'll say like 22, 23, I think probably when I first started streaming, my feeling is that any word is just a word. And if it hurts you, that's your fault. Take responsibility for yourself. This probably came from my background of being like a really independent person. So that's just kind of like the mind that I had for everything. And there were basically, there were like a collection of experiences that I had that as I grew, I started to realize like, okay, well, I feel differently about some of these words depending on the context. And I can see how they can affect other people depending on the context. So as I've kind of like grown, I think I've developed a more sophisticated understanding of how different words are used and how they affect people, whether they like it or not. And more importantly, whether I like it or not. And that words can, even if I don't want it to be, they can be a vehicle for emboldening certain types of ideas that I don't want to embolden. And yeah, that's kind of been the whole like growth. I've been lucky that in the time that I came up on the internet, I was able to learn these lessons. Because if I was trying to learn those same lessons today, I would have been completely destroyed because I had insane views on language like 10 years ago. We could talk about the past, we could talk about the present. Let's talk about the past first. So how do you deal with the fact that there's videos of you in the past saying the N word, including the N word with a hard R? So generally- And what's the context? Can you give me like- Yeah, so- What would be the context usually? When I lay out this defense, it's not because I wouldn't have used the N word. Generally, whenever I said the N word, it was usually in an example of like, this is something that like a racist person would say. I don't think I've ever on the internet, I don't think I've ever called anybody like the N word with a hard R. Not because I wouldn't have, but just because it wasn't in my vocabulary. I played RTS, real-time strategy, and we used the F slur for gay people. That's one, and I use that one a ton. I've called people that a ton in the past. So I should actually just as a small tangent- Yeah, go for it. And this is what I'd like to explore with you. There's a ruthlessness to the language in the gaming world. And there's different communities, they have different flavors of language- Of hate speech, yeah. Of hate speech, essentially. And there's also a humor to it, which really bothers me in a dark way that I haven't been able to really think through, because humor seems to be a kind of catalyst for hate. It seems to normalize hate. You say, basically, it's like Louis C.K. says a lot of edgy things, but you take something Louis C.K. says and do it in a non-funny way, and do it over and over and over, and keep increasing the hatefulness of it, the vitriol, and somehow you find yourself, like Alice in Wonderland, in a world full of hate, where there is no good and evil, it's all the same. In fact, the good is to be mocked, and the evil is to be celebrated for the humor of it. Basically, not taking the ideas of evil seriously. And I don't know what it, it reveals something about human nature that you can let go. The moral relativism that can happen when you do that kind of stuff. At the same time, I'm a fan of dark humor, when done well. Anyway, for people who are not familiar, I just wanted to mention that, you know, I'm not a fan of that some of the worst hate speech that ends in LOL happens in gaming communities. Yeah, the- And that's where you come from, in a certain part. So a lot of people don't remember this, or don't know this because they're younger, but way back in the day, in the late 90s, early mid 2000s of the internet, the way that online kind of like shit talk worked was, you were just trying to ramp up to the most insanely edgy, crazy stuff you could say to like provoke a reaction. Have you ever heard of something called the aristocrats? That it's like a joke, the joke. Oh yeah, the joke, yeah, there's a movie on it, yeah. Okay. Basically every single like shit talk back in the internet was like that. Like what is the most increasingly depraved, and back then, you didn't get banned for slurs or anything on any of these chat rooms. So it was just like insane world to walk into. And I was fully 100% a part of, a product of, and a contributor to that world. So that probably still goes on on the internet in some way, and that probably still goes on on the internet in a maybe more pacified way. Only in darker parts of the internet. I'd say for the most part, most, well, compared to back then, compared to 20 years ago, the internet is way cleaned up now. There are still going to be boards you can go on, or parts of the internet where you see that type of humor, but not, nowhere near as mainstream. Like back then, you could open your mic on Xbox Live and hear some insane stuff when that first started. Nowhere near what you'd hear today. Although, there's still elements of escalation that happen that just seems to be part of human nature on the internet. Because we don't get the feedback of actually hurting people directly. So the trolling, like for the lulz, you'll do like, you will still escalate within the bounds. You're just saying that there's more bounds now. On Reddit, there's more bounds and so on. There's moderators that kind of yell at you, that ban you and so on if you cross those bounds. But overall, that basic human instinct to escalate, especially under the veil of anonymity, is still there. I don't know, it's dark. It's dark. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to look at it. And there's different ways you can break that out. Like for instance, you mentioned dark humor. And you say that sometimes dark humor is funny, and sometimes it's not. I think that it's really important to dig into and figure out why certain things are funny. Can I give you an example? Yeah, go. It's from your subreddit. Oh boy. No, that made me laugh and I felt wrong about it. Oh no. So this is a... I already know what this is, yeah. Yeah. So this is a trolley problem. To me, it connects because I think about the... It keeps, because I worked on autonomous vehicles, the trolley problem, the philosophical thought experiment, keeps brought up a lot. When AI is part of making the decision, do I kill three people here or five people here? And AI makes that decision, how do you do that calculus? And this particular... There's a deep satire that reveals some kind of flaw in society. I feel like that's what... That's what dark humor does? Successful dark humor does. And I don't know if this... Reveals a flaw. Hmm. I feel like there's a certain brand of dark humor. And I think the reason someone is why it's good, or why it is good humor, I think it's because it... I don't think it necessarily reveals a flaw. Sometimes I feel like it reveals a kind of virtue, I think. If you look at this particular thing... Yeah, can I explain what we're... Yeah, go for it. Oh, yeah, sure. We're just listening. The title of the Reddit post is, you know what to pick. And it says, five people are going to die either way, but if you flip the lever, the trolley will do a sick fucking loop first. And also the top comment is a question saying, which I think is also part of the dark humor that's successful, can I get the gender and ethnic backgrounds of the groups first? And the top answer is both groups are each comprised of five white orphaned cis male heavy meth users who are consistently in and out of drug rehab, all who identify as right-wing extremists. Humor is so... It's such a sophisticated thing that we engage in. Humor is like really complicated. But I would argue that like, hopefully the humor here shows the virtue of like, like this is obviously horrible, but that's kind of why it's funny. It's funny because it's such a horrible question to ask. Like, do we kill five people in a boring way or in a really entertaining way? And it's like, that's really, that's really... And then when you ask even more like, what are the ethnic backgrounds? Like, that's even worse to say that, you know? So I feel like that's like the type of... There's a way that you can engage with dark humor where it's like, oof, like it's funny because it's so wrong and so taboo. And we all know that it's wrong and taboo. And that's kind of where the shared laugh comes from. So for me, the question that... Asking the diversity question is a sophisticated way of revealing the absurdity of asking about diversity when it's talking about human life. Oh, interesting. Because the way that I took that was, I think it reveals the absurdity of how people will weigh different ethnic backgrounds so differently when it comes to value of human life. Like, I'm actually thinking of that in terms of like an immigration-related question, where people are really keen and quick to dehumanize like, Black or Brown people. So like the question is like, well, if five of them are Brown and five are White, well, I know which one I'm gonna pull the lever for. That's how I read that. But it's satirizing that aspect. Yeah, exactly. Yes, of course. Yeah. But that's what I mean, that that's the flaw. To me, at least, it showed that humanity or social networks that are easy to be outraged and love the outrage and the chaos, that Twitter and social networks will pull that lever. Like, they would always try to maximize the fun. And there's a sick aspect to all the atrocities, all the tragedies that happen in the world, that we kind of always lean towards the outrageous narrative weaved around it. Yeah, the one that leads to sort of the most clicks, to the most attention, to the most outrage, to all that kind of stuff. So that's almost like a satire of society, when they are faced with tragedy, they will maximize. I'm trying to think of a word that's not fun, but... Entertainment. Maximize the entertainment, yeah. This is a big criticism I give, especially to conservative crowds. You know, left-leaning people, everybody does it. I don't like when people blame the media for the state of the media today. I very much believe that everything in society is a feedback loop, and that if you're really unhappy with the state of the media, I think that the media is a good reflection for what people want to see. Because there is a room right now in the United States where somebody could start a company where all they do is completely factual reporting, they don't have a political slant, and they're not giving you these sensationalist narratives or stories, and that media company would fail in two weeks, because people don't want to see that. Generally, people really want to see the, like, show me the guy that really believes in what I say that calls the other guy an idiot, the guy that are screaming on TV or on the radio, like, this is what I really want. And people will engage in that, and that feedback loop will continue for generations. And then all of a sudden, people are like, why is the media so biased? Why is the media driving so many narratives? And it's like, well, what do you mean? This is exactly what you want to see. And that's frustrating for me. That's one of my big kind of when I defend establishments or when I talk about, like, the interplay between citizen and all these institutions we have, that the institutions are very much a reflection of the population, at least in democratic societies. And I think that people very much try to elude the personal responsibility or the country's responsibility to why some of them look the way that they do. But that takes us back to the N word with a hard R. Why? For the particular examples that I was given or for the particular conversations that I was having, if you're going to have challenging conversations around certain words, I think you should probably be able to say them. Otherwise, it feels really ridiculous to me. That's like my- Do you still believe that? Yes. And not like calling people those words, but in having conversations about those words, I would say that I still believe that, yeah. But don't you think, as you said, that using those words actually gives motivation and strength to people who have hate in their hearts? I think depending on the context of what's going on, I think that that's going to be a big driver in terms of how people are going to perceive or take it. So in a conversation about the N word, I don't think I would normally say the N word. We would just talk about the word much the same way that, like, say, like in a movie, like in Django, people use the N word. Should that be censored in that movie? Or in the context of that movie, is it being employed in a way where these aren't good people, you're not supposed to like them, and that's what the audience walks away with? Yeah, but that context is different in the conversation. It feels like in conversation, you using that word normalizes it. And normalizing that word is going to make it easier for people who use that word in a hateful way to use it. Same with the F word, the F slur. If you use that casually and normalize it in a way that's not hateful, you use it in a way that's not hateful, but the side effect is that it normalizes it, then people who do use it in a hateful way will be more likely to use it. Therefore, mathematically looking at the equation of the number of times the N word or the F word is used throughout the world, it increases the number of times it's used in a hateful way. Yeah, I think that human beings- And you're a part of that problem, Stephen. I don't agree. I understand the thought process, but I don't know if using certain words within different contexts is going to necessarily normalize the hateful use of that word. That is an argument that I've heard people use. Somebody will say like, okay, well, hold on, that should never be used ever because by virtue of you normalizing it, even in an inoffensive environment, you increase the proclivity for people to use it in a potentially more offensive environment. And my argument is always like, no, I don't think that crossover exists, but if you did want to take that argument, and maybe you do feel this way, I think that you get really problematic when you run into communities that do use certain words that people would say, well, they should be allowed to do it. So for instance, if you think that any utterance of the N word at all is highly problematic and might increase hatred, then the entire rap industry has to dramatically change the way that they engage with the N word. And obviously a lot of people that criticize people's use of the N word aren't going to turn to rappers and say, well, you guys can't say it either. No, it's who, I mean, it's who uses the N word. So it's not just the word, it is context dependent. But I would say that you as a white person having conversations, the context there is the kind that would lead to an increase in hate. Do you think the N word should be censored in the dictionary? No. And I believe there's a Wikipedia page on it and it's not censored. Yeah, I think it should be in the dictionary. I think the context of casual conversation, like I said, I just believe that on the internet, having humor, having fun conversations as you have on your streams, that leads to the normalization of the word without any educational value. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think I would agree with that. Sorry, so there's a difference between F slur and N word and both, I think should not be used in a fun way, but the F word was used in a fun way for the longest time. For sure. And I'll tell you something that bothers me about your streams, not your streams, your streams and basically every other stream, is the casual use of the R word. Oh, the ableism, yeah. I don't know if it's about the ableism. I don't even know. Listen, it's complicated. I'm not like virtue signaling here. No, ableism isn't virtue signaling. I mean, it's a legitimate, yeah. Like I get emails from fans that say like, hey, I deal with this particular issue. Every time you use this word, it kind of feels like you're attacking me. So it's a valid concept, yeah. It's just something cuts wrong for me. Like for example, I'm not bothered by, I am bothered by the excessive use of the word fuck, but not- In the same way that- Moderate use of the word fuck. What is it, I'm curious, when somebody calls somebody an R word, what is it that, what is the feeling that you get that makes you feel bad about it? It signals to me that you don't give a damn about people who are struggling in ways that you are not struggling. Like that, that signals to me. Like about the experience of others. Do you think that there are other words also that could convey like a similar feeling to you or why? Because it feels like you've drawn a pretty special circle around, because like I imagine, oh, this guy's, you're an uneducated dumb fuck, or you're a nitwicker. Like, do those words probably don't feel it? That circle keeps changing. Which it can, which is fine. I think that's what the whole point with the culture. So I'm trying to feel, my feeling is a kind of, you know, I'm a human being that exists in a social context that we're all evolving that language together and just feels wrong. Like, you know, the word bitch, for example, it really, but like I've heard on your streams and in general, calling a woman a stupid bitch really bothers me. But it's not just the word bitch, it's context. Like, for example, me personally, I'm speaking to me personally, like badass bitch is different than stupid bitch. Sure, like a bad bitch or something is different than, yeah, of course. Way different. I think it speaks to a bigger sense of civility and respect for human beings that are not like you. That's what, that's the feeling that I'm bothering. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is just because people speak in this kind of way in the gaming world and streams and streams, doesn't mean that you, like a lot of people look up to you. It doesn't mean young people especially, doesn't mean that you don't have the responsibility to sort of stand alone from the crowd. Because you're somebody that values the power of effective discourse. And to be effective discourse, there is some level of civility. So you can be the sort of the beacon of civility in that world versus giving in to the derogatory words. Because you have to lift people out of that world, out of the muck of what I would say is like drama and ineffective discourse. I think that's one of your missions, right? Is like to inspire the world through conversation, through debate, through effective discourse. So I guess I'm just calling you out that I think using our word for me personally, as a fan that believes in your mission, it just makes you look ineffective and bad and uninspiring to young people that look up to you. Because those young people are going to use those words that you're using and they'll do it much less effectively. Sure. That's the problem. Yeah, I guess the challenge is always just like finding the line. Like my vocabulary shifted dramatically from, even from like two or three years ago, I think my vocabulary shifted quite a bit as we've like, we've kind of gotten rid of some words and some things are kind of coming out. The R word is one that has kind of gone out and come back and gone out and come back. That one we've definitely gone back and forth on. I know there are different thoughts about it in different communities on the internet. This is interesting. I mean, I'm just telling you, for me, it cuts, and I'm not a social justice warrior type. It cuts pretty hard. So what you're saying is I'm going to lose a subscriber if I'm... No, it's not a subscriber. No, no, I'm just kidding. I actually have to empathize harder because I'm like, maybe this is not a very good person. That's what I feel. Like if you're so carelessly using that word, then maybe you're not actually thinking deeply about the suffering in the world. Like to be a student of human nature, you really have to think about other humans and other experiences that are unlike your own. Yeah, of course. And so that's the sense I get. But at the same time, you're also like the grandpa, I mean, ageist, who's trying to be cool with the young kids. A lot of the reason young kids look up to you is like you also know the language of the internet. Yeah, but I mean, that's not an excuse to use words that we think shouldn't be used. I guess the question that I would have, because it's always a struggle, and to some extent it's kind of happened, is let's say that like three years ago, I would have said I'm no longer saying the R-word. I'm just going to get rid of that in my vocabulary. Like is there a chance that today we would be having a conversation about like, why do you call people dumb fucks? Like is that really appropriate? Like does this attack at the core of like somebody's like level of intelligence, education, opportunities in life, like is that worthy? You don't think so? I think that's a, as the kids say, cope. You really think so? I think that's- Because the words have definitely moved in a way where it's like, this was okay, now it's not. This is okay, now it's not. So you're standing your ground by using, listen, you could, you could, you could. But I think it's better to use those words, if you want to defend the ground, words stand on, to use them rarely and deliberately versus how you currently use them, which is to express an emotion. Like you, I'm going to be honest, you use R-word not when you're at your best. True. And so that's not- That's generally, that could be true for a lot of swearing too though, but yeah, I know what you mean. No, but like, you know that R-word is offensive, you know? And there's part of it is like, the, you tell yourself that like, you're still kind of fighting political correctness by using it a little bit when you say it. No, I don't think so. I think, I'm trying to think in terms of like, where is the virtue, where like, there's a whole bunch of arguments for why some words are okay, some words aren't okay or whatever. And I try to like, think more along those lines rather than, but like, there's going to be like a lot of phrases where like, if the R-word has come out, the conversation is over. Like, I know that, like things, my brain is shut down, the person I'm talking to is, but there's like, there's a lot of words also in terms of like, if you ever hear me say like, fucking moron in a debate, it's like, it's done. Like, this conversation is over. There's no way that anything productive is happening past that point. I think fucking moron is not, I think it's ineffective, it's not civil, but it's not, it doesn't bother me in a way. It's basically when you speak in a way that I know there's a group that's going to be hurt by that. Not only do I think about the hurt that group experiences, but I think of you as a lesser intellectual, like as a lesser person who's thinking about the world. What bothers me the most is just what kind of mindset that inspires in young people, especially when you're a public figure and a lot of people look up to you. So I definitely don't think sort of this idea, the R-word is not the battleground of expanding the Overton window of discourse. Okay? Like, I don't think it'll lead to dumb fuck being canceled two years later, unless that word is hurting people's experience, which I don't foresee that happening. I think legitimately, R-word and F-slur and calling women bitches, context matters here too, like, of course, but just the way I've heard you use it, it is not, it's from emotion and it's from frustration and it ultimately is rooted in disrespect. I don't, I think it's ineffective. And of course, like who gets to say, I don't know, but I'm saying somebody who would, like, I admire effective conversations and I admire great humor, dark humor, wit. To me, oftentimes, the use of the R-word in the way you've used it and the way I see the community use it is none of those things. It contributes not at all to the humor and so on. Now I could see it might contribute to the camaraderie of that particular group, especially when they normalize the use of that word. You kind of take some of the edge off, but you forget that there's a large number of other people that don't have the chemistry, that don't hear the music of the friendship that you have, the relationship you have. And instead they hear the normalization of a hateful word and it ultimately has an impact that's hateful. And then people like me who show up, you know, I haven't watched much of your stuff. It turns me off from like, a couple of times your content came before me, like, and I listened to it a little bit, it turned me off completely. I didn't understand how good your heart is. I didn't understand how your mission of actually deradicalize people, help people, and increase the level of good faith discourse in the world. I didn't understand any of that, because what I was hearing is pretty rough, like, the R-word type of stuff. And I just feel like the benefit-cost analysis is heavy on the cost. Gotcha. That's why I just have to sort of call this out. And I straight up think it's wrong. But that's my own- Why do you think it's wrong? Because it's hurting people without any benefit to you whatsoever. When you say hurting people, do you mean the person I'm using it at, or do you think there's like the- No, no, no, no, we're listening. The affected third group. The third group. It's good feedback, right? I always consider everything, especially, I respect you a lot, you're a really smart guy. Something that I always kind of like to fight over in terms of language, or who to attack, or what to attack, or what to do, is that it's very hard to draw what boxes are okay to insult people on versus what aren't. So, for instance, if I call somebody a Nazi with a lot of vitriol, I'm okay with every single Nazi being negatively affected by that, because that category intrinsically calls upon it some level of more condemnation for me, right? Whereas if I'm out there, I try to make sure that I'm out there, I try not to do image-related jokes, right? I don't want to call you like, oh, you're a fat fucking loser, because there's a lot of people that are fat, that are overweight, where I don't want them to feel bad. I don't want them, I'm not trying to call you out or insult you. So, there's a lot of, you say cost-benefit, I like a lot of collateral damage from a word like that, where there's no purpose in doing that. So, certain words are easy to get rid of. They're off the table, right? F-slur, N-word, these are not words you call people, because there's so much collateral, it's not worth it. We've got some words where it's like, if you have some form of mental thing, it is a bad thing, you're not a bad person, but just using that word could feel like a collateral damage to those people. And then there's other categories of words. So, if I say that this person is a stupid fucking Republican, right? There's probably some Republicans that aren't dumb, that I don't want to feel called out by that. Are those types of phrases that you think should be completely removed as well? Or I'm kind of curious. So, this completely removed, just so we're clear, I'm not referring to censorship. Oh, no, I'm not even talking about, I'm just a person like emotionally. Removed is the wrong word though. I care about, I'm not trying to listen to people on the internet saying, you shouldn't say that word, that's not good. I mean, I'm trying to look to your mind and heart. The reason we're talking today is you're betraying your gift. You're better than this. You think it's indicative of a more flip of thought process, where it's like, the only way you can say that word is if you're ignoring the hurt and suffering of those people. And if you're somebody that says- Not even those people, you're ignoring the state of language. Because I think you're getting to the point, because it's not about a single word. It's about like, it's music. And I just feel like there is off notes. A very strong note. It's a strong note that ruins the melody. Gotcha. And I don't think I can say, you shouldn't use the R word or whatever. I'm just speaking to, I'm just listening to music and reviewing the final result. It's not necessarily, because maybe one use of the R word strategically or part of an actual, like, when you've built up a camaraderie that's sandwiched in some love, but then you try to reveal their, because you're talking about a lot of, there's a bunch of drama. You have friends with whom you're worrying and stuff. And they're all a little bit beautifully insane. And you've said that you are becoming more and more insane. It's beautiful to watch. It's the human condition laid before us. Wonderful. And some of that is swearing and so on. So it's a tricky thing. But the whole skill of discourse, just like it is with dark humor, is walking that line. I just feel like it's overuse of the R word. And I don't want to die in that ground, because I don't think it's that representative. There's certain things like that, it feels like it ruins the music. Gotcha. And I don't, you know, it's the same like a dumb Republican or a dumb Democrat. I don't, yeah, that ruins it too a little bit. Depends on how you use it. You can be lazy with that. Yeah. You know, like, even overuse of the word, I think, bots is what's used for people who don't think, or something. I don't actually know the definition. I'm offended on behalf of robots. That might be a compliment soon. Right, exactly. But I guess bot means you don't think. Yeah, you're like an NPC, you just copy and paste. Again, I'm offended on behalf of NPCs, I count myself as one. But there's a sense if you say bots too much, that you're just dismissing people. Like, everything I say is right, and anyone that disagrees with me is a bot. That's lazy too. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's effective. Basically, saying a lot of people in the mainstream media or something like that are bots. Okay, a little bit of that is effective. But too much, it becomes ineffective. And I'm trying to speak to that. And I'm just, the reason we're highlighting clear examples, like the N-word. Joe Rogan had to contend with that. I think it's ineffective. It makes you less effective at discourse. But, like you've talked about many times, language is a tricky one. It's always hard, because you talk about constructing a melody. There's not one melody that sounds good to everyone. But there are probably certain notes that, like, if you got rid of them, everybody's still gonna like it about as much, and you don't really lose anything. There's a whole other part of an audience that might be more willing to listen, of course. And it's not about losing the magic of that melody. Like, you don't want to be vanilla. I just feel like there's stuff that doesn't need to be there. Yeah, for sure. It's fat. But then again, the other thing that people should understand that might be listening to this, you're streaming many hours a day for many years. I don't know, it's a- 11 or 12, I think, yeah. I started in 2010. And so, one of the things that people can do is just clip out anything. You're going through the full human experience of emotion. Anger, fear, frustration, all of it. So, of course, there's going to be moments when you're not the best version of yourself. Anything else to say about the language? It's complicated. I'm still always trying to figure it out. There are opinions that I have that have changed throughout the years. It's possible that the R word has always been the next one on the chopping block that we're all kind of looking at, but people are always worried about that treadmill. But it's possible in a year or two, I'll have a different view on it, or I'll have changed away some of the words I use. Yeah, it's definitely like a- it's always like a work in progress. There's always like different communities that feel different ways about different words. Yeah. Yeah, but do you acknowledge that there's people out there that are never going to talk to you? They're never going to think of you as a good man because you used the N word with the hard R publicly. In the past? I mean, yeah, those people exist, but I mean, there are some people that are beyond my reach, which I'm okay with. Like, there's going to be some people because of things that have been involved, or even ideas that I have now that might make them beyond my reach. Something you said earlier is very true. I think the goal is to like identify what are the elements that you can cut out that aren't integral to your message, but could be alienating to more people, and those are probably the things that you identify. But I think that you can get lost in yourself, or lost in the internet, or lost in, you know, the outside of yourself if you're trying to appeal to every single person. It's just never going to be the case. And for- I actually, I like that I've had the journey that I've had on the internet, that you can find me saying and defending a lot of insane stuff 10 years ago, because I think it shows like a level of progress. And I think I do get a lot of respect and buy-in to certain communities where it's like, I'm not just some random dude telling you that like, oh, you shouldn't say, you know, the F word or the N word. Like, I'm a guy that's been there, that's done it, that's defended it, and you can see my whole past, my whole history is laid bare for you to watch every, you know, thousands of hours of it. But I can show that like, there's growth and evolution and change that can happen in a person, so. Yeah, and you're honest about that growth. It's a tricky thing, because people just call- bring up stuff from your past, right? For sure. I hope we figure out as a civilization a mechanism to clearly say this was- this was me two years ago, this was me five years ago, this- I'm a different person. And like, because Twitter doesn't care about that, these social mechanisms that bring stuff up doesn't care about that. It's like one stupid thing you say, it becomes like a scarlet letter. And I don't know how to fight that, it's tricky to fight that. Have you ever seen Men in Black? Yes. When KJ on the bench and he says, a person is smart, but people are stupid, dumb, finicky animals or whatever, there's something that changes for human dynamics when there is a group of people that make it so hard to control. Like, I think one-on-one, anybody can sit across on somebody and admit to some horrible stuff. I used to be a- you know, I abused my husband when I was, you know, 20, and now I'm 35 and I see what's wrong, or I did this, I was addicted to whatever, and you know, I made these mistakes. One-on-one, it's always easy. But in group environments, that in-group, out-group, tribalistic thing of like, identifying one thing and then coming to destroy a person's life is like, it's such a huge impulse we have. And I think probably when we were like hunter-gatherers in the forest, it's probably good, because you really want to push weird people out or anything like that. But now on the internet, when we can hunt for any dissenting opinion and just with ruthless precision, destroy somebody's life over it, it's a pretty scary dynamic. I think one of the mechanisms that could fix it is make it super easy for each individual person to analyze all the stupid shit they themselves have said in the past. Like, a full recording. Because I think people are just honestly paint a very rosy picture to their own brain of who they have been in the past. If we can have empathy for the fact that we've said stupid shit, or we're drunk, the ridiculous things you say, the offensive things you might have said, the offensive things you might have done, I just feel like that would give us the ammunition to have empathy for others that are like, okay, yeah, this guy five years ago said this. Maybe that doesn't represent who they are any more than stuff I said five years ago represents who I am today. I feel like technology can actually enable that. Maybe, although you're talking about more recording and more stuff, which people are already wary of. But it's a double-edged sword. I think there is going to be more and more recording. We have to figure out how to do that in a way that respects people's privacy and gives them ownership of their data and so on. I've looked at the search history you have done on Google, which for most people is available, your Google search history, and it's fascinating to watch the evolution of a human being. It doesn't seem like the same person. It's like a different person. For sure. It's weird. It's also hard too with the internet today. I'm going to be ageist again. But now all of the people are thrown together, whereas I don't want a 27-year-old judging the language of a 15- or 16-year-old. Obviously, he's in high school. There is that story that came out of the, there was a kid that saved a recording of, I think it was some white girl. I think that she got her driver's license and she was like, I can drive now, N-words with the A or whatever. It was dumb, she shouldn't have said it. But I think she was 15 or 16 when she TikToked this or whatever. And he held on to that recording until she applied and got accepted to college three years later. And then he released it to get her kicked out of college. And I'm like, damn, if everything that I had ever said as a 15-, 16-year-old was immortalized on the internet, my life wouldn't have even begun. And those are insanely high standards to hold people to. Not that, like, obviously you shouldn't be saying those, you shouldn't be saying certain words or whatever, but you have to be able to make mistakes in adolescence. Like, everybody does. We all did. Everybody did it growing up, you know? Why do you think there is so much misogyny in the streaming community? And how can you fight it? Because you've shown a lot of interest in fighting it, trying to decrease or eliminate misogyny from your community. I think it's really difficult. I think that eliminating racism is easier than eliminating misogyny. Because I don't- On the internet, you mean? On anywhere. Because I think fundamentally, I don't think there's that much difference between white people and black people and brown people and Asian people or whatever. We have different cultures and stuff, but at the end of the day, we're all people. But I think there are differences between men and women throughout all of history and time, and then even today in every culture. And when real differences do exist, it's harder to account for them in a way that, can we have conversations with each other without it becoming very gendered in a negative way, right? Negative way of gendering something would be like a misogynistic way of doing it. Of course, it's unclear to me that it's so difficult to avoid the negative gendering versus the positive. Because there's a lot of positive to the tension that dams between the different genders and so on. Maybe in this particular moment in history, it's not. But it's not trivial to me that racism is easier to eliminate. It's an interesting hypothesis just because there's more biological difference between men and women. That means it's harder to eliminate. But- I don't know if this is true. I hear this a lot. I feel like I read this somewhere, but I need to get a better source. I've repeated it everywhere. But I've heard that in the US military, for instance, they've gotten exceedingly well, they do an exceedingly good job at getting different people of different races to integrate. And it's not a huge problem once you're through basic training, all the training, everything. But for different sexes, it still represents a significant problem that the military hasn't figured out. And I actually looked at like, well, what's the military doing? Because if something was solvable, like can we sleep for four hours a night and be healthy? If we could, I bet the military would know. So I kind of look sometimes to them to see their integration. But it might be that there are other issues there that make it- Yeah, it feels like the military is a very particular kind of- For sure, yeah, it could be. The actual task at hand might bias the difficulty of the process. Potentially, yeah. There's been a lot of interesting talk about like, women integrating into male groups. And how do you do this in a way where everybody is happy with the outcome and there's not like issues? I think Jordan Peterson spoke about this a little bit. And then Workplace Culture speaks about this a bit. Would you happen to remember, I want to say it was like five or 10 years ago, there was a big tech conference. And there were two guys behind a woman and they made a joke about like a USB dongle, like dongle was a dick. And this woman turned around, she tweeted pictures of them, spoke about like misogyny. And then that blew up into a huge ordeal that like, yeah. There's this interesting phenomenon that in a less misogynistic and more inclusive workplace environment, some women might end up feeling worse. Because in a more misogynistic environment, you're thinking like, okay, that's a woman, she doesn't get our humor. I'm going to treat her in a very indifferent, you know, very dispassionate, cold way and whatever. And then I'm gonna have my boys over here. And then you've got like these environments where they're a little bit more warmer. And it's like, oh, cool, we're gonna bring this woman into our environment. And we're gonna make all the same types of like crass jokes we did before. And it's actually worse now. Now the woman feels even more otherwise, because like, oh my God, why do you talk like this? I think that internet communities, especially online ones that do like political debate and video games are very much like big boys clubs. So it's not enough to just say, you can't be misogynistic to get rid of misogyny, there's always going to be an othering effect on women. There's a lot of like behaviors that are unintuitive, that you have to account for. And you've got to try to like push that back. And that's just a very, very, very challenging thing to do. So I like to deal with concrete examples. Here's a concrete example. And this is like a recent initiative in my community, because I'm trying to like be because misogyny hasn't been fixed anywhere on the internet. I'm curious, well, there are ways that I can push my community to do this. I don't think you should almost ever make a comment on a woman's appearance ever if they're appearing in like some political or professional manner. Even if it's a positive comment, I think it's equally bad to a negative comment. It's just never good to do. And that's kind of an unintuitive thing. Because it's like, well, a woman appears, wow, she's really cute. It seems like a nice comment, you're being nice, you know, she looks cute, or whatever. But it's like, it's not at all the point of why she's there. And just by saying that, you're kind of like otherizing her as like a person to like, think she looks good rather than listening to anything she has to say, you know? Well, there's a lot of stuff that you're saying that is a part of misogyny, it's almost like, obvious. Like any woman will tell you that. Woman will, yeah, but they're not in these spaces, and a lot of the guys don't know. I think what that requires is just empathy. You don't need, you need to consider the female experience. That's it. Like, you have to either read about or talk with women. You learn, like the low hanging fruit is very easy to learn. It feels like just the level of social skill, oftentimes, in internet communities is quite low. I disagree. I don't like to say, here's the problem with empathy is it's very hard to have empathy for experiences that are so outside of your own. It well, maybe some people, there might be some people that can do it, I can't. There's a lot of stuff that I had to learn. Women are half the population. But they're women. They're totally different. They're totally different. So here, we'll talk about, right, so they're not totally different. So here's an example, okay? So, especially for me, my archetype makes up a lot of the internet. White man. There's never been a point- The name of a beautiful woman. Who might be a dancer. What's the backstory? From New Orleans or from- I haven't thought that through yet. Yeah, it's ambiguous, okay? Like an open world. Open world. I want you to project wherever you want Destiny the Dancer to be from. That's in your mind, okay? All right. I'll save that for later tonight. Yeah, okay. As a white guy, I don't know if there's ever been a spot that I've been in where I've been made to feel like I don't belong there just by virtue of who I am. I don't, I actually don't, it's impossible for me to empathize that because I don't even have that experience. If you go back eight, nine years, one of the big issues that came up was harassment in gaming against women. And I was one of the big debaters against that, saying that like, sure, women might get harassment, but everybody gets harassment. If you're a woman and you're in gaming and you get harassed, congratulations, you're being treated like a man. What you're actually asking for is for us to actually treat you differently. You don't want to be insulted. You don't want to be treated like a man. And that's actually misogyny is women making that argument. You still stand by that? Is that a problem if I do? No, I'm just kidding. Okay, hold on. So a little while after- I disagree with it. Sure, okay. That's good. You should. A little while later, I had a friend, Jessica, super cool girl. We go to play games. She was between jobs and she's like, I've got like two months and we're going to grind CSGO. And I'm like, okay, this is awesome. Let's do it. CSGO, Counter-Strike, Global Offensive, Shooter Game, FPS, Microphones. First day we start playing, okay? Hop into our first game. Obviously she talks, everybody's making, is that a 12 year old boy? Why aren't you making sandwiches? Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, okay, whatever. Play our first game. Play our second game, same jokes. Third game, fourth game. By like the fourth or fifth game, I was actually starting to feel triggered. Like every time the game started, I was like, can you just like talk so we can get over like the stupid fucking jokes. It's so fucking stupid. And you hear the same fucking joke every single time. And it took one day of that experience for me to realize it's not about being insulted. It's like this othering feeling that you don't belong. And I've never felt that because I'm a white guy. Not to be like virtue signaling, but like there's just, there's no places where it's like, you're white, you don't belong here. You're a guy, you don't belong here. Like I've never felt that non-inclusion. And playing with her, there's a different feeling when it's the same types of jokes coming from a group of people to make you feel like you don't belong there. Where I was like, damn, this actually feels really bad. And it feels bad in a different way where it's like, if you call me like an F slur or any other type of swear word or insult, like, yeah, you can call me that. But at the end of the day, like we're all kind of the same, we're all white dudes and we call each other names. But like, this is a woman and this is not her place and she doesn't belong here. Kind of the analogy that I would make, because I, after getting these experiences, I would learn this afterwards. If I tell you that there's another guy in a room and you need to think of the worst insults ever for that person without ever knowing anything about them or meeting them. If I tell you that it's like a white straight guy and you have to write insults, you're fucked. Maybe you can do like school shooter, but there's not really much you can say at the end of the day. But if I tell you it's a woman, whew, we could, there are so many different jokes you can write. If it's a black person, so many different racist things we can say. You sure? I can come up with a lot of stuff for a white guy. In terms of stuff that is just intrinsic to him being a white guy? Yeah, like there's- Really? Wait a minute. What are you talking about? There's a lot, the internet has sharpened that sword. In terms of like jokes that are targeted at his sex, which part of it is- Incel, virgin, weak. Some of the incel, virgin, maybe. Yeah, that's getting there. Sure. That's for sure. That's recent though. Sorry, I'm older on the internet. We didn't have those words way back then. When I was making these analogies that incel and virgin- Back in my day, we didn't have general relativity. There were no incels back then. None of us had sex. We just accepted it. We were all computer gamers. Nobody had sex to play video games back then, okay? People don't remember that. There wasn't the Big Bang Theory. You were just a loser that was stuck in- You guys didn't even know sex existed so you could use it as an incel. We had to download sexual pictures and they took two minutes and you didn't even know if you were going to get the right thing by the time it finished loading. But what I'm saying is like, okay, I think you agree that if somebody gives you a race, like a black person who's a woman, we can write very cutting, scathing insults for that person that are very otherizing. Oh, words that would really hurt if they spoke in that way. Yeah, that are very cutting to the person. But like, for a white guy, it's kind of hard because that's like the default. There's not as much otherizing of those people. Yeah. So the insults you have from white guy to white guy, the insults are much harsher. So when you start to apply the same kind of harshness to other groups- You can make them feel like they really don't belong. And that otherizing effect is something that's very hard for me. I can't really empathize with it because I've never felt it. So I have to intellectualize it and then sympathize with it. It's like a whole process I have to go through. And then I try to walk other people through that. Because if you're a white guy on the internet, which is a lot of the internet, you really don't know what that feels like. You've never felt like that before. You never- So you're now in a leadership position, Grandpa Destiny. So that's, a lot of people look up to you for that, for that sort of pathway to empathy. How not to otherize. I mean, you have felt otherizing. You mentioned high school people like not being- Yeah, but those were always for things that like, it's different to insult somebody for a non-immutable characteristic. Like, okay, you think poorly about me because I'm like, not enough money or I don't have money, but I could get more money and I could change that. But it's different for somebody to really attack you for like, your gender or attack you for like, your race. A lot of the attacks that hit the hardest is not about gender. It's, I do think that they're like, the way women are attacked on the internet, it's the same kind of attacks you would do towards other guys, but you go harsher. I feel like they're fundamentally different. I feel like when we're attacking guys, I'm not usually attacking you on like, the virtue of you being a guy. But like, if it's a woman and she's typing something like, oh, did your boyfriend type that for you? Or like, what are you even doing here? Like, don't you, shouldn't you be trying to find a husband? Or like, oh, you're like a stupid cunt, like go start an OnlyFans or whatever. No, but the stupidity, the intelligence aspect is what's attacked. Yeah, but it's so much different. Like, you can call a guy stupid, but that's because he's a guy that's being stupid. But when you call a woman stupid, she's stupid because she's a woman. Yeah, but I honestly think that women are called stupid more than men on the internet. It's nothing to do, like the attack is not gendered. It's, the gender inspires an increased level of attack. I feel like it is gendered. I wish we had data on this. Have you ever heard of the XKCD comics? Yes. It's a really good comic where, and this is something that I've dealt with a lot in my community, okay? There's a guy at a board and he fucks up a math equation and it's like, wow, you suck at math. And then the next panelist, there's a girl that does it and she fucks it up and it's like, wow, women suck at math. And there's like that feeling that happens where when I bring on, I won't use names, but they're like YouTube people that are brought on that have crazy opinions. And when they're men, that person is crazy. Oh my God, he said the crazy stuff. He's so dumb. He's so crazy. So stupid. But when it's a woman, it's like, oh my God, why do you always bring dumb women here? Why do so many women on the internet have crazy opinions? There's a different minority character that has to stand it and represent their whole group where white men don't typically have to. Speaking of groups versus individuals, yes. But then what I feel happens is then another person from that group comes, another woman comes, and people before she says anything will already feel like they're ready with that attack. For sure. But they're ready for the attack because she's a woman. They're going to call her, she's stupid because she's a woman. Not because she says something, just because she's a woman. So like the group in their brain accumulates all the negative characteristics of the individuals they've met, not the positive, the negative. And it becomes like this ball of stickiness. And then that becomes the bias for their judgment of a new person that comes. With white men, there's more of a blank slate in terms of bias of how they analyze the person. With any of the minority group, they're basically make a judgment based on the negative characteristics of the individuals they've met in the past. That leads to a system where you're just harsher towards minority groups and towards women. How do you solve that? The most important thing for any problem ever is step one is to be aware of it. If you're not aware of it, then you're hopelessly lost at sea. But yeah, the first thing I like to say is just be aware of it. There's a girl that I've had on recently and she says a lot of, in my opinion, kind of crazy things. But people will use her as like, this is why women shouldn't be here. This is like, she's crazy and she's a woman and blah, blah, blah. But I can bring on a guy who says similarly dumb things and he's evaluated on his own merits because it's a guy. There's never, ever, ever been a case where I brought a stupid guy on stream and everybody's like, this guy makes me hate men. This guy makes me hate white people. That has never happened. But then there's other women that come on and it's like, now I know why incels exist. Or I totally understand where red pill ideology comes from. And even if the statements are kind of true, when you're making these observations over and over and over and over again, it damages your ability to individually perceive somebody. And then two people that make the same statements, one can be perceived more harshly just because of that like group bias you've got built up. I think there's something about streaming that just brings that out of people. Like, cause you have to talk for like seven hours. So you're like, all right, well, whatever psychological issues and complexities I have, I'm going to explore that. They're going to be magnified. Magnified. And then it's the, as you talked about, the mimetic theories, the Girardian, like whatever, the things that are very similar and you're going to magnify the conflicts that you have and you're going to explore all the different perspectives on those different conflicts. And I mean, I don't know if it's just anecdotal, but it's nice to have women on stream. I think the dynamic that you guys have is wonderful. It's really interesting. So it's just the female voice in general. I love having women on the podcast. The female voice I feel like is under heard on the internet. For sure. And I would love the internet to be a place where women feel safe to speak. All right. Given that you're, like we talked about a progressive with nonstandard progressive views. So you're very pro free speech, pro capitalism. So given that it's very interesting that you're also pro establishment and pro institutions. So right now, if you look at the world, there's a significant distrust of institutions, at least in sort of public intellectual discourse. What is the nature of your support for government and institutions? Can you make the case for and against them? Broadly speaking, there is a synergistic effect when two humans come together. If I can speak very broadly in terms of, we'll say utility. Okay. My happiness with one person might be 10. The happiness with another person might be 10. But when they come together, it's like 50 between the two of them. There's like this synergistic effect when humans work together that the sum is greater than all the individual parts or whatever. There's like an emergent thing that happens there. There's a capacity, there's a possibility of that. Yeah. A possibility. Sure. Things could go really wrong. There could be a cannibalistic tribe that all eats each other. Sure. But for the purpose of this- There's other failure modes, but yes. Okay. Sure. Yeah. But I think broadly speaking, are you going to be the well actually guy? Okay. If you want to well, okay. Well actually. Well actually. Sometimes cannibalism is actually good for both. True. Yeah. Sometimes things do go wrong. But I think broadly speaking, the fact that you're sitting here in clothing that you didn't make and I'm sitting here on an airplane that I don't know how to fly or build. There's a lot of cool stuff that happens when people come together and they make civilizations. Part of that civilization building is the fact that we can specialize and it's the fact that we can offload a bunch of trust onto third parties that we delegate the power to make important decisions about our lives. I don't know anything about how to build a combustion engine, but I know that when I push the button on my car, it's going to drive around and the fumes aren't going to kill me and I can park it in garages and the building's not going to collapse. The only reason all of this works is because I've offloaded a lot of trust onto these third party things and I would say that the pillars of these third party things that society is built on are roughly speaking institutions. So that might be the institution of peer review for scientific articles. It might be the institution of voting for government, right, or the ability for us to vote and that whole process. It might be, yeah, the FDA. Like all of these institutions are things that they need to exist because we don't have the time or the capability to individually sort through all of these things individually. We have to rely on some third party to do it. Okay, so you believe at scale, when we're together, we're greater than the sum of our parts. That's the case for institutions. Absolutely. What about the inefficiencies of bureaucracy? Is there some aspect when at scale, different dynamics come into play than they do when there's two people together? Two people that love each other, the birds and the bees. Is there some aspect that leads more to cannibalism at scale? So like corruption, inefficiencies that due to bureaucracy and so on. Bureaucracy, which is not, I hate it when people try to say bureaucracy is government because bureaucracy exists a ton in private environments as well, right, in businesses and everything. Bureaucracy introduces its own set of problems, but I mean, a bureaucracy is necessary because it's coordinating all of the underlying things in order to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts, right? Like all of the software developers in the world are useless without being paired with good designers in order to make their products usable by a person. And the coordination of those people and the coordination of increasingly more and more things necessitate some level of bureaucracy. I think we always say bureaucracy when it's like a bad, it's like a slur almost, like you're a bureaucrat, you're bureaucratic. The bureaucracy is slowing everything down. It's like, sure, the bureaucracy slows things down, but bureaucracy also gives us things like safe medicine and safe water to drink for most of the US or safe buildings to live in or safe cars to drive, so. Lexey Andrade So the managers in institution versus like the software developers and the designers, the managers is the bureaucracy. The reason bureaucracy is used as a slur is that something about human nature leads to bureaucracy often growing indefinitely. Jonathan Sometimes. Lexey Andrade And becoming less and less efficient without, I mean, this is where capitalism can come in, that capitalism puts a pressure on the bureaucracy not to grow too much because you want the bureaucracy to be useful, but not large. Jonathan Yeah. To be a certain size, yeah, of course. Lexey Andrade To be the minimum size to get the job done. And so capitalism provides that mechanism and government does not always. And so that's the criticism of government, of institutions, where it can grow without a significant mechanism that says there's a cost to bureaucracy that's not being accounted for here. We're just paying for the increasing size of government without the benefit. Jonathan Yeah, government is a special institution because it doesn't have to show itself to be financially viable. And we kind of live in a capitalist economy where that's generally the case. So government gets its powers from votes from the people, which introduces a whole new set of possible positives and possible negatives, right? Having something, for instance, that gives food or shelter to homeless people, maybe you don't want that to have to run at a profit. But giving an organization that can self-justify its budgets perpetually and indefinitely growing, maybe that's not the best thing. Yeah, we always have to figure out how to do the constraints there. Lexey Andrade What about the corrupting nature of power? That comes with institutions as well. Jonathan Absolutely. So then you better pick your style of institution very carefully. I think that the democratic institution we have in the United States today, I think works very well. But I mean, there are other styles of government that have been tried in the past that I think lend themselves more to corruption. Not to say that, by the way, there's not corruption in the United States. Of course, there's going to be varying levels of corruption at all levels. But you ran into this interesting problem where authoritarian regimes can act with ruthless precision and swiftness, because they don't have to ask any questions. They just do, do, do, do, do, and that's it. But the problem is, it's an authoritarian regime. They're prone to missteps. They're slow to respond to changing or evolving needs. There was an interesting study that was put out a while ago that showed that every single famine that happened around the world, almost 98% of them happened under authoritarian regimes where freedom of speech is very limited. It's very rare for a famine to happen under democracy, because press and everything makes the government more responsive to the needs of the people. Power can corrupt. There are levels of corruption. But you have to have a system of checks and balances on all of those different levels to make sure it doesn't run off the rails, I guess, and do a sick loop-de-loop, and half the population gets... Nice callback. There's a lot of people that will listen to you say that the democracy in the United States is working pretty damn well, and they will spit out the drink if they're drinking a drink and be very upset. Can you make the case that they're right and you're wrong? Can I make the case that... Can you steel man? They're right. Yeah. Well, the steel man for them is that people have a lot of problems on the day-to-day. And when they look and they see what government is doing, they might see potholes outside their house, homeless people all over their downtown, and the United States just approved another X billion amount of dollars for Ukraine. Or they might be living in a city where half the factories are shut down, a lot of their people out of work, but the president is on the TV talking about how to find jobs for immigrants coming in from Mexico. And for these people, they have problems that exist in their lives. Some of them are paying taxes to alleviate these problems. And then when they listen to the government talk, it feels like the government is not responding to the needs that they have. And then that's one problem. Then on top of that, you've got all of these people working in alternative media that can show you, well, look at this politician wasting this much money, or look at him double speaking here or there. Look at Hillary Clinton saying she's got a private position and a public position. Look at how all of these politicians have family members that are getting rich because of their relationships with people in Congress. Look at the revolving door between capitalist companies and the government. How can you look at all of that, take into account that the government's not responding to your needs, and then really feel like it's a government by the people and for the people? Yeah, this was a very good steel man and good question. How can you tell that they're not just politicians that care more about continuously winning the elections versus running government effectively? They should care about winning the elections. That's the first misconception. A lot of people say, this guy only cares about getting voted in. This guy, he doesn't even believe in fracking or abortion. He just changes his opinion to get voted in. Anytime somebody says that, you should say, that's really good. You want them to change their opinion so they get voted in. That's the whole point of a democracy. You don't want them to remain obstinate. You don't want them to say, I'm not changing my opinion no matter what the people want. You want them to evolve and adopt new opinions based on what the population, their constituents are voting for. Yeah, but the cynical take is that on the surface, they're changing their opinion, but that there's a boys club, where boys means the elite, that under in the smoke-filled rooms in secret, they actually have their own agenda and they're following that agenda and they're just saying anything publicly to placate the public based on whatever the new trends are. So here's- The cynical take a pull-up. Yeah, I understand. Somebody asked me this question and it flipped. I 180'd completely. I was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 and my single issue voting thing was lobbying. I thought that lobbying, the government was corrupt. They weren't responding to these people. It was completely destroyed my faith in government and everything. And I had one question posed me by a conservative that used to come on my stream and chat with me. And he said, and then he asked me, can you think of any popular opinion that the American public has that the government is unresponsive to? Is there some big piece of legislation or policy or whatever that people want that the government isn't doing? And he asked me that, I couldn't think of a single good answer. And I'm like, oh, geez. There's a good answer. Drugs. There's not. And that's the thing. Legalization of drugs. Hold on a second. Yeah, go for it. Oh, shoot. You're doing the Joe Rogan thing. You're pushing back because I brought up weed. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I have become meme. I don't even, I don't want to interrupt your- No, you're good. Because there's memes upon memes upon memes I can go with here. But no, because people bring up, okay, there's no issues. There's no issues that the government is not representing of the public. So here's the issue. So somebody will bring up like, well, what about the legalization of drugs? Okay. The first issue people have is one, they look at national polling. Very few things are decided on a national level. So that's the first huge mistake. Arguably, a lot of BLM made mistakes in this arena where they're saying like, why isn't the government doing anything about policing? Federal government can't do anything about policing. That's going to be your, sometimes it's going to be your state government, sometimes your local city government, the people that like elect like your chief of police, your police commissioner, that's coming from your mayor, right? So you've got people looking one, at the wrong parts of the government to even figure out the solution to the problem. Two, oftentimes for polling, the questions are vague enough that you can pull very high, but when you get into the weeds on things, no pun intended, you start to realize like, oh shoot, this is more complicated than I thought. I don't know the numbers in particular for legalization of marijuana, but this is what I'm going to guess is the case. If you poll and you say, should we legalize marijuana? That number might pull at like 65, 70%, but that's including people that are in favor of medical marijuana. If you were to pull like, should we legalize, should we decriminalize recreational use of marijuana? That number might drop to like 52%. And then if you pull like, should we completely legalize, not just decriminalize, but completely legalize recreational use of marijuana, that number might drop to like 40%. There's like all these different ways you can pull around issues where people are like, oh no, we broadly agree on this topic. But when you really figure out, well, do you, do we really agree? Or is there just like broad consensus around a thing that's never going to show up like in a piece of legislation? A really good example, one example I do know is socialized healthcare. I think if you poll, there was a time a few years ago where if you poll America, do you think every American citizen should have access to like free healthcare? I think that answer, that poll at like 74% yes. But when you asked, should the government be the sole provider of healthcare, it dropped to like 26%, dropped 50 points. And you could see it was both asking questions about single payer, but the way that it was asked was so different that even if you all, it looks like there's consensus, there's not nearly as much consensus as people think around certain ideas. Yeah, go, we can argue any political- You're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. That polls, the way you ask the polls really matters. But when you ask, should the government be in charge of a thing, that also biases the answer, right? Because there's such a negative experience with government creating a.gov site that runs the thing. But sometimes. Sometimes. I think if you dig in, if you have a one hour conversation with each individual citizen, I think you will understand that yes, there is support for socialized medicine. Like it's not- The argument has to be made though, yeah. What do you mean the argument has to be made? Like if you just ask a conservative, like what about single payer? They're going to tell you no. You might be able to build up to an argument for it, but you're going to have to make the case for it. No, but I thought we were talking about the feeling deep inside your mind and heart, does the government represent that? Oh. So it's not like some shallow surface layer public opinion. Does the government effectively represent what the people want? Not a shallow survey, but deeply what they want. I'm not actually that familiar with the debates over healthcare, but let's maybe look at an easier one. Sure. Maybe you'll say it's harder. War. War is a really good example where the government was very responsive, I think, to the people. You think so? So Iraq, Afghanistan, the government didn't manipulate public opinion. There's an argument to be made that they did in terms of like WMD and everything, but after 9-11, were you in the United States after 9-11? After 9-11, I legit- That seems accusatory. Like where were you on 9-11? I'm just checking, okay? All right, cool. I have evidence and witnesses. Oh, sure. I believe you. Okay, all right. I'm very defensive right now. It's very strange. Look into it, Alex Jones. I think after 9-11, we could have gone to war with any country in the world. We were ready because all of America was like, oh my God, and they pointed to Iraq and the reasons for the WMDs was kind of dumb, but I don't think we even needed WMDs to go to Iraq. We could have just said Saddam Hussein was giving medical aid to Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Iraq, let's go, and we would have gone for it. But post-Iraq, Iraq was for a while popular and then became obviously deeply unpopular, Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think you could see that influence other foreign policy that the United States had. For instance, we opted more towards drone warfare than troops on the ground for places like Yemen. We opted more towards sending money and help instead of boots on the ground for places like Syria. And I think that a lot of that was kind of in response to how unpopular the Iraq stuff had became. And when you looked at a lot of elections afterwards, even for Obama, one of the defining characteristics of a lot of campaigns were like, I'm going to close Guantanamo Bay. I'm going to get us out of foreign wars. Even up to Trump, I'm not going to stop doing all this weird stuff in the Middle East. But they didn't still withdraw from Afghanistan. They didn't withdraw, but they definitely tapered off and weren't as aggressively pushing those types of conflicts because they knew it was unpopular. But I think if you also consider perfect information or good information, if you ask a lot of people, are you okay spending this amount of money for this purpose? So a military conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think almost from the very beginning, they would say no. After 9-11? I feel like- Maybe like a few days after 9-11. I remember Freedom Prize. What was the nature? Well, there's some memes and so on, yes. But the nature of the public support for the war, was there public support in 2003, which is when the invasion happened? I feel like initially there was a lot. I remember seeing it on, but then I also lived in a Republican household and I was not very media savvy at that time. So my parents- And I don't know if the nature of that public support had to do with WMDs or with 9-11. Because the weird- It became about WMDs. But I wonder what is the- If you were to poll people and let's say hypothetically, there was above 50% support for the war, what would be the nature of that support? And to what degrees the government actually representing the will of the people versus some complex mechanism like the military-industrial complex is manipulating the narrative that's controlling public opinion. And then there's the media that gets a lot of attention by being divided and how they're shaping the narrative through the mechanism of division. So what- There's a lot of complicated things out there. It's not just like the people and then the government. And that's, yeah, for sure I agree that there are going to be different elements at play. And how much of those elements that lead us astray can be attributed to the largeness of the different systems and the different institutions, like the media institutions and government. The institutions that have a monopoly on violence, let's put it this way, which is one way to define government. Sure. It's complicated. There's definitely going to be different institutions at play. But I think that all I would say is, in reference to my original point, when there becomes broad consensus around a thing, I think the government will usually follow. It's not going to fight. It's going to follow more often than not. But I think that a lot of times I think Americans think that there's more consensus around certain issues than there actually are. So like a really good example, we're on that war point too. What caused like the lowest dip in Biden's approval rating? I'm pretty sure it was right after we pulled out of Afghanistan, which I think if I would have asked people like a year before, like, let's assume that we could pull out of Afghanistan. The government's probably going to collapse after we leave because they just don't have the will to fight. They don't have the support. They don't whatever. It's just not going to work. But like no Americans are going to die. There might be a couple other people who are like, no, America's going to die. We're going to get out of Afghanistan. Would you support that? I think broadly speaking, I think more than 60 or 70% of Americans are like, yeah, that would be fine. But then when it actually plays on TV, when we see the people hanging onto the planes, when we see like helicopter embassies, some of the courts and politicians, well, now it's like, oh my God, this was horrible. And it was so botched. And it was so like, it could have gone so much better. It's like, well, could it have gone better? Like maybe, maybe not. But I mean, it seems like you can have consensus around a certain opinion. But the way that things play out and the way that people actually feel, it's actually way, way, way more complicated. And there's not usually this broad consensus opinion. Yeah, go ahead. I'd like to believe that. I mean, just to lay my cards on the table, I have faith in the power of effective government. I just have a lot of concern about what happens as institutions grow in size. And I just have a lot of worry about the natural corrupting influence on the individuals and on the system as a whole, like the boys club nature of it. I don't know, there must be a better term, but basically they agree to the game and they play the game and there's a generational aspect, momentum to the game. And they more and more stop being responsive to the people that they represent. I just feel like there is that mechanism. And I think the nice thing, democracy elections are resistance to that natural human mechanism. Also the balances of power is a resistance to that mechanism. In some ways, the media that reveals the bullshit of politicians is also a resistance to that mechanism. It's hard to be full of shit as a politician because people will try to catch you on it. So there's a honesty method there that keeps you honest to some degree, but it still feels like politicians are going to politician. Yeah, they definitely play their games. That is true. There's probably always going to be that meta narrative over governance that just develops as you have to form relationships and play games to get legislation passed and everything. The only reason why I don't like it when people attack institutions is because one, institutions are incredibly important, arguably paramount. No, they are to keeping society running. And two, I think sometimes when we shift the blame onto institutions too much, I think that we lose sight of what the real problems are. So for instance, in the United States today, people might be very critical of the government not getting much done, but then everybody turns their eyes to the government for being ineffective. But what I would argue is I would say the government is actually incredibly effective and it's showcasing the will of the American people really well right now, which is we are historically more divided than we have ever been. And if I were to just look at the people and I would say we have a historic divide that is getting rapidly blown apart by things like the internet and the media, right? If that exists, well, what would I expect that government to look like? I wouldn't expect the government to be governing very effective. I would expect that government to show that legitimate divide in people. Do you think that divide, we have a perception of a large divide between left and right. Do you think that's a real divide that's in this country? Narrow the language. What do you mean by real divide? Do you think there is that divide in ideology, that there's a large number of people that believe a certain set of policies and the different set of policies? Or is it just the perception on Twitter? No, I think there is a large divide in terms of belief. I don't think there's very much divide between any people in terms of what they, on the most fundamental levels, want in terms of human beings. But in terms of like Democrat versus Republican right now, I think there is a huge divide in terms of the direction they want to see the country go and what they believe really, and what they even believe is reality, right? Unfortunately, that's where we've gotten to. Can I just speak about the mechanism of the left and right here, maybe on the mimetic rivalry aspect? Is there some aspect to the left on which you're a part of that attacks their own for ideological impurity more than the right does? Is it the bigotry of small differences? There's a concept where when you're near somebody who is very slightly different than you, you want to destroy, but when you're with somebody that's way different than you, you don't. I think the left does it, but I think the right does it too. I didn't realize it until I started dipping more into conservative communities, but oh my god, the people from The Daily Wire and the people from Turning Point and the America First, but all these different groups of people hate each other and they fight each other so much. They hire and fire sometimes employees. They talk smack about each other. I think there's a lot of political division between both sides. I think that the left just gets highlighted more because it's the internet and a lot of the internet spaces have a lot of left-leaning people. You see the crazy communists and the crazy progressives and the crazy center-left liberals and the crazy blah, blah, blah, whereas a lot of the right-leaning people have been pushed off of the main areas of the internet now. Interesting. My sense was that it's hard to exist on the center-left, but maybe because I just don't have the full spectrum view of the political divide. It felt like center-left is a difficult position to occupy. Yeah, I would definitely say so, yeah. I don't know if it's that difficult to be center-right. It's very difficult to be center-right. I think actually maybe even more difficult because a center-right person might be somebody who's conservative, but not a fan of Trump and you're over. Look at Liz Cheney. You've had politicians that are just like, they didn't back the Trump stuff and now they're gone. Or you might be center-right, but you don't think the election was stolen and now half the Republican Party is looking at you like you're crazy. That's true. I think there's a Ben Shapiro who I'm talking with. I think he publicly spoke against Trump, right? He did initially, but I feel like he softened his language upon him pretty significantly. So there's a significant pressure to kind of cop out a certain kind of messaging. Which the whole Republican Party is feeling right now. Geez, two years from now, that election is going to be insane. It's just hard. Okay, so to generalize, it's hard to be in the center, it feels like. For sure. To center and then do a random walk among the policies around that. I don't know what that mechanism is. I mean, it makes people like me not feel good being in the center. It seems like people are just not nice to people in the center. Like the public, the Twitter machine is not nice to people who are open-minded in the center. Is there some truth to that? Two reasons for that. One is because I think a lot of people that market themselves as center are legitimately spineless cowards and deserve to be called out. I've never killed a man, but today might be my first. Oh no. Like I told you, I'll take over your stream. With AI? Yeah, we'll see. With AI. Is that guy going to be streaming in the background? Hey fellas. Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Lots of gotchas. Okay, gotcha. Okay, gotcha. And decrease the, which already is a pretty low level of emotion, just decrease it completely. When people are screaming at you and accusing stuff, just remain calm. Absolutely. Emotionless. The gaslighter strategy. Yeah. Okay, so what we're talking about. So I don't- I don't ever identify as center anything because it's got such a bad reputation because- Fuck that. I stand center with a spine. It's called being open-minded and it's not center left and right. Those are just labels. Here's a really good quote my mom said to me when I was really young. She said, Stevie, don't ever let your mind be so open that your brain falls out. And that's what I find that a lot of center people do. That's not what she told me last night. Sorry. Why are you like this? I'm sorry, man. Okay, I'm glad I can bring that. I'm glad you feel like this is a safe space. Like I said, people, non-judgmental. If you want to talk about fucking my mom, you know what? You're totally within your rights. I didn't say that. You said that. I didn't say that. I support that. She's a beautiful woman. Her husband probably wouldn't be too happy about it, but you know. I didn't say there's any sexual relations. It was just that having a conversation with her, you projected that. That says more about you than me. Anyway, go ahead about spineless center. Spineless center. There is some aspect to that, which is like amorphous. To me, center means you think freely about each individual policy without being stuck to a camp. Some ideal. Yeah, but a lot of people don't do that. They call themselves centrist, but then they're anti-establishment, essentially, on everything. I don't know your position on the vaccines or anything, but I met a lot of free and open thinkers who were like, you know what? I'm open to everything, and it's an experimental vaccine, and I'm going to eat hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin because that's what the institutions are telling me not to take, and I think Fauci got too much money from that company, but I'm an open thinker. I'm at MIT. What do you think my position on vaccines is exactly? I hear a lot of crazy things from a lot of people, okay? You might be from MIT, but I know you from the internet, okay? People from the internet are weird and crazy, so. Well, I- Who knows? I don't like arrogance, and I have criticized scientists during COVID, a lot of people, but scientists included, having arrogance. Which is fair. And I think there's a lot of good criticism to be made of different scientific and medical establishments over a lot of stuff, but nobody can make those good criticisms because they're too obsessed over just trying to have the anti-establishment answer, and that is what is upsetting me the most. I think there are good conversations to be had about a lot of stuff related to how we handled the coronavirus. Were lockdowns effective? Was there enough data to support the huge measures we took? Why didn't we have the option to show, I was infected a month ago, why do I need to be vaccinated? Why wasn't that option ever a thing in the United States? I don't think it was. There are really good questions to be asked there, but all the people asking the questions are also trying to tell you that ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies are the way to go for everything, and the vaccine is evil, and it's going to turn you gay like the frogs. And it's like, Jesus, there's no place to reasonably criticize from, because all of the people that are criticizing aren't doing it with an open mind, or they're not reading studies or doing anything. They're saying, I do my own research, which means they listened to whatever the last guy on Joe Rogan said, and now they are parroting that opinion 100%. Easy now. Easy now, gross now. The last guy on Joe Rogan, not Joe Rogan, okay? That Robert Malone guy on Joe Rogan got me real fired up. That's one guest. People see him as like the father of mRNA technology. He published one paper, okay? What do you mean people? Which people think that? Joe Rogan fans. I run into these people. I start arguing with people, and they start citing me, but what about- I'm a Joe Rogan fan, and I appreciate the vaccine. That's good. I'm glad you do. But there's definitely- But you said there's a type. What's the type of Joe Rogan fan? Anti-establishment. I think that's not Joe Rogan. That's a general public discourse. There's a default anti-establishment on the right and the left. That's the default easy thing to go to. I think Joe Rogan fans are definitely a certain type of anti-establishment, though. I could guess the Joe Rogan fan. If I were to do general population versus Joe Rogan fan, who do you think is more likely to be anti-vaccine? Do you have data on this? Or are you just guessing? You're just doing that to me? Just guessing? Yeah. I think you are actually judging. I am, yeah. I think you're judging, because I think you're also- The beautiful thing about podcasting, this could be similar to streaming, is there's a large number of people that just listen. What does it mean to be a Joe Rogan fan? I don't think you just listen. I think people listen and absorb the information. I would say that the Joe Rogan fan base is as divided in the vaccine as the general public. Gotcha. Man, I'm going to look for polling data on that. I'm sure somebody's got to have done it out there. No, but you're basically revealing the fact they have no data. You're using your own judgment. For sure. Based on how he's had conversations about his experience with the coronavirus, and then based on the guests that have come on that have talked and echoed a lot of anti-vax talking points and been completely unchallenged, and then based on statements he's made about myocarditis and the vaccine and everything as well. So it's the level of challenge or not that he's doing. Well, yeah, and then what his true positions are, and then the types of guests he typically chooses to bring on to talk about the vaccines. Okay, but that represents somehow a deep anti-establishment feeling versus just the vaccine. I mean, I've seen the vaccine and other things being a thing that broke people. I think all the coronavirus, that whole one or two years broke a lot of people. There's a lot of emotion, and that emotion quickly solidified into an opinion that almost had nothing to do with thinking through and updating your knowledge and so on. You just made up your mind. Yeah, but I think a lot of it comes from that anti-establishment place. The vaccine represents the ultimate of establishment. It was a huge private company backed by a huge public government, and there's Fauci and there's Biden and there's Pfizer and there's all these countries locking us up in our homes, telling us to do a thing. The vaccine was like the ultimate submission tool to show you that the government owns you. Not only do you have to get injected once, it's a series, and then you've got to get boosters, and it's like they're trying to keep you under their thumb, and that's the control. I feel like that vaccine became the ultimate rallying cry between, do you support, are you a sellout that is going to believe whatever the government tells the sheep to take, or are you going to be the guy that stands against the crowd and gets fired from his job and pulls his kids from school because they're not going to let the evil Fauci medicine jab them in the arm? And the funny thing is the crowd that stands against the institution is not larger than the crowd of sheep. There's one sheep standing there. Sure, yeah, or it feels that way sometimes. One vaccinated sheep. Well, okay, what's the defense of institutions? How do you regain the trust of institutions? First of all, do you think that there's ways in which WHO, CDC failed, and do you think there's criticism towards Pfizer and the big pharma companies that deserve it? Damn, it's the pharma companies, I'm not sure. For CDC and WHO, so here's a criticism that I have of all of academia, and I feel it stronger and stronger every day. I don't think it's enough to be a researcher or to be correct about issues. Academia needs to increase its ability to communicate. It is just an unbelievable, unmitigated failure that academics are unwilling to wade into the complicated topics that exist today because other people are, you know? First you call me spineless, and then you call me a bad communicator. But no, look, you're here, you're doing it, so you get props for me, okay? Good job. That motherfucker. But there are so many, but I'm sure that you must have heard another fellow academic, a fellow colleague, express some amount of frustration about, in their specific discipline, they know something to be true, and they know that a lot of the messaging is wrong or bad in the public about it, but they're never going to step out and say anything because either one, they're very measured and careful with their take, which they feel is incompatible with what people want to hear, or two, they're really worried that they might be incorrect, so they're going to be cautious while everybody else is going out and hard-courting their opinions. And they also don't have the support of institutions for them to go out on a limb. Yeah, that too. So to take risks. For example, I've heard that with lab leak theory. I've had a lot of biologists, virologists, friends that are like, yeah, it's obviously leaked from a lab, early on. Oh, maybe, okay. We can fight over this one, but sorry, go ahead. No, no, keep talking. We can fight over this. But they, okay, I should sort of backstab and say that's like, you talk about shooting the shit, you haven't really investigated, but it's your gut. Like, this doesn't make any sense. They would never say that publicly. Of course. Mostly because you're saying like, what they would all say is like, we want to see data. Yeah, which would be good, which is fine. So they're going with like, this is too many coincidences in the same place. That's the logic. But they don't want to say anything because there's no data. You need to have evidence. You need to have actual evidence to say one way or the other. There's that. But there's also, just like you said, I mean, effective communication. You're a fan of Sean Carroll. Oh, yes. He's like one of the only people in this whole planet that I like besides you. I love Sean Carroll. Any time Sean Carroll is brought up as evidence, there's a smile that comes over your face. I love it. Of like joy. Yeah. Of like a little kid thinking about Santa Claus. Okay, I love Sean Carroll too. I love Sean Carroll because I hate this divide between like, you're either STEM or you're like philosophy, arts, and all that other stuff. And the two worlds kind of across. And I love that he was so good at physics, but like explores and pays attention to all of the sociological stuff too. It's so rare to find that quality in a person. He's legit one of the really, really, really special minds. But you don't have to be a Sean Carroll. You can be just a little better at educating. Another person in the medical and the health space is somebody named Andrew Huberman, a friend of mine from Stanford. He's an incredible educator. There's the kind of process in science that you should call like review or survey papers where you basically summarize all that's going on, integrate it, and like draw wisdom from it and also project like where's the discipline headed. And Andrew does that basically on all these subcomponents of the different stuff going on in neuroscience and biology and neurobiology, all that. He's able to, he does a podcast called Huberman Lab where he just summarizes all and is able to explain like what does that actually mean for your life in terms of protocols of how to make your life better. I feel like people should be able to do that more and more. But with virology and, oh boy, that's a tricky one. That's a really tricky one. I wish that people could have honest conversations. Like I attack a lot of people that do the lab leak theory stuff. But truly, we should be able to have that conversation publicly. It just, it always feels like the people that are having the conversation don't ever really want to have the conversation. They're not being honest. Like, I'm a guy that like does his own research and it's so boring. Reading studies and a lot of it I can only do abstracts and like, it's so much work. But I'll never, ever say that about myself. I'm a guy that does his own research because every time I hear somebody say that, they don't do any research. When they say they do their own research, what they mean is they've seen one podcast and their opinion on it is completely- What podcast is that? Definitely not mine because if it was mine, I wouldn't be criticizing anything they say. But yeah, so like lab leak is another one where it's like, well, how do you know it's lab leak? How do I know it's lab leak? Because Fauci lied and Hunter Biden laughed at it. And it's like, okay, come on, you haven't engaged with it at all. There's really interesting research that shows there's a really strong study that shows that there's like a high degree of certainty that it came from the wet markets. Very, very high degree of certainty. And there was an article that came out recently where it's like, Senate concludes that virus actually came from the Wuhan virology lab or whatever. And that whole article, if you actually read it, it never says that in the article. I don't know why they tweeted it with that headline. But yeah, it's, to back up, I'm sorry. I think we should have good- You should be sorry. Yeah. I'm not sorry, actually. I get to ramble here. Okay? I'm here for a long time. I rescind my apology. Okay? I actually rescind my apology. We should be able to have challenging conversations about things, but you gotta, man, be well read on both sides. Not this like, I do my own research, so I don't believe anything that Fauci says. Like, come on, dude. Dude, you can do better than that. Not you personally, but- Gotcha. How does that feel? Feels great. So for people who don't know, that's the catchphrase. Gotcha. Through all tragedy and triumph, through all the rollercoaster of life, your response to it is gotcha. Yeah. It's, well, actually, let me jump to that before I continue to, with political discourse. Psychologically, you are in a lot of heated debates, and you're usually super calm under fire until you're not. Sometimes you lose your temper completely. Very rarely, but- That's like your opinion, man. Let me ask you about your psychology. What are psychologically your strengths and weaknesses that you're self-aware about? I think I'm very nonjudgmental, so I can entertain a lot of different thoughts without agreeing with them or condoning them. I think that's a really big benefit to me. For whatever reason, I seem to be pretty calm in dealing with annoying people. It's why I got promoted at the casino so fast. I could deal with drunks or whatever. It just didn't affect me that much. What percent of the population is annoying? Depends on how you're engaging with them. Most people aren't really annoying ever. That's what I mean. If you're doing political debate, what percentage is annoying? I guess it depends on who I'm debating and what the topic is. Well, I guess I'm trying to point out the fact that sometimes you can say that reveals something about you if you think a large percent of people are annoying. Well, I would say working graveyard shift when alcohol is involved, that percentage of people goes very, very, very high. Comes up. Or to be more fair, actually, it's not a high percentage, truly, but if you're a server, one bad customer can ruin the rest of your shift. So you only need one or two people acting in that manner to just totally throw you off. And you're able to, at least these days, not allow that one customer to throw you off, quote unquote. Yeah, very much like a... I noticed this especially after having a son. There's something about six-year-old kids or whatever where it's like, if they get mad, they're never gonna be mad for that long. They'll move on. That's my mentality. I'm a six-year-old kid. I might be mad about something, but I'll get over it in 30 minutes or an hour. I'm pretty good about not carrying that through. It's very rare that I'll hold a grudge against anybody or be angry about something or really disaffected by something over the long term. That almost never happens to me. What are your weaknesses psychologically, could you say? I still have a problem with projecting, I think we all probably do, but my mind onto others. It's like, if I understand this and I've said this, you should understand it. And if you're not, you're dumb. That's an issue that I... I still have that where I project too much. What about holding grudges and stuff like that? I never hold grudges. I'm the least grudgy person ever. It's kind of a meme in my community because anybody can always come back as long as they're acting different. What about the... As long as they're acting different. As long as they're acting different. I mean, all right. The reason why I say that is because... So for instance, nobody likes this, but I have a strong stance on apologies and that I hate them. I don't ever want to hear an apology. I don't care about them ever. They don't mean anything to me. If you did something bad, as long as you've fixed the behavior and you're not doing that thing, then we're generally chill. Like there's been a lot of people that have been involved in weird stuff with me, but then they go off, they do their thing and they come back and it's like, okay, cool. As long as you don't do it again, we're fine. It's all good. Yeah, right. I'm sorry you feel that way. It's not your fault, Stephen. It's not your fault. Okay, gotcha. You've said plenty of negative stuff, positive stuff and negative stuff about Hasan. Yeah. This is my podcast. I get to get you to force you to say positive things. What do you love? I'm all about love. Let's go back to grilling me on the R word stuff. You're going to make me compliment Hasan? This is going to be a harder conversation than that. All right. We're going to get you to feel emotions. Okay. So for people who don't know, he's another popular political streamer. I think you had, as the kids call it, a bridge burning over Bernie Sanders. I don't know. My research is very limited on this. Sure. But what do you respect and love most about Hasan? He puts in a lot of work. When he was growing his stream from 2,000 concurrent viewers to 15,000, he was streaming, like, it was like 12 hours a day, like every single day. So that was admirable. He did a lot of work. He does seem to be pretty good at networking and socializing and making the correct friends and connections to continue to build his business. What about him as a political thinker? I know you don't think highly of him in that regard. Really? Do you think that's unfair? I think that's unfair. Oh, man. I honestly want to push back on that because— Okay. I have zero respect for him as a political thinker. There's not going to be almost anything. So you can't— Oh, I will say I admire the fact that through no actual capability or ability of his own, he manages to wind up at some of the correct answers just because he's towing the line. That is— Good job for him on that. He's got a lot of correct opinions, just he has no idea why, so. I think that's undeserved. I think that's too harsh, man. Okay. The reason I bring that up is I feel like there is a deep grudge in there somehow. So you're the father now, so since you're so old, the grandfather of the political debate on stream, on livestream political debater, so there could be some grudge about that split that happened or not enough credit given or all that kind of stuff. I just think he's somebody that has a left-leaning ideology that's different than yours. He was a Bernie supporter, right? And I guess you were not. Can you explain to me what the division is? He exemplifies everything that I absolutely hate about politics. Which is what? Which is shallow engagement, heavily ideologically driven. And you're not ideologically different. Absolutely not. So that's what we're talking about, like the free thinker in the real meaning of that word. Yeah, so the way— let me qualify— Issue by issue thinking. Let me qualify what I mean when I say that. I spent a lot of time, unfortunate time, delving into the boring world of philosophy. I spent a lot of time thinking about like, what are my ethical positions? How do I feel about myself, the people around me, and how that relates to the world around me? And then from all of these positions— I think you might have used the phrase first principles earlier. From these kind of like first principles, out of that is where all of my political positions are built out of, like full stop. So if you ask me a question like, how do you feel about like the right to own a firearm? Or how do you feel about social health care? Like we can walk through, well this is how I feel about it as like a thing from the government. This is where the government gets its power. This is ethically how groups of people are supposed to function. This is morally how we relate to each other. And personally, this is how I feel like I'll be able to do every single political belief back there. It's not like I'm telling you, like if I were to ask Hasan, what do you feel about this political topic? He's going to tell me what progressives are supposed to say. I don't know what he thinks about it. I don't know if he thinks about it. Don't you think that's a cynical take? Why is he— just because his views coincide with the mainstream narrative, mainstream viewpoints of progressive thinkers. I mean, why does that mean he's not thinking? Because his engagement with every subject is incredibly shallow, 100% predictable. Like I could write like a, I could probably program a script to like give you every single potential answer you could have to any single question you could give him. Again, I think that's a pretty cynical take. Okay, it could be the case that his brain perfectly aligns with every single mainstream person. No, but I don't know if you know it is perfectly aligned. Because I think you're just taking a very select, just like streamers do of each other, a very select slice that represents the perfect alignment as opposed to looking at a person struggling with ideas and thinking through ideas and then giving them a pass like a lot of people like I give you a pass on just the fact that you say a lot of crazy shit on stream for drama. Like, which is— I don't say things for drama. That might be dramatic, but— I mean, you've evolved as a fish evolves legs. You've evolved a mechanism which creates controversy. Sure. You could say it's not intention, but it happens. I think you— Okay, sure. The extremists kind of learn that kind of thing. And so I'm sure Hasan does the same kind of stuff. And so like underneath it, there's still a thinking being that's contending with political ideas. You don't think so. He does a really good job at hiding it. There are other political figures that I really don't like that I wouldn't say the same thing about. So like, I don't know if you have Vosch written in there. I'm like, okay, that's a person that he also split out of my community and grew to something and now he hates me and he's an anti-fan community. And they all hate me. Tell me something you love above all this shit. I can tell you a lot of things about Vosch. I think Vosch legitimately thinks through a lot of his political positions. I admire or did admire that he has like his own like positions. He would take someone's contrary to people further left than him. He's got some positions that don't fit his ideology kind of at all. Like he's his own intimate thinker. Rhetorically, he's very effective. He was willing to sit down and do research for like his debates and everything. He would spend a lot of time practicing like his rhetorical effectiveness and navigating conversations. He intentionally and purposefully built like a community that exemplified his values. Yeah, I've got a lot. I don't—we are completely split and hate each other now. But like I have a lot of— Why? Why? Why? First of all, hate is a strong—why the hate? Okay, I don't hate him, but he hates me because we had a couple of really big debates. What happened? Well, one had to do with whether or not you should live your values. And can you give me the story that's a charitable interpretation? I always give charitable interpretation. You don't. I do. I absolutely do. You don't. Wait, name one time it happened. Five minutes ago, you talking about Hassan. Everything I said about Hassan is true. There is no steel man there. Okay? That's not charitable. I'm sorry. If you can prove me wrong, I would love for you to do it, okay? I'm using my gut instinct. Usually when somebody feels strongly about another person in that way, it's not coming from a place of data and reason. It's coming from a place of emotion. It's coming from a place of resentment and grudge and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I understand. There's emotions deep in there. So the gotchu is hiding—the gotchu is a surface of an iceberg, and there's a deep ocean underneath that you yourself have not explored. I disagree, but I understand what you're saying. Love is actually a doorway. The young love is a doorway for you to explore the depths of your— Get into that ocean to find my fish, my pre-evolved form. Yeah. I understand why you think the way you do, and you should. You shouldn't believe me, and I understand that. Because if somebody told me the same thing, I'd think, you probably just really don't like this person for a reason or two. I understand what you think that way, okay? The reality is, though, for any political person that I disagree with, like, I can give them a fair shake. It's one of the few things I think I do exceedingly well on my stream. Even with Hasan, there's been drama that he's been involved in, and I've like very— When I'm involved in drama, he'll always throw me under the bus, but when he's involved in stuff, I'll always say, oh, like, I think Hasan was right here, or I think that he meant this. There was a thing that came up once we were on Livestream Fail. He was getting roasted because he referred to somebody— he used the expression shitskin to refer to somebody's, like, the way they looked. And I have only ever heard that in the context of 4chan people talking about, like, Indians or, like, Black people. Like, it's a racial thing. But I could tell the context and everything that he was saying. He was insulting some guy. I think it was kind of like Incel, Virgil, whatever. He was going for, like, acne skin. I think that's what he meant when he said it. And there were a whole bunch of people that were insulting him, like, oh my God, did he just say racist term? And I was like, no, I don't think he was racist. I think he was, like, he was just reaching for words, and that's what came out. So, like, that's an example of me being charitable. But, okay, but didn't you criticize him for something? I was trying to, like, Google why the hell you guys split up, because I thought your friends, you should be, like— It's a little bit of a Kamala Harris video, but go ahead. What were you— Is that what, is that the— I feel like you criticized him over something. And I, okay, this is very vague memory, but you criticized him over something, and I felt that criticism wasn't charitable. Was it Pete Buttigieg stuff? Yeah, Pete Buttigieg, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so I've said this a million times, but no amount of context or no amount of nuance is ever acceptable to people. I don't think Hasan is homophobic, but I think the comments made about Pete Buttigieg were really homophobic. That's what he said, right? Yeah, and there were a lot of people making a lot of comments that made me really uncomfortable about Pete Buttigieg. That was insane to me. Spurred by the comments of Hasan? No, but it was an environment of progressives. All the progressives were attacking Pete, and I felt like his gayness became, like, the subject of a lot of attacks. Yeah, but why throw Hasan under the bus for that? Because he was jumping along with all of those types of, like, insults. You don't think you've done the same kind of stuff? If I do, call me out on it, and I'll probably say I shouldn't have done it. That's what the R-word was about. That's fine, that's a good call-out. Yeah. No, but, like, you're a friend. You should privately tell them, right? Well, no, by then we were sworn enemies, so. So that wasn't the reason you- No, no, no, it was over a Kamala Harris video. Sworn enemies! He hates me! What am I supposed- Listen, for all of these people, I will accept them back into my life if they ever want to come back in at any point in time, but usually they're the ones that- If they correct themselves, right? No, I'm not expecting anybody to- So here's the deal with Vash and Hasan. These are, like, the three- We're the three guys online. None of us will talk to each other. Hasan, because he won't give clout to anybody, and Vash, because he thinks I'm bad faith. And then neither of them will talk to me because they both hate me. You guys should go, like, on a camping trip together. Just, like, Brokeback Mountain, but three-way. And just, like, rejoin, refine- Yeah, that could be a thing. Refine the pre-shame for each other. Honestly, just from the internet perspective, for me as a- just stepping into this world, there's some aspect to which you have a responsibility. I hate that word. You have an- Good word! Don't run from it. You have an opportunity. I wish you guys would kind of be the beacon of, like, forgiveness and friendship and, like, camaraderie and that kind of stuff. Yeah, I agree. And even if we disagree, it would be really good content for us to argue each other. Yeah, like, shit talk, like, friends shit talk. Sure. Versus not- like, the fact that you guys don't talk to each other. Like, I would love for you to shit talk publicly, with the camaraderie always there. Like, there's love in the beginning, love in the end, but you beat the shit out of each other in the middle. And that's what live streaming is for, the political discourse. That's great political discourse. Yeah. Versus, I think, what underlies it is some jealousy and so on. You get this many follow- I just wanna make sure you're clear to your audience. Everybody has, to your audience. Yeah. I'm sure you have flaws, and I'm just not- In this dynamic- Hard to find, you know, because I'm- Your only flaw is you're too modest. Yeah. So why did you guys split up? Because I would love it, honestly, just- Let me just put that idea out there for you guys to make up. Yeah, it's out there, of course. Everybody talks, me, Vash and Hasan. It's crazy that the three largest political debate, left-leaning people online can't do any type of content or collaboration at all. It's so stupid. Yeah, it's strange. What was the reason you guys split up, the Kamala Harris? So Hasan's entry into the Twitch political debate world was in, I think, 2018. I think he did a debate with Charlie Kirk, and he reached out to me to review that debate, to go over it on stream. And he came on, we went over it, and then we kind of- Friendship developed, we hung out in real life. I think when I came to LA, I think I slept on his couch, we played with his dog. We were like kind of friends. And as time went on, I think he was a little bit more- He was farther left than he let on. So like, I was a social Democrat, he was a social Democrat. But back in those days, like 2018, when people said they were a social Democrat, they really meant socialist, but they just didn't want to say it. So he was farther left than me, and we had a lot of deep divides in our approach to politics. Whereas I was very much like a first principles, this is my whole political position. And he was very much kind of like a, this is like the political ideology I'm involved in, and this is kind of like the field that I kind of like navigate in. So there were a couple instances where these divides would be laid very bare. One was when, it was either him or the Young Turks, I think it was him. There was a shooting in a neighborhood where a very young Black child gets killed by a white shooter. And they did a video about like hate crimes, and how hate crimes are on the rise. Between races and white people are evil and blah, blah, blah. Not that, but like white people committing hate crimes against Black people. And I remember saying to him, I was like, hey, we don't have all the data yet for this. It feels really bad to make videos about this beforehand, because it's the same type of shit that happens at airports. Is there a thing going on? Was it a brown person? Are they Muslim? It's Islamic extremism. We see this played out so many times in recent history, probably not a good idea to jump to conclusions. And he's like, well, no, you don't understand, like it's not that big a deal, whatever. And obviously, as the story goes, tale as old as time, the data comes out. It was just an errant shot. There was like gang violence, shot goes out of nowhere, hits a kid in the car. It wasn't like a hate crime. The guy was trying to kill a kid. But yeah, we basically, we bump up against a few kind of political disagreements like this. And an annoying thing is happening in my community, where Hasan is like the serious political figure, because he's from the Young Turks. And I'm just kind of like, I do politics, but I also game. And anytime I criticize Hasan, people like Destiny, you need to be more respectful. He does this full time. If you're going to bring criticisms, you need to be like really well read and researched because he's got a, you know, more serious, whatever, which I thought was ridiculous. So by the way, if people don't know, he worked at the Young Turks, which is- Like the largest left-leaning YouTube channel, probably. At least at the time, yeah. So finally, he did a video on, skip ahead to some more minor disagreements. He does a video on Kamala Harris, he calls it Kamala Harris. And it's like seven or eight horrible things about Kamala Harris. And I'm like, okay, I know at least one or two of these things are not fully accurate. So I'm going to do all the research. I'm going to have all the sources and we're going to have a long conversation about it. So that now when I provide criticism to him, it's not going to be like this horrible, like just me saying something flippantly or whatever. It's going to be like substantial criticism. So I was on a plane ride, JFK to Orlando, whatever, flying to Sweden to visit my wife. And on the plane, I review all of the video, all the data, do all the research. And I write everything. I'm just like, okay, I get to my wife's dad's house and I'm at the table. We're having a conversation like, hey, we should talk about the Kamala Harris stuff. And he's like, okay, well, let's do it. And we go over it and I'll leave to the audience to watch the video. Enough people to say this, I feel pretty confident in this. I was pretty reasonable, pretty measured, pretty calm the whole time. And I think he started to get increasingly irritated that I was levying like more and more serious criticisms at like the quality of work that he did. Probably because he felt a little bit intimidated, I think, by my willingness to like dive through political stuff. There'd been a couple of awkward blowups where like on, there was like a show called the Raj Royale, where sometimes politics would come up and Hassan would kind of try to explain something. And there was another person one time on the show that made the joke. It's like, instead of Hassan taking 10 minutes to explain this, can Destiny just come here and explain it in 30 seconds? And he like exploded at that. He got so fucking mad at that. So yeah, I think that when I made that kind of call out or critique of him over the Kamala Harris stuff, he's probably feeling like increasingly irritated, threatened, agitated. And then that's kind of what began the huge split from our- So you don't think you were a dick at all? I don't think so in that conversation. Especially given that like at that point, because this is still 2018 or 20, this might be 2019. I'm still known at that point as being very aggressive towards conservatives or all writers. Oh, gotcha. Yeah. So, and with lefties is what I call them. I think I'm being like very gentle. Like my conversation with conservatives is like, you're a fuck idiot, you're so dumb. Like that's how I'm like doing. So like with him, I'm like, well, don't you think that like, this is like a little bit of like an inconsistent presentation of how, like, I feel like it'd be a nice But I always leave to the audience, they can go and watch that Kamala video, Kamala Harris video, Destiny of Sun if they think that I was being a dick at all. But a lot of people watching said I was being pretty gentle. Well, let me say as a new fan of this space, I hope you guys make up and I hope you guys fight it out in the space of discourse and ideas. Me too. And also with empathy, understanding what the strength of the other person is, what their buttons are. And, you know, there's like an unspoken rule that you don't press the buttons that you don't need to, unless you're doing it mutually and it's fun because, you know, it's fun to piss each other off. So that's kind of like what friends do. You don't cross a certain line, but then other than that, you fight it out. Okay, let's step back. One other super interesting aspect of your worldview is you're a big supporter of Biden. Can you explain what you love about Biden? Do you love Biden more than Sean Carroll or less? Sean Carroll is just like in another world of admiration. I feel like I'm culturally appropriating you by saying gotcha now, but it's so convenient. It's an easy word. You're just now we're on the same wavelength. Okay, we're synchronizing. That's good. I mean, it is really interesting because even the people that support Biden usually don't say they love sort of, they don't support it strongly, you know. Ideologically, philosophically, the reason why I like Biden is because he's really committed to this bringing the left and right together, which is something we so desperately need in the country. And his, you know, statements over and over again of like, I'm not the Democrat president or the Republican president. I'm the president of the United States. His desire to bring Republicans together to work on things like the infrastructure bill. That's so incredibly needed. And I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for him for trying to push through on that message. Do you think then it's unfortunate that he made that comment about MAGA? MAGA Republicans? Yeah. I mean, I forget what the comment was, but MAGA Republicans are not good people kind of thing. I watched the full video and he's right. There is this toxic aspect and it's hard to call out because they're always going to spend like, oh, he hates our Republicans. He's not. If you watch the quote, he's very specifically calling out like this group of people that think that the election was fraudulent. Is it clear? It is. That's what he meant by... We can bring it up. All right. This is... Oh no. Uh oh. But I remember watching our stream. He's like, if you said it, yeah, that's bad. You can probably like YouTube MAGA Republicans Biden. But like, it feels like it's pretty clear he's talking about the people that are like election denying. Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represented extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. Now, I want to be very clear, very clear up front. Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know because I've been able to work with these mainstream Republicans, but there's no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country. I disagree with that, man. He didn't clearly say extremist ideology. He didn't say the people that doubt the validity of the election. I mean, that's Donald Trump. No, but there's... That's all the candidates that Donald Trump is supporting. How many? What is it like 40, 50? How many candidates right now that are MAGA candidates are election deniers? No, but there's, you know, 80 million or whatever people voted for Donald Trump. You could say that's the MAGA Republicans. So to me, it sounded like he was referring to not even the majority. I mean, that's one nice, helpful, clarifying statement. But it's basically there's the mainstream Republicans, and then there's those that voted for Donald Trump. That's the way I heard it. Okay. And it's like, so... Maybe he should have done a better job at clarifying, but... Yeah, I... I feel like there's like a clear... There is a huge problem with this group of Americans that think that the election is stolen. I feel like that's what he's trying to call it. No matter if that's what he meant, even flirting with that line is not a person who's bringing people together. I feel like the extending a hand to the, like, most... I've worked with Republicans in Congress. Not all... Not even a majority of Republicans are like this. No, but why say not the majority of Republicans are like this? Say, like, we are like a... We're one country. We believe the same thing. So like, focus on the uniting part versus saying... He does before and after. That was 50 seconds, okay? But that... You never... The point is you never say something like that. Listen, like that... You've spoken about the Bosnia speech, which is your favorite of his. Yeah. I went back to it and listened to it. Before I move to that, just on this, it's really hard for him to call out that group of, like, election deniers, I think, without it always feeling like... Well, why call them out? Because it's arguably one of the most destructive forces that exist in this country today. Did it destroy anything? They were trying to. Did it, though? It didn't, did it? So does that mean we don't call it out? We wait till next time? No, because calling it out is giving fuel to the division. Like, the people that doubted the validity of the election, that's anger, that's frustration with the other side. You heal that as opposed to saying all those people that believed that at any time are idiots. They're un-American. I mean, they don't think the election was real. I don't know if Biden has the ears of these people at all. I don't know what he can do for... There's people that believe the same thing in 2016 with the Russian hacking, right? There's... Hold on. Yes. That is a super not fair comparison. There were definitely... The mainstream Democrat opinion was that Russian intrusion in terms of like social media and stuff happened, but there was never a claim that like the election was stolen. No main... Or at least I don't know of any mainstream Democrat that supported that. Donald Trump is not just saying there was interference and blah, blah, blah. Donald Trump is literally saying the election was literally stolen, that vote boxes were... Ballot boxes were hidden, that vote tallies were manipulated, that I think the claim is there's a huge gulf of difference between the two. So you can attack Donald Trump for that. Yeah. I believe it's not the words of a uniter to attack people that believe that. You could argue maybe it's okay, but especially not being super clear about that, about who you're referring to when you say MAGA Republicans. Okay. Because MAGA is a hat and a slogan that refers to whatever the number is, 70 million people, whoever, that voted for Donald Trump. Like... Of all the Republicans that consider themselves MAGA Republicans, what percentage of them do you think believe the election was stolen? I feel like that number is... I don't have the poll, but I feel like the number is like probably more than 70%. What's a MAGA Republican? Maybe I'm not familiar... Like a Trump-supporting Republican, a MAGA Republican. They're there for Trump. What's the difference between somebody that voted for Trump and a... MAGA Republican? And a MAGA Republican. So my mom is a MAGA Republican. If Trump ran independently and DeSantis ran under the Republican ticket, my mom would vote for Trump. She'll follow him to the end of the earth. That's like a MAGA Republican. I think it's easy to mistake that distinction in these kinds of political speeches. Because to me, anybody who voted for Trump can easily, in the context of the speech, be interpreted as a MAGA Republican. Gotcha. I understand what you're saying. Maybe you could have been more clear, but I think in listening to that, I think it's pretty obvious who he's talking about. But I guess if you have an emotional response to it, I can understand the emotional response. But there's a lot of people that... I don't have an emotional response. I just don't like... I think I'm with, what is it, Michelle Obama. They go low, we go high. Meaning to me, a uniter doesn't participate in derision. Sure, a uniter might not, but a leader has to be able to accurately assess the situation before him and make people aware of what's going on. You mean all the impeachment trials, all the censoring from social media, all of that didn't do the job? That's not his job. I don't know about censoring any of that. That mechanism... His job is to inspire a nation to unite a nation. How can he do that when half the people don't believe that he was even legitimately elected? I think he's done a good job at working on legislation and doing stuff that hopefully benefits all Americans. But I think it's important to recognize that there is a contingent of Americans that don't even believe that this is really crazy. There are plenty of people that recognize that and are fighting that and are constantly screaming that from the rooftops. His job is to be the inspiring figure that makes the majority of Americans be proud for him to be a president of the nation they love. And that's what the uniting aspect is. It's you remind people that we are one and we love this country. We love the ideas that it represents. Trigger does that in other parts of that speech. It's like a 20 minute speech, isn't it? But that's a fuck up. You just don't participate in that division. Anyway, I understand. I understand. I just wanted to push back on the saying. Sure. One of his strengths is that he's uniting. But yes, that is an ideal. That is a goal. It's a great one. And he is one that espoused that goal for a long time. Do you think... What else? So from policy perspective and so on. I thought the way he's handled Ukraine and everything thus far has been almost perfect. I think he did a really good job at the political maneuvering and bringing other countries into the fold at establishing clearly what our mission was in relation to Ukraine. I thought he did a good job there. I admire him for pulling out of Afghanistan. Even it was a little bit rough around the edges. Like we got out and we're gone. No American lives are lost. The domestic policy, he's passed more major legislation than I think anybody thought possible. The green energy stuff with the last bill, the infrastructure bill, a lot of the coronavirus relief I thought was really good, especially the expansion of the child tax credit. So from a policy perspective, foreign and domestic, I think he's been successful. Rhetorically, I think he's generally been above board in terms of not attacking people or being too divisive. He's trying to bring people together and work on them. What do you think about the sort of popular in the media criticism of his mental decline? Do you think he's experiencing mental decline? You know, he's an old guy. But do you think... Yeah, maybe a little bit, but he's still doing a good job. Not from a speech perspective, you mean from a policy perspective? Yeah, I'm analyzing it as a job. Yeah, from a speech perspective, maybe not the greatest, but yeah, I mean, he's definitely, what is he like 80, 81? How old is he? I lose track after so many years. But you did say that he's probably going to run in 2024 and he's probably going to win. Did I say that? That he's probably going to win? No way did I say that. I read that somewhere. He's probably going to run. Who knows who will win? But I feel like the incumbent advantage is so strong. Are you really going to throw that away? Like, there's been like one or two times in history in the US, right? Where like the non-incumbent, the parties put somebody else up. Yeah, I mean, the concern is like just the age and the mental decline, just the wear and tear of the campaign, all of that kind of stuff. All the speech you have to make, the debates and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I guess we'll see what happens. What? The least excited... I mean, two years from now is a long time. And his current mental state, he could run and do it. He could do a possible job. In two years, man, I don't know. I've seen videos of Bill Clinton recently. He's looking pretty rough. You know, if Biden is looking a lot more rough, worse for wear in two years, then maybe they actually do have to dig out another person for running. Who knows? What do you think about Trump? When he won in 2016, I think is when you came to fruition, politically speaking. Mm-hmm. So what do you think his winning the 2016 election represents? So for me, Trump, the reason why I got into politics was Trump was like this new epistemic force in American politics that like you kind of have to like flirt with facts before, even if you wanted to be non-factual. He super didn't care. Lying was like a first language to him, just like in speaking in terms of like the way that he used language to just say to you what he felt like you needed to hear to support him and not care at all about what is going on about... Yeah, that's what Trump represented to me in terms of like things that I cared about. He also represents a lot more, obviously, that there was this undercurrent of American opinion that a lot of people didn't know still existed, and it did. He got elected. That the Overton window was misidentified by even a large amount of the Republican Party. That populism was a lot more popular than a lot of people figured. Yeah, there's a lot that I guess he represented. Do you think Trump should have been banned from Twitter? Can you make the case for and against it? So you're a big supporter of free speech? Yeah, so the case in favor of it... Do you think he should be brought back? As Elon tweeted. Yeah, because if he gets brought back, there's a higher chance that I'll be brought back. So I'm supporting that all the way. Thank you, Elon. Unban my account. Unban my account. So because you called me weak spine, I'm going to have to message Elon. Okay, at Omnidestiny. It was a verified Twitter account. Omnidestiny. No, I'm just kidding. Why'd you get banned from Twitter, Destiny? I don't know. I'll add that to Elon. I saw that there was a screenshot of you referring to the rape of somebody. Okay, that was on an older Twitter account, and that was a bad tweet. You have multiple Twitter accounts. You're trying to go around the bans that you keep getting. Okay, hold on. You're slandering me a lot right now. Yeah. Let's get the facts straight, okay? I don't even remember why my first account got banned, but it was a wild account. I tweeted some wildly inappropriate things. You regret? I don't like that word. I'm going to give the answer that most people give. It's like, I don't regret it because I learned a lot. So I'm glad I had the bad experiences that I did. Why don't you like the word regret? I think if we look at where we are... How do you feel about determinism? I believe in the hardest of determinism. That's who I am, okay? Sure. So who I am today is the culmination of everything that's occurred in the past. But I believe you speaking of... Sorry to interrupt. I believe in you speaking about regret is a nice way to communicate that in this deterministic world, you've analyzed the acts of the past, and you're no longer that person. Yeah, of course. For sure. That's what regret usually means. Okay. Thanks for giving me the human explanation. Okay, true, so in that sense, there's a lot of things I've done that I regret. Oh, what are you? You're not human, you're a bot? NPC is my preferred term. Okay, all right. I wish I would have been smart enough at the time to not have to have had made those mistakes. Okay. There you go. Good job. But yeah, obviously, really dumb, really crazy, off the wall tweets. But that account got banned. But then I made another account called... I can't believe I'm giving you a history of my Twitter accounts. But another account called OmniDestiny. So I made a Twitter account called OmniDestiny. Another account called OmniDestiny. It's an honor. And that was my... I got verified. I was cool. They let me have that account because originally they banned it. I said appeal and I was like, oh, let me have one more. And back then Twitter was cool. And they're like, okay, go for it. And that account lasts for a long time. And I don't actually know 100% why that account got banned. I believe that the tweet that showed up in the final... I got banned for hate speech. And it was because there was a picture that I tweeted with three different alt writers that are kind of like neo-Nazi people. And they were all like mixed race people. And I said like the new alt right looks like a Disney Channel original movie in terms of racial composition. And somehow they got flagged for instigating violence against minorities, I think. And I think that's the tweet that got me banned. Because I think that's what showed up in the final report. But I don't know. Maybe there were other reasons because nobody ever communicates. But ever since that account went under, it's just been ban evading ever since. So... Oh, ban evading ever since. So all my new accounts that I'm gonna ban just get banned because they finally figured out it's me. And then they ban evade. There's like one dude at Twitter HQ who's like constantly looking for my new accounts. And they get me. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. That whole... So post Trump world. Do you think, okay, I mean this... Oh, should he be banned? Oh, you asked me to make both cases. Should he be banned? I mean, damn, dude, when you're tweeting out shit that's arguably leading stuff like January 6th, I can understand why. Because it's like, what else is this wild dude gonna tweet out? Like, is he gonna start instigating other violent events? So I'm sympathetic towards the like, okay, well, he can't just be here saying stuff like this. That's insane. We're gonna ban him. I'm sympathetic... Because it's instigating... Yeah, you're instigating......actual physical violence in the physical world. Yeah. Like if I would tweet stuff like that, I would get banned, probably. On the flip side, this is the President of the United States. It seems like he's like doing presidential decree by social media sometimes. Like, is it really right that one public or private, I should say, one private company can like erase the President of the United States words from the eyes of a lot of Americans that are using these social media feeds? And one big one, which I for sure am against, is the permanent ban. Yeah, I don't like that. I hate that. Even in my community, if somebody comes back over like a year, like, I mean... Did you just compare yourself to the President of the United States? No, I compare myself to Twitter banning the President of the United States. Let me put it this way. If I ban Donald Trump in my chat room, I'd unban him in a year. A year? Yeah. What's the process for unbanning Donald Trump? What would he have to do? Usually people send me an email. They're like, listen, I did this stuff. I'm sorry I was dumb. I'll give him another chance. But a year, what if they send an email a month later? Usually I'll unban him. That's usually my policy. I ban pretty quickly in my community, but if you ever ask... You're a big softie. Yeah, I usually let him back. Well, because I used to be the worst type of internet person. And I think I'm a little bit better than I used to be. Now that you're older. Yeah, now that I've matured. Yeah, of course. Age bestows a wisdom that just can't be gotten any other way. What's your sense in general? Is there something interesting you could say about your view on free speech? It seems like one of those terms that's also overused to mean a lot of different things. What does it mean to you? If you have a democratic style of governance, you are entrusting people with one of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities. And that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are going to make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history. If you're going to trust people to vote correctly, you have to be able to trust them to have open and honest dialogue with each other. Whether that's Nazis or KKK people or whoever talking, you have to believe that your people are going to be able to rise above and make the correct determinations when they hear these types of speeches. And if you're so worried that somebody is going to hear a certain political figure and they're going to be completely radicalized instantly, then what that tells me is that you don't have enough faith in humans for democracy to be a viable institution, which is fine. You can be anti-democratic, but I don't think you can be pro-democracy and anti-free speech. Within reason. So what's the within reason? So I mean, you can't post like child porn or something on Twitter or people try to get you on that stuff or like direct calls to violence or probably not. You shouldn't be tweeting out like, we're going to meet up tomorrow and go bomb, blah, blah, blah. Probably not. So do you think it's okay to allow racism and anti-Semitism and hate speech? Hate speech, yes, because that can be very broadly defined. I can understand there being some basic rules of like no slurs on like a platform that gets into like acceptable forms of moderation or like excessive harassment and bullying. I can understand. But past that, when the moderation becomes ideological, I get a little bit nervous because you know, there's a whole other host of reasons. Yeah, of course, it's all a gray area, but when it feels like ideology has seeped into the censorship, not good. Yeah. Which it's so fascinating to think, especially now that Elon bought Twitter, how do you engineer a system that prevents ideology from seeping in and nevertheless is able to create a whole a creative platform that has healthy conversations? Because if you have one guy who's just screaming nonsense nonstop, it has this effect where the quiet voices at the back of the room are silenced. Yeah. So like, that's what you usually don't talk about. Like if you let one annoying, loud person in, that's actually censoring the voice of a lot of people that would like to speak, but they don't get a chance. That's one of the things, especially around like trans discourse, I have to constantly do that like reminder for my audiences. So like when I'm dealing with these types of people on the internet, a lot of them might seem really crazy. A lot of these types of people might seem insane, but like in the real world, outside of like the crazy Twitter activist world, like the vast majority of people you're meeting from LGBT communities are like the coolest, normalist people. All they want is the right to live their life the way they want to and to be like unobstructed and like, yeah. But people will get this impression of like an online activist, like a vegan or LGBT person or whatever, and then they think that every single person in real life is like that and it's a really negative stereotype. And then even the other people in that group. Oh, is Melina coming over? Oh yeah, I asked her. I don't know if that's her. Okay, Melina just joined us. What were we talking about? Was it interesting? You were saying that you were going to talk to Elon about getting at Omni Destiny, the verified Twitter account, unbanned. I said, that's so- That sounds like a lie. That's so gracious of you. I can't even believe you would do that for me. And then you admitted that you tried to evade the ban multiple times, which I'm sure would be very looked upon. You know, I heard that in Norway, in their prison system, they don't actually punish you for trying to escape jail because that's like the natural human thing to do. They hug you? What do they do? I don't know if they, but they don't punish you because of course you're trying to be free. That's all I'm trying to be on Twitter. I'm just trying to be free. Oh, that's the natural humanistic- Yeah, that's the natural human course, is to ban you, man. You're not a destructive force. You're just- No, I'm a force for good. That's why all my accounts only get banned for banning and banning. I don't get banned for doing bad things. Break out. And I'm a progressive show. I'm like far left. I love like progressive causes. I thought this is what you criticized Hasan for being. I show them from a place of first principles, not from a mindless AI echoing kind of thing. Okay. So you're a free thinking bot. Yeah, exactly. All right, cool. Well, I'm sure we'll return to some politics. That was beautiful. Malia, can you tell us about yourself? You're also a fellow streamer. Yes. What's your story? I stream and I started streaming because I met him basically, kind of, but I don't do the politics. I do like travels or talk about relationships, talk to my audience basically. And you're from that part of the world, right? Sweden. Yeah, exactly. So did you escape from prison and they didn't? That was Norway. It's different. I actually really, I've been to Sweden a bunch of times. I love it. There's a tech sector there that's really like flourishing. Where did you go? Which city? I went to Stockholm. I think I gave a few lectures there. There's a vibrant tech sector. It was cool. And people are super nice. Yeah. We're friendly. We're not like very deep. Like we don't really have much deep conversation. It's like a meta conversation. Oh, there's not many intellectuals that come from Sweden. We don't really speak very highly of ourselves. We kind of like just chill all the time. We don't make a scene. We don't, we're just like, you know. Do you know what the name for that is? There's a specific name for it. It's Jantelagen. Yeah, Jantelagen. Yeah, Jantelagen. Yeah. Oh, there's a philosophy behind it. When you're part of like Sweden or Norway, you don't talk too highly of yourself because it's seen as kind of like rude. Like think of like America, except the exact opposite. You don't even really want to like, you don't want to make yourself into a victim too much. You don't want to be too much of anything. You're just like sticking to the group. Don't make big scene about yourself. But that said, you came here and you put yourself in front of a camera and became a streamer. Do you understand how weird that is for my friends in Sweden? Do you have anxiety? I just didn't talk about myself and just like make a big deal about myself for hours every day. Was that like terrifying? Did you have anxiety about that? No, because I don't see them. But then I come back and I'm like, ooh. Also, what do you feel like when you're actually streaming? You feel like you're just alone in a room? One-on-one type thing? No, I see, I see chat. I'm thinking, oh, they're like a little fairies. They're not really real. They're just like out there. I don't know what they look like. I just see little names and they're just cute. And just colors, you know? You're talking to little fairies inside your head. Yeah, that's what I do. Is that how you feel about chat? They're demons for me. They're demons? Okay, my Anna fairies. Are they, so is chat a source of stress or happiness? Like, is there a comparison? No, for me, that's a source of happiness. I've been very intentional with like the construction of my community. So I'm really happy with where it's at. How are you able to actually have deep political discourse while playing a video game at the same time? I have a really good chat room in terms of like the way that people engage in conversations. Like I was one of the earliest people to embrace the philosophy of like, I am in total control of what people watch me think. That like I have a high level of responsibility for how they conduct themselves. And that if I conduct myself in a certain way, I can expect a certain level of conduct from them. And for the most part, it's like worked pretty well for the past, you know, nine or 10 years. Yeah. What about the actual playing of the game? Like you're able to parallelize the brain, like? Oh. Like it seems like Factorio seems like a super complex game. Yeah. I don't actually think that's possible. I don't think multitasking for a human brain is possible. If you see me playing a game, usually what's happening is the conversation is like, I've had it a million times, so I'm not thinking about it. I've automated that. Or if the conversation is very challenging, then if you watch me, if you really watch what's happening, I'm probably just running around in circles because I have to think about the conversation. Okay. Because with Factorio, it looks like a lot of stuff is going on. Sometimes, yeah. So I guess it's hard for a person who hasn't played the game to detect that you're not actually- Does that come off as like, you're super intelligent and multitask? Or does it come off as like, he's not interested in this conversation at all? Yeah. There's a coolness to it. Like when you're not paying attention, like if you're looking elsewhere, like you're checking your phone, you're too cool for this conversation. There's a sense like that. Yeah. The reality is though, is if you watch, it was easier to see in Minecraft, because in Minecraft, when there was a challenging conversation, if you watch me play, I'm literally just running around and jumping in circles because I have to think about the conversation 100%. I can't do a complicated task and think about the conversation. Or like the people always joke in my chat, like, oh no, the notepad came out. If it's a really challenging conversation, I'll get rid of the game and I'll bring out a notepad and I'll start writing stuff down to keep track of what's going on. So what kind of stuff do you stream? So advice, you talk about- Yeah. Like either I talk to chat or I travel around, basically. Like we have a conversation, so we like go to countries. I've been to like Italy. I was in Italy for like one and a half months, just like traveling around alone, going to cities, like having like my camera with me and like streaming for hours. Where's the coolest place you've been to? Ever? It's probably New Zealand. New Zealand? I think so. After that, it's probably going to be Italy, I think. Because I like history and yeah. Oh, so both history, because New Zealand is also beautiful. So it's both natural beauty and historical beauty. Yeah, for sure. I think I just really like the Polynesian sort of culture. I think it's very interesting. Like the ocean people and it's just really beautiful. People are very relaxed, chill. They're very far away, which is interesting as well. Because whenever they talk about politics, or they talk about just like the world, it feels really far away. So where's home for you? Is Austin home? It's home for me. A human being is home? Yeah. We've lived in a lot of different places and traveled around a lot. So that's why you think of home as like humans? I think so, yeah. I mean, if there's going to be a place, it's probably going to be like my childhood places, probably. Like my old country house or something like that. We don't have it anymore. But like that's like home for me, I guess. So how'd you guys meet each other? You're currently married. Yes. To each other, yeah. Yeah. To each other. All right, cool. How'd you guys meet? I was watching his YouTube stuff, like 2018, I think. Like because it was the Swedish election around that time. And I was interested in politics. And then I think he said in one of his videos that he had an Instagram and that he needed people to stop DMing him that wasn't cutie pies. And then I messaged him and said, am I a cutie pie? And then you replied in like two minutes. And then that's when I was in New Zealand. And I guess you wanted to escape America or like LA for a little bit. And that included New Zealand. Where were you mentally there? Because we've talked through this timeline. Where's 2018? Was it 18, 19? Where's the low point? Or that was way earlier? Low point, carpet cleaning. That was like 2010. Oh, okay. 2018 was probably your peak. Every day now is my peak. What do you mean? That was my peak. Why would you say that? Nobody ever admits being past their prime. Just say it. Well, I mean, my prime is still coming up. It was probably around the time where you were getting a lot of lefties through your community and you were really like thinking about that they would go too far. Maybe. I think that was still when Hasan and Vash were both in my community. Exactly. So I would say it feels like there was not really like much issues when it comes to your stuff or your work stuff back then. Oh, something we didn't talk about is that there were no politics on Twitch. I exclusively inhabited that place for like two years because nobody else did it because it was a really toxic environment for politics. So for a couple of years as it grew, I kind of grew the whole space because nobody was doing that yet. What did that look like? You're having political debates, political discourse. Yeah, mainly going into YouTube people to try to argue with them or just doing politics on stream, like reading stories, researching stuff, talking about stuff. But there's not like other people on Twitch to debate about politics because there was no politics. It was, yeah. Was there a debate in the space of communism, socialism, social democrats, kind of like this? Are you trying to outline your own position during that time? I think it was mainly me fighting against conservatives because it was like Trump stuff. And then it was coming off the back of like, there was this movement called Gamergate and there was all this anti-SJW stuff on the internet. And I was like the SJW, like the progressive that was fighting on the progressive side of things. So I think that's what I was known for. But I was fighting with people off of Twitch because on Twitch there weren't very many political discussions happening. So you were holding the SJW flag. Yeah. To what degree do you still hold it? Like what's the best, what's the steel man case for SJW? I mean, like I'm still very much that SJW from 2018, 2019, but the positions have moved so much farther left that some people might not call me that anymore. I'm not sure. It depends on who I'm talking to. So it's basically, what is social justice? Were you like being sensitive to the experience of others? Yeah, being sensitive and empathetic towards the experience of others and then trying to build a better world that like suits as many different types of people as possible while being like aware of like their needs. Okay. So you guys met, what's your, from your perspective, is that, did she, she, she telling lies? Is it accurate? No, it's pretty accurate. Okay. When'd you guys actually meet? I flew out in 2019. 19, yeah, in like in February. Yeah. Basically there was like weird stuff happening in LA. I just come off of kind of a weird, not kind of sort of relationship. And I just wanted to like go away for a while. Another company reached out to me and they had like a fun streaming device. And they said they'd sponsor a trip if I went somewhere. And I was like, oh, well, I know this person. I know a couple of people in New Zealand. Melina is one of them. It's like, I'll go to New Zealand. It'll be fun. And yeah, I did that for two weeks. Do you guys believe in love? I feel like you lack, the gotcha got us into this. I'm not sure to the degree to which you have human emotions. I have quite a few. Okay. From your perspective, when did you fall in love with Melina? When did you fall in love with Meli Mel? The minute I saw her. I don't know. We, our first two weeks together were a lot of fun. We had a lot of chemistry in person. I was kind of shocked. I wasn't thinking about it. Cause it was like, we spent like a week together and you said, I really want to tell you something. And you were like, you were like stalling that for the longest time. I think she was, oh, she said like, I love you. No, he basically just said like, I really like you and it never really happens. That's what he said. And I was like, oh, and I thought, hey, I thought. So let's still run. We said Trump getting banned from Twitter. Is that what we were talking about before? Oh yeah. Hey, you agreed to me coming on here. Of course I'm going to be doing this. How long? So how long did that take? Two weeks, you said? That took like a week. No, I don't know. I think it was just like. Thing is my mind processes like information so quickly. Two weeks to somebody like you is actually like years for me. So. Oh, like me. Yeah. It's just, there was like a lot of like factorial type of strategic thinking. Yeah. Going on. I was seeing like all the events like Dr. Strange or whatever in the Avengers when he's like seeing into all the. Also when you saw me, you just saw the future. Yeah, I was looking at all of them. Yeah. You're doing like some game theoretic simulation of all the possible outcomes. Exactly. Okay. But no, yeah, it was probably pretty soon. I realized that we had a lot of chemistry. Yeah. I think before I left after my two weeks there, I was like, we need to make sure you got like a ticket to come visit me in the United States because it'll be fun and everything. And then. I kind of decided that last minute too. It was like really like five hours before you fly back. We kind of realized because it was kind of like men is just like a one-time thing. And then that was it. But we're like, oh no, this is a lot of fun. We should probably hang out again. Oh, so you realized you would miss each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was a one-time thing. The melancholy side of love. Okay. When did you fall in love with Steven? I thought he like hated me. I don't know. I thought not hated me. She still thinks I hate her. But no, no, I, I remember like what he said that he really liked me. I was kind of a little shocked about that because I, I don't know. There was a lot of like random things happening in New Zealand. It was a lot of fun, but it was definitely like very interesting, like things that happen. Because I was like around a lot of other people as well. So I thought he might've had like a really bad time. But when he said that I was thinking about it more and then we spent like more time together, like a week after that. And then it felt like that was more like real. And I think when he was about to leave, I kind of realized like, no, I really like him. Do you guys ever say love to each other? Like I love you. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay. Right. Why would you ask that? What has he said before? Because I haven't, I don't think I've heard you speak. The only time I've heard you talk about love is when you're like criticizing the, the red pill community saying they don't ever talk about love and relationships. Almost all the time I'm giving criticism to people. Like I said, I'm kind of stepping in. I'm very disconnected from my own emotional experience because I'm trying to talk within there. So it's pretty rare that I'll talk about. What is your own emotional experience? Exactly. Highly blunted, I guess. There's a lot. Okay. I mean, what's the, what's deep in there? Are you, is this just who you are genetically or are you running from something? I think I have a pretty good understanding of myself. A lot of people make that accusation to me, but I don't think I am. Okay. This is just who you are. It's just who I am. Yeah. Okay. There's not childhood stuff like trauma. It's all sorted and done. You figured it all out? Yeah. In your old age? As I grow every year, I figure out more and more. He did mention, I think I heard this somewhere that this is a source of fights for the two of you, the age thing. I felt the ageism throughout this whole conversation. He's basically, he's saying that he gambles like with time. He's just like, I think she will be good later. And then just like. Like an investment. Yeah. Yeah. It's like what he's doing. When this treasury bond matures, I'm going to be able to cash out. What do you think so far? Is the stocks going up or? It's tumultuous. What's that mean? It's like Bitcoin. Oh my God. Yeah. Like Bitcoin, crypto mill. All right. If you guys don't mind, one interesting aspect of your relationship is you're in an open relationship. What's that like from a game theoretic simulation perspective? What went into that calculation and like, how does that. Like how it started or. How did that start? Sure. The only relationships I've ever done has been open relationships since I was like in high school. Cause I didn't really understand like, why wouldn't you be able to like do other things with other people, but then just like have your main partner basically. So what is an open relationship generally speaking? That means you have one main partner. Not a monogamous relationship, like you're somehow allowed like in different ways. You can see other people sexually. Sexually. But like there's one main. Yeah. Or it doesn't have to be there for some people, but like, I think it's probably easier and we probably don't really have time or the energy for like more than like one person to like really like. What about like emotional? It's really complicated. There's a lot of complicated stuff going on under the hood there. Yeah. I think broadly speaking, you've got like polyamorous relationships and you've got like open relationships where polyamorous is like, oh, I've got like three different girlfriends and we all hang out or sometimes even live together or three boyfriends, whatever. And then you've got like open relationships, which is like, oh, you know, like you can basically hook up with other people and then you've got like your main relationship and that's it. I think ours is probably somewhere in the middle of that to where like, we've got like long-term friends, some of them we hook up with and that's kind of how we, yeah, it's a delicate dance that explodes every six months on itself. So it does explode, you guys fight over it? We fight over some things, yeah. I think it's mostly because a lot of people can't handle it and they agree to something and then they realize that we're way too cool and then they get really obsessed and they think that they can like get in there and then it gets really dramatic. Have you figured it out? Like, it seems like a complicated dance. I feel like we figure out things more and more like when it comes to like what's a good person for us to hang out and what's not a good person for us to hang out with or like I probably have more opinions on like who he hangs out with because he likes the fucking psychos. Yeah, so you like to surround... He likes the not like the crazy ones, like the baby trap sort of women. That's the ones and I don't like that because that affects me. That affects your game theoreticalization. Yeah, obviously, yeah. Right. You like to surround yourself like in general you've talked about with crazy people. I say crazy and I really shouldn't. It's a humorous way. It's like, yeah, it's very unstable, very can be unstable, but people that are very unique like when I meet this person, that's like boring. Yeah, not boring. Yeah. And you said that you're progressively becoming not boring yourself. No, I think I'm pretty stable. I don't let them affect me much, but. So you don't think they affect your... No, if I've said that I said a joke. I think I've like I've got my stuff like really well figured out. It's what allows me to engage with people like this so easily because I can engage. I can make them feel seen and heard. And then if it gets insane, I can cut off and I can be chill like very few things affect me in the long term. Do you guys experience jealousy? Usually, like whenever I feel like he's not spending the like the amount of time that I'm asking for and he spends it on his video games or his stream or like he sees someone else like more than he sees me or something like that, that would like not be good because then it affects like our relationship. Do you have a good sense of like, is it literally time or is it the energy put into the... It's probably like if like if he's with me that like the attention in the time like when he hangs out with me and then there's also probably the time. So if I feel like something else is distracting too much, like it could be work or it could be a friend or it could be anything. Like if I feel like it starts to take away from like me, then I'm having an issue with it. I don't think he really cares much. I guess the only jealousy you experience is probably when you feel like like if I get upset about him seeing someone too much and then I go see someone more and then he's like, why can't I go see my friend more like as much as you? So like that's the sort of like thing that we're trying to navigate on, I guess. I think we are like diametrically opposed sometimes in terms of how we view like engagement with people or engagement with the world sometimes. So like on her end of the spectrum, like a perfect week for her might be like being in a cabin, watching like fireflies at night, going hiking every morning, going swimming at the beach because it's like you're taking in like the grandeur of nature. You're like connected with yourself. You're like very at peace. Everything is like chill and cool. There's the wind, the feeling of nature, everything. That's like her peak living experience. I like being present. Yeah. And like my peak experiences are like people trying to destroy my life, like the challenge of like navigating really complicated discussion, like, you know, several different dramatic events unfolding that might end my career. Like these things are like very, I like the stress and the action and the entertainment and everything's like very cool for me. So when we're together, she generally wants me to be like more chill. But if I don't feel like I'm being like stimulated a lot, then it's easy for like my mind to wander to wander somewhere else. Or that's kind of the issue. We have a very different way of like engaging with. So how can you find happiness in the stillness? I feel like if we're just like aware of it and we're trying our best, like whenever we like we're supposed to do this one thing. So let's say that we want to go to New York and I'm like, we should just like go out and do this one specific thing. We try to find something that he enjoys doing. Like now that we're in Texas, we can go shooting or do something fun that he enjoys, then we can do it. And then I think like, just like for me also to be aware that like when he spends lots of time on crazy people, it's not because he like loves them or wants to be with them. It's just because he likes being like having his life destroyed. Like you said, which I don't really do. It's a completely different thing. So like for me to like understand more like how he's thinking, because it's so different for mine and for him to understand how I'm thinking about things. So like what I prioritize in my life, I think that's like how we navigate. But I think it's good. I think the differences can be good. Like when we're finding a way. Yeah. Well, I think you're, you're relatable. I'm definitely very difficult to get along with. Like I always tell people that, that like if you're dating me for like more than a few years, like you get like an award for that. It's like a war zone that you've survived. Absolutely. You're like a veteran, you get medals and stuff. And it's always like, I think there's probably been like six different, I don't think she says it anymore, but there were like six different times in our relationship where she's like, is it always like this? Is this actually right? And like every next year it's like. You lied in the beginning of it, like you were lying about that. Well, it got worse. You were like, nah, it's just like right now I'm having a huge argument online about saying the N-word in private. It's just going to be like this and I'm going to be streaming 24 hours a day. And I'm like, when are you going to go to bed? It's been a week. Are you playing League coming into this? A little bit, but I'm clean. I'm clean of League like six months right now. Yeah. What do you hate about League of Legends? I never got. The humans. Well, speaking of which, my participation in League involved on the robot side. Good. Because that's an improvement. Because both with Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, because OpenAI and DeepMind both participate in creating bots in those. I was a professional Starcraft 2 player. So I remember when the AI started to play. It's interesting the types of restrictions that you would have to put on like a gaming robot to make it like functional and not totally unfair to the other side. Yeah. To make it human-like. Yeah. Was that interesting to you to see AI be able to play those video games? I think in some ways people think things are more complicated than they actually are. And I think video games is one of those things where you're like, oh my God, there's like a million possibilities at every second. And who knows? And it's like, no, there's like three or four things going on at any point in time. And I'm willing to bet that like an AI could probably solve some of these games like pretty easily, especially if there are no constraints on how they can learn. Yeah. Can I talk to you about relationships? Yeah. We already have. Yeah, I know. But more generally, I'm more interested in relationships. I know, but more generally speaking, we didn't get a chance to talk about the Red Pill community. Oh, sure. Well, first of all, what is the Red Pill community, the metasphere in general? I'd love to get both of your opinions on this. Sure. I know you're probably not as opinionated on that whole- I'd say, what do you think I am then? Like probably not as much as you, but I do have opinions. You do? Okay. I usually don't like speak out too much on it because I feel like there's like a language barrier. That's why I don't really do politics because this is my second language. Yeah. That's right. You have to know the- A little bit like that, yeah. You know how to use derogatory terms every other sentence so they understand you, right? Exactly. I don't know anything about that. Stephen and I talked about- You need to be able to speak really well for people to take you seriously, I think. And that's the thing. If I don't have the words and I can't pronounce things correctly, then people are not going to say- A person searching for words looks stupid, essentially. That's how people view it. Tell me about it. I have a podcast that a bunch of people listen to and I mumble and they, yeah. Wait, what's your first language? Russian. Oh, okay. But I speak both languages horribly. I'm just not- I'm not like, there is definitely a big disconnect between my brain and my mouth module. I'm not able to generate the thoughts efficiently. The things you're able to do, like speak like that, I'm not. It's very, very tough. Plus, there's a huge amount of anxiety and social interaction that I have, which makes speaking even harder. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough. I understand. I gotcha. Makes sense. Yeah. The gotcha is both a symbol of compassion and derision at once. I'm just letting you know I understand what you're saying. I'm just going to sit there and stare at you and- Confirm. No, you can just say, yeah, I get it. I get it. Gotcha. No, no, gotcha sounds- No, it's so short. It's like- I got you. Say a longer sentence, but that means the same thing. I understand you. Yeah, good. That's good. That's like, not chills, you know? You get chills, so you understand me. Yeah, it feels good. Yeah. I hear you. I hear you. And like, if you just like hold the other person's hand, that's even better. You got to put in some emotion there, okay? Show that you have some. What do you think about- Gotcha. What do you think about Red Pill? What, sorry, what is it, first of all, for people who don't know? Yeah, the Red Pill community, obviously, it's the Matrix reference. The Red Pill that you take is when you realize what dating standards and norms really are in the world, that men are providers and have to become some great thing to hunt and attract, you know, the woman who are just kind of there floating around looking for people to give them the most resources. And it's like coming to a realization of what the world of dating really is, broken away from the Hollywood standards and the romantic stuff that they try to sell you in, you know, stores. So there was kind of, maybe you can kind of educate me on this, but Red Pill used to be associated with just maybe anti-establishment views, I don't know, maybe Republican conservative viewpoints, maybe alt-right. Yeah, they use Red Pill a lot in like different communities. When you say the Red Pill community- Yeah, that usually means dating. The dating thing. But a lot of people say, oh, Trump voters, they're Red Pilled. Are you Red Pilled on like politics or whatever? People will say stuff like that, yeah. Okay, cool. And then there's like the Manosphere, all the similar type of stuff. And Andrew Tate is somebody that represents kind of the figurehead- Of the Manosphere, of like the Red Pill stuff, yeah, I would say so. I'm pretty sure, yeah. Okay. All right, cool. So what are some ideas that they represent and what do you think about them? I think they do a good job at speaking to disaffected young men who feel like the rest of the world has kind of left them behind or isn't willing to speak to them. And they do identify some true and real problems. It feels like on the left, we have a really hard time doing like self-improvement or telling people how to better themselves. We focus too much on like structural or systemic issues rather than what can an individual do to uplift or empower themselves. And it also feels like they do a good job at speaking to some of the positive aspects of masculinity, that it's okay to be like strong and brave and a soldier and a warrior and provide for your family and blah, blah, blah. So I would say like those are like positive messages, like self-improvement and everything that come from the Red Pill community. What's the negative? I think the analysis on how men and women interact is a way too transactional. All of like the romanticism and love and chemistry is totally sucked out of it. Everything is very like sex-based, like how do you basically have sex with the most amount of women possible and that's going to make you happy. And then I think people's motivations sometimes are just spoken about in such a shallow derogatory way that I don't think is always reflective of reality. Like a woman only wants you because you make six figures and you're tall and a guy only wants you because he wants to have sex with you and blah, blah, blah. Like it feels like there's a lot of that going on a lot. Yeah, and that misses some fundamental aspects about relationships, about meaningful relationships and so on. I don't think I've never heard Red Pill people ever, ever talk about like meaningful relationships. It's always just how to get in one or how to have sex really. Mel, what bothers you about some of that philosophy? I feel like the people that are like the Red Pill people, I feel like their solution is something that doesn't actually work out. Like where it works out for some people, people that makes a lot of money is like really successful in that sort of way, but it's not going to help most men out there. So I feel like it's just like a pointless speech to give to these really lost guys. And they really do believe that they can become successful, they can get money and when they get all these things, they can get girls, but most of them is not going to achieve that ever. To get the money part or become successful. Just become a billionaire, you know? And you'll get all the girls, which is true, but not everyone can do that. So I feel like when these guys are speaking to these men and they're just like, we just care about these men out there, you know, they need to hear this. It doesn't really help a lot of them. And it doesn't inspire them to develop compassion towards the opposite sex, which is probably something required to have a meaningful relationship. And also like they seem to complain a lot about women, like only wanting men that have money and that's tall and that's muscular or whatever, you know, all those things. And, but they complain about that, but that's like also kind of what they're trying to make the men try to do for themselves. So they kind of like fall into the same sort of behavior and it seems like they're kind of unaware of that as well. They're just playing a part of the game instead of trying to find a woman that doesn't look for those things and that are looking for not those things. Yeah. I actually would love to have like straight up data on people in that world versus not in that world, how often they get laid. Yeah. Like literally, so I think for sure people in that world have fewer meaningful long-term relationships that are fulfilling, that actually helped them succeed in life, that helped them be happy and content and all that kind of stuff. But just even the straight up, the shallow goal of getting laid, I wonder, because it's very possible that like just the roughness with which they treat intellectually women that might lead to lower success, not higher success. It's very adversarial, which I think is always disappointing. Anything that talks about men and women, I think it's good to acknowledge differences, but when it becomes like adversarial, especially when you talk about sex, sex is something that men are getting and it's something that women are giving and that type of like trade off and the way they talk about it is like, yeah, it sets people against each other in a really toxic way, I think. Mm-hmm. How do you talk to people from that world, from the red pill world? Like would you ever talk to somebody like Andrew Tate? Oh yeah, if I had the chance to. I've been on the Fresh and Fit podcast a few times and then I've got a friend, Sneeko, who's like very red pill, that stuff. If I'm trying to talk to them, usually it's kind of like approaching it like a scared cat. The first thing you have to do is be very gentle and say like, I understand your issues, I understand your complaints, I know that I'm scary because you think I'm going to say like toxic masculinity and feminism and all these scary words at you. So the first thing is always to recognize it. Like a lot of what they talk about, there are like true aspects to what they're talking about that people on the left won't recognize. So I think it's good to acknowledge those things that like men and women are kind of different. We do look for different things in general when it comes to relationships. It's okay to say that. It's not, there's nothing bad there. And then it'll usually be like, once I've got your trust and I'm in your bubble, like let's talk about the things that you want and maybe like some of the strategies that you're employing aren't necessarily going to get you some of the things that you want. So for instance, if you're really worried about like shallow girls, like ruining your life, like Melina said, it's probably not best to build your entire worldview around trying to get shallow girls that are going to ruin your life. Like if your way of attracting a girl is to go to the gym, get a whole bunch of money and try to like flaunt your wealth as much as possible, you're going to be attracting the very same type of women that you're here like decrying on your stream. I think we talked about that on the podcast. Like you probably want to have a woman that's going to be there if you lose your job, still there, like that cares about the things that's not just your job. Yeah. It's more stable. And also I don't help you become a great man or a great like grow. Like I feel like a great friendship and a partnership, like it helps you make you a better person. Some of the most successful people I know, I mean they have families and there's clearly a dynamic there that's like that makes them, they wouldn't be that without. They're not an island, yeah. Yeah. And the kids actually a big part of that too. Like for most people, if you're like a good parent, they make you step up somehow in life. You have to take responsibility for getting your shit together and excelling in ways that I guess the philosophy of the Red Bull does not quite get to. That's always an interesting, I think I've asked that a couple of times where it's like, would you let your daughter date Andrew Tate? And it's always funny to watch them kind of like squirm around those answers sometimes. But see if they don't have a daughter, like I don't have a daughter, I think your whole philosophy changes once you have a daughter. Sure. Well, but even at that, like they know that what they're answering, they feel a little bit weird about it. It's funny to watch them, like even they know, it's like, ah, fuck, you know. Well, they might say like, I want my daughter to date like a high value male to the degree that he's a high value male, yes. But like, I don't think you'll feel that way. The definition of high value changes completely. For sure. Certainly the stereotypical measures of value contribute to the calculation, but it's so much more than that. I think the chemistry of the whole thing is bigger. You've also mentioned about body count. You guys both have a high body count. Does body count matter? Or it depends, like you said, it's low in some people's eyes, it's high in other people's eyes. Does body count matter in relationships? Does the past matter? Well, the past matters. I don't think body count, not to me, I don't really care. Not just as it is, no. Yeah. I mean, it could be. But the past does. Yeah. Well, the past is who you are, right? Like if somebody tells me like they have a 200 body count and they're 16, something's probably going on there that's not good. I was thinking about that too. Because it could be like really young people that are having some sort of like mental problems going on. Or somebody's like 45 and they've like never had sex before. There's probably something going on, right? So it could be indicative. But if somebody's like in their 20s and they've had sex with 100 people or 50 people, whatever, it's, you know, whatever. There's more experience, which can be good. Sure. Okay. So that just represents you're like sexually open and so it doesn't really necessarily mean any kind of... Not necessarily. It could, though. The number alone doesn't mean anything. Yeah. Okay. Well, you could meet a guy that's like, I just really, really like when I fuck a lot of people because it makes me so cool. You can meet someone like that, which is like... The body count doesn't matter, but like where it comes from. Yeah. Like why have you slept with the people you slept with? Does it hurt like the romantic aspect of the relationship, knowing that there's a lot of people in the past? Not for us. No. Is a part of the relationship fundamentally romantic? For us? Yeah. I'd say so. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What? You come off as such a cold person. No, I was just in my head thinking I wanted to just say gotcha right there. It's so judgmental. I think when it comes to the sex thing, there's always like the way that I explain it is... And I understand like, I have to say this because I don't advocate for what I do for everybody or what she does for everybody, because obviously there's a whole bunch of natural feelings of jealousy that pop up for a lot of people. But when people ask me, you know, it's always like, oh, like, isn't this like horrible that you guys are doing this and you don't love each other? From my perspective, I can have sex with like any person and it can be sex. Like, that's not like a special thing between two people in my eyes. It's like anybody can have sex. But there are like certain activities and ways you can spend time with each other where you're like carving out these like precious little moments in time with a certain person that can do things that are special to that person. And those are the kind of like events that I remember more than anything else. So like the idea of like, oh, wow, I had sex with a person that was so special doesn't mean as much as like, you know, us traveling to like New Zealand or sharing some special moment doing like some really fun activity or event or whatever. That's usually how I look at it. So a shared intimate moment. Yeah. I kind of agree, but I can definitely connect the romance with sex. Boring. I'm curious why you can't do that. That's because she's a woman. See, that's where the red pill's right. We've also talked about misogyny, which is clearly the embodiment of that. What were you saying? So there's some, there's a connection between romance and sex. Yeah, I think it is because I think sex could be a lot of things, right? It's some sort of bonding, I'd say in some way. Let's say that you really like BDSM, you kind of like you become submissive to someone or you take control over someone. It's like in a very bonding, like intimate moment, I'd say. And that's romantic. The intimacy is romantic. I think it is. If you can show yourself as really submissive or like weak, or you have like absolutely no control over yourself and you let someone else do it, or you are the one being that, like you are the dominant force of someone. I think that's a really like intimate thing because you show like the weakest part of yourself, kind of. I just feel like I personally, to me, some component of romantic, but to me, this is not judging to others, to me, maybe it's how I was brought up, the romance increases if the number of intimate interactions are limited to one person. Like for me, for some reason, spreading it out decreases like exponentially the feeling of romance you feel. But I don't know what, that could be just like sort of having grown up in the Soviet Union, there's a kind of, there's the fairy tale stories and you're kind of maybe living through them. Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is like really normal. Like most people probably feel that way. Yeah. But because you guys are able to successfully not do that, I just want to question my own understanding of it, you know? Like- Like why is that? Why is that? Like am I being very jealous for no reason? Like maybe you can maximize the number of intimate experiences if you just open up and let go of the jealousy, essentially. I think, I feel like in Sweden, like in Scandinavia, we're extremely just sexually open, like in general. We're not like super religious either. We're very like relaxed. We don't feel bad about ourselves. It's just like a different sort of thing. And I would say like, we're more progressive when it comes to feminism and stuff. So it's more common that you will meet women with a higher body count than like when I meet like American girls, all of them have like vaginismus, like super suppressed sexually and- What did you just use? They have like issues to like, they can't relax during sex, so it just hurts for them. Vaginismus. So they get really nervous. Vaginismus, isn't that what it's called? Yeah. So like I meet so many girls that are having like a lot of issues with sex and they have like a very low body count because they just can't relax or they, yeah, and it's probably, and usually they come from like a very religious background. So they have just been told like, you cannot wear that, you cannot be like that, you can't like, you know, and like where I grew up, it was not like that at all. We just see it as more like a casual thing. So then you could just maximize the awesomeness of the experience. Yeah, I guess. You don't have to trom over it. Exactly. I think the important thing I think for everybody to realize is there's always pros and cons to everything. Like my lifestyle, like obviously I get to have a lot of fun experiences. That's like a huge pro and that's super cool. And if you're like a more monogamy brain person, you're not going to get those experiences. But if you're a monogamy brain person, like when you're sharing that special moment in time with somebody else, like that moment can be really, really, really special because now it's the thing that you're showing yourself and opening yourself up to another person and they're only trusting you to do that. And that's like a really special thing that only the two of you are sharing with each other. So, I mean, like there's always like pros and cons to everything. Like I think we both would say like, like doing an open relationship is probably not like we would not recommend it. Yeah, no, of course not. I don't think we would, no. Yeah, I recently fasted for three days and I ate a chicken breast at the end of that. And it was like the most delicious food I've ever eaten. So like there's some aspect of fasting and scarcity and so on that like, and you have to figure out what for your own psyche, what works the best. It's good to be a little bored or like not do something or like work because you can just enjoy the time when you're doing something really fun. It's more fun. Otherwise, you're just going to get numb in general with everything. Yeah. Yeah, I personally just never get bored. Like I guess the boring thing is exciting to me. Though I just like everything. You're like me because everything I like is boring. I got to ask you, we talked about misogyny and he's trying to battle it out on the internet. What's your sense as a woman about the level of misogyny on the internet, in the streaming community and how to fight it? For me, because I guess I get it every single day somehow, like because I have an online, like I have a chat that's live, right? And, but I have like mods moderating that all the time. So I don't really need to see much of it. I think it's just pretty annoying because you get to like see it all the time. So it's become like background noise? Yeah, a little bit. And it's like the same comments over and over again. But it's usually for me, I don't personally care that much. I understand that other people do, especially when it comes into like, when there's like a lot of sexism and stuff. And when there's a lot of like men not taking women seriously, like I definitely get that. And I used to get that even more like a few years ago with my accent and everything. And like I used to be blonde as well, like a few months ago. I feel like people wouldn't take me seriously because of that. That's a bit annoying. But I feel like it's pretty easy to like see through when someone acts that way. And for me personally, I don't really care. But it's a bit annoying, like being online and like getting stuff every single day. I would say like the probably the worst thing is when you feel like you put in a lot of effort into some sort of work, everyone is just going to say, you just got that because you're a woman and you're attractive. And that's probably like the worst thing. Is there a way to fight that you think? Yeah, I don't think you can. I think it just comes up all the time. It's just like it is what it is, I guess. You just got to keep doing whatever you do and like not let it like emotionally control you somehow. I think having more women in those spaces is always good. It's probably good. Yeah. Like a lot of the guys you can tell online that don't bring on the worst ones. Then she did the misogyny thing by having some bad women on. She's saying all women. Well, you know, it's true. Right. Simply, I disagree with you and I'm older than both of you and therefore wiser. Right. So combined, we're older than you. We're one only metronome. Yeah, we've got combined age. Or it could be the same thing. I was like, also the age thing and like the woman thing. A lot of people think that I'm just copying every single thing that he says, which I think is a bit annoying as well. So I can never really like. A son accused her of that one. Yeah, which is a bit annoying. I don't think he likes it much, you know. It was about the defunding police. Like my dad is a cop. Friendship, camaraderie and love and respect, which you both have had for a time and have lost and I would like you to regain it. Let's try to increase, not decrease the amount of love in the space. What do you think about some of the harshness of his language, which we talked about? R word in the past when you used N word, all of that kind of stuff. When he, what he used to do. I mean. No, like, what do you think about it? Like, do you give him advice? To not speak a certain way? No, like a little more civility. I was just trying to get a second opinion on this. Second opinion about. Normie people, non-internet people are way more extreme than she's way more extreme. No, that's not true. Okay. So, okay. So here's the thing for me. Okay. I was not online until three years ago at all. Like I would watch YouTube. That's pretty much all I would do. I wouldn't do anything else. Really. I didn't grow up playing video games or anything. So I'm like extremely new to everything. So when I came into this world and I started seeing clips from him in the past, I don't think I really had much of an opinion because it just sounded like it was just a different like words that we're using, but it didn't mean anything. That's what it feels. It was just like, if you're saying the R word, it's because you just want to call someone stupid, but you want to like do it a little bit more. Like, but it's not like, it didn't feel like it was like a, it's not like racist more like, you know, it's not. Agreement on this side here, right? So like, if he was saying the F word because it was just like a word to like insult someone and he wasn't like, I don't think he was ever, I don't think you were ever homophobic back in the day or anything like that. But I think it was just like a way to express yourself maybe back then. I don't know. I didn't do it. There's no videos of me or anything because I wasn't even online back then. But my case was, I definitely don't think Stephen is homophobic or racist or any of those, obviously. So there's a good heart there and a good mind. I was just saying, he just likes being mean. Well, there is some, you lose yourself and forget the bigger picture that he's pushing for more effective discourse on the internet. He's like an inspiration to a lot of people, especially now of like how you can use effective conversation to make for a better world, to do radicalize people and so on. And then you lose some of that power by losing yourself in like the language, just more language of emotion versus effective communication. I would say- But it's a gray area. I would say like something that is probably recently done in that case, because he's been joking about women a lot. Like it's women's fault, they're bad. Like it's just, it's been like a lot of jokes when it comes to misogyny, I guess, in your community. And I think it's actually turned people a little bit that way. That's why we've done the recent misogyny. Yes. So that, I guess that's actually true because I don't think it was pretty, I don't think it was clear enough. I don't think it actually was. I think you did that mistake. But I think back then I was even saying like, hey, you should probably not, like you probably should not do that. Because it actually is pretty hard for me because whenever I come into his community, like his chat, people are just going to spam. It's like a woman moment. It's a woman moment whenever I say something and it's kind of like, yeah, it's getting pretty annoying. As I said, it's just annoying when you see it every single day. Yeah. There you go. Wisdom from somebody younger than you. Wisdom can come from all kinds of people. Yeah, of course. Just sometimes in very limited quantities, depends on the age. Oh boy. You can learn something from anybody. What advice would you give to young people, the both of you? That you have both audiences where young people look up to you. In general, if you were to give advice to somebody in high school, like how to create a life they can be proud of, what would you say? The most important thing that I've learned is to view people as different and not better or worse. And when you view people as different instead of better or worse, you learn that there's almost something that you can learn from anybody. Like be open and empathetic towards other people's experiences. Nobody does anything by random choice. Like there's always reasons why people act the way they do. And as long as you're willing to kind of like be open and receptive to the lived experiences of other people, you're going to be able to gather information and create like a more cohesive and better view of the world than any of your peers will. Do you have any kind of advice you can give to young folks? I feel like something that I see, especially in America a lot, is that a lot of people kind of get told what to do early on. Like in high school, they're supposed to become this thing. Like education wise, like they're supposed to like become a doctor or this thing or whatever. And then they kind of just like give up on things that they're actually passionate about. So I think a lot of teenagers get really confused. They get an education and then they get that job and they hate everything. And they think that when they're reaching the job, when they're reaching like the journey, they're going to get happy. That's like where the happiness is going to be. But then when they get to there, they just hate everything. And then they become really depressed. And I've seen this so much. Like I've seen this all the time. And it's pretty sad to me to see so many people that are just wasting time. And then they just get really confused and I don't know. It's the same thing with relationships too. No one really knows what they want anymore. I feel like everyone is just kind of doing whatever like society is saying, or their parents are saying, or their friends are saying. And they're never really doing anything that's super meaningful anymore. And like they don't... So what I would say is like try to find something that is important to you. It could be anything really. Like some sort of passion, maybe like your friends, maybe like what matters to you. Like figuring those things out, I think is really important. And that comes from being able to listen to like some inner voice. So it's not going to come from elsewhere. It's really hard because you're living the life and like there's things happening around you. People tell you what to do and what not to do. No one really has like their own opinions. Everyone is just kind of like listening to the cooler thing or, you know. Except Steven, he seems to stand on his own. True. I guess. Yeah, I'd say so. High hashtag. Like something I realized too, like because we just went to TwitchCon and we were talking to a lot of streamers. How was that? It was interesting. I thought it was interesting because the few people that I feel like I, that seem really cool and that I look up to like in the streaming world, all of them wants to quit streaming. All of them wants to do it. No one wants, like no one likes it. And they're so successful. Like they are around successful people. They're working every single day. They're working hard. They're making so much money. And everyone is just complaining. And like they're complaining about like not being able to see their partner or, you know, because they need to live somewhere else. Because I see these things and they seem extremely unhappy. And, but it's so hard for them to just like cut all this successful stuff off because that's like what you, you know, learn to do. And that's like supposed to be like your happiness, but it isn't. Everyone is really unhappy. Yeah. There's something about maybe streaming is different, but YouTube folks too have interacted with a few. And even in podcasting space, people become obsessed about the views and numbers and subscribers and stuff like that. So I turned, I never talk about that. I don't pay attention to that. I feel like that's a drug that destroys your mind. Your mind as an artist, the ability to create truly unique things. Also your mind in terms of the anxiety, the ups and downs of the attention mechanism. And then also being just, if something that you make is not popular, but it meant a lot to you, you will think of it less because it's not popular. Yeah. That's a really dangerous thing. And because everyone around you is reinforcing, like I'll get messages like, wow, this thing got this many views or something. Great job. It's like, no, you don't get it. Like that's not, everyone is enforcing this language of views and likes and so on. And it's correlated of course, because truly impactful things will get a lot of attention often. But it's not on the individual local scale, like temporarily, it can really fuck with your mind. And I see that in the creators, they become addicts to the algorithm. Lost and chasing views. Like we know friends that we know cool people, and then they start streaming and eventually they're like chasing the dragon of like. And they change, yeah, it's like hard to engage for them. This is something I've always said that like, one of the biggest blessings and biggest curses of humanity is we are very good at acclimating. Like you can become paralyzed, you can have all sorts of horrible things happen to you, and you'll get used to it and you'll be okay. You're gonna have like a good baseline, but it works the other way too. And that you can get more and more and more and more, and you acclimate to it almost immediately. There's like, this is a phenomenon that I bet it happens in the YouTube world, but I know it happens in the streaming world where you're streaming 1,000 viewers every day, huge event happens and you blow up and you got like 15,000 viewers for a day or two. And then it starts to go down and down and down and down and down. And then after all the drama's died off, you're at like 3,000 concurrent viewers. Now in the macro, you went from 1,000 to 3,000. That feels awesome. But you actually feel like shit the whole time, because you're remembering when you had 10 or 15,000 and now everything feels horrible. And you'll see people climb over time. They're like, fuck, like, but whatever that one huge stream I had, like I've never been able to. And it's like, dude, you're doing great. Yeah, that happens a lot. There's so many people that we know that we find super, super cool. They're passionate about things. They have so much interest. And then they just get like so addicted to these numbers. And like all the, everything is just ruined. Like all the cool things about them is ruined, because they stopped doing the things that they actually like to do something else that gives them more viewers and more money. And it's really sad to see. Yeah, that temporary sacrifice that seems temporary is that it actually destroys you. Like for one time making a choice, because I come across those choices often. Like I can do this. You can kind of know what's going to be popular and not. And you have to ask yourself the question, like, is this going to sacrifice? Because if people are sacrificing like intimate relationships, they're sacrificing time with their family. They're sacrificing time with the things that they feel good about and that they like. And that's something I kind of realized last year, because I was working so much and I was just grinding, grinding, grinding. But because it was kind of new for me and then New Year's came by and I was like, wait, what did I even do like the entire year? Like I traveled to a bunch of places, but nothing actually really meant anything to me, because I felt like I was just working the entire time. I felt like I was just numb through the entire year. And I was really scary. Like I rented a super pretty house like for a week with my dad and my sister, because I wanted to spend time with them. But the entire time I was just streaming. And I actually didn't ever like calm down and just like chill with them. And I like that's like time I'll never get back. I don't give a shit about the money that I made that week, but I lost the time. And like that is really important to me. And yeah, and a lot of people are doing that. And I feel like, as you said, like you can definitely see that in like artists, for sure. I feel like if you look at like artists like back in the 60s or 70s, I feel like things were just so much better back then. And it feels like they were actually making music that meant something to them. They were actually making art. And I feel like today, everything is just kind of like whatever is cool, whatever sells, whatever, you know, sounds in a certain way. Everything is kind of the same thing. And everything that is very artistic and very cool is actually not that popular at all. And that's kind of sad. I think. Yeah, of course, there's now bigger mechanisms and platforms to spread stuff, music. So as long as you can be content with not being popular, I think you can still create art. But not like when people get a little popular, they get addicted to that so fast. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah. You have been somewhat good, at least from my outside of perspective, because I think you, I can at least imagine you making choices that could make you more popular. And you don't seem to make those choices. Like having a corporate problem. Like sabotage my career, like, frankly. But it is very intentional, like you said, like, and I made that choice at every single stage of my life. One is because from the perspective of being a carpet cleaner, my life is way better than that was or ever would have been. So I'm already doing way better than I ever thought somebody like me ever could be. But then two, I super love my job. Every time I wake up, every time I fly to a place to do a podcast, every time I get to talk to really cool people, like every single part of my job, I super like. If there's something I don't like, I just cut it off because I don't care. Because I'm already making plenty of money doing what I do. And why would I ever wake up and not like what I'm doing when I can like what I'm doing? How do you guys find through that, given that you love it, and you sometimes maybe lose yourself in the drug of it? How do you find like work-life balance together inside a relationship? Like time for each other? I don't at all. So I'm not a good person to ask. What do you love more, Mel or Factorio? Factorio is a really good game. That's like not a fair comparison, okay? You're talking about one of the best cleanest games, best support ever made, cleanest code base. Yeah, I think I'm just saying all's probably right. Yeah, it's more Factorio time for me. Starting to understand where the misogyny comes from. By the way, is Factorio legit a really good game? Yeah, of course. Do you enjoy programming? Of course, that's all I do. That's all. Okay. To me, programming is the game in itself that I enjoy probably more than anything else. But yeah, it's very much a game like that. If you're into stuff like that, you can lose hundreds of hours very quickly to you have a problem and then you think of a solution. And then you iterate on that over and over and over again in larger, larger schemes. Sometimes you got to redesign stuff. Sometimes you get like, it's a very much like that kind of game. So you're essentially building a factory like what, on a foreign planet or something like that? It's basically, it's like a bunch of, you're trying to automate different problems so that you can build bigger things, so that you can automate bigger problems, so you can build bigger things and automate bigger problems. So it's more complicated than like a city building game, like some city type of thing? I wouldn't say it's more complicated. It's more, like, Factorio is like a game of like logic, like strictly like logic. Oh, so you're almost like building a circuit or something. Yes, yeah, there's like, there's circuitry and you've got your N-ORGs, ORG-Ns, there's stuff like that. It's very much like that. What are the enemies in the game? Like what? They're like, trying to bite you and you can get guns and shoot and kill them. But it's like, I saw there's like shooting going on. Yeah, but that's like a minor, it's just like another problem to solve in the game, basically. Okay, all right. So you see what we did there? We just started talking about the game as we're trying. Oh my God, that's like a, that's horrible. Anyway, is there, is that basically the struggle, not a struggle, how to get human, like intimate human time? I feel like it was like that a little bit more in the past. I feel like it's been better lately, but I think it's because when we started dating, I wasn't streaming and I kind of just like gave up like my trip in New Zealand. I give up like, like I left Sweden. So I was just like in LA, which I hate, I hate LA, I don't like LA at all. It's hard to make friends that are like real, that are into the same stuff as you. It was just really hard for me to connect with anyone, especially also like being a European and like being around Americans was very strange. So the only thing I had when I came here was him. And I didn't expect that. Bad situation. Because, yeah, because we had like two weeks of hanging out and like he would be on his computer sometimes and like do emails and stuff, but I wasn't thinking that he would stream like 12 hours a day. And it was pretty, like it was pretty intense, like in the beginning of it as well. And I realized it was really hard to like get attention or get time because his like love meter would be like full if I was just in the house. And that's just kind of like the way he is. And for me back then, when I didn't have anything else to do, it was kind of like a, it was kind of crazy for me. I feel like right now, because I do work as well and I have things going for me and I have other friends now that I made, I feel like it's a lot easier because and I can definitely like enjoy just like being in separate rooms and just like hear him in the background is really nice. I can sit and paint and like in my room and I will do that for hours while I'm just like hearing a scream in the background. It's kind of like comforting that he's just there. It feels nice. I like it. Because to you, that's the sound of happiness. Yes, because I know he's right there. Yeah, it's nice. And they'll come in and check on me sometimes. And it's kind of like, it's actually very comforting. It's very nice. I like it. Yeah, I think that's kind of what a relationship is. Like you do fun things together and you share moments together. But also just like having someone like around you is really, really nice. And I think that's probably maybe it's me growing up. Maybe that's what it is. And like I start liking like the kind of I feel like we're like an old couple, like we're like 80 and we're just like around. We don't really have to talk much. It's nice to just do that. That fills your love meter? I like this terminology. I need both. I mean, okay, you're making it sound like that I'm like craving like crazy time. I'm not saying anything. I haven't said a single thing at all. I know exactly what you're thinking. There's so much judging going on. There's no judging. No, but like we I think whenever we do plan something out, like if we go on a trip like every other month or once a month, I feel like usually like that's enough. As long as he's not playing Factorio the entire time. Like if I feel like he's going on these trips with me and he's not like doing things for me or he's not interested in like spending time or like being present with me, then I feel like I just feel like I'm just wasting time right now and then I get kind of disappointed. But otherwise, I think this is fun. I think this is like spending time together because we're doing something together. It's fun. Yeah. My love meter is full. It's my social life. We like to think about it that way. That like I need like a little bit more of like this one thing, like quality time. And he needs like almost zero quality time. But like let's say that we took away like physical touch, you would probably not be very happy. So you need physical touch. So it's not just Factorio, huh? No, I'm a very cuddly person. Yeah, like cuddly. And then you're like, I guess like acts of service. Like if I do something for you, you get really happy. Like hot chocolate. Yeah. Like if I give him hot chocolate in the morning, he gets really happy. So the actual, it's not the hot chocolate, it's the giving of the hot chocolate. No, it's just the hot chocolate. But if she gives it to me, I didn't have to get it myself. It's just physical touch that you like. That's really nice. All right. Well, if you have to choose between Factorio and the drama or political discourse, which probably political discourse, probably my calling, but I am a good Factorio player. What role exactly does Factorio play in your streaming life? Oh, well, right now it's just, usually there are like these games that I play in the background as I have conversations, because it's hard for me to just sit on the computer and just talk and not like be playing a game at the same time. So just something to keep me kind of like occupied. You know, I was gonna go buy like little like widget things, I guess. Yeah, that's what yours is. Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's like Minecraft or Factorio for me. All right. Well, my love meter is full from this. Mel, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. This was really fun. You guys are fascinating human beings. Thank you for existing. I'm glad to live in a world where you exist. I can't wait to see what kind of beautiful thing you create next and the crazy kind of art that you create through the different people you interact with. Destiny, Steven, you're an amazing human. Thank you so much for talking to me. It's an honor. Hope to talk with you again. I'm talking to Ben Shapiro. You've given me a lot of inspiration. It's an honor to talk to the Ben Shapiro of the left. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you, guys. It's been fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Destiny. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Lewis Carroll. It's no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/bqeuFiAUU4o

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Tim Urban: Tribalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Social Justice, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #360

A radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country, has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the US, which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country, and hijack medical journals, and universities, and the ACLU, all the activist organizations, and non-profits, and many tech companies. And the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years. And they all rely on public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning. And what I see this thing is, is a parasite on that, whose goal is... And I'm not saying each... By the way, each individual in this is... I don't think they're bad people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of, its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust. The following is a conversation with Tim Urban, his second time in the podcast. He's the author and illustrator of the amazing blog called Wait, But Why? And is the author of a new book coming out tomorrow called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. We talk a lot about this book in this podcast, but you really do need to get it and experience it for yourself. It is a fearless, insightful, hilarious, and I think important book in this divisive time that we live in. The Kindle version, the audiobook, and the web version should be all available on date of publication. I should also mention that my face might be a bit more beat up than usual. I got hit in the chin pretty good since I've been getting back into training jujitsu, a sport I love very much, after recovering from an injury. So if you see marks on my face during these intros of conversations, you know that my life is in a pretty good place. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tim Urban. You wrote an incredible book called What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies. In the beginning, you present this view of human history as a thousand-page book where each page is 250 years. And it's a brilliant visualization because almost nothing happens for most of it. So what blows your mind most about that visualization when you just sit back and think about it? It's a boring book. So 950 pages, 95% of the book, hunter-gatherers kind of doing their thing. I'm sure there's obviously some major cognitive advancements along the way in language. And I'm sure the bow and arrow comes around at some point. So tiny things, but it's like, oh, now we have 400 pages till the next thing. But then you get to page 950 and things start moving. Recorded history starts at 976. So basically the bottom row is when anything interesting happens. There's a bunch of agriculture for a while before we know anything about it. And then recorded history starts. Yeah, 25 pages of actual recorded history. So when we think of prehistoric, we're talking about pages 1 through 975 of the book. And then history is page 976 to 1,000. If you were reading the book, it would be like epilogue AD, the last little 10 pages of the book. And we think of AD as super long, 2,000 years, the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. That's so long. Human history has been going on for over 2,000 centuries. It's hard to wrap your head around. And even that's just the end of a very long road. The 100,000 years before that, it's not like that was that different. So it's just there's been people like us that have emotions like us, that have physical sensations like us for so, so long. And who are they all? And what was their life like? And I think we have no idea what it was like to be them. The thing that's craziest about the people of the far past is not just that they had different lives, they had different fears, they had different dangers and different responsibilities, and they lived in tribes and everything, but they didn't know anything. We just take it for granted that we're born on top of this tower of knowledge. And from the very beginning, we know that the earth is a ball floating in space, and we know that we're going to die one day, and we know that we evolved from animals. Those were all incredible epiphanies quite recently. And the people a long time ago, they just had no idea what was going on. And I'm kind of jealous, because I feel like it might have been scary to not know what's going on, but it also I feel like would be, you'd have a sense of awe and wonder all the time, and you don't know what's going to happen next. And once you learn, you're kind of like, oh, that's a little grim. But they probably had the same capacity for consciousness to experience the world, to wander about the world, maybe to construct narratives about the world and myths and so on. They just had less grounded, systematic facts to play with. They still probably felt the narratives, the myths, they constructed as intensely as we do. Oh, yeah. They also fell in love. They also had friends, and they had falling outs with friends. Didn't shower much, though. No, they did not smell nice. Maybe they did. Maybe beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Maybe it's all relative. So how many people in history have experienced a hot shower? Almost none. That's like, when were hot showers invented? 100 years ago? Less? George Washington never had a hot shower. It's just kind of weird. He took cold showers all the time. And again, we just take this for granted, but that's an unbelievable life experience to have a controlled little booth where it rains hot water on your head. And then you get out, and it's not everywhere. It's contained. A lot of people probably lived and died with never experiencing hot water. Maybe they had a way to heat water over a fire. But then it's, I don't know. There's so many things about our lives now that are just total anomaly. It makes me wonder, what is the thing they would notice the most? I mean, the sewer system, like it doesn't smell in cities. What does the sewer system do? I mean, it gets rid of waste efficiently in such a way we don't have to confront it, with any of our senses. And that probably wasn't there. I mean, what else? Plus all the medical stuff associated with sewage. Yeah, I mean, how about the disease? How about the cockroaches and the rats and the disease and the plagues? And then when they got, so they caught more diseases, but then when they caught the disease, they also didn't have treatment for it. So they often would die, or they would just be in a huge amount of pain. They also didn't know what the disease was. They didn't know about microbes. That was this new thing, the idea that these tiny little animals that are causing these diseases. So what did they think? In the bubonic plague, in the Black Death, the 1300s, people thought that it was an act of God, because God's angry at us. Because why would you not think that if you didn't know what it was? And so the crazy thing is that these were the same primates. So I do know something about them. I know in some sense what it's like to be them, because I'm a human as well. And to know that this particular primate, that I know what it's like to be, experienced such different things. And like, this isn't, our life is not the life that this primate has experienced almost ever. So it's just a bit strange. I don't know. I have a sense that we would get acclimated very quickly. Like if we threw ourselves back a few thousand years ago, it would be very uncomfortable at first, but the whole hot shower thing, you'd get used to it. Oh yeah. After a year, you would not even miss it. There's a few, I'm trying to remember which book that talks about hiking the Appalachian Trail. But you kind of miss those hot showers. But I have a sense like after a few months, after a few years. Well, your skill recalibrates. Yeah. You know, I was saying the other day to a friend that whatever you're used to, you start to think that, oh, that the people that have more than me or are more fortunate, like, it just sounds incredible. I would be so happy. But you know that's not true. Because the experience, what would happen is you would get these new things, or you would get these new opportunities, and then you would get used to it. And then you would, that's the hedonic treadmill. You'd come back to where you are. And likewise, though, because you think, oh my God, what if I had to, you know, have this kind of job that I never would want? Or I had this kind of marriage that I never would want? You know what, if you did, you would adjust and get used to it. And you might not be that much less happy than you are now. So on the other side of the you being okay going back, you know, we would survive if we had to go back. You know, we'd have to learn some skills. But we would buck up. And people have gone to war before that. We're in the shopkeepers a year before that. They were in the trenches the next year. But on the other hand, if you brought them here, you know, I always think it would be so fun to just bring, forget the hunter-gatherers, bring a 1700s person here, and tour them around, take them on an airplane, and show them your phone and all the things it can do. Show them the internet, show them the grocery store. Imagine taking them to a Whole Foods. Likewise, I think they would be completely awestruck and on their knees crying tears of joy. And then they'd get used to it, and they'd be complaining about, like, you don't have the this oranges in stock? It's like, you know, and that's, you know. The grocery store is a tough one to get used to. Like when I first came to this country, the abundance of bananas was the thing that struck me the most. Or like, fruits in general, but food in general. But bananas somehow struck me the most. That you could just eat them as much as you want. And that took a long time for me. Probably took several years to really, like, get acclimated to that. Is that- Why didn't you have bananas? The number of bananas, fresh bananas, that wasn't available. Bread, yes. Bananas, no. Yeah, it's like, we don't even know what to have, like, we don't even know the proper levels of gratitude. You know, walking around the grocery store, I don't know, to be like, the bread's nice, but the bananas are like, we're so lucky. I don't know. I'm like, oh, I could have been the other way. I have no idea. Well, it's interesting then where we point our gratitude in the West, in the United States. In the United States. Probably, do we point it away from materialist possessions? Towards, or do we just aspire to do that towards other human beings that we love? Because in the East, in the Soviet Union, growing up poor, it's having food is the gratitude. Having transportation is gratitude. Having warmth and shelter is gratitude. But see, within that, the deep gratitude is for other human beings. It's the penguins huddling together for warmth in the cold. I think it's a person-by-person basis. I mean, I'm sure, yes, of course, in the West, we will, on average, feel gratitude towards different things, or maybe a different level of gratitude. Maybe we feel less gratitude than countries that... Obviously, I think the easiest, the person that's most likely to feel gratitude is going to be someone whose life happens to be one where they just move up, up, up throughout their life. A lot of people in the greatest generation, you know, people who were born in the 20s or whatever, and a lot of the boomers, too. The story is the greatest generation grew up dirt poor, and they often ended up middle class. And the boomers, some of them started off middle class, and many of them ended up quite wealthy. And I feel like that life trajectory is naturally going to foster gratitude, right? Because you're not going to take for granted these things because you didn't have them. You know, I didn't go out of the country, really, in my childhood very much. You know, we traveled, but it was to Virginia to see my grandparents, or Wisconsin to see other relatives, or maybe Florida after going to the beach. And then I started going out of the country like crazy in my 20s because I really became my favorite thing. And I feel like because I... If I had grown up always doing that, it would have been another thing. I'm like, yeah, it's just something I do. But I still, every time I go to a new country, I'm like, oh my god, this is so cool. And in another country, this thing I've only seen on the map. I'm like, I'm there now. And so I feel like it's a lot of times it's a product of what you didn't have, and then you suddenly had. But I still think it's case by case in that there's like a meter in everyone's head, you know, that I think on... At a 10, you're experiencing just immense gratitude, right? Which is a euphoric feeling. It's a great feeling. And it makes you happy to savor what you have, to look down at the mountain of stuff you have that you're standing on, right? To look down at it and say, oh my god, I'm so lucky. And I'm so grateful for this and this and this. And obviously, that's a happy exercise. Now, when you move the meter down to six or seven, maybe you think that sometimes, but you're not always thinking that. Because you're sometimes looking up at this cloud of things that you don't have, and the things that they have but you don't, or the things you wished you had or you thought you were going to have or whatever. And that's the opposite direction to look, right? And that's the either that's envy, that's yearning, or often it's, if you think about your past, it's grievance, right? And so then you go down to a one, and you have someone who feels like a complete victim. They are just a victim of the society, of their siblings and their parents and their loved one. And they are wallowing in everything that's happened wrong to me, everything I should have that I don't, everything that has gone wrong for me. And so that's a very unhealthy, mentally unhealthy place to be. Anyone can go there. There's an endless list of stuff it can be aggrieved about and an endless list of stuff you can have gratitude for. And so in some ways, it's a choice and it's a habit. And maybe it's part of how we were raised or our natural demeanor, but it's such a good exercise. You are really good at this, by the way. Your Twitter is like, go on. Well, like, you're, you're constantly just saying, man, I'm lucky, or like, I'm so grateful for this. And that's, it's, it's a good thing to do, because you're reminding yourself, but you're also reminding other people to think that way. And it's like, we are lucky, you know, and, and so anyway, I think that scale can go from one to 10. And I think it's hard to be a 10. I think you'd be very happy if you could be, but I think trying to be above a five and looking down at the things you have more often than you are looking up at the things you don't or being resentful about the things that people have wronged you. And well, the interesting thing, I think, was an open question, but I suspect that you can control that knob for, for the individual, like you yourself can choose, like the stoic philosophy, you could choose where you are as a matter of habit, like you said, but you can also probably control that on a scale of a family, of a tribe, of a nation, of a society. I mean, a lot, you can describe a lot of the things that happens in Nazi Germany and different other parts of history through a sort of societal envy and resentment that builds up. Maybe certain narratives pick up and then they infiltrate your mind and then now your knob goes to, from the gratitude for everything, it goes to resentment and envy and all the rest. Germany between the two world wars, you know, like you said, the Soviet kind of mentality. So yeah, and then when you're soaking in a culture, so there's this kind of two factors, right? It's what's going on in your own head and then what's surrounding you and what's surrounding you kind of has concentric circles. There's your immediate group of people, because that group of people, if they're a certain way, they feel a lot of gratitude and they talk about it a lot, that kind of insulates you from the broader culture because people are going to have the most impact on you or the ones closest. But often, all the concentric circles are saying the same thing, the people around you are feeling the same way that the broader community, which is feeling the same way as the broader country. And I think this is why I think American patriotism, nationalism, can be tribal, can be very, not a good thing. Patriotism, I think is a great thing because really, what is patriotism? I mean, if you love your country, you should love your fellow countrymen. You know, that's a Reagan quote. It's like patriotism is like, I think a feeling of unity, but it also comes along with an implicit kind of concept of gratitude because it's like, we are so lucky to live in, you know, people think it's chauvinist to say we live in the best country in the world, right? And you know, yes, when Americans say that, no one likes it, right? But actually, it's not a bad thing to think. It's a nice thing to think. It's a way of saying, I'm so grateful for all the great things this country gives to me and this country has done. And I think, you know, if you heard a Filipino person say, you know what, the Philippines is the best country in the world, no one in America would say that's chauvinist. They'd say, awesome, right? Because when it's coming from someone who's not American, it sounds totally fine. But I think national pride is actually good. Now, again, that can quickly translate into xenophobia and nationalism. And so, you know, you have to make sure it doesn't go off that cliff. But yeah, there's good ways to formulate that, like you talk about, we'll talk about like high rung progressivism, high rung conservatism. Those are two different ways of embodying patriotism. So you could talk about maybe loving the tradition that this country stands for, or you could talk about loving the people that ultimately push progress. And those are, from an intellectual perspective, a good way to represent patriotism. We've got to zoom out, because this graphic is epic. A lot of images in your book are just epic on their own. It's brilliantly done. But this one has famous people for each of the cards. Like the best of. Yeah. And by the way, good for them to be the person that, it's not that I could have chosen lots of people for each card, but I think most people would agree, you know, that's a pretty fair choice for each page. And good for them to be, you know, you crushed it if you can be the person for your whole 250 year page. So. Well, I noticed you put Gandhi, didn't put Hitler. I mean, there's a lot of people going to argue with you about that particular last page. True. Yes, you're right. I could have, I could have put, I actually, I was thinking about Darwin there too. Darwin, yeah. Einstein. Yeah, exactly. You really could have put anyone. Did you think about putting yourself for a second? Yeah, I should have. I should have. That would have been awesome. I'm sure that would have endeared the readers to me from right from the beginning of the first page of the book. A little bit of a messianic complex going on. But yeah, so the list of people just so you know, so these are 250 year chunks. The last one being from 1770 to 2020. And so it goes Gandhi, Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Muhammad, Constantine, Jesus, Cleopatra, Aristotle, Buddha. It's so interesting to think about this very recent human history. That's 11 pages. So it would be 2750, almost 3000 years. Yeah, just that there's these figures that stand out and that define the course of human history. It's like the craziest thing to me is that like Buddha was a dude. He was a guy with like arms and legs and fingernails that he maybe bit and like he liked certain foods and maybe he got you know, he had like digestive issues sometimes and like he got cuts and they stung and like he was a guy and he had hopes and dreams and he probably had a big ego for a while before he, I guess Buddha totally overcame that one. But like, and it's like who knows, you know, the mythical figure Buddha, who knows how similar he was. But the fact, same with Jesus, like this was a guy. Like to me, he's a primate. What an impact. He was a cell first and then a baby. Yeah, he was a fetus at some point. He was a dumb baby trying to learn how to walk. Yeah, like having a tantrum because he's frustrated because he's in the terrible twos. Jesus was in the terrible twos. Buddha never had a tantrum, let's be honest. The myth. The mother was like, this baby's great. Like, wow. Let's figure something out. It just blew me, I mean, listen, hearing, learning about Genghis Khan, it's incredible to me because it's just like, this was some Mongolian, you know, herder guy who was taken as a slave and he was like dirt poor, you know, catching rats as a young teen with, you know, to feed him and his mom and his, I think his brother. And it's just like the odds on when he was born, he was just one of, you know, probably tens of thousands of random teen boys living in Mongolia in the 1200s. The odds of that person, any one of them being a household name today that we're talking about, it's just crazy, like what had to happen. And for that guy, for that poor, dirt poor herder to take over the world, I don't know, so history just like continually blows my mind. Like, you know. And he's the reason you and I are related, probably. Yeah, no, I mean, it's also, that's the other thing, is that some of these dudes, by becoming king, by having a better army at the right time, you know, William the Conqueror or whatever, is in the right place at the right time with the right army, you know, and there's a weakness at the right moment and he comes over and he exploits it and ends up probably having, you know, I don't know, a thousand children and those children are high up people who might be have a ton of, the species is different now because of him. Like, forget England's different or, you know, European borders look different. Like, we are, like, we look different because of a small handful of people, you know. When I sometimes I think, I'm like, oh, you know, this part of the world, I can recognize someone's Greek, you know, someone's Persian, someone's wherever because, you know, they kind of have certain facial features. And I'm like, it may have happened. I mean, obviously, it's that that's a population, but it may be that like someone 600 years ago that looked like that really spread their seed and that's why the ethnicity looks kind of like that now. Sorry, anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think individuals like that can turn the direction of history? Or is that an illusion that narrative we tell ourselves? Well, it's both. I mean, so I said that William the Conqueror, right, or Hitler, right? It's not that Hitler was born and destined to be great at all, right? I think in a lot of cases, he's some frustrated artist with a temper who's turning over the table in his studio and hitting his wife and being kind of a dick and a total nobody, right? I think almost all the times you could have put Hitler baby on earth. He's a rando, right? You know, and maybe he's a, you know, maybe sometimes he becomes a, you know, some kind of, you know, he uses the speaking ability because that ability was going to be there either way, but maybe he uses it for something else. But that said, I also think, but it's not that World War II was going to happen either way, right? So it's both. It's that like, these circumstances were one way and this person came along at the right time and those two made a match made in this case, hell. But it makes you wonder, yes, it's a match in hell, but are there other people that could have taken this place? Or do these people that stand out, they're the rare spark of that genius, whether it takes us towards evil, towards good, whether those figures singularly define the trajectory of humanity. You know, what defines the trajectory of humanity in the 21st century, for example, might be the influence of AI, might be the influence of nuclear war, negative or positive, not in the case of nuclear war, but the bioengineering, nanotech, virology, what else is there? Maybe the structure of governments and so on. Maybe the structure of universities. I don't know. There could be singular figures that stand up and lead the way for human. There will be. But I wonder if the society is the thing that manifests that person or that person really does have a huge impact. I think it's probably a spectrum where there are some cases when a circumstance was such that something like what happened was gonna happen. If you pluck that person from the earth, I don't know whether the Mongols is a good example or not, but maybe it could be that if you plucked Genghis Khan as a baby, there was, because of the specific way Chinese civilization was at that time and the specific climate that was causing a certain kind of pressure on the Mongols and the way they still had their great archers and they had their horses and they had a lot of the same advantages. So maybe it was waiting to happen. It was gonna happen either way and it might not have happened to the extent or whatever. So maybe. Or you could go the full other direction and say, actually, this was probably not gonna happen. And I think World War II is an example. I kind of think World War II really was kind of the work of, of course, it relied on all these other circumstances. You had to have the resentment in Germany, you have to have the Great Depression. But I think if you take Hitler out, I'm pretty sure World War I, World War II doesn't happen. Well, then it seems like easier to answer these questions when you look at history, even recent history, but let's look at now. Let's look at, I'm sure we'll talk about social media. So who are the key players in social media? Mark Zuckerberg, what's the name of the MySpace guy, Tom? Tom, it's just Tom, yeah. There's a meme going around where MySpace is like the perfect social media because no algorithmic involvement, everybody's happy and positive. Also, Tom did it right. At the time, we were like, oh man, Tom only made like a few million dollars. Ooh, sucks to not be Zuck. Tom might be living a nice life right now where he doesn't have this nightmare that these other people have. Yeah, and he's always smiling in his profile picture. Yeah, he looks happy. And so there's like Larry Page, so with Google, that's kind of intermingled into that whole thing, into the development of the internet. Jack Dorsey, now Elon, who else? I mean, there's people playing with the evolution of social media, and to me, that seems to be connected to the development of AI, and it seems like those singular figures will define the direction of AI development and social media development, with social media seeming to have such a huge impact on our collective intelligence. It does feel in one way like individuals have an especially big impact right now in that a small number of people are pulling some big levers. And there can be a little meeting of three people at Facebook, and they come out of that meeting and make a decision that totally changes the world, right? On the other hand, you see a lot of conformity. You see a lot of, they all pulled the plug on Trump the same day, right? So that suggests that there's some bigger force that is also kind of driving them, in which case it's less about the individuals. I think, what is leadership, right? I mean, to me, leadership is the ability to move things in a direction that the cultural forces are not already taking things, right? A lot of times people seem like a leader because they're just kind of hopping on the cultural wave, and they happen to be the person who gets to the top of it, and now it seems like they're, but actually the wave was already going. Like, real leadership is when someone actually changes the wave, changes the shape of the wave. Like, I think Elon with, you know, SpaceX and with Tesla, like, genuinely, like, shaped a wave. You know, maybe you could say that EVs were actually, like, they were going to happen anyway, but there's not much evidence about at least happening when it did. You know, if we end up on Mars, you know, you can say that Elon was a genuine, like, leader there. And so there are examples. Now, like, Zuckerberg definitely has done a lot of leadership along the way. He's also potentially kind of, like, caught in a storm that is happening, and, you know, he's one of the figures in it. So I don't know. And it's possible that he is a big shaper if the metaverse becomes a reality, if in 30 years we're all living in a virtual world. To many people, it seems ridiculous now, that that was a poor investment. Well, he talked about getting, you know, 10, you know, I think it was something like a billion people with a VR headset in their pocket in by, you know, I think 10 years from now, back in 2015. So we're behind that. But when he was talking about that, and honestly, this is something I've been wrong about, because I went to, like, one of the Facebook conferences and tried out all the new Oculus stuff. And I was, like, you know, pretty early talking to some of the, you know, major players there, because I was going to write a big post about it that then got swallowed by this book. But I would have been wrong in the post, because what I would have said was that this thing is, you know, when I tried it, I was like, this is, you know, some of them suck, some of them make you nauseous, and they're just not that, you know, the headsets were big, and, you know. But I was like, the times when this is good, it is, I have this feeling I haven't had, it reminds me of the feeling I had when I first was five, and I went to a friend's house, and he had Nintendo. And he gave me the controller, and I was looking at the screen, and I pressed a button, and Mario jumped. And I said, I said, I can make the something on the screen move. And the same feeling I had the first time someone showed me how to send an email, it was, like, really early. And he's like, you can send this. And I was like, it goes, I can press enter on my computer, and something happens on your computer. Those were, obviously, you know, when you have that feeling, it often means you're witnessing a paradigm shift. And I thought, this is one of those things. And I still kind of think it is, but it's kind of weird that it hasn't, you know, like, where's the VR revolution? Like... Yeah, I'm surprised, because I'm with you. My first and still instinct is, this feels like it changes everything. VR feels like it changes everything, but it's not changing anything. Like, a dumb part of my brain is genuinely convinced that this is real, and then the smart part knows it's not. But that's why the dumb part was like, we're not walking off that cliff. The smart part's like, you're on your rug. It's fine. The dumb part of my brain is like, I'm not walking off the cliff. So it's like, it's crazy. I feel like it's waiting for, like, that revolutionary person who comes in and says, I'm going to create a headset. Like, honestly... Yeah, Steve Jobs, iPhone of... Honestly, a little bit of a Carmack type guy, which is why it was really interesting for him to be involved with Facebook, is basically, how do we create a simple dumb thing that's a hundred bucks, but actually creates that experience? And then there's going to be some viral killer app on it, and that's going to be the gateway into a thing that's going to change everything. I mean, I don't know what exactly was the thing that changed everything with a personal computer. Is that understood? Why that... Maybe graphics? What was the use case? I mean... Exactly. Wasn't the 84 Macintosh, like, a moment when it was like, this is actually something that normal people can and want to use? Because it was less than $5,000, I think. And I just think it had some, like, Steve Jobs user-friendliness already to it that other ones hadn't had. I think Windows 95 was a really big deal. I remember, like, because I'm old enough to remember the MS-DOS when I was, like, kind of remember the command. And then suddenly this concept of, like, a window you drag something into, or you double click an icon, which now seems, like, so obvious to us, was, like, revolutionary, because it made it intuitive. So, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Windows 95 was good. It was crazy, yeah. I forget what the big leaps was, because Windows 2000 sucked, and then Windows XP was good. I moved to Mac around 2004, so I stopped. And you sold your soul to the devil? Yeah. I see. Well, us, the people, still use Windows and Android. The device in the operating system of the people, not you elitist folk with your books and your, what else? And success. Okay. You write, more technology means better good times, but it also means badder bad times. And the scary thing is, if the good and bad keep exponentially growing, it doesn't matter how great the good times become. If the bad gets to a certain level of bad, it's all over for us. Can you elaborate on this? Why is there, why does the bad have that property? That if it's all exponentially getting more powerful, then the bad is going to win in the end. Was, am I misinterpreting that? No. So the first thing is, I noticed a trend, which was like, the centuries, the good is getting better every century. Like, the 20th century was the best century yet, in terms of prosperity, in terms of GDP per capita, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of poverty and disease, every metric that matters. The 20th century was incredible. It also had the biggest wars in history, the biggest genocide in history, the biggest existential threat yet with nuclear weapons, right? You know, the depression was, you know, probably as big an economic. So it's this interesting thing where the stakes are getting higher in both directions. And so the question is like, if you get enough good, does that protect you against the bad? Right? The dream, and I do think this is possible too, is the good gets so good. You know, have you ever read the culture series, the Ian Banks books? Not yet, but I get criticized on a daily basis by some of the mutual folks we know for not having done so. And I feel like a lesser man for it. Yes, I need to change that. So that's how I got onto it, and I read six of the 10 books, and they're great. But the thing I love about them is like, it just paints one of these futuristic societies where the good has gotten so good that the bad is no longer even an issue. Like, basically, and the way that this works is the AI, you know, the AIs are benevolent, and they control everything. And so like, there's one random anecdote where they're like, you know, what happens if you murder someone? In because you're still, you know, there's still people with rage and jealousy or whatever. So someone murders someone. First of all, that person's backed up. So it's like they helped to get a new body. And it's annoying, but it's like, it's not death. And secondly, that person, what are they going to do? Put them in jail? No, no, no, they're just going to send a slap drone around, which is this little like, tiny, you know, random drone that just will float around next to them forever. And by the way, kind of be their servants. Like, it's kind of fun to have a slap drone, but just making sure that they never do anything. And it's like, I was like, oh, man, it could just be everyone can be so safe. And everything can be so like, you know, you want a house, you know, the AIs will build your house. There's endless space. There's endless resources. So I do think that that could be part of our future. That's part of what excites me is like, there is like, today would seem like a utopia to Thomas Jefferson, right? Thomas Jefferson's world would seem like a utopia to a caveman. Mm hmm. There is a future. And by the way, these are happening faster, these jumps, right? So the thing that would seem like a utopia to us, we could experience in our own lifetimes, right? Like, it's especially if, you know, life extension combines with exponential progress. I want to get there. And I think in that part of what makes it utopia is you don't have to be as scared of the worst bad guy in the world trying to do the worst damage because we have protection. But that said, I'm not sure how that happens. Like, it's easier said than done. Nick Bostrom uses the example of if nuclear weapons could be manufactured by microwaving sand, for example, we probably would be in the Stone Age right now because 0.001% of people would love to destroy all of humanity, right? Some 16-year-old with huge mental health problems who right now goes and shoots up a school would say, oh, even better. I'm going to blow up a city. And now suddenly there's copycats, right? And so that's like, as our technology grows, it's going to be easier for the worst bad guys to do tremendous damage. And it's easier to destroy than to build. So it takes a tiny, tiny number of these people with enough power to do bad. So that to me, I'm like, the stakes are going up because what we have to lose is this incredible utopia. But also, like, dystopia is real. It happens. The Romans ended up in a dystopia. They probably earlier thought that was never possible. We should not get cocky. And so to me, that trend is the exponential tech is a double-edged sword. It's so exciting. I'm happy to be alive now overall because I'm an optimist and I find it exciting. But it's really scary. And the dumbest thing we can do is not be scared. Dumbest thing we can do is get cocky and think, well, my life is always, the last couple generations, everything's been fine. Stop that. What's your gut, what percentage of trajectories take us towards the, as you put, unimaginably good future versus unimaginably bad future? As an optimist. It's really hard to know. I mean, all I can, you know, one of the things we can do is look at history. And on one hand, there's a lot of stories. I'm actually listening to a great podcast right now called The Fall of Civilizations. And it's literally every episode is like, you know, a little like two hour deep dive into some civilization. Some are really famous, like the Roman Empire, some are more obscure, like the Norse and Greenland. But, but it's, each one is so interesting. But what's, it's, I mean, there's a lot of civilizations that had their peak. There's always the peak, right? When they're thriving and they're at their max size and, and, and they have their waterways and they have their, it's civilized and it's representative and it's fair and whatever. Not always, but it's, it's, the peak is a great, you know, if I could go back in time, you know, it's not that you don't, you know, the farther you go back, the worse it gets. No, no, no. You want to go back to a civilization during, I would go to the Roman Empire in the year 100. Sounds great, right? You don't want to go to the Roman Empire in the year 400. We might be in the peak right now here, whatever this empire is. Honestly, I think about like the 80s, you know, the 70s, the 80s. Oh, here we go. The music. No, no, I hate the 80s. So much better. The 80s culture is so annoying. It's just like, I'm, I'm, I'm, when I read, when I listen to these things, I'm thinking, you know, the 80s and 90s, America, the 90s was popular. People forget that now. Like Clinton was, was a superstar around the world. Michael Jordan was exported internationally. Then basketball was everywhere. Suddenly you had like music, the sports, whatever. It was a little, probably like the 50s, you know, you coming out of the world, the world war and the depression before it, it was like this kind of like, everyone was in a good mood kind of time. You know, it's like a finish a big project and it's Saturday. It was like, I feel like the 50s was kind of like everyone was having it, you know, the, the 20s, I feel like everyone was in a good mood randomly. Then the 30s, everyone was in a bad mood. But the 90s, I think we'll look back on it as a time when everyone was in a good mood. And it was like, you know, again, of course at the time it doesn't feel that way necessarily, but I look at that, I'm like, maybe that was kind of America's peak. And like, no, maybe not, but like it hasn't been popular since really worldwide. It's, it's gone in and out depending on the country, but like, it hasn't reached that level of like, America's awesome around the world. And the political, you know, situation has gotten, you know, really ugly. And, you know, maybe it's social media, maybe who knows, but I, I wonder if it'll ever be as simple and positive as it was then. Like, maybe we are in the, in the, you know, it feels a little like maybe we're in the beginning of the downfall or not. Because, because these things don't just go, it's not a perfect smooth hill. It goes up and down, up and down. So maybe we're, there's another big upcoming. And it's unclear whether public opinion, which is kind of what you're talking to, is correlated strongly with influence. You could say that even though America has been on a decline in terms of public opinion, the exporting of technology, that America has still, with all the talk of China, has still been leading the way in terms of AI, in terms of social media, in terms of just basically any software related product. Like chips. Yeah, chips, so hardware and software. I mean, America leads the way. You could argue that Google and Microsoft and Facebook are no longer American companies. They're international companies, but they really are still at the, you know, headquartered in Silicon Valley, broadly speaking. So, and Tesla, of course, and just all of its, all the technological innovation still seems to be happening in the United States. Although culturally and politically, this is not, this is not, it's not good. Well, maybe that could shift at any moment when all the technological development can actually be, create some positive impact in the world. Yeah. That could shift it with the right leadership and so on, with the right messaging. Yeah, I think, I don't feel confident at all about whether, no, no, I don't mean that. I don't mean, I don't feel confident in my opinion that we may be on the downswing or that we may be, I truly don't know. It's like, I think the people, these are really big macro stories that are really hard to see when you're inside of them. It's like, it's like being on a beach and running around, you know, a few miles this way and trying to suss out the shape of the coastline. Like, it's just really hard to see the big picture. You know, you get caught up in the micro stories, the little tiny, you know, ups and downs that are part of some bigger trend and also giant paradigm shifts happen quickly nowadays. The internet, you know, came out of nowhere and suddenly was like, you know, changed everything. So there could be a changed everything thing on the way. It seems like there's a few candidates for it and like, but I mean, it feels like the stakes are just high, higher than it even was for the Romans, higher than it was for because that we, we're more powerful as a species. We have God-like powers with technology that other civilizations at their peak didn't have. And so I wonder if those high stakes and powers will feel laughable to people that live, humans, aliens, cyborgs, whatever lives 100 years from now that maybe, maybe are a little like this feeling of political and technological turmoil is nothing. Well, that's the big question. You could eat. So right now, you know, you know, the 1890s was like a super politically contentious decade in the U S it was like immense tribalism. Um, and the newspapers were all like lying and telling, you know, you know, there was a lot of like what we would associate with today's media, the worst of it. Um, and it was over gold or silver being this, I don't know. It was very, it's something that I don't understand, but the point is it was a little bit of a blip, right? It happened. It felt, it must've felt like the end of days at the time. And then now we look, and most people don't even know about that versus, you know, again, the Roman empire actually collapsed. And so the question is just like, is yeah, you know, we'll in 50 years, will this be like, or like McCarthyism? Oh, they had like a, oh, that was like a crazy few years in America. And then it was fine. Or is this the beginning of something really big? And that's about it. Well, I wonder if we can predict what the big thing is at the beginning. It feels like we're not, we're just here along for the ride and at the local level and at every level of trying to do our best. Well, how do we do our best? What's the, that's the one thing I know for sure is that we need to have our wits about us and do our best and the way that we can do that, you know, we have to be as wise as possible, right? To proceed forward. And wisdom is an emergent property of discourse. So you're a proponent of wisdom versus stupidity? Because you can make an, I can steal man the case for stupidity. Do it. I probably can't. But there's some, I think wisdom, and you talk about this, can come with a false confidence, arrogance. I mean, you talk about this in the book, that's too easy. That's not wisdom then. If you're being arrogant, you're being unwise. Unwise. Yeah. You know, I think wisdom is doing what people a hundred years from now with the hindsight that we don't have would do if they could come back in time and they knew everything. It's like, how do we figure out how to have hindsight when we actually are not? What if stupidity is the thing that people from a hundred years from now will see as wise? I mean. The idiot by Dostoevsky being naive and trusting everybody, maybe that's the one. Well, then you get lucky. Then maybe you get to a good future by stumbling upon it. But ideally, you can get there. Like, I think a lot of the America, the great things about it are a product of the wisdom of previous Americans. You know, the constitution was a pretty wise system to set up. There's not much stupid stumbling around. Well, there is. I mean, with Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Prince Mishkin, and Brothers Karamazov, there's Alyosha Karamazov. You err on the side of love and almost like a naive trust in other human beings. And that turns out to be, at least in my perspective, in the long term, for the success of the species is actually wisdom. It's a compass. But we don't know. It's a good compass. It's a compass when you're in the fog. In the fog. It's a compass. Yeah. Love is a compass. Okay, but here's the thing. So I think we should have a compass is nice, but you know what else is nice? It's a flashlight in the fog. That can help. You can't see that far, but you can see, oh, you can see four feet ahead instead of one foot. And that to me is discourse. That is open, vigorous, like, discussion in a culture that fosters that is how the species, how the American citizens as a unit can be as wise as possible, can maybe see four feet ahead instead of one foot ahead. That said, Charles Bukowski said that love is a fog that fades with the first light of reality. So I don't know how that works out, but I feel like there's intermixing of metaphors that works. Okay. You also write that quote, as the authors of the story of us, which is this thousand page book, we have no mentors, no editors, no one to make sure it all turns out okay. It's all in our hands. This scares me, but it's also gives me hope. If we can all get just a little wiser together, it may be enough to nudge the story onto a trajectory that points towards an unimaginably good future. Do you think we can possibly define what a good future looks like? I mean, this is the problem that we ran into with communism, of thinking of utopia, of having a deep confidence about what a utopian world looks like. Well, it's a deep confidence. That was a deep confidence about the instrumental way to get there. It was that, you know, I think a lot of us can agree that if everyone had everything they needed and we didn't have disease or poverty and people could live as long as they wanted to and choose when to die and there was no existential, major existential threat, because we can, I think almost everyone can agree that would be great. That communism is a, that was, they said, this is the way to get there. And that is, that's a different question, you know. So the unimaginably good future I'm picturing, I think a lot of people would picture, and I think most people would agree, not everyone, there's a lot of people out there who would say humans are the scourge on the earth and we should de-growth or something, but I think a lot of people would agree that, you know, just again, take Thomas Jefferson, bring him here. He would see it as a utopia for obvious reasons, the medicine, the food, the transportation, just how, the quality of life and the safety and all of that. So extrapolate that forward for us. Now, we're Thomas Jefferson, you know, what's the equivalent? That's what I'm talking about. And the big question is, I actually don't, I don't try to say here's the way to get there. Here's the actual specific way to get there. I try to say, how do we have a flashlight so that we can together figure it out? Like, how do we give ourselves the best chance of figuring out the way to get there? And I think part of the problem with communists and people, ideologues, is that they're way too overconfident that they know the way to get there. And it becomes a religion to them, this solution. And then you know, you can't update once you have a solution as a religion. And so. I felt a little violated when you said communists and stared deeply into myself. In this book, you've developed a framework for how to fix everything. It's called the ladder. Can you explain it? Okay, it's not a framework for how to fix everything. This humor. I would never say that. I'll explain it to Tim Urban at some point. Okay. How this humor thing works. Yeah, no. A framework of how to think about collaboration between humans such that we could fix things. I think it's a compass. It's like a ruler that we can, once we look at it together and see what it is, we can all say, oh, we want to go to that side of the ruler. Sure. Not this side. And so it gives us a direction to go. So what are the parts of the ladder? So I have these two characters. This orange guy, this primitive mind, is, this is our software. That is the software that was in a 50,000 BC person's head that was specifically optimized for, to help that person survive in that world. And not even, not just not really survive, but help them pass their genes on in that world. And civilization happened quickly and brains change slowly. And so that unchanged dude is still running the show in our head. And I use the example of like Skittles. Like, why do we eat Skittles? It's trash. It's obviously bad for you. And it's because the primitive mind in the world that it was programmed for, there was no Skittles and it was just fruit. And, you know, and if there was a dense, chewy, sweet fruit like that, it meant you just found like a calorie gold mine. Energy, energy, take it, take it, eat as much as you can, gorge on it. Hopefully you get a little fat. That would be the dream. And now we're so good with energy for a while. We don't have to stress about it anymore. So today, Mars Inc. is clever and says, let's not sell things to people's higher minds, who's the other character. Let's sell to people's primitive minds. Primitive minds are dumb. And let's trick them into thinking this is this new, this, this thing you should eat and then they'll eat it. Now, Mars Inc. is a huge company. Actually, just to linger real quick. So you said primitive mind and higher mind. So those are the two things that make up this bigger mind that is the modern human being. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's not perfect. Obviously, there's a lot of crossover. There's people who will yell at me for saying there's two minds. And, you know, but to me, it's still a useful framework where you have this software that has making decisions based on a world that you're not in anymore. And then you've got this other character. I call it the higher mind. And it's the part of you that knows that skills are not good and can override the instinct. And the reason you don't always eat Skittles is because the higher mind says, no, no, no, we're not doing that because that's bad. And I know that, right? Now, you can apply that to a lot of things. The higher mind is the one that knows I shouldn't procrastinate. The primitive mind is the one that wants to conserve energy and not do anything icky and, you know, can't see the future. So he procrastinates that, you know, you can apply this. No, I, in this book, apply it to how we form our beliefs is one of the ways and then eventually to politics and political movements. But like, if you think about, well, what's the equivalent of the Skittles tug of war in your head for how do you form your beliefs? And it's that the primitive mind in the world that it was optimized for, it wanted to feel conviction about its beliefs. It wanted to be sure that it was, it wanted to feel conviction and it wanted to agree with the people around them. It didn't want to stand out. It wanted to fervently agree with the tribe about the tribe's sacred beliefs, right? And so there's a big part of us that wants to do that, that doesn't like changing our mind. It feels like it's part of our, the primitive mind identifies with beliefs. It feels like it's a threat, a physical threat to you, to your primitive mind when you change your mind or when someone disagrees with you in a smart way. So there's that huge force in us, which is confirmation bias. That's where that comes from. It's this desire to keep believing what we believe and this desire to also fit in with our beliefs, to believe what the people around us believe. And that can be fun in some ways. We all like the same sports team and we're all super into it and we're all going to be biased about that call together. I mean, it's not always bad, but it's not a very smart way to be. And you're actually, you're working kind of for those ideas. Those ideas are like your boss and you're working so hard to keep believing those. Those ideas are, you know, a really good paper comes in that you read that conflicts with those ideas and you will do all this work to say that paper is bullshit because you're a faithful employee of those ideas. Now, the higher mind, to me, the same party that can override the Skittles can override this and can search for something that makes a lot more sense, which is truth. Because what rational being wouldn't want to know the truth? Who wants to be delusional? And so there's this tug of war because the higher mind doesn't identify with ideas. Why would you? It's an experiment you're doing. It's a mental model. And if someone can come over and say, you're wrong, you'd say, where? Show me, show me. And if they point out something that is wrong, you say, oh, thanks. Oh, good. I just got a little smarter, right? You're not going to identify with the thing. Go, yeah, kick it. See if you can break it. If you can break it, it's not that good, right? So there's both of these in our heads and there's this tug of war between them. And sometimes, you know, if you're telling me about something with AI, I'm probably going to think with my higher mind because I'm not identified with it. But if you go and you criticize the ideas in this book or you criticize my religious beliefs, you criticize, I might have a harder time because the primitive mind says, no, no, no, those are our special ideas. And so, yeah, so that's one way to use this ladder is like it's a spectrum. You know, at the top, the higher mind is doing all the thinking. And then as you go down, it becomes more of a tug of war. And at the bottom, the primitive mind is in total control. And this is distinct, as you show, from the spectrum of ideas. So this is how you think versus what you think. And those are distinct. Those are different dimensions. We need a vertical axis. We have all these horizontal axes, left, right, center, or, you know, this opinion all the way to this opinion. But it's like what's much more important than where you stand is how you got there, right, and how you think. So this helps if I can say this person's kind of on the left or on the right, but they're up high, I think. I think, in other words, I think they got there using evidence and reason and they were willing to change their mind. Now, that means a lot to me what they have to say. If I think they're just a tribal person and I can predict all their beliefs from hearing one because it's so obvious what political beliefs, that person's views are irrelevant to me because they're not real. They didn't come from information. They came from a tribe's kind of, you know, sacred Ten Commandments. I really like the comic you have in here about with the boxer. This is the best boxer in the world. Wow, cool. Who has he beaten? No one. He's never fought anyone. Then how do you know he's the best boxer in the world? I can just tell. Now, I mean, this connects with me and I think with a lot of people just because in martial arts, it's especially kind of true. This whole legend about different martial artists and that kind of, we construct like action figures like, you know, thinking that Steven Seagal is the best fighter in the world or Chuck Norris. But Chuck Norris is actually backed up. He's done really well in competition, but still the ultimate test for particular for martial arts is what we now know as mixed martial arts, UFC and so on. That's the actual scientific testing ground. It's a meritocracy. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's within certain rules and you can criticize those rules like this doesn't actually represent the broader combat that you would think of when you're thinking about martial arts. But reality is you're actually testing things. And that's when you realize that Aikido and some of these kind of woo-woo martial arts in their certain implementations don't work in the way you think they would in the context of fighting. I think this is one of the places where everyone can agree, which is why it's a really nice comic because then you start to talk about map this onto ideas that people take personally. It starts becoming a lot more difficult to basically highlight that we're thinking with not with our higher mind, but with our primitive mind. Yeah, I mean, if I'm thinking with my higher mind and now here is I can use different things for an idea as a metaphor. So here the metaphor is a boxer. Yeah. For for one of your conclusions, one of your beliefs. And if I'm if I'm if I'm if all I care about is truth, in other words, for the that means all I care about is having a good boxer. I would say, go, yeah, try see if this person is good. Go. In other words, I would get into arguments, which is throwing my boxer out there to fight against other ones. And if I think my argument is good, by the way, I love boxing. If I if I think my guy is is amazing, you know, Mike Tyson, I'm thinking, oh, yeah, bring it on. Who wants to come see? I bet no one can beat my boxer. I love a good debate. Right. In that case. Now, what would you think about my boxer if not only had I was telling you he was great, but he's never boxed anyone. But then you said, OK, well, your idea came over to try to punch him. And I screamed and I said, what are you doing? That's violence. And you're you're in your and you're an awful person. And I don't want to be friends with you anymore because you you would think this boxer obviously sucks. And or at least I think it sucks deep down because why would I be so anti anyone? No boxing allowed. You know, people. So I think if you're in so this I call this a ladder, right? If you're in low rung land, you know, whether it's a culture or whatever, a debate, an argument when someone says, no, that's totally wrong. What you're saying about that and here's why you're actually being totally biased. It sounds like a fight. People are going to say, oh, wow, we got in like a fight. It was really awkward. Like, are we still friends with that person? Because that's not a culture of boxing. It's a culture where you don't touch each other's ideas. That's that's insensitive versus in an in a high rung culture. It's sport. That's I mean, like every one of your podcasts, you're you're whether you're agreeing or disagreeing. The tone is the same. It's not like, oh, this got awkward. It's like the tone is identical because you're just playing intellectually either way. Because it's a good high rung space. At his best, at his best. But people do take stuff personally. And then that's actually one of the skills of conversation just as a fan of podcast is when you sense that people take a thing personally, you have to like there's sort of methodologies and little paths you can take to like calm things down. Like go around. Don't take it as a violation of like. You're trying to suss out which of their ideas are sacred to them. And which ones are, bring it on. And sometimes it's actually I mean, that's the skill of it, I suppose, that sometimes it's the certain wordings in the way you challenge those ideas are important. You can you can challenge them indirectly and then together, walk together in that way. Because they're what I've learned is people are used to their ideas being attacked in a certain way, in a certain tribal way. And if you just avoid those, like, for example, if you have political discussions and just never mentioned left or right, or Republican and Democrat, none of that. Just talk about different ideas and avoid certain kind of triggering words. You can actually talk about ideas versus falling into this path that's well established through battles that people have previously fought. When you say triggering, I mean, who's getting triggered? The primitive mind. So what you're trying to do, what you're saying in this language is how do you have conversations with other people's higher minds, almost like whispering without waking up the primitive mind. The primitive mind is there sleeping, right? And as soon as you say something, the left primitive mind gets up and says, what? What are you saying about the left? And now everything goes off the rails. What do you make of conspiracy theories under this framework of the latter? So here's the thing about conspiracy theories is that once in a while they're true, right? Because sometimes there's an actual conspiracy. Actually, humans are pretty good at real conspiracies, secret things. And then, you know, I just watched the Madoff doc, great new Netflix doc, by the way. And so the question is, how do you create a system that is good at you put the conspiracy theory in and it either goes, or it says, is interesting, let's keep exploring it. Like, how do you put, how do you do something that it can, how do you assess? And so, again, I think the higher on culture is really good at it because a real conspiracy, you're what's going to happen is you put it, it's like a little machine you put in the middle of the table and everyone starts firing darts at it or bow and arrow or whatever. And everyone starts kicking it and trying to, and almost all conspiracy theories, they quickly crumble, right? Because they actually, you know, you know, Trump's election one is, you know, I actually dug in and I looked at like every claim that he or his team made. And I was like, all of these don't, none of these hold up to scrutiny. None of them. I was open-minded, but none of them did. So that was one that as soon as it's open to scrutiny, it crumbles. The only way that conspiracy can stick around in a community is if it is a culture where that's being treated as a sacred idea that no one should kick or throw a dart at, because if you throw a dart, it's going to break. So it's being, it's, and so what you want is a culture where no idea is sacred. Anything can get thrown at. And so I think that then what you'll find is that 94 out of 100 conspiracy theories come in and they fall down. The other, maybe four of the others come in and there's something there, but it's not as extreme as people say. And then maybe one is a huge deal and it's actually a real conspiracy. Well, isn't there a lot of gray area and there's a lot of mystery. Isn't that where the conspiracy theories seep in? So it's great to hear that you've really looked into the Trump election fraud claims. But aren't they resting on a lot of kind of gray area, like fog, basically saying that there is dark forces in the shadows that are actually controlling everything. I mean, the same thing with maybe you can, there's like safer conspiracy theories, less controversial ones, like have we landed on the moon? Right. Did the United States ever land on the moon? There's, you know, like the reason those conspiracy theories work is you could construct there's incentives and motivation for faking the moon landing. There's a lot of, there's very little data supporting the moon landing. Like that's very public and it kind of looks fake, space kind of looks fake. And that would be a big story if it turned out to be fake. That's the argument, that would be the argument against it. Like are people really as a collective going to hold on to a story that big? Yeah, so that, but there's a lot, the reason they work is there's mystery. Yeah, there's a great documentary called Behind the Curve about flat earthers. And one of the things that you learn about flat earthers is they believe all the conspiracies, not just the flat earth. They're convinced the moon landing is fake. They're convinced 9-11 was an American con job. They're convinced, you know, that, name a conspiracy and they believe it. And so it's so interesting is that, you know, the conspiracy theories are so big, I think of it as a skepticism spectrum. So on one side, it's like a filter in your head, a filter in the belief section of your brain. On one end of the spectrum, you are gullible, perfectly gullible. You believe anything someone says, right? On the other side, you're paranoid. You think everyone's lying to you, right? Everything is false. Nothing anyone says is true, right? So obviously those aren't good places to be. Now, the healthy place, I think that the, so I think the healthy place is to be somewhere in the middle. And, but also you can learn to trust certain sources and then, you know, you don't have to do as much, apply as much skepticism to them. And so here's what, like, when you start having a bias, just say you have a political bias, when your side says something, you will find yourself moving towards the gullible side of the spectrum. You read an article written that supports your views. You move to the gullible side of the spectrum and you just believe it. And you don't have any, where's that skepticism that you normally have, right? And then you move and then you soon, as soon as it's the other person talking, the other team talking, you move to the skeptical, the closer to the, to the, you know, in denial paranoid side. Now, flat earthers are the extreme. They are either a 10 or one. So it's like, it's so interesting because they're the people who are saying, ah, nah, I won't believe you. I'm not gullible. No, everyone else is gullible about the moon landing. I won't. And then yet when there's this evidence like, oh, because you can't see Seattle, you can't see the buildings over that horizon and you should, which isn't true. You should be, if it were, if the earth around, you wouldn't be able to see them. Therefore, so suddenly they become the most gullible person here. Any theory about the earth flat, they believe it. It goes right into their beliefs. So they're actually jumping back and forth between refusing to believe anything and believe anything. And so they're the extreme example. But I think when it comes to conspiracy theories, the people that get themselves into trouble are the ones who, they, they, they become really gullible when they hear a conspiracy theory that kind of fits with their worldview. And they likewise, when there's something that's kind of obviously true and it's not a big lie, they will actually, uh, they'll, they'll, they'll think it is. They, they, they just tighten up their kind of skepticism filter. And so, yeah. So I think the healthy places to be is where you are not, because you also don't want to be the person who says every conspiracy, you hear the word conspiracy theory and it sounds like a, like a synonym for like quack job, crazy theory. Right. So yeah. So I think, yeah, I think it's be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum and to learn to fine tune it, which is a tricky place to operate because you kind of have to, every time you hear a new conspiracy theory, you should approach it with an open mind and, you know, and also if you don't have enough time to investigate, which most people don't kind of still have a humility, not to make a conclusive statement that that's nonsense. There's a lot of, um, social pressure actually to immediately laugh off any conspiracy theory. If it's done by the, the, the bad guys, right. You will quickly get mocked and laughed at and not taken seriously. If you give any credence, you know, back to the lab leak was that was a good one where it's like, uh, turned out that that was at least very credible, if not true. And that was a perfect example of one where when it first came out and not only so, so, so Brett Weinstein talked about it and then I, in a totally different conversation, said something complimentary about him on a totally different subject. And people were saying, Tim, you might've gone a little off the deep end. You're like quoting someone who is like a lab leak person. So I was getting my reputation dinged for complimenting on a different topic, someone whose reputation was totally sullied because they had, you know, they questioned an orthodoxy. Right. So it's, you see, so what does that make me want to do? Distance myself from Brett Weinstein. That's the, at least that's the incentive that's, and what does that make other people want to do? Don't become the next Brett Weinstein. Don't say it out loud because you don't want to become someone that no one wants to compliment anymore. Right. You can see the social pressure and that's, and of course, when there is a conspiracy, that social pressure is its best friend. Because then they see the people from outside are seeing that social pressure enact like Tim Urban becoming more and more and more extreme to the other side. And so they're going to take the more and more and more extreme to, I mean, this, what do you see that the pandemic did, that COVID did to our civilization in that regard, in the forces? Why was it so divisive? Do you understand that? Yeah. So COVID, I, you know, I thought might be, you know, we always know the ultimate example of a topic that will unite us all is the alien attack. Yeah. Although honestly, I don't even have that much faith then I think there'd be like, some people are super like, you know, pro alien and some people are anti alien. But anyway, I was actually sorry to interrupt because I was talking to a few astronomers and they're the first folks that made me kind of sad in that if we discover life on Mars, for example, that there's going to be potentially a division over that too, whereas half the people will not believe that's real. Oh, well, because we live in a current society where the political divide has subsumed everything and that's not always like that. It goes into stages like that. We're in a really bad one where it's actually in the book, I call it like a vortex, like almost like a whirlpool that pulls everything into it. It pulls, it pulls. And so normally you'd say, okay, you know, immigration naturally going to be contentious. That's always political, right? Yeah. But like COVID seemed like, oh, that's one of those that will unite us all. Let's fight this not human virus thing. Like obvious, there's no one sensitive, no one's like getting hurt when we insult the virus. Like let's all be, we have this threat, this common threat that's a threat to every one of every nationality in every country, every ethnicity. And it didn't do that at all. It, the whirlpool was too powerful. So it pulled COVID in and suddenly masks. If you're on the left, you like them. If you're on the right, you hate them. And suddenly lockdowns, if you're on the left, you like them and on the right, you hate them. And vaccines, this is people forget this. When Trump first started talking about the vaccine, Biden, Harris, Cuomo, they're all saying, I'm not taking that vaccine. Not from this CDC. Because it was too rushed or something like that. No, but because I'm not, I'm not trusting anything that Trump says. Trump wants me to take it. I'm not taking it. I'm not taking it from this CDC. So this was, if Trump, this Trump was almost out of office, but at the time, if Trump had been, it would have been, I'm pretty sure it would have stayed. Right likes vaccines. The left doesn't like vaccines. Instead, the president switched. And all those people are suddenly saying, they were actually specifically saying that if you, you know, that, that, that like, if you're saying the CDC is not trustworthy, that's misinformation, which is exactly what they were saying about the other CDC. And they were saying it because they genuinely didn't trust Trump, which is fair. But now when other people don't trust the Biden CDC, suddenly it's this kind of misinformation that needs to be censored. So it was a sad moment because it was a couple of months at the very, even a week or so at the, I mean, a month or so at the very beginning when it felt like a lot of our other squabbles were kind of like, oh, I feel like they're kind of irrelevant right now. And then very quickly, the whirlpool sucked it in. And, and, and in a way where I think it damaged the reputation of these, a lot of the, the trust in a lot of these institutions for the long run. But there's also an individual psychological impact. It's like a vicious negative feedback cycle where they were deeply affected on an emotional level and people just were not their best selves. That's definitely true. Yeah. I mean, talk about the primitive mind. I mean, one thing that we've been dealing with for our whole human history is pathogens. Yeah. And it's, it's emotional, right? It, it brings out, you know, there, there's really interesting studies where like, if, what, they, they studied the, the, the, the phenomenon of disgust, which is one of these like, you know, smiling is universal. You don't have to ever translate a smile, right? Certain, you know, you know, throwing your hands up when you're, when your sports team wins is universal because it's part of our, we're coding. And so is disgust to kind of make this like, you know, face where you wrinkle up your nose and you kind of put out your tongue and maybe even gag. That's to expel, expel whatever, because it's, it's the reaction when something is potentially a pathogen that might harm us, right? Feces, vomit, whatever. But they did this interesting study where people who in, in two, two groups, the control group, you know, was shown images of, and I might be getting two studies mixed up, but they were showing, they were showing images of like car crashes and like disturbing, but not disgusting. And the other one was shown like, you know, like, you know, rotting things and just, just things that were disgusting. And then they were asked about immigration. These were Canadians and the group that was, had the disgust feeling going through, pulsing through their body was way more likely to prefer like immigrants from white countries. And the group that was, had been shown car accidents, they were, they still prefer the groups from white countries, but much less so. And so what does that mean? It's because with the disgust impulse makes us scared of, you know, sexual practices that are foreign, of ethnicities that are not look, they don't look like us, of, of, it's still xenophobia. So it's, it's ugly. It's really ugly stuff. This is of course also how, you know, the, the Nazi propaganda with cockroaches and, or it was, Rwandan was cockroaches, you know, the Nazis was rats. And, you know, it's, it's specifically, it's a dehumanizing emotion. So anyway, we were, we were, we were talking about COVID, but I think it does, it taps deep into like the human psyche and it, and it's, I don't think it brings out our, I think like you said, I think it brings out an ugly side in us. You describe an idea lab as being opposite of echo chambers. So we know what echo chambers are. And you said like, there's basically no good term for the opposite of an echo chamber. So what's an idea lab? Yeah, well, first of all, both of these, we think of an echo chamber as like a group maybe, or even a place, but it's, it's a culture. It's an intellectual culture. And this goes along with the high rung low. So high rung and low rung thinking is individual. That's what I was talking about, what's going on in your head. But this is very connected to the social scene around us. And so groups will do high rung and low rung thinking together. Basically, it's collect, so an echo chamber to me is a collaborative low rung thinking. It is, it's a culture where the cool, it's based around a sacred set of ideas. And it's the coolest thing you can do in an echo chamber culture is talk about how great the sacred ideas are and how bad and evil and stupid and wrong the people are who have the other views. And this, and it's quite boring. You know, it's quite boring, you know, it's very hard to learn. And changing your mind is not cool in an echo chamber culture. It makes you seem wishy-washy. It makes you seem like, you know, like you're waffling and you're flip-flopping or whatever. It showing conviction about the sacred ideas and echo chamber culture is awesome. If you're just like, you know, obviously this makes you seem smart, while being, you know, humble makes you seem dumb. So now flip all of those things on their heads and you have the opposite, which is ideal lab culture, which is collaborative high rung thinking. It's collaborative truth finding. But it's also just, it's just a totally different vibe. It's a place where arguing is a fun thing. It's not, no one's getting offended and criticizing like the thing everyone believes is actually, it makes you seem like interesting. Like, oh, really? Why do you think we're all wrong? And expressing too much conviction makes people lose trust in you. It doesn't make you seem smart. It makes you seem stupid if you don't really know what you're talking about, but you're acting like you do. I really like this diagram of where on the x-axis is agreement, on the y-axis is decency. That's in an ideal lab. In an echo chamber, there's only one axis. It's asshole to non-asshole. Right. I think this is a really important thing to understand about the difference between, you call it decency here, about assholishness and disagreement. So my college friends, we love to argue, right? And no one thought anyone was an asshole for, it was just for sport. Sometimes we'd realize we're not even disagreeing on something and that would be disappointing and be like, oh, I think we agree. And it was kind of like sad. It was like, oh, well, there goes the fun. And one of the members of this group, she brought her new boyfriend to one of our hangouts and there was a heated, heated debate. You know, just one of our typical things. And afterwards, the next day he said, is everything okay? And she was like, what do you mean? And he said, after the fight. And she was like, what fight? And he was like, you know, the fight last night. And she was like, you mean like the arguing? And he was like, yeah. And so that's someone who is not used to Idea Lab culture coming into it. And seeing it is like, that was like, this is like, are they still friends, right? And Idea Lab is nice for the people in them because individuals thrive. You don't want to just conform. That makes you seem boring in an idea. But you want to be yourself. You want to challenge things. You want to have a unique brain. So that's great. And you also have people criticizing your ideas, which makes you smarter. It doesn't always feel good, but you become more correct and smarter. And Echo Chamber is the opposite, where it's not good for the people in it. And it does, your learning skills atrophy. And I think it's boring. But the thing is, they also have emergent properties. So the emergent property of an Idea Lab is like super intelligence. Just you and me alone. Just the two of us. If we're working together on something, but we're being really grown up about it, we're disagreeing, we're not, you know, no one's sensitive about anything. We're going to each find flaws in the other one's arguments that you wouldn't have found on your own. And we're going to have double the epiphanies, right? So it's almost like the two of us together is like as smart as 1.5. It's like 50% smarter than either of us alone, right? So you have this 1.5 intelligent kind of joint being that we've made. Now bring a third person and fourth person in, right? You see it starts to scale up. This is why science institutions can discover relativity and quantum mechanics and these things that no individual human was going to come up with without a ton of collaboration because it's this giant Idea Lab. So it has an emergent property of super intelligence. And Echo Chamber is the opposite, where it has the emergent property of stupidity. I mean, it has the emergent property of a bunch of people all paying fealty to this set of sacred ideas. And so you lose this magical thing about language and humans, which is, you know, this collaborative intelligence, you lose it. It disappears. But there is that axis of decency, which is really interesting because you kind of painted this picture of you and your friends arguing really harshly. But underlying that is a basic camaraderie, respect. There's all kinds of mechanisms we humans have constructed to communicate, like mutual respect or maybe communicate that you're here for the Idea Lab version of this. Totally. You don't get personal, right? You're not getting personal. You're not taking things personally. People are respected in an Idea Lab and ideas are disrespected. And there's ways to signal that. So like with friends, you've already done the signaling. You've already established a relationship. The interesting thing is online. I think you have to do some of that work. To me, the sort of steel manning the other side or no, having empathy and hearing out, being able to basically repeat the argument the other person is making before you and showing like respect to that argument. I could see how you could think that before you make a counter argument. There's just a bunch of ways to communicate that you're here not to do kind of, what is it, low rung, you know, shit talking, mockery, derision. But are actually here ultimately to discover the truth in the space of ideas and the tension of those ideas. And I think it's a skill that we're all learning as a civilization of how to do that kind of communication effectively. Because I think disagreement, as I'm learning on the internet, is actually a really tricky skill. Like high effort, high decency disagreement. I got to listen to, there's a really good debate podcast, Intelligence Squared. Love it. And like they can go pretty hard in the paint. Classic Idea Lab. Exactly. But like how do we map that to social media? When people will say, well like Lex or anybody, you're not, you hate disagreement. You want to censor disagreement. No. I love Intelligence Squared type of disagreement. That's fun. You want to reduce asshole. And for me personally, I don't want to reduce asshole, I kind of like assholery, it's like fun in many ways. But the problem is when the asshole shows up to the party, they make it less fun for the party that's there for the Idea Lab. And the other people, especially the quiet voices at the back of the room, they leave. And so all you're left is with assholes. Well that Twitter, political Twitter to me is one of those parties. It's a big party where a few assholes have really sent a lot of the quiet thinkers away. Yeah. And so if you think about this graph again, what, some place like Twitter, a great way to get followers is to be an asshole with a certain, you know, pumping a certain ideology. You'll get a huge amount of followers. And for those followers, and the followers you're going to get, the people who like you are probably going to be people who are really thinking with their primitive mind because they're seeing you're being an asshole, but because you agree with them, they love you. And they think, they don't see any problem with how you're being. Yeah, they don't see the asshole. This is the fascinating thing. Well, because look at the thing on the right, agreement and decency are the same. So if you're in that mindset, the bigger the asshole, the better. If you're agreeing with me, you're my man. I love what you're saying. Yes, show them. Right? And the algorithm helps those people. Those people do great on the algorithm. There's a fascinating dynamic that happens because I have currently hired somebody that looks at my social media and they block people because the assholes will roll in. They're not actually there to have an interesting disagreement, which I love. They're there to do kind of mockery. And then when they get blocked, they then celebrate that to their echo chamber. Like, look at this, I got them or whatever. Or they'll say some annoying thing like, oh, so he talks about he likes, if I'd done this, they'll say, oh, he says he likes IdeaLabs, but he actually wants to create an echo chamber. But I'm like, nope, you're an asshole. Look at the other 50 people on this thread that disagreed with me respectfully. They're not blocked. Yep, exactly. And so they see it as some kind of hypocrisy because again, they only see the thing on the right and they're not understanding that there's two axes or that I see it as two axes. And so you seem petty in that moment, but it's like, no, no, no, this is very specific what I'm doing. You're actually killing the conversation. And generally, I give all those folks a pass and just send them love telepathically. But yes, like it's getting rid of assholes in the conversation is the way you allow for the disagreement. You do a lot of like when I think when like primitive mindedness comes at you, at least on Twitter, I don't know what you're feeling internally in that moment, but you do a lot of like, I'm going to meet that with my higher mind. And you come out and you'll be like, thanks for all the criticism. I love you. And that's actually an amazing response because it just, what it does is it, it unrails up that person's primitive mind and actually wakes up their higher mind who says, oh, okay, you know, this guy's not so bad. And suddenly like civility comes back. So it's a very powerful. Hopefully long term. But the thing is, they do seem to drive away high quality disagreement because like, because it takes so much effort to disagree in a high quality way. I've noticed this on my blog. Like my, one of the things I pride myself on is like my comment section is awesome. Like there's, there's, there's every, everyone's being respectful. No one's afraid to disagree with me and tell them and say, you know, tear my post apart. But in a totally respectful way where the underlying thing is like, I'm here because I like this guy and his writing and people disagree with each other and they get in these long and it's interesting and I read it and I'm learning. And then I, you know, a couple of posts, especially the ones I've written about politics. It's not like it seems like any other comment section. People are being nasty to me. They're being nasty to each other. And then I looked down one of them and I realized like almost all of this is the work of like three people. Yeah. That's who you need to block. Those people need to be blocked. You're not being thin skinned. You're not being petty doing it. You're actually protecting an idea lab because what would really aggressive people like that do is they'll turn it into their own echo chamber because now everyone is scared to kind of disagree with them. It's unpleasant. And so people who will chime in or the people who agree with them and suddenly like they've taken over the space. And I kind of believe that those people on a different day could actually do high effort disagreement. It's just that they're in a certain kind of mood and a lot of us, just like you said, with a primitive mind could get into that mood. And I believe it's actually the job of the technology, the platform to incentivize those folks to be like, are you sure this is the best you can do? Like if you really want to talk shit about this idea, like do better. Like, yeah. And then we need to create incentives where you get likes for high effort disagreement because currently you get likes for like something that's slightly funny and is a little bit like mockery. Like yeah, basically signals to some kind of echo chamber that this person is a horrible person, is a hypocrite, is evil, whatever. That feels like it's solvable with technology because I think in our private lives, none of us want that. I wonder if it's making me think that I want to like, because a much easier way for me to do it just for my world would be to say something like, here's this axis, this is part of what I like about the latter is it's a language that we can use. It's like specifically what we're talking about is high rung disagreement good, low rung disagreement bad. Right? And so it gives us like a language for that. And so what I would say is I would have my readers understand this axis and then I would specifically say something like, please do the do it but why a favor and upvote regardless of what they're saying horizontally. Right? Regardless of what their actual view is. Upvote high rungness. They could be tearing me apart. They can be saying great, they can be praising me, whatever. Uproot high rungness and downvote low rungness. And if enough people are doing that, suddenly there's all this incentive to try to say, I need to calm my emotion down here and not be personal because I'm going to get voted into oblivion by these people. I think a lot of people would be very good at that. They and they not only would they be good at that, they would want that. That task of saying, I know I completely disagree with this person, but this was a high effort, high rung disagreement. It gets everyone thinking about that other axis too. You're not just looking at where do you stand horizontally. You're saying, well, how did you get there? And how are you, you know, are you treating ideas like machines or are you treating them like little babies? And there should be some kind of labeling on personal attacks versus idea disagreement. Sometimes people like throw in both a little bit. Right. That's like, all right, no, there should be a disincentive at personal attacks versus idea attacks. Well, you can also, one metric is a respectful disagreement. If I see, just say someone else's Twitter and I see, you know, you put out a thought and I see someone say, you know, you know, someone say, you know, I don't see it that way. Here's, here's where I think you went wrong. And they're just explaining. I'm thinking that if Lex reads that he's going to be interested, he's going to, he's going to want to post more stuff, right? Because he's going to like that. If I see someone being like, you know, wow, this really shows the kind of person that you become or shows up. I'm thinking that person is making Lex want to be on Twitter less. It's making him it's. And so what's that doing? What that person's actually doing is they're putting, is they're actually shut, they're chilling discussion because they're making it unpleasant to, they're making it scary to say what you think. And the first person isn't at all. The first person is making you want to say more stuff. So, and those are both disagreed. Those are people who are both disagree with you. Exactly. Exactly. I want to, great disagreements with friends in meat space is like, you're, they disagree with you. They could be even yelling at you. Honestly, they could even have some shit talk where it's like personal attacks. It is still feels good. Because you know them well and you know that that shit talk, because like, yeah, friends should talk all the time playing a sport or a game. And again, it's because they know each other well enough to know that this is fun. We're having fun. And obviously I love you. Like, you know, and that's important online. It's a lot harder. Yeah. The, that obviously I love you that underlies a lot of human interaction. Right. Seems to be easily lost online. I've seen some people on Twitter and elsewhere just behave their worst. Yeah. And it's like, I know that's not who you are. Totally. Like, why are you, I actually, you know, I know this human. I know someone personally who is one of the best people. Yeah. Um, it just, I love this guy. Like one of the best, like fun, funny, like nicest dudes. And he, if you would, if you look to this Twitter only, you would think he's a culture warrior, an awful culture warrior and, you know, you know, biased and just stoking anger. And, and it, and it comes out of a good place and I'm not going to give any other info about, you know, specific, but like, I think you're describing a lot of people. It comes out of a good place because he really cares about what, you know, it comes out, but it's just, I can't square the two. It's so, and that's, you have to, once you know someone like that, you can realize, okay, apply that to everyone. Cause a lot of these people are lovely people and it's just bring, even just, you know, back in the, before social media, did you ever had a friend who like, was just like, they had this like dickishness on text or email that they didn't have in person. And you're like, wow, like email you is like kind of a dick. And it's like, it just, certain people have a different persona behind the screen. It has for me personally, has become a bit of a meme that Lex blocks with love, but there is a degree to that where this is, I don't see people on social media as representing who they really are. I really do have love for them. I really do think positive thoughts of them throughout the entirety of the experience. I see this as some weird side effect of online communication. And so it's like, to me, blocking is not some kind of a derisive act towards that individual. It's just like saying, Well, a lot of times what's happened is they have slipped into a very common delusion that dehumanizes others. So that doesn't mean they're a bad person. We all can do it, but they're dehumanizing you or whoever they're being nasty to, because they, in a way they would never do in person, because in a person they're reminded that's a person. Remember I said the dumb part of my brain when I'm doing VR, like won't step off the cliff, but the smart part of my brain knows I'm just on the rug. That dumb part of our brain is really dumb in a lot of ways. It's the part of your brain where you can set the clock five minutes fast to help you not be late. The smart part of your brain knows that you did that, but the dumb part will fall for it, right? That same dumb part of your brain can forget that the person behind that screen, that behind that handle is a human that has feelings. And that doesn't mean they're a bad person for forgetting that, because it's possible. But this really interesting idea, and I wonder if it's true that you're right, is that both primitive mindedness and high mindedness tend to be contagious. I hope you're right that it's possible to make both contagious, because our sort of popular intuition is only one of them, the primitive mindedness is contagious, as exhibited by social media. To compliment you again, don't you think that your Twitter to me is like, I was just looking down, and I mean, it is a, it's just high mindedness. It's just high mindedness, down, down, down, down, down. It's gratitude, it's optimism, it's love, it's forgiveness, it's all these things that are the opposite of grievance and victimhood and resentment and pessimism, right? And there's, I think, a reason that a lot of people follow you, because it is contagious. It makes other people feel those feelings. I don't know, I've been recently, over the past few months, attacked quite a lot. It is fascinating to watch, because it's over things that, I think I probably have done stupid things, but I'm being attacked for things that are totally not worthy of attack. I got attacked for a book list. I saw that, by the way, I thought it was great. But you can always kind of find ways to, you know, I guess the assumption is, this person surely is a fraud, or some other explanation. He sure has dead bodies in the basement he's hiding, or something like this. And then I'm going to construct a narrative around that and mock and attack that. I don't know how that works. But there is, there does, and I think you write this in the book, there seems to be a gravity pulling people towards the primitive mind. Well, when it comes to anything political, right? Religious, certain things are bottom heavy, you know, for our psyche. They have a magnet that pulls our psyches downwards on the ladder. And why? Why does politics pull our psyches down on the ladder? Because for the tens of thousands of years that we were evolving, you know, during human history, it was life or death. Politics was life or death. And so there's actually an amazing study where it's like, they challenged like 20 different beliefs of a person. And different parts of the person's brain, and they had an MRI going, different parts of the person's brain lit up when non-political beliefs were challenged versus political beliefs were challenged. When political beliefs were challenged, when non-political beliefs were challenged, the rational, like the prefrontal cortex type areas were lit up. When the political beliefs were challenged, and I'm getting over my head here, but it's like the parts of your brain, the default mode network, the parts of your brain associated with like introspection and like your own identity were lit up. And they were much more likely to change their mind on all the beliefs, the non-political beliefs. When that default mode network part of your brain lit up, you were going to, if anything, get more firm in those beliefs. When you had them challenged. So politics is one of those topics that just literally, literally lights up different part of our brain. It's, again, I think we come back to primitive mind, higher mind here. It's like, it gets our higher, this is one of the things our primitive mind comes programmed to care a ton about. And so it's going to be very hard for us to stay rational and calm and looking for truth because we have all this gravity to it. Well, it's weird because politics, like what is politics? Like you talk about, it's a bunch of different issues and each individual issue, if we really talk about it. Yeah, tax policy. Like why are we being emotional about this? I don't think we're actually that, I mean, yeah, we're emotional about something else. Yeah, I think what we're emotional about is this, my side, the side I've identified with is in power and making the decisions and your side is out of power. And if your side's in power, that's really scary for me because that goes back to, you know, the idea of who's making, who's pulling the strings in this tribe, right? Who's the chief? Is it your family's patriarch or is it mine? You know, you might not have food if we don't win this, you know, kind of whatever, you know, chief election. So I think that it's not about the tax policy or anything like that. And then it gets tied to this like broader, I think a lot of our tribalism has really coalesced around this. We don't have that much religious tribalism in the US, right? Now they know the Protestants and the Catholics hate each other. We don't have that really, right? And honestly, you say people like to, you know, say we have racial tribalism and everything, but a white, even a kind of a racist white conservative guy, I think takes the black conservative over the woke white person any day of the week right now. So that's the strongest source of division. It tells me that I think politics is way stronger tribalism right now. I think that that white racist guy loves the black conservative guy compared to the white woke guy, right? There's no, so to me, again, not that racial tribalism isn't a thing, of course, it's always a thing, but like political tribalism is the number one right now. So race is almost a topic for the political division versus the actual sort of element of the tribe. It's a political football. It's, yeah. So there's, I mean, this is dark because, so this is a book about human civilization. This is a book about human nature, but it's also a book of politics, about politics. It is just the way you list it out in the book, it's kind of dark how we just fall into these left and right checklists. So if you're on the left, it's maintain Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare good, mainstream media fine, guns kill people, US is a racist country, protect immigrants, tax cuts bad, climate change awful, raise minimum wage. And on the right is the flip of that, reverse Roe v. Wade, universal healthcare bad, mainstream media bad, people kill people, not guns kill people, US was a racist country, protect borders, tax cuts good, climate change overblown, don't raise minimum wage. I mean, it has, you almost don't have to think about any of this. It's like literally. So when you say it's a book about politics, it's interesting because it's a book about the vertical axis. Right. It's specifically not a book about the horizontal axis in that I'm not talking, I don't actually talk about any of these issues. I don't put out an opinion on them. Those are all horizontal, right? But when you, so rather than having another book about those issues, about right versus left, I wanted to do a book about this other axis. And so on this axis, the reason I had this checklist is that this is a low part of the low rung politics world, right? Low rung politics is a checklist. And that checklist evolves, right? Like Russia suddenly is like popular with the right as opposed to, you know, it used to be, you know, in the sixties, the left was the one defending Stalin. Like, so they'll switch. It doesn't even matter. The substance doesn't matter. It's that this is the approved checklist of the capital P party. And this is what everyone believes. That's a low rung thing. The high rungs, this is not what it's like high rung politics. You tell me your one view on this. I have no idea what you think about anything else. Right. And you're going to say, I don't know about a lot of stuff because inherently you're not going to have that strong an opinion because you don't have that much in for these are complex things. So there's a lot of, I don't know. And people are all over the place. It's when you know, you're in, you know, you're talking to someone who has been subsumed with low rung politics. When, if they tell you their opinion on any one of these issues, you could just, you know, you could just rattle off their opinion on every single other one. And if, and if in three years it's becomes fashionable to have this new view, they're going to have that's you're not thinking that's echo chamber culture. And I've been using kind of a shorthand of centrist to describe this kind of a high rung thinking, but people tend to, I mean, it seems to be difficult to be a centrist or whatever a high rung thinker. It's like people want to label you as a person who's too cowardly to take stance. Yeah. Somehow as opposed to asking, saying, I don't know, is a first statement. Well, the problem with centrist is that would mean that in each of these tax cuts, bag tax cuts. Good. It means that you are saying I am in, I think we should have some tax cuts, but not that many. You might not think that you might actually do some research and say, actually, I think tax cuts are really important. That doesn't mean, oh, I'm not a centrist anymore. I guess I'm a far, you know, no, no, no. That's why we need the second axis. So what you're trying to be when you say centrist is high rung, which means you might be all over the place horizontally. You might agree with the far left on this thing, the far right on this thing. You might agree with the centrist on this thing, but, but calling yourself a centrist actually like is putting yourself in a prison on the horizontal axis and saying that, you know, I, whatever the, on the, on the different topics, I'm right in between the two policy wise. That's not where you are. So yeah, that's what we, we're badly missing this other axis. Yeah. I mean, I still do think it's like for me, I am a centrist when you project it down to the horizontal, but the point is you're missing so much data by not considering the vertical, because like on average, maybe it falls somewhere in the middle, but in reality, there's just a lot of nuance issue to issue that involves just thinking and uncertainty and changing in the, given the context of the current geopolitics and economics is just always considering, always questioning, always evolving your views, all of that. Not just, not just about like, oh, I think we should be in the center on this. But another way to be in the center is if there's some phenomenon happening, you know, there's a terrorist attack, you know, and one side wants to say, this has nothing to do with Islam. And the other one, the other side wants to say, this is radical Islam, right? What's in between those is saying, this is complicated and nuanced, and we have to learn more. And it probably has something to do with Islam and something to do with the economic circumstances and something to do with, you know, geopolitics. So in a case like that, you actually do get really a nuance when you go to the extremes and all of that nuance, which is where all the truth usually is, is going to be in the middle. So, yeah. But there is a truth to the fact that if you take that nuance on those issues, like one Ukraine, COVID, you're going to be attacked by both sides. Yes. People who have, who are really strongly on one side or the other hate centrist people. I've gotten this myself and you know, the, this, the, the slur that I've had thrown at me is I'm an enlightened centrist in a very mocking way. So what are they actually saying? What does enlightened centrist mean? It means someone who is, you know, Steven Pinker or Jonathan Haidt gets accused of is, you know, that they're highfalutin, you know, intellectual world and they don't actually have any, they don't actually take a side. They don't actually get their hands dirty and they can be superior to both sides without actually taking a stand. Right. So I see the argument and I disagree with it because I firmly believe that the hardcore tribes, they think they're taking a stand and they're out in the streets and they're pushing for something. I think what they're doing is they're just driving the whole country downwards and I think they're, they're hurting all the causes they care about. And so it's not that, it's not that, you know, it's not that we need everyone to be sitting there, you know, refusing to take a side. It's that you can be far left and far right, but be upper left and upper right. If we talk about the, you use the word liberal a lot in the book to mean something that we don't in modern political discourse mean. So it's this higher philosophical view. And then you use the words progressive to mean the left and conservative to mean the right. Can you describe the concept of liberal games and power games? Yeah. So the power games is, is what I call the like, basically just the laws of nature as the, when laws of nature are the laws of the land, that's the power game. So animals, watch any David Attenborough special. And when the little lizard is running away from the, the, you know, the bigger animal or whatever. And I use an example of a bunny and a bear. I don't even know if bears eat bunnies. They probably don't, but pretend bears eat bunnies. Right. So it's like in the power games, the bear is chasing the bunny. There's no fairness. There's no, okay, well, what's right. What, you know, what, what, what, what, what's legal? No, no, no. If the bear is fast enough, it can eat the bunny. If the bunny is, can get away, it can say living. And so that's it. That's the only rule. Now humans have spent a lot of time in essentially that environment. So when you have a totalitarian dictatorship, it's, and so what's the rule of the power games? It's everyone can do whatever they want. If they have the power to do so, it's just a game of power. So if the bunny gets away, the bunny actually has more power than the bear in that situation. Right. And likewise, the totalitarian dictatorship, there's no rules. A dictator can do whatever they want. They can, they can, they can torture. They can, you know, flatten a rebellion with a lot of murder because they have the power to do so. What are you going to do? Right. And that's, that's kind of the state of nature. That's our natural way. You know, that, you know, when you look at a mafia, watch a mafia movie, you know, there's, we do a lot of, we have, we have it in us. We all have, we all can snap into power games mode when it becomes all about, you know, just, just actual raw power. Now the liberal games is, is, you know, something that civilizations for thousands of years have been working on. It's not invented by America or modern times, but America's kind of was like the latest crack at it yet, which is this idea instead of everyone can do what they want if they have the power to do so, it's everyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. Now that's really complicated. How do you define harm? And, and the idea is that everyone has their, a list of rights, which are protected by the government. And then they have their inalienable rights and they're, they're protected. You know, those are protected, uh, uh, again, by, you know, um, from, from an invasion by other people. And so you have this kind of fragile balance. And so the idea with the liberal games is you, that there are laws, but it's not totalitarian. They will build very clear, strict laws kind of around the edges of what you can and can't do. And then everything else, freedom. So unlike a totalitarian dictatorship, actually it's, it's very loose. You can, there's a lot of things can happen and it's kind of up to the people, but there are still laws that protect the very basic inalienable rights and stuff like that. So it's this much looser thing. Now the vulnerability there is that it, so, so, so the, the benefits of it are obvious, right? Freedom is great. It seems like it's the most fair, they, you know, that, that equality of opportunity seemed like the most fair thing. And, um, and you know, equality before the law, you know, due process and all of this stuff. So it seems fair to the founders of the U S and other enlightenment thinkers. And it also is a great way to manifest productivity, right? You know, you have, um, you have Adam Smith saying it's not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we get our dinner, but from their own, from their own self-interest. So you have, you can harness kind of selfishness for, for progress, but, um, it has a vulnerability, which is that because the laws it's like the totalitarian laws, they don't have an excess of laws for no reason. They want to control everything. And the U S you know, in the U S we say, we're, they're not going to do that. And so the second, it's almost two puzzle pieces. You have the laws and then you've got a liberal culture. Liberal laws have to be married to liberal culture, kind of a defense of liberal spirit in order to truly have the liberal games going on. And so that's vulnerable because free speech, you can have the first amendment, that's the laws part. But if you're in a culture where anyone who, you know, speaks out against orthodoxy is going to be shunned from the community, well, you're lacking the second piece of the puzzle there. You're lacking liberal culture. And so therefore you, um, you might as well be in a, you might as well not even have the first amendment. And there's a lot of examples like that, where the culture has to do its part for the true liberal games to be enjoyed. So it's just much more complicated and much more nuanced than the power games. It's kind of, it's kind of a set of basic laws that then are coupled with a basic spirit to create this very awesome human environment that's also very vulnerable. So what do you mean the culture has to play along? So for something like a freedom of speech to work, there has to be a basic, what, decency? That if all people are perfectly good, then perfect freedom without any restrictions is great. It's where the human nature starts getting a little iffy. We start being cruel to each other, we start being greedy and desiring of harm, and also the narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths in society, all of that, that's when you start to have to inject some limitations on that freedom. Yeah, I mean, if, um, so what the government basically says is we're going to let everyone be mostly free, but no one is going to be free to physically harm other people or to steal their property, right? And so we're all agreeing to sacrifice that, you know, that 20% of our freedom. And then in return, all of us, in theory, can be 80% free. And that's kind of the bargain. But now that's a lot of freedom to leave people with. And a lot of people choose, it's like you're so free in the US, you're actually free to be unfree if you choose. That's kind of what an echo chamber is to me. It's, you know, you can choose to kind of be friends with people who essentially make it so uncomfortable to speak your mind that it's no actual effective difference for you than if you lived in a country. If you can't, you know, criticize Christianity in a certain community, that you have a First Amendment, so you're not going to get arrested by the government for criticizing Christianity. But if you have this, if the social penalties are so extreme that it's just never worth it, you might as well be in a country that imprisons people for criticizing Christianity. And so that same thing goes for for wokeness, right? This is what people get, you know, cancel culture and stuff. So when the reason these things are bad is because they're actually, they're depriving Americans of the beauty of the freedom of the liberal games by, you know, imposing a social culture that is very power games-esque. It's basically a power games culture comes in, and you might as well be in the power games now. And so liberal, if you live in a liberal democracy, it's, you, there will be always be challenges to a liberal culture, lowercase l, liberal. There'll always be challenges to a liberal culture from people who are much more interested in playing the power games. And there has to be kind of an immune system that stands up to that culture and says, that's not how we do things here in America, actually. We don't excommunicate people for not having the right religious beliefs or not, you know, we don't disinvite a speaker from campus for having the wrong political beliefs. And if it doesn't stand up for itself, it's like the immune system of the country failing and power games rushes in. So before chapter four in your book, and the chapters that will surely result in you being burned at the stake, you write, quote, we'll start our pitchfork tour in this chapter by taking a brief trip through the history of the Republican Party. Then in the following chapters, we'll take a Tim's career tanking deep dive into America's social justice movement, as you started to talk about. Okay, so let's go. What's the history of the Republican Party? I'm looking at this through my vertical ladder. I'm saying, what is this familiar story of the Republicans from the 60s to today? What does it look like through the vertical lens? Right? Does it look different? And is there an interesting story here that's been kind of hidden because we're always looking at the horizontal? Now, the horizontal story, you'll hear people talk about it, and they'll say something like the Republicans have moved farther and farther to the right. And to me, that's not really true. Was Trump more right wing than Reagan? I don't think so. I think he's left. Actual policy, yeah. Yeah. So we're using this, again, it's just like you're calling yourself centrist when it's not exactly what you mean, even though it also is. Yeah. So again, I was like, okay, look, this vertical lens helps with other things. Let's apply it to the Republicans. And here's what I saw is I looked at the 60s, and I saw an interesting story, which I don't think not everyone's familiar with what happened in the early 60s. But in 1960, the Republican Party was a plurality. You had progressives, like genuine Rockefeller, pretty progressive people, all the way to then you had the moderates like Eisenhower and Dewey. And then you go all the way to the farther right, you had Goldwater and what you might call, I call them the fundamentalists. And so it's this interesting plurality, right? Something we don't have today. And what happened was the Goldwater contingent, which was the underdog, they were small, right? Eisenhower was the president, or had just been the president and was it seemed like the moderates were, you know, that's the he said, you have to be close to the center of the chessboard. That's how you maintain power. These people were very far from the center of the chessboard, but they ended up basically have like a hostile takeover. They conquered their own party, and they did it by breaking all of the kind of unwritten rules and norms. So they did things like they first started with like the college Republicans, which was like this feeder group that turned in, you know, a lot of the politicians started there. And they went to the election and they wouldn't let the current president, the incumbent speak. And they were throwing chairs and they were fistfights. And eventually people gave up and they just sat there and they sat in the chair talking for their candidate until everyone eventually left. And then they declared victory. So basically they came in, there was a certain set of rules, agreed upon rules, and they came in playing the power games saying, well, actually, if we do this, you won't have the power. We have the power to take it if we just break all the rules. Right. And so they did and they won. And that became a hugely influential thing, which then they conquered California through again, these people were taken aback, these proper Republican candidates were appalled by the kind of like, you know, the insults that were being hurled at them and the intimidation and the bullying. And eventually they ended up in the National Convention, which was called like the right wing Woodstock. It was like, you know, the Republican National Convention in 64 was just, again, there was jeering and they wouldn't let the moderates or the progressives even speak. And there was racism, you know, Jackie Robinson was there and he was a proud Republican. And he said that like he feels like he was a Jew in Hitler's Germany with the way that blacks were being treated there. And it was nasty. But what did they do? They had fiery, you know, plurality enough to win and they won. They ended up getting crushed in the general election and they kind of faded away. But to me, I was like, what? That was an interesting story. I see it as I have this character in the book called the Golem, which is a big kind of a big, dumb, powerful monster. That's the, you know, the emergent property of like a political echo chamber. It's like this big giant, stupid, but it's powerful and scary. And to me, I was like a Golem rose up, conquered the party for a second, knocked it on its ass and then and then faded away. And to me, when I look at the Trump revolution and a lot and not just Trump, the last 20 years, I see that same lower right, that lower right monster kind of. Making another charge for it, but this time succeeding and really taking over the party for a long period of time. I see the same story, which is the power games are being played in a situation when it had always been the government relies on all these unwritten rules and norms to function. But for example, you have in 2016 Merrick Garland gets nominated by Obama and the unwritten norm says that when the president nominates a justice, then you pass them through unless there's some egregious thing. That's what has happened. But they said, actually, this is the last year of his presidency and the people should choose. I don't think we should set a new precedent where the president can't nominate people, nominate a Supreme Court justice in the last year. So they pass it through and it ends up being Gorsuch. And so they lose that seat. Now, three years later, it's Trump's last year and it's another election year and Ginsburg dies. And what did they say? They say, oh, let's keep our precedent. They said, no, actually, we changed our mind. We're going to nominate Amy Barrett. So to me, that is classic power games, right? That there's no actual rule. And what you're doing is they had the they did technically had the power to block the nomination then. And then they technically had the power to put someone in there and they're pretending there's some principle to it. But they're just extra. They're going for the short term edge at the expense of what is like the workings of the system in the long run. And then one of the Democrats have to do in that situation, because both parties have been doing this, is they either can lose now all the time or they start playing the power games, too. And now you have a prisoner's dilemma where it's like both end up doing this thing and everyone ends up worse off. The debt ceiling, all these power plays that are being made with these holding the country hostage. This is power games. And to me, that's what Goldwater was doing in the 60s. But it was a healthier time in a way because there was this plurality within the parties reduced some of the national tribalism and that there wasn't as much of an appeal to that. But today it's just like do whatever you have to do to beat the enemies. And so I'm seeing a rise in power games and I talk about the Republicans because they did a lot of these things first. They have been a little bit more egregious, but both parties have been doing it over the last 20, 30 years. Can you place blame, or maybe there's a different term for it, at the subsystems of this? So is it the media? Is it the politicians like in the Senate and in Congress? Is it Trump? So the leadership? Is it, or maybe it's us human beings? Maybe social media versus mainstream media. Is there a sense of where, what is the cause and what is the symptom? It's very complex. So Ezra Klein has a great book, Why We're Polarized, where he talks about a lot of this. And there's some of these, it's really no one's fault. First of all, it's the environment has changed in a bunch of ways you just mentioned. And what happens when you take human nature, which is a constant, and you put it into an environment, behavior comes out. The environment is the independent variable. When that changes, the dependent variable, the behavior, changes with it. Right? And so the environment has changed in a lot of ways. So one major one is, it used to, for a long time, actually, the, first it was the Republicans and then the Democrats just had a stranglehold on Congress. There was no, it was not even competitive. The Democrats for 40 years had the majority. And so therefore, it actually is a decent environment to compromise it. Because now we can both, what you want is Congress people thinking about their home district and voting yes on a national policy because we're going to get a good deal on it back at home. That's actually healthy, as opposed to voting in lockstep together because this is what the red party is doing, regardless of what's good for my home district. An example is Obamacare. There were certain Republican districts that would have actually voted for it. There were certain Democratic districts that would have actually officially been benefited by Obamacare, but every Republican voted against it. So, and part of the reason is because there's no longer this obvious majority. Every few years, it switches. It's a 50-50 thing. And that's, you know, partially because it's become so, we've been so subsumed with this one national divide of left versus right that people are not, people are whoever, you know, they're voting for the same party for president all the way down the ticket now. It's a 50-50 color war, and that's awful for compromise. So, there's like 10 of these things, you know, that have redistricting, but also it is social media. It is, I call it hypercharged tribalism. You know, in the 60s, you had kind of distributed tribalism. You had some people that are worked up about the USSR, right? They're national. That's what they care about. US versus foreign. You had some people that were saying left versus right, like they are today, and then other people that were saying that they were fighting within the party. But today, you don't have that. It's, you have ideological realignment, so you kind of got rid of a lot of the in-party fighting, and then there hasn't been that big of a foreign threat, nothing like the USSR for a long time. So, you kind of lost that, and what's left is just this left versus right thing. And so, that's kind of this hypercharged whirlpool that subsumes everything. And so, yeah, I mean, people point to Newt Gingrich, you know, and people like, there's certain characters that enacted policies that stoked this kind of thing, but I think this is a much bigger kind of environmental shift. PAUL Well, that's going back to our questions about the role of individuals in human history. So, the interesting, one of the many interesting questions here is about Trump. Is he a symptom or a cause? Because he seems to be, from the public narrative, such a significant catalyst for some of the things we're seeing. BRIAN This goes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? Like, is it the person or is it the times? I think he's a perfect example of, it's a both situation. I don't think, if you pluck Trump out of this situation, I don't think that Trump was inevitable, but I think we were very vulnerable to a demagogue, and if you hadn't been, Trump would have had no chance. And so, why were we vulnerable to a demagogue is because you have these, I mean, I think specifically on the right, if you actually look at the stats, it's pretty bad. Like, the people who, because it's not just who voted for Trump, a lot of people just vote for the red, right? What's interesting is who voted for Obama against Romney and then voted for Trump? These are not racists, right? These are not hardcore Republicans. They voted for Obama. And where did the switch come from? Places that had economic despair, where bridges were not working well. That's a signifier, where paint's chipping in the schools. These little things like this. So I think that you had this, a lot of these kind of rural towns, you have true despair, and then you also have, the number one indicator of voting for Trump was distrust in media. And the media has become much less trustworthy, you know? And so, you have all these ingredients that actually make us very vulnerable to a demagogue, and a demagogue is someone who takes advantage, right? There's someone who comes in and says, I can pull all the right strings and push all the right emotional buttons right now and get my self-power by taking advantage of the circumstances. And that is what Trump totally did. It makes me wonder how easy it is for somebody who's a charismatic leader to capitalize on cultural resentment when there's economic hardship to channel that. So John Haidt wrote a great article about, basically, truth is at an all-time low right now. The media's not penalized for lying, right? MSNBC, Fox News, these are not penalized for being inaccurate. They're penalized if they stray from the orthodoxy. On social media, it's not the truest tweets that go viral, right? And so Trump understood that better than anyone, right? He took advantage of it. He was living in the current world when everyone else was stuck in the past. And he saw that, and he just lied. Everything he said, you know, it doesn't, truth was not relevant at all, right? It's just truly, it's not relevant to him and what he's talking about. He doesn't care, and he knew that neither do a subset of the country. I was thinking about this, just reading articles by journalists, especially when you're not a famous journalist in yourself, but you're more like a New York Times journalist. So the big famous thing is the institution you're a part of. You can just lie, because you're not going to get punished for it. You're going to be rewarded for the popularity of an article. So if you write 10 articles, there's a huge incentive to just make stuff up. You got to get clicks. You get clicks. That's the first and foremost. And like culturally, people will attack that article to say it's dishonest. Like one half of the country will attack that article for saying it's dishonest. But they'll kind of forget. You will not have a reputational hit. There won't be a memory like, this person made up a lot of stuff in the past. No, they'll take one article at a time, and they'll attach the reputation hits will be to New York Times, the institution. So for the individual journalist, there's a huge incentive to make stuff up. It's wild. Totally. And it's scary, because it's almost like you can't survive if you're just an old school, honest journalist who really works hard and tries to get it right and does it with nuance. What you can be is you can be a big time substacker or big time podcaster. A lot of people do have a reputation for accuracy and rigor, and they have huge audiences. But if you're working in a big company right now, it's I mean, especially I mean, like, I think that many of the big media brands are very much controlled by the left. And but I will say that the ones that are controlled by the right are even more egregious, not just in terms of accuracy, but also in terms of, you know, the New York Times, for all of its criticisms, they have a handful of they every day here and there. They put out a pretty, you know, an article that strays from the they know Barry Weiss wrote there for a long time. And then you've got they wrote an article criticizing free speech on campus stuff recently. And they have, you know, they have a couple very, you know, left, progressive, friendly conservatives, but they have conservatives that are operating the op eds. Fox News, you know, you're not seeing thoughtful Breitbart. You're not seeing thoughtful progressives writing there, right? There's some degree to which the New York Times, I think, still incentivizing the values, the vertical, the high effort. So you're allowed to have a conservative opinion, if you do a really damn good job. Yeah. Like if it's a very thorough, in-depth kind of- And if you kind of pander to the progressive senses in all the right ways, you know, I always joke that, you know, Ted, you always have a couple, you know, token conservatives, but they get on stage and they're basically like, so totally, you're all, you know, the progressivism is right about all of this, but maybe, maybe, you know, libertarianism isn't all about, you know, it's just, so there is an element, but you know what? It's something. It's better than being a total tribal. I think you can see the New York Times tug of war, the internal tug of war. You can see it because then they also have these awful instances, you know, or like, you know, the firing of James Bennett, which is a whole other story. But like they have, yeah, you can see it going both ways, but in the 60s, what did you have? You had ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, the 70s, you know, you had these three news channels and they weren't always right. And they definitely sometimes spun a narrative together, maybe about the Vietnam or whatever, but they, if one of them was just lying, they'd be embarrassed for it. They would be penalized. They'd be dinged and they'd be known as this is the trash one. And that would be terrible for their ratings because they weren't just catering to half the country. They're catering, they all were catering to the whole country. So both on the axis of accuracy and on the axis of neutrality, they had to, you know, try to stay somewhere in the reasonable range. And that's just gone. One of the things I'm really curious about is I think your book is incredible. I'm very curious to see how it's written about by the press. Because I could see, I could myself write with the help of Chad J. Petit, of course, clickbait articles in either direction. Yeah. It's easy to imagine. Your whole book is beautifully written for clickbait articles. Yeah. If any journalists out there need help, I can help. Yeah. I can write the most atrocious criticisms. Yeah. I'm ready, I'm braced. Yeah. So speaking of which, you write about social justice. You write about two kinds of social justice, liberal social justice and SJF, social justice fundamentalism. What are those? Yeah. So like the term wokeness is so loaded with baggage. It's kind of like mocking and derogatory. And that's, I was trying not to do that in this book. If it's a term loaded with baggage, you're already kind of, you're from the first minute, you're already behind. So to me, it also, when people say wokeness is bad, social justice is bad, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater because the proudest tradition in the US is liberal social justice. And what I mean by that, again, liberal meaning with lowercase l, it is intertwined with liberalism. So Martin Luther King, classic example, his I Have a Dream speech, he says stuff like this country has made a promise to all of its citizens and it has broken that promise to its black citizens, right? In other words, liberalism, the constitution, the core ideals, those are great. We're not living up to them. We're failing on some of them. So civil disobedience, the goal of it wasn't to hurt liberalism, it was to specifically break the laws that were already violating, the laws that were a violation of liberalism to expose that this is illiberal, that the constitution should not have people of different skin color sitting in different parts of the bus. And so it was really patriotic, the civil rights movement. It was saying, this is a beautiful, we have a, liberalism is this beautiful thing and we need to do better at it. So I call it liberal social justice. And it used the tools of liberalism to try to improve the flaws that were going on. So free speech, Mario Savio in the 60s, he's a leftist. And what were the leftists doing in the 60s on Berkeley campus? They were saying, we need more free speech because that's what social justice, liberal social justice was fighting for. But you can also go back to the 20s, women's suffrage. I mean, the emancipation, the thing that America obviously has all of it, these are all ugly things that it had to get out of, but it got out of them one by one. And it's still getting out of them. That's what's cool about America. And liberal social justice basically is the practice of saying, where are we not being perfect liberals? And now let's fix that. So that's the idea of liberalism that permeates the history of the United States. But then there's interplay, so many good images in this book. But one of them is highlighting the interplay of different ideas over the past, let's say 100 years. So liberalism is on one side, there's that thread. There's Marxism on the other, and then there's postmodernism. How do those interplay together? So it's interesting because Marxism is, and all of its various descendants, obviously there's a lot of things that are rooted in Marxism that aren't the same thing as what Karl Marx preached. But what do they all have in common? They think liberalism is bad, right? They actually think that the opposite of what Martin Luther King and other people in the civil rights and other movements, they think the opposite. He thinks liberalism is good, we need to preserve it. They said liberalism is the problem. These other problems with racism and inequality that we're seeing, those are inevitable results of liberalism. Liberalism is a rigged game, and it's just the power games in disguise. There is no liberal games. It's just the power games in disguise, and there's the upper people that oppress the lower people, and they convince the lower people, it's all about false consciousness, they convince the lower people that everything is fair. And now the lower people vote against their own interests, and they work to preserve the system that's oppressing them. And what do we need to do? We need to actually, it's much more revolutionary, we need to overthrow liberalism, right? So people think, oh, what we call a wokeness is just a normal social justice activism, but it's more extreme, right? It's this, no, no, it's the polar opposite, polar opposite. And so now that's the Marxist threat. Now postmodernism is kind of this term that is super controversial, and I don't think anyone calls themselves a postmodernist, or take all of this with a grain of salt in terms of the term, but what's the definition of radical? The definition of radical to me is how deep you want change to happen at. So a liberal progressive and a conservative progressive will disagree about policies, the liberal progressive wants to change a lot of policies, change, change, change, right? And the conservative is more wants to keep things the way they are. But they're both conservative when it comes to liberalism, beneath it, the liberal kind of foundation of the country, they both become conservatives about that. The Marxist is more radical because they want to go one notch deeper and actually overthrow that foundation. Now what's below liberalism is kind of the core tenets of modernity, this idea of reason and the notion that there is an objective truth and science as the scientific method, right? These things are actually beneath, and even the Marxist, if you look at the Frankfurt School, these post-Marxist thinkers and Marx himself, they were not anti-science, they believed in that bottom, bottom foundation. They actually wanted to preserve modernity, but they wanted to get rid of liberalism on top of it. The post-modernist is even more radical because they want to actually go down to the bottom level and overthrow it. They think science itself is a tool of oppression. They think it's a tool where oppression kind of flows through, they think that the white Western world has invented these concepts, they claim that there's an objective truth and that there's reason and science, and they think all of that is just one meta-narrative, and it goes a long way to serve the interests of the powerful. So in the sense that it's almost caricatured, but that is to the core of their belief that math could be racist, for example. Oh yeah, absolutely. Not the education of math, but literally math, mathematics. The notion in math that there's a right answer and a wrong answer, that they believe is a meta-narrative that serves white supremacy, or the post-modernist might have said it serves just the powerful or the wealthy. So what social justice fundamentalism is, is you take the Marxist thread that has been going on in lots of countries, and whoever the upper and lower is, that's what they all have in common, but the upper and lower, for Marx was the ruling class and the oppressed class, it was economic. But you come here, and the economic class doesn't resonate as much here as it did maybe in some of those other places, but what does resonate here in the 60s and 70s is race and gender and these kind of social justice disagreements. And so what social justice fundamentalism is, is basically this tried and true framework of this Marxist framework, kind of with a new skin on it, which is American social justice, and then made even more radical with the infusion of post-modernism, where not just is liberalism bad, but actually, like you said, math can be racist. So it's this kind of philosophical Frankenstein, this stitched together of these. And so again, they wear the same uniform as the liberal social justice. They say social justice, right, you know, racial equality, but it has nothing to do with liberal social justice. It is directly opposed to liberal social justice. It's fascinating, the evolution of ideas, if we ignore the harm done by it, it's fascinating how humans get together and evolve these ideas. So as you show, Marxism is the idea that society is a zero-sum, I mean, I guess zero-sum is a really important thing here. A zero-sum struggle between the ruling class and the working class with power being exerted through politics and economics. Then you add critical theory, Marxism 2.0 on top of that, and you add to politics and economics, you add culture and institutions. And then on top of that, for post-modernism, you add science, you add morality, basically anything else you can think of. To stitch together Frankenstein, and if you notice, which is not necessarily bad, but in this case, I think it's actually violating the Marxist tradition by being anti-science. And it's violating the post-modernism because what post-modernists were, they were radical skeptics, not just of that, they were radical skeptics, not just of the way things were, but of their own beliefs. And social justice fundamentalism is suddenly, is not at all self-critical. It says that we have the answers, which is the opposite of what post-modernists would ever say. No, you just have another meta-narrative. So, and it's also violating, of course, the tradition of liberal social justice in a million ways because it's anti-liberal. And so this Frankenstein comes together. Meanwhile, liberal social justice doesn't have a Frankenstein. It's very clear. It's very, it's a crisp ideology that says, we need, they're trying to make, we're trying to get to a more perfect union, they're trying to keep the promises made in the Constitution. And that's what it's trying to do. And so it's much simpler in a lot of ways. So you write that my big problem with social justice fundamentalism isn't the ideology itself. It's what it's scholars and activists started to do sometimes around 2013 when they began to wield a cudgel that's not supposed to have any place in the country like the US. So it's the actions, not the ideas. Well, to be clear, I don't like the ideology. I think it's a low-rung ideology. I think it's morally inconsistent based on, you know, it's flip-flops on its morals depending on the group. I think it's echo chambery. I think it's full of inaccuracies and kind of can't stand up to debate. So I think it's a low, but there's a ton of low-rung ideologies I don't like. I don't like a lot of religious doctrines. I don't like a lot of political doctrines, right? The US is a place inherently that is a mishmash of a ton of ideologies. I'm not going to like two thirds of them at any given time. So my problem, the reason I'm writing about this is not because I'm like, by the way, this ideology is not something I like. That's not interesting. The reason that it must be written about right now, this particular ideology, is because it's not playing nicely with others. If you want to be a hardcore, you know, evangelical Christian, in the US says live and let live. Not only are you allowed to have an echo chamber of some kind, it's actively protected here. Live and let live. They can do what they want. You do what you want. Now, if the evangelical Christian started saying, by the way, anyone who says anything that conflicts with evangelical Christianity is going to be severely socially punished, and they have the cultural power to do so, which they don't in this case. They might like to, but they don't have the power. But they're able to get anyone fired who they want. And they're able to actually change the curriculum in all these schools and suddenly not conflict with no more evolution in the textbooks because they don't want it. Now I would write a book about evangelical Christianity, because that's what every liberal, regardless of what you think of the actual horizontal beliefs, doesn't matter what they believe when they start violating live and let live and shutting down other segments of society. And it's almost like a, you know, it's not the best analogy, but it's like an echo chamber is like a benign tumor, and what you have to watch out for is a tumor that starts to metastasize, starts to forcefully spread and damage the tissue around it. And that's what this particular ideology has been doing. P.H. Do you worry about it, you know, as an existential threat to liberalism in the West, in the United States? Is it a problem or is it the biggest problem that's threatening all of human civilization? P.H. I would never, I would not say it's the biggest problem. It might be. I wouldn't, if someone, if it turns out in 50 years someone says actually it was, I wouldn't be shocked. But I also, I wouldn't bet on that because there's a lot of problems. P.H. I'm a little sorry to interrupt. It is popular to say that kind of thing though. And it's less popular to say the same thing about AI or nuclear weapons, which worries me that I'm more worried about nuclear weapons even still than I am about wokeism. P.H. So I've gotten, I've had probably a thousand arguments about this. That's one nice thing about spending six years procrastinating on getting a book done is you end up test battle testing your ideas a million times. So I've heard this one a lot, right, which is, there's kind of three groups of former Obama voters. One is super woke now. Another one is super anti-woke now. And the third is what you just said, which is sure, wokeness is over the top, right? They're not, you're not woke, but I think that the anti-woke people are totally lost their mind. And it's just not that big a deal, right? Now here's why I disagree with that. Because it's not, it's not wokeness itself. It's that a radical political movement, of which there will always be a lot in the country, has managed to do something that a radical movement is not supposed to be able to do in the U.S., which is they've managed to hijack institutions all across the country and hijack medical journals and universities and the ACLU, all the activist organizations and non-profits and NGOs. And certain tech companies. Yeah, and many tech companies. And so it's not that I think this thing is so bad. It's a little like we said with Trump. It's that what I'm, the reason Trump scares me is not because Trump's so bad. It's that because it shows, it reveals that we were vulnerable to a demagogue, a demagogue candidate, and what wokeness reveals to me is that we are currently, and until something changes, we'll continue to be vulnerable to a bully movement, and a forcefully expansionist movement that wants to actually destroy the workings, their liberal gears and tear them apart. And so here's the way I view a liberal democracy is it is a bunch of these institutions that were trial and error crafted over hundreds of years, and they all rely on trust, public trust, and a certain kind of feeling of unity that actually is critical to a liberal democracy's functioning. And what I see this thing is, is there's a parasite on that whose goal is, and I'm not saying each, by the way, each individual in this is, I don't think they're bad people. I think that it's the ideology itself has the property of its goal is to tear apart the pretty delicate workings of the liberal democracy and shred the critical lines of trust. And so you talk about AI and you talk about all these other big problems, nuclear, right? The reason I stopped, I like writing about that stuff a lot more than I like writing about politics. This wasn't a fun topic for me, is because I realized that like all of those things, if they were going to have a good future with those things and they're actually threats, like I said, we need to have our wits about us and we need the liberal gears and levers working. We need the liberal machine working. And so if something's threatening to undermine that, it affects everything else. We need to have our scientific mind about us, about these foundational ideas. But I guess my sense of hope comes from observing the immune system respond to wokeism. There seems to be a pro-liberalism immune system. And not only that, so like there's intellectuals, there's people that are willing to do the fight. You talk about courage, being courageous, and there is a hunger for that such that those ideas can become viral and they take over. So I just don't see a mechanism by which wokeism accelerates like exponentially and takes over, like it's expand. It feels like as it expands, the immune system responds. Or the immune system of liberalism, of basically a country, at least in the United States, that still ultimately at the core of the individual values the freedom of speech, just freedoms in general, the freedom of an individual. But that's the battle, which is stronger. So to me, it is like a virus in an immune system. And I totally agree. I see the same story happening. And I'm sitting here rooting for the immune system. But you're still worried. Well, here's the thing. So a liberal democracy is always going to be vulnerable to a movement like this, right? And there will be more because it's not a totalitarian dictatorship, because if you can socially pressure people to not say what they're thinking, you can suddenly start to just take over, right? You can break the liberalism of the liberal democracy quite easily. And suddenly a lot of things are illiberal. On the other hand, the same vulnerability, the same system that's vulnerable to that also is hard to truly conquer. Because now the Maoists, right, similar kind of vibe. They were saying that science is evil and that the intellectuals are, you know, it's all this big conspiracy. But they could murder you. And they had the hard cudgel in their hand, right? And the hard cudgel is scary. And you can conquer a country with the hard cudgel. But you can't use that in the US. So what they have is a soft cudgel, which can have the same effect. Initially, you can scare people into shutting up. You can't maybe imprison them and murder them. But if you can socially ostracize them and get them fired, that basically is going to have the same effect. So the soft cudgel can have the same effect for a while. But the thing is, it's a little bit of a house of cards because it relies on fear. And as soon as that fear goes away, the whole thing falls apart, right? The soft cudgel requires people to be so scared of getting canceled or getting whatever. And as soon as some people start, you know, Toby Lutka of Shopify, I always like think about, you know, he just said, you know what, I'm not scared of this soft cudgel and spoke up and said, we're not political at this company and we're not a family, we're a team and we're going to do this. And you know what? Like, they're thriving. He will be on this podcast. He seems like a fascinating human being. He's amazing. He spoke up. He's one of the smartest and like kindest dudes. But he's also, he has courage at a time when it's hard. But here's the thing is that it's different than that. You need so much less courage against a soft cudgel than you do. The Iranians throwing their hijabs into the fire, those people's courage just blows away any courage we have here because they might get executed. That's the thing is that you can actually have courage right now. And it's so. Don't worry about it. Oh man, the irony of that. And you talk about the two things to fight this. There's two things, awareness and courage. What's the awareness piece? The awareness piece is first just understanding the stakes. Like getting our heads out of the sand and being like technology is blowing up exponentially. Where our society's trust is devolving, like we're kind of falling apart in some important ways. We're losing our grip on some stability at the worst time. That's the first point, just the big picture. And then also awareness of, I think, this vertical axis or whatever your version of it is, this concept of how do I really form my beliefs? Where do they actually come from? Where do, you know, are they someone else's beliefs? Am I following a checklist? How about my values? I used to identify with the blue party or the red party, but now they've changed and I suddenly am okay with that. Is that because my values changed with it or am I actually anchored to the party, not to any principle? Asking yourself these questions, asking, you know, looking for where do I feel disgusted by fellow human beings? You know, that maybe I'm being a crazy tribal person without realizing it. How about the people around me? Am I being bullied by some echo chamber without realizing it? Am I the bully somewhere? Right? So that's the first, just, I think, just to kind of do a self-audit. And I think that like just some awareness like that, just a self-audit of your own self-audit about these things can go a long way. But if you don't, if you keep it to yourself, it's almost useless. Because if it doesn't, if you don't have, without, you know, awareness without courage does very little. So courage is when you take that awareness and you actually export it out into the world and it starts affecting other people. And so courage can happen on multiple levels. It can happen by, first of all, just stop saying stuff you don't believe. If you're being pressured by a kind of an ideology or a movement to say stuff that you don't actually believe, just stop. Just, just, just stay on your ground and don't say anything. That's, that's courage. That's one first step. Start speaking out in small groups. Start, you know, actually speaking your mind. See what happens. The sky doesn't usually fall. Actually, people usually respect you for it. Like, you know, and it's not, not every group, but like you'd be surprised. And then eventually, you know, maybe start speaking out in bigger groups. Start going public, you know, go public with it. But, and you don't need everyone doing this. Look, some people will lose their jobs for it. I'm not talking to those people. Most people won't lose their jobs, but they have the same fear as if they would, right? And it's like, what, are you going to get criticized? Or are you going to get a bunch of people, you know, angry Twitter people will, will criticize you? Like, it, yeah, it's not pleasant, but actually that's a little bit like our primitive minds fear that really, back when it was programmed, that kind of ostracism or criticism will get, leave you out of the tribe and you'll die. Today, it's kind of a delusional fear. It's not actually that scary. And the people who have realized that can exercise incredible leadership right now. So you have a really interesting description of censorship, of self-censorship also, as you've been talking about. Who's King Mustache? And this gap, I think, I hope you write even more, even more than you've written in the book about these ideas, because it's so strong. This censorship gaps that are created between the dormant thought pile and the kind of, thing under the speech curve. Yeah. So first of all, so I like to think of, I think it's a useful tool is this thing called a thought pile, which is if you have a, on any given issue, you have a horizontal spectrum and just say, I could take your brain out of your head and I put it on the thought pile right where you happen to believe about that issue. Now I did that for everyone in the, in the community or in a society. And you're going to end up with a big mushy pile that I think will often form a bell curve. If it's really politicized, it might form like a camel with two humps because it's like concentrated here. But for a typical issue, it'll just form a fear of AI. You're going to have a bell curve, right? You know, things like this. That's the thought pile. Now, the second thing is a line that I call the speech curve, which is what people are saying. So the speech curve is high when not just a lot of people are saying it, but it's being said from the biggest platforms, being said in the, you know, in the New York Times, and it's being said by the president on, you know, in the state of the union. Those things are the top of the speech curve now. And then, you know, and then when the speech curve is lower, it means it's being said, either whispered in small groups, or it's just not very many people are talking about it. Now, a healthy, when a free speech democracy is healthy on a certain topic, you've got the speech curve sitting right on top of the thought pile. They mirror each other, which is naturally what would happen. More people think something is going to be said more often and from higher platforms. What censorship does, and that's censorship can be from the government. So I use the tale of King Mustache and King Mustache, he's a little tiny tyrant, and he's very sensitive and people are making fun of his mustache and they're saying he's not a good king and he does not like that. So what does he do? He enacts a policy and he says, anyone who is heard criticize anyone who is heard criticizing me or my mustache or my rule will be put to death. And immediately at the town school, because his father was a very liberal, it was always free speech in his kingdom. But now King Mustache has taken over and he's saying this is a new rules now. And so a few people yell out and they say, that's not how we do things here. And that moment, it's what I call a moment of truth. Did the king's guards stand with the principles of the kingdom and say, yeah, King Mustache, that's not what we do, in which case he would kind of have to, he's nothing he can do. Or are they going to execute? So in this case, it's as if he laid down an electric fence over a part of the thought pile and said, no one's allowed to speak over here. The speech curve, maybe people will think these things, but the speech curve cannot go over here. But the electric fence wasn't actually electrified until the king's guards in a moment of truth get scared and say, okay, and they hang the five people who spoke out. So in that moment, that fence just became electric. And now no one criticizes King Mustache anymore. So I use this as an allegory. Now, of course, he has a hard cudgel because he can execute people. But now when we look at the US, what you're seeing right now is a lot of pressure, which is very similar. An electric fence is being laid down saying no one can criticize these ideas. And if you do, you won't be executed, you'll be canceled. You'll be fired. Now, is that fence electrified from there? No, they can't actually. They don't work at the company. They can't fire you. But they can start a Twitter mob when someone violates that speech curve, when someone violates that speech rule. And then the leadership at the company has the moment of truth. And what the leaders should do is stand up for their company's values, which is almost always in favor of the employee and say, look, you know, you're not going to be able to do this. Even if they made a mistake, people make mistakes, we're not going to fire them. Or maybe that person actually said something that's reasonable and we should discuss it. But either way, we're not going to fire them. And if they said no, what happens is the Twitter mob actually doesn't have, they can't execute you. They go away. And the fence is proven to have no electricity. What's been the problem with the past few years is what's happened again and again is the leader gets scared and they get scared of the Twitter mob and they fire them. Boom, that fence has electricity. And now, actually, if you cross that, it's not just a threat. You will have, you'll be out of a job. It's really bad. You'll have a huge penalty. You might not be able to feed your kids. So that's an electric fence that goes up. Now, what happens when an electric fence goes up and it's proven to actually be electrified? The speech curve morphs into a totally different position. And now these new people say, instead of having the kind of marketplace of ideas that turns into a kind of a natural bell curve, they say, no, no, no, these ideas are OK to say, not just OK. You'll be socially rewarded. And these ones don't. That's the rules of their own echo chamber that they're now applying to everyone. And it's working. And so the speech curve distorts. And so you end up with now instead of one region, which is a region of kind of active communal thinking, what people are thinking and saying, you now have three regions. You have a little active communal thinking, but mostly you now have this dormant thought pile, which is all these opinions that suddenly everyone's scared to say out loud. Everyone's thinking, but they're scared to say it out loud. Everyone's thinking, but no one's saying. And then you have this other region, which is the approved ideas of this now cultural kind of dictator. And those are being spoken from the largest platforms. And they're being repeated by the president. And they're being repeated all over the place, even though people don't believe it. And that's this distortion. And what happens is the society becomes really stupid. Because active communal thinking is the region where we can actually think together. And now no one can think together. And it gets siloed into small private conversations. It's really powerful what you said about institutions and so on. It's not trivial from a leadership position to be like, no, we defend the employee or defend the employee, the person with us on our, because there's no actual ground to any kind of violation we're hearing about. So the mob, they resist the mob. It's ultimately to the leader, I guess, of a particular institution or a particular company. And it's difficult. It's difficult. It's difficult. Oh, yeah. No, no, it's not. I don't, if it were easy, it wouldn't, there wouldn't be all of these failings. And by the way, this is, that's the immune system failing. That's the liberal immune system of that company failing. But also then it's an example, which means that a lot of other, you know, it's failing kind of to the country. It's not easy. Of course it's not. Because what, because we have primitive minds that are wired to care so much about what people think of us. And even if we're not going to, you know, maybe, first of all, we're scared that it's going to start a, because there's, you know, what, you know, what do mobs do? They don't just say, I'm going to criticize you. I'm going to criticize anyone who still buys your product. I'm going to criticize anyone who goes on your podcast. So it's not just you. It's now suddenly if Lex becomes tarnished enough, now I go on the podcast and people are saying, oh, I'm not buying his book. He went on Lex Friedman. No, no thanks. Right. And now I get, it's a call, I call it a smear web. Like you've been smeared and it's so, we're in such a, you know, bad time that it's smeared travels to me. And now meanwhile, someone who buys my book and tries to share it, someone said, you're buying that guy's book. He, you know, he goes on Lex Friedman. You see how this happens, right? So that hasn't happened in this case, but that, so we are so wired, not an A, that is kind of bad, right? Like that is actually like bad for you, but, but we're wired to care about it so much because it meant life or death back in the day. Yeah. Yeah. And luckily in this case, we're both, probably can smear each other in this conversation. This is wonderful. I smear you all the time. Given, given the nature of your book. What do you think about freedom of speech as a term and as an idea, as a way to resist the mechanism, this mechanism of a dormant thought pile and artificially generated speech, this ideal of the freedom of speech and protecting speech and celebrating speech? Yeah. Well, so this is, this is kind of the point I was talking about earlier about King Mustache made a rule against, he's created a fish. Can I just, I just love the, the, one of the amazing things about your book as you get later and later in the book, you cover more and more difficult issues as a way to illustrate the importance of the vertical perspective. But there's something about using hilarious drawings throughout that make it much more fun. And it, it takes you away from the personal somehow. And you start thinking in the space of ideas versus like outside of the tribal type of thinking. So it's a really brilliant, I mean, I would advise for anybody to do, when they write controversial books, to have hilarious drawings. It's true. Like put a silly stick figure in your thing and it lightens, it does, it lightens the mood. It gets people's guard down a little bit. Yeah. You know. And it works. It reminds people that like, we're all friends here, right? Like we're, you know, let's like laugh, you know, laugh at ourselves, laugh at the, laugh at the fact that we're like in a culture war a little bit and now we can talk about it, right? As opposed to like getting religious about it. But, but basically like King Mustache had no First Amendment. He said, we, the government is censoring, right? Which is very common around the world, right? Governments censor all them. The US, you know, again, there's some, you can argue there's some controversial things recently, but basically the US, the First Amendment isn't the problem, right? No one is being arrested for saying the wrong thing. But this graph is still happening. And so, so freedom of speech, when people, what people like to say is, if someone's complaining about a cancel culture and saying, you know, this is, this is, you know, an anti-free speech. People like to point out, no, it's not. The government's not arresting you for anything. This is called like, you know, the free market, buddy. Like this is called, you know, you're putting your ideas out and you're getting criticized and your precious marketplace of ideas, there it is, right? And I've gotten this a lot. And this is not making a critical distinction between cancel culture and criticism culture. Criticism culture is a little bit of this kind of high rung idea lab stuff we talked about. Criticism culture attacks the idea and, and, and, and, and encourages further discussion, right? It enlivens discussion. It makes everyone smarter. Cancel culture attacks the person. Very different. Can't, criticism culture says, here's why this idea is so bad. Let me tell you. Cancel culture says, here's why this person is bad and no one should talk to them and they should be fired. And what does that do? It doesn't enliven the discussion. It makes everyone scared to talk and it's the opposite. It shuts down discussion. So you still have your first amendment, but first amendment plus cancel culture equals, you might as well be in King must, you might as well have government censorship, right? First amendment plus criticism culture. Great. Now you have this vibrant marketplace of ideas. So there's a very clear difference. And so when, when people criticize the cancel culture and then someone says, oh, see, you're so sensitive now, you look, you're doing the cancel culture yourself. You're trying to punish this person for criticizing. No, no, no, no, no, no. We, every good liberal and I, and I mean that in the lower case, which is that anyone who believes in liberal democracies, regardless of what they believe should stand up and say no to cancel culture and say, this is not okay, regardless of what the actual topic is. And that makes them a good liberal versus if they're trying to cancel someone who's just criticizing, they're doing the opposite. Now they're shutting. So it's the opposite things, but it's very easy to get confused. You can see people take advantage of the, and sometimes they just don't know it themselves. The, the, the, the lines here can be very confusing. The wording can be very confusing and without that wording, some suddenly it looks like someone who's criticizing cancel culture is canceling, but they're not. You, uh, apply this thinking to universities in particular. Um, uh, there's a great, yet another great image on a trade off between knowledge and conviction. And it's what's commonly actually can maybe explain to me the difference, but you, uh, it's often referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect where you, uh, when you first learn of a thing, you have an extremely, um, high confidence about self-estimation of how well you understand that thing. You actually say that Dunning-Kruger means something else. So yeah, it's everyone, I post this, everyone's like Dunning-Kruger and it's, and it's what everyone thinks Dunning-Kruger is. Dunning-Kruger is a little different. It's, it's, you have a diagonal line like this one, right? Which is the place you are. It's the, I call it like the humility tight rope, but the humility sweet spot, it's exactly the right level of humility based on what you know. If you're below it, you're, you're insecure. You actually have too much humility. You don't have enough confidence because you know more than you're giving yourself credit for. And when you're above the line, you're in the arrogant zone, right? You're, you're, you need a, you need a dose of humility, right? You think you know more than you do. So we all want to stay on that tight rope. And Dunning-Kruger is basically a straight line that's just a, has a lower slope. So you start off, you still are, you still are getting more confident as you go along, but you start off above that line and as you learn more, you end up below the line later. So, but anyway. So this wavy thing. This wavy thing is, is, is a different phenomenon and it's, it's related, but. So this idea, so for people just listening, there's a child's hill, pretty damn sure you know a whole lot and feeling great about it. That's in the beginning. And then there's an insecure Canyon. You crash down, acknowledging that you don't know that much. And then there's a growth mountain. Grown up mountain. Grown up mountain. Where after you feel ashamed and embarrassed about not knowing that much, you begin to realize that knowing how little you know is the first step in becoming someone who actually knows stuff. And that's the, the grown up mountain. And you climb and climb and climb. You're saying that in universities, we're pinning people at the top of the child's hill. So, so for me, this is a very, you know, I think of myself with this because I went to college, like a lot of 18 year olds and I was very cocky. I just thought I knew it. I know, and when it came to politics, I was like bright blue, just because I grew up in a bright blue suburb and I wasn't thinking that hard about it. And I thought that, you know, and what I did when I went to college is met a lot of smart conservatives and a lot of smart progressives. But I've met a lot of people who weren't just going down a checklist and they knew stuff. And when I, and it's suddenly I realized that like a lot of these views I have are not based on knowledge. They're based on other people's conviction. Everyone else thinks that's true. So now I think it's, whoa, I'm, I'm, I'm actually like, I'm, I'm transferring someone else's conviction to me and who knows why they have conviction. They might have conviction because they're transferring from someone else. And I'm a smart dude. I thought, why, why am I, why am I like giving away my own independent, you know, learning abilities here and just adopting other views? So anyway, it was this humbling experience and it wasn't just about politics, by the way. It was that I had strong views about a lot of stuff and I just, I got lucky or not lucky. I sought out, you know, the kind of people I sought out were the type that love to disagree and they were, man, they knew stuff. And so you're quickly in, you know, in, in, in, in again, ideal lab culture. It was an ideal lab. And also, I also went to, I started getting in the habit. I started loving listening to people who disagreed with me because it was so exhilarating listening to a smart person when I thought there was no, no credence to this other argument, right? The, the, the, the, this side of this debate is obviously wrong. I wanted to see an intelligence squared on that debate. I wanted to go see, I've actually gotten into intelligence squared in college. I wanted to see a smart person who disagrees with me talk. It became so fascinating to me, right? It was the most interesting thing. That was a new thing. I didn't think I liked that. And so what did that do? That, that shoved me down the humble tumble here, number three, it shoved me down where I started to, and I, and then I, and then I went the other way where I realized that I had been, a lot of my identity had been based on this faux feeling of knowledge, this idea that I thought I knew everything. Now that I don't have that, I was like, I felt really like dumb and I felt really almost like embarrassed of what I knew. And so that's where I call this insecure canyon. I think it's sometimes when you're so used to thinking you know everything and then you realize you don't, it's like, it's, and then you start to realize that actually really awesome thinkers, they, they, they don't judge me for this. They totally respect if I say, I don't know anything about this and say, oh, cool, you should read this and this and this. They don't say, you don't know anything. They don't say that. Right. And so, and not that I'm, by the way, this is not to say I'm now on grownup mountain and you should all join me. I am often find myself drifting up with like a helium balloon. Oh, I think I read about the new thing and suddenly I think I have, I think I, you know, I read three things about, you know, a new AI thing and I'm like, I'll go do a talk on this. I'm like, no, I won't. I don't, I just, I'm going to just be spouting out the opinion of the person I just read. So I have to remind myself, but it's useful. Now, what the reason my problem with colleges today is that it's, I was a graduate in 2004. This is a recent change is that all of those speakers I went who disagreed with me, a lot of them were conservative. So many of those speakers would not be allowed on campuses today. And so many of the discussions I had were in big groups or classrooms. And this is still, you know, this was a liberal campus. So many of those disagreements, um, uh, they're not happening today. And you, I've interviewed a ton of college students. It's chilly. It is, you know, people keep to themselves. So what's happening is not only are people losing that push off Child's Hill, which was so valuable to me, so valuable to me as a thinker, it kind of started my life as a better thinker. They're losing that, but actually what college, a lot of the college classes and the vibe in colleges, a lot of what it is now saying that there is one right set of views and it's this kind of, you know, woke ideology. Um, and it's right and anyone who disagrees with it is bad and anyone, and, and, and don't speak up, you know, unless you're going to agree with it. It's teaching people that Child's Hill is that, you know, it's, it's, it's nailing people's feet to Child's Hill. It's teaching people that these are right, this views are right. And like, you don't have any, you, nothing to, you should feel a complete conviction about them. Yeah. How do we fix it? Is it, is it, is it part of the administration? Is it part of the culture? Is it part of the, uh, is, is it part of like actually instilling in the individual, like 18 year olds, the idea that this is the beautiful way to live is to embrace the disagreement and the growth from that? It's awareness and courage. It's the same thing. So first of all, just get, when that awareness is people need to see what's happening here, that kids are getting, losing the, they're not going to college and becoming better, tougher, more robust thinkers. Yeah. They're actually going to college and becoming zealots. They're getting taught to be zealots. And the, and the website still advertises, you know, wide variety of, you know, the website is a bait and switch. You list all the universities, yeah, Harvard. It's a bait and switch. It's, it's still saying here, you're coming here for a wide intellectual, basically they're advertising this as an ideal lab and you get there and it's like, actually it's an echo chamber that you're paying money for. So if people realize that, they start to get mad, hopefully. And then courage, I mean, starts, you know, yes, brave students. There's been some very brave students who have started, you know, big think clubs and stuff like that, where it's like, we're going to have, you know, present both sides of a debate here. And that, that takes courage, but also courage and leadership. Like the, it's, it's like, if you look at these colleges, it's specifically the leaders who show strength, who've get, who get the best results. Remember the, the cudgel is soft. So if a leader of one of these places says, you know, the, the, the college presidents who have shown some strength, they actually don't get as much trouble. It's the ones who pander, the ones who, in that, you know, in that moment of truth, they, they shrink away, then they get a lot more trouble. The mob smells blood. PEDRO DA COSTA For the listener, the, the podcast favorite, Liv Burry just entered and your friend just entered the room. So do you mind if she joins us? LIV BURRY Please. PEDRO DA COSTA I think there's a story she has about you. So Liv, you mentioned something that there's a funny story about, we haven't talked at all about the actual process of writing the book. Is, is there, you guys made a bet of some kind? LIV BURRY Yeah. PEDRO DA COSTA Is this a true story? Is this a completely false fabric? LIV BURRY No, no, it's, it's true. PEDRO DA COSTA Liv is, she's mean, which I did not know mean Liv. She's like, she's like a bully. She's like scary. I had to have that, have that screenshot. So Liv was FaceTiming me and she was like, she was like being intimidating. I took a screenshot and I made it my phone background. So every time I opened it, I was like, ah. LIV BURRY So to give the background of this, it's because, if you hadn't noticed, Tim started writing this book, how many years ago? Six? PEDRO DA COSTA 2016. LIV BURRY Right. PEDRO DA COSTA Mid-2016. LIV BURRY Right, as sort of a response to like the Trump stuff and... PEDRO DA COSTA Not even, yeah, it was just supposed to be a mini post. I was like, oh, I'm so like, I was like, I'm looking at all these like future tech things and I feel this like uneasiness, like, ah, we're gonna like mess up all these things. Why? There's like some cloud over our society. Let me just write a mini post. And I opened it up to WordPress to write a one day little essay. And things went... PEDRO DA COSTA On politics. LIV BURRY It was going to be on like this feeling I had that, like this feeling I had that we were, our tech was just growing and growing and we were becoming less wise. What's up? What's up with that? And I just wanted to write like, just like a little like a little thousand word essay on like something I think we should pay attention to and that was the beginning of this six year nightmare. PEDRO DA COSTA Did you anticipate the blog post would take a long while? LIV BURRY I don't remember the process fully in terms of... I remember you saying, oh, I'm actually writing this is it's turning into a bigger thing. And I was like, you know, because the more we talked about it, we were talking about it. I was like, oh, this goes deep, because I didn't really understand the full scope of the situation, like nowhere near. And you sort of explained it. I was like, okay, yeah, I see that. And then the more we dug into it, the sort of the deeper and deeper and deeper it went. But no, I did not anticipate it would be six years. Let's put it that way. And... PEDRO DA COSTA When was your TED Talk on procrastination? DAVID FALZON So that was, that was March of 2016. And I started this book three months later, and fell into the biggest procrastination hole that I've ever fallen into. PEDRO DA COSTA Oh, wow. DAVID FALZON The irony isn't lost on me. I mean, it's like, it's, I just like I like how much credit I have as as for that TED Talk. I'm like, I am legit procrastinator. That is not I'm not just saying it like... PEDRO DA COSTA But it wasn't just that. Because I mean, you did, you know, you did intend it to start out as a blog post, but then you're like, actually, this needs to be multiple. Actually, let's make it into a full series. You know what, I'll turn it into a book. And then that's why... DAVID FALZON And what also what Liv witnessed a few times, and my wife has witnessed like 30 of these is like these, these 180 epiphanies, where I'll be like, like, I'll have a moment when I'm and I don't know what, you know, sometimes it's that there's a really good idea, but sometimes it's like, I'm just dreading having to finish this the way it is. And so there's epiphanies where it's like, you know what, I need to start over from the beginning and just make this like a short, like 20 little blog post list. And then I'll do that. And I'll say, no, no, no, I have like a new epiphany. And it's these and yeah, it's kind of like the crazy person a little bit. GABY WOOD But anyway, can I tell the story of the bed? All right. So things came to a head when we were in, we were all on vacation in Dominican Republic. Tim and his wife, me and Igor. And we were in the ocean. And I remember you'd been in the ocean for like an hour, just bobbing in there, becoming it. And we got talking and we were talking about the book. And you know, you were expressing just like this, you know, just the horror of the situation, basically. You're like, look, I just, I'm so close, but there's still this and then there's this. And an idea popped into my head, which is the, you know, poker players often, we will set ourselves like negative bets, you know, like essentially, if we don't get a job done, then we have to do something we really don't want to do. So instead of having a carrot, like a really, really big stick. So I had the idea to ask Tim, OK, what is the worst either organization or individual that you, if you had to, you know, that you would loathe to give a large sum of money to? And he thought about it for a little while and he gave his answer. And I was like, all right, what's your net worth? He said his net worth. All right, 10% of your net worth to that thing. If you don't get the draft, because, oh, that's right. But just before that, I'd asked him how long, like if you had a gun to your head, onto your wife's head, and you had to get the book into a state where you could like send off an edit to the, a draft to your editor, how long? And he's like, oh, I guess like I could get it like 95% good in a week. And 95% good in a month. I was like, OK, great. In one month's time, if you do not have that edit handed in, really scary. 10% of your net worth is going to this thing that you really, really think is terrible. But you're forgetting the kicker. The kicker was that, because, you know, procrastinators, they self-defeat. That's what they do. And then Liv says, I'm going to sweeten the deal. And I am going to basically match you. And I'm going to put in, I'm going to send this, like a huge amount of my own money there if you don't do it. So, and I can't, that's, that would be really bad for her. So not only are you screwing yourself, you're screwing a friend. And she was like, and as your friend, because I'm your friend, I will send it. I will send the money. I will send the money, I mean, like, that, you know, like, tyranny. And I got the draft in. Yeah. I got the draft in. Just! I know. Well, I was... The ego could attest to this. Actually, it was funny because it was, it was like supposed to be by the summer solstice or whatever it was. It was like a certain date. And I got it in at four. I got it in at 4am, like the next morning. But then, and they were both like, that doesn't count. I'm like, it does. It's still, for me, it's the same day still. It's okay. Can you imagine how fucked in the head you have to be? Yeah. To like, literally, technically pass the deadline by four hours. And an obscene amount of money to a thing you loathe. That's how bad his sickness is. Because I knew the hard deadline. I knew that there was no way she was going to actually send that money because it was 4am. So I knew I actually had the whole night. So yeah. You know, I should actually punish you. And just, I should send like a nominal amount to that thing. No, thanks. No. But yeah. Is there some micro like lessons from that, from how to avoid procrastination writing a book that you've learned? Yes. Well, I've learned a lot of things. I mean, like first, don't take, don't write like a dissertation about like proving some grand theory of society. Because that's really procrastinating. Like I would have been an awful PhD student for that reason. So, and so like, I'm going to do another book and it's going to be like a bunch of short chapters that are one-offs. Because that's like, it just doesn't feed into procrastination. Your book is like a giant like framework. There is grand theories. I know. All through your book. I know. And I learned not to do that again. I did it once. I don't want to do it again. Oh, with the book. Yeah. Yeah. I learned that like. So the book is a giant mistake. Yes. Don't do another one of this. Look, look, some people should. It's just not for me. You just did it. I know. And it, and it almost killed me. Okay. So that's the first one. But secondly, yeah. Like basically there's two ways to fix procrastination. One is you fix, it's like a picture. You have a boat that's leaking and it's not working very well. You can fix it in two ways. You can get your hammer and nails out and your boards and actually fix the boat, or you can duct tape it for now to get yourself across the river, but it's not actually fixed. So ideally down the road, I have repaired whatever kind of bizarre mental illness that I have that makes me procrastinate in a very, like, I just don't self-defeat in this way anymore. But in the meantime, I can duct tape the boat by bringing what I call the panic monster into the situation via things like this and this scary person and having external pressure to have external pressure of some kind is critical for me. It's, it's, yes, I don't have the muscle to do the work I need to do without external pressure. By the way, Liv, is there a possible future where you write a book? And meanwhile, by the way, huge procrastinator. That's the funny thing about this. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. I mean, I'm- How long did your last video take? Oh my God. Is there advice that you give to Liv how to get the videos done faster? Well, it would be the same exact thing. Actually, I can give good procrastination advice. Panic monster? Yeah, well, we should do it together. It should be like we have this date, but, you know, it's, it's- We should actually just do another bet. I have to have my script done by this time. Yes. I gotta get the third part out. Because then you'll actually do it. And, and, and it's not the thing is the time in, but it's like, if you, if you could take three weeks on a video and instead you take 10 weeks, it's not like, oh, well, I've also, I'm having more fun in those 10 weeks. You're, you're, the whole 10 weeks are bad. Yeah, it's torture. Bad. So you're, you're just, you're just having a bad time and you're getting less work done and less work out. And it's not like you're enjoying your personal life. It's bad for you, for your relationships. It's bad for your, your own. But you keep doing it anyway. Yeah. Well, a lot of people, a lot of people have troubles keeping a diet, right? Yeah. Primitive mind. Why'd you point at me when you said that? That was offensive. What's your procrastination weakness? Do you have one? Everything. Everything. What are you doing right now? Everything. Everything. Preparing for a conversation. I had your book, amazing book. I really enjoyed it. I started reading it. I was like, this is awesome. It's so awesome that I'm going to save it when I'm behind the computer and can take notes, like good notes. Of course that resulted in like a last minute, everything, everything, everything I'm doing in my life. Not everyone's like that. You know, people self-defeat in different ways. Some people don't have this particular problem. Adam Grant is a, he calls himself a pre-crastinator where he gets an assignment. He will go home and do it until it's done and handed it, which is also not necessarily good. You know, it's like you're rushing it either way, but it's better. But some people have the opposite thing where they will, um, the, the, the, the, the looming deadline makes them so anxious that they go and fix it. Right. And the procrastinator I think has a similar anxiety, but it, they, they resolve it in a totally different way. Well, they don't solve it. They just live with the anxiety. Right, right. They just live with the anxiety. Now I think there's a even bigger group of people. So there's these people, the Adam Grants, there's people like me, and then there's people who have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but they're still part of a bigger group of people that actually, they, they, um, they need a deadline there to do something. So they actually, they, they still are motivated by a deadline. And as soon as you have all the things in life that don't have a deadline, like working out and like working on that album you wanted to write, they don't do anything either. So there's actually like, that's why procrastination is a much bigger problem than people realize, because it's not just the funny last second people. It's anyone who, um, actually can't get things done that don't have a deadline. You dedicate your book, quote, to Tannis, who never planned on being married to someone who would spend six years talking about his book on politics, but here we are. What's the secret to a successful relationship with a procrastinator? That's maybe for both of you. Um, well, I think the first and most important thing. You already started with a political answer, I can tell. Okay, go ahead. No, the first and most important thing is, because people who don't procrastinate, if you don't, it's like, you will, people, the instinct is to judge it as like, uh, that's either, either just think, think they're just being like a loser, or they're taking it, they'll take it personally, you know. Uh, and instead to see this as like, this is, this is a, uh, some form of addiction or some form of, um, ailment. You know, they're not just being a dick, right? Like, they have a problem and so, some compassion, but then also maybe finding that line where you can, you know, maybe apply some tough love, some middle ground. On the other hand, you might say that, you know, you don't want the, the significant other relationship where it's like, they're the one nagging you. Maybe that's, you don't want them even being part of that. And I think maybe it's, you know, better to have a live, do it instead. Right. Having someone who can like create the infrastructure where they aren't the direct stick. You need a bit of carrot and stick, right? Maybe they can be the person who keeps reminding them of the carrot. And then they set up the friend group to be the stick. And then that keeps your relationship in a good place. Stick, like looming in the background. That's your friend group. Okay. At the beginning of the conversation, we talked about how all of human history can be presented as a thousand page book. What are you excited about for the 1000th, how do you say that, first page? So the next 250 years. What are you most excited about? I'm most excited about, have you read the Fable of the Dragon? No. Okay. Well, it's an allegory for death and it's, you know, Nick Bostrom and he talks about the, he compares death to a dragon that eats 60 million people or whatever the number is every year. And you just, every year we shepherd those people up and they feed them to the dragon. And that there's a Stockholm syndrome when we say that's just a lot of man. And that's what we have to do. And anyone who says, maybe we should try to beat the dragon, they get called vain and narcissistic. But someone who tries to, someone who goes, does chemo, no one calls them being a narcissistic. They say, they're, they're, you know, good, good for you, right? You're a hero. You're, you're, you're fighting, fighting the good fight. So I think there's some disconnect here. And I think that if we can get out of that Stockholm syndrome and realize that death is just the machine, the human physical machine failing, and that there's no law of nature that says you can't with enough technology, repair the machine and keep it going until no one, I don't think anyone wants to live forever. People think they do. No one does. But until people are ready. And I think when we hit a world where we can, we have enough tech that we can continue to keep the human machine alive until the person says, I'm done, I'm ready. I think we will look back and we will think that anything before that time, that'll be the real ADBC. You know, we'll look back at BC before the big advancement and it'll seem so sad and so heartbreaking, barbaric. And people will say, I can't believe that humans like us had to live with that when they lost loved ones and they, they died before they were ready. I think that's the ultimate achievement, but we need to stop criticizing and smearing people who you talk about it. So you think that's actually doable in the next 250 years? Yes. A lot happens in 250 years, especially when technology really exponentially, yeah. And you think humans will be around versus AI completely takes over where mortality means something completely different? I mean, look, the optimist in me and maybe the stupid kind of 2023 person in me says, yeah, of course we'll make it, we'll figure it out. But you know, I mean, we are going into a great, you know, I have a friend who knows as much about the future as anyone I know. I mean, he's really, he's a big investor in, you know, future tech and he, he's really on the pulse of things and he just says, future is going to be weird. That's what he says. Future is going to be weird. And it's, it's going to be weird. Don't look at the last few decades of your life and apply that forward and say, that's just what life is like. No, no, no. It's going to be weird and different. Well, some of my favorite things in this world are weird. And speaking of which, it's good to have this conversation. It's good to have you as friends. This was an incredible one. Thanks for coming back. And Liv, thanks for talking with me a bunch more times. This was awesome. Thank you, Lex. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tim Urban. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Winston Churchill. When there's no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/GkZz2I6sK08

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Sarma Melngailis: Bad Vegan, Fraud, Prison, and Sociopathy | Lex Fridman Podcast #288

He made me think that everything was going to be reversed and okay, and anybody that money was borrowed from, they would get it back maybe tenfold. It was this weird situation of having one foot in his reality, and potentially believing the things he was saying, or even over time, wanting to believe them more and more because the alternative was worse. The alternative was increasingly a bigger and bigger nightmare. The following is a conversation with Sarma Melengalas, a chef and restaurateur who was the subject of the Netflix documentary, Bad Vegan, Fame, Fraud, and Fugitives, that documents the rise and fall of her vegan raw food restaurants in New York City, that ended in what she called a road trip from hell. Being arrested in Tennessee, her pleading guilty for stealing over $2 million, and serving four months at Rikers Island Jail. Sarma disputes the veracity of the documentary and its conclusions, saying that she was misrepresented. I wanted to talk to her to get the full story, and to seek understanding of who she is as a human being, the good and the bad. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends, here's Sarma Melengalas. You said that you did a lot of reading when you were growing up, and you mentioned fear and loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. From the reading you've done in those early days, how did you see the world? Was it to you a beautiful place or a cruel place? I don't think I thought about the world. You were focused on family, just basic day-to-day life? I think I was focused on day-to-day. I had an awareness of not fitting in, but I think back then it felt like something was wrong versus some people are just that way. Speaking of books, I read a book called Party of One by a woman named Anneli Rufus that somebody gave me and suggested I read and that helped a lot. That was one book that made me feel like, it made me understand things from the past that I hadn't understood before specifically feeling out of place, even among my family, which is where you're not supposed to feel out of place. Yeah, I'm not sure where I saw it, but I think you mentioned that you were a bit of a loner. I also think I saw somewhere pictures of you with green hair in high school and a wild haircut. What was that about? Was that real? Am I just imagining? No, you're not imagining it. It's strange because I was a loner. It'd be strange to do something that calls so much attention to yourself. Because back then, I grew up in a suburb of Boston in Newton. Anybody that was there around that time, probably if you said that girl with green hair or blue hair, it was blue most of the time, they would remember seeing me walking down the street because it stood out like crazy, especially back then. Now, it wouldn't stand out so much, but back then it really stood out. So I was trying to think about why I did that when I was kind of shy, and on the one hand, wouldn't want to bring attention to myself, but I did something that did. And it wasn't my family, to their credit, they were fine with it. So it wasn't a rebellion against them or anything like that. They were fine with it. I don't think they loved it, but... Your dad was a physicist at MIT. Yes. So he was cool with your green hair when you're a rebellion. That's just the way of life. He was fine with the green hair, but I think in some ways maybe they had to be fine with it because I didn't cause problems otherwise. And I got good grades in school. I was a very low maintenance child, I think. Even with the green hair. So Hunter S. Thompson wrote a lot of good stuff. He has a lot of just brilliant quotes, a lot of brilliant lines. So one of the ones I love is, life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, wow, what a ride. What do you think about that? Is that good life advice from Hunter S. Thompson? I think so. I think he followed it, right? Somewhere, I heard recently what he consumed in a day. Yeah. And it was kind of astonishing. It's funny, when I was in college, there were always really interesting people coming through, speakers and whatnot, and I tended to not go to events and whatnot, but in the four years I was there, I mean, really interesting people came through and gave talks. You know, I don't know, just a lot of famous people. But then one day, Hunter S. Thompson came to speak, and that was the only one I attended. Oh, wow. That was the only interesting person who came to speak on the campus that I attended was Hunter S. Thompson, and he had a glass of whatever it was, whiskey. And I don't remember a whole lot about it, but it was entertaining. And yeah, I mean, later in his life, he started making less and less sense, but he was still somehow like embodying the crazy that he represented throughout his life, the boldness, the fearlessness, the wildness, all that kind of stuff. And we'll talk about Johnny Depp a little bit too. Funny enough, there's like a echo. Obviously, Johnny Depp played him, or he starred in Feel Unloathing, and they hung out together, and it just seemed to somehow, like the universe rhymes in these two individuals. They're both madmen in different kind of ways. So you also told me that Leon the Professional is one of your favorite films. It's also the reason you named your dog Leon. So what do you find beautiful and powerful about this film? I've watched it a bunch of times, but it's been a while since I've watched it. So for people who haven't watched it, there's a guy named Leon played by Jean Reno. There's a young girl, I think, I don't know, 13, 14, Matilda played by Natalie Portman, and she's abused. She has a really hard life. Her parents are, spoiler alert, murdered. And then she finds protection under this fellow Leon, who also happens to be a professional assassin. And he is also kind of a Forrest Gump type character. Like he's a really simple, simple human. He almost, he seems to be like the immature one, or like rather the one who's young, and she seems to have a wisdom far beyond her age because of the hard life she had to live through. And then they're here huddling together from the cruelty of the world and finding connection. Yeah, I think it's one of those films where there's so many interesting things about it, but I'm sure one of them is just the contradiction of him being a caring person and reluctant to get attached to her. He tries to, I think he knows, he was very reluctant to get attached to her in the beginning. And so you see all of his humanity, but yet he's also an assassin that kills people. So that's interesting. And I think probably a psychoanalyst would have a field day with why I like that movie so much. And I haven't gone there myself, but there's something I think about. She, even in the brief part that depicts her in the beginning, it seems clear that she's sort of out of place in her family. And then, yeah, there's all kinds of interesting things about their relationship along the way. What I like about that movie, and I had to think about it recently because I've read stuff about it that bothered me, or it bothered me the fact that I haven't really thought about it before. For people who haven't watched the movie, so here's a young underage girl who kind of comes on to him. First of all, I think she actually just doesn't know what familial love is. So this is the only way she knows how to express love. That's one. And two is, a lot of bad people in this world would take advantage of that. And the fact that she finally met a human being who doesn't and is just there to protect her, that's a real sort of, I don't know, a powerful statement of what it means to be sort of like a father figure, I suppose, a protector. So that to me, I love the idea of being sort of the protector, that there's something worthwhile in this world to protect amidst all the cruelty that's all around. So that's a beautiful kind of, you're basically saving this young human's, or you're repairing this young human's path to love, to real love in life. Because that idea of love was destroyed for her. Just family, everything is, everything is sort of, everything around her is broken and he's kind of repairing it by reestablishing what that kind of love can be. I don't know. And the plant, they save the plant also. Well, there's also just the simplicity of the film, just from a cinematic perspective is beautiful. The music, the way it looks, the minimalism. Even the violence was beautiful. Yeah, the violence. It was over the top. And also the bad guy, the bad cop, played by Gary Oldman. Yeah, he was amazing. I think he was listening to Beethoven or something like that and he'd taken some sort of pills and drugs of some kind. So there was a kind of, like it's part of the orchestra, like the violence was part of some kind of musical creation. Yeah, it's interesting, because I turn away from violence or films usually that have violence or TV or anything that has that sort of element to it, except in certain cases where- Where the violence is beautiful? Yeah, yeah. Or did you see the movie True Romance? Yes. That's my second favorite movie. Okay, that's probably my favorite movie. Oh, well, interesting. That's my second favorite movie. That's a more simple kind of love, but also with the violence that is beautiful, I suppose you could say. Yeah, and my favorite scene is the one with Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini. Oh, yeah, where there's a shotgun involved. Yeah. Yeah, and then- It actually makes me cry every time I see it, for some reason. So for people who haven't seen the film, I think he's actually, I think he's hitting her, or like there's blood and violence and so on, because she's resisting being murdered. Yeah, there's a lot of violence. And then he throws her into the glass, the shower thing, and she's all cut up and beat up. Only and she laughs. Yeah, there's just so much passion in it. She knows she's gonna, or in that moment, she knows or thinks she knows that she's gonna die anyway, because she knows he's gonna kill her. So she kind of gives it all she has. But she also just has guts, she's not afraid. Yeah, well, and also she loves Clarence. Yeah, the love comes through through that violence, yeah. Just like Clarence, her fella in that film has the same kind of thing when he visits- Well, it was Gary Oldman again. It was Gary Oldman again, that's right. The pimp. Looking very different. Drexel. Drexel, yeah. Yeah, and he's also fearless in that interaction saying, she's not mine. It's interesting, that movie is so romantic. And a happy ending, spoiler alert, in a way. That's what I like about it too, because I feel like some movies should come with, I don't wanna watch a movie if it's gonna be devastating, usually, unless it's worthwhile in some other way, but I'm kind of sensitive and I don't want, I don't like movies that have a terrible ending. I mean, there's a book I read because it got so many good reviews, and the very last scene, the woman steps in front of a train and it was like, so I'm partial to movies with happy endings. Leon ends with loss in the movie. Right, but it's still inspiring. Love persists in some kind of form. Yeah. She persists. And the plant. And the plant. Okay, sure, sure. True Romance does have one of the, I mean, it's probably unhealthy. The ending scene is just amazing. You're so cool, where she, is that one, where she just kind of looks at Clarence and her son and child or whatever, and she's saying, you're so cool, you're so cool. Yeah, that's love. I just felt that movie has so much in it, because it's funny, and there's so many good actors in that film. And Brad Pitt plays in that film, a pivotal role of Pothead on couch. Yeah, they're all so good and funny, and Michael Rapaport, and even Val Kilmer. People don't realize he's in the movie because he doesn't look like himself. Wait, what did Val Kilmer look like? Val Kilmer's in the very end. It's, you know when he's, there's like the Elvis sitting there talking to him in the end? That's Val Kilmer. Yeah, you don't notice it unless you somehow either are very perceptive or noticed it in the credits. Yeah, and Quentin Tarantino wrote the film, I think. Yes. Which is interesting. Directed by Tony Scott, and the music is beautiful too. And Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper plays Clarence's dad, and they have this very racist sounding scene, but the big important aspect of that scene is it's a father willing to die to protect his son. I mean, it's so much beautiful violence in that film. There is, there is. I love that film so much. And she's a prostitute, or not really, part time, short time. No, it was her first time. First time. Yeah. Okay, and he saved her. And, hmm. My third favorite film has no violence whatsoever. What's your third favorite film? A Room With A View. I feel like you'd like it. It's, I forget the author, it's a book, and I read the book much later, but it's Helena Bonham Carter, and Daniel Day-Lewis is in it, and Julian Sands. Daniel Day-Lewis is a fascinating character. He's amazing in this film, because he plays, he's very funny. He sort of plays a, he's a comical character, which is unlike most of what he does, I think. I don't watch a ton of movies, so, but yeah, he plays, his role is funny. Well, that's a heck of a top three. You brought me some books, some bread and books. Yeah. Some Russian bread, Russian-inspired bread. Yeah, I mean, it's Latvian, but it's similar to. Close enough. Similar to what's made in Russia, and it's made at a Russian bakery in Brooklyn. Where your dad is from, right? My dad is from Latvia, yeah. So you got me some books, Beautiful Ruins. Yeah, and if you never read them, who cares? That's totally fine. People give you books, and then you feel like you just, you sort of feel like. I see this as, we'll talk about this. This is part therapy session. I don't feel the need to satisfy people's happiness. That's a good thing. Okay, so, but it could also be an opportunity to experience something I never otherwise would have. So, Beautiful Ruins. It's a book that made me laugh and cry, and it's just a happy story. And for some reason, I don't know exactly why, but for some reason, when you asked me to come, it just, I thought, oh, I'm gonna bring a copy of that book. You just felt, it came, a voice told you. Yeah. There's others, Darkness Visible. These are more. Memoir of Madness, compelling, harrowing, a vivid portrait of a debilitating disorder. Offers the solace of shared experience, the New York Times. This is. William Styron. There's a little bit about this book that reminds me of the Karl Deisseroth book, because he writes about his own condition in, I mean, he's an amazing writer, so he writes about it in this beautiful way, and oddly enough, in some ways, it's kind of delightful. So, it's not at all a depressing book. At least, I didn't find it depressing at all. I don't think it is. But he writes about his own experience with depression in such a beautiful way. My own copy is full of underlines. I would love that copy, too. I would love to look into the underlines and the books with notes, those little secrets that people leave, traces. That's part of why I like paper books, is because I underline, I tend to underline like crazy. The Karl Deisseroth book is full of underlines, too. Well, I do the same thing on Kindle, but, and then you can actually more effectively go back to the things you've underlined, because you highlight and so on. But, in fact, when you underline on paper books, you sometimes never go back, which always makes me sad. To the book? To the things you've underlined. In the paper books? Yeah, in the paper books. Oh, I do, I go back. Yeah, I go back a lot. Do you wonder what the heck you were thinking about when you wrote something? No, well, sometimes I underline things that are, well, also what I do is I have a whole file in Evernote of transcribed quotes from books, ones that I wanna save. So I might underline a lot of things in a book, and then maybe like a third of them, I wanna write them down somewhere. So I write those down, and I think even the time it takes to transcribe it is somehow worthwhile. It's like searing it in your brain. And you're reliving the memory of having read it the first time. Yeah, and then sometimes I'll pick up books. I even, and sometimes I just underline sentences that are, it's not the content of the sentence. It's more that it's just a beautifully written sentence or like a particularly apt metaphor or something that's really nice. And I like paper books too, because I bought Beautiful Ruins. I would have never heard of it, I don't think, except one of my favorite things is to go to used bookstores. Actually, Goodwill sometimes has really good big book selections, and depending on the area where you go, sometimes you find a lot of treasures there. And what ends up happening a lot is I end up buying books that I know, sometimes also because I lost all my belongings at one point, so I'll very often buy books that I've already read just to have them. But then what always ends up happening is I'll find, there'll be a couple of books that I buy that I've never heard of the author. I don't really know anything about, I don't know anything about the book at all, but something drew me to it. And what I like about that is you're buying used books, so it costs a dollar or two. So if you made a mistake, like no big deal, who cares? So, but every time I come back with a book haul, there's usually at least one gem that I end up loving, and I'm so glad that I read it. And Beautiful Ruins was that book for me. And I was drawn to it because of the cover art. Like I just loved the cover and the colors. And then I picked it up and read the back and bought it. And I also feel bad sometimes buying used books when the author is still alive, because I feel like if you write a book, you should get the royalties. So- But you get to live with that regret. Well, also, I mean, I'll usually end up putting a picture of Leon reading the book online, and then other people buy it and read it. And so I feel like I've made up for- You make up for it. I've made up for depriving him of the royalties. I used to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I know it well. I used to hang out at the pit in Harvard Square with my green and blue hair when I was very, way too young to be doing that by myself. And there's a guy that I think has been there for a long time, sort of between Kendall and Central, that would just lay out used books and sell them. And I always loved that guy, whoever he was. He had a cool hat. He's an older gentleman. And you could just tell he's seen some things. I don't know who he is. I always wanted to actually talk to him for a long time, but I was too afraid, maybe because I wouldn't be able to handle what he had to tell me. Because I almost wanted to maintain the innocence of just, okay, here's this guy. But he was so... Every time you would ask him a question about a book, first of all, he's read all of them. Oh, that's interesting. Which means he's traveled quite a few places inside these worlds. And then you would tell him, I would look at a book, right? And he would catch you being curious about it. And then he would walk up to you and then he would start talking about the book. And he would always forget that you were there. He's almost like, he's not trying to sell you the books. Apart talking to himself? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like almost like an ex-girlfriend he's visiting through this book or something. Did you buy books from him? Yeah, yeah, definitely. But the experience of just being there because he lays them out and people actually that watch or listen to this probably would be able to tell me what his name is. Because I'd love to find that guy again. I'm sure he's still there. Maybe you'll have him on the podcast. I 100% will. But it's almost terrifying. I'm not sure I can handle. Because he's been through some things. I'm not sure if he's homeless or just looks like it. Yep, that's sometimes a thing. And some of my favorite people either are homeless or look like it. So, okay, what's the third one? The Confession of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas, A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight. It's a book I recommend a lot. Because I've read a lot about sociopathy and I've read all the books by psychologists. And this one's written by a woman who understands herself that she is a sociopath. And so it's beautifully written. But I learned more from that book than from any other book. And I think I thought about it a long time ago. I think a lot of conversations, you've talked a lot about good and evil and whether everybody's really good or some people are not good. And I think sociopathy is something that I think the world needs to understand much better. And so that book helped me understand a lot. And it's beautifully written and she tackles all the really interesting moral questions. Like, what if we were able to definitively diagnose people in some way? Like there was a, you could immediately identify who's a full-blown sociopath. And then what as a society would you do with them? Because in most cases, they're just gonna cause destruction and pain and harm and or potentially rise to power and become president or something. So I just found that book fascinating. And we'll return to this idea, because it's fascinating. We'll return to human psychology and human nature. But let's go through the timeline of your life. Let's take a stroll. So you wrote that the documentary about you called Bad Vegan Fame Fraud Fugitives is not a documentary. You got some things right, some things wrong, and some were quote, disturbingly misleading. So let's go through and get things right today. First, can I give you a whirlwind summary, the way I understand it? And also for context of people. So 2004, you, Matthew Kenney, and Jeffrey Chodorow opened Pure Foods and Wine in New York City. Did I say their names correctly? Pure Food and Wine. No, their names. Oh, theirs. Well, yeah, Matthew Kenney and Jeffrey Chodorow, yeah. Yeah, so it's, and I'll ask you about what it takes to launch and run a restaurant in New York City. That's a fascinating story in itself. So it's an upscale raw food restaurant. All right, that's 2004. 2007, you opened One Lucky Duck, Juice and Takeaway, and second and third locations in 2009 and 14. All of those things closed in 2016, 15 and 16, okay. All right, 2009, Jeffrey lends you $2.1 million to buy the business outright, and Matthew is out. Matthew was out earlier than that, and then time passed, time passed, and I had, what was complicated is I had started the One Lucky Duck brand on my own. At first it was a dot-com that was doing like delivery. It was a dot-com where people could order ingredients and things and all of the products that we made and packaged, so we made a bunch of cookies and snacks and things that were, I think, different and, if I may say so myself, better than other. Strong words. Products out there. Talking trash already. Yeah, but then. About the cookies. But I feel like I can brag about our food and products because I wasn't, you know, a few recipes early on I came up with, but it was, the people that worked with me that created really good recipes and products, and I was just kind of there curating it all or helping to get it out there. What was your favorite thing that you've created? Maybe yourself eat. Not you created, but this whole, all of these efforts I've created in terms of meal. Like, you said cookies, you said cookies, what are we talking about here? Oh, that's a hard question. I mean. It's just, okay, not the favorite, but like something that pops into memory that brought you joy. The Malo Mar. Everybody loved the Malo Mar. So very often we made like raw vegan versions of things that people are familiar with. So it was, I think it was pecans. It was like a salty cookie made with nuts and then covered in chocolate, and then there's a big blob of coconut cream. I love coconut. Which it didn't taste coconutty. Our ice cream was made with a coconut also. It's like the meat from coconuts, pureed, and then there's some soaked cashews in there. But anyway, it was a blob of vanilla flavored cream, kind of like a healthy natural version of fluff. I don't know if you're familiar with fluff. Basically every single word you say I'm not familiar with, you should see my diet. I don't. It's like steak and vegetables. Fluff is like a thing that I remember it from my childhood, like peanut butter and fluff is a ridiculously delicious combination. Is it fluffy or is it not? It's like a marshmallow. It's basically like if you softened marshmallows and made it into a luxurious, amazing goo. Oh, so it's like a fancy marshmallow. And then put it in a jar. Okay. And then made it spreadable. It's spreadable marshmallows, kind of. Oh, I see. I think that's, yeah. Spreadable marshmallows, got it. Yeah, so there's a big blob of that. I didn't know that existed. That's a thing? Fluff. Fluff. I know. Does everyone, do people know about this? Oh yeah, everybody knows. People, I mean, I think so. People know about fluff. And see, I think I went, I took the road less traveled by. You know, I went the peanut butter and Nutella road in terms of spreadable things. Nutella is like the chocolate version. And then fluff is like the vanilla equivalent, sort of. But I think commercial fluff that you buy in the store is just like sugar and whatever else they put in there. Anyway. So it's not actually fluffy. It's kind of fluffy, but it's wet. Because Nutella is not fluffy. Yeah, so it's like Nutella if you whipped it. And then kind of got a little bit aerated. So it's a bit more fluffy. So fluff was a part of the formula here. So this fluff. So the coconut cream that we made was like a healthy version of fluff, kind of. Except it would, you know, you could make a quenelle, like a little scoop of it, and it would stay in that form. Malamars were refrigerated. And then there's like chocolate drizzled over that. So it had that like salty, sweet thing going on. That was probably my favorite. That's a dessert. Yeah, it was like a dessert snack. You wouldn't order it on the restaurant menu, but in the takeaway you could get them. Or sometimes some people would get them shipped on dry ice and pay a lot of money. Like a lot of money to have them shipped on dry ice. People are funny. I know. I kind of want to like name drop, because it was Tom Brady used to order them. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, they would order those shipped on ice to Boston. Yeah. Continuing on, in 2011, you meet Anthony Stranges on Twitter, and then in real life, also around this time, I think before you got your rescue dog, a pit bull named Leon. Yeah, before. 2011, 2010. Do you remember? It was September, 2010. So, because I think he was born roughly around March. I gave him a designated birthday of March 10th, 2010. Why is that? Why March 10th? I wrote about the story of adopting him on my website a long time ago, and then I reposted it here on my current website. And what happened, I got weirdly obsessed with Leon before he was Leon. He was a dog in a shelter named Quinn. And I couldn't stop thinking about him. Him specifically. Him specifically, yeah. I saw him and there's something very special about him. I was trying to convince somebody else to adopt a dog. So, and I- Alec Baldwin. Yeah, and it didn't occur to me that I would get a- I like how you didn't name drop him, but you named drop Tom Brady. I like it. So, I was trying to convince him to get a dog because I thought, you know, he should have a dog. I saw Leon's picture and just got weirdly obsessed with it in a way that I couldn't really explain. And I was laying in bed one night and thinking, I just couldn't stop thinking about him, the dog. And the paper, or the description in the shelter bio said that he was roughly five months old, or however, whatever it gave us his age, I went back and it would have been March 20, would have been March of that year that he was born. And I had a cat that I was particularly attached to. I had two cats, brother and sister, but the boy cat, we had sort of like a, something that felt like a, you know, like we'd look at each other and like, there was something there. I don't know what it was, but, and in fact, when he got sick, I knew it before he even had any symptoms. It was like something in the way that he looked at me, I knew something was wrong. And then- Was it friendship? Was it like, was there a power dynamic? Cats seem to not really- Give a fuck? Yeah, they seem to dismiss you as- Usually, yeah. Your entire worth as a human being. Right. In a single look. Was that there or? He was more dog-like. He would occasionally fetch, like this little styrofoam thing I had, he would fetch it and bring it back. And he was friendly and, you know, if somebody came over, he would jump in their lap. He was less standoffish than most cats. But there was just something about the way he would look at me, I don't know. And I, maybe, probably, in his mind, he's just a cat, I give him food, whereas in my mind, it's some kind of, you know, great soul connection. Great, great long-running romance. Not in his kitty mind, but either way, so he died in March and I thought, so I sort of concocted this, I just thought, you know, that, well, if he died on March 10th, and so I thought, well, maybe Leon was born that same day and that's why I'm so drawn to him. I don't know. Okay, that makes sense. But then you just felt like, when you saw him, you just, like, there's something. It was his picture, yeah. Oh, the picture, and you were drawn something about the personality in the eyes. It was something about his picture, I don't know what it was. And everybody at the time was like, what are you thinking? Why would you get a dog? You can't, you know, can't even take care of yourself. You're overworked and busy, and why would you get a five-month-old pit bull mix? You know, why not get an older dog that's easier to take care of? And for me, it was like, I don't want any dog. I don't want, my intention isn't to get a dog, but there's something about this dog that I have to get. And so I went to see him, and then I had already filled out an application. It was just, I went to see him, and then I, it was the afternoon, and I sort of decided in my head, like, all right, I'm coming back to get him, I have to. And so the next morning, I got on the subway, I went back to get him, and I was crying on the subway, and I remember thinking that people, I don't like crying in public. I cry a lot, but I don't like crying in front of other people. And- I love it. Yeah. I thought people on the train looking at me probably think that, you know, I just, somebody died or- So you're crying on the way there or on the way back? On the way there to get him. Yeah. I don't, and I don't know why I was crying. It was just something about it was overwhelming, so. So tears of happiness or tears of something? Something. Yeah, I think tears are overwhelming. And now I'm like jumping off, but there was some, I don't, now I'm trying, was it in your conversation or the book, Karl Deisseroth talks about tears of joy and trying to explain them. And he said something about how it was like about, you know, because tears of sadness could be understood in a having like a evolutionary purpose, but why tears of joy? And I think he said it was something about like hope that could be like lost. So if you cried at a wedding, it might be like you're crying because their love is beautiful and you're crying because, you know, they could get hit by a bus tomorrow or something, you know, like it had something to do with that. And I thought, but I thought, to me it feels like overwhelmed because then how would that explain music? Because music will make me cry a lot. No, because it's anything beautiful, like love, you realize you're gonna have, it's gonna be over one day. So you- Or it's just overwhelming. It could be overwhelming. I think it's just overwhelming. But over, it could, like, if you had to explain, like one way to explain it, as you're saying is, it's so awesome that it breaks your heart that it's gonna be over. This feeling is gonna be over, the, either it's the song or the person, you're gonna lose them one day. Or at the dawn. I was watching something that, this is completely ridiculous, but I remember one time I probably was hormonal or something, but it was like an episode of Family Feud years ago and the, oh no, Wheel of Fortune. Yeah. It was Wheel of Fortune. And some family, like, won all this money and they were so happy, like it just, they were so happy, they must probably needed the money or something. And I started crying and I'm thinking, why am I crying? But I think it's just, I think it's just like an overwhelming, I think it's overwhelming in some way. And crying, like, crying, because crying is a relief. Like, you feel better after you cry. But that's not, doesn't explain the crying. You feel better after you cry. And you're saying it's overwhelming, but that's on the surface. The question is what's going on underneath. That's the yin-yang shadow. And I don't think, neither you or I can answer that question. Right. But there's something going on underneath. Right. There's probably something that touches you in some specific way. Yeah. And so you were crying on the subway. So I was crying on the subway. It's a very New York thing to do. Yeah, well, that's one of the things I love about New York, is people, you can be weird and do strange things and nobody's gonna look at you strangely or. The fascinating thing about New York, it's super crowded and yet you can still feel super alone. But also energized, because a lot of other things and places will make me feel depleted, but there's something about the energy of New York specifically that feels energizing. I mean, everybody is going about their day excited for a future they're building and so on. And that could be energy. Sure, sure. It could be overwhelming though. It can be, yeah. I mean, also depending on what neighborhood and what part. Well, I'm just talking about the subway. Right, yeah. The subway, and then there's the musicians. I love New York. New York at its best is a special place. I've never lived, but every time I visit, it's so many characters, so many fascinating people. Yeah. And then there's a bunch of people always crying on the subway. And you're one of those people. I was one of those people one day. Yeah. I befriended some busking musicians, like the guys that just play out on the street, these two young guys playing guitar. And I felt like it was one of those moments where it was like candid camera, because nobody was paying attention. And I thought it was like, it was so beautiful, I may have cried or almost cried. But anyway, I ended up becoming friends with them and helping them out in some ways. And I knew, I was like, well, they're gonna do really well. And now they're like playing large places and it's kind of fun to watch via Instagram. You know, they're going on tour in Europe and they were these two scrappy guys. Well, now it's just one of the guys. But they had like no money, nowhere to live, nothing. And another. And they didn't quit. No. Persisted. That's cool. Yeah, exactly. But I cried on the subway and I got there and he was there and I adopted him. But it just felt very profoundly like a force that was beyond me. Like I couldn't not get him. So he was the same in person as he was in the picture? Like, meaning in terms of like something like pulling you towards him, like some. Yeah, when I first met him the day before, he was really distracted, which I think is, you know, he is a puppy that spends most of his day in a cage, which is not natural. So when I, they let me take him for a walk and he was kind of, you know, distracted and all over the place. But then when we put him back in the cage, he sort of lay down and looked at me and I looked back at him. And of course I imagined all kinds of, I just looked at him and I thought, all right, don't worry, I'm coming back to get you. Like I'll get you. So yeah, it just, it felt like, it felt like something that I had no choice that I had to do. And that was the beginning of a 12 year journey together. An ongoing one. But so I wrote about these things on my website and I think it was, you know, among the many things that was later weaponized by Anthony Strange's. Just because I was so open about it. Yeah, and also just, it's not like I believe that he was, you know, that I was just expressing my feelings about how I felt going to get him, that there was something about Leon and specifically that I, it was like, I felt like I had to get him. So- Is there words you can put to your connection with Leon? Like, is it love? Is it friendship? Is it some kind of, like, what is it? Or are we getting to the crying and being overwhelmed? Something you just can't put words to? Yeah, it's probably something that's hard to put words to. Kind of like, I sort of feel like love being something that's hard to define is part of, is the definition. The fact that you can't define it. You know that- The moment you define it, you're no longer talking about love? Sort of, something like that. So- Well, my definition of love is whatever's going on in true romance. I don't know. Let me fly through the timeline before we get to any of the interesting details. So, in 2011, you meet Anthony Strangis. Then in 2012, you two get married. 2015, the staff walk out due to failure to pay from the two restaurants. It reopens in April of 2015. And July of that year, there's another walkout and so on. There's all this kind of stuff. It's a confusing timeline. Well, to me, that's not even... The point is in 2015, there's chaos happening. Okay. 2016, in the spring, Pure Foods and Wine closes. Closed in 2015. 2015, okay. There's some factual stuff that's not, yeah, maybe correct me on it. To me, it's not that important. To me, the spirit of the thing is important. Okay, May 12, 2016, you and your then husband, Anthony Strangis, were arrested after he ordered pizza using his real name. Okay, in May 2017, you pleaded guilty to stealing more than $2 million from investors and scheming to defraud, as well as, this is from Wikipedia. Yeah, I got it wrong. Well, let me just finish reading it and then you tell me why it's wrong. In May 2017, you pleaded guilty to stealing more than $2 million from investors and scheming to defraud, as well as criminal tax fraud charges. Why is Wikipedia wrong and how dare you? I know. Well, I mean, I did plead guilty to those things, which I had to, oh, I was, I got a jury duty summons and I had to fill out like what charges I pled guilty to. And I had to go online and look it up because I didn't really remember, which is, I thought that was interesting. I had to go look it up, but. Actually, let me finish the time because there's one more point. Oh, yeah. March 16th, 2022, bad vegan documentary comes out where you're interviewed. Does, they tell the story. Some stuff is true, some is not, some is disturbingly misleading, as you said. Okay, timeline over. Anyway, what's wrong with the, how would you elaborate onto the, you pleading guilty for $2 million stealing? So a lot of people plead guilty when they're, for reasons other than they're actually guilty. So, you know, it's, even right now, if I knew that I was gonna have to spend four months or three and a half at Rikers, and I was thinking about this recently, and even if I knew that I'd be acquitted at the end of a trial, I very likely would have just taken the four months because, you know, the stress of going through a trial, but in particular, it'd be incredibly stressful not knowing the outcome. And then money and expense I didn't have. And so, you know, people plead guilty all the time, even if they don't think that they should. And my situation was so complicated and hard to understand that it just was the easier thing to do. But also I just was kind of going on the advice of lawyers. So the choice, just so I understand, was to plead guilty or to go through a lengthy trial. And that trial would stretch a long time, and it would be extremely stressful. And extremely expensive. Because you have to pay the lawyers. Right, and I didn't have anything. Right. And so a lot of people in that situation might choose to plead guilty. And so that doesn't necessarily mean the full heaviness of that statement of guilt. Right, and I think people plead guilty all the time in situations where they're being threatened with like a heavy sentence, and they sort of feel like they have no choice. But that's kind of part of a lot of things that are messed up about the system overall that didn't necessarily apply in my case. So we'll talk about to what degree you're guilty, and what that even means. Yeah, yeah. Because it depends on intention, I think. Yeah, yeah. But then the word intention also means a lot of things like the word love. That's true. All right. So the restaurant closed the first time when I was away and told to be off communication. And then I- By Anthony. Yes. And then- He told you not to talk to anybody. He told me not to like open email or look at my phone or whatever. And so when I came back and had to get it reopened, which seemed like an unbelievably difficult task, and I was kind of shocked that I was able to pull it off, I worked incredibly hard to get it reopened. And because that place meant everything to me. And so I just had to get it reopened. Were you surrounded by people that were just angry at you? At that time, not, well- The staff and all that. Yeah, but most of them came back. A lot of them came back. I think what was so unbelievably painful about that whole time was like not being able to tell anybody what was really going on. And in a sense, not really knowing what was going on myself, but not being able to, like having to pretend all the time was just like- So you didn't really tell anybody about Anthony. About him and what was really going on, in part because I didn't really understand what was going on. So what I did was I raised money to reopen the restaurant. And I think I raised something like eight, maybe like 900 grand. And probably 90% of that went to reopen the restaurant. And I even made two sales tax payments right before we disappeared. So it just sort of logically seemed like, so I didn't, it's not like all of this money was taken and then he and I ran off together with a whole bunch of money. It was like, I raised a bunch of money to reopen the restaurant, because I wanted the restaurant to exist again. And I wanted to run it. I wanted to reopen the restaurant. And most of that money went to reopen the restaurant. And then I disappeared. So sort of the timeline gets a bit wonky. So it's, this impression was created that we ran off with a whole bunch of money and we didn't. So if I wanted to be a criminal and steal a bunch of money, why would I have put it all back into the restaurant and reopened it? And then also made two $10,000 sales tax payments that I didn't, and I also repaid $10,000 of another loan. I was making repayments and stuff. And then boom, I disappear. So was your mind going through a rollercoaster here? So could there have been multiple yous there? So one mind is like, I love this restaurant. I'm going to reopen it. I'm this chef, business owner, this person. And then the other is a human that's in this complicated love affair. It was no love affair. Okay. These are just words. How can I, okay. I don't want to, I say that lightly, but also not because love can make us do dark things. And you can say that's not love, but okay. The thing that traps us, the things that pulls us in to a connection with another human being, that's love. Even when it's abusive and dark and toxic and all those kinds of things. In some cases, I think, like if it's voluntary, but in other cases, somebody pulls you in. So it's not like you're drawn towards them. They pull you in. So just to clarify, even when it's not physical, when the pull is with words, so it's emotional. Yeah. Okay. Where is your mind when you raise eight to $900,000 to open the restaurant? Working your ass off to open this thing, okay. Making payments and then all of a sudden disappearing. Where was your mind? If you had a lengthy conversation with Karl Deisseroth in privacy, what would you be telling him as your therapist? I would probably be asking him questions. Okay, no, forget Karl is part of this. Well, and actually I have more questions for Andrew Huberman because I've had to investigate all of these things myself, like dissociation. And even, there's a psychologist who believes that he must have used neurolinguistic programming on me, which is something that Keith Ranieri from the NXIVM cult, he was known to have used that with people. And I think neurolinguistic programming is kind of the same as like a sort of like hypnotism. The only reason I know about what NLP is is because in what I do, there's something called natural language processing, artificial intelligence stuff. So it has the same like three letters. Right. What was the other thing that NLP, neurolinguistic programming? Neurolinguistic programming. Programming, yeah. Anyway, all right, well, we talked about Andrew, my friend Andrew Huberman offline, and you definitely, you should do a podcast with him. He's a fascinating, he's such a brilliant and kind human being, definitely worth talking to. Yeah, I've listened to a lot of his podcasts. And you said that you listened to a lot of his instructions on getting light in the morning or whatever, during the day, it's very important for your mental, like there's all these kinds of studies. It's good for your mind, for your. Oh, and also the other thing that he got me to do is to try to delay having coffee. So instead of having coffee right when you wake up, I always drink a lot of water first. But then instead of having coffee right away, if you wait an hour or an hour and a half or two hours, then your body is able to naturally do something that drinking coffee too soon would sort of blunt that. So then you'll be more tired in the afternoon. So if you wait an hour and a half or two hours, or as long, before you have your first cup of coffee, then you won't be as tired in the afternoon. Interesting. There's a lot of. Does it work? Yes. One coffee addict talking to another coffee addict. Yes, it works. And so I try to get up and do other things first before I have coffee. So, and the light thing also makes a lot of sense to me. Getting light early in the morning. I have one of those bright light boxes. And I would love to have an apartment that had a little deck or something where I could just step outside. Because when you live in an apartment, you kind of have to like go all the way outside and then there's people everywhere. And so to get that early morning light isn't that hard to do when you're. Are people good for you or bad for you? What does Andrew Huberman say about that? I'm just kidding, it's a joke. Okay, so moving back to where was your mind that led you to disappear to, did you guys go to Vegas first and then to Tennessee? No, I kind of refer to it as like the road trip from hell. It's a very Hunter S. Thompson way to describe it. Right. You went back to back country. Maybe it was sort of Hunter S. Thompson-esque except without actual drugs. That was one of the first questions my father asked me, was it drugs? And I wished that I could have said yes. Because I didn't know how to explain what had happened. But he took me away involuntarily, except of course he wasn't holding a gun to my head, but all along it was like a metaphorical gun. Was there ever physical abuse? No. What would qualify as sexual abuse? Yes. But physically, no. A couple of times we would get into slightly physical fights, but he never, I mean he was big and as large and blubbery as he was. He was also really strong. So sometimes he would like subdue me. But other than that, no, there wasn't physical violence. But a lot of people will say that the psychological violence is, I don't wanna diminish physical violence, but some people say that the psychological and emotional violence is more destructive. It's just that the physical violence is easier to identify. It's easier to identify, and it seems kind of more straightforward. Whereas psychological, and you have a bruise on your face or you break a bone and those things hopefully heal in a visible way, but psychological stuff, you can't easily identify or understand, or others can't easily identify it. And then you find yourself crying for no reason at a beautiful song at some point. Yes. And that has to do something happening in the depth of your mind. Okay, so he took you away, but where was your mind that was doing both of those things? It was able to be taken away, but also was pushing to the flourishing, the reopening and the flourishing of the restaurant? Well, I wouldn't have reopened the restaurant and then knowing I was gonna all of a sudden be taken away from it and it was gonna get closed again. I was like, why would I do that? Why would anybody do that? And one of the things that I tried to do towards the end was I was trying to get myself off the bank accounts because I didn't want him to be able to get money out of me. And so there was one time when I tried to get one of the investors, we went to the bank together to put her on as the signer and take me off. And because we didn't have the operating agreement, they wouldn't let us do it. So it was like this little snafu. And so all of these things are sort of the opposite of criminal intent. But that's a legal thing. What's going on in your mind at this time? I don't know. I mean- Were you, oh, did you give yourself a chance to just think? No, and I think that's part of, one of the things that might have saved me or anybody that's pulled into a cult, one of the things that they do is they keep you exhausted, overwhelmed, confused, and afraid. And so you don't have any time to think. So you're just kind of constantly running and you're confused and then things are happening. That's funny, I have some quotes in my book draft because I listen to a lot of podcasts. I don't know what the logistics are of crediting a quote from a podcast in a book. But I have a couple. I think it was Andrew Huberman on Joe Rogan said something about if a animal, if a human or animal, I don't know how he would know. If a human or animal is stressed, and I'm paraphrasing this horribly, but they're much more easily prone to be, not prone to, but forced into delusional thinking. And so that quote resonated for me because he kept me in this incredibly stressed out, afraid, confused state. And then whatever he's sort of planting in my mind, I'm gonna be that much more likely to just kind of go along with it. Well, we'll see how this whole journey ends. Let's actually just step back a little bit and just looking at the employees of the restaurant and so on. Do you have remorse for what happened, especially from the perspective of the employees and the staff? Yeah, I mean, hurting them was sort of the last thing that I would ever have wanted to do. And in part, I mean, there was financial harm, but I don't know whether it's more important or not, but it was taking a place that was very much like a family to them, and it was as if I destroyed it. And so I think that because we were so much like a family, it was almost as if mom went off the deep end and got together with some cuckoo, abusive guy and sort of abandoned them, and they didn't know what was going on and what was happening. So do you regret lying to them? I regret lying to anybody in all of those circumstances, but I wasn't lying. He made me think that everything was gonna be reversed and okay, and anybody that money was borrowed from, they would get it back, maybe tenfold. And so it was this weird situation of having one foot in his reality. And potentially believing the things he was saying, or even over time, wanting to believe them more and more because the alternative was so, the alternative was worse. The alternative was increasingly a bigger and bigger nightmare. So there's this whole situation where you're constantly giving him money, you're constantly borrowing and borrowing money with this idea that it'll be repaid like 100x fold. Right. Kind of like, yeah. So it's sort of like lying to somebody because you're planning their surprise party. You think like, well, I'm lying to somebody, but it's because there's a good reason. Yeah. It's sort of, that's not a good example, but. But you could have not made it a surprise party and be like, pull them in onto the planning of the party and be honest about everything that's happening, not in a negative way, but like get them in on the fact that, okay, I just need to give money to this guy, but we'll get, he is a super rich person of some kind and he'll repay. I mean, I wish I, well. Because you're holding on to this. Although the entire time, that's part of the torture is that you're isolated and unable to tell anybody. But you're not unable, or he was telling you you're not allowed to say anything to anybody. I mean, you're choosing not to say anything, but it's because of the sort of the weight of it. Because it's embarrassing to sort of, is it embarrassing? It's something, I mean, why do you not tell others? What is that? What's happening to the mind where you don't tell others? I don't know. Part of why the story, everything that happened is hard to summarize and talk about in any concise way is that so much of it happens in this very slow, slow, slow way. And people always use the whole like frog in boiling water example. So that by the time you realize you're fucked, it's too late. And it seems hard to believe or understand other people because they see where you are or where you ended up. And they think, well, how did you let that happen? Well, I don't know. Would I have willingly destroyed my life and hurt all the people I care about and allowed my mother to get hurt? And I wouldn't have ever willingly done that. So something else must have happened. And that's the part that's difficult to understand. Let me ask you about another hard question. Do you deserve most or all of the blame for the failure of the business or are others at fault too? Well, the business didn't fail. It was doing well. And so it's closing. It's like it was destroyed. Who deserves the blame for that? I'm asking from your perspective when you think about it. In the privacy in your mind, are you angry at Anthony or are you angry at yourself? Both. I think that in the privacy of my own mind and to everybody listening, I feel responsible. I feel responsible in the same way that if you kind of did something, if you were driving and you did something stupid and caused an accident in which other people died, you would feel, I think, horrifically responsible and you'd blame yourself because maybe you looked away or checked your phone or something. But you didn't intend to kill those people, of course. So for me, it's like I didn't intend to kill, sometimes I say like my own child. I don't know if that's offensive to some people, but it's like as if I killed my own child. It was a business, but it was special. So I don't feel guilt. I feel responsibility. And then I'm angry at him, even though that anger is pointless. Okay, because this has come up, let's continue with the hard questions. Are they gonna get easier? They're gonna get easier. Most of them are easy. This is fun, we're having fun. You posted on Instagram, the ending, no, I'm gonna cite Instagram like it's Shakespeare. Okay. The ending is disturbingly misleading, but still I'm very grateful for this coverage. Let's talk about the documentary, in quotes documentary. I'm okay with the criticism and judgment, but would rather it be based on what's true. And then you say a couple more sentences and then you say Leon who has his own Instagram account, one lucky rescue dog says, hello, he loves you all. Even if you call me a quote defective, arrogant sociopath, it's all okay. So the hard question, do you think you are in part a sociopath? No. Would you know it if you were? Yes. How does this work? So what have you learned from reading this book? I had all these interesting thoughts about all these sort of questions and thoughts about it because the book I'm reading now that I'm only about a third of the way through, she talks about some of the things in the brain structure that are particular to sociopaths. And so then it makes you think, well, what if that could be tweaked in some way? Like, could you un-sociopath a sociopath? Is it nature or nurture? I guess it poses the question. I think it's both. I think it's genetic and then it's like genes that are turned on by things like a particularly violent childhood or some sort of a dysfunction. So I think somebody could have the gene, it's not turned on, and then the sociopaths have the gene and it's turned on. So sociopath means that you're not able to be empathetic or you're generally not empathetic to the suffering of others or to the emotions of others. It's a hollowness. So it's like you don't have just completely lacking the capacity. I mean, it's tragic because they wouldn't understand or feel love, but it's like a hollowness. And then something also about the wiring, and I think also because of that hollowness, they're able to incredibly quickly look at others and identify their insecurities and buttons and weak spots. So they're incredibly good at manipulation. Is that because they're just able to objectively observe the situation? I wonder. Probably in part, but there was some other explanation related to the brain structure that I read somewhere that made sense to me. And I won't remember it, because I don't usually. You're not Andrew Cuberin, who seems to reference perfectly every single line from every book or paper he's ever read. Yes. Right, I don't remember things in that way. I try to usually remember the conclusions. So I might remember that he might give a whole long explanation about why it's good to do this or to take this supplement. That's a bad habit I have. Sometimes I'll order supplements, and then by the time they arrive, I've forgotten why. I forgot why. Just take them all. It's the Paris Thompson, but the healthy version. I hope we get to talk about food, because I feel like you have a brain that should be fed only the best food. Oh, wow. So we can talk about that later. I have a lot of philosophies about that. But certainly fluff is not, and the best, what is best? We'll definitely talk about food throughout. What is best? That makes me think of Conan. And I just talked to Oliver Stone, who I didn't realize wrote Conan the Barbarian. Do you know that in my head, I pictured Conan O'Brien? That's what I was doing. He's also one of the funniest. Wait, why? I love him, but when you said that, I was like, why did that make you think of Conan O'Brien? Yeah. Yeah. I love him so much. He's such a brilliant human. Yeah. Sociopathy. Sociopathy. Yeah. So it's stuff about the brain, fine. But how do you know you're not a sociopath? Would you know it? Am I a sociopath? No. How would I know it? How do you know? Well, having listened to a lot. Well, wouldn't I be able to be good at faking it? Isn't that what? Well, because you would be out there- There's a mask on the cover of this book. I don't think you would be doing the work that you're doing. I don't wear lipstick. You'd probably be running for office or a trader on Wall Street. One of the things about sociopaths is they kind of need like the stimulation of risk and danger. Well, I need. Okay, sure. More than average. I like, okay. But Wall Street, there's a fakeness. Like I don't like the fakeness of Wall, the game of it. Yeah, that's why I left. I didn't, I just, it was a strange environment. Okay, so you're not a quote, defective, arrogant sociopath. What does defective even mean? Well, I think that somebody had just called me that. And I think that, you know, it's easy for people to say like, don't read the comments, but it's hard not to. Because then also you'd miss the beautiful ones. Or sometimes like you have to go on there to check a private message and you just stuff, it's there, people saying terrible things. So I try to, people say, you know, don't pay attention to the comments. It's hard not to, but I try to. Even with the documentary, you try to still kind of see, to look, to look for the good ones, for the kind ones, for the supportive ones. Well, there were overwhelming kind comments. And so that helped and felt a lot better. But sometimes the negative comments are based on, you know, they're based on false information. So if somebody understood, if somebody knew everything that happened and then wanted to judge me or say things like, that's somehow, at least that's all right. But people saying these things based on things that are totally false is just, it's hard to just let that go. But I know that people also say things, you know, for their own personal reasons. I had a fascinating exchange with somebody who direct messaged me and called me trash. And you responded? I responded, because it was, no, it was amazing. So I would do this once in a while. It's sort of like a, I might be procrastinating, but I would scroll through, because the private messages were overwhelming and there's still just this massive backlog that I'll never probably get to read. But the one that called you trash as an opener, you were like, this is interesting. I just was in a mood. Yeah. And so I responded. And I wish I hadn't deleted it, because I sort of deleted a bunch. And then I was like, oh, why did I delete that one? Because I was curious what exactly I said to him, but I responded to him in a nice way. And then he responded back. And then it started this whole back and forth conversation. So he was kind quickly or no? Yes. And then also like wanted to get to know me and lives in Pennsylvania and was like, I'll come to you. I'm like, do you realize if we, you know, if somehow this just turned into, like that would be our, how did you meet story? Well, he called me trash online. That's a pretty good, yeah. He ended up having such an insightful comment. I just found it interesting. And I think he, at first he said, I never imagined you'd reply, which is, you know, it's like part of the whole thing with social media. Although this guy wasn't anonymous. Was not anonymous. No, he had a, I think he had a private account, but it's like his name and his face was there. Yeah, people forget that you're a human being when they message you. Exactly. Folks, when you message me, I'm a human being. So I told him that that was, you know, like that I was hurtful. And I guess I wanted to understand more why he said it. And it was surprisingly insightful, but he said something about, again, I wish I hadn't deleted it, that he was like, I guess I was just angry because like that guy, he said something like, I guess I was just angry because that guy got you and I would have, you know. So it made me think of the whole like sort of in-cell jealousy thing that can be very terrifying if you're female, is that like, if you reject a guy, they might turn around and be violent or angry at you. And so his- Well, to be fair, there's a dormant anger in probably all of us. I believe there's a capacity for cruelty and anger and destruction in all of us. And the whole struggle of life is to emphasize good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not just an in-cell thing. It's true for men and women, both capable of cruelty. That is very true. But this one guy, so then you put on my therapist hat. It's, we started, what did we start with? I already forgot, but the, oh, Leon. He's talking back to sociopath, Leon. No, no, just, you know, maybe it's not the best idea to answer comments that start with you're trash. I don't do it all the time. It's just, I happened upon that one and I was just in a certain mood. I was just in a certain mood. Well, let's further offline sort of discuss this mood that you're in, because it might get you in trouble at some point in your future. Okay. Can we just jump back, speaking of guys that say, as an opener, you're trash, how did you and Anthony Stranges meet? Can we jump around and tell some of the details here? Because I believe the documentary doesn't cover that well. It's not clear. There's some Twitter interactions and you've kind of assumed, by the way, I do think he needs some social media coaching on this because I think, you know, I have some books you need to read, I think, some manuals on how to use Twitter properly. But anyway, apparently you kind of thought that this person who turned out to be, what was his name, Shane, he called himself Shane Fox, but he turned out to be Anthony Stranges, that he was somehow friends with Al Baldwin because of their friendly interaction on Twitter. And so you started interacting with him. And then there was, how did that escalate quickly to? It escalated slowly. And I think, I'm sure it was intentional because had I met him right away, I would have probably thought like, oh, he's not what I thought he was and no thanks. But it was a long time, it was many weeks of back and forth conversation, digitally one way or another. So it was, you know, via Twitter and then via direct message. And then we both played Words With Friends back then and we would message in Words With Friends. And then eventually, you know, we exchanged phone numbers. How does Words With Friends work? What's that? I know that's a popular game. Is that like Scrabble? It's like Scrabble and you're playing other people and then there's like a chat function. Yeah, and then you can chat with them. Right. So you were this intellectually stimulating game and you were what, like flirting and that kind of stuff. Like witty banter. Yes. AKA flirting. Yes, but all of that lasted a really long time and he would give me like little tiny bits and pieces of information about himself that made him seem kind of mysterious. This is a dark, mysterious man who was a Navy SEAL, strong. Yeah, and he would always imply things versus say them outright. So you're kind of always guessing and filling things in. Clint Eastwood type of character. He's not gonna say it outright. He's what? He's a Clint Eastwood type of character. He's not gonna say it outright. Right. He's just gonna act badass. Yeah. Okay, all right. And plus intellectual, because of Wars with Friends. Is that still a thing, by the way? That's an it. Wars with Friends? I think it still exists, yeah. But I feel like if I started playing it again, I would get a little addicted. Yeah. Stick to the coffee. One of the interesting things is that I used to think that he like used an app to look up things, but then he would do it in front of me. He could like look at, he was really good at it, and he could look at the board and just like come up with a hundred point word that I'd never even heard of. So I think he had a little bit of that, something going on in his brain that was like, I don't know, a little Rain Man-ish or something in the way that he was able to recall. I think his recall is incredibly. It's important if you lie a lot. If you lie a lot, yeah. To have good recall. Okay, so when, so okay, so how did it escalate slowly from Words with Friends to meeting in real life? Like what, you know what, I mean, what, okay. I know it's not a love affair. That said, when did you kinda get hooked by the, ooh, I wonder, you know. Like fall in love. I think it was just a slow. Yeah, when did you fall in love? It was a slow process. And I think he found me at a time when there was sort of a perfect storm of the right conditions for me to fall into whatever I fell into with him. Cause that was heartbroken for the first time in my life. Where was the heartbreak coming from? I had split with my boyfriend of four years. And that broke your heart? Yeah, I mean, it was, I knew, it was a relationship that I knew would end even when I got into it in the first place. Cause he's 15 years younger than me. And surely that can't be the only reason it wouldn't work. I need to also give you a book on love. What's it called? I'm gonna write it, I don't know. Okay, cause there's another book that I didn't bring. There's no book on Twitter and there's no book on love. Well, cause there's actually a book on love that I really like that I think you might like. What is it, like love languages? I still have to read that one. No, it's called On Love. I can't wait. I'm gonna read the cliff notes. It's short by this guy named Alain de Botton. I don't trust him already. No, it's funny and it's beautiful and shocking that he wrote it when he was very young. And I first heard him on a Krista Tippett podcast. That's how I end up reading a lot of books is like you hear somebody on a podcast. So you're heartbroken. You knew it wasn't gonna work. I knew it wasn't gonna work because. Because of the age difference. That's just because of the age difference also. I just knew that eventually he'd wanna move on and probably he'd find somebody younger and or was young enough that he still needed to go have a bunch of other experiences and probably wanted a family or whatnot eventually. So he was 21 and I was 34 when we first met. But then we ended up living together for four years and it was the most drama free, like there was no drama. And I had just come off, my prior relationship was Matthew Kenney which was very dark in many ways and full of all kinds of, yeah. And I just couldn't handle that. So. Can I ask you a personal question? Yes, between us and. Between us friends. Is there a part of you that's attracted to the drama and the chaos? Now looking back. I feel like that happens a lot. And maybe there was at some point, but I don't think so because, what made that relationship work with his name was Tobin was that there was no drama, not at all. And I don't think I could have handled it. And I feel that way now too. Like I just couldn't, I can't like fighting or any kind of like the people being passive aggressive, I can't handle that. So. You've had enough storms, now you want the calm. Yes. So you knew it wasn't work. I knew it wasn't gonna be forever. Well, that could be just insecurity and cynicism, but fair enough. And then the heart was broken. Yes. And now the heart was broken and fragile and there to be manipulated in some sense. Yes. And there's another person that I heard that I quoted my book saying that when you're heartbroken, you can't rely on your instincts. Somehow your instincts are compromised when you're heartbroken. And maybe I'm just like looking for excuses. No, no, it's true. As to why this happened, but I was heartbroken. And then. And then. I like to see people when they're heartbroken because it's like shows how much they really love somebody, you know? Yeah, it's. It's sad, but like sometimes love doesn't reveal itself as richly when you're in it versus when you lose it. Right, that's probably true. Anyway, so your judgment wasn't good. Great, so now you're, so you're lonely and you're super busy running the restaurant, but when you get home, you're lonely or like in between. Yeah, and I was kind of overwhelmed and. I'm sure you were getting a lot of really positive attention from other guys too while New York or too busy. Well, no, because it was a restaurant, there was constantly, you're like constantly meeting people and really interesting people and New York is full of a lot of interesting people. And you're, you know, attractive. So why are you connected to some mysterious distant man from somewhere else playing overwords? Because, well, I think now looking back, I think it's because I felt like he understood me. And, you know. What was that feeling coming from you think? Like what, why does one feel that you're understood? One thing that made me extra easy to target is that I'd written a lot of very personal blogs and things, so in addition to him asking me questions and me probably just being insanely open and answering whatever he asked me, I'd also written and posted a bunch of personal blogs. Some of them I've reposted on my new website and then some of them I haven't. But in one of them I go into detail about my frustrations professionally in growing the business. And having read that and being a very smart person, he would have known kind of precisely what to say to get me drawn in. So I think by waiting so long before we met in person, he'd already gotten me hooked in a way that was gonna then make it possible for me to see him. And even though he doesn't look like I thought he did, I'll make excuses for it. Or, I mean, that's a dangerous thing about when people, and I'm not saying I fell in love with him in this way, I feel like there's another explanation for what felt like love. But when people fall in love quickly, there's that danger that because that's what happens first, that the more you learn about them, you'll sort of rationalize away things that might be red flags or things that you don't like. So I think it's safer to fall in love when you get to know somebody not in the context of dating them, like Jim and Pam on The Office. Did you watch The Office? Yeah, of course I watched The Office. British Office is better, strong words, but yes. But yes, so, well, yeah, fine, true. It might be a little romantic. Yeah, I like the romantic. You can fall for it. Yeah, it's fine. But just, I think the better lesson is, yes, that's one thing to say, but the other is when you see the red flags, notice them. Be a little better about noticing them, even amidst the passion. What if a brilliant woman kind of threw herself in your path, right? Because talking on a podcast is a little bit like having a blog where you overshare because people learn everything about you, what you like, what you don't like, what your wants and dreams and, you know. So some woman could pretend to throw herself in your path seemingly accidentally, and then you meet. She has a Russian accent and probably works for FSB. No, but whatever, she is who she is, and then she sort of slides into the conversation like a quote from The Idiot, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're like, boom. Yep. Right, but then, but she's not who she, that's all a pretend. And so you very quickly could fall in love with her, and she's gonna turn out to like enjoy the game of destroying your life. Yep. That or it's the love of my life. It could be, but not if she did all those things intentionally. But you don't really know. But you have to then pay attention to, that's the dark aspect here. You mentioned blog. Like I love when people have stuff about themselves online, because you get to really learn. I mean, I'm a fan of podcasts, I'm a fan of people. I love learning about them, the personal stuff and so on, hopefully for good reasons. So the person, people you connect with, the good ones are the ones that are going to be very sort of empathetic, and the bad ones are the ones that are going to be fake empathetic. Like they're going to learn everything about you and use you to manipulate you, as opposed to learn everything about you to fall deeper in love with you as a friend or as a romantic partner. Or like genuine curiosity. Yeah, genuine curiosity. Like there's something you're drawn, like imagine your dog Leon had a blog after, oh yeah, he does now, yeah, that's true. He kind of does. Yeah, but as when you met him, right? Then you'd be like, what is this? What is there that's pulling me towards this creature, this entity? Like what is there? And it'd be fascinating to learn more. And then you fall in love with the details, not just with some kind of ethereal thing. Yeah, you don't know. You have to pay attention to the red flags. You have to- Yeah, I think one of them actually is somebody who doesn't have that kind of, I mean, plenty of people are private and they don't put stuff out about themselves online for all kinds of very valid reasons. But somebody who does share a lot about themselves personally is, maybe there's examples, but it's probably not a sociopath if they're sharing all kinds of- Sure, sure. But I mean, on the other side, when you meet people, yeah, I still like the falling in love. Because the red flags, whether you see them early or later, it doesn't matter. I'd rather see the red flags right away. I go in hard, intensely, like, to clarify, but going hard, I mean, like, you know, no small talk. Just get to know a person. Get to know quickly. Get to know the person. Challenge. Travel with them. Travel with them is really powerful. And the road trip from hell or not. Go on a road trip and find out if it's a road trip from hell, yeah. But you might, so, there was somebody I was in a- This is also a male perspective. Destructive relationship with, where we had already fallen in love and then went for the first trip. Yeah. In a situation where we were, like, had to borrow, I guess he was still sharing his car with his ex-wife, so we had to go to the garage to pick up the car to go on his little trip. So you literally baggage the ex. Yes. That's, wow. So, but something happened where the garage attendant was, like, wanted more identification and it was a pain in the ass. And anyway, this guy was so unbelievably rude to the garage attendant, like, just nasty. And I was completely shocked and disturbed. And we got in the car for this long car ride. And I was, like, not saying anything and really shocked. And then he noticed that and was very concerned. And I explained, you know, like, I just, I never, I would never treat somebody that way. And then he pretended to get incredibly upset and to feel horrible and remorseful about it. And it was, like, all we talked about for the next few hours. And then I kind of thought, like, well, okay, you know, I can get over that. And then the relationship continued and it was a dark and destructive one. Whereas, you know, had I seen him behave that way before we were in a relationship, I would have known to back away. Okay, but the lesson, you could still walk away. You could still walk away. No, you can't, well, I could have walked away at any point with, I call him Mr. Fox because it sort of depersonalizes him. But I could have walked away from him at any point in time. But that's the whole, that's kind of the whole point of what they do and the whole reason why people don't understand it. I mean, it's like being in a cult of one. So the people who've been in cults and gotten out, we understand each other very well because the same psychology was used, the same psychological tactics were used on us. And then we experienced the same thing on the other side of it, which is it's hard for us to understand and it's hard for other people to understand. And everybody's saying, that would never happen to me. Or they're saying, I don't get it because you're smart. How could you let that happen? Why didn't you leave? Why didn't you walk away? And on the other side of it, we don't have the answers or it takes a really long time of self-reflection and reading and investigation to try and figure out how it is that it happened and why didn't we walk away. No, I mean, it's definitely hard at every level. And I just think that even for more subtle, not outrageously toxic relationships, but normal toxic, not normal, a little bit toxic relationship. There are some people that thrive on conflict. Yeah, but you could still just be self-aware. I think you've talked about, give yourself time to think about the red flags. And I pride myself on being able to walk away. You have to think. Is this the kind of thing I can live with in friendship and business partners? And because the little things that bother you turn out to be big things down the line. So. Yeah, so it could be less romantic, but I feel like getting to know somebody slowly over time. Yeah, it's the smarter thing. It's safer. Fuck it though. It's safer. It's safer. But that's again, my Russian slash Ukrainian male perspective. Anyway, so meeting Mr. Fox, Anthony. That's a chapter title in my book, Meeting Mr. Fox. Meeting Mr. Fox. So you're working on a book about this. I'm almost done. It's taking a long time. I'm almost done. It's taking a really long time. Can you define almost done? Because I've said that it's like, it's when people say like, they're leaving, like I'm almost in the car. Right. And they actually, they're not really, they haven't even started the showering yet or something. So. Yeah, I think I probably need some like therapist to work with me on this. Are you usually late to things? No. Okay. I'm usually, oh, I sent you a text message because I was early when I got here. Yeah. And I said that I'm, because of, I think I said my crippling fear of being late. I'm like always early. So I'm loitering outside like a weirdo, but glad to come in if it's not too early. The crippling fear of being late makes me chronically early and today's no exception. Yeah, it's interesting. So I got here before I rang the bell. Yeah. I was outside for a little while, like just killing time going, I'm way too early, but it's really hot out. Oh, that's true. Yeah, I always air, like I was very early to the airport and then I had all this time to kill, but that's fine with me because that's actually time I appreciate because I can write things or, I worked on my book draft on the airplane, mostly editing, which it needs a lot because it's really long, it's in word count. So all the things are already completed and you're just editing down? No, I wish. It's in five parts and I've written one through four and part five is like the chapters are all there, but some of them are messy. Some of them are just like a few paragraphs. Some of them are just notes. Some of them are done. So I am kind of, it's like five parts and part five is not quite finished. What have you- But I've been editing along the way, so. So this is gonna come out in 2023, I think you mentioned. So it won't come out for a bit or we'll figure it out. What have you learned about yourself from putting some of these things down on paper? What's like the darkest thing you've realized about yourself from writing? The darkest, well, one of the things that was fascinating is reading through all of the correspondence between him and me that I was able to find because he deleted all our emails, but he didn't, I think he thought he deleted all of our G chats, but he didn't. So he had access to your email and he deleted it on that side too? And he had access to my email most of the time. And then at the end was also emailing people as me, which was incredibly mortifying to come home and then get back into my old email and find that. And I think he was also texting people as me and those I'll never know unless somebody brings it to my attention. Because after a certain date in 2015, he had my phone and he had exclusive access to my phone and email. So I wasn't looking at it until I got out, till after we were arrested and I was out on bail on my sister's. And it took me a long time to get back into my Gmail because I had to verify who I am and I never got my phone back. So I don't know what he texted to other people as me after that time. But anyway, I was able to recover a lot of our G chats, which we use that. I don't know why people don't use it anymore, but it used to be a thing. It was like, if you work with people and you use Gmail, it's a really easy way to just message back and forth. It's a chat client within Google, but I think Google shut it down already or no. I think it's still there. Okay. I used to talk to people on there and nobody talked to me anymore. And so I'd rather be. I don't talk to you. Thank you. Thank you. People don't love Google social products for some reason. The social network, they tried several times, Google Plus. It just dies out. Something about it. It's like when Microsoft tries to do stuff, it just doesn't feel right. Anyway, it is very lonely in that Google chat window. It makes total sense though. Anyway, so that was still there. So you're reading through them. So finding, being able to go back and read. And then I kept finding more layers of stuff, and including a journal that I didn't find, the DA, the prosecutor found. Written by? Me, my journal. That I thought he'd thrown away. I didn't know it existed. So somehow he still had it and they found my journal, which was for the year 2014 and the very beginning of 2015. This is after you got, this is in the middle of it. It was in the middle of it, yeah. So reading that was fascinating. Yeah, what's some interesting things there? What was it, was your mind completely detached? It was weird because no. Were you concerned? Were you in love? Were you afraid? I was not in love. I was afraid. I definitely write repeatedly in there that I'm afraid of him. I also write repeatedly things like, I don't know what's going on. Like, please let this be over. Please let this be over. Please let this be over. And then in a sort of, if I try to remove myself and look at it as if I was a different person, it's sort of heartbreaking because I was trying so hard to be positive and that didn't work out. You know, I was trying to be positive. So, but when I, it turned up later in the process and my lawyer at the time called or something and said, you know, the DA has your, or the prosecutor, they have your journal. I haven't read it yet, but as soon as I get a PDF copy, I'll send it to you. So that was sort of weird to think that everybody's reading my journal, which, you know, you don't write it thinking people are gonna read it, unless you're like a historical person and then later on you think people are gonna print from it, but you're not, nobody's writing a journal. I can just imagine like a 14 year old thinking they're gonna be a historical person. Right? Right. Well, no, I mean like, you know, presidents who keep journals and then they're later on. Sure, sure, sure. So you write it, you don't think anybody's gonna read it. And so that was a weird feeling. And then also just not knowing, having, you know, not remembering what I wrote. So I think it was the next day I got, she sent me a PDF copy of it and I read it really quickly cause I could read my own. It was a PDF, so it was like Xeroxes of the pages. So it was in my own handwriting, which I could read really fast cause even though it's messy, I wrote it so I could read it really fast. And I read the whole thing and was crying cause I thought, okay, finally, like surely nobody could read this and think that I intended to commit crimes. And so I thought, like, I thought that journal was just gonna fully exonerate me and they would like, you know, if not drop the charges, like it would just be like, okay, well, you know, some bad things happened, you're responsible, you know, here's probation. But it didn't seem to make any difference, which was strange. But anyway, so the journal and then also finding all of the correspondence between, not all of the correspondence between him and me, but the G-chat correspondence between him and me. And to me, so, you know, all of that, and it's entirely like, I wish that everything could have been kind of put out there as evidence. Like the more they turned up the better for me because I wanted them to see everything. And there are just so many examples in the correspondence between him and me where he's, you know, threatening me and, you know, lying to me and telling me that if I don't do what he says, my whole life will be destroyed and I'll lose everything I ever cared about, all kinds of things like that. But what I still don't quite understand and what one of my lawyers said why all of that wasn't as useful as I thought it might be is because so much of that correspondence, I'm like sarcastically, angrily, I'm yelling at him, I'm mad at him. I'm like, fuck you, I'm making fun of him. I call him names. I'll say to him like, you're lying. Why should I believe you? You told me you'd pay me back before, but you didn't. So it seems like it doesn't make sense. Like, how is it that if I say to him, you're lying, you're a liar, that I still, so then what would happen is I'm reading that correspondence and then it stops for a while maybe because I was with him in person. And then I'll look at like my timeline of things and I'll see like, oh, I sent him a wire for 80,000. Yeah, how do you explain your ability to still joke around and also to be mean to him in a joking way? Like, couples can do that, I guess. I mean, there's cruel ways of doing that and then there's like humorous ways, just like you're talking shit, whatever. You were able to do that still and yet you're sending over the money and are afraid. Like, how can you be those two things? Like, as opposed to completely shutting down. Well, I don't know. I mean, these are all interesting questions that I have as well. Like, how is it that I was functional and yet also doing these things? And so the year that we were gone is like a different level because I no longer was running the business. But the thing about dissociation is that you're functioning but like your feelings and your thinking are detached in some way so that like you're functioning and people wouldn't look at you and go, oh, that person's dissociating because you're functioning. You seem normal, but somehow in your head, you're like disconnecting your feelings and your thinking. So you're still able to be like the game of social interaction, like being witty and so on, all that kind of stuff. For me, I think it's like a coping mechanism too because if I went, I haven't been to a funeral in a long time but if I went, I'd probably like find absurd thing, or I'll tend to like either make jokes or wanna make jokes at really inappropriate times, even in tragic times, because it's almost like a defense mechanism, I think. Like you said, you told me you like dark humor. Yeah. My next door neighbor is Michael Malice. He's an anarchist. I have one of his books. The Hero? Dear Reader. Dear Reader, yeah. And he loves, he embodies dark humor, trolling and dark humor, and is underneath the sweetest human being. Because he's writing a book now, The White Pill, that's really focused on Stalin and the Holland Amour, there's basically atrocities throughout the 20th century. And I think he needs the dark humor to release the valve. I think there's something about incredibly good, the most offensive comedians tend to have the kindest hearts, I think. This is my theory. People like Ricky Gervais, who goes out and insults people and makes jokes that people find horribly offensive and crude and yet, is a huge animal rights guy and appears to be an incredibly sweet and kind person and sensitive. And Howard Stern, people who are incredibly crude, very often are, in my experience, to the extent that I've gotten either to know people personally, observe them, learn about them in other ways, but almost like the more crude and offensive the comedian or the person, they tend to have the kindest. Like they would- Yeah, I don't know if it's a universal rule, but yeah, I see what you mean. And you lost me with Howard Stern. He seems like not a good person. Oh no, he's such a good person. Underneath it. Oh yeah, such a good person. He's just said so much. So I'm friends with Rogan. He says so many ignorant things about Rogan, but I suppose that's- So I haven't heard, I haven't listened to Howard Stern in a long time. And I also think that people who say bad things about Rogan don't listen to his podcast. Right. Because I've listened to his podcast and like people think that, I think people would assume that I don't like him because, or the whole like vegan thing and he's all about meat and they would think that I would think, no. Because I've listened to enough of his podcast, I've heard the one where he talked about why he hunts. Whereas if I only knew him via his Instagram, I might think he's an asshole. Yeah. But having listened to all of his, not all of them, I don't listen to all of them, there's a ton of them. But having listened to a lot of his podcasts, enough to know that he's an extremely kind person with all the best intentions. And I think that all of that judgment comes from people who are just seeing little clips. Yeah, because the lesson- Because it's probably easy to take little clips from him that sound- Yeah, the lesson there is just not make judgments on people without getting to know them, especially, and you have no excuse when the content is out there, like don't be lazy. Yeah, I try. Yeah, I'm very careful when a lot of these cases, like the Depp-Hurd thing or- Oh, Johnny Depp and- And Elizabeth Holmes and anything controversial. And sometimes that makes me, I can't think of an example, but very often when somebody criticizes something or something becomes controversial, that's what gets me to wanna understand it better. So then I'll go read the book that everybody's mad about. Yeah, it's hard to know what's true, though. So I try to have humility and always assume I don't really know the full story and keep pulling at the string, keep learning more and more. But even then, the more you learn, the more you realize that things are complex. What do you think about, as a small tangent, Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, trial's going on. It's a quick pause, it's gonna resume next week. So again, this is one of those situations where I have very limited information because I'm also not sitting there watching the trial. Yeah, have you watched any of it? Little bits of it. And it's like, I know that if I go there, then I'm gonna wanna watch it all. Yeah, it's good. I know, I really- Because it's raw human relationships that is most toxic and it's most deep also because you can tell there's love, probably still there's love, which is the interesting thing. They probably still love each other, even though they hate each other. And there's a lot of lying going on. It looks like it's Amber Heard lying to my foolish eyes. It seems like she's lying nonstop, but I wanna know the full story and we'll never get to know it. But you see this raw, like post-mortem on a relationship, on a love affair that was clearly passionate. There was clearly something deep of a connection there. And it just, that's the sad thing about love. It can destroy you as much as it can uplift you. So there- It can be also used to destroy people. Yeah, to manipulate and all that kind of stuff, yeah. Right, so people who feel that strongly are, I think, particularly vulnerable. Yeah, it's hard to talk about because I've dipped into like a podcast or something where other people were discussing Bad Vegan in like a pop culture way. And they're analyzing it and it's so annoying to listen to. So I'm like, oh my God, that's totally wrong. That's totally wrong. Well, if they only knew this, well, I have, nope, that's wrong. So, you know, listening to other people analyzing my situation or my psychology when they don't have all the information has been really frustrating. But- There's a difference. I did- There's a difference because the world doesn't know much about you except for the Netflix documentary. Right. There's a lot more information about both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the trial is revealing the real people. This is so interesting. But I haven't watched it all. Okay, but- But I did listen to it. There's a difference between a documentary and like a raw human being- Exactly, the real trial. You can see the body language. It's so interesting that I think you could tell the difference between a person who is full of shit and not, I- No. I mean, I'm not sure. Duh, it's another, I'm gonna, I can't remember. Sorry, I keep interrupting you, but on top of this, they're actors too, which is very annoying. Right, exactly. Because like, I don't know if they're putting, be sure as hell it looks like Amber Heard is putting on like a soap opera act. Soap opera meaning like really bad acting and lies. But- I would say all of these things are really hard. People would say about me, I don't look like a victim. And I don't mind you interrupting me because Andrew Huberman said that means you're interested in the conversation. He said it was a good thing. So you don't have to apologize for- I think- Interrupting me. He keeps coming up, but I keep thinking of these. That's one of the things that Andrew told me that I'm like, are you sure? Because it just does seem like an asshole thing to do. I don't- I guess it depends on the context. If we're in a business meeting and somebody, you know, talks over you to kind of make their point heard. But if it's a one-on-one situation, then it's not. I could argue with that forever. So a long time ago, I listened to, there was an audio that was released of a taped argument between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. And I don't remember why, like which one of them had taped it and if they knew it was being taped. But it was like an hour and a half. And I listened to it almost like you would listen to a podcast where I was doing other things. It was like cleaning my apartment and I was fascinated listening to it. To a fight. So I was, and it's interesting too, because it was just the audio, not, so you're not looking at their body language, which can be completely misleading. And there was another podcast where they talked about how judges make worse decisions on whether or not somebody deserves, you know, parole or to be released on bail when they see the person in person versus if they're just looking at the information on paper. So I think body language and those kinds of things can be, can actually be misleading. Or we think that like by looking somebody in the eye we'll know if they're lying or not, but the skilled liars are able to bypass that. Or they, because I'm jumping all over the place, but one of the things about sociopaths is they're not gonna have the same tell. So like if I was lying, somebody would know because I'm like stressed out, mortified. I'm probably doing all the things that we do when we lie because it's stressful for me, whereas they don't have those things. So I think that, you know, they could, for example, I think that they could pass a lie detector test. They also don't have like a startle response. So the activity in their brain, like if you and I watched something graphic and tragic on TV or watched something happen, like things would happen in our brains that don't happen in the brains of sociopaths. So they don't react to things in the same way that we do. But that makes them- Again, you keep assuming I'm not a sociopath. I didn't say I'm not a sociopath. This assumption you keep making is very interesting. Then why did I murder all those people? Let's get back to the, what were we talking about? Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. So the audio that I heard made me, without knowing anything else, made me very inclined to be team Johnny Depp. Yeah. Based on that, just based on that audio. Yeah, well, that's how the people are feeling about this whole interaction. By the way, I do think it's a very healthy thing to do in a relationship is to record each other for months at a time. Every time you fight, that just seems like a very, that's sarcasm. I don't understand how that, because they both recorded each other. It just, I suppose you could look back at all human relations and be like, this was ridiculous. What was I doing? But when you're in it, you don't. Right, I wondered that too. Like who made the recording and why? And did they both know about it, that it was being recorded? Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. All I know is just the poetry of Johnny Depp's speaking and sort of movement about the whole thing. It's interesting. It makes you wonder what's real. Maybe this is whole, maybe they're both in love and this is like a troll that they played on the world. I don't know. It makes me wonder what's real at all. Because you have to remember they're actors too. Yeah, I don't think he would have filed a lawsuit if he was. No, I mean, I'm joking. No, I know, but no, I mean, my point is. Yes, yeah. If somebody was trying to make the argument that he's the abuser and that he's lying and he's full of shit, it sort of doesn't make sense that he would have filed a lawsuit unless he's trying to have this all come out in the open because he believes he's in the right. Again, I have no idea. I agree with you. I agree with you. As a fan of love and human nature, I appreciate the fact that they went through this. I know it's probably extremely painful, but it's fascinating to watch human relationships be presented in such a raw way. And it made me realize how rare it is to get a glimpse like that. Yeah, and I think one of the reasons I like that book, Confessions of a Sociopath, also is it's female who's writing it. And I think statistically men are more likely to be sociopaths, maybe not. I mean, these are all things where a lot of times there exist statistics that would be inherently hard to get. So who knows? But I think that people tend to think of sociopaths more as men, which probably gives female sociopaths the advantage in that people are less likely to, like the Elizabeth Holmes, people who are really manipulative and really good at it. And part of how they're able to succeed is that people don't understand their motives or people will assume that people behave rationally, even if rationally means, it's like Anthony Strange's. It would have made more sense if he had gotten all this money out of me and put it in an overseas account and then ditched me and got on a plane to Mexico. Like everybody would understand that more. Whereas the way things happened and he dragged me around the country and like, what were we doing in Tennessee? And then why didn't, like, nothing really makes any sense. But, and also all of the things that he did to me and had me do, it was as if all of those things together only make sense if his primary goal was to maximally destroy me and also make it, like have me burn all my bridges and make it so I'll never recover. And when you read a book like that, you understand that that's what he wanted. Like that's his life. It's like a game. Like what do you think? It's about power and it's a game. Do you think he understood the long-term goals he has or was it the short-term game of it that he enjoyed, the ability to destroy you? Well, yeah, it was the short-term game of it. Because control another human? Yeah, and also I think for him, their motivations are just different. So, he spent a year incarcerated because he never got out on bail, but then he got out. He's out of prison now. He got out before I went in to serve my time, which was particularly, like psychologically I had to try really hard not to be infuriated. But anyway, so I think for him, the consequence of spending time in jail is sort of like an inconvenience. It's like life is a game. And so he wouldn't feel, if you're not capable of being emotionally hurt, then you have immense power because you can go around and do things and people can't hurt you. It's like a superpower. And he did this for people who are not familiar. I guess he did this to other women. Yes, yes. I think it was in the documentary that his, I guess, ex-wife from somewhere else. Florida. Florida. Of course, Florida. Sorry. Strong, strong words. Well, it's just like when there's the weirdest story about people eating Tide pods and then doing crazy. It's like, it's always in Florida. So I feel like whenever crazy things, so to me it makes sense that he would have spent time in Florida before. And that's where- Crazy in a good way. And I mean that on an insult on him. I also, like, she's an amazing person. So it's like, it's him that I'm making the like, Florida is weird. Yes, he manipulated her as well, lied to her, that kind of things. Well, jumping around, but one of the things you said that was disturbingly misleading is the ending of the documentary. And the ending has a phone call, I think, of you and Anthony talking. So high level, let me ask, how many times have you talked with Anthony since you got out of prison? And what did you talk about? And why is that, quote, misleading? That segment of audio misleading? My issue with it also was that it was deliberately misleading, which was what was particularly infuriating about it. And then also there was, it was like there were things, one major thing that was incorrect that I think helped allow people to make an incorrect conclusion at the end was, in the film it talks about, I say something about how my accountant made a joke about if I married him, he could easily transfer me money without tax consequences. And then the film has me saying something like, and then within 24 hours we were married, but that's like audio from here and audio from here spliced together. So they made it seem like there's a- Like I married him because it was like he could give me money and that wasn't the case. So you're part mastermind of some kind of scheme that involve money transfer and you got married and that kind of thing. Right, or if nothing else, I had, I was trying to get money, that's why I married him. Which is absurd because again, New York is full of legitimate people with loads of money. If I really wanted to marry somebody for money in New York, it wouldn't be that hard to do. But anyway, it was like, it was just a deliberate making it seem like my intention was to marry him for his fictitious money. Right. Okay, so that's one. But either way- Let's go to that ending thing because we're on that sort of topic. Because when you got out of prison, what the film implies is that whatever, there's a small aspect of your mind that still wants to continue a relationship with Anthony. Yeah, that's not the case. And not just that, but there's still flirtation and that kind of body- That I was laughing. Like we got the world like at our fingertips, we're playing. So I mean, one of the exciting things about being like a couple that's fucking with the world, that's getting away with something is that there's all these powerful forces that want to catch you in a crime and you keep getting away with it. That's exciting. In some romantic world it could be, although- Not in this case. Right, and also I always have to keep reminding people like get away with what? Because I lost everything and all these people lost other, you know, people I cared about lost a lot. My mother lost a lot, but I lost everything too. Yeah, your restaurant, your dream. Yeah, my reputation, my stuff, my home, ending up with millions of dollars of debt. Like it's not even like I lost it all and then it's a clean slate. It's like I lost it all and now I have this like giant boulder of, or like this wobbly, unclear how to, like, yeah, so when people say- Well, Sisyphus had a thing. Way with something, I'm always like, got away with what? I know. Destroying my life and ending up in debt? Because that's, it's not even like, you can't even sort of point to like, as if I was trying to do something and then oops, that happened. It's like, there's no, nothing that logically makes sense if somebody was trying to decipher my, you know, whatever motives I might've had. Yeah, you didn't walk away from the explosion. You were inside the explosion. Okay, but that said, the movie implied, and so, I mean, it's interesting to ask, not just in clarifying the movie, but just as a human being, you're out of prison, he's out of prison. There was, you know, there was that toxic connection, but it was there and there was a depth to it. So toxic connections can be pretty deep. So what was the conversation like and how often have you talked with him? Well, we don't speak anymore. And that call at the end was- Not even on G-chat? Recorded, was recorded on, like I recorded the call and gave it to them, you know? So I was like deliberately recording him. It's not like I was caught on a hot mic. Like I made that call. As part of the documentary. I recorded him intentionally. I was trying to get him to repeat some of like the kookier things he would say about like his meat suit or some of the weird like the things about something not being real, the more like fantastical things. I was trying to get him to repeat those things. And it was probably like a 40 minute call, which I mean, it's actually on my phone. I still have it. I haven't gone back to listen to it, but- You ever think of publishing that whole thing? Oh yeah. Oh, I think about publishing everything. My entire journal, all- You should publish that call unedited. Just publish it. That'd be fun. No, I wanna publish like a lot of stuff. He took all these videos of me also that they used a couple of clips of. And I would, I mean, I would, they're also on my phone. I would publish them all. I would publish everything. In particular, because I- You should release that with your book. It's good. Yeah. I probably, I mean, I've planned to do that eventually. If all of that material would be really useful to psychologists or people studying it. So to the extent that it would help other people understand what happened, which I think would be- Well, he's still out there. Meaningful. Which is fascinating. Yeah, he's still out there doing weird shit with his clean slate. I get a little annoyed about that. He's got the clean slate. Well, he didn't have a restaurant. He didn't have a persona. Does he have any public persona or no? Or we don't know. He got booted off of Twitter. He had to get a tweet. Maybe Elon will put him back on. Is that a passive aggressive statement? No, not at all. I find that whole conversation really, really interesting. Whether to put somebody like Anthony back on Twitter. Well, no, I think, because I used to always think like if only everybody had to identify as themselves on Twitter and you could have like a parody account or like Leon has an account, but it's very clear that it's me behind it. Or sometimes there's like, you know, Devon Nunez's cow. So people have parody accounts, but if we could identify who it is, then a lot of- Why did he get booted off of Twitter? I don't know, but I used to. So in the last few years, I would periodically, probably like once a month, maybe more, I would like look at his Twitter just to kind of see like, well, where is he? And, you know, like just to see like, what is he up to? And I figured out, I could tell from the photographs that he'd moved to California. And I think he might've told me one of the last times I spoke to him that he was gonna move to California. But, and then I also screen grabbed a lot of stuff that he put on Twitter. And he put these creepy videos of himself on Twitter at the beginning of COVID, I screen grabbed those. And then one day I went and like, he was, you know, account was suspended. And then I kept going back and it's like been suspended ever since. So he might've started a new account and I don't know what it is. Probably. He's probably in California you're saying. He is in California, that's been verified. Somebody who was gonna have to interact with him in an official capacity was gonna go meet him. And I said, and was nervous about it. And I said, he's gonna be really likable. Like you're gonna like him. He's probably gonna like figure out what you're interested in, talk sports, talk whatever it is that he figures out quickly that you're interested in. He's gonna be really nice. He's gonna seem like a nice guy. And that person later got back to me and was like, you're exactly right. So yeah, that's the sociopath thing, right? Yeah. You have to be extremely careful, but inside relationship that's even more dangerous. So I think that part of the reason I spoke to him was entirely self-serving and strategic after the fact. Well, even before I knew there was ever gonna be a documentary, I spoke to him. And I knew how dangerous it was because I knew that in a situation like this, you're supposed to have no contact, which makes sense. And I understand why, which makes it extra tragic when people have kids with a sociopath or in a narcissistic abusive relationship, if you have kids, then you're tethered, which is tragic. But- Why are you supposed to avoid conversations? Because you can get pulled right back in. You still have no contact. Yeah, because they'll continue abuse or you'll be vulnerable to them being able to pull you back in. So I knew that to be the case. But why was it self-serving? Why did you talk to him anyway? Because he was getting out, he was gonna be out free, out in the open while I was gonna be locked up at Rikers for three and a half months. And the one thing that, if his motivation was to destroy me, then what else could he do to really like, hammer that last nail in the coffin? That would be Leon. And so he would have known that Leon would be staying with my mother. He knows where, he spent a lot of time at her house. He knows where she lives. It would be super easy for him to just drive up there, wait for her to let him out. And then, you know, he, because out in the country, he can be off leash and all he'd have to do is kind of whistle, call him over and he could take him away and do whatever. So I was completely like gripped with that fear. So not fear for yourself, but fear for Leon. Well, I was gonna be at least safe from him, but I was gonna be locked away, so. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Rikers, yeah, yeah, sure. So- I got it. Got it, got it, got it. I would be powerless to do any things and he would have free reign to go destroy me further by, you know, taking or hurting Leon. And then when he got out, I still, I had unfollowed him from my own account, but Leon had never unfollowed him. So I was looking at, I know, I was looking at his account- Can I just say, cause Joe has an account for his dog too. I just love when people do that, it's so great. Cause I actually pretend, in my mind for some reason, I do think Leon has an account. Like I don't, you forget that there's a human behind it. You're like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, I know. I love it when people do that. Anyway, so continue. So Leon didn't unfollow him and what? So I was able to go back and look at his Twitter and somehow he quickly got a phone, but he very quickly started tweeting right after he got out. And I was kind of like fascinated cause I didn't know what to expect or what he was gonna be saying. And then he started saying things that I could tell were directed at me, you know, like little things that only I would know, like random things, like things that were like the equivalent of like an inside joke that you have, just so he was posting things like that. And there's so many things going on at once. So another thing that would have in a twisted, but I think understandable way, in sort of a sick way that I was fully aware of is that here I am having gone through this completely like messed up thing that now I'm in trouble for everybody's looking at and nobody understands, right? And so there was this unfortunate situation of the only person who understands what I went through is the person who put me through it, right? So- So were you also just a little bit seeking closure of some kind? Probably a lot, but also with the awareness that I probably wasn't gonna get it, you know? And I mean, I know for a fact I would never get it in the same way that, which is why I was able to later on, like in the context of recording those calls, I was able to talk to him in this detached way because I know he doesn't give a shit that, like he doesn't give any shits about what he did to my mother or me or anybody or anything, just doesn't care. So he's certainly not gonna care if I, you know, he's never gonna say like, I'm sorry, or I did a bad thing, or like he's not gonna be affected. Like if I yelled and screamed at him, that would just be frustrating for me. And he would actually probably be gratified by that. So that gave you, that empowered you in being cold and sort of distant. Yes, and I had a prior experience where I had to do the same thing, where like, if you're able to be very cold and not allow somebody to push your buttons, then you're taking away their power. And then that feels empowering, or it feels like we're claiming a little bit of your power. So in my talking to him, I always had a reason, you know, like there was always, like I didn't want him to hurt Leon, or I wanted information, or I wanted to know where he was. I'd rather let him think that, you know, maybe he could still manipulate me one day or whatever. It was like safer to keep that there than to not know where he was. And if I was gonna like be walking Leon and turn the corner and he's standing there, and like if there's a crazy murderer out on the loose, you'd rather know where they are than have no idea. So there are a lot of different reasons. Why does it upset you? Why was it wrong to have that audio clip at the end of the documentary? Like what did it- Well, because it implied all kinds of things that were completely not true, and it also just didn't make sense, and it confused people. So for people who haven't watched it, spoiler alert, is they play the clip of, sorry, I don't even remember what was said, but it was kind of- That last, what we spoke about? Yeah, what was the- I only watched, like I still haven't watched it. I only watched the film once. Yeah. And people were looking at me for my reaction, and I was crying, and it was really weird and strange and surreal, and I haven't gone back to watch it again. I feel like I'm just gonna get more annoyed, but I will eventually. And when the ending happened, I immediately blurted out, like, I hate that. I hate that ending. But I sort of assumed, a lot of people saw it for what it was. They saw that it was like the director doing a weird thing, and that it was kind of just weird and off, and that doesn't make sense. Yeah, it seemed out of the blue. But so it was basically you joking around, like flirting almost. It made it seem like, as if we're still friendly. Yeah. And there's more to come. It's almost like there's going to be a bad vegan too. Right, or, yeah. And then also, I mean, it made it seem like, if I was laughing with him, that I don't take anything seriously, that I don't take what happened seriously, or that it's like all- Or don't feel any remorse, which is why the- Exactly. Yeah, and after that, he goes to the credits with Wild World, which is a great song. Yes. Oh, baby, it's a wild world. I never got to hear that, because the version I watched didn't have the end credits, but I knew that they used that song at the end, and paid a lot for it. Yeah, yeah, I was like, ooh, well, you got this song. Did you ever say what was the darkest thing about yourself that you discover from the book? Oh. We took attention upon attention upon attention. Right, because we started talking about, exactly, yeah, about the G-Chats. And I think it was, I guess it was trying to understand how I was able to be sarcastic and make jokes at his expense, dirt, while all that stuff was going on. Ah, so what is that? Does that, have you figured out what that means about you? No. No, it just was interesting to look at, and also, I think, you know, I have a tendency sometimes to be sort of like jokingly hyperbolic or sarcastic, and it's gotten me into trouble. One time, I got locked up in the Harlem psych ward for a day because of my hyperbole and sarcasm. And like this sort of- How did that, do you wanna tell the story of that? Lost in translation errors. That's a heck of a lost in translation error. Yeah. Did you say something funny to a therapist? It was, yeah, I mean, I was sort of making jokes about how bad I was feeling, but in a hyperbolic way. And so then suddenly, somebody told somebody, and then the lost in translation, and then they were worried that I might kill myself, and then did a wellness check, and then tried to call me, and I was in the shower, so I didn't answer the phone. So then somebody called the police to do a wellness check on me. Things just escalated. And then not knowing that if I had handled it the right, if I had immediately, if I'd sort of understood what was going on and handled it the right way immediately, I probably could have gotten out of it. But they err on the side of taking you to the hospital no matter what. Makes a lot of sense. And I didn't know that, and it also- So you really leaned into the joke by going to the hospital. I didn't. It's sort of one of those situations that was both comical and tragic, because, and would actually make a really good, it's weird how I do this sometimes, like it would make a really good scene in a filmed version. Who would play you in the film? I don't know. There is a thing being made that's- Sharon Stone? Who would play? Because- Have you cast the scene yet? No, but there's a thing being made that I have nothing to do with, which is frustrating and weird. What film, about you? About, it's like somebody's making a fictionalized drama, and it's frustrating because, for all kinds of obvious reasons, it's like annoying. And- It can go any way. It could go any way. You could be like the bad guy. Inevitably, they'll get a bajillion things wrong. And there are also a bunch of people like profiting off of it and like, thanks guys. So it's infuriating for all kinds of reasons. Do you know who's playing, who are the actors? No, I don't even like, I just don't like, I'll inevitably know, but I don't really wanna know. The whole thing is just annoying. And also, I've always, people ask me this all the time, and I always thought, because of the way everything that happened was such a kind of a slow build, and there was so much nuance, and it's kind of really hard to understand that it could only really be done well in like a Breaking Bad type of series, long, like a long series, where like you would be taken through these kind of gut-wrenching, icky, slow build things, and then that would make it all make sense. Like that, if it was done that way, it could be done accurately. But the reason why I think, so I made these stupid jokes, and then somebody did a wellness check, and, or asked the police to do it well. When they knocked on my door and came in, it was like a repeat of getting arrested. So I sort of weirdly flashed back to that, and then burst into tears, which isn't the appropriate response if you're trying to diffuse a, if you're trying to discourage the people coming to do the wellness check from taking you to the hospital, starting to cry is not the right reaction. Well, the thing is, I mean, there is, it's funny, but it could be also through the joke. The joke, the best jokes are grounded in truth and pain, in this case, pain. Yeah, and truth. Have you ever, if I may ask, considered suicide? Yes. Yeah. When? Well, I'm kind of a wimp, so I'm afraid of all of the gruesome ways, but one of the things I remember doing is sort of hoarding medications, which I had, when around the time and before he took me away, because I wanted the safety of an out. But around that time, so when Anthony, that's the road trip right before the road trip from hell, you were hoarding? Around that time, yeah. Hoarding medication and? Yeah, like if I could get my hands on any sort of weird medication, I would kind of hold onto it. So all the chaos that you've gone through. I knew that it would be hard to do it that way. So I definitely thought about it, but I never. In that really tough time, you're thinking about, you're thinking about taking your own life. What gave you hope? What gave you sort of, because the business, the restaurant that you give so much of yourself to is lost. You're lying to everybody. You're in the hole financially. You're being psychologically trapped, manipulated. I might just go kill myself now. Well, you're still there. Please don't. See, I made a joke about it. Like that's. There you go. But it's always there. It's the, Albert Camus says, you basically always have to be aggressively looking for a reason to live. Otherwise. What's the point? Yeah, otherwise it's easy to go the other way because why live is a very good question. But anyways, by way of hope, by way, it's a dark time. It's a dark time. If you could sort of look back, what gave you just strength? I think that just, just having like a sort of relentless optimism. And I think too that sometimes people assume that suicide is the result of circumstances, which maybe in some cases it is. But I think one of the things that that book explains well is that very often it doesn't have anything to do with circumstances, it's just the pain. Which book? The darkness visible. You know, because people like to, so when somebody commits suicide, people will very often criticize them like it was a selfish act if they have a family, which most people do, but especially if they have kids. And I think that, yeah, everybody's quick to sort of call the person who killed themselves selfish. And I think that the type of pain that one is experiencing that leads to that is something that most people, and I don't, like people don't understand, but it's not a selfish thing. It's just like quite literally becomes intolerable from what I understand. And it can hit you. It could be slow, it could be fast. Yes. That pain. Yes. So I think because for me it was more just my circumstances were so crappy, but also I had an awareness that, even in Rikers, I knew how wildly lucky I was to have family, a support system, opportunities, and like I'll always be okay one way or another. So I felt lucky that I have that. But also I want the shame of everything that happened and will I ever be able to crawl out from under it and rebuild something? I don't know. So there were certainly times where, especially when I would learn something new, like reading the emails between Mr. Fox, my mother, I just wanted a- So he- I wanted like a meteor to hit my particular spot on the earth right then and there just because it was- He was manipulating your mom too, because your mom loved you and was willing to give money. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really grotesque. And so, and I feel like it's my fault. What's your mom say about this whole situation now, looking back? We don't talk about it as much as one would think that we would, because I feel sickening, because I feel like it's my fault. And I think she also feels sick over it. And so we don't talk about it as much as one might think. Sometimes I've had to ask questions in the process of writing the book. And then there are other things where like, I could ask the questions, but I just don't want to, because I don't want to put her through that. Or, you know, it's not really necessary to ask the questions, but there are things that I'm sort of curious about. But- When you went on that road trip from hell, what was that like? Where'd you guys go first? Vegas? So you drove from New York, where? It was a series of stops at like hotel, motel type places. Cause I did a similar road trip, but from Boston. I drove across the United States with no destination. I had always wanted to do that. And now, again, I just feel like it's one of those things that sort of like ruined for me, cause a lot of- You know how you can always reclaim it. Yeah, I could. But now, yeah. I did think about like how one day, if I did some sort of a book tour or something, that I imagine this Leon and I in a car. It has to be different than a, man, book tours, they, if you're not careful, can suck the soul out of a human being. I think you have to do like a Hunter S. Thompson style book tour where you miss a bunch of the dates cause you got too drunk the night before. But anyway. Or I just, what I worry about is that I just would be feeling terrible in some way and not be up for it. Up for the trip or up for the speaking? Cause for like a certain type of appearance. I think I'm always afraid of that in committing to things. Like if it involved going to a big public event. Yeah, I think you have to be very careful. Like podcasts is an interesting one. I'm always surprised that people just jump on podcasts they haven't really listened to and just do a lot of podcasts, a kind of book tour. First of all, financially, it doesn't make any sense. Like, especially going on a small podcast, like what's the benefit? Like really you want to go on just a couple of big podcasts that you're actually a fan of. Like it's really, really, really important. People don't, like they don't understand the power. I mean, maybe you just don't understand podcasting. But me as a fan of podcasts, is like the biggest thing I love listening to is when a guest is a fan, they understand the culture, the style, the sound, the feel of the podcast. They understand the other person. They feel the pain, the hopes of the other person, the weird like quarks of the other person. It makes for much better listening. And ultimately the appearance itself is not just enough to sell the book. You have to, you're selling yourself as a human being. And that requires having chemistry and all those kinds of things. Yeah, I agree. And podcast appearance is exhausting. Like you're giving a lot of yourself. It's intimate, it's deep. It's like, I don't know. Anyway, road trip. So you don't remember the motels and the hotels along the way? Well, there are a lot of things where like, I'll remember things that happened, but I don't remember where it was. Take you to your drove without a destination, really. I assume he must've known ahead of time, but he made it seem like, oh, funny we ended up in Vegas. Funny how that happened. But now when I see all the places that we stopped, they were all places where there were casinos. So there's a lot more casinos around the country than I knew. And there, so. So he had a gambling addiction. Yes, but I think that it's not a, so I think that regular people have gambling addictions and it's a horrible, tragic thing and can destroy their lives. And I know people who've, like regular people can have a gambling addiction, which is explained in the way that addictions are explained. For him, I don't think it was so much an addiction as like a thrill seeking, because he could win money, lose money, and he didn't really care. Whereas somebody who has an actual addiction and then all normal people with normal human emotions, would either be elated and relieved or devastated to lose a lot of money. And for him, it didn't really care. It was more, again, I think it was more just like a game. Like what was going through your mind here? Like, would you be on the run? Did you feel like you were on the run? No. Did you know you were on the run? No, so I didn't know that. I mean, the other thing is the restaurant was operating and he took me away and then like people weren't paid and it all sort of fell apart. And you weren't checking your texts or any of that? No, and then he had my phone and my email. I did later on get, later on I got a brand new phone with like an empty phone with no existing numbers in it or whatnot. And so that he and I could communicate when I went to the grocery store or something like that. What was the reason he had the phone? Like what was the narrative, the story that he was taking over your phone? Was it, I mean, like how did you allow that to happen or maybe a better way to ask is how did he make that happen? Well, I was conditioned to it before because before he was always checking my phone, which was wildly infuriating. And I feel like- You fixed it by giving him the phone. Well, I mean, the conditions were different later on, but in some sense I didn't want my phone because everything, like I was in a state of shock and it was just like, take it, fine. Like I give up, like I guess I'd given up. And so, yeah, I'd given up. So there was no, like I wasn't gonna fight back on anything. Before when he would take my phone and look through it, it was infuriating and he sort of forced me to get used to it. And this is again, something that like people who've been in cults would understand because it's like they condition you to not react negatively to things that you would normally react negatively to. And like if I was in a relationship, like if somebody, I would never ever look in somebody's phone. And if somebody did that to me, I would be like, goodbye. So I'm pretty sensitive about that. And so it was very infuriating when he would take my phone and look at it. And it got to the point where not only did I feel like everything I said or wrote or emailed digitally or whatnot would be read, but he got me to the point of feeling like I was being watched all the time in a non-explainable way. Yeah, what were some of the, you didn't mention them, the documentary touched on some of them. What are some of the fantastical stories? So he mentioned that he might help make Leon immortal. What? All of that was always really vague. Intentionally, like a lot of what he talked about was always very vague. But a lot of that stuff was very vague. And again, like- But convincing. Slowly over time. And a lot of those things too are things that, conveniently, you kind of can't disprove. So it's almost like people believe in God or religious people believe certain things. And so one could argue why is it that much crazier for me to have been open to the idea that maybe Leon, maybe we do live forever in some way when a lot of religious people have similar beliefs. So the other thing is he was, maybe you can correct me, but reincarnated or something like that? Or like- He acted like he had lived many lifetimes and had all kinds of wisdom from having lived all these prior lifetimes and being aware of it. So was that, and it was vague, but it was somehow believable? Or is it just like part of the charm? Like what, how do you not call bullshit? I know. Well, not necessarily bullshit. I understand when you're smitten in whatever way, but like a little more details, proof. I suppose it's easy to just, you know, like put it off for later. Assume that more details will come later. Right. I think he's a mentalist or an illusionist named Darren Brown. And it was on a Joe Rogan podcast. I think Joe interviewed Darren Brown. I think Sam Harris interviewed him. I got really intrigued. And then I was looking for other podcasts or maybe Joe interviewed him like right after. I may have gone looking for it, but anyway, it was in the conversation with Joe where Darren explains, he's somebody I would love to meet, a mentalist and illusionist, because they understand a lot of the ways in which the mind can be manipulated. So I feel like they would, if they looked at everything about my situation, they would be able to understand better how he was able to get me to believe things or go along with things. Because Darren Brown is pretty fascinating what he does. And he's really, seems like a very kind person and he's very open about it. And when he was talking to Joe, he said this thing that, and I use this quote in my book. And again, I'm paraphrasing because I don't have it in front of me, but it's like, he says something about how we wanna believe the lie because we'd rather believe that it's something amazing than just that ugly and pathetic a lie. And I, whatever he said was said in a much better way. But the point is like, that's, and so he was explaining it in the context of the way that an illusionist or whatever they're called is able to pull off certain things, which is that they're sort of, it was about somebody who was watching and watched that person sort of leverage people's tendency to want to believe that something amazing and cool is about to happen versus like, this is just a really ugly, pathetic lie. So I think that a lot of the things that Mr. Fox, that he put forward, I couldn't understand it from the perspective of it being a lie because it just seemed too weird and crazy. So I think that this happens sometimes where you believe somebody because it seems so weird that they would lie about it. I think that somebody has, or it's been said sometimes that like the more fantastical, the lie, the more believable it is because you don't believe that somebody would tell that lie. And I think something also that Mr. Fox, people like him are capable of doing is going out and lying in very brazen ways that normal people would be terrified to do. So that kind of also makes it more believable. So if somebody could go out on a world stage and lie and not kind of feel weird about that or even knowing that it's a lie that can be pointed out as being a lie. And then there's also the layer of to what extent is this person in some way also delusional themselves and sort of believing their lies? Because people have asked me that and I've wondered the same thing. To what extent did he believe some of the stuff he was saying? And I think probably there was some sort of delusional aspect, almost like he was sort of halfway aware of playing his own sort of virtual reality game. Like he was in some kind of metaverse in his brain. So you think he believed some of the things he was saying? In some way, yeah. Or he wanted to. Because he wanted to be his own, he wanted to be a superhero. He never built anything or created anything or accomplished anything in his life. Yet, so in his own brain, if he could turn himself into a movie superhero. That's a nice shortcut. Yeah. What about the Navy SEAL thing? Did that ever get resolved? The lie that he, he said that he's a Navy SEAL. I don't know if he said he was a Navy SEAL or that he implied that he worked with the CIA or then it was like he worked with black ops that is by definition under the radar. Right? Okay. That's obviously a huge red flag now going forward is like if somebody, first of all, if somebody tells you that information pretty quickly, that's itself a red flag. I mean. All right, cross that off my list of pick up lines. But conveniently, if he say in some world he actually did work for Blackwater, one of those places or I wouldn't be able to just call someplace and verify it. Anyway, so I think that in some psychological way that I don't understand, he probably did in some way, halfway exists in this world where he was this, you know, like fighter. And he would say things like, it's because of people like me, that people like you can sleep at night, which is probably a line out of a movie that I've never seen. I feel like a lot of things. That's a great, that's funny. That is a great, who said that? Is that really a line out of a movie? It's not a movie. You know what would happen at Rikers is when these things would happen where one of us couldn't think of something and you're like, oh, who was that actor in that movie and that thing? No, and so what we do is like, somebody would be on the phone and you'd be like, hey, who are you talking to? Can you ask them to look up on their phone? Like, so we'd ask people on the phone or somebody would go make a call and you'd have to call somebody and ask them to Google the cast of a movie or something like that. I think you would find jail, don't ever get arrested or try not to, but I think you would find jail fascinating. Oh, I always wanted to go to jail, prison, because there's a lot of elements to it and I'll ask you questions about it, but I feel like I can get a lot of reading done. I got a ton of reading done. Yeah, yeah, yes, I remember now. People attribute this to George Orwell, but they're not sure if George Orwell ever said it, but it's something like, there's a lot of different variations, but we sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us. And there's a lot of variations of this, but basically we depend, our entire society depends on bad motherfuckers who are willing to fight to protect our freedoms, to protect our well-being. And one of the things about the United States is because we're surrounded by water, we don't get to see the violence that's required in part to protect the sovereignty of nations. You mentioned that I would, not to go to prison, but that I may enjoy my time there. Let me ask you. By the way, I love prison movies. You would find it fascinating. I don't, because it's still kind of too soon. Well, how was your time? You spent three and a half months at Rikers. How was that? How was your experience in prison? How's the food from a chef perspective? Not good, but Rikers was, when I got to Rikers, so I was arrested. I spent, I think about 10 days in a small town Tennessee jail. Oh, Pigeon Forge is also the weirdest place on earth. Is it a town? Yes, it's a town where I was arrested. Why is it so weird? In the film, I told them, I told them, you have to go to Pigeon Forge. You have to go there. You have to go there. And I think I was pushing them because it was gonna potentially be the end of the season. It's like a summertime or it's a tourist destination and it's so bizarre and weird and trippy that it doesn't even seem real. It seems like a carnival is happening there nonstop. Exactly. It's, I think I say that in my intro that it's carnivalesque and trippy and weird. Is there a lot of clowns walking around or? Not necessarily clowns, but there is a video on YouTube that I, because I got to the chapter where we arrive in Pigeon Forge and I'll never forget, although I have forgotten, but I remember being like weirdly, like felt like we had entered a different universe driving down this strip and just looking at everything on either side. And I'm wishing that I could remember in more detail like the names of the places or what was there because I wanted to describe it in this chapter. And I was like, I wish somebody, I wish there was like a video of somebody going down the street kind of showing what's on one side and then the other side. And I was like, there probably is. And there is on YouTube. Like I found it and I watched the whole thing. How does this come up from prison exactly? Pigeon, why did that spark you? So that's the town that I went to jail in. Oh, right. In Tennessee. So. What was that like? The food there and some of the conditions, the food made, when I got to, then I was extradited and transferred to Rikers. And when I got to Rikers, I felt like it was like the Four Seasons in comparison. Wow. So, and I really kind of appreciated a lot of things about New York when I got to Rikers, even though there are a lot of things that are very scary about it. Where's Rikers located? Is it close to New York City? Yes. And in a very kind of almost poetically interesting way, the dorm room where I was when I was there for the three and a half months was one of the ones that faced Manhattan. So I could go across the room and look out the window and see the whole Manhattan skyline. Bit of view. Which was. I remember being shocked by the cost per prisoner per year. Yes. That New York pays. It's like 400, $500,000 or something. I didn't think it was that much. I thought I wrote it down, but either way it is. No, I mean, it's elevated during COVID, which is fascinating to that, the number I just said. Yeah, during COVID, I felt sick to my stomach thinking about people stuck there. And again, so Rikers isn't like a long-term prison. It's most of the people at Rikers are in the dorm room. It's not like a long-term prison. It's most of the people at Rikers are awaiting trial and they've been arrested, but not convicted. And then if you're convicted and you're sentenced to less than a year, then you put on a different color uniform and you go upstairs to different dorms. If you're convicted and sentenced to more than a year, you're sent to one of the upstate prisons. So most of the people at Rikers are there in transition. They've been arrested, but not convicted or awaiting trial. So you could be perfectly innocent and you're stuck there. And that happens to a lot of people. Or you could be arrested over some kind of comparatively petty thing or nonviolent thing and stuck there because you don't have as little as $500 to pay bail, which is completely messed up and unjust. And I think most reasonable people agree that it's unjust, but it's different when you're there and you see those people and you see kind of the anguish. And whether, I mean, I have no idea if they're guilty. I mean, I usually don't know what people are there for or what the situation is, but you watch the sort of helplessness set in, because you're kind of powerless there. You have very little contact with the outside world. You have these limited phone calls. And so for people who had kids and a job and an apartment, it's like one by one, those things are lost, or their kids are now being looked after by their abusive ex-husband or something like that. And so watching that is just gut-wrenching. And then also knowing that the only reason they're unable to get out is because of $1,000, $2,000, in some cases, $500. There were people... So there's all of these tragic cases, but then there was also, while I was there, I mean, if I'd had any money, I would have been wanting to bail people out left and right. And then in some cases, I think there was a woman there who snored really loud and her bail was $500. And I was like, I wish I had money to bail her. She just wanted to bail her out. Cause I'm pretty sensitive to sounds and being in a room with 50 people inevitably. So you're in a room with a large number of people. Yeah, there are areas there with cells, but a lot of the areas there are rooms with 50 beds. And they're about three feet apart from each other. So during COVID, there was certainly no social distancing. And that just felt kind of sickening, especially cause so many of the people are there for non-violent things or drug addiction related or mental health issues. How did that, you personally, just having spent that time there for three and a half months, how did that change you? Like what, did that have an effect on your mind? On my mind, personally, I think I was surprised at how well I adapted and then how I was able to, and then I think I sort of took it to the next level when one of the books somebody sent me was The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. And it's very much about like observing your mind and that kind of helped take it to the next level. Was this like a meditation retreat for you? Well, it'd be like trying to meditate in the middle of a circus or in crazy circumstances cause you're never alone. There's nowhere to be alone and there's always- People are talking, there's noises, there's- Fighting, noises, chaos. Did you feel in danger? Yes, but I never felt terrified there. You know, one of my friends, the bathroom is the scary place because they don't have cameras in the bathroom. So that's sort of a, one has to watch out there. And I did, one of my friends who I, one of the people I was friends with there, she did get beat up a bit in the bathroom one day. A lot of weird shit happened in the bathroom. But it was, if you're interested in human behavior and psychology and it can be fascinating to kind of sit there and watch things. You were saying like you might enjoy prison for that perspective, like just you get to watch human nature at its, like at the, I don't wanna say that it's worse, but like the full variety that it can take. Right, and there was a lot of beauty there as well. I mean- Is there love? People being, well again, depends on the definition of love, but people being, you know, incredibly generous and kind to each other. And sometimes people singing at night. There was just a lot of, and then there was a lot of, you know, hilarious stuff. It's just, it's all there. There's like, there's tragic things, you know, interesting things. A lot of people with mental health issues, which is, can be difficult to witness. So very different experience. I should ask you this, but somebody that's currently in prison, Galene Maxwell, I believe she spent approximately 500 days in isolation. So it's a very different prison experience, but what do you think about her case? What do you think about her and Jeffrey Epstein? She, so her brother, her family, she says that she's a victim, not the monster. I think this is an especially fascinating case because, and I have listened to podcasts about the Epstein situation, and there was one that was more focused on her by Vicki Ward that I would definitely listen to. Vicki Ward is a journalist. I think she'd written an article about Jeffrey Epstein for Vanity Fair, so she got to know Jeffrey Epstein, and then she knew Galene Maxwell from being sort of part of the social circle in which they would have overlapped. Have you, by the way, ever met them since this New York? Do you remember meeting this, you know, Jeffrey or Galene? No, I never met them, but they're also very much like this sort of Upper East Side crowd. I did meet Harvey Weinstein once that made me have all kinds of interesting thoughts later. At the restaurant or elsewhere? No, it was weird. It was out on the street, and we had this really strange interaction, and knowing what I know now, it was eerie, and also, had he contacted me after that and made it seem like he could have done something for me, like would I have been, you know, say he said, oh, I'm gonna finance your whole expansion or something and come meet me at this hotel, and then I go to that hotel, and then he's like, come up to the room, and then I would have been like, uh. And you were wondering whether you would have done it. Yes, and sadly, I think I would have, and so I felt a lot of compassion for those who, you know, didn't yell at him and leave or didn't storm out, because I think what happens in those situations is, you know, there's all kinds of uncertainty in the moment, and you sort of freeze, and then you'll, if, I'm probably one of those people that would sit there and somehow in the moment, without clarity, just instinctively feel like, somehow I must have done something wrong, and it's my fault, and like I led him on, and, or just being afraid, and then you don't know how to deal with it, and so you freeze. So I think that, you know, if you're somebody that maybe was raised differently or you have a lot of self-confidence or you might have reacted differently and kind of pushed him away and stormed out, but I am probably not one of those people, but I did not ever meet Jeffrey Epstein, but he seems very straightforwardly, you know, just a classic, the way he was able to charm people, the way he could step into these roles, you know, I think he was teaching at Dalton, and then just kind of the way he would get himself into the academic crowd within Harvard, and I think also MIT, right? He sort of, so he's playing a role, but he's doing it so well that he fools all these people, and the things that people would, in hindsight, say about him are just the same things that people say about, it's like you hear the same things over and over again, you hear the same things said about those people who were taken in by Elizabeth Holmes, is that they were, it was as if he was under a spell, it was as if I was under a spell, is something you hear a lot, and so it's like they have this powerful charm that's almost over, it's overwhelming in that they overwhelm your better judgment, or they overwhelm your like normal, otherwise normally functioning capacity for rational thought, and they sort of overwhelm that with their charm, so when you look at, I think it was like James Mattis invested a bunch of money with Elizabeth Holmes, and all these people were involved with her, and nobody really did their due diligence, or they just sort of trusted her, and Jeffrey Epstein, I think it's still unclear where he got all of his money, but the guy Wexner, Les Wexner? Yeah, Les Wexner. Who had an enormous amount of money, and somehow very quickly turned over management of it to Jeffrey Epstein, and so people wonder, why would he do that, that's insane, and then other people have commented about that relationship, it was as if he was under Jeffrey's spell, observers would say, I couldn't understand it, it was as if he was under his spell, and so somebody observing me and Mr. Fox could have possibly said the same thing about me, but it's a bit different, because it wasn't all charm, I think Epstein used his charm, and then was probably very, very, very crafty in getting, another thing that people like him do, and cults do also, is to get you somehow compromised, because then they've got you, so I think. Some kind of usually sex related. Yeah, and with Epstein, certainly, he was known to have cameras everywhere, and so if he got any of these people on camera doing something compromising, and they're all very powerful people, then he's got them. Yeah. And I think he was also very smart to do that, to target people of both parties, so that politically, that he was able to maintain his power, like no matter, like nobody wanted him to be totally exposed because then people, a lot of people would be exposed. By the way, that part, you know, that's all kind of conspiracy, right? Right, we don't know that. So a lot of people believe that, and I tend to kind of naturally believe that, because it makes sense, but it's also possible that straight up with charisma. I mean, he did record people, and there were recordings, so I listened to an interview with a woman who, I mean, was a girl back then, maybe she was 15 or 16 back then, and subsequently, years later, was able to see some of the video of, I mean, I think that's a verifiable thing that there were video cameras all over his house. The degree to which it was used. Right, we don't know that. And to the degree of how many people were involved, and so on, there's all kinds of conspiracies around the man. But the question about. Her. Her, Ghislaine. So I only know what I know from the inputs, which are, the Vicky Ward, it's one of the podcasts, it's a narrative podcast, so it's like an audio kind of a documentary or journalistic piece that she did and put out. I thought it was really, really well done. I think it's called Chasing Ghislaine. And I listened to that whole thing. I didn't intend to listen to it all in one stretch. That's how you know it's good. I mean, it was like a weekend and I basically was, you know, cleaning and doing other things and walking Leon and listening to it. And I got through it pretty quickly. But I got really fascinated by it because, I don't know, but I think, I feel, like I find the whole situation gut-wrenching because I think Jeffrey Epstein is a straight up, like straight up sociopath, like no question. With her, everybody's calling her evil and for her to have enabled and done a lot of the things that she did could potentially require, one might say that it could require a lack of empathy to be able to do those things knowingly. But at the same time, I think, the information that was conveyed in the Vicki Ward piece was fascinating to me because it's clear that at the very least, it's like all of these things could be true. She could maybe be not enough of a good person to have, you know, horribly victimized these young girls and destroy their lives. But she could have all, I feel like I'm gonna get bashed for saying this, but she could have in some way of not quite known what she was doing or been a bit out of her mind. Like manipulated, essentially. I'm just saying people, I would hope that people would be open to exploring that as a possibility. Well, her family and friends are making that case. They're painting a broad picture of who she is as a human being and showing that she couldn't have done any of those things without being systematically manipulated. That's their case. Right, what I listened to in that podcast about her relationship with her father, how her father died, her things about her childhood, and then Epstein coming into her life and basically kind of pushing all those buttons and becoming like the father figure. And so she would be in a position of kind of always wanting his approval. And just the way that, things that are described about the way that she like was so subservient to him in this kind of astonishing way that seems really weird and abnormal. And yet I think she had a lot of money and connections. And I think she lost the money but had all the connections. Either way, there was a lot, that a ton that Epstein gained via his relationship with her, like a ton. So it makes sense that he would have manipulated her. He manipulates everybody. So he, without question, I think one could argue, he definitely manipulated her. And again, I wanna be like careful not to be saying like, that's an excuse for what she did. I just think that- That's one possibility. It's important to like explore these things and be open to them as opposed to just like broad brush painting her as a horrible person. I mean, because people could say that based on things they've read or things that I did that like I'm a horrible person. And it's very different because what she did involved young girls whose lives were destroyed. But I think that people could be a bit open to understanding how somebody could be manipulated. There's a psychologist that I'm friends with that I got to know after I watched him on Leah Remini's show. So Leah Remini is the actress who was in Scientology, got out and has really been speaking out about it and trying to expose what they're all about and how diabolical that organization is. And a lot of people are exposing them and doing this type of work. And so she had this guy on her show who was in the Moonies and his name is Steve Hassen. And so he was in a cult and then he got out again by extreme circumstances. He got in a car accident and almost died. And that's what ended up getting him out of the cult that he was in. But really smart guy was targeted when he was young, got pulled into the Moonies. But watching this interview of him on her show, he said, he's talking about his experience. And he said, if they had told me to kill somebody, I would have. And that in that moment made me cry, but I also felt like I understand that. And not that if Mr. Fox had told me to kill somebody, I don't think I would have. But again, I understand how it could get to that point. So that makes me feel like with her, like I would be curious what Steve Hassen would think kind of analyzing the entire situation. Because it's hard to understand that unless you've been in it. And I understand with him how he could have said that. If they had told me to kill somebody, I would have. That's pretty intense. I mean, that's pretty extreme. And it's interesting how you can get into it, how far you can go just one day at a time, like gradually. Right. Just like the frog in the boiling water. Yeah. So fascinating. I mean, all of these cases are fascinating. Like Patty Hearst, that whole story. Well, I'm just also, I just, it's already a while ago, reread the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I've been reading a lot about Hitler and Goebbels for a long time, working on a series about Hitler and the Third Reich. Because for me, it's like returning. So much of my family was destroyed or impacted by this time in history. That it is somehow a way to find out more about myself is going back to that time. Have you ever thought about inherited trauma? This sounds, not to mock people, but this sounds like a thing that- Like a woke thing? Like a woke thing, yeah. I don't mean it that way at all, but I get it because sometimes now when I say, now I almost have to put air quotes when I say something's triggering, because I feel like I'm using a word that's now overused or used in less, so now when I say something's triggering, it's like I use air quotes. Yeah, it's funny, because good words get taken up and then they get destroyed. People are overusing gaslighting. And I worry that that would happen with sociopathy. I think people need to understand sociopathy. I think it's critical for humanity that people understand it. Yeah, so just because you're being an asshole doesn't mean you're a sociopath. Doesn't mean you're a sociopath, exactly. And I feel like it's gonna be this thing where now everybody's gonna start calling everybody else a sociopath and it's like, ugh. And right now everybody calls everything gaslighting. If somebody's lying, it's not gaslighting. I have to talk, we started talking about, I already forgot, fluff? Is it fluff? It's fluff, right? Fluff, yeah. Fluff, yeah. Okay, so that was great. That's a new discovery for me. Let's talk about food a little bit, if we can. You know what, let's talk about restaurants first. That's the fascinating part of the story before anything else, which is opening an exceptionally successful restaurant in NYC, New York City. What's that take? What does it take to open up from the very beginning, from the idea stage to the launching it, both the finances and the skill of actually getting people super excited by it and then running it, all that chaos. I mean, to me, am I over-romanticizing? But it seems like New York City's a really tough place to launch a restaurant in. Yes, very. Well, I think because it's extremely competitive and the standards are so high. So I think that's why there are so many good restaurants in New York, because if they're not good, they're not gonna survive. So even like you could walk into what looks like a hole in the wall and it's gonna have amazing food. That happens a lot. So what was the menu? So was it a raw, was it vegan and raw from the beginning? Yeah, it was. And raw means what? Now I'm getting thrown back to all the interviews I did when people asked me these questions. It was so long ago. At the time. What's it like being vegan? So nothing was cooked over roughly 118 degrees. It was this very, like, the world of, there were people who were hardcore raw foodists and there's also people who are hardcore vegans and I was never any of those things. So I think what we did. You weren't the hardcore part? Yeah. You weren't, but you, like, what parts of your life were you a vegan? Are you still a vegan? Do you eat meat? Are you a vegetarian? Are you raw? Good question. I don't apply labels. So none of those labels would apply because it's. Male and female. That's, I'm beyond those labels myself as well. But I'm a carnivore most of the time. There you go. It's the opposite of vegan, unfortunately. But no judgment. I think that's a beautiful thing to be is vegan. Likewise, I think that it's people who are very adamantly one way or the other. I think that after all my years in this world and in general and also consuming an enormous amount of inputs and podcasts about health. Like I love listening to different points of view. So I love when like somebody's arguing vegan and then somebody's arguing carnivore and like or even with other issues. I like listening to what other people, you know, opposing sides assuming they're both, you know, intelligent, interesting sources. Especially when they're, I love it when they're sort of really testing that diet. Meaning they're athletes or in some way really testing it. Not just like vaguely saying what's healthy and not for you. But like really what is life like under this particular diet? Yeah, and I think that probably everybody's different. And so in the same way that some people tolerate, like some people can't tolerate nightshades or some people can't tolerate certain spices or some people can't tolerate gluten or some people thrive off of this or that. And I've heard it said and discussed that there's a great deal to sort of what your body's used to, what your ancestors ate, where, because it seems like the human body is pretty adaptable. So you can adapt to eating a certain type of a food. And so that if your, you know, if your family comes from a certain part of the world where certain things aren't grown or more meat is eaten or, because there's people who are vegan their entire lives and they're incredibly healthy and they thrive. And there's athletes and there's people like Rich Roll, who I like, who's vegan and an athlete. But it might be something where that's working really well for him, but it wouldn't work well for somebody else. And I think there's also an element of people who try these things and then feel really good or feel really bad. And they make a conclusion based on that initial period of time when it might be something where it makes you feel really good temporarily, but then over time you're gonna be depleted of certain things. And then we also live in a world where like our soil is depleted and there's a lot of processing that takes out of foods, a lot of things that we need. So I just think that there's no kind of one right answer. I think you can look at it from just a health perspective and then you can also look at it from like a morality and ethics perspective. And then also like what's the impact on the environment and all of those things are important. And I think that I've watched a lot of films and things and for a while right after that, I might think, oh my God, I can't believe I ate this thing last week and now I'm gonna go back to being 100% vegan because I just watched this thing and it's fresh in my mind and now I'm thinking about it in a certain way. But then over time that sort of fades and then you start to get a bit more loose. And for me, I will end up eating a lot of things that aren't vegan usually in the context where I'm not adding to the consumption of it. So like at Rikers, most of the meat there was kind of weird and fake, but there was like a chicken every Thursday and Sunday, there was actual chicken, like the leg. Was that the most exciting thing for people? Oh yeah, oh and then the most fights broke out on chicken day because there was like heightened tension. Thursday and Sunday you said? Yeah. Chicken day. So I have a question. So that was the most real meat you're getting is the chicken. Yeah, a lot of the rest of it. Chicken breast or dark, white or dark meat? Dark is the leg and the thigh. And it was cooked surprisingly well. And so I would always eat it. I don't know, I mean, it's there and it's not, from a health perspective, one could say, well, that's probably the shittiest of the shitty chickens that are full of antibiotics and hormones and terrible things. And so it's not optimal from that point of view. But it's like if it's otherwise gonna be thrown in the trash, then. Yeah, you're not adding to it. Right, or like I've been drunk at a party and eaten a bunch of stuff that one would think I would never eat. Yeah. But it's not like I ran to the store and bought it or went to a restaurant and ordered it. I'm the same. Liquor makes me eat things I shouldn't be eating. Oh yeah. Or maybe should. Well, I think. Life is, as you wrote me in the email, life is complicated and fascinating and so was our decisions when we're drunk. I actually am a big fan of 7-Eleven. I go there sometimes late at night to think about life and I'll eat whatever the stuff they have. I also think it's fascinating how our bodies intuitively know if you're quiet enough and you think about what you're craving. As long as it's not like, if you're craving some processed, junky food, that's probably something that's not quite functional. But if you're, sometimes I'll be like, I must have avocado or I'll wanna eat an entire parsley salad. And then it's happened, I went through a phase where, and here I'm like, do I say this out loud? I went through a phase of. Now you're gonna say it. Where I was, I know, now I have to say it. Where I couldn't get enough, I don't know where it started, like whose house I was at or whatever, but grass-fed butter. I just, I was like, I could tell that my body wanted whatever was there. And so I suppose I could have investigated it and thought, well, what's in there? Is it vitamin K, vitamin D? What is it in the grass-fed butter? Because it wasn't regular, like regular butter, ew, no. But this grass-fed butter, I felt like I just wanted, I needed it. So there's probably something in there and maybe I could have gone and just taken a lot of vitamin K and then not eaten the butter. But there is something in there that's fascinating. I had that last night actually with, I went to a grocery store and I had a craving for tomatoes. I was like, what the hell is this? Like what, I don't, it was weird. You should listen to that and then just get a bunch of tomatoes, because there's probably something in there. It was like, it felt right. When I was little, my mother, no, but that's exactly what I was saying, is that somehow your body knows without you knowing. And today I have zero interest in tomatoes. Yeah, did you eat the tomatoes then? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well then you probably. I ate way too many, but that's all right. Or maybe not enough, there you go. So yeah, what you were saying? Anyway, I think these things like shift and change and there's not like a right answer. And then there's something where it's like one person might do well on something, another person doesn't. Or you might do well on something for, like I might, maybe if I ate a bunch of liver, I'd feel better because I'm getting vitamins that I don't, that I'm lacking. But then once I get them, I'm fine and I don't need that anymore. And I could potentially get those from other sources or. But yeah, when I was little, I used to crave. My mother said I craved, not craved, but she said I would always eat sardines, but I wouldn't eat the pieces. I would only eat the whole ones, which have the bones in them. And I used to chew on chicken bones and try to eat eggshells when I was like a little. So I think all of those things have calcium and other minerals in common. So there's probably something there that I needed. Cause you'd think as a little kid, I wouldn't be drawn to oily fish and bones and eggshells. Yeah, it's interesting cause like you're saying the explanation for the craving is probably the nutrients you're getting. But when you're imagining the craving, you're not obviously imagining the nutrients, you're imagining the texture, the taste, the feel, I mean, a lot of things that we actually experience as we're eating, that's our brain probably tricking us. Right, but do you love tomatoes? Well, I think we determined that love is possible to define. Are you extremely fond of, do you think tomatoes are like one of the most delicious foods? No, no, but maybe. But yet you crave them. Maybe it's generational, cause it's a big Russian thing with potatoes and tomatoes and cause it's good with vodka, salted. We were talking about the menu and the early days of the restaurant in New York. So what was on the menu? What kind of foods were you playing with? Do you remember, was that one of the challenging things is putting together, cause you're like crafting a new thing in New York where it's extremely competitive. Well, over time it got easier and easier. And then also I had, I wasn't coming up with new dishes, it was the people that worked there. So I feel like if I could take credit for something, it would be recognizing talent. And when dishes were developed, this is when I was there on my own. So it was opened with Matthew and Jeffrey and then within a year Matthew was out and Jeffrey was still involved as like the, the corporate sort of side of it. But then over time, I separated from that infrastructure as well and then was completely on my own. And in part I did that because I was growing one lucky duck on the side and that was growing and growing and growing. And I knew there was something there. And yet the two businesses were completely intertwined. And so potential investors would come at me and they would see this very messy situation where I owned one lucky duck and Jeffrey Chodro owned the restaurant and how do we move forward from there? And then people would say, I should shut down the restaurant and just focus on one lucky duck. And I wanted them all to be together under one umbrella and to move forward where everybody's incentives were aligned and- What was the magic? Why was it so successful so quickly, would you say? I want to half jokingly, but not joking, but sort of say that it was about the love and the food and the space. Can you define love? But it's, there was something special. So I always, when people ask me about opening a restaurant, I say, I don't wanna get back into the restaurant business unless it's the same restaurant in the same space. Because there was something about that space that felt, I guess, felt magical for lack of a better word, and the energy of a lot of the people there. And I think that people really cared about it. And so for whatever reason, there was an energy about the place. Would you ever do it again? Yes. Would you ever consider reopening? In the same space. Wow. That's a tough thing in New York, but you're thinking, okay, well. It's there. It's there? Let me ask you this question. I've been searching for that myself, like asking myself this question. If I, you know, the last meal question. Like what's the best meal you've ever eaten in your life? Like if you had, if I had to murder you at the end of this and you get one meal, but you can travel anywhere in the world, what would you eat? It's one of those questions where I feel like I should have an answer prepared. No, it's too difficult to sort of pick favorites, but if somebody would, you know, force you to choose, you'd have to. I was eating something once, and I had the thought that if I was gonna die, I would come here and order plate after plate of this and eat this. Do you remember what it was? Yes. Some diner in the middle of nowhere? No, it was, Pure Food and Wine was on Irving Place, and then the kitchen connected to the One Lucky Duck juice bar, which had an entrance on 17th Street. So it was kind of like this L shape, and then there was a huge garden in the back. On the corner was Casa Mono and Bar Jamon, which was Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich were behind that, and it was very focused on meat, but also like organ meats and strange, unusual meats. Spanish restaurant, wow, lots of good reviews. Yeah, it was really good. This is just a funny that we surrounded it, but Bar Jamon was this tiny little bar, and I went in there once with Tobin late, and I don't know why we ended up going there, but it was right before they closed, and drank red wine, and they had tomato bread, and it's just like a baguette, although it's a Spanish, whatever. It's like a bread like a baguette, like a thin that they toast, and I think they rub it with garlic, and they don't even put tomato slices on it. It's like they rub it and the tomato juices all over it. It was just bread and tomato juice, and probably some garlic flavor, and really good salt. And- With some wine. And red wine, and we sat there and ordered a plate, ate it, ordered another one, ate it, ordered another one. I think we had like six plates, and I remember sitting there thinking, I could just eat this until my stomach bursts, and so if this is like, if somebody was like, what's the last, I would just wanna sit there, and eat plate after plate after plate. I think if you went back there and ate the same thing, it wouldn't taste nearly as good. Like was there something magical about that night, about the way that bread was made on that night, the way you felt at that night, the wine, the something? Or do you think, like where's the power from that food come from, is it the food itself, or is it the environment? I'm sure it's both, but like if somebody brought a plate of it here right now, it would be completely delicious. Yeah. But it might not feel as kind of, not that it felt magical, but it was the whole warmth of the experience, and the red wine, and- It's the afternoon in Texas right now, so it's different. And I keep forgetting and thinking it's late at night. Yeah, we're surrounded by, this whole place is anti-Huberman, there's no light. Well, it's pro-Huberman if it's in the afternoon or the evening, except for these bright lights. If they were lower down, if they were like down below, then they're hitting the tops of our eyes, but it's the light coming from above that's destructive at night because it's hitting the bottom of your eyes, so it's mimicking the sun, which is signaling your body that it's time to be awake, so as much as possible. So I do this in the evenings, I shut off all the overhead lights. I try to dim the lights as much as I can, and I turn on a lamp versus an overhead light. Are you also doing the caffeine thing, like not consuming much caffeine late before bed? Oh, I can't, yeah, I usually don't have caffeine late. I try not to have it, so ideally- Drink into the night, caffeine. 2 p.m. would be my last. I wouldn't, ideally I wouldn't drink coffee after two, but plenty of times I do, especially if I haven't had midday coffee, then I worry I'm gonna get a headache. That makes you way more responsible than me. Let me return to love. What do you think makes for a good romantic relationship? Given your experience. I mean this question seriously. I think a mutual respect is a big part of it. Mutual respect, that's interesting. Well, and understanding it in a way that you want what's best for the other person, not in a way that you would sacrifice yourself for them necessarily, but in a very healthy way. So I think a healthy relationship is where you want what's best for the other person. So I always find it tragic. Like say you started dating somebody who then would get jealous or upset if you spent too much time working on something, right? But that's like your life. So if you're working on some robotics thing and you're having some breakthrough and so you just wanna spend a lot of time wherever you spend a lot of time doing those things, and then that other person got all bent out of shape and it became like a competition, that to me seems very unhealthy. Because if it was like a genuine healthy love, she would want you to be doing those things. Yeah, that's a good observation. But to me, I think the way to achieve that is actually, or the easiest way to achieve that, at least for me, is actually legitimately be excited by the things the other person's excited by. So like not in some generic sense, it's good for them to be doing the robotics thing. Like it's more like you become a fan of all the cool things that they're doing in their life. So like I definitely have this. Somebody told me recently, there's a term for this, but I love watching other people succeed, be excited about. I like celebrating other people. It's fun for me to watch people do the thing they love doing. So in some sense, that's reinvigorating to me and exciting to me. And so one of the things for me in a relationship is you get excited by watching another person do the thing they're excited about. It's not like I intellectually know it's good for them to have their own thing. It's like I legit get excited by their own thing. Because otherwise- Right, but that's what I mean. It's like that person would be excited because you're excited. But they would, I think the easiest way to achieve that is actually be, like, what am I trying to say? It's like it's not like saying that you should be excited. It's like you can't help yourself but be excited. That's what I- Right, but I think that's possible. But it's possible for that to be the case for somebody that might have an appreciation for what you're doing, but that's not what that person's gonna go spend their time on themselves. Yeah, if they were by themselves, yeah. So the other person might be really good at a musical instrument that requires a lot of practice, and you're not interested in playing that musical instrument but you appreciate the beauty of the music and understand that that person is getting something out of it so you would be excited when they get a chance to practice or whatnot. So it's that kind of a- Do you think love should be simple or complicated in a relationship? Well, it might be inherently complicated. I may have asked Huberman the exact same question. Forget what he said. I thought it was interesting when you asked Elon about love. Oh boy, yeah. That's gonna be conversation number seven, that he actually answers it. Well, what was interesting that I found admirable was this sort of like a duty to humanity. I think you asked about it not in about person, but about the work. And so it was like to put all this energy to try to kind of like move things forward knowing that he will probably die before it gets there. You're talking about like something related to the science of rocketry. Yeah. Rocketry. He's kind of a rocket scientist. But whatever, you were asking him about whether something could be accomplished and he said yes, but not in his lifetime, but he's gonna keep pushing it forward anyway. So I felt like that was a really, to put so much of yourself into something just to kind of move the baton forward for humanity struck me as an admirable thing. There's no great reward in terms of you're gonna see that invention happen or you're gonna see Mars colonized or whatever it is, but you're willing to put in all the work and brainpower to try to push it along. Like thinking about the biggest possible impact on the world, just thinking about humanity. I think all of us, when we do cool things, are contributing to humanity. And it's good to think of it that way. When you run a restaurant and you make all the people happy, I don't know, that's part of that. And it's good to think big like that. And Elon does definitely. But when I asked him about love, I'm just knowing him personally now, I'm asking about the personal question about love, but I'm giving him the freedom to escape it, which he always does. That's very generous of you. Because I don't want to trap him. I understand it's a difficult. So he's better at solving engineering problems than talking about love. The other thing he's really good at is going to the joke. So for him, for him, love and all those kinds of things, especially those kind of cliche sounding things are the stuff of memes. It's the stuff, the easiest way you can talk about it is humor. The same with trauma, like personal trauma, easiest stuff for him to talk about is his laugh about it. He's been very tough privately or on podcasts to talk about personal, difficult stuff. And for me, obviously, that's often the most interesting stuff as humans. Like, where's your darkness? But for him, it's tough. For a lot of people, it's tough, but it's important to go there. Maybe first in the privacy of your own mind. And I think, bringing it back to the relationship thing is wanting to understand and accept those things about somebody else. I mean, it's sort of cliche to say that you can't change somebody. And you don't want to also try to change yourself for somebody, but you can sort of figure things out and be willing to make adjustments and navigate for the sake of something working. And sometimes that comes from understanding, which might require a lot of effort and open-mindedness if somebody is kind of very different from you. Yeah, and being fragile yourself, revealing your flaws and getting to learn about theirs and getting to see the beauty in them because that's the good stuff. Or if the flaws are too much of a red flag, then you walk away. That's the hard stuff. Either the red flags might be the thing that you actually get to love deeply because they're a flawed human, or it might be the reason to walk away quickly. And you don't know. It's a gamble. Although, I feel like if it's a red flag, then it, by definition, is something that's telling you to walk away. If it was just something about their character that's challenging, you could appreciate that or understand it, but it's not something that they're intentionally trying to use to deceive you. I think red flags, it's like, I guess it's more about manipulation and or somebody's kind of extreme dysfunction or something would be red flags. But I think there could be things that are quirky or weird or even dark about somebody that are acceptable. Yeah, but they might look like red flags. If there's someone crying on the subway, that's a red flag for me. That she might be an emotional basket case, high maintenance crazy person. Yeah, that's true. But there could be a deeper story to it. So that's what I'm trying to tell you. That's true. All right, what advice would you give to young folks today if they wanna launch a restaurant in New York City and then message somebody on Twitter? I was, before you finished the sentence, I was about to say read a lot of books. But then you, then, cause you said what advice would you give to young people today? And I was like, read a lot of books. And then you got to the restaurant part. Yeah, no, I mean, that's, I was joking about the restaurant. I said, yeah, about life, I would say. Not just about career as a restaurateur, but just in life, how to be successful, how to be, how to live a life that can be fulfilling and how to live a life that can be proud of. So read a lot of books. It's complicated because- Have you figured it out yet? No, but I think self-awareness is key. But I also think there's some of those things where people kind of have to learn their own lessons. But I think in part because I never had kids and I never wanted kids, I feel like through my book, I keep thinking that I want a lot of the lessons that I learned to be useful to other people, particularly younger people, and in many cases, younger females, to maybe understand themselves a little better along the way. Because I think that a lot of the mistakes that I made and things that happened or things that I did that I'm embarrassed about, or things that I stepped into that I wouldn't have otherwise stepped into or allowed to happen were a result of, in many cases, like insecurity, like a lack of confidence. And I think in the context of moving forward with relationships, being really careful to understand why you're there or if you're repeating a pattern, that's something that is sort of cliche, but I feel like it's very, I mean, aren't cliches or things that aren't true, they're just repeated a lot. But anyway, the idea that people repeat patterns, right? So I think that's very true. Right. And so to be aware of that and to figure it out sooner rather than later so you don't keep stepping into the same thing over and over again. You mentioned sort of giving yourself time and space to think. Yeah, which sometimes isn't possible. But don't let momentum of life sort of carry you away. Right. And I think for me, one of the things that would have scared me about having kids is the chaos of it or not being able to handle it. But I think that's just me, not most people. You ran a restaurant. I know, which is probably why I would go home at night and lie on the floor and cry or- How often do you do that? Do you like a good cry? I do. Music usually or what's, can you paint a scene? In just in general? Yeah, is there candles? I cried this morning. Okay. Not intentionally. Out of happiness or just overwhelmed? It was like, I looked a little bit at Instagram and saw, what was it? Very often they're like, like these little animal rescue stories or whatever. But this is, this guy Matt, who used to be my trainer years ago and put this little montage video to music. That was interesting. If there hadn't been music, I probably wouldn't have cried. But it was showing his wife having their second child, not showing it, but like the sort of before and then the baby in her arms right afterwards and then bringing the baby home. It was this very short little clip, but set to music. And I watched that and started to cry, but like, I didn't sob or anything. So I think I cry easily. Interestingly though, in actual horrifically tragic things, or when they apply to me, I might not cry. And then people find that unusual. And that was in the film that, I don't know if it was my sister or my father, described that when my parents got divorced, I didn't cry and I just, whereas my sister bawled her eyes out and I didn't cry at all ever. And I just didn't say anything. I want to talk about it. Like when I was sentenced to jail, I didn't cry. So a lot of times when something really big happens, I get a little bit weirdly, I don't know, but I very often- Too much to feel it all directly. So you kind of cried out later slowly. Right, maybe years later. Maybe years later. Yeah, and maybe that's what I'm really crying about when I cry at these little videos or something. I don't know, but I'm glad for it because I feel like it always feels like kind of a relief. Well, let me ask this because it's interesting what you would say. Do you have regrets about things in your life? Like what do you regret? If there's a one day you could live again, which day would you pick? Like relive and make different choices. Well, like one obvious thing could be the day that I let Anthony Strange in the door. If I had instead, if at any time early on, I had instead just pushed him out, that my life would be wildly different. It's hard to- So that's the biggest mistake of your life, you would say, just letting Anthony into your life? I think, yes. I think one could argue that's the biggest mistake, but then at the same time, you never know because like when I was in a sort of a dark relationship that then led to the restaurant and my having the One Lucky Duck brand. So I felt like that darkness, it's like if you married a horribly abusive person, but you had a beautiful child, and then you go on and you have this beautiful child, and you think, well, if I hadn't been with that horribly abusive person, I wouldn't have this beautiful child. So I wouldn't go undo it. So I feel like a lot of things are like that. And I guess I could optimistically hope that there are good things down the road where I'll think, well, I'm here and I'm grateful for it. And therefore I'm grateful for the things that got me here, which include a lot of dark things. It's hard to say because a lot of people were hurt in my case, but I am optimistic that I can make those things up. And there are also hurts that were, I mean, in some cases emotionally, but also very much financial. And I feel like those are numbers and the employees were all paid back. So anybody else that is out money because of everything that happened, isn't somebody that's like not able to feed themselves. Most of those people have plenty of money and it's like not a big deal, but I still wanna repay all of it. And it's numbers, it's not, like nobody died. And sometimes when I think about my own challenges, they feel sort of inconsequential in comparison to other things going on in the world. So, yes, it's hard being humiliated or it's hard to have people say nasty things about you on Twitter, Instagram, but really who cares, because that's just words and things. And I'm not like fleeing my home and watching people get shot. And there's still out of this darkness, out of this you can still, that you still have a lot of time to create something beautiful in the world. Maybe something even more beautiful than you've ever done before. I am optimistic. And I also feel like, part of the reason I like having these conversations is because I feel like people will learn stuff from my shitty experiences to avoid going through their own shitty experience. And I've heard a ton of that from a lot of women and some men writing to me saying that they went through something similar and nobody understood. And my story helped them or might help them get somebody else out of a situation. So making it useful feels good. So through all of this, Leon was with you. He recently had a birthday, March, I guess. Yes, 12. Yeah, I made him a phenomenal meat cake or a layered cake that involved a variety of animal foods. He's not a vegetarian. No, he's not. But I also give him like really high quality stuff. But yeah, he's not a vegan or vegetarian. Let me ask you a hard question. Do you think about the tragic fact that dogs live much shorter lives than us humans? Do you think about his mortality? All the time. I kind of try not to, but all the time. Because you told me in traveling here to Austin, Texas, you're not in the habit of leaving Leon by himself. Well, he's not by himself, but I haven't been away from him certainly since before COVID. So given that. So I'm not used to it. And so people always say that dogs have, like that dogs have attachment issues or get separation anxiety. But in my case, at least it's like, I think he's fine. I'm the one that is, he's like fine. I'm the one that gets anxious about it, being away from him. You're the one who acts like a dog when you come back and you're super excited to see him. Yeah, I can't pee on the floor. Pee on the floor and wiggle your tail and drool and all that kind of stuff. But do you think about the fact that you might lose Leon soon? I do, I think about it all. I mean, I try not to think about it, but I do. Are you scared of it? Yeah, it's scary, but then I also just try to understand that it's inevitable. And I mean, yeah, assuming I'm still around, then that's, I think one of the things about adopting a dog or caring for an animal, unless it's one of those animals that lives a really long time. I just found out that parrots live an extraordinarily long time. But they're annoying. So you get, it's a trade-off. The ones we love live a short time, the ones that annoy you live a long time. So I just think it's one of those things that you just know it's gonna happen and it's just part of life. And I think it's one of those pains that's, it's painful, but you just kind of have to go through it. And what's the alternative? You're not gonna, it's like saying you would never wanna fall in love because of the heartbreak that's gonna inevitably come. So some people do that. They just have a way forever. You're saying screw it, I'm diving right in. Yes. It was all worth it. What about your own mortality? You think about yourself dying? Less so than I was before. I think I wrote about that and I put this letter, Dear Mr. Fox online, which I never intended to do, but I did because of all the misconceptions about the film and our relationship. And so I put this thing up online that I'd written on my phone on multiple subway rides. And at the end of it, I talk about, because especially then when it was the height of everything was gone and what do I have to live for? I sort of noticed and wrote about how differently I felt about things, whereas I used to be afraid. I used to have a healthy fear of being pushed in front of a train, because that happens in New York or anywhere. Or I had a healthy fear of, I don't know, walking down a dark street at night. But I noticed that at the time, I didn't really have those fears, because I was like, what do I have to lose? Who cares? I don't have anything anymore, what do I have to lose? So I certainly feel much less that way. But something about those feelings lingered where I'm less afraid of it, or more just less afraid of it, but hoping it's not some sort of a gruesome way. I mean, some people are really afraid of flying, and I feel like, well, statistically, it's extremely safe. And if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. There's nothing you can do. Like, there's really nothing you can do unless you're gonna like do what that guy in that small plane did the other day and like leap over and was able to take control of the plane. But I mean, like a commercial flight. So it's like, if you're gonna die, you're gonna die, and it's just your time, and all you can do is hope that. I would probably prefer to have as little awareness about it as possible. You know, it's like, you'd rather have somebody, if you were gonna get shot, you'd rather have somebody shoot you in the back of the head and you didn't see it coming, and just boom, lights out, versus somebody holding a gun to your head, and then you're gonna feel all this fear, and have to like feel all of that, which also made me think of, you know, animals and animal suffering, and the way that some people argue that because of the conditions and the fear that that's like, that's like in their bodies when they're killed, which is an interesting thing to think about. Yeah, I clearly struggle with the ethics of, I just, I think about it a lot, about, you know, like our current food system, which involves a system that everybody has sort of accepted and normalized where, like say, aliens did come down, like say, aliens did come down, and looked at us, and realized that we're a particularly good source of whatever fuel they need, so then they imprisoned us all in cages that were like the equivalent of like sardines and jammed in an elevator, and then we were bred, and we would get sick, and we'd go crazy, and we'd do the equivalent of like pecking, and then we'd get abused, and then like grotesquely and brutally killed, and that was like our entire lives, and so if like aliens came down and did all of that, we would have to be okay with that, which is something that was said to me after watching this movie called Our Daily Bread many years ago, but it's an interesting way to think about it because I mean, we would have to be okay with it because that's kind of what we're doing now, right? Yeah, we've normalized certain kinds of cruelty. And I don't, people think, yeah, people think that like I would object to hunting. Hunting for sport, I think, is grotesque, but if you're hunting, and then you're gonna eat the entire animal, and you're hunting in a way where it's kind of like, you know, that animal like lived a free and happy life until that moment in the same way that the animal lived a free and happy moment, lived a free and happy life, or we don't know, maybe they were depressed, but they lived a free life until like the lion came and took it down. So is a human shooting an animal for food somehow more tragic or horrible than a lion attacking an elk? Yeah, well, there's a lot of complexities to it on top of all of that. So one, you said sort of hunting for sport is bad, but there's this like complex ethical equation of the fact that hunting for sport is the thing that often funds the preservation of a species. That's, well, no, that's another complicated layer. There's like the Maui venison, all the deer in Hawaii, and I might have gotten Maui venison treats for Leon, but they're hunting those deer is a way of preserving. Yeah, so I mean, these things are complicated, but that's why I don't have a problem with somebody shooting an elk or bringing it home and eating it. Like my, you know, like I've eaten elk jerky and things like that from, that's one of those situations where like, I wouldn't morally have a problem with it. And for me, it's also, I'm not one of those people where I think like, ew, I wouldn't eat meat. It's more like, I don't wanna add to the consumption of it. And I wouldn't wanna eat sort of like the factory farmed meat necessarily, unless I'm in prison and it's otherwise gonna get thrown away, but. Yeah. Hashtag. A lot of things, you know, you may do things differently there, but. Yeah. So, you know, it's just, these things are complicated, but so it's not about like, ew, I don't want that in my body. It's sort of like, what, where did it come from and what's going on here? And I think that, like if you just followed Joe Rogan's Instagram, there's sort of a bit of a glorification of meat that, because I listened to enough that I heard the one where he talked, it was a recent one where he was talking about Anthony Bourdain. And in that conversation, I think it was that one, he explained that, he sort of did it in summary. So I feel like he talked about it in the past, but did all this research and came to the conclusion, based on all his research, came to the conclusion that he was either gonna be vegetarian or shoot his own meat and hunt. And so that's totally different. I mean, that's very like admirable, I think. And he has the means to do it. But if you- Not only that, he does it with a bow. Right, even more so. It is a good question. It's a good question how we get out of this factory. Right, because I do, I like meat. I think it's delicious. And we're dependent on not just on the nutrients and the taste, we're also dependent on the cost. A lot of people have gotten used to a particular kind of cost that they pay for meat. Right, but I think if you wiped out all the government subsidies, it would be a completely different story, because why are vegetables so expensive? And all the subsidies- Somebody who bought some tomatoes yesterday, I'm protesting, why is salad so expensive? Right, but none of the, if you look at the subsidies that are given to all of the inputs to the meat industry, like the grain and soy and whatnot, and then to the meat and dairy industries, and all the subsidies that prop up those industries and allow those products to be cheap and sustainable from a business perspective, not environmental, it's government subsidies. So what if we took all that away? And then also, what if we gave that to the kale and hemp and fresh greens farmers, then, and made those foods more affordable, and then had meat reflect its actual true cost? Then people would just eat more vegetables and less meat because of the cost. You mentioned that you crossed off one item from your list. I forget what the item was, but- Oh, it was, I had previously thought that I would wanna go to Vegas one day just to cross that off my list. And it's not like, I was like, ooh, one day I wanna go to Vegas. It was just like, I imagined I would only go there once just to see it and then be done with it. Yeah, yeah. That's a good one, that's a good one. And I still think you can do it because there's a particular Vegas experience that's worth having, and there's maybe a couple Vegas experiences that are worth having. I find casinos horribly depressing because I think they're just predatory. Everything about them is predatory. It's not the casinos that are important, it's the people. The culture and the whole crazy atmosphere. The people you meet, the people you meet in the chaos that is Las Vegas can create a memorable experience. You lose track of what is day, what is night. You can get drunk and make all the mistakes that somehow create a beautiful masterpiece at the end of it. That's for another time. What else is on the bucket list? What items on the bucket list you haven't done yet you really, really would like? We talked about mortality, that there's a finite deadline. What pops in your head as something that you wanna still do? What I want is to not die and owe people money. So. So whatever mistakes you make. I wanna live to write those things, and I also felt really strongly about what I and everybody in the business had built. And so a big part of me wants to resurrect the brand because I felt really strongly about it. Like I had that feeling that this was gonna be a thing that I wanted to build and grow and could have a really positive impact. And that'll last me. Would you bring it back as the same name? Yeah, well, I put the logo on my arm. That's kinda how strongly I felt about it. And so when I did that, and around that time and all of that time, I felt really, really strongly that quietly, because it feels like a little bit bold, but quietly felt really, almost with a certainty that it was going to be something really big and it was growing and growing, and all signs were pointing towards there. I was just sort of stalled and couldn't figure out the logistics and then enter Mr. Fox. So. The universe can be quite absurdly cruel at times. But yeah, I think that's the thing. It's cruel at times, but that is something worth reaching for, is repay the debts of the past. And then people have said to me that Leon achieved some kind of immortality via being in the documentary. And then I might, I don't understand this world at all, but I might do like an NFT thing related to Leon's image, which would be another way of kind of immortalizing his image at least. Yeah, yeah. But that's a, I mean, it's a potentially in progress, kind of a crazy leap, but. And potentially relaunching the restaurant. Possibly, yes. There's the restaurant and there's one lucky duck in that brand and they're sort of separate but related. And they could each exist independently. I liked it better when they existed together because I felt like they were very complimentary in a lot of ways and they made sense together. But either one could be done separately without the other. Do you think you will find love again, given the chaos yet to go through? I have, and I never talk about it. I've never talked about it. Do you have found love again? Yes. Outside of Leon. But also in a kind of possibly doomed temporary way. Which. You don't like it simple, do you? It's not that it's not simple, it's actually quite simple. It's just that, again, there's a large age gap. I'm the older one, which in itself isn't a problem. Because again, I wouldn't want to, like if somebody wanted kids in a family, I wouldn't want to hold them back from that. And so if I sort of wanted to be with somebody who wanted those things, even if I was completely in love with somebody, I would have to kind of like, you know, hurt, endure the pain to be like, no, I'm gonna keep you from those things, so you should go do those things. So that's the source of the temporariness? No, it's a bit related to like logistics and living one place and having like extremely different lifestyles. Is this a prince of some sort? No. Does he have a castle? No. Okay, all right. No, no. Are you gonna say who it is or are we gonna keep that a mystery? I don't, on the one hand, like I feel like it's protective for me to talk about it in some ways. But I also worry because very often I avoid saying anything because for a lot of reasons, but one being that people freak out and just assume that I'm gonna step into something horrible again. Because I did step into something horribly destructive again after Mr. Fox. And what happened was I allowed something to happen. And so going back to that, what advice would you give to people? I would tell people to be very careful, to be deliberate about who they're getting involved with and thoughtful about it and making sure that they're not just allowing something to happen. So it's like, men can sometimes be, and I suppose women can be as well, but people can be very persistent. And sometimes that's a good thing, but it could also be a dangerous thing. Because sometimes somebody might just, and this has happened to me a lot, where somebody just wears you down and you're like, ugh, fine. That's funny. And no, I mean, it's shockingly like the things that I've done in the spirit of like, or not wanting to hurt somebody's feelings. That's another dangerous. Just to be nice. Let's get married just to be nice. That's another dangerous thing. And also, I feel like I'm like circling back to all these unanswered questions from before, but I didn't marry, I married him. He like convinced me to marry him in this very quick, annoying way. And as if it was like something I had to do and I'd be protected and all kinds of weird reasons. And it was just like my response to my agreeing to marry him was like, ugh, fine. And then I remember being embarrassed at city hall, going to get the license. People who are in love and wanting to get married aren't sitting in city hall mortified and embarrassed. So I sort of cringe when people call him my ex-husband because I don't think of him that way. Even though technically that's correct. Yeah, but there's a powerful romantic notion to the thing and to those words and that had nothing to do with you getting married. It was more. It was just like another thing that he made me do. Like a chore almost. That just had unfortunate consequences of like then having to get divorced and the whole. Yeah, I think even weddings are romantic. Like the whole, the cheesy thing, there's, you know. Yeah, they are. Those are cool. I agree. We don't get many of those in life. Well, you know what? Let's keep it a mystery. Let's keep the person a mystery to be continued on season two on conversations with some. Like a known person or anything, but I feel like people always worry that I'm stepping back into something and I don't have the energy to be sort of defensive. Should they be worried? No. There you go. Don't worry, friends. No. And also just remember that thing I was saying about how like it's good if you get to know somebody really slowly over a long period of time. It's kind of one of those situations. So I feel very confident that I'm like certain that I'm not stepping into something where I'm gonna be surprised and somebody turns out to be not who they presented themselves to be. So that's. That's the wise way to do it. Especially for me, yeah. And also again, it's like I would caution people to be careful about, you know, wanting to go into something deliberately versus kind of getting caught up in something and or rushed or. That said, I would suggest people take that cautionary advice, but sometimes you just fall in love. Yeah. Love at first sight is a thing. There are those stories of, you know, sweet stories of older people that have been married forever. They don't have to be sweet. You can get hurt for it too, but don't, listen to your heart. This was an incredible conversation. We talked for way over four hours. We did? Yeah. And I feel like I can keep talking to you. This was amazing. Salma, thank you so much for being honest, for being fearless in answering all the questions, all the difficult questions. And thank you for trying to create something special with your restaurant and maybe create something special still in your future. Yeah, I hope so. Thank you for having me. I kept thinking, I kept thinking that like, I was gonna get a message that was like, just kidding. I just, I've listened to your podcast a lot. And so I've certainly felt very intimidated knowing who's sat, if not in this actual chair, in this chair, in another location, or maybe here. So very- Were you nervous? Yes. And- Yeah, I was nervous too. Yeah, but at the same, but also because I've, because I know the way that you speak in your style, I felt like it was gonna feel like a good natural conversation as opposed to sometimes you have conversations where it's like, anyway. It felt good? You're happy with it? I didn't feel nervous because of like what I was walking into. I felt nervous that I was gonna, you know, sound stupid and boring and everybody would be like, why did he interview her? Like, you know. It was not, it was exciting. You happy with it? How do we do? Yeah, I think so. Very often after- Are you self-critical after stuff? Yes, very. Like when you go home tonight, are you gonna be like happy with yourself or not? I mean, I feel good. I don't feel like I can't think of anything that I said that I regret. Maybe there's things that, you know, somebody is gonna yell at me because I said something that I said like meat tastes good or something, or I don't, you know, like this, like vegan judgment. Yes. Yes. But I think it's more useful to be honest about the contradictions and conflicting feelings because I feel like that's what most people have. And so if you wanna help people shift a certain way. Yeah, you were raw, honest. It was beautiful. It was beautiful to watch. Thank you for the books. Your darkness today was visible. But the beauty too, it was an amazing conversation. I'm really, really happy with it. I'm honored that you sat down with me. That was awesome. I'm floored that you're honored and I'm honored that you asked me to be here, so. Thank you, Sarma. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarma Mellengales. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from playwright August Wilson. Confront the dark parts of yourself and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/iZjby1LkTWQ

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Noam Chomsky: Deepest Property of Language

What are the most beautiful or fascinating aspects of language or ideas in linguistics or cognitive science that you've seen in a lifetime of studying language and studying the human mind? Well, I think the deepest property of language and puzzling property that's been discovered is what is sometimes called structure dependence. We now understand it pretty well, but it was puzzling for a long time. I'll give you a concrete example. So suppose you say, the guy who fixed the car carefully packed his tools. It's ambiguous. He could fix the car carefully or carefully pack his tools. Suppose you put carefully in front, carefully the guy who fixed the car packed his tools. Then it's carefully packed, not carefully fixed. And in fact, you do that even if it makes no sense. So suppose you say carefully, the guy who fixed the car is tall. You have to interpret it as carefully he's tall, even though that doesn't make any sense. And notice that that's a very puzzling fact, because you're relating carefully, not to the linearly closest verb, but to the linearly more remote verb. Linear closeness is an easy computation. But here you're doing a much more, what looks like a more complex computation. You're doing something that's taking you essentially to the more remote thing. If you look at the actual structure of the sentence, where the phrases are and so on, turns out you're picking out the structurally closest thing, but the linearly more remote thing. But notice that what's linear is 100% of what you hear. You never hear structure. So what you're doing is, and incidentally this is universal, all constructions, all languages. And what we're compelled to do is carry out what looks like the more complex computation on material that we never hear. And we ignore 100% of what we hear and the simplest computation. By now there's even a neural basis for this that's somewhat understood. And there's good theories by now that explain why it's true. It's a deep insight into the surprising nature of language with many consequences.

https://youtu.be/MRcrJHxhWMY

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Balaji Srinivasan: How to Fix Government, Twitter, Science, and the FDA | Lex Fridman Podcast #331

Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you still man the case for it and against it? Everybody who's watching this around the world basically saw, let's say, US establishment or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate, you know, the head of state digitally, right? Like just boom, gone, okay? And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president, who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing. Regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken. Just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first area, everybody was shocked by them, then they became a policy instrument. And now there's bailouts happening, every single bill is printing another whatever, billion dollars or something like that. The following is a conversation with Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State, How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. This conversation is over seven hours. For some folks, that's too long. For some, too short. For some, just right. There are chapter timestamps, there are clips, so you can jump around or, like I prefer to do with podcasts and audio books I enjoy, you can sit down, relax with a loved human, animal, or consumable substance, or all three if you like, and enjoy the ride from start to finish. Balaji is a fascinating mind who thinks deeply about this world and how we might be able to engineer it in order to maximize the possibility that humanity flourishes on this fun little planet of ours. Also, you may notice that in this conversation, my eye is red. That's from jiu-jitsu. And also, if I may say so, from a life well lived. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Balaji Srinivasan. At the core of your belief system is something you call the prime number maze. I'm curious, I'm curious. We gotta start there. If we can start anywhere, it's with mathematics. Let's go. All right, great. A rat can be trained to turn at every even number or every third number in a maze to get some cheese. But evidently, it can't be trained to turn at prime numbers. Two, three, five, seven, and then 11, and so on and so forth. That's just too abstract. And frankly, if most humans were dropped into a prime number maze, they probably wouldn't be able to figure it out either. They'd have to start counting and so on. Actually, it'd be pretty difficult to figure out what the turning rule was. Yet, the rule is actually very simple. And so, the thing I think about a lot is just how many patterns in life are we just like these rats and we're trapped in a prime number maze? And if we had just a little bit more cogitation, if we had a little bit more cognitive ability, a little bit more, whether it's brain-machine interface or just better physics, we could just figure out the next step in that prime number maze. We could just see it. We could just see the grid. And that's what I think about. That's a big thing that drives me, is figuring out how do we actually conceive, understand that prime number maze that we're living in. So, understand which patterns are just complex enough that they are beyond the limit of human cognition. Yes. And what do you make of that? Are the limits of human cognition a feature or a bug? I think mostly a bug. I admire Ramanujan. I admire Feynman. I admire these great mathematicians and physicists who were just able to see things that others couldn't. And just by writing it down, that's a leap forward. People talk about it's not the idea, it's execution, but that's for trivial ideas, for great ideas, for Maxwell's equations or Newton's laws or quantum electrodynamics or some of Ramanujan's identities. That really does bring us forward, especially when you can check them and you don't know how they work. You have the phenomenological, but you don't have the theory underneath it. And then that stimulates the advancement of theory to figure out why is this thing actually working. That's actually, StatMech arose in part from the kind of phenomenological studies that were basically being done where people are just getting steam engines and so on to work. And then they kind of abstracted out thermodynamics and so on from that. So, the practice led the theory rather than vice versa. To some extent, that's happening in neural networks now, as you're aware, right? And I think that's, so just something that's true and that works, even if we don't know yet, that's amazing and it pulls us forward. So, I do think that the limits are more of a bug than a feature. Is there something that humans will never be able to figure out about our universe, about the theory, about the practice of our universe? Yeah, people will typically quote Girdell's incompleteness for such a question. And yeah, there are things that are provably unknowable or provably unprovable, but I think you can often get an approximate solution. You know, Hilbert's problem's like, we will know, we must know. At least we should know that we can't know. Push to get at least an approximate solution, push to know that we can't know. At least we push back that darkness enough so that we have lit up that corner of the intellectual universe. Okay, let's actually take a bit of a tangent and explore a bit in a way that I did not expect we would. But let's talk about the nature of reality briefly. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Don Hoffman. No, I don't. I know Roger Penrose has his Road to Reality series for basic physics getting up to everything we know, but go ahead, tell me what else you know. Oh, it's even wilder. In modern physics, we start to question of what is fundamental and what is emergent in this beautiful universe of ours. And there's a bunch of folks who think that space-time, as we know it, the four-dimensional space, is emergent. It's not fundamental to the physics of the universe. And the same, many argue, I think Sean Carroll is one of them is that time itself, the way we experience it, is also emergent. It's not fundamental to the way our universe works. Anyway, those are the technical term, I apologize for swearing, those are the mind fucks of modern physics. But if we stroll along that road further, we get somebody like Donald Hoffman, who makes the evolutionary case that the reality we perceive with our eyes is not only an abstraction of objective reality, but it's actually completely detached. Like we're in a video game, essentially, that's consistent for all humans, but it's not at all connected to physical reality. It's an illusion. It's like a version of the simulation hypothesis, is that his? In a very distant way, but the simulation says that there's a sort of computational nature to reality, and then there's a kind of a programmer that creates this reality and so on. Now he says that we humans have a brain that is able to perceive the environment, and evolution is produced from primitive life to complex life on Earth, produce the kind of brain that doesn't at all need to sense the reality directly. So like this table, according to Donald Hoffman, is not there. So, like, not just as an abstraction, like we don't sense the molecules that make up the table, but all of this is fake. Interesting. So, you know, I tend to be more of a hard science person, right, and so, you know, so just on that, people talk about qualia, you know, like is your perception of green different from my perception of green? And, you know, my counterargument on that is, well, we know something about, you know, spectrum of light, and we can build artificial eyes. And if we can build artificial eyes, which we can, you know, like they're not amazing, but you can actually, you can do that, you can build artificial ears and so on. Obviously we can build recording devices, and, you know, for cameras and things like that. Well, operationally, the whole concept of your perception of green, you see green as purple, I see green as green, or what I call green, doesn't seem to add up because it does seem like we can do engineering around it. So the Hoffman thing, I get why people more broadly will talk about a simulation hypothesis, because, you know, it's like Feynman, many others have talked about how math is surprisingly useful to describe the world. You know, like very simple equations give rise to these complex phenomena. Wolfram is also on this from a different angle with the cellular automata stuff. But- It's almost suspicious how well it works. Yeah, but on their hand, it's like, you know, it is, yet we're still also in a prime number maze. You know, there's things we just don't understand. And, you know, so- Also, within the constraints of the non-prime numbers, we find math to be extremely effective, surprisingly effective. Yeah, exactly. So maybe the math we have gets us through the equivalent of the even turns and the odd turns, but there's math we don't yet have that is more complex or more complex rules for other parts. This is probably all RH, or all just rats in a cage. I know that gets like very abstract, but, you know, there are unsolved problems in physics, like the condensed matter space. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening. My recollection, I may be, you know, out of date on this, like things like sonoluminescence, we don't know exactly how they work. And sometimes those things that are like at the edges of physics, you know, in the late 1800s, I think Rutherford, somebody, I think it was Rutherford said, you know, basically all physics is being discovered, et cetera, and that was obviously before quantum mechanics. You know, that sort of edge case, people are looking at the bomber and the passion series and seeing, you know, this weird thing, you know, with the hydrogen spectrum, it was quantized. And, you know, that led to like the sort of phenomenological set of observations that led to quantum mechanics and everything. And, you know, sometimes I think the UAP stuff might be like that, right? People immediately go to aliens for UAP, like the unidentified aerial phenomena, right? And people have been, there's surprising amount of stuff out there on this. The UK has declassified a bunch of material. You know, Harry Reid, who's a Senator, has talked about this. It's not an obviously political thing, which is good. It's something that, is there something happening there, right? And people had thought for a long time that the UAP thing was a, like, American kind of counter propaganda to cover up their new spy planes that were spying over the Soviet Union to make anybody who talked about them seem, you know, crazy and hysterical or whatever. But if the UAP thing is real, it could be atmospheric phenomena, like the aurora borealis or the northern lights, but some things we don't understand. It could be something like the Bomber and Passion series, you know, which were the observations of emission spectra before quantum mechanics. So that's like another option, as opposed to doesn't exist or little green men. It could be physics we don't understand yet. That's one possible. Do you think there's alien civilizations out there? So there's a lot of folks who have kind of written and talked about this. There's, you know, the Drake equation, which is like, you know, multiplying all the probabilities together. There's perhaps more sophisticated takes, like the dark forest, you know, which says that if the universe is like a dark forest, we're the dumb ones that aren't hiding our presence. There's one calculation I saw, and I haven't reproduced it myself, but basically says that the assumption that other civilizations have seen ours is wrong because when you have like a spherical radius for like the, you know, electromagnetic radiation that's leaving our planet, as that sphere gets larger and larger, it gets like smaller and smaller amounts of energy. So, you know, you get farther out, you're not getting enough, you know, photons or what have you to actually detect it. You know, I don't know. I actually haven't looked into the math behind it, but I remember seeing that argument. So actually it is possible that it's so diffuse when you go past a certain, you know, number of light years out that people, you know, that an alien civilization wouldn't be able to detect it. Right, that's another argument. That's more basically about signals from them, from us, to be able to, signals colliding enough to find the signal from the noise. Right, exactly. Intelligent signal. Yeah, Hanson has an article called Grabby Aliens. Have you seen his thing? Yes, I've seen it. He's been on this podcast. Oh, great. He's brilliant. I like him. He pushes, you know, boundaries in interesting ways. In every ways, in all of the ways. In all the ways, that's right. I like him overall. He's, you know, he's an asset to humanity. Grabby Aliens, so he has this interesting idea that the civilizations quickly learn how to travel close to the speed of light. Right. So we're not gonna see them until they're here. Yeah, that's possible. I mean, one of the things is, so here's, for example, a mystery that we haven't yet done, right, which, or we haven't really figured out yet, which is abiogenesis in the lab, right? We've done lots of things where you've got, you can show macromolecules binding to each other. You can show, you know, evidence for the so-called RNA world, abiogenesis is to go from, you know, like non-life to life, right, in the lab. You can show microevolution, obviously, with bacteria. You can do artificial selection on them. Lots of other aspects of, you know, fundamental, you know, biochemistry origins of life stuff have been established. There's a lot of plausibility arguments about the primitive environment and nitrogens and carbons snapping together to get, you know, the RNA world is the initial hypothesis. But to my knowledge, at least, we haven't actually seen abiogenesis demonstrated. Now, one argument is you need just like this massive world with, you know, so many different reps before that actually happens. And one possibility is if we could do atomic level, you know, simulations of molecules bouncing against each other, it's possible that in some simulation we could find a path, a reproducible path to abiogenesis, and then just, you know, replicate that in the lab, right? I don't know, okay? But that seems to me to be like a mystery that we still don't fully understand, like an example of the prime number maze, right? One of the most fascinating mysteries. One of the most important, yep. Yeah. And again, there may be some biochemist who's like, oh, Bhaji, you didn't know about X, Y, and Z that happened in the abiogenesis field. I freely confess I'm not like, you know, au courant on it. The last thing I remember looking at is- What does au courant mean? Like up to the moment. Oh, nice, that's a nice word. That's a- Au courant. I'm probably mispronouncing it, but- Yeah. We'll edit it in post to pronounce it correctly with AI. Yeah, yeah. We'll copy your voice and it will pronounce it perfectly correctly in post. One thing that I do think was interesting is Craig Venter a while back tried to make a minimum viable cell where he just tried to delete all of the genes that were not considered essential. And so it's like a new life form. And this was like almost 20 years ago and so on. And that thing was viable in the lab, right? And so it's possible that you could, you kind of reverse engineer. So you're coming at the problem from different directions. Like RNA molecules can do quite a lot. You've got some, you know, reasonable assumptions as to how that could come together. You've got like sort of stripped down minimum viable life forms. And so it's not there isn't stuff here. You can see microevolution. You can see at the sequence level. You know, if you do molecular phylogenetics, you can actually track back the bases. There's actually, so it's not like there's no evidence here. There's a lot of tools to work with. But this, in my view, is a fascinating area. And actually also relevant to AI because another form of abiogenesis would be if we are able to give rise to a different branch of life form, the silicon based as opposed to carbon based, you know, to stretch a point. You give rise to something that actually does meet the definition of life for some definition of life. What do you think that definition is for an artificial life form? Because you mentioned consciousness. Yeah. When will it give us pause that we created something that feels by some definition or by some spiritual, poetic, romantic, philosophical, mathematical definition that it is alive. Right. And we wouldn't want to kill it. So a couple of remarks on that. One is Francis Crick of Watson and Crick. Before he died, I think his last paper was published on something called the claustrum. Okay. And the thing is that, you know, sometimes in biology or in any domain, people are sort of discouraged from going after the big questions, right? But he proposed the claustrum is actually the organ that is the seat of consciousness. It's like this sheath that like covers the brain. And for mice, if you, and again, I may be recollecting this wrong, so, but you can look, but my recollection is in mice, if you disrupt this, the mouse is like very disoriented, right? It's like, it's the kind of thing which, you know, Watson and Crick were all about structure implies function, right? They found the structure of DNA, this amazing thing. And, you know, they remarked in this very under, understated way at the end of the paper that, well, obviously this gives a basis for how the genetic material might be replicated and error corrected because, you know, helix unwinds and you copy paste it, right? So he was a big structure function person. And that applies not just at the protein level, not just at the level of DNA, but potentially also at the level of organs. Like the colostrum is kind of this system integrated level, right? It's like the last layer in the neural network or something, you know? And, and so that's, that's the kind of thing that I think is worth studying. So consciousness is another kind of big, abiogenesis is a big question. The prime number of maize consciousness is a big question. And, you know, then definition of life, right? There's folks, gosh, there's, I think, so this one is something I'd have to Google around, but there was a guy I think at Santa Fe Institute or something who had some definition of life and like some thermodynamic definition. But you're right that it's gonna be a multi-feature definition. We might have a Turing test like definition, frankly, which is just, if enough humans agree it's alive, it's alive, right? And that might frankly be the operational definition. Cause you know, viruses are like this boundary case, you know, are they, are they alive or not? Most people don't think they're alive, but they're on, they're kind of, they're more alive than a rock, in a sense. Well, I think in a world that we'll talk about today quite a bit, which is the digital world, I think the most fascinating philosophically and technically definition of life is life in the digital world. So chatbots, essentially creatures, whether they're replicas of humans or totally independent creations, perhaps in an automatic way, I think there's going to be chatbots that we would ethically be troubled by if we wanted to kill them. They would have the capacity to suffer, they would be very unhappy with you trying to turn them off. And then there'll be large groups of activists that will protest and they'll go to the Supreme Court or whatever the Supreme Court looks like in 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And they will demand that these chatbots would have the same rights as us humans. Do you think that's possible? I saw that Google engineer who was basically saying this had already happened, and I was surprised by it because when I looked at the chat logs of it, it didn't seem particularly interesting. On the other hand, I can definitely see, I mean, GPT-3, for people who haven't paid attention, shows that serious step-ups are possible. And obviously, you've talked about AI on your podcast a ton. Is it possible that GPT-9 or something is kind of like that? Or GPT-15 or GPT-4, maybe? But- Yeah, for people just listening, there's a deep skepticism in your face. Yeah, the reason being because, you know it's possible, it's possible that you have a partition of society on literally this basis. That's one model where there's some people, just like there's vegetarians and non-vegetarians, there may be machines have life and machines are machines. Something like that. You could definitely imagine some kind of partition like that in the future where your fundamental political social system, that's a foundational assumption. And is AI, does it deserve the same rights as a human? For example, a corporation is an intermediate. Do you see the thing which is how human are different corporations? Have you seen that infographic? It's actually funny. Yeah, there's a spectrum. There's a spectrum. So for example, Disney is considered about as human as a dog. But like Exxon, I may be remembering this wrong, but they had a level with human at one end and rock at the other. Does it have to do with corporate structure? I think it's about people's empathy for that corporation, their brand identity. But it's interesting to see that, first of all, people sort of do think of corporations as being more, like the branding is really what they're responding to. Well, that's what, I mean, they're also responding. I have a brand of human that I'm trying to sell and it seems to be effective for the most part. Although it has become like a running joke that I might be a robot, which means the brand is cracking, it's seeping through. But I mean, in that sense, I just, I think, I don't see a reason why chatbots can't manufacture the brand of being human, of being sentient. I mean, that is the Turing test, but it's like the multiplayer Turing test. Now that actually a fair number of chatbots have passed the Turing test, I'd say there's at least two steps up, right? One is a multiplayer Turing test where you have chatbots talking to each other. And then you ask, can you determine the difference between in chatbots talking to each other and clicking buttons and stuff in apps and in humans doing that? And I think we're very far off, or I shouldn't say very far off, at least I don't know how far we are in terms of time, but we're still far off in terms of a group of in chatbots looking like their digital output is like the group of in humans, like go from the Turing test to the multiplayer Turing test. That's one definition. Another definition is, you know, to be able to kind of swap in and you're not just convincing one human that this is a human for a small session, you're convincing all humans that this is a human for end sessions. Remote work actually makes this possible, right? That's another definition of a multiplayer Turing test where basically you have a chatbot that's fully automated, that is earning money for you as an intelligent agent on a computer that's able to go and get remote work jobs and so on. I would consider that next level, right? If you could have something that was like that, that was competent enough to, I mean, because everything on a computer can be automated, right? Literally, you could be totally hands-free, just like autonomous driving, you could have autonomous learning. As a challenge problem, if you were Microsoft or Apple and you had legitimate access to the operating system, just like Apple says, can you send me details of this event? A decentralized thing could, in theory, log the actions of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million people. And with cryptocurrency, you can even monitor a wallet that was on that computer. And you could see what long run series of actions were increasing or decreasing this digital balance. You see what I'm saying, right? So you start to get, at least conceptually, it'd be invasive and there'd be a privacy issue and so on. Conceptually, you could imagine an agent that could learn what actions humans were doing that resulted in the increase of their local cryptocurrency balance, okay? There may be better ways to formulate it, but that I consider a challenge problem is to go from the Turing test to a genuine intelligent agent that can actually go and make money for you. If you can do that, that's a big deal. People obviously have trading bots and stuff, but that would be the next level. It's typing out emails, it's creating documents. It's actually- So mimic human behavior in its entirety. Yeah, that's right. And it'll schedule Zooms, it'll send emails. It'll essentially, because if you think about it, a human is hitting the keys and clicking the mouse, but just like a self-driving car, the wheel rotates by itself, right? Those keys are effectively just, it's like the automator app in Apple, right? Everything's just moving on the screen. You're seeing it there and it's just an AI. It's kind of hilarious that the I'm not a robot click thing actually works. Because I actually don't know how it works, but I think it has to do with the movement of the mouse, the timing, and they know that it's very difficult for currently for a bot to mimic human behavior in the way they would click that little checkbox. Yeah, exactly. I think it's something, I mean, again, my recollection on that is it's like a pile of highly obfuscated JavaScript with all kinds, it looks like a very simple box, but it's doing a lot of stuff and it's collecting all kinds of instrumentation. And yeah, exactly. Like a robot is just a little too deterministic or if it's got noise, it's like Gaussian noise. And the way humans do it is just not something that you'd usually be able to do without collecting thousands and thousands and thousands of human traces doing it. But it is a predator prey on that. Go ahead. Well, and then the computer. Or millions of human traces, I don't know. The computer just sees the JavaScript. It needs to be able to look outside the simulation for the computer, the world is like, it doesn't, the computer doesn't know about the physical world. So it has to look outside of its world and introspect back on this simple box, which is kind of, I think that's exactly what mushrooms do or like psychedelics is you get to go outside and look back in. And that's what a computer needs to do. I do wonder whether they actually give people insight or whether they give people the illusion of insight. Is there a difference? Yeah, because, well, actual insight, actual insight is, again, Maxwell's equations. You're able to shift the world with that. There's a lot of practical devices that work. The illusion of insight is I'm Jesus Christ and nothing happens, right? So I don't know. I think those are quite different. I don't know. I think you can fake it till you make it on that one, which is insight in some sense is revealing a truth that was there all along. Yeah, so I mean, I guess like I'm talking about technical insight where you have, this is the thing we were talking about actually before the podcast, like technical truths versus political truths, right? Some truths, they're on a spectrum. And there's some truths that are actually entirely political in the sense that if you can change the software in enough people's heads, you change the value of the truth. For example, the location of a border is effectively consensus between large enough groups of people. Who is the CEO? That's consensus among a certain group of people. What is the value of a currency or any stock, right? That market price is just the psychology of a bunch of people. Like literally, if you can change enough people's minds, you can change the value of the border or the position of the hierarchy or the value of the currency. Those are purely political truths. Then all the way on the other end are technical truths that exist independent of whatever any one human or all humans think, like the gravitational constant, right? Or the diameter of a virus. Those exist independent of the human mind. Changing a few minds doesn't matter. Those remain constant. And then you have things that are interestingly in the middle where cryptocurrency has tried to pull more and more things from the domain of political truths into technical truths where they say, okay, the one social convention we have is that if you hold this amount of Bitcoin, or that if you hold this private key, you hold this Bitcoin. And then we make that very hard to change because you have to change a lot of technical truths. So you can push things to this interesting intermediate zone. Yeah, the question is how much of our world can we push into that? Right. And that takes us in a nonlinear fascinating journey to the question I wanted to ask you in the beginning, which is this political world that you mentioned in the world of political truth. As we know it, in the 20th century, in the early 21st century, what do you think works well and what is broken about government? The fundamental thing is that we can't easily and peacefully start new opt-in governments. Like startup governments. Yeah, and what I mean by that is basically you can start a new company, you can start a new community, you can start a new currency even these days. You don't have to beat the former CEO in a duel to start a new company. You don't have to become head of the World Bank to start a new currency, okay? Because of this, yes, if you want to, you can join, I don't know, Microsoft or name some company that's a GameStop and you can try to reform it, okay? Or you can start your own. And the fact that both options exist mean that you can actually just start from scratch. And that's just, I mean, the same reason we have a clean piece of paper, right? I've mentioned this actually in the Network State book. I'll just quote this bit, but we want to be able to start a new state peacefully for the same reason we want a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh start or a clean slate, because we want to build something new without historical constraint, right? For the same reason you hit plus and do docs.new, you know, like create a new doc. It's for the same reason, right? Because you don't have to backspace, you don't have to have just like 128 bytes of space, 128 kilobytes and just have to backspace the old document before creating the new one. So that's a fundamental thing that's wrong with today's governments. And it's a meta point, right? Because it's not any one specific reform, it's a meta reform of being able to start new countries. Okay, so that's one problem, but you know, you could push back and say, that's a feature, because you know, a lot of people argue that tradition is power. Through generation, if you try a thing long enough, which is the way I see marriage, there's value to the struggle and the journey you take through the struggle and you grow and you develop ideas together, you grow intellectually, philosophically together. And that's the idea of a nation that spans generations, that you have a tradition that becomes more, that strives towards the truth and is able to arrive there, or no, not arrive, but take steps towards there through the generations. So you may not want to keep starting new governments. You may want to stick to the old one and improve it one step at a time. So just because you're having a fight inside a marriage doesn't mean you should get a divorce and go on Tinder and start dating around. That's the pushback. So it's not obvious that this is a strong feature to have to launch new governments. There's several different kind of lines of attack or debate or whatever on this, right? First is, yes, there's obviously value to tradition. And you know, people say, this is Lindy and that's Lindy. It's been proven for a long time and so on. But of course there's a tension between tradition and innovation. Like going to the moon wasn't Lindy, just, it was awesome. And artificial intelligence is something that's very new. New is good, right? And this is a tension within humanity actually itself, because it's way older than all of these nations. I mean, humans are tens of thousands of years old. The ancestors of humans are millions of years old, right? And you go back far enough, and the time that we know today of the sessile farmer and soldier is, if you go back far enough, you wanna be truly traditional, well, we're actually descended from hunter gatherers who were mobile and wandered the world and there weren't borders and so on. They kind of went where they want, right? And people have had done historical reconstructions of like skeletons and stuff like that. And many folks report that the transition to agriculture and being sessile resulted in diminution of height. People had like tooth decay and stuff like that. The skeletons, people had traded off upside for stability. Right, that's what the state was. That was what these sessile kinds of things were. Now, of course, they had more likelihood of living consistently. You could support larger population sizes, but it had lower quality of life, right? And so the hunter gatherer, maybe that's actually our collective recollection of a Garden of Eden where people, just like a spider kind of knows innately how to build webs or a beaver knows how to build dams. Some people theorize that the entire Garden of Eden is like a sort of built-in neural network recollection of this pre-sessile era where we're able to roam around and just pick off fruits and so on, low population density. So the point is that I think what we're seeing is a V3. You go from the hunter gatherer to the farmer and soldier, the sessile nations are here and they've got borders and so on, to kind of the V3, which is the digital nomad, the new hunter gatherer. We're going back to the future because what's even older than nations is no nations, right? Even more traditional than tradition is being international, right? And so we're actually tapping into that other huge thread in humanity, which is the desire to explore, pioneer, wander, innovate. And I think that's important. So the way to make America great again is to dissolve it completely into oblivion. No, that's a joke. I see, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's a joke. Well- Humor, I'm learning this new thing. Yes, a new thing for the road. The chatbot emulation isn't fully working there. Yeah, yeah, glitch. That's where in the beta. And let me say one other thing about this, which is there are, I mean, everybody in the world, okay, let's say, I don't know what percentage, let's say 99.99% or it's rounds to that number of political discourse in the US focuses on trying to fix the system. If those folks, I mean, 0.01% of the energy is going towards building a new system, that seems like a pretty good portfolio strategy, right? Or 100% are supposed to go and edit this code base from 200 something years ago. I mean, the most American thing in the world is going and leaving your country in search of a better life. America was founded 200 years ago by the founding fathers. It's not just a nation of immigrants, it's a nation of emigrants, right? Emigration from other countries to the US and actually also emigration within the US. There's this amazing YouTube video called, it's like 50 states, US population, I think 1792. It says 2050, so they've got a simulation. So you just stop it at 2019 or 2020. But it shows that like Virginia was like number one early on and then it lost ground in like New York gained. And then like Ohio was a big deal in the early 1800s. And it was like father of presidents and general these presidents and later Illinois and Indiana. And then California only really came up in the 20th century, like during the great depression. And now we're entering the modern era where like Florida and Texas have risen and New York and California have dropped. And so interstate competition, it's actually just like inter-currency competition. You've got trading pairs, right? You sell BTC by ETH, you sell Solana or Z, sell Monero by Zcash, right? Each of those trading pairs gives you signal for today on this currency is down or up relative to this other currency. In the same way, each of those migration pairs, someone goes from New York to Ohio, Ohio to California, gives you information on the desirability of different states. You can literally form a pairs matrix like this over time, very much like the link matrix. That's shaped America in a huge way. And so, you ask, A, if this nation of immigrants that was founded by men younger than us, by the way, the founding fathers were often in their 20s, right? Who endorsed the concept of a proposition nation, who've given rise to a country of founders and pioneers, who've literally gone to the moon, right? Those folks would think that this is the end of history, that that's it, we're done. Like, we've done everything else. I mean, there's people in technology who believe, and I agree with them, that we can go to Mars, that we might be able to end death, but we can't innovate on something that was 230 years old. You know? So there is a balance, certainly, to strike. The American experiment is fascinating, nevertheless. So one argument you can make is actually that we're in the very early days of this V2. If this is what you describe as V2, you could make the case that we're not ready for V3, that we're just actually trying to figure out the V2 thing. You're trying to like skip- When are we ever ready? Now again, we'll go back to marriage, I think, and having kids kind of thing. I think everyone who has kids is never really ready to be kids. That's the whole point, you dive in. Okay, but the... I mean, you mentioned the U.K. and Washington. Is there other criticisms of government that you can provide as we know it today? Before we kind of outline the ideas of V3, let's stick to V2. I'll give a few, right? And so a lot of this stuff will go into the version, so I've got this book, The Network State, which covers some of these topics. Does Network State have a subtitle? It is The Network State, How to Start a New Country. How to Start a New Country. But I just have it at thenetworkstate.com. I should say, it's an excellent book that you should get. I read it on Kindle, but there's also a website. And Balaji said that he's constantly working on improving it, changing it. By the time the whole project is over, it'll be a different book than it was in the beginning. I think so. It's getting its old skin. Well, I wanted to get something out there and get feedback and whatnot, just like an app, right? Again, you have these two poles of an app is highly dynamic and you're accustomed to having updates all the time and a book is supposed to be static. And there's a value in something static, something unchanging and so on. But in this case, I'm glad I kind of shipped a version 1.0 and the next version, I'm gonna split it into tentatively motivation, theory and practice. Like motivation, like what is the sort of political philosophy and so on that motivates me at least to do this, which you can take or leave, right? And then theory as to why network state is now possible and I can define it in a second. And then the practice is zillions of practical details and everything from roads to diplomatic recognition and so on, funding, founding, all that stuff. A lot of the stuff actually I left out of V1 simply because I wanted to kind of get the desirability of it on the table and then talk about the feasibility. I should actually linger on that briefly in terms of things we can revolutionize. Like one of the biggest innovations I think that Tesla does with the way they think about the car, the way they deploy the car is not the automation or the electric to me, it's the over the air updates. Be able to send instantaneously updates to the software that completely changes the behavior, the UX, everything about the car. And so I do think it would be interesting because books are representation of human knowledge, a snapshot of human knowledge. And it would be interesting that if we can somehow figure out a system that allows you to do sort of like a GitHub for books, like if I buy a book on Amazon without having to pay again, can I get updates like V1.1, V1.2 and there's like release notes. That would be incredible. It's not enough to do like a second edition or a third edition, but like minor updates that's not just on your website, but actually go into the model that we use to buy books. So I spend my money, maybe I'll do a subscription service for five bucks a month where I get regular updates to the books. And then there's an incentive for authors to actually update their books such that it makes sense for the subscription. And that means your book isn't just a snapshot, but it's a lifelong project. Right. If you care enough about the book. So I think there's a lot that can be done there because actually in going through this process, in many ways, the most traditional thing I did was self-publish ebook on Kindle, right? Why? Because basically like, if you actually ink a deal with a book publisher, first they'll give you some advance. I didn't need the advance or anything. But second is all these constraints. Oh, you wanna translate into this, or you wanna do this other format, or you wanna update it, you have to go and now talk to this other party, right? And also the narrowing window of what they'll actually publish, it gets narrower and narrower you see all these meltdowns of very young adult novels and stuff on Twitter, but it's more than that. So actually having an Amazon page, it's just like a marker that a book exists. Okay, and now I've got an entry point where if someone says, okay, I like this tweet, but how do I kind of get the, that might be a concept from like the middle of chapter three, right? How do I get the thing from front to back? I can just point them at thenetworkstate.com that is import this, right? This one entry point, okay? And you mentioned like subscription and money and so on and so forth. And I think people are paying for content online now with newsletters and so on, but I've chosen to, and I will always have the thing free. And I want it on, you can get the Kindle version on Amazon simply because you have to kind of set a price for that. But then networkstate.com, what I wanna do is have that optimized for every Android phone. So people in India or Latin America or Nigeria can just tap and open it. Gonna do translations and stuff like that. Greg Fodor of AllSpaceVR, founder of AllSpaceVR, he sold that and he coded the website and worked with him on it. And there's another designer who, Elijah, and it was basically just a three-person group. And we thought we had something pretty nice, but one thing I was really pleasantly surprised by is how many people got in touch with us afterwards and asked us if we could open source the software to create this website, right? Because it's actually, you can try it on mobile. I think it's actually in some ways a better experience than Kindle. And so that was interesting because I do think of the website as like a V1 version of this concept of a book app, right? For example, imagine if you have the Bible and the 10 commandments aren't just text, but there's like a checklist and there's a gateway to a Christian community there. And the practice is embedded into the thing. Like, did you know brilliant.org? Amazing site, I love this site. Brilliant is basically mobile-friendly tutorials. And you can kind of just swipe through, you're in line at Starbucks or getting on a plane or something, you just swipe through and you just get really nice micro lessons on things. And it's just interactive enough that your brain is working and you're problem solving. And sometimes you'll need a little pen and paper, but that format of sort of very mobile-friendly, just continuous learning, I'd like to do a lot more with that. And so that's kind of where we're gonna go with the book app. So there's a lot of fun stuff about the way you did at least V1 of the book, which is you have like a one sentence summary, one paragraph summary, TLDR, and like one image summary, which is, I think honestly, it's not even about a short attention span. It's a really good exercise about summarization, condensation, and really like helping you think through what is the key insight. Like we mentioned the prime number maze that reveals something central to the human condition, which is struggling against the limitation of our minds. And in that same way, you've summarized the network state in the book. So let's actually jump right there. And let me ask you, what is the network state? What is the network state? So I'll give it a sentence and also give it an image, right? So the informal sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states, okay? So just taking those pieces, highly aligned online community. That is not Facebook. That is not Twitter. People don't think of themselves as Facebookers or Twitterians, right? That's just a collection of hundreds of millions of people who just fight each other all day, right? It's a fight club. A company is highly aligned where, you know, you'll put a task into the company Slack and if you do it in all hands, about 100% of the people in a company Slack will do it. So they're highly aligned in that way. But online communities don't tend to be highly aligned. Online communities tend to be like a Game of Thrones fan club or something like that. Or, you know, on a Twitter account, you might get 0.1% of people engaging with something. It's not the 100%. If you combine the degree of alignment of a company with the scale of a community, that's like what a highly aligned, you know, online community is, right? Start to get a thousand or 10,000 people who can collectively do something as simple as just all liking something on Twitter. For example, why would they do that? They're a guild of electrical engineers. They're a guild of graphic designers. And you've got a thousand people in this guild and every day somebody is asking a favor from the guild and the other 999 people are helping them out. For example, I've just launched a new project or I'd like to get a new job. Can somebody help me? And so on. And so you kind of give to get. You're, you know, you're helping other people in the community and you're kind of building up karma this way and then sometimes you spend it down. Like Stack Overflow has this karma economy. It's not meant to be an internal economy that is like making tons and tons of money off of is sort of the keep score, right? That's a highly aligned online community part. Then capacity for collective action. I just kind of described that, which is at a minimum, you don't have a highly aligned online community unless you have a thousand people and you paste in a tweet and a thousand of them RT it or like it, okay? If you can't even get that, you don't have something. If you do have that, you have the basis for at least collective digital action on something, okay? And you can think of this as a group of activists. You can think of it as, for example, let's say, I mentioned a guild, but let's say they're a group that wants to raise awareness of the fact that life extension is possible, right? Every day there's a new tweet on, I don't know, whether it's a Metformin research or Sinclair's work or David Sinclair, right? Andrew Huberman has good stuff here, you know, or there's a Longevity VC. There's a bunch of folks working in this area. Every day there's something there. And literally the purpose of this online community is raise awareness of longevity. And of the thousand people, 970 go and like that. That's pretty good, right? That's solid. You've got something there. You've got a laser, right? You've got something which you can focus on something because most of the web to internet is in tropic. You go to Hacker News, you go to Reddit, you go to Twitter, and you're immediately struck by the fact that it's like 30 random things, random. It's just a box of chocolates. It's meant to be, you know, we're- Some of them look delicious. Some of them look delicious. Novelty, we can over consume novelty, right? So, you know, where we're talking about earlier, the balance between tradition and innovation, right? Here is a different version of that, which is entropy going in a ton of different directions due to novelty versus like focus, you know? It's like heat versus work, you know? Heat is entropic and work force along a distance. You're going in a direction, right? And so if those 30 links on, you know, the next version of Hacker News or Reddit or something like so brilliant, it's just, that's leveling you up. The 30 things you click, you've just gained a skill as a function of that, right? So these kinds of online communities, I don't know what they look like. They probably don't look like the current social media. Just like, for example, I know this is a meta analogy, but in the 2000s, people thought Facebook for Work would look like Facebook. And, you know, David Sachs, you know, founded and sold a company, Yammer, that was partially on their basis. It was fine, it was a billion dollar company. But Facebook for Work was actually Slack, right? It looked different. It was more chat focused, it was less image focused and whatnot. What does the platform for a highly aligned online community look like? I think Discord is the transitional state, but it's not the end state. Discord is sort of chatty. The work isn't done in Discord itself, right? The cryptocurrency for tracking or the crypto karma for sort of tracking people's contributions is not really done in Discord itself. Discord was not built for that. And I don't know what that UX looks like. Maybe it looks like tasks, you know, like maybe it looks something different. Okay. Wait, wait, wait, let me linger on this. So you were actually, there's some people might not be even familiar with Discord or Slack or so on. Even these platforms have like communities associated with them. Yes. Meaning the big, like the meta community of people who are aware of the feature set and that you can do a thing, that this is a thing and then you could do a thing with it. Discord, like when I first realized it, I think it was born out of the gaming world. Yes. Is like, holy shit, this is like a thing. There's a lot of people that use this. Right. There's also a culture that's very difficult to escape that's associated with Discord that spans all the different communities within Discord. Reddit is the same, even though there's different subreddits, there's still, because of the migration phenomenon maybe, there's still a culture to Reddit and so on. Yes. So I'd like to sort of try to dig in and understand what's the difference between the online communities that are formed and the platforms on which those communities are formed. Sure. Very important. Yes, it is, it is. So for example, an office, a good design for an office is frequently you have, you know, the commons, which is like the lunchroom or the gathering area, then everybody else has a cave on the border they can kind of retreat to. Cave in the commons, I love it. By the way, I was laughing internally about the heat versus work. I think that's gonna stick with me. That's such an interesting way to see Twitter. Yeah. Like is this heat or is this thread, because there's a lot of stuff going on. Right. Is it just heat or are we doing some like, is there a directed thing that's gonna be productive at the end of the day? That's right. I love this, I've never seen, I mean, anyway, the cave in the commons is really nice. So that has to do with the layout of an office that's effective. That's right. So you can think of many kinds of social networks as being on the cave in commons continuum. For example, Twitter is just all commons. The caves are just like individual DMs or DM threads or whatever, but it's really basically just one gigantic global public fight club for the most part, right? Then you have- Or love club. Well, some would love, but mostly fight. Or actually it's- I love aggressively, that's all. Yeah, I mean, the way I think, I mean, Twitter is like a cross between, you know, a library and a civil war, you know? It's something where you can learn, but you can also fight if you choose to fight, right? Yeah, well, I mean, it's because of the commons structure of it, it's a mechanism for virality of anything. Yeah, so- You just describe the kind of things that become viral. Yeah, meaning no offense to Liberians, it's like a library and Liberia. Liberia was wracked by civil war for many years, right? Libraries is one of my favorite sets for porn. Just kidding, jokes. I'm learning as that's probably crossing the line for the engineers working on this humor module. Maybe take that down a notch. Gosh, we're just talking about- Oh yeah, so continue, continue, right? Twitter's the commons. Yeah, so Twitter's the commons. Then Facebook is like, it's got all these warrens and stuff. Facebook, it's very difficult to reason about privacy on that. And the reason is I think it's easy to understand when something is completely public like Twitter or completely private like Signal. And those are the only two modes I think in which one can really operate. When something is quasi private like Facebook, you have to just kind of assume it's public because if it's interesting enough, it'll go outside your friend network and it'll get screenshotted or whatever and posted. And so, Facebook is sort of forced into default public despite its privacy settings. For anybody who says something interesting, if it's like, you can figure out all their dials and stuff like that, but just hard to understand unless it's totally private or totally public. You have to basically treat it if it's totally public, if it's not totally private. Okay, at least under a real name. I'll come back to soon. So you've got Twitter, that's total commons. Facebook, which is like a warrens, it's like rabbit warrens or like a ant colony where you don't know where information is traveling. Then you've got Reddit, which has sort of your global Reddit and then all the subreddits. That's a different model of cave and commons. I think one of the reasons it works is that you have individual moderators where something is totally off topic and unacceptable in this subreddit and totally on topic and acceptable in another, that's like kind of a precursor of the digital societies I think that we're gonna see that actually have become physical societies, like lots and lots of subreddit like things have become physical societies. Then you start going further into like Discord where it's more full featured than, as you go Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, now you jump into Discord and Discord is a bunch of individual communities that are connected and you can easily sort of jump between them, right? And then you have Slack and yes, you can use Slack to go between different company Slacks, but Slack historically at least, I'm not sure what their current policy is, historically they discourage public Slacks. So it's mostly like you have your main Slack for your company and then you sometimes may jump into like, let's say you've got a design consultant or somebody like that, you'll jump into their Slack, but Discord is, you've got way more Discords usually that you jump into than Slacks, right? Okay. And let me ask you then on that point because there is a culture, one of the things I discovered on Reddit and Discord of anonymity or pseudonyms or usernames that don't represent the actual name. Now Slack is an example of one. So I think I did a, I used to have a Slack for like deep learning course that I was teaching and that was like very large, like 20,000 people, whatever. But, so you could grow quite large, but there was a culture of like, I'm going to represent my actual identity, my actual name. And then same stuff in Discord, I think I was the only asshole using my actual name on there. It's like everybody was using pseudonyms. So what's the role of that in the online community? Well, so I actually gave a talk on this a few years ago called the pseudonymous economy, okay? And it's come about faster than I expected, but I did think it was going to come about fairly fast. And essentially the concept is obviously we've had, so first anonym, pseudonym, real name, right? Can you describe the difference? Anonymous is like 4chan where there's no tracking of a name. You know, there's zero reputation associated with an identity, right? Pseudonymous is like much of Reddit where there's a persistent username and it has karma over time, but it's not linked to the global identifier that is your state name, all right? So your quote real name, even the term real name, by the way, is a misnomer because it's like your social security name, like social security number. It's your official government name. It's your state name. It is the tracking device. It's the air tag that's put on you, right? Why do I say that, right? Another word for a name is a handle. And so just visualize like a giant file cabinet. There's a handle with Lex Friedman on it that anybody, the billions of people around the world can go up to and they can pull this file on you out. Images of you, things you said, like billions of people can stalk billions of other people now. That's a very new thing. And I actually think this will be a transitional era in like human history. We're actually gonna go back into a much more encrypted world. Okay, okay, okay, let me linger on that because another way to see real names is the label on a thing that can be canceled. Yes, that's right. In fact, there's a book called, Seeing Like a State, which actually talks about the origins of surnames and whatnot. Like if you have a guy who is, that guy with brown hair, that's like an analog identifier. It could mean 10 different people in a village. But if you have a first name, last name, okay, that guy can now be conscripted. You can go down with a list, a list of digital identifiers, pull that guy out, pull him into the military for conscription, right? So that was like one of the purposes of names was to make masses of humans legible to a state, right? Hence, seeing like a state, you can see them now, right? See, digital identifiers, one thing that people don't usually think about is pseudonymity is itself a form of decentralization. So, you know, people know Satoshi Nakamoto was pseudonymous. They also know he's into decentralization. But one way of thinking about it is, let's say his real name, okay, or his state name is a node, okay? Attached to that is every database, you know, his Gmail, his, you know, Facebook if he had one, every government record on him, right? All of these databases have that state name as the foreign key, right? And so it can go and look things up in all of those databases, right? And so it's like, think of it as being the center of a giant network of all of these things. When you go and create a pseudonym, you're budding off a totally new node that's far away from all the rest. And now he's choosing to attach BitcoinTalk and Bitcoin.org and the GPT signatures of the code if he should choose to do that. All those things, the digital signatures are all attached to this new decentralized name because he's instantiating it, not the government, right? One way of thinking about it is the root administrator of the quote real name system is the state because you cannot simply edit your name there, right? You can't just go, you can't log into USA.gov and backspace your name and change it. Moreover, your birth certificate, all this stuff that's fixed and immutable, right? Whereas you would take for granted that on every site you go to, you can backspace, you can be like, call me Ishmael, you know, walk into a site, you use whatever name you want. You just have to use the same name across multiple sites, you can do that. And if not, you don't have to. One thing that we're seeing now actually is at the level of kids, you know, the younger generation. Eric Schmidt several years ago mentioned that, you know, people would like change their names when they became adults so that they could do that. This is kind of already happening. People are using, I remarked on this many years ago, search resistant identities. Okay, why? They have their Finsta, which is their quote fake name Instagram and Rinsta, which is their real name Instagram. This is cool. Okay, and what's interesting is on their Rinsta, they're their fake self because they're in their Sunday best and, you know, smiling. And this is the one that's meant to be search indexed, right? On the Finsta, with their fake name, this is just shared with their closest friends. They're their real self and they're, you know, hanging out at parties or whatever, you know? And so this way they've got something which is the public persona and the private persona, right? The public persona that's search indexed and the private persona that is private for friends, right? And so organically people are, you know, like Jean Jacobs, she talks about like cities and how, you know, they're organic and what I like. Some of the mid 20th century guys, the architecture they had removed shade from, you know, like awnings and stuff like that got removed. So this is like the restoration of like awnings and shade and structure so that you're not always exposed to the all seeing web crawler that I have sore on, which is like Google bot just indexing everything. These are search resistant identities and that like I just sort of passes over you, like, you know, in the Terminator, like in the Terminator, I just kind of passes over you, right? So searchers and identity is not pulled up. It's not indexed, right? And now you can be your real self. And so we've had this kind of thing for a while with communication. The new thing is that cryptocurrency has allowed us to do it for transaction, hence the pseudonymous economy, right? And should go from anonymous, pseudonymous, real name. These each have their different purposes, but the new concept is that pseudonym, you can have multiple of them, by the way, your ENS name, you could have it under your quote, real name or state name, like Lex Friedman.eth, but you could also be punk6529.eth, okay? And now you can earn, you can sign documents, you can boot up stuff, you can have a persistent identity here, okay? Which has a level of indirection to your real name. Why is that very helpful? Because now it's harder to both discriminate against you and cancel you. Concerns of various factions are actually obviated or at least partially addressed by going pseudonymous as default, right? It is the opposite of bring your whole self to work. It's bring only your necessary self to work, right? Only show those credentials that you need, right? Now, of course, anybody who's in cryptocurrency understands Sushi Nakamoto and so on is for this, but actually many progressives are for this as well. Why? You don't ban the boxes. It's like, you're not supposed to ask about felony convictions when somebody is being hired because they've served their time, right? Or you're not supposed to ask about immigration status or marital status in an interview. And people have this concept of blind auditions, where if a woman is auditioning for a violin seat, they put it behind a curtain so they can't downgrade her for playing. So her performance is judged on the merits of its audible quality, not in terms of who this person is. So this way they don't discriminate versus male or female for who's getting a violin position. So you combine those concepts like ban the box, not asking these various questions, blind auditions, and then also the concept of implicit bias. Like if you believe this research, people are unconsciously biased towards other folks, right? Okay, so you take all that, you take Satoshi and you put it together and you say, okay, let's use pseudonyms. That actually takes unconscious bias even off the table, right? Because now you have genuine global equality of opportunity. Moreover, you have all these people, billions of people around the world that might speak with accents, but they type without them. And now if they're pseudonymous, you aren't discriminating against them, right? Moreover, with AI, very soon, the AI version of Zoom, you'll be able to be whoever you wanna be and speak in whatever voice you wanna speak in, right? And you'll be, and that'll happen in real time. So I mean, this is really interesting. For Finsta and Rinsta, there's some sense in which the fake Instagram you're saying is where you could be your real self. Well, my question is under a pseudonym or when you're completely anonymous, is there some sense where you're not actually being your real self? That as a social entity, human beings are fundamentally social creatures. And for us to be social creatures, there is some sense in which we have to have a consistent identity that can be canceled, that can be criticized or applauded in society. And that identity persists through time. So is there some sense in which we would not be our full, beautiful human selves unless we have a lifelong, consistent real name attached to us in a digital world? So this is a complicated topic, but let me make a few remarks. First is real names, quote unquote state names, were not built for the internet. They're actually state names, right? It's actually a great way of thinking about it, social security name, right? So your state name, your official name, was not built for the internet. Why? They give both too much information and too little, okay? So too much information because someone with your name can find out all kinds of stuff about you. Like for example, if someone doesn't wanna be stalked, their real name is out there, their stalker knows it, they can find address information, all this other kind of stuff, right? And with all these hacks that are happening, just every day we see another hack, massive hack, et cetera, that real name can be indexed into data that was supposed to be private, right? Like for example, the Office of Personnel Management, like the government, the US government, many governments actually, are like a combination of the surveillance state and the Keystone cops, right? Why? They slurp up all the information and then they can't secure it. So it leaks out the back door, okay? They basically have 100 million records of all this very, 300 million records, all this very sensitive data, they just get owned, hacked over and over again, right? And so really there should be something which just totally inverts the entire concept of KYC and what have you. And of course, comply with the regulations as they are currently written. But also you should argue privacy over KYC, the government should not be able to collect what it can't secure. It's slurping up all this information, it's completely unable to secure it, it's hacked over and over again. China probably has the entire OPM file. And it's not just that, Texas is hacked. And some of these hacks are not even detected yet, right? And these are just the ones that have been admitted. And so what happens is criminals can just run this stuff and find, oh, okay, so that guy who's got that net worth online, and he merges various databases, they've got a bunch of addresses to go and hit, okay? So in that sense, real names were not, state names were not built for the internet, they just give up too much information. In our actually existing internet environment, they give up too much information. On the other hand, they also give too little, why? If instead you give up lexfriedman.eth, okay? Or a similar crypto domain name or urban name or something like that, now that's actually more like a DNS, okay? First, if you've got a lexfriedman.eth, what can you do that? Some you can do today, some you'll soon be able to do. You can pay lexfriedman.eth, you can message lexfriedman.eth, you can look it up like a social profile, you can send files to it, you can upload and download. Basically, it combines aspects of an email address, a website, a username, et cetera, et cetera. Eventually, I think you'll go from email to phone number to ENS address or something like that as the primary online identifier, because this is actually a programmable name, right? Whereas a state name is not. Think about it, like a state name will have apostrophes perhaps in it, or is that your middle name or this and that? That was a format that was developed for the paper world, right? Whereas the ENS name is developed for the online world. Now, the reason I say ENS or something like it, you know, somebody in a village, their name might be Smith because they were a blacksmith or Potter because they were a Potter, right? And same, I think your surname, right now for many people, it's.eth and that reflects the Ethereum community. Your surname online will carry information about you. Like.sol says something different about you..btc says, yeah, it's something different. I think we're gonna have a massive fractionation of this over time. We're still in the very earliest days of our internet civilization, right? 100, 200 years from now, those surnames may be as informative as say Chen or Friedman or Srinivasan in terms of what information they carry, because the protocol, it's a civilization fundamentally that you're associated with, right? Right, so there's some improvements to the real name that you could do in the digital world. But do you think there's value of having a name that persists throughout your whole life that is shared between all the different digital and physical communities? I think you should be able to opt into that, right? At which stage? At which level, in terms of the society that you're joining. Wait a minute, so can I murder a bunch of people in society one and then go to society two and be like, I'm murder free. My name is- I don't mean it like that. No, no, yeah, so here's why that wouldn't work. That's the application I'm interested in. Okay, well, I'm not interested in the murder application, but what do you think? I don't know, I'm just kidding. I would like you to prevent me, a person who's clearly bad for society, from doing that. Sure, sure, sure. Murder is gonna be against the rules in almost every society. And I mean, people will argue- Most likely, yeah. Yeah, most likely, right? And there's a reason I'm thinking that- Except animals. Well, I'm thinking of like the Aztecs or the Mayas or something like that. There's various, you know, Soviet Union. There's weird edge case, unfortunately. Yeah, there's societies, unfortunately, that have actually, that's why I asterisked it. But let's say murder is something that society one probably has effectively, a social smart contract or a social contract that says, that's illegal, therefore, you're in jail, therefore, you're deprived of the right to exit. But upon entry into that society, in theory, you would have said, okay, I accept this quote, social contract, right? Obviously, if I kill somebody, I can't leave, okay? So you've accepted upon crossing the border into there, right? Now, as I mentioned, you know, like, what is murder? Like people will, I mean, there's an obvious answer, but as I said, there's been human sacrifice in some societies, communism, they kill lots of people, Nazism, they kill lots of people. Unfortunately, there's quite a lot of societies. You know, I wanted to say it's an edge case, but maybe many of the 20th century societies around the world have institutionalized some kind of murder, whether it was the Red Terror, you know, in the Soviet Union, or obviously the Holocaust, or, you know, the Cultural Revolution, or Year Zero, and so on and so forth, right? So my point there is that who's committing all those murders? It was the state, it was the organization that one is implicitly trusting them to track you, right? And how did they commit those murders? Well, how did Lenin, you know, you know the hanging order? You know, I'm talking about the hanging order for the Kulaks? Yes. Okay, the famous hanging order, which actually showed they were actually bloodthirsty, the key thing was he said, here's a list of all the, quote, rich men, the Kulaks, go and kill them. The real names, the state names were what facilitated the murder. They didn't prevent the murderers there, right? So my point is, just in the ethical weighting of it, it's a two-sided thing, right? You're right that the tracking can, you know, prevent disorganized murders, but the tracking facilitates, unfortunately, organized murders. Lists of undesirables were the primary tool of all of these oppressive states in the 20th century. You see my point? I see your point, and it's a very strong point. In part, it's a cynical point, which is that the rule of a centralized state is more negative than positive. I think it is a, it is like, it's like nuclear energy, okay? It's, it's, or it's like fire. It is something which you're gonna keep having it reform because there's good reasons where you have centralization, decentralization, recentralization, but power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and you just have to be very suspicious of this kind of centralized power. The more trust you give it, often the less trust it deserves. It's like a weird feedback loop, right? The more trust, the more it can do. The more it can do, the more bad things it will do. So, okay, there is a lot of downside to the state being able to track you. Right. And history teaches us lessons, one at a large scale, especially in the 20th century, at the largest of scale, a state can do, commit a large amount of murder and suffering. And by the way, history isn't over. If you think about what the Chinese are building on this, right, that surveillance state, it's not just tracking your name, it's tracking everything on you, you know? Like WeChat is essentially like, it is all the convenience and none of the freedom. So that's the downside, but don't you, the question is, I think, probably fundamentally about the human nature of an individual, of how much murder there would be if we can just disappear every time we murder. Well, I mean- At the individual level. So the issue is basically like, once one realizes that the moral trade-off has two poles to it, right? And moreover, that basically centralized, organized murder has, I mean, if we add up all the disorganized murder of the 20th century, it's probably significantly less than the organized murder that these states facilitated. Right? And probably by, you know, R.J. Rommel has this thing called Democide, right? And the thing is, it's so grim, right? Because, you know, it's saying like, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, right? These are just like, just incalculable tragedies that we can't even, you know, understand. But, you know, nevertheless engaging with it, like, you know, I don't know, is the ratio 10X? Is it 100X? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 100X, right? Yeah, but have you seen the viciousness, the negativity, the division within online communities that have anonymity? So that's the thing, is basically, there's also a Scylla and a Charybdis. I'm not, you know, when you see what centralization can do, and you correct in the direction of decentralization, you can overcorrect with decentralization and you get anarchy. And this is basically, then you want to re-centralize, right? And this is the, you know, I think it's the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the empire long united must divide, the empire long divided must unite. That's always the way of it, right? So what's gonna happen is, we will state certain verbal principles, right? And then the question is, where in state space you are? Are you too centralized? Well, then, okay, you want to decentralize. And are you too decentralized? Then we want to centralize and maybe track more, right? And people opt into more tracking because they will get something from that tracking, which is a greater societal stability. So it's kind of like saying, are we going north or south? And the answer is like, what's our destination? Where's our current position in the civilizational state space? Well, my main question, I guess, is does creating a network state escape from some of the flaws of human nature? The reason you got Nazi Germany is a large scale resentment with different explanations for that resentment that's ultimately lives in the heart of each individual that made up the entirety of Nazi Germany and had a charismatic leader that was able to channel that resentment into action, into actual policies, into actual political and military movements. Can't you not have the same kind of thing in digital communities as well? Have you heard the term argumentum ad Hitlerum or like Godwin's Law or something? Like, it's something where if the reference point is Hitler, it's this thing where a lot of things break down. But I do think, I mean, look, is there any, did Bitcoin manage to get where it was without a single shot being fired, to my knowledge? Yes, right? Did Google manage to get to where it is without shots being fired? Absolutely. And- While a lot of shots were being fired elsewhere in the world. Sure. But who's firing those shots? The states. The states, right, yeah. But that's because Bitcoin and Google are a tiny minority of communities. It's like the icing on the cake of human civilization. Sure, basically, any technology, I mean, like you can use a hammer to go and hit somebody with it, right? I'm not saying every technology is equally destructive or what have you, but you can conceive of, it's kind of like rule 34, but for technology, right? Okay, right, you can probably figure out some- Your ability to reference brilliant things throughout is quite admirable, yes. But anyway, sorry, rule 34 for technology. Rule 34, but for abusive technology, you can always come up with a black mirror version of something, and in fact, there is this kind of funny tweet which is like a sci-fi author. My book, Don't Invent the Torment Nexus, was meant to be a cautionary tale on what would happen if society invented the Torment Nexus, and then it's like, tech guys, at long last, we have created the Torment Nexus. I don't know, right? And so the thing is that simply describing something, some abuse, unfortunately, after the initial shock wears off, people will unconsciously think of it as sort of an attractor in the space, right? It's like, I'll give you some examples, like Minority Report had the gesture thing, right? And the Kinect was based on that. So it's a dystopian movie, but it had this cool kind of thing and people kind of keyed off it, right? Or people have said that movies like Full Metal Jacket, that was meant to be, in my understanding, it was meant to be an anti-war movie, but lots of soldiers just love it, despite the fact that the drill sergeant is actually depicted as a bad guy, right? For the sort of portrayal of that kind of environment, right? So I'm just saying it's like giving the vision of the digital Hitler or whatever is not actually a vision I wanna paint. I do think everything is possible. Obviously, ISIS uses the internet, right? But like, is it- Yeah, we're not bringing up Hitler in a shallow argument. We're bringing up Hitler in a long, empathetic, relaxed discussion, which is a different- Sure, sure, I understand. Which is where Hitler can live in a healthy way. So- There's deep lessons in Hitler and Nazi Germany as there is with Stalin, yes. Okay, so in many ways, and this is a very superficial way of talking about it, but this is, exit is the anti-genocide technology, right? Because exit is the route of the politically powerless. Exit is not, people always say, oh, exit is for the rich or whatever. That's actually not true. Most immigrants equals most immigrants are not rich. They're politically powerless. You can describe exit. What is exit? So there's this book which I reference a lot, I like it, called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirschman, okay? And he essentially says, and I gave this talk in 2013 that goes through this at YC Starb School, but just to describe these, voices reform, exits alternatives. For example, in the context of an open-source project, voice is submitting a bug and exit is forking. In a company, voices, you're saying, hey, here's a ticket, okay, that I'd like to get solved, and exit is taking your business elsewhere, okay? At the level of corporate governance, voices, board of directors vote, and exit is selling your shares, right? In a country, voice is a vote and exit is migration, okay? And I do think that the two forces we talk about a lot, democracy and capitalism, are useful forces, but there's a third, which is migration, right? So you can vote with your ballot, you can vote with your wallet, you can vote with your feet. Wallet has some aspects of exit built into it, but voting with your feet actually has some aspects of voice built into it, because when you leave, it's like an amplifier on your vote. You might say 10 things, but when you actually leave, then people take what you said seriously. You're not just like complaining or whatever, you actually left San Francisco because it was so bad on this and this issue, and you've actually voted with your feet. It is manifest preference as opposed to stated preference. So voice versus exit is this interesting dichotomy. Do you try to reform the system or do you exit it and build a new one or seek an alternative? And then loyalty modulates this, where if you are a patriot, as part of the initial part of your conversation, like, are you a trader? You're giving up on our great thing or whatever, right? And people will push those buttons to get people to stick. That's like, I shouldn't say the bad version, let's say a common version, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But then there's the good version, which is, oh, maybe the price is down right now, but you believe in the cause. So even if they're on paper, you would rationally exit, you believe in this thing, and you're gonna stick with it, okay? So loyalty can be, again, good and bad, but it kind of modulates the trade-off between voice and exit, okay? So given that framework, we can think of a lot of problems in terms of, am I gonna use voice or exit or some combination thereof? Because they're not mutually exclusive, it's kind of like left and right, somebody's gonna use both together. I think that one of the biggest things the internet does is it increases microeconomic leverage, and therefore increases exit in every respect of life. For example, on every phone, you can pick between Lyft and Uber, right? When you're at the store, you see a price on the shelf and you can comparison shop, right? If it's Tinder, you can swipe, right? If it's Twitter, you can click over to the next account. The back button is exit. The microeconomic leverage, leverage in the sense of alternatives, right? This is like one of the fundamental things that the internet does. It puts this tool on your desktop, and now you can go and talk to an illustrator, or you can kind of build it yourself, right? By typing in some characters into Dali. And that makes the positive forces of capitalism more efficient, increase in microeconomic leverage. And it's individual empowerment, right? And so our sort of industrial-age systems were not set up for that level of individual empowerment. Just to give you like one example that I think about. We take for granted every single website you go and log into. You can configure your Twitter profile, and you can make it dark mode or light mode, and your name, all this stuff is editable, right? How do you configure your USA experience? Is there a USA.gov that you edit? Can you even edit your name there? Dark mode for USA. But I mean, just your profile. Is there like a national profile? I mean, there's like driver's license. The point is that it's assumed that it's not like individually customizable quite in that way, right? Of course, you can move around your house and stuff like that, but it's not like your experience of the US is like configurable, you know? Let me think about that. Let me think about sort of the analogy of it. So the microeconomic leverage, you can switch apps. Can you switch your experience in small ways efficiently multiple times a day inside the United States? Well, the physical world- I think you do, yeah, under the constraints of the physical world, you do like micro migrations. So this is coming back to the hunter-gatherer, farmer-soldier, digital nomad kind of thing, right? The digital nomad combines aspects of the V1 and the V2 for a V3, right? Because digital nomad has the mobility and freedom with the hunter-gatherer, but some of the consistency of the civilization of the farmer and soldier, right? But coming back to this, one of the thing about it is in the 1950s, if a guy in assembly line might literally push the same button for 30 years, okay? Whereas today, you're pushing a different key every second. That's like one version of like microeconomic leverage. Another version is, in the 1980s, I mean, they didn't have Google Maps, right? So you couldn't just like discover things off the path. People would just essentially do, you know, home to work and work to home and home to work and a trip had to be planned, right? They were contained within a region of space or you do home to school, school to home, home to school. You know, it wasn't like you went and explored the map. Most people didn't, right? They were highly canalized, okay? Meaning, you know, it was just back and forth, back and forth, very routine. Just like the push the button, push the button, trapped within this very small piece and also trapped within this large country because it was hard to travel between countries. Again, you know, of course there were vacations. Of course there was some degree of news and so on. Your mobility wasn't completely crushed but it was actually quite low, okay? Relatively speaking, just you were trapped in a way that you weren't even really thinking about it. Okay? And now that map has opened up. Now you can see the whole map. You can go all over the place. You know, I don't have the data to show it but I'd be shocked if people, the average person didn't go to more places, wasn't, you know, going to more restaurants and things like that today than they were in the 80s, simply because the map is open, okay? And the map is made more open through the digital world. To the digital world, exactly. So we're reopening the map like the hunter-gatherer, okay? Because you can now, think about every site for very low cost that you can visit, right? The digital world, you can, I mean, how many websites have you visited? I don't know, hundreds of thousands probably at this point over your life, right? How many places on the surface have you visited? You're actually unusual. You might be like a world traveler or what have you, right? But still, even your physical mobility is less than your digital mobility, right? You can just essentially, I mean, the entire concept of like nations and borders and whatnot didn't exist in the hunter-gatherer era, right? Because you couldn't build permanent fortifications and whatnot. Even nations as we currently think of them with like demarcated borders, you needed cartography, you needed maps, right? That stuff didn't exist for a long time. You just had sort of a fuzzy area of, we kind of control this territory and these guys are on the other side of the river, okay? I think just to- I don't wanna digress too much, but yeah. The word digress away, I think entirety of life on earth is a kind of a digression which creates beauty and complexity as part of the digression. I think your vision of the network state is really powerful and beautiful. I just wanna linger on this real name issue. Yes, really. Let me just give you some data. Go ahead. Personal anecdotal experience data. There's a reason I only do this podcast in person. There is something lost in the digital space. Oh, sure. And I find, now I personally believe to play devil's advocate against the devil's advocate that I'm playing, I personally believe that this is a temporary thing. We will figure out technological solutions to this, but I do find that currently people are much more willing to be on scale cruel to each other online than they are in person. The way to do that, I just visited Ukraine, went to the front. The way you can have people be cruel to each other in the physical space is through the machinery of propaganda that dehumanizes the other side, all that kind of stuff. That's really hard work to do. Online, I find just naturally at the individual scale, people somehow start to easily engage in the drug of mockery, derision, and cruelty when they can hide behind anonymity. I don't know what that says about human nature. I ultimately believe most of us want to be good and have the capacity to do a lot of good, but sometimes it's fun to be shitty, to shit on people, to be cruel. I don't know what that is. It's weird because I think, you know, one of my sayings is just like the internet increases in microeconomic leverage, the internet increases variance. For anything that exists before, you have the zero and 100 versions of it. I'll give some examples, then I'll come to this. For example, you go from the 30-minute sitcom to the 30-second clip or the 30-episode Netflix binge. You go from guy working 95 to the guy who's 40 years old and has failed to launch, doesn't have a job or anything, and the 20-year-old tech billionaire. You go from all kinds of things that were sort of Gaussian or kind of constrained in one location to kind of extreme outcomes on both sides, okay? And applying that here, you are talking about the bad outcome, which I agree does happen, where the internet, in some sense, makes people have very low empathy between others, but it also is the other extent where people find their mental soulmates across the world, someone who's living in Thailand or in, you know, like Latin America, who thinks all the same stuff, just like them. Wow, you'd never met this person before, right? You get to know them online, you meet in person, it's like, you know, the brains have been communicating for two years, three years, you've been friends, and you see them in person, it's just great, right? So it's actually, it's not just the total lack of empathy, it is, frankly, far more empathy than you would be able to build, usually with an in-person conversation in the 80s or the 90s with someone on the other side of the world, because you might not even be able to get a visa to go to their country, or not even know they existed, how would you be able to find each other, and so on and so forth, right? So it is kind of both. It is tearing society apart, and it's putting it back together, both at the same time. My main concern is this, what I see is that young people are, for some reason, more willing to engage in the drug of cruelty online, under the veil of anonymity. That's what you're seeing publicly, but you're not seeing the private chats. It's a, you know, the central distribution. Well, I work for the intelligence agency, so I'm seeing the private chats. Okay, you see the private chats. I mean, I'm collecting all of your data. Yes, but you can intuit stuff, and I don't think I'm being very selective. I mean, if you just look at the young folks, I mean, I am very concerned about the intellectual, psychological growth of young men and women. So I'm not disagreeing with you on this. I am saying, however, there is a positive there that once we see it, we can try to amplify that. Yes, with technology. Yes, that's right. But I'm just saying the very, very basic technology, like if the stuff I caught up over the weekend kind of thing, I think if I throw anonymity on top of that, it will lead to many bad outcomes for young people. Anonymity, yes. Pseudonymity, maybe not, because Reddit is actually fairly polite, right? Yeah. The entirety of Reddit just chuckled as you said that. Well, within a subreddit, it's actually fairly polite. Like I say, you're not usually seeing, it depends on which subreddit, of course. There's a consistency. I think definition of politeness is interesting here, because it's polite within the culture of that subreddit. Yes, they abide by, let me put it a different way. They abide by the social norms of that subreddit. Right, and that's the definition of politeness. Yeah, or civility, is that right? So there is an interesting difference between pseudonymous and anonymous, you're saying. It's possible that pseudonymity, you can actually avoid some of the negative aspects. Absolutely. We're re-Dunbarizing the world in some ways, okay? With China being the big exception or outlier. You know, the Dunbar number, 150 people, if you know, that's like roughly the scale of your society, right? That's the number of people that a human can kind of keep in their brain. That's, you know, whether apocryphal or not, I think it's probably roughly true. And we're re-Dunbarizing the world because, A, we're making small groups much more productive, and B, we're making large groups much more fractious. Right, so you have an individual like Notch, who can program Minecraft by himself, or Satoshi who could do V1 of Bitcoin by himself, or, you know, Instagram, which is just like 10 people, or WhatsApp, which is like 50 people when they sold. But on the other hand, you have huge, quote, countries of hundreds of millions of people that are just finding that the first and second principle, or the, you know, they're just splitting on principle components, you know? Scott Alexander thinks of them as scissor statements, you know, like statements that one group thinks is obviously true, one group thinks is obviously false. You can think of them as political polarization. You can think of it in terms of game theory. There's lots of different reasons you can give for why this happens, but those large groups now are getting split, and so you have both the unsustainability of these large, sort of artificial groups, and the productivity of these small, organic ones. And so that is kind of, it's like sort of obvious that's the direction of civilizational rebirth. We just need to kind of lean into that. Scissor statements, there's so many beautiful, just like, you know, we mentioned chocolates, right, advertising themselves. Your entirety of speech is an intellectual, like, box of chocolates. But okay, so I don't think we finished defining the network state. Let's like linger on the definition. You gave the one sentence statement, which I think essentially encapsulated the online nature of it. I forget what else. Can we just try to bring more richness to this definition of how you think about the network state? Absolutely, so that informal sentence is, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. So we talked about was the alignment of online communities and the capacity for collective action. Well, one collective action, it could be a thousand people liking a tweet, right? If you can get a thousand of a thousand people doing it. But a much higher level, much higher bar is a thousand people crowdfunding territory and actually living together, just like people currently- In physical space. In physical space. And not all in one place, that's critical. Just like Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, the network state is a recipe for a decentralized, state-like entity, okay? Where it starts with, for example, two people just get, they become roommates. They meet in this community, they become roommates, okay? They get a place together. Or 10 people get a group house. Or eventually 100 people just buy a small apartment building together. And guess what? They start getting equity and not just paying rent, okay? These are all people who share their values. And now they can crowdfund territory together. Now, of course, they don't just jump straight from a thousand people liking something to a thousand people crowdfunding something. What I described in the middle is, you do a lot of meetups, you get to know these other people before you decide to live collectively with them. But once you live with them, you start to get a network effect. For example, if those 100 people want to learn Spanish or Turkish or Vietnamese, they could all have a building where they're doing Vietnamese immersion, right? And that's something which they get a benefit from being physically around the other people that the pure digital wouldn't give them to quite the same extent, right? And so crowdfunds territory around the world, crucially, not just one place, they're all connected by the internet. Just like Hawaii is 2000 miles away from the continental US, but both sides think of them as American, both the people on Hawaii and people in the continental US. What's the role of having to have territory? Why? If most of the exchange, so presumably as technology gets better and better, the communication, the intimacy, the exchange of ideas all happens in a digital world, what's the importance of being able to crowdfund territory? Well, because we're still physical creatures. You can't reproduce yet digitally, right? There's still lots of things. So it's all about sex. Well, that's gotta be part of it. You're gonna wanna reproduce, right? Wait, are we talking about a cult? Well, it's not a cult. It's not a cult, it's not a cult. Why can't you just take a train? Why is it not a cult? It's not a cult because a cult is very internally focused and it tries to close its members off from the outside world. This is much more how America itself was populated, where there were lots of towns, like Penn is named after William Penn or the founder of Texas, like Sam Houston, right? Lots of towns like the Oneida Commune in Northern New York, they recruited and they became a town and they became actually the Oneida Glassware Company, kind of makes glassware out of it. All of these communities that were opt-in voluntary communities were not simply like cults that were closed off from the world they were meant to set an example to the world of what virtuous living looked like and they were trying to recruit from the rest of the world and they were exporting goods to the rest of the world. So it's, yes, reproduction, it's marriage and kids and so on but it's also just hanging out and it is just the physical world is very high bandwidth. There's lots of stuff. It's fun to just go and have a dinner in person just to hang out, to build things. Moreover, there's also lots of innovation that can only take place in the physical world. Look, one of my sayings in the book is, cloud first, land last, but not land never. In many ways, one of the problems the book solves is Thiel's problem of, we have innovation in bits but not in atoms. We can build a billion dollar company online but we need a billion permits to build a shed in San Francisco. How do you reconcile that? Well, what is stopping the innovation in atoms? It is a thicket of regulations. What are those regulations? Ultimately, a social construction. If you lean into the whole deconstructionist school of thinking, you can deconstruct and then reconstruct the state itself given sufficient social consensus online. If the population of Nevada had 100% consensus, you could just dissolve every law in Nevada in theory and then build new ones. So the online consensus of getting people to agree on something is upstream of what happens offline. So once you have consensus in bits, the human consensus also, cryptographic consensus, cryptocurrency consensus, then you can reshape the world of atoms. The reason we can't reshape the world of atoms right now is because you don't have that consensus of minds. For example, in SF, anything you do, there's gonna be 50% of people who are against you. So that's just a recipe for gridlock. Whereas if you have a bare piece of land that everybody agrees on, you can get, 70,000 units get set up in Burning Man in just a few days. Okay, that's the power of what, when you actually have human consensus. And one way I talk about this also in the book a little bit, and this I'm gonna go much more into detail in the V2, I think of this as 100% democracy as opposed to 51% democracy. 51% democracy, which is the current form of government, is 49% dictatorship. Because the entire premise of democracy is about the consent of the governed, right? That's actual legitimating underpinning principle. And insofar as 49% did not consent to the current president or prime minister or whatever, let's say presidential system first past the post, okay? Insofar as 49% did not consent, or in a prime minister system, it could be like 60% or more didn't consent to the current leader, those folks are having something imposed on them that they literally did not vote for. Moreover, campaign promises are non-binding. So whatever they voted for, they can effectively be defrauded. The actual voter fraud is when a politician promises X, but does not do it. It's as if you bought a can of orange juice and it actually drinking its milk, or it's nothing, right? So all of that is routinized, all of that is accepted. We have this thing which is just the minimum possible amount of democracy of 51%, okay? And what happens is then that 50% tries to ram something down the 49% throat, and then the next election it's now 51, 49 the other way, and then they ram it back. And that's how you get the seesaw that is just splitting countries apart, right? The alternative to that is you build a consensus online, you go and get some God-forsaken patch of territory. Actually, the worse the territory, the better. Why? Because it's like Burning Man, nobody cares, right? The nicer the piece of land, the more the people are gonna argue about it. But Starlink has repriced the world. Basically all kinds of piece of territory that were previously, you know, they're far away from natural ports, they're far away from natural resources, all kinds of piece of territory around the world now have satellite internet. And so what you can do is, again, the map has been reopened, right? What we were talking about earlier, the map has been reopened, you can gather your community online, they're now capable of collective action, you can point here, this place has great Starlink coverage, you go there like the Verizon guy, you know, can you hear me now? Good, right? You see that the coverage is good there, you drive out there, you test it out. Maybe you do it with mobile homes first, right? This by the way is its own thing. There's Yimby and there's NIMBY and there's YIMBY, but I actually also like HIMBY, okay? Do you want that? Should I just pick that? Let's go, NIMBY, YIMBY, HIMBY, what are those? So NIMBY is not in my backyard, don't build in cities. YIMBY is, let's build high density buildings, really tall buildings and so on in cities. There's a third version, which is HIMBY, my little coinage, which is horizontal sprawl is good. Why horizontal sprawl? Because to build a skyscraper, to build a tall building in a city, you have this enormous permitting process, all of this stuff which has to get done. It's expensive, it's time consuming. The way that cities were built, if you go back to the V1, what does the startup city look like? It looks like something like Burning Man. It looks like the cities of the Wild West. They were not multi-story buildings, right? They were basically things that were just like one story and someone could have it there in the dust and then you build roads and stuff between them and they can move them around. It was a much more dynamic geography. And so when you have that as a vision of what a startup city looks like, right? Now you've got something, there's a company I found called Kift, which is like van life. There's a lot of stuff in construction that makes this feasible. There's so-called man camps for fracking where people can just do like, companies like Agreco, they have private power. You can bring water, all this stuff on site. So it's easy to actually snap this stuff to grid, relatively speaking, if you've got horizontal space, you pick this space, you crowd from the territory, now you've got a city. Okay, and the last bit is, eventually gains diplomatic recognition from preexisting states. And this is the part that people, different people will be with me up to this point and then they'll say, okay, that's a part I disagree with or how are you gonna ever do that, right? They'll say, yeah, you can build an online community. I believe you can get them to do collective action. And of course, people have crowdfunded land and moving together and doing it a larger scale. All that I believe, how are you possibly ever gonna gain diplomatic recognition from preexisting states? You dumb delusional tech bro, right? That's a common thing. Okay, that's about the tone of it as well, right? And so first I would say, sovereigns are already out for business. They're inking deals, okay? Nevada inked a deal with Tesla to build the Geiger factory. El Salvador has Bitcoin as its national currency. Wyoming has done the Dow law where Ethereum is now recognized, where you can have on-chain incorporations that are recognized by Wyoming law. Virginia and New York negotiated with Amazon for HQ2. Tuvalu signed a deal with GoDaddy for the.tv domain. Columbia signed a deal for the.co domain and on and on and on. Sovereigns are open for business. Sovereigns are doing deals with companies and with currencies. Sovereigns at the level of cities, like Miami or New York, where the mayors are accepting their salary in Bitcoin. States like Wyoming or Nevada has its new private cities legislation. Or entire countries like El Salvador. So- When you say sovereigns, by the way, you mean the old school- Governments. Physical nation states, governments. Fiat states. Fiat states. Okay. But the fiat isn't the thing that makes a state. What makes a state is geographical location. It is something where, they're both, right? So basically it's a play on words. So just like fiat currency is cryptocurrency, we will have fiat country and crypto country, right? And in fact, you can think of the fiat and crypto version of almost anything. One thing I'll come to later is, a big thing, the big thing I think comes after digital currency is digital passports. Okay? So, and that's a big part of this whole network thing, which we'll come back to. But, so that last bit, the reason I just mentioned all those deals between sovereigns, whether at the city, U.S. state, or U.N. listed country level, okay? And on the other hand, so that's on one side of the market, on the other side are the companies and the currencies. Why could we not have online communities, right? So let me- Making those deals, saying this. So diplomatic recognition, but aren't you still attached to the responsibilities that come from being a member of a sovereign, old school nation state? So can you possibly escape that? So, yes, and let me give you a concrete example. Israel, okay? Why? You know, people talk about, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, Balaji just, he took this from Snow Crash, or some sci-fi book they'll reference. Actually, if there's many different references in the book, this is not the only reference, but a very important reference that I think is much more important to me than Snow Crash, which is good, a good book, whatever, but it's fictional, is Dzerzhudinstat by Theodor Herzl, which translates as the Jewish state, and that led to the foundation of Israel, and that's very real. It's worth reading because it's amazing. Theodor Herzl was like a tech founder, okay? In the book, he was writing about the death of distance in 1897. Why? Because steamships could take you across countries, okay? And he, like, he's just, you know, amazingly smart and practical guy, where he just handled all these various objections, and he said, look, you know, the Jewish people, you know, our choices are either A, assimilate and give up the culture, or B, some people are thinking communism's a good idea. I disagree with that. We should do C, build our own country, right? And that was considered totally crazy, but what he did was he A, wrote a book, B, started a fund, C, organized a semiannual conference, the, you know, World Zionist Congress, and the fund and the Congress are still going today. Crucially, there were a bunch of intermediate stages between the book and the idea, and then the actual state of Israel in 1947. For example, the, you know, the folks who were committed Zionists got together and started crowdfunding territory in what is now Palestine. And in fact, though, Palestine was only one choice. In the book, they also had Argentina as a choice. So this is my concept, cloud first, land last, and the land's a parameter, you can choose, right? Other places that were considered at various points, like Madagascar, Bir Bidzin in the former Soviet Union, right, so the land was a parameter. Palestine went out because of its, you know, historical and religious importance. Now, by the way, one thing, I'm sure there's some, like, some fraction of viewers are gonna be like, oh my God, like all the bad stuff that happened. I'm obviously not denying that there's enormous amounts of controversy and so on that attends Israel. I consider myself generally pro-Israeli. I also consider myself pro-Palestinian. I fund lots of Palestinians and so on and so forth. So I'm leaving that part out, that huge conflict, you know, for now, okay? And you might say that's airbrushing it. I don't mean it to do that. I'm saying here is the positive things they did. Can we take the positive and not have the negative? And I'll come back to how we might swap those parts out. But let me just talk about this a little bit more. So one of the things that happened was committed Zionists went and crowdfunded territory in what is now Israel, and they knit it together, right? Why? Because when you're physically present on territory, yes, in theory, like the British Empire was in control. They were the sovereign, okay? In practice, who were the boots on the ground, the facts on the ground, right? These are the people who are actually tilling the land and building the buildings and so on and so forth. Like who had the claim there is like the people who are present, okay? Now, this territory, this network of territories eventually became the basis for, or part of the basis for what became Israel. Now, I'm fully aware that the exact configuration of what territory belongs to Israel, what territory belongs to Palestinians, this is an enormous topic of dispute, okay? But I just point this out to say the process of going from book to crowdfunding territory to a sovereign state where people were now citizens of Israel, as opposed to the British Empire, is not some fictional thing, but did happen. And within the lifetimes of some of the older, you know, they're in their 80s now, but in the lifetimes of some older people, okay? So it's not impossible. In fact, it has happened, right? But for that step, perhaps, hopefully, is a better example, because in this particular, like you said, land last, if I were to say, if I was an alien and arrived at Earth and say, choice of land, maybe if you were interested in choosing a land that represents a network state where ideas that unites a people based on ideas, maybe pick a land that doesn't lead to generational conflict and war. Yes, so I'll get to that point. And destruction and suffering and all that. All the stuff, that's right. So now that I've said what are, you know, the positive things about Israel, and I think there's a lot to admire in Israel, as I said, I think there's also a lot to admire in the Palestinians and so on, I'm not taking any position on that. There's other inspirations for the network state. The second major inspiration is India, which managed to achieve independence non-violently. That's very important. So can you fuse these things? A state started with a book that achieved independence non-violently, and that managed to build this polyglot, multicultural democracy that does, like India has its flaws, but it does manage to have human rights of lots of people respected and what have you. And has managed to, you know, there were times like emergency in the 1970s in the Aragondi declared emergency. There are times when it seemed touch and go, but overall with fits and starts, this flawed thing has kind of made its way through. And, you know, the third inspiration is Singapore with Lee Kuan Yew, who built a city state from nothing. You know, I shouldn't say from nothing. Okay, there was something there, but let's say built one of the richest countries in the world without like huge amounts of natural resources in the middle of it. In the middle of a zone where there was lots of communist revolution going on. And so he was the CEO founder essentially of this amazing startup country, right? And, you know, finally, of course, America, which has too many influences to name, things we talked about, the nation of immigrants, obviously the constitution and so on. And you think, okay, can we go, you think of, you know, these inspirations, what's interesting about these four countries, by the way, Israel, India, Singapore, and the US, they have something in common. You know what that is? What's that? They're all forks of the UK code base. We think obviously, you know, the UK was sort of the ancestor of America, but Israel was a former British colony, right? The India was a British colony, and so was Singapore, right? For people who don't know what fork and code base means, it's a language from versioning systems, particularly Git, represented online on a website called GitHub. And a fork means you copy the code and all the changes you make to the code now live in their own little world. So America took the ideas that define the United Kingdom and then forked it by evolving those ideas in a way that didn't affect the original country. That's right, and what's interesting about this is, and of course I'm saying that in a somewhat playful way, right, but I think it's a useful analogy, an interesting analogy, right? So you have the Americans who forked, you know, the UK code base, and then you have, you know, the Indians, Israelis, and the Singaporeans who also made their own modifications. And in some ways, each society has pieces that you can take from them and learn from them and try to combine them, right? So you have a state that is started by a book that non-violently assembles, that crowdfunds territory around the world, that is led by a CEO founder, and that is also governed by something that's like a constitution, but just like you went from, you know, I talk about the V1, V2, and V3 a lot, right? Like V1 is gold and V2 is fiat and V3 is Bitcoin, right? Or V1 is hunter-gatherer and V2 is farmer-soldier, V3 is digital nomad or sovereign collective, okay, which is not just an individual but a group. Here, V1 is UK common law. They don't have a constitution. It's just all precedent going for many years, right? V2 is the US constitution, and V3 is the smart contract, the social smart contract, which is a fusion, obviously, of Rousseau's concept of the social contract and the smart contract. The social smart contract is like written in code, okay? So it's like even more rigorous than the constitution. And in many ways, you can think of going from the United Kingdom of England, Wales, you know, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the United States of America, the network states of the internet, okay, where you go from the rights of Englishmen with the Magna Carta to Europeans, African-Americans, all the immigrants to the Americans or the North America, then you go to all the people of the world. And so you basically are more democratic and you're more capitalist because you're talking about internet capitalism, not just nation-state-locked capitalism. In a sense, it's the V3, right? In other ways, the V3, only about 2% of the world is over 35, native-born American, can qualify to be president of the United States. But 100% of the world, you could become the president of a network state. There might be a Palestinian Washington or a Brazilian Hamilton, right? And now, rather than say, okay, maybe you have a small percentage chance of immigrating to the US and a small percentage chance of your descendant becoming president, now we can just say, you can start online. And you know what? Maybe this person is so exceptional, they have Americans coming to their network state, right? You don't think that kind of thing is possible with the rich get richer in a digital space too, the people with more followers have friends that have followers and they like- I don't think it's the rich get richer. I think what happens is, so this is an important concept. It's multi-axis, right? That is to say, for example, just the introduction of the Bitcoin axis, right? And those, because it didn't exist pre-2009, now it exists. Those people who are rich in BTC terms are only partially correlated with those who are rich in USD terms. There's all these folks, essentially- BTC is Bitcoin and USD is US dollar. Yes. So that's a new axis. And ETH is yet another axis, right? Ethereum, ETH is Ethereum. Right. So you are essentially getting new social systems which are actually net inequality decreasing because before you only had USD millionaires and now you have a new track and then another track and another track, right? You have different hierarchies, different ladders, right? And so on net, you have more ladders to climb. And so it's not the rich getting richer. In fact, old money in some ways is a last to cryptocurrency. Old money and old states, I think, those people who are the most focused on, you might call it reform, I would call it control. Okay? Those folks on control of the old world who have the least incentive to switch, the rich will get poorer because it will be the poor or those who are politically powerless, politically poor, who go and seek out these new states. Yeah, I didn't mean in the actual money, but yes. Okay, there's other ladders. I meant in terms of influence, political and social influence in these new network states. You, I think, said that basically anybody can become president of a network state. Just like anybody can become CEO of a startup company. Of course, whether people follow you is another matter, but anybody can go and found one. Go ahead, sorry. Oh, from the perspective that anyone can found one. Anyone could found, I see. We don't think it's implausible that somebody from Brazil or Nigeria, I mean, most quote billionaires in the world are not American. And in fact, actually, here's another important point. It's far easier to become a tech billionaire than become, or a billionaire period, than become president of the United States. There's less than 50 US presidents ever, all time. It is a much more realistic ambition to become a billionaire than become president. There's like thousands of billionaires worldwide. In fact, 75% of them are outside of the US. And many of those have been, some of them are like energy and oil, which is often based on political connections, but a very large chunk of the rest are tech. And that's something where you're mining, but you're mining online by hitting keys as opposed to with a pickaxe and granite. So the point is that we think it's totally understandable today for there to be a huge founder who comes out of Vietnam or South America, like you can name founders from all over the world. Exceptional people can rise from all over the world to run giant companies. Why can they not rise to run giant new countries? And the answer is we didn't develop the mechanism yet. And just as another example, I talk about this in the book, Vitalik Buterin is far more qualified than Jerome Powell, or anybody at the Federal Reserve. He actually built and managed a monetary policy and a currency from scratch as a 20-something. Obviously that's a more accomplished person than somebody who just inherited an economy. This is a- A lot of people can push back at that and say that the people that initially build a thing aren't necessarily the best ones to manage a thing once it scales and actually has impact. Sometimes, sometimes, but Dzuk has done a good job of both. I think Vitalik has done a good job of both, right? But that's not an inherent truth. Well, so actually I've- If you built the thing, you will be the best person to run it. I will agree with you on that. And actually I talk about this in the book, or I've got an essay on this called Founding vs. Inheriting, okay? And the premise is actually that, the classic example, you know the saying, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. It means the guy who starts out poor and builds a fortune, his son maintains it and his dissipate grandson dissipates it, right? Why is shirt sleeves a symbol of poverty? Back in the past, it was kind of like, you know, you're just working with your, you're not white collar, you're back to working with your hands, you're just- Oh, so it's a blue collar to blue collar in three generations. Yeah, yeah, or working class or something like that, right? So essentially that the grandson squanders it, right? And, you know, in a sense, by the way, just to talk about that for a second, if you have two children and four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren and 16 and so on, and in older families, you know, they were much bigger, right, six, you know, children is not uncommon. Whatever fortune you have is now split six ways and then six ways and six ways again. So with the exception of premature geniture where the oldest son inherits all the way down, the majority of descendants just a few generations out have probably inherited none of that fortune unless it is compound to such an extent that it's like up six X over 20 years, right? So it's actually hard to maintain a quote ruling class in the sense that this person who's like four generations down has, you know, like 1 16th of the DNA, you know, one over two to the fourth, right, of their scion who built a fortune. So it's not even like the same, is it the same family even, right? Is the fortune actually in the family? So most people don't think a few generations out, they just kind of think, oh, Marx is right, there's always been a rich and a poor. It's actually much more dynamic than that because you literally, like, what is even the family when it's diluted out, you know, 1 16th, right? If you're 1 16th of Rockefeller, are you a Rockefeller? Or are you 15, 16, something else? Would you have the Rockefeller fortune? Probably not, right? Now, are there, again, pre-mogeniture where the guy who inherits the name all the way through, that would be one way to pass it down. But even that person doesn't necessarily have the qualities of the guy who, you know, the cultural qualities, other qualities of the guy who's like four generations past, so they tend to squander it, right? So this actually brings us to, you know, coming back up to governance, the system, the guys who built the United States, you know, like Washington and Hamilton, these are giants, right? These are founders. And the folks today are like, not the grandson, but like the 40th generation heir of a factory that somebody else built. Like, think about a factory and you have, you know, this grandchild or great-grandchild that inherits a factory. Most of the time, it's just cranking out widgets and the great-grandson is cashing checks. They have been selected as legitimate heir because it's the, you know, the founder, passes it down to his son, passes it down to his grandson, to his great-grandson. So legitimacy is there. They've got title, they can show, I own this factory, okay? They can cash the checks. There's professional managers there. Everything seems fine. Until one day, that factory has to go from making, you know, widgets to making masks for COVID or something else. It has to change direction. It has to do something it hasn't done before. None of that capability for invention and reinvention is present anymore. These people have inherited something that they could not build from scratch. Because they could not build from scratch, they can't even maintain it. This is an important point. The ability to build from scratch is so important because if some part breaks and you don't know why it was there, can you even maintain it? No, you can't, okay? Unless all the replacement parts and the know-how to fit them together is there, you can't repair this. So in 2009, Mother Jones had a story that said that the US military had forgotten how to make some kinds of nuclear weapons because there was a part where all the guys who knew how to make it aged out or left. Okay? And this was some aero gel or something like that. It was rumored, okay? Thing is, you're seeing increasingly, for example, you've got wildfires in California. You've got water that's not potable in Jackson. You've got power outages in Texas. You're seeing a lot of the infrastructure of the US is just less functional. I think probably part of that is due to civil engineering not being that sexy a field. People aging out and just domain knowledge being lost. And the heirs who win the role of mayor or whatever of this town don't have the ability to build it from scratch. You're just selected for legitimacy, not competence. Okay? So once you think about this concept of founding versus inheriting, and I've got the whole essay which talks about this, of course, the alternative to somebody who's legitimate but not competent, what people will say is, oh, we need an authoritarian to be in control of everything. And then their hope is that that person is competent, but they don't have legitimacy. Because if they're just installed as just like a authoritarian ruler, 50% of the population is really mad at them. They don't have title. They just grab the title. Maybe they can exert enough force. That's the problem with the authoritarian dictator takeover, right? So the alternative, the third version, is the founder who combines both legitimacy and competence because they start from scratch. And they attract people to their vision, and they build it from scratch. And so you need is the ability to constantly do refoundings, rebirths. So if you imagine a world that is primarily network states, can you help me imagine what that looks like? Now, there's several ways to imagine things, which is how many of them are there, and how often do the new ones pop up? There could be thousands. Given seven billion people, eight billion people on Earth. Yeah, yeah. There's network state in the precise definition I have in the book, which is a diplomatically recognized entity. And there's network state in sort of the loose definition where, you know, one thing that's interesting is this term has become a lowercase term really fast, okay? Network state. Yeah, like in the sense of Google became lowercase Google for like Googling, or like Uber became lowercase Uber. Like if you go to the networkstate.com from such reviews, or you go to search.twitter.com and put in network state, you'll see it's just become like a word or a phrase, okay? So that means it's sort of whatever I intend it to mean, people will use it to mean what they want it to mean, right? Okay. Internet. It's internet, right? You've become a meme. Well, first of all, you're a meme, and this book is a meme. Am I a meme? Okay, maybe I'm a meme. But the book is, I think, is a good meme. That's actually why I wanted to make it free. I wanted people to take it out there and make it their own. And one of the things I say at the beginning, and I'll come back to this thing, is it's a toolbox, not a manifesto. Even if you dislike 70% of it, 80% of it, 90% of it, if there's something that's useful to you, you can take that and use it. Just like a library, a software library. You might just use one function there. Great, I'm glad I've delivered you some value. Right, that's my purpose in this. So you're not Ayn Rand? No, I'm not Ayn Rand. Basically, the whole point of this actually is it's polytheistic, polystatistic, polymystic, it's genuinely- Is it polyamorous? It's not polyamorous. Okay. Though somebody might want to- Do you have love advice in the book? I didn't see it. So did you talk about love in the book? I do not talk about love. I would rather- Maybe to you, love. Not that I don't believe in love. Love is great. All right, I will accept your offer to write a guest chapter in your V2 book about love. All right, great. Because there is some aspect that's very interesting, which parts of human civilization require physical contact, physical, because it seems like more and more can be done in a digital space. Yeah, but as I said- Like work, for example. But you're not gonna build a self-driving car city in digital space. You're not gonna be able to do- Oh, why do you need cars at all? Well, sure, but let's say you're not gonna be able to get to Mars in a purely digital thing. You need to build, you have to have a little rocket launchpad. You're not gonna be able to do all the innovative biomedicine, whether it's all the, have you seen bioelectricity, or there's stuff on regenerative medicine, stem cells, all this stuff. You just can't do that digitally, right? We're still physical beings, so you need physical space, but how do we get that, right? So this is meant to wind its way through various roadblocks in the so-called, actually my term from many years ago, the idea maze. It's meant to wind its way through the idea maze to find how to use bits to unlock innovation atoms. The idea maze within the bigger prime number maze, or go back to visualizing the number of states and how often are they born. So let me first anchor this, because people, just to give some numbers, right? How many UN-listed countries are there? Like 196, 193, okay? And there's some that are on the border like Taiwan or Israel, right? Where they're not, I mean, Israel is a country, but it's not recognized by every country or what have you. Is Texas a country? No, but it may eventually become. Right, okay. So within that list of about 200 countries, okay, I've got a graph in the book that shows that most countries are actually small countries. About, there's 12 countries that have less than 100,000 people by the UN definition of a country. There's another 20-something that have between 100,000 and one million. There's another 50 or 60-something that have between a million and 10 million. So most countries in the UN are less than 10 million people. There's only 14 countries that are over 100 million people. Okay, so most countries are small countries is kind of surprising to us because most people live in big countries, okay? And so now you're like, okay, well, I've built social networks that are bigger than that. You have a following that's bigger than 100,000 people. You have a following that's bigger than a small country like Cure Body or what have you, right? And, okay, so that first changes feasibility. You think of a country as this huge, huge, huge thing, but it's actually smaller than many, many countries are smaller than social networks that you've built, okay, number one. Number two is the number of UN-listed countries, even though it's been flat-ish for the last 30 years with a few things like South Sudan and East Timor that have come online, there's a graph that I posted which shows that it's increased by about, from about 40 or 50-something at the end of World War II when the UN was set up to 197 today. There's been like kind of a steady increase in particular with all the decolonization, all the countries that got their independence first from the British Empire and then from the Soviet Empire, right? That imperial breakup led to new countries, okay? And so then the question is, is that flat forever? Well, the number of new currencies similarly increased for a while, roughly one per country or thereabouts, and then it was flat for a while, and then suddenly it's gone completely vertical. That's an interesting graph, right? Where it's like linear-ish, then it's flat, and then it just goes voof like this. Now you can define, you can argue where the boundary is for quote a new currency, okay? But I think Bitcoin certainly counts, I think Ethereum certainly counts in terms of just its scale and adoption worldwide. So at least you have two. If you take the broad church view, you have a thousand or something like that, right? Somewhere in between, you might say, how many currencies are above the market cap of an existing previously recognized fiat currency? Like which got onto the leaderboard, right? There's a website just like coinmarketcap.com. That's like a site for cryptocurrency tracking, it's very popular, okay? There's a fun site called fiatmarketcap.com, which shows where Bitcoin is relative to the fiat currencies of the world. And it's like, last I checked, like number 27, somewhere in between the Chilean peso and the Turkish lira or something, okay? And it previously been close to cracking the top 10, okay? And I think it will again at some point. So we know that you can have a currency out of nowhere that ranks with the fiat currencies of the world. Could you have a country out of nowhere that ranks with the countries of the world? So this is maybe the fastest way, you probably should have said this at the very beginning. If you go to the network state in one image, okay? That kind of summarizes what a network state looks like in a visual, just one single visual. And the visual is of a dashboard. And the dashboard shows something that looks like a social network, except you're visualizing it on the map of the world. And it's got network nodes all over the place. A hundred people here, a thousand people there, they're all connected together. The total population of the people in this social network is about 1 million people. So 1.7 million people in this example. And some of the buildings are, some of the people are just singletons. They're just folks in their apartment who can conceptualize themselves as citizens of this network state. And they've got the flag on their wall, right? And the digital passport on their phone along with the digital currency. Others are groups of hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people that have all taken over a neighborhood, just like Chinatowns exist, right? Just like, you know, intentional communities existed. They just basically, you know, go and crowdfund land together, right? And these are all networked together, you know, just like the islands of Indonesia are separated by ocean. These are islands of this network state that are separated by intranet, okay? So they conceptualize themselves as something. And at the very top of the dashboard, there's something very important, which is the population, annual income, and real estate footprint of this network state. So the population we already discussed. You can build an online social network. We know you can build something which has a population that's bigger than these hundred thousand or million person countries. One of the new things contributions the network state has is say that you can not just exceed in population, you can exceed it in real estate footprint. Because one way of thinking about it is, I don't exactly know the numbers on foreign ownership in Estonia, but let's say to first order, the million something Estonians own and could afford Estonia, okay? A million people could buy a territory that is the size of Estonia, right? That's probably true to first order. There might be some overseas ownership, but it's probably true, okay? You probably find a country for which that's true. But that means is a million people digitally could buy distributed territory that is probably greater than or equal to the size of Estonia. Especially if they're buying like desert territory or stuff like that. Which means now you have a digital country that is ranking not just in people, not just in real estate footprint. So it's also in real estate footprint with the countries of the world. So you start ranking and you're bigger than these UN listed countries in your population and your real estate footprint. And the third is income, okay? You can prove on chain that you have a income for the digital population that is above a certain amount, right? This is what I call the census of the network state. And it's actually such a crucial component that I have it in the essay, the network state in a thousand words. The post office and census were actually important enough to be written into the US constitution, okay? Partly because it was like for apportionment of representatives, partly because it was a feedback mechanism. And so that census was done every 10 years and it's provided a crucial snapshot of the US for the last several hundred years, okay? Now here, this census of a digital state could be done every 10 seconds, okay? Conducting it is actually not the hard part. You know what the hard part is? Proving it. Because how will the world believe that you actually have 100,000 people spread across countries? Couldn't they all be bots? Couldn't they be AIs? Proof of human, proof of income, and also proof of real estate start to actually rise dramatically in importance because you're saying we're gonna rank this digital state on the leaderboard of the fiat states, okay? And so that means that people will start to, at first they'll just laugh at it. Once you start claiming you have 10,000 citizens, people are gonna start poking and be like, is that real? Prove that it's real, okay? So I have a whole talk on this, actually I'm giving at this Chainlink conference, but essentially how do you prove this, right? The short answer is crypto oracles plus auditing. The somewhat longer answer is you put these assertions on chain, these proof of human, these proof of real estate, et cetera, assertions on chain, okay? And there's people who are writing to the blockchain and they are digitally signing their assertions. Now, of course, simply just putting something on chain doesn't make it true. It just says you can prove not that what is written on chain is true, but that the metadata is true. You can show who wrote it via their digital signature, what they wrote, their hash, and when they wrote it, their timestamp. So you can establish those things in metadata of who, what, and when was written. Who's the who in that picture? So for example, let's- How do you know it's one human? Great question. So let's say you've bought a bunch of your piece of territory from Blackstone, okay? As a function of that, blackstone.eth signs an on-chain receipt that says this, lexfriedman.eth bought this piece of property from us and it has, you know, like, it's a thousand square meters and this is put on chain, they sign it, okay? That's their digital receipt. Just like you might get an email receipt when you buy a piece of property or something, okay? It's just put not online, but on chain and it's signed by Blackstone or whatever real estate vendor you buy it from. It could be a company, it could obviously be an individual, right? And so you have a bunch of these assertions. Let's say there's 47 different real estate vendors. I know vendor's an atypical term there, but just bear with me, right? 47 different real estate sellers that you've bought all of your territory from. Each of them put digital signatures that are asserting that a certain amount of real estate was bought and its square meters, its location, or whatever else they wanna prove. The sum of all that is now your real estate footprint, okay? And now the question is, was that real? Well, because they signed what they put on chain, you can do things like you can audit. Let's say Blackstone has signed 500,000 properties and they've sold them and put them on chain. And I'm not talking about 2022 or 2023, but 2030, right? It'll be a few years out, but people are doing this type of stuff. They're putting this stuff on chain. So you get that on-chain receipt. They've got 500,000 of these. What you can do is just sampling, okay? You pick a subset N of them, let's say 500 properties around the world. You go there, you actually go and independently look at what the square footprint is. And then from that, you can see what was the actual, your measurement versus their reported. And then you can, via Cisco inference, extrapolate that if they were randomly selected to the rest of the properties and get a reliability score for Blackstone's reporting of its real estate square footage. Who does the, so that's the auditing step. That's the auditing step. So the crypto oracle is the- Auditable oracle. On-chain, what did you say, assertions? That's right. Yeah, like who bought stuff with who. I still have to get to the proof of human, but auditing, there's a bunch of people randomly checking that you're not full of shit. That's right. Who is in charge of the auditing though? So it could be a big four, like a PWC and basically the accountants that do corporate balance sheet and cashflow and- Who keeps them in check from corruption? I'm just imagining a world full of network states. Yeah, it's a good question. So at a certain point you get to who watches the watchers, right? Yeah. And, oh, well, the government is meant to keep the accountants accountable. And Arthur Anderson actually did have a whole flame out in the, around the time of the Enron thing. So it is possible that there's corrupt accountants or bad accountants or what have you. But of course, the government itself is corrupt in many ways and prints all this money and seizes all of these assets and surveils everybody and so on and so forth. So the answer to your question is going to be probably exit, in the sense that if those accountants, they are themselves gonna digitally sign a report and put it on-chain, okay? So they're gonna say, we believe that X, Y, and Z's reports are on-chain, we're this reliable, and here's our study. If they falsify that, well, if somebody finds that, eventually, then that person is downweighted, then you have to go to another accountant, right? Is there ways to mess with this? I mean, I just, let me breathe in and out. As I mentioned, some of the heaviest shit I've ever read. So because I've visited Ukraine, I've read Red Famine by Ann Applebaum, Bloodlands. Yep. And it's just a lot of coverage of the census. I mean, there's a lot of coverage of a lot of things, but in Ukraine in the 1930s, Stalin messed a lot with the census to hide the fact that sort of a lot of people died from starvation. And did that with the cooperation of Arthur G. Sulzberger's New York Times company. Like Walter Grant, he falsified all those reports. Are several parties involved? Can there be several parties involved in this case that manipulate the truth as it is represented by the crypto oracle and as it is checked by the auditing mechanism? It is possible, but the more parties are involved in falsifying something, the more defections there are. So that's why you basically have another level of auditing, is fundamentally the answer, right? And really, I think what it comes back to is if you're showing your work, right? This is the difference between crypto economics and fiat economics. You know, the Bitcoin blockchain, anybody can download it and run verification on it, okay? This is different than government inflation stats, which people don't believe, right? Because the process is just, you know, it is true that CPI methodology is published and so on, but it is not something which people feel reflects their actual basket of goods, right? And so the independent verifiability is really the core of what true audibility is. And so then to your question, it's hard for some group to be able to collude because the blockchain is public and everything they've written to it is public. And so if there's an error, it's easier in some ways to tell the truth than to lie, because the truth is just naturally consistent across the world, whereas lies can be found out, even, you know, statistical tests, so you know Benford's law? Yes. Right, it's something where the digits in like a real, if you take the last digit, or the first, I forget if it was the last digit or the first digit. I think it's the first. First digit, right? So you take the first digit in an actual financial statement, you look at the distribution of like how many ones and how many twos, how many threes, the percentages. It has actually, you'd guess it might be, oh, each one will be equally random, it'd be 10%. It's not like that, actually. There's a certain distribution that it has, and fake data doesn't look like that, but real data does. That's weird. It's interesting, right? Benford's law, also called the first digit law, states that the leading digits in a collection of data sets are probably going to be small. For example, most numbers in a set, about 30%, will have a leading digit of one. Yeah, so that's a great example of what we were talking about earlier, the observational leading to the theory. Ooh, there's a Benford's law of controversy. I'm looking that up. Benford's law of controversy. Benford's law of controversy is an adage from the 1980 novel Timescape, stating passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available. The adage was quoted in an international drug policy article in peer-reviewed social science. Can I just say how much I love Wikipedia? I have the founder of Wikipedia coming on this very podcast very soon, and I think the world is a better place because Wikipedia exists. One of the things he wanted to come on and talk about is the ways that he believes that Wikipedia is going wrong. So on technical truths, it's great. Remember I think earlier on technical truths versus political truths? On technical truths, it's great. On political truths, it's like a defamation engine. Just as one example, okay? This is something that I was gonna write up, but there was a scam called HPZ Token that managed to edit Wikipedia. Nobody detected it. It said that I was the founder of HPZ Token. That you were the founder of HPZ Token. Yeah, I had nothing to do with this, and people were scammed out of it because Google just pushes Wikipedia links to high on Google, and people are like, well, it's Wikipedia, therefore it's real, right? Wikipedia has the bio of living persons thing. They should just allow people to delete their profile because they have zero quality control on it. It's literally facilitating fraud, right? Where people will maliciously edit and then do things with them, and nobody cares or is looking at it beyond the fraudsters, and this is happening. If that was happening, that was undetected. I wasn't paying attention to this. This was there for weeks or months, totally undetected, that literally facilitated fraud, right? And fundamentally, the issue is that Wikipedia doesn't have any concept of who's editing or property rights or anything like that. It is also something which is, it used to be something in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, people said, oh, it's Wikipedia, how trustworthy can it be, Britannica's reviewed. And that's been forgotten, and now it's become over-trusted, right? Remember the thing, like, the more trust something gets, the less trustworthy it often becomes. It kind of abuses the power, right? So what I'm interested in, Google actually had a model a while back called KNOL. KNOL, K-N-O-L, was something where when there were different versions of a Wikipedia-style page, you had Google Docs-like permissions on them. For example, you might have 10 different versions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, okay? And each one had an editor and folks that they could grant edit rights and so on. But this way, you would actually be able to see different versions of a page, and they might have different versions of popularity, but this way, you wouldn't have edit wars, you'd have forks, right? And they would all kind of coexist, and then people could review them, and now you could see different versions of something versus the thing that just kind of rewards dogged persistence or being an editor or something like that. The other thing is, a lot of the folks who have editorial privileges at Wikipedia are there from the early 2000s, and most of India wasn't online then. Most of Africa wasn't online then, right? So there's this inherited power that exists, which again, was fresh and innovative 10 or 20 years ago, but it's now kind of outdated. Yeah, I wanna see some data, though. You wanna see what? I wanna see some data, because we can always, I mean, this is, we often highlight small anecdotal cases. Hold on a second. We often highlight issues in society, in the world, in anything by taking a specific example, taking anecdotal data and saying, there's a problem here. I wanna know on net how much positive is being added to the world because of it. My experience that I try to be empathetic and open-minded, my exploration of Wikipedia has been such that it is a breath of fresh air in terms of the breadth and depth of knowledge that is there. Now, you can say there's bias built in. There's wars that are incentivized not to produce truth, but to produce a consensus around a particular narrative, but that is how the entirety of human civilization operates, and we have to see where's it better and where's it worse in terms of platforms. I think Wikipedia was an improvement over what came before, but it has a lot of flaws. You're right, that absolutely, sometimes people can over-fixate on the anecdotal, but sometimes the anecdotal illustrates a general pattern. For example, one thing that happens frequently in Wikipedia is there are editors who will plant a story, and then they will then go and use that story as a neutral third party to win an edit war. So here's a phenomenon that happens in Wikipedia. You have an editor who's privileged above just random users, okay, who will plant a story and then cite that story as if it was a neutral third party. So there's a site called Wikipediocracy, okay, and it discusses the case of a person named Peppermint who had a name that they didn't want included, their so-called dead name, on their Wikipedia profile, and there's a Wikipedia editor named Tenebrae who people allege was a Newsday reporter or writer that put a piece into Newsday that dead-named Peppermint, and then was able to cite it on the Wikipedia article as if it was like a neutral third party when it actually wasn't, when people allege it was the same guy, okay? Now, that is not an uncommon thing. That actually- That's what I want data on. Okay, I know- How many articles? I'm not- Who is auditing Wikipedia? I'm dancing with you, not against you. Sure, sure. Okay, I'm saying how many articles have that kind of war where douchebags are manipulating each other? So that's the question, what's the audit? Has Wikipedia actually been audited, right? Who are the editors? Like, who's actually writing this stuff? It is actually something where, again, on technical topics, I think it's pretty good. On non-technical topics, there's something called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Policy. It's a fascinating page, okay? So it actually takes a lot of the stuff that we have been, you know, the world has been talking about in terms of what's a reliable source of information and so on and so forth. It's called the Wikipedia Reliable Sources, Perennial Sources, okay? And if you go to this page, okay, which I'm just gonna send to you now, all right, you will literally see every media outlet in the world and they're colored gray, green, yellow, or red, okay? And so red is like untrustworthy, green is trustworthy, yellow is like neutral, okay? Now, this actually makes Wikipedia's epistemology explicit. They are marking a source as trustworthy or untrustworthy. For example, you are not allowed to cite social media on Wikipedia, which is actually an enormous part of what people are posting. You will, instead, you have to cite a mainstream media outlet that puts the tweets in the mainstream article and only then can it be cited in Wikipedia. By the way, to push back, this is a dance. We're dancing. That those are rules written on a sheet of paper. I have seen Wikipedia in general play in the gray area that these rules create. Oh, well, if you are an editor, then you can get- But you can use the rules, because there's a lot of contradictions within the rules, you can use them to, in the ways you said, to achieve the ends you want. It really boils down to the incentives, the motivations of the editors. And one of the magical things about Wikipedia, the positive versus the negative, is that it seems like a very small number of people, same with Stack Overflow, can do an incredible amount of good editing and aggregation of good knowledge. Now, as you said, that works, seems to work much better for technical things over which there's not a significant division. So some of that has to do less with the rules and more with the human beings involved. Well, but here's the thing, is, so first, let me take this, I should finish off this point, reliable source, perennial sources, right? So if you go to this, you'll see that Al Jazeera is marked green, but let's say the Cato Institute is marked yellow, right? The nation is marked green. Oh, shit. Oh, snap. Right, okay, sure, yes. The nation is marked green, but National Review is marked yellow, okay? You could probably go and do, so what's good about this is it makes the epistemology explicit, right? You could actually take this table, and you could also look at all the past edit wars and so on over it, and take a look at what things are starting to get marked as red or yellow and what things are starting to get marked as green, and I'm pretty sure you're gonna find some kind of partisan polarization that comes out of it, right, number one. Number two is once something gets marked as being yellow or red, then all links and all references to it are pulled out. For example, Coindesk, okay, was marked as being like, gosh, what was it? Yellow. I think it's marked as red. Coindesk, which is actually like- I get a lot of useful information from Coindesk. That's right, but it's marked as red, why? Because there's some Wikipedia editors who hate cryptocurrency. So cryptocurrency on Wikipedia has been a huge topic where they've just edited out all the positive stuff, and these are senior editors of Wikipedia who can control what sources are considered reliable. So they've now knocked out Coindesk, they've knocked out social media. They only allow mainstream media coverage, and not even all mainstream media, only those they've marked as green. This is the manipulation of consensus. I wanna know how many articles are affected by it, and on that- Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. You could just say that randomly. I can, I can. No, no, no, no, no. I can, because all the- There's different levels of effect in terms of it actually having a significant impact on the quality of the article. Let me give you an example. Let me give you an example, right? The fact that people cannot cite direct quotes on social media, but can only cite the rehash of those quotes in a mainstream media outlet, and not just any mainstream media outlet, but those that are colored green on the Wikipedia reliable perennial sources policy, is a structural shift on every single article to make Wikipedia align with US mainstream media corporations, right? I am, as often, playing devil's advocate, to counter a point so that the disagreement reveals some profound wisdom. That's what I'm doing here. But also in that task here, I'm trying to understand exactly how much harm is created by the bias within the team of editors that we're discussing, and how much of Wikipedia is technical knowledge. For example, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Wikipedia article I've seen there, now that changes very aggressively a lot, and I hear from every side on this, but it did not seem biased to me. Like, as compared to mainstream media in the United States. So now I'm gonna sound extremely woke, okay? If you go and look at this, all right? Times of India is yellow, but Mother Jones, Jacobin, okay, they are green, right? So a niche, mostly white, Western, like, partisan left outlet is marked green. But a billion people, you know, like, the Times of India is marked yellow, right? That's a structural bias towards Western media outlets and Western editors when much of the rest of the world hadn't gotten online or whatever at the time. I would just love to see, in terms of the actual article, what ideas are being censored, altered, shifted. I would love, I just think it's an open, I'm not sort of- So the edit logs are there, edit logs are public. Yeah, I would be fascinated, is there a way to explore the way that narratives are shifted because of- Sure, so a very simple one is, if you were to pull all the edit logs of Wikipedia, you could see how many times are social media links disallowed, okay? Like, first of all, think about it like this, how many, I mean, just the fact that social media is not allowed to be cited on Wikipedia or inconsistently- You think that's a problem? It's a huge problem. You can't cite, let's say, Jeff Bezos' own tweet. You have to cite some random media corporation. Here's the thing, and sorry if I'm interrupting. Please. Hopefully I'm adding to it. I think they're trying to create friction as to the sources used, because if you can use social media, then you can use, basically, bots to create a bunch of sources, right? And then you can almost automate the editor war, right? Here's the thing, is basically, Wikipedia initially, like I said, oh, we'll only cite mainstream media as a way of boosting its credibility in the early 2000s, okay, when its credibility was low. Now it's sort of become merged with the US establishment, and it only cites these things whose trust, I mean, have you seen the graphs on trust in mainstream media? Like, it's plummeted. It's down to like 10% or something like that, right? So the most trusted sources for Wikipedia are untrusted by the population. Yeah. True? That feels like it's a fixable technological problem. I think I'm under-informed, and my gut says we're both together under-informed to do a rigorous three to four hour discussion about Wikipedia. But hold on a second. I think I have a gut sort of developed feeling about which articles not to trust on Wikipedia. I think I need to make that explicit also. I have a kind of an understanding that you don't go to Wikipedia for this particular topic. Like, don't go to Wikipedia for an article on Donald Trump or Joe Biden. There's going to be, if I did, I would go to maybe sections that don't have room for insertion of bias, or like the section on controversy or accusations of racism or so on, or sexual assault. I'll usually not trust Wikipedia on those sections. Like math, that'll be great, right? Wikipedia's great for that. On many topics that do not have a single consensus truth, it's structurally shifted towards basically white Western liberals, woke whites, right? Fundamentally, that's a demographic of the Wikipedia. What kind of articles do you think are affected by this? Let's think about, like, what- Everything that's not math and technology. I think that's too strong a statement. So we can, like I said, war in Ukraine. Sure. I think that's too strong a statement. There's so much, I guess I'm saying affected to a large degree, even major battles in history, battles of Stalingrad, or- Sure. Like, that's not math. So you think all of that is affected to a point where it's not a trusted source? Absolutely, if you look at the edit wars, for example, on Stalin versus Hitler, Hitler's, the tone on Hitler starts out legitimately and justifiably as basically genocidal, maniacal dictator. With Stalin, there's a fair number of Stalin apologists that edit out mention of genocide from the first few paragraphs. I am playing devil's advocate in part, but I also am too under-informed to do the level of defense I would like to provide for the wisdom that is there, for the knowledge that is there. I don't wanna use the word truth, but for some level of knowledge that is there in Wikipedia, I think I really worry about, I know you don't mean this, but a cynical interpretation of what you're saying, which is don't trust anything written on Wikipedia. I think you're being very consistent and eloquent in the way you're describing the issues in Wikipedia, and I don't have enough actual specific examples to give where there is some still battle for truth that's happening that's outside of the bias of society. I just, I think if we naturally distrust every source of information, there is a general distrust of institutions and a distrust of sources of knowledge that leads to an apathy and a cynicism about the world in general. If you believe a lot of conspiracy theories, you basically tune out from this collective journey that we're on towards the truth, and that's, it's not even just Wikipedia. I just think Wikipedia was, at least for a time, and maybe I tuned out, maybe because I am too focused on computer science and engineering and mathematics, but to me, Wikipedia for a long time was a source of calm escape from the political battles of ideology. And as you're quite eloquently describing, it has become part of the battleground of political ideology. I just would love to know where the boundaries of that are. You know, Glenn Greenwald has observed this. Lots of other folks, you know, for example, I'm definitely not the only person who's observed that Wikipedia- A lot of, let me just state, because I'm sensing this, and because of your eloquence and clear brilliance here, that a lot of people are going to immediately agree with you. Okay. And this is what I am also troubled by, not, this is not you, but I often see that people will detect cynicism, especially when it is phrased as eloquent as yours, and will look at a natural dumbass like me and think that Lex is just being naive. Look at him trusting Wikipedia- Let me argue your side. For the mainstream narrative. Let me argue your side, okay? Can you please do that? Because you could do that better than me. No, no, no. No, Lex, I enjoy talking to you. And I'm doing devil's advocate a little bit because I do really want to be, I am afraid about the forces that are basically editors of authority of talking down to people and censoring information. Yeah, so let me first argue your side, and then let me say something, okay? Which is, what you are reacting to is, oh, even those things I thought of as constants are becoming variables. Where is the terra firma? If we cannot trust anything, then everybody's just, it's anarchy and it's chaos. There's literally no consensus reality, and anybody can say anything, and so on and so forth. And I think that there's two possible deviations from, let's say that the mainstream, obviously people talk about QAnon, for example, as this kind of thing where people just make things up. They just go totally, quit supply chain independent from mainstream media. And if mainstream media is a distorted gossamer of quasi-truth, these guys go to just total fiction as opposed to like, right? The alternative to QAnon is not BlueAnon, mainstream media, but Satoshianon, okay? Which is an upward deviation, okay? Not a downward deviation to say there is no such thing as truth, but rather the upward deviation is decentralized cryptographic truth, not centralized corporate or government truth, okay? So how does the decentralization of Wikipedia look like? Great question. It's this concept of the ledger of record. First, whether you're Israeli or Palestinian, Japanese or Chinese, Democrat or Republican, those people agree on the state of the Bitcoin blockchain. Hundreds of billions of dollars is managed without weapons, okay, across tribes with wildly varying ideologies, right? And what that means is that is a mechanism for getting literally consensus. It's called consensus, cryptographic consensus, proof of work. And when people can get consensus on this, what they're getting consensus on are basically bytes that determine who holds what Bitcoin. This is exactly the kind of thing people would fight wars over. You know, for hundreds of billions of dollars, let alone millions of dollars, people will kill each other over that in the past, right? So for hundreds of billions of dollars, people can get consensus truth on this in this highly adversarial environment, right? So the first generalization of that is it says, you can go from bytes that reflect what Bitcoin somebody has, to bytes that reflect what stocks, bonds, other kinds of assets people have. That's the entire DeFi theory in that whole space, okay? Basically the premise is if you go from consensus on one byte by induction, you can go to consensus on N bytes, depending on the cost of getting that consensus, right? And almost anything digital can be represented, you know, everything digital can be represented as bytes. So now you can get consensus on certain kinds of digital information. Bitcoin, but then also any kind of financial instrument. And then the next generalization is what I call the ledger of record. Many kinds of facts can be put partially or completely on chain. It's not just proof of work and proof of stake. There's things like proof of location, proof of human, proof of this, proof of that. The auditable oracles I talked about extended further. Lots and lots of people are working on this, right? Proof of solvency. Seeing that some actor has enough of a bank balance to accommodate what they say they accommodate. You can imagine many kinds of digital assertions can be turned into proof of X and proof of Y. You start putting those on chain, you now have a library of partially or completely provable facts, okay? This is how you get consensus. As opposed to having a white Western Wikipedia editor or mostly white Western US media corporation or the US government simply say what is true in a centralized fashion. So do you think truth is such an easy thing as you get to higher and higher questions of politics? Is the problem that the consensus mechanism is being hacked or is the problem that truth is a difficult thing to figure out? Was the 2020 election rigged or not? Is the earth flat or not? That's a scientific one. My technical versus political truth spectrum, yeah. But even the earth, like, well, that one is, yeah, nevermind, that's a bad example because that is very, you can rigorously show that the earth is not flat. But there's some social phenomena, political phenomena, philosophical one that will have a lot of debates, historical stuff about the different forces operating within Nazi Germany and Stalinist Soviet Union. I think there's probably a lot of, yeah, like, historians debate about a lot of stuff, like Blitz, the book that talks about the influence of drugs in the Third Reich. Where they're on meth or something. Yeah, there's a lot of debates about how truth, what is the significance of meth on the actual behavior and decisions of Hitler and so on. So there's still a lot of debates. Is it so easy to fix with decentralization, I guess is the question. So I actually have, like, basically chapter two of the Network State book is on essentially this topic. And so it's like 70 pages or something like that. So let me try to summarize what I think about on this. The first is that there was an Onion article that came out. I can't find it now anymore, but it was about historians in the year 3000 writing about the late 90s and early 2000s. And they're like, clearly Queen Brittany was a very powerful monarch. We can see how many girls around the world worshipped her like a god. And so, and it was very funny because it was a plausible distortion of the current society by a human civilization picking through the rubble a thousand years later, having no context on anything. And it's a very thought provoking article because it says, well, to what extent is that us picking over Pompeii or the pyramids, or even like the 1600s or the 1700s, like a few hundred years ago, we're basically sifting through artifacts. And Selma Berger actually has this concept like, which is obvious, but it's also useful to have a name for it. So I think he calls it like dark history, which is, and again, I might be getting this wrong, but it's like only a small percentage of what the Greeks wrote down, has come to us to the present day, right? So perhaps it's not just the winners who write history, it's like the surviving records. We have this extremely partial, fragmentary record of history. And sometimes there's some discovery that rewrites the whole thing. Do you know what like Gobekli Tepe is? Everything I know about that is from Rogan, because he's a huge fan of that kind of stuff. Yeah, so that like rewrites. And then there's a lot of debates there. There's a lot of debates. So basically it's like the discovery of this site in Northern Turkey that totally shifts our estimate of like when civilization started, maybe pushing it back many thousands of years further in the past, right? You know, the past, it's like an inverse problem in physics, right? We're trying to reconstruct this from limited information, right? It's like X-ray crystallography, it's an inverse problem, right? It's Plato's cave. We're trying to reconstruct what the world looks like outside from these shadows, these fragments that have been given to us, right? Or that we've found. And so in that sense, as you find more information, your estimate of the past changes, right? Oh, wow, okay, that pushes back civilization farther than we thought. That one discovery just changes it. So you want to try to, given all the gaps in the data we have, you want to try to remove bias from the process of trying to fill the gaps. Well, so here's the thing. I think we're very close to the moment of it. And so that's why it'll sound crazy when I say it now, but our descendants, I really do think of what the blockchain is and cryptographically verifiable history as being the next step after written history. It's like on par with that. Because anybody who has the record, the math is not gonna change, right? Math is constant across human time and space, right? So the value of pi is constant. That's one of the few constants across all these different human civilizations, okay? So somebody in the future, assuming of course the digital record is actually intact to that point, because in theory, digital stuff will persist. In practice, you have lost data and floppy drives and stuff like that. In a sense, in some ways, digital is more persistent, in some ways, physical is more persistent, okay? But assuming we can figure out the archival problem somehow, then this future record, at least it's internally consistent, right? You can run a bunch of the equivalence of checksums, right? The Bitcoin verification process, just sum it all up and see that, okay, it's F of G of H of X, and boom, that at least is internally consistent, okay? Again, it doesn't say that all the people who reported it were, they could have put something on chain that's false, but at least you know the metadata is likely to be very difficult to falsify. And this is a new tool. It's really a new tool in terms of a robust history that is expensive and technically challenging to edit and alter. And that is the alternative to the Stalin-esque rewriting of history by centralized power. Yeah, I'm gonna have to do a lot, actually, reading and thinking about, I'm actually, as you're talking, I'm also thinking about the fact that I think 99% of my access to Wikipedia is on technical topics, technical topics, because I basically use it very similarly to Stack Overflow. And even there, it doesn't have unit tests. For example, one thing- That's a good way to put it. Right, so one thing I remember, again, I might be wrong on this, but I recall that the Kelly Criterion, it's actually quite a useful thing to know. It's like how to optimally size your bets, okay? And you can have, given your kind of probability that some investment pays off or assumed probability, you can have bets that are too large, bets that are too small. Sometimes the Kelly Criterion, it goes negative, and actually it says you should actually take leverage. You're so sure this is a good outcome that you should actually spend more than your current bankroll because you're gonna get a good result, right? So it's a very sophisticated thing. And as I recall, many sites on the internet have the wrong equation. And I believe that was reprinted on Wikipedia. The wrong equation was put on Wikipedia as a Kelly Criterion for a while. That's funny. Okay, and so without unit tests, see, math is actually the kind of thing that you could unit test, right? You could literally have the assert on the right-hand side today, right, the modern version. We've got Jupiter, we've got Repl.it, we've got all these things. The modern version of Wikipedia, there's sites like golden.com, for example, like there's a bunch of things. I'm funding lots of stuff across the board on this. And I'm not capitalizing these companies or capitalize independently, but I'm trying to see if, not just talk about a better version. It's hard to build something better, so actually go and build it. And where you want is assertions that are actually reproduced. You don't just have the equation there. You have it written down in code. You can hit enter, you can download the page, you can rerun it. It's reproducible. So the problem with that kind of reproducibility is that it adds friction. It's harder to put together articles that do that kind of stuff, unless you do an incredible job with UX and so on. The thing that I think is interesting about Wikipedia on the technical side is that without the unit tests, without the assertions, it still often does an incredible job. Because the reason it's, the people that write those articles, and I've seen this also in Stack Overflow, is are the people that care about this most. And there's a pride to getting it right. Okay, so let me agree and disagree with that, right? So absolutely, there's some good there. There's, I mean, again, do I think Wikipedia is a huge step up from what preceded it in some ways on the technical topics? Yes. However, you're talking about the editing environment, right, like the markup for Wikipedia, it's very, you know, mid 2000s, right? It is not- It's a Craigslist. Yeah, exactly. At a minimum, for example, it's not WYSIWYG, right? So like Medium or something like that, you know, or Ghost, you can just go in and type and it looks exactly like it looks on the page. Here, you have to go to a markup language where there can be editor conflicts and you hit enter and someone is over in your edit or something like that. And you don't know how it looks on the page and you might have to do a few, you know, previews or what have you. So number one, so editing, you talk about bearish ending, that's a thing. Number two is, given that it might be read 1,000 times for every one time it's written, it is important to actually have the mathematical things unit tested, if they can be, given that we've got modern technology. And that's something that's hard to like retrofit into this because it's so kind of ossified, right? Right, there's the interface on every side for the editor. Even just for the editors, you check that they're, say the editor wants to get it right, make it, you wanna make it really, or not really easy, but easier to check their work. Like debugging, like a nice ID for the, for the, for the editing experience. That's right, and the thing about this is, as I said, because the truth is a global constant, but like incorrectness, you know, right? Go ahead, every happy family. I love to think that like truth will have a nice debugger. Well, so here's, right? So the thing is that what you can do is, let's say you did have like a unit tested page for everything that's on Wikipedia. First of all, it makes a page more useful because you can download it, you can run it, you can import it and so on. Second is it leads into, one of the things that we can talk about, I've sort of like a roadmap for building alternatives to not just existing companies, but to many existing US institutions, from media and tech companies to courts and government and, you know, academia and nonprofits. The Wikipedia discussion actually relates to how you improve on academia, right? And so academia right now, one of the big problems, this is kind of related to the, oh boy, okay, the current institutions, we don't have trust in them, but is that the answer is, is that the answer to trust no one, right? And I think the alternative is decentralized cryptographic trust or verification. How does that apply to academia? First observation is we are seeing science being abused in the name of quote unquote science, okay? Capital S science is Maxwell's equations. That's- That's the good one. That's a good one, right? Quote unquote science is a paper that came out last week. And the key thing is that capital S science, real science, is about independent replication, not prestigious citation. That's the definition, like all the journal stuff, the professors, all that stuff is just a superstructure that was set on top to make experiments more reproducible. And that superstructure is now like dominating the underlying thing, because people are just fixating on the prestige and the citation and not the replication, right? So how does that apply here? Once you start thinking about how many replications does this thing have? Maxwell's equation, I mean, there's trillions of replications. Every time, us speaking into this microphone right now, you know, we're testing, you know, our theory of the electromagnetic field, right? Or electromagnetic fields. Every single time you pick up a cell phone or use a computer, you're putting our knowledge to the test, right? Whereas some paper that came out last week in Science or Nature may have zero independent replications, yet it is being cited publicly as prestigious because prestigious scientists from Stanford and Harvard and MIT all came up with X, right? And so the prestige is a substitute for the actual replication. So there's a concept called Goodhart's Law, okay? I'm just gonna quote it. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, okay? So for example, backlinks on the web were a good signal for Google to use when people didn't know they were being used as a signal. Yeah, you talked about quantity versus quality and PageRank was a pretty good approximation for quality. Yes. It's a fascinating thing, by the way, but yeah. It is a fascinating thing, we can talk about that. But basically, once people know that you're using this as a measure, they will start to game it. And so then you have this cycle where, you know, sometimes you have a fixed point, like Satoshi with Proof of Work was miraculously able to come up with a game where the gaming of it was difficult without just buying more compute, right? So it's actually, it's a rare kind of game where knowledge of the game's rules didn't allow people to game the game, okay? Yeah, or a brilliant way to put it, yeah. Which is one of the reasons it's brilliant, is that you can describe the game and you can't mess with it. Exactly, it's very hard to come up with something that's stable in this way. There's actually, on the meta point, gosh, there's a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules, okay? It is- You mean Human Civilization or what? Yeah, gosh, it is called something, NOMIC, okay? N-O-M-I-C? NOMIC is a game where the rule of the game is to change the rules of the game. At first, that seems insane. Then you realize that's Congress. Yeah. Right? Literally, it is so meta because there are laws for elections that elect the editors of those laws who then change the laws that get them elected with gerrymandering and other stuff, right? That's a bad way of thinking about it. The other way of thinking about it is this is what every software engineer is doing. You are constantly changing the rules by editing software and pushing code updates and so on, right? So, you know, many games devolve into the meta game of who writes the rules of the game, right? Become essentially games of NOMIC. Proof of work is so amazing because it didn't devolve in such a way, right? It became very hard to rewrite the rules once they got set up. Very financially and technically expensive. That's not to say it will always be like that, but it's very hard to change. If we could take a small tangent, we'll turn to academia. I'd love to ask you about how to fix the media as well after we fix academia. Yeah, these are all actually related. Related. Yeah, Wikipedia, media, and academia are all related to the question of independent replication versus prestigious citation. Sure, so the problem is authority and prestige as you see it from academia and the media and Wikipedia with the editors. We have to have a mechanism where sort of the data and the reproducibility is what dominates the discourse. That's right, and so one way of thinking about this is, I've said this in, I think I tweeted this or something, but Western civilization actually has a break glass in case of emergency button. It's called decentralization. Martin Luther had it. When the Catholic church was too ossified and centralized, decentralized with the Protestant Reformation. He said, at the time, people were able to pay for indulgences. Like that is to say they could sin. They could say, okay, I sinned five times yesterday. Here's the equivalent of 50 bucks. Okay, I'm done with my sin. I can go and sin some more. Okay, they really buy their way out of sin, okay? Now people debate as to how frequent those indulgences were, but these are one of the things he invade against in the 95 Theses. So decentralization, boom, break away from this ossified church, start something new, right? And in theory, the quote religious wars of the 1600s that ensued were about things like where the wafer was the body of Christ or what have you, but in part they were also about power and whether the centralized entity would write all the rules or the decentralized one would. And so what happened was obviously Catholicism still exists, but Protestantism also exists, okay? And similarly here, you've got this ossified central institution where, you know, forget about, I mean, there's complicated studies that are difficult to summarize, but when you have the science saying masks don't work and then they do, okay, which everybody saw. And this is not like, you know, everybody knew that there was not like some massive study that came out that changed our perspective on mask wearing. It was something that was just insistently asserted as this is what the science says. And then without any acknowledgement, the science said something different, you know, the next day, right? I remember, cause I was in the middle of this debate. And I think you could justify masks early in the pandemic as a useful precaution. And then later, you know, post-vaccination, perhaps not necessary. I think that's like the rational way of thinking about it. But the point was that such levels of uncertainty were not acknowledged. Instead, people, you know, were basically lying in the name of science and public policy was, you know, it wasn't public health, it was political health, okay? So something like that, you're just spending on all the credibility of an institution for basically nothing, okay? And so in such a circumstance, what do you do? Break glass, decentralize. What does that look like? Okay, so let me describe what I call cryptoscience by analogy to, you know, crypto, just like there's fiat science, crypto science, right? Fiat economics, okay? So in any experiment, any paper when it comes out, right, it's, you can sort of divide it into the analog to digital and the purely digital, okay? So the analog to digital is you're running some instruments, you're getting some data, okay? And then once you've got the data, you're generating figures and tables and text and a PDF from that data, right? Leave aside the data collection step for now, I'll come back to that, right? Just the purely digital part. What does the ideal quote academic paper look like in 2022, 2023? First, there's this concept called reproducible research, okay? Reproducible research is the idea that the PDF should be regenerated from the data and code, okay? So you should be able to hit enter and regenerate it. Why is this really important as a concept? John Clare Boo and David Donahoe at Stanford 20 years ago pioneered this in stats because the text alone often doesn't describe every parameter that goes into a figure or something, right? You kind of sometimes just need to look at the code and then it's easy and without that, it's hard, okay? So reproducible research means you regenerate the PDF from the code and the data, you hit enter, okay? Now, one issue is that many papers out there in science, nature, et cetera, are not reproducible research, moreover, the data isn't even public. Moreover, sometimes the paper isn't even public. The open access movement has been fighting this for the last 20 something years. There's various levels of this like green and gold, open access, okay? So the first step is the code, the data, and the PDF go on chain, step number one, okay? The second thing is once you've got, so you can, anybody who is, and that could be the Ethereum chain, it could be its own dedicated chain, whatever, okay? It could be something where there's a, just the URLs are on the Ethereum chain and stored on Filecoin, many different implementations, but let's call that on-chain broadly, okay? Not just online, on-chain. When it's on-chain, it's public and anybody can get it. So that's first. Second is once you've got something where you can regenerate the code or the PDF from the code and the data on-chain, guess what? You can have citations between two papers turn into import statements. Yeah, that's funny. That's cool, right? So now you're not just getting composable finance, like DeFi, where you have like one interest rate calculator calling another. You have composable science. And now you can say this paper on this, especially in ML, right? You'll often cite a previous paper in its benchmark or its method, right? You're gonna wanna scatter plot sometimes your paper, your algorithm versus theirs on the same dataset. That is facilitated if their entire paper is reproducible research that is generated. You can just literally import that Python and then you can generate your figure off of it, right? Moreover, think about how that aids reproducibility because you don't have to reproduce in the literal sense every single snippet of code that they did. You can literally use their code, import it, okay? People start compounding on each other. It's better science, okay? Now I talked about this, but actually there's a few folks who have been actually building this. So there's usescholar.org, which actually has a demo of this, like just a V1 kind of prototype where it shows two stats papers on chain and one of them is citing the other with an import statement. There's also a thing like called I think dsci.com, which is trying to do this, right? Decentralized science. So this itself changes how we think about papers. And actually, by the way, the inspiration for PageRank was actually citations. It was like the impact factor out of academia. That's where Larry Page and Sergey Brin got the concept out of, right? So now you've got a web of citations that are import statements on chain. In theory, you could track back a paper all the way back to its antecedents, okay? So if it's citing something, you can now look it up and look it up and look it up. And a surprising number of papers actually, you know, their antecedents don't terminate or the original source says something different or it just kind of got garbled like a telephone game. And, you know, there's this famous thing on like the spinach, like it does actually have iron in it or something like that. I forget the details on this story, but it was something where you track back the citations and people are contradicting each other, okay? But it's just something that just gets copy pasted and it's a fact that's not actually a fact because it's not audited properly. This allows you to cheaply audit, in theory, all the way back to Maxwell or Newton or something like that, okay? Now, what I'm describing is a big problem, but it's a finite problem. It's essentially taking all the important papers and putting them on chain. It's about the scale of, let's say, Wikipedia, okay? So it's like, I don't know, a few hundred thousand, a few million papers. I don't know the exact number, but it'll be out of that level, okay? So now you've got, number one, these things that are on chain, okay? Number two, you've turned citations into import statements. Number three, anybody can now, at a minimum, download that code. And while they may not have the instruments, and I'll come back to that point, while they may not have the instruments, they can do internal checks, the Benford's Law stuff we were just talking about. You can internally check the consistency of these tables and graphs, and often you'll find fraud or things that don't add up that way, because all the code and the data is there, right? And now you've made it so that anybody in Brazil, in India, in Nigeria, they may not have an academic, you know, like a library access, but they can get into this, all right? Now, how do you fund all of this? Well, good thing is crypto actually allows tools for that as well. Andrew Huberman and others have started doing things like with NFTs to fund their lab. I can talk about the funding aspect. There's things like researchhub.com, which are trying to issue tokens for labs, but a lab isn't that expensive to fund. Maybe it's a few hundred thousand, a few million a year, depending on where you are. Crypto does generate money. And so you can probably imagine various tools, whether it's tokens or NFTs or something like that to fund. Finally, what this does is it is not QAnon, right? It is not saying don't trust anybody. Neither is it just trust the centralized academic establishment. Instead it's saying trust because you can verify, because we can download things and run them. The crucial thing that I'm assuming here is the billions of supercomputers around the world that we have, all the MacBooks and iPhones that can crank through lots and lots of computation. So everything digital, we can verify it locally, okay? Now, there's one last step, which is I mentioned the instruments, right? Whether it's your sequencing machine or your accelerometer or something like that is generating the data that you are reporting in your paper when you put it on chain, okay? Basically you think of that as the analog digital interface. We can cryptify that too, why? For example, an Illumina sequencing machine has an experiment manifest. And when that's run to, there's a website called NCBI, National Center for Biotechnology Information. You can see the experiment metadata on various sequencing runs. It'll tell you what instrument and what time it was run and who ran it and so on and so forth, okay? What that does is allows you to correct for things like batch effects. Sometimes you will sequence on this day and the next day and maybe the humidity or something like that makes it look like there's a statistically significant difference between your two results, but it was just actually batch effects, okay? What's my point? Point is, if you have a crypto instrument, you can have various hashes and stuff of the data as a chain of custody for the data itself that are streamed and written on chain that the manufacturer can program into this. For anything that's really, and you might say, well, boy, that's overkill, right? I'm saying actually not, you know why? If you're doing a study whose results are going to be used to influence a policy that's gonna control the lives of millions of people, every single step has to be totally audible. You need the glass box model. You need to be able to go back to the raw data. You need to be able to interrogate that. And again, this is, anybody who's a good scientist will embrace this, right? Yeah, so first of all, that was a brilliant exposition. Brilliant exposition of a future of science that I would love to see. The pushback I'll provide, which is not really a pushback, is like what you describe is so much better than what we currently have that I think a lot of people would say any of the sub-steps you suggest are already going to be a huge improvement. So even just sharing the code. Yes. Or sharing the data. You said, I think it would surprise people how often. It's hard to get data. It is, like the actual data or specifics or a large number of the parameters, not you'll share like one or two parameters that were involved with running the experiment. You won't mention the machines involved, except maybe at a higher level, but the versions and so on. The dates when the experiments were run. Exactly. You don't mention any of this kind of stuff. Right. So there's several ways to fix this. And one of them, I think, implied in what you're describing is a culture that says it's not okay. Exactly. To like, so first of all, there should be, even if it's not perfectly unchanged to where you can automatically import all the way to Newton, just even the act of sharing the code, sharing the data, maybe in a way that's not perfectly integrated into a larger structure is already a very big positive step. Yeah. I'm saying like, if you don't do this, then this doesn't count. And because in general, I think my worry, as somebody who's a programmer, who's OCD, I love the picture you paint that you can just import everything and it automatically checks everything. My problem is that makes incremental science easier and revolutionary science harder. Oh, I actually very much disagree with that. I would love to hear your argument. Let me just kind of elaborate. Sure. Why, sometimes you have to think in this gray area of fuzziness when you're thinking in totally novel ideas. And when you have to concretize in data, like some of the greatest papers ever written are that don't have data. They're in the space of ideas almost. Like you're kind of sketching stuff and there could be errors, but like Einstein himself with the famous five papers, I mean, they're really strong, but they're fuzzy. They're a little bit fuzzy. And so I think, even like the Gann paper, you're often thinking of like new data sets, new ideas. And I think maybe as a step after the paper is written, you could probably concretize it, integrate it into the rest of science. Sure. Like you shouldn't feel that pressure, I guess, early on. Well, I mean, there's different, each of the steps that I'm talking about, right? There's like the data being public and everything. Just having the paper being public, that's like V1, right? Then you have the thing being regenerated from code and data, like the PDF being regenerated from code and data. Then you have the citations as import statements. Then you have the full citation graph as an import statement. So you just follow it all the way back, right? And now you have, that gives you audibility. Then you have the off-chain, the analog digital crypto custody, right? Like where you're hashing things and streaming things. So you have the chain of custody. Each of those is kind of like a level up and adds to complexity, but it also adds to the audibility and the verifiability and the reproducibility. But one thing I'd say, I wanted to respond to that you said was that you think this would be good for incremental but not innovative. Actually, I think it's quite the opposite. I think academia is institutional and it's not innovative. For example, NIH has this graph, which is like, I think it's age of recipients of R01 grants, okay? And what it shows is basically it's like a hump that moves over time, roughly plus one year forward for the average age as the year moves on, okay? And I'll see if I can find the GIF. What this, why is this? Let me see if I can find it actually. Look at this movie, just for a second. It's a ridiculously powerful movie and it's 30 seconds. What's that? I just mentioned, what's that? The name of the video is Age Distribution of NIH Principal Investigators and Medical School Faculty. And it starts out on the X-axis is age with the distribution and percent of PIs. And from early 1980s, moving one year at a time. And the mean of the distribution is moving slowly, approximately as Bellagio said, about one year. Per year. Per year. Yeah, this is 10 years ago. One year in age per year of time. And notice how, first of all, the average age is moving way upward before you become an NIH PI. Second is, it's a cohort of guys, people, who are just awarding grants to each other. Yeah. That's clearly what's happening. That's the underlying dynamic. They're not awarding grants to folks who are much younger, okay, because those folks haven't proven themselves yet. So this is what happens when you get prestigious citation rather than independent replication. The age just keeps creeping up. And this was 10 years ago and it's gotten even worse. It's become even more gerontocratic, even more hidebound, right? And so the thing is, the structures that Vannevar Bush and others set up, the entire post-war science establishment, one thing I'll often find is people will say, Baljeet, the government hath granted us the internet and self-driving cars and space flight and so on. How can you possibly be against the US government? Kneel and repent for its bounty. And really, the reason they kind of, they don't say it quite in that way, but that's really the underpinning kind of thing because they've replaced GOD with GOV. They really think of the US government as God. The conservative will think of the US government as like the all-powerful military abroad and the progressive will think of it as the benign, all-powerful, nurturing parent at home, okay? But in this context, they're like, how come you, as some tech bro could possibly think you could ever do basic science without the funding of the US government? Has it not developed all basic science, right? And the answer to this is actually to say, well, what if we go further back than 1950? Did science happen before 1950? Well, I think it did. Bernoulli and Maxwell and Newton, were they funded by NSF? You know, no, they weren't, right? Were aviation, railroads, automobiles, gigantic industries that arose and both were stimulated by and stimulated development of pure science? Did they, were they funded by NSF? No, they were not, right? Therefore, NSF is not a necessary condition for the presence of science, neither is even the United States. Obviously, a lot of these discoveries, Newton was before, you know, like, I believe he's before the American, hold on, let me just find the exact. It's actually less old than people think. Okay, so Newton died 1727, right? So I knew that, you know, it was like in the 1700s. So Newton was before the American Revolution, right? Obviously, that meant huge innovations could happen before the US government, before NIH, before NSF, right? Which means they are not a necessary condition, number one. That itself is crucial because a lot of people say the government is necessary for basic science. It is not necessary for basic science. It is one possible catalyst. And I would argue that mid-century, it was okay because mid-century was the time when, the middle of the centralized century. 1933, 1945, 1969, you have Hoover Dam, you have the Manhattan Project, you have Apollo. That generation was acclimatized to a centralized US government that could accomplish great things, probably because technology favored centralization going into 1950 and then started favoring decentralization going out of it. I've talked about this in the book, The Sovereign Individual has talked about this, but very roughly, you go up into 1950 and you have mass media and mass production and just centralization of all kinds, giant nation states slugging it out on the world stage. You go out in 1950 and you get cable news and personal computers and the internet and mobile phones and cryptocurrency, and you have the decentralization. And so this entire centralized scientific establishment was set up at the peak of the centralized century. And it might've been the right thing to do at that time, but is now showing its age. And it's no longer actually geared up for what we have. Where are the huge innovations coming out of? Well, Satoshi Nakamoto was not, to our knowledge, a professor, right? That's this revolutionary thing that came outside of it. Early in the pandemic, there was something called project-evidence.github.io, which accumulated all of the evidence for the coronavirus possibly having been a lab leak, when that was a very controversial thing to discuss. Alina Chan, to her credit, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan have written this book on whether the coronavirus was a lab leak or not. I think it's plausible that it was. I can't say I'm 100% sure, but I think it's at least, it certainly, it is a hypothesis worthy of discussion. Though, of course, it's got political overtones. Point being that the pseudonymous online publication at project-evidence.github.io happened when it was taboo to do so. So we're back to the age of pseudonymous publication where only the arguments can be argued with. The person can't be attacked, okay? This is actually something that used to happen in the past. Like, you know, someone, there's a famous story where Newton solved a problem and someone said, I know the lion by his claw or something like that, right? People used to do pseudonymous publication in the past so that they would be judged on part by their scientific ideas and not the person themselves, right? And so I do disagree that this is the incremental stuff. This is actually the innovative stuff. The incremental stuff is gonna be the institutional gerontocracy that's academia where it's like, you know, do you know who I am? I'm a Harvard professor. They're doing science. I don't, I think I agree with everything you said, but I'm not gonna get stuck on technicalities because I think I was referring to your vision of data sets and importing code. Sure. And so that forces just knowing how code works, it forces a structure and structure usually favors incremental progress. Like if you fork code, you're not going to, it decentrifies revolution. You want to go from scratch. Okay, so I understand your point there, okay? And I also agree that some papers like Francis Crick on the Klaustrum or others are theoretical. They're more about like where to dig than the data itself and so on and so forth, right? So I agree with that. Still, I don't, the counter argument is rather than a thousand people reading this paper to try to rebuild the whole thing and do it with errors, when they can just import, they can more easily build upon what others have done, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So the paper should be forkable. Well, yeah, yeah. So here's why, you know, like, Python has this concept of batteries included for the standard library, right? Because it lets you just import, import, import, and just get to work, right? That means you can fly. Whereas if you couldn't do all those things and you had to rewrite string handling, you would only be able to do incremental things. Libraries actually allow for greater innovation. That's my counter. I think you create, I think that paints a picture. I hope that's a picture that fits with science. It certainly does. It fits with code very well. I just wonder how much of science can be that, which is you import, how much of it is possible to do that? Certainly for the things I work on, you can, which is the machine learning world, all the computer science world, but whether you can do that for, all right, you can think biology, it seems to, yes, I think so. Chemistry, I think so. And then you start getting into weird stuff like psychology, which some people don't even think is a science. No, just love for my psychology friends. I think as you get farther and farther away from things that are hard technical fields, it starts getting tougher and tougher and tougher to have importable code. Okay, so let me give the strong form version. So there's a guy who I think is a great machine learning guy, creator of actually Keras, who he disagrees with me on Francois Chalet. Yeah, he's been on this podcast twice. Okay, great. So he disagrees- I disagree with him on a lot of stuff. Yes, me too. I think we have mutual respect, you know, follow each other on Twitter, whatever. I think, yes, I think he does respect and like you. Here's something which I totally agree with him on, and he actually got like trolled or attacked for this, but I completely agree. Within 10, 20 years, nearly every branch of science will be for all intents and purposes, a branch of computer science, computational physics, computational chemistry, computational biology, computational medicine, even computational archeology, realistic simulations, big data analysis, and ML everywhere. That to me is incredibly obvious why. First of all, all we're doing every day is PDFs and data analysis on a computer, right? And so every single one of those areas can be reduced to the analog to digital step, and then it's all digital. Then you're flying, you're in the cloud, right? Did he put a date? Did he say how long or- 10 to 20 years, he was thinking. 10 to 20 years. Arguably, it's already there, right? And here's the thing, you were saying, well, you know, you might drop off when you hit psychology or history. Actually, I think it's the softer sciences that are gonna harden up. Why? One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is, for example, with history, the concept of crypto history makes history computable. One way of thinking about it is, remember my Britney Spears example, right? Where Queen Britney, right? Yeah. Okay, so at first it's kind of a funny thing to say a computer scientist's term for history is the log files. Until we realized that, what would a future historian, how would they write about the history of the 2010s? Well, a huge part of that history occurred on the servers of Twitter and Facebook. So now you go from like a log file, which is just the individual record of like one server's action, to a decade worth of data on literally billions of people. All of their online lives, like arguably, that's why I say that's like actually what the written history was of the 2010s was this giant digital history. As you go to the 2020s and the 2030s, more of that is gonna move from merely online to on-chain and then cryptographically verifiable. So that soft subject of history becomes something that you can calculate things like Google Trends and Ngrams and stuff like that. Yes, beautifully put. Then I would venture to say that Donald Trump was erased from history when he was removed from Twitter and many social platforms and all his tweets were gone. I think someone who has an archive of it, but yeah, I understand your point. Yeah, well, as the flood of data about each individual increases censorship, it becomes much more difficult to actually have an archive of stuff. But yes, for important people like a president of the United States, yes. Let me on that topic ask you about Trump. You were considered for a position as FDA commissioner in the Trump administration. And I think in terms of the network state, in terms of the digital world, one of the seminal acts in the history of that was the banning of Trump from Twitter. Can you make the case for it and against it? Sure, so first let me talk about the FDA thing. So I was considered for a senior role at FDA, but I do believe that, and this is a whole topic, we can talk about the FDA. I do believe that just as it was easier to create Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, reforming the Fed basically still hasn't happened. So just as it was easier to create Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will literally be easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA. It may take 10 or 20 years. I mean, think about Bitcoin, it's only about 13 years old. It may take 10 or 20 years to start a new network state with a different biomedical policy. But that is how we get out from perhaps the single worst thing in the world, which is harmonization, regulatory harmonization. Can you describe regulatory harmonization? Regulatory harmonization is the mechanism by which US regulators impose their regulations on the entire world. So basically you have a monopoly by US regulators. This is not just the FDA, it is SEC and FAA and so on and so forth. And for the same reason that a small company will use Facebook login, they will outsource their login to Facebook. A small country will outsource their regulation to the USA. Okay, with all the attendant issues. Because, I mean, you know the names of some politicians. Can you name a single regulator at the FDA? No, right? Yet they will brag on their website that they regulate, I forget the exact numbers, I think it's like 25 cents out of every dollar, something along those lines, okay? It's like double digits, okay? That's a pretty big deal. And the thing about this is, you know, people will talk about quote, our democracy and so on. But many of the positions in quote, our democracy are actually not subject to democratic accountability. You have tenured professors and you have tax exempt colleges. You have the Salzburgers, the New York Times, who have dual class stock. You have, you know, a bunch of positions that are out of the reach of the electorate. And that includes regulators who have career tenure after just a few years of not necessarily even continuous service. So they're not accountable to the electorate. They're not named by the press. And they also aren't accountable to the market because you've got essentially uniform global regulations. Now, the thing about this is, it's not just a government thing, it's a regulatory capture thing. Big pharma companies like this as well. Why? Because they can just get their approval in the US and then they can export to the rest of the world, right? I understand where that comes from as a corporate executive. It's such a pain to get, you know, access in one place. So there's a team up though between the giant company and the giant government to box out all the small startups and all the small countries and lots of small innovation. There are cracks in this now, right? The FDA did not acquit itself well during the pandemic. For example, it denied, I mean, there's so many issues, but one of the things that even actually New York Times reported, the reason that people thought there were no COVID cases in the US early in the pandemic was because the FDA was denying people the ability to run COVID tests and the emergency use authorization was, you know, emergency should mean like right now, right? But it was not, it was just taking forever. And so some labs did civil disobedience and they just disobeyed the FDA and just went and tested academic labs with threat of federal penalties, because that's what they are. They're like the police, okay? And so they were sort of retroactively granted immunity because NYT went and ran a positive story on them. So NYT's authority is usually greater than that of FDA if they come into a conflict and NYT runs stories, then FDA kind of gets spanked, right? And it's not, you know, probably neither party would normally think of themselves that way, but if you look at it, when NYT goes and runs stories on a company, it names all the executives and they get all hit. When it runs stories on a regulator, it just treats the regulator usually as if it was just some abstract entity. It's Zuckerberg's Facebook, but you can't name, you know, the people who the career bureaucrats at FDA. Interesting, right? There's- It's very interesting. It's a very important point. That person who's like named and their face is known. Like you, just as an example, you know Zuckerberg's face and name. Most people don't know Arthur G. Sulzberger. They couldn't recognize him, right? Yet he's a guy who's inherited the New York Times company from his father's father's father. That is unaccountable power. It's not that they get great coverage, it's that they get no coverage. You don't even think about them, right? And so it's invisibility, right? There's some aspect why Fauci was very interesting. He was a public face. In my recent memory, there's not been many faces of scientific policy, of science policy. Yeah. And he became the face of that. And, you know, as there's some of his meme, which is, you know, basically saying that he is science or to some people represent science, but in- Or quote unquote science or whatever, yeah. Yeah, the positive aspect of that is that there is accountability when there's a face like that. Right, but you can also see the Fauci example shows you why a lot of these folks do not want to be public because they enter a political, you know, in media minefield. I'm actually sympathetic to that aspect of it. What I'm not sympathetic to is the concept that in 2022, that the unelected, unfireable, anonymous American regulator should be able to impose regulatory policy for the entire world. We are not the world of 1945, you know? It is not something where these other countries are even consciously consenting to that world. Just as give an example, you know, there's this concept called challenge trials, okay? The Moderna vaccine was available very, very early in the pandemic. You can just synthesize it from the sequence. And challenge trials would have meant that people who are healthy volunteers, okay? They could have been soldiers, for example, of varying ages who are there to take a risk their lives for their country, potentially, okay? It could have been just healthy volunteers, not necessarily soldiers, just patriots of whatever kind in any country, not just the US. But those healthy volunteers could have gone. And at the early stages of the pandemic, we didn't know exactly how lethal it was gonna be because, you know, Li Wenliang and, you know, 30-somethings in China were dying from this. It seemed like it could be far worse. How lethal the virus would be. Yeah, it may be, by the way, that those who are the most susceptible to the virus died faster earlier. It's as if you could imagine a model where those who were exposed and had the lowest susceptibility also had the highest severity and died in greater numbers early on. If you look at the graph, like deaths from COVID were exponential going into about April, 2020, and then leveled off to about 7,500, 10,000 a day, and then kind of fell, right? But it could have gone to 75,000 at the beginning. So we didn't know how serious it was. So this would have been a real risk that these people would have been taking, but here's what they would have gotten for that. Basically, in a challenge trial, somebody would have been given the vaccine and then exposed to the virus and then put under observation. And then that would have given you all the data because ultimately the synthesis of the thing, I mean, yes, you do need to scale up synthesis and manufacturing and what have you, but the information of whether it worked or not and was safe and effective, like that could have been gathered expeditiously with volunteers for challenge trials. And you think there'd be a large number of volunteers? Absolutely. What's the concern there? Is there an ethical concern of taking on volunteers? Well, so let me put it like this. Had we done that, we could have had vaccines early enough to save the lives of like a million Americans, especially seniors and so on, okay? Soldiers and more generally first responders and others, I do believe there's folks who would have stepped up to take that risk. The heroes walk among us. Yeah, that's right. Like if military service is something which is a ritualized thing, people are paid for it, but they're not paid that much. They're really paid in honor and in duty and patriotism. That is actually the kind of thing where I do believe some fraction of those folks would have raised their hand for this important task. I don't know how many of them, but I do think that volunteers would have been there. There's probably some empirical test of that, which is there's a challenge trials website. There's a Harvard prof who put out this proposal early in the pandemic, and he could tell you how many volunteers he got. But something like that could have just shortened the time from pandemic to functional vaccine, right? To days even, if you'd actually really acted on it. The fact that that didn't happen and that the Chinese solution of lockdown, that actually, at the beginning, people thought the state could potentially stop the virus, stop people in place. It turned out to be more contagious than that. Basically, no NPI, no non-pharmaceutical intervention really turned out to work that much, right? And actually at the very beginning of the pandemic, I said something like, look, it's actually February 3rd, about a month before people, I was just watching what was going on in China. I saw that they were doing digital quarantine, like using WeChat codes to block people off and so on. I didn't know what was gonna happen, but I said, look, if the coronavirus goes pandemic, and it seems it may, the extreme edge case becomes the new normal. It's every debate we've had on surveillance, deplatforming and centralization accelerated. Pandemic means emergency powers for the state, even more than terrorism or crime. And sometimes a solution creates the next problem. My rough forecast of the future, the coronavirus results in quarantines, nationalism, centralization. And this may actually work to stop the spread, but once under control, states will not see their powers, so we decentralize. And I didn't know whether it was gonna stop the spread, but I knew that they were gonna try to do it, right? And look, it's hard to call every single thing right, and I'm sure someone will find some errors, but in general, I think that was actually pretty good for like early February of 2020, right? So it's my point though. The point is, rather than copying Chinese lockdown, we should have had were different regimes around the world. To some extent, Sweden defected from this, right? They had like no lockdowns or what have you. But really the axis that people were talking about was lockdown versus no lockdown. The real axis should have been challenge trials versus no challenge trials. We could have had that in days, okay? And those are two examples on both vaccines and testing. There's so many more that I can point to. So those are kind of decentralized innovations and that's what FDA should stand for. FDA can stand for it. Or something like FDA, right? Ah, so let's talk about that, right? Something like FDA. So this is very important. In general, the way I try to think about things is V1, V2, V3, as we've talked about a few times. So FDA, V. Well, right, so what was before FDA, right? So there was both good and bad before FDA, because people don't necessarily have the right model of the past, okay? So if you ask people what was there before the FDA, they'll say, and by the way, FDA itself omits the, right? Their pronouns are just FDA, FDA, okay? So, but basically- Why is that important? It's just something where- Why is that either humorous or interesting to you? They have a sort of in-group lingo where when you are kind of talking about them the way that they talk about themselves, it is something that kind of piques interest. It's kind of like, you know, in LA, people say the 101 or the, you know, right? Whereas in Northern California, they'll say 101. Or people from Nevada will say Nevada, right? It just instantly marks you as like insider or outsider, okay, in terms of how the language works, right? And that's, go ahead. I mean, it just makes me sad, because that lingo is part of the mechanism which creates the silo, the bubble of particular thoughts, and that ultimately deviates from the truth because you're not open to new ideas. I think it's actually like, you know, in Glorious Bastards, there's a scene in the bar. Do you want to talk about it? No, but it's good. You can't, just to censor you, this is like a Wikipedia podcast, like Wikipedia. You can't cite Quentin Tarantino films, no. Okay, okay, okay. Sorry, get me back there. Basically, like English start going like one, two, three, four, five, and I believe it's like the Germans start with the thumb. Something that you'd never know, right? I may be misremembering it, but I think that's right, okay? So that's like- FDA's got the lingo, all right. Right, so FDA's got the lingo. So coming back up, basically, just talk about FDA and then come back to your question on the platform. So what was V0, FDA, what's V1? What does the future look like? V1 was quote, patent medicines, okay? That's something some people say. But V1 was also Banting and Best, okay? Banting and Best, they won the Nobel Prize in the early 1920s, right? Why? They came up with the idea for insulin supplementation to treat diabetes. And they came up with a concept, they experimented on dogs, they did self-experimentation, they had healthy volunteers, they experimented with the formulation as well, right? Because just like you'd have like a web app and a mobile app, maybe a command line app, you could have a drug that's administered orally or via injection or cream, or there's different formulations, right? Dosage, all that stuff, they could just like iterate on, okay, with willing doctor, willing patient. These folks who were affected just sprang out of bed, the insulin supplementation was working for them. And within a couple of years, they had won the Nobel Prize and Eli Lilly had scaled production for the entire North American continent, okay? So that was a time when pharma moved at the speed of software when it was willing buyer, willing seller, okay? Because the past is demonized as something that our glorious regulatory agency is protecting us from, okay? But there's so many ways in which what it's really protecting you from is being healthy, okay? As, you know, I mean, there's a zillion examples of this. I won't be able to recapitulate all of them just in this podcast, but if you look at a post that I've got, it's called Regulation, Disruption, and the Future, Technologies of 2013, Coursera PDF, okay? This lecture, which I'll kind of link it here so you can maybe put in the show notes if you want, this goes through like a dozen different examples of crazy things the FDA did from the kind of stuff that was dramatized in Dallas Buyers Club, where they were preventing people from getting AIDS drugs to their various attacks on, you know, quote, raw milk, where they were basically saying, here's a quote from FDA filing in 2010. "'There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health. "'There's no right to consume or feed children "'any particular food. "'There's no fundamental right to freedom of contract.'" They basically feel like they own you. You're not allowed to make your own decisions about your food. There's no generalized right to bodily and physical health, direct quote from their like written kind of thing, okay? The general frame is usually that FDA says it's protecting you from the big bad company, but really what it's doing is protecting, it's preventing you from opting out, okay? Now, with that said, and this is where I'm talking about V3, as critical as I am of FDA or the Fed for that matter, I also actually recognize that like the Ron Paul type thing of end the Fed is actually not practical. End the Fed will just be laughed at. What Bitcoin did was a much, much, much more difficult task of building something better than the Fed. That's really difficult to do because the Fed and the FDA, they're like the hub of the current system. People rely on them for lots of different things, okay? And you're gonna need a better version of them and how would you actually build something like that? So with the Fed and with SEC and the entire, the banks and whatnot, crypto has a pretty good set of answers for these things. And over time, all the countries that are not, or all the groups that are not the US establishment or the CCP will find more and more to their liking in the crypto economy. So that part I think is going, okay? We can talk about that. What does that look like for biomedicine? Well, first, what does exit the FDA look like, right? So there actually are a bunch of exits from the FDA already, which is things like right to try laws, okay? CLIA labs and laboratory developed tests, compounding pharmacies, off-label prescription by doctors and countries that aren't fully harmonized with FDA. For example, Kobe Bryant, before he passed away, went and did stem cell treatments in Germany, okay? Stem cells have been pushed out, I think in part by the Bush administration, but by other things. So those are different kinds of exits. Right to try basically means at the state level, you can just try the drug, okay? CLIA labs and LDTs, that means that's a path where you don't have to go through FDA to get a new device approved. You can just run it in a lab, okay? Compounding pharmacies, these were under attack. I'm not sure actually where the current statute is on this, but this is the idea that a pharmacist has some discretion in how they prepare mixtures of drugs. Off-label prescription by MDs. So MDs have enough weight in the system that they can kind of push back on FDA. And off-label prescription is the concept that a drug that's approved for purpose A can be prescribed for purpose B or C or D without going through another whole new drug approval process. And then countries that aren't harmonized, right? So those are like five different kinds of exits from the FDA on different directions. So first those exits exist. So for those people who are like, oh my God, we're all gonna die, or he's gonna poison us with non-FDA approved things or whatever, right? Like those exits exist. You've probably actually used tests or treatments from those. You don't even realize that you have, right? So it hasn't killed you, number one. Number two is actually testing for safety. There's safety, efficacy, and comparative. Safety is actually relatively easy to test for. There's very few drugs that are like, there's TGN-1412, that's a famous example of something that was actually really dangerous to people, right? With an early test. So those do exist, just acknowledge they do exist. But in general, testing for safety is actually not that hard to do, okay? And if something is safe, then you should be able to try it, usually, okay? Now, what does that decentralized FDA look like? Well, basically you take individual pieces of it and you can often turn them into vehicles. And this is like 50 different startups. Let me describe some of them. First, have you gotten any drugs or something like that recently? I mean, like prescribed drugs, prescription drugs? No, that you clarify the answers, no. Yeah. No. Prescribed drugs, no. Okay, so. Not long, maybe antibiotics a long time ago, maybe. But no. So you know how you have sort of like a wadded up chemistry textbook, the package insert that goes into the, right? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. It's a wadded up chemistry textbook, I love it. That's what it is, right? That's what a terrible user interface, we don't usually think of it that way. Why is your user interface so terrible? That's a web of regulation that makes it so terrible. And there's actually guys who tried to innovate just on user interface called, like, Help, I Need Help. That was like the name of the company a while back. And it was trying to explain the stuff in plain language. Okay. Just on user interface, you can innovate. And why is it important? Well, there's a company called PillPack, which innovated on, quote, the user interface for drugs by giving people a thing which had like a daily blister pack. So it's like, here's your prescription and you're supposed to take all these pills on the first and second. And basically, whether you had taken them on a given day was manifest by whether you had opened it for that specific day. Okay. This is way better than other kinds of so-called compliance methodologies. Like, there are guys who try to do like an IOT pill where when you swallow it, it like gives you measurements. This was just a simple innovation on user interface that boosted compliance in the sense of compliance with a drug regimen dramatically, right? And I think they got acquired or would have you for a lot of money. And hopefully utilized effectively. Utilized effectively, right? Although sometimes these companies that do incredible innovation, it really makes you sad when they get acquired that that leads to their death, not their scaling. Sure. I mean, they did a lot of other good things, but this was one thing that they did well, right? So PillPack just shows what you can get with improving on user interface. Why can't, I mean, we get reviews for everything, right? One thing that, you know, like people have sort of, in my view, somewhat quoted our context, are like, oh, biology thinks you should replace the FDA with the alt for drugs. Actually, there's something called phase four, okay, of the FDA, which is so-called post-market surveillance. Do you know that that's actually something where, in theory, you can go and fill out a form on the FDA website, which basically says, I've had a bad experience with a drug. Like VAERS but for drugs. Yeah, so it's called MedWatch, right? And so you can do like voluntary reporting and you can get like a PDF and just like upload it, right? Is this a government, like is this the.gov? Yes, form 3500B. I love it. It's HTML, it's gonna be like from the 90s, or it's gonna have an interface designed by somebody who's a COBOL slash Fortran programmer. Right, here we go. So here we go. So basically the 3500B. I hope to be proven wrong on that, by the way. So 3500B, consumer voluntary reporting, when do I use this form? You were hurt or had a bad side effect, use a drug which led to unsafe use, et cetera. The point is FDA already has a terrible Yelp for drugs. It has a terrible version of it. What would the good version look like? The fact that you've never, I mean, the fact you have to fill out a PDF to go and submit a report. How do you submit a report at Yelp or Uber or Airbnb or Amazon, you tap, and there's star ratings, right? So just modernizing FDA 3500B and modernizing phase four, okay, is a huge thing. Is it, can you comment on that? Is there, what incentive mechanism forces the modernization of that kind of thing? Here's how it would work, or one possible. To create an actual Yelp. Yeah, here's how that would work, right? You go to the pharmacy or wherever, and you hold up your phone and you scan the barcode of the drug, okay? What does it use to say? Instantly you see global reports, right? By the way, because your biology, your physiology, that's global, right? Information from Brazil or from Germany or Japan on their physiological reaction to the same drug you're taking is useful to you. It's not like a national boundaries thing. So the whole nation state model of only collecting information on by other Americans, really you want a global kind of thing, just like Amazon book reviews, that's a global thing. Other things are aggregate at the global level, okay? So what you want is to see every patient report and every doctor around the world on this drug. That might be really important to your rare or semi-rare condition. Just that alone would be a valuable site. Who builds that site? It sounds like something created by capitalism. It sounds like it would have to be a company. Yeah, you can definitely do it. See, these are- But we don't have a world where a company is allowed to be in charge of that kind of thing. I don't know about- When Google Health went down, it just seems like a lot of the- So it depends, right? Basically, this is why you have to pick off individual elements, right? There's essentially a combination of first recognizing that the FDA is actually bad. You need to be able to say that, that, let me put it like this, it does a lot of bad things. It is something which you need to be able to criticize. You might be like, well, that's obvious, right? Well, in 2010, for example, there's a book that came out, if anybody wants to understand FDA, it's called Reputation and Power. Yeah, a lot of people don't want to criticize FDA. Yeah, because they will retaliate against your biotech or pharma company. Yeah, and that retaliation can be initiated by a single human being. Absolutely, the best analogy is, you think about the TSA, okay? Have you flown recently? Yeah. Okay, do you make any jokes about the TSA when you're in the TSA line? Usually you don't want to, but they're a little more flexible. Okay. You know what, can I tell a story? Sure. Which is, it's similar to this. I was in Vegas at a club, I don't go to clubs. I got kicked out, I think the first time in my life, for making a joke with a bouncer. Because I had a camera with me, and you're not allowed to have a camera, and I said, okay, cool, I'll take it out, but I made a funny joke that I don't care to retell. But he was just a little offended, and he was like, you're out, I don't care who you are, I don't care who you're with. And he proceeded to list me the famous people he has kicked off that club. But there is, I mean, all of those, the reason I made the joke is I sensed that there was an entitlement to this particular individual, like where the authority has gone to his head. Respect my authority. Yeah. Right. I almost wanted to poke at that. Right. And I think the poking the authority, I quickly learned the lesson, I have now been rewarded with the pride I feel for having poked authority, but now I'm kicked out of the club that would have resulted in a fun night with friends and so on. Instead, I'm standing alone crying in Vegas, which is not a unique Vegas experience. Sure. It's actually a fundamental Vegas experience. But that, I'm sure, that basic human nature happens in the FDA as well. That's exactly right. So just like with the TSA, just to extend the analogy, when you're in line at the TSA, right, you don't wanna miss your flight. That could cost you hundreds of dollars. And so you comply with absolutely ludicrous regulations like, oh, three ounce bottles. Well, you know what? You can take an unlimited number of three ounce bottles and you can combine them into a six ounce bottle through the terrorist technology called mixing. Yep. Okay. Advanced, right? And the thing about this is everybody in line, actually some fairly high, let's say, call it influence or net worth or whatever, people fly, right? Millions and millions and millions of people are subject to these absolutely moronic regulations. It's all what, you know, I think, security theater is Shryer's term, right? A lot of people know this term. So millions of people are subject to it. It costs untold billions of dollars in terms of delays and if you could just walk up to it, right? It irradiates people. And this is another FDA thing, by the way. This is an FDA-TSA team up, okay? In 2010, the TSA body scanners, there were concerns expressed. But when it's a government to government thing, see a dot com is treated with extreme scrutiny by FDA. But when it's another dot gov, well, they're not trying to make a profit. So they kind of just wave them on through, okay? So these body scanners were basically like applied to millions and millions of people and this huge kind of opt-in experiments. Almost, I think it's quite likely by the way, that if there was even a slightly increased cancer risk, that the net morbidity and mortality from those would have outweighed the deaths from terrorism or whatever that were prevented, right? You can work out the numbers, but you can just get the math under reasonable assumptions. It's probably true. If it had any increased morbidity and mortality. I've not seen the recent things, but I've seen that a concern expressed 12 years ago. Point being that despite the cost, despite how many people are exposed to it, despite how obviously patently ludicrous it is, you don't make any trouble, nor do people organize protests or whatever about this, because it's something where people, the security theater of the whole thing is part of it. Oh, well, if we took them away, there'd be more terrorism or something like that. People think, right? But it is fascinating to see that the populace puts up with it, because one of my favorite things is to listen to Jordan Peterson, who I think offline, but I think also on the podcast, is somebody who resists authority in every way. And even he goes to TSA with a kind of suppressed, like all the instructions, everything down to, whenever you have the yellow thing for your feet, they force you to adjust it even slightly if you're off. Just even, I mean, it's like, it's a Kafka novel. We're living, like TSA, it makes me smile, it brings joy to my heart, because I imagine Franz Kafka and I just walking through there, because it really is just deeply absurd. But, and then the whole motivation of the mechanism becomes distorted by the individuals involved. The initial one was to reduce the number of terrorist attacks, I suppose. Right, now it's guns and drugs. Basically, it's like, essentially what they've done is they've repealed the Fourth Amendment, right? Search and seizure, they can do it without probable cause. Everybody is being searched, everybody's a potential terrorist, so they've got probable cause for everybody, in theory. And so what they do, they'll post on their website the guns and drugs or whatever that they seized in these scanners. Well, of course, if you search everybody, you're gonna find some criminals or whatever, but the cost of doing that is dramatic. Moreover, the fact that people have sort of been trained to have compliance, it's like the Soviet Union, right? Where, you know, just grudgingly, all right, go along with this extremely stupid thing. What's my point? The point is, this is a really stupid regulation that has existed in plain sight of everybody for 20 years. We're still taking off our shoes, okay? Because some shoe bomber, whatever number of years ago, okay? All of this stuff is there, as opposed to there's a zillion other things you could potentially do, different paradigms for, quote, airport security. But now apply that to FDA. Just like a lot of what TSA does is security theater, arguably all of it, a lot of what FDA does is safety theater. The difference is, there's far fewer people who go through the aperture. They're the biotech and pharma CEOs, okay? So you don't have an understanding of what it is to deal with them, number one. Number two is, the penalty is not a few hundred dollars of missing your flight. It is a few million dollars or tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for getting your company subject to the equivalent of a retaliatory wait time. Just like that bouncer threw you out, just like the TSA officer, if you make a joke, or they can just sit you down and make you lose your flight, right? So two, can the FDA just silently impede the approval of something and choke you out financially because you don't have enough runway to get funded, right? So just impose more wait time. Guess what, we want another six months. Data's gonna take another six months, your company doesn't have the time, you die, right? If you live, you have to raise a round at some dilutive valuation, and now the price gets jacked up on the other side. That's the one thing that can give, by the way, in this whole process. When you push out timelines from days to get a vaccine approved with, or a vaccine evaluated rather, via challenge trials, to months or years, the cost during that time, when you, it just increases non-linearly, right? Because you can't iterate on the product. All the normal observations, if it takes you 10 years to launch a product versus 10 days, what's the difference in terms of your speed of iteration, your cost, et cetera, right? So this is part of what, it's not the only thing, there's other things, there's AMA and CPT, there's other things, but this is one of the things that jacks up prices in the US medical system, okay? So now you have something where these CEOs, they're going through this aperture, they can't tell anybody about it because if you read Reputation and Power, okay, I'm gonna just quote this because it's an amazing, amazing book, right? It's written by a guy, Daniel Carpenter, a smart guy, but he's an FDA sympathizer. He fundamentally thinks it's a good thing or what have you. Nevertheless, I respect Carpenter's intellectual honesty because he quotes the CEOs in the book verbatim and he gives some paragraphs. And essentially from their descriptions, it's like, think about a Vietnam War thing where you've got a POW and they're blinking through their eyes, I'm being tortured, okay? That is the style when you read Carpenter's book, you read the quotes from these CEOs. Oh, let me see if I can find it. Do you recommend the book? It's a good book, yeah. Or it's now a little bit outdated, okay? Because it's like almost 10 years old. Still, as a history of the FDA, it is well worth reading. And by the way, the reason I say it, like the FDA is so insanely important. It's so much more important than many other things that people talk about, but they don't talk about it, right? I just wanna read his little blurb for it, right? This is 2010. The US Food and Drug Administration is the most powerful regulatory agency in the world. How did the FDA become so influential and how does it wield its extraordinary power? Reputation and power traces the history of FDA regulation of pharmaceuticals, revealing how the agency's organizational reputation has been the primary source of its power is also one of its ultimate constraints. Carpenter describes how the FDA cultivated a reputation for competence and vigilance throughout the last century and how this organizational image has enabled the agency to regulate while resisting efforts to curb its own authority. First of all, just that description alone, you're like, wait a second, he is describing this as an active player. It's not like a DMV kind of thing which is passed through. It's talking about cultivating a reputation, its power, resisting efforts to curb its own authority. The thing is, now you're kind of through the looking glass. You're like, wait a second, this is kind of language I don't usually hear for regulatory agencies. The thing is, the kind of person who becomes the CEO of a giant company, what do they wanna do? They wanna expand that company. They wanna make more profit. Similarly, the kind of person who comes to run a regulatory agency or one of the subunits, that person wants to expand its ambit. Okay? By the way, is that always obvious and sorry to interrupt, but for the CEO of the company, I know the philosophical ideal of capitalism is you want to make the thing more profitable, but we're also human beings. Do you think there's some fundamental aspect to which we wanna do a lot of good in the world? Sure, but the fiduciary duty will push people to get the ambitious, the profit-maximizing, expansionist CEO is selected for, right? Basically, they believe, crucially, they're not just, this is important, they're not just, I mean, some of them are grant-of-auto, make as much money as possible, but they believe in the mission, okay? They've come to believe in the mission and that is the person who's selected. Chomsky actually had this good thing, which is like, I believe that you believe what you believe, but if you didn't believe what you believe, you wouldn't be sitting here. Right. Right. So they select for the kind of people that are able to make a lot of money, and in that process, those people are able to construct a narrative that they're doing good, even though what they were selected for is the fact that they can make a lot of money. Yeah, and they may actually be doing good, but the thing is, with CEOs, we have a zillion images in television and media and movies of the evil corporation and the greedy CEO. We have some concept of what CEO failure modes are like, okay? Now, when have you ever seen an evil regulator? Can you name a fictional portrayal of an evil regulator? Can you name an evil CEO? There's tons. Yeah, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. But that's so interesting. I'm searching for a deeper lesson here. You're right. You're right. I mean, there is portrayals, especially in sort of authoritarian regimes or the Soviet Union, where there's bureaucracy, you know, Chernobyl, you can kind of see, within that, there's the story of the regulator, but yeah, it's not as plentiful, and it also often doesn't have a face to it. It's almost like bureaucracy is this amorphous thing that results, any one individual, you see, they're just obeying somebody else. There's not a face to it of evil. That's right. It's almost like it controls the entire machine. That's right. That's what I call the school of fish strategy, by the way. It's something where you are an individual and you can be signaled out, but there's more accountability for one person's bad tweets than all the wars in the Middle East, right? Because it's a school of fish. Yeah. Right? So if the establishment is wrong, if the bureaucracy is wrong, they're all wrong at the same time. Who could have known? Whereas if you deviate, then you are a deviation who can be hammered down, okay? Now, the school of fish strategy is, unfortunately, very successful because truth is whatever. If you just always ride with the school of fish and turn when they turn and so on, unless there's a bigger school of fish that comes in, you basically can never be proven wrong, right? And this is actually, of course, someone who believes in truth and believes in innovation and so on just physiologically can't ride with the school of fish. You just have to say what is true or do what is true, right? Still, you've described correctly how it's faceless, right? So I will give two examples of fictional portrayals of evil regulators. One is actually the original Ghostbusters. Okay. Did not expect that one, but yes. Yeah, so the EPA is actually the villain in that where they flip a switch that lets out all the ghosts in the city. And essentially, the guy is coming in with a head of steam as this evil regulator that's just totally arrogant, doesn't actually understand the private sector or the consequences of their actions. And they force the... And crucially, they bring a cop with them with a gun. So it shows that a regulator is not simply some piece of paper, but it is the police, right? And that cop with the gun forces the Ghostbusters to release the containment and the whole thing spreads. The second example is Dallas Buyers Club, which is more recent. And that actually shows the FDA blocking a guy with a life-threatening illness, with AIDS, from getting the drugs to treat his condition and from getting it to other people, right? Those are just two portrayals. But in general, what you find is when you talk about FDA with people, one thing I'll often hear from folks is like, why would they do that, right? They have no mental model of this. They kind of think of it as, why would this thing, which they think of as sort of the DMV, they don't think of the DMV as like this active thing, okay? Why would the FDA do that? Well, it is because it's filled with some ambitious people that wanna keep increasing the power of the agency, just like the CEO wants to increase the profit of the company, right? I use that word ambit, right? Why ambit? Because these folks are, we know the term greedy, right? These folks are power hungry. They want to have the maximum scope. And sometimes regulatory agencies collide with each other, right, even though FDA is under HHS, sometimes it collides with HHS and they've got regulations at conflict. For example, HHS says everybody's supposed to be able to have access to their own medical record. FDA didn't want people to have access to their own personal genomes. That conflicts, okay? And both of those are kind of anti-corporate statutes that were put out, but HHS is being targeted at the hospitals and FDA being targeted at the personal genomics companies, but those conflicted, right? It's a little bit like CFTC and SEC have a door jam over who will regulate cryptocurrency, right? Sometimes regulators fight each other, but they fight each other. They fight companies. They are active players. This reputation and power book, the reason I mention it is, I'm gonna see if I can find this quote. So let me see if I can find this quote. Reputation and power, organizational image and pharmaceutical regulation at the FDA. So Genentech's executive G. Kirk Robb, right? Robb would describe regulatory approval for his products as a fundamental challenge facing his company. And he would depict the administration in a particularly vivid metaphor. I've told the story hundreds of times to help people understand the FDA. When I was in Brazil, I worked on the Amazon River for many months selling teramicin for Pfizer. I hadn't seen my family for eight or nine months. They're flying into Sao Paulo and I was flying down from some little village on the Amazon to Manus and then to Sao Paulo. I was young guy in his 20s. I couldn't wait to see the kids. One of them was a year old baby. The other was three. I missed my wife. There was a Quonset hut in front of just a little dirt strip with a single engine plane to fly me to Manus. I roll up and there's a Brazilian soldier there. The military revolution happened literally the week before. So this soldier is standing there with his machine gun and he said to me, you can't come in. I speak in pretty good Portuguese by that time. I said, my God, my plane, my family, I gotta come in. He said again, you can't come in. I said, I gotta come in. And he took his machine gun, took the safety off and pointed at me and said, you can't come in. And I said, oh, now I got it. I can't go in there. And that's the way I always describe the FDA. The FDA is standing there with a machine gun against the pharmaceutical industry. So you better be their friend rather than their enemy. They are the boss. If you're a pharmaceutical firm, they own you body and soul. Okay, that's the CEO of a successful company, Genentech. He said he's told the story hundreds of times and regulatory approval is a fundamental challenge facing his company because if you are regulated by FDA, they are your primary customer. If they cut the cord on you, you have no other customers. And in fact, until very recently with the advent of social media, no one would even tell your story. It was assumed that you were some sort of, you know, corporate criminal that they were protecting the public from, that you were gonna put poison in milk, you know, like the melamine scandal in China. I'm not saying those things don't exist, by the way. They do exist. That's why people are like, they can immediately summon to mind all the examples of corporate criminals, right? That's why I mentioned those fictional stories, those templates. Even if Star Wars doesn't exist, how many times have you heard a Star Wars metaphor or whatever for something, right? Breaking bad, you know, go ahead. Yeah, but the pharmaceutical companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place because the reputation, if they go to Twitter, they go to social media, they have horrible reputation. So it's like, they don't know. Yes, but why is that? Because reputation and power. FDA beat down the reputation of pharma companies, just like EPA helped beat down the reputation of oil companies. And as it says over here, right? In practice, dealing with the fact of FDA power meant a fundamental change in corporate structure and culture. At Abbott and at Genentech, Rob's most central transformation was in creating a culture of acquiescence towards a government agency. As was done at other drug companies in the late 20th century, Rob essentially fired officials at Abbott who were insufficiently compliant with the FDA. What that means is de facto nationalization of the industry via regulation. Just to hover on that, that's a really big deal. Because if their primary customer is this government agency, then it has nationalized it just indirectly, right? This is partially what's just happened with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, the other MAGA, okay? They have been, that's funny. It's well done. Yeah, I didn't even think about that, it's well done. Right, so I have this tweet, it's like MAGA Republicans and MAGA Democrats, right? Okay. Oh, damn it. So many things you've said today will just get stuck in my head. It changes the way you think. Catchy, something about catchy phrasing of ideas makes me even more powerful. So yeah, okay, so that's happening in the tech sector. It's happening in tech. So Facebook is the outlier because Zuck still controls the company. But just like, I mean, why had tech had a good reputation for a while? Because there wasn't a regulatory agency whose justification was regulating these corporate criminals, right? Once that is the case, the regulatory agency basically comes back to Congress each year. If you look at its budget approvals, it's saying, we find this many guys, we found this many violations, right? They have an incentive to exaggerate the threat in the same way that a prosecutor or a policeman has a quota, right? Like these are the police. One way I describe it also is like, you know, like a step-down transformers. You have high voltage electricity that's generated at the power plant and it comes over the wires and then there's step-down transformers that turn it into a lower voltage that you can just deal with out of your appliances, right? Similarly, you have something where the high voltage of like the US military or the police, and that is transmitted down into a little letter that comes in your mailbox saying, pay your $50 parking ticket, where it's a piece of paper, so you don't see the gun attached to it. But if you were to defy that, it's like Grand Theft Auto, where you get one star, two star, three stars, four stars, five stars, and eventually, you know, you have some serious stuff on your hands, okay? So once you understand that, you know, every law is backed by force, like that Brazilian guy with the machine gun that Rob mentioned, these guys are the regulatory police, okay? Now, see, for a time, what happened was you had the captured industry because all of the folks who were in pharmaceuticals were, as Carpenter said, a culture of acquiescence towards the FDA. The FDA was their primary customer. So just like in a sense, it's rational, you know, Amazon talks about being customer obsessed, right? What Rob did was rational for that time, right? What GKirp Rob did was saying our customer is the FDA, that's our primary customer, nobody else matters, they are satisfied first. Every single trade-off that has to be made is FDA, right? And, you know, really, that's why the two most important departments at many pharmaceutical companies, arguably all, are regulatory affairs and IP, not R&D, right? Because one is artificial scarcity of regulation, which jacks up the price, and the other is artificial scarcity of the patent, which allows people to maintain the high price, right? So this entire thing is just like, you know, college education, these things may at some point have been a good concept, but the price has just risen and risen and risen until it's at the limit price and beyond, okay? So what has changed? What's changed is in the 2010s, the late 2000s and 2010s and so on, with the advent of social media, with the advent of a bunch of millionaires like who are independent, with the advent of Uber and Airbnb, right? With the advent of cryptocurrency, with the diminution of trust in institutions, it used to be really taboo to even talk about the FDA as potentially bad in like, you know, 2010, 2009, okay? But now people have just seen face plant after face plant by the institutions, and people are much more open to the concept that they may actually not have it all together. And I think it's a, you know, you could probably see some tracking poll or something like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it's like a 20 or 30 point drop after the CDC failed to control disease and the FDA failed, and the entire biomedical regulatory establishment and scientific establishment was saying masks don't work before they do. This was just a train crash of all the things that you're paying for that you supposedly think are good. As I mentioned, one response is to go QAnon and people say, oh, don't trust anything. But the better response is decentralizing FDA, okay? So I will say one other thing, which is I mentioned, you know, this concept of improving the form 3500B where you like scan, go ahead. No, yeah, yeah, right, that just makes me laugh that I could just tell the form sucks by the fact that it has that code name, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, right? UX is broken at every layer. Yeah, so they have a bad yelp for drugs. Could we make a better one? We could make a better one, just modern UX. The key insight here, by the way, which is a non-obvious point, and I've got a whole talk on this actually that I should probably release, I actually did like almost eight, nine years ago, it's called Regulation is Information. Product quality is a digital signal. Okay, what do I mean by that? Basically, when I talk about exit, you know, exit the Fed, that's the crypto economy, right? What does exit the FDA look like? Well, one key insight is that many of the big scale tech companies can be thought of as cloud regulators rather than land regulators. What do I mean by that? Well, first, what is regulation? People do want a regulated marketplace. They want A, quality ratings, like on a one to five star scale, and B, bans of bad actors, like the zero star frauds and scammers and so on, and these are distinct, right? Somebody who's like a low quality but well-intentioned person is different than a smart and evil person. Those are two different kinds of failure modes you could have in a marketplace, right? Why is it rational for people to want a regulated marketplace, especially for health? Because they wanna pay essentially one entry cost, and then they don't have to evaluate everything separately where they may not have the technical information to do that, right? You don't wanna go to Starbucks and put a dipstick into every coffee to see if it's poisoned or something like that. You sort of wanna enter a zone where you know things are basically good, and you pay that one diligence cost on the zone itself, right, whether it's a digital or physical zone, and then the regulator's taking care of it, and they've baked in the regulatory cost into some subscription fee of some kind, right? So the thing is, the model we've talked about is the land regulator of a nation state and a territorially bounded thing. But the cloud regulator, what's a cloud regulator? That is Amazon star ratings, that's Yelp, that is eBay, that is Airbnb, that is Uber and Lyft, and so on and so forth. It's also actually Gmail and Google, why? Because you're doing spam filtering, and you are doing ranking of emails with a priority inbox, right? With Google itself, they ban malware links, right? So the bad actors are out, and they're ranking them, right? How about Apple, the App Store, right? They ban bad actors, and they do star ratings. When you start actually applying this lens, PayPal, they've got a reputation there. Every single web service that's at the scale of like tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people has had to build a cloud regulator. And the crucial thing is it scales across borders. So you can use the data from Mexico to help somebody in Moldova or vice versa, right? Because it's fundamentally international, right? Those ratings, you have a network effect. And there's another aspect to it, which is these are better regulators than the land regulators. For example, Uber is a better regulator than the taxi medallions, why? Every ride is GPS tracked. There's ratings on both the driver and the passenger side. Both parties know that payment can be rendered in a standard currency, right? If you have below a certain star rating on either side, you get deplatformed and so on to protect either rider or driver and on and on, right? What does that do? Think about how much better that is than taxi medallions, rather than a six month or annual inspection. You have reports from every single rider, okay? Before Uber, it was the taxi drivers and taxi regulators were in a little monopoly locally, okay? Because they were the persistent actors in the ecosystem. Taxi riders had nothing in common, didn't even know each other. Some, you know, in New York, some guy gets in a taxi and another guy, they had no way to communicate with each other. So the persistent actors in the ecosystem were the regulators and the drivers. And they had this cozy kind of thing and medallion prices just kept going up. And this was a sort of collaboration on artificial scarcity. Afterwards with Uber and Lyft and other entrants, you had something interesting, a different kind of regulator driver fusion. If you assume regulatory capture exists and lean into it, Uber is the new regulator and Uber drivers are the drivers. Lyft is the competing regulator and Lyft drivers are the new drivers, okay? So you have a regulator driver fusion versus another regulator driver fusion. You no longer have a monopoly, you have multiple parties, okay, you have a competitive market. This is the concept of like polycentric law, right? Where you have multiple different legal regimes in the same jurisdiction overlapping that you can choose between with a tap of a button, right? All these concepts from like libertarian theory, like, you know, polycentric law or catalysis, all these things are becoming more possible now that the internet has increased microeconomic leverage. And because that exit is now possible. Now, you may argue, oh, well, Lyft and Uber, they're not profitable anymore. And there's two different criticisms of them. One is, oh, they're not profitable or, oh, they're charging too much. And I think part of this is because of certain kinds of, the regulatory state has caught up to try to make them uncompetitive. For example, they don't allow people in some states to identify themselves as independent contractors, even if they are part-time, okay? There's various other kinds of rules and regulations. You know, in Austin for a while, Uber was even banned, what have you, right? Net-net though, like Uber, Grab, Gojek, Lyft, Didi, like ride sharing as a concept is now out there. And whatever the next version is, whether it's self-driving, like, while it's like a very hard fought battle and the regulatory state keeps trying to push things back into the garage, this is a fundamentally better way of just doing regulation of taxis. Similarly, Airbnb for hotels. I mean, it's basically the same thing, okay? And now Airbnb could use competition. I think that it would be good to have, you know, like competition for them. And there are other kinds of sites opening up, but the fundamental cons of the cloud regulator now, let's apply it here. Once you realize regulation is information, the way you'd set up a competitor to FDA or SEC or FAA or something like that is you just do better reviews. Like you just start with that, that's pure information. You're under free speech, that's like still, you know, the most defended thing, literally just publishing reviews and not just reviews by any old person. It turns out that FDA typically will use expert panels where there's expert panels. It's like professors from Harvard or, you know, things like that. So what that is, this is considered a reputational bridge. What you wanna do is you wanna have folks who are, let's say biotech entrepreneurs or they're, you know, profs like Sinclair or what have you. You do wanna have the reviews of the crowd, okay? But you also wanna have, especially in medicine, by the way, so you wanna have the reviews of experts of some kind. So there's gonna be defectors from the current establishment. Okay, just like, you know, there are profs who defected from computer science academia to become Larry and Sergey and whatever, you know, or they weren't profs, they were grad students, right? In the same way, you'll have defectors who have the credentials from the old world, but can build up the new. Just like there's folks from Wall Street who have come into cryptocurrency and helped legitimate it, right? Just like there's folks who left Salzburger to come to Substack, okay? You know, we have these folks who, by defecting, they help, and then they're also supplemented by all this new talent coming in, right? That combination of things is how you build a new system. It's not completely by itself, nor is it trying to reform the old, it's some fusion, okay? So in this new system, who do you have? You have like the most entrepreneurial and innovative MDs. You have the most entrepreneurial and innovative professors, and you have the founders of actual new products and stuff. And they are giving open source reviews of these products. And they're also building a community that will say, look, we want this new drug, or we want this new treatment, or we want this new device, and we're willing to crowdfund 10,000 units. So please give us the thing, and we'll write a very fair review of it, and we'll also all evaluate it as a community and so on. So you turn these people from just passive patients into active participants in their health. That's a community part, and they've got the kind of biomedical technical leadership there. Now, what is the kind of prototype of something like this? Something like VitaDow is very interesting. Things like MoleculeDow are very interesting. It'll start with things like longevity, right? And why is that? Because the entire model of FDA, this 20th century model, is wait for somebody to have a disease and then try to cure them, okay? Versus, you know, saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? Why are we not actually tracking folks and getting a constant dashboard on yourself so you can see whether things are breaking? And then you deal with it just like you've got server uptime things. You don't wait necessarily for the site to go down. You start seeing, oh, response rates are spiking. We need to add more servers, right? You have some warning, okay? Even 10 years ago, there was this article called The Measured Man in the Atlantic where this guy, physicist Larry Smarr, okay? What he was doing is he was essentially doing a bunch of measurements on himself. And he was finding that there were predictors of inflammation that were spiking. And he went to the doctor, showed the charts, and the doctor was like, I can't do anything with this. Then it turned out to be an early warning of like a serious condition that he had to, I think, go for like, you know, surgery or something. And he was starting to think, well, look, the way that we're doing medicine right now is it's not quite like pre-germ theory of disease, but it is pre-continuous diagnostics, okay? Continuous diagnostics, just to talk about this for a second, this is, I mentioned one angle on which you go after FDA, which is like the better phase four, right? I've mentioned the concept of better reviews in general, okay? I mentioned VitaDow, which is like a community that is going after longevity. Let's talk about continuous diagnostics. So basically, we know better what is going on in Bangalore or Budapest than in our own body. That's actually kind of insane to think about. This stuff that, you know, it's all the other side of the world, 10,000 miles away, but, you know, a few millimeters away, you don't really know what's going on, right? And that's starting to change with all the quantified self-devices, the hundreds of millions of Apple Watches and Fitbits and stuff, right? You're also starting to see continuous glucose meters, which are very important. They're starting to give you readouts. People are seeing, wow, this is spiking my insulin. Or rather, this is spiking my blood sugar. And it might be something you didn't predict. It varies for different people. For some people, you know, a banana isn't a big deal. For others, it's actually quite bad for their blood sugar. What happens when you extend that? Well, about 10 years ago, a guy, Mike Snyder, professor at Stanford, did something called the integrome, where he just threw the kitchen sink of all the diagnostics he could at himself over the period of, I think, a few weeks or a few months. I forget the exact duration. He was able to do things where he could see, during that period, he like got a cold or something. And he could see in the expression data, the gene expression data, that he was getting sick before he felt sick. He could also see that something about that like viral infection, like, made him develop diabetes-like symptoms, if I'm remembering it accurately. So you could see, oh, wait a second. These are things that I can see in my readouts that I would only have the vaguest interpretation of as like a human being, right? And moreover, he could take, you know, I don't think he did this, but if you took treatments, if you took drugs, right, you could actually show what your steady state was, if you tracked over time, show what your disease state or sick state was, and then this drug pushes you back into non-disease state. You can actually get a quantitative readout of what, you know, like steady state was, right? So that, and that steady state, you know, your expression levels across all these genes, your small molecules, basically everything you can measure, that's gonna vary from person to person, right? What's healthy and natural for you may be a different baseline than for me. For example, people who are, small example, people who are South Asian or have dark skin tend to have vitamin D deficiency. Why? Because we need a lot of sunlight. So often inside, you're tapping on your screen. So what do we do? Take like actually significant vitamin D infusions, okay? That's like a small example of where baselines differ between people, okay? So continuous diagnostics, what could that mean? That could mean, you know, it's things like the continuous glucose meter, it's quantified self, it's like continuous blood testing, right? So you have a so-called mobile phlebotomist. This is something which, phlebotomist takes blood, right? Mobile phlebotomy would come to your office, come to your remote office. This is a great business for people. I think, you know, you can revisit this in 2022. People tried this in the 2010s, but I think it's worth revisiting. Mobile phlebotomist comes every week or every month, takes blood, runs every test, right? Maybe that's, you know, a few thousand dollars a year, maybe eventually gets to a few hundred dollars a year. And that's expensive in some ways, but boy, that's better health insurance in other ways. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. So one, there's a bunch of companies that do this, and I actually would love to learn more about them. One of them is a company called Insight Tracker that sponsors this podcast. They do that, but the reason I really appreciate them, they're the first ones that introduced me to, like how easy it is. But it's also depressing how little information exactly, as you beautifully put once again, how little information we have about our own body in a continuous sense. Yes. And actually also sadly, even with Insight Tracker, as I collect that data, how not integrated that data is with everything else. Right. If I wanted to opt in, I would like, I can't, just like riffing off the top of my head, but I would like Google Maps to know what's going on inside my body. That's right. Maybe I can't intuit at first why that application is useful, but there could be incredible, like that's where the entrepreneur spirit builds, is like, what can I do with that data? Can I make the trip less stressful for you and adjust to Google Maps, that kind of thing. That's right. So, I mean, one of the things about this, by the way, is because there are so many movies made about Theranos, okay, that's one of the reasons why people have sort of been scared off from doing diagnostics to some extent, okay? Why? Because the species are like, oh, is this another Theranos? Like the diligence and everything, everyone's looking at it, oh, blood testing, one drop of blood, huh? Hurts the recruiting. Essentially, a lot of the media and stuff around that basically has pathologized the thing that we wanna have a lot more entrance in, right? Now, one way of thinking about it is FDA has killed way more people than Theranos has, all right, way more. Just take drug lag alone, okay? Whenever you have a drug that works and reduced morbidity and mortality after it was actually generally available, but was delayed for months or years, the integral under that curve is the excess morbidity and mortality attributable to FDA's drug lag. You could go back and do that study across lots and lots of different drugs, and you'd probably find quite a lot. Alex Tabarrok and others have written on this, right? Daniel Henninger has written on this, okay? That's just like one example. I mean, I gave the pandemic example, the fact that they held up the EUAs for the tests and didn't do challenge trials. That's like a million American dead. That could have been orders of magnitude less if we had gotten the vaccine out to the vulnerable population sooner, okay? So you're talking about something that has a total monopoly on global health, and you can't know what it is without that unless you have zones that are FDA-free, but that have some form of regulation. As I mentioned, it's a V3. It's not going back to zero regulation, everybody in a manner for itself, but it's a more reputable regulator, just like Uber is a better regulator than the tax medallions, right? Yeah, I mean, you're painting such an incredible picture. You're making me wish you were FDA commissioner. There are a bunch of people who tweeted something like that after the pandemic. Whatever, go ahead, yeah. Is that possible? Like if you were just given, if you became FDA commissioner, could you push for those kinds of changes, or is that really something that has to come from the outside? The short answer is no, and the longer answer, meaning- It'd be funny if you're like, the short answer is no, the long answer is yes. So basically, see, a CEO of a company, while it's very difficult, they can hire and fire, right? So in theory, they can do surgery on the organism, and like Steve Jobs took over Apple and was able to hire and fire, raise money, do this, that. He basically had root over Apple. He was a system administrator, right? He had full permissions, okay? As FDA commissioner, you do not have full permissions over FDA, let alone like the whole structure around it, right? If you're FDA commissioner, you are not the CEO of the agency, okay? Lots of these folks there have career tenure. They can't be fired. They can't even really be disciplined. There's something called the Douglas factors. You ever heard of the Douglas factors? It's like the Miranda rights for federal employees, okay? You know, the right to remain silent. So basically, if you've heard that federal employees can't be fired, the Douglas factors are how that's actually operationalized. When you try to fire somebody, it's this whole process where they get to appeal it and so on and so forth. And they're sitting in the office while you're trying to fire them. And they're complaining to everybody around them that this guy's trying to fire me, such a bad guy, blah, blah, right? And everybody around, even if they may think that guy is doing a bad job, they're like, wait a second, he's trying to fire you, he might try to fire me too. And so anybody who tries to fire somebody at FDA just gets a face full of lead for their troubles. What they instead will do is sometimes they'll just transfer somebody to the basement or something so they don't have to deal with them if they're truly bad, okay? But the thing about this is there is only one caveat, Douglas factor number eight, the notoriety of the offense or its impact upon the reputation of the agency. There's that word again, reputation of reputation and power. So the one way you can truly screw up within a regulatory bureaucracy is if you sort of endanger the like annual budget renewal. Think of it as like this mini Death Star that's coming to dock against the max Death Star for its like annual refuel. And it's talking about all the corporate criminals that it's prosecuted, the quotas, like the police quotas, the ticketing, and if they don't have a crisis, they will like invent one. Just again, just like TSA, just like other agencies you're more familiar with, you can kind of map it back. Look at the guns and drugs we've seized. And so you have an incentive for creating these crises or manufacturing them or exaggerating them. And if you endanger that refueling, that annual budget renewal or what have you, then the whole agency will basically be like, okay, you're bad and you can be disciplined or sometimes with rare except you can be booted. But what that means is that FDA commissioner is actually a white elephant. It's a ceremonial role, really, right? You know the term white elephant, it's like basically, you know, the Maharaja gives you a white elephant as a gift. Seems great. Next day, it's eaten all of your grass, it's pooped on your lawn, it has like just put a foot on your car and smashed it, but you can't give it away. It's a white elephant, the Maharaja gave it to you, right? That's what being like FDA commissioner is. It's the kind of thing where if, and a lot of people are drawn in like moths to the flame for these titles of the establishment. I wanna be head of this, I wanna be head of that, right? And really what it is, it's like, I don't know, becoming head of Kazakhstan in the mid 1980s in the Soviet Union, the Kazakhstan SSR, right? Soviet Socialist Republic, before the thing was gonna like crumble potentially, right? In many ways it's becoming, you know, folks who are just totally status obsessed getting these positions, but like a lot of the merit, all the folks with merit are kind of leaving the government and going into, you know, tech or crypto or what have you. So even if these agencies were hollow before, in some ways they're becoming hollower because they have less talent there, right? So A, you can't hire and fire very easily. You can hire a little bit, you can't really fire. B, a lot of the talent has left the building, but was there. C, we're entering the decentralizing era. And D, you know, like be like Satoshi. Satoshi founded Bitcoin because he knew you could not reform the Fed. There's everybody's trying to go and reform, reform, reform. The reason they're trying to reform is we haven't figured out the mechanism to build something new. And now perhaps we have that. So I've named a few of them, right? I'll name one more. Related to the utterance. Fitness is actually the backdoor to a lot of medicine. Okay, why is that? You go to any, you know, conference, it could be neurology, it could be cardiology. You'll find somebody who's giving a talk that says something along the lines of fitness is the ultimate drug. Maybe not today when people are saying, oh, fat phobic, whatever. But not too many years ago, you'd see somebody, people saying fitness is the ultimate drug. If we could just prescribe fitness in a pill, that would improve your cardiovascular function, your neurological function, it deals with depression. By the way, in that case, the use of the word drug means medicine, so. Medicine, yeah, sure, sure, sure. Fitness is the ultimate medicine, yeah. Yeah, the ultimate medicine, right? So if they could just prescribe the effects of it, it's just like, boom, just massive effect, right? Like you're fit enough, you do the resistance training, it helps with, you know, preventive diabetes. Every kind of thing in the world, you see a significant treatment effect. Yet your fitness is your own responsibility. You go to some gym, 24-Hour Fitness, what do they have? They have on the wall exhortations like, your body is your responsibility, right? Am I right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, go ahead, bud. No, it's just, it's hilarious, yes, yes, yes. It's funny, but it's true, right? Yeah, it's funny because it's true. And so your fitness, your diet, that's your responsibility. But when you go into a doctor's office, suddenly it becomes lie back and think of England, okay? Suddenly you become passive. Suddenly, oh, your doctor is Dr. Google? Well, your doctor must be a moron. You're going and trying to take care of yourself, you're Googling symptoms. Oh, how stupid you are. I have a medical degree. And that doctor, see, the thing is, if you come in and you've self-diagnosed, or you've done some of your own research, if you're right, and if they've got an ego about it, they're undermined. And if you're wrong, they're like, you know, ha ha, you know, arrogant. And the other way they have, if they've got this kind of mindset, they have an incentive to resist the patient taking care of themselves. Isn't that the doctor's job, right? And they're kind of taught to behave like this, many of them. So what that means then is that intervention of that 15 or 30 minute appointment with the doctor, whatever drug they prescribe better hit you like Thor's hammer to put you back on the straight and narrow. Because that's only with you for like a few seconds, you know, a few minutes or whatever. The doctor's only with you for a few minutes. The drug is only, you know, some drugs are very powerful. So they actually do work like this, okay. But your fitness is your own responsibility. And that's a continuing forcing function every day. And again, we get back to decentralization, right? The decentralization of responsibility from somebody thinking of themselves merely as a patient to an active participant in their own health, who's doing their own monitoring of their own health, right, and logging all their stuff, who's eating, you know, properly and looking at the effect of their diet on things like their, you know, continuous glucose monitor is a V1, but other things, right? Who is, you know, as fit as they can possibly be. Like, these are kind of obvious things, but why is this the back door to medicine? Because since FDA only regulates those things that are meant to diagnose and treat a disease, all the stuff that is meant to improve an otherwise healthy person is potentially out of their purview. Supplements are one interesting aspect that they were carved out in the mid 90s. And that's why the supplement industry is big because FDA doesn't have as tight a rein on that. But all of the Fitbit, CGM, continuous glucose monitor type stuff, you can crank out all kinds of things that help people get fitter, that will also actually have just general health value, but you're not, quote, marketing them to diagnose or treat, you know, a disease. See what I'm saying? You're marketing them for the purpose of fitness. This is a market, why? Because psychologically, people, they don't like paying to get back to normal, but they will absolutely pay tons of money to get better than normal. They'll pay for fitness, they'll pay for makeup, they'll pay for hair, they'll pay for this and that, right? So that's actually the back door, and you can do tons of things there where obviously being healthier is also protective. You can actually show the studies on this. So this way, you build out all the tooling to get healthier, and that actually helps on this axis. Fewer things which kind of, the US medical system, well, I'm on it. So you got me on this topic. I love this. Okay, so. This is the most eloquent exploration of the US medical system and how to improve it, how to fix it, and what the future looks like. Yeah, so. I love it. So basically, so part of it is decentralizing control back to the individual, right? Now, I have talked about FDA at length, but let me talk about some of the other broken parts of the US system, right? There's like AMA, there's CPT, there's CPOM, there's this, like all these regulations, which see, normally in capitalism, you have a buyer and a seller, right? Duh. In medicine, you have third-party regulation and fourth-party pricing and fifth-party payment, okay? So third-party regulation, FDA is regulating it. Fourth-party pricing, it is the CPT codes, right? Fifth-party payment, it's the insurance companies, all right? And just to discuss these bits of the system, first, why are some people against capitalism in medicine? I actually understand why they're against it, because they are visualizing themselves on a gurney when they're being wheeled in, and now somebody at their moment of vulnerability is charging this insane price for their care. And many people in the US have had this horrible experience where they're bankrupted or scared of being bankrupt of their medical bills. Therefore, the concept of adding more capitalism to medicine scares them, and they think it's horrible, and you're some awful, greedy tech bro kind of thing, all right? Let me say I understand that concern, and let me kind of, let me pull, tease that apart a little bit, right? Basically, the most capitalistic areas of medicine are the most functional areas of medicine. So that's to say the places where you can walk in and walk out, okay? Whether that's dentistry, dermatology, plastic surgery, even veterinary medicine, which is not human, okay? Where you can make a conscious decision, say, okay, I want this care, or I don't want this. I see a price list. I can pay cash, right? If I don't like it, I go to another dermatologist. There's few dermatological emergencies. That's why dermatologists have a great quality of life, okay? By contrast, when you're being wheeled in on a gurney, you need it right now, okay? And you're unconscious or what have you, or you're not in a capacity to deal with it, right? And so these are the two extremes. It's like ambulatory medicine, you can walk around and pick, and like ambulance medicine, okay? And what that means is the more ambulatory the medicine, the more legitimate capitalism is in that situation. People are okay with a dermatologist basically turning you down because you don't have enough money and you go to another dermatologist because you can comparison shop there. It's not usually an emergency, right? Whereas if you're coming in with an ambulance, then people don't wanna be turned down and I understand why, okay? What this suggests by the way, is that you should only have insurance for the edge cases. Insurance should only cover the ambulance, not the ambulatory. And most people are losing money on insurance, right? Because most people are paying more in in premiums than they are getting out. It's just that this huge flight of dollars through the air that no one can make heads or tails out of. Oh, the other aspect that's obviously broken is employer provided health insurance which just started after World War II. So, auto insurance is in a much more competitive market. You don't whip out your auto insurance card at the gas station to pay for your gas, right? You only whip it out when there's a crash, right? That's what quote health insurance should be. And the Singapore model is actually a pretty good one for this where they have sort of a mandatory HSA. You have to like put some money in that and that pays for your healthcare bills but then it's cash out of that. It's like a separate pocket sort of for savings to pay for- Health savings account. Health savings account, right? The thing about this is once you realize, well, first ambulatory medicine is capitalistic medicine, ambulance medicine is socialist medicine, okay? You wanna shift people more towards ambulatory. Guess what? That's in their interest as well. Now that brings us back to the monitoring, right? The continuous monitoring where whether eventually it's Mike Snyder's Integroam, the V1 is the quantified self and the Apple Watch and the continuous glucose meters and the VN is the Mike Snyder Integroam. There's a site called Q.bio which is doing this also, right? Eventually this stuff will hopefully just be in a device that just measures tons and tons of variables on you, right? There's ways of measuring some of these metabolites without breaking the skin. So it's not, you don't have to keep breaking the skin over and over, there's various ways of doing that. So now you've got something where you've got the monitoring, you've got the dashboards, you've got the alerts and just like this Larry Smarr guy that I mentioned, the measured man, you might be able to shift more and more things to ambulatory. And one of the things about this also is the medical system is set up in a bad way where the primary care physician is the one who is like not the top of their class but the guys who are at the bottom of the pinball machine, the surgeons and the radiologists, once your stuff is already broken, okay? They're the ones who are paid the most. So a lot of the skill collects at the post-break stage, right where you actually want Dugie Howser MD is at the upstream stage, okay? So you want this amazing, amazing doctor there, right? How could we get that? I mentioned the app that doesn't exist which is like a better version of the 3500B, right? Here's another app that doesn't exist and this is one that FDA is actively quashed. Why can't you just take an image of a mole or something like that? With the incredible cameras we have, a huge amount of medical imaging should be able to be done at home and it goes to doctors, whether it's in the US or the Philippines or India. I mean, teleradiology exists, right? Why can you not do that for dermatology, for everything else? You should be able to literally just hold the thing up and with a combination of both AI and MDs, just diagnose. That should exist, right? Answer is there's a combination of both American doctors and the FDA that team up to prevent this or slow this. And one argument is, oh, the AI is not better than a human 100% of the time because it's not deployed yet. Therefore, it could make an error, therefore it's bad. Even if it's better than 99% of doctors, 99% of the time. Another argument is the software has to go through design control, okay? Now, basically, once you understand how FDA works, basically imagine the most bureaucratic frozen process for code deployment at any company ever. And that is the most nimble thing ever relative to FDA's design review. So just to review, A, talked about how FDA was blocking all this stuff. B, talked about why ambulatory medicine is capitalist medicine, ambulance medicine is socialist medicine. C, talked about how with the diagnostic stuff, we can shift it over to ambulatory. D, talked about how there's lots of things where you could have a combination of doctor and AI in an app that you kind of quickly self-diagnose. Some of this is happening now. Some of the telemedicine laws were relaxed during COVID where now people, a doctor from Wyoming can prescribe for somebody in Minnesota. Like some of that stuff was relaxed during COVID, okay? There's other broken things in medical system. I'll just name two more and then kind of move on, okay? I mentioned like AMA and CPT, okay? Those are two regulatory bodies? AMA, American Medical Association, CPT, Current Procedural Terminology, okay? Basically, you know Marx's labor theory of value where people are supposed to be paid on their effort, right? And of course, the issue with this is that you'd be paying a physicist to try to dunk and they'd be trying, but they wouldn't actually probably be able to do it. They'd be trying real hard, whereas you actually wanna pay people on the basis of results, right? Cheaply attained results are actually better than expensively attained non-results, perhaps obvious, okay? Nevertheless, the way that the US medical system has payouts is based on so-called RVUs, relative value units. And this is something where there's a government body that sets these prices and it is in theory only for Medicare but all the private insurers key off of that. And AMA basically publishes a list of these so-called the CPT codes, which is like the coding, the biomedical coding of this, and what each medical process is worth and whatnot. So it's like, I don't remember all the numbers, but it's like a five-digit code and it's like, okay, I got a test for cystic fibrosis or a test for this or a test for that. God help you if your medical billing is erroneous. Why? The insurance company will reject it because it doesn't pay for that. This is this giant process of trying to encode every possible ailment and condition into these CPT codes and you can literally get degrees in medical billing just for this, okay? This enormous inefficient industry. Okay, like literally medical billing is a whole field. Okay? Yeah. What do you wanna do when you grow up? I wanna work in medical billing. In medical billing, okay? Where everybody's mad at you at all times. Yeah. Part of what happens is when you give a treatment, when a doctor gives a treatment to a patient, they can't like repo the treatment, okay? Like a car, you sell a car, you can in theory repo the car. So the patient has a treatment. Now, what happens? Well, the insurance company, you know, that treatment is perhaps provided, look, it's a lab test provided by a company, right? The company bills the patient. The company is supposed to charge a high price. Why? The insurance company wants it to try to collect from the patient. The patient is scared. Oh my God, they see this huge price. They sometimes don't pay. Sometimes the insurance company doesn't pay either and when a company is stiffed by an insurance company, when a diagnostic company is stiffed by an insurance company it has to jack up the price on everybody else, right? Everything boils down to the fact that you don't have, you know, a buyer and a seller. The doctor doesn't know the price of what is being sold. The buyer doesn't know the price of what is being bought at the time it's being bought. Neither party can really even set a free price because there's this RVU system that hovers above. The buyer feels they've already bought it because they bought insurance. The insurance company doesn't wanna pay for it. Everybody is trying to like push the price onto somebody else and, you know, not actually show the sticker price of anything and hide everything and so on and so forth. Oh, the other thing about it is obviously lawsuits are over everything. Everybody's mad about everything. It's health, people are dying, okay? So everything is just optimized for optics as opposed to results, right? Similarly, actually many drugs are optimized for minimizing side effects and optics rather than maximizing effects, which are totally different criteria, right? You might have, for example, a drug that only cures a thousand people but doesn't have any side effects versus one that cures a million people but that has 10 really serious side effects a year, right? And the second one would probably not happen because those side effects would be so big, okay. How do you attack this? I name a few examples, but I actually think the reform is gonna come in part from outside the system. In particular, India is coming online, okay? Why is that important? Well, you may have encountered an Indian doctor or two, okay, maybe an Indian programmer, one or two, all right? And I do think telemedicine could explode, right? Where you could have an Indian doctor in India and there's a US doctor, okay, who's like a dispatcher. You see what I'm saying? They've got all these other Indian doctors behind them, they've got a telemedical app, and you are now doing something where these relatively inexpensive Indian doctors who are vetted by the American doctor or the doctor in the jurisdictions of license become the backend doctors of the world. To some extent, that's already there with teleradiology and other kinds of things, right? But now that you've got literally like a billion Indians who've just come online, okay, you have this huge pool of folks who have a different attitude towards medicine. For example, it's a lot more cash payment over there. For example, India's big on generic drugs. For example, during COVID, it had something called, has something called Arrogya Setu, which is a national telemedicine app, okay? The US wasn't able to ship that. In some ways, India's digital infrastructure, again, you'll have to read a post called The Internet Country by tigerfeathers.substack.com, and you'll see that actually India's national software infrastructure is surprisingly good. It's not as good as China's in some ways, but it's like better than the US's, which is like healthcare.gov and like non-existent. It's like kind of impressive how good some of India's software is. The fact that it exists is good. So you have all these new doctors coming online. India cranks out generics, right? Telemedicine is now more legal in the US, and you have cash payment in India, right? And in a lot of other places. You don't have the whole insurance, employer health thing. And this market is growing. So you could have a sort of parallel market that starts evolving, right? Which is, and people are already doing some medical tourism. I don't think that's another exit from the FDA. You have a parallel market that starts evolving that just starts from fundamentally different premises. It's just cash, cash for everything, right? There's downsides with cash for everything. There's a huge upside with cash for everything. Cash for everything means you get customer service from the doctor. It means the prices are actually visible. It ideally pushes you, again, towards more ambulatory medicine rather than ambulance medicine. It is monitoring, constant monitoring with the quantified self and whatnot, as opposed to just let your system fail and then wheel you in, right? There's a reputational bridge because now we've had a couple of generations almost of Indian doctors in the US. So people know that there's some very competent Indian doctors. There are a good chunk of AMA. And so they can sort of lobby for this. And you have plenty of Indian engineers. Now, I'm not saying India alone is a panacea, but I do think that this is a large enough parallel market to start doing interesting things. And you could see sort of medical tourism, medical migration to where it gives India an opportunity to basically let go of the constraints of the FDA. Yeah, because- And innovate aggressively. And I mean, it's just such a huge opportunity to define the future of medicine and make a shit ton of money from a market that's desperate for it in the United States because of all the over the regulation. That's right. And basically it's something where the reason it needs- And that would fix the FDA, sorry to interrupt. Yes, we fix the FDA by exiting the FDA, right? And then the FDA would dry out and then it would hopefully- It might reform, it might dry out, right? And this is why people are, for example, they're traveling across borders, they're getting orders from Canadian pharmacies. A lot of this type of stuff, we can start to build alternatives, right? I mean, India's generic industry is really important because it just doesn't enforce American IP there. So generic drugs are cheaper, right? And it's quite competent, it's been around for a while. So there's enough proof points there where, again, I'm not saying a panacea, it's gonna be something which will require like American and Indian collaboration. I think there's gonna be a lot of other countries and so on that are involved. But you can start to see another pole getting set up, which is a confident enough civilization that is willing to take another regulatory path, right? And that is in some ways doing better on national software than the US is. And it has enough of a bridge to the US that it can be that simulation which you need, which is kind of something that outside poke, right? I wanna talk about India, but let me just kind of wrap up on this big FDA biomedical kind of thing, right? With the book, The Network State, the purpose of The Network State, I want people to be able to build different kinds of network states. I want people to build the vegan village. I want people to be able to build a, if they wanna do the Bendic option, like a Christian network state. If people wanna do different kinds of things, I'm open to many different things and I will fund lots of different things. For me, the motivation is just like you needed to start a new currency, Bitcoin. It was easier to do that than reform the Fed. I think it's easier to start a new country than reform the FDA. And so I wanna do it to, in particular, get to longevity, right, meaning longevity enhancement, right? And what does that mean? So in an interesting way, and this will sound like a trite statement, but I think it's actually a deep statement, or let me hopefully try to convince you it is. Crypto is to finance sort of what longevity is to, you know, the current state of medicine. Why? It inverts certain fundamental assumptions. Okay, so at first, crypto looks like traditional finance. It's got the charts and the bands and you're buying and selling and so on. But what Satoshi did is he took fundamental premises and flipped them. For example, in the traditional macroeconomic worldview, hyperinflation is bad, but deflation is also bad. So a little inflation is good, right? In the traditional macroeconomic worldview, it's good that there are custodians, banks, that, you know, kind of intermediate the whole system, right? In the traditional, you know, worldview, every transaction needs to be reversible because somebody could make a mistake and so on and so forth, right? In the traditional worldview, you don't really have root access over your money. Satoshi inverted all of those things, okay? Obviously, you know, the big one is hyperinflation is bad, but he also thought mild inflation was bad and deflation was good. That's just a fundamental shift, okay? He gave you root access over your money. You're now a system administrator of your own money. You can room-RF your entire fortune or send millions with a keystroke. You are now the system administrator of your own money. That alone is why cryptocurrency is important. If you want system administration access at times to computers, you'll want it to currency, right? To be sovereign. You know, there's other assumptions where like, the assumptions every transaction is private in the existing system by default, or it's visible only to the state, whereas at least the initial, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain, everything is public, right? There are various kinds of things like this where he just inverted fundamental premises. And then the whole crypto system is in, the crypto economy is in many ways a teasing out of what that means. Just to give you one example, the US dollar, people have seen those graphs where it's like inflating, and so it just like loses value over time, and you've seen that, okay? Whereas, and most of the time, it's just sort of denied that it's losing any value. The most highbrow way of defending it is the US dollar trades off temporary short-term price stability for long-term depreciation. And Bitcoin makes the opposite trade-off. In theory, at least, long-term appreciation at the expense of short-term price instability. Because like, you know, there's the whole plunge protection team and so on. Basically, there's various ways in which, quote, price stability is tried to be maintained in the medium term at the expense of long-term depreciation. You need like a reserve of assets to keep, you know, stabilizing the dollar against various things. So what does crypto medicine look like relative to fiat medicine, to make the same analogy, right? The existing medical system, it assumes that a quick death is bad, an early death is bad, but also that living forever is either unrealistic or impossible or undesirable, that you should die with dignity or something like that, okay? So a little death is good. That's the existing medical system. Whereas the concept of life extension, and, you know, David Sinclair, and, you know, what you call health span, says, rejects that fundamental premise. And it says, actually, the way to defeat cancer is to defeat aging. Aging is actually a programmed biological process, and we can, we have results that are showing stopping or even reversing aging in some ways. And so now, just like with the other thing, you say a quick death is bad, and so is actually death itself, right? So we actually want significant life extension. This is similar, it's very similar to what, you know, the rejection of the fiat system, right? The fiat system says, a little inflation is good. Fiat medicine says, a little death is good. Bitcoin says, actually, no inflation, just get more valuable over time. And crypto medicine says, actually, let's, you know, extend life. This leads to all kinds of new things where you start actually thinking about, all right, how do I maintain my health with, you know, diagnostics? How do I, you know, take control of my own health with the decentralization of medicine? All the stuff that I've been describing sort of fits, like, longevity is traditional medicine as crypto is to traditional currency. If we take those assumptions separately, so we take cryptocurrency aside, is that to you obvious that this, letting go of this assumption about death, is that an obvious thing? Is longevity obviously good versus, for example, the devil's advocate to that would be, what we want is to keep death and maximize the quality of life up until the end, like, so that you're right into the sunset, healthy. Somebody who was listening to the whole podcast would say, well, Balaji, just a few hours ago, you were saying this gerontocracy runs the US and they're all old and they don't get it, blah, blah, blah. And now you're talking about making people live forever so there's never any new blood to wash it out. Ha ha, what a contradiction, right? It's funny that you're so on point across all the topics we covered and the possible criticism, I love it. Well, just trying to anticipate, you know, some of it. Good, well done, well done, sir. I think the argument on that is, so long as you have a frontier, it is okay for someone to live long, okay? So long as people can exit to a new thing, number one. Number two is, in order for us to go and colonize other planets and so on, if you do wanna get to Mars, if you wanna become Star Trek and what have you, probably gonna need to have, just to survive a long flight, so to speak, multiple light year flight, you're gonna need to have life extension. So to become a pioneering interstellar kind of thing. I know that, like, it's the kind of thing which sounds like, okay, yeah, and when we're on the moon, we're gonna need shovels. It sounds like a piling a fantasy on top of a fantasy in that sense, but it's also something where, if you're talking about the vector of our civilization, where are we going? Well, I actually do think it's either anarcho-primitivism or optimalism slash transhumanism. Either we are shutting down civilization, it's degrowth, it's Unabomber, et cetera, or it's the stars and escaping the prime number maze. It's like, to me, it's obvious that we're going to, if we're to survive, expand out into space. Yes. And it's obvious that once we do, we'll look back at anyone, which is currently most people, that didn't think of this future, didn't anticipate this future, worked towards this future as Luddites, as people who totally didn't get it. It will become obvious. Right now, it's impossible, and then it will become obvious. Yes. It seems like, yes, longevity in some form, I mean, there could be a lot of arguments of the different forms longevity could take, but in some form, longevity is almost a prerequisite for the expansion out into the cosmos. That's right. Expansion of longevity. There's also a way to bring it back to Earth to an extent, which is how were societies used to be judged? You may remember people used to talk about life expectancy as a big thing, right? Life expectancy is actually a very, very, very good metric. Why? It's a ratio scale variable. There's like four different class of variables statisticians talk about. Ratio scale is like years or meters or kilograms, okay? Then you have interval scale, where plus and minus means something, but there's no absolute zero. Then you have ordinal, where there's only ranks, and plus and minus don't mean anything. And then you have categorical, like the Yankees and the Braves are categorical variables. They're just different, but all you have is the comparator operator, whether you have a quality, you don't have a rank, okay? So ratio scale data is the best because you can compare it across space and time. If you have a skeleton that is like two meters tall, that's from 3,000 years ago, you can compare the height of people from many, many years ago, different cultures and times, right? Whereas their currency is much harder to value. That's not like a ratio scale variable. Other things are harder to value across space and time, right? So life expectancy is good because, as a ratio scale variable, it was a very clear definition, right? Like when someone born and died, those are actually relatively clear. But most other things aren't like that. That's why murder or death, it can be scored, it's unambiguous, it's done when it's done. Whereas when did somebody get sick? Oh, well, they were kind of sick, or they were sick today, they were sick at this hour, the boundary conditions, many other kinds of things are not like clear cut like that, right? And I should just briefly comment that life expectancy does have this quirk, a dark quirk that it, when you just crudely look at it, is incorporates child mortality, mortality at age of one or age of five. And maybe it's better and clearer to look at mortality after five or whatever. And that's still, those metrics still hold in interesting ways and measure the progress of human civilization in interesting ways. Yeah. That's right. You actually want longevity biomarkers. A lot of people are working on this. There's a book called The Picture of Dorian Gray, right? And the concept is sell your soul to ensure the picture, rather than he will age and fade, right? And so the concept is that that thing on the wall just reflects his age and you can see it, okay? So there's a premise that's embedded in a lot of Western culture that to gain something, you must lose. If you're Icarus and you try to fly, then you'll fly too high and it'll melt your wings. But guess what? We fly every day, commercially off flight, right? So the opposite of the Icarus or Picture of Dorian Gray kind of thing is the movie Limitless, which I love because it's so Nietzschean and so unusual relative to the dystopian sci-fi movies where there's a, without giving, I mean, the movie's kind of old now, but there's a drug in it that's a nootropic that boosts your cognitive abilities and it's got side effects, but at the end, he engineers out the side effects. Amazing, just like, yeah, there were planes that crashed and we land, right? Okay, so why did I mention the Picture of Dorian Gray? Well, there's another aspect of it, which is longevity biomarker. The point is to kind of estimate how many years of life you have left by that Q.bio or Integrome or you take all these analyses on somebody, right? One of the best longevity biomarkers could be just your face, right? You image the face and you can sort of tell, oh, somebody looks like they've aged, oh, someone looks younger, et cetera, et cetera. And this is actually data that you've got on millions and millions of people where you could probably start having AI predict, okay, what is somebody's life expectancy given their current face and other kinds of things, right? Because you have their name, your birth date, you have their date they passed away if they've already passed away, right? And you have photos of them through their life, right? So just imaging might give a reasonably good longevity biomarker, but then you can supplement that with a lot of other variables. And now you can start benchmarking every treatment by its change in how much time you have left. If that treatment, that intervention boosts your estimated life expectancy by five years, you can see that in the data. You can get feedback on whether your longevity is being boosted or not, okay? And so what this does, it just fundamentally changes the assumptions in the system. Now, with that said, life extension may be the kind of thing, I'm not sure if it'll work for our generation, we may be too late, it may work for the next generation. Wouldn't that make you sad? Well, I've got something. To the last generation. Could be, but I've got something for you, which is, I call it genomic reincarnation. Okay, this one you probably haven't heard before. I've tweeted about it, okay? So- By the way, good time to mention that your Twitter is one of the greatest Twitters of all time, so people should follow you. Well, Lex Friedman has one of the greatest podcasts of all time. You guys should listen to the Lex Friedman podcast. Which you may be doing, right? Which you may be doing right now. Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you. So- What was the term again? Sorry, genomic- Sorry, I call it genomic, not resurrection, but genomic reincarnation, okay? So here's the concept. You may be aware that you can synthesize strands of DNA, okay? There's sequencing of DNA, which is reading it, and synthesizing DNA, which is creating strands of DNA. What's interesting is you can actually also do that at the full chromosome level for bacterial chromosomes. Remember that thing I was saying earlier about the minimum life form that Craig Venter made? So people have synthesized entire bacterial chromosomes, and they work. Like, they can literally essentially print out a living organism, all right? Now, when you go from bacteria to eukaryotes, which are the kingdom of life that we're a part of, right? Yeast are part of this kingdom and so on. It becomes harder because the chromosomes are more complicated. But folks are working on eukaryotic chromosome synthesis. And if you spot me that sci-fi assumption that eventually we'll be able to take your genome sequence and just like we can synthesize a bacterial chromosome, we can synthesize not just one eukaryotic chromosome, but your entire complement of chromosomes in the lab, right? Because you have 23, 46, whatever, you take the pairs. What you can do is potentially print somebody out from disk, reincarnate them, insofar if your sequence determines you, and you can argue this, because there's epigenetics in our stuff, okay? But let's just say at a first order, your DNA sequence is Lex. You can sequence that, okay? You can do full genome sequencing and log that to a file. Then here's the karma part. Your crypto community, where you've built up enough karma among them, if when you die, your karma balance is high enough, they will spend the money to reincarnate the next Lex, who can then watch everything that happened in your past life, and you can tell them something. Everything I described there, I mean, if you spot me, eukaryotic chromosome synthesis, that's the only part that I think will be possible, right? Folks are working on it, I'm sure someone will mention it. It's essentially a clone. It's like a clone, right? But it is you in a different time. You in a different time, but you don't unfortunately have the memories. Well, you could probably watch the digest of your life, and it would be pretty interesting, right? I mean. Yeah, that's actually a process for psychology to study. If you create a blank mind, what would you need to show that mind to align it very well with the experiences, with the fundamental experiences that define the original version, such that the resulting clone would have similar behavior patterns, worldviews, perspectives, feelings, all those kinds of things. Potentially, right? Including, sadly, enough traumas and all that. Or what have you, right? But basically, just like in a very simple version of it, you know, by the time one is age 20 or 30, or something to me in your 20s, you'll sort of learn your own personal operating system. You'll be like, oh, alcohol really doesn't agree with me, or something like that. And just by trial and error, things that are idiosyncratic to your own physiology, like, oh, I'm totally wrecked if I get seven hours of sleep versus nine hours, or whatever it is, right? People will have different kinds of things like this. That manual can be given to your next self, so you can go, don't do this, do this, don't do this, do this, right? To some extent, personal genomics already gives you some of this, where you're like, oh, I'm a caffeine, you know, or a slow metabolizer. Oh, that explains X or Y, you know? Or I have a weird version of alcohol dehydrogenase. Oh, okay, that explains my alcohol tolerance. So this is part of the broader category of what I call practical miracles, right? So it's longevity, it's genomic reincarnation, it is restoring sight, and it is curing deafness with the artificial eyes and artificial ears. It is the super soldier serum, did I show you that? So like, Myostat and Nell, they tweet about this. Basically, X-Men are real. So here is a study from NEGM from several years ago, okay? What is this, is like the mid-2000s. This was in 2004, okay? So it's now 17 years later, it's probably, this is almost certainly a teenager by now. So this kid basically was just totally built. Yeah. Okay? Extraordinarily muscular. He looked very muscular at a very young age. Yes, so the child's birth weight was in the 73th percentile. He appeared extraordinarily muscular with protruding muscles in his thighs. Motor and mental development has been normal. Now at four and a half years of age, he continues to have increased muscle bulk and strength. And so essentially, Myostatin mutation associated with gross muscle hypertrophy in a child. So this is like real life X-Men, okay? And- Yeah, and there's pictures of animals. Yes, so this company called Variant Bio. That is looking at people who have exceptional health-related traits and is looking for essentially this kind of thing, but maybe more disease or whatever related, right? For example, people who have natural immunity to COVID. Understanding how that works, perhaps we can give other people artificial immunity to COVID, right? If you scroll up, you see my kind of tweet, super soldier Sarah Mizreal, where it's like wild type mouse and a Myostatin null. And look at the chest on that thing. You see the before and after. Wow. Okay, this is what's possible. This could be us, but you're regulating. You know, right? You're not saying like, this could be us, but you're playing. This could be us, but the FDA regulating, right? All this- Oh yeah, on steroids. But it's not, that's the thing is- But it's not steroids. Well, that's the thing is people, again, you get back to the Icarus thing. They think, oh, steroids. Well, that's definitely gonna give you cancer, screw up your hormones, et cetera, et cetera. And it could, but you know what? Like, have we actually put in that much effort into figuring out like the right way of doing testosterone supplementation or the right way of doing this? Obviously, we've managed to put a lot of effort into marijuana, increasing the potency of it or what have you. Could we put the effort into these kinds of drugs, right? Or these kinds of compounds? Maybe. I think that would actually be a really good thing. The thing about this is I feel this is just a massively underexplored area. Rather than people drinking caffeine all the time, that's a very mild enhancing drug, okay? Nicotine is also arguably kind of like that. Some people have it even without the cigarettes, right? Why can't we research this stuff? One way of thinking about it is, Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, yes, he violated all the rules. You know, he shouldn't have won the Tour de France or anything like that. But as chemists, and I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, but also, his chemists are candidates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Because they brought a man back from testicular cancer to winning Tour de France against a bunch of guys who probably, a bunch of them were also juiced or whatever. Whatever was done there, take it out of the competition framework, there's a lot of testicular cancer patients or cancer patients, period, who would want some of that. And we should take that seriously. We should take that pursuit really, really, really seriously. Yes, except, again, just like the Theranos stuff, all this pathology, oh, it's a Balco scandal, oh, it's this, oh my God, you know? And yes, of course, within the context of that game, they're cheating. When the context of life, you want to be cheating death. Yes. Right? So it's just a kind of a reframe on what is good, right? And it is just taking away these assumptions that mild inflation is good or mild death is good and going towards transcendence. So that gets me done with the giant FDA, biomedical, et cetera, et cetera. Longevity, yeah. That is beautifully, beautifully done. You have two questions. One was on Trump and deplatforming, and the other was on crypto and the state of crypto, and the third is on India. Which one should we do? All right, since we talked about how to fix government, we talked about how to fix health, medicine, FDA, longevity, let us briefly talk about how to fix social media, perhaps. Sure, very much. Since we kind of talked about it from different directions, but it'd be nice to just look at social media. And if we could perhaps first, as an example, maybe it's not a useful example, but to me it was one that kind of shook me a little bit, is the removal of Trump, and since then, other major figures, but Donald Trump was probably the biggest person ever to be removed from social media. Do you understand why that was done? Can you steelman the case for it and against it? And if there's something broken about that, how do we fix it? Steelman the case for is kind of obvious in the sense of you are seeing a would-be dictator who is trying to run a coup against democracy, who has his supporters go and storming the seat of government, who could use his app to whip up his followers across the country to reject the will of the people. And so you're an executive and you'll take actions that while perhaps controversial are still within the law, and you'll make sure that you do your part to defend democracy by making sure that at least this guy's megaphone is taken away and that his supporters cannot organize more rights. That's basically the case for the deplatforming. Okay. Would you agree with that? So it's like really steelmanning it. You asked to steelman, so I'm giving the for case, yeah. Well, I guess I would like to separate the would-be dictator. Oh, I guess if you're storming the Capitol, you are a dictator, I see, I see. So those are two are interlinked, right? You have to have somehow a personal judgment of the person. Bad enough to be worth this significant step. Yeah, it's not just their actions or words in a particular situation, but broadly, this person is dangerous. The context of everything that led up to this moment and so on, right? Yeah. So that's a for case, right? Now, the against case. There's actually several against cases, right? There's obviously the Trump supporters against case. There is the sort of the libertarian slash left libertarian against case, and there is the rest of world against case. Okay? There's actually three, because it's not just two factions, there's multiple, right? So what is the Trump supporter against case? There's an article called the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election, right? Which came out a few weeks after the inauguration, like February 4th, 2021. And essentially, the Trump supporter would read this as basically saying, in the name of defending democracy, they corrupted democracy, whether it was actually vote counts or just changes of all the rules for mail-in ballots and stuff. There were regular meetings between the Chamber of Commerce and AFL and the unions. In particular, they admit that the BLM riots of the mid 2020s were actually on a string and they could say, stand down, right? So that's actually, that's a quote from this article where it's like, the word went out, stand down, protect the results, announce that it would not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, remains ready to activate if necessary. Hothoser credits the activists for their restraint. So basically, the activists re-arched the protected results protest towards a weekend of celebration. So point being that the fact that, the Trump supporter would say, the fact that they could tell them to stand down meant that the previous unrest was in part coordinated. And so they'd say, okay, so that makes it illegitimate in a different way, right? Plus, was one riot on Jan 6th versus the attacks on the White House and stuff, there's a storming of the White House in mid 2020 and then actually stormed the White House, but they're setting fires outside and it's quite a lot of stuff, right? So the second against case is the, let's say libertarian slash left libertarian who'd say, do we really want giant corporations, regardless of what you think about Trump and you don't have to be a Trump supporter, do you really want giant corporations to be determining who can say what on the internet? And if they can de-platform a sitting president and the quote, most powerful man in the world, he's not the most powerful man in the world. In fact, the quote, people are electing a figurehead and actually it's the heads of network that are more powerful than the heads of state, right? That the fact that the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter and Google and Apple and Amazon all made the decisions at the same time to not just de-platform Trump from Twitter, which literally billions of people around the world saw, but also censor or stop on Facebook and to have Google and Apple pull Parler out of the app store and Amazon shut down the backend, that would be corporate collusion by any other name. It's actually very similar to the so-called business plot against FDR. FDR was a complicated figure who can in some ways best be thought of as the least bad communist dictator or socialist dictator of the 20th century. Why? Because he nationalized the economy, repealed the 10th amendment, right? Tried to pack the courts. He sicced the government on all of his enemies from Huey Long to Andrew Mellon. Obviously he interned the Japanese, which shows that wasn't really totally a good guy, right? We don't usually think about the same guy who did this, did that. Earlier in his life, most people don't know this one, he led a whole Navy thing to entrap gay sailors. And did you know about this one? No. Yeah, Google FDR entrapment of gay sailors. Basically he got young men to try to find folks within the Navy who were gay and then basically entrap them so that they could be prosecuted and what have you, right? FDR did a lot of stuff, but fundamentally nationalized the economy and set up the alphabet soup, is what they called it at the time. And that's like all these agencies or whatever. And in some sense, he's like continuous, like there'd been a rising trend of centralization. Woodrow Wilson, obviously centralized, Lincoln centralized, right? Even actually 1789 was a degree of centralization over the more loose thing that was 1776, 1789. So he was on that trend line, but he was definitely a huge kind of dog leg up. So the thing is that because of all the lawsuits that were flying, many folks like Amie Schlaes, has written a book, The Forgotten Man. And essentially her thesis and thesis of many others at that time, like John T. Flynn, who's this journalist who was pro FDR and then was against, was that FDR made the Great Depression great. Okay, that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing without him mucking up the entire economy and giving it a sickness. It would have recovered quickly without that, right? This is a counterfactual, which people just argue about it really angrily back and forth. And you can't actually run the experiment unless you could fork the economy, right? Just like where the bailouts good or bad. I think they were bad, but how could I prove it? I'd need to actually be able to fork the economy. Crypto actually allows you in theory to do that. Like where folks could actually shift balances. This is a whole separate thing where you can actually start to make macroeconomics into more of an experimental science rather than simply arguing from authority. You could argue from experiment. Some of the virtual economy stuff that Edward Castronova has done is relevant to this. We can talk about that. Point is though, with FDR, there's this thing, because he had waged such a war on private industry at that time and justified it with this narrative, quote, bold, persistent experimentation, there was something called the, quote, business plot, where all of these captains of industry that he'd been beating up. And again, Teddy Roosevelt had also been doing this with the trust buster, the journos at the time. Ida Tarbell had gone and basically ran all these articles on Rockefeller and knocked him down. Woodrow Wilson and his control. But FDR, the CEOs were thinking, oh, bad, this is so terrible. There's a so-called business plot to try to take over the government and stop FDR from pushing the country in what they thought was a bad direction. Smedley Butler was a general that they recruited to try to help them with this, but he turned on them and he went and kind of broke the whole thing open and told to Congress and so on. And so this guy's, you know, the whole plot was broken up, all right? Now, one way of thinking about today, or the whole aftermath of Jan 6th, is it's a business plot, but in reverse. Because the generals and the CEOs both were against Trump and actually the business plot happened and now all the CEOs just, boop, boop, boop. You know, they pushed all the buttons that they needed to, and now the network was prime over the state, okay? Now, why is that an interesting way of looking at it? Because one thing I have in the book is, you can kind of think of 1950 as like, ish as peak centralization. You go forward and backward in time, things decentralize. You know, for example, and you start getting mirror image events that happen with the opposite outcome. For example, 1890, the frontier closes. 1991, the internet frontier opens. Internet becomes open for commerce, okay? You go backwards in time, you have the Spanish flu, forwards in time, COVID-19, right? Backwards in time, you have the captains of industry, the robber barons, forwards in time, you have the tech billionaires. And there's so many examples of this. Like another one is, backwards in time, the New York Times is allying with Soviet Russia to choke out Ukraine. Now, today, they have reinvented themselves as cheerleaders for Ukraine against nationalist Russia, right? And of course, I think you could absolutely support Ukraine on other measures, but it's pretty hypocritical for the guys who profited from the Haldimor, you know, the Oxelsburg family, literally profited from denying the Haldimor to now make themselves cheerleaders for Ukraine. It's actually this insane thing, which we can talk about. A tiny tangent on that. Yeah. You put it brilliantly, and a reminder for anyone who listens to me talk about Ukraine, it is possible to have empathy for a nation and not be part of the machine that generates a mainstream narrative. Yes, that's right. Like basically, I was actually one of the first of three Estonian EU residents, okay? And I completely understand why Estonia and the Baltics and all these countries, including Ukraine, that just recently, within living memory, got their independence from the Soviet empire would not want to be forcibly reintegrated into a place that they just escaped from, you know? And so that is something which is sort of outside the American left-right, you know, tired kind of thing, where when you understand it from that point of view, right? Then there's like a fourth point of view, which is like India's point of view, or like much of the developing world, or what I call, you know, parts of it are, you know, ascending, parts are descending, whatever. But much of the rest of the world, outside of that border region, says, look, we're sympathetic to the Ukrainians, but we can't allow our people to starve. So we're gonna maintain trade. And guess what, actually, you know, we've got a lot of wars in our neck of the woods and human rights crises that Europe just didn't even care about. So it can't be that Europe's problems are the world's problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's problems, right? So it's like a fourth point of view. Then a fifth point of view is China, which is like, guess what, we're gonna be the Iran of the Iraq war. You know, where like, who won the Iraq war? Iran, arguably, Brexit extended their influence into Iraq. Right? So China's like, guess what, we're gonna turn Russia into our gas station and build a pipeline. They're building, there's a power, Siberia's like the name of the Eastern Russia pipeline, just like Nord Stream is, you know, Nord Stream One and Nord Stream Two. I think they're building a new pipeline, you know, through Mongolia. So Xi Jinping and Putin and the Mongolian head of state were all photographed kind of thumbs upping this pipeline. We'll see if it goes through, but it's ironic that, you know, Russia wanted to make Ukraine their, you know, colony, but the outcome of this war may be that Russia becomes China's colony, you know? So that's at least like five different perspectives, right? There's like the US establishment perspective, there's the, you know, Tucker-MAGA perspective, there's the Baltics and Ukrainian perspective, there's like the Indian and like poor countries perspective, and then there's a Chinese perspective, and then of course there's the Russians, right? So just respect to that, by the way, that's another example of history happening in reverse. This is the Sino-Soviet partnership, except this time, China's the senior partner and Russia's the junior partner, and this time they're both nationalist rather than communist. And there's so many flips like this, and, you know, I'm gonna list a few more actually, because there's so, so, so many of them. Do you have an explanation why that happens? Yes, let me just list a few of them. This is in the, you'll never see a book, it's in the chapter called Fragmentation, Frontier, Fourth Turning, Future is Our Past, right? So I give this example of like a fluid unmixing, all right, just watch this for a second, all right? This is from Smarter Every Day, Unmixing Color Machine, Ultra-Limited Reversible Flow, Smarter Every Day, 217. And so you can mix something, and then like this thing that you don't think of as reversible, you can unmix it, which is insane, right? That it works, okay, the physics of that situation, it just works, right? So for people just listening, that there is whatever the mixture this is, this is ultra-laminar reversible flow, so this probably has to do something to do with the material. We're used to mixing not being a reversible process. Exactly. And that's what that shows, and then he then reverses the mixing and is able to do it perfectly. That's right. So that's like the futures are past the- It shows the free will is an illusion, just kidding. Well, basically there's some environments where the equations are like time symmetrical, right? And this is one model, sort of it's just an interesting visual model for what's happening in the world as we've re-decentralized after the centralized century. Right? So basically, I mentioned the inter-frontier reopens back in the Western frontier closed, today we experience COVID-19, back then we experienced the Spanish flu, tech billionaires, and we have the capital industry, right? Today, founders like Elan and Dorsey are starting to win against establishment journalists. Back then, Ida Tarbell demagogued and defeated Rockefeller. I think net-net founders win this time versus the journos. Back then, the journos won over the founders, okay? Today we have cryptocurrencies, back then we had private banking. Today, this is an amazing one, we have a populist movement of digital gold advocates. Back then, because Bitcoin maximalists and so on, where gold has become populist because it's against the printing money and so on and so forth. Back then, we had a populist movement against gold in the form of William Jennings Bryan in the cross of gold speech. Gold was considered a tool of big business. Now, gold is the tool against big business and big government, right? Digital gold, yeah. Digital gold, right? Today we have the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar-like America, back then we had the inflation and cultural conflict of Weimar Germany. Today in Weimar America, we have right and left fighting in the streets, same unfortunately in Weimar Germany. Peter Turchin has written about, today we have what Turchin considers antebellum-like polarization, like pre-war polarization. Back then, if you go further back in time, we had what we now know to be antebellum polarization. Today we have Airbnb, back then we had flophouses. Today we have Uber, back then we had gypsy cabs. So today we see the transition from neutral to yellow journalism. Back then we saw the transition from yellow to quote neutral journalism, right? And today figures like Mike Moritz, he wrote about China's energetic and America's laconic. But back then Bertrand Russell actually wrote this whole long book, actually the mathematician Bertrand Russell, right? Wrote this whole long book, which I didn't even realize he wrote about these kind of topics, about the problem of China. And one of his observations was, again, I'm not saying this is, I'm just saying he made this observation. He was saying that America was energetic and China laconic at the time, because everybody was in opium dens and so on and so forth, okay? More examples, the one I just mentioned where the Chinese and Russians are again lining up against the West, except this time the Chinese are the senior partner in the relationship rather than the junior partner. Today I think in the second Cold War, there will also be a third world, but this time I think that third world might come in first, because it's not the non-aligned movement, it's the aligned movement around Web 3 protocols. That's fascinating, yeah. That's where Indyk comes in. By the way, something we haven't mentioned, Africa, that there could be very interesting things in Africa as well. Nigeria is actually, Nigeria has its first tech unicorn, and I'm investing there. And I think, it's one of these things where China's risen, India's like about 10 years behind China, but I think this is the Indian decade in many ways. We can come back to that point. But there's absolutely sparks of light in Africa. I mean, it's a huge continent. Now let's go. It feels like the more behind, sorry to interrupt, the more behind you are, the more opportunity you have to leapfrog. Sometimes, that's right. M-PESA is a classic example where they did this in East Africa, but I think there's more possibility there. So what is the fact that this, there's a kind of symmetry in history. There's a kind of symmetry, right. What is that, how did that take us from Trump, the different perspective you took, the libertarian perspective of it doesn't really matter. Yeah, because the libertarian perspective, or the left libertarian perspective would say, is it really a good idea to have total corporate power against the quote elected government, even if you may disagree, do you wanna open the door to total corporate oligarchy? And it's like the opposite, that's why I mentioned it's like the opposite of business plots and they pulled on that thread, okay. So the macro explanation that I have for this future is our past thesis. And there's more, it also gives some predictions, right. If you go backwards in time, the US federalizes into many individual states, like before the civil war, people said the United States are, and after they said the United States is, before FDR, the 10th amendment, reserve rights to the states, afterwards it was just federal regulation of everything. As we go forwards in time, you're seeing states break away from the feds on gun laws, drug laws, right, sanctuary cities, okay, many other kinds of things, you know. And now Florida, for example, has its own guard that's like not a national guard, but like a state guard. Other states are doing this. And that's a force of decentralization, you're saying that parallels in reverse. In reverse, right, so you're having- What happened before. Make America states again. Nice. Okay, that's what I think happening, right. I'm not saying, well, I think there's aspects of that that are good, there's aspects that are bad, but just like that's kind of the angle, right. But then that's, I mean, from your perspective, that's probably not enough, right. That's not- It's part of the future. Let's just say whether I think- I think you, it's not a general view, you suggested all kinds of ways to build different countries. I think that's probably one of them. You said like start micro-countries or something like this. I forgot the terminology. Yeah, micro-nations. Yeah, that's not my, I actually think of them as, a better term is micro-states because they're actually not nations. That's why they don't work. But micro-states are better, right. Coming back to the difference between the nation and the state, the nation is like, the nation state is a term that people use without expanding it, but nation comes from the same root word as like natality. So it's like common descent, common birth, right. Common origin, like the Japanese nation. That's a group of people that have, come down from history, right. Hence nationalism. Yeah, whereas the state is like the administrative layer above them. It's like labor and capital, like labor and management, okay. The American state stood over the Japanese nation in 1946 after the war. Right, so you weren't talking about tradition, you know, that doesn't matter. Traditionally. In terms of like, I thought you meant nation is a thing that carries across the generations. There's a tradition, there's a culture and so on, and state is just the layer. I mean, that's also another way of thinking about it, right. There's a reversal there as well, okay. Yeah, so I mean, one way of thinking about it is, you know, one nation under God indivisible is no longer true. It is, America is at least two nations, the Democrat and Republican, in the sense of their own cultures, where I can show you graph after graph. You've seen the polarization graphs. I can show you network diagrams where, you know, like there's this graph of polarization in Congress where there's red and blue, they're separate things. There's this article from 2017 showing how, you know, shares on Facebook and Twitter are just separate sub graphs. They're just separate graphs in the social network and they're pulling apart. Those are two nations. They're not under God because people in the US no longer believe in God. And they're very much divisible because 96% of Democrats won't marry Republicans in a high percentage other way. And in one, what that means is in one generation, ideology becomes biology. These become ethnic groups. It takes on the character of Hutu and Tutsi or Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiite. It's not about ideology. If you think about all the flips during COVID, right, where people were on one side versus the other side, it's tribal, it's just tribe on tribe. And so it's not universalist that identity of American makes less sense than the identity of Democrat and Republican right now, or perhaps the identity of Israel states. What I think that's a good or bad thing, I think that's unfortunately, you know, whatever it is, it's the hour of history, right? On the opposite side of things, India is actually was 562 princely states at the time of Indian unification from 1947 to 19, 1947 when they got independence from the British, it was 562 princely states. Most people don't know that part. They got, or outside India don't know that part. It got unified into a republic only by like 1950. And India is like actually a modern, India is like Europe. It's kind of like the European Union in the sense that we didn't have a unified India in the past. It was something with a lot of different countries like Northern South India or like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu were as different as Finland and Spain, okay? But India is moved in the direction of much more unification, like much more, you know, centralization or what have you, whereas the U.S. is decentralized. And you go, okay. Few more things, there are flips and I'll finish this off. Today we're seeing the rise of the pseudonymous founder in starved societies back all the way back in the 1770s, we saw pseudonymous founders of starved countries, namely the U.S. right? The Federalist Papers. Today we're seeing so far unsuccessful calls for wealth seizures in the U.S. Back then we saw FDR's Executive Order 6102, which was a successful seizure of gold. I expect we may see something like that, an attempted seizure of digital gold. And I think that'll be one of the things that individual states like Florida or Texas may not enforce that. And I think that's actually the kind of thing where you could see, you know, like a breakup potential in the future, right? One other thing that kind of rhymes is in many ways, like the modern U.S. establishment, the story that you hear is the victories in 1945 and 1865 legitimate the current establishment. That is being the Nazis, being the Confederates, right? So you beat the ethnic nationalists abroad and they beat the quote, secessionists at home, right? And the ethnic nationalists were, you know, Aryan Nazis and the secessionists were, you know, slave owners and against freedom and so on and so forth. Okay, I'm not disputing that, I'm just saying that that's just like the way people think about it. There's a possibility, and I'm not saying it's 100% at all, okay? But if you're a sci-fi writer, there's a possibility that the U.S. loses to the ethnic nationalists abroad, except this time they're Chinese communists, non-white communists, as opposed to Aryan Nazis, which seemed like the total opposite, okay? And there's a possibility that there is a financial secession at home, where it's, you know, Bitcoin maximalist states that are advocating for freedom, the opposite of slavery. See what I'm saying? Oh boy, that's dark. You're looking for major things in history that don't yet have a- Cognate going forward, right? And that's a nice way to think about the future. It is only one model, and, you know, any mental model or something like that, that's why I say as a sci-fi scenario, it's just like a scenario one could contemplate, right? Where the new version has, I mean, the Chinese communists do not think of themselves as Aryans, right? But they are ultra-nationalists. And, you know, the Hitler comparisons, people talk about Hitler endlessly, you know, like Saddam is the new Hitler, everybody's the new Hitler, et cetera. If there is a comparison to, quote, Nazi Germany, it is, you know, CCP China, in a sense. Why? They are non-English speaking, manufacturing powerhouse, with a massive military build-out under one leader that is a genuine peer competitor to the US on many dimensions. And in fact, you know, exceeding on some dimensions of technology and science. Right? That is like, the problem is it's a boy who cried wolf. People say this a zillion times, right? And, you know, that is like, you know, I'm not saying this by the way, crucially, I am just like, I think China is very complicated, and there's hundreds of millions of people, probably half in China that disagrees with the current ultra-nationalist kind of thing, right? And so I kind of hate it when innocent Chinese people abroad or whatever are just like, attacked on this basis or what have you. Plus, the other thing is that many Chinese people will say, well, look, relative to, you know, where we were when Deng took over in 1978, we built up the entire country. We're not starving to death anymore, and the West wants to recolonize us. And so I understand where that's coming from. This way, you want to be able to argue different points of view. With that said, there's one huge difference, right? Which is Nazi Germany was like 70 million people, and the US was 150 million, and the Soviet Union was 150 million, and the UK was like 50 million. So they were outnumbered like five to one. China outnumbers the US four to one. This is gonna be a fun century. Things are gonna get- Under this model. Under this model, things are gonna be potentially crazy. Plus, you know, people are like, oh, I think this is, you know, again, I have nothing personal. There's this guy, Peter Zaihan, he writes these books, right? I probably agree with about 20 or 30%, but I disagree with a lot of the rest. And a bunch of it is basically about how China's really weak and America's really strong, and the rest of the world is screwed. And, you know, I think there's absolutely problems in China, and, you know, like the current management is actually messing a lot of things up. We could talk about that. But I do think that, you know, the US is like fighting its factory. So one thing, you know, Zaihan will talk about is how, oh, America has this blue water Navy, all the aircraft carriers, and China has nothing, it's got bupkis, et cetera. Well, China ships things all around the world, right? It probably has, you know, one of the most active fleets out there in terms of, you know, its commercial shipping. And in terms of building ships, here's a quote, China's merchant shipbuilding industry is the world's largest, having more than 23 million gross tons of shipping in 2020. US yards built a mere 70,000 tons the same year, though they typically average somewhere in the 200,000s. That is a 100 to 300X ratio, just in shipbuilding. Pretty much everything else you can find in the physical world is like that, okay? We're not talking like 2X, we're talking they can put together a subway station in nine hours with prefab, and the US takes three years, okay? When you have a thousand X difference in the physical world, the reason the US was won against, you know, Nazi Germany in a serious fight is they had this giant manufacturing plant that was overseas and they just outproduced, right? And they supplied the Soviets also with lend-lease, and the Soviets talked about how they would not have won the war without the Americans. People are like, oh, the Russians, you know, fought the Germans. The Russians, armed by Americans, fought the Germans. Like it's a Soviet Union, they're not actually able to make high quality stuff. There obviously are individual people in Soviet Russia who were innovative, right? I'm not taking that away. There's a tradition of amazing, I just wanna be like, there's individual Russians who obviously I admire, Mendeleev and, you know, Klimogorov and so on. There's amazing Russian scientists and engineers. So I'm not saying that, you know, that- I mean, in general, from brilliant folks like yourself that criticize communism, it's too easy to say nothing communism produces is good, which of course is not true. There's a lot of brilliant people, and a lot of even, you know, there's a lot of amazing things that have been created. Yeah, so they had some amazing mathematicians, amazing scientists, and so on, right? However- Great branding on the, you know, red and yellow. Yeah, yeah. The branding is stellar. So- Nazi Germany, too, excellent branding. With the flag and so on, you know? Yeah. So- It ends there in terms of compliments. Yeah, well, actually, they copied a lot of stuff from each other, you know? Like, there's this movie called The Soviet Story. It basically shows a lot of Nazi and Soviet propaganda things next to each other, and you can see guys almost in, like, the same pose. It's almost like, you know how AI will do, like, style transfer? You can almost see, because the socialist realism style of, like, the muscular brawny worker, very similar to, like, the style of the Aryan Superman, you know, like, pointing at the vermin or whatever. And then there's the crappy open-source version that tries to copy, which is Mussolini. Yeah. That just, like, that does the same exact thing, but does it kind of shittier, so. Right. Anyway. So, my main thing about this is basically, like, trying to fight your factory in the physical world is probably not gonna work. People are, I think, overconfident on this stuff, right? With that said, I think we want to, at all, you know, the future is not yet determined, right? At all odds, you know, we want to avoid a hot war between, like, I mean, a hot war between the US and China would be- Do you think it's possible that we'll get a war? We're doing these things like Pelosi going to Taiwan and trying to cause something. Like, look, again, this is one of these things which is complicated because, obviously, if you're, there's more than one perspective on this, right? Again, you've got the US establishment, the US conservative, the Taiwanese perspective, the Chinese perspective, all the bystanders over there. There's more than one perspective on this, okay? If you're, you know, one of China's many neighbors, you look at China with apprehension. Like Vietnam, for example, has sort of fallen into, or not fallen into, is partnering with India because they're a mutually apprehensive China. China's not making, like, great friends with its neighbors. It's kind of, you know, it's demonizing Japan. It's so ultra-nationalist nowadays. And so if you're Taiwanese, you're like, yeah, I do not want to be under the Chinese surveillance state. I completely understand that. Some people are pro-reunification, others aren't, but there's more, you know, trend, you know, in some ways for independence. Okay, fine. But there's also an increasing temperature across the entire world. As we sit here today, there's speeches by Vladimir Putin about the serious possibility of a nuclear war. And that escalates kind of the heat in the room of geopolitics. It escalates the heat in the room, of course, right? And the thing is, people have this belief that because something hasn't happened, it won't happen or can't happen. But like, there were a lot of measures people took during the Cold War to make sure a nuclear exchange didn't happen, the whole mutually assured destruction thing and communicating that out and like the balance of terror. There were smart guys on both sides who thought through this and there were near misses, right? There, you know, like there's that story about like the Soviet colonel who didn't order a nuclear strike because he thought it was just like an error in the instruments, right? Okay, what's the point? Point is, you know, for example, Pelosi going to Taiwan, that didn't strengthen Taiwan. That didn't like, if you're gonna go and provoke China, I thought Scholar Stages' Twitter account had a good point, which is you should, if you're actually gonna do it, then you strengthen Taiwan with like huge battalions of like arms and materiel and you make them a porcupine and so on and so forth. Instead, her kind of going and landing there and mooning China and then flying back in the middle of a hot war with Russia, that's absolutely, you know, in the middle of an economic crisis or what have, it just, you know, can you pick battles or whatever, right? It's like, you don't have to fight Russia and China at the same time. It's like kind of insane to do that, okay? Plus even with Ukraine, some people were like, oh, this was like a victory for the US military policy or something. There was a guy who, I'm not trying to beat him up or anything, he's like, this is in March, threat on US security assistance to Ukraine, it's working. Ukraine might be one of the biggest successes of US security assistance. And the reason is, you know, US didn't focus on some high-end shiny objects, but on core military tasks that focus should remain. And it's like, how is this a success? The West gave massive arms to Ukraine only after the invasion, but not enough before to deter. And now Ukraine is like this Syria-like battleground with, you know, a million refugees or whatever the number is, right? Their country is blown to smithereens, thousands of people dead, whatever thousand dollar gas in Europe with like 10X energy, radicalized Russians, the threat of World War III or even nuclear war, you know, shooting somebody isn't, that's not like the point of the military. The point is, you know, there's a million ways to smash Humpty Dumpty into pieces and, you know, unleash the blood-drenched tides, right? And have people all shooting each other and killing each other It's really hard to maintain stability. That's what competence is, is deterrence and stability. Right? There's not like a success in any way. It's like an absolute tragedy for everybody involved, right? Yeah, I mean, deterrence of course is the number one thing, but there's a lot to be said there, but I'm a huge not fan of declaring victory as we've done many times when it's the wrong. Yeah, I mean, the other thing about this is the whole mission accomplished thing during Iraq. Mission accomplished is what I meant, yeah. Exactly, mission accomplished was obviously, you know, the thing is Russia lives next door to Ukraine. And so, I mean, just like Iraq lives next door to Iran and Afghanistan is next door to Pakistan and China. And so if the US eventually gets tired of it and leaves, those guys are next door, right? And so, you know, who knows what's gonna happen here, okay? But one of the problems is like, you know, the whole Afghanistan thing or the Iraq thing is the lesson for people was the uncertainty. They're like, is the US gonna fight? Don't know. Will the US win if it fights? Don't know. Therefore roll the dice. That uncertainty is itself like tempting to folks, you know, like Putin over there, right? So point is, coming all the way back up, we were talking about how history, futures are past and FDR, like the business plot for FDR failed, but like the tech companies were able to de-platform Trump, right? And the left libertarian would say, do we want that much corporate power? Okay. And so that's, so we gave the four case for Trump de-platforming, protecting democracy. The Trump supporter case against, which is on the secret history of the shadow campaign to save the 2020 election, basically that article. The left libertarian or libertarian case against. And then to me, what is, you know, like I am more sympathetic to the libertarian slash left libertarian against. And then also maybe the fourth group, which is the non-American case, right? Which is to say every, you know, you know, Amlo, he's the, he was the, you know, head of state of Mexico, I think at that time, okay. Amlo, Macron, you know, other folks, everybody who's watching this around the world, basically saw, let's say US establishment or Democrat aligned folks just decapitate, you know, the head of state digitally, right? Like just boom, gone, okay. And they're like, well, if they can do that in public to the US president, who's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world, what does the Mexican president stand against that? Nothing, right? Like these US media corporations, these US tech companies are so insanely powerful. Everybody's on Twitter or what have you, other than China, leaving them aside. They've got their own root system. If somebody tried to de-platform Xi Jinping off of Sina Weibo, they'd probably just fall through a trap door, you know, their whole family, right? But for the rest of the world, that's on the, that is hosting their business, their politics on these US tech companies. They're like, regardless of whether it was justified on this guy, that means they will do it to anybody. Now the seal is broken, just like the bailouts, as exceptional as they were in the first era, everybody was shocked by them. Then they became a policy instrument. And now there's bailouts happening, every single bill is printing another whatever, billion dollars or something like that, right? Can I ask on your thoughts and advice on this topic? If I or anyone were to have a conversation with Donald Trump, first of all, should one do so? And if so, how do you do it? And it may not necessarily be Trump, it could be other people like Putin and Xi Jinping and so on. Let's say people that are censored. Right. Like people that platforms in general see as dangerous. Hitler, you can go, we keep bringing it up. Of course, that's the ultimate edge case, right? In the sense of, that's saying like, something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done, right? I've heard that one before. No, but I love it. So this is just- Can I just use that as an explanation with confidence for everything I do? Yeah, sure. There you go, right? Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done. Therefore this must be done. So that is the, like, all kinds of regulations, all kinds of things are kind of justified on that basis. There's a version of that, which is punch a Nazi, I decide who's a Nazi, you're a Nazi. Therefore I punch you and that's justified, yeah. Yeah, and like people say, oh, how many people are calling Israelis? Like these things, right? And so the problem with argumentum ad hilarum is, it just, I mean, people will say Obama's a Nazi, everybody will say everybody's a Nazi, right? But there is a social consensus about who, let's set Nazis aside, but who is dangerous for society. Okay, but now let's talk about that, all right? So basically, I think a more interesting example than Hitler in this context is Herbert Matthews. So Fidel Castro, before he became the communist dictator of Cuba, was on the run. He was like Osama Bin Laden at the time, he was like a terrorist that the Cuban regime had seemingly defeated. And what Herbert Matthews did is he got an intro to him, he went to the place where he was hiding out, he gave an interview and he printed this hagiography in the New York Times with this like, photo of Castro looking all mighty and so on. And he's like, Castro is still alive and still fighting, okay, and there's this book on this called The Man Who Created Fidel, okay? Where basically, NYT's article was crucial positive press that got Castro's point of view out to the world and helped lead to the communist revolution that actually impoverished Cuba, led to like gay people being, you know, like discriminated against there, led to people fleeing, you know, and drowning trying to escape, right? That's an example of where platforming somebody led to a very bad outcome. In fact, many of the communist dictators in the 20th century had like their own personal journalist, right? For example, there's a guy, John Reed, he's an American. He's buried, you know, if I get this right, I think he's buried at the Kremlin wall, okay? Why is an American buried there? Okay, because he wrote a book called 10 Days That Shook the World that whitewashed the entire Soviet revolution and the, you know, the Russian revolution in 1917, October revolution, and made these guys out to be the good guys when they were actually genocidal psychopaths, okay? He got their point of view out to the world and it was a totally misleading point of view, all right? So- What do you think he was thinking? He's like- Do you think he saw the psychopathy? You know, sometimes it's not obvious, like- Well, the French revolution had already happened. So people kind of knew that this sort of psychopathic, you know, killing in the name of equality could produce bad results, right? And, but it's more than that, right? So it's John Reed, it's Herbert Matthews, it's Edgar Snow, okay? So these are all people who should be extremely famous, right? So Edgar Snow is Mao's journalist, okay? So he wrote, you know, here's the, there's actually an article in this how 1930s reporter from Missouri became China's ideal journalist, okay? And he wrote various books, including like Red Star Over China, okay? And it's just a hagiography of Mao, right? Yeah. And then of course you've got Duranty. And he is like Stalin's biographer, right? Just to recap, John Reed brought Lenin's message to the world, Mao is dead. Duranty helped Stalin starve out the Ukrainians, Mao is dead. Edgar Snow was Mao's biographer. And Herbert Matthews was like Castro's. And this guy, David Halberstam in Vietnam, who was effectively Ho Chi Minh's. He basically went and took leaks from a communist spy. I'll give you the exact name. Pham, I'm gonna mispronounce this, but it's Perfect Spy, the incredible double life of PHAM, Pham Xuan Anh, Time Magazine reporter and Vietnamese communist agent. That guy was the source of many fabricated stories that David Halberstam printed in the New York Times that led to the undermining of the South Vietnamese regime. And, you know, for example, stories of Buddhists being killed and so on. Ashley Rinsberg in The Great Lady Winked writes this whole thing up at length, so you can go and read it for his account. But basically, all of these communist dictators had a journalist right alongside them as their biographer. Yeah. Okay? But those are tools of the propaganda machine versus- Well, so my point is, these are five examples that are on the far left that should be balanced also against the Times running profiles of Hitler on the far right. We know that basically, the Times actually also ran a whole thing, which was Hitler's mountain retreat or something like that. Do you know about that story? What year was this? I'll tell you, one second. Hitler at Home in the Clouds. Oh boy, please tell me it's early 30s? I think it's, oh yeah, this is Otto D. Tallisius. This is actually a guy that Ashley Rinsberg writes up in The Great Lady Winked, right? 1937. 37. There's another one where I think the date is wrong, but it's 39, you know. But essentially, these titles are like, where Hitler dreams and plans. He lives simply, you know, right? And there's another one, Herr Hitler at Home in the Clouds, okay? The thing about this is, absolutely, there are folks who are hagiographers of the far right, but whether you're talking Lenin and John Reed or Stalin and Walter Duranty of The New York Times or Castro and Herbert Matthews, again, of The New York Times or Edgar Snow and Mao or David Halberstam and Ho Chi Minh, again, of The New York Times, like, you start to see a pattern here where the guys who are being platformed and given a voice are these guys who end up being like far left, you know, lunatics, right? And I think part of the issue here is, you know the saying about how communists don't understand self-interest? Nationalists don't understand other interest. And so nationalists are more obvious. Isn't that good? I thought it was good. It's pretty good. Right? Pretty good. So the nationalist is very obvious in the sense of like, they're for the Aryans. They're not even for like the Slavs or whatever, right? Like, you know, basically, you know, had Hitler constructed a different ideology, you know, then like he might've gotten more support in Eastern Europe or whatever, right? But he also called the Slavs inferior, not just, you know, basically everybody was inferior to the Aryans, okay? Except maybe the English or whatever, but that was it, right? Oh, and the Japanese are honorary Aryans or something. So the nationalist declares the supremacy of their own race or culture or what have you, and doesn't understand people's other interest. But he also pumps up his own guys, okay? Same with, you know, in some ways China today, same with Japan back in the day. Whereas the communist has a message that sounds more appealing. It's a universalist message ostensibly, but it's actually a faux universalism because it's actually particularism. Like during the Soviet Union, communism, this faux universalism was basically a mask for Russian nationalism, you know, where, you know, or at least Soviet nationalism where in particular Russians were pushed into many territories and, you know, Russian speakers were, you know, like privileged in, you know, the Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Of course, Russians themselves were oppressed at home as sultanates rights. They were both victim and victimizer of the regime. Their churches were crushed and so on. As compensation, they were agents of empire. It's a tragedy all around, right? I'm not, you know, I think Russians have been hard done in many ways. They've had a very hard, hard century. They've also done hard by others. Okay, it's complicated. Those journalists you mentioned, just to elaborate, maybe you disagree with me. I wonder what you think. Sure. But I think conversation, like not to sort of glorify any particular medium, but there's something, one of the reasons I like long form podcasts or interviews, long form unedited interviews, there's been shows throughout the 20th century that do that kind of thing, but they seem to be rare. That's podcast made it much more popular and common. Is it somehow makes it easier not to do this kind of bullshit journalism that- The gotcha stuff, yeah. I feel like asking interesting and deep questions allow, I think you could sit down with Hitler in 1940, 1941, 1942, and the podcast actually serve a purpose. In 41 and 42, mid-World War II? Mid-World War II, a purpose of one, which is very important, get good information for the future so history can study it. And two, reveal to the world the way a man thinks that is beyond the propaganda. So all this stuff is complicated, but today, so in the specific issue of the folks you were talking about, like Putin, Z, Trump, right? For those folks, they are very clearly outgroup for both the US left and right, which is, you'll say the Western left and right, which are your audience. There's folks who are tankies and there are folks who are MAGA who are sympathetic. So what are tankies? Tankies are those who are, they may call themselves tankies. Let's say they're anti-imperialist left and MAGA right, okay? For different reasons are against the US establishment and for Putin or Z or something like that as an agent against the US establishment, right? So leaving those aside, the point is that most of your audience is sort of on guard, vaccinated in a sense, right? Versus Z and Putin and Trump, right? Like they know the counter arguments and so on and so forth, okay? In which case, I wouldn't think interviewing them would be like that big a deal relatively because there's so much other coverage and so on out there. I think it's probably okay. However, for something like, when what John Reed was doing and so on, when he was the sole source of information about the Russian revolution, right? That's different. That's different, right? So it's something about, it kind of gets back to the competitive environment and so on. There's no dearth of folks who are writing critical coverage of these three men, right? And so if I felt that that was insufficient, then you might need more of it, right? Just like, for example, nowadays with Stalin, there are a lot of articles and books and PDFs and so on on it. But at the time, not as much. At the time, not as much, right? That's why I brought those guys, right? Because often, it's kind of like, have your stock shelves at a supermarket? It's seem totally out of left field. No, but shoes, but the same thing, Sierra, I used to work with Sierra. The thing that is the most popular is the thing that's not on the shelf because it's being sold out, right? So in some ways, this is similar to that famous photo that people have, or image that people have on Twitter of the plane and the parts that are shot versus not, right? The survivorship bias, right? And one way of kind of thinking about it is the guys who you think of as bad guys or possible bad guys or controversial guys or whatever are those you've already got some vaccination, dude, that's why you think of them at all. Whereas the folks that I mentioned, the regulators, invisible, you don't, right? Salzberger, you know Zuckerberg, you know his pros and cons, you know who he is as a person. You don't even know Salzberger exists, most people, right? Despite the fact that he's like, certainly is powerful. You know, he owns the New York Times, he inherits it. He also got dual class stock, just like Zuck. But he's invisible, right? Well, that's why I think studying the knowns, the people that are known can help you generalize to the way human nature is, and then you start to question, are the same kind of humans existing in places that wield power? And you can assume they are, they do exist there, and then you can start to infer and ask questions. So this is kind of, what I try to do is I'm like, what is the dark matter? What is the question that is not being asked or what have you, right? And so, you know, that's not to say that you need to be so anti-memetic that you only do that. But I think you need to do that as well as understand what is good about the conventional wisdom. And, you know, for example, if you notice a lot of what I talk about is like the V1, V2, V3, where as critical as I am of, let's say, the FDA, I recognize that people want a regulated marketplace and how do we do better? As critical as I can be of the Fed, I recognize that some kind of monetary policy is necessary and Satoshi came up with a better one, right? As harsh as one can be a critic of the current system, it is really incumbent, as difficult as that is, upon one to come up with a better version. Just like academia, as much as I think current science is corrupted, what I propose is a way to actually improve on that. And actually, any true scientist say, yes, I want my work to be reproducible. Yes, I want citations to be important statements and so on and so forth. And we don't have to get everybody to agree with that, but just enough to build that better version and not regress. Yeah, there's an implied optimism within the V1, V2, V3 framework. Let me ask you at a high level about social media because you are one of its prominent users to communicate your wisdom. I use Twitter, I wouldn't really think of it as communicate my wisdom per se or anything like that. I use Twitter like I might use GitHub as a scratch pad for just kind of floating concepts. And I've got, okay, here's a frame on things, let me kind of put it out there and see what people think, get some feedback and so on. Don't you think it has lasting impact, your scratch book? I think it's good, but basically if I say what's my primary thing on Twitter, it's that. It's a scratch pad for me to kind of put some concepts out there, iterate on them, get feedback on them and so on and so forth. Do you think it's possible that the words you've tweeted on Twitter is the most impact you will have? On the world? On the world. I don't, so- Is that possible? Is it possible? Well, my tweets- What would you give me? It's a good question. I think the network state will be, I think, important, or I hope it, well, the book- The book or the concept? Good question. Sorry, just to clarify. The movement. The movement. Right? In the sense that Zionism shows that it is possible to have a book and then a conference and then a fund and eventually in the fullness of time, with a lot of time and effort, to actually get a state. And as I mentioned earlier, a lot of countries are small countries, but I didn't mention there's a guy who's the head of Kazakhstan, and he made a remark. He's like, you know, if we allow every nation that wants to have self-determination to have a state, we'd have 600 countries rather than 190. Because, you know, the option, there's many opposites of a nation state, but one of the opposites is the stateless nation. And so you remember the network state is popular? In places like Catalonia. Catalonian nationalists in Catalonia, guys who are committed Catalonian nationalists. So Catalonia, you know, this region of Spain, right? The thing is that, again, V1, V2, V3, the nation state is V2, and it beat the city state, which is like V1. And the network state I think of as a potential V3, which combines aspects of V1 and V2. So Catalonia or the Basque region, these are underneath the quote nation state of Spain, but many Catalonians think of themselves as part of a separate nation. Not all, many, okay? And so they want a state of their own. Who doesn't, if you're a nation? You know, meaning that they've got a legitimate claim from history, language, culture, all that stuff, right? The Basques do as well. The Kurds do as well, okay? Lots of ethnic groups around the world do. So in the game of musical chairs, that was the formation of current national borders, they lost out, right? So what did they do? Well, one answer is they just submit to the Spanish state, and they just speak Spanish, and their culture is erased, and their history is erased, and so on. The second is they do some sort of Ireland-like insurgency, the troubles, to try to get a thing of their own, which is obviously bad for other kinds of reasons, right? You know, violent, et cetera. What this Catalonian nationalist said, he's like, "'Look, while we can't give up on our existing path, "'the network state is a really interesting third option.'" I mean, by the way, I hadn't talked to this guy, V. Partal, okay, and he's got this site called VIAweb, and, or V-I-L-A, VILAweb, sorry. It can be, meaning the network state can be especially appealing to us. Catalans are now embarking on the task of having a normal and current state in the old way, and this is a project that we cannot give up. But this does not mean that at the same time, we are not also attentive to ideas like this, and we do not try to learn and move forward, right? Meaning, you know, the network state, right? Because that's the third way, which says, okay, maybe this particular region is not something where you're gonna be able to get, you know, a state. But just like there's more Irish people who live outside of Ireland, right? Just like, you know, the Jewish people, you know, didn't actually get a state in Poland or what have you, they had one in Palestine. Perhaps the Catalonians could crowdfund territory in other places and have essentially a state of their own that's distributed, okay? Now, again, what people are immediately gonna say is, well, that's gonna lead to conflict with the locals necessarily, and so on and so forth. But if you're parallel processing, you don't have the all-in-one bucket aspect of, I must win here, and the guy on the other side is like, I must win, you have optionality. You can have multiple different nodes around the world, just like there's multiple Chinatowns, you could have multiple Catalonian towns, right? And some places you might be able to just buy an island and that becomes, you know, the New Catalonia, right? Just like in, I think there's a region called New Caledonia and that's in the Southeast Pacific. So maybe New Catalonia is somewhere else, right? So if you're flexible on that, now, of course, a bunch of people will immediately say, they'll have 50 different objections to this. They'll say, oh, you don't get it, the whole point is the land and so on, they've been there for generations, et cetera, et cetera. Say, I do get it, but this Catalan nationalist who's literally ridden in Catalonian for, I don't know how many years, right, is basically saying, this is worth thinking about. And so it's a peaceful third way. Yeah, but it's interesting. I mean, it's a good question whether Elon Musk, SpaceX, and Tesla will be successful without Twitter. Yeah, I don't think as successful. I mean, obviously they existed before Twitter and a lot of the engineering problems are obviously non-Twitter things, right? But Twitter itself has certainly probably helped Musk with Tesla sales. The engineering, no, that's not what I mean. Oh, go ahead. The best people in the world solve the engineering problem. Yes, but he hires the people to solve them and he knows enough about engineering to hire those people. That's the point I'm making. Oh, sure. Twitter, the legend of Elon Musk is created. The vision is communicated and the best engineers in the world come to work for the vision. It's an advertisement of a man of a company pursuing a vision. I think Twitter is a great place to make viral ideas that are compelling to people, whatever those ideas are, and whether that's the network state or whether that's humans becoming a multi-planetary species. Here is a remark I had just before the pandemic related to this, okay, about Twitter helping Elon, just beyond that for a second. Maybe centralization is actually also underexplored in the design space. For example, today's social networks are essentially governed by a single CEO, but that CEO is a background figure. They aren't leading the users to do anything. What if they did? One example, could Elon Musk's then 30 million followers somehow get us to Mars faster? Tools for directed collaborative work by really large groups on the internet are still in their infancy. You can see pieces of what I was talking about, the scratch pad thing, the network state being a group which can do collective actions. This is kind of the thing, right? So technologies for internet collaboration that can be very useful to the software for future network states. Operational transformation, that's how Google Docs coordinates edits. Conflict-free replicated data types is another alternative, easier to code in some ways than operational transformation. Microtasks like Mechanical Turk, Scale.ai, and Earn.com before we sold it. Blockchains and crypto, obviously. The Polymath Project, where a bunch of people parallel processed and were able to solve an open math problem by collaborating. Wikipedia with its flaws that we talked about. Social networks and group messaging. All these are ways for collaborating. They're not just simply attacking or doing something on the internet. This is something that Elon could use, right? What works and what doesn't about Twitter? If there's something that's broken, how would you fix it? A million things I can say here. So a few things. First is fact-checking. I had this kind of fun, I thought it was a funny tweet. To anyone who wants to quote, ban lying on social media, please write down a function that takes in a statement and returns whether it is true. If you can start with the remand hypothesis, that would be amazing. Yeah. Okay? Yeah, we'll put. That's kind of funny, right? That's funny. And so now the thing is? That joke landed on like five people. Sure, you wanna explain the joke? Go. Well, no, there's a lot of problems, decidability, where the truth, that's what proofs in math is. The truth of the thing is actually exceptionally difficult to determine. And that's just a really nice example. Right. The problems that persist across centuries that have not been solved by the most brilliant minds, they're essentially true or false problems. That's right. And so when people are saying, when they were saying they want to ban lying on social media, fact-check social media, the assumption is that they know what is true. And what do they mean by that? They really mean the assertion of political power, right? With that said, do I think it could be useful to have some kind of quote fact-checking thing? Yes, but it has to be decentralized and open source. You could imagine an interesting concept of coding Trugal, like a Google, that returned what was true. It's like a modified version. Right? It's like GPT-3, but the stable diffusion version where it's open. Okay. And so now anybody, stable diffusion shows it is possible to take an expensive AI model and put it out there. Right? So you have, you know what a knowledge graph is? Like basically, you wouldn't actually, whether you have it as RDF or like a triple store kind of thing, or some other representation, it's like an ontology of A is a B and, you know, B has a C and it's got probabilities on the edges sometimes and other kinds of metadata. And this allows Google to show certain kinds of one box information where it's like, what is Steve Jobs's, you know, what is Lorraine Powell Jobs's age or birthday? They can pull that up out of the knowledge graph. Right? And so you can imagine that Trugal would have both deterministic and statistical components. And crucially, it would say whether something is true according to a given knowledge graph. And so this way, at least what you can do is you can say, okay, here's the things that are consensus reality, like the value of the gravitational constant will be the same in the MAGA knowledge graph and the US establishment knowledge graph and the CCP knowledge graph and the, I don't know, the Brazilian knowledge graph and so on and so forth. Okay. But there's other things that will be quite different. And at least now you can isolate where the point of disagreement is. And so you can have a form of decentralized fact-checking that is like, according to who, well, here is the authority and it is this knowledge graph, right? So that's like a kind of thing, right? Yeah. So that is, so that's one concept of like what next social media looks like. There's actually so much more. Another huge thing is decentralized social media, okay? Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense. There's a great article called "'The Secret Document That Transformed China.'" Do you know what China was like before 1978? I know about the atrocities. Sure. But there- To put some flesh on the bones, so to speak, okay? So basically- There's a good book I'm reading because I think a lot of documents became public recently. And so- There was a window when it opened up. Now it's probably closing back down again, but- But great biographies because of that were written. Like I'm currently reading "'Mao's Great Famine' by Frank Decatur." Yeah. Which is, ooh boy. It's crazy, okay? Yeah. Here's the thing is capitalism was punishable by death in living memory in China. Just to explain what that meant, okay? I mean, that's what communism was, right? It was literally the same China that has like the CCP, you know, the entrepreneurs and Jack Ma and so on and so forth. 40 something years ago, capitalism was punishable by death. But to give you a concrete example, this is a famous story in China. It may be apocryphal, but it's what the folks have talked about. There's a village in Xiaogang and basically all the grain that you were produced was supposed to go to the collective. And even one straw belonged to the group. At one meeting with Communist Party officials, a farmer asked, what about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? Answer, no, your teeth belong to the collective. Okay? Now, the thing is that when you're taking 100% of everything, okay? Work hard, don't work hard, everyone gets the same, so people don't wanna work, right? So what happened? These farmers gathered in secret and they did something that was like, would have gotten them executed. They were a contract amongst themselves and said, we all agree that we will be able to keep some of our own grain. We will give some of them to the regime so when it comes to collect the grain, they've got something. We'll be able to keep some of it. And if any of us are killed for doing this, then the contract said that the others would take care of their children. Okay? To keep some of what you earned. I mean, just think about how- They formed a mini capitalism society within the Communist Party. Yes. A secret capitalism society. So what happened? Amongst five people. Right, so now that they could keep some of what they earned, right? So keep some of what they earned, they had a bumper harvest. And you know what happened with that bumper harvest? That made the local officials really suspicious and mad. They weren't happy that there was a bumper harvest. They were like, what are you doing? You're doing capitalism? Yeah. Right? And in a few years earlier, they might have just been executed. And in fact, many were. That's what it means when you see millions dead. Millions dead means guys were shot for keeping some grain for themselves. Okay, it means like guys came and kicked in the door of your collective farm and raped your wife and took you off to a prison camp and so on and so forth. That's what communism actually was, okay? It hasn't been depicted in movies. There's a great post by Ken Billingsley in the year 2000 called, if I get this right, Hollywood's Missing Movies, okay? This is basically here, I'll paste this link so you can put it in the show notes, all right? This is worth reading. It's still applicable today, but now that we have stable diffusion, now we have all these people online, now that Russia and China are America's national bad guys, as they were before, they are again, perhaps we'll get some movies on what communism actually was during the 20th century and how bad it was, right? And vaccinate people against that as well as against Nazism, which they should be, okay? The point of this, go ahead. No, because I'm congratulating myself on the nice because you're sending me excellent links on WhatsApp and I just saw that there's an export chat feature. Yes, great. Because we also have disappearing messages on, so I was like, all right, this is great. Great. I get it. This, your ability to reference sources is incredible, so thank you for this. Anyway. Otherwise, if I say something, it sounds too surprising, so that's why I wanna make sure I have. Just on this topic. Yeah, so like, yeah, I mean, people would be like shot for holding some grain. So what happened though was Deng Xiaoping said, okay, we're not gonna kill you. In fact, we're gonna actually set up the first special economic zone in Shenzhen. He didn't try to flip the whole country from communist to capitalist in one go. Instead he's like, we can reform in one place. And in fact, he fenced it off from the rest of China. And it did trade with Hong Kong and he spent his political capital on this one exception. It grew so fast that gave him more political capital. Some people think actually that the Sino-Vietnamese war was Deng's way of just distracting the generals while he was turning China around to get it back on the capitalist road. And what he did was the opposite of a rebranding. He did a reinterpretation. Like a rebranding is where the substance is the same but the logo is changed. You're now, you were Facebook, you're now meta. That's a rebranding. Reinterpretation is where the logo and the branding is the same. They're still the CCP. They're still the Chinese Communist Party but they're capitalist now, the engine under the hood. It's deniable. And this is a very common, once you realize those are different things, it's like swap the front end, swap the back end. Yeah. Go ahead. Good way to put it. Right? It's really good. Yeah, yeah. I'm enjoying your metaphors and way of talking about stuff. Yes, I get, yeah, yeah. Swap, you could, yeah. Rebranding is swap the front end. Reinterpretation is swap the back end. That's right. And once you realize that, you're like, okay, I can just like as an engineer, you can kind of, okay, sometimes I wanna do this on the front end, sometimes I wanna do it on the back end, sometimes it's explicit and sometimes user doesn't need to see it and it's on the back end. Lots of political stuff, you know, is arguably not just best done on the back end, but always done on the back end. One of the points I make in the book is, left is the new right is the new left, is, you know, if you look through history, the Christian King, the Republican conservative, the CCP entrepreneur, the WASP establishment, these are all examples of a revolutionary left movement becoming the ruling class right. Okay, like the Republican conservative, just as that one example, I go through extended description of this in the book, but the Republicans were the radical Republicans, the left of 1865, they won the revolution and their moral authority led them to have economic authority in the late 1800s. You wouldn't want a Democrat Confederate trader as the head of your, you know, railroad company, would you, right? So all the Confederate traders that were boxed out from the plum positions in the late 1800s. And so what happened was the Republicans turned their moral authority into economic authority, made tons of money. The Democrats then started repositioning, not as a party of the Southern racists, but the poor, right? And, you know, the cross of gold speech by William Jenkins Bryan was part of that. There's a gradual process that reaches a pot, not a pot, but let's say a crucial mark with the election of FDR, where it was actually not the 1932, but 1936 election that black voters switched over to FDR, okay? That was actually the, like the major flip to like 70%, you know, to the Democrats. Now they'd repositioned as a party of the poor, not the party of the South, okay? And Republicans had lost some economic authority, or rather they had moral authority, they turned into economic authority. They started to lose some moral authority. The loss of moral authority was complete by 1965. That was actually a mop-up. People dated, you know, the civil rights movement as the big way where the Republicans lost moral authority. It's not really, that was a mop-up because 1936, 30 years earlier was when black voters switched to the Democrats, okay? So 1965 was another 10 points moving over of black voters to Democrats. Republicans had completely lost moral authority 100 years after the civil war, okay? Then the next 50 years, that loss of moral authority meant that they lost economic authority, because now you wouldn't want a Republican bigot as a CEO of your tech company anymore, would you? Right? So by 2015, now you have, it's like two sine waves that are staggered, right? Moral authority leads to economic authority, leads to loss of moral authority, leads to loss of economic authority. And so now you have the Democrats, you know, have completed 155 year arc from the defeated party in the civil war to the dominant party in the US establishment. All the woke capitalists are now at the very top. And now the same repositioning is happening, where if you're so woke, why are you rich? You get it, right? Like, you know, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich is the normal kind of thing, right? If you're so woke, if you're so holy, why is like, for example, the BLM founder, why do they have this million dollar mansion, right? If you're so woke and it's all about being good and you're anti-capitalist, how come you seem to be raking in the money, et cetera, right? This is an argument which I'm not sure how long it will go. It might take years to play out, it might take decades to play out. I think probably on the order of a decade. You're gonna see, in my view, the repositioning. If the Democrats are the woke capitalists, the Republicans will eventually become, are becoming the Bitcoin maximalists. Why? Because, you know, if one guy picks left, the other guy picks right. It's literally like magnets kind of repelling. They're sort of forced into the other corner here, right? And the Bitcoin maximalists will essentially, where this guy says centralization, they say decentralization, where they defend the right of capital to do anything, the maximalists will say, actually, you're all cantillionaires, you're all benefiting from printed money, you don't have anything that's legitimate, you don't actually own anything, it's all a handout from the government, and so on and so forth, right? And so that's a counter positioning that will basically attack the wokes by how much money they're making. They're not contesting the ideology. So when one guy signals economics, you signal culture. When the other guy signals culture, you signal economics. That's actually, that's a whole thing I can talk about. Should I talk about that for a second? Sure, is this integrated into the forces that you talk about? You've talked about the three forces, the trifecta of forces that affect our society, which is the wokes, let's say. Woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital. You talk so fast, and I think so slow. No, no, no. Woke capital, communist capital, and crypto capital. Can you explain each of those three? We actually talked about each of the three in part, but it'd be nice to bring them together in a beautiful triangle. Then I will also come back up, and I'll talk about how the CCP story relates to social media and decentralized social media, okay? All right, so NYT, CCP, BTC is woke capital, communist capital, crypto capital. And communist capital is, the simplest it is, you must submit. The Communist Party is powerful, CCP is powerful, and you are not. In China, you just submit. CCP is an embodiment of communist capital that you're talking about. Well, yeah, so basically, and by the, in China, they call it CPC, you know? So basically, they don't like it, usually, if you say CCP, right? So, like Communist Party of China, as opposed to Chinese Communist Party of China. Basically, that is capitalism, that is a Chinese pool of capital, that billion-person pool, okay? That's WeChat, and it's Alibaba, and it's that entire kind of thing, that is one just social network with currency, the whole thing's vertically integrated. When we say communist, what do you mean here? Why is the word communist important? Why don't you just say China? So, is communist an important word? It's just, well, it's actually- Or is it just a catchy label? It's a catchy label, but I think it's also important, because it seems, it's paradoxical, right? So, I had a thread on this. The future is communist capital versus woke capital versus crypto capital. Each represents a left-right fusion that's bizarre by the standards of the 1980s consensus. It's PRC versus MMT versus BTC, all right? And why is it bizarre by the standards of the 1980s consensus? Well, in the 1980s, you wouldn't think the communists would become capitalists, but they did. You wouldn't think that the wokes, the progressives, right, would become so enamored with giant corporations and their power, right? They've seen something to liken that, right? And you also wouldn't think that the non-Americans or the post-Americans or the internationalists would be the champions of capital, because you'd think it's the American nation, right? So, rather than the conservative American nationalists being the defenders of capital, you have the liberal Americans who are with capital, you have the communist Chinese who are with capital, and you have the internationalists who are with capital. And it's the conservative American nationalists who are in some ways against that, which is kind of funny, right? So, it's like this weird ideological flippening that if you take the long lens, you have these poles that kind of repel each other, okay? So, just on the CCP, NYT, BTC thing. NYT, by the way, is woke capital. Yeah, what is NYT? So, its formula is a little interesting. If CCP is just, you must submit because they're powerful, okay, and then you bow your head because the Chinese Communist Party is strong. Woke capital is, you must sympathize. Why do you bow your head, Lex? Oh, because you're a white male. Therefore, you're guilty. You must bow your head because you are powerful. Yet, notice it ends in the same place, in your head looking to the ground, right? In China, it's because they're powerful, so therefore you must bend your head. For the wokes, it's the left-handed version where you are powerful and it's shameful, so you should bow your head, right? Right. Okay? But it ends in your head bowed. It's an ideology of submission. It's not that subtle, but it's somewhat subtle. And then finally, crypto capital is head held high. You must be sovereign, okay? Which, and one of the things I point out in the book is, each of these polls is negative in some ways when taken to extreme, but also negative in its opposite. For example, obviously just totally submitting to total surveillance is bad, but a society where nobody submits is San Francisco where people just rob stores and walk out in the middle shoplifting all these goods and nothing happens, right? A society where you have the woke level of sympathy where you get to the kind of insanity of math is white supremacist and whatever nonsense is happening today is terrible, but a society that's totally stripped of sympathy is also not one that one would wanna be part of, right? That's just like the, whether it's 4chan's actual culture or it's feign culture or something like that, or some weird combination, that's also not good. It's like Russia in the 90s, like nobody trusts anybody, that's also bad. And being totally sovereign, that sounds good. And there's a lot that is good about it. I'm sympathetic to this corner, but being totally sovereign, you go so capitalist, so sovereign that you're against the division of labor. You don't trust anybody. So you have to pump your own water and so on. So you actually have a reduced standard of living over here, okay? And conversely- Like survivalist or whatever. Survivalist type of stuff, right? And you just go kind of too crazy into that corner. And then of course, though, the other extreme of having no sovereignty is the, you will own nothing and be happy. Everything's in the cloud and can be deleted at any point, right? So each of these has badness when it's there, but also its total extreme opposite is bad. And so you wanna kind of carve out an intelligent intermediate of these three poles, and that's the decentralized center or the re-centralized center, I call it. Now, with that said, I think there is a repositioning in particular of woke capital that is happening. And I think if the 2000s was a global war on terror, and then the channel just changed to wokeness in the 2010s, and when I mean channel change, have you seen Paul Graham's graph, or actually David Rosado's graph that Paul Graham posted? No, but this is a good chance to say that Paul Graham is awesome. Okay, yeah. And so here is this graph, okay? David Rosado's data analysis, I think, that put this together. So basically, this is a graph of the word usage frequency in New York Times, 1970 to 2018. And he's got some controls there. Paul Graham tweets, "'Hypothesis' Although some newspapers can survive the switch to online subscriptions, none can do it and remain politically neutral, quote newspaper record. You have to pick a side to get people to subscribe." And there's a bunch of plots on the x-axis is years, on the y-axis is the frequency of use. And sexism has been going up, misogyny has been going up, sexist patriarchy, mansplaining, toxic masculinity, male privilege. All these terms have been going up very intensely in the past decade. Yeah, but really, 2013 is the exact moment. You see these things, they're flat, and then just go vertical, mansplaining, toxic masculinity. What precisely happened in 2013? Ah, so I talk about this in the book, but I think fundamentally what happened was tech hurt media and their revenue dropped by about $50 billion over the four years from 08 to 2012. Yeah. Tech helped Obama get reelected and media was positive on tech until December 2012. They wrote like the nerds go marching in the Atlantic. Then after January, 2013, once Obama was ensconced, then the knives came out because basically these tech guys were bankrupting them. They were through supporting them. And so the journals got extremely nasty and just basically they couldn't build search engines or create social networks, but they could write stories and shape narratives. So a clear editorial direction went down that essentially took all of this, all these weapons that had been developed in academia to win status competitions in humanities departments. And then they just deployed them. And essentially somebody observed that wokeness is the combination of Foucauldian deconstruction and civil rights, where deconstruction takes away the legitimacy of the old order, and then civil rights says, okay, the only thing that's good is this, which says the old order is also bad in a different way, but this is what's good. And that is the underpinning ideology that all these words have embedded in them, like an ideology, right? Another way of thinking about it is, this is not my reference, but I'll cite it anyway. The glossary of the Greek military junta, right? The creation and or use of special terms are employed by the junta as propaganda tools, because essentially the word itself embeds a concept. You can Russell conjugate something one way or the other, right? Russell conjugation is this concept that I sweat, you perspire, but she glows. You can always take something, you are uncontrollably angry, but he is righteously indignant, okay? You have a thin skin, they clap back, right? So once you kind of realize that these words have just been chosen in such a way as to delegitimize their target, and they all went vertical in 2013, and they were suddenly targeted against their erstwhile allies in tech, but also just across the country, you can see that this great awokening, that's what Iglesias called it, by playing words to the great awakening, right? This kind of spasm of quasi-religious extremism. I wouldn't call it religious, because it's not God-centered, it's really state and network-centered, so I call it a doctrine, which is a superset of religion and political doctrine. These words went vertical, and all the terrorism stuff you just noticed kind of fell off a cliff. That was the obsession of everything in the 2000s, and just channel change, right? It's amazing how that happened. It's not like any of the pieces got picked up. Some of those wars are still raging, of course. And there's victims to this wokeism movement. But in a weird way, even though some parts of it, just like there's wars in the Middle East that still keep raging, there's certainly active fronts of wokeism, but in a sense, the next shift is already on. You know why? It's a pivot from wokeism to statism. In many ways, NYT is sort of, and more generally the US establishment, is sort of kind of coming, you may not believe this, they're kind of coming back to the center a little bit, in the same way that Lenin, after the revolution, implemented the new economic policy, which you may be aware of, right? Which was just like, X percent more capitalism. He kind of, boot on the neck, take control, but then ease up for a bit, and the so-called net men during the 20s were able to eke out something. It was like, oh, okay, fine, he's gonna be easier on us. Then it intensified again, because basically by loosening up, they were able to consolidate control, they weren't putting as much pressure on, right? Then it went extremely intense again, right? Similar to Mao's 100 flowers thing, let 100 flowers bloom, and everybody came out, and then he found out all the people who were against him, and he executed a bunch of them, right? So what's happening now is, NYT is, and more generally the US establishment, is somewhat tacking back to the center, where they're not talking BLM and abolish the police, they're saying, fund the Capitol police, right? They've gone from the narrative of 2020, which was meant to win a domestic contest, where they said, America is a systemically racist country, tear down George Washington, we're so evil, to the rhetoric of 2022, which is, we're the global champion of democracy, and every non-white country is supposed to trust us. Now, obviously those are inconsistent, right? If you're in India, or you're a Nigerian, you just heard that America's calling itself the same guys, by the way, saying it's so institutionally racist, systemically racist, and now you're saying, well, we're the leader of the free world, and the number one. Obviously there's an inconsistency between the domestic propaganda and the foreign propaganda, right? There's a contrast between abolish the police and put two billion for the Capitol police. You can reconcile this, and you can say, the US establishment is pro-federal and anti-local and state. So abolish the local police, who tend to be Republican or rightist, but fund the FBI, fund the Capitol police, who tend to be, just like in the Soviet Union, is the national things like the KGB, right? They were for the state, but there were all these local nationalist ethnic insurgencies in like Estonia and other places, right? So you can reconcile them, but nevertheless on its face, those are contradictory. So what are you gonna get, I think? I think you're gonna get this rotation where a fair number of the folks on the sort of authoritarian right are kind of pulled back into the fold a bit, okay? These are the cops and the military and whatnot, some of them, because as this decade progresses, you're gonna see the signaling on American statism as opposed to wokeism, okay? Which is 30 degrees back towards the center, right? Conversely, on the other side, you're gonna have the left libertarians and right libertarians who are signaling crypto and decentralization and so on, okay? And so the next one isn't red versus blue, it's orange versus green. It's the dollar versus Bitcoin. And so you have the authoritarians, the top of the political compass versus the quote libertarians, right? And here's the visual of that. So that's why, as I wrote the book and after I showed, I was like, I'm already seeing this shift happening from war on terror to wokeism to American statism, right? And here, just take a look at this visual. Interesting, so the visual is an animation transforming the left versus right, libertarian versus authoritarian, to Bitcoin, dollar versus crypto. That's right, and some folks switch sides, right? Because you have folks like Jack Dorsey and a lot of the tech founders in basically the lower left corner, right? Who were blue but are now gonna become orange or are orange. And you have folks in the upper right corner who are going to, at the end of the day, pick the dollar and the American flag over the internationalist ideals of cryptocurrency. The realigning, as you call it. Let me ask you, briefly, we do need to get a comment, your visionary view of things. We're at a low point in the cryptocurrency space. From a shallow analysis perspective, or maybe in a deeper sense, if you can enlighten me, do you think Bitcoin will rise again? Yes. Do you think it will go to take on fiat, to go over a million dollars, to go to these heights? I mean, I think it's possible, and the reason I think it's possible is I think a lot of things might go to a million dollars. Because inflation. Oh, because of inflation. Right. What I'm... That was an important point, right? Yes, it's a very important point, yes. Because you're seeing, essentially... Yes. Right, sort of the choke pointing on energy is pushing up prices across the board for a lot of things. China's not doing us any favors with the COVID lockdowns. Putin's not doing the world any favors with this giant war. There's a lot of bad things happening in the physical world. You have, I mean, when China, Russia, and the US are all, and Europe is, there's folks who are just insane about degrowth, and they're against, they're pushing for burning coal and wood, right? So a lot of prices are going up in a really foundational and fundamental way. And with that said, also, the dollar is in some ways strengthening against certain other things, because a lot of other countries are dying harder, right? And you've got riots in Sri Lanka, and riots in Panama, and riots in all these places, right? So it's very complicated, because you've got multiple different trends going in the same way. Your Bitcoin maximus would just say infinity over 21 million, and so therefore you print all the dollars, there's only 21 million Bitcoins, so Bitcoin goes to infinity. But it can be something where lots of other currencies die, and the dollar is actually exported via stable coins, okay? But I do think- So it still moves, fiat still moves somehow into the cryptocurrencies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's kind of like Microsoft, where, I mean, Windows is still around, right? Microsoft's still around. It's still a multi-hundred billion dollar company. It had- He doesn't mean it, he doesn't mean it, don't worry. All my machines are Windows, and let's do a boot, yeah. Okay, okay. I don't own a single Mac. Really? Okay, you are unusual on that. Yeah. That's, so at least for our- It's not ideology, just convenience. Fine. I mean, they actually now, post-Sethia, they do make some good stuff, right? Like Microsoft Teams is good, right? Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff. New CEO has done a lot of innovative things, like GitHub. Yeah, I mean, well, there's an acquisition, but still, I give them credit for it. The acquisition, the pivoting of vision, and motivations, and focus, and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, yes. Microsoft is an analogy, a metaphor for something? Well, yeah, so basically just like, they didn't need a turnaround, but they did endure to the present day. They didn't die from Google app. I mean, for the massive attacks on them, they didn't die. They're less powerful, but they make more money, right? Yes. And I think that might be something that, I mean, our best case scenario is, the US establishment, or CCP, has more power over fewer people. Okay. I see. And so, but you can't exit. If you're there, you're kind of knuckling under, or whatever, but you can't exit, right? And so I mentioned those three polls. CCP is obviously a billion people, 1.4 aligned under the digital yuan, and so on, right? NYT is the entire, it's the tech companies, it's the US dollar, it is the establishment. And then crypto capital is everybody else. But I actually think that over time, that third world is web three this time, and that's the third poll, and that's India and it's Israel, and it's lots of American conservatives and left libertarians and libertarians, and it's also lots of Chinese liberals, all the folks who are trying to get out of China, because it's become so nationalist and crazy and difficult for capitalism. And so if you take basically non-establishment Americans on both left and right, okay, the bottom two quadrants in the political compass I talked about, you take the liberal Chinese, you take the Israelis and the Indians, why? Because they don't, both of them have a lot of tech talent, right, they're the number one and number two demographics for tech founders, and they want to, while they are generally sympathetic to the West, right, and they have more ties to the West, they also are more cautious about national interests rather than just starting fights, you know, where that's how they would think about it, right, they just, you know, India thinks of itself as a poor country, Israel thinks of itself as a small country, and so therefore it needs to not just get in every fight just for the sake of it, and so need to maintain a cautious distance with China, but not like do what Pelosi is doing and try and start like a big thing, okay? I think Israel is similar, where it's maintaining diplomatic relations with China, it's more friendly towards China than the US is. India and Israel, I think, are two sovereign states that have a lot of globally mobile tech talent that obviously have ties to the West with a large diaspora that are hard to demonize, you know, in the sense of willing to argue on the internet. I just put it like that, in English, right, it's very important. And them plus enough Americans plus enough Chinese can set up another poll that is not for Cold War or military confrontation, but for peace and trade and freedom and so on and so forth, right? That's the center, as opposed to the, you know, left of the woke American US establishment or the right of the ultra-nationalist CCP, right? That's what I think about. Now, what I would say here is, the reason I think these are kind of the three polls, you can argue against this, right? You can say, it's a unipolar world, America's totally dominant, that's one argument. You can say it's a bipolar world, it's just the US versus China. No, everybody else will have to be forced to align with one or the other. Jay Shankar, you know, actually explicitly rejected this. He's like, look, there's a billion people in India. It's coming up on, it will eventually be like the number three economy. It's on the rise. He's got the history and culture. He thinks he's entitled to have, India's entitled to have its own side, right? In such a thing. It's a funny way of putting it, right? But it's also true. And so you could say it's unipolar, you could say it's bipolar, you could say it's just multipolar and everybody is kind of, they're, you know, India, Israel, these are groups out there. But I actually think it's gonna be tripolar. And the reason it's tripolar is, these three pools are the groups that have enough media and money and scale and whatnot to really kind of be self-consistent civilizations. Obviously China's like the vertically integrated, like Apple or whatever, just like one country. Maybe a stable ideology. A stable ideology, that's right, right? Obviously the, you know, the Borgs have control of lots of institutions. They've got the US establishment and they've got the tech companies, they've got the media companies and so on. But crypto is basically everybody else. And crucially crypto has inroads in China and America where it's hard to demonize it as completely foreign because there's many, many, many huge proponents of the universalist values of crypto in America and China, because it is true global rule of law and free speech and, you know, so on. It is genuinely universalist in a way where America can no longer be, you know, the number one rule of the rules-based order is America is always number one. And China doesn't even pretend to maintain a rules-based order, right? Whereas for all those countries that don't wanna either be dominated by the US media corporations that can, or social media that can just censor Trump, nor do they wanna be dominated by China, this is an attractive alternative, a platform they can make their own, right? So that's where I think, you know, I wrote an article on this in Foreign Policy on, here, here's two articles that talk about this a little bit. It's called Great Protocol Politics. And then here's another one on the sort of domestic thing, Bitcoin is civilization for barrier-wise, okay? But I wanna just come up the stack a little bit and just return to that original point, which I diverged on, which was why, I gave the whole example of how we got into China because I talked about how China had gone from communist to capitalist and letting people have just a share of what they owned, right? With social media, we're still in kind of the communist era of social media almost, where whatever you earn on social media, like Google takes its cut, Twitter takes 100%, you're nothing for all your tweets or anything like that. Not only do you have, do you earn nothing, you might get a little rev share on TikTok or YouTube, you can do okay, right? But not only do you earn either nothing or a little bit, you have no digital property rights, even more fundamentally. You are at the, just the whim of a giant corporation can hit a button and everything you worked for over years, gone, okay? That is, even if that is quote, the current state of events, the state of affairs rather, that is not the right balance of power to be able to unperson somebody at the touch of a key and take away everything in the digital world when we're living more and more in the digital world. We need to check on that power. And the check on that power is crypto and its property rights and its decentralization, right? Then when I say decentralization, I mean, your money and your digital property is by default yours. And there has to be a due process for someone to take that away from you. Everything, all work is online. All your money is online. Your presence is online. If that can just be taken away from you with the press of a key, that just gives, you know, bad governments, bad corporations, so much power that that's wrong, right? That's why I'm a medium and long-term bull on crypto, simply because the check on this thing. And that if you think about it in terms of just abstract decentralization is one thing, but you think about it in terms of property rights, it's quite another. And now what that also means is once you have property rights and you have decentralized social media, it'll be like the explosion of trade that happened after China went from communist to capitalist. Literally billions of people around the world are no longer giving everything to the collective. They own the teeth in their head now, finally. Okay, it's funny, right? So you're lexfriedman.eth, you own it. The keys are on your computer. The bad part is, of course, they can get hacked or something like that. Then you can deal with that with social recovery. There's ways of securing keys. But the good part is, ta-da, you actually have property rights in the Hernando de Soto sense. You have something you own, ownership, digital ownership. The cloud is great, but crypto gives you some of the functionality of the cloud while also having some of the functionality of the offline world where you have the keys. So it's a V3, right? It's a continuous theme, right? The V1 was offline, I've got a key, I own it, I have de facto control. V2 is the cloud, someone else manages it for me, it's hosted, I get collaboration, so on. V3 is the chain where you combine aspects of those, right? You have the global state of the cloud, but you have the local permission and controlling of the private key, okay? So that's why I'm a medium to long-term ultra bull on crypto and I've actually, there's a podcast I gave with Asymco where I talked through how crypto actually doesn't just go after finance. So it's gold and it's wire transfers and it's crowdfunding and it's all finance with DeFi. But it's actually also search and it's social and it's messaging. It's actually even operating systems and eventually cloud and whatnot. Do you want me to talk about that briefly? Yeah. Yeah, if you can briefly see- Sure, very briefly. How broad you see the effect of crypto. So first, crypto is fundamentally a new way of building backend systems, right? So if you think about how big a deal it was to go from AT&T's corporate Unix to Linux, it's permissionless, right? When you went from, as much as I admire a lot of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have done at OpenAI, I mean, they're phenomenal in terms of research, they've pushed the envelope forward, I give them a ton of credit, right? Still, it was great to see stable diffusion out there, which was open source AI, right? And so from a developer, from a power user standpoint, whenever you have the unlocked version, like an unlocked cell phone, it's always gonna be better, right? So what crypto gives you, obviously it's every financial thing in the world. You can do stocks, bonds, et cetera. It's not, just like the internet wasn't just a channel. It wasn't like radio and TV and internet. It was internet radio and internet TV and internet this and internet that. Everything was the internet. All media became the internet. Crypto is not an asset class, it's all asset classes. It's crypto stocks and crypto bonds, et cetera. In a real sense, private property arguably didn't exist in the same way before crypto. International law didn't exist before crypto. How are you gonna do a deal between Brazil and Bangladesh? If a Brazilian company wants to acquire a Bangladeshi company, they usually have to set up a US adapter in between because otherwise, what are the tax or the other obligations between the two? You set up a US adapter or a Chinese adapter to go between, but now that Brazilian and Bangladeshi can go peer to peer because they're using blockchain. They can agree on a system of law that is completely international and that's code so each party can diligence it without speaking Portuguese and Bengali. So that's why I am a long-term bull on crypto. I just described the finance case. Let me go through the others. Social, so you have the private keys for your ENS. You have apps like Farcaster. You basically have decentralized social media where there's different variants. Some, you just log in with your crypto username. Others, the entire social network and all the likes and posts are on chain like Deeso, but there's several different versions, right? Search, once you realize block explorers are an important stealth threat to search. They're very high traffic sites like blockchain.com and Etherscan that Google has just totally slept on. They don't have a block explorer. You don't have to do anything in terms of trading or anything like that. Google does not have a block explorer. Why? They don't think of it as search, but it is search. It's absolutely search. It's a very important kind of search engine. And once you have crypto social, you now show that you're not just indexing in a block explorer like on-chain transactions, but on-chain communications, okay? So now you suddenly see, oh, the entire social web that Google couldn't index. It could only index the World Wide Web and not the social web. Now it's actually the on-chain signed web, right, because every post is digitally signed. It's a new set of signals. It's way easier to index than either the World Wide Web or the social web, because it's open and public. So this is a total disruptive thing to search in the medium term, because it's a new kind of data sets index, right? So that's how it's a threat to social, to search. It is a threat to messaging. Why? Because, or it's disruptive eventually, because of the ENS name, as I mentioned, is like a universal identifier. You can send encrypted messages between people. That's a better primitive to base it on. You know, WhatsApp is just claiming that they're end-to-end encrypted, but with an ENS name or with a crypto name, you can be provably audibly end-to-end encrypted because you're actually sending it back and forth, right? Because the private key is local, right? That itself, given how important that is, right? You could man-in-the-middle signal or WhatsApp because there's a server there, right? If you have, you know, so end-to-end encrypted messaging will happen and with payments and all this other stuff, okay? So you get the crypto messaging apps, you get operating systems. Why? Well, the frontier of operating systems, I mean, look, you know, Windows, Linux, and Mac OS have been around forever. But if you actually think about, you know, what is a blockchain? Well, there's operating systems, there's web browsers. A blockchain is the most complicated thing since an operating system or web browser because it's a kind of operating system. Why? It's got, you know, something like Ethereum has an EVM. It's got a programming language. It's got an ecosystem where people monetize on it. They build front-end apps and they build back-end apps. They interoperate between each other. This is the frontier of operating systems research. People haven't thought of it that way, right? It's also the frontier of a lot of things in databases. You will get a crypto LinkedIn where there's zero knowledge proofs of various credentials. Okay? Basically, every single web two company, I can probably come up with a web three variant of it, right? Like Ethereum is, I mean, and this is high praise for both parties, but Ethereum is like the crypto stripe, or the web three stripe. And you will see versions of everything else that are like this. But, you know, I kind of described search, social, messaging, operating systems, the phone, right? Solana is doing a crypto phone. Why do you want that? Again, digital property. Apple was talking about running some script to find if people were having, you know, CSAM, like, you know, child porn or whatever on their phones, right? And even NYT actually reported that, like Google ran something like this and found false positive. Some guy had to take a photo of a kid for, you know, medical diagnosis. It got false, you know, falsely flagged as CSAM. He lost access to his account. Total nightmare. Imagine just getting locked out of your Google account, which you're so dependent on, right? As more and more of your digital life goes online, you know, is it really that much ethically different if it's the Chinese state that locks you out or an American corporation, right? Basically, it's operationally very similar. You just have no recourse. You're unpersoned, right? So the crypto phone becomes like insanely important because you have a local set of private keys. Those are the keys to your currency and your passport and your services and your life, right? So like, become something that you just hold on you with your person at all times, like your normal phone. You might have backups and stuff, but you know, the crypto phone is an insanely important thing, okay? And so that's search, that's social, that's messaging, that's operating systems, that's a phone, that's a lot right there. Yeah, that's beautiful. Can I have 120 seconds to just finish up a few more thoughts on social media? Yes, please. Okay, AI and AR, okay? This massive impact, obviously, of AI and social media. You're gonna have completely new social media companies, gestures, other things, you know, TikTok having, you know, some of the AI creation tools in there is just like a V1 of that. There's this whole thread with everything, stable diffusion is unlocking. But basically, this is gonna melt Hollywood. US media corporations that took a hit in the 2010s, we're now gonna be able to have everyone around the world able to tell their story. And all the stuff about AI ethics and AI bias, the ultimate bias is centralized AI. Only decentralized AI is truly representative. You cannot be faux representative. You cannot claim that Google is representing Nigerians and Indians and Brazilians and Japanese, like those folks need to have access themselves, right? So that's a fundamental ethical argument against centralized AI. It's unethical and it's like, you know, this faux thing where you might have like faux diversity in the interface, but you haven't actually truly decentralized it. This is the woke capitalism, right? You justify it with the wokeness and you make the money by centralizing it. But the actual way of doing it is letting it free for the world and letting people build their own versions. If people wanna build a Asian Lord of the Rings, they can do that. If they wanna build an Indian one, they can do that. If they, you know, whatever they want, right? So that is the argument for AI decentralization and for how that kind of links to this. I love that AI decentralization fixes the bias problem in AI, which a lot of people seem to- Yeah, centralization- Talk about and focus on. Yeah, centralization is inherently unrepresentative, fundamentally, like you can like mathematically show it. It's not representing the world. The decentralization allows anybody to pick it up and make it their own, right? And centralization is almost always a mask for like that private corporate interest, right? It's like, one of the things about the woke capitalism thing by the way, is the deplatforming of Trump was political. Other things are political. But do you know what deplatforming started with? In the late 2000s, early 2010s, all the open social stuff was when deplatforming was being used as a corporate weapon against Meerkat and Zynga and Teespring, right? These were companies that were competing with features of TweetDeck, et cetera. They're competing with features of Twitter or Facebook, and the API was cut off. And that was when actually progressives were for net neutrality and an open internet and open social against the concentration of corporate power and so on. Remember that, right? And so what's gonna happen is both those two things, the political and the corporate are gonna come together. Why? In the Soviet Union, denunciation was used as a tool to, for example, undercut romantic rivals, right? There's a great article called The Practice of Denunciation in the Soviet Union, right? Which talks about all these examples where the ideological argument was used to kick somebody into the 300-like pit that existed at the center of the Soviet Union. Anybody could be kicked into the pit at any moment. And ta-da, well, Ivan's out, and now, hey, Anna, whatever, right? OK, that same thing is gonna be used by woke capitalists, is being used by woke capitalists, where the woke argument is used to justify pushing their competitor out of the app store or downracking them in search. Well, again, you wouldn't want a bigot to be in search who could compete with us or whatever, right? And conversely, so the wokeness is used to make money, and the money is used to advance the ideology. It's like this kind of back and forth. Sometimes, right now, you think of those as independent things, but then they fuse, OK? And so that's very clear with the AI bias arguments, where it just so happens that it's so powerful, Lex, this technology is so powerful in the wrong hands, it could be used, so we will charge you $9.99 for every use of it. How's that? How altruistic is that? Is that amazingly altruistic? It's really good, right? So once you kind of see that, as I said, whenever they're positioning on economics, you can go in culture. When they're positioning on culture, you can go in economics. If they're so woke, why are they rich? If they're so concerned about representation, why is it centralized? Answer, they're not actually concerned about it. They're making money, right? OK, so that is, I think, in a few words, blows up a lot of the AI bias type stuff, right? OK, they're basically, they're biasing AI. All right, so the amount of stuff that can be done with AI now, like, it also helps the pseudonymous economy, as I was talking about with the AI Zoom. So you have totally new sites, totally new apps that are based on that. I think it may, I mean, it changes. You're going to have new Google Docs, all these kinds of things. You might have, you know, once you can do things with just a few taps, you might have sites that are focused more on producing rather than just consuming. Because, you know, you might, with AI, you can change the productivity of gestures. You know, you can have a few gestures, like, for example, the image to image thing with the Seattle diffusion, where you make a little cartoon third graders painting, and it becomes a real painting. A lot of user interfaces will be rethought now that you can actually do this incredible stuff with AI, it knows what you want it to do, right? So, and I saw this funny thing, which was a riff on Peter Thiel's line, which is AI is centralized and crypto is decentralized. And somebody was saying, actually, it turns out crypto is centralized with the CBDCs and stable coin and so on, but AI is getting decentralized with stable diffusion. Ha ha, right? Which is funny. And I think there's centralized and decentralized versions of each of these, right? And finally, the third pole that actually, you know, Thiel, you know, he talks about AI and crypto, but the third pole is actually, that's sort of underappreciated because people think it already exists, is social. That just is keeping on going, right? And obviously the next step in social is AR and VR. And why is it so obvious? Because it's meta, you know, it's Facebook. Now I saw this very silly article, it's like, oh my God, Facebook is so dumb for putting a $10 billion into, you know, virtual reality. Right? And I'm like, okay, the most predictable innovation in the world, in my view, is the AR glasses. Have you talked about this on the podcast before? AR and VR? I mean, of course a lot, but the AR is not as obvious, actually. Okay, so AR glasses. What are AR glasses? So you take Stampshed Spectacles, Google Glass, Apple's AR Kit, Facebook's Oculus Quest 2, right? Or MetaQuest 2, whatever, okay? You put those together and what do you get? You get something that has the form factor of glasses that you'd wear outside, okay? Which can, with a tap, record or give you Terminator vision on something, or with another tap go totally dark and become VR glasses, okay? So normal glasses, AR glasses, VR glasses recording. It's as multifunctional as your phone, but it's hands-free. And you might actually even wear it more than your phone. In fact, you might be blind without your AR glasses because, you know, one of the things I've shown in the book early on are like floating sigils. Did we talk, did I show you that? So this is a really important just visual concept. That right there shows with AR Kit, that you can see a globe floating outside, okay? Secret societies are returning. This is what NFTs will become. The NFT locally on your crypto phone, if you hold it, you can see the symbol. And if you don't, you can't. By the way, for people just listening, we're looking at a nice nature scene where an artificially created globe is floating in the air. Yes, but it's invisible if you're not holding up the AR Kit phone, right? So- So only you have a window into this artificial world. That's right. And then here's another thing, which shows you another piece of it. And this is using ENS to unlock a door. So this is an NFT used for something different. So the first one is using the NFT effectively to see something, and the second is using the NFT to do something, okay? So based on your on-chain communication, right? You can unlock a door. That's a door to a room. Soon it could be a door to a building. It could be the gates to a community. It could be your digital login, okay? And so- Amazing. What this means is basically a lot of these things which are like individual pieces get synthesized, right? And you eventually have a digital, just like you have a digital currency, or digital currencies unify concepts like, obviously gold, stocks, bonds, derivatives, every kind of financial instrument, plus Chuck E. Cheese tokens, karma, everything that's fungible and tangible. And transferable. The digital passport unifies your Google style login, your private keys, your API keys, your NFTs, your ENS name, your domain name, all of those kinds of things, and your key card for your door and so on, right? So the AR glasses are what probably, I don't know, it'll be Facebook's version three or version four. Apple is also working on them. Google's also working on them. You might just get a bunch of those models at the same time. It's like predicting the iPhone, just like Dorsey knew that mobile was gonna be big. And that's why he had 140 characters for Twitter, because it was like an SMS code limitation, and Twitter was started before the iPhone. AR glasses are an incredibly predictable invention that you can start thinking about the future of social is in part in person, okay? And it also means people might go outside more. Why? Because you can't see a monitor in the sun, but you can hit AR, and maybe you have a full screen thing, and you just like kind of move your fingers or something, and you can tap. You have to figure out the gesture. You don't wanna have gorilla arms. Maybe you do have a keyboard outside, or just even like a... You could even have a desk like this. If you can touch type, you can imagine something where you look down, and you can see a keyboard with your AR glasses, and it registers it, and then you can type like this, right? And probably you could have some AI that could figure out what you meant rather than what you were doing, right? Okay, so that's AI and social media. That's AR and social media. But really, one last thing I'll say, which is the non-technological part, is I think we'll go from very broad networks, which are hundreds of millions or billions of people like Twitter and Facebook, which have many small communities in them, to much smaller networks that have a million or 10 million people, but are much deeper, right, in terms of their affiliation, right? And this is the long-term trend in tech because you're going from eyeballs in the 1980s, sorry, eyeballs in the 1990s, to daily active users in the 2000s, to holders in the 2010s. So you go from just like, oh, I'm just a looky-loo, to I'm logging in every day, to I'm holding a significant percentage of my net worth. And then this decade is when the online community becomes primary. You're a netizen. The digital passport is your main identity. And so this is not, see, the problem with Facebook or Twitter is it's a bunch of different communities that don't share the same values fighting each other. This brings us back to the network state where you have one community with shared values, shared currency, and it's full stack. It's a social network, and it's a cryptocurrency, and it's a co-living community, and it's a messaging app, and it's a this, and it's a that. And it's like a Sonya, with a million people, you can actually build a lot of that full stack. That starts to get to what I call a network state. I feel like there should be like a standing applause line here. This is brilliant. You're an incredible person. This was an incredible conversation. We covered how to fix our government, looking at the future of governments, moving into network state. We covered how to fix medicine, FDA, longevity. That was just like a stellar description. Really, I'll have to listen to that multiple times to really think, and thank you for that, especially in this time where the lessons learned from the pandemic are unclear to at least me. And there's a lot of thinking that needs to be done there. And then just a discussion about how to fix social media and how to fix money. This was brilliant. So you're an incredibly successful person yourself. You co-taught a course at Stanford for startups. That's a whole nother discussion that we could have, but let me just ask you, there's a lot of people that are watching, a lot of people that look up to you. So if there's somebody who's young in high school, early college, trying to figure out what the heck to do with their life, what to do with their career, what advice could you give them? How they can have a career they can be proud of, or how they can have a life they can be proud of? At least what I would do, and then you can take it or leave it or what have you. But so- Yeah, maybe to your younger self. Advice to your younger self. You know, my friend Novel, this is a lot of what he puts out, is the very practical brass tacks, next steps. And I tend towards the macro. Of course, we both do sort of both kind of thing, right? Let's talk brass tacks, next steps, because I actually am practical, or at least practical enough to get things done, I think. Just like you said, you're breaking up the new book into three. Yes, it's motivation, theory, and practice. Motivation, theory, and practice. That's right. And- Let's talk about practice. So let's talk practice. Especially at the individual scale. Right. So first, what skill do you learn as a young kid, right? So let me just give what the ideal full stack thing is, and then you have to say, okay, I'm good quantitatively, I'm good verbally, I'm good this, I'm good that, right? So the ideal is you are full stack engineer and full stack influencer, or full stack engineer, full stack creator, okay? So that's both right brain and left brain, all right? So what does that mean with engineering? That means you master computer science and statistics, okay? Of course, it's also good to know physics and continuous math and so on. That's actually quite valuable to know. And you might need to use a lot of that continuous math with AI nowadays, right? Because a lot of that is actually helpful, right? Great descent and whatnot. But computer science and stats are to this century what physics was to the last. Why? Because, for example, what percentage of your time do you spend looking at a screen of some kind? A large percentage of the time. A large percentage of the time, right? Probably more than, for many people, it's more than 50% of their waking hours. If you include laptop, you include cell phone, tablet, your watch, maybe a monitor of some kind, right? All those together, it's a lot, okay? Which means, and then that's gonna only increase with AR glasses, okay? Which means most of the rest of your life will be spent, in a sense, in the matrix, okay? In a constructed digital world, which is more interesting, in some sense, than the offline world. Because we look at it more, it changes faster, right? And where the physics are set by programmers, okay? And what that means is, you know, physics itself is obviously very important for the natural world. Computer science and stats are for the artificial world, right? And why is that? Because every domain has algorithms and data structures. Whether it's aviation, okay? You go to American Airlines, right? They're gonna have, you know, planes and seats and tickets and so on. So it's data structures, and you're gonna have algorithms and functions that connect them. You're gonna have tables that those data are run to. If it's Walmart, you're gonna have SKUs, and you're gonna have shelves, and you're gonna have, so you have data structures, and you have algorithms to connect them. So every single area, you have algorithms and data structures, which is computer science and stats. And so you're going to collect the data and analyze it, right? And so that means if you have that base of CS and stats, where you're really strong, and you understand, you know, the theory as well as the practice, right? And you need both, okay? Because you need to understand, you know, obviously the basic stuff like big O notation and whatnot, and you need to understand all your probability distributions, okay? You know, a good exercise, by the way, is to go from the Bernoulli trials, right? To everything else, because you can go Bernoulli trials, to the binomial distribution, to the Gaussian. You can also go from, you know, Bernoulli trials to the geometric distribution, and so on. You can drive everything from this, right? And computer science includes not just big O, but software engineering? Well, computer science is theory, software engineering is practice, right? You could argue probability and stats is theory, and then data science is practice. Sure. Right? And so- You include all of that together. I include all of that as a package. That's theory and practice, right? I mean, look, it's okay to use libraries once you know what's going on under the hood, right? That's fine, but you need to be able to kind of write out the whole thing yourself. I mean, it's... That could be true, could not be true. I don't know. Are you sure about that? Because- Well, you should implement- Go ahead. You might be able to get quite far standing on the shoulders of giants. You can, but it depends. Like, you couldn't build... well, okay. Maybe you could. Somebody if they- However you were going to finish that sentence, I could push back before you- You could probably push back, right? But here's what I was going to say. I was going to say, you couldn't really, you couldn't build Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple without somebody at the company who understood like computer architecture and layout of memory and theory of compilers and- Theory of compilers and- See, the thing is, if you just look at libraries, you might be able to understand the capabilities and you can build up the intuition of like what a great specialized engineer could do that you can't. Like, for example, at least a while back, facebook.com, like was literally, it's just a single C++ compiled binary. Or sorry, it's not C++. It was like hip hop. They had a PHP compiler where they had just one giant binary. I may be getting this wrong, but that's what I recall, right? Yeah. I mean, it should be simple. It should be simple. And then you have guys like John Carmack who comes in and does an incredibly optimized implementation that actually- Well, yeah, more than that, right? Like he's, I mean, yes, right, but go ahead. I mean, there's some cases with John Carmack by being an incredible engineer is able to bring to reality things that otherwise would have taken an extra five to 10 years. Yeah, or maybe even more than that. Like, so, you know, this is the great man theory of history versus like sort of the kind of the determinist, like, you know, waves of history are pushing things along. The way I reconcile those is the tech tree model of history. You know, like civilization, you're playing game civilization. Yeah. So like civilization, you got the tech tree and you can go and be like, okay, I'm going to get spearmen or I'm going to do granaries and pottery, right? And so you can think of it as something where here's everything that humanity has right now. And then Satoshi can push on this dimension of the tech tree. So he's a great man because there weren't other, there wasn't a Leibniz to Satoshi's Newton, right? Like Vitalik, as amazing as he is, was five years later or thereabouts, right? There wasn't contemporaneous, like, you know, another person that was doing what Satoshi was doing. It's truly Sui Gennaris, right? And that shows what one person can do. Like probably Steve Jobs with Apple, given how the company was dying before he got there and he built it into the most valuable or put on the directory becomes the most valuable company in the world. It shows that there is quote, great man, right? Maybe more than just being five or 10 years ahead, like truly shaping where history goes, right? But on their hand, of course, that person, Steve Jobs himself wrote that email that recently was first thing saying that, he doesn't grow his own food and he doesn't, he didn't even think of the rights that he's got. Someone else thought of those and whatnot. And so he kind of, it is always a tension between the individual and society on this, right? But coming back to CS and stats, that's what you wanna learn. I think physics is also good to know because you go one level deeper and of course all these devices, you're not gonna be able to build, LIDAR or things like that without understanding physics, right? You mentioned that as one side of the brain. What about the other? Right, so CS and stats is that side. Okay, and then you can go into any domain, any company, kick butt, add value, right? Okay, so now the other side is creator, becoming a creator. First, online, like social media is about to become far, far, far more lucrative and monetizable. People are not updated. They kind of think this is, it's like over or something like that or it's old or whatever. But with crypto, once you have property rights on social media, now it's not what Google just allows you to have, but it's what you own, right? You actually have genuine property rights. And that's just completely changed everything, just like the introduction of property rights in China changed everything. It might take some lag for that to happen, but you can lend against that, borrow against that. You own the digital property, right? And you can do NFTs, you can do investments, you can do all this other stuff, right? So in many ways, I think anybody who's listening, who's like, I wanna build a billion dollar company, I'm like, build a billion dollar company, yes, also build a million person media company. A million person media operation or a million person following or something online, right? Because a US media company is simply not economically or socially aligned with your business. I mean, the big thing that I think, tech and media actually, it's funny, there's this collision and sometimes there's an Adam smashing event and there's like a repositioning, right? And media attacked tech really hard in the 2010s as well as many other things. And now post 2020, I think it's now centralized tech and media versus decentralized tech and media. And centralized tech and media is NYT and Google, which have all become woke-ified, the establishment companies. But decentralized tech and media is like Substack, all lots of defectors from the US establishment, from the NYT have gone to Substack. But also all the founders and funders are much more vocal on Twitter, whether it's Mark Anderson, Jack Ma, Mark Anderson, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg. Zuck is just cutting out the establishment and just going direct to posting himself or posting the jujitsu thing, which he recently did, or going and talking to Rogan, right? And so you now have this sort of Adam smash and like kind of reconstitution. Why is that important? Well, look, once you realize US media companies are companies and they're employees, Sulzberger's employees are just dogs on a leash, right? They're hit men for old money, assassins for the establishment. They're never gonna investigate him, okay? There's this thing right now, like some strike that or possible strike that's going at the New York Times. The obviously, the most obvious rich corporate zillionaire, the epitome of white privilege is, and again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, right? But the guy who inherited the company from his father's father's father's father, in the NFL, right? You're supposed to have the Rooney rule where you're supposed to interview diverse candidates for the top job. You know, the other competitors for the top job of the publisher of the New York Times were two cousins of Sulzberger. So it's three cis straight white males in 2017 who competed for this top job. And everybody in media was like silent about this coronation. They had this coronation article in the Times about this, right? So you have this meritless nepotist, right? This literally rich cis white man who makes millions of dollars a year. And it makes like 50 X the salary of other, you know, NYT journalists, okay? And, you know, lives in a mansion and so on. While denouncing, this is a born rich guy who denounces all the built rich guys at a company which is far whiter than the tech companies he's been denouncing, okay? And again, there's a website called techjournalismislessdiversethentech.com which actually shows the numbers on this, right? Here, I can look at this numbers, right? So why did I say this? Well, centralized US media has lost a ton of clout. Engagement is down. You've seen the crypto prices down, like stock prices have crashed. That's very obvious and quantifiable. Less visible is that media engagement has crashed, right? By the way, yeah, there's a plot that shows on the X axis percent white and then the Y axis are the different companies. And the tech companies are basically below 50% white and all the different media, tech journalism companies are all way above, you know, 70, 80, 90, 90 plus percent white. And hypocrisy, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, again, I'm not the kind of person who thinks white is an insult, but these guys are. And they are the wokest whites on the planet, right? It's like ridiculous, right? I, you know, it's like anyone, anyone who's homophobic, anyone who's, it feels like it's a personal thing that they're struggling with. Maybe the journalists are actually the ones who are racist. Well, actually, you know, it's funny you say that because there's this guy, A.M. Rosenthal, okay? And, you know, on his gravestone was, quote, we kept the, he kept the paper straight, right? And actually he essentially went and, this is a managing editor of the New York Times for almost, you know, from 69 to 77, executive editor from 77 to 86. And it was a history. Oh, my Lord. Yeah, history of basically keeping, you know, gay reporters shut. So essentially, the way I think about it is, New York Post reported that, just to talk about this for a second because it's so insane, all right? New York Post reported, and I've got some of this in the book, okay? But A.M. Rosenthal, managing editor of the New York Times from 1969 to 1977, executive editor from 1977 to 1986, his gravestone reads, he kept the paper straight. And then here's Jeet here on this. He kept the paper straight. As it happens, Rosenthal was a notorious homophobe. He made it a specific policy of the paper not to use the term gay. He denied a plum job to a gay man for being gay. He minimized the AIDS crisis. So, like, you know, the thing about this is, this is not like a one-off thing, okay? The New York Times literally won a Pulitzer for choking out the Ukrainians, for helping starve 5 million Ukrainians to death. And now has reinvented themselves as like a cheerleader to stand with Ukraine, right? They were for, you know, Abe Rosenthal's homophobia before they were against it, right? They were, like, if you saw the link I just pasted in, okay? During BLM, you know, it's credibly reported that, and I haven't seen this refuted, the family that owns the New York Times were slaveholders. Somehow that stayed out of 1619 and BLM coverage, right? So they were literally getting the profits from slavery to help bootstrap, you know, what was the Times or, you know, went into it. They actually did this article on, like, the compound interest of slaveholders in Haiti and how much they owed people, right? If you apply that to how much money they made off of slaves, I mean, can anyone name one of Salzburg's slaves? Like, can we humanize that, put a face on that, show exactly, you know, who lost such that he may win, right? And so you stack this up and it's like, you know, for the Iraq war before they were against it. And it's like, yeah, sure, Bush, you know, did a lot of bad stuff there, but they also reported a lot of negative, you know, not negative coverage, like false coverage, right? About WMDs, like, you know, the whole jihadist military. And so it's like this amazing thing where if some of the most evil people in history are the historians, if the, you know, they actually ran this ad campaign in the 2017 time period called The Truth. So giant Orwellian billboards, right? Which say, you know, the truth is essential. Here, it looks like this. This was when? This was just a few years ago, 2017. And this is in New York, a billboard by the New York Times reads, the truth is hard to know. The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to hear. The truth is hard to believe. The truth is hard to accept. The truth is hard to deny. The truth is more important now than ever. And this is like, yeah, this is 1984 type of stuff. Yeah, now here's the thing. Do you know what other? Truth. Yeah. Truth, period, big white board. So, okay, what other national newspaper proclaimed itself the truth in constantly every day? You know this one actually. Oh, you mean Pravda? Yeah, yeah. There you go. That's right. What is it? What is the Soviet translation? What's the Russian translation of Pravda? It's truth. Yeah. That's true, sorry. That didn't even connect to my head, yes. Yeah, truth. Unironically, huh? And again, it just so happens that- Is this an Onion article? Well, it's an Onion article, right. So, like, you know, Pravda, like at least they were communists, these guys have figured out how to get, charge people $99 a year or whatever it is for the truth. Wow, that's actually even amazing, right? So the corporate truth. So when you stack all that up, right, basically legacy media has delegitimized themselves, right? Every day that those quote investigative journalists don't investigate Sulzberger shows that they are so courageous as to investigate your boss, but not their own. Yes. Ta-da, total mass drop, right? That's like just obvious, right? And now once you realize this, and you know, every influencer who's coming up, every creator realizes, okay, well, that means I have to think about these media corporations as competitors. They are competitors. They're competitors for advertising, they're competitors for advertisers and influence. They will try, basically what the media corporations did partially successfully during the 2010s is they sort of had this reign of terror over many influencers where they'd give them positive coverage if they supported sort of the party line and negative coverage if they didn't, okay? But now the soft power has just dropped off a cliff, right? And, you know, many kinds of tactics that, you know, establishment journalists do, when we're thinking of them as a for-profit Stasi, why? Because they may stalk you, dox you, surveil you, like they can literally put, you know, like two dozen people following somebody around for a year, and that's not considered stalking, right? That's not considered spamming. They are allowed to do this and make money doing this. Whereas if you so much as criticize them, oh my God, it's an attack on the free press, blah, blah, blah, right? But you are the free press and I'm the free press, like, we're the free press. Again, it goes back to the decentralized, you know, the free speech is not like some media corporation's thing. It's everybody's right. And what actually happened with social media, what they're against is not that it is an attack on democracy, it's that it's the ultimate democracy because people have a voice now that didn't used to have a voice. You know, the saying, freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, right? That old one, right? Or never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel, right? In a real way, the entire things that were promised to people, freedom of speech, free markets, like a beggar's democracy, it's like, oh yeah, you can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach because you're just talking to yourself in your living room in, you know, Buffalo, New York, right? Maybe you can gather some friends around. You didn't have the licenses to get, you know, like a TV broadcast license, radio license, you know, the resources to buy a newspaper. You didn't have practical reach or distribution, okay? What happened was all these people in the US and around the world suddenly got voices and they were suddenly saying things that the establishment didn't want them to say. And so that's what this counter decentralization has meant, both in the US and in China, this crackdown, but it's as if like a stock went up like 100x and then dropped like 30%, all the deplatforming stuff, yes, it's bad, okay? It's a rearward move, but in the long arc, I think we're going to have more speech. I think the counter decentralization may succeed in China, but I don't think it's going to succeed outside it because you're trying to retrofit speech and thought controls onto an ostensibly free society, right? Now that Czech got cash, people actually have a voice. It's not going to be taken away from them very easily, right? So how does this relate to my advice to young kids? Once you have that context, right? Once you realize, hey, look, Apple didn't like do deals with Blackberry, okay? Amazon didn't collaborate or give free content to Barnes and Noble. Netflix was not going and socializing with employees of Blockbuster. These employees of establishment media corporations are your competitors, okay? They are out for clicks. They are out for money. They will, if they literally choke out the Ukrainians before making themselves into champions of the Ukrainian cause, they'll basically do anything, you know? And so when you realize that, you're like, okay, I need to build my own voice, okay? If you're Brazilian, you're Nigerian, you're in the Midwest or the Middle East, right? If you're Japanese, wherever you are, you need to build your own voice because outsourcing that voice to somebody else and having it put through the distorting filter, which maximizes the clicks of the distorting kind of thing, it's just not going to be in one's own interest. You don't have to even agree with everything I'm saying or even all of it to just be like, well, look, I'd rather speak for myself. I'd rather go direct if I could speak unmediated in my own words, right? Because the choice of word is actually very important, right? So that's the second big thing you need to, and this is the thing that took me a long time to understand, okay? Because I always got the importance of math and science. And in fact, I would have been probably just a career academic or mathematician in another life, maybe statistician, something like that, electrical engineer, et cetera. But the importance of creating your own content and telling your own stories, if you don't tell your own story, the story will be told for you, right? The sort of flip of winners write history is if you do not write history, you will not be the winner. You must write a history, okay? As kind of a funny way of putting it, right? Yeah, chicken and egg. Yeah. Contra positive, right? And now what does that mean practically? Okay? So in many ways, the program that I'm laying out is to build alternatives, peaceful alternatives to all legacy institutions, right? To obviously to the Fed, right? With Bitcoin, to Wall Street with DeFi and with Ethereum and so on, to academia with the ledger of record and the on-chain reproducible research that we talked about, to media with decentralized social media, decentralized AI, you can melt Hollywood with this, okay? Melt the RIA, melt the MPAA. I mean, there's some good people there, but everybody should have their own movies. You know, there's people should be able to tell their own stories and not just wait for it to be cast through Hollywood and Hollywood is just making remakes anyway. Okay? So you can tell original stories and you can do so online and you can do so by hitting a key and the production values will be there now that the AI content creation tools are out there. I mentioned disrupting or replacing or building alternatives to the Fed, to Wall Street, to academia, to media. I mentioned to Wikipedia, right? There's things like Golden. There's things like there's a bunch of web three ish Wikipedia competitors that are combining with AI and crypto for property rights. There's you'll also need alternatives to all the major tech companies. That's that was the list that I went through with, you know, decentralized search and social and messaging and operating systems and even the crypto phone. Okay. And then finally, you need alternatives to US political institutions and more generally and Chinese political institutions. And what are those? That's that's where the network state comes in. And the fundamental concept is if, you know, as I mentioned, only 2% of the world can become president of the United States about the number of Americans who are native born and over 35 and so on and so forth. But 100% of the world can become president of their own network state. What that means is and this kind of related to those two points, right? If you're an individual and you're good at engineering and you're good at content creation, okay? Like somebody like Jack Dorsey, for example, or Mark Anderson, actually a lot of the founders are actually quite good at both. Nowadays, you look at Bezos. He's actually funny on Twitter when he allows himself to be. He's, you know, you don't become a leader of that caliber without having some of both, right? If you've got some of both now, no matter where you are, what your ethnicity is, what your nationality is, whether you can get a US visa, you can become president of a network state. And what this is, it's a new path to political power that does not require going through either the US or the Chinese establishment. You don't have to wait till you're 75. You don't have to become a gerontocrat or about the party line and so on. The V1 of this is like folks like, you know, Francis Suarez or Naibu Kelly of El Salvador, but, you know, Suarez is a great example where, while not a full sovereign or anything like that, he has many ways, in many ways, the skills of a tech CEO where he just put up a, you know, a call on Twitter and helped build Miami, recruited all these people from all over. And it wasn't the two-party system, but the end city system. He just helped build the city by bringing people in, okay? And that's, and when I say Suarez is a V1, you know, I love Francis Suarez. I love what they're doing. The next iteration of that is to actually build the community itself rather than just kind of taking an existing Miami, you're building something that is potentially the scale of Miami, but as a digital community. And how many people is that? Well, like the Miami population is actually not that large. It's like 400 something thousand people. You could build a digital community like that. So if you have the engineering and you have the content creation and you build your own distribution, you own your own thing, you can become essentially a new kind of political leader. Where you just build a large enough online community that can crowdfund territory and you build your vision of the good. And anybody could build the vision of the good, talking about 8 billion people. I mean, there's no more inspiring. I mean, sometimes when we look at how things are broken, there could be a cynical paralysis, but ultimately this is a really empowering message. Yes. I think there is a new kind of vision of the good birth of global freedom and that in the fullness of time, people will look at the internet as being to the Americas, what the Americas were to Europe. A new world. Okay. In the sense of this cloud continent has just come down. Okay. And people are, you know, if you spend 50% of your waking hours looking at a screen, 20%, you're spending all this time commuting up to the cloud in the morning and coming back down, you're doing these day trips and it's got a different geography and all these people are near each other that were far in the physical world and vice versa. Right. And so this will, because it's this new domain, it gives rise to virtual worlds that eventually become physical in the same way that most people don't know this that well, but, you know, the Americas really shaped the old world. Many concepts like the ultra capitalism and ultra democracy of the new world, the French revolution was in part, I mean, that was a bad version. Okay. But that was in part inspired by the American. Okay. There are many, many movements that came back to the old world that started here in the same way. You know, I don't call it the mainstream media anymore. You know, I call it the downstream media because it's downstream of the internet. That's right. Right. That's right. And, you know, there's this guy a while back, he had this meme called the one kilo year American empire, that everything's American and so on. And his, I think, fundamental category is he considers the internet to be American, but you know why that's not the case? Because, and it'll be very obviously so I think in five or 10 years. Why? Because the majority of English speakers online by about 2030 are going to be Indian. Okay. They're all, they just got 5G LTE super cheap internet recently, the last few years. It's like one of the biggest stories in the world that's not really being told that much. Okay. And they've been lurking and here's the thing, and this took me a long time to kind of, you know, figure out like to, not to figure out, but to communicate, actually I realized this in 2013, but these folks don't type with an accent. Okay. They speak with an accent, but they don't type with an accent. And all the way back in 2013, when I taught this Coursera course, I was like, who are these folks? I had hundreds of thousands of people from around the world sign up. It was a very popular course even then. Okay. And hundreds of thousands of people signed up. I was like, who are these folks? And there were like Polish guys and, you know, like, you know, like this lady from Brazil and so on. And they knew scumbag Steve and good guy Greg, but they didn't know the Yankees or hot dogs or all the offline stuff of America. They didn't know physical America. They knew the digital conversation, the Reddit conversation and, you know, what became the Twitter conversation. For example, I just saw this, this YouTube video where there's a Indian founder and he just said, just casually like, oh, I slid into his DMs like this, right? It was kind of a joke, but he said in an Indian accent and everybody laughed. Everybody knew what he meant. And you're like, wait, that is a piece of what people think of as American internet slang. That's actually internet slang, which will soon be said mostly by non-Americans. Now, what does that mean? That means that just like the U.S. was a, was a branch of the UK and it started with English. And certainly there's lots of antecedents you can trace back to England, but nowadays, most Americans are not English in ancestry. There's Germans and Italians, Jewish people, African-Americans, you know, everybody, right? In the same way, the internet is much more representative of the world than the USA is. It may have started American, but it got forked by the rest of the world. That's right. And it is, it gives a global equality of opportunity. It's even more capitalist than America is. It's even more democratic than America is, just as America is more capitalist and democratic than the UK. The meme has escaped the cage of its captor. And by the way, that doesn't mean I'm, so I want to be very clear about something. When I say this kind of stuff, people will be like, oh my God, you hate America so much. You know what I'm saying? And that's not at all what I'm saying. It's like, first, take Britain, okay? Would you think of the US or Israel or India or Singapore as being anti-British? Not today. They're post-British, right? In fact, they're quite respectful to, I mean, look at the Queen and so on. People respect the UK and so on. Everyone's coming there to pay their respects. Well, I might not be the greatest example, but yes, go on. Well, let's put it like this. Yes, broadly speaking. They're not like burning the British flag and effigy or anything. Essentially, the point is each of these societies is kind of moving along their own axis. They're not defining every action in terms of whether they're pro-British or anti-British, right? Once you have kind of a healthy distance, people can respect all the accomplishments of the UK while also being happy that you're no longer run by them, right? And then you can have a better kind of arm's length relationship, right? And that's what post-British means. It is not anti-British, not at all. In fact, you can respect it while also being happy that you've got your own sovereignty, right? And happy that Britain is doing its own thing. I'm glad they're doing well, right? Okay. And they're actually doing some special economics on stuff now. And in the same way, if you think of it as not being pro-American or anti-American, because that's a with us or against us formulation of George Bush, you know? Like rather than just everything must be scored as pro-American or anti-American, you can think of post-American, that not everything has to be scored on that axis. Like, you know, there are certain things that things around the world, which should be able to exist on their own. And you should be able to move along your own axis. Like is like, perhaps obvious example, like is longevity pro-American or anti-American? You know, no, it's like it's on its own axis. It's moving on its own axis and new states and new countries should be able to exist that do not have to define themselves as anti-American to do so. They're just post-American friendly to, but different from that is totally possible to do. And we've got examples of that, right? And so when I talk about this, I'm talking about is really in many ways, US and Western ideals, you know, but manifested in just a different form, right? And also crucially integrative of global ideals. You know, these are in a sense are global human rights or global values, which is freedom of speech, private property, protection from search and seizure. And actually, so that's all the bill of rights type stuff. And I saw something that I thought was really good recently. That's a good first cut. That's something that I might want to include. I credit him, of course, in the V to the book, a digital bill of rights. Okay. And so this was a really good, decent first cut at a digital bill of rights. Okay. And he talks about the right to encrypt the right to compute the right to repair the right to portability, right? So encrypt is perhaps obvious, you know, e-commerce and everything compute like your device. It's not like you can't just have somebody intercepted or, you know, shut down your, your floating points. That might sound stupid, but in the EU, they're trying to regulate AI. And by doing that, they have some regulation that says like logic is, is, is it self-regulated? You see this? No, it's hilarious. Fine. But click the tweet that I sent you just before this one, right? So I was like, you know, in, in woke America, they're abolishing accelerated math because math is quote white supremacist not to be outdone. Europe seeks to regulate AI by regulating logic itself. You can't reason without a license, right? Article three, for purposes of this regulation, the following definition apply. AI system is software that's developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed in annex one. And you know what's in annex one? In annex one, logic and knowledge-based approaches. So step away from the if statement. Right. Okay. And the thing is, you know, if you've dealt with these bureaucracies, the stupidest possible interpretation, I mean, think about if you think, oh no, no, that wouldn't make any sense. They wouldn't do that. The entire web has been uglified by the stupid cookie thing that does absolutely nothing, right? The actual way to protect privacy is with user local data, meaning like decentralized systems, right? Where the private keys are local. Now I'm just laughing at the layers of absurdity in this step away from the if statement. I mean, it's hilarious. It's very, very clumsy. It's us struggling how to define, yeah, the digital bill of rights, I suppose, and doing it so extremely clumsily. It's funny, you know, like I heard this thing, which is like, Europe's like, well, look, the US and China are way ahead of us in AI, but we're gonna be a leader in AI regulation. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And something we haven't mentioned much of in this whole conversation, I think maybe implied between the lines is the thing that was in the constitution of the pursuit and happiness and the thing that is in many stories that we humans conjure up, which is love. Oh yeah. I think the thing that makes life worth living in many ways, but for that, you have to have freedom. You have to have stability. You have to have a society that's functioning so that humans can do what humans do, which is make friends, make family, make love, make beautiful things together as human beings. Balaji, this is like an incredible conversation. Thank you for showing an amazing future. I think really empowering to people because we can all be part of creating that future. And thank you so much for talking to me today. This was an incredible, obviously the longest conversation I've ever done, but also one of the most amazing, enlightening. Thank you. Thank you, brother, for everything you do. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Well, this was great. We didn't get through all the questions. We didn't. Just for the record, we didn't get, I would venture to say we didn't get through 50%. This is great. This is great. And I had to stop us from going too deep on any one thing, even though it was tempting, like those chocolates, those damn delicious looking chocolates that was used as a metaphor about 13 hours ago, or however long we started the conversation. This was incredible. It was really brilliant. You're brilliant throughout on all those different topics. So yeah, thank you again for talking to me. This is great. I really appreciate being here. Sir. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Balaji Srinivasan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ray Bradbury. People ask me to predict the future. When all I want to do is to prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Forever oscillate between dissatisfaction and gratitude

And the final piece of advice, I love that picture, okay, is to look up to the stars and appreciate every single moment you're alive at the mystery of this world, at the beauty of this world. Again, this is my perspective, take it with a grain of salt, but I advise to forever oscillate between deep profound doubt and self-dissatisfaction and the deep gratitude for the moment, for just being alive, for all the people around you that give you their love, with whom you get to share those moments, you share the love. A poem by Stephen Crane that I especially like in the desert. In the desert, I saw a creature, a naked bestial, who squatting up on the ground, held his heart in his hands and ate of it. I said, is it good friend? It is bitter, bitter, he answered, but I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart. So I would say the bitter is the self-dissatisfaction, that's the restless energy that drives us forward. And then enjoying that bitterness and enjoying the moment and enjoying the sweetness that comes from eating your own heart in this poem is a thing that makes life worthwhile. And that is to me, happiness. So with those silly few pieces of advice, I'd like to continue on the gratitude and say thank you. Thank you to my advisor. Thank you to this university for giving me a helping hand, there you go. And thank you to my family and all the friends that I've had along the way. Thank you for their love, I appreciate it. Thank you.

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Brian Greene: Quantum Gravity, The Big Bang, Aliens, Death, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #232

The following is a conversation with Brian Green, theoretical physicist at Columbia and author of many amazing books on physics, including his latest, Until the End of Time, Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Brian Green. In your most recent book, Until the End of Time, you quote Bertrand Russell from a debate he had about God in 1948. He says, quote, "'So far as scientific evidence goes, "'the universe has crawled by slow stages "'to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth, "'and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages "'to a condition of universal death. "'If this is to be taken as evidence of purpose, "'I can only say that the purpose is one "'that does not appeal to me. "'I see no reason, therefore, "'to believe in any sort of God.'" That's quite a depressing statement. As you say, this is a bleak outlook on our universe and the emergence of human consciousness. So let me ask, what is the more hopeful perspective to take on this story? Well, I think the more hopeful perspective is to more fully understand what was driving Bertrand Russell to this perspective, and then to see it within a broader context. And really, that's in some sense what my book Until the End of Time was all about. But in brief, I would say that there's a lot of truth to what Bertrand Russell was saying there. When you look at the second law of thermodynamics, which is the underlying scientific idea that's driving this notion that everything's gonna wither, decay, fall apart, yeah, that's true. Second law of thermodynamics establishes that disorder, entropy, in aggregate, is always on the rise. And that is indeed interpretable as disintegration and destruction over sufficiently long timescales. But my view is, when you recognize how special that makes us, that we are these exquisitely ordered configurations of particles that only will last for a blink of an eye in cosmological time-like terms, the fact that we're here and we can do what we do, to me, that's just really something that inspires gratitude and wonder and a sense of deep purpose by virtue of being these unique collections of entities that happen to rise up, look around, and try to figure out where we are and what the heck we should do with our time. So it's not that I would disagree with Bertrand Russell in terms of the basic physics and the basic unfolding, but I think it's really a matter of the slant that you take on what it means for us. So maybe we'll skip around a bit, but let me ask the biggest possible question, then, you said purpose. So what's the meaning of it all, then? Is there a meaning to life that we can take from this, from this brief emergence of complexity that arises from simple things and then goes into a heat death that is once again returns to simple things as the march of the second law of thermodynamics goes on? I think there is, but I don't think it's a universal answer. And so I think throughout the ages, there has been a kind of quest for some final way of articulating meaning and purpose, whether it's God, whether it's love, whether it's companionship. I mean, many people put forward different ways of taking this question on, and there is no one right answer when you recognize deeply that the universe doesn't care. There is nothing out there that is the final answer. It's not as though we need a more powerful telescope and somehow if we can look deeply into the universe, all will become clear. In fact, the deeper we've looked, both literally and metaphorically, into the universe and into the structure of reality, the more it's become clear that we are just a momentary byproduct of laws of physics that don't have any emotional content. They don't have any intrinsic sense of meaning or purpose. And when you recognize that, you realize that searching for the universal for this kind of a question is a fool's errand. Every individual has the capacity to make their own meaning, to set their own purpose. And that's not some platitude. That is what we are. Because there is no fundamental answer. It's what you make of it. And however much that may sound like a Hallmark card, this really is the deep lesson of physics and science more generally over the past few hundred years. Well, there's some level where you can objectively say that whatever we got going on here is kind of peculiar. It's kind of special in terms of complexity. And maybe you can even begin to measure it and like come up with metrics where whatever we got going on on Earth, these like interesting hierarchical complexities that form more and more sophisticated biological system, that seems kind of unique when you look at the entirety of the universe, the observable part that we can see with our tools. So I have to ask, as you describe in your book once again, Schrodinger wrote the book, What is Life? Based on a few lectures he gave in 1944. So let me ask the fundamental question here. What is life? This particular thing we got going on here, this pocket of complexity that emerged from such simple things. Yeah, it's a tough question. I asked that question even to Richard Dawkins once and I already have my preconceived notion which he pretty much confirmed, which is if one could give an answer to that question that allowed you to sort of draw a line in the sand between the not living and the living, then perhaps we would have the insight that we yearn for in trying to say what is so special about life. But the fact of the matter is, it's a continuum. There's a continuum from the things that we would typically call non-living, inanimate, to the things that we obviously call animate and full of the currents of life. Somewhere in there, it is a question of the complexity of the structure, the ability of the structure to take in raw material from the environment and process it through a metabolism that allows the structure to extract energy and to release entropy to the wider environment. Somewhere in those collections of biological processes is the necessity or the necessary ingredients and processes for life. But drawing that line in the sand is not something that we're able to do, but I would agree with you. It's deeply peculiar. It may in fact be unique, but it may not. It could be that the universe is such that under fairly typical conditions, a star that's a well-ordered source of low entropy energy, that's what the sun is, together with the planet being bathed by that low entropy energy, together with a surface that has enough of the raw constituents that we recognize are fairly commonplace result of supernova explosions where a star spews forth the result of the nuclear furnace that is the core of a star. It could be that all you need are those fairly commonplace conditions and maybe life naturally forms. Look, the James Webb Space Telescope, right, is going up, hopefully, in December. And one of the goals of that mission is to look at atmospheres around distant planets and perhaps come to some sense of how special or not life, or at least life as we know it, is in the universe. Which part of the story of life, let's stick to Earth for a second, do you think is the hardest? If you were like a betting man, which part is the hardest to make happen? Is it the origin of life? Again, we haven't drawn the line of where, as you say, the line between a rock and a rabbit. That part, is it complex organisms like multicellular organisms? Is it crawling out of the ocean where the fish somehow figured out how to crawl around? Is it then the us homo sapiens, as we like to think of ourselves special and intelligent? Or is it somewhere in between, as you also talk about, again, very hard to know at which point this consciousness emerge. If you were to sort of took a survey and made bets about other Earth-like planets in the universe, where do you think they get stuck the most? Well, I would certainly say, if we're gonna go all the way to conscious beings like ourselves, I would put it at the onset of consciousness, which again, I think is a continuum. I don't think it is something that you can draw the line in the sand, but there are obvious circumstances, there are obvious creatures such as ourselves where we do recognize a certain kind of self-reflective conscious awareness. And if we think about what it would require for a system of living beings to acquire consciousness, I think that's probably the hardest part. Because look, take Earth and recognize that it weren't for some singular event 65 million years ago where this large rock slams into planet Earth and wipes out the dinosaurs. Maybe the dinosaurs would still rule the planet and they may well have not developed the kind of conscious awareness that we have. So for billions of years on this planet, there was life that didn't have the kind of conscious awareness that we have. And it was an accidental event in astrophysical history that allowed a mammalian species like us to ultimately be the end product. And so, yeah, I could imagine there's a lot of life out there, but perhaps none of it's wondering what's the meaning of life or trying to make sense of it. Just going about its business of survival, which of course is the dominant activity that life on this planet has practiced. We are a rare exception to that. I really appreciate that you lean into some of these unanswerable questions with me today. But so you think about consciousness not as like a phase shift, a binary zero one. You think of it as a continuum that humans somehow are maybe some of the most conscious beings on Earth. I mean, people will dispute that. Yes, I mean, well, yeah. And it's a very hard argument. People will dispute that. Rocks probably will stay quiet on the matter. Maybe not, right? For the moment, they're waiting for their opportunity. But I agree that, look, even when you and I look at each other, I am not fully convinced that you're a conscious being, right? I mean, I think that you are. It's on to me. I mean, your behavior is such that that's the best explanation for what's going on. But of course, we're all in the position of only having direct awareness of our own conscious being. And therefore, when it comes to other creatures in the world, we're in a similar state of ignorance regarding what's actually happening inside of their head, if they have a head. And so it's hard to know how singular we are. But I would say, based on the best available data and the best explanations that we can make, yeah, there is something special about us. I don't think that there are fish walking around and coming up with existentialism. I don't know that there are dogs walking around who've developed an understanding of the general theory of relativity. I mean, maybe we're wrong, but that seems the best explanation. What do you think is more special, intelligence or consciousness? I think consciousness. And I think that there's a deep connection between these ideas. They are distinct, but they're deeply connected. But look, I mean, to me and to, of course, many philosophers actually coined a name for this, the hard problem of consciousness, you know, David Chalmers and others. As a physicist, I look at the world and I see it's particles governed by physical law. We can name them. You know, we got electrons, we've got quarks that come in various flavors and so forth. We have a list of ingredients that science has revealed. And we have a list of laws that seemingly govern those ingredients. And nowhere in there is there even a hint that when you put those particles together in the right way, an inner world should turn on. And it's not only that there's no hint, it's insane. I mean, it's ridiculous. How could it be that a thoughtless, passionless, emotionless particle, when grouped together with compatriots, somehow can yield something so deeply foreign to the nature of the ingredients themselves? So answering that question, I think is among the deepest and most difficult questions that we face. Do you think it is in fact a really hard problem or is it possible, I think you mentioned in your book that it's just like almost like a side effect. It's an emergent thing that's like, oh, it's nice. It's like a nice little feature. Yeah, well, I mean, when people use the phrase hard problem, I mean, they mean in a somewhat technical sense that it's trying to explain something that seems fundamentally unavailable to third party objective analysis, right? I'm the only one that can get inside my head and I can tell you a lot about what's happening inside my head right now is reflected in what I'm saying. And you can try to deduce things about what's going on inside my head, but you don't have access to it in the way that I do. And so it seems like a fundamentally different kind of problem from the ones that we have successfully dealt with over the course of centuries in science where we look at the motion of the moon, everybody can look, everybody can measure it. We look at the properties of hydrogen when you shine lasers on, everybody can look at the data and understand it. And so it seems like a fundamentally different problem. And in that sense, it seems like it is hard relative to the others. But I do think ultimately that the explanation will be, as you recount, I think that 100 years from now, or maybe it's a thousand, it's hard to predict the timescale for developments, but I think we'll get to a place where we'll look back and kind of smile at those folks in the 20th century and before 21st century and before who thought consciousness was so incredibly mysterious when the reality of it is, eh, it's just a thing that happens when particles come together. And however mysterious that feels right now, I think, for instance, when we start to build conscious systems, things that you're more familiar with than I am, when we start to build these artificial systems and those systems report to us, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling anxious. Yeah, there's a world going on inside here. I think the mystery of consciousness will just begin to evaporate. Well, that's, first of all, beautifully put, and I agree with you completely. Just the way you said it, it'll begin to evaporate. I have built quite a few robots and have had them do emotional type things, and it's immediate that exactly what you're saying, this kind of mystery of consciousness starts to evaporate, that the kind of need to truly understand, to solve the hard problem of consciousness disappears, because, well, I don't really care if I understand or can solve the hard problem of consciousness. That thing sure as heck looks conscious. You know, I feel like that way when I interact with a dog. I don't need to solve the problem of consciousness to be able to interact and richly enjoy the experience with this other living being. Obviously, same thing with other humans. I don't need to fully understand it. And there's some aspect, maybe this is a little bit too engineering-focused, but there's some aspect in which it feels like consciousness is just a nice trick to help us communicate with each other. It sounds ridiculous to say, but sort of the ability to experience the world is very useful in a subjective sense, is very useful to put yourself in that world and to be able to describe the experience to others. It could be just a social and the emerge, obviously, animals, the sort of more primitive animals might experience consciousness in some more primitive way, but this kind of rich subjective experience that we think about as humans, I think it's probably deeply coupled with like language and poetry. Yeah, that resonates with my view as well. I mean, there's a scientist, maybe you've spoken to him, Michael Graziano from Princeton. Yeah, he's developed ideas of consciousness that, look, I don't think they solve the problem, but I think they do illuminate it in an interesting way where basically we are not aware of all the underlying physiochemical processes that make our brains and our inner worlds tick the way they do. And because of that dissociation between sensation and the physics of it and the chemistry of it and the biology of it, it feels like our minds and our inner worlds are just untethered, like floating somewhere in this gray matter inside of our heads. And the way I like to think of it is like, look, if you were in a dark room, right? And I had glow-in-the-dark paint on my fingers, so all you saw was my fingers dancing around, there'd be something mysterious. How could those fingers be doing that? And then you turn on a light, you realize, oh, there's this arm underlying it, and that's the deep physical connection explains it all. And I think that's what we're missing, the deep physical connection between what's happening up here and what is responsible for it in a physical, chemical, biological way. And so to me, that at least gives me some understanding of why consciousness feels so mysterious, because we are suppressing all of the underlying science that ultimately is responsible for it. And one day we will reveal that more fully, and I think that will help us tether this experience to something quite tangible in the world. I wonder if the mystery is an important component of enjoying something. So once we know how this thing works, maybe we will no longer enjoy this conversation. We'll seek other sources of enjoyment, but this is, again, from an engineering perspective, I wonder if the mystery is an important component. Well, have you ever seen, there's this beautiful interview that Richard Feynman did, a great Nobel laureate physicist responsible for a lot of our understanding of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and so forth. And he was in a conversation with an interviewer where he noted that some people feel like once the mystery is gone, once science explains something, the beauty goes away, the wonder of it goes away. And he was emphasizing in his response to that, he's like, no, that's not the right way of thinking about it. He says, look, when I look at a rose, he says, yeah, I can still deeply enjoy the aroma, the color, the texture. He says, but what I can do that you can't if you're not a physicist, I can look more deeply and understand where the red comes from, where the aroma comes from, where the structure comes from. He says, that only augments my wonder. It only augments my experience. It doesn't flatten it or take away from it. So I sort of- I hope he's right. Yeah, well, I sort of take that as a bit of a motto in some sense, that there is a wonder that comes from a kind of ignorance. And I don't mean that in a derogatory sense, but just from not knowing. So there is a wonder that comes from mystery. There's another kind of wonder that comes from knowing and deep knowing. And I think that kind of wonder has its own special character that in some ways can be more gratifying. I hope he's right. I hope you're right. But there's also, I remember he said something about like science is an onion or something like that. You can peel back, you can keep peeling back. I mean, there is also, when you understand something, there's always a sense that there's more mystery to understand. Like you never get to the bottom of the mystery. But I think it's also different than, I don't think you can analogize say to a magician, right? A magician does some trick, you learn how it sounds like, oh my God, that's ridiculous when you find. But nature is perhaps the best magician if you wanna try to make the analogy there because when you peel things back and you understand how it is that things have color and you have electrons, dancing from one orbital to another, emitting photons at very particular wavelengths that are described by these beautiful equations of quantum electrodynamics, part of which that Feynman developed, it gives you a greater sense of awe when the curtain is pulled back than what happens in other circumstances where it does flatten it completely. Yeah, it's very possible then, say in physics, that we arrive at a theory of everything that unifies the laws of physics and has a very strong understanding of the fabric of reality, even like from the Big Bang to today, it's possible that that understanding is only going to elevate our appreciation of this whole thing. Yeah, I think it will. I think it will. I mean, I think it has so far. But the other side of it, which you emphasize is, it's not like science somehow reaches an end, right? There are certain categories of questions that do reach an end. I think we one day will close the book on nature's ingredients and the fundamental laws. Now, we can't prove that. Maybe it goes on forever, smaller and smaller. Maybe there are deeper and deeper laws. But I don't think so. I think that there's going to be a collection of ingredients and a collection of basic laws. That chapter will close. But it's one chapter. Now we take that knowledge and we try to understand how the world builds the structures that it does, from planets to people to black holes to the possibility of other universes. And every step of the way, the collection of questions that we don't know the answer to only blossoms. And so there's a deep sense of gratification from understanding certain qualities of the world. But I would say that if you take a ratio of what we understand to the things that we know that we don't yet understand, that ratio keeps getting smaller and smaller because the things that we know that we don't understand grows larger and larger. Do you have a hope that we solve that theory of everything puzzle in the next few decades? So there's been a bunch of attempts from string theory to all kinds of attempts at trying to solve quantum gravity or basically come up with a theory for quantum gravity. There's a lot of complexities to this. One for experimental validation, you have to observe effects that are very difficult to measure. So you have to build, that's like an engineering challenge. And then there's the theory challenge, which is like, it seems very difficult to connect the laws of gravity to quantum mechanics. Do you have a hope or are we hopelessly stuck? Well, I have to have a hope. I mean, it's in some sense, but I devote at least part of my professional life toward trying to make progress on, I'm glad you used the phrase quantum gravity. I'm not a great fan of the theory of everything phrase because it does make other scientists feel like if they're not working on this, what are they working on? Man's like, you know, there's not much left when you're talking about theory of everything. Phyology is just small details. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, so it is really trying to put gravity and quantum mechanics together. And since I was a college kid, I was deeply fascinated with gravity. And as I learned quantum mechanics, the notion of physicists being stumped and trying to blend them together, how could one not get fired up about maybe contributing something to that journey? And so we've been on this, you know, I've been on this for 30 years since I was a student. We have made progress. We do have ideas. You mentioned string theory is one possible scenario. It's not stuck. String theory is a vibrant field of research that is making incredible progress, but we've not made progress on this issue of experimental verification, validation, which is, you know, it is a vital part of the story. So I would have hoped that by now we would have made contact with observation. If you would have interviewed me back in the 80s when I was, you know, a wild, bright-eyed kid trying to make headway, working 18 hours a day and this sort of stuff, I would have said, yeah, by 2021, yeah, we're gonna know whether it's right or wrong, we'll make contact. I would have said, look, there may be certain mathematical puzzles that we've yet to work out, but we'll know enough to make contact with experiment. That has not happened. On the other hand, if you would have interviewed me back then and asked me, will we be able to talk about detailed qualities of black holes and understand them at the level of detail that we actually, I would have said, no, I don't think that we're gonna be able to do that. Will we have an exact formulation of string theory in certain circumstances? No, I don't think we're gonna have that, and yet we do. So it's just to say you don't know where the progress is going to happen, but yes, I do hold out hope that maybe before I move on to wherever, I don't think there is an after, but I would love before I leave this earth to know the answer. But science and the universe, it's not about pleasing any individual. It is what it is, and so we just press onward and we'll see where it goes. So in terms of string theory, if I just look from an outsider's perspective currently at the theoretical physics community, string theory as a theory has been very popular for a few decades, but it has recently fallen out of favor, or at least it became more popular to ask the question, is string theory really the answer? Where do you fall on this? How do you make sense of this puzzle? Why do you think it has fallen out of favor? Yeah, so I would actually challenge the statement that it's fallen out of favor. I would say that any field of research, when it's new and it's the bright, shiny bicycle that no one has yet seen on that block, yeah, it's gonna attract attention and the news outlets are gonna cover it and students are gonna flock to it, sure. But as a field matures, it does shed those qualities because it's no longer as novel as it was when it was first introduced 30, 40 years ago. But you need to judge it by a different standard. You need to judge it by, is it making progress on foundational issues, deepening our understanding of the subject, and by that measure, string theory is scoring very high. Now, at the same time, you also need to judge whether it makes contact with experiment, as we discussed before, too, and in that measure, we're still challenged. So I would say that many string theorists, myself included, are very sober about the theory. It has the tremendous progress that it had 30, 40 years ago, that hasn't gone away, but we've become better equipped at assessing the long journey ahead. And that was something that we weren't particularly good at back, say, in the 80s. Look, when I was just starting out in the field, there was a sense of physics is about to end. String theory is about to be the be all and end all, final unified theory, and that will bring this chapter to a close. Now, I have to say, I think it was more the younger physicists who were saying that. Some of them were seasoned, even if they were pro-string theory at the time. I don't know if they were rolling their eyes, but they knew that it was gonna be a long, long journey. I think people like John Schwartz, one of the founders of string theory, Michael Green, no relation to me, founders of the theory, Edward Witten, one of the main people driving the theory back then and today, I think they knew that we were in for a long haul, and that's the nature of science. Quick hits that resolve everything, few and far between. And so if you were in for the quick solution to the big questions of the world, then you would have been disappointed, and I think there were people who were disappointed and moved on and worked on other subjects. If we were in in the way that Einstein was in for a lifetime of investigation to try to see where, what the answers to the deep questions would be, then I think string theory has been a rich source of material that has kept so many people deeply engaged in moving the frontier forward. There's a few qualities about string theory which are weird. I mean, a lot of physics is just weird and beautiful. So let me ask the question, what to you is most beautiful about string theory? Well, what attracted me to the theory at the outset, beyond its putting gravity and quantum mechanics together, which I think is its true claim to fame, at least on paper it's able to do that, what attracted me to the theory was the fact that it requires extra dimensions of space. And this was an idea that intrigued me in a very deep way, even before I really understood what it meant. I somehow had, I mean, talk about sort of the emotional part of consciousness and the cognitive part in some, perhaps you call it strange, in some strange emotional way, I was enamored with Einstein's general relativity, the idea of curved space and time. Before I really knew what it meant, it just spoke to me. I don't know how else to say it. And then when I subsequently learned that people had thought about more dimensions of space than we can see and how those extra dimensions would be vital to a deep understanding of the things that we do see in this world, four, five, six dimensions might explain why there are certain forces and particles and how they behave. To me, this was like amazing, utterly amazing. And then when I learned that string theory embraced all these ideas, embraced the general theory of relativity, embraced quantum mechanics, embraced the possibility of extra dimensions, then I was hooked. And so when I was a graduate student, we would just spend hours, we, I mean, a couple of other graduate students and myself who had sort of worked really well together, this is at Oxford in England, we would work these enormous numbers of hours a day trying to understand the shapes of these extra dimensions, the geometry of them, what those geometrical shapes for the extra dimensions would imply for things that we see in the world around us. And it was a heady, heady time. And that kind of excitement has sort of filtered through over the decades, but I'd say that's really the part of the theory that I think really hooked me most strongly. How are we supposed to think about those extra dimensions? Are we supposed to imagine actual physical reality or is this more in the space of mathematics that allows you to sort of come up with tricks to describe the four dimensional reality that we more directly perceive? No one really knows the answer, of course, but if I take the most straightforward approach to string theory, you really are imagining that these dimensions are there, they're real. I mean, just as you would say that the three space dimensions around us, left, right, back, forth, up, down, yeah, they're real, they're here. We are immersed within those dimensions. These other dimensions are as real as these with the one difference being their shape and their size differs from the shape and size of the dimensions that we have direct access to through human experience. And one approach imagines that these extra dimensions are tightly coiled up, curled up, crushed together, if you will, into a beautiful geometrical form that's all around us, but just too small for us to detect with our eyes, too small for us to detect even with the most powerful equipment that we have. Nevertheless, according to the mathematics, the size and the shape of those extra dimensions leaves an imprint in the world that we do have access to. So one of the ways that we have hoped yet to achieve to make contact with experimental physics is to see a signature of those extra dimensions in places like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. And it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it won't happen, but that would be a stunning moment in the history of the species if data that we acquired in these dimensions gives us kind of incontrovertible evidence that these dimensions are not the only dimensions. I mean, how mind-blowing would that be? So with the Large Hadron Collider, it would be something in the movement of the particles or also the gravitational waves potentially be a place where you can detect signs of multiple dimensions like with something like LIGO, but much more accurate. In principle, all of these can work. So one of the experiments that we had high hopes for, but by high hopes, I'm actually exaggerating. One of the experiments that we imagined might in the best of all circumstances yield some insight. We weren't with bated breath waiting for the result. We knew it was a long shot. When you slam protons together at very high speed at the Large Hadron Collider, if there are these extra dimensions and if they have the right form, and that's a hypothesis that may not be correct, but when the protons collide, they can create debris, energetic debris that can in some sense leave our dimensions and insert itself into the other dimensions. And the way you'd recognize that is there'd be more energy before the collision than after the collision because the debris would have taken energy away from the place where our detectors can detect it. So that's one real concrete way that you could find evidence for extra dimensions. But yeah, since extra dimensions are of space and gravity is something that exists within, in fact is associated with the shape of space, gravitational waves in principle can provide a kind of, you know, cat scan of the extra dimensions if you had sufficient control over those processes. We don't yet, but perhaps one day we will. Does it make you sad a little bit, maybe looking out into the future, you mentioned Ed Witten, that no Nobel prizes have been given yet related to string theory. Do you think they will be? Do you think you have to have experimental validation or can a Nobel prize be given? Which I don't think has been given for quite a long time for a purely sort of theoretical contribution. Yeah, it's certainly as a matter of historical precedent has been the case that those who win the prize have established, investigated, illuminated a demonstrably real quality of the world. So gravitational waves, the prize was awarded after they were detected, not the mathematics of it, but the actual detection of it. You know, the Higgs particle, you know, it was an idea that came from the 1960s, Peter Higgs and others in fact, and it wasn't until 2012 on July 4th when the announcement came that this particle had been detected at the Large Hadron Collider that people viewed it as eligible for the Nobel prize. The idea was there, the math was there, but you needed to confirm it. Indeed, the prize ultimately was awarded. So I'm not surprised. In fact, I would have been surprised if a Nobel prize had been awarded in the arena of string theory, because it's far too speculative right now. It's far too hypothetical. In fact, I am sympathetic to the view that it really shouldn't be called string theory. It degrades the word theory, because theory in science of course, means the best available explanation for the things that we observe in the world, the things that we measure in experiments about the world. And string theory does not do that, at least not yet. So it really should be the string hypothesis, right? We're at an earlier stage of development, and that's not the kind of thing that Nobel prizes should be awarded for. What do you think about the critics out there? Peter White, he's from Columbia too, I think Sabine Havenstadter. Is that a healthy thing, or should we sort of focus on sort of the optimism of these hypotheses? Yeah, it's actually a good way that you frame it, because I'm always somewhat repelled by views of the world that start from the negative, try to cut down an idea, try to say that's the wrong way of thinking about things, and so on. I'm much more drawn, maybe because I'm an optimist, I don't know, I'm much more drawn to those who go out into the world with new ideas. And don't try to cut down one idea, but rather present another one that might be better. And so you make the first idea, maybe string theory irrelevant, because you've come up with the better approach to the world. So do I think it's healthy? Look, I think having a wide range of views and perspectives is generally a healthy thing. I think it's good to have arguments within a subject in order that you stay fresh and you stay focused on the things that matter. But in the end of the day, I think it's a more vital contribution to give us something new rather than to criticize something that's there. Yeah, I'm totally with you. But it could be just the nature of being an optimist. And also just a love of engineering. It helps nobody by criticizing the rocket that somebody else built. Just build a bigger, cheaper, better rocket. Right, exactly. And that seems to be how human civilization can progress effectively. We've mentioned the second law of thermodynamics. I gotta ask you about time. Yeah. And do you think of time as emergent or fundamental to our universe? I like to think of it as emergent. I don't have a solid reason for that perspective. I have a lot of hints of reasons, that some of which come out of string theory and quantum gravity that perhaps would be worth talking about. But what I would say is time is the most familiar quality of experience because there's nothing that takes place that doesn't take place within an interval of time. And yet at the same time, it is perhaps the most mysterious quality of the world. So it's a wonderful confluence of the familiar and the deeply mysterious all in one little package. If you were to ask me, what is time? I don't really know. I don't think anybody does. I can say what time gives us, it allows us the language for talking about change. It allows us to envision the events of the universe being spread out in this temporal timeline. And in that way, allows us to see the patterns that unfold within time. I mean, time allows us the structure and the organization to think about things in that kind of a progression. But what actually is it? I don't really know. And that's so strange because we can measure it, right? I mean, there are laboratories in the world that measure this thing called time to spectacular precision. But if you go up to the folks and say, what is it that you're actually measuring? I don't know that they can really articulate the kind of answer that you would expect from those who are engineering a device that can measure something called time to that level of precision. So it's a very curious combination. What do you make of the one way feeling of causality? Like is causality a thing or is that too just a human story that we put on top of this emergent phenomenon of time? I don't know. I can give you my guess and my intuition about it. I do think that at the macroscopic level, if we're talking about sort of the human experience of time, I do think at the macroscopic level, there is a fundamental notion of causality that does emerge from a starting point that may not have causality built in. So I certainly would allow that at the deepest description of reality, when we finally have that on the table, we may not see causality directly at that fundamental level. But I do believe that we will understand how to go from that fundamental level to a world where at the macroscopic level, there is this notion of A causes B. A notion that Einstein deeply embraced in his special theory of relativity where he showed that time has qualities that we wouldn't expect based on experience. You and I, if we move relative to each other, our clocks tick off time at different rate. And our clocks is just a means of measuring this thing called time. So this is really time that we're talking about. Time for you and time for me are different if we're in relative motion. He then shows in the general theory of relativity that if we're experiencing different gravity, different gravitational fields or actually more precisely, different gravitational potentials, time will elapse for us at different rates. These are things that are astoundingly strange that give rise to a scientific notion of time travel. Okay, so this is how far Einstein took us in wiping away the old understanding of time and injecting a new understanding of its qualities. So there's so much about time that's counterintuitive, but I do not think that we're ever going to wipe away causality at the macroscopic level. At the macroscopic, I mean, there's so many interesting things at the macroscopic level that may only exist at the macroscopic level. Like we already talked about consciousness that very well could be one of the things. You mentioned time travel. So I mean, according to Einstein and in general, what types of travel do you think our physical universe allows? Well, it certainly allows time travel to the future. And I'm not talking about the silly thing that you and I are now going into the future second by second by second. I'm talking about really the diversion that you see in Hollywood, at least in terms of its net effect, whereby an individual can follow an Einsteinian strategy and propel themselves into the future in some sense more quickly. So if I wanted to see what's happening on planet Earth one million years from now, Einstein tells me how to get one million years from now. Build a ship. I got to turn to guys who know how to build stuff. I can't do it like you. Build a ship that can go out into the universe near the speed of light, turn around and come back. Let's say it's a six month journey out and a six month journey back. And Einstein tells me how fast I need to travel, how close to the speed of light I need to go so that when I step out of my ship, it will now be one million years into the future on planet Earth. And this is not a controversial statement, right? This is not something where there's differences of opinion in the scientific community. Any scientist who knows anything about what Einstein taught us agrees with what I just said. It's commonplace, it's bread and butter physics. And so that kind of travel to the future is absolutely allowed by the laws of physics. There are engineering challenges, there are technological challenges. The close to the speed of light part, yeah. Yeah, and there are even biological challenges, right? There are G-forces that you're gonna experience. So there's all sorts of stuff embedded in this, but those I will call the details. And those details, notwithstanding, the universe allows this kind of travel to the future. And if I could pause real quick, you can also at the macro level with biology, extend the human lifespan to do a kind of travel forward in time. If you expand how long we live, that's a way to, from a perspective of a conscious observer that is a human being, you're essentially traveling forward in time by allowing yourself to live long enough to see the thing. Yes. So that's in the space of biology. What about traveling back in time? Yeah, that is a natural next question, especially if you're going on one of these journeys. Is it a one-way journey? Yeah. Or can you come back? And the physics community doesn't speak with a unified voice on this as yet. But I would say that the dominant perspective is that you cannot get back. Now, having said that, there are proposals that serious people have written papers on regarding hypothetical ways in which you could travel to the past. And we've seen some of these, again, Hollywood loves to take the most sexy ideas of physics and build narratives around them. This idea of a wormhole, like Jodie Foster in Contact went through a wormhole, Deep Space Nine star, I'm sure there are many other examples where these ideas that I've probably never even seen. But with wormholes, there's at least a proposal of how you could take a wormhole, tunnel through space-time, manipulate the openings of the wormhole in such a way that the openings are no longer synchronous. They are out of sync relative to each other, which would mean one's ahead and one's behind, which means if you go through one direction, you travel to the future. If you go back, you travel to the past. Now, we don't know if there are wormholes in the world. But they're possible according to Einstein, correct? They are possible according to Einstein, but even Einstein was very quick to say, just because my math allows for something doesn't mean it's real. And he famously didn't even believe in black holes. Didn't believe in the Big Bang, right? And yet the black hole issue has really been settled now. We have radio telescopic photographs of the black hole in M87. It was in newspapers around the world just a couple of years ago. So it's just to say that just because it's in Einstein's math, it doesn't mean it's real. But yes, it is the case that wormholes are allowed by Einstein's equations. And in principle, you can imagine putting electric charges on the openings of the wormhole, allowing you to tow them around in a manner that could yield this temporal asymmetry between them. Maybe you tow one of the mouths to the edge of a black hole. In principle, you can do this, slowing down the passage of time near that black hole. And then when you bring it back, it will be well out of sync with the other opening and therefore could be a significant temporal gap between one and the other. But people who study this in more detail question, could you ever keep a wormhole open, assuming it does exist? Could you ever travel through a wormhole? Or would there be a requirement of some kind of exotic matter to prop it open that perhaps doesn't exist? So there are many, many issues that people have raised. And I would say that the general sentiment is that it's unlikely that this kind of scenario is going to survive our deeper understanding of physics when we finally have it. But that doesn't mean that the door is closed. So maybe there's a small possibility that this could one day be re-opened. That's such an interesting way to put it. This kind of scenario will not survive deep understanding of physics. It's an interesting way to put it because it makes you wonder what kind of scenarios will be created by our deeper understanding of physics. Maybe, sorry to go crazy for a second, but if you have like the panpsychism idea that consciousness permeates all matter, maybe traveling in that, whatever laws of physics the consciousness operates under, something like that, in that view of the universe, if we somehow are able to understand that part, maybe traveling is super easy. Yeah. It does not follow the constraints of the speed of light. Something like this. Yeah, so look, I have a definite degree of sympathy with the possibility that consciousness might be more than what we described earlier is just the byproduct of mindless particles. You just made the rock happy. Exactly. So it isn't the approach that feels to me the most likely, but I see the logic. If you've got the puzzle, how do mindless particles build mind, one resolution might be the particles are not mindless. The particles have some kind of proto-conscious quality. So there's something appealing about that straightforward solution to the puzzle. And if that's the case, if we do live in a panpsychist world where there is a degree of consciousness residing in everything in the world around us, then yes, I do think some interesting possibilities might emerge where maybe there's a way of communing with physical reality in a deeper way than we have so far. I mean, we as human beings, a vital part of our existence is human to human communication, contact. We live in social groups and that's what has allowed us to get to the place where we've gotten. Imagine that we have long missed that there's other consciousness out there and some kind of relationship or communion with that larger conscious possibility would take us to a different place. Now, do I buy into this yet? I don't, I don't see any evidence for it, but do I have an open mind and allow for the possibility in the future? Yeah, I do. So if that's not the case and you have these simple particles that at the macro level emerges some interesting stuff like consciousness, another thing you write about in the Until the End of Time book is the thing that it seems to emerge at the macro level is the feeling like there's a free will, like we decide to do stuff. And you have a really interesting take here, which is no, there's not a free will. I'm just gonna speak for you and then you can correct me. No, there's not a free will, but there is an experience of freedom. Yeah. Which I really love. So where does the experience, where does freedom come from if we don't have any kind of physics-based free will? Yeah, and so the idea follows naturally from all that we've been talking about. Let's make the assumption that all there is in the physical universe is stuff governed by laws. We may not have those laws, may not know what the fundamental stuff is yet, but everything we know in science points in the direction that it's physical stuff governed by universal laws. And that being the case, or that being the assumption, then you come to a particular collection of those ingredients called the human being, and that human being has particles that are fully governed by physical law. And when you then recognize it, every thought that we have, every action that we undertake is just the motion of particles. When I'm thinking thoughts right now, of course, at this level of description, it is the motion of particles cascading down various neurons inside of my head and so on. And every single one of those motions, collectively and individually, is fully governed by these laws that we perhaps don't have yet, but we imagine one day we will. That leaves no opportunity for any kind of freedom to break free from the constraint of physical law. And that is the end of the story. So the traditional intuitive notion of free will, that we're the ultimate authors of our actions, that we're the buck stops, that there is no antecedent, that is the cause for our deciding to go left or right, choose vanilla or chocolate, live or die, that intuitive sensation does not have a basis in our understanding of the physical world. So that's the end of the free will of the traditional sort, but then your question is, what about this other kind of freedom I talk about? And the other kind of freedom, if you focus on it intently, I think is actually the true version of freedom that we feel, and that freedom is this. You look at inanimate objects in the world, rocks, bottles of water, whatever, they have a very limited behavioral repertoire. Why? Their internal organization is too coarse for them to do very much, right? You try to have a conversation with a glass of water, you send sound waves, it doesn't do much. It may vibrate a little bit, but the repertoire of responses are incredibly limited. The difference between us and a rock or a bottle of water is that our inner organization, by virtue of eons of evolution by natural selection, is so refined, so spectacularly ordered, that we have a huge repertoire of behaviors that are finely attuned to stimuli from the external world. You ask me a question, that's a stimulus, and all of a sudden, these particle processes go into action, and this is the result, this answer that I'm giving you. So the freedom that we have is not from the control of physical law. The freedom that we have is from the constrained behavior that has long since governed inanimate objects. We are liberated from the limited behavioral repertoire of rocks and bottles of water to have this broad spectrum of responses. Do we pick them? We do not. Do we freely choose them? We do not, but yet we have them, and we can marvel at those behaviors, and that's the freedom that we have. The complexity and the breadth of that repertoire is where the freedom emerges. Is there something to be said about emergence? I don't know if you know or have looked at much about objects that I seem to love way more than anyone else, which is cellular top, like game of life type of stuff. From simple things emerges beautiful complexities, and so that's that repertoire. It's like it seems if you have enough stuff, just beautiful complexity emerges that sure as heck to our human eyes looks like there's consciousness there, there's free will, there's little objects moving about and making decisions. I mean, all of that, you could say it's anthropomorphization, but it sure as heck feels like there are organisms making decisions. What is that emergence thing? Is that within the realm of physics to understand? Is it within the realm of poetry? What is that, the complex systems, emergence? Will that ever be understood by science? So here's the way that I think about it. So there are clearly qualities of the world that emerge on macroscopic scales. Our sense of beauty, wonder, consciousness, all these kinds of qualities. Do I feel that they ultimately are explainable from the laws of physics? I do. There is nothing that's not ultimately explainable with the laws of physics from this physicalist perspective, which is what I take. So you got the particles, you got the laws, and you have things that emerge from the choreographed motions of those particles. But is that the best language for talking about these emergent qualities? Usually not. If I was to take something even more mundane, like a baseball flying through the air, if I was to describe it in terms of the quarks and the electrons, I'd give you this mountain of data with 10 to the 28 particles and all of their coordinates and spaces as a function of time. I'd hand you this mountain of data, you'd be like, I don't know what this is. And then if you really were clever and you're looking, oh, it's a baseball just described in the least economical way possible. It is much more useful and insightful to talk about the baseball flying through the air. Similarly, there are things at the macroscopic level like human experience and human emotion and human action and the sensation of free will that we undeniably all have, even if it itself doesn't have a basis in our understanding of the physical world. It's useful to talk about things in this very human language. And so yes, it's vital to talk about things in the poetic language of human experience, but do not lose sight of the fact, and some people do, they say, oh, it's just an emergent phenomenon. Don't lose sight of the fact that emergent phenomena are emerging from this deeper understanding that comes from the reductionist account of physical law. And there's a lot of insight to come from that, such as the freedom that you thought that you had, the freedom of will that you thought you had, it doesn't have a basis in that reductionist account, so it's not real. So speaking of the poetry of human experience, you mentioned the images of the black holes. How did it make you feel a few years ago when that first image came out? Truly amazing. A sense of, well, I guess the feeling was both amazing and there was a little sense of, jealousy is not quite the right word, but a sense of longing. Yeah, I think that's a better word, because here's a subject that started with Einstein back in 1915, writes down the equations of the general theory of relativity, and then there are scores of individuals over the decades, you know, starting with people like Carl Schwarzschild who analyze the equation, see the possibility of black holes, people develop these ideas, John Wheeler, all these greats of physics, it's still a hypothetical subject. It gets closer to reality through observations of the center of our galaxy, stars whipping around in a manner that could only really be explained by there being a black hole in the center of our galaxy, but it was still indirect. To actually have a direct image that you can look at, what a beautiful arc, narrative arc, from the theoretical to the absolutely established. And that's what we hope will happen with other areas, for instance, string theory, right? I mean, holy mathematical subject at the outset, and still pretty much a holy mathematical subject today. Yeah, do we long for that image where we can look at it and say, string, it's real. I mean, how thrilling, how thrilling to be part of that journey, to be part of that step that moves things from the abstract to the concrete. Yeah, so like the image of the DNA, the early images of the DNA, for example. But there is something, especially, so the problem with strings is they're tiny, so it's harder to take a picture. In the following sense, when you think of a black hole, I mean, you have a swirl of, I guess, what is, I don't even know, it's dust, whatever, light. Accreting onto the event horizon. And then there's darkness in the center. And you just imagine, so that picture in particular, I guess, is of a gigantic black hole. So you just, I mean, it's terrifying. Billions of times the mass of the sun. Yeah, so it's both exciting and terrifying. I mean, I don't know where you fall on the spectrum. I think it's exciting at first, like the longer I think about it, every time I think about it, the more terrifying it becomes. So it always starts exciting, and then it goes to terrifying. And both are feelings, very human feelings that I appreciate. It's like terrified awe somehow is still beautiful. That's a good way of saying it. I think I kind of share that reaction because there is a way in which when you work on this subject, like all the time, I teach it, I teach about black holes, write the equations on the blackboard. The ideas reside in a very cognitive, I don't know, mathematical portion of the brain, or at least for me. And it's only when you like sit down and it's quiet and you start to contemplate, wait, wait, wait, this isn't just like a mathematical game. There are these monsters out there. Now, not in a sense of I fear for my life, but it's a sense of how extraordinary is this universe. And so it is breathtaking. How powerful nature is. Yeah, how stupendously powerful nature is. And so there is a deep sense of humility that I think this instills if you really allow the ideas to sink in. Well, I have to ask about the most stupendously powerful thing to have ever happened in our universe, which is the Big Bang. What's up with the Big Bang? So we can, I mean, with gravitational waves, the hope is when you have more and more accurate measurements of the gravitational waves, you can crawl back further and further back in time towards the Big Bang. Do you have a hope that we'll be able to understand the early spark that created our universe? Yeah. You know, that and the deep interior of a black hole are I think the biggest mysteries that we hope the melding of quantum mechanics and gravity will reveal, will illuminate. And you know, what question could be more captivating than why is there something rather than nothing, right? Why is there a universe at all? And will the theories that we're developing take us to an answer to that? I don't know. Even if we truly knew what the Big Bang is, and that's a big question in its own right, one would still be left with the question, well, okay. So you've explained the process by which a tiny nugget of a universe, a tiny nugget of space-time can undergo some kind of growth to yield the world around us. But presumably in that explanation, you're gonna involve mathematics and some ingredients like quantum fields or matter or energy or something. Where did that stuff come from? You know, can we get to that level of explanation? I don't know, but it is remarkable that if you ask what happened a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, it's not really that controversial any longer, right? Even though there's a lot of argument in the field, and it's very heated right now, I should say, regarding what is the right theory of the Big Bang? What is the right theory of early universe cosmology? Where I mean early, much earlier than a millionth of a second. A lot of dissent, a lot of heated arguments about that. No pun intended. Yeah, right, exactly. But you go like a millionth of a second after that, and we're on pretty firm ground. Isn't that amazing, right? To understand what happened from that point forward. But to go back is controversial. So there is this theory called inflationary cosmology, which I would say has been the dominant paradigm since early 1980s. So what does that mean? Roughly 40 years now, it's been the dominant cosmological paradigm. And it makes use of a curious feature of Einstein's general theory of relativity, his theory of gravity, where Einstein shows us mathematically that gravity can not only be attractive, you know, the kind of gravity that we're used to, things pulled together, but it can also be repulsive. And that fact is then leveraged by people like Alan Guth and Andre Linde, and at the time Paul Steinhardt, and Andreas Hallbrecht and others to say, okay, if we had a little nugget in the early universe, which was filled with the stuff that yields this repulsive gravity, well, that would have blown everything apart. It would cause everything to swell. Beautiful explanation for what the bang in the Big Bang was. And then people mathematically analyze the consequences of this idea. And they make predictions for tiny temperature differences across the night sky that in principle could be measured. You send up balloons, you send up satellites with very refined thermometers, and they measure the temperature of the night sky. And the statistical distribution of the temperature differences agrees with the mathematical predictions. I mean, you just sort of have to stand in awe of this insight. So you think, aha, the theory has been established. But scientists are an incredibly skeptical bunch. And some scientists, including one of the people who helped develop the theory at the outset, Paul Steinhardt, comes along and says, well, yeah, it's done. This theory's done pretty well so far, but there are aspects of this theory that are making me lose confidence. For instance, this theory seems to suggest that there might be other universes. Like, how do you make sense of a theory that suggests there are other universes? Or there are others who come along and say, this theory seems to talk about length scales that are minuscule even by the so-called Planck length, the sort of shortest length that we can imagine making sense of in a theory of quantum gravity. How do you make sense of that? And so on and so forth. They develop a list of things that they consider to be chinks in the inflationary cosmological theory's armor. And they develop other ideas which they claim yield the same predictions as inflationary cosmology for those temperature differences across space, but don't suffer from these problems. And then the inflationary cosmology folks say, no, no, no, hang on. Your theory suffers from different problems. And so the arguments goes. It's a healthy debate. Talk about real debates in science. So when you ask, what's up with the Big Bang? I don't know right now. If you would have asked me five years ago, maybe even less than that, three or four years ago, I would have said, look, inflationary cosmology has some issues. But the package of explanations it provides is so potent. And the issues that beset it are seemingly solvable to me that I would imagine it's going to in the end win out. I would still say that today, but I wouldn't say it as loudly. I wouldn't say it as confidently. I think it's worth thinking about alternate ideas. And it could be the case that the paradigm at some point shifts. Does dark matter and dark energy fit into the shifting of the explanations for those? Yeah, certainly. So dark energy has in the inflationary theory, is kind of a big mystery. So dark energy is the observational realization in the last 20 years that not only is universe expanding, it's expanding ever more quickly. Something is still pushing things outward. And the explanation is that there's like a residual version of the repulsive gravity from the early universe, but it's such a strange number. When you write that amount of dark energy using the relevant units in a theory of quantum gravity, it's a decimal point followed by like 120 zeros and then a one. We're not used to those kinds of numbers in physics. We're used to a half, one, pi, E squared to two. Those are the kinds of fundamental numbers that emerge in our explanations of the world. And we look at this bizarre number, decimal point, all these zeros and a one, we say, something's wrong there. Like where would that number have come from? Now there are people who suggest resolution to it, so it's not like we're totally in the dark on it, but those people like Paul Steinhardt who have alternate cosmological theories, cyclic cosmologies as they call it, claim that they have a more natural explanation of the dark energy that it naturally feeds into a cyclical process that is their cosmological paradigm. So yeah, if the cosmology should change, it's conceivable our view of dark energy may change from deeply mysterious to deeply integrated into a different paradigm. That is possible. I think it's Roger Penrose that think that information can bleed through from before the Big Bang to after the Big Bang. Yeah. Is the Big Bang like a full erasure of the hard drive or is there some information that could bleed through? Yeah, I mean, so Roger is among the most creative thinkers of the last hundred years, rightly won the Nobel Prize for his insights into singularities in space time that we know to afflict our mathematical solutions of black holes and the Big Bang and so forth. And he has an enormously fertile imagination. And I mean that in the most positive sense. And so he has put forward this idea, this conformal cyclic cosmology, I think is the official title, although I could be getting that wrong. I can't say that I've studied it. I have seen lectures on it. I don't find it convincing as yet. It feels like it's being built to find a solution as opposed to sort of more naturally emerging. Maybe Roger would say otherwise, and I don't mean to in any way cast aspersions on the work. It's vital and interesting and people are thinking about it. I don't consider it as close a competitor to say the inflationary theory as for instance, the stuff that Paul Steinhardt has put forward. But again, you've got to keep an open mind in this business when there's so much that we don't yet understand. I mean, it is wild to think that information could survive something like that. Just like it is wild to imagine that information could escape a black hole, for example. It just seems like by construction, these things are supposed to not bleed out anything. But one of the challenges in all these theories is when we talk about a singularity, has this real sexy term, the singularity. But a singularity is in more ordinary language, a physical system where the mathematics breaks down. It's nonsensical. It's like taking one divided by zero. You put that into a calculator and it says E, error. It does not make sense, doesn't compute. And so it's very hard to make definitive statements about things like the Big Bang or about black holes until we cure the mathematical singularities. And there are some who claim that in certain regimes, the singularities have been cured. I don't by any mean think that there's consensus on these ideas. So when one talks about information sort of bleeding through the Big Bang, you've really got to make sure that the equations have no singularity. You talk about cyclic cosmology, you've got to make sure that the equations don't have any singularities as you go from say one cycle to the next. Now, some of the proponents of these theories claim that they have resolved these issues. I don't think that there's a general sense that that is the case as yet, but it could be that, look, life is so short that I haven't had the time to deeply delve into all the mathematical intricacies of all the ideas that have been put forward. If I did that, I'd never do anything else. But that's what the issue is. And of course, it's just math. There may be holes. There may be gaps in our understanding in the way we're modeling physical reality. Well, that's the point. In fact, when you said I was about to jump in and say modeling, but you got there first and it's exactly the right point. We're talking about the universe here, right? And how do you talk about the universe with a straight face mathematically? And the way you do it is you simplify, you throw away those characteristics of the universe that you don't think are vital to a full understanding. And so we're gonna get to a point, and people are starting to, where we've got to go beyond those simplifications. And so cosmology has, for a long time, modeled the universe in the most simplest terms, homogeneous, isotropic. It has just a few parameters that describe it. The average density of mass and energy and so forth. We have to go beyond those simplifications, and that will require putting these things on computers. We're not gonna be able to do calculations there. So much as astrophysics has gone beyond many simplifications to now give really detailed simulations of star systems and galaxies and so forth, we're gonna have to do that with cosmology, and people are starting to do that today. Yeah, I've seen some interesting work on simulation. Most simulation cosmology, by the way, is just awesome, but just simulation of the early formation of our solar system to understand how the Oort cloud, and just, I don't know, the whole of it, how Earth came to be, like how Jupiter just the full- Protects us. Protects us, and then there's weird moons and volcanoes, and modeling all of that, the formation of all of that is fascinating because that naturally leads the question of how does life emerge on these kinds of rocks? How does a rock become a rabbit? But speaking of models, there's an equation called the Drake equation. We were talking about life. Have to ask at the highest level first, when you look out there, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there? Well, it was zero, one, or many. So if you say civilization, I would bring my number way down. It could be zero. If you talk about life, I think it could be many. As we were saying before, I think the move from life to consciousness, the kinds of beings that would build what we would recognize as a civilization, that may be extraordinarily rare. I hope it's not. As a kid, I loved Star Trek. I just loved the idea that we would be part of some universal community where, look, experience on planet Earth suggests it doesn't always go so well when groups who are separated try to come together and live in some larger collective. But again, as an optimist, how amazing would it be to converse with an alien civilization and learn what they've figured out about physics and cosmology and compare nodes and learn from each other in some wonderful way? I love that idea, but if you ask me the likelihood of it, I would err on saying it may be so improbable that the conditions conspire to allow life to move to this place of consciousness that it might be rare. It might be oversimplifying things, but just observing the power of the evolutionary process, I tend to believe, and you read different theories of how we went, how Homo sapiens evolved. It seems like the evolutionary process naturally leads to Homo sapiens or creatures like that or much better than that. So to me, there's several scary scenarios. So, okay, the positive scenario is life itself is really difficult. So that origin of life is difficult. That's exciting for many reasons because we might be able to prove that wrong easily in the near term by finding life elsewhere. Sure. The scary thing to me is if life is easy and there's plenty of conscious, intelligent civilizations out there and we have not obviously made contact, which means with intelligence and consciousness comes responsibility and ultimately destruction. So with power comes great responsibility. And then we end up destroying ourselves. That's the scariest. The positive, I guess, version is that maybe we're being watched sort of like there's a transition to where you don't want to ruin the primitive villages out there. And so there's a protective layer around us. Yeah. They're watching. So where do you, in these possible explanations to the Fermi paradox, why haven't we contacted aliens? Do you land on? Well, I think the most straightforward explanation is that there aren't any. Now, there are many other explanations too. So you can't be dogmatic about things that are just sort of gut feel. But one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, I don't know if you ever saw this one, where this alien civilization finally comes to planet Earth and gives us this book that they really want us to have and to hold and it's in this foreign language. You don't understand it. The cryptographers, they desperately try to decipher it as humans are going to visit this other alien planet. And they're all sending back postcards, how wonderful it is and so forth. And they finally decipher the title. It's to serve man. And everyone's so thrilled. Oh, they're here to service. It all makes sense. And then just as one of the final cryptographers is going onto the alien ship, his helper runs and says, I've deciphered the rest of the book to serve man. It's a cookbook. You know, so. Yeah. So yeah, is that a possibility? Sure. And so could they be watching us and just sort of waiting for us to get to a mature enough level? I don't know, it strikes me. Well, you know, I think it'd be better to have this conversation after the James Webb telescope. I mean, I do think that if we look at the atmospheres of many planets, I mean, there's now an estimate now that there's on order of one planet per star on average. So we've long known that, you know, the galaxy, hundreds of billions of stars, numbers of galaxies, hundreds of billions of galaxies. So we're talking about hundreds of billions of hundreds of billions of planets. Oh my, you know. And if we start to survey some of these planets and one after the other, after the other, we just sort of find no evidence for any of the biological markers. It could be, of course, maybe life takes a radically different form. It'd be hard to know that. But I think, you know, that would at least give us some insight on the life question. But I just don't see how we get insight on the civilization or consciousness question without, you know, the direct connection. And it strikes me that if consciousness is ubiquitous, let's say life is, I'm willing to grant that. If consciousness is also ubiquitous, then I don't understand why they haven't been here or why there hasn't been such a decision because presumably they should be much further ahead of us. How unlikely would it be that we're like, of all consciousness in the universe, we're the most advanced. That'd be such a special place for human beings that it's hard for me to grant that as a likely possibility. Rather, I think we're kind of run of the mill. And there are many who are far more advanced than us. And I don't think that they would expend the energy to hide themselves. So I don't think they care enough. And so, see, that's actually what I believe, that there's a very large number of civilizations that are far more advanced than us. But my sense is that humans are exceptionally limited, both in our direct sensory capabilities and our physics, our tools of sensing. That just like with the string theory and the multiple dimensions, we're just not, like, it's like, I honestly believe there could be stuff in front of our nose that we're just not seeing. Because we're too dumb, too much hubris. And I mean, there's a bunch of stuff. And too ignorant to the fabric of reality, all of those things. We're young in terms of intelligence. But I guess what I say is, like, I'm on board with all of that as a real possibility. But then it does strike me that we are sufficiently able to observe the, look, we can look back to a fraction of the duration from here to there. Just a fraction is left that we are unable to see. So however young we are, we have been able to sort of pierce the universe. And it just strikes me that there would be some signature. But maybe that's coming. But look, having said that, I do, look, I certainly note the fact that it's rare that I stoop down while walking in Manhattan and sort of dig up some ants in the bushes on the side of the street and talk to the ants, right? Because it's just not interesting to me. So if we're like the ants on the cosmological landscape, then yeah, I can imagine that the super advanced aliens would be like, who would ever, you know? But I feel like we're sufficiently advanced that there should be some signal, signature of that. But maybe it's coming. I think the deeper fundamental problem between us and the ants is that we don't have a common language. It's not the interest. It's that we don't even have a common language. And so the alien civilizations don't even know how to, like we humans have convinced ourself we're special because we developed a language. You talked about the importance of language to the intelligence. But it makes you wonder like how very niche is that, like club that we've, like tribe we've created of language and linguistic type of systems that are very specific to our particular kinds of brains and we share ideas together. We're all super excited that we can understand the universe because we came up with some notation and math. I wonder if there's some totally other kinds of language that communicates on a different time scale with different, very different mechanisms in the space of information that just is not. It's everything, everything is lost in translation. Yeah, and it could well be. So look, I mean, I think part of the reason I go toward the possibility of the soul intelligence is there's a certain kind of romantic appeal to looking out in the cosmos and it's just quiet and it's just eternal silence. There's something that appeals to me at an emotional level that way. But yeah, I mean, nobody knows. And it's certainly conceivable that there's just a radical mismatch between the kinds of things that we are able to observe and sensitive to versus the kinds of structures that permeate the universe in a manner that simply we're unable to detect. Well, if we are alone, that is exciting. And one of the ways it's exciting is that it's up to us to become, to expand out into the universe, to permeate consciousness out into the universe. So that's where space exploration comes in. Let me ask you, as somebody who's a screen theorist, a physicist, do you think space exploration, colonizing space, is it physics or an engineering problem? What would you say? Yeah, I think it's fundamentally an engineering problem if we're not trying to do things like build wormholes the way they did, say, an interstellar to get to a different place or trying to travel near the speed of light so that we would actually be able to traverse interstellar distances. I mean, without that, our colonization will happen in a very, very slow rate, right? But one of the beauties of relativity is if you do travel near the speed of light, you can actually go arbitrarily far in a human lifetime. People say, how's that possible? You can't go billions of light years. Well, you can, actually, because as you can do the speed of light, the way in which space and time change allows you to go, in principle, arbitrarily far. That's very exciting. But if we put that physics side of the issue and the manipulation of space and time to the side, yeah, I think it's a deep engineering problem. How do you terraform other planets? I mean, how do you go beyond our local neighborhood, say, without using the ideas of relativity? So I think it's all quite exciting. And I think the idea is using solar sails that people have developed and trying to take that first step to Mars. I think that's a vital and valuable step to take. But yeah, I think these are fundamentally engineering challenges. Or extending the human lifespan through biology research or maybe reducing what it means to be a human being into information and uploading certain parts of it. Maybe not all the full resolution of a human life, but maybe the essential things like the DNA and be able to reconstruct that human being. But I have to ask about Mars. Do you find the dream of humans stepping on Mars, stepping foot first, but also colonizing Mars, is one that's worth us fighting for? Yeah, hugely so. I mean, I think what we have long been not always in the best way is a species of explorers in the literal sense of traveling from one part of the world to another or in the more metaphorical sense of trying to travel through our minds to the quantum realm or back to the Big Bang or to the center of black holes. I think that's fundamentally part of the human spirit. So I do think that's a vital part of our heritage brought forward into its next incarnation. That's who we are. Do you think there'll be a day in the future where a human being is born on Mars and has to learn about his or her human origins on Earth? Like they'll have to read in a book? Yeah, I don't think it'll be a book at that stage. It'll probably just be uploaded into the head or something or imprinted into the DNA and then they just sort of sense it. But yeah, I think there's, well, look, the issue you raised before is the vital one. Is it the case that any sufficiently advanced civilization destroys itself? Is that sort of a commonplace quality? I mean, that's the other potential answer to the Fermi paradox. Why aren't they here? Because by the time they got to the technological development where they could travel here, they blew themselves up. They destroyed themselves. And that's an unfortunate, but not a hard to imagine possibility based on things that have happened here on planet Earth. But putting that to the side, I think that's the big obstacle but putting it to the side, we will resolve the engineering challenges. And I should probably modify my answer from before when you said, is it engineering or physics? It's really both, right? So we will surmount the engineering challenges and that will then make the physics challenges relevant. It'll make it relevant to figure out how to travel near the speed of light. It'll make it relevant to learn how to manipulate the shape of space time and so forth. So I think it's a multi-stage process where it is engineering and ultimately physics. And if we stick around long enough, those are the kinds of challenges I think that we're ultimately gonna surmount. And then the physics side is figuring out how to harness energy enough to travel outside the solar system, which seems like a heck of a difficult journey. But even Mars itself, I don't know, maybe because I was born in the Soviet Union and was born with the, looking up at the stars and that dream of like the highest of human achievement is ability to fly out there, to join the stars. I really liked the idea of going to Mars and not just stepping foot on Mars. It wasn't until, maybe I'm misinformed, but for me personally, it wasn't until Elon Musk started talking about the colonization of Mars did I realize like we humans can actually do that. And first of all, the importance of somebody saying that we can do these seemingly impossible things is immeasurable because the fact that he placed that into my mind and into the minds of millions of others, maybe hundreds of millions, maybe billions of others, young kids today, I mean, that's gonna make it a reality. I, for some reason, am deeply excited, even though my work is in AI, that echoes all of this. I'm excited by the idea that somebody would be born, as we were saying, on Mars and sort of look up and be able to see with a telescope Earth and say, that's where I came from. I don't know, that idea, scale to other planets, to other solar systems, that's really exciting. And hugely exciting. I think you're absolutely right. I mean, the vital thing is to dream, right? I mean, and it sounds hackneyed, but it is so important for young kids for the next generation to think about the things that are seemingly impossible. I mean, that's what makes them possible. And this is one which is concrete enough. I mean, this is something that's gonna happen soon in terms of actually going to Mars. And then the next step of establishing some presence, some semi-permanent or permanent presence, this is not something that's gonna wait to the 25th century. I mean, this is something that's gonna happen relatively soon. So, I mean, it could well be in your lifetime, unlikely mine, but possibly in your lifetime that that kid will be born and have the experience that you described. So yeah, it's spectacularly exciting. And I actually, I would love to go on Mars on one of the early. You would? Yeah. What if it's one way? I'm happy to do one. Really? Wow. And I'm single. There's ladies out there that wanna start that family. Let's go out to Mars. No, I think. See, I have to tell you something. You spoke about terror, thinking about like black holes. If I actually think about going to Mars and being on Mars and put myself in there fully, that's terror-inducing. The idea of to be in this foreign world where you can't come back, where you've made this choice that can't be reversed, or at some point it may be, but in that guise, that to me carries a deep sense of terror. You know, I feel that sense of terror every time. Kerouac, Jack Kerouac talked about this on the road, is when you leave a place, if you're honest about it, like life is short. And when you leave a place, you move to a new place, and you think of all the friends, maybe family, you're leaving behind as you drive over the hill, that really is goodbye. Like we sometimes don't think of it that way when we're moving, but that really is goodbye to that life, to the person you were, to all the people. Maybe if it's close friends, you'll see them maybe 10, 15 more times in your life, and that's it. And you're saying goodbye to all of that. And so in the same way, I see it as way more dramatic when you're flying away from Earth, and it's like, it's goodbye to Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, and it's goodbye to whatever, I don't know why I picked those, but all the things that are special to Earth, it's goodbye. But that's life. I suppose more what excites me about that kind of journey is it's a distinct contemplation of your mortality, acceptance of your mortality. You're saying, just like when you take on any difficult journey, it's accepting that you're going to die one day, and might as well do something truly exciting. Yes, I mean, I'm with you on that. I'm a strong believer that deep underneath human motivation is this terror of our own mortality. There's this wonderful book that had a great influence on me called The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. And when you are aware of the ways in which our mortality influences our behaviors, it really does add a different slant, a different kind of color to the interpretation of human behavior. Yeah, it's funny, that book had a big influence on me as well. Oh, is that right? Wow. And terror management theory, and again, from an engineering perspective, I don't know how many people that book influenced, because I talk to people about the fear of death, and it doesn't seem to be that fundamental to their experience. And I don't think on the surface it's fundamental to my experience, but it seems like an awfully, in terms of we talk about models and strength theory and theories, in terms of theories of this macro experience of human life, it seems like a heck of a good theory, that the fear of death is the one at the core. Yeah, well, I mean, and the terror management theories that you make reference to, I mean, this is a group of psychologists, social psychologists, who devised these very clever experiments, real world experiments with real people, where you can directly measure the hidden influence of the recognition of our own mortality. I mean, they've done these experiments where they have group of people A, group of people B, and the only difference between the two groups is that group B, they somehow reminded them in some subtle way of their own mortality. Sometimes it's nothing more than interviewing them with a funeral home across the street. An influence is there, but it's subtle, you don't even think you'd take note of. And they can find measurable effects that differentiate the two groups to a high degree of statistical significance in how they respond to certain challenges or certain kinds of questions that shows a direct influence of the reminder of their own mortality. And I've read a number of these studies and they are really convincing. And so, yeah, I would say that the reason why so many people would say that, yeah, fear of mortality is not front and center in my worldview. Yeah, I don't really think about it much, doesn't really matter too much. The reason why they're able to say that is because this thing called culture has emerged over the course of the last 10,000 years. And part of the role of culture is to give us a means of not thinking about our mortality all the time, of not living in terror of the inevitable end which faces us all. So it's completely understandable that that's the response because that's what culture is at least in part for. It's at least possible that the fear of death, the terror of your mortality is the creative force that created all of the things around us at this human civilization. And I think about from an engineering perspective, this is where I lose all of my robotics colleagues is I feel like if you want to create intelligence, you have to also engineer in some kind of echoes of this kind of fear. Fear is such a complicated word, but it's kind of like a scarcity, a scarcity of time, a scarcity of resources that creates a kind of anxiety, like deadlines get you to do stuff. And there's something almost fundamental to that in terms of human experience. Yeah, well, that's an interesting thought. So you're basically in order to create a kind of structure that mirrors what we call consciousness, you'd better have that structure confront the same kinds of issues and terrors that we do. Consciousness and suffering only makes sense in the context of death. If you want to, I feel like if you want to fit into human society, if you're a robot and if you want to fit into human society, you better have the same kind of existential dread, the same kind of fear of mortality, otherwise you're not gonna fit in. Right. Yeah, it might be wild, but at least like we're talking about all the theories that are at least worth consideration, I think that's a really powerful one. And definitely one has resonated with me and definitely seems to capture something beautifully, like real about the human condition. And I wonder, it's of course sucks to think that we need death to appreciate life, but that just may be the way it is. Well, it's interesting if this robotic or artificially intelligent system understands the world and understands the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, even an artificial intelligence will realize that even if its parts are really robust, ultimately it will disintegrate. Yeah. I mean, so the timescales may be different, but in a way when you think about it, it doesn't matter. Once you know that you are mortal in the sense that you are not eternal, the timescale hardly matters because it's either the whole thing or not, because on the scales of eternity, any finite duration, however large is effectively zero on the scales of eternity. And so maybe it won't be so hard for an artificial system to feel that sense of mortality because it will recognize the underlying physical laws and recognize its own finitude. And then it'll be us and robots drinking beers, looking up at the stars and just, having a good laugh in awe of the whole thing. Yeah. I think that's a pretty good way to end it, talking about the fear of death. We started talking about the meaning of life and ended on the fear of death. Brian, this was an incredible conversation. My pleasure, thank you, I enjoyed it enormously. I really, really enjoyed it. It's been a long time coming. I'm a huge fan of your work, a huge fan of your writing. Thanks for talking to me, Brian. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Green. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bill Bryson. Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity. But so far, all we have is a kind of elegant messiness. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/98HZanvAJ8Y

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Ray Dalio: Idea Meritocracy | AI Podcast Clips

The reason my company has been successful in terms of this is because of an idea meritocratic decision making, a process by which you can get the best ideas. You know, what's an idea meritocracy? An idea meritocracy is to get the best ideas that are available out there and to work together with other people in the team to achieve that. So if we can linger on a little bit longer, the idea of an idea meritocracy, it's fascinating but especially because it seems to be rare, not just in companies but in society. So there is a lot of people on Twitter and public discourse and politics and so on that are really stuck in certain sets of ideas, whatever they are. So when you're confronted with an idea that's different than your own about a particular topic, what kind of process do you go through mentally? Are you arguing through the idea with the person? Sort of present it as almost like a debate or do you sit on it and consider the world sort of empathetically? If this is true, then what does that world look like? Does that world make sense? And so on. So what's the process of considering those conflicting ideas for you? I'm going to answer that question but after saying first, almost implicit in your question is it's not common. What's common produces only common results. So don't judge anything that is good based on whether it's common because it's only going to give you common results. If you want unique, you have a unique approach. And so that art of thoughtful disagreement is the capacity to hold two things in your mind at the same time. The gee, I think this makes sense. And then saying, I'm not sure it makes sense. And then try to say, why does it make sense? And then to triangulate with others. So if I'm having a discussion like that and I work myself through and I'm not sure, then I have to do that in a good way. So I always give attention, for example, let's start off, what does the other person know relative to what I know? So if a person has a higher expertise or things, I'm much more inclined to ask questions. I'm always asking questions. If you want to learn, you're asking questions you're not arguing. Okay. You're taking in, you're assessing when it comes into you. Does that make sense? Are you learning something? Are you getting epiphanies and so on? And I try to then do that if the conversation, as we're trying to decide what is true and we're trying to do that together and we see truth different, then I might even call in another really smart, capable person and try to say, what is true and how do we explore that together? And you go through that same thing. So I would, I said, I describe it as having open-mindedness and assertiveness at the same time that you can simultaneously be open-minded and take in with that curiosity and then also be assertive and say, but that doesn't make sense. Why would this be the case? And you do that back and forth.

https://youtu.be/_tg9F5_P3CY

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Jeremi Suri: Civil War, Slavery, Freedom, and Democracy | Lex Fridman Podcast #354

the war continues after the battles end. This is something that's hard for Americans to understand. Our system is built with the presumption when war is over, when we sign a piece of paper, everyone can go home. It's not what happens. The following is a conversation with Jeremy Suri, a historian at UT Austin. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jeremy Suri. What is the main idea, the main case that you make in your new book, Civil War by Other Means, America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy? So our democratic institutions in the United States, they are filled with many virtues and many elements in their design that improve our society and allow for innovation. But they also have many flaws in them, as any institutions created by human beings have. And the flaws in our institutions go back to a number of judgments and perspectives that people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries had. And those flaws have been built into our institutions, and they continue to hinder innovation and growth in our society. Three of the flaws that I emphasize in this book are flaws of exclusion, the ways our institutions exclude people, not just African-Americans, many different groups, the ways our institutions also give power to certain people who have position, rather than skill or intelligence or quality. And third, and most of all, the ways our institutions embed certain myths in our society, myths that prevent us from gaining the knowledge we need to improve our world. In all of these ways, our democracy is hindered by the false reverence for institutions that actually need to be reformed, just as we need to highlight the good elements of them. That's really what my book is about. And then the myth, the false reverence, what are we talking about there? So there's a way in which we believe that if we love our country, it's somehow wrong to criticize our institutions. I believe if you love your country, you wanna encourage your institutions to get better and better. I love my university where I work, but I want it to be better. We have many flaws. I love my family, but I'm constantly telling family members how they can be better. That's what true knowledge leadership is about, not just cheerleading. What's the counterpoint to that? Because the other extreme is a deep, all-encompassing cynicism towards institutions. So for me, I like the idea of loving America, which seems to be sometimes a politicized statement these days that you believe in the ideals of this country. That seems to be either a naive or a political statement, the way it's interpreted. So the flip side of that, having a healthy skepticism of institutions is good, but having a complete paralyzing cynicism seems to be bad. Absolutely, both are ahistorical positions. What I try to do as a historian is work in between those spaces. The virtue is in the middle ground, for better or for worse. And what we have to recognize is that our institutions are necessary. There's a reason government exists. There's a reason our union was created. That's what Abraham Lincoln was heroically fighting for. So we have to believe in our union, we have to believe in our government, and we as business people, as intellectuals, we have to be part of the solution, not the problem. But that doesn't mean just ignoring the deep flaws in our institutions, even if we find personally ways to get around them. What really worries me is that there are a lot of very intelligent, well-intentioned people in our society who have figured out how to live with the flaws in our institutions, rather than how to use their skills to correct the flaws in our institutions. There's folks like somebody that lives next door to me, Michael Malice is an anarchist. Philosophically, maybe more than practically, just sort of argues for that position. It's an interesting thought experiment, I would say. And so if you have these flaws in institutions, one thing to do, as the communists did at the beginning of the 20th century, is to burn the thing down and start anew. And the other is to fix from within, one step, one slow step at a time. What's the case for both from a history perspective? Sure, so historically, there has always been an urge to burn down the institutions and start again, start with a blank slate. The historical record is that almost never works. Because what happens when you destroy the institutions, you gave the example of the Bolshevik Revolution. When you destroy the institutions, all you do is in the jungle that's left behind, you give advantages to those who are the most powerful. Institutions always place certain limits upon the most powerful in the jungle. If you go back to the jungle, the most powerful are actually going to have the most influence and most control. So the revolutionaries who are usually the vulnerable turn out to then be the victims of the revolution. And this is exactly what we saw with the French Revolution, with the Russian Revolution. So the record for that is not a great record. There still might be times to do that. But I think we should be very cautious about that. The record for working through institutions is a much better record. Now, what we have to be careful about is as we're working through institutions, not to become bought into them, not to become of those institutions. So what I've written about in this book and in other books, my book on Henry Kissinger, for example, is how it's important when in an institution to still bring an outsider perspective. I believe in being an inside outsider. And I think most of your listeners are inside outsiders. They're people who care about what's going on inside, but they're bringing some new ideas from the outside. I think the correct statement to say is most of the listeners, most people aspire to be inside or outsiders. But we, human nature is such that we easily become inside or insiders. So we like that idea, but the reality is, and I've been very fortunate because of this podcast to talk to certain folks that live in certain bubbles. And it's very hard to know when you're in a bubble that you should get out of the bubble of thought. And that's a really tricky thing because yeah, whether it's politics, whether it's science, whether it's any pursuits in life, because everybody around you, all your friends, you have like a little rat race and you're competing with each other. And then you get a promotion, you get excited, and you can see how you can get more and more power. It's not like a dark, cynical rat race. It's fun. That's the process of life. And then you forget that you just collectively have created a set of rules for the game that you're playing. You forget that this game doesn't have to have these rules. You can break them. This happens in Wall Street. Like the financial system, everybody starts to like collectively agree on a set of rules that they play, and they don't realize like, we don't have to be playing this game. It's tough, it's really tough. It takes a special kind of human being, as opposed to being anti-establishment on everything, which also gets a lot of attention. But being just enough anti-establishment to figure out ideas how to improve the establishment. That's such a tricky place to operate. I agree. I like the word iconoclastic. I think it's important to be an iconoclast, which is to say you love ideas, you're serious about ideas, but you're never comfortable with consensus. And I write about that in this book. I've written about that actually a lot in the New York Times too. I think consensus is overstated. As someone who's half Jewish and half Hindu, I don't wanna live in a society where everyone agrees, because my guess is they're gonna come after people like me. I wanna live in a society that's pluralistic. This is what Abraham Lincoln was really fighting for in the Civil War. It's what the Civil War is really about, and what my book's about, which is that we need a society where institutions encourage, as you say, different modes of thought, and respect different modes of thought, and work through disagreement. So a society should not be a society where everyone agrees. A democratic society should be a society where people disagree, but can still work together. That's the Lincoln vision. And how do you get there? I think you get there by having a historical perspective, always knowing that no matter what moment you're in, and no matter what room you're in with really smart people, there are always things that are missing. We know that as historians. No one is clairvoyant, and the iconoclast is looking for the things that have been forgotten, the silences in the room. And also, I wonder what kind of skill, what kind of process is required for the iconoclast to reveal what is missing to the rest of the room? Because it's not just shouting with a megaphone that something is missing, because nobody will listen to you. You have to convince them. Right. It's honestly where I have trouble myself, because I often find myself in that iconoclastic role, and people don't like to hear it. I like to believe that people are acting out of goodwill, which I think they usually are, and that people are open to new ideas, but you find very quickly, even those who you think are open-minded, once they've committed themselves and put their money and their reputation on the line, they don't want to hear otherwise. So in a sense, what you say is bigger than even being an iconoclast. It's being able to persuade and work with people who are afraid of your ideas. Yeah, I think the key is, like in conversations, is to get people out of a defensive position, like make them realize we're on the same side, we're brothers and sisters, and from that place, I think you just raise the question. It's like a little thought that just lands, and then I've noticed this time and time again, just a little subtle thing, and then months later, it percolates somewhere in the mind. It's like, all right, that little doubt, because I also realize in these battles, when especially political battles, people often don't have folks on their side that they can really trust as a fellow human being to challenge them. That's a very difficult role to be in, because in these battles, you kind of have a tribe and you have a set of ideas, and there's another tribe and you have a set of ideas, and when somebody says something counter to your viewpoint, you almost always want to put them in the other tribe as opposed to truly listening to another person. That takes skill, but ultimately, I think that's the way to bridge these divides is having these kinds of conversations. That's why I'm actually, again, optimistically believe in the power of social media to do that if you design it well, but currently, the battle rages on on Twitter. Well, I think what you're getting at, which is so important, is storytelling, and all the great leaders that I've studied, some of whom are in this book, some of whom are not, whether they're politicians, social activists, technologists, it's the story that gets people in. People don't respond to an argument. We're trained, at least in the United States, we're often trained to argue. You're told in a class, okay, this part of the room take this position, this part of the room take this position, and that's helpful because it forces you to see different sides of the argument, but in fact, those on one side never convince those on the other side through argument. It's through a story that people can identify with. It's when you bring your argument to life in human terms, and someone, again, like Abraham Lincoln was a master at that. He told stories. He found ways to disarm people and to move them without their even realizing they were being moved. Yeah, not make it a debate, make it tell a story. That's fascinating, because yes, some of the most convincing politicians, I don't feel like they're arguing a point. They're just telling a story, and it gets in there, right? That's right, that's right. I mean, when we look at what Zelensky has done in Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion, and I know you were there on the front lines yourself, it's not that he's arguing a position that persuaded us. We already believe what we believed about Russia, but he's bringing the story of Ukrainian suffering to life and making us see the behavior of the Russians that is moving opinion around the world. Well, the interesting stuff, sometimes it's not actually the story told by the person, but the story told about the person. And some of that could be propaganda, some of that could be legitimate stories, which is the fascinating thing. The power of story is the very power that's leveraged by propaganda to convince the populace. But the idea, one of the most powerful ideas when I traveled in Ukraine, and in general, to me personally, the idea that President Zelensky stayed in Kiev in the early days of the war, when everybody from his inner circle to the United States, everybody in the West and NATO, everybody was telling him, and even on the Russian side, I assume they thought he would leave, he would escape, and he didn't. From foolishness or from heroism, I don't know. But that's a story that I think united a country, and it's such a small thing, but it's powerful. It's the most basic of all human stories, the story of human courage. Yeah, courage. And I remember watching his social media feed on that, and he was standing outside, not even in a bunker, standing outside in Kiev, right, as the Russian forces are attacking and saying, I'm here, and this minister is here, and this minister is here. We're not corrupt, we're not stooges of the Americans who told us to leave. We're staying because we care about Ukraine. And the story of courage, I mean, that's the story that babies grow up seeing their parents as courageous, right? It's the most natural of all stories. And that's also the stories, for better or worse, that are told throughout history. Yeah. Because stories of courage and stories of evil, those are the two extremes, are the ones that are kinda, it's a nice mechanism to tell the stories of wars, of conflicts, of struggles, all of it. Yeah, yeah. The tension between those two. And the reason I believe studying history and writing about history is so essential is because it gives us more stories. The problem with much of our world, I think, is that we're confronted by data, we're confronted by information, and of course it's valuable, but it's easy to manipulate or misuse information. It's the stories that give us a structure. It's the stories where we find morality. It's the stories where we find political value. And what do you get from studying history? You learn more stories about more people. Yeah, I'm a sucker for courage, for stories of courage. Like, I've been in too many rooms, I've often seen too many people sort of, in subtle ways, sacrifice their integrity and did nothing. And people that step up when the opinion is unpopular and they do something where they really put themselves on the line, whether it's their money, whether it's their wellbeing, I don't know. That gives me hope about humanity. And of course, during a war like Ukraine, you see that more and more. Now, other people have a very cynical perspective of it that's saying, oh, those are just narratives that are constructed for propaganda purposes and so on, but I've seen it with my own eyes. There's heroes out there, both small and big. So just regular citizens and leaders. One set of heroes I learned about writing this book that I didn't know about that I should have are more than 100,000 former slaves who become Union soldiers during the Civil War. It's an extraordinary story. We think of it as North versus South, white Northern troops versus white Southern troops. There are, as I said, more than 100,000 slaves, no education, never anything other than slaves who flee their plantations, join the Union Army. And what I found in the research, and other historians have written about this too, is they become some of the most courageous soldiers because they know what they're fighting for, but there's something more to it than that. It seems in their stories that there is a humanity, a human desire for freedom and a human desire to improve oneself, even for those who have been denied even the most basic rights for all of their lives. And I think that story should be inspiring to all of us as a story of courage, because we all deal with difficulties, but none of us are starting from slavery. That's really powerful, that that flame, the longing for freedom can't be extinguished through the generations of slavery. So that's something you talk about. There's some deep sense in which, while the war was in part about slavery, it's not, the slaves themselves fought for their freedom, and they won their freedom. I don't think it's a war about slavery. I think it's a war about freedom. Because if you say it's a war about slavery, then it sounds like it's an argument between the slave masters and the other white guys who didn't want slavery to exist. And of course that argument did exist, but it wasn't, it was a war over freedom, especially after 1863, into the second year of the war, when Lincoln, because of war pressures, signs the Emancipation Proclamation, which therefore says that the contraband, the property of Southerners, i.e. their slaves, will now be freed and brought into the Union Army. That makes it about freedom. Already the slaves were leaving the plantations. They knew what was going on, and they were gonna get out of slavery as soon as they could. But now it becomes a war over freeing them, over opening that opportunity for them. And that's how the war ends. That's really important, right? And that's where we are in our politics today. It's the same debate. It's why I wrote this book, The Challenge of Our Time, is to understand how do we make our society open to more freedom for more people. So let's go to the beginning. How did the American Civil War start, and why? So the American Civil War starts because of our flawed institutions. The founders had mixed views of slavery, but they wanted a system that would eventually work its way toward opening for more people of more kinds. Not necessarily equality, but they wanted a more open democratic system. But our institutions were designed in ways that gave disproportionate power to slave holders in particular states in the union, through the Senate, through the Electoral College, through many of the institutions we talk about in our politics today. Therefore, that part of the country was, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, holding the rest of the country hostage. For a poor white man like Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky, who makes his way in Illinois, slavery was an evil, not just for moral reasons. It was an evil because it denied him democratic opportunity. Why would anyone hire poor Abe to do something if they could get a slave to do it for free? And his economy of opportunity for him had to be an economy that was open, and that did not have slavery, particularly in the new states that were coming into the union. Lincoln was one of the creators of the Republican Party, which was a party dedicated to making sure all new territory was open to anyone who was willing to work, any male figure who would be paid for their work. Free labor, free soil, free men, basic capitalism. Southerners, Southern plantation owners were an aristocracy that did not want that. They wanted to use slavery and expand slavery into the new territories. What caused the Civil War? The clash, and our institutions that were unable to adapt and continue to give disproportionate power to these Southern plantation slave owners. The Supreme Court was dominated by them. Senate was dominated by them. And so the Republican Party came into power as a critique of that, and Southerners unwilling to accept, Southern Confederates unwilling to accept that change went to war with the union. So who was on each side, the union, Confederates? What are we talking about? What are the states? How many people? What's like the demographics and the dynamics of each side? The union side is much, much larger, right? In terms of population, I think about 22 million people. And it is what we would today recognize as all the states basically North of Virginia. The South is the states in the South of the Mason-Dixon line. So Virginia and there on South, West through Tennessee. So Texas, for example, is in the Confederacy. Tennessee is in the Confederacy, but other states like Missouri are border states. And the Confederacy is a much smaller entity. It's made up of about 9 million people plus about 4 million slaves. And it is a agricultural economy, whereas the Northern economy is a more industrializing economy. Interestingly enough, the Confederate States are in some ways more international than the Northern states because they are exporters of cotton, exporters of tobacco. So they actually have very strong international economic ties, very strong ties to Great Britain. The United States was the largest source of cotton to the world before the Civil War. Egypt replaces that a little bit during the Civil War. But all the English textiles were American cotton from the South. And so it is the Southern half of what we would call the Eastern part of the United States today with far fewer people. It's made up, the Confederacy is, of landed families. Wealth in the Confederacy was land and slaves. The Northern United States is made up predominantly of small business owners and then larger financial interests, such as the banks in New York. And what about the military? Who are the people that picked up guns? What are the numbers there? So the Union also outnumbered the Confederacy. By far, but this is a really interesting question because there's no conscription in the Constitution. Unlike most other countries, our democracy is formed on the presumption that human beings should not be forced to go into the military if they don't want to. Most democracies in the world today, actually, still require military service. The United States has very rarely in its history done that. It's not in our Constitution. So during the Civil War, in the first months and years of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln has to go to the different states, to the governors, and ask the governors for volunteers. So the men who take up arms, especially in the first months of the war, are volunteers in the North. In the South, they're actually conscripted. And then as the war goes on, the Union will pass the Conscription Acts of 1862 and 1863, which for the first time, and this is really important because it creates new presidential powers, for the first time, Lincoln will have presidential power to force men into the army, which is what leads to all kinds of draft riots in New York and elsewhere. But suffice it to say, the Union Army throughout the war is often three times the size of the Confederate Army. What's the relationship between this no conscription and people standing up to fight for ideas and the Second Amendment? A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. We're in Texas. Yes. So what's the role of that in this story? The American population is already armed before the war. And so even though the Union and the Confederate Armies will manufacture and purchase arms, it is already an armed population. So the American presumption going into the war is that citizens will not be forced to serve, but they will serve in militias to protect their own property. And so the Second Amendment, the key part of the Second Amendment for me as a historian is the well-regulated militia part. The presumption that citizens as part of their civic duty do not have a duty to join a national army, Prussian style, but are supposed to be involved in defending their communities. And that's the reality. It's also a bit of a myth. And so Americans have throughout their history been gun owners, not AK-47 owners, but gun owners. And gun ownership has been for the purpose of community self-defense. The question coming out of that is, what does that mean in terms of, you have access to everything? Antonin Scalia even himself asked this question on the Supreme Court. He said in one of the gun cases, you have the right to defend yourself, but you don't have the right to own an Uzi. You don't have the right to have a tank. I don't think they'd let you park a tank, Lex, in your parking spot, right? I looked into this. I think there's a gray area around tanks, actually. I think you're legit allowed to own a tank. Oh, you really? I think there's, somebody look into this, somebody told me, but I could see that, because it's very difficult for that to get out of hand. Right, right. Okay, there may be one guy in a tank. You could be breaking laws in terms of the width of the vehicle that you're using to operate. Anyway, that's a hilarious discussion. But, so to make the case, speaking of AK-47s and rifles, and back to Ukraine for a second, one of the fascinating social experiments that happened in Ukraine at the beginning of the war is they handed out guns to everybody, rifles, and crime went down, which I think is really interesting. Yeah. I hope somebody does a kind of psychological data collection analysis effort here to try to understand why. Because it's not obvious to me that in a time of war, if you give guns to the entire populace, anyone who wants a gun, it's not going to, especially in a country who has historically suffered from corruption, not result in robberies and assaults and all that kind of stuff. There's a deep lesson there. Now, I don't know if you can extend that lesson beyond wartime, though. Right, that's the question, what happens after the war? I mean, my inclination would be to say that can work during war, but you have to take the guns back after the war. But they might be very upset when you try to take the guns. That's the problem. No, that's precisely the problem. That's actually part of the story here. I mean, what happens after the Civil War, after Appomattox in 1865, is that many Southern soldiers go home with their guns and they misuse their weapons to, quite frankly, shoot and intimidate former slaves who are now citizens. This is a big problem. I talk about this in the book in Memphis in 1866. It is former Confederate soldiers and police officers and judges who are responsible for hundreds of rapes within a two-day period and destroying an entire community of African-Americans, and they're able to do that because they brought their guns home. But underneath the issue of guns there is just the fundamental issue of hatred and inability to see other humans in this world as having equal value as another human being. What was the election of 1860 like that brought Lincoln to power? So the election of 1860 was a very divisive election. We have divisive contested elections from 1860 really until 1896. The 1860 election is the first election where a Republican is elected president, that is Lincoln, but he's elected president with less than 40% of the vote because you have two sets of Democrats running, Democrats who are out to defend the Confederacy and everything, and then Democrats who wanna compromise but still keep slavery, most famous Stephen Douglas, who argues for basically allowing each state to make its own decisions, popular sovereignty as he called it. And then you still have traditional Whigs who are running, that was the party that preceded the Republican Party. So you have four candidates, Lincoln wins a plurality. Lincoln is elected largely because the states that are anti-slavery or anti-expansion of slavery are not a majority, but they're a plurality. And the other states have basically factionalized and so they're unable to have a united front against him. Was the main topic at hand slavery? I think the main topic at hand at that time was the expansion of slavery into new territories. Into new territory. Right, it was not whether to abolish slavery or not, Lincoln is very careful and his correspondence is clear. He wants no one on his side during the election to say that he's arguing for abolitionism, even though he personally supported that. What he wants to say is the Republican Party is for no new slave territories. Did he make it clear that he was for abolition? No, he was intentionally unclear about that. Do you think he was throughout his life? Was there a deep, because that takes quite a vision. Like you look at society today and it takes quite a man to see that there's something deeply broken, where a lot of people take for granted. I mean, into modern day you could see factory farming as one of those things that in 100 years we might see as like the torture, the mass torture of animals could be seen as evil. But just to look around and wake up to that, especially in a leadership position. Yeah, was he able to see that? In some ways yes, in some ways no. I mean, the premise of your question is really important that to us it's obvious that slavery is a horror. But to those who had grown up with it, who had grown up seeing that, it was hard to imagine a different world. So you're right, Lincoln's imagination like everyone else's was limited by his time. I don't think Lincoln imagined a world of equality between the races, but he had come to see that slavery was horrible. And historians have differed in how he came to this. Part of it is that he had a father who treated him like a slave. And you can see in his early correspondence how much he hates that his father, who was a struggling farmer, was basically trying to control Lincoln's life. And he came to understand personally, I think how horrible it is to have someone else tell you what you should do with your labor, not giving you your own choices. But Lincoln was also a pragmatist. This is what made him a great politician. He wanted to work through institutions, not to burn them down. And he famously said that if he could preserve the union and stop the spread of slavery by allowing slavery to stay in the South, he would. If he could do it by eliminating slavery in the South, he would. If he could do it by buying the slaves and sending them somewhere else, he would. His main goal, what he ran on, was that the new territories West of Illinois, that they would be areas for free, poor white men like him, not slavery. What do you learn about human nature if we step back and look at the big picture of it, that slavery has been a part of human civilization for thousands of years? That this American slavery is not a new phenomenon? I think history teaches us a very pessimistic and a very optimistic lesson. The pessimistic lesson is that human beings are capable of doing enormous harm and brutality to their fellow man and woman. And we see that with genocide in our world today, that human beings are capable with the right stimuli, the right incentives of enslaving others. I mean, genocide is in the same category, right? The optimistic side is that human beings are also capable with proper leadership and governance of resisting those urges, of putting those energies into productive uses for other people. But I don't think that comes naturally. I think that's where leadership and institutions matter. But leadership and institutions can tame us. We can tame, we can civilize ourselves. You know, for a long time, we stopped using that verb, to civilize. I believe in civilization. I believe there's a civilizing role. Lincoln spoke of that, right? So did Franklin Roosevelt, the civilizing role that government plays. Education is only a part of that. It's creating laws, minimal laws, but laws nonetheless, that incentivize and penalize us for going to the dark side. But if we allow that to happen, or we have leaders who encourage us to go to the dark side, we can very quickly go down a deep, dark tunnel. See, I believe that most people want to do good. And the power of institutions, if done well, they encourage and protect you if you want to do good. So if you're just in the jungle, from a game theoretic perspective, you get punished for doing good. So being extremely self-centered and greedy, and even violent and manipulative, can have, from a game theory perspective, benefits. But I don't think that's what most humans want. Institutions allow you to do what you actually want, which is to do good for the world, do good for others, and actually in so doing, do good for yourself. Institutions protect that natural human instinct, I think. And what you just articulated, which I think the historical record is very strong on, is the classic liberal position. That's what liberalism means in a 19th century sense, right? That you believe in civilizing human beings through institutions that begins with education. Kindergarten is an institution. Laws, and just basic habits that are enforced by society. How do you think people thought about the idea, how do they square the idea of all men are created equal, those very powerful words at the founding of this nation? How do they square that with slavery? For many Americans, saying all men were created equal required slavery, because it meant that the equality of white people was dependent upon others doing the work for us. In the way some people view slavery, the work for us, in the way some people view animal labor today. And maybe in 50 years, we'll see that as a contradiction. But the notion among many Americans in the 17th, 18th century, and this would also be true for those in other societies, was that equality for white men meant that you had access to the labor of others that would allow you to equalize other differences. So you could produce enough food so your family could live equally well nourished as other families, because you had slaves on the land doing the farming for you. This is Thomas Jefferson's world. So it's like animal farm, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. That's right. And I think that's still the way people view things. Yeah. Right? I don't know if that's a liberal position or it's just a human position that all humans have equal value, just on the basic level of humanity. But do we really believe that? We want to. I don't know if our society really believes that yet. And I don't know exactly. I mean, it's super complicated, of course, when you realize the amount of suffering that's going on in the world, where there's children dying from starvation in Africa, and to say that all humans are equal, well, a few dollars can save their life. And instead we buy a Starbucks coffee and are willing to pay 10, 50, $100,000 to save a child, our child, like somebody from our family, and don't want to spend $2 to save a child over in Africa. Right. So there's, and I think Sam Harris or others have talked about like, well, I don't want to live in a world where we'd rather send $2 to Africa. There's something deeply human about saving those that are really close to you, the ones we love. So that like hypocrisy that seems to go at tension with the basic ethics of alleviating suffering in the world, that's also really human. That's also part of this ideal of all men are created equal. It's a complicated, messy world, ethically. It is, but I mean, I think, at least the way I think about it is, so what are the things even within our own society where we choose to do something with our resources that actually doesn't help the lives of many people? So we invest in all kinds of things that are often because someone is lobbying for them. This happens on both sides of the aisle. This is not a political statement, right? Rather than saying, you know, if we invested a little more of our money, really a little more, we can make sure every child in this country had decent healthcare. We can make sure every child in this country had what they needed to start life healthy, and that would not require us to sacrifice a lot, but it would require us to sacrifice a few things. Yeah, there's a balance there, and I also noticed the passive-aggressive statement you're making about how I'm spending my money. Hey, well, me too. Spending it a little more wisely. Hey, hey, hey. You know, I like to eat nice meals at nice restaurants, so I'm as guilty of this as you are. I got a couch, and that couch serves no purpose. It looks nice, though. No, it's a nice-looking couch. It's a nice-looking couch. It's actually very clean. I got it for occasional Instagram photos to look like an adult. Okay, because everything else in my life is a giant mess. What role did the ideas that the founding documents of this country play in this war, the war between the Union and the Confederate States, and the founding ideas that were supposed to be unifying to this country? Is there interesting tensions there? Well, there are certainly tensions because built into the founding documents, of course, is slavery and inequality and women's exclusion from voting and things of that sort. But the real brilliance of Abraham Lincoln is to build on the brilliance of the founders and turn the Union position into the defense of the core ideas of the country. So the Confederacy is defending one idea, the idea of slavery. Lincoln takes the basket of all the deeper ideas and puts them together. Three things the war is about for Lincoln, and this is why his speeches still resonate with us today. Every time I'm in Washington, I go to the Lincoln Memorial. It's the best memorial, best monument, I think, in the world, actually. And there are always people there reading Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural. Lincoln had two years of education, yet he found the words to describe what our country was about better than anyone, and it's because he went back to these founding values, three values. We already talked about one, freedom. And freedom is actually complex, but it's also simple. The simple Lincoln definition is that freedom is the right of each person to work for himself or herself, which is to say, it doesn't mean you own your own company, but it means you control your labor. And no one can tell you you have to work for a certain wage. You might not have a job, but you decide. You decide, right? You can see where that comes from his own background as a poor man, right? So freedom is the control of your own labor. Second, democracy, government of the people, by the people, for the people. The government is to serve the people, is to come from the people. And then the third point, justice and helping all human beings. He, at the end of his life, as the Civil War is ending, he never declares that the South should be punished. His argument is that we shouldn't apologize for their misdeeds, but that all should be part of this future. He's not arguing for consensus. He's arguing for a society where everyone has a stake going forward. So justice, democracy, freedom. Those are the gifts. I talked about the flaws in our system. Those are the virtues in our system that our founders coming out of the enlightenment planted. And Lincoln carries them forward. He gives us the 2.0 version of them. So a few tangent questions about each of those. So one on democracy, people often bring up the United States as not a democracy. It's a republic that is representative. Is there some interesting tensions there in terminology? Or is, yeah, can you maybe kind of expand on the different versions of democracy? So the philosophy of democracy, but also the practical implementations of it? Sure, the founders intended for us to be a democracy. This argument that they wanted us to be a republic instead of a democracy is one of these made up myths. They believed that fundamentally what they were creating was a society, very few of which had existed before, a society where the government would be of the people, by the people, for the people. That's what they expected, right? That's what it meant. So the legitimacy of our government was not gonna be that the person in charge was of royal blood, that's the way the Europeans did it, or that the person in charge had killed enough people, a la Genghis Khan, or that the person in charge was serving a particular class. It was that the person in charge, the institutions were to serve the people. They adopted Republican tools to get there because they were fearful appropriately of simply throwing every issue up to the masses. Democracy is not mob rule. Democracy is where you create procedures to assess the public will and to act in ways that serve the public without harming other elements of the public that are not in the majority. That's why we have a constitution and a bill of rights. And for their time, the founders did not believe that women should be part of this discussion, that they were not capable. They were wrong about that in their time. That's how they thought. We've of course changed that. They believed you had to have property to have a stake. We don't believe that anymore. So we can argue over the details and those 50 years from now will criticize us, right? For the way we think about these things. But it was fundamentally about, this is the radicalism of the American experiment, that government should serve the people, all people. So democracy means of the people, by the people, for the people. And then it doesn't actually give any details of how you implement that because you could implement all kinds of ways. And I think what we've learned as historians, I think what the founders knew because they were very well-read in the history of Rome and Greece, was that democracy will always have unique characteristics for the culture that it's in. If coming out of the war against Russia, Ukraine is able to build a better democracy than it had before, it's never gonna look like the United States. I'm not saying it's gonna be worse or better. A culture matters. The particular history of societies matters. Japan is a vibrant democracy. I've been there many times. It does not look at all like the American democracy. So democracy is a set of values. The implementation of those values is a set of practical institutional decisions one makes based in one's cultural position. So just to linger on that topic, if you do representative, you said like, democracy should not, one failure mode is mob rule. So it should not descend into that. Not every issue should be up to everybody. Correct. Okay, so you have representation, but Stalin similarly felt that he could represent the interests of the public. He was also helping represent the interests of the public. So that's a failure mode too. If the people representing the public become more and more powerful, they start becoming detached from actually being able to represent or having just a basic human sense of what the public wants. I think being of the people, by the people, for the people means you are in some way accountable to the people. And the problem with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, this was already evident before Stalin came into power, is the same problem the Communist Party of China has today, which is that you have leadership that's not accountable. Well, let me go then to one of the other three principles of freedom, because one of the ways to keep government accountable is the freedom of the press. So there's the internet, and on the internet, there's social networks, and one of them is called Twitter. I think you have an account there, people should follow you. And recently, people have been throwing around recently, for a while, the words of freedom of speech. Just out of curiosity, for a tangent upon a tangent, what do you think of freedom of speech as it is today, and as it was at that time during the Civil War, after the Civil War, and throughout the history of America? So freedom of speech has always been one of the core tenets of American democracy, and I'm near absolutist on it, because I think that people should have the right to speak. What makes our democracy function is that there is always room for, quite frankly, people like you and me, who like to disagree, and have reasons to disagree. So I am against almost all forms of censorship. The only time I believe in censorship is if somehow an individual or a newspaper has stolen the Ukrainian plans for their next military movements in the next week. You should not be able to publish that right now, maybe after they act. But criticism, opinion, interpretation should be wide open. Now, that doesn't mean, though, that you have the right to come to my classroom and start shouting and saying whatever you want. You have the right on the street corner to do that, but my classroom is a classroom for my students with a particular purpose. Sorry about that from last week. I'll never do it again. I apologize. I'm really sorry. It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. I get drunk. So the people who don't know, you're a professor at UT Austin, it's nearby, so sometimes I get a little drunk and wander in there. I apologize. You're not the only one. Was that you? I didn't even know it was you. I'm sorry. Okay. So the point is that free speech is not licensed to invade someone else's space. And I also believe in private enterprise. So I think that if I owned a social media network, I don't. It would be up to me to decide who gets to speak on that network and who doesn't. And then people could decide not to use it if they don't want to use it. But there's a, so yes, that's one of the founding principles. So oftentimes when you talk about censorship, that's government censorship. So social media, if you run a social media company, you should be able to decide from a technical perspective of what freedom of speech means. But there's some deeper ethical, philosophical sense of how do you create a world where every voice is heard of the people, by the people, for the people? That's not a, that's a complicated technical problem. When you have a public square, how do you have a productive conversation where critics aren't silenced, but at the same time, whoever has the bigger megaphone is not gonna crowd out everybody else? So I think it's very important to create rules of the game that give everyone a chance to get started and that allow for guideposts to be created from the will of the community, which is to say that we as a community can say, we can't stop people from speaking, but we as a community can say that in certain forms, we're gonna create certain rules for who gets to speak and who doesn't, under what terms, but they can still have somewhere else to go. So I believe in opening space for everyone, but creating certain spaces within those spaces that are designed for certain purposes. That's what a school does. So I will not bring someone to speak to my students who is unqualified. It's not a political judgment. The rules at a university are where an educational institution, you need to have the educational credentials to come speak about artificial intelligence. I'm not gonna bring some bum off the street to do that. We have certain rules, but that bum on the street can still, in his own space or her own space, can still say what he or she wants to say about artificial intelligence. This is how newspapers work. When I write for the New York Times, they have an editorial team. The editorial team makes certain decisions. They check facts. And there's certain points of view. They don't allow anti-Semitic comments. Right, you're not gonna be able to publish an anti-Semitic screed, whether you think it's true or not true in the New York Times, but that doesn't prevent you from finding somewhere else. So we allow entities to create certain rules of the game. We make transparent what those rules are. And then we as citizens know where to go to get our information. What's been a problem the last few decades, I think, is it hasn't been clear what the rules are in different places and what are the legitimate places to get information and what are not. Yeah, the transparency seems to be very critical there. Even for the New York Times, I think there's a lot of skepticism about which way the editorial processes lean. I mean, there's a public perception that it's, especially for opinions, it's going to be very left-leaning in the New York Times. And without transparency about what the process is like, about the people involved, all you do, like conspiracy theories and the general public opinion about that is going to go wild. And I think that's okay for the New York Times. People can, in a collective way, figure stuff out. Like they could say, okay, New York Times, 73% of the time is gonna lean left in their head. They have like a loose estimation or whatever. But for a platform like Twitter, it seems like it's more complicated. Now, of course, there should be rules of the game, but I think there's, maybe I wanna say a responsibility to also create incentives for people to do high-effort empathetic debate versus throwing poop at each other. Yeah, I think those are two slightly different things, though I agree. I think that my view is that the failure of Facebook and Twitter and others in recent years has been that they have been completely untransparent about their rules. So what I would think would advance us is if they had a set of rules that were clear, that were consistently followed, and we understood what they were. That would also tell us as consumers what the biases are, how to understand what's going on. It seems, if I might say, that since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, it's been arbitrary in who's thrown off and who's not thrown off. And that's a real problem. Arbitrariness is in some ways the opposite of democracy. But there's also a hidden arbitrariness in interpretation of the rules. So for example, what comment incites violence? That's really, really difficult to figure out to me. Like, there's a gray area. Obviously, there's very clear versions of that. But if I know anything about people that try to incite violence, they're usually not coming out and clearly saying it. They're usually kind of dog-whistling it. And same with racism and anti-Semitism, all of that. It's usually dog whistles. So like, and they usually have fun playing with the rules, playing around the rules. So it's a gray area. Same with during COVID, misinformation. What's misinformation, right? I agree. And some of these are age-old problems. Our legal system, common law, has been struggling with what is incitement to violence since the first Supreme Court decisions in the 18th century. Right? So you're absolutely right. But I will say this. There are certain things that are clearly incitement to violence. I'll give you very clear examples. I'll just make it personal, right? My wife is an elected official here in Austin. There have been people who have put things up on Twitter calling for her to be hanged or calling for her to be attacked. That's incitement to violence. When you specifically call for violence against someone, I agree, there's a lot of other stuff where it's a gray area, but we could start if we're applying these rules by getting that material off of these sites. So some of that is a problem of scale too, but the gray area is still a forever problem that we may never be able to solve. And maybe the tension within the gray area is the very process of democracy. But saying like, we need to take our country back, is that incitement to violence? I don't think that. I think we need to take our country back, just that? No. But then, you know- Because I might say that. I might say we need to take our- I say that all the time. Again, I walk around drunk, just screaming at everybody. I thought you wanted us to take you back. Exactly. I was very confused. My messaging needs to work. But let's go to the January 6th example, right? To say, hang Mike Pence, that's incitement to violence. Yeah. To say, go get Nancy, that's incitement to violence. Yeah, yeah, it's very clear. Again, I don't think that's the big problem. The big problem is the gray area. But yeah, and the other problem is just how to technically find the large scale of comments and posts and so on that are doing this kind of clear incitement to violence. Yeah, but this is something for you to solve. You're the AI guy. I understand. I mean, don't ask me those questions. Well, I have to say, some of that is motivation, some of that is vision, and some of that is execution. So for example, just to go out briefly on a dark topic, something I've recently became aware of is, Facebook and Twitter and so on, people post violence on there, like videos of violence, child porn, some of the darkest things in this world. And to find them at scale is a difficult problem. And to act on it aggressively is a difficult problem. But I think part of this motivation, like saying, this is a big problem, we need to take this on, we need to find all the darkest aspects of human nature that rise and appear on our platform and remove them so that we can create a place for humanity to flourish through the process of conversation. But it's just hard, it's just really hard. When you look at millions of posts, trillions of interactions, it's wild, with the amount of data. But where we are now with social media seemed wild and impossible five years ago, right? Yes. I actually, what frustrates me is I think there are people who have politicized this issue in unnecessary ways. Everyone, regardless of their politics, would support what you just said. Investing our money, maybe grants from the federal government, in AI skilled people like you figuring out ways to get violent videos off of there. That shouldn't be political. Well, some of that also requires being transparent from a social media company perspective and transparent in a way that really resists being political. To be able to be transparent about your fight against these evils while still not succumbing to the sort of the political narratives of it. That's tricky, but you have to do that kind of, and walk calmly through the fire. That's what Twitter feels like if you're being political. It's like a firing squad from every side. As a leader, you have to kind of walk calmly. And that is where we need a new generation of people who will have diverse politics, but will stand up against that, right? I mean, that's the lesson from after the civil war is where progress is made. The war doesn't solve problems of hate. Where progress is made is where you have local leaders and others who stand up and say, we can differ, but we're gonna stop calling people from certain backgrounds monkeys, which was a common thing to do at that time. Jews are still called monkeys in certain places, right? People have to stand up while still maintaining their political differences. Several hundred thousand people died. Now, what made this war such a deadly war? It's extraordinary how many people died, more than half a million. And this was without a single automatic rifle, without a single bomb. It was mostly in hand-to-hand combat, which is to say that these 600,000 or so people who died, they died where the person who killed them was standing within a few feet of them. And that's really hard. Most of the killing that happens in wars today is actually from a distance. It's by a drone, it's by a bomb, it's by a rocket or by an automatic weapon. And just to make this even more focused, to this day, the deadliest day in American history was during the Civil War. September, 1862 at Antietam, more than 22,000 Americans killed one another hand-to-hand. There hasn't been a day that deadly in American history since then. That's amazing considering the technological changes. What was in the mind of those soldiers on each side? Was there conviction for ideas? Did they hate the other side? I think actually they were fighting out of fear. What we know from reading their letters, what we know from the accounts is that, yes, there are ideas that are promoted to them to get them to the battlefield. They believe in what they're doing. But here it's the same as World War I. And I think the Civil War and World War I are very similar as wars. You are in these horrible conditions, you're attacked, and you have the chance to either kill the other side and live or die. And you fight to live and you fight to save the people next to you. What is true about war, what is both good and dangerous about it, is you form an almost unparalleled bond with those on your side. This is the men under arms scenario, right? And that's where the killing goes. And it's a civil war, which means sometimes it's brother against brother, quite literally. And what it teaches us is how human beings can be put into fighting and will commit enormous damage. And that's why this happens. It goes on for four years. And just the extensive research you've done on this war for this book, what are some of the worst and some of the best aspects of human nature that you found? Like you said, brother against brother. That's pretty powerful. They're both, right? So the level of violence that human beings are capable of, how long they're able to sustain it. The South should not have, the Confederacy should not have lasted in this war as long as it did. By the end, I mean, they're starving and they keep fighting. So the resilience in war of societies and the power of hate to move people. What are the bright sides? You see in Lincoln and Grant, who I talk about a lot in the book as well, Ulysses Grant, you see the ability of empathetic figures to still rise above this in spite of all the horror. Lincoln went to visit more soldiers in war than any president ever has. Often at personal peril, because he was close to the lines and he connected. It wasn't propaganda. There weren't always reporters following him. He was able to build empathy in this context. And I think, as I said, war is horrible as it is, often gives opportunities to certain groups. So African-Americans, former slaves, are able to prove themselves as citizens. Jews did this an enormous number in World War II. Henry Kissinger, who I wrote about before, he really only gets recognized as an American. He's a German Jewish immigrant. He's seen as an American because of his service in World War II. So the bright side of this is that often in the case of war, on your own side, you will let go of some of your prejudices. Ulysses Grant has a total transformation. He goes into the civil war, an anti-Semite and a racist. He comes out with actually very enlightened views because he sees what Jewish soldiers and what African-American soldiers did. What's Ulysses Grant's story? What do you learn from him? Is he a hero or a villain of this war? I think he's a hero, though he's a flawed hero, as all heroes are. He's a man from Ohio and Illinois, who was really a failed businessman time and again, and had an ability to command people in war. Where did this come from? He was a clear communicator and an empathetic figure. He tended to drink too much, but he was the kind of person people wanted to follow. They trusted him. And so in battle, that became very important. And the second thing is he did his homework. He had a sense of the terrain. He had a sense of the environment he was operating in, and he was ruthless in pursuing what he had studied. So he turns out at battles like Vicksburg and elsewhere to actually undertake some pretty revolutionary maneuvers. And then he figures out that the advantage now is on his side in numbers, and he just pounds Lee, pounds him to death, similar to what the United States does at the end of World War II with Germany and Japan. He comes out of the war, Grant does. He's a believer in union. He wants to protect former slaves and other groups, and he tries to use the military for that purpose. He's limited. And then as president, he tries to do that as well. Right now, we still use many of the laws that were passed during Grant's presidency to prosecute insurrectionists. So the 900 or so people who have been prosecuted for breaking into the Capitol and attacking police on January 6th, those insurrectionists, they've been prosecuted under the 1871 anti-Klu Klux Klan law. So that's a big accomplishment by Grant, and we still benefit from it. The problem is Grant was not a great politician. Unlike Lincoln, he didn't give good speeches. He wasn't a persuasive figure in a political space. And so he had trouble building support for what he was doing, even though he was trying to do what, in the end, I think, were the right things. What was the role of the KKK at that time? So the Klu Klux Klan is formed at the end of the Civil War by Confederate veterans, first in Tennessee, in Pulaski, Tennessee, and then it spreads elsewhere. And there are other groups that are similar, the Red Shirts and various others. These are veterans of the Confederate Army who come home and are committed to continuing the war. They are gonna use their power at home and their weapons to intimidate and, if necessary, kill people who challenge their authority, not just African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, various others. They are going to basically protect the continued rule of the same families who owned the slaves before in post-slavery Tennessee and post-slavery South Carolina. And when we get to voting, they're often the groups that are preventing people from voting. The white sheets and the ritual around that was all an effort to provide a certain ritualistic legitimacy and hide identity, though everyone knew who they were. Oh, so that whole brand, that whole practice was there from the beginning. Have you studied the KKK's history a little bit? I have, and there are a number of other historians who have, too, so I've used their research as well. I'm kind of curious. I have to admit that my knowledge of it is very kind of caricature knowledge. I'm sure there's interesting stories and threads, because I think there's different competing organizations or something like that. Of course. Within the United States. And I feel like through that lens, you can tell a story of the United States also of these different groups. There are often business associations. I mean, there's a lot of work showing that actually people joined the KKK for the reasons I just laid out, but also because it was networking for your business. You gained legitimacy in the area that you were in. So these were community groups that were formed to help white business people. They helped white sheriffs get elected. What we have to understand today is when we're debating policing, this history matters enormously, right? I have nothing against police. My cousin, one of my closest relatives, just retired from 25 years in the New York Police Department. Thank God he survived. I have deep respect. He's one of the best public servants I know. But what we also have to recognize as we respect police officers is that for many communities in our country, they know this history. And the KKK in the 1870s and in the 1930s, you look at any KKK organization as I have in my research and you find the police chiefs are the KKK members, the local police officers, local judges, because it was how you became police chief. So these groups infiltrated some of the main institutions in our nation. I don't even think they infiltrated. I think they were part of those institutions. The deeper question today in the 21st century is, one, how much of that is still there and how much of the history of that reverberates through the institutions. And I'm making the latter point, that it's not there that much now, but people remember it. Well, and some people would even say it's not there at all, that there is not institutional racism or policing. But if that's the case, then you can also say that if there is not direct institutional racism there, what is it? The echoes of history still have effects. Of course, and that's really important in that we have to take that seriously. That's not an excuse for people then saying nasty things about the police, but it is what we have to recognize. Look, I'm Jewish and there are certain elements of Russian behavior today I see in Ukraine that reverberate with the history of how my grandparents dealt with pogroms in Russia, right? Even though what Putin is doing in Ukraine might not technically be a pogrom, that history matters in how I view these issues. And that's a reality. Yeah, I went to 7-Eleven recently and what did I eat? I ate one of their salads. I'm sorry, I love 7-Eleven, I'm sorry. Ate one of the salads and got terrible food poisoning. I was suffering for like four days and now I can't, I love 7-Eleven, I love going to 7-Eleven late at night in sweatpants and just I escaped the world. I'm listening to an audio book. And now every time I pass that salad, for the rest of my life, I would have hate for that salad. So history matters, even if the salad is no longer have any bad stuff in it. It's probably the lettuce or something, whatever. Mostly for humor's sake, but I'm also giving a kind of metaphor that history can have an individual and a large-scale society effect on human interactions, both the good and the bad. If you actually recommend to me offline books on the KKK, that would be really- I'd be happy to. There were a few mentioned in the footnotes of my book here. And also in part, because I also want to understand the white nationalism, white supremacists, Christian supremacists, or Christian nationalism, all those different subgroups in the United States and elsewhere in the world. I'm a bit- my mind has been focused on some of the better aspects of human nature, that it's nice to also understand some of the darker aspects. Let me ask you sort of a personal question for me. Do you think it's possible- Do you think it's useful to do a podcast conversation with somebody like David Duke? Or somebody- This was somebody that everybody knows. So it's not like you're giving a platform to somebody that's a hidden member of the KKK, or like a- It's sort of putting a pretty face on some dark ideas, but everybody knows. And so now you're just exploring. You're sitting across the table, maybe not in his case, maybe somebody who's an active KKK member, sitting across from a person that literally hates me, Lex. I think that's fascinating to explore that way. I think so long as what you are doing is not boosting someone, so taking an obscure figure, and making that figure now famous, but if it's someone who's already infamous, and it helps us to understand them, and so long as your effort is to ask them tough questions, which you do, right? You don't give them all the questions in advance, you don't have limitations on what you can ask. So long as it is a real interview, not pablum, then I'm for it. What I'm against is a softball interview that allows someone to sound reasonable when they're not. But the way I've seen you do this, when you've had figures like that, I won't name who I have in mind, but when I've seen that, I think that's useful, because honestly, the historian in me, and the citizen in me wants to understand. My Jewish grandfather always was the first to be against any effort to suppress anti-Semites, because his view was he wanted to know who they were, and he wanted to know what they thought so he could be prepared. And I also see, perhaps as a historian, you may be able to appreciate this kind of thing, that's probably how you see the world, but there's several ways to see a human being, like Vladimir Putin is an example. One is a political figure that's currently doing actions on the world, geopolitics internally, the politics of Russia, but there's also that human being in a historical context. And collecting information about that person in the historical context is also very valuable. So you could see interviews with Hitler in 39, 40, 41, as being very bad and detrimental to all that is good in the world, but at the same time, it's important to understand that human mind, how power affects that mind, how power corrupts it, how they see the world. Absolutely, absolutely. I would be all in favor, and maybe he will, if Vladimir Putin would sit down with you, absolutely. I don't think you're boosting someone like that when you ask them tough questions. In fact, I think that's what we need to do. Those sorts of figures tend to insulate themselves from tough questions. So just to restate, I am for the Lex Fridman interview of those sorts of figures. I am not for the puff piece on Fox and Friends, where they just come on and they're asked, oh, isn't it, tell us what you think of this. Tell us what you think of that. So, but there's a balance there, because a lot of people that interview somebody like Vladimir Putin, all they do is hard-hitting questions. They often demonstrate a lack of knowledge of the perspective of the Russian people and the president. There's not an empathy to understanding that this is a popularly elected, you can criticize that notion, but this is still a leader that represents the beliefs of a large number of people, and they have their own life story. They see the world, they believe they're doing good for the world. And I don't, that idea seems to not permeate the questions and the thoughts that people say, because they're afraid of being attacked by the people back home, fellow journalists, for not being hard enough. Well, maybe, I think that's probably true. I think in my experience with interviewers is that a lot of them are really lazy. You're not, which is why I like talking to you. Can I just say, okay, this is not you saying it. Can I just rant? If you're sitting across from Xi Jinping or from Vladimir Putin, you should be fired if you have not read at least several books on the guy. The surprising lack of research that people do leading up to it. So you need to be a historian or a biographer. You need to be the kind of person that writes biographies or histories before you sit in front of the person. Not a low effort journalist. And it's so surprising to me that I think they're probably really busy and it's probably not part of the culture of the people that do interviews to do deep, deep investigative. You need to be the kind of person that lives that idea. Like see it as a documentary that you work on for three years kind of thing. Anyway, of course, some journalists do do that and they do that masterfully and that's the best of journalism. But I think a lot of the times when the questions are, as you said, out of touch with the society that person is leading, it's because the interviewer hasn't taken the time. And I understand you can't be an expert on every subject, but you can do what you do, right? You read my book to prepare for this. You look things up. You had a sense of the person you're talking to and you put the time in to do that. This is what I always tell my students, right? The secret to success in anything is outworking other people. Be more prepared, right? What you show is like an iceberg. It's the tip of the iceberg, right? Is what people see. It's all the work that goes on below the surface. And if you work hard enough, which I aspire to do, at the end of the day, just like an animal farm, you'll be like the horse boxer and slaughtered unjustly by those that are much more powerful than you. But you'll be happy when you're slaughtered. You have lived for the right ideal and history will remember you fondly. Okay, what about Robert E. Lee? So he's the Confederate general that you mentioned. Was he a hero or a villain? To me, he's a villain. Many people treat Robert E. Lee as a hero. And one of the points I make in the book is we have to rethink that. And it's very important for our society because Robert E. Lee pops up all over our society, names of schools, names of streets. And he also embeds and justifies certain behaviors that I think are really bad. Lee was a tremendous general. He had the weaker side and he managed to use maneuver, secrecy and circumstance to give himself so many advantages and win so many battles he should have lost. So in terms of the technical generalship, he's a great general. But Lee at the end of the war never wants to really acknowledge defeat. What he acknowledges at Appomattox is that his soldiers will have to leave the battlefield because they have not won on the battlefield. But he refuses to do what Grant asks him, which is to help sell his side on the fact that we're going into a post-war moment where they don't have to see themselves as losers, but they have to get on board with change. Real leadership is convincing people who follow you that they have to change when they don't wanna change. Lee refuses to do that. He says to Grant, I quote this in the book, he says to Grant at Appomattox, if you wanna change the South, you have to run your army over the South three or four times. He's not gonna do anything. He's not gonna help. And he becomes a figure who people rally around in the rest of his life and even after he dies. So it is as if at the end of World War II, Hitler had been allowed to just retire and he didn't go back into politics, but yet he was there and he continued to have meetings with former Nazis and people would rally around the idea of bringing back or going back to Hitler's ideas. Think of how harmful that would be. Lee played that kind of role after the war. And I think it's one of the problems we have now. I don't think we should continue to revere him because it justifies too much of what the Confederates stood for. And that's the difference that you highlight between World War II and the Civil War, that in the case of Hitler, there was an end to that war. There's a very distinctive, clear end to that war. And you also make the case that World War II is not a good example, not a good model of a war to help us analyze history. It's given Americans the wrong idea of what war is because World War II ends as most wars don't end. World War II ends with the complete defeat of the German army and the German society and the near complete defeat of Japan. And where both sides in different ways accept defeat. What I'm pointing out in the book is that most wars don't end with one side accepting defeat. And generally the war continues after the battles end. This is something that's hard for Americans to understand. Our system is built with the presumption of war is over. When we signed a piece of paper, everyone can go home. It's not what happens. I mean, Civil War is a special case. It's especially a strong case of that because the people that fought the war is still living in that land. That's exactly right. And in this case, some of them are leaders also. Many of them become the leaders of the very areas that they were leading before. And I think that's another lesson here too that we did undertake after World War II though in a flawed way. We had a Nuremberg system. We did prohibit at least Nazi leaders from coming back into power. We made an exception for the emperor in Japan but we generally followed the same rule in Japan. Whereas in the United States, as I point out, many of the leaders of the Confederacy, first of all, don't surrender. They flee to Mexico. And then they come back after they lose in Mexico a second time, they come back to the United States and they get elected to office. The guy who writes the election laws in Texas, Alexander Watkins Terrell, most people don't know this even in Texas. He was a Confederate general, fled to Mexico. So he committed treason by joining the army of Maximilian, emperor of Mexico who was put in power by Louis Napoleon. After Maximilian's defeated, Alexander Watkins Terrell comes back to Texas, runs for the state legislature and then writes the election laws. It's crazy. Can you make the case for that, that that's a feature of the American system, not a bug, that that is an implementation of justice, that you forgive, that you don't persecute everybody on the other side of the war? Maybe, and I think that's a good feature in terms of lower level individuals. But I think a bad feature of our system is we do allow elite figures who have committed wrongdoing, we give them many ways to get out of punishment. You are more likely to be punished in this society if you do something wrong and you're not an elite figure than if you are an elite figure. That's true. There should be a proportional, like forgiveness should be equally distributed across. And it's not. Yeah. And it's not. But we could change that. We could fix that. How do we fix that? How do we fix that? What I think was argued at the end, this is one of the really important things about studying history, you learn about ideas that were not pursued that could be pursued today. At the end of this war, there was an effort to ban anyone who was in a leadership position in the Confederacy from ever serving in federal office again. That's the third element of the 14th Amendment. It's in the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment clause three says that if you took an oath of office, meaning you were elected to office, so you're an elite figure, and you violated that oath, you can still live in the country. You can still get rich, but you can't run for elected office again. And we've never really implemented that. Is it obvious that everybody who's in a leadership position on the Confederate side is a bad person for the future of the United States? Or is that just a safe thing to assume for the future of the nation? I think it's the latter. People do things for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes they have regrets. That's also why we have the pardoning capability. You could pardon someone individually if they show you that they've changed. And it would only create fairness, because right now, let's say, Lex, you take out a huge, huge loan, and you don't pay your loan back, that will go on your credit, and you won't get a big loan again. You don't get to say, just give me another chance. You're gonna have to prove. I think about holding public office in the same way. If you've violated your credit rating on that, you should have a much higher road to go to prove to us that you should be back in office. So, how did the war end, in quotes? So you said, and you make this case in the book, that in some sense, the elements, the tensions behind the Civil War continue to this day. But officially, how did the war end? So officially, the war ends at Appomattox in the early spring of 1865, when Grant has pretty much smashed Robert E. Lee's army. Appomattox Courthouse is a small town in Virginia, and the two men meet, and there are portraits of this, there's a painting of it we have in the book. And Grant and Lee sign a paper which basically allows Lee's soldiers to leave the battlefield, and leave with their side arms to go back home. That's pretty much the end. Jefferson Davis, who's the president of the Confederacy, goes into hiding. He's later captured, and then not convicted. But there's no formal settlement in the way there is at the end of World War II, where they meet in Yokohama Bay, the US and Japanese leaders in China. This is not that. So what stands out to you as brilliant ideas during this time, and actions too, of Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln? So I mentioned his values. I think a number of the things that he does that are quite extraordinary. First, in emancipating the slaves. Now, the slaves were freeing themselves. But Lincoln recognizes that he needs more labor in the Union Army. And he recognizes that there's still a lot of resistance. And what he does is he makes the case for freeing the slaves based on the argument, not just of the moral value of that, but based on how that will benefit the North. He's able to convince non-abolitionists to pursue abolitionist policies by serving their own interests. What he's basically saying by 1863 or 64 is I can ask for more white soldiers, or I can bring in former slaves. Would you like me to take your son, or would you like me to put in? It's the same thing Franklin Roosevelt does during World War II. He says, we need to build more planes and more tanks. And I'm sending all the soldiers off to Europe. I've got all this African-American population in the South. Wouldn't you like me to move them up to Chicago so we can win this war and build things in the factories? So Lincoln uses the war to move the country forward morally, even if at times he's convincing people by using other reasons. And I think that's great politics. I guess that's one of the components of great leadership is do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or publicly sounding wrong reasons, yeah. Find ways to move people. What we talked about before, different stories move different people. So you can tell different stories. He tells one set of stories to the religious leaders who are abolitionists, and a different set of stories to the New York bankers. And that's leadership. You tell different kinds of stories to move people to a new position. The other thing Lincoln is really brilliant at is managing the international side of this. So one of the real dangers for the Union is that the British will come in on the side of the Confederacy. The Confederates expected the British would, because again, the Confederates were selling all their cotton to Britain. And they knew that the British leadership, first of all, was very happy to work with slave holding societies, even though they didn't have slaves. And number two, that they believed the Union was getting too strong and threatening the British in Canada. So there were many reasons the British might have gone in with the Confederates. Lincoln mixes sticks and carrots with the British. He threatens them. And when the British actually try to send diplomats to negotiate with Southerners, he interdicts that. He basically initiates a quarantine of the South. On the other hand, he reaches out to them and tries to show that he wants better relations and makes the argument that they will actually benefit more from having the industrial capability of the Union on their side. So he's a very good diplomat. He is considered to be one of the great presidents in the history of the United States. Are there ways that he failed? Is there things he could have done better? So he failed in the ways that most great leaders fail, which is that he had a terrible succession plan. His vice president, who I spend a lot of time on in the book, Andrew Johnson, who was probably our worst president ever, Andrew Johnson had no business being anywhere near the presidency. Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator who did not secede. And so even though he was a Democrat, Lincoln wanted to show that he was creating a unity ticket when he ran for re-election in 1864. This happens today, right? So he put someone on as vice president who he didn't even like, but who he thought was politically useful. Problem is, when Lincoln was assassinated, this guy took over. Andrew Johnson was drunk at his own inauguration. The guy was a true drunkard. He was not prepared to lead in any sense, intellectually, politically, and he was against most of the principles Lincoln was for. And the irony is that when Lincoln is assassinated in April of 1865, Andrew Johnson takes over and he has all the war powers Lincoln had. That was not good planning by Lincoln. And we can look back on it now and say, even though Lincoln is the first president who was assassinated, he should have known that there were people coming for him. It wasn't inevitable that he'd be assassinated, but he should have had a backup plan for who would take over, hopefully someone who was capable of doing the job, and Andrew Johnson was not capable. So for me, for a person, if I were to put myself in Lincoln's shoes or any leadership position's shoes, it is difficult to think about what happens after my death, after I'm gone, right, to plan well. But at the same time, if you care about your actions to have a long-term impact, it seems like you should have a succession plan that continues on the path, that continues to carry the ideals that you've implemented. So I'm unsure why people don't do that more often. Like, I wonder how much Vladimir Putin spends percentage of time per day thinking what happens after he's gone to help flourish the nation and the region that he deeply cares for. I wonder, and it's the same as for other presidents, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, they might think politically, like, how do I guarantee that it's a Democrat or a Republican but do they think like visionary for the country? I don't know, I wonder. I think that's very rare, and I think what I understand from the literature among business people who talk about this a lot, is what ends up happening is you become so powerful, you assume you're always gonna be in power. You convince yourself of that. You convince yourself that the end is far away. And of course, for Lincoln, the end could have been far away. He was healthy, he was only in his 50s, he could have lived a lot longer, but it also, it ended fast as it could. And my understanding is that most Americans don't prepare their wills and estates, and it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor. They assume things are just gonna go on because it's not fun to think about this. Yeah, but I feel like it's freeing. Like, you know what I did, which is interesting? Before I went to Ukraine, I recorded a video. I set up a whole thing where I recorded a video, like, what happens if I die? I record a video to release, and I gave my brother access to my passwords, and I gave him instructions. You're not allowed to look at this, but please publish this if I die. And you know, that made me, it sounds silly and ridiculous, but that made me feel free to do the best thing I wanna do. It's like, it's liberating. So like, I guess that's for your will, but also, like, do the best possible damn job you can. I feel like as a leader, having a plan what happens if you fail, and not if you fail, if you die, or you lose some of the oomph, some of the power, some of the momentum that is driving you currently, that there's going to be a handoff, where you will still be remembered as a great man or woman. But you identify one of the other problems, right? Which is one of the other reasons why someone like Lincoln, or certainly Henry Kissinger, doesn't create a successor. Because you're afraid they're gonna steal your passwords. You're afraid they're gonna steal the power from you. That's true. You had to find someone, your brother, hopefully, who you could trust. No, no, no, let's just be clear. I love my brother, but he's a troll. So there's a feature on whatever password manager I may or may not use. And there's a bunch of services like this. It's interesting, I don't know if you know about this. I've learned about all this. Is you can have them request access, and it's gonna wait 30 days before it gives them access. So it's kinda has this built-in trust, okay, trust padding. But it's interesting. I mean, to me, on that aspect, is just to have a plan in all aspects of life. This is for leadership in your private life. Like what happens to not just your will and your wealth or whatever, but what happens to other stuff, like social media and all of that, in this digital world? It's fascinating. And anything you care about, if you want it to live on. And that's the problem. But if you, unless you can devise a technical solution like that, you have to give someone power now. Yeah, and that's the tricky thing. I mean, democracy is a kind of technology. You kinda have to figure out how to do it correctly, how to have that power propagate, and especially during war, how you get everybody together into this warmongering mood, and then how do you come down from that and just relax? Precisely. So in some sense, that's, with Andrew Johnson, that was the problem, is the over-centralization of power. It was the over-centralization of power, but it was also that Lincoln had a designated successor who was going to do and tried to do everything that ran against what Lincoln was doing. And it set the country back. We went forward at the end of the Civil War, and then we went backward, more so than we would have if there had been a new election. Because if there had been a new election, there still would be reason for that person running, even if they were on the other side, to try to find some compromise positions. Andrew Johnson inherited power with very few limitations on how he used that power. Congress wasn't even in session. And so this became very directly a problem because Andrew Johnson started pardoning Southerners, allowing them to come back into power. So he had like a few months where he just went wild. Yeah. It's giving the car keys to someone who's not prepared to drive, but decided that they're gonna do what they want with the car for a while. All right. Is there any level to which power corrupted Lincoln? A war president? Yes, I do think there were some areas. And I think that even though he was a great president, if not our greatest president, maybe one of the greatest figures of our history, he was flawed. One is his problem of succession. But also, I think Lincoln over-invested in the power of the presidency. He came to believe too much in the role of one man and not in creating a more balanced approach to governance. And that's a function of war. That's where war is dangerous. War has an inherent centralizing power in a democracy. That is dangerous. Because even when you have the best of people running a war, that gives them a lot of power to make decisions. Yeah, how do you come down from that? I see that was Zelensky and Putin currently. Yep. It's a war. How do you come down? Because Ukraine and everybody, anybody in a war, especially if you're fighting for the ideal of democracy, it seems like war is anti-democratic. It is. So how do you come down from that? What's the interesting mechanism of, I mean, some of it is leadership. You have to be like a George Washington type figure to be able to walk away from power. I think you gave the answer right there. You need to walk away from power or you need to be forced to walk away from power. Historically, one of the things that democracies have tended to do when they have a chance is to vote out of office the victor in the war. Think about Winston Churchill. Roosevelt is elected to his fourth term when he's still in the war. It's not clear that he would have been elected again, let's say he lived on. Because there is a sensibility that the person has become too powerful in this role and that someone else should now step in. Someone else who's also not a war president but has other interests. So let's hope Ukraine wins this war. Zelensky should then step down or someone else should be voted in. It will be dangerous if he remains president. Let's say he wins somehow and a true victory, just as a hypothetical. He should not be, he should be praised, maybe given a nice villa, but someone else should take over because the problem is that he's gonna have too much power and honestly, he's going to be too out of touch with what the country needs after the war. What do you think would have happened if Lincoln had lived? That's the sort of counterfactual view of history. It's an interesting question that probably you think about a lot. This gets raised a lot. What would have happened if he didn't get assassinated? It's a reasonable question because it was not inevitable he'd be assassinated. He could have had more protection that night. He'd invited Ulysses Grant to go to the theater with him and Grant and his wife didn't go. If they had been there, there would have been more protection for Grant. So he would have had at least double the security there. So there are many ways in which he might not have died. I think it still would have been a difficult transition, but I think there were a few things that would have been better. First of all, Lincoln would not have pardoned all of these Confederate leaders and allowed them to come back into power. Lincoln also would have been a better politician at holding his Republican coalition together. And I think Lincoln was more committed to empowering former slaves and others. So we still would have had a lot of conflicts, but I think what would have been a degree of difficulty was doubled or tripled because Lincoln was removed and the opposite came into power with Andrew Johnson. So you don't think there's a case you made that Andrew Johnson turned out to be a bad decision, but the spirit of the decision is the correct one? No, I think it was a terrible decision because you should never put someone one step away from enormous power who's not prepared. Oh, in that sense. Yeah. In that sense, I got it. But the spirit of the decision, meaning you put somebody who's in a, represents a very opposing viewpoint than you. Well, I'm for that so long as that person is on board with some of the basic values that you're pursuing and that person is capable of doing the job. Well, do you think that was obvious to him that Andrew Johnson was not capable of doing the job? Yes. Okay. It's in the right, I mean, everyone recognized that. But it made sense. I mean, what Lincoln has to be praised for is in the midst of a war, when at that point he was not doing well, the war was not going well, he ran for re-election. He didn't try to postpone the election. He didn't try to do anything. And so he needed all the help he could get when running. And so he wanted to have someone on there who looked like a unity candidate who could appeal to some Southerners. So it made sense from a political point of view, but it created a really big problem. And there were people who said he should have removed Johnson as soon as he was elected. And in retrospect, he probably should have. How gangster is that to, during a war still run the election? It's extraordinary. I mean, Lincoln believed in democratic values. He also believed he would win, but he knew it was not guaranteed. And it's interesting for people who don't know this, the reason we have mail-in balloting in the US is because of that. So almost, what? I think it's almost a million union voters are away from their homes. And so how do they vote? As soldiers, as nurses, they vote by mail. The post office delivers their ballots. That's why we have mail-in balloting. What about the other counterfactual question of what would have happened if Confederate States won the war? The Confederate States had won the war, you would have seen, I think, a separate country. In the South, you would have seen two countries. And that Confederate country would have been a smaller country, but it probably would have been able to defend itself because it would have actually gotten much richer than it was. It was poor at the time, but through its cotton trade and other things, it would have been recognized by Great Britain, by France, by other societies. And you would have seen a Southern Republic. I don't think you would have seen that Southern Republic dominate the continent. The Union had the men and people and had the resources, but you would have seen a rival republic to the United States in the South. Do you think they had interest to dominate the continent, to take over the Union? They had a foreign policy, they had a plan. Many have written about this. They had plans, many Southerners did, of expanding into the Caribbean, which was actually more feasible. They did not have the personnel to occupy so much territory going out West, if you think about the amount of land that had to be covered. But they had the nautical capabilities and naval power and the money to dominate islands in the Caribbean. And those islands were important for their trade. So there were many Southerners who wanted to take control of Cuba, wanted to take control of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And so you probably would have seen Southern warfare in those areas. From a counterfactual history perspective, can you make the case that secession would have created a better world? Like if we're sitting today, and do back to the future thing, the secession in this context, if we put aside the suffering and the loss of life in the war, that we'd be in a better world today? Just look into the political climate. And can you also make the case that actually this outcome of the Union winning the war is the better one? I think the Union victory is by far the better outcome, because I think what you would have had otherwise is you would have had a slave republic in the South that would have encouraged slavery in other parts of the world, would have exported slavery, and would have necessarily been hostile to many of the positive changes that occur in the Union, the movement toward progressive reforms, creating cities with health codes and public education, and many of those things. Public education really develops in the North as a way of training workers who are being paid to be better workers in a factory. There's a reason you don't educate slaves, because if you educate slaves, they rebel. Yeah, so don't you think there'll be a huge pressure from the North to abolish slavery anyway? There would have, but I think the South could have survived without another war. I mean, I think the way that slavery would have ended in the South, if it didn't end with the Civil War, it would have been with another war. I guess the deeper question is, is it better to work through your problems together, or is it better to get a divorce? I think in this case, it was better to work through the problems. It's not even working through them together. It's better to work through the problems where one side has the resources to incentivize you to work through the problems, rather than leaving you on your own to go your own direction. I think the argument against the union winning would be the argument that would be made by those who believe they suffered from union power later on. So you could argue, if you're a historian of Native Americans, if you're a historian of the Philippines, you could argue some of the areas where this newly united nation coming out of the Civil War was able to use its power to spread its influence, it would have been harder for the union to do that if the union had to deal with a rival to the South. So as a historian, the union won. To which degree are the people from the union, that is now the United States, the writers of the history, that color the perspective of who's the good guys and the bad guys? So this is such an interesting question, because- I like how you take every question I ask and make it into a better question. That's a deep, I deeply appreciate it. Every time I ask some ridiculous question, and you go, that's really interesting. No, because they're really good questions. They're thoughtful questions. Actually, the best questions are not the simple ones. The axiom is that the winners write history. And that's usually the case. Most of the history I learned about Ukraine when I was growing up was written by Russians. It was Russian history of Ukraine. Most of the history of Europe has been written by Germans and French and British citizens. So usually it's that way. And for the most part, our history has been written from a sort of Northeastern point of view. But it's very interesting, the history of the years after the Civil War that I focus on in this book has largely been written by the losers. Because the union and its legacies, and I grew up in New York, so I'm growing up as a legacy of that, right? Those were individuals who wanted to write about what happened long after the Civil War, when the North got rich. All those beautiful buildings in New York, all that wealth in New York, it's 1880s, 90s, the late 19th century, it's the Gilded Age. And that's what Northerners wanna write about, right? Because there's glory there. The 20 years or so after the Civil War, the years that really count, 1865 to 1880 or so, those years are ugly, it's messy. And so who wrote about them? Southerners wrote about them. And they wrote a story that was about Northern carpetbaggers and corrupt African-Americans. And this is the story that Americans learned until a few years ago. I've gone around the country talking about this book, and the number of people have told me they never learned this basic history, because they grew up in Chicago, not because they grew up in Texas, because they grew up in Chicago. And the story they were told, the Civil War ended, oh, now let's talk about the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and how Chicago is coming of age as this great city. We don't like to write history in our country that's not about glory. I'm all for the greatness of our country, but you become great by studying your failures as well as your successes. And that's a real problem we have. And I would love to see a kind of humility from a history perspective. One of the things that always surprised me, just coming from the Soviet Union to the United States, as you've, I think, spoken about, is the perspective on World War II, and who was the critical component of winning the war. Obviously in the Soviet Union, it's the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Union are the ones that suffered, and often actually don't emphasize the suffering, they emphasize the glory, that they defeated this huge evil. But then you listen to the United States' perspective on this, and it's almost like, I mean, there's several ways of phrasing it, but basically the United States won the war. Without the United States, it would be impossible to win the war. They were the turning point, they were the, my last, my everything, that song, my first, my last, my everything. So that, and I'm sure, I wonder what, growing up in, maybe after war in Britain, I wonder if there's history books written there that basically say, and they could also make a pretty strong case, that Britain was central to the turning point. You could really make a strong case that Churchill and Britain were the turning point of the war, that they're responsible for some of the first failures, major failures of Hitler from a military strategy perspective. But that's interesting to look at that very recent history from very different perspectives. And it's the same problem with the Civil War. We wanna tell the story of the Union winning the war, and then everything is good. Yeah. And it's not the way it worked. What I'm really trying to get at is, when you love your country, you have to study the failures. Yeah. Because by studying the failures, that's how you improve yourself, and that's where you see where real courage is. It's actually that Lincoln failed for so long that makes him a great president. He lost more battles than he won, but he learned, and he got it right in the end. Same with Ulysses Grant. I don't want generals, I'm just echoing Lincoln here. I don't want generals, I don't want leaders who think they're gonna get it right the first time, because they're never gonna get it right the first time. You never get it right the first time in an AI experiment, right? It's those who can work through failure learn from failure. And we as a society have to start doing that better. We have to not just trumpet the successes. Let's talk about where we failed as Republicans, as Democrats, as Independents, and let's move forward from there. In recent years have been a kind of movement of highlighting some of the hypocrisy, sort of highlighting the racism, the fact that many of the founding fathers were slave owners, that kind of thing, sort of highlighting from the current ethics of our world, showing that many of the people involved in the war on each side were evil. What do you think about that perspective on history? I think it's super valuable. I think we should expose the gap between ideals and practice, but that doesn't mean we should throw away the great people who are also hypocrites, because everyone I've studied is a hypocrite. I'm a hypocrite. I think I'm a pretty good father. Luckily, my son is an even better mother, but there are parts of me that, I mean, I often find myself telling our children to do things that I didn't do, right? But they're smart and they recognize that and they learn something from that. So let's not cover over the hypocrisy, but let's not throw people away for being hypocritical. Here's my view of Thomas Jefferson, which is similar to my view of Abraham Lincoln, right? These are incredibly insightful, thoughtful people who added so much to our country, but they also created flawed systems. And one of, excuse me, Jefferson's flaws was even though he saw all the evils of slavery, he was a terrible farmer and he could not imagine living the lifestyle he lived without slaves. He could never work his way out of that, but that doesn't make the Declaration of Independence less valuable. In fact, it makes it more valuable. There's more that we can learn from that. And to me, on the hypocrisy side, many of the people that participate in cancel culture and these kinds of movements that call everything is racist and so on, sometimes they're highlighting properly the evils in our current society, but the hypocrisy they have is not realizing if they were placed in Germany in the 40s, if they were placed in the position of being a white Christian during slavery at the founding of this country, they would do the same thing. They would do the evils they're now criticizing, most of them. So that it takes a truly heroic human to think outside, to be aware of all the evils going on around you and take action. It's easy now on Twitter to call people as racist. What's hard is to see the racism when you're living in it and your wellbeing is funded by it. Yep, I think that's right. I think to analyze ourselves and look honestly in the mirror is very hard. I also think, I make this point in actually all of my books, the real, and it's an Eli Wiesel point, that a lot of the evil in our world is the evil of silence and just looking away. And one form of that on Twitter is just hitting like. It's a cheap way of pretending you're doing something that's important, right? After the civil war, there's all sorts of bad stuff that happens. I talk about it a lot. There always are people there who could stop it. Most people are not responsible for the bad activities, but most don't do something to stop it. And when I say do something, I mean really do something. Yeah, really. And it's also to push back and push back, silence on Twitter is not what Eli Wiesel was talking about. So sometimes silence on Twitter is the courageous action because you wait and think and learn and have patience to truly understand the situation before you take actual action. Not participate in the outrage crowds on Twitter, the hysteria of cancellation. What's hard to do is to speak up when everybody else is silent. That's what's hard to do. And to speak up against those who you thought were on your side. Yes, exactly. Good luck to those on the left who speak up against the left. And the same, good luck to those on the right who speak up against the right. It's a lonely place. It's a painful place. That's why walking in the center is tough. You get attacked by both sides. It's a wonderful, wonderful journey. And you know what's interesting to me and what I learned writing this book, every book is a journey. What I learned in the laboratory of this book, right, was a lot of those figures who do stand up, even in their own lifetime, they don't get the accolades they deserve, but they make a difference. And that's maybe not enough comfort because you wanna see benefits in your own lifetime, but I think it really matters. And many of the figures I talk about were not even well-known in their time. So you can make a difference. You do impart something small in the universe that can grow into something better. And we shouldn't forget that. Yeah, that's why I admire Boxer, the horse. I will work harder even if he gets sent to the slaughter by the evil pigs. You're on Orwell today. I love you. I'm on recently. I mean, Animal Farm is one of my favorite books. I've been recently, I just am rereading 1984 now. It's been politicized, that book in general. But to me, it's a love story. It is a love story. That there's a, like, love is the, it's a story of an oppressive government. It's a surveillance state and the nature of truth being manipulated by wartime, da, da, da, da, da, so on. But the beacon of hope in the human heart that pulls you out, that wakes you up in a world like that is a love of another human being. It's transcendence. I totally agree. My understanding, you would know better than I would, is that it's now a best-selling book in Russia again. 1984? Yeah, it's actually being downloaded more. There was a piece on NPR. I heard about this, actually. Yeah, yeah. Well, I hope it's because they're looking for love. That's what I was just gonna say. Hopefully not in all the wrong places. Hey, there's no such thing as the wrong places. But that's my opinion. I'm the one that showed up naked and drunk to your classroom. I still surprised that was you. I was wearing a wig, I'm sorry. Quick pause. Can I take a breath? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're back. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in his diary, as you write in your book. He wrote about Lincoln, our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The country is not what it was. What was the idea of the country that John Wilkes Booth believed in? You talked about this country that's just constantly being repeated in his writing. For John Wilkes Booth and many other people who are close to the southern part of the country in the Confederacy, they believe the country should be a democracy for white people, a bounded democracy. And Booth was horrified, and we have to empathize with it, not sympathize, but recognize how strange it seemed to him that all of a sudden those who were slaves were now soldiers with guns. And he was particularly offended when he saw in Washington, DC, a group of African-American Union soldiers holding southern prisoners of war. And the world was turned upside down for him. Democracy for him, he believed in democracy, but democracy for white people, and that justified mistreating black people for him. So country means white people. Yeah, and I don't think it's that different from- And white Christians. White Christians, yes. Yeah, he was not arguing for Jewish emancipation either. I don't think that's really different from what we've seen in the 20th century for people who justify ethnic cleansing or genocide. Let's go to the extreme example of Hitler again that we've talked about before. His view was actually, he claimed he wanted a democracy for Germany. He wanted a democracy of the right Germans, and he wanted those who he saw infecting and mongrelizing the society out. That's in essence what John Wilkes Booth thought. The scary thing is those kinds of ideas, you can put a pretty face on them. Like you don't have to use, and maybe Hitler didn't until the war started, or even parts of the war, make it so clear that you just want the certain kind of Germans that have made Germany a great nation to be the people that are running that nation, and other people who are not truly interested in it, don't hold the interest of the country at heart. Like they should go elsewhere where they can flourish also, it's wonderful. But like the good Germans, they've built all these amazing things. We should give them the power and not to the others. And you can put a bunch of flowery language around that. Precisely, it's the argument that's made all the time today against immigration, that the wrong people are coming into our society. It's ironic, because it's often made by those who themselves are immigrants. History teaches us that those who have arrived as immigrants are no more likely to like those who come. In fact, they might be against the next group for just this reason, because they think they're the right group. Can you describe to me if it's useful at all to know the difference, if there's a difference between white nationalism, white supremacism, and Christian nationalism? Is there an intersection between them? I've heard these terms used, oh, separatism too, right? Is there an interesting distinction that permeated that history that still lasts today? I think there's a long history in the United States of a belief in white supremacy. And it's not unique to the United States. We actually inherit this from Europe. And white supremacy is the belief that for whatever reason, those with lighter colored skin, usually of Northern European extraction, are superior, have more rights, are the better people to make decisions, all sorts of things. That's an aesthetic judgment as much as it is a political judgment. And that gets embedded in our society, right? We inherit that. Christian nationalism is the presumption that it's not just your race, but now it's also your Christian belief. And that is actually relatively new. There are little pieces of that in our history. But many of those who are white supremacists, even those in the Confederacy, are not Christian nationalists because they don't agree on which kind of Christianity, and they don't view those who are from a different denomination of Christianity as being good Christians. There isn't this big tent Christianity in the 19th century. This notion that there is one Christian nation and that we're all part of it, that's actually really a 20th century creation. It precedes the evangelical movement, but it's been made even more popular. But it would not make sense to a Confederate to say we're a white Christian nation. It would make sense to say we're a white Protestant nation because they didn't consider Catholics good Christians, or a white Presbyterian nation. And so that's something new, and I think what's particularly dangerous about this notion of Christian nationalism is it creates this false history, saying we've always been together as Christians, that's always how we've defined ourselves, and that's not accurate. Well, one interesting thing, so I recently talked to a left-leaning or maybe a far-left political streamer named Destiny, Stephen Bunnell, I don't know if you're familiar with him. He does live streaming debates with people. It's very passionate. I've heard of this, my students have told me. I'm not actually saying. My students are always up on the most hip things. Yes, that is, no, no, the funny thing about him, he's already considered like a boomer. He's already the old streamer because he's been doing it for 10 years. He's not the cool kid anymore. Anyway, he goes into some difficult political territory, and he actually had a mini conversation with Nick Fuentes. And he says, I mean, some of it is humor, but some of it is pretty dark, hard-hitting sort of criticism is, he says that anyone who claims to be a Christian nationalist asks them if they would rather have a million people who are atheists from Sweden who are white come, or if you would rather have a million people from Africa who are Christian come. And the truth comes out that this is a very surface level, this kind of idea of Christian nationalism is still underneath it is a deep racism, like hatred towards black people. I think that's, I'm sure that's right. I'm sure that's right. That's the sense I got into it. Does not seem to have deep kind of, yeah, like historical context to it. It's just a different, a rebranding of the old kind of hate. What I think is important, though, in drawing this distinction, and why it really matters beyond the history of it, is someone like Lincoln quotes scripture all the time. The second inaugural is filled, second inaugural address, Gettysburg Address, filled with biblical references. But he does it in a way that's not Christian nationalist, because he's using the text to bring people together. He's using it as a fable of humanity. And you could say he's not open to Islamic thinking, he's ignorant of the Islamic world. But as a Jew, I'm a Jew, reading and studying Lincoln, I know he's a Christian, but I don't feel excluded from his rhetoric. Because I share that Bible, we have different views, but I don't feel excluded. It actually brings people together. The Christian nationalist approach that we've seen in the 20th century, and especially in recent decades, is intended to divide people. It excludes Jews. It excludes Christians who don't interpret Christianity their way. And to say that's what we've always done is an entire distortion of our country. And it also hides why this is so dangerous. Insofar as Christianity matters to our country, it should be in the way Lincoln uses it, as a set of common texts that many of us resonate with, knowing that we have different rituals and different understandings. Not as a way to exclude people, and not as a cover for racism, which is what it is. It's kind of interesting that you could talk about, I've talked to a lot of people, Muslim folks, Jewish folks, Christian folks, there's a way to talk about religion that's inclusive, and then that's exclusive. I mean, it's just been, I've been listening to a lot of these interfaith conversations, and they're awesome. They like celebrate the beauty of each religion, they banter and argue with each other about details and so on, but like, it feels like love. Like it feels like anybody from any of those religions would feel welcome at that party. And I think that's possible. Can you tell me about the disputed election of 1876? So this is fascinating. The 1876 election is one of many elections, we've had some recently, that are intensely controversial. And they're controversial because they're so close. They're controversial because it's not always clear who's won. In 1876, Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York, who's running as a Democratic candidate, wins more votes across the country. So everyone knows he becomes president, right? Wrong, he doesn't become president, because in three states, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida, it's very, very close. And even though Tilden has more total votes, if he loses those states, the electors in those states, all of which go to the winner of the state, would actually make Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate president. In all three of those states, you also have Republican governors who have just lost, but are still the people who have to certify the election. All three states say that Hayes won, even though it's very close and disputed. So Hayes has one more electoral vote. Of course, the Democrats don't accept that. And so we go into February, the inauguration was done in March, not in January. We go from November to February, without clear agreement on who the president is. In the end, there's an agreement that they come to a deal, which is where the Democrats will accept Hayes as president in return for Hayes doing all the things the Democrats want in the South. And so in essence, you have a deal made that one side will get all it wants while allowing the other side to have the figurehead. And so in a certain way, this marks a moment when the Confederacy wins. For example, Hayes has to agree to pull out all federal force from the South, which means there's no protection for fair elections going forward. And you'll see in states like Mississippi, the number of African-American voters will decline and not recover again until the late 20th century. So that's what that election does. And from 1876 until 1896, we have a series of elections that are very close. It happens also in 1888 that the person with the most popular vote loses, that's Grover Cleveland, who loses to Benjamin Harrison. And again, we'll have the same issue where there's a dispute. And so what that election shows us, 1876, 1888, is that our election system and the problem of having an electoral college really complicates things. It makes it harder for us to come to any kind of consensus, any kind of agreement on who's won an election. Super important for today, because most of the 20th century, we don't have close elections, so it doesn't matter. When we come to a world today where our elections are very close, our system is not well-designed to deal with those issues. Do you draw any parallels with our time and what are some key differences? There's been contested elections, Florida, Florida, Florida, with Al Gore, and there's been just contested election after contested election. And of course, most famously recently, with the contested election that led to January 6th. So I think a couple of parallels and a couple of differences. One parallel is that when you have close elections, the losing side's never happy. It's a myth that when you have a close election, the other side just accepts it, and it's not, that doesn't happen. And we need to be attentive to that and ready for that. January 6th actually should surprise us, not because it happened, but because it hadn't happened before. People who lose a close election are never happy, and they always think that something has been done. That's one parallel. Second parallel is elections are violent. We have this myth that our elections are peaceful. No, there's always violence involved in one way or another, violence in either trying to prevent people from voting, or violence in preventing people from preventing people from voting, right? Elections are not peaceful walks in the park. And that's why most countries have a centralized system to manage elections and provide protection for people. We need to think about that. A lot of people don't vote because they're afraid. They don't want to take the time, but they're also afraid that they're gonna anger someone or that they're gonna be seen as politicizing an issue. Differences. In 1876, there was fraud in the election. There were people who voted two, three times. One of the things the Ku Klux Klan did is it prevented black people from voting and that it helped white people go to multiple voting booths. And this was quite common. In the 1880s, if you went to vote, here's how it would happen in a place like Chicago or New York, the union boss from your factory would come and get you at the factory, give you lunch, get you drunk, and then drive you from one voting booth to another and give you a ballot that you would bring in and just, and he would watch you deposit that ballot. Sounds pretty nice, not gonna lie. I'd take that ride. So that's a difference. That is not how our elections work now. One of our great accomplishments has been to eliminate virtually all the fraud in our elections. How have we done that? By creating safeguards. It is very difficult. All the evidence we have is that the minimal fraud that's occurred in elections are onesies and twosies, and it's never in the last 20 years had any big difference in the outcome of elections. So that's a big difference. And then another big difference I think is that in that time, the Democrats and Republicans are on the opposite sides of where they are now, and that changes everything. So the Democrats then are the party of the Confederacy, the Democrats are the party of exclusion, the Republicans are more the party of economic expansion, and the Republicans are the big 10 party, we're reversed today. Do you think because there's much less election fraud now, like you described, one of the lessons we wanna maybe learn from that is there doesn't actually have to be election fraud for either side to claim there's election fraud. It seems like it's more and more common, and it seems to me that in 2024 election in the United States, if a Republican wins, there would also be just maybe just as likely as if a Democrat wins, that there'll be nuanced claims of election fraud, because it's become more and more normalized. I think what this history shows is that our election system makes it easy for people to claim fraud because it's so unnecessarily complex. First of all, we don't have a system where the person who gets the most votes is necessarily the winner. So that already creates one problem. Second problem is everything I talk about this in the book is controlled at the county level. So what happens with Hayes and Tilden in 1876 is you have one county official who says they think one person won, another county official thinks says the other person won. There's no centralized system. It would be as if we allowed every airport to control safety in airplanes, our airplanes would not be safe. Our airplanes are safe because the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board have strict universal guidelines for what makes for a safe plane, and therefore our planes generally don't fall out of the sky. Our system is very complex. It has complex rules and has too many people who have authority in too many different places. Complexity makes it easier for someone to make an argument that the wrong thing has been done. We should simplify the system. In Brazil, they had a very close election, and it's very hard for Bolsonaro, who lost that close election, to claim there was fraud because there's a central authority run by the judiciary that counted the votes, and it's just simple. It's not about which states, it's not about who the county officials were. Did he claim or no? He has not acknowledged that he lost. Right, so to push back on your statement, I'm undefeated in monopoly and risk because any time I lose, I walk away claiming there was fraud and cheating involved, and I refuse to believe otherwise. I just think that accusations of fraud is a narrative that's disjoint from the reality of whether there was or not fraud. Yeah, yeah, I agree, but I think we make it a little easier for that narrative by having a complex, convoluted system. And I wonder if there's other improvements that take us into the 21st century that allow for electronic voting. There's all kinds of improvements that it seems our system is dragging their feet on. Rank choice, voting, all that kind of stuff. Let's make this clear. We claim to be the greatest 21st century democracy, and we still vote like the 19th century. We're not even in the 20th century. Most people, when they went to vote, they actually checked a box and put a piece of paper in a box, right? I mean, that's not 21st century. We can move millions of dollars, maybe billions for you, Lex, in bank accounts from our keyboard. Thank you. From our keyboards. Billions of rubles. Billions of pennies. Pennies. Why can we move money safely and not vote in the same way? Yeah, and at the same time, so there's security there in the movement of money, and then there's the actual engagement. Most of us, depending on your age demographic, click like on Facebook or Twitter or TikTok tens of thousands of times a year. I think this kind of mechanism of constantly, and a like is a vote. So you're constantly voting, voting, voting, voting. We love voting. We love giving our opinion on that stuff. It just seems obvious that gamifying the system, which is essentially what the election is, making it fun to be engaged in different issues, and there's also be a case, now I don't understand these things deeply, but it always seemed to me that issue-based voting should be the future. It seems like too complicated to vote for singular people versus on ideas, which on Twitter, we don't necessarily vote for people. We vote for ideas. If you like a tweet or not, you like it, and so on. That too seems to be a possibility for improvement. Well, there's certainly a way to improve polling. We could measure public opinion better. We still poll as if we're in the early 20th century. They still actually call people. It's amazing to me. I was talking to one pollster. They will call 100 people and get one person, but they still do that. That makes no sense. They probably still call landlines, right? Yeah, well, they try to get cell phones too, but they do call landlines, but one could create a system that would be far better in the way you're describing, it seems to me, Lex, to actually assess what people like and don't like. So your book, your work in general, your perspective on history is, I would say, at least from my perspective, nonpartisan. Thank you. Yeah, you do exceptionally good job of that, despite the attacks and the criticisms. That said, you personally, just the way you speak, my judgment, and you can push back on this, I think you lean left in your politics on the political spectrum. Maybe you can push back on that. Can you make the case for either perspective on your own personality as a fan of yours that you do lean left or you don't lean left? I think it depends on the kinds of issues we're talking about. I do tend to lean left on the social and cultural issues. Yes. So I'm a believer, a firm believer. I didn't believe this when I was younger. I've come to believe that people should choose their own lifestyle and that we should get out of the way. I'm a believer, deep believer, as a father of a 20-year-old woman, that my 20-year-old daughter should have the right to make any choice she wants with her body. And if she were to get pregnant at a fraternity party at college, she should have the right to decide whether to have a child or not. So on those issues that would code me left of center. I'm actually reasonably conservative on fiscal issues. I don't think we should spend money we don't have. I'm skeptical. I've long been skeptical of cryptocurrency and things like that. I know some of your listeners will disagree with me. This is part of my own ignorance of cryptocurrency. But I'm conservative, lowercase C, in the way I think about fiscal issues. I worry about debt. I am a believer that there are certain areas where the federal government should play more of a role. And there are other areas where things should be left to the localities. And so sometimes that can code me one way or another. But I think I sound sometimes a little more left of center because on the social issues, I definitely. Well, that, because, I mean, there's other explanations, not to be grilling you too hard here. No, it's fair. Because you're also an exceptionally respected and successful professor in the university system, where sometimes there is a lean towards the left. And the other aspect is, I think, your viewpoints on Trump, where you're a strong critic of Donald Trump. Yes. And I guess the question I wanna ask is, you as a historian, does that color your perspective of history? Can you, do you ever catch yourself where maybe your criticism of Donald Trump might affect how you see the Civil War? Like as you were completely diving in and looking at the Civil War, are you able to put aside your sort of the current day political viewpoints? No, I'm not. I think we have to be honest that none of us are objective. We strive to be nonpartisan. I really liked when you said that because I think it's an aspiration. No one is objective. We all have our biases. Some people like chocolate, some like vanilla. And it's just, that's just the reality, right? And as far as I know, there's really hard, it's very hard even to biologically explain that. And so my view is that what a good historian, what a good scholar does, I don't care what their field is, is you're self-conscious of your biases and you try to recognize them as you're doing your research and you make doubly certain that where your research seems to reinforce your biases, that you actually have the evidence to make that argument. But I still believe even doing that, that someone with a slightly different perspective might read the same evidence in different ways. That's what makes history vibrant. So I wrote this book in part, as I say in the introduction, because I was self-critical watching Trump and the things I quite frankly find deeply dangerous about Donald Trump and about what happened on January 6th. And I found I had not thought deeply enough about the roots of that in our society because I don't believe Trump or any one figure creates these kinds of movements. They come out of a deeper history. Just a small side tangent. I do believe your work is nonpartisan, but it's also funny that there are a lot of people on the right that would read your work and say that you're partisan. And I think the reason that can happen sometimes, not strongly though, I think you do a really good job, is like the use of certain words also. I try to be cognizant of that. I try not to use words that trigger people's tribalism. It's kind of interesting. So you have to be also aware of that maybe when you're writing history, when you're writing in general, is if you're interested in remaining, you can put on different hats. You can be carefree in just stating your opinion of criticizing Donald Trump or Joe Biden, or you can be nonpartisan deliberately. And that takes skill probably and avoiding certain triggering words. To me, it's about choosing your battles. So I try to write, because I want everyone to read them. I actually think people on the left and right have a lot to learn from this history. So many people have said to me around the country, this is history I wish I had known before. But there are moments when I use words that I know are controversial because I'm trying to show there's a fact base behind them. So white supremacy does exist. I've had people say, I don't think that's, I think that's a politically correct term, or it's a woke term. It can be used in the wrong ways. One should not go around calling everything one doesn't like that. But the Confederates were white supremacists. And I use that word because I think it's an accurate descriptor and we need to recognize that that is a part of our history. But that does trigger some people. Because that language is used to mean other things currently. So the press will take on certain terms like white supremacists and label everybody white supremacist. Like a lot of people that basically are on the right or something like that. They use this outraged language and that actually ruins the ability to use the language precisely. Exactly. For historical context. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. But you do have to, unfortunately, we do have to, no, actually people disagree. You might disagree with this. But I tend to try to avoid, like take on the responsibility of avoiding that language. Like if the press is using a certain kind of language, I try to avoid it. Yeah, what I try to do is sometimes avoid it, but where I think the language is necessary. To be precise, yeah. To be precise, but also to contextualize it. So I don't call all Confederates white supremacists, but I point out where white supremacist ideas have influenced them. And I point out where certain individuals are doing things that resonate with that. But I'm against these kind of blanket labels and categories. And you also have to speak about white supremacism in that context in a nuanced way. So people use white supremacists without thinking what that means, and they just use it as a slow word, like this is an evil person. But white supremacist is also just an ideology that a lot of people have believed throughout. Supremacy, whatever, white, black supremacy, whatever supremacy. Believing that some people are better than others, some group is better than another. And there have been nations built around these kinds of ideas. And a lot of human history is built around those ideas. It's not just evil people believe in this. We in the United States of America believe this kind of ideology is not productive, it's unethical. But those ideas have been held by a lot of people. And not like fringe groups. But majorities of nations. I'd say the same about antisemitism. And there are many people who are not antisemites, but don't recognize that they're carrying around or promoting antisemitic ideas or antisemitic myths. It's a thought that's been held by a lot of people, and you need to be convinced out of it. That requires conversation and being empathetic. It's not just calling somebody antisemite and you're evil because you've ever said something that's kind of a dog whistle against Jewish people. You have to be open-hearted to that. These are ideas that you have to contend with, that you have to ultimately, I think, heal the division behind those ideas by having empathetic conversations with people, as opposed to, again, throwing poop. I just like saying poop. All right. Ooh, I got a challenge for you. Given that you have been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, can you say one thing you like and one thing you don't like about Donald Trump? And perhaps, can you do the same for our current president, Joe Biden? One thing you like and one thing you dislike. So it's harder for me to do the one thing I dislike because there's so many things I dislike. But the one thing I like about Donald Trump, he believes that America should be a better country. I disagree on what he thinks it should be, but he's not a declinist. He's someone who believes the world could be made better. I disagree with what he's trying to do. I disagree with how he's trying to do it, but I like the fact that he thinks it can be better. His whole argument for himself is that he can make things better. I don't think he can, but I think things can be made better. So I like the second half of that sentence when he says, I can make things better, take the I out. I like the can be better because there are too many people on the left and the right who think that we can't make things better. We have to accept them as they are, or they're getting worse. I think a world without hope is horrible. And I think what he has offered his followers is a kind of hope. So underneath his message is a kind of optimism for the future of this nation. Yeah, it's a narcissistic optimism, but it's still an optimism, yes. That he's promising that if you elect him again, he will make things better. And I think people need to be told and we need to believe that we can make things better. So that part I accept. And I reject those who say we can't make things better. My whole historical career is about showing that history gives us tools to make things better. So I like the idea of trying to make things better and giving people hope and reason to believe that things can be better. What's the main thing you dislike about Donald Trump? I think he has no concern or care for the welfare of anyone other than himself. So assuming, on a basic human psychology perspective. And I think he doesn't even care about his children. I think he's just, I think it's him. I think he's gone into a rabbit hole. He might not always have been this way. I did watch him a long time in New York City when I was growing up in New York. And I think he's been in this path. And I think it's an extreme, it's a clinical kind of narcissism. So do you, when you analyze presidents and you've written about presidents, you don't just look at policies and so on. You look at the human being. Of course you have to. Leadership is about human being. Policy matters. It's one part of the equation, but it's not the only part. What about Joe Biden? What do you like and what do you dislike about him? So what I like about Joe Biden is in contrast to Trump. I think Joe Biden really, right now in his career, sees his role as the shepherd of democracy. He really believes that it's his role as president to make our democracy more stable and more vibrant. I think he really believes. I think that's why he's doing what he's doing right now. And he comes from that system, the political system, that basically the process of democracy, he's worked there for many decades. It's all he's done. Yeah, that's all he knows. And he wants that to propagate for better and for worse. And he's not an extreme democratic partisan at all. He's actually a pretty middle of the road guy on most issues. Some people don't like him for that. But I think he is about democracy. What do I dislike about Biden? I think he does not have the capacity right now to provide the language and the public discussion of where our country should go. He doesn't have a language to inspire and build enthusiasm for the future. That would probably be one of my, I mean, cause I'm a sucker for great speeches. And so for me, that's definitely a thing that stands out for several reasons. One, in a time, cause we've been facing so many challenges, like the pandemic. It just seems like a, to me it seems like a easy layup. There's so many troubles we're going through that just require a great unifying president. With a great, like, just if I were to speak candidly about kind of the speaking ability of Obama, for example, Obama would just destroy this right now. Both on the war in Ukraine, on the pandemic, all of it. The unified, there's a hunger for unification, I believe. Maybe people disagree with that cause they've, I think people have become cynical in that the divisions that we're experiencing are kind of already really baked in. They're really planted their feet, but I don't think so. I think there's a huge hunger, maybe a little bit of a quiet hunger for a unifier, for a great unifier. I agree, I agree. And I think what a great speech does is it's like a great piece of music or poetry. It helps you see something in yourself and feel something you didn't feel before. It doesn't overcome all different, I don't think that speeches are unifying, but I think what they are is they're mobilizing. And you can mobilize people to the same mission with different points of view. Do you think Trump derangement syndrome is a medical condition? Also, is there such thing as Biden derangement syndrome? What I mean by that, it's a funny kind of question, but why are people so deeply outraged, seemingly beyond reason, at their hatred or support of Donald Trump, but hatred in particular? I've seen a lot of friends and people I respect like lose their mind completely. So I'm not sure it's a medical condition, or not because I'm not a medical doctor, so my kids say I'm the wrong kind of doctor. I'm a doctor, so let me take you from here. No, the fact that you get the doctor's sign after getting a PhD is a ridiculous hilarity to me, hilarious, ridiculous. So as the wrong kind of doctor, I'm not gonna comment on whether it's a medical condition, but I do think you're onto something. I think there is a way in which these men become touchstones of anger. And there's all kinds of anger and anxiety that people have. And I've seen this in other historical periods. You center it on one person. In a way, that's John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. He actually didn't have a personal beef with Lincoln. It was that all the things he feared were manifest in that. And I think that's an old story, and then it's made worse by social media and the way we're bombarded. And it's like, it becomes a drug. I mean, there are people I know who hate Trump or Biden so much and just watch them. It's not that they don't watch them, it's that they do watch them, right? And it's just sort of, and it triggers you and you get hateful, and then you feel like you've done something by shouting out your hate or typing in. And so I don't know if it's a derangement syndrome. I think it's a way in which our energy gets channeled and expressed in totally useless ways. Yeah. That's an interesting psychology, which reminds me, I need to explore that, because I've noticed that, believe it or not, it's easy for me to believe, but there's people watching this right now who really hate me. And they're watching because they hate me. They hate the way I look, the way I speak, the mumbling, all of that, and they're still watching. And I'd like to say that, as I nervously try to explain myself, I'd like to say that that's not a productive way. I get it. I understand, there's a kind of, because I, what is it? Is it the same psychological effect when you see a car crash and you keep staring? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's some kind of thing that pulls you in. Totally. And you just feel like, it's that feeling, this is probably slightly different, but you kind of want to, you want to maybe feel something and there's an anger in you already, frustrations from day-to-day life, life is hard, and you just want to channel that anger towards something. But I just, the internet really makes that easy for some reason. And it makes sense of your life, that's the problem. For people whose lives are chaos, hating you and blaming you gives order to their lives. Yeah, if it makes you happy, please continue. I'm curious, it seems to bother you though, doesn't it? Yeah, hate of any kind, not towards me, just the people, because I think about them and I tend to think that most people are amazing human beings and that have a capacity to do great things in this world. And so I just think that's not a productive way of being. Like psychologically, for anything whatsoever, everybody has quirks that you can hate, but you just focus on the really positive stuff and you celebrate that stuff and that feels good. That has a momentum to it. I guess the hate has a momentum to it too. And that's what I'm trying to highlight. If you follow the momentum of hate, that's going to maybe feel good in the short term, but it's not, it's gonna fuck you over more and more in your life. And you have to be cognizant of that as you interact with the internet. I agree with everything you said, but I think people who do things that are influential and serious, there always are some people who hate them. I suppose that, but I wanted to show the difference between philosophical disagreement that borders on hate and what's called hate watching, where you just, which is what I would say TDS is, which is you're almost enjoying how much you hate this person. You're just sitting in their hate and you forgot. You lose all reason, you lose everything. Your capacity to think as an individual, to empathize with others, you lose all of that. You're in this muck of hate and somehow it helps you make sense of this particular difficult moment in your life. But otherwise, it just, it seems like a shitty way to live. But disagreement, definitely, I like disagreement. But I guess what I'm saying is, and I think this is your message too, right, is that don't let the fact that people don't like you or even that some people hate you stop you from doing the right thing. Think about how you can perhaps trigger them less, but don't stop what you're doing. I see too many, and this is why I bring this up, too many of my students, too many young, very talented people who are afraid to take risks because they're afraid that someone will hate them. And that can't get in your way. The reality is most people, or there will always be at least one person that will have your back and that will support you. And you just focus on them. As long as you're doing the right thing, focus on them for the strength. But in general, I'm exaggerating here because most of the time, 99% of people are supportive on the internet. It's just that something about the human psychology really stands out to you when somebody criticizes. Well, it's easy on the internet. This is historically different from where we were before and as a society. It's very easy now to say hurtful things to people and not have to even deal with them looking at you in the face. One of the things that encourages politeness is the fact that we're looking at one another. And we are naturally programmed not to want the other person to react to us in certain ways. But when we don't see their face, it's very easy to say all kinds of things. Let me actually comment on that point. There's a lot of people on the internet that say that I don't push back on points or criticize people or ask the hard questions enough. First of all, oftentimes I disagree with that assessment. But also, I don't think you guys realize how hard that is to do when you're sitting with a person. I don't care about access. I don't care about them being famous. Just on a basic human level, it's really hard to ask a hard question from a place of empathy. Except when I'm sitting here. You seem to be able to ask me hard. No, this is a super fine. I mean, when there's brilliant people like you and there's nothing to push back on, that's easy. But there's a basic human thing that doesn't, I think it's almost easier to be a journalist. Like journalists do this well where they don't have empathy for the person. They're just asking the hard questions. So where were you at this time last night? Because that's very suspicious. It's in contradiction to what you said. And they're just doing factual stuff. And if you actually truly have a conversation with another human being you empathize, it's very difficult. Because they have a story. They have a vision of themselves that they're the good person. And to call somebody a liar while having empathy basically imply that they're a liar, that's damn, damn hard. So anyway, I'm trying to figure this thing out. Can you make the case that the January 6th storming of the US Capitol is a big deal? And can you make the case that it is not a big deal? I think the case is overwhelming that it was a big deal. And I opened the book with this before going back to the end of the Civil War because I think it echoes that moment. You had a group of people who literally tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power and were intending, and there's overwhelming evidence of this, if they had caught the vice president or the speaker of the house to do bodily harm to them or to kidnap them. So this was a coup d'etat. That is the definition of a coup d'etat when you try to capture and prevent elected officials from doing their job. That's a huge deal. That had happened before in our country in states. I talk about this in Louisiana, in Tennessee, in places like that after the Civil War, but it never happened in the Capitol. That's a huge deal. That is, if I might say, that's like third, what we would think of as third world behavior in our society. And no offense to those from other parts of the world. I'm just trying to make a point is how we see that as happening somewhere else, not here. That's a big fucking deal. The case that is not a big deal, I guess the case to make there is that they didn't succeed. The case that it's not a big deal is not that their intentions were not bad. I don't see how you can defend their intentions. The case that it's not a big deal is that they're a bunch of clowns. And yeah, they broke in, but in the end, once they got in there, they didn't know what to do, which is true. And so, I think a professional coup plotter would say these were the amateurs and that they had no real chance of succeeding because once they got into the Capitol, they had no plan what to do next. What were they gonna do? You know, steal stapler from Nancy Pelosi's office. They didn't seem to have a plan. And then what ended up happening, they left the building. Well, that would be the case that it's not a big deal because their intention was not to overthrow. Their intention was to protest because if the intention was to overthrow, it would be much more organized. I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that they intended to stop. They were there to stop the certification of the election. They were there to prevent Donald Trump from having to leave office. They just didn't have a good plan. This was the keystone cops. So you're saying there is some, like statistically some possibility that this would have succeeded at halting the basic process of democracy. You could imagine a scenario where it might have, if they had gotten lucky, sure. If they had caught the vice president. But what could have, if they caught the vice president- They couldn't go on and certify then. He has to be there. No, but don't you think that would resolve itself through police action and so on? My question is how much is this individual hooligans and how much of this is a gigantic movement that's challenging the very fabric of our democracy? Well, it's not a gigantic movement, but it was a small coup d'etat that could have actually made the transition much more difficult. Was there a scenario where Donald Trump stayed in office legitimately? No. But was there a scenario where they created a great deal of chaos that further undermine our democracy? Absolutely yes. Here's how it would happen, right? They capture Pence, right? They either kidnap him and try to ransom him, or they, which is what they were trying to do with the Michigan governor, Governor Whitmer, or they kill him. And then Donald Trump says, "'Okay, well, there's no vice president, "'so you can't certify.'" The Senate would choose someone else to be vice president, but Donald Trump says, "'No, that's not legitimate.'" Do you think it's possible that Donald Trump would say something like that? Absolutely. I disagree with you. He said that morning that Pence should not certify. He said that morning. But there's a difference between sort of Twitter rhetoric. No, no, he said it at a rally. Sure, rally rhetoric. And there is a threshold. It feels like a big leap. He asked people around him in the Oval Office how he could make that happen. He tried to get a new person appointed attorney general who would do that. He tried to find legal justification for it. I think the evidence is overwhelming that Trump was supportive of efforts after the election didn't go the way he wanted to keep him in office. And whether that's legally actionable and whether one thinks that means he's a bad president or not is a matter of opinion. But facts are facts. Yeah, I just wonder if it's possible for him to have stayed president in this kind of context. To me, it seems like a heated, just like you said, elections can even be violent. They're heated. People are very upset. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The amount of anger, I was just, the energy I was getting from people. I mean, if there was any way to channel that anger, I think people would be in trouble. But let's just- There's anger. Yeah, I agree with that. And that is right. And elections are violent, as I said. But this is different. This is the person in the office of the presidency using the power of the presidency to try to stay in office, to imperil people's lives, to distort our government on a scale we had not seen before. And these are not opinions of mine. We have the documentary evidence. We have the testimony from people about this. We can differ over what you think of his presidency as a whole. We can differ over whether you think he should be held legally responsible. Those are matters of opinion. But the facts are he sat on January 6th, watched it on TV, did not send ever, ever. Did he ever send any protection for Congress? That is his job. And throughout, asked, continued to ask how this certification could be prevented. To you, that's not incompetence, that's malevolence. Absolutely. If I watch my children getting harmed and I don't do something about it, I'm watching it. And in fact, I take action that tries to help those who are doing the harm, you would not just say I'm an incompetent president, you would, a parent, you would say I was a negligent parent and you'd call parental support to take away my children. I was troubled by the way the press covered it, that they politicized the crap out of that. And not just the press, but also Congress itself. It just seemed like impeachment and all this, that just seemed to be a kind of circus that wasn't interested in democracy or non-partisanship. So it's very difficult for me to see the situation with clear eyes because it's been colored by the press. It's very difficult for me to know what is even true. Members of Congress, including our members of Congress from our district and others, right? Their lives were threatened. They were traumatized. I have a lot of students, at least a dozen who are staff members, more than half are Republicans. And part of what traumatized them was that the president did not do his job to protect them. Yes, as a child would be traumatized, not only if harmed by someone, but if mom and dad don't do everything they can. One of the things that makes people feel safe is they know their parents, they know their person in authority can't always keep them safe, but they want to know the person's always trying. I agree with you that there, listen, I'm somebody that believes in this kind of idea of family, especially people I work with, that to me is a high ideal to protect. But that's a little bit different. It's his job. Hold on a second. That's a little bit different than protecting democracy. Those are two different things. Protecting your employees and protecting democracy is an ideal. You could say he didn't protect either, but I think the criticism that he didn't protect the employees is one thing. But the employees in this case are the ones carrying out democracy. So it's like saying the general who doesn't protect his soldiers is maybe not protecting his employees. He's also not protecting the war effort, right? It is his, the people we're talking about are the people who are actually doing the work of democracy at that moment, the most basic function of democracy, which is certifying votes. And their lives with, I'm telling you, I had students, one who works for Senator Romney, for example, who spent hours in a closet hearing people outside, looking on her phone, when is the president sending people to protect us so we can do our job? And she was not happy with the way the election turned out, but she was there to do her job because she believes in democracy to service the Senate and the Senate's role. What should have Donald Trump done without turning him into a different human being? He should have immediately, just as we were watching things get breached, the moment they had, that the members of the House and the Senate had to evacuate their respective chambers, he should have immediately gone on TV and Twitter and every space he could and tell his supporters to leave and say what he never said. This is un-American what you're doing. This is unacceptable. Never use those words. This is un-American, this is unacceptable. I'm completely against anyone storming the Capitol like this. Go home now, please. Or you can use his own language, but tell him to leave. Yeah, and immediately, as soon as, we know he was watching for hours and we have testimony from his own daughter, from Ivanka, saying she tried time and again to get him to say something earlier on, and he didn't. He watched it. He can still criticize all the politicians. He can criticize everyone he wants, but he should have told him to leave. All he has to do in that moment is basic, protecting democracy, protecting the Capitol, leave. Tell them to leave and do everything he can to find any kind of force he can give to go protect the Capitol. I wonder how difficult it is to lose a presidential election. It's happened so many times, we know. I understand that, but it's, especially when like, what is it, you know, 80 million people vote for you, or like some, like millions and millions and millions of people vote for you. It's crazy. It's crazy. This democracy thing is crazy. George H.W. Bush won a war in the Middle East, right? He had 90% approval rating, and then a year later lost the election to someone, Bill Clinton, he thought, had none of the experience he had. Someone he believed didn't have the right moral character. And Bush did everything he could to help the next president get started well, and they became good friends. George W. Bush, he didn't love Obama. That's considered one of the smoothest transitions. George W. Bush ordered every single person in his administration to do everything they could to help the new, that's what a leader does. Yeah, humility is one of the things I admire in leaders. Well, that felt heated. Yeah. Speaking of which, can you just linger on, how do you think we can heal the divide in this country? Do you think it's possible? There feels to be a strong division. I think we can heal the divide. I think, as you said, there's so many opportunities with new technology to bring people together, just as we're using it to tear them apart. I have the best job in the world because I get to teach so many students. I'll have 300 in my class in the spring, in my US history class. And what I found with my students is they're mostly not Democrats or Republicans. They mostly care about the same things. Every one of my students seems to care about climate change. Oh, I thought you were gonna say TikTok, but okay. Yeah, TikTok. Second to that, climate change. You know, and I think they, I think they offer a new future for us. And here's what I'll say as a historian. We go through cycles of division and cycles of less division, less partisanship. One moment when it seems people agree too much on the mainstream encourages people to go to the extremes. When people see the extremes, they wanna come back to the middle. And that is where my students are. Most of my students want lower inflation. They agree with Republicans on that, but they want more to be done about climate change. They're in the middle on these issues. And I think giving them more opportunity. So what's the best way to heal our divisions, honestly? Get the old men out and the young women and men in. Because they ultimately don't have that same division and they're like deeply baked in. Not only that, they find it disgusting in the way you and I do. Yeah, that's true. What's the right way to have conversations? I mean, just to stay on that with people on the left and the right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how often you practice this. You care about politics. How often do you talk to people who voted for Trump or who are Republicans? I try, but it's hard. 75% of the people I talk to are not those people. Do you have people who are Trump supporters in your extended family? Thanksgiving? No, I don't in my extended family. Are they no longer? No longer in my family. Yeah. It's a fashion. I have taken them out of the photograph. They do not exist. Yeah, you just erase. I do, but I know I have friends who fall into that, but it's still a minority of my friend group. So I wanna be clear that I'm not as good at this as I should, but I think we do have to reach out. But I also, I'm less interested, honestly, in refighting old battles with old dogs. I'm more interested in finding ways to get a new crop of people educated and involved and engaged without imparting the same partisanship on them. So I will support, and this I have, I will support and encourage, especially any student of mine, but any young person who is smart, has good ideas, I don't care whether, I don't ask whether they're a Democrat or Republican. And I have given money to some young candidates who are not Democrats. So that's the way. I think it's a generational change. And I think it's reaching out and trying to get people to see beyond partisan divisions who are in their 20s and teens. That's why we do our podcast, This is Democracy. Zachary and I do that, my son and I, because we're exactly that. You will never hear an episode where we take one side or another. Our goal is to explain the issue, whether it's the challenges of democracy in China, or it's climate change, or whatever it is, or it's memory of war in our society, and to explain the issue and then offer people an optimistic pathway that's neither one side nor the other. So actually, to push back a little bit on young people, I do see that, the exhaustion with the partisanship. But I've also, and this I think is the case throughout history, and I see it now, especially in the teenage years, especially if I'm being honest with boys, there's a desire for extremism in various directions. All kinds of extremism. Like just extreme awesomeness or extreme anything, just extreme. And F the man that tries to make me behave, this kind of energy. And that's why you can take any ideology, basically any extreme ideology, it starts being exciting. Whether you're a Marxist or a communist, you're not just gonna be like for socialized healthcare. You're gonna be like, no, no, no, no, no. Let's go full hammer and sickle. I'm gonna wear red. And then the same with white supremacy or just red pill. Red pill, the way you see society, the way you see the world, the extremism is there. And part of that, it's kind of, to steel map that perspective, I mean it can be productive, that energy, if it's controlled. And especially if we have institutions that keep it a little under control. One of the criticisms I have, a lot of people have, I'm actually much more moderate in that criticism of universities is they give a little too much power to the 18 year old who just showed up with their Marxist books and so on. And they wanna burn the whole thing down. That's beautiful, but the whole process of the universities get different viewpoints, educate more, make that person's viewpoint more sophisticated, complex, nuanced, and all that kind of thing. I think you're right, but I think that's more talk than action. In my experience, there is, especially among young men, you're absolutely right, there is a valorization of the tough guy. Because most men 18 and 19 are still not fully comfortable in their masculinity, however they're going to define it. And so a way of performing that is being extreme in one way or another. And I've definitely seen that, but I think it's more often than not rhetoric. And actually there's a very strong power of peer pressure and conformity that works on young people. And the positive side of that now is the peer pressure among them is not to join one party or the other. It's to say, this is terrible, look at how our parents are screwing things up. And they're right. And I think we can lean into that and get a lot of positive creative action out of that. On universities, you brought this up a few times, and I think we have to be careful. I think you and I agree on this. It's not that universities are free of bias, but universities, especially large universities, whether it's UT, MIT, Yale, whatever we're talking about, right? They're large, complex empires. And most universities, people in the arts tend to be a little left of center at self-selection. Those in engineering tend to be pretty much in the middle. And those at business schools tend to be right of center. And so I think we need to be careful not to generalize. You know, at the University of Texas, there's as much influence from the business school and the athletic department as there is from the humanities. So it's not a left-leaning campus. And that's also true at Yale. You have the School of Management at Yale. You have a huge medical school, right? People who are very professional and less political on a lot of these issues. So I think we have to be careful. I think there's certain pockets of things, but some of that you're never going to avoid, right? Engineers are always gonna be the people who- Hey, no, easy now. No, but I'm sure you've heard, who want to generally find some objective measure and avoid political interpretation, right? They want to find their objective measure. I'm surprised how most people in robotics don't seem to, they're afraid of humans. They run away from humans. Precisely, precisely. And the arts people are always gonna be more touchy-feely, and the business people are always gonna like markets. I mean- My own personal opinion on this is, this is just me talking. I don't know if it's grounded in data, but just my own experiences, it seems a lot of the things that people criticize about universities comes from administrations, from the bureaucracies. The faculty and the students are, even with biases, are really interesting people, and all of their different, I wouldn't call them biases, but the different perspectives add to the conversation. It's the administrate, too much, of course you need, just like with institutions, you need some, but too much, it becomes too heavy-handed. And somehow that has been getting a little bit out of hand that a bunch of universities, just too much administration. And I don't know what the mechanism is to make it more efficient, but that's been always the struggle. Maybe the public criticism is the very mechanism that makes universities, the administration smaller. Absolutely, we have those issues, and you can also say athletics has gotten out of control. Sure, yeah. Like you said, you co-host a podcast with your son, Zachary, called This Is Democracy. What's been, there's a million questions I can ask, but just that pops to memory, what's been a challenging or maybe an eye-opening conversation you've had on it? Oh, we've had a lot of eye-opening conversations. Our most recent episode is an episode on the German right. As I'm sure many of your listeners know, there was a group called the Reichsbürger, I think they still exist in Germany, they were actually led by a former German prince, and they had been planning to assassinate the Bundeskanzler and were organizing all sorts of other efforts. They do not believe that the current German government is legitimate. They think the last legitimate government was the Nazi government. They see the whole post-war period as illegitimate. So it's the German far right. Correct, and we had on a member of the German Bundestag, of their parliament, who's been involved in the investigations or in the oversight of the investigations, and talking with her about the depth of these issues and the challenges they face in Germany. It's certainly not a huge part of German society, but it's a significant number of people, probably more than 20,000 people who are part of this, to me brought home how much of what we thought was the past is still in the present. And I think that's a recurring theme in our show. And our show is optimistic, which is not about woes to the world. It's actually about taking issues, we take a topic each week that's in the news, we go back to understand the history, and we then use that history to make better policy, to talk about how to make better policy today. And in this case, it was clear that even in Germany, there's a lot of unfinished work in explaining to people and helping those, for instance, in the former East, where a lot of this group has its support, why this government is legitimate, why it operates the way it does, and addressing their concerns. It was strikingly similar to some of the problems we have in our own society. Yeah, it's interesting that there's a far right movement in Germany. So you look at different parts of the world as well, not just the United States. We do, we did an episode recently on China, on the effects of zero COVID and the protests in China. We've done a number of episodes on the war in Ukraine. Our role each week is to have on either a policymaker, a scholar, or an activist, who can help us understand an issue and get beyond partisanship. So what's been eye-opening are some of the details, but what's also been eye-opening, honestly, is how easy it is to have a non-partisan conversation. It's not hard. We open every episode with a poem that Zachary writes. He writes an original poem, I'll brag on my son. He's the youth poet laureate in Austin right now, and he writes a poem on each topic. What's the style of poetry usually? You know- Is he dark? Is he- No, he's usually, he's often ironic. Ironic, like with a bit of humor? Yes. Okay. And he likes word plays. So he's not like a rebellious, dark teenager that's just, no. He's a creative know-it-all. Strong words. He would probably disagree. But what's interesting- Sounds like you're the know-it-all on the podcast. Oh no, oh no. I try, we do have a lot of followers, and most of them comment on him. They don't comment on me. So I'm the junior partner. You're the Yoko Ono of the partnership. Correct. I'm scared. But what I will say, and this is a really optimistic thing that I deeply believe, if you frame things properly, you open with a poem, you open with questions, not with partisan positions. Even when we have someone on who's a known Republican or Democrat, we can have a very nonpartisan conversation. I mean, of course, we get criticisms, but we're almost never criticized for being partisan one way or the other. It's not hard to do this. You just have to make an effort to avoid the partisan claptrap that we can all fall into. Focus on the humanity. What has your brilliant, popular son, Zachary, taught you about life? Oh, he's taught me so much in his 18 years, as has our daughter, who's 20. Two things stand out. He's taught me that a new generation has so much to offer. And I don't just mean because he's smart and engaged as our daughter is too. I also mean that you realize when you have a child, that even though you're doing the same things with them, they see the world differently and legitimately. And it reminds us that the world can be seen legitimately in different ways. And it's not that he and I disagree, and it's not that he and I disagree on major political issues. It's actually the small stuff that he sees differently. Like in the details, you see that you can have a very different perspectives. Exactly. You have a very different way to draw, to create a painting of the same scene. And then the other thing he's taught me is, as I said about the poetry, the importance of the arts. I've always been a lover of the arts, but it had always been in some ways parallel to my historical scholarship. We need to do a better job of integrating, as the Greeks did, right? The artistry, all the things we do, we separate them as disciplines, but they're all deeply connected. This is what I like about your podcast, honestly, is that you integrate all these things. You'll have people on with AI, you'll have a guy doing arm wrestling, you have all these things together, right? And it's that these worlds come together, and there's a lot to gain by bringing the arts and the sciences and all this together. It's an obvious thing to say, but we forget. Yeah, and it somehow becomes bigger than the individual parts. What gives you hope about the future? You looked at, especially with this book, at just such a divisive part of our history, and the claim, the idea that you carry through the book, that that division still permeates our society. So what gives you hope? I try to end the book on a very hopeful note, because I am hopeful. I'm hopeful that these divisions were made by people and can be unmade by people. I do not believe that what I describe in this book, the division, the hate that we see today as well, I don't think it's inevitable. I think it can be actually corrected quite easily, and corrected easily by addressing the challenges in our institutions, the ways in which this history has been embodied in our institutions, even though we're different, and through our own recognizing of it. The gift of the last few years, I don't care whether you're a Democrat or Republican, the gift of the last few years is that we've been able to see the horror around us. And once you see the horror, you can do something about it. What's dangerous is when the horror is there and you don't see it, and it's hidden. It's been unmasked. I don't care where you stand. Probably spoken in about 25, 30 cities about this book. Every audience I've asked, how many of you have been shaken by the last four to five years, and everyone, everywhere has raised their hand. That's a gift. That's consciousness raising. I grew up in a time in the 1980s when we were concerned everyone was apathetic. That was what was being said. We had lower voter turnout than we have now. People didn't seem to care. My students, when I was a young, I'm still young, I was a very young professor in the early 2000s, my students all wanted to go work for banks. They just wanted to make money. The best students wanted to go work for Goldman. We're not in that world anymore. There's been a consciousness raising. Knowing there's a problem, naming the problem, gives us a chance to fix the problem. And I think that's where we are as a society now. Young people are excited to solve the problem. Do you think the individual, like if a young person is listening to this, do you think the individual has power in this? Absolutely. I think the individual has a huge amount of power now. There's a demographic reason. We've got all these old people who have held on too long. Look at president, look at senator, look at any institution, and they're all, we're reaching a demographic cliff. Unlike China, we have a large population that's coming up. So those who are watching now who are in their 20s, they're gonna get to move into leadership positions much faster than their parents did. Let's go. Yeah, so that's one. And then the second thing is just what we're doing here. I mean, social media, when used properly, gives a platform to young people. They don't have to go through the New York Times like I do, right? This is why I do the podcast with my son. Find other ways. You reach millions of people. And this can be done. You don't need to wait for the old guys to give you the check mark that it's okay. Just put on a suit, get a haircut, and start speaking nonsense into a microphone. Well, also, I mean, have a very neat place. And that's why I love you. All right, Jeremy, you're an incredible human being. Thank you for talking once more time. Thank you for writing this important book. I hope you keep writing. And I hope to keep talking to you because you're the shining beacon of political hope I have here in Austin that we get to enjoy. I wanna thank you for having me on and thank you for your show. I think what you're doing is so important and I really deeply respect what you do. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeremy Suri. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Abraham Lincoln. Nearly all men can stand adversity. If you want to test a man's character, give him power. Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/GvX-heRWFfA

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Lex Fridman plays Red Dead Redemption 2

We're playing Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that my good friend Ng has recommended. We met in Austin, but she's now in Boston, Cambridge, working on exoskeletons. And robotic limbs. And robotic limbs, which in the future I guess would be cyborgs. We started playing it a little bit ago, and it's way better than I imagined. So the dialogue is great. But just even the dynamics of horses, because I thought it was just going to be grand theft auto on a horse, but there's so much more to this game. Well right now we're in story mode. If we played free play, we could find a random horse and train it. Yeah, but it's cool that the horse gets tired, you have to take care of it. Just the harsh conditions of snow as a start of the story is incredible. You ever ridden a horse? Yeah. You're laughing because there's a picture of me on the internet on a horse. Okay, I'm not sure this is going to be a lot of shooting. Is it Y to take out the gun? I don't think we have a gun. I picked up where you left off. No, why did I get off the horse? Okay, check your pockets. Oh, you've got your binoculars. I know you have in your pocket. But the gun, I don't know. I don't know if you have any weapons. What happened? What happened to our weapon? I don't know. I wasn't here for that. All I did is I played it for like five more minutes and I shot the wolves that were attacking. Oh, the wolves? What happened with the wolves? That's how you wasted all of your ammo? With the wolves? Yeah, there's like five of them. It was as difficult as you don't. How long did it take? You said it took you five minutes? No, I did. Yeah, it was five minutes because it was just one little chase, but it took me like three attempts because I was trying to get better at aiming because I kept killing the other guy. Oh, there's a bit of a fight. It's like we're about to go into combat. Anyway, I mentioned Austin. Do you remember how we met? How long ago was this? It was like a year and a half ago, I think. In the summer, right? I came to visit some friends and that was at a coffee shop and we ran into each other. Yeah. And that was, and since then, when did you go to MIT? That was recent, right? Very recent. That was in September. It's been fun. The winter is very cold, though. So this is your first cold place, right? Yeah. And I love the heat. Like the Texas heat was great. 96 degrees, walking on the trail. Yeah, it's nice. I love it. How do I pull out a gun? I don't know if you have a gun. Hold LB. Oh, you have a gun. Nice. Okay, so how do you do the, you know, like you can swap through the different guns you have. How do you think you could flip through it? No. I don't need guns. I use fists, bro. Okay, but the revolver might be enough. Okay. Approach our horse. I think it's more entertaining when you play this. Because I'm so bad at it. It's just so great. It's just an incredibly gorgeous game. Just like the snow, the sound of it. I also put it on cinematic mode. Which does what? Which does what? Just the views of it. It's not really first person. It's not as pleasant for playing the game, but it's pleasant for watching someone else play. Okay, is this not my horse? Just for the record, we're both noobs at this game, but it's more fun this way. Yeah. Okay, horse weapons. I saw that you can skin animals. There's a lot of really interesting stuff. R key to cycle. Oh, there we go. Yeah, there you go. I told you. How do you swipe? How do you? R key to cycle? R key. R key. Cool. Okay. Why do I need to go? Why do I still need to do this? I remember like it was yesterday. All the wolves I killed were there. Our needs right now are supplies. Nice twirl. Everything else, including comb, can wait. Okay. This guy walks really slow.... to deal with as it is. But come on. I don't think these guys are in touch with their feminine side. Why don't you think that? Just everything they're doing is like the most masculine. Their coats are pretty long. That's true. It's pretty feminine. Look, three-year kilt. Probably no, or a skirt. I guess a kilt isn't. What do you think about kilts? Um, I think they're pretty awesome. I mean, it's pretty aggressive. Could take. Buy one, but... Yeah, if you're not Scottish. Just in general. Just sport a kilt. It's just like an aggressive move. Walk around Boston in a kilt. A giant coat in a kilt. I mean, I don't wear a skirt in the winter. You think I can go to the gym in a kilt? Just work out. Just do curls. Might be kind of stinky. Would I get kicked out of Planet Fitness if I wore a kilt? I mean, well, you have to think about it this way. Like, would I get kicked out of Planet Fitness if I wore a skirt to the gym? I don't think they think of it that way. They'll just see me in a kilt. It's like, excuse me, sir. You're scaring. You're scaring everyone. And you're making all kinds of sounds. You would make sounds while you're wearing a kilt? Yeah, you have to. You have to make the sounds? Like William Wallace. I'll paint my face blue, whatever, and stripes. Like Braveheart? Wow. Wow. It's cheesy as hell, but it's epic. It's a great speech. Is it? It's a good monologue? No, he does a speech where they're the underdogs and they have to fight the British. He basically says, like, we can run and keep our lives, or we can stand here and fight for our freedom. And the question is, you have to imagine years from now, when you're in your deathbed and you're looking back, would you come back here for just one more chance to fight instead of fleeing? It's a good speech. Gotta be brave. Yeah. Sometimes you have to put your life on the line. Bravery is important. I was talking to my nephew about this recently. So he plays, I think it's called Minecraft. Yeah. And there's zombies in the game, and he knows a way of, like, escaping whatever conflict he's in so that he doesn't have to face it. And I told him that in life, it's really important to be brave because you can't always run away from your problems. So I think bravery is super important. What are they saying? Should I take the lead or should I send the gang? What do you mean? You have those options? I have those options. No, take the lead, send the gang, send the gang. Oh, lead from the back. All right. Oh, shoot. Where is, where are the people? Oh, that's right. I didn't see the dot. The screen is humongous. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Should I bring the thing closer? No, it's good. Oh, shoot. I keep on getting shot. How do I hide? Oh, this is getting real. Hold on. How do I crouch again? Sometimes you have to put, just like you said, you have to put your life on the line. It's worth it. It was worth it at the end. Retry checkpoint. Don't restart the mission. Is that an A? A. Oh, you have to hold it. Yeah, because restarting the mission, we're going to go through that whole walking thing. So what is it? Is it Y to shoot? No. To take out the gun? This is really hard. I know. It's hard to like chat and do this. Yeah. You try it. Okay. Oh, shit. That was me. That wasn't you. That was me. Yeah, that was you, me, and me. That was me. It was animating your death shot. Yeah, I did so good. Nice. Oh, there's someone there. All right, where are the people? Oh, nice. Oh, where are the... Who is it? I don't think there's anybody behind you. I think you're imagining things. Nice. Oh, no. But I figured it out now. Okay. What are we doing, Dutch? I mean, by the minute, becoming more and more of a cowboy. Thank God we're in Texas. Where's the set? Do you know? I don't know. I could look it up. Oh, my phone's trying to charge. Oh, there's a guy. Oh, there's a guy. Oh, there's a guy. Oh, there's a guy. Oh, my phone's charging somewhere over there. Did you hear what he said? I don't go down that easy. You just shot him twice. Just to prove a point. Sounds like your claim was false. You need to eat. Oh, oh, oh. I need to eat. Oh, wait. Yeah, all right, cool. Hold on. What am I eating? Apples? You need to hold on. I think that's salt. Let's get. How do I switch over? Oh, I see. Okay. That thing. LB to use. Okay. Did that help? Let me see. I want to eat. Oh, shoot. No, no, no, no, no. Everything is fine. All right. I'm just keep dying. Oh, what? I restarted the mission. Yeah, just restarting the mission. We're going to go through that whole walking thing. That's good. Gives us a chance to relive the incredible graphics of this video game. Going faster. Were you pressing a while you were on the horse? Yeah, but not enough. I haven't figured out if you can just hold it or if you have to keep pressing it. It's complicated. I don't think I'm controlling it anymore. Yeah. This is gorgeous. Yeah, it's really beautiful. Have you ridden horses? Yeah, I used to go to a horseback riding camp. You like it? Loved it. I like horses a lot. They're very gentle. They're kind of like, well, they're better than dogs in a way. Like they're more loyal and they don't realize how large they are. Yeah. And they're really just sweet. I love horses. There's so many cliche things and this is great. This is like a mix of Grand Theft Auto and Skyrim. Because the nature scenes are beautiful. It's not always winter, right? Well, I think that I remember a version where it was winter. I'm sure the seasons change in the game. Winter is brutal. It's crazy. So you're not enjoying the craziness of it? At least a little bit? I mean, I think it's bonding for the people that live there. Because you get to complain? Yeah, because they get to complain together. And you get to appreciate it deeper when it's actually warmer. When it's like a different season. Yeah. When the seasons change. It is beautiful when it snows. We recently, it was a weekend where it was like negative 11 degrees or something. It's crazy. You ever build a snowman? Once, but when I was younger. Have you? Yeah, all the time. All the time? Yeah. I used to really enjoy eating snow and then people would tell me you shouldn't do that. And I said, I would still do it. Why did you keep doing it? Just a rebellion and you couldn't live with it. Yeah, it tastes good. I see. It tastes good. I don't know. Do you chew on ice too? No. No, it's like, it's refreshing, but I think it's probably horrible for you. Because all kinds of stuff can be in the snow. I don't think I was so much concerned about my health or immune system when I was young. Probably made it stronger. Yeah, probably. Kids these days. They're not eating enough snow. They don't know what it was like. What's the scariest thing you've ever done? Scariest? Skydiving. Did you skydive? I've gone skydiving. I think probably scuba diving. Because I didn't take a class or anything and I was scuba diving. We went under the water and there were stingrays. And it was like this really weird feeling of like, this may go very wrong, but I feel like the people around me are very competent, so they'll take care of me if something happens. Yeah, the same thing for skydiving for me. Yeah. Have you ever killed a man? No, have you? Yeah. Lost count. I'm really taking this game in. The spirit of this game. Just killed many cows. Just killed many cowboys in my day. If you had the opportunity to live in this time for like a year, would you? Oh yeah, probably. Like a vacation, but the opposite of a vacation. Could I come back? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, you have to stay for a whole year though. Whole year I would do it. Okay. Yeah. My lab, they do this thing where they go to Africa and they help people and you stay for a month. But it's like these really harsh conditions. I think two of the girls that recently went, they got really sick while they were there. But you're helping these people who don't have access to these limbs. Yeah, probably also helps you appreciate. Yeah, everything that you have access to readily. You guys are suspiciously close together. I know. We're like, hey. Hey. What are you thinking about, Jan? All right, let's go. Wait, wait, wait. Why isn't it letting me? All right. Oh, that's what it was. I only had my fist. Oh, shoot. Nice. I really want to get this guy. Okay. All right, come on. Obviously, we're not very good at this game. Oh. It's kind of fun. We just keep. We just keep dying the same. But. Hey, how about this? What? Yeah. A, restart checkpoint. Okay. Hey. I'm the one that pointed that out. I pushed the restart mission by accident. That's true. What do you think about cyborgs? Do you think in 100 years, we'll all be partially robot? Yeah, I think we have to merge with technology in order to. In order to evolve with it, because it's evolving so quickly. If we don't evolve with it, it's like we lose a step in evolution. Yeah. Like it's the logical next step. Including brain. Yeah. BCIs and BMIs are the future. So you like the New York link stuff? Love it. Love it. There's a lot of awesome New York link people here in Austin. Are there? They were saying they want to give me a tour and meet them and stuff. I really want to meet them. And the surgeon. I talked to a few surgeons. They're just incredible people. I love it. Yeah. And the cool thing about New York link is they have all these different... How do I stop crouching? I don't know. Oh. Okay. That's fine. Crouching is good. It's a good look. I feel like you should be crouching. You're definitely safer. Yeah. But you look less gangster, but it's fine. The cool thing is they got all kinds of... They got materials, engineering people. They got electrical, robotics. Obviously, software engineering. They have to take care of the animals. That's a whole thing. Yeah. That's tough. I mean, I deal with a lot of animal stuff in our lab too. Like with the rats. The rats are a lot nicer than the mice. But I think they're dealing with monkeys, right? Yeah. No, they're doing everything. They do mice too, I think. But they're monkeys. And they make them super happy. And pigs too. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. I did gig a factory opening. There's an animal zoo you can rent. You can rent folks that... They'll bring a bunch of animals and you get to play with them. They're petting. It's a cool thing for a party. That's so cute. You just order a bunch of animals and you get to pet them. Like a goat and a bunny. You're talking about petting zoos? Yeah. But they're portable. You can bring it to your party. Yeah. Those exist. They usually come to children's parties. Yeah, it was hard. Yeah, they're great. I will forever be a child. Do you see any bad guys? No, but I hear someone shooting. Where? I don't know. They're shooting at someone. I feel like they're just shooting... They're just shooting at some of the things. Is it aiming at them? They're trying to look cool. They're shooting for the gram. I don't know. It's like you're going to the gun range. Okay. It's like me wearing the... The kilt. At the gym. I think I might eat the protein bar that's in your fridge. It's not... Can I just have a bite of it? Because I feel like my blood sugar is really low. It's not that good. Is it? Does this have sugar in it? No. Sadly not. Maybe it'll help me. I killed the last of them. The last of what? Of the powerade things? No, the last guy. You did? Yeah. I think the AI in this game is pretty shitty. It didn't pick up? They were just shooting around. They couldn't figure out what the enemy is. And the enemy couldn't figure out what the good guys are. And kill without thought. You're in. Whoa. Why did you buy that one? What do you mean? The protein bar. Because I went out yesterday and it was past midnight and I wasn't sure where to get food. So that's what you decided to eat? Yeah. I was ambitious. I got a different flavor and it was pretty good. What are they shooting at? Oh, there you go. Am I still shooting at somebody? Oh. Advance or defend? Advance. I think you should mount a horse. I don't live. You should mount a horse. I think it would be more fun and quicker. But you don't look as cool. Look how I'm walking. No cover. Not crouching anymore. Not crouching. Yeah. You made me angry. When I get angry, I don't crouch. Do you ever play shooters? Like Call of Duty? I'm not as into it. I like when there's a story. No. With Call of Duty, I think there's a story mode. Like single player. There is. But it's more like... It's a lot of this, but not as scenic. Yeah. It's also a little bit more military. So if you're into that kind of thing. I don't know which direction I'm being shot from. It doesn't show you on the map. Oh. I guess not. They're running away. There. I took care of everything. Thank you. What would I do without you? I don't know. I need to just chill with the guys, I think. Oh, we're going into different buildings. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to shoot these guys. Nice. Okay. I like that we're delegating duties here. That's great. I mean, if there's anything I love to do in a game, it is forge. Forge something? That's great. You can do all of the fighting. I'm not good at fighting in this either. We're learning. I like the we in that. It feels like a team. This is great. I really thought this game would be way worse. Well, you didn't like Zelda. So I think that's why. Yeah, we should mention we played Zelda for a little bit before. And it was too fun. It was too adventure. It was too shallow. You like the accents in this game better? Yeah, this game is gritty. It's like... It feels like a movie I'd want to watch. Do you think you were a cowboy in a past life? What made you decide to live in Texas? What guy would answer no to that? No, I was... I was more of a carrot farmer. Like some very insignificant vegetable. Of course I was... No, you know what? Not a cowboy. Because the cowboys are the good guys usually, right? I think so. I mean... I was a bank robber. Bank robber? Do you... So you think that being a criminal would be a lot of fun? Yeah, I like the challenge of it. Yeah. I don't like the murder, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get the job done. It's like a puzzle? No, I'm just speaking like a cowboy. No. No, I think it's actually... would be, in this context, super challenging to... without hurting anybody to steal money. But you're going to hurt a lot of people. It's also very stressful. If you rob a bank in a small town at that time, you're probably hurting a lot of people. You think so? You think you have to kill someone? No, I mean like financially. Oh, yeah. That town is probably dependent on the bank. Although like... It's a really good show, Yellowstone. Oh, that's a great show. It's a great show. I've seen it. You've seen it? Yeah. Good job. It's more like a modern... I mean... You know... Without going into cowboy sounding cliches, there's a certain kind of ethic and value system you live under that I think is in part admirable. Oh, I clicked the wrong thing. What happened? Oh, we didn't get there in time. I'm sorry. We were chatting too much. I got distracted. Yeah. It's just beautiful. I like kind of chilling and walking around this world. Does it make you sad that we'll have cyborgs and robots and AI? No, I think if we merge with it, we have a really optimistic looking future. But you're going to lose some of the... this kind of cowboy humanness, you know? Well, I think that your humanness will be enhanced. Like the same way that, you know, money makes you rich, sure. But it just amplifies whatever type of person you are. I think it'll be the same thing with AI. Like it's just a current... It's amplifying whatever interests you have. So if you're very interested in, I don't know, art, you're going to be able to download all of art history and have access to it at any time that you need it. Yeah. Was that the guy that I was supposed to shoot? No. Oh. Oh, I think so. Don't hurt me. Is don't hurt me... Is he dying? Is that like a... reverse psychology or what? I think he has to die. Was I not supposed to kill him? Oh. Damn it. Oh no. We weren't supposed to kill him. Oh no. I think we're not paying attention to the mission and I think it's better that way. I think it's more entertaining. Yeah. I thought for sure he was trying to trick you. Yeah, I'm definitely excited about AI. But you have to be... You definitely have to be cautious. Especially about which companies get the control of it. I like the more companies, the more people have control. The more people have control of AI systems, the better. The distributed. That's the cool thing about ChadGBT is like, it's pretty easy to build. Relatively speaking. So a lot of companies will be doing it. How'd you know that? Wait, did you do that? Yeah, I did. Wait. What did I do? Hold on. Why is it going this way? Okay, that started so nice. I know, that really went well. Don't hurt me. Okay, hold on. Why is the horse... LT ready to lasso. Throw the lasso. RT. Cool. Alright. Now you're just flirting with him. And then dismount. How'd you kill him? I think you killed him. Press B near... Oh, hog tying him. Oh, nice. He's really playing dead for you. Yeah. Nice. He's done. Hold X and you just gotta pick him up. Alright. Are we kidnapping him? I think so. Approach the back of your horse and hold X to stow him? Yeah. I don't really think it's kidnapping. He's like broken, dying in the middle of the wilderness. I think you're saving him, honestly. Alright, let's get back on the horse, I guess. Wow, this winter is brutal. Do you think people will have relationships with AI systems? Yeah. Because the AI system will be able to, I think, guess your needs very quickly. But I think it'll get boring. I think it'll be... It'll be too perfect? Yeah. Would you date a robot? Um, maybe. Maybe for a little bit. I don't think it would be as fun as dating a human, though. Especially if humans merge with technology. Sure. Well... Fun. That's an interesting word. Yeah, I suspect that robots would be too perfect. But if it's... I think the human merging with the AI would be a very interesting combo. Yeah, I agree. Because then you wouldn't have this laggy brain that's like forgetting things. You would have more interesting conversations, and you would have like all of your passions. You would be able to dive in deep to them and then come up with really great ideas on how to explore those ideas and research would become more intuitive, I think. Yeah, it's a tricky thing, because you want some... Like, life should still have some challenge. It feels like a lot of our development happens in the face of challenge. Or we just find new challenges with the... Even though we gain extra abilities, we'll still find stuff that's challenging. This guy does not sound nice. Is that how you dress in Boston? Pretty much. Pretty much. It's too cold. I would always underdress. Did you? Were you driving a lot? No, I didn't have a car. I did do threadline and bus. I love it. I love taking the T. But I do bus much more. I would stand in the bus stop freezing. There's an intimacy. There's a romance to the bus. There is some romance to standing on the bus. There is some romance to standing outside while it's cold out. Like, you're bearing this cold, but why? What is it that you're doing that's so important that you need to be facing these elements? But you're also together with other people that are just standing there and suffering. And all pretending like we're not suffering, but we're suffering. But then we're not really suffering. It's just cold. It's just temporary, too. I never understood the romance. People would always post like, winter in Miami. And then post a picture of them on the beach. Oh, I see. They're trolling? Wait, didn't you do that? I've never done that in my life. I feel like you sent me a picture of winter in Miami. Oh, because you're now a boss. You feel like you've earned the right to. Yeah. We're going to starve to death up here, Mr. Morgan. I'm going to get you. We're going to starve to death up here, Mr. Morgan. We're okay. We have a few cans of food and a rabbit. For what, 10, 12 people? When I was in the Navy. I do not want to... You know, I was thinking about the barbecue. What about it? It was so good. Should we go back? Should. I think so. I'm very up for that. It's really good. It's so great. You take it for granted because I haven't gone in a while. It's so delicious. Where do you usually go? I just go to restaurants or just eat at home. Because it's like... I don't know why, it's almost too delicious. It's like a treat. It should be like a treat, but it's not really. It is really special though when you do have it. Because I feel like it takes a while to prepare that kind of food. They're smoking it all day, right? I like it because when visitors come, you go to Terry Black's and you do the barbecue. It's crazy. It's so good. And because there's so many... The bar is so high and then they still deliver. Yeah. It's cool. And it's consistently great. Every time you go, it's amazing. You know, one time my dad and I went. My dad used to do his residency here. And he was so excited. He was like, I can't wait to go have barbecue. I'm so excited you're going to live in Texas. All this stuff. We ate way too much and we got so sick afterwards. That's the challenge. There's a few tech folks here. They're really cool. We went out with them. But we got trashed. Like whiskey. Just so drunk. And what I didn't realize is when I'm that drunk, whatever module in my brain that says don't stop eating was off. Yeah, because your body is so relaxed. And I'm having fun and then all of a sudden it's a good idea to order like 10 pounds of meat. And then you're just... Well, not just me. Everybody together. We're just eating and eating. And it's so hard to stop because it's so freaking delicious. And then you're drunk. It's delicious. It's great while you're eating it. You know what I've noticed about unhealthy foods or like treats? It's always really fun while you're eating it. But before and after, there's always this feeling of regrets. Or like before you eat a cupcake or something, I always feel this feeling of I'm really going to regret this after I eat it but I really want it. And then while I'm eating it, I'm enjoying it. I'm like, oh, this is so good. I want another one. I have to really work on that to walk away. Walk away while you really want a thing and you say, nope, no more. God, that looks beautiful. Look at that. Do you ski? I have. I grew up cross-country skiing. Like, you know, not downhill. I don't know what that is. I was born in the mountains with the goats. No, I don't really... With goats? Why goats? Because they're really good with the mountains. Oh yeah, aren't they the ones that stand on the edges of... I have an inner goat. What's your favorite really bad meal that you shouldn't be eating? My favorite really bad meal that I shouldn't be eating? Cheap meal. Like something naughty? Probably like fried chicken. I love fried chicken. Like what kind? I don't think I've had much fried chicken. So you're talking about like KFC? No, so there's this grocery store in Miami. It's called Publix. And they have the best fried chicken. Like, it's so good. Oh, in like that little spot that keeps it warm? Yes, yep. And it's so good. And they have like thick and tender. It's super crispy and all that? Oh, it's so good. It's great. With sauce of some kind? No sauce. I'm not a sauce person. Okay, well that's no respect. Are you saucy? No, I'm not saucy at all. I'm just giving you respect. The people that cover themselves with sauce are the people that... Are you being the saucest? 100%. The people that... I'll have people here in Texas that were like like legit barbecue like aficionados or whatever you call that. They will put sauce on their barbecue. They'll like dip it and stuff. They'll have like different sauces, right? I did that the last time, I think. You did? I put a little bit of sauce on my barbecue. It's not cool. It's not cool. It's disrespecting the meat. It's just not cool. It's like putting ketchup on a steak, on an aged steak. I don't judge people for putting sauce, but for certain things I don't need sauce. I don't judge people. It sounds like you're very emotionally charged for this. For anything except putting sauce. Except putting sauce on their barbecue. It's the one thing I judge them on. No, I don't care. But it is... I like great basic ingredients. Why is it all slow motion? Because I activated eagle eye. I just don't know what I'm looking for. That's the problem. I keep chatting with you. And forgetting what we're doing. Oh, shoot. Alright, check it out. Oh, it's there. Oh, cool. It has a... What is that? It's like a scent? What is it?... We're looking for an animal. Okay, so then we focus on the track. And then... So all you have to do is press RB while focusing on the track. I just don't know where the track went. Oh, there we go. So you see how it's like... How do you know we're hunting for an animal? Oh, stop tracking. I see. It's a giant TV and the text is blurry. I'm pretty sure my vision doesn't suck that bad. No, it's definitely... I think it's just too much stimuli. Like it's just a giant screen. You don't know where to look. Giant screen on low resolution or something? I don't know what it is. It's just a quality thing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Is there any other ones? Go get them. Go get the meat. I don't know how to uncrouch. You press this button. Oh, okay. Let a man handle it. I like how you did the hunting and I'm now doing the... The gathering. The gathering. Oh, hey. Hey. What the... Wouldn't it tell me to do stuff with it? No, you have to look for more deer. Okay. Why is he crouching? Looks like he's really trying to be stealth. Anyway, besides fried chicken, what else? I love sweets. So I love chocolate. Dark? I'm a milk chocolate girl. But I love dark chocolate. Yeah, me too. I'm a milk chocolate girl. Because it was... So much creamier. Yeah, it's more delicious. But then like the sophisticated people... How do I run? Dark chocolate's not bad. I'll have dark chocolate with some nut butter in it. But people will judge you because if you're a real chocolate person you're going to do dark chocolate because it's the more sophisticated, complicated flavor, right? That's fake. That's like someone going to some restaurant and being like, if you don't order this, then you didn't really go to that place. I don't think that really matters. I think it's all subjective. Say we like coffee. I still drink instant coffee. Do you like instant coffee? I don't think I've ever had instant coffee. I don't like to admit it because people say that... Because they don't consider instant coffee real coffee. It's coffee. And it's reliable. I can count on it. I know the flavor. It's good. I know the amount. The aroma. The whole point of coffee... Not the whole point. Can you make it with hot water? Yeah, with hot water. Hot water. I'm just running around. Not that way. What are you doing? I just asked you. Oh, so I should follow this guy? But he's just crouching. Well, you have to use your eagle eye. What's the eagle eye thing? It's these two. You click them down at the same time. And you've got to look around because you're going to run out of eagle eye. How do I... I think we lost the animal. Hold on. Cancel it. Wait. Don't do it yet. Just go back to where that animal was and then look for the... Right. Then look for the scent. Chocolate. What are your favorites? Like something naughty, though. Because you eat very clean. I don't think I use the word naughty to describe... When describing food, it makes me uncomfortable. Does it? It's such a weird word to use. I'm feeling naughty. I don't think I feel naughty. I think that's not... That's just not in my vocabulary. Yeah. Is this back? Is this where it is? Uh... Why is he following you like that? I think he likes the view. I don't know. Oh, okay. So the animal's over there. So get close to it and then just look around and I'm sure you'll find the scent. I love baking, by the way. Actually baking? Yeah. So cookies, like oatmeal raisin. The best cookie is oatmeal raisin. I've got a lot of trouble over this. Non-chocolate chip? Yeah. I went to war on Twitter over this. You're a chocolate chip girl? Yeah. So I'm doing oatmeal raisin for me. Like warm oatmeal raisin. So one of my nephews really loves oatmeal raisin. The other one loves chocolate chip. Am I following? Yeah, that's a scent. Anyway, oatmeal raisin cookie, like a thick oatmeal raisin cookie. Thick? Yeah. It has to be thick. The thin ones, it makes no sense. Because it's not enough cookie? Yeah, there's not enough meat and substance to the cookie. Good job. Just like a warm, thick oatmeal raisin cookie with some milk. It's your jam. With almond milk, actually. Almond milk? Yeah. With a cookie. The creamy almond milk or like real almond milk? I don't know what real almond milk is. Yeah, real but not sweetened. Unsweetened. Looking for the horse. Got to take the steer on the horse. Oh, there it is. Nice. This horse is great. What's your favorite cookie? Chocolate chip. Yeah, I love a chocolate chip cookie because there's so many different ways of making it. I'm sure there's the same thing for oatmeal raisin. Are you going to leave the animal? No, I'm going to grab it. I had to move the horse. So I had the option to grab it. So you can make like cakey chocolate chip cookies. Sure. You can make like a gooey chocolate chip cookie. You can make a chewy one. You got to go gooey. Maybe chewy gooey. Chewy gooey. It depends on what you can add molasses. Do you want it to crumble or do you want it to be chewy? I don't like a crispy. I like chewy. Yeah, good. There's a, you know, growing up in I think it's like in the Soviet Union that had I think there's a kind of cake. I don't know how they call it in English but it's muragina kucha, which is an antil cake I think. Is it like an angel hair cake? No. It's condensed milk. Oh. With a bunch of you know what condensed milk is? Yes, of course. Of course? I'm Cuban. Oh. Leche con la salada. Do Cubans do this kind of thing? What do they use it for? You use it for a lot of different things but... Desserts. Desserts, yes. You can also yeah, you can make a lot of different things with it. It's delicious. It's like very sweet and gooey. Probably portable for you. It's a cake with I don't know, it's called anthill. People can look it up. It's great. It was just a source of happiness because my mom would make it every year for my birthday. Oh, that's delicious. But then you like as you grow up you realize like, oh, this is probably really bad for you. Yeah, it's not great. And I'm the only one that eats it so when she makes it it's like Am I going to do like this 20,000 calorie contraption? Am I really going to take this on? And I do because I can't do a slice of it. No, you just keep going. The gods of cake. So your mom likes to bake too? Yeah. What else does she bake? What else is your favorite thing? Like a home cooked meal? I think it's just being with family is the favorite thing versus like a specific meal. Probably like barbecuing like, I'll usually grill. I'll make meat. So just getting together around a grill. And then enjoying the meal with family. And then just drink like whiskey vodka. I feel that way about traveling. Like people romanticize going to different places but I think it's really about the company that you keep. It almost feels like we're having a conversation but we're actually on a horse having a conversation. It does feel like we're on a horse. Which one am I and which one are you? I think they look the same. Look how big that deer is. In the back of my horse. It's kind of incredible. This game just looks beautiful. It's like realistic. Wait, did you say bear? Yeah, what do we do with that? Oh, I gotta get on my horse. It's a bear. What are we gonna do about the bear? Aim weapon? RT? Alright, I guess we won't shoot it. Could be cocaine bear. It looks like cocaine bear. Look how big it is. Actually in the trailer for cocaine bear, the cocaine bear doesn't look big. He doesn't? He looks kind of skinny. Well he's a CGI now. Yeah, I understand this but like it... I think they realized they can't make the cocaine bear fat. Because then he would be lazy. Yeah, it would be a slow movie. You have to have a skinny agile bear. Yeah, like just woke up from hibernation. Yeah, took some cocaine. And some caffeine. And just go nuts. I really want to see that movie. Just to see... Like how far they take it? Like how can you have a movie for two hours on a premise that feels like it should not last longer than 10 seconds? It feels like a joke that you say amongst friends for like 10 minutes. And like maximum 10 minutes. You have this weird banter about it and it gets weird after like 3 minutes. So literally... This is based on a true story, right? So literally they're gonna... I love the name. It is. There was some cocaine in the woods, dropped off in the woods. So they're gonna do that. And you're gonna say, oh, it looks like some bear ate into it. That takes like 2 minutes to introduce. What else is there? Maybe half the movie is just like the cocaine story. Could be. Or maybe like looking at how the cocaine changes the relationship the bear has with his family. And other bears. Going like the Lion King way. Yeah, I don't know. It's a very silly movie. It could be like a cool action film. Maybe they're going like... I think it might be hilarious. Kills a bunch of... Like the bear kills a bunch of people. I almost hope that it's really dumb because I think it would be funnier that way. I hope Liam Neeson is it. Who's that? Liam Neeson. He made a giant mistake. For stealing my daughter. That would be great. He would call the bear. Is that the guy from Taken? Yeah, Taken. That's the one. I am a sucker for those movies. For Taken? I am taking all of them. He's in a bunch of... He plays the same exact guy and he is such a badass. Those movies freaked me out. I think it was probably a good thing. I'd love to talk to him on a podcast. He's a really interesting dude. And he like... Same with... What's the guy from Breaking Bad? I don't know his name but I know who you're talking about. Aaron something? That's the blonde guy. The older guy. I don't know what his name is. Bryan Cranston I want to say. He's like a badass in real life too. I like it when you're like... When you don't just play the part. Like it's part of who you are. I feel like playing the part made him more of a badass. And he embraced it. The part changed him. And that's really cool. I mean when you play a meth dealer for like 10 seasons whatever it is. That's gonna change you. Yeah. Definitely. I mean it's part of you now. It's like when you do any job. It becomes... It consumes you. Yeah. You've been working like crazy right? I work a lot. Yeah. I work like 60 or 70 hours a week. That's good. I love it. Hard work is good. Yeah. It's important.... It's interesting when you spend 60 or 70 hours a week doing something. Because before that I wasn't working. It's like become my entire life. It's all that I think about. To the point that sometimes when I go to a restaurant I'll see an elderly person. A person who's having a hard time walking. And I'm like I should be in the lab working. What am I doing? Why am I here? That's really good. That means you really care about it. I mean you were talking about it when I met you. About prosthetics and all that kind of stuff. That was a passion. It's cool that you found that passion in this work. It's great. Yeah. I'm skinning a deer. Here we go. I'm kidding. Did you have to press something? Just why? Did you do any animal work? Ever? Yeah. Dissecting in high school and college. Yeah. For anatomy and physiology. Yeah. It's funny. I miss high school for the educational aspects. Were you funny in high school? What were you like in high school? Very stoic. I read a lot. And wrestling and sports. And just that. Was there any book that really shaped you in high school? Yeah. Like a lot. A lot. First it was like The Stranger. Which is probably by Albert Camus. He... I just re-read it recently and it's not nearly as good. As when you read it? I've read other books that I've read it and they're much better. Or is it not as good in comparison to books that you've read after that? See there's other books like Dostoevsky Gets Better and Better as I get older. And I read that in high school. But The Stranger was like meh. But it's the first time I had this feeling of existentialism of like it's the first time I really intensely felt like what's the meaning of it all? Like felt it. Not just Like an existential... Yeah. Interesting. And then of course you like take it way too seriously. Yeah and you get like really depressed and nervous. Yeah. You know the one that really hit me is Animal Farm. Oh that's a great book. Can I tell you which character I like the most? And then you tell me which one you like the most. Can you guess? Uh... It's not the pigs. Is it the the... Molly? The horse that likes pretty... How dare you? Benjamin the donkey. Nope. Who's cynical about everything. Nope. I feel like it's obvious. It's Boxer. Oh yeah. Now you're just... Working harder. Yeah obviously it's mine too. You're stealing my best... My vibe. Yeah. Yeah I will work harder. I think hard work is a lot more important than... Human intelligence doesn't vary all that much. Like when you're smart I mean there's only... Like you can't get much smarter. So you think hard work beats the cliche talent. Yeah. I think like a combination of the two probably. Or like even just being passionate. And putting in the work. Because you could be passionate and lazy. And I think sometimes if you think you're really smart it kind of holds you back. To where you feel like you don't have to try as hard. Yeah. But then it leads to like a very I think boring life. But who knows. For some people they enjoy that. This is straight up a movie. Yeah it's beautiful. What do you think is the meaning of life? I feel like it's a good thing to ask while we're watching a bunch of cowboys ride through the woods. I think nothing in life matters except for love and human connection. Like nothing else is really all that important. Like I think when you look back on life you look back on the moments that you shared with other people. How deeply you loved them. How deeply you felt things. I think all of that is important. Everything else is just noise. I agree. This is really beautiful. The seasons are changing. Yeah. Before our eyes. What do you think is the meaning of life? How good you can ride a horse. And how pretty you look in a cowboy hat. That's probably it. So it's not wearing shorts barefoot on a beach. On a horse. When the feeling strikes you. That's so romantic. A ridiculous photo of me. It's my favorite photo. I've never seen him in person. It's a fabulous photo. The funny thing is there's a bunch of shirtless versions of that. There's shirtless versions? It was like ridiculous. I rode the horse shirtless but then I put on a shirt. This is too ridiculous to take a picture of. Like what are you doing? It was cool. Being on sand is a different experience. It's like looking out over the ocean. It's cool. It's an incredible feeling. Why did you just shoot a gun? I had binoculars. Sorry. This is how all bad things happen. This is why we can't have nice things. I think this is a good place to end it. I think so too. What game should we play next time? Do you have ideas? Maybe we'll play GTA. Could be. Good thought. What's your big takeaway from this journey we took together? Do you like the game? I love the game. I love it too. It's almost nostalgic. That would be fun. Nostalgic personally for you? I used to play this as a kid. I see. I thought you meant it takes me back. It takes me back to my old days when I used to ride horses in summer camp. Me too. Your shirtless Mexico trip. I don't talk about that time. You don't talk about that time. The things I've seen. The things these eyes have seen.

https://youtu.be/U6-TaGK_d4o

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Gilbert Strang: Four Fundamental Subspaces of Linear Algebra

So let's talk about linear algebra a little bit, because it is such a, it's both a powerful and a beautiful subfield of mathematics. So what's your favorite specific topic in linear algebra, or even math in general, to give a lecture on, to convey, to tell a story, to teach students? Okay, well, on the teaching side, so it's not deep mathematics at all, but I'm kind of proud of the idea of the four subspaces, the four fundamental subspaces, which are, of course, known before, long before my name for them, but. Can you go through them? Can you go through the four subspaces? Sure I can, yeah. So the first one to understand is, so the matrix, maybe I should say the matrix. What is the matrix? What's a matrix? Well, so we have like a rectangle of numbers. So it's got N columns, got a bunch of columns, and also got an M rows, let's say. And the relation between, so of course, the columns and the rows, it's the same numbers. So there's gotta be connections there, but they're not simple. The columns might be longer than the rows, and they're all different, the numbers are mixed up. First space to think about is, take the columns. So those are vectors, those are points in N dimensions. What's a vector? So a physicist would imagine a vector, or might imagine a vector as a arrow in space, or the point it ends at in space. For me, it's a column of numbers. You often think of, this is very interesting in terms of linear algebra, in terms of a vector. You think a little bit more abstract than how it's very commonly used, perhaps. You think this arbitrary multidimensional space. Right away, I'm in high dimensions. In the dreamland. Yeah, that's right, in the lecture, I try to. So if you think of two vectors in 10 dimensions, I'll do this in class, and I'll readily admit that I have no good image in my mind of a vector, of a arrow in 10 dimensional space, but whatever. You can add one bunch of 10 numbers to another bunch of 10 numbers, so you can add a vector to a vector, and you can multiply a vector by three, and that's, if you know how to do those, you've got linear algebra. You know, 10 dimensions. Yeah. You know, there's this beautiful thing about math, if we look at string theory, and all these theories which are really fundamentally derived through math, but are very difficult to visualize. How do you think about the things, like a 10 dimensional vector, that we can't really visualize? Yeah. Do you, and yet, math reveals some beauty underlying our world in that weird thing we can't visualize. How do you think about that difference? Well, probably, I'm not a very geometric person, so I'm probably thinking in three dimensions, and the beauty of linear algebra is that it goes on to 10 dimensions with no problem. I mean, if you're just seeing what happens if you add two vectors in 3D, yeah, then you can add them in 10D. You're just adding the 10 components. So, I can't say that I have a picture, but yet I try to push the class to think of a flat surface in 10 dimensions. So, a plane in 10 dimensions, and so that's one of the spaces. Take all the columns of the matrix, take all their combinations, so much of this column, so much of this one, then if you put all those together, you get some kind of a flat surface that I call a vector space, space of vectors, and my imagination is just seeing like a piece of paper in 3D. But anyway, so that's one of the spaces, that's space number one, the column space of the matrix, and then there's the row space, which is, as I said, different, but came from the same numbers. So, we got the column space, all combinations of the columns, and then we got the row space, all combinations of the rows. So, those words are easy for me to say, and I can't really draw them on a blackboard, but I try with my thick chalk. Everybody likes that railroad chalk, and me too. I wouldn't use anything else now. And then the other two spaces are perpendicular to those. So, like if you have a plane in 3D, just a plane is just a flat surface in 3D, then perpendicular to that plane would be a line. So, that would be the null space. So, we've got two, we've got a column space, a row space, and there are two perpendicular spaces. So, those four fit together in a beautiful picture of a matrix. Yeah, yeah, it's sort of a fundamental, it's not a difficult idea, comes pretty early in 1806, and it's basic.

https://youtu.be/_G6Sh7P-cK4

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Yann LeCun: Can Neural Networks Reason? | AI Podcast Clips

Do you think neural networks can be made to reason? Yes, there is no question about that. Again, we have a good example, right? The question is how? So the question is how much prior structure do you have to put in the neural net so that something like human reasoning will emerge from it, from learning. Another question is, all of our kind of model of what reasoning is that are based on logic are discrete and are therefore incompatible with gradient-based learning. And I'm a very strong believer in this idea of gradient-based learning. I don't believe that other types of learning that don't use kind of gradient information, if you want. So you don't like discrete mathematics? You don't like anything discrete? Well, it's not that I don't like it. It's just that it's incompatible with learning and I'm a big fan of learning, right? So in fact, that's perhaps one reason why deep learning has been kind of looked at with suspicion by a lot of computer scientists, because the math is very different. The math that you use for deep learning, you know, it kind of has more to do with, you know, cybernetics, the kind of math you do in electrical engineering than the kind of math you do in computer science. And, you know, nothing in machine learning is exact, right? Computer science is all about sort of, you know, observational compulsive attention to details of, like, you know, every index has to be right. And you can prove that an algorithm is correct, right? Machine learning is the science of sloppiness, really. That's beautiful. So, OK, maybe let's feel around in the dark of what is a neural network that reasons or a system that works with continuous functions that's able to do, build knowledge, however we think about reasoning, build on previous knowledge, build on extra knowledge, create new knowledge, generalize outside of any training set ever built. What does that look like? If, yeah, maybe do you have inklings of thoughts of what that might look like? Yeah, I mean, yes and no. If I had precise ideas about this, I think, you know, we'd be building it right now. But and there are people working on this or whose main research interest is actually exactly that. Right. So what you need to have is a working memory. So you need to have some device, if you want, some subsystem that can store a relatively large number of factual, episodic information for, you know, a reasonable amount of time. So, you know, in the brain, for example, there are kind of three main types of memory. One is the sort of memory of the state of your cortex. And that sort of disappears within 20 seconds. You can't remember things for more than about 20 seconds or a minute if you don't have any other form of memory. The second type of memory, which is longer term, but still short term, is the hippocampus. So you can, you know, you came into this building, you remember where the exit is, where the elevators are. You have some map of that building. That's stored in your hippocampus. You might remember something about what I said, you know, a few minutes ago. I forgot it all already. Of course, it's been erased. But, you know, but that would be in your hippocampus. And then the longer term memory is in the synapse, the synapses. Right. So what you need if you want a system that's capable of reasoning is that you want the hippocampus-like thing. Right. And that's what people have tried to do with memory networks and, you know, neural training machines and stuff like that. Right. And now with transformers, which have sort of a memory in their kind of self-attention system, you can think of it this way. So that's one element you need. Another thing you need is some sort of network that can access this memory, get an information back, and then kind of crunch on it, and then do this iteratively multiple times. Because a chain of reasoning is a process by which you update your knowledge about the state of the world, about, you know, what's going to happen, etc. And that has to be this sort of recurrent operation, basically. And you think that kind of, if we think about a transformer, so that seems to be too small to contain the knowledge that's, to represent the knowledge that's contained in Wikipedia, for example. But a transformer doesn't have this idea of recurrence. It's got a fixed number of layers, and that's the number of steps that, you know, limits, basically, its representation. But recurrence would build on the knowledge somehow. I mean, it would evolve the knowledge and expand the amount of information, perhaps, or useful information within that knowledge. But is this something that just can emerge with size? Because it seems like everything we have now is too small. No, it's not clear. I mean, how you access and write into an associative memory in an efficient way. I mean, sort of the original memory network maybe had something like the right architecture, but if you try to scale up a memory network so that the memory contains all Wikipedia, it doesn't quite work. Right. So there's a need for new ideas there. Okay. But it's not the only form of reasoning. So there's another form of reasoning, which is through, which is very classical also in some types of AI. And it's based on, let's call it energy minimization. Okay. So you have some sort of objective, some energy function that represents the quality or the negative quality. Okay. Energy goes up when things get bad and they get low when things get good. So let's say you want to figure out, you know, what gestures do I need to do to grab an object or walk out the door? If you have a good model of your own body, a good model of the environment, using this kind of energy minimization, you can do planning. And in optimal control, it's called model predictive control. You have a model of what's going to happen in the world as a consequence of your actions. And that allows you to, by energy minimization, figure out a sequence of action that optimizes a particular objective function, which minimizes the number of times you're going to hit something and the energy you're going to spend doing the gesture and et cetera. So that's a form of reasoning. Planning is a form of reasoning. And perhaps what led to the ability of humans to reason is the fact that, or, you know, species that appear before us had to do some sort of planning to be able to hunt and survive and survive the winter in particular. And so, you know, it's the same capacity that you need to have. So in your intuition, if we look at expert systems and encoding knowledge as logic systems, as graphs, in this kind of way, is not a useful way to think about knowledge? Graphs are a little brittle or logic representation. So basically, you know, variables that have values and constraints between them that are represented by rules, it's a little too rigid and too brittle, right? So some of the early efforts in that respect were to put probabilities on them. So a rule, you know, if you have this and that symptom, you know, you have this disease with that probability, and you should prescribe that antibiotic with that probability, right? That's the mycin system from the 70s. And that's what that branch of AI led to, you know, Bayesian networks and graphical models and causal inference and variational, you know, method. So there is, I mean, certainly a lot of interesting work going on in this area. The main issue with this is knowledge acquisition. How do you reduce a bunch of data to a graph of this type? It relies on the expert, on the human being to encode, to add knowledge. And that's essentially impractical. Yeah. It's not scalable. That's a big question. The second question is, do you want to represent knowledge as symbols? And do you want to manipulate them with logic? And again, that's incompatible with learning. So one suggestion, which Geoff Hinton has been advocating for many decades, is replace symbols by vectors. Think of it as pattern of activities in a bunch of neurons or units or whatever you want to call them. And replace logic by continuous functions. Okay. And that becomes now compatible. There's a very good set of ideas written in a paper about 10 years ago by Leon Boutou, who is here at Facebook. The title of the paper is From Machine Learning to Machine Reasoning. His idea is that a learning system should be able to manipulate objects that are in a space and then put the result back in the same space. So it's this idea of working memory, basically. And it's very enlightening. And in a sense, that might learn something like the simple expert systems. You can learn basic logic operations there. Yeah, quite possibly. Yeah. And there's a lot of debate on how much prior structure you have to put in for this kind of stuff to emerge. That's the debate I have with Gary Marcus and people like that.

https://youtu.be/YAfwNEY826I

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Bjarne Stroustrup: Deep Learning, Software 2.0, and Fuzzy Programming

So a crazy question, but I work a lot with machine learning, with deep learning. I'm not sure if you touch that world much, but you could think of programming as a thing that takes some input. Programming is the task of creating a program, and a program takes some input and produces some output. So machine learning systems train on data in order to be able to take in input and produce output. But they're messy, fuzzy things, much like we as children grow up. You know, we take some input, we make some output, but we're noisy. We mess up a lot. We're definitely not reliable. Biological systems are a giant mess. So there's a sense in which machine learning is a kind of way of programming, but just fuzzy. It's very, very, very different than C++, because C++ is, just like you said, it's extremely reliable, it's efficient, you can measure, you can test it in a bunch of different ways. With biological systems or machine learning systems, you can't say much except sort of empirically saying that 99.8% of the time it seems to work. What do you think about this fuzzy kind of programming? Do you even see it as programming? Is it totally another kind of world? I think it's a different kind of world. And it is fuzzy, and in my domain, I don't like fuzziness. That is, people say things like they want everybody to be able to program. But I don't want everybody to program my airplane controls or the car controls. I want that to be done by engineers. I want that to be done with people that are specifically educated and trained for doing, building things. And it is not for everybody. Similarly, a language like C++ is not for everybody. It is generated to be a sharp and effective tool for professionals, basically, and definitely for people who aim at some kind of precision. You don't have people doing calculations without understanding math, right? Counting on your finger is not going to cut it if you want to fly to the moon. And so there are areas where an 84% accuracy rate, 16% false positive rate is perfectly acceptable and where people will probably get no more than 70. You said 98%. What I have seen is more like 84, and by really a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, you can get up to 92 and a half. So this is fine if it is, say, pre-screening stuff before the human look at it. It is not good enough for life-threatening situations. And so there's lots of areas where the fuzziness is perfectly acceptable and good and better than humans, cheaper than humans, but it's not the kind of engineering stuff I'm mostly interested in. I worry a bit about machine learning in the context of cars. You know much more about this than I do. I worry too. But I'm sort of an amateur here. I've read some of the papers, but I've not ever done it. And the idea that scares me the most is the one I have heard, and I don't know how common it is, that you have this AI system, machine learning, all of these trained neural nets, and when there's something that's too complicated, they ask the human for help. But the human is reading a book or asleep, and he has 30 seconds or three seconds to figure out what the problem was that the AI system couldn't handle and do the right thing. This is scary. I mean, how do you do the cutover between the machine and the human? It's very, very difficult. And for the designer of one of the most reliable, efficient, and powerful programming languages, C++, I can understand why that world is actually unappealing. It is for most engineers. To me, it's extremely appealing because we don't know how to get that interaction right, but I think it's possible. But it's very, very hard. It is. And I was stating a problem, not a solution. That is impossible. I would much rather never rely on the human. If you're driving a nuclear reactor or an autonomous vehicle, it's much better to design systems written in C++ that never ask human for help. Let's just get one fact in. All of this AI stuff is on top of C++. So that's one reason I have to keep a weather eye out on what's going on in that field, but I will never become an expert in that area. But it's a good example of how you separate different areas of applications, and you have to have different tools, different principles, and they interact. No major system today is written in one language, and there are good reasons for that.

https://youtu.be/fjIhFzTUB9I

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Noam Chomsky: Language is the Basis of Reason and Creativity

So how deep do the roots of language go in our brain? Our mind, is it yet another feature like vision or is it something more fundamental from which everything else springs in the human mind? Well, in a way it's like vision. There's something about our genetic endowment that determines that we have a mammalian rather than an insect visual system. And there's something in our genetic endowment that determines that we have a human language faculty. No other organism has anything remotely similar. So in that sense, it's internal. Now there is a long tradition which I think is valid going back centuries to the early scientific revolution at least that holds that language is the sort of the core of human cognitive nature. It's the source, it's the mode for constructing thoughts and expressing them. That is what forms thought. And it's got fundamental creative capacities. It's free, independent, unbounded and so on. And undoubtedly I think the basis for our creative capacities and the other remarkable human capacities that lead to the unique achievements and not so great achievements of the species. The capacity to think and reason, do you think that's deeply linked with language? Do you think the way we, the internal language system is essentially the mechanism by which we also reason internally? It is undoubtedly the mechanism by which we reason. There may also be other, there are undoubtedly other faculties involved in reasoning. We have a kind of scientific faculty, nobody knows what it is. But whatever it is that enables us to pursue a certain lines of endeavor and inquiry and to decide what makes sense and doesn't make sense and to achieve a certain degree of understanding of the world that uses language but goes beyond it. Just as using our capacity for arithmetic is not the same as having the capacity.

https://youtu.be/X7JCyI8_lQw

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Elon Musk: Physics View of Love | AI Podcast Clips

Do you think we will ever create an AI system that we can love and loves us back in a deep meaningful way like in the movie Her? I think AI will be capable of convincing you to fall in love with it very well. And that's different than us humans? You know we start getting into a metaphysical question of like do emotions and thoughts exist in a different realm than the physical? And maybe they do, maybe they don't, I don't know. But from a physics standpoint I tend to think of things, you know, like physics was my main sort of training. And from a physics standpoint, essentially if it loves you in a way that you can't tell whether it's real or not, it is real. Just a physics view of love. If you cannot prove that it does not, if there's no test that you can apply that would make it, allow you to tell the difference, then there is no difference. And it's similar to seeing our world as simulation. There may not be a test to tell the difference between what the real world and the simulation and therefore from a physics perspective it might as well be the same thing. Yes. And there may be ways to test whether it's a simulation. There might be, I'm not saying there aren't, but you could certainly imagine that a simulation could correct, that once an entity in the simulation found a way to detect the simulation it could either restart, you know, pause the simulation, start a new simulation, or do one of many other things that then corrects for that error.

https://youtu.be/JBSj5OP64LM

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Michael Kearns: Algorithmic Trading and the Role of AI in Investment at Different Time Scales

You've worn many hats, one of which, the one that first caused me to become a big fan of your work many years ago is algorithmic trading. So I have to just ask a question about this because you have so much fascinating work there. In the 21st century, what role do you think algorithms have in the space of trading, investment, in the financial sector? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, in the time I've spent on Wall Street and in finance, I've seen a clear progression and I think it's a progression that kind of models the use of algorithms and automation more generally in society, which is the things that kind of get taken over by the algos first are sort of the things that computers are obviously better at than people, right? So first of all, there needed to be this era of automation, right, where just financial exchanges became largely electronic, which then enabled the possibility of trading becoming more algorithmic because once the exchanges are electronic, an algorithm can submit an order through an API just as well as a human can do at a monitor. It can do it really quickly, it can read all the data. Yeah, and so I think the places where algorithmic trading have had the greatest inroads and had the first inroads were in kind of execution problems, kind of optimized execution problems. So what I mean by that is at a large brokerage firm, for example, one of the lines of business might be on behalf of large institutional clients taking what we might consider difficult trades. It's not a mom and pop investor saying, I want to buy 100 shares of Microsoft. It's a large hedge fund saying, I want to buy a very, very large stake in Apple and I want to do it over the span of a day. And it's such a large volume that if you're not clever about how you break that trade up, not just over time, but over perhaps multiple different electronic exchanges that all let you trade Apple on their platform, you will move, you'll push prices around in a way that hurts your execution. So this is an optimization problem. This is a control problem, right? And so machines are better. We know how to design algorithms that are better at that kind of thing than a person is going to be able to do because we can take volumes of historical and real-time data to kind of optimize the schedule with which we trade. And similarly, high-frequency trading, which is closely related but not the same as, obviously, optimized execution, where you're just trying to spot very, very temporary mispricings between exchanges or within an asset itself, or just predict directional movement of a stock because of the kind of very, very low-level granular buying and selling data in the exchange. Machines are good at this kind of stuff. It's kind of like the mechanics of trading. What about the, can machines do long-term sort of prediction? Yeah. So I think we are in an era where clearly there have been some very successful quant hedge funds that are in what we would traditionally call still in the stat arb regime. So- What's that? Stat arb referring to statistical arbitrage. But for the purposes of this conversation, what it really means is making directional predictions in asset price movement or returns. Your prediction about that directional movement is good for, you have a view that it's valid for some period of time between a few seconds and a few days. And that's the amount of time that you're going to kind of get into the position, hold it, and then hopefully be right about the directional movement and buy low and sell high as the cliche goes. So that is a kind of a sweet spot, I think, for quant trading and investing right now and has been for some time. When you really get to kind of more Warren Buffett style time scales, right? Like my cartoon of Warren Buffett is that Warren Buffett sits and thinks what the long-term value of Apple really should be. And he doesn't even look at what Apple's doing today. He just decides, I think that this is what its long-term value is and it's far from that right now. And so I'm going to buy some Apple or short some Apple and I'm going to sit on that for 10 or 20 years. So when you're at that kind of time scale or even more than just a few days, all kinds of other sources of risk and information. So now you're talking about holding things through recessions and economic cycles. Wars can break out. So there you have to understand human nature at a level. Yeah, and you need to just be able to ingest many, many more sources of data that are on wildly different time scales, right? So if I'm an HFT, I'm a high-frequency trader, like I don't, I really, my main source of data is just the data from the exchanges themselves about the activity in the exchanges, right? And maybe I need to pay, I need to keep an eye on the news, right? Because that can cause sudden, the CEO gets caught in a scandal or gets run over by a bus or something that can cause very sudden changes. But I don't need to understand economic cycles. I don't need to understand recessions. I don't need to worry about the political situation or war breaking out in this part of the world because all I need to know is as long as that's not going to happen in the next 500 milliseconds, then my model's good. When you get to these longer time scales, you really have to worry about that kind of stuff. And people in the machine learning community are starting to think about this. We held a, we jointly sponsored a workshop at Penn with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia a little more than a year ago on, I think the title was something like Machine Learning for Macroeconomic Prediction. And referring specifically to these longer time scales. And it was an interesting conference, but it left me with greater confidence that we have a long way to go to... And so I think that people that, in the grand scheme of things, if somebody asked me like, well, whose job on Wall Street is safe from the bots? I think people that are at that longer time scale and have that appetite for all the risks involved in long-term investing and that really need kind of not just algorithms that can optimize from data, but they need views on stuff. They need views on the political landscape, economic cycles and the like. And I think they're pretty safe for a while, as far as I can tell. So Warren Buffet's job is safe for a little while. Yeah, I'm not seeing a robo Warren Buffet anytime soon. To give him comfort.

https://youtu.be/KWD6j5B_Lio

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Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? (Vitalik Buterin) | AI Podcast Clips

So before we talk about the fundamental ideas behind Ethereum and cryptocurrency, perhaps it'd be nice to talk about the origin story of Bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. You gave a talk that started with sort of asking the question, what did Satoshi Nakamoto actually invent? Maybe you could say who is Satoshi Nakamoto and what did he invent? Sure, so Satoshi Nakamoto is the name by which we know the person who originally came up with Bitcoin. So the reason why I say the name by which we know is that this is an anonymous fellow who has shown himself to us only over the internet, just by first publishing the white paper for Bitcoin, then releasing the original source code for Bitcoin, and then talking to the very early Bitcoin community on Bitcoin forums and interacting with them and helping the project along for a couple of years. And then at some point in late 2010 to early 2011, he disappeared. So Bitcoin is a fairly unique project in how it has this kind of mythical, kind of quasi-godlike founder who just kind of popped in, did the thing, and then disappeared and we've somehow just never heard from him again. So in 2008, so the white paper was the first, do you know if the white paper was the first time the name would actually appear, Satoshi Nakamoto? I believe so. So how is it possible that the creator of such an impactful project remains anonymous? That's a tough question and there's no similarity to it in the history of technology as far as I'm aware. Yeah. So one possibility is that it's Hal Finney because Hal Finney was kind of also active in the Bitcoin community as Hal Finney in those two beginning years. And Hal is one of the people in the early Cypherpunk community. He was a computer scientist, cryptographers, people interested in technology, internet freedom, like those kinds of topics. Is it correct that he seemed to have been involved in either the earliest or the first transaction of Bitcoin? Yes. The first transaction of Bitcoin was between Satoshi and Hal Finney. Do you think he knew who Satoshi was? If he was Satoshi, you probably know. How is it possible to work so closely with people and nevertheless not know anything about their fundamental identity? Is this like a natural sort of characteristic of the internet? If we were to think about it, because you and I just met now, there's a depth of knowledge that we now have about each other that's like physical. My vision system is able to recognize you, I can also verify your identity of uniqueness. It's very hard to fake you being you. So the internet has a fundamentally different quality to it, which is just fascinating. Yeah, this is definitely interesting. I definitely just know a lot of people just by their internet handles. And to me, when I think of them, I see their internet handles and one of them has a profile picture as this face that's not quite human with a bunch of psychedelic colors in it. And when I visualize him, I just visualize that. That's not an actual face. You are the creator of the second, well, at least currently the second most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. So on this topic, if we just stick on Satoshi Nakamoto for a little bit longer, you may be the most qualified person to speak to the psychology of this anonymity that we're talking about. Your identity is known, I've just verified it. But from your perspective, what are the benefits in creating a cryptocurrency and then remaining anonymous? If it can psychoanalyze Satoshi Nakamoto, is there something interesting there? Or is it just a peculiar quirk of him? It definitely helps create this kind of image of this kind of neutral thing that doesn't belong to anyone. You've created a project and because you're anonymous and because you also disappear or as unfortunately happened to Halfini, if that is him, he ended up dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and he's in a cryogenic freezer now. But if you pop in and you create it and you're gone and all that's remaining of that whole process is the thing itself, then no one can go and try to interpret any of your other behavior and try to understand like, oh, this person wrote this thing in some essay at age 16 where he expressed particular opinions about democracy. And so because of that, this project is a statement that's trying to do this specific thing. Instead, it creates this environment where the thing is what you make of it. It doesn't have the burden of your other ideas, political thought and so on. So now that we're sitting with you, do you feel the burden of being kind of the face of Ethereum? I mean, there's a very large community of developers, but nevertheless, is there like a burden associated with that? There definitely is. This is definitely a big reason why I've been trying to kind of push for the Ethereum ecosystem to become more decentralized in many ways, just encouraging a lot of kind of core Ethereum work to happen outside of the Ethereum foundation and of expanding the number of people that are making different kinds of decisions, having multiple software limitations instead of one and all of these things. There's a lot of things that I've tried to do to remove myself as a single point of failure because that is something that a lot of people criticize me for. So if you look at the most fundamentally successful open source projects, it seems that it's like a sad reality when I think about it, is it seems to be that one person is a crucial contributor often, if you look at Linus for Linux, for the kernel. That is possible. I'm definitely not planning to disappear. That's an interesting tension that projects like this kind of desire a single entity, and yet they're fundamentally distributed. I don't know if there's something interesting to say about that kind of structure and thinking about the future of cryptocurrency. Does there need to be a leader? There's different kinds of leaders. There's dictators who control all the money. There's people who control organizations. There's high priests that just have themselves and their Twitter followers. What kind of leader are you, would you say? These days, I'm actually a bit more in the high priest direction than before. I definitely actually don't do all that much of going around and ordering Ethereum Foundation people to do things because I think those things are important. If there's something that I do think is important, I do just usually say it publicly or just say it to people. Quite often, projects just start doing it. That's rarely just on small groups.

https://youtu.be/mKtsM2vv0DA

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Einstein Carried His Luggage (Eric Weinstein and Lee Smolin) | AI Podcast Clips

There are things which are right there in front of us which we miss. And I'll quote my friend Eric Weinstein in saying, look, Einstein carried his luggage, Freud carried his luggage, Marx carried his luggage, Martha Graham carried her luggage, etc. Edison carried his luggage. All these geniuses carried their luggage. But not once before relatively recently did it occur to anybody to put a wheel on luggage and pull it. And it was right there waiting to be invented for centuries. So this is Eric Weinstein. What do the wheels represent? Are you basically saying that there's stuff right in front of our eyes that once it just clicks, we put the wheels in the luggage, a lot of things will fall into place? Yes. That's what I do. And every day I wake up and think, why can't I be that guy who was walking to the airport? What do you think it takes to be that guy? Because like you said, a lot of really smart people carried their luggage. What just psychologically speaking, so Eric Weinstein is a good example of a person who thinks outside the box. Who resists almost conventional thinking. You're an example of a person who by habit, by psychology, by upbringing, I don't know, but resists conventional thinking as well, just by nature. Thank you, that's a compliment. That's a compliment? Good. So what do you think it takes to do that? Is that something you were just born with? I doubt it. From my studying some cases, because I'm curious about that, obviously. And just in a more concrete way, when I started out in physics, because I started a long way from physics, so it took me a long, not a long time, but a lot of work to get to study it and get into it. So I did wonder about that. And so I read the biographies, in fact I started with the autobiography of Weinstein and Newton and Galileo and all those people. And I think there's a couple of things. Some of it is luck, being in the right place at the right time. Some of it is stubbornness and arrogance, which can easily go wrong. And I know all of these are doorways, if you go through them slightly at the wrong speed or in the wrong angle, they're ways to fail. But if you somehow have the right luck, the right confidence or arrogance, caring, I think Einstein cared to understand nature with a ferocity and a commitment that exceeded other people of his time. So he asked more stubborn questions, he asked deeper questions. I think, and there's a level of ability and whether ability is born in or can be developed to the extent to which it can be developed, like any of these things, like musical talent. You mentioned ego, what's the role of ego in that process? Confidence. Confidence, but do you, in your own life, have you found yourself walking that knife's edge of too much or too little, so being overconfident and therefore leading yourself astray or not sufficiently confident to throw away the conventional thinking of whatever the theory of the day, of theoretical physics? I don't know if I, I mean, I've contributed what I've contributed, whether if I had had more confidence in something, I would have gotten further, I don't know. Certainly I'm sitting here at this moment with very much my own approach to nearly everything, and I'm calm, I'm happy about that. But on the other hand, I know people whose self-confidence vastly exceeds mine, and sometimes I think it's justified and sometimes I think it's not justified.

https://youtu.be/yyFPYOa7bA0

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Ray Dalio: What Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Other Shapers Have in Common | AI Podcast Clips

You mentioned shapers, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, what, who are the shapers that you find yourself thinking about when you're constructing these ideas? The ones that define the archetype of a shaper for you? Well, as I say, a shaper for me is somebody who comes up with a great visualization, usually a really unique visualization, and then actually builds it out that makes the world different, changes the world in that kind of a way. So when I look at it, Mark Benioff with Salesforce, Chris Anderson with TED, Mohammed Yunus with Social Enterprise and Philanthropy, Jeffrey Canada and Harlem Children's Zone, there are, all domains have shapers who have the ability to visualize and make extraordinary things happen. What are the commonalities between some of them? The commonalities are, first of all, the excitement of something new, that call to adventure, and then again, that practicality, the capacity to learn. The capacity then, they're able to be, in many ways, full-range. That means they're able to go from the big, big picture down to the detail. So let's say, for example, Elon Musk, he describes, he gets a lot of money from selling PayPal, his interest in PayPal. He said, why isn't anybody going to Mars or outer space? What are we gonna do if the planet goes to hell? And how do we gonna get that? Nobody's paying attention to that. He doesn't know much about it. He then reads and learns and so on. Says, I'm gonna take, okay, half of my money, and I'm gonna put it in there, and I'm gonna do this thing, and he learns, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and he's got creative, okay. That's one dimension. So he gave me the keys to his car, which was just early days in Tesla, and he then points out the details. Okay, if you push this button here, it's this, the detail. So he's simultaneously talking about the big, the big, big, big picture. Okay, when does humanity going to abandon the planet? But he will then be able to take it down into the detail so he can go, let's call it helicoptering. He can go up, he can go down, and see things at those types of perspective. And then you've seen that with the other shapers as well. And that's a common thing that they can do that. Another important difference that they have in mind is how they deal with people. I mean, meaning there's nothing more important than achieving the mission. And so what they have in common is that there's a test that I give these personality tests because they're very helpful for understanding people. And so I gave it to all these shapers. And one of the things in workplace inventory test is this test, and it has a category called concern for others. They're all having concern for others. This includes Mohammed Yunus, who invented microfinance, social enterprise, impact investing, as Mohammed Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize for this, Congressional Medal of Honor. One of the, fortune determined, one of the 10 greatest entrepreneurs of our time. He's built all sorts of businesses to give back money in social enterprise, a remarkable man. He has nobody that I know practically can have more concern for others. He lives a life of a saint. I mean, very modest lifestyle, and he puts all his money into trying to help others. And he tests low on what's called concern for others because what it really, the questions under that are questions about conflict to get at the mission. So they all, Jeffrey Canada, who changed Harlem Children's Zone and developed that to take children in Harlem and get them well taken care of, not only just in their education, but their whole lives. Harm, him also, concern for others. What they mean is that they can see whether those individuals are performing at a level, an extremely high level, that's necessary to make those dreams happen. So when you think of, let's say, Steve Jobs was famous for being difficult with people and so on, and I didn't know Steve Jobs, so I can't speak personally to that, but his comments on, do you have A players, and if you have A players, if you put in B players, pretty soon you'll have C players and so on. That is a common element of them, holding people to high standards and not letting anybody stand in the way of the mission. What do you think about that kind of idea, sorry to pause on that for a second, that the A, B, and C players, and the importance of, so when you have a mission, to really only have A players and be sort of aggressively filtering for that. Yes, but I think that there are all different ways of being A players, and I think, and what a great team, you have to appreciate all the differences in ways of being A players, okay? That's the first thing, and then you always have to be super excellent, in my opinion, you always have to be really excellent with people to help them understand themselves and get in sync with them about what's true about them and their circumstances and how they're doing so that they're having a fabulous personal development experience at the same time as you're dealing with them. So when I say that they're all different ways, this is one of the then qualities, you asked me what are the qualities, so one of the third qualities that I would say is to know how to deal well with your not knowing and to be able to get the best expertise so that you're a great orchestrator of different ways so that the people who are really, really successful, unlike most people believe that they're successful because of what they know, they're even more successful by being able to effectively learn from others and tap into the skills of people who see things different from them. Brilliant, so how do you, when that personality being, first of all, open to the fact that there's, other people see things differently than you and at the same time have supreme confidence in your vision, is there, just the psychology of that, do you see a tension there between the confidence and the open-mindedness? And now it's funny because I think we grow up thinking that there's a tension there, right? That there's a confidence and the more confidence that you have, there's a tension with the open-mindedness and not being sure, okay? Confident and accurate are almost negatively correlated in many people. They're extremely confident and they're often inaccurate. And so I think one of the greatest tragedies of people is not realizing how those things go together because instead it's really that by saying, I know a lot and how do I know I'm still not wrong? And how do I take that best thinking available to me and then raise my probability of learning? All these people think for themselves, okay? I mean, meaning they're smart, but they take in like vacuum cleaners, they take in ideas of others, they stress test their ideas with others, they assess what comes back to them in the form of other thinking and they also know what they're not good at and what other people who are good at the things that they're not good at, they know how to get those people and be successful all around because nobody has enough knowledge in their heads. And that I think is one of the great differences. So the reason my company has been successful in terms of this is because of an idea meritocratic decision-making, a process by which you can get the best ideas. You know, what's an idea meritocracy? An idea meritocracy is to get the best ideas that are available out there and to work together with other people in the team to achieve that.

https://youtu.be/JNNfeqt9BAU

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Noam Chomsky: Good and Evil in Human Nature

You've said that evil in society arises from institutions, not inherently from our nature. Do you think most human beings are good, they have good intent, or do most have the capacity for intentional evil that depends on their upbringing, depends on their environment, on context? I wouldn't say that they don't arise from our nature. Anything we do arises from our nature. And the fact that we have certain institutions, not others, is one mode in which human nature has expressed itself. But as far as we know, human nature could yield many different kinds of institutions. The particular ones that have developed have to do with historical contingency, who conquered whom, and that sort of thing. They're not rooted, they're not rooted in our nature in the sense that they're essential to our nature. So it's commonly argued that these days that something like market systems is just part of our nature. But we know from a huge amount of evidence that that's not true. There's all kinds of other structures. It's a particular fact about a moment of modern history. Others have argued that the roots of classical liberalism actually argue that what's called sometimes an instinct for freedom, an instinct to be free of domination by illegitimate authority is the core of our nature. That would be the opposite of this. And we don't know. We just know that human nature can accommodate both kinds.

https://youtu.be/mzcGvaZyyKs

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Noam Chomsky: Neuralink and the Expansion of Cognitive Capacity

So I just spent a day at a company called Neuralink, and what they do is try to design what's called the brain machine, brain computer interface. So they try to do thousands readings in the brain, be able to read what the neurons are firing and then stimulate back, so two way. Do you think their dream is to expand the capacity of the brain to attain information? Sort of increase the bandwidth at which we can search Google kind of thing. Do you think our cognitive capacity might be expanded, our linguistic capacity, our ability to reason might be expanded by adding a machine into the picture? Can be expanded in a certain sense, but a sense that was known thousands of years ago. A book expands your cognitive capacity. Okay, so this could expand it too. But it's not a fundamental expansion. It's not totally new things could be understood. Well, nothing that goes beyond their native cognitive capacities. Just like you can't turn the visual system into an insect system. Well, I mean, the thought is perhaps you can't directly, but you can map. You could, but we know that without this experiment. You could map what a bee sees and present it in a form so that we could follow it. In fact, every bee scientist does that. But you don't think there's something greater than bees that we can map and then all of a sudden discover something, be able to understand a quantum world, quantum mechanics, be able to start to be able to make sense. Students at MIT study and understand quantum mechanics. But they always reduce it to the infant, the physical. I mean, they don't really understand. Oh, you don't, there's things. That may be another area where there's just a limit to understanding. We understand the theories, but the world that it describes doesn't make any sense. So, you know, the experiment, the Schrödinger's cat, for example, can understand the theory, but as Schrödinger pointed out, it's an unintelligible world. So, one of the reasons why Einstein was always very skeptical about quantum theory, he described himself as a classical realist, in one's intelligibility. He has something in common with infants in that way.

https://youtu.be/X9z9LODEjo4

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Dan Kokotov: Speech Recognition with AI and Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #151

The following is a conversation with Dan Kokorov, VP of Engineering at Rev.ai, which is, by many metrics, the best speech-to-text AI engine in the world. Rev, in general, is a company that does captioning and transcription of audio by humans and by AI. I've been using their services for a couple years now and am planning to use Rev to add both captions and transcripts to some of the previous and future episodes of this podcast to make it easier for people to read through the conversation or reference various parts of the episode, since that's something that quite a few people requested. I'll probably do a separate video on that with links on the podcast website so people can provide suggestions and improvements there. Quick mention of our sponsors. Athletic Greens, all-in-one nutrition drink. Blinkist app that summarizes books. Business Wars podcast. And Cash app. So the choice is health, wisdom, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I reached out to Dan and the Rev team for a conversation because I've been using and genuinely loving their service and really curious about how it works. I previously talked to the head of Adobe research for the same reason. For me, there's a bunch of products, usually software, that comes along and just makes my life way easier. Examples are Adobe Premiere for video editing, iZotope RX for cleaning up audio, AutoHotKey on Windows for automated keyboard and mouse tasks, Emacs as an IDE for everything, including the universe itself. I can keep on going, but you get the idea. I just like talking to people who create things I'm a big fan of. That said, after doing this conversation, the folks at Rev.ai offered to sponsor this podcast in the coming months. This conversation is not sponsored by the guest. It probably goes without saying, but I should say it anyway, that you cannot buy your way onto this podcast. I don't know why you would want to. I wanted to bring this up to make a specific point that no sponsor will ever influence what I do on this podcast or to the best of my ability influence what I think. I wasn't really thinking about this, for example, when I interviewed Jack Dorsey, who is the CEO of Square that happens to be sponsoring this podcast, but I should really make it explicit. I will never take money for bringing a guest on. Every guest on this podcast is someone I genuinely am curious to talk to or just genuinely love something they've created. As I sometimes get criticized for, I'm just a fan of people, and that's who I talk to. As I also talk about way too much, money is really never a consideration. In general, no amount of money can buy my integrity. That's true for this podcast, and that's true for anything else I do. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now, here's my conversation with Dan Kokorov. You mentioned science fiction on the phone, so let's go with the ridiculous first. What's the greatest sci-fi novel of all time, in your view? And maybe what ideas do you find philosophically fascinating about it? The greatest sci-fi novel of all time is Dune, and the second greatest is the Children of Dune, and the third greatest is the God Emperor of Dune. So I'm a huge fan of the whole series. I mean, it's just an incredible world that he created. And I don't know if you've read the book or not. No, I have not. It's one of my biggest regrets, especially because the new movie is coming out. Everyone's super excited about it. I used to, it's ridiculous to say, and sorry to interrupt, is that I used to play the video game. It used to be Dune. I guess you would call that real-time strategy. Right, right. I think I remember that game. Yeah, it's kind of awesome. 90s or something. I think I played it actually when I was in Russia. I definitely remember it. I was not in Russia anymore. I think at the time that I used to live in Russia, I think video games were about like the suspicion of Pong. I think Pong was pretty much like the greatest game I ever got to play in Russia, which was still a privilege, right, in that age. So you didn't get color? You didn't get like... Well, so I left Russia in 1991, right? 1991, okay. So I always wanted to feel like a kid because my mom was a programmer. So I would go to her work, right? I would take the Metro. I'd go to her work and play like on, I guess, the equivalent of like a 286 PC, you know? Nice, with floppy disks. Yes. So okay, but back to Dune. What'd you get? Back to Dune. And by the way, the new movie I'm pretty interested in, but... Are you skeptical? I'm a little skeptical. I'm a little skeptical. I saw the trailer. I don't know. So there's a David Lynch movie, Dune, as you may know. I'm a huge David Lynch fan, by the way. So the movie is somewhat controversial, but it's a little confusing, but it captures kind of the mood of the book better than I would say like most any adaptation. And like Dune is so much about kind of mood and the world, right? But back to the philosophical point. So in the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune, there's a sort of setting where Leto, one of the characters, he's become this weird sort of God Emperor. He's turned into a gigantic worm. I mean, you kind of have to read the book to understand what that means. So the worms are involved. Worms are involved. You probably saw the worms in the trailer, right? And in the video. So he kind of like merges with this worm and becomes this tyrant of the world. And he like oppresses the people for a long time, right? But he has a purpose. And the purpose is to kind of break through kind of a stagnation period in civilization, right? But people have gotten too comfortable, right? And so he kind of oppresses them so that they explode and like go on to colonize new worlds and kind of renew the forward momentum of humanity, right? And so to me, that's kind of like fascinating, right? You need a little bit of pressure and suffering, right? To kind of like make progress, not get too comfortable. Maybe that's a bit of a cruel philosophy to take away, but... That seems to be the case, unfortunately. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of suffering. So one of the reasons we're talking today is that a bunch of people requested that I do transcripts for this podcast and do captioning. I used to make all kinds of YouTube videos and I would go on Upwork, I think. I would hire folks to do transcription. And it was always a pain in the ass, if I'm being honest. And then I don't know how I discovered Rev, but when I did, it was this feeling of like, holy shit, somebody figured out how to do it just really easily. I'm such a fan of just when people take a problem and they just make it easy, you know? Like just... There's so many things in life that you might not even be aware of that are painful. Then Rev, you just like give the audio, give the video, you can actually give a YouTube link. And then it comes back like a day later or two days later, whatever the hell it is, with the captions, all in a standardized format. I don't know. It was truly a joy. So I thought I had, just for the hell of it, talk to you. One other product, it just made my soul feel good. One other product I've used like that is for people who might be familiar is called iZotope RX. It's for audio editing. That's another one where it was like, you just drop it. I dropped into the audio and it just cleans everything up really nicely. All the stupid, like the mouth sounds. And sometimes there's a background like sounds due to the malfunction of the equipment, it can clean that stuff up. It has like general voice denoising, it has like automation capabilities where you can do batch processing and you can put a bunch of effects. I mean, it just, I don't know, everything else sucked for like voice based cleanup that I've ever used. I've used Audition, Adobe Audition. I've used all kinds of other things with plugins. You have to kind of figure it all out. You have to do manually here. It just worked. So that's another one in this whole pipeline that just brought joy to my heart. Anyway, all that to say is Rev put a smile to my face. So can you maybe take a step back and say, what is Rev and how does it work? And Rev or Rev.com? Rev, Rev.com. Same thing, I guess. We do have Rev.ai now as well, which we can talk about later. Like do you have the actual domain or is it just the... The actual domain, but we also use it kind of as a sub-brand. So we use Rev.ai to denote our ASR services, right? And Rev.com is kind of our more human and to the end user services. So it's like WordPress.com and WordPress.org. They actually have separate brands that like, I don't know if you're familiar with what those are. They provide almost like a separate branch of... A little bit. I think with that, it's like WordPress.org is kind of their open source, right? And WordPress.com is sort of their hosted commercial offering. Yes. With us, the differentiation is a little bit different, but maybe a similar idea. Yeah. Okay. So what is Rev? Before I launch into what is Rev, I was going to say, you know, like you're talking about like Rev was music to your ears. Your spiel was music to my ears and to us, the founders of Rev, because Rev was kind of founded to improve on the model of Upwork. That was kind of the original or part of their original impetus. Like our CEO, Jason, was an early employee of Upwork. So he's very familiar with their work. Upwork the company. Upwork the company. And so he was very familiar with that model and he wanted to make the whole experience better because he knew like when you go... At that time, Upwork was primarily programmers. So the main thing they offered is if you want to hire, you know, someone to help you code a little site, right? You could go on Upwork, you could like browse through a list of freelancers, pick a programmer, you know, have a contract with them and have them do some work. But it was kind of a difficult experience because for you, you would kind of have to browse through all these people, right? And you have to decide, okay, like, well, is this guy good or is somebody else better? And naturally, you know, you're going to Upwork because you're not an expert, right? If you're an expert, you probably wouldn't be like getting a programmer from Upwork. So how can you really tell? So there's kind of like a lot of potential regret, right? What if I choose a bad person? They're like going to be late on the work. It's going to be a painful experience. And for the freelancer, it was also painful because, you know, half the time they spent not on actually doing the work, but kind of figuring out how can I make my profile most attractive to the buyer, right? And they're not an expert on that either. So like, Rob's idea was, let's remove the barrier, right? Like, let's make it simple. We'll pick a few verticals that are fairly standardizable. Now, we actually started with translation and then we added audio transcription a bit later. And we'll just make it a website. You go, give us your files. We'll give you back the results as soon as possible. You know, originally maybe it was 48 hours. Then we made it shorter and shorter and shorter. Yeah, there's a rush processing too. There's a rush processing now. And we'll hide all the details from you, right? Yeah. And like, that's kind of exactly what you're experiencing, right? You don't need to worry about the details of how the sausage is made. That's really cool. So you picked like a vertical. By vertical, you mean basically a service. A service category. Why translation? Is Rev thinking of potentially going into other verticals in the future? Or is this like the focus now is translation, transcription, like language? The focus now is language or speech services generally. Speech to text, language services. You can kind of group them however you want. But originally, the categorization was work from home. So we wanted work that was done by people on a computer. We weren't trying to get into, you know, task rabbit type of things. And something that could be relatively standard, not a lot of options. So we could kind of present the simplified interface, right? So programming wasn't like a good fit because each programming project is kind of unique, right? We're looking for something that transcription is, you know, you have five hours of audio, it's five hours of audio, right? Translation is somewhat similar in that, you know, you can have a five page document, you know, and then you just price it by that. And then you pick the language you want. And that's mostly all it is to it. So those were a few criteria. We started with translation because we saw the need. And we picked up kind of a specialty of translation where we would translate things like birth certificates, immigration documents, things like that. And so they were fairly even more well defined and easy to kind of tell if we did a good job. You can literally charge per type of document? Was that the... So what is it now? Is it per word or something like that? Like, how do you measure the effort involved in a particular thing? So now it looks like for audio transcription, right? It's per audio unit. Well, that, yes. For our translation, we don't really actually do that. We just do it by the way it is. For our translation, we don't really actually focus on that anymore. But, you know, back when it was still a main business of Revit, it was per page, right? Or per word, depending on the kind of... Because you can also do translation now on the audio, right? Like subtitles. So it would be both transcription and translation. That's right. I wanted to test the system to see how good it is. To see like how... Is Russian supported? I think so. Yeah. It'd be interesting to try it out. I mean, one of the... But now it's only in like the one direction, right? So you start with English and then you can have subtitles in Russian. Not really the other way. Got it. Because I'm deeply curious about this. When COVID opens up a little bit, when the economy, when the world opens up a little bit... You want to build your brand in Russia? No, I don't. First of all, I'm allergic to the word brand. I'm definitely not building any brands in Russia. But I'm going to Paris to talk to the translators of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. There's this famous couple that does translation. And I'm more and more thinking of how is it possible to have a conversation with a Russian speaker? Because I have just some number of famous Russian speakers that I'm interested in talking to. And my Russian is not strong enough to be witty and funny. I'm already an idiot in English. I'm an extra level of like awkward idiot in Russian, but I can understand it. Right. And I also wonder how can I create a compelling English-Russian experience for an English speaker? Like if I... There's a guy named Grigory Perlman, who's a mathematician, who obviously doesn't speak any English. So I would probably incorporate like a Russian translator into the picture. And then it would be like a, not to use a weird term, but like a three, like a three, three person thing where it's like a dance of... I understand it one way. They don't understand the other way. But I'll be asking questions in English. I don't know. I don't know the right way. It's complicated. It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth it. It's complicated, but I feel like it's worth the effort for certain kinds of people. One of whom I'm confident Vladimir Putin, I'm for sure talking to. I really want to make it happen because I think I could do a good job with it. But the right, you know, understanding the fundamentals of translation is something I'm really interested in. So that's why I'm starting with the actual translators of like Russian literature, because they understand the nuance and the beauty of the language and how it goes back and forth. But I also want to see like in speech, how can we do it in real time? So that's like a little bit of a baby project that I hope to push forward. But anyway, it's a challenging thing. So just to share, my dad actually does translation, not professionally. He writes poetry. That was kind of always his, not a hobby, but he had a job, like a day job, but his passion was always writing poetry. And then we got to America and like he started also translating. First, he was translating English poetry to Russian. Now he also goes the other way. He kind of gained some small fame in that world anyways, because recently this poet like Louise Clark, I don't know if you know of, an American poet, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. And so my dad had translated one of her books of poetry into Russian. And he was like one of the few. So you kind of like they asked him and gave an interview to Radius Vaboda, if you know what that is. And he kind of talked about some of the intricacies of translating poetry. So that's like an extra level of difficulty, right? Because translating poetry is even more challenging than translating just, you know, interviews. Do you remember any experiences and challenges to having to do the translation that that's the got to you, like something he's talked about? I mean, a lot of it, I think, is word choice, right? It's the way Russian is structured is first of all, quite different than the way English is structured, right? Just there is inflections in Russian and genders and they don't exist in English. One of the reasons actually why machine translation is quite difficult for English to Russian and Russian to English, because they're such different languages. But then English has like a huge number of words, many more than Russian, actually, I think. So it's often difficult to find the right word to convey the same emotional meaning. Yeah, Russian language, they play with words much more. So you were mentioning that Rev was kind of born out of trying to take a vertical on Upwork and then standardize it. So we're just trying to make the freelancer marketplace idea better, right? Better for both customers and better for the freelancers themselves. Is there something else to the story of Rev, finding Rev? Like what did it take to bring it actually to life? Was there any pain points? Plenty of pain points. I mean, as often the case, it's with scaling it up, right? And in this case, you know, the scaling is kind of scaling the marketplace, so to speak, right? Rev is essentially a two-sided marketplace, right? Because, you know, there's the customers and then there's the Revvers. If there's not enough Revvers, Revvers are what we call our freelancers. So if there's not enough Revvers, then customers have a bad experience, right? You know, it takes longer to get your work done, things like that. You know, if there's too many, then Revvers have a bad experience because they might log on to see like what work is available and there's not very much work, right? So kind of keeping that balance is a quite challenging problem. And, you know, that's like a problem we've been working on for many years. And we're still like refining our methods, right? If you can kind of talk to this gig economy idea, I did a bunch of different psychology experiments on Mechanical Turk, for example. I've asked to do different kinds of very tricky computer vision annotation on Mechanical Turk. And it's connecting people in a more systematized way, I would say, you know, between task and what would you call that? Worker is what Mechanical Turk calls it. What do you think about this world of gig economies, of there being a service that connects customers to workers in a way that's like massively distributed, like potentially scaling to, it could be scaled to like tens of thousands of people, right? Is there something interesting about that world that you could talk about? Something interesting about that world that you could speak to? Yeah, well, we don't think of it as kind of gig economy. Like to some degree, I don't like the word gig that much, right? Because to some degree, it diminishes the work being done, right? It sounds kind of like almost amateurish. Well, maybe in like music industry, like gig is the standard term. But in work, it kind of sounds like, oh, it's frivolous. To us, it's improving the nature of working from home on your own time and on your own terms, right? And kind of taking away geographical limitations and time limitations, right? So, you know, many of our freelancers are maybe work from home moms, right? And, you know, they don't want the traditional nine to five job, but they want to make some income and Rev kind of like allows them to do that and decide like exactly how much to work and when to work. Or by the same token, maybe someone wants to live the mountaintop, you know, life, right? You know, cabin in the woods, but they still want to make some money. And like, generally, that wouldn't be compatible before this new world. You kind of have to choose. But like with Rev, like you feel like you don't have to choose. Can you speak to like, what's the demographics, like distribution, like where do Revvers live? Is it from all over the world? Like, what is it? Do you have a sense of what's out there? From all over the world. Most of them are in the US. That's the majority. Because most of our work is audio transcription. And so you have to speak pretty good English. Yes. So the majority of them are from the US. We have people in some other of the English speaking countries. And as far as like US, it's really all over the place. You know, for some of the years now, we've been doing these little meetings where the management team will go to some place and we'll try to meet Revvers. And, you know, pretty much wherever we go, it's pretty easy to find, you know, a large number of Revvers. You know, the most recent one we did is in Utah. But, but anywhere really. Are they from all walks of life? Are these young folks, older folks? Yeah, all walks of life, really. Like I said, you know, one category is, you know, the work from home. Students, you know, who want to make some extra income. There are some people who maybe, you know, maybe they have some social anxiety. So they don't want to be in the office. Right. And this is one way for them to make a living. So it's really pretty, pretty wide variety. But like on the flip side, for example, one Revver we were talking to was a person who had a fairly high powered career before and was kind of like taking a break and just wanted, she was almost doing this just to explore and learn about, you know, the gig economy, quote unquote. Right. So it really is a pretty wide variety of folks. Yeah. It's kind of interesting through the captioning process for me to learn about the Revvers, because like some are clearly like weirdly knowledgeable about technical concepts. You can tell by how good they are at like capitalizing stuff, like technical terms, like in machine learning and deep learning. Right. Like I've used Rev to annotate, to caption the deep learning lectures or machine learning lectures I did at MIT. And it's funny, like a large number of them were like, I don't know if they looked it up or were already knowledgeable, but they do a really good job at like, I don't know. They invest time into these things. They will like do research. They will Google things, you know, to kind of make sure they get it right. But to some of them, it's like, it's actually part of the enjoyment of the work. Like they'll tell us, you know, I love doing this because I get paid to watch a documentary on something. And I learn something while I'm transcribing. Right. Pretty cool. Yeah. So what's that captioning transcription process look like for the Revver? Can you maybe speak to that to give people a sense, like how much is automated, how much is manual? What's the actual interface look like? All that kind of stuff. Yeah. So, you know, we've invested a pretty good amount of time to give like Revvers the best tools possible. You know, it's a typical day for Revver. They might log into their workspace. They'll see a list of audios that need to be transcribed. And we try to give them tools to pick specifically the ones they want to do, you know, so maybe some people like to do longer audios or shorter audios. People have their preferences. Some people like to do audios in a particular subject or from a particular country. So we try to give people the tools to control things like that. And then when they pick what they want to do, we'll launch a specialized editor that we've built to make transcription as efficient as possible. They'll start with a speech rec draft. So, you know, we have our machine learning model for automated speech recognition. They'll start with that and then our tools are optimized to help them correct that. So it's basically a process of correction. Yeah, it depends on, you know, I would say the audio. If the audio itself is pretty good, like probably like our podcast right now would be quite good. So they would do a fairly good job. But if you imagine someone recorded a lecture, you know, in the back of a auditorium, right, where like the speaker is really far away and there's maybe a lot of crosstalk and things like that, then maybe they wouldn't do a good job. So the person might say, like, you know what, I'm just going to do it from scratch. Yeah, so it kind of really depends. What would you say is the speed that you can possibly get? Like, what's the fastest? Can you get is it possible to get real time or no? As you're like listening, can you write as fast as real time would be pretty difficult? It's actually a pretty it's not an easy job. You know, we actually encourage everyone at the company to try to be a transcriber for a day descriptions for a day. And it's way harder than you might think it is, right, because people talk fast and people have accents and all this kind of stuff. So real time is pretty difficult. Is it possible like there's somebody we're probably going to use Rev to caption this. They're they're listening to this right now. What's what's what do you think is the fastest you could possibly get on this right now? I think on a good audio, maybe two to three X, I would say real time, meaning it takes two to three times longer than the actual audio of the of the podcast. This is so meta. I could just imagine the reverse working on this right now. Like you're way wrong. You're way wrong. This thing's way longer. But yeah, definitely doubted me. I could do real time. Yeah. OK, so you mentioned ASR. Can you speak to what is ASR, automatic speech recognition? How much like what is the gap between perfect human performance and perfect or pretty damn good ASR? Yeah, so ASR, automatic speech recognition. It's a class of machine learning problem, right? To take speech like we're talking and transform it into a sequence of words, essentially. Audio of people talking. Audio, audio to words. And, you know, there's a variety of different approaches and techniques, which we could talk about later if you want. So, you know, we think we have pretty much the world's best ASR for this kind of speech. Right. So there's there's different kinds of domains, right? For ASR, like one domain might be voice assistance. Right. So Siri. Very different than what we're doing, right? Because Siri, there's fairly limited vocabulary. You know, you might ask Siri to play a song or, you know, word repeats or whatever. And it's very good at doing that. Very different from when we're talking in a very unstructured way. And Siri will also generally adapt to your voice and stuff like this. So for this kind of audio, we think we have the best. And our accuracy right now, I think it's maybe 14% word error rate on our test suite that we generally use to measure. So word error rate is like one way to measure accuracy for ASR. Right. So what's 14% word error rate? So 14% means across this test suite of a variety of different audios, it would be, it would get in some way, 14% of the words wrong. 14% of the words wrong. Yeah. So the way you kind of calculated this, you might add up insertions, deletions and substitutions. Right. So insertions is like extra words, deletions are words that we said, but weren't in the transcript. Right. Substitutions is you said Apple, but I said, but the ASR thought it was Able, something like this. Human accuracy, most people think realistically, it's like 3%, 2% word error rate would be like the max achievable. So there's still quite a gap. Right. Would you say that, so YouTube, when I upload videos often generates automatic captions. Are you sort of from a company perspective, from a tech perspective, are you trying to beat YouTube? Google, it's a hell of a Google, I don't know. Google, I mean, I don't know how seriously they take this task, but I imagine it's quite serious and they, you know, Google is probably up there in terms of their teams on ASR or just NLP, natural language processing, different technologies. So do you think you can beat Google? On this kind of stuff? Yeah, we think so. Google just woke up on my phone. This is hilarious. Okay. Now Google is listening, sending it back to headquarters. Who are these rough people? But that's the goal. Yeah. I mean, we measure ourselves against like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, you know, some of the, some smaller competitors. And we use like our internal tests with it. We try to compose it of a pretty representative set of ideas. Maybe it's some podcasts, some videos, some interviews, some lectures, things like that. Right. And we beat them in our own testing. And actually Rev offers automated, like you can actually just do the automated captioning. So like, I guess it's like way cheaper, whatever it is, whatever the rates are. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a, by the way, it used to be a dollar per minute for captioning and transcription. I think it's like a dollar 15 or something like that. A dollar 25. A dollar 25. A dollar 25 now. Yeah. It's pretty cool. That was the other thing that was surprising to me. It was actually like the cheapest thing you could, one of the, I mean, I don't remember it being cheaper. You could on Upwork get cheaper, but it was clear to me that this, that's going to be really shitty. Yeah. So like, you're also competing on price. I think there were services that you can get like similar to Rev kind of feel to it, but it wasn't as automated. Like the drag and drop, the entirety of the interface. It's like the thing we're talking about. I'm such a huge fan of like frictionless, like Amazon's single buy button, whatever. Yeah. That one click, the one click that's genius right there. Like that is so important for services. Yeah. That simplicity. And I mean, Rev is almost there. I mean, there's like some trying to think. So I think I've stopped using this pipeline, but Rev offers it and I like it, but it was causing me some issues on my side, which is you can connect it to like Dropbox and it generates the files in Dropbox. So like it closes the loop to where I don't have to go to Rev at all and I can download it. Sorry, I don't have to go to Rev at all and to download the files, it could just like automatically copy them. Right. You put in your Dropbox and a day later or maybe a few hours later, it just shows up. Yeah. I was trying to do programmatically too. Is there an API interface you can? I was trying to through like through Python to download stuff automatically, but then I realized this is the programmer in me. Like, dude, you don't need to automate everything like in life, like flawlessly, because I wasn't doing enough captions to justify to myself the time investment into automating everything perfectly. Yeah, I would say if you're doing so many interviews that your biggest roadblock is clicking on the Rev download button, now you're talking about Elon Musk levels of business. But for sure, we have like a variety of ways to make it easy. You know, there's the integration. You mentioned, I think, a store company called Zapier, which kind of can connect Dropbox to Rev and vice versa. We have an API if you want to really like customize it, you know, if you want to create the Lex Friedman, you know, CMS or whatever. For this whole thing. OK, cool. So can you speak to the ASR a little bit more? Like, what does it take, like approach wise, machine learning wise? How hard is this problem? How do you get to the 3% error rate? Like, what's your vision of all of this? Yeah, well, the 3% rate or error rate is definitely that's the grand vision. We'll see what it takes to get there. But we believe, you know, in ASR, the biggest thing is the data, right? Like, that's true of like a lot of machine learning problems today, right? The more data you have and the higher quality of the data, the better label the data. You know, that's how you get good results. And we at Rev have kind of like the best data. Like, we have... Like, you're literally, your business model is annotating the data. Our business model is being paid to annotate the data. Being paid to annotate the data. So it's kind of like a pretty magical flywheel. And so we've kind of like ridden this flywheel to this point. And we think we're still kind of in the early stages of figuring out all the parts of the flywheel to use. You know, because we have the final transcripts and we have the audios and we train on that. But we, in principle, also have all the edits that the Revvers make, right? Oh, that's interesting. How can you use that as data? That's something for us to figure out in the future. But, you know, we feel like we're only in the early stages, right? But the data is there. That'd be interesting. Like, almost like a recurrent neural net for fixing transcripts. I always remember we did segmentation annotation for driving data. So segmenting the scene, like visual data. And you can get all... So it was drawing people, drawing polygons around different objects and so on. And it feels like it always felt like there was a lot of information in the clicking, the sequence of clicking that people do, the kind of fixing of the polygons that they do. Now, there's a few papers written about how to draw polygons, like with recurrent neural nets to try to learn from the human clicking. But it was just like experimental. You know, it was one of those like CVPR type papers that people do like a really tiny detail. Like a really tiny data set. It didn't feel like people really tried to do it seriously. And I wonder if there's information in the fixing that provides a deeper set of signal than just like the raw data. The intuition is for sure there must be, right? There must be. And in all kinds of signals and how long it took to, you know, make that edit and stuff like that. You know, it's going to be like up to us. That's why the next couple of years is like super exciting for us, right? So that's what the focus is now. You mentioned Rev.ai. That's where you want to... Yeah, so Rev.ai is kind of our way of bringing this ASR to the rest of the world, right? So when we started, we were human only. You know, then we kind of created this TEMI service. I think you might have used it, which was kind of ASR for the consumer, right? So if you don't want to pay $1.25, but you want to pay... Now it's 25 cents a minute, I think. And you get the machine generated transcript, you get an editor, and you can kind of fix it up yourself, right? Then we started using ASR for our own human transcriptionists. And then the kind of Rev.ai is the final step of the journey, which is, you know, we have this amazing engine. What can people build with it, right? What kind of new applications could be enabled if you have SpeedTrack that's that accurate? Do you have ideas for this, or is it just providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with? It's providing it as a service and seeing what people come up with and kind of learning from what people do with it. And we have ideas of our own as well, of course. But it's a little bit like, you know, when AWS provided the building blocks, right? And they saw what people built with it, and they try to make it easier to build those things, right? And we kind of hope to do the same thing. Although AWS kind of does a shitty job of like, I'm continually surprised, like Mechanical Turk, for example, how shitty the interface is. We're talking about like Rev.ai making me feel good. Like when I first discovered Mechanical Turk, the initial idea of it was like, it made me feel like Rev.ai does. But then the interface is like, come on. Yeah, it's horrible. Why is it so painful? Does nobody at Amazon want to like seriously invest in it? It felt like you could make so much money if you took this effort seriously. And it feels like they have a committee of like two people just sitting back, like a meeting. They meet once a month. Like, what are we going to do with Mechanical Turk? It's like two websites make me feel like this. That and craiglist.org, whatever the hell it is. It just feels like it's designed in the 90s. Well, craiglist basically hasn't been updated pretty much since the guy originally built. Do you seriously think there's a team? Like, how big is the team working on Mechanical Turk? I don't know. There's some team, right? I feel like there isn't. I'm skeptical. Yeah. Well, if nothing else, they benefit from, you know, the other teams like moving things forward, right? In a small way. Possibly. But no, I know what you mean. We do, we use Mechanical Turk for a couple of things as well, and it's painful. It's painful. But yeah, it works. I think most people, the thing is most people don't really use the UI, right? Like, so like we, for example, we use it through the API, right? So, yeah. But even the API documentation and so on, like it's super outdated. Like, yeah, it's, I don't, I don't even know what to, I mean, the same, like same criticism, as long as we're ranting, my same criticism goes to the APIs of most of these companies, like Google, for example, the API for the different services is just the documentation is so shitty. Like it's not so shitty. I should, I should actually be, I should exhibit some gratitude. Okay. Let's practice some gratitude. The, the, you know, the documentation is pretty good. Like most of the things that the API makes available is pretty good. It's just that in the sense that it's accurate, sometimes outdated, but like the degree of explanations with examples is only covering, I would say like 50% of what's possible. And it just feels a little bit like there's a lot of natural questions that people would want to ask that doesn't, doesn't get covered. And it feels like it's almost there. Like it's such a magical thing. Like the Maps API, YouTube API, there's a bunch of stuff. I got to imagine it's like, you know, there's probably some team at Google, right? Responsible for writing this documentation. That's probably not the engineers, right? And probably this team is not, you know, where you want to be. Well, it's a, it's a weird thing. I sometimes think about this for somebody who wants to also build the company. I think about this a lot, you know, YouTube, the, you know, the service is one of the most magical, like, I'm so grateful that YouTube exists and yet they seem to be quite clueless on so many things like that. Everybody's screaming them at, like, it feels like. Whatever the mechanism that you use to listen to your quote unquote customers, which is like the creators is not very good. Like there's literally people that are like screaming white, like their new YouTube studio, for example, there's like features that, that were like begged for, for a really long time, like being able to upload multiple videos at the same time that was missing for a really, really long time. Now, like there's probably things that I don't know, which is maybe for that kind of huge infrastructure, it's actually very difficult to build some of these features, but the fact that that wasn't communicated and it felt like you're not being heard, like, I remember this experience for me and it's not a pleasant experience and it feels like the company doesn't give a damn about you. And that's something to think about. I'm not sure what that is. That might have to do with just like small groups working on these small features and these specific features. And there's no overarching, like dictator type of human that says like, why the hell are we neglecting like Steve Jobs type of character? It's like, there's people that we need to, we need to speak to the people that like want to love our product and they don't. Let's fix this shit. Yeah, maybe at some point you just get so fixated on the numbers, right? And it's like, well, the numbers are pretty great, right? Like people are watching, you know, doesn't seem to be a problem, right? And you're not like the person that like build this thing, right? So you really care about it. You know, you're just there, you came in as a product manager, right? You got hired sometime later, your mandate is like, increase this number, like, you know, 10%, right? And you just- That's brilliantly put. Like if you, this is, okay. If there's a lesson in this is don't reduce your company into a metric of like how much, like you said, how much, how much people watching the videos and so on. And, and, and like convince yourself that everything's working just because the numbers are going up. Yeah. There's something, you have to have a vision. You have to, you have to want people to love your stuff because love is ultimately the beginning of like a successful long-term company is that they always should love your product. You have to be like a creator and have that. Yeah. Like creator's love for your own thing, right? Like, and you paint by, you know, these, these comments, right? And probably like, Apple, I think did this generally like really well. You know, they're, they're well known for kind of keeping teams small, even when they were big. Right. And, you know, he was an engineer, like there's that book, uh, creative selection. I don't know if you read it by a, um, Apple engineer named Ken Kosienda. It's kind of a great book actually, because unlike most of these business books where it's, you know, here's how Steve job ran the company. It's more like, here's how life was like for me, you know, an engineer here, the projects I worked on and here what it was like to pitch Steve jobs, you know, on like, you know, I think it was in charge of like the keyboard and the auto correction. Right. Um, and at Apple, like Steve jobs reviewed everything. And so he was like, this is what it was like to show my demos to Steve jobs and, you know, don't change them because like Steve jobs didn't like how, you know, the shape of the little key was off because the rounding of the corner was like not quite right or something like this, but it was famously a stickler for this kind of stuff. But because the teams were small, you really owned this stuff. Right. So you really cared. Yeah. Elon Musk does that similar kind of thing with Tesla, which is really interesting. There's another lesson in leadership in that is to be obsessed with the details. And like he talks to like the lowest level engineers. Okay. So we're talking about ASR and so this is basically where I was saying, we're going to take this like ultra seriously. And then what's the mission to try to keep pushing towards the 3%. Yeah. And kind of try to, um, try to build this platform where all of your, you know, all of your meetings, you know, um, they're as easily accessible as your notes. Right. Like, so like imagine all the meetings, the company might have, right. You know, I'm now that I'm like no longer a programmer, right. And I'm a quote unquote manager. Uh, that's less like my day as in meetings. Right. Yeah. And, you know, pretty often I want to like, see what, what was said, right. Who said it, you know, what's the context, but it's generally not really something that you can easily retrieve. Right. Like imagine if all of those meetings were indexed, archived, you know, you could go back, you could share a clip, like really, really quickly. You could share a clip like really easily. Right. So that might change completely. It's like everything that's said converted to text might change completely the dynamics of what we do in this world, especially now with remote work. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Was, was zoom and so on. That's, that's fascinating to think about. I mean, for me, I care about podcasts, right. And one of the things that was, you know, I'm torn. I know a lot of the engineers at Spotify. So I love them very much because they, they dream big in terms of like, they want to empower creators. So one of my hopes was with Spotify that they would use a technology like Rev or something like that to, to start converting everything into, into text and make it indexable. Like one of the things that, that sucks with podcasts is like, it's hard to find stuff. Like the, the model is basically subscription. Like you find it's similar, it's similar to what YouTube used to be like, which is you basically find a creator that you enjoy and you subscribe to them. And like, you just, you just kind of follow what they're doing, but the search and discovery wasn't a big part of YouTube back in the early days. But that's what currently with podcasts, like is the search and discovery is like non-existent. You're basically searching for like the dumbest possible thing, which is like keywords in the titles of episodes. Yeah. But even aside from searching discovery, like all the time, so I listened to like a number of podcasts and, you know, there's something said, and I want to like go back to that later because I was trying to, I'm trying to remember what do you say? Like maybe like recommend some cool product that I want to try out. And like, it's basically impossible. Maybe like some people have pretty good show notes, so maybe you'll get lucky and you can find it. Right. But I mean, if everyone had transcripts and it was all searchable, it was a game changer. It'd be so much better. I mean, that's one of the things that I wanted to, I mean, one of the reasons we're talking today is I wanted to take this quite seriously. The, the rev thing, I just been lazy. So, because I'm very fortunate that a lot of people support this podcast, that there's enough money now to do a transcription and so on. And it seemed clear to me, especially like CEOs and sort of like PhDs, like people write to me for like graduate students in computer science or graduate students in whatever the heck field. It's clear that their mind, like they enjoy podcasts when they're doing laundry or whatever, but they want to revisit the conversation in a much more rigorous way. And they really want a transcript. Like it's clear that they want to like analyze conversations. Like so many people wrote to me about a transcript for a Yosha Bach conversation. I had just a bunch of conversations. And then on the Elon Musk side, like reporters want, like, they want to write a blog post about your conversation. So they want to be able to pull stuff. And it's like, they're essentially doing on your conversation transcription privately. They're doing it for themselves and then starting to pick up on it. And starting to pick, but it's so much easier when you can actually do it as a reporter. Just look at the transcript. Yeah. And you can like embed a little thing, you know, like into your article, right? Here's what they said. You can go listen to like this clip from the section. I'm actually trying to figure out, I'll probably on the website create like a place where the transcript goes, like as a webpage so that people can reference it, like reporters can reference it and so on. I mean, most of the reporters probably have wanted to write clickbait articles that are complete falsifying, which I'm fine with. It's the way of journalism. I don't care. Like I've had this conversation with a friend of mine, a mixed martial artist, Ryan Hall. And we talked about, you know, as I've been reading the rise and fall of the Third Reich and a bunch of books on Hitler. And we brought up Hitler and he made some kind of comment where like we should be able to forgive Hitler. And, you know, like we were talking about forgiveness and we're bringing that up as like the worst case possible thing is like even, you know, for people who are Holocaust survivors, one of the ways to let go of the suffering they've been through is to forgive. And he brought up like Hitler is somebody that would potentially be the hardest thing to possibly forgive, but it might be a worthwhile pursuit psychologically. So on, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter. It was very eloquent, very powerful words. I think people should go back and listen to it. It's powerful. And then all these journalists, there's all these articles written about like MMA fight, UFC fight. MMA fighter loves Hitler. No, like, well, no, they were somewhat accurate. They didn't say like loves Hitler. They said, thinks that if Hitler came back to life, we should forgive him. Like they kind of, it's kind of accurate ish, but it, the headline made it sound a lot worse than, than, than it was, but I'm fine with it. That's the way that that's the way the world, I want to, I want to almost make it easier for those journalists and make it easier for people who actually care about the conversation to go and look and see. Right, they can see it for themselves. For themselves. There's the headline, but. Full context. They can go. There's something about podcasts, like the audio that makes it difficult to, to go, to jump to a spot and to look for that, for that particular information. I think some of it, you know, I'm interested in creating like myself experimenting with stuff. So like taking Rev and creating a transcript and then people can go to it. I do dream that like, I'm not in the loop anymore that like, you know, Spotify does it right. Like automatically for everybody, because ultimately that one click purchase needs to be there. Like. I mean, like it kind of wants support from the entire ecosystem. Exactly. From the tool makers and the podcast creators, even clients, right? I mean, imagine if like most podcast apps, you know, if it was a standard, right? Here's how you include a transcript into a podcast, right? Podcast is just an RSS feed ultimately. And actually just yesterday I saw this company called Buzzsprout, I think they're called. So they're trying to do this. They proposed a spec, an extension to their RSS format to reference podcasts, reference transcripts in a standard way. And they're talking about like, there's one client dimension that will support it. But imagine like more clients support it, right? So any podcast you could go and see the transcripts right in your like normal podcast app. Yeah. I mean, somebody. So I have somebody who works with me, works with, helps with advertising. Matt is an awesome guy. He mentioned Buzzsprout to me, but he says it's really annoying because they want exclusive, they want to host the podcast. This is the problem with Spotify too. This is where I'd like to say like F Spotify. There's a magic to RSS with podcasts. It can be made available to everyone. And then there's all, there's this ecosystem of different podcast players that emerge and they compete freely. And that's a beautiful thing. That's why I go on exclusive, like Joe Rogan went exclusive. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. I just Spotify is a huge fan of Joe Rogan. I've been kind of nervous about the whole thing, but let's see. Let's I hope this Spotify steps up. They've added video, which was very surprising that they were able to. So exclusive meaning you can't subscribe to his RSS feed anymore. It's only in Spotify. For now you can until December 1st and December 1st, it's all everything disappears. It is Spotify only. I, you know, and Spotify gave him a hundred million dollars for that. So it's, it's a, it's an interesting deal, but I, I, you know, I did some soul searching and I'm glad he's doing it. But if Spotify came to me with a hundred million dollars, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do well. I have a very different relationship with money. I hate money, but I just think I believe in the pirate radio aspect of podcasts. I believe in the pirate radio aspect of podcasting, the freedom and that there's something about the open source spirit. The open source spirit is just doesn't seem right. It doesn't feel right. That said, you know, because so many people care about Joe Rogan's program, they're going to hold Spotify's feet to the fire. Like one of the cool things, what Joe told me is the reason he likes working with Spotify is that they, they're like ride or die together. Right. So they, they want him to succeed. So that's why they're not actually telling him what to do. It's about what people think. They, they don't tell them, they don't give them any notes on anything. They want him to succeed. And that's the cool thing about exclusivity with a platform is like, you're kind of want each other to succeed. And that process can actually be very fruitful. Like YouTube, it goes back to my criticism. YouTube generally, no matter how big the creator, maybe for PewDiePie, something like that, they want you to succeed. But for the most part, from all the big creators I've spoken with, Veritasium, all those folks, you know, they get some basic assistance, but it's not like YouTube doesn't care if you succeed or not. They have so many creators. They have like a hundred other. They don't care. So, and especially with, with somebody like Joe Rogan, who's a big fan of PewDiePie, he's who YouTube sees Joe Rogan, not as a person who might revolutionize the nature of news and idea space and nuanced conversations. They see him as a potential person who, who has racist guests on, or like, you know, they see him as like a headache potentially. So, you know, a lot of people talk, talk about this. It's a hard place to be for YouTube actually, is figuring out with the search and discovery process of how do you filter out conspiracy theories and which conspiracy theories represent dangerous untruths and which conspiracy theories are like vanilla untruths. And then even when you start having meetings and discussions about what is true or not, it starts getting weird. Yeah. It's difficult these days, right? I worry more about the other side, right? Of too much, you know, too much censorship. Well, maybe censorship is the right word. I mean, censorship is usually government censorship, but still, yeah, putting yourself in a position of arbiter for these kinds of things, it's very difficult. And people think it's so easy, right? Like, it's like, well, you know, like no Nazis, right? What a simple principle. But, you know, yes, I mean, no one likes Nazis, but there's like many shades of gray. Yeah. Very soon after that. Yeah. And then, you know, of course, everybody, you know, there's some people that call our current president a Nazi. And then there's like, so you start getting Sam Harris. I don't know if you know that is wasted, in my opinion, his conversation with Jack Dorsey. And I spoke with Jack before in this podcast, and we'll talk again. But Sam brought up, Sam Harris does not like Donald Trump. I do listen to his podcast. So I'm familiar with his views on the matter. And he asked Jack Dorsey, he's like, how can you not ban Donald Trump from Twitter? So, you know, there's a set, you have that conversation, you have a conversation where some number, some significant number of people think that the current president of the United States should not be on your platform. And it's like, okay, so if that's even on the table as a conversation, then everything's on the table for conversation. And yeah, it's it's tough. I'm not sure where I land on it. I'm with you. I think that censorship is bad. But I also think. Ultimately, I just also think, you know, if you're the kind of person that's going to be convinced, you know, by some YouTube video, you know, that, I don't know, our government's been taken over by aliens, it's unlikely that, like, you know, you'll be returned to sanity simply because, you know, that video is not available on YouTube, right? Yeah, I'm with you. I tend to believe in the intelligence of people and we should trust them. But I also do think it's the responsibility of platforms to encourage more love in the world, more kindness to each other. And I don't always think that they're great at doing that particular thing. So that, that there's a nice balance there. And I think philosophically, I think about that a lot. I think about that a lot, where's the balance between free speech and like encouraging people, even though they have the freedom of speech, to not be an asshole. Yeah, right. That's not a constitutional like. So you have the right for free speech, but like, just don't be an asshole. Like, you can't really put that in the Constitution. The Supreme Court can't be like, just don't be a dick. But I feel like platforms have a role to be like, just be nicer. Maybe do the carrot, like encourage people to be nicer, as opposed to the stake of censorship. But I think it's an interesting machine learning problem. Just be nicer. Machine learning for niceness. It is. I mean, that's. Responsible AI. I mean, it is. It is a thing for sure. Jack Dorsey kind of talks about it as a vision for Twitter is how do we increase the health of conversations? I don't know how seriously they're actually trying to do that, though. Which is one of the reasons that I am in part considering entering that space a little bit. It's difficult for them, right? Because, you know, it's kind of like well known that, you know, people are kind of driven by, you know, rage and, you know, outrage maybe is a better word, right? Outrage drives engagement. And, well, these companies are judged by engagement, right? So it's. In the short term, but this goes to the metrics thing that we were talking about earlier. I do believe, I have a fundamental belief that if you have a metric of long term happiness of your users, like not short term engagement, but long term happiness and growth and both like intellectual, emotional health of your users, you're going to make a lot more money. You're going to have long, like you should be able to optimize for that. You don't need to necessarily optimize for engagement. Yeah. And that'll be good for society too. Yeah, no, I mean, I generally agree with you, but it requires a patient person with, you know, trust from Wall Street to be able to carry out such a strategy. This is the, this is what I believe the Steve Jobs character and Elon Musk character is like, you basically have to be so good at your job. Right. You got to pass for anything. You can hold the board and every, all the investors hostage by saying like, either we do it my way or I leave. And everyone is too afraid of you to leave. Right. Because they believe in your vision. So that, but that requires being really good at, really good at what you do. It requires being Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. There's kind of a reason why like a third name doesn't come immediately to mind, right? Like there's maybe a handful of other people, but it's not that many. It's not many. I mean, people say like, why, like people say that I'm like a fan of Elon Musk. I'm not, I'm a fan of anybody who's like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. And there's just not many of those folks. It's the guy that made us believe that like we can get to Mars, you know, in 10 years. Right. I mean, that's kind of awesome. And it's kind of making it happen, which is like, it's, it's great. It's kind of gone like that kind of like spirit, right. Like from a lot of our society. Right. You know, like we can get to the moon in 10 years and like we did it. Right. Yeah. Especially in this time of so much kind of existential dread that people are going through because of COVID, like having rockets that just keep going out there now with humans. I don't know that it, just like you said, I mean, it gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and dream for us engineers too. It is inspiring as hell, man. I, what, well, let me ask you this, the worst possible question, which is, so you're like at the core, you're a programmer, you're an engineer, but now you made the unfortunate choice, or maybe that's the way life goes of basically moving away from the low level work and becoming a manager, becoming an executive. Having meetings, what's that transition been like? It's been interesting. It's been a journey. Maybe a couple of things to say about that. I mean, I got into this, right. Because as a kid, I just remember this like incredible amazement at being able to write a program, right. And something comes to life that kind of didn't exist before. Yeah. I don't think you have that in like many other fields. Like you have that with some other kinds of engineering, but you may be a little bit more limited with what you can do like, right. But with a computer, you can literally imagine any kind of program, right. So it's a little bit God-like what you do, like when you create it. And so, I mean, that's why I got into it. Do you remember like first program you wrote or maybe the first program that like made you fall in love with computer science? I don't know what was the first program. It's probably like trying to write one of those like, you know, like, you know, like emulate the snake game or whatever. I don't remember, to be honest. But I enjoyed like, that's why I always loved about, you know, being a programmer is just the creation process. And it's a little bit different when you're not the one doing the creating. And, you know, another aspect to it, I would say is, you know, when you're a programmer, when you're an individual contributor, it's kind of very easy to know when you're doing a good job, when you're not doing a bad job. When you're being productive, when you're not being productive, right, you can kind of see like you're trying to make something and it's like slowly coming together. Right. And when you're a manager, you know, it's more diffuse, right? Like, well, you hope, you know, you're motivating your team and making them more productive and inspiring them. Right. But it's not like you get some kind of like dopamine signal because you like completed X lines of code, you know, today. So kind of like you missed that dopamine rush a little bit. But then, you know, slowly you kind of see, yes, your teams are doing amazing work, right? And you can take pride in that. You can get like, what is it like a ripple effect of a dope or somebody else's dopamine rush. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You live off other people's dopamine. So is there pain points and challenges you had to overcome from becoming a developer? So is there pain points and challenges you had to overcome from becoming from going to a programmer to becoming a programmer of humans? Programmer of humans. I don't know. Humans are difficult to understand, you know, it's like one of those things like trying to understand other people's motivations and what really drives them. It's difficult. Maybe you like never really know. Right. Do you find that people are different? Yeah. Like I, one of the things, like I had a group at MIT that, you know, I found that like some people I could like scream at and criticize like hard and that made them do like much better work and really push them to their limit. And there's some people that I had to nonstop compliment because like they're so already self-critical, like about everything they do that I have to be constantly like, like I cannot criticize them at all because they're already criticizing themselves and you have to kind of encourage and like celebrate their little victories. And it's kind of fascinating that like how that the complete difference in people. Definitely people respond to different motivations and different modes of feedback and you kind of have to figure it out. It was like a pretty good book, which some reason now the name escapes me about management. First break all the rules. First break all the rules. First break all the rules. It's a book that we generally like ask a lot of like first time managers to read a ref. Like one of the kind of philosophies is managed by exception, right. Which is, you know, don't like have some standard template. Like, you know, here's how I, you know, tell this person to do this or the other thing. Here's how I get feedback like managed by exception, right? Every person is a little bit different. You have to try to understand what drives them and tailor it to them. Since you mentioned books, I don't know if you can answer this question, but people love it when I ask it, which is, are there books, technical fiction or philosophical that you enjoyed or had an impact on your life that you would recommend? You already mentioned Dune, like all of the Dune. All of the Dune. The second one was probably the weakest, but anyway, so yeah. All of the Dune is good. I mean, yeah. Can you just slow little tangent on that? Is how many Dune books are there? Like, do you recommend people start with the first one if that was? Yeah, you kind of have to read them all. I mean, it is a complete story, right? So you start with the first one, you got to read all of them. So it's not like a tree, like that, like a creation of like the universe that you should go and sequence? You should go and sequence, yeah. It's kind of a chronological storyline. There's six books in all. Then there's like many kind of books that were written by Frank Herbert's son, but those are not as good. So you don't have to bother with those. Shots fired. Shots fired. OK. But the main sequence is good. So what are some other books? Maybe there's a few. So I don't know that, like, I would say there's a book that kind of, I don't know, turned my life around or anything like that. But here's a couple that I really love. So one is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. And it's kind of incredible how prescient he was about, like, what a brave new world might be like, right? You know, you kind of see genetic sorting in this book, right? Where there's like these alphas and epsilons and from like the earliest time of society, like, they're sorted. Like, you can kind of see it in a slightly similar way today where, well, one of the problems with society is people are kind of genetically sorting a little bit, right? Like, there's much less, like, most marriages, right, are between people of similar kind of intellectual level or socioeconomic status, more so these days than in the past. And you kind of see some effects of it in stratifying society. And kind of he illustrated what that could be like in the extreme. Different versions of it on social media as well. It's not just like marriages and so on. Like, it's genetic sorting in terms of what Dawkins called memes, his ideas. Right, right. Being put into these bins of these little echo chambers and so on. Yeah, and that's the book that's, I think, a worthwhile read for everyone. I mean, 1984 is good, of course, as well. Like, if you're talking about, you know, dystopian novels of the future. Yeah, it's a slightly different view of the future, right? But I kind of, like, identify with Brave New World a bit more. You know, speaking of, not a book, but my favorite kind of dystopian science fiction is a movie called Brazil, which I don't know if you've heard of. I've heard of it, and I know I need to watch it. But yeah, because it's in, is it in English or no? It's an English movie, yeah. And it's a sort of, like, dystopian movie of authoritarian incompetence, right? It's like, nothing really works very well, you know, the system is creaky, you know, but no one is kind of, like, willing to challenge it, you know, just things kind of amble along. It kind of strikes me as, like, a very plausible future of, like, you know, what authoritarians might look like. It's not like this, you know, super efficient evil dictatorship of 1984. It's just kind of like this badly functioning, you know, but it's status quo, so it just goes on. Yeah, that's one funny thing that stands out to me is in, what is this, authoritarian dystopian stuff or just basic, like, you know, if you look at the movie Contagion, it seems in the movies, government is almost always exceptionally competent. Like, it's, like, used as a storytelling tool of, like, extreme competence. Like, you know, you use it, whether it's good or evil, but it's competent. It's very interesting to think about where much more realistically is incompetence and that incompetence is itself has consequences that are difficult to predict. Like, bureaucracy has a very boring way of being evil. Of just, you know, if you look at the show, HBO show Chernobyl, it's a really good story of how bureaucracy, you know, leads to catastrophic events, but not through any kind of evil in any one particular place, but more just like the... It's just the system, kind of. System, distorting information as it travels up the chain, that people unwilling to take responsibility for things, and just kind of like this laziness resulting in evil. There's a comedic version of this, I don't know if you've seen this movie, it's called The Death of Stalin. Yeah. I like that. I wish it wasn't so... There's a movie called Inglourious Bastards about, you know, Hitler and, you know, so on. For some reason, those movies piss me off. I know a lot of people love them, but like, I just feel like there's not enough good movies, even about Hitler. There's good movies about the Holocaust, but even Hitler, there's a movie called Dawnfall that people should watch. I think it's the last few days of Hitler. That's a good movie, turned into a meme, but it's good. But on Stalin, I feel like I may be wrong on this, but at least in the English speaking world, there's not good movies about the evil of Stalin. That's true. Let's try to see that. Actually, so I agree with you on Inglourious Bastards. I didn't love the movie, because I felt like kind of the stylizing of it, right? The whole like Tarantino kind of Tarantinoism, if you will, kind of detracted from it, and made it seem like unserious a little bit. But Death of Stalin, I felt differently. Maybe it's because it's a comedy to begin with, so it's not like I'm expecting, you know, seriousness. But it kind of depicted the absurdity of the whole situation in a way, right? I mean, it was funny, so maybe it does make light of it, but it's something that's probably like this, right? Like a bunch of kind of people that are like, oh shit, right? You're right. But like the thing is, it was so close to like what probably was reality. It was caricaturing reality, to where I think an observer might think that this is not, like they might think it's a comedy. And well, in reality, that's the absurdity of how people act with dictators. I mean, I guess it was too close to reality for me. Yeah, the kind of banality of like what were eventually like fairly evil acts, right? But like, yeah, they're just about the same. But like, yeah, they're just a bunch of people trying to survive. And like, I mean, because I think there's a good, I haven't watched yet the good movie on the movie on Churchill with Gary Oldman. I think it's Gary Oldman. I'm maybe making that up. But I think he won, like he was nominated for an Oscar or something. So I like, I love these movies about these humans and Stalin. Like Chernobyl made me realize the HBO show that there's not enough movies about Russia. That capture that spirit. I'm sure it might be in Russia and there is. But the fact that some British dude that like did comedy, I feel like he did like hangover or some shit like that. I don't know if you're familiar with the person who created Chernobyl, but he was just like some guy that doesn't know anything about Russia. And he just went in and just studied it, like did a good job of creating it and then got it so accurate, like poetically and the facts that you need to get accurate, he got accurate. Just the spirit of it down to like the bowls that pets use, just the whole feel of it. It was nice. It was good. Yeah. I saw the series. Yeah, it's incredible. It made me wish that somebody did a good, like 1930s, like starvation of Stalin, like leading up to World War II and in World War II itself, like Stalingrad and so on. Like I feel like that story needs to be told. Millions of people died. And to me, it's so much more fascinating than Hitler because Hitler is like a caricature of evil almost, that it's so, especially with the Holocaust, it's so difficult to imagine that something like that is possible ever again. Stalin to me represents something that is possible. Like the so interesting, like the bureaucracy of it, it's so fascinating that it potentially might be happening in the world now, like that we're not aware of, like with North Korea, another one that, like there should be a good film on. And like the possible things that could be happening in China with overreach of government. I don't know. There's a lot of possibilities there, I suppose. Yeah, I wonder how much, you know, I guess the archives should be maybe more open nowadays, right? I mean, for a long time, they just, we didn't know, right? Like, or anyways, no one in the West knew for sure. Well, there's a, I don't know if you know him, there's a guy named Stephen Kotkin. He's a historian of Stalin that I spoke to on this podcast. I'll speak to him again. The guy knows his shit on Stalin. He like read everything. And it's so fascinating to talk to somebody, like he knows Stalin better than Stalin knew himself. It's crazy. Like you have, so I think he's at Princeton. He is basically, his whole life is Stalin. Studying Stalin. Yeah, it's great. And in that context, he also talks about, and writes about Putin a little bit. I've also read at this point, I think every biography of Putin, English biography of Putin, I need to read some Russians. Obviously, I'm mentally preparing for a possible conversation with Putin. So what is your first question to Putin when you have him on the podcast? It's interesting you bring that up. First of all, I wouldn't tell you, but. You can't give it away now. But I actually haven't even thought about that. So my current approach, and I do this with interviews often, but obviously that's a special one. But I try not to think about questions until last minute. I'm trying to sort of get into the mindset. And so that's why I'm soaking in a lot of stuff, not thinking about questions, just learning about the man. But in terms of like human to human, it's like, I would say it's, I don't know if you're a fan of mob movies, but like the mafia, which I am, like Goodfellas and so on, he's much closer to like mob morality, which is like. Mob morality, maybe, I could see that. But I like your approach anyways of this, the extreme empathy, right? It's a little bit like, you know, Hannibal, right? Like if you ever watched the show Hannibal, right? They had that guy, well, you know Hannibal, of course, like. Yeah, sounds like the lamb. But there was a TV show as well, and they focused on this guy, Will Durant, who's a character like extreme empath, right? So in the way he like catches all these killers, is he pretty much, he can empathize with them, right? Like he can understand why they're doing the things they're doing, right? And it's a pretty excruciating thing, right? Like, because you're pretty much like spending half your time in the head of evil people, right? Like, but. I mean, I definitely try to do that with other, so you should do that in moderation. But I think it's a pretty safe place to be. Like one of the cool things with this podcast, and I don't know, you didn't sign up to hear me listen to this bullshit, but. No, it's interesting. And what's his name, Chris Latner, who's a Google, oh, he's not Google anymore, Sci-Fi. He's one of the most legit engineers I've talked with. I talked with him again on this podcast, and he gives me private advice a lot. And he said, for this podcast, I should like interview, like I should widen the range of people because that gives you much more freedom to do stuff. Like, so his idea, which I think I agree with Chris, is that you go to the extremes. You just like cover every extreme base, and then it gives you freedom to then go to the more nuanced conversations. It's kind of, I think there's a safe place for that. There's certainly a hunger for that nuanced conversation, I think, amongst people where like on social media, you get canceled for anything slightly tense, that there's a hunger to go full. Right, you go so far to the opposite side. And it's like demystifies it a little bit, right? Yeah, yeah. There is a person behind all of these things. Yeah, and that's the cool thing about podcasting, like three, four hour conversations that it's very different than a clickbait journalism. It's like the opposite, that there's a hunger for that. There's a willingness for that. Yeah, especially now, I mean, how many people do you even see face to face anymore? Right, like this, you know? It's like not that many people, like in my day to day, aside from my own family, that like I sit across. It's sad, but it's also beautiful. Like I've gotten the chance to, like our conversation now, there's somebody, I guarantee you, there's somebody in room, somebody in Russia, listening to this now, like jogging. And there's somebody who is just smoke some weed, sit back on a couch and just like enjoying. Like I guarantee you that we'll write in the comments right now that yes, I'm in St. Petersburg, I'm in Moscow, I'm whatever. And we're in their head. And they have a friendship with us. And I'm the same way, I'm a huge fan of podcasting. It's a beautiful thing. It's a weird one way human connection. Before I went on Joe Rogan, and still, I'm just a huge fan of his. So it was like surreal. I've been friends with Joe Rogan for 10 years, but one way. Yeah, from this way, from the St. Petersburg way. Yeah, the St. Petersburg way. It's a real friendship. I mean, now it's like two way, but it's still surreal. And that's the magic of podcasting. I'm not sure what to make of it. That voice, it's not even the video part. It's the audio that's magical. I don't know what to do with it. But it's people listen to three, four hours. Yeah, we evolved over millions of years, right? To be very fine tuned to things like that, right? Yeah. Oh, expressions as well, of course, right? But back in the day on the Savannah, you had to be very attuned to whether you had a good relationship with the rest of your tribe or a very bad relationship, right? Because if you had a very bad relationship, you were probably gonna be left behind and eaten by the lions. Yeah, but it's weird that the tribe is different now. Like you could have a one-way connection with Joe Rogan as opposed to the tribe of your physical vicinity. But that's why it works with the podcasting, but it's the opposite of what happens on Twitter, right? Because all those nuances are removed, right? You're not connecting with the person because you don't hear the voice. You're connecting with like an abstraction, right? It's like some stream of tweets, right? And it's very easy to assign to them any kind of like evil intent, you know, or dehumanize them, which is much harder to do when it's a real voice, right? Because you realize it's a real person behind the voice. Let me try this out on you. I sometimes ask about the meaning of life. Do you, your father now, an engineer, you're building up a company. Do you ever zoom out and think like, what the hell is this whole thing for? Like, why are we descended to vapes even on this planet? What's the meaning of it all? That's a pretty big question. I think I don't allow myself to think about it too often, or maybe like life doesn't allow me to think about it too often. But in some ways, I guess the meaning of life is kind of contributing to this kind of weird thing we call humanity, right? Like it's in a way, I can think of humanity as like a living and evolving organism, right? That like we all contribute in a way, but just by existing, by having our own unique set of desires and drives, right? And maybe that means like creating something great, and it's bringing up kids who, you know, are unique and different and seeing like, you know, they can enjoy in what they do. But I mean, to me, that's pretty much it. I mean, if you're not a religious person, right, which I guess I'm not, that's the meaning of life. It's in the living and in the creation. Yeah, there's something magical about that engine of creation. Like you said, programming, I would say, I mean, it's even just actually what you said with even just programs. I don't care if it's like some JavaScript thing and a button on the website. It's like magical that you brought that to life. I don't know what that is in there, but that seems, that's probably some version of reproduction and sex, whatever that's in evolution. But like creating that HTML button has echoes of that feeling, and it's magical. Right, I mean, if you're a religious person, maybe you could even say, right, like we were created in God's image, right? Well, I mean, I guess part of that is the drive to create something ourselves, right? I mean, that's part of it. Yeah, that HTML button is the creation in God's image. Yeah, so maybe hopefully it'll be something a little more... So dynamic, maybe some JavaScript. Yeah, maybe some JavaScript, some React and so on. But no, I mean, I think that's what differentiates us from the apes, so to speak. Yeah, we did a pretty good job. Dan, it was an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for being part of creating one of my favorite services and products. This is actually a little bit of an experiment, allowing me to sort of fanboy over some of the things I love. So thanks for wasting your time with me today. It was awesome. Thanks for having me on and giving me a chance to try this out. Awesome. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dan Kokorov. And thank you to our sponsors, Athletic Greens, All-in-One Nutrition Drink, Blinkist app that summarizes books, Business Wars podcast, and Cash App. So the choice is health, wisdom, or money. Choose wisely, my friends. And if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Ludwig Wittgenstein. The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/yTWa-Z1UQwU

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Aella: Sex Work, OnlyFans, Porn, Escorting, Dating, and Human Sexuality | Lex Fridman Podcast #358

It was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work. Like for me, it was like breathing. Like you're just doing sex and you're bored. I'm like, what do you do? I don't know, let's try something funny. Like it's just the natural progression. And it felt to me like there was almost no competition. Like I would just be really creative and like immediately it was the top not safe for work post on Reddit. I'm like, well, I didn't even try that hard. The following is a conversation with Ayla, a sex researcher who does some of the largest human sexuality survey studies in the world on everything from fetishes to relationships. She's fearless in pursuing her curiosity on these topics by asking challenging and fascinating questions and looking for answers in a rigorous data-driven way and writing about it on her blog, knowingless.com. She's also a sex worker, including OnlyFans and Escorting and is an exceptionally prolific creator of thought-provoking Twitter polls. Ayla and I disagree on a bunch of things, but that just made this conversation even more interesting. I like interesting people in the full range of the meaning that the word interesting implies. I'm currently reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac and would be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite quotes from that book that feels relevant here. The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time. The ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles, exploding like spiders across the stars. In the middle, you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes, ah. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ayla. I feel like this conversation can go anywhere. Is that exciting or terrifying to you? I think it's more exciting. The uncertainty exciting to you? Yes. In conversations in general or just this one? I think conversations in general. Like, is anybody like, ah, the certainty is really exciting? Maybe if the certainty is something new. I mean, novelty always comes with uncertainty, right? Almost always. I started trying to think of a counter example. Immediately. Yeah. You're uncomfortable with generalizations of that kind. Like, always is always a really bold word to use. But if it's truly novel, that means you don't really understand it. It's outside your distribution. So therefore, it's gonna have a bunch of uncertainty. But you don't think of it as uncertainty. You think about it as something new, but it actually also attracts you because there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding it, probably. Like, what is this new thing? Yeah, like, annihilating the mystery, like that drive. What about the danger of it? It's like part, I was just thinking of, on the drive over, because I was like, I'm a little nervous about doing this podcast. And then I was feeling into the unpleasantness of it, like the fear of what if something goes terribly wrong. And then I was also feeling into how much that feels like part of why it's exciting. If I knew that it was going to go great, I don't know. Did you actually imagine all the possible ways it can go wrong? Not like all of them, but I was like, what if I say something really dumb? Or like, you ask me a question, and I answer it in a way that makes me sound like a lot less capable than I am. I'm like really afraid of being perceived as stupid or something. I was also thinking about this on the way over, like I'm kind of risk averse in some ways. Like I don't like driving fast in cars, because I was driving very carefully here, because the roads are bad. And then I was thinking, but I'm very like pro-risk in other ways, like being really exposed to like a wide variety of people who might hate you. And I think like from the outside, that might look fine, but I think the monkey brain is really sensitive to lots of people yelling at you for whatever problems that you seem to have. So that's the big risk you're taking is putting yourself out there as an intellectual, like through your writing, and then a lot of people yelling at you. Is that the worst embarrassment you've experienced? It's pretty bad, yeah. I think the worst embarrassment is if I put something out there that I failed to like be properly skeptical of in myself, and then people are like, oh, we caught this thing that you didn't catch. I think that's the biggest terror. Yeah, from looking at your reading and listening to your interviews, you seem to be very defensive and worried about being a good scientist. Yeah, definitely. But you're like methodology. Yes. And funny enough, you get attacked on that methodology, even though, you know, I'm a fan of psychology, of like academic psychology, and it's kind of disappointing often how non-rigorous their work is, how small the sample size and so on, and how big and ambitious, over-ambitious the proclamations about results is, especially with the news reports on it. Now, you're both the researcher, the scientist, and the reporter, right? So like that's what you have with the blog. Your sample size is often gigantic. The methodology is right there. The data is right there. You provide the data. And then you're like raw and honest with your interpretation of the data. Like there's an honesty, authenticity to it. So it's actually really refreshing. I don't know why people criticize it. I think this is what psychologists are probably terrified about being transparent in that way is because they'll get attacked for their methodology. So they wanna cloak it in a sort of layer of authority. Like I'm from this institution. It was peer-reviewed, this kind of all these layers, and I'm also not gonna share the data with you, and I'm also gonna pretend like most psychology studies are not replicable. I'm just going to pretend there's authority to it. I think it works on a lot of people. Like from the outside, you're like, ah, the scientists with the white lab coats with credentials, those are the people who are like doing science. And like doing science is, you know, you have like fancy terms that other people don't really understand. And to be fair, like I have a lot to learn. I'm still like, I'm self-teaching. I'm like learning through people. Learning as I go, I'm definitely not super knowledgeable about this stuff. But a lot of what those people are doing in science is not that hard. And a lot of people like don't try to learn it because it seems so like elevated. And this is one thing that really bothers me. I think like everybody can do science. Like if you just have this aspect of curiosity and like you just really want to figure something out, you can go and start, you know, asking people questions, doing surveys, like writing down the answers. And then you can go learn how to look at that data in a way that gives you more information about the world. Like it's very simple and straightforward. If you just approach it humbly and earnestly, and you're like, please, let's figure this out together. But people like are I think self crippled in this because they view this as like relegated to the domain of the experts and you know, the fancy scientists. And I think that makes me feel really sad. You're almost attracted to the questions you're not supposed to ask. Oh yeah, also yes. Which might contribute to the controversy. Not exclusively probably. Oh no. But you're just not limited by like part of your curiosity to asking questions that seem common sense. Like some of the most controversial questions are like around sex. It's like everybody thinks and talks and does sex. I mean, it's the driver of human civilization. And yet there's so little like rigorous discussion about the philosophical and the scientific questions around it. It's like, it gets really weird to be able to discuss them. It becomes tricky to discuss them. Yeah, super charged. Because everybody has a really strong opinion, like whether or not, you know, pornography is damaging to society, or like how sex corresponds to gender, or like what kind of sexuality is acceptable. Like, can you have sexual preferences that in themselves are immoral? People get very angry about it. Well, the sad part is they're not just opinionated, but most of us, our relationship with sex is, I think, I guess I want to say not rigorous. I think it's very difficult to be rigorous about sex. Like, I would consider sexual urges to be kind of elusive to introspection in a way that's a little bit disproportionate to a lot of other things. Like you could like, you know, introspect about, you know, how I want other people to like me and where my insecurities lie. But sex is one of those black box things. A really common thing is for people to, if you have a fetish, you sort of check back in your childhood to see an event that corresponds to that fetish. And then you like develop a narrative, like, ah, this event in my childhood must have caused this fetish. And so I think this causes people to be biased towards like a concrete, coherent, causative way that events happen or that sexual fetishes happen. This is just like one example of like why I think it's really hard to be rigorous with introspection. Because we can't avoid, you just want to tend towards making like coherent narratives which I think is not always the correct way to explain it. The narratives that are connected to childhood and so on, how they originate. Yeah, you've, I mean, we'll talk about fetishes because you have a lot of really interesting writing on that. Just actually zooming out, I should mention, you tweeted, I wrote this down. You tweeted, I do not understand how to have normal conversations with people in person if I'm not on drugs. So I guess, let's both agree to not have a normal conversation, I guess. Assuming you're not on drugs now. Or if you are, you don't have to tell me. I feel like a very small amount of phenibut, which is a nootropic. Don't know if that counts. Is that a drug? Well, I guess I'm on caffeine. Yeah. So we're both- Drugged up. Good enough to have a normal conversation. We don't have to. What is normal anyway? What do you think is the primary driver of human civilization? Is it the desire for sex, love, power, or immortality? Like avoiding the fear of death, constructing illusions that make us forget about our terror over mortality. So sex, love, power, death. Is this a Twitter poll? There's more options. This is reality, not everything maps perfectly to a Twitter poll. But in this case, because there's four options and it is a small number of characters, it does. But I'd like to think I'm more interested. You know what? I think your Twitter polls are fundamentally interesting. There's something about the brevity of a poll, limiting to a set of choices, and having an existential crisis and searching for the answer. That's beautiful. That combination. Well, this one is a big one. Like, what do you think is behind it? Do you believe that there is one primary driver? Like, do you think that it can be understood in the terms of primary drivers? Yeah, I think, well, maybe it's an engineering perspective, like trying to reverse engineer the brain. I don't think we're equipped or understand enough about the mind to get there. Yeah, like, what's the primary driver of a tree? Yeah, well, then it gets to the question of what is life? What is the living organism? Like, to self-replicate, probably. That's a very clean simplification. But I think life is more interesting than just self-replication. Yeah, but it sounds like there's a curiosity in you that you're trying to, like, poke at, and I don't understand exactly what that curiosity is. So if I had to dedicate 1,000 years to understand one of these topics, which one would be the most fruitful, I guess is the indirect thing I'm asking. Fun? No, well, fun. To me, everything is fun. Really? Yeah, I mean, I'm with David Foster Wallace. The key to life is to make sure that everything's unboreable or to be unboreable, or nothing is boring. Everything is fun. Like, everything. I could just literally sit. I honestly, because I don't think, I don't know where you got that glass, but that glass exists, and I forgot it exists, and it was really fun to me to know that now it was there. What about the really unpleasant things? Like, if you're in deep agony? Yeah, that's fun. Okay. That's fun, because it's like, I mean, yeah, heartbreak is like knowing that I'm capable of that. We're all living in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars. So when you're in that gutter, for some reason, the stars look brighter, right? So whenever you're going through a difficult time, or whenever you see maybe other people being shitty to each other, it makes you really appreciate when they're not. The contrast makes life kind of amazing. I'm reading a bunch of books, and one of them is Brave New World, where they remove the ups and downs of life, partially through drugs, but over sexualization, all that kind of stuff. I feel like you need the ups and downs of life. The dark, you need the dark to have happiness, to have a deeply intense feeling of affection towards another thing or a human being. Yeah. Yeah, so everything's fun. But fun is also a weird word to define, because fun, I think for a lot of people, that's why I talk about love a lot. I think love is a better word than fun, because fun is lighthearted. Love is more intense. I love that glass and the water that's in it, because it's freaking awesome. Somebody made that glass, right? And not have many mistakes. And the way it bends light in interesting ways, and the way water bends light in interesting ways, I can see part of your arm through that water. That's freaking amazing. Everything is amazing. I'm with the Lego movie. Okay. But from a scientific perspective, if I were to investigate sex, I don't know why I put love in there. Let's narrow it down to the Twitter poll. Let's focus on the basics here. Sex, power, or death, immortality. If I were to try to, from a neuroscience, neurobiology perspective, or reverse engineer through building AI systems that focus on these kinds of dynamics, exploring the game theoretic aspects of it, exploring the sort of cognitive modeling aspects of it, which one would get me to a deeper understanding of the human condition? That's the question. Sex. Nietzsche is the will to power. Freud and the bunch is all about sex. And then death. Liv just, Liv Burley, brilliant previous guest on this podcast, she just released a video where on her bedside was the book Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, which of course she would have on her bedside. But that, his whole work is that everything is motivated by our trying to escape the cold, harsh reality that we're going to die and we're terrified of it. One of the gifts and burdens for human beings is that we are cognizant of our own death and that terrifies us, that's the theory. And because of that, we do everything we can. We build empires to escape the fact that we're mortal. Wouldn't this change quite a bit for religious people then who don't believe that they're going to die? Well, they created religion, the idea there is to create myths, religions, you can create religions of all kinds. Yeah, but if this is one of the defining things that defines civilization, then we should expect to see massive differences between people who believe we're going to die and people who don't. Good, I love it. You think it like scientifically here, but, and they have actually answers. Like there's a whole terror management theory where they do write psychology type papers and they do actual experiments. I can mention how their methodology is interesting. They prime with the discussion of death. Like they take one certain set of people and have a conversation with them, another set of people, they mention death to them before the conversation and see how that affects the nature of the conversation. It's really interesting because death fundamentally alters the nature of the conversation. Just even priming, like reminding you that you're going to die briefly changes a lot of things. These kinds of priming papers are usually not replicated. I just have like, I feel like I've heard a bunch of priming ones that- I think you have PTSD over psychology papers that are not replicated. I just did one, I just did a priming experiment on my own and found it didn't have any effect. But again- Can't you just give me a careless statement summarizing an entire scientific discipline of terror management theory? I don't know. Like I haven't rigorously looked at how good of it is psychologically. I think it is interesting philosophically, the way Freud talked about the subconscious mind, philosophically it's an interesting discussion. Then you have to get rigorous with each for sure. But the idea is that, like it's not that religious people get rid of the terror of death. This is just one of the popular ways they create an illusion on top of it. That's that idea, like a myth that allows, that makes it easier for them to forget, to escape that terror. But everybody else does different methods. Like you fill your days with, like capitalism has a whole religion of itself, like the rat race for getting more and more material possessions and so on. And couldn't you argue it in the opposite direction? Like, let's say, assume that we're Christians here and we're like, oh, the atheists, everybody has terror of hell and the atheists invent this mythology where actually evolution is true in order to escape their terror of hell. So that doesn't feel like a persuasive argument to me. But I used to be very, very Christian and I did not have a terror of death. And then I lost my faith and then I had a deep terror of death set in for a few years. It felt very different to me. So for denial of death, I don't know if he says that it's actually possible without really a lot of work to get to the actual terror. Like, I think his claim is that in early, early, early childhood development, that's when the terror is real. And then we aggressively construct systems around it of social interaction to sort of construct illusions on top of it. I'm doing a half-ass description of this philosophy, but it is interesting to simplify the human mind into underlying mechanisms that drive it. I was gonna say, your thinking seems kind of poetic. Like, the way that you're sort of handling these, these concepts feel like more like aesthetically driven. I think this theme is gonna continue throughout this conversation as we talk about relationships and sex, yes, for sure. I think so. And I think your thinking seems to be very driven by how can I construct an experiment to test this hypothesis? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, but aren't, there's some things, especially that have to do with the human mind, that are really messy, really difficult to understand. There's so many uncertainties and mysteries around that we don't yet have the tools to collect the data. Like, one of your favorite tools is the survey, is asking people questions, and then figuring out different ways to indirectly get at the truth, because there's flaws to the survey. You kind of learn about those flaws, and you get better and better at asking the right questions and so on. But that's not, that's indirect access to the human mind. But do you think like poetic narratives are? I'm not like saying poetic narratives are bad. Like, I think it's like a cool way of like handling concepts, but I'm not sure that they are more rigorous. No, no, no. Okay. No, but like they might be the more correct, like philosophy might be the right way to discuss things that were really far from understanding. Yeah, I mean, they might be more useful shorthand. Yeah. Like morality, like I don't think morality makes any sense, but it's really useful shorthand to use when handling concepts a lot of the time. Right, like ethics and morality. You could construct studies that ask different questions. Like, you know, just having worked with autonomous vehicles a lot, the trolley problem gets brought up, and I don't know, you can construct all kinds of interesting surveys about the trolley problem, but does that really get at some deep moral calculus that humans do? It's sexy because people like write clickbait articles about it, but does it really get to like what you value more, five grandmas or like three children? Whatever, like they construct these arguments of like, if you could steer a train, if you could steer an autonomous car, which do you choose? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's possible with some of those to construct. Sometimes the fuzzy area, there's some topics that are fuzzy and will forever be fuzzy, given our limited cognitive capabilities. I don't know, there's a way of looking at things where it's like, for example, the childhood fetish thing that I was talking about, like where do your fetishes come from? Like you can develop a narrative where it's like, you know what, I think like this kind of thing is, you know, when you're surrounded by feet when you're a child, this causes foot fetishes. And this is like kind of a cool narrative. And I think a lot of people's ideas about philosophy follow the same sort of thing. Like what is the narrative that is cool? And I think this is useful for meaning making. Like I'm very pro meaning making. Like when you're talking about everything is fun because you know, the contrast or whatever. I very much ascribe to that. I really enjoy that philosophy. I also find everything to be very delightful. And this isn't like a question of truth, right? We're not like, where's the true delight that we're objectively measuring. Like this is a frame, a poetic frame that you're using to like sort of change the way the light hits the world around you. And that's super useful because it like makes you happier or something. Yeah, but also gets to the truth or something. Yeah, I guess if what is true. Yet another question, what is truth? You've, actually to jump back, you believe that free will is an illusion. So why does it feel like I'm free to make any decision I want? What's a cool illusion? I think that's probably like where a sense of identity comes from. It's a fun illusion. Like when you really meditate on your sense of identity, for at least for me, it seems like it comes down to the sense of choice. Like, oh, I am doing the thinking. Like what does it mean to do with thinking? It's like something in me has exerted agency over having this thought or not having this thought. Like the sense of self really comes down to choice. And so when I say that like free will is an illusion, I also mean there's something like the self is an illusion. Identity is a trick of the light. But it's a really fun one. Yeah. You think a lot about your identity. I have occasionally. Yeah, like you really struggle with it. You're proud of it. I do too. It's not, we have different journeys, but so. I really take a lot of delight in it. I used to be very into like deconstructing it. Like you, maybe you know, I did a bunch of, like way too much jealousy for a while. And at that point, very no ego. And now I'm like very ego. I really enjoy having a lot of ego. I actually happen to know like everything about you. Really? Yeah. Like more than you do. It's interesting. That's fascinating. Wait, could you solve my problems? Yes, all of them. I did thorough research. Okay. What is consciousness then? I actually wrote that as a quote. What is consciousness? To remind myself. So like, how does that tie in together with free will and identity and all of that? That's what I thought. What is consciousness is like one of the biggest questions ever. I think, I do think that people often get confused when talking about consciousness. Cause I think people are referring to two separate concepts and often like combining them into one thing. Like we asked the question, you know, is AI going to be conscious? I think this is kind of the wrong question. Like we can identify signs of consciousness. Like, ah, they seem to refer to themselves. But this is not necessarily proof of consciousness in the same way that like dream characters acting exactly the way normal human people do in your dream is not evidence that they themselves are conscious. So like signs of consciousness are not proof of consciousness. But there is something that we definitely know, which is like, I currently am conscious. I can tell because, right. Like I'm like just directly observing my experience. And so like there's one kind of consciousness, which is I am directly observing my experience and that you cannot replicate it. Like I cannot observe two experiences. It is necessarily singular and it is necessarily certain. Like you can make all the arguments you want. Like I'm still directly observing. It's not a thing that's subject to reason. Whereas our other thing is conscious. This is something that's replicable. Like you can apply it to multiple people. It's something that's not certain, like almost definitionally not certain. Like we don't actually know if there is, you know, an internal experience. So my argument is that like when people are talking about other things having experience, they're using a different concept than the thing that they're actually looking at when they look at their own experience. I think they're two different things. Definitionally not possible. No, if you understand the mechanism of consciousness, you'll be able to measure it probably, right? Yeah, but what are you measuring? Like I think there's just like a subtle difference. Like when you're asking the question, is this other thing conscious? Yeah, the easy thing to measure is like a survey. Does this thing appear conscious? Yeah. And then the hard thing is you understand the actual mechanism of how consciousness arises in the physics of the human brain. Yeah, but you can do that in a dream, presumably. Like if you had a very good dream or a very good simulation. Yeah. But we could then have somebody in a simulation or a dream where they go through and they fully understand, you know, they do all the tests and the tests come back exactly the way you'd expect them to. But from the outside, we're like, well, this is misleading. They're not actually conscious. Like your dream characters aren't conscious, right? Probably. I don't know, are you asking? Are you telling? I'm appealing to an intuition. But it sounds like you're driving towards a narrative. You did a poll about men and women and dreams. Yeah. Those are some kind of difference. I couldn't tell what the difference was, except that more men than women. Quite a lot more women dream vividly than men. Oh. Which I actually found my chaos survey. So I did a survey, maybe you know. I know everything, do you remember? You know, yes, I'm sorry. So as you clearly know. I'll try not to talk down to you through this conversation. I'm sorry. And I not only know everything, I know how your future looks like. Really? And how everything ends, yeah. So you could probably win all the prediction markets on my life. Yeah. Cool. So we should also mention that you have prediction markets. You have votes. What's the site called again? Manifold. Manifold. And one of them was, will I be on the Lex Friedman podcast? Yeah. And I voted. I invested everything I owned into the yes. Is there such thing as insider trading on there? Because that goes against the terms of the- No, I think insider trading is part of the information. So it's supposed to be. Oh, I see. And then I realized it's actually public information that I voted. Because I think my face shows up there, it's like, damn it. It's going to influence- You could make a fake account. You could make the fake account. Or I could be lying, right? Yeah, that's true. And then dump the stock or whatever. You know, I try to manipulate. Somebody made a market, like is Ayla going to post a poll, spelled P-O-L-E on her Twitter, like a photo. And I was like, I'm going to manipulate this market. So I like fucked around with it. And I voted no. And then I accidentally posted a photo of a poll without thinking. It's like a double-roll poll. Oh, but that's like self-sabotage. Yeah, I accidentally fucked up my own market. That doesn't, that's like the reverse of insider trading. Yeah. What were we talking about? Oh, the women and the men and the difference, the vivid dreams and the markets. I forget what the market, oh, because I can perfectly predict your future. Yeah. But then it's not fun. I like the romance of unpredictability. And so I like to, even though I know everything, I like to forget everything. Yeah. Very Buddhist of you. Yeah, the river. No man in the river once, whatever, the footsteps, however that goes. That's one of my favorite questions, is like if you could press a button and then have all of your wants fulfilled, anything that you want, so it's like such a rapid degree that you don't really experience the want, like as the want arises, it then is like completed as immediately, so that you are completely without want. Like, would you press that button? 100% not. Yeah, I didn't think you would. No, no, no. Because immediately everything stops being fun. The first, it's only fun the first time. But if you want it to be fun. But like, what would be my source of fun? I feel like I would, like on day four, just to get off, I would need to like do like nuclear war, because it will escalate quickly. I feel like if everything is possible, I assume you mean like something that like is not just normal human things. Yeah, magical world. Magical world. And you start escalating really quickly. Like, I wonder, I'll probably do like, I want everybody to just fly into the air and hover in the air. Everybody. And then you're like, oh, life is meaningless. Like, why does, like, I feel like you get, no, actually, that'd be a really interesting experiment. Like, what are the limits? Like, are we all capable of becoming psychopaths, essentially? Like, I'd like to believe not. There's very hard limits on that, like in our own mind, like of basic compassion. Because I love being compassionate towards other human beings. And it's one of the things I think about if you give me power, like a lot of power, like absolute power. And I think that's the power you mentioned is the scariest kind of power. Because it's like, it's not even power in this normal world. It's like magical power, where you lose, it's like dream world power, where you, like video game power, you don't even think of it as reality. You could just mess with the world. I feel like that's terrifying. Yeah, you'd basically be God. God, yeah. But without, like, I feel like the idea of God wants to keep things functioning properly. And then you'd probably, if you wanted to keep them functioning properly, then it would rapidly, like you would never experience a time where you're like, oh no, that was a mistake. Because as soon, like before you even experienced that, the world would shift to match it. Oh, interesting. No, I think I would actually, I take it back. I think I would regret the first time I hurt somebody. See, in my visualization, it was like a video game where everybody's like NPC, really dumb. No, I think the first time I witnessed pain from anybody, that's when I would stop. And I would probably run into that very quickly. Like, even just the hovering, make a person hover, and they're gonna be probably really upset with the hovering, right? And so I'm gonna be like, no, don't do that anymore. And then I'll probably go to, honestly, I'll just return back to my normal life. Yeah, that's kind of what I feel like. Like, if I had the power to do anything, I think I would probably want to have a life very similar to where I am now. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like with Uber, like it'd be probably more convenient to do certain things. But even then, like the struggle, like I got a flat tire, so I have to fix that. I kind of, the flat tire makes everything more beautiful. It's like, cool, I could do like a normal manual thing. But also it makes you like appreciate your car, appreciate transportation, appreciate the convenience of transportation, all of it. I know some people who would like call this a bunch of copium, like you're just sort of making do with what you have. Like, we wouldn't go back to Amish times or like pre-technology because to like, in order to make ourselves appreciate things more. And so this seems like a hindsight reasoning, which like I can appreciate that argument, but I don't know. I'm like, I kind of- Anyone who uses, sorry to interrupt the word copium in their argumentation, I think is sus. Is sus. Yeah. Is sus my entire argument is now. No, I'm just kidding, I'm sorry. Go ahead, sorry. I interrupted rudely the flow of thought. But you don't think so? In part, you disagree with that kind of argument? Yeah, because I think people have this idea that if you like come to accept or like find meaning in what you have now, this is sort of at odds with trying to improve it. And I don't find this to be the case. I find like the attempt to improve it to also be part of it. Like I enjoy the fact that there's something like problematic going on because now I get the experience of like striving to make it go away. And like that in itself is where the meaning lies. It's not just that things are bad, it's that there's things are bad and we're trying to stop it and also. Exactly. If you combine that with a sense of optimism that the future can be better, yeah, that feeds into this productive effort of making things better. And it somehow makes the vision of the things that are better more intense, having experienced shitty things. Yeah. So we talked about free will and consciousness and what drives human civilization. Question left unanswered. It's a homework problem for the reader. Okay. Let's. I get like a scoreboard at the end, the amount of questions. The answer. Completed successfully versus not. Like polls. Yeah. Can we talk about some practical things? Sure. So one of the many amazing things, I think of you as a researcher, but you've also been doing research in the field. Yeah, fieldwork. Fieldwork. The Jane Goodall of. Yeah, yeah. The sex work. How did you get, what's the short and the long story of how you got into sex work? How did I get into sex work? Well, I mean, there's a whole like childhood thing where I was conservatively homeschooled. Do you wanna actually talk about your childhood? I think it's interesting because you also worked at a factory. So like your childhood is really fascinating and difficult, traumatic. So, and you've written about it. There's a lot of ways we could talk about it, but maybe what are the things you remember the good and the bad of your childhood of your maybe interaction with your father? Yeah, my dad probably has narcissistic personality disorder. And so it was very centered on very controlling childhood, immensely so. We were homeschooled and pretty isolated from the outside world. Like we didn't know anybody else who wasn't homeschooled. We went through a program called Growing Kids God's Way, which was very, it was like the kind of program where you're not supposed to pick up babies when they cry to train them that they can't manipulate the parents. Because like baby crying was viewed as like, you're just teaching them from an early age that they're allowed to make the parents do what the kids want. And we're very against this philosophy. So, that combined with a narcissistic personality disorder, my dad was pretty rough. So controlling. Super controlling, yeah. And developing and feeding the self-critical aspect of your brain. Yeah, very much. It was, I was like lazy, but I was never gonna accomplish anything in life. I was gonna move out of the house and realize how good I had it at home, the classic stuff. He was very like logical and smart though. And so he'd also like teach us logic stuff. I remember some of my earliest memories are him like giving me basic logic puzzles. Like the dog has three legs, how many dogs have four legs? And I would mess up. But he was an evangelist, basically, a Christian evangelist. So we did like Bible study five nights a week. I memorized, I think 800 verses of the Bible by the time before I became an adult. Yeah, and it was very patriarchal also. So I was expected to grow up and become a housewife, basically. They're like, oh, you can go to college to meet a man and also to get a little bit of education so that you can homeschool your own kids. Like we were explicitly told that women were subordinate to men in regards to like making decisions when you're married. Our pastor's daughter was not allowed to leave home because she would be outside of the authority of a man. So when she got married, she was allowed to leave because she was never allowed to live in a house where she was not under a hierarchy. So this is like the kind of culture that we live in. So there's a hierarchy and there's a gender aspect to the hierarchy. There's men at the top of that hierarchy. Men at the top. Okay, but your own psychology, your own mind, so most of that self-critical brain is bad, right? It's confusing because he told me that I was smart, but also that I would fail. But not smart enough, right? Or like smart, but not smart enough? Smart, but like not virtuous or something. Okay, right, there's always a flaw. There's always a flaw. I think a lot of it was, a lot of the fucked upness of my brain came from feeling like I didn't have the authority to think because it was so carefully suppressed. My ability to express or have any sort of power was just absolutely annihilated, systemically. Psychologically, they would do psychological torture mechanisms to make sure that I wasn't actually thinking on my own or being able to deviate from anything anybody ever told me. To the degree that it still ingrained in me, I once was with a friend, we were traveling, and he wanted me to hop a turnstile. It was very late at night, the train was here, and I could not physically force myself to do it. He was yelling at me, like, come on, do it. I was trying so hard to make my body cross the line, and it was just, it's embedded in my physical being to be unable to do stuff like that, which is really annoying. You're not free to take action in this world. Yeah, some of it. So that was, I think, the most annoying part of my upbringing. Would you classify it as suffering? At the time, yeah, definitely. Well, it's confusing, because when I was a child, it was just painful in the sense that things suck. But it was placed in a meaning framework. It is good, it is virtuous to submit to your parents and do what they want. If they tell you to say goodbye to your best friend forever and never talk to them again, you go do that without complaining. And so I would go do something like that, and it would suck. It really was concretely painful, but it was also placed in this narrative where I was fulfilling some sort of greater purpose. So it's very confusing to refer to it as suffering, because there's so many painful things we do today that are placed in the narrative of a greater purpose that I think I would agree with. I go get a medical procedure done, and that sucks, but I'm like, ah, this is helping me in the long run. But say if I got abducted to an alien planet, and they're like, by the way, all of those medical procedures you got done, you didn't have to get them done, those are totally unnecessary, then I might get really upset about it. I would trust those aliens, though, because they probably wanna do different medical procedures than you. This is true. I saw a thumbnail for a video that I'm proud of myself for not clicking on about a man who's claimed that he had sex with aliens. And I was like, oh. Proud of yourself for not clicking on that? Because I was wondering, because I would probably watch it for like 20 minutes, and then I should be doing work. Oh, I see. So like, and I'm actually happy, because I get to imagine all the different possibilities that it could have been for that man who had sex with aliens. Did you just have like a really high like resting happiness state? Yes, yeah. Like probably like a mushroom state, yeah. Wow, do you do mushrooms? I've done mushrooms before. It was very awesome. Like more intensely awesome. But like, because I was just looking at nature, it makes nature even more beautiful, I think. But it's already pretty beautiful. I haven't done MDMA. People say that I should. It's very nice, yeah. Yeah, anyway. But I'm already, yeah. What did you call it? Resting happiness state? Yeah, high resting happiness. Yeah, that's a good way to describe it. But it's not like, some of it is genetic, that you're able to notice the beauty in the world, and some of it is practiced, where you realize focusing on the negative things in life, like unproductively, it just doesn't help your mind flourish. So like you just notice that, and it's like, I mean, I think people with like depression learn that, or like probably with trauma too, is like there's certain triggers. Like if you suffer from depression, you have to kind of consciously know there's going to be triggers that will spiral, like force you to spiral down. And so just avoid those triggers. Some people have that with diet, with food and so on. And so I just don't like, whenever there's a shitty things happening, or shitty people, unless I can help, unless I can somehow help, like why focus on it, yeah. Anyway, back to your upbringing. What was the journey of escaping that? Well, I left home like kind of early, because my dad and I were not getting along by the time I was a teenager. But I still Christian for a while. And I lost my faith after I think I moved away, and I started having friends that weren't religious, or like weren't raised in this super conservative environment that I came from. And I think, this was not conscious at the time, this is my hindsight story. But I believe that like being exposed to a culture in which I had the capacity to believe, like allowed my brain to actually seriously consider the thought that maybe all of this stuff was untrue, that I'd been taught like 6,000 year old earth, and evolution is a lie, you know, macro evolution and all of this stuff. Because like when you're immersed in an environment like that I don't think you actually have a choice. Like your brain has to believe these things, because this is a survival thing. Like if you believe this, you'll be, like if you believe the wrong thing, you'll be totally cast out. Even if they're not going to cast you out, you're going to be cast out in like communion with others. Because we were always told that you can't like trust non-believers really. They don't have a moral compass. They're going to screw you over. And so I'm like, oh, I can't be that. Like everybody's going to outcast me internally. So anyway, I wasn't, I don't think I actually had the capacity to seriously question my faith, even though I thought that I was questioning it quite hard, until I got into an environment where it was safe to do so. And once I started being able to make friends who were not religious, I'm like, oh, if I lose my faith, I'm still going to have some sort of community. And then at that time I went through some questioning and then I lost my faith. So in that, given your friends, given your situation, you now have the freedom to think essentially. Or at least the ability to think of something that was acceptable in the new culture, yeah. Without, I mean, is there a danger of like adopting the beliefs of the new culture? So like there's some aspect of just being able to think freely, which you weren't able to do when you were growing up, just to think, like look at the world and wonder how it works, that kind of thing. I mean, you work it within certain boundaries. Like there are certain basic assumptions. And as long as you were following those basic assumptions, which is to be fair, it's like kind of what we're doing now. Like we have, have I gone and done the personal research that like evolution is the thing that's going on? Have I looked at like the age of the stones? No, I haven't, I'm trusting other people. Which I think is like a fair choice to make given where I'm at right now. But you're also assuming like there's causality in the universe, time is real. Yeah. That like, that first of all, the thing that your senses are perceiving is real. You're assuming a lot of things. Yeah, I think like it's better just to become aware of the assumptions you're making. Like as opposed to not making those assumptions at all. Like you have to assume something. And I did, it's very suspicious, right? That I went out of this very conservative culture. And now, well, I guess I don't believe things that are super in line with the current culture. I think this is why I feel a little bit safer right now. Because like when I was Christian, I believed generally Christian things. But now I believe a bunch of things that like people really hate. Like I get canceled online all the time. I'm like, okay, this is a sign that maybe you're thinking independently. If you're like able to think things that are completely at odds with the people around you. And to be fair, this is a little bit easier to do when it's like general culture. But it's much harder to do with your peer group. Like the people that you trust, your friends, the people whose opinions you respect. Like disagreeing with those people is very difficult and I'm not very good at it. Yeah, I do think that if you establish yourself as a person who can be trusted and is a good human being, you have a lot more freedom to then explore ideas that are different from your peer group. So like those seem, if you separate the space of ideas versus some kind of like deeper sense of what this person is. Like that they're an interesting and trustworthy and good human being. Well, is there somebody that you respect who you consider significantly smarter than you? And can you imagine believing an idea that you've heard them talk really disdainfully about? Like how would you feel coming to me? Like I believe this thing that you find to be. Yeah, I do all the time. Oh yeah? Yeah. You may be braver than me. Yeah. And to be fair, I support doing this. Like I try to do this, but I think like subconsciously, I noticed that I don't do it as much. And so I'm suspicious of myself. I'm like, oh, I wonder if I'm hiding to myself like actual curiosity about things that might deviate from my peer group. Because I've noticed that I'm not actually deviating with them as much as I do with the outside world. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean like, because I do see most people I interact with as smarter than me, but I also have this intuitive feeling that dumb people, which I consider myself being, have wisdom. So like in the disagreement, actually I also believe in the power of conversation and in the tension of disagreement. So I think even just disagreeing from a place, from a good place, from a place of like love and respect for each other, I think I just believe in that. So it's not like individuals you're disagreeing, you're like working towards arriving at some deeper truth together, right? Even if the other person is smarter. Maybe that's how I justify it for myself. I'm also a fan of conversations, because I've seen just listening to conversations. It seems like a great conversation more emerges from it than the sum of its parts, right? Like somehow two people together can do, like that dance of ideas can somehow create a cool thing. By the way, I enjoyed, I saw a video of you dancing at a bar drunk. There wasn't a bar drunk, it didn't look drunk, but just the dancing. It was like ballroom dancing type of thing. I was like, yeah. Something like that. I've been doing a bit of tango dancing. I like it. Argentine? Mm-hmm. Nice. I like stuff with the body in general, like wrestling or combat. Like usually when there's a tension, you have to understand the mechanics of how two bodies move when they're in conflict and dancing is similar. Like you have to do like rapid thinking also, like rapid intuitive physical thinking. And that's my favorite kind of thing. Like a lot of exercise is really boring to me because you can just do it while your brain's off. But something like ballroom dancing or fusion dancing, you have to constantly be like figuring out, like it's a rapid puzzle. And that's so wonderful. What's fusion dancing? That's the video. Fusion dancing is like, if you have any sort of dance background, you can come and you just kind of mix those together. Oh, you just improvise. So you can have like people doing ballet with people doing ballroom with people doing blues. Cool. And then there's an interesting dynamic because there's, I don't know, maybe you can correct me, but there's a, that's very meta. There's usually a lead and a follow. I guess most dancers have that. Yeah. Yeah. And so that, but both have a different, like you both have to be quite sensitive to the other human being, but in a different way. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. So I like both that there is that definitive role, but also like, it's not somehow that one is better than the other. There's a interesting tension between the two. Yeah. It's cool. Cause it's like a basic rule set that allows for a ton of expression. I've recently started to experiment with like reverse leading. It's not like back leading. It's like, I don't know. Like sometimes I'll like lead a move. So you can lead as a follow. Oh, you can lead. What I'm typically following, like occasionally throw in a little lead here and there. But don't you kind of follow it? Oh, I see. Don't you hit hint at a lead when you're following? Like, don't you just by the dynamics of your movement, you're not perfectly following. I mean, cause there is like, the lead is listening to your body, right? Yeah. So like you're kind of both figuring out what you do next. That's true. I'm a very good follow though. Okay. So I'm like, I'm an invisible follow. You do move, it's like I. Oh, interesting. I'm not like good at technique. I didn't know those existed. Like a perfect follow. Oh yeah, perfect. So you can perfect follow. I'm really ideal. I'm not great at technique and sometimes I'll fall over, but like with the following part, I'm very good at it. Do you enjoy following? Yeah, yeah. It's really nice. It's again, like it's a very fast physical puzzle you have to solve. It's like typing. I really like typing. That's why I was inquiring about your keyboard earlier. Why do you like typing? It's like the very fast, like the really rapid response. What's the reaction time? I like things that like have very fast reaction times, like games like that. But typing is not a reaction or is it the brain generating words? And then you're like, how's typing a reaction? Okay, the sensation that I get when I am typing is the kind of thing that I'm trying to point out. So maybe reaction time isn't the quite, I don't know what the term is, but whatever that thing is, like the thing where you have to like look at a word and then communicate it into your fingers. Yeah. It feels like dancing. Like you're responding. You're responding to your brain. Your fingers are doing the responding to the brain that generated the words. Making your body do what your brain wants it to do, but like fast and precisely. Well, then you might not like this Kinesis keyboard because it makes it easier to do that. You probably like the struggle, right? Well, I mean, it looks hard because it looks like it's high depression on the keys. No, well, oh, I see. Yes, more than like a laptop keyboard, but like that you don't have to, one of the main things is you don't have to move your fingers at all. So like, for example, a lot of people, I think they have a backspace up in the top right corner. So if you have to make mistakes, which is like, I mean, that's like so metaphorical. Every mistake you have to like really hurt yourself for because it's like stretch for the backspace. So just that poetic narrative again. It's like it emanates from a lot of your perspective. Everything. Yeah, no. Yeah, I don't, and I see it as a good thing. It's a good, like a romantic element permeates my interpretation of the world, yes. But you left home early. How did you end up working at a factory? I tried to go to college, but failed. Couldn't afford it. Did you like it? I remember it just being really slow. I remember being shocked that the teachers didn't care. Like I was used to homeschooling. Yeah. And where, I don't know, like educate, it just like meant something. It felt like the people around me that were teaching me, because we had like a mom's group also, like directly cared about what I was learning. And I would be able to ask questions and they would like really respond. What's a mom's group? And it was like a homeschooling group. So we're a bunch of moms who are homeschooling their kids, get together and then teach each other's kids. Oh, cool. Yeah. And they have different like interests and capabilities and so on and they kind of. And sometimes if some of the kids are really good at something you have like the older kids teaching the other ones too. So it was very like, everybody kind of figures out what they're good at and they share that skill set with everybody else. Which I think was a pretty great setup. Honestly, I think my childhood kind of sucked in a lot of ways, but homeschooling was excellent for me. Mainly because it just had so much free time. Like I was just did like two to three hours of school and then did whatever the fuck I wanted for the rest of the day. And I got to actually pursue skills that are still useful for me to this day. Even in that constrained environment. Like I wrote, I've read fantasy books and I wrote so much. And now I'm writing a lot for my blog. What kind of fantasy books? Like sci-fi type stuff? Like classic, like I read like Mercedes Lackey and the E.E. Knight and Ursula Le Guin. I don't know any of this. What is this? What is it? Is it like a romantic thing? Or is it like, is it romance? All the fantasy books. Like dragons and elves. Oh, dragons. Got it, got it, got it, got it. You didn't mention Tolkien for the fantasy. I read Tolkien. Okay. All right, well, it's beautiful. So you threw all the dragons. How did you end up in a factory? You tried school. Yeah, yeah, I tried school. Had to drop out for a couple of months. And then I was like, well, I'm poor. And I was ready to take any job. I was like applying for sewer jobs. And then I got a factory. I'm like, all right, let's do it. Because my parents, no financial help at all. They're like, you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. So anyway, I went to work at a factory and that sucks ass. Do not recommend. I had to wake up like 4 a.m., work on weekends too. Fluorescent lights. It was terrible. And so I did that for about a year. And I was like, this is, I was trying to grip my teeth and be like, this is my life, right? But I didn't have high expectations for my life. I was just like, I thought like if you get a job where you don't have to be on your feet all the time, that you're living a good life. But, and then I got another job briefly as a photographer. And then they fired me. I think I was 19 at the time. Fired you for like? I was just too young. And really, really bad at interacting with people in the outside world. Like I was pretty well socialized as a homeschooler with other homeschoolers, but in the outside world, especially with all of the like hierarchy submission stuff beaten into me, like literally beaten into me, it was very difficult for me to interact with other people who were like older than me or had any sort of confidence at all. So they hired me to do like photography for people. And then I was rapidly, turned out that I was bad at this. And so they fired me. But at that point I'd left my factory job. I'm like, I can't go back to the factory. So I tried, I had some savings and I slept on friends' couches and I tried various self-employment stuff. I'm like, maybe I can do product photography or something. But it's Idaho, you know, nothing. And if you're like a 19 year old with no experience in the outside world at all, it was really difficult. And so I had a friend recommend that I try becoming a cam girl. So that's how it started. What's, what is camming? What is being a cam girl? What's that called? Camming is like you talk to the camera live on the computer, like you live stream. It's kind of like Twitch. And then people are typing in the chat, like, hi, do this stuff. And then the people can tip you money and then you can do things in response. Like, oh, if you tip me a hundred tokens, you know, I'll take my shirt off or something like that. And like, what's the, what site were you using at that time? My free cams. My free cams? Is that a popular site? Yeah, it's pretty popular. Okay. And how did, what were the next steps? Like, did you enjoy it? Oh, well, it was the first time I had actual control over my life. And I made like actual real money. And so I just exploded into it. I thought about it nonstop. I was streaming all the time. I was like coming up with like new creative things. And the thing is like, I don't know. There's something about public school that I ended up living in a house of cam girls full of other girls who had gone to public school. And I don't know if how much of it's genetic or like just because I'm weird or is it because of our upbringing, but I felt like I was much more fearless and much more weird and creative online than other people were. Not because they weren't awesome people, but because I think like public school, I got the impression based on them talking about it that it sort of like beats out any sort of deviance from you. Like- More so than your, cause I got the- We had moral deviance was beaten out, but like you could do whatever- Creative deviance was not- Creative deviance wasn't so much. Like I didn't have other kids making fun of me ever. I didn't, I don't think I'd ever heard an insult about my physical appearance as a child or teenager once. So your father was basically saying you're not good enough was intellectual. Oh, no, that was like moral failing. Moral failing. Yeah, like I was not virtuous. Oh, wow. Like in various ways, like you're lazy and mostly the lazy part. I have like ADHD or something. Yeah. And I was not good at it as a kid either. I would totally forget all the time. Is there some sexual repression aspect to that? Like, you know how they say that there's, it's not just homeschooling, but just like Catholic girls and so on, just because like there's moral, you're forbidden to do certain things. Like there's a kind of liberating feeling of saying, like basically rediscovering yourself, rediscovering your freedom by doing, just diving head in, head first into sexuality, into your own sexuality. Is there some aspect to that? Yeah, absolutely to some degree. I think that like people kind of model it slightly wrong. Like I think there's a truth to it. But when I first got out of the house, for me freedom was like going outside at 2 a.m. or like eating chocolate, you know, on days that I previously wasn't allowed to eat chocolate. Like that was like a really intense expression of rebellion for me. And I think people like don't think of this, like I got out a lot of my like intense rebellion through things that people don't typically consider to be rebellious at all. Like I wore a bikini. Yeah. Insane. I just like walked around and then like, I can do this. Yeah, basically. Yeah. And so like, this was most of that emotional processing for me. And it took me a couple of years from leaving home and all of that conservative culture into doing sex work. In the meantime, I did try having sex with a lot of people, but this was mainly because I didn't know what the norms were. I didn't really understand. I was just like, okay, take things logically, take things one step at a time. And I'm like, okay, if the whole previous set about like how I'm not supposed to kiss somebody until the altar of marriage, if that's not the way that things are supposed to go, then what is the way things are supposed to go? And I was like, well, if I am aroused, I should go have sex with someone, right? Is there any reason not to? No. I would go around asking random people to have sex with me. Did you have any peer pressure saying like, that's not good or that is good or like any, did you feel any currents of society in any direction? It's probably, or are you independently just thinking like for first principles? I think, I mean, like I'm not saying it was a totally clean thing. I'm sure that I was experiencing society telling me this is bad, but you have to know, like I wasn't watching normal movies when I was a teen. Like we watched Christian movies, or the stuff that we watched was filtered. Like I watched the Titanic and I had no idea that Jack and Rose had sex because it was put through a filtered- Wait, did they? Yeah, they went and, you know, he'd painted her naked and- Yeah, yeah. There was a scene in a car on the ship. A car on the ship? Yeah, on the, they had like stored cars in storage and there's a hand. I watched it again later. And I was like, oh my God. I don't remember the sex scene. Well, maybe were you also put through a filtered version? Maybe it's the filter I see, like did the couple in the notebook also have sex? Because maybe for romantic movies, I focus on the romance, maybe, right? And the sex scenes are always like weirdly filmed in these- Yeah. Because it's never, I mean, it doesn't, it feels more like romance than sex. I guess that's the main focus of this, right? Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, anyway. So they had sex, it's good to know now. They did. I'll go back and watch now. You have your own personal filter on your brain. And once you realize that there are some, like the foundation of your beliefs were wrong, then everything might be wrong. And you're kind of just doing from first principles. Yeah, it was like from first principles, basically. And again, like not totally separate from culture, but also I think in general, I also have a predisposition to just be like, you know, fuck what culture tells you. Just figure out what's right for you and do it. And so that mixed with, you know, the figuring things out from first principles. I did eventually figure out that I didn't like having casual sex with just anybody quite as much. So I stopped that, but it took me a while to figure that out. What's the negative of casual sex? It's just like not good. I mean, if you like figure out the chemistry you have with someone better, then it can be a lot nicer. But I wasn't doing that. I was just like somebody I met. And I'm like, you seem kind of cute. Okay. Like I didn't bother to try and develop any chemistry. I mean, I didn't- Chemistry even outside of sex, just chemistry, like human chemistry, like conversation. Yeah. Okay. I would, it's like kind of cringy, but I would like walk up to guys or send them messages. Like, would you like to have coitus? That's what I would say. You would say coitus. I'd said that. I mean, it's kind of cute in a way. I mean, it's a girl asking you to get laid. So they probably didn't care that much. But I'm saying that like, I had a lot of rebellion out of my system by the time I started sex work. Yeah. So like for me, like maybe I'm sure it was somehow related because we were extremely sexually repressed growing up. I remember the day I learned I had a vagina, which was absolutely horrifying. Do not recommend figuring out you have another orifice in your body. But like- Do you want to share the process of you figuring out that you had a vagina? It's just they told me I had a vagina. Oh, like intellectually, like there was somebody said you have a vagina. Vagina, yeah. And that was horrifying to you. Yeah. I didn't know I had, because you weren't supposed to ever like touch or look at yourself ever. So I never did. It was really disgusting. And so I had no idea that what was going on in my genital region. And so one day my mom sat me down, I think I was like nine or 10. And she was like, you have a, there's another? What? And you're going to bleed out of it, is what she told me. You're going to bleed out of it for a while. And I was like, what the fuck, mom? I didn't know what the word fuck was, but I would have said that if I had known. When did you first learn the word fuck? Oh, I think I learned it when I was at a playground and it was written somewhere and I read it out loud. And then the kid next to me started giggling. Did you ever, did you say fuck again for a while? No, I think the next time I said, I swore the first time I was 18. Like intentionally said a swear word when I was 18. Did it feel good? I was like really nervous. I was like nervous. What's your favorite swear word? I mean, fuck's pretty good. Yeah, fuck's pretty good. Yeah. Okay, so that's camming. I mean, what are the pros and cons of camming and how does OnlyFans map into this? Did you switch to OnlyFans at some point? I did, yeah. I came for like five or six years and I burned out eventually. What are the good aspects? What are the bad aspects of camming? Well, the good aspects were that it was just your own terms. You get to decide. Everything about it is under your control, which I loved at the time. I was like, I can work when I want, how I want, any sort of expression I experimented. And I was very successful. I was making around $200 an hour, which for that website at the time was like pretty good. I had elaborate routines. I was a mime. I would do like dress up as a mime and then dress up a chair and I would seduce the chair. Oh, cool. Yeah, or like. So it was, was there an artistic element to it almost? Yeah, very much. I had like gnomes. Did you talk to the chair? You had gnomes? No, I was a mime. Oh, sorry, right. Yeah, get it straight, dude. You know what I really appreciate about you is I'm asking some really dumb questions and you're answering in a very intelligent way, so I appreciate that. Did you ask the chair questions? I was a mime, you fucking idiot. Okay, I'm sorry. But there's gnomes on the, like big gnomes or small gnomes? Like lawn gnomes. Lawn gnomes? And you seduce the lawn gnome on the chair? The gnome is sitting on the chair? There were some, yeah, gnomes on the chair. I did a photo set, which I submitted to Reddit, where I got abducted. I was like stripping, taking my clothes off, and then slowly the gnomes surrounded me in the background and dragged me off. And I did this as a photo set. Consensually? I didn't feel consensual in the photos, but. But it was the 11th top post of. Consensual, not consensual, the gnomes. It was very successful on Reddit, basically. It was the top post on Gone Wild and the 11th top post of all time on Reddit. Which I think probably just means it's artistic, it's interesting, it's edgy, it's funny, so it's really, really well done. But it was really shocking to me that nobody else was doing anything creative with sex work. Like for me, it was like breathing. Like you're just doing sex and you're bored, and I'm like, what do you do? I don't know, let's try something funny. Like it's just the natural progression. And it felt to me like there was almost no competition. Like I would just be really creative, and like immediately it was the top not safe for work post on Reddit. I'm like, well, I didn't even try that hard. And so it's really shocking to me that other women who are doing this sort of thing. Is that still a little bit of the case? That there's not as much like, because from my sort of outsider perspective, that seems to be still the case. Like there's not, like as you describe it, that's kind of cool. That's like almost like playing, like having fun with sexuality almost. Yeah. Yeah, but that does require kind of thinking through, it's almost like a creative project, like a photography project or something like that. Almost like a little skit movie. It's interesting. It's this vibe of like, how can you like bring like vibrant novelty to whatever you're doing, anything you're doing. And I really like doing this with surveys too. Like I've been doing a lot of standard surveys, but I'm also like experimenting with novel creative artistic surveys. I'm like, how do you ask a question in a way that's like beautiful and unusual? And like a thing that's completely groundbreaking. Like nobody's ever like- You always make everything so poetic and romantic is disgusting though. But yes, I think you have that engine in your head, I guess, of creativity. Like, yeah, the way you ask questions, which is not trivial to do, like for, it's actually very difficult to do, like good survey questions. And I mean, we're joking, but like, yeah, almost like poetic because you have to ask a question in a way that doesn't lead to the answer. Yes. Like you have to kind of inspire them to think and then indirectly get at the truth. It's an art form, honestly. Yeah, and also in a way where they don't misinterpret the question because it's amazing how any question you think, oh, this is the clearest question possible. No, you're wrong. It has to be even clearer. Right, willingly or unwillingly, because like you also have to defend against that question being criticized later when you publish about it, all of that. You have to think about it all. Yeah, I think this might be my greatest strength. So I'm not very good at statistics. I'm not like great at presenting data, but I think probably my greatest strength is in fact survey design and like question phrasing. Because I have tweeted so many thousands of polls and every single one I get people telling me like the way that they misinterpreted the poll. So it's like- You've become master. Gone through fire. And then again, I'm testing the phrasings all the time. Like what happens if you slightly shift phrasings? And so I'll do the same question test over time to see how it changes and the way the framing affects the results. So the good and the bad of the camming. So you said good, the, what was it? I forgot. Your freedom. The freedom. The freedom to also be creative. Yeah. And the bad is just that it was exhausting. The side that I was on, the way that it's structured is that you're ranking on the site and thus the amount of people that see you and thus the amount of money you earn is affected by the amount of money that you earn on average over the last 60 days. So if you're streaming and nobody's tipping you, this means that you're going to be dropping down in the rankings, which is gonna make it harder in the future. Okay, so the rich get richer on that site. Yeah, so it's very high pressure. Like if you're on, you need to be making money as fast as you can, if you wanna continue to make money. So that was really stressful. It was very mentally taxing. I would do it for a couple hours and just log off and be completely exhausted because you're just like on as hard as you can. And this is why I have a little PTSD around streaming. Like I've considered Twitch streaming and I try a little bit and I'm like, I haven't fully integrated the fact that you don't have to be like maximally entertaining every single second yet. You can actually just chill out and take it slow and nothing bad happens. Yeah, yeah, you can just enjoy silence. Yeah. Did you feel lonely doing it? I mean, even just streamers feel lonely. I moved into a house of cam girls. Did that make it better or worse? Better, they're great. I'm still friends with them to this day. Oh, so it was like a team, almost like we're in this kind of together? Yeah, so we would like work together and stream together and swap our clothes and stuff. It was great. Swap ideas too? Swap ideas, yeah. And actually on a small tangent, maybe a big tangent, what do you think, because it's a recent controversy of Andrew Tate and that he, I think in the past ran a camming business and he's being accused of sex trafficking. What do you think, like from your own experience, what do you understand about Andrew Tate? Is he a good person? Is he a bad person? Is there something shady about his practices or not? I wish I could answer, but I don't know. I haven't looked into it at all. I've heard people talking about it, I just haven't bothered to go into it. It is well-known that when I was doing it back in the day, the Eastern European models had something different going on though. It was like a trope about, there's the Eastern European models and then there's everybody else. That they're what, it's like darker or something like that? They do studios and they're lower quality. Which means what? Studios are, you go into a warehouse and then they have set up a little, things that replicate bedrooms, but they're just stalls. And then you give, you rent out or you pay the studio percentage of your income. And you can tell when something looks like a studio, it's like a type of background. That if you're watching enough, it kind of starts to, you notice the patterns. So like the standards are lower there and the ethical boundaries are a little looser. How people are treated. I never heard anything about the ethical side. I just knew that it was like lower quality. Like the girls seemed like they were less into it and like cared less. How does this all interplay with like sex trafficking? So consensual versus non-consensual. I would be shocked if there were never any non-consensual camming. I mean, I guess it's like, if it were going to happen, I wouldn't be surprised if it were in fact Eastern European models. Based on, this is outdated, this is, I'm just thinking of my stereotypes back when I cammed a lot. Sure, so some of that is stereotypes versus like collecting good data, right? Yeah, I haven't done data on cam girl. It's hard, I mean, it's hard, it's even hard to get that data, right? But obviously a really important problem. There's a method that I'm trying that I really like. I designed a survey type, which is like asking people who you know. Like, who do you know who's done this? And you tell me like, oh, do you know anybody who's a doctor? Do you know anybody who has had cancer or like smokes or? Personally, you mean? Yeah, personally, just do you know anybody? And then if you ask about a whole bunch of things, you can calibrate the responses. So like if your population, you know, 20% of them know doctors, and then you know the actual amount of doctors, then you can tell like how this is corresponding, like what is the visibility of doctors? So you can reconstruct the graph. Basically, yeah, and we can do this with sex trafficking. And of course people are gonna be like, well, sex trafficking is not visible. People, you don't know those. Like, well, then we can ask about other non-visible things that other people don't know that we do have data for. Like homelessness or being in jail, or like if you have been like sexually assaulted, a lot of people don't like talking about if they've been sexually assaulted. So you can do a whole bunch of things that are like similarly suppressed in knowledge in some way that we do actually have rates for, and then compare that to the graph when we ask people, do you know anybody who's in sex traffic? So again, this is not perfect. I'm not saying this is ideal. But like- But you can infer things. You can infer things about that graph. But I'm saying we don't have good ways of measuring sex trafficking right now. Anyway, I did a big deep dive into the research that we have on sex trafficking in the Western world. And the actual, like I read the studies and like reports about the studies, and it's really pitiful. We have terrible data. It's like, there's just like vague estimations made from one guy in a basement in the 80s. That's like the basis for like one big study that like a lot of people report on. And so I'm like, okay, so the method I'm proposing obviously is not perfect, but like the bar is so low at this point. Well, I wonder also if there's ways to design a survey that gets at the victims of sex trafficking also, which is they presumably have public access to the internet. And I wonder how many of them are distinctly aware that they're victims. Like it's asking the question when you're inside of a toxic relationship, are you inside of a toxic relationship? I mean, if the toxic relationship is truly toxic, sometimes your mind is fucked with, right? You don't even know what's true. So it's interesting if you can design surveys- For people who are actively sex trafficked? Yeah, who could break through that. So basically get data on how many people are getting sex trafficked directly. Oh yeah, like if you don't frame it, like if you don't say the word sex trafficking, you're like, are you just in a situation where you'd- And maybe through the survey, I mean, that's very meta, but through the survey, help them. You know, I did this, this is what started my relationship surveys. So I've done a series of relationship surveys, and that was because I knew somebody in a terrible relationship. And I was like, I bet if she took a survey where she answered questions about her relationship and at the end got a score that compared her to everybody else, she'd be like, oh wait, everybody else has much better relationships than I do. So that's why I started making the relationship surveys, was exactly for that reason. Yeah, that's really, really, really powerful to know that like you're not, you're not crazy for thinking this is a bad relationship. Right, or I think like the actual question is like, could you do better if you broke up? I think that the thing that keeps most people in their relationships is like, this is the best that I can do. Like, this is normal. And if it were normal, I would say that they are right. Like if you live in a culture where everybody is abusing their people in their relationships, then yeah, I mean, what are you gonna do? Break up and then just be alone for the rest of your life? Most people don't wanna do that. But now comparing yourself to the average is good to know. Know your options are. At least understand it because being normal is not always, like this conversation is not always great. Meaning this conversation is anything but normal. Okay, and that was a tangent on a tangent about a niche passion, which is really fascinating that you're playing with those kinds of ideas of survey design. But back to camming, so what were the cons? What were the negatives of camming? Oh, like the exhaustion of just like live, like the high pressure thing. That was probably the worst thing. So not, what about the interaction with different people? Like the dynamics of the interaction with the fans, I guess. I had a pretty great time. I mean, it obviously wasn't perfect because it's the internet, but I don't know. This is the thing that confuses me a lot because a lot of women that I know complain about being harassed by men quite a lot. They're like, you know, men are always, you know, grow up in a harass, you know, you have to be paranoid in the club. People are like, they're always huffing on you and you're just like, Jesus Christ, get away, man. And I do not have this experience. Or like, maybe I do, but I'm interpreting it differently. I don't know. The thing is, I don't know what causes me to have such a different experience from these women that are like really, feel really hostile towards men. And my guess is that there's some sort of like very subtle signaling that we're accidentally doing. We're like, no fault of our own. I'm not saying this is a virtue. I'm saying like, maybe it's just genetic or the fact that I'm falling. That women are doing? That the women are doing, yeah. Like that, and it might be just something that I'm completely accidentally through no intention, like happening to signal the thing that is causing men to not view me as like a desirable target or like a target at all. Well, what about the flip side? Maybe you're not sensitive to the creepy stare. Yeah, that also might be true. The dude who's like, as I'm dressing you with his eyes, that like in a creepy way, that you're just not, you don't like worry about it. Or you're not touched, like the fear of that, the anxiety of that, the unpleasantness of that just doesn't hit you. I think that's also at least part of it, maybe all of it. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's some evidence for it. I think often like guys will do a thing to me and I'm just like, that's a thing, cool. I don't have any negative response whatsoever. That's call back to the tire. It's a thing, this is nice. Yeah. That happened. It was good to know that can happen. Like I once had like a homeless guy, like asked me to come back to my place, baby. And I was like, this is fun. Yeah. Like, I'm like, do you want me to, I love asking men, like, are you trying to get me to have sex with you? Just like saying it out front. And they'll be like, well, they usually they stop for a minute, they're like, well, yeah, I mean, I would like to have sex. And they'll be like, thanks for asking, but I'm not interested in having sex with you. How do you have a good day? And then I walk away. And that's great, I don't know. I have no issues with that interaction. But like, maybe this is the kind of thing that other women would find to be really offensive. So you have that conversation and it doesn't turn into like a threatening feel. No. Like with a homeless guy. No, I've never had that happen though. But I think there's just something, I think I'm doing something like, again, this is kind of accidental. Like I'm just am like this always. And I think I just happen to be like this at people and they don't expect it. Like they don't expect me to be like really nice while explicitly asking them what their intentions are. Like directly putting my finger on the thing that like, oh, you're trying to have sex with me. And then also not judging them for it. Yeah. I think this like throws people off a little bit so they don't get aggressive. They're like, oh, you're autistic or something. Even the cloak of anonymity on the internet, you weren't getting. Yeah, I just think I'm just not reactive and or maybe I'm giving off, I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Maybe it's both, maybe it's a feedback loop. So I just, I had a pretty good experience. I know not everybody did. Definitely people reported having antagonistic experiences. But when I was scamming, I generally really liked. People were really nice to me, had a great time, made friends. So you also did OnlyFans, as you mentioned. And I read on a website, so this is very investigative reporting, that on some months you've made over $100,000 on OnlyFans. How did that feel? Great, really great. I mean like, well, actually, because so much of your upbringing, you didn't have money. You had to struggle with the fact of your job and so on. Maybe a good person to ask can money buy happiness? Well, I mean, I think you get like a resting set point of happiness regardless of how much money you have. But money can buy being less stressed, I would say. Is there a lot of variation in the basic rest happiness for humans in general? Like is that a good thing to think about? I mean, they've done some studies, but again, I'm not sure, I haven't actually read the studies, so maybe they didn't replicate, where like they measured people before and after winning a bunch of money to see if their happiness was higher. I think like by some measures it was, and by some it wasn't. No, I mean like basically almost genetically, so nature and nurture, but is there, let's say after you're 18, is there like some stable level of happiness that all the environmental genetic factors combine to create so that everything that life throws at you has to face that happiness? Like you mentioned earlier that I seem to be happy with a lot of stuff. So maybe I have a certain level. Do other people have a lower level? Some people have higher level. Yeah, definitely. Like is that a useful model of human beings or is it all ups and downs? Like is it all, like there's no stable. Well, I mean, it's like combo, right? Like I don't know, some people just are happier than others in general and other people aren't, but then you also have ups and downs. Like I'm sure you've experienced sadness sometimes and happiness the other times. Like if I actually were to integrate, so have an integral under the, the area under the curve, I don't know if I'm different than other people. Maybe I'm just like really focused on the happy moments and maybe feel the down moments most intensely. And maybe that like on average, it's all the same. Is that possible? I mean, maybe. I just, I don't know. Like I remember when I was a kid, my mom would call me Pollyanna all the time. It's always like finding the good in everything. I'd be like something bad would happen. So you were a happy kid. I was a really happy kid, yeah. Even in the harsh conditions. Yeah, I mean, like I said, like I think the harshness comes from the bad meaning. Like, and I had good meaning applied to it. You were stoic. I was, yeah. With another book I'm reading next week, tune in. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. All right. Camming, 100K, so it felt good. So it's crazy though, right? You can just like take clothes off in a creative way with some gnomes and make a hundred thousand. Yeah, I mean, there was a lot more to it than that, but yeah. What was it? What's the different process? I mean, it's marketing. So with only, with my free cams, I was unusual in that I decided to do outside of the website marketing. I would like post on Reddit, right? This was very unusual at the time, but like OnlyFans is structured such that they have almost no internal discovery whatsoever. So if you want people to come to your page, you have to go out onto external websites and advertise for yourself directly. Very different model. And so this is something that I had already been doing and already had practiced in, and so I think I was like already quite advanced. Like I already had an account on Reddit that was like seven years old at the time. Tons of like karma that means I could post in subreddits. I'd already been on Twitter for years, you know, like posting actively. So I already had like presences on all these other platforms that really helped with the conversion. Reddit and Twitter? Reddit, Twitter, FetLife, Instagram, TikTok. And you were still advertising creatively? So like there's like sexuality, but there's also like creative sexuality and ideas too. Yeah, like one of the really popular ones was I like molested myself as a mime using a one arm through a jacket. And so the jacket looked like it was, the jacket looked like it was alive. And you know, and that one did really well. Did you like brainstorm with somebody? And like I recently got to hang out with Mr. Beast and sit on a session of brainstorming different ideas. I just envision you with like a team brainstorming. All right, how about we try the mime and the molesting thing? I don't know, it's too edgy. I wish, I think the team would have been a lot more fun. But no, it's just me. Like I had an apartment that looked like, kind of like this, you know, you just sit alone and you're like, well, that would be a good idea. And I'd seen, you just collect ideas over time, right? Like I'd seen somebody doing a version of like this animated hand act, like when I was a kid. And I just always stuck in my head. And like one day I was like, I bet I could do that. And then when I was trying to think of ideas to do as a sex worker, I was like, why don't I just try that? And then it turned out to be like a really, like quite a viral hit. Is there stuff like you mentioned too edgy? Like Mr. Beast tries to keep it PG. Yeah. Do you try to keep it PG-13? Well, with the sex advertising stuff, I mean, it's sex advertising, so it's obviously not PG-13. I don't know these ratings. What does even beyond that are? It's not family-friendly. It is X. Like the one that I'm describing to you at some point, like you can see my boob. And is a boob is X? A boob is, I guess. I thought R. I think you could show a boob in PG-13. Yeah, maybe X is like if you got some sort of rhythmic motion going on. Maybe that sound, but the rhythmic motion not. You can have one or the other, but you can't have both. You have both. That's when we hit the X. Yeah. Okay. So definitely not family. I mean, with the sex advertising stuff, like guys like vanilla shit. Guys want basic hot girl. You can do something like kind of sexy and creative, like getting objected by gnomes or like the self molestation, right? But those are still pretty within the normal boundaries. What do you mean guys like vanilla stuff? I mean, most guys like vanilla stuff. What's vanilla stuff? Like hot girl being hard. See, we'll talk about fetish. Fetishes. I think my Overton window on what is vanilla is expanding quickly after following your work. But yeah, what is it? I actually have done a lot of studies on what is vanilla. Like I've done a couple of different surveys where I ask people like how taboo is this thing? And I have like a rating from least to most taboo. By the way, I don't like, I don't appreciate the beauty of vanilla ice cream. You don't? It is really good though. You eat vanilla ice cream? I eat vanilla ice cream, yeah. I think there's just so many more options. It's like the absence of creativity. I mean, if you put it in like some chocolate chips or something. Yeah, they already made it more interesting. It's a start. Okay, so what's vanilla? And why do guys like vanilla? So hot girl doing hot girl things? What, like on dressing and then having sex? The thing that I found was most successful were frames where the man was framed as passive and the woman is active. Or like, for example, like, oh, you know, we got assigned to the same bunk at the breeding school or something. Or like, oh, we're the last people on earth, right? Or like, oh no, you know, I like, I desperately need somebody to like cure me with this disease and I need semen. So it's like in any scenario where the guy just like finds himself such that the woman like desperately needs him for some reason and he doesn't have to do much. That is like typically one of the much more successful things that guys like women falling into their lap. What about the power dynamic? So guys are less into power dynamics than women are. And you can do power dynamics as long as it's like handed to them. Some guys, obviously, some guys are like very dominant and like prefer like having to work, but this is the minority. Like if you're trying to do make 100K a month and you're trying to appeal to the widest group of people, the most effective advertising, you're not gonna be making the most money by being like particularly submissive. So on the camming side, that's your, unlike like escorting or just personal relationships, you're trying to, you have an audience. You have like a theater full of people. Like with live camming? Yeah, with live camming. Yeah, it's like a live theater. Does that freak you out? There's just a bunch of people watching? How do you feel right now? I don't know they're watching because it's not live. Yeah, that's true, it's not live. So like it might as well be, like they could be watching. I feel like there's just the two of us. I don't know. And there's like, sometimes I imagine there's a third person. Like God? Usually, no, no, not God. Just, I usually imagine either a guy or a girl or a couple just sitting there for some reason, like usually on the beach and usually high or on some kind of like on mushrooms, just like listening passively, just kind of looking at the sunset. That's what I imagine. Oh, that's really good. Yeah. I think that's useful. I do write my blog posts. Sometimes I do terribly, but it's the most effective when I imagine one person that I'm writing to, to try to explain. And like having a high couple watching the sunset is maybe really lovely as a calibration. I have to say, it is pretty romantic because I've gotten a chance to meet couples that listen to podcasts together. I don't know why, that seems like intensely romantic to me because like, because you're not watching TV together. You're listening to a thing. I mean, I guess sometimes they watch it, but like you're listening to ideas together. I don't know. It seems- It's like you're going through the same kind of thought process at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really beautiful way to put it. So it's like you're melding, your thinking is following the same line. Some of our podcasts do that more than movies. I think movies give you a lot more freedom to think about stuff. I feel like your thoughts are aligned. And like, especially if the podcast is good, like if it's listening to like a Dan Carlin podcast about history, that you're like on a journey together. There's an intimacy to that anyway. But I've learned that those couples do that, hashtag relationship goals. Go ahead. That's what you want with your future wife? With my, yeah. You should make an application. Application? An application for dating you. I mean, maybe this is more of like my strategy and less yours, but you have like a wide enough audience that might work. I, it's not, okay, let's just go there. So, cause you've put together an application of like people to have casual sex with you, I think. You've had that. And also dating, yeah. And also dating and relationship. I'd love to, so what is in that application? Cause like, you know, I'm sure there's quite a lot of people that would like to date you or to sleep with you, but finding the person, I mean, it depends what your goals are. I guess relationship would be an open relationship for you. Yes. Right. Like for me, I guess it's more intensely selective because it's like a monogamous relationship and a committed one. Like, I'm swinging for the, Yeah. Like for like long-term. I'm not like weirdly obsessed with long-term, but it's like, you just, I would love to have one girl for the rest of my life. But finding that, I feel like applications will not get to that. I feel like there's some aspect of the magic of the serendipity of it, of meeting people in strange places and so on. I just, I personally have noticed that like fame has not made that process easier. But I mean, like if you could, you know, if there's two rooms and one of them, it's like a random population of hot women and the other one is a random population of hot women, but all of them definitely are monogamous and are looking for a long-term committed relationship. Yeah. Which one would you rather go into? Like if you're looking for a mate. Yeah, well, but see, I guess my preferences are more, that's a really strong point, but my preferences represent the majority probably, right? Because don't most women want monogamous relationships? Yeah. So like, I'm okay with either option. Because like statistically speaking. But I feel like we can apply it to like a bunch of other things. Yeah, and this is just a problem if you have a high volume to filter through and you like, you don't know. Like it's a good like initial filter. Like you can take it from like a thousand people to 20 people and then go on dates with them. But the filter is so anti-romantic. Like what? This is true. This is not the romantic narrative that you're very prone to. Like if I feel like, how did you two meet? Well, she passed the three filters I set up. And I mean, but it's also, but also can you put into a survey the things that you're interested in? I mean, I definitely think about this a lot with hiring, like teams, engineers and so on. But with engineers, you're okay losing truly special engineers because you have to filter because there's like thousands of applications. Like it feels like, it feels like I worry that you would miss the thing that actually, because so much of it is chemistry. So much of it is like the magic. But the thing is you're missing it anyway. Yeah, you're missing it. Oh, you can just run it. And then in addition, try some of those people. And then go on the dates that you were going to go on with anyway, regardless. It's just the thing that helps like pull someone out of the crowd. Like this, I dated a guy from my survey. I'd ran the survey. I assigned point values to each of the questions. I went on a date with like the top couple people. And then one of them, I was like, and I'm still dating him to this day. And it was awesome. And I would never, I never would have gone on a date with him without the survey. Can you, if from memory, or we can look it up, do you remember what kind of questions were on the survey? I asked a couple of different categories. I asked about like basic life stuff. So like what kind of relationships, like monogamy versus polyamory? Like, do you want kids? You know, like where you want to live? Like basic things that you need to be compatible. And then I asked like sexual compatibility, like various preferences. And then I had a section about like personality. Like what are, I try to ask questions that would do the most effective filtering. So like what are ways that like, I can't give people what they need, that like maybe they really want. Like, I don't really, I'm not very outdoorsy. It was just very common. A lot of people like being outdoorsy. So I asked the question, like how much do you value someone else that you're dating being outdoorsy? And if they marked yes, I was like, okay, we probably, I should probably downgrade the results. Man, but doesn't polyamory make that really difficult? Because can't they find somebody for the outdoorsy stuff? Yeah, they could. I mean, this doesn't, like, but if you're going to have somebody, it's like nicer to have them be more compatible than less. But you're a little bit, like in terms of sexual compatibility, you're able to like yourself aware enough to know what preferences you have. Like you can. I think so. I think that one helped a lot with the escorting. Like the escorting helped a lot with knowing my preferences. But there's like, out of the giant pool of different preferences, you have like a subset that's clearly defined for you. Okay. Like, like dominant submissive. Yeah, power dynamic stuff. Power dynamic stuff. Yeah. Okay. And then not just sexual, but in relationship too. Like that was that in the survey? I don't like power dynamics in relationships. I didn't ask about- No, defining them in, like making it clear in a survey, like asking a question about power dynamics in a relationship. I don't think I asked about power dynamics in relationships. Okay. Because I just assume most people don't. And there's a lot of things that are kind of like- Most people don't. You're putting together a survey, a systematic survey to understand compatibility. Wouldn't power dynamics inside of relationships that naturally emerge often be part of the question? Or is that hard to question because it naturally emerges? Well, the thing is like a lot of questions sort of overlap in demographic. And if you're making a survey, you want to have the minimum possible questions that give the maximum possible like filtering information. Yes, yes, yes. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But that purpose of that survey wasn't to do a good research study. It was to select one subject that you could take. So that's part of what is good. Like you want to most efficiently filter out. Because one, you get more people taking the survey the fewer questions you have, which is good for finding a mate. Like if you have 5,000 men take the surveys, better than 1,000 men take the survey. Don't you want men that would be patient enough and dedicated enough to- Yeah, but what if you want like a high powered man who's like on his lunch break, right? So it's like- Like a billionaire who's too busy just flipping through. Yeah. And the guy that I dated, he took the survey, he was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven. And so it was important that it was short. And so you want to be efficient. Is it metaphor or literally pizza coming out of the oven? Literally waiting for pizza. And he saw the thing, he's like, I guess I'll just fill out the survey really fast and changed our lives. So romantic. I, for me, this is my kind of romance. I'm really into it. But you can be efficient with surveys by like making sure your questions don't overlap. So for example, if somebody is very polyamorous, they're very unlikely to be interested in like a traditional like man works and like, and the job and the woman stays home and raises the kids kind of relationship. Because poly people just generally don't do that. And so if I'm asking about polyamory, it's sort of kind of already covers the thing. And so if I have a whole bunch of questions, like I can kind of like triangulate a bunch of implicit kinds of questions that I haven't directly asked about. So this is why I didn't ask directly about power dynamics because like from the rest of the questions that are in my survey, like I can pretty accurately predict whether or not you're gonna be interested in power dynamics. But I'm afraid, yeah, like I'm trying to think as you're talking, I get it. That's really interesting that you did that. Also, maybe not for the effectiveness of finding a partner, but for just exploring the actual, the process of human sexuality, of like the search, this complicated optimization process we're all engaging in on the landscape of happiness. That seems to be this, not even a differentiable function. It's a giant nonlinear mess. Okay, but like for me, I don't think I would be able to design that survey. I would like bias it too strongly. Like I would probably prefer women that have read Dostoevsky or something like that. Like that would be a filter for me, right? But like that's a horrible filter because there's a lot of amazing people that have never, they don't give a shit about reading or they don't give a shit about reading Russian literature or they don't give a shit about, but they're amazing and passionate and creative and all in some other dimension that you might completely miss. But you were like, because I wonder if there's any, basically you're saying compatibility, like hard lines that you know statistically is just going to be an issue. Yeah, I mean, you weight this a lot more. Yeah. But there's also like preferences. Like if you have a woman who's totally equal and she's read the thing that you like versus another woman who's also identical, but like she hasn't read the thing that you like, like you probably like very slightly prefer the one that has. But you don't know if they're identical, yes, yes. But like you can't through survey get the identical. Like you don't know. Sure, but you can kind of like do a whole bunch of weight. So like the person that like I ended up going on a date with, he did not answer like correctly to a lot of the survey questions, but he didn't have to. Like he was just overall, overall the weights were like, he just tended to be more in the direction. Was there a text-based fill in like survey? But like, sorry, paragraph, like. No, you ought to avoid that if you're dealing with like large amounts of data. No, why not? Because you have to fill, oh, oh, interesting. Interesting. Like I'm different. Because like, first of all, you do keyword searches. No, okay, that's fair. Second of all, you do, you can do machine learning models that like, first of all, you can do like crude metrics, like the length. That's a good point. Of how long they've written, right? And it could flag certain things. Yeah, it's actually pretty easy to, I've looked at like for hiring, I've looked at like thousands of applications really quickly. You can really, the human brain is really interesting, especially like if you visually highlight certain information for yourself, like keywords or again, with machine learning models like sentiment, you can highlight different parts that will catch your eye better than not. And I can go through just a huge number of applications. Are you telling me I can use, if I learn machine learning, I can process dating survey applications better? Yes. No, like textual. Yeah, like I can like have them write things in. Like this is like a new way of, that's a really good incentive. I think that would, so it's a really nice aspect of text input, like long form text input, multiple long form text input based on an interestingly phrased question is you get to learn how to make a better survey. I think you would appreciate that. Like you start to see how they're actually interacting with these questions. Like I asked certain questions, like just to see how people think, is it better to work smart or better to work hard? Or is it ever okay to betray a close friend? Like I'll ask like questions like this that don't really have a right answer, but I just wanna see how they think. Or is truth more important than loyalty? Yeah. And I get their long form answer. You get like, and you get to see the reasoning process. Yeah, yeah. Like what they, it reveals so much, not just about the person, but about the kind of questions I should be asking that have nothing to do with truth or loyalty, but like how to get a good engineer with like very specific questions. But I think it's really useful to get text input. I have done text input usually with beta surveys. So I usually do beta surveys before I do the real survey. What's a beta survey? Like I do like a shorter version or it depends on what I'm doing, but like a different version of the survey that I have people take before I release. I use their information from the initial survey to inform the questions that I ask in the real survey. And I haven't actually in recently, but I used to do a lot of like the text-based questions to see if they're similar. Although I don't think I relied on it quite as heavily. And if I introduced machine learning, I think it would be a lot more efficient. I love that you're also doing like, you're writing scripts and stuff. Like you're doing some like statistical analysis. Are you using Python also? Yeah, I had to learn Python for this just a couple months ago. Which is the best way to learn Python. And the best reason to learn machine learning is to solve actual like problems. Yeah, I can't be motivated. I'm just not motivated to learn something unless there's an actual curiosity I have and I have to learn it and to solve it. I was trying to avoid learning coding for so long, but eventually it was my data set became too large. I couldn't work with it with anything else. So, oh, Python it is. You know what's also an interesting data set that you're probably interested in a little bit is like Twitter itself, right? I don't know if you've, I've played with the Twitter API a lot. Can you just get the download? I'm just, I'm stuttering now because- Download the Twitter? You can download Twitter? No, there's a lot of Twitter. So Twitter is a social network with a bunch of people that are interacting a lot. Like there's like, I don't know, the number is insane, the number of interactions, but there's different ways to interact to get data from Twitter. There's streams you can look at. It depends what you're interested in. You can do results for searches. You can look at individual tweets and get entire, which to me is super interesting, the entire tree of different conversations, the replies, which might be very interesting for you because like it's not, it's much harder to ask rigorous questions, which you do with your polls, but you can see like how divisive certain things are. You can look at sentiment. Like calibrators to figure out like exactly what questions you should be asking. Yeah, and also highlight interesting anecdotal things when like two people freak out at each other and just argue like a thread that goes on for like a thousand messages that you might never be even aware is happening because you're like, because Twitter doesn't like surface that, like it would be, Twitter doesn't make it easy for you to like visualize what the hell's going on even with your own social network. Like if you post something that's controversial that gets a large amount of attention, you can't clearly visualize everything that's going on. Like it's very, it's a blurry, amorphous, like you're just kind of looking through the fog at different replies and it kind of, yeah. So to be able to- They have like graphs of networks? They have the data for the graphs, yeah. So you can reconstruct it yourself, yeah. And then you have different levels of access in terms of how many queries you can do. That is really cool. And now, because there's like Elon, there's a lot of sort of revolutionary stuff happening at Twitter, I think you could literally sort of push for innovation there like there's aggressive innovation happening. So in terms of requesting stuff for the API, you could do all that kind of stuff. I think Twitter is just a fascinating platform for the, as cliche as it sounds, for studying. For me, it's interesting what makes for a healthy conversation. That term has been used, but it's interesting how conversation, to me, it's fascinating how conversations break down and not, like how, like the virality of drama or conflict or disagreement, how that evolves when a large number of people are involved, when a large number of misinterpretation of statements is involved in text-based with some anonymity thrown in. Like I feel like there's a lot of study that can be done there. I mean, Twitter's probably not great at it, right, as it stands. No. Because it's like necessarily short, you can quote, treat things out of context, et cetera. But we should understand that, right? Yeah. At a large scale, you should be able to study that kind of thing. Oh yeah, what was your casual sex survey? I actually haven't looked at it in a while. I think I just asked people about a whole bunch of fetishes, because you don't want to be obvious about yours, because then people are going to hijack it to try to tell you that they like what you like. So you want to be obscure. So how do you design a survey where you're testing for a thing, but you're still obscure about the thing you're trying to ask about? So you still see it as a survey? Yeah. Like an application? Because I think you tweeted saying, like, I'm thinking of just like showing up to San Francisco and saying, is anybody open for casual sex? Yeah. Something like this? Yeah, something like this. Maybe escorting? I'm not sure. Oh, for escorting, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Which is similar. Like, I kind of use escorting as the way to have casual sex now. Okay, so let's talk about escorting. So you wrote about escorting in your blog post, escorting was good for me. How did you get into escorting? I was working at like a, I quit camming, because I was burned out, and I was like trying to work at a friend's startup, and it was hard for me. I don't, it's difficult for me to work on projects that are not my projects. And so I was like, hey, fuck it, like I wanna go back to sex work, I wanna make more money, but I don't wanna cam anymore, because I'm burned out. So I'm like, well, let's try, I have a friend who's an escort, I'm like, let's try that. And so we had a call, she like outlined the basics for me, and then I put up some ads, and then started working. What's the basics of escorting? How does that work? The basic, if you wanna get started escorting, so just in case you have a career change. I would like to. Or you're gonna want to get some nice photos, so you probably have those. First of all, you assumed I haven't done it before. How rude. Oh, have you? Yeah, well, you know, recreation I would like to do professionally, I suppose. So if I wanted to do it, if I wanted to do it, if I really, really wanna step up my game, how would I do it? Yeah, well, you got the whole tutorial. Recreational escorting is just, okay, okay. No, I'm meaning like, like, you know, like selling products on Etsy versus doing a startup, yeah. Well, I mean, escorting is kind of all just selling products on Etsy. No, like selling a lot of products on Etsy. Like high volume. You've like dabbled. Yeah, like, yeah, yeah. Small handcrafted artisan. It's small handcrafted dolls, yeah. Escorting. Versus mass manufacturer. Yeah. Okay, if you want a mass manufacturer, you're escorting. I just feel like I haven't been getting, you know, I've been undervaluing my services and I would like to really step up. I think you could really just like grease some marketing gears and be true to your goal. Yeah, I mean, so some of this is marketing. So like how, I guess I wanna like know, is it similar to camming in that way? Like, is it, you're basically advertising yourself and you're, like the marketing, all the creativity that you mentioned before, all of that? Yeah, I found escorting to be pretty easy because escorting is not like highly competitive. For example, camming is highly competitive because like the thing that I outlined before, you know, the amount of money that you make determines your ranking. And you can also go and see other girls. You can see what they're doing. So if a girl figures out an incredible strategy for making money, it's like two seconds before that strategy proliferates into everybody else. So it's very fast paced and like really tough. With escorting, you don't get to see what other girls are doing. You can look at their websites, but like you don't know what they're doing with clients at all. You can look at their rates, but you don't know what their volume is. So you don't actually know what is successful and what isn't very much. So I think there's much less like evolution of marketing through this process. And so I came in with like my aggressive marketing skills for being a cam girl. I think that really helped. I did very well as an escort. I just came in and like made a fantastic website and I knew how to do the ads right. And- What was the finding people? I guess it's also like finding the right kind of customer. The right kind of client. I got like in a lot of trouble for this recently in the sex worker sphere, because I said that if you raise prices, you're more likely to encounter clients that aren't going to abuse you. Like it's safer. Yeah. They did not, they said that I was being classist, you know, implying that poor people are more violent. But to be fair, if you're a guy and you wanna be violent towards a woman, you're probably not gonna be paying her a lot of money. You're probably gonna be like, you're the kind of person likely who's going to haggle a lot because you don't respect her. But anyway, that aside, it's a little pet peeve for me. Yeah, I just, I tried to start charging 800 an hour and then pretty rapidly raised it to 1200. And then a while after that, raise it to 1400. Well, the interesting thing you mentioned in my extensive research, you used to do 1200 to 1400 an hour. And then you said that you're thinking of jumping back in at a rate of 2400 the first hour. Yeah. And I think 900 each successive hour. That's interesting. That's like, I mean, to me, that's really interesting. Like why? It's like a lot in the first hour. Yeah. Oh, it's just because it depends on how you wanna incentivize like the amount of hours. So if you have to pay a lot for the first hour, but not very much for the successive, you're more likely to buy like a longer period of time. And usually I find that clients who buy a longer period of time are nicer to you. I don't have a great theory for why that is, but they're more likely to like take you to dinner and get to know you first. And I just enjoy that a lot more. I enjoy like knowing who I'm gonna have sex with. Like a date, you know? Yeah, so it incentivize the long form date dynamic versus like not. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. How does money change the dynamic? Just basic human dynamic of interacting for free versus for money. Like I think about that a lot. It's like just talking to rich people. It's like you usually get paid for your time and you're doing this for free. Like what's the difference? Is there a difference really or no? A bit, yeah. So I've actually, it depends a lot. So when I was doing it full time, it was my only source of income. It changed quite a lot because I was really incentivized to have repeat customers. So I'm like, okay, my primary interaction with you is to like have you hire me again. I'll do whatever that takes to make that happen. And so if I have to like laugh at jokes that I don't find funny or like be like more adoring of your penis than I actually genuinely feel, like that's what I'm going to express. And obviously it's to some degree like titrated. It's unpleasant to force yourself to like something that you don't. So like I would actually like not see clients again that I didn't want to. But to some degree, there was a sort of self-suppression going on, which I think is the way it works in any sort of customer service job. Like you want the customer to leave happy. So you just make sure that you are happy the whole time and you're like, ah, really enjoying the other person. But so recently when I've like kind of dabbled in it since baking money through other means, where I don't need the money, it's more like a fun side thing that like, like I said, it's fulfilling the role of casual sex for me. So like, I don't have to do it. This is not my primary job. I just want sort of a good excuse to like have sex with somebody. And the money is like a great filter for that. And so in that case- That's interesting. So the money is, yeah, okay. The money is basically a filter for somebody who's taking this interaction seriously. Yeah. It also, so there's an interesting like psychological thing where I have difficulty having casual sex with somebody because some part of my brain, which I assume is like quite female, is doing some evaluation of status and whether or not this is going to damage my reputation by having sex with them. So like if you found out that I went and like had random sex with like a homeless man, you might be like, wow, that says something about Ayla. Like maybe she's, you know, trashy or she just has no standards for who she's gonna fuck. But if, and so some part of me is continually anxious. I'm like, does this mean I have no standards if I decide to have casual sex with you? Like, what are people going to think? And so if you introduce money, it takes away that anxiety. I don't have to worry about it because it's like, oh, of course Ayla would have sex with that person. They paid her. Like, this is not an indication of the kind of mate that she can get. This is just an indication of like a business transaction. And this allows me to enjoy casual sex so much more when somebody pays me for it, to the degree that like I almost view it as a kink. And so it's like, so I'm using it sort of to replace casual sex now. Like occasionally I'm like, gosh, you know, like it's paying me a little bit to erase the anxiety and I'll like have a fun time. In case you see like dinner like that or something like that, if the person pays for dinner or like, so like it's all just, if any money's involved, if it's a kink, then you could just like use it. And you, buys a coffee at a Starbucks. It's like, all right. Right, but it has to be plausible. Like you have to like trick my brain into like having it actually be incentivizing for me. Two coffees? Like a cappuccino or something? Yeah, like the homeless man bought me a coffee and then I sucked his dick. Like, that's not cool. All right, so I- No shade to homeless men, by the way. Like I've been friends with a lot of them. I'm just using like some sort of stereotype of- Yeah. Right now. So like it has to be plausible where you could trick your mind. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And so that's different. So now, now within this sort of frame, I am still like, I'm accepting money, but still much more expressive of my actual preferences. So like I, before when I would start escorting full time, I was suppressive. And now I'm like, you know, fuck, like I'm doing this for me. So we're going to make sure that I have a good time. And so I'm much more demanding. And then you're having more fun because you're not pretending. Exactly. Like laughing at a joke or something like that. That sounds terrible. Sounds like- I mean, it's- But it's also like social. I mean, I guess I would, would I do that? Like when you first meet people like strangers and so on, there's some aspect of like niceties, but like, I don't know, intimacy, like real intimacy requires like getting past the niceties. Like laughing at somebody's joke when it's not funny feels like anti-intimacy. Yeah, but I laugh at so many jokes automatically. It's interesting because like, I don't mean to, I'm not trying to be fake, but like if I'm in a group of people and somebody makes a joke and everybody laughs, I laugh even before I'm checking within myself, like do I genuinely enjoy this joke? So it's like, I don't know, like the degree that I am sort of just like a result of social programming in all cases, that like when I'm with a client back when I was doing it full time, like it doesn't feel significantly different. It just felt like a different version of myself. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, to that degree. To the degree you don't feel like you're going against Yeah. your nature, yeah. Yeah, it was very rare that I actually felt like I was going against my nature. What about the market of how much to charge? So you, 2,400, like how transparent is that market? Is there like a market? Like how much can you sell when you're charging that much? Yeah, no, like what are the competitors? Like if this, Oh yeah. Like what do you, are you distinctly, because you said it's a lot of it is a bit more shrouded in mystery, like it's a more confidential. Like do you have some transparency to the market, what the competitors are? I did a survey of Escort, it's only like 130. I'm trying to remember, and the median was around like 400, $300, I think an hour. Oh wow. Something like that with a very long tail at the top end. I'm trying to remember what the, I also asked the amount where I could calculate the amount they made per month. I think it was like six or $7,000 a month. I need to double check that one, but. I charged 50 bucks an hour. You charge 50 bucks an hour, you should raise your rates. Yeah, I believe I gave a really shitty hand job. All right. But usually the rates are around, like if you want a median Escort in a big city, it's usually four to $600. A city, so the, sorry, four to 600? In a big city, but like smaller cities, you charge, the rates go lower. So that's so fascinating. What's like the most you've ever seen somebody charge? I think I am. You're like the. But at this point it's because I'm post work. Like I can just put in a state number. Does like, does the fact that you're sort of like a sexuality expert, like a researcher and so on, like your mind is fascinating as well, and you're a bit of a celebrity, does that play into it? Yeah. Or do you feel the celebrity now? Like when you're with people? Yeah, absolutely. Usually if people are interested in hanging out with me, it's because of that. But that's different. Like I think besides the fun part, like this is a kink as opposed to this is a job, like with this as a job, usually the high end is closer to 2000 an hour, like the very high end. Have clients ever fallen in love with you? I think so, yeah. I think it happens to be much less than most other people due to like the thing I think we were talking about before. Which is what? Where like, you know, you give off vibes, maybe like subconscious vibes. But they have fallen in love, but not as often? I think I, something about my signaling indicates that people should not fall in love with me because I don't think it happens very much. And it happens a lot with other women that I know. But I have occasionally had, the thing is it's hard for me because I try to be as vulnerable as I can in a connection with a client. And like I do really like some of them. I still remember some of them very fondly, and I'm like, I hope they're doing well. And some of them are really profound. Like one guy saw me because he found out he was dying of cancer. And he was like, I don't wanna die without seeing someone. I'm like, Jesus Christ, that's such a, I don't know, I'm very touched by many of the people that I saw. So there's like deep intimacy there. Yeah, I know that it's brief, and I know that it's like kind of weird, but like there's like a real glimpse into somebody's soul when you get to be intimate. And I think this is especially true for men because a lot of time men don't have like a way to be really vulnerable in front of anybody. But like if you're in bed with a woman that you find to be attractive, you can sort of let loose a little bit more. So they can become vulnerable in general quickly? Yeah, and I really like that. I like being as vulnerable as I can to match it. Like I'm not forcing myself or anything, but like I just feel into it and like notice how beautiful the person was and like feel grateful for being able to be in this intimate experience with them. And that was so wonderful. Does it ever hurt to say goodbye? No, but I think that's unique to me because I like being alone a lot. Even with my friends who I like dearly, I'm like happy not seeing them because I don't like making facial expressions very much. But I do miss some of my clients. Wait, sorry. What does making facial expression have to do with saying goodbye? Well, if you are not with somebody in person, you don't have to make facial expressions anymore. Oh, you can just think about them. Yeah, you can just sit there totally blank face and then have all of the emotions that you want. Oh, you're telling me. Do you have this thing too? It's not a thing, but like you're on camera. Yeah. So like I feel feelings, but people usually want you like social interaction is such that like you probably want me to show feelings on my face. Yeah, like that, good job. Yeah, there you go. So like I definitely, there could be just an introvert thing where you like have a vibrant inner world that you forget to show to the rest of the world. And also I'm scared of social interaction. And I just have a lot of anxiety about interacting with the external world. So yeah. I'm kind of surprised to hear that because when you talked about like finding the light and everything and everything is fun, like I usually don't associate that with having not very much anxiety. Well, because I have the, we mentioned that earlier. I just, I appreciate the beauty in the world when I observe it. But then when I'm interacting with others, I have a very harsh self-critical aspect to my brain that says like, you're gonna fuck this up. You're gonna fuck up this interaction. You're gonna fuck up the beauty that's there. If I'm sort of being fragile and vulnerable for a moment. One of the things I'm afraid of, I get so much love from people that listen, or even like reach out, like you said through the survey, like women and so on. I'm afraid that, yeah, you know, you admire me because you don't know me, but you won't admire me once you know me. So that's self-critical. But it's a silly, I mean, as you get older, you're like, yeah, okay. Like I'm able to step away and objectively look at myself as like, there's no, this is, you're fine, you're good. It's like, but it's still there. This is the part of the brain that you can't just shut off. Does it, like what would fucking up in this conversation look like? Like, it doesn't have to be rational, but I'm curious if there's like a specific thing. A lot of it is just a feeling, like an amorphous fear of failure. What it would actually look like. Maybe because we're talking about sexuality, me not being able to eloquently explain the worldview I have and why I appreciate it, that would make me feel like a failure because that would make me feel like maybe you don't know what you're doing, right? Because sexuality, not sexuality, but even romantic relationships are really important to happiness, they're really important to me. And I'm not sure like the conception of love I have, romantic love, is like fully made rigorous. So especially when I'm talking to you, that thinks very rigorously about a lot of these topics, I'm not sure if I've thought about them a lot. I feel them. I interact with the world in the space of feelings. Maybe I'm almost afraid to be very rigorous with these kinds of thoughts. And so I think the failure would be like, I would be confronted with the fact that I can't explain what makes me happy, that could be a failure. And there could be just a bunch of other failures. Another big failure is like, I think you're a really brilliant person. And a lot of folks I know know and admire your work as well. And so like for me not to be part of highlighting that brilliance would be a failure, definitely. Like because then other people might feel like, like notice the discrepancy or something. Yeah, but no, no, no, that's not other people, just my personal feeling. And the other is like jokes, because like we're talking about sex, right? So for me, like it's fun to just joke around, but you also have to tread carefully because like it's a weird surface because like, you know, even I already feel bad about making a joke for 50 bucks for a handjob that's crappy by me, but I think, I think sometimes you just gotta go for it. I went for it, it kind of fell flat on its face, but that's the thing of the conversation. I think there's like this fear where it's like, if you become like scientific about something, you'll figure out that your feelings are unjustified and then you'll experience this horrible thing where like, ah shit, like I'm like afraid of this, but I'm sort of being forced to by my logical mind to like believe this thing. Which I don't think, I don't think this is true at all. I think like your feelings are there for a reason, like they're for a good reason. And like logic or like rigorous analysis or something should be dedicated to figuring out why it's there. Not that, not to like suppress it or tell it it shouldn't be there, you know? What do you think is more important to like, to just life, to reason versus emotion? Like not life, to what makes us human, I guess. My romantic narrative answer to this, which is like not rigorous at all is curiosity. Curiosity. Yeah. What is curiosity? That's such a middle ground. Curiosity is like both emotion and reason, right? So it's like this pull, because reason is the tool you use to figure out the puzzle. And then curiosity is the pull towards the puzzle. Yeah, I don't like the world views that pit like emotion and rationality is opposite each other. They feel like beautiful parts of like a cohesive whole. Like if you're doing rationality to the extent where you're like suppressing some emotional reactions you have, then I think you're doing it wrong. You're like missing a big part of it. Like it should be like integrated. It should be like part of like one unified flow. Like the things that you like, if you want to be in a romantic, committed relationship for the rest of your life, then this is like beautiful and good. And the kind of like logic that you're using to make sense of the world should be fitted into that correctly. I think that's really cool. Like anytime you have sort of like an internal at odds thing with it, I think you're like using some sort of force to suppress one or the other. Like, oh, I'm not allowed to reason about this or I'm not allowed to feel about that. And that feels harsh to me. And I think curiosity is the solution. Like if you're simply just calmly curious, oh, why do I feel like that? Let's go find out, that's so cool. Right, like you can use logic and your feelings to like discover the answer. Do you sometimes, because you do this kind of technique, which is interesting. And I've mentioned it to others. You'll sometimes step away from like a third person perspective and describe the feeling you're feeling. Or like even just the situation, like you'll step out and talk about, wait, what is happening here? Like in the conversation itself. In the conversation itself. Yeah. First of all, what is that? Do you find that to be useful and interesting? Because it's very interesting. It feels raw and honest. The danger of it seems like you escape the actual experience of it though. So that's the trade-off. You make it intellectual, right? Is it though, intellectual to do that? I mean, maybe it is, I don't mean to, no. Maybe that's the wrong word. You can make it intellectual. Yeah. But you can still continue the same flavor because you're not fully disengaging from the conversation. You're just creating an extra metal layer. Yeah. That's happening at the same time. I think exploring the emotional reaction to what's going on in the moment. Yeah. Yeah, in some way it's actually making it stronger. Like, or enriching it, like making it more, giving it more context, giving it deeper understanding. I think there's like a way of going meta that is a flinch move. Like, oh, I noticed that we're doing this thing. I'm gonna name it. And I think the thing that I described earlier, like when the homeless guy approached me and asked, can you go home with me? And I was like, are you trying to have sex with me right now? Like what I was doing is like a meta move. Like you're stepping outside and like, okay, what is the purpose of this conversation? And we explicitly identify it. And in that case, I think that is sort of like a flinch move. Like I'm not telling him my emotional response. I'm not like being fully present. I'm like sort of identifying it as a way to subvert what's going on. And I absolutely think this is a possible thing. But I usually try to be aware of that in myself. And it depends on the purpose of what's going on. That guy, cause that is actually like a chest move you did. You had a purpose for that chest move, but the flirtation is on. Like he could have like done a better move that would make you like curious, like. Yeah, that's true. Like interesting, cause you had an agenda with that, but he could have changed your mind. Like he could have with a few words, cause you just created extra layers, extra entry points. If he'd gotten more meta, he might've been like, okay, well now I am gonna sleep with you. Exactly. See, there is something, yeah, that's aids into the chemistry of the conversation when you do that meta. I really enjoy it. It's like a rare, I forget, did you and I, I forget who, I've had a few people do that with me, like just in conversation. And I feel like you were involved somehow, cause I've met you before somewhere. I don't know if we were, or you were just in- We were at a couple of parties together. Maybe it was just like a bunch of people that kind of play with the same, or like a comfortable- It's circling. It's just a practice explicitly dedicated towards that. What's circling? Circling is like- That might be the thing they- Yeah, I think we know, we have some mutual circlers in our- Circlers? In our networks here. What's circling? I don't remember what's circling. I'm gonna describe it horribly, cause it's like one of those things that's difficult to describe unless you experience it, like kind of like drugs. But it's something like you sit around, there's like kind of guidelines to the conversation where you talk about the present moment, and you're like honest about your experiences as much as you can be. And if you don't wanna be honest, then you say, I don't wanna be honest. And it's your commitment to connection. So you're here to actually connect with the other person, understand them and be understood. You're not supposed to project. So if you have an analysis about the other person, you own it, you're like, I'm experiencing you as this, you know, and then you check is it true? Or like- Are you supposed to be almost like converting it towards the thing you're thinking? Like constantly? Are you supposed to say what you're thinking? If it feels right in the moment, you can. The thing is, it's very amorphous, right? It's like almost like creating a magical sensation. And I've been with some, I've seen some very good circlers, really high skill circle. And I feel like I'm on drugs when that happens. It's very rare to see. Does it feel honest somehow? Yeah, very honest. Like right now in this moment, I'm feeling like kind of like nervous energy because I'm talking to you and this is a unique situation. And like, I want you to think I'm cool. I want everybody listening to me to think I'm cool, but I'm also having some sort of delight at being able to express in this way. And like some admiration for how you like set up and built this thing that I can be a part of. And all of these things are sort of in my body right now is this sort of vibrating high thing. I remember like in the party setting, because I've had to talk to a few people, I felt like it was going sexual very quickly. Okay, I don't know if you remember this, but the first time I met you, I didn't know who you were. I just heard, I knew I'd heard your name, like you just your name. And I'm like, I think I've heard people discuss that. And I was in the middle of a very sexual conversation with another woman. Oh, you were? Yeah, I was. And you just like turned around and left very shortly afterwards. And I thought it was very- Oh, was I listening in on the conversation or something like that? It was like, I was talking to her and you were just kind of like right there. And so we introduced ourselves and then we continued on with the conversation. You were like standing there and listening. Yeah, I don't think I would have left the conversation. It's funny, you probably interpret it in a different way. I interpret it as you like not wanting to listen to like graphic sexual stuff. Was it like super graphic? I don't know, I was asking her about, I was doing it, I was interviewing her about her fetish, basically. Oh, yeah, I don't think I would have walked away from that. I would have been like curious. Oh, interesting, because I don't often see people having a deep interview about fetishes. Like I wouldn't even be, listen, I'm like Jane Goodall here. Like, I'm not like, I'm not afraid of sexuality. Or something like that. I just have certain values in terms of like monogamy and so on, but I think sexuality is really beautiful. Yeah, I don't think, yeah, I can't imagine myself walking away from that conversation. Somebody must have like called you or something. So I didn't remember exactly how it worked. I just remember thinking later on. Or maybe I thought I was intruding. Oh, maybe. Because if- I was kind of drunk, so. And I probably was very drunk too. Okay. I would like to actually have like footage of that conversation so we can actually interpret what actually happened, because it was probably, I mean, you know, human interactions are funny like that. They can happen for all kinds of reasons. Have you ever fallen in love with a client? No. I mean, like in tiny ways, like micro loves. Like- Have you ever fallen in love love? I mean, I don't know what it means, but probably. The thing that other people say when they say fall in love is probably something I've experienced. What do you think they mean? What is love? Ayla. Yeah, I know. No? It's a fantastic question. I think, so love is one of those words that refers to like a billion different concepts. And I think we maybe should just taboo the term to have a better understanding of what we're referring to. Because there's things like a feeling of intense attachment. There's something feeling like soulfully aligned. There's like sexual attraction. There's like excitement. Are you talking to me and saying we should taboo the term love in this conversation? How dare you? No. Romantic love. To make it flourish into lots of other new definitions. Okay, thank you. For expanding love. It sounds like you're censoring the most important word. This is like 1984 all over again. Okay. Also on the book reading list. No, okay. Listen, no, romantic love, like a deep intimacy for somebody else, like a deep connection with a human being that is also, I mean, yeah, with polyamory it's tricky. And your relationship with sex is also tricky. So like, what's the difference between a deep friendship and a friendship that also has a sexual component? I remember being very confused about that when I did a lot of LSD. I was like, what? The line between romantic relationships and everything else kind of got blurred. I was like, oh, I'm just like in intimacy. Yeah. And some intimacies mean that you spend your life together more and have sex, but like the same basic thing is there. Like you're seeing someone for who they are. Do you think you can be, if you're heterosexual, do you think you could be really deeply close with friends with a guy and not have sexual relationships with him? I assume it's possible. Like if anything is ever possible, then probably, yeah. Everything is possible. Time travel is possible. Quantum mechanics makes every, traveling faster than the speed of light is possible, according to general relativity. Everything's possible. So you're saying there's a chance. Dummer has taught me that everything is fucking possible. Not super likely, assuming that they are like attracted to each other. Yeah. And for somebody that has surveys and statistical analysis, we're interested in like, what's the likely thing here versus like what's possible. If you say possible, it's like where anything's open. Did you just avoid answering the love thing? Okay. I have a lot to say about love. I just need to be precise. Yeah, okay. Let's be precisely and precise and continue. Oh, sorry, that's my phone. It feels like a passive aggressive suggestion that we shouldn't talk about love anymore, but we shall continue. No, we should absolutely talk about love. It's just the term is very confusing. Cause it's like, some people say the word love and the thing that they're thinking of is like, oh, the butterfly is like the sparkle thing that I get in my stomach when I think about my loved one. But I study relationships over time. I just really, like I did a survey about it. And that sparkle goes away within like two to four years. But people still report loving their partner after that. So I'm like, okay, like when you say the word love, like what the fuck are we talking about? Yeah. I just wanna get on the same page. Okay. So what are the different, so the butterflies, boy, I'd like to push back on two to four years on the butterflies, but okay. I mean, statistically, not everybody. Butterflies don't give a fuck about statistics. You ever heard of the flap of a butterfly wing causing like nuclear war? How do you describe that with your statistics? Okay. So butterflies, that's the basic infatuation, the chemistry of the initial interactions, sure. But a deep, meaningful connection, like that feels like sexuality is a component of that. Like the kind of intimacy that's only possible when you're also sexual with another human being. On top of that, you have the butterfly. And on top of that, you have the friendship. And on top of that, you have like, what is that? That's a sandwich. That's the love sandwich. The love sandwich. Okay, I'm down to call it a love sandwich. Okay. We'll just call it sandwich, L-S. Okay, what role does that play in the human condition? He asked about the human condition. It's an interesting phrase. Yeah. I'm like, this is like not a phrase that's common in my own thinking. Sure, human condition is a good summary. And what do you think? What do you feel when I say human condition? I think I ask very different kinds of questions than you. Sure, yeah. Which is interesting. I've been trying to figure out what kind of brain that you have is creating this category of question. Which is why I was thinking, there's something about poetic narrative in there. Because it's very aesthetic. I think you've asked much more aesthetic questions than I do. I don't even know what the word aesthetic means, really. Like artistic. Artistic. Yeah. I mean, I know what aesthetic means, but I also don't know what it means. It's kind of like the word love. Oh. Aesthetic perspective. Yeah, well, but part of it in conversation, you don't want to ask a question that has an answer. Fully, always. Like do you have an example of a question that has- What's the meaning of, oh, has an answer. Like one that you'd say, like, ah, that's like a bad question, because it has an answer. How many sexual partners you had in the last year? Oh my God. That's such a, okay, I feel like we just like got to some sort of crux about like the kinds of questions that we like to answer. Sure. Because I would love that question. Okay, right. To ask enough people. All right, but does that really tell the story of what you've felt over the past year? That's true, but then I could just tell you. Okay, so by when you're saying the kinds of questions that you like, the ones that don't have an answer, by not an answer, you mean like not an answer where you can know that you're done telling it. Is that- That you can escape having to think by actually answering it. I see. Yeah. The struggle is the place where we discover something, not the destination. Contention. It's working, it's working. Okay, so what is the role of the love sandwich in the human condition? Okay, that's fine. I take that question, but it's a stupid question. You don't have to, I'm ready to try. Do you like love? Do you personally like love? Do you not like love? Yeah, I mean, I think, like, there's a part of me that feels like I have unconditional love for all things. Like when you're talking about the glass being beautiful, I felt that, it's like, that feels like it rang something, that like I have a similar resonance in me for that. If I were to circle right now, I feel like you're avoiding the love question, the love sandwich question. What's your own personal feeling towards loving another human being versus having sex with another human being? I think, love is like one of the concepts that dissolved for me a long time ago, so I have difficulty directly answering it. But I have the experience. When you described the love sandwich, I feel like I have had that experience. I have it currently for some people also. Like I'm dating people and I have that. So people who you date, you would describe sharing a love sandwich with them. Yeah. Okay. So how does, I mean, that's great to hear. So you're not, are you afraid of love? No, not at all. So can you describe to me polyamory? What is it? What does it mean? Because there's like different terms. You have a nice blog post about it. Yeah, I have a personal definition of it, which I readily admit is not shared by a lot of people. But to me, the definition of polyamory is simply not forbidding your partner from pursuing intimacy with others. Yeah. You have to pursue it personally. Like two people could be married and only have had sex with each other for 20 years. And as long as they're like, you know what? If you ever, you want to go have sex with somebody else, you're welcome to do that. Well, the interesting thing you said is that doesn't mean they have to do it. They just have the freedom to do it. Yeah. It's the freedom that matters to me. Which is, I mean, it's called the polyamory post. It has so many good blog posts. People should just go look at your, read your writing. Because it's really, really strong and often backed by data. But also just a deeply honest look at yourself and your understanding of the world. It's, yeah, it's refreshing to be, like with a lot of stuff I disagree with, but I feel like if I disagree with it, you'll be very open arguing it and kind of thinking through it. There's just the honesty that radiates from the whole thing. Anyway, so yeah, it's, I mean, it would be interesting to kind of explore what polyamory, like how it works, what are the different versions? What is the, what does that freedom look like? What does that freedom feel like? To be able to go see other people. Depends on you. Like, do you want to go see other people? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. So usually for me, I tend to be pretty happy with like one or a few people. And then occasionally I like some novelty. So usually I'll go like, I host orgy sometimes. So I'll host an orgy and then I'll go have sex with people at the orgy and then that'll be good for the novelty for a while. Can I ask you about orgies? Yeah. So how many people are at an orgy? What's like a standard, we're having a Sunday picnic and it's an orgy, what's like a number of people at an orgy? Oh, I've only recently started hosting orgies, but I have been to a lot of orgies. I would say like the median is maybe 15 people. I like how you say median versus mean. Okay, median is 15 people. What's the gender distribution usually? Usually about even. It's like ideal if you can get more women than men in most of them. I've recently been hosting free use orgies or orgies where consent is assumed by default when you enter. And of course you can revoke it any time or go over a whole bunch of rules to make sure it's very safe. You like have wristbands. So nobody's actually doing anything they don't want to, but in those ones you have to have more men than women. I thought free use was like consensual, like at any time, but it's at any time within the constraints of this building or something like that. Yeah, so at the orgies, it's like you, by entering, if you wear a wristband, then you are by default opting into consent. So people don't have to do a thing where they negotiate with you and be like, is this okay? It's just the default is you just go for it. And if they want you to stop, they say the safe word, like red, don't, and then you have to stop. And we do exercise in the beginning of people saying red to make sure that everybody knows exactly what the rules are. What's your favorite safe word? Red. Red. When I first started doing weird kinky shit, I was like, oh, let's make a safe word. And we picked the word foliage. I was like, that's goofy, right? But then eventually came a time where I did actually, in fact, want to say the safe word and I couldn't. I was like in agony. I was like crying. I'm like, I can't make myself say this stupid word right now. Foliage. So after that, I was like, red, doesn't matter. I don't care. It's not funny. We're just going with very simple. Very practical. How does an orgy compare sexually to like a one-on-one sexual experience? Like what is it same ballpark or is it fundamentally different? I mean, the experience of both orgies and one-on-one sex can be like really high variety. There's a high variety. But you kind of, it's a little bit like you're having sex with someone, but you're surrounded by really realistic VR porn of other people having sex. Oh, okay, cool. And sometimes it's like a three sums also, like maybe there's another person involved, but it's hard to like have a whole bunch of people on one, in one cluster. Because usually there's kind of different little clusters of people having their experience. Sure. I once was part of a 10 woman orgy. It was a total lesbian thing. And that felt like a writhing cluster. It was very nice. But typically you kind of separate out with like very small pods of people doing stuff. Okay. So back to polyamory. So what's a good, what does it take to manage? Do you have a main partner? If you're being polyamorous and you're dating multiple people, is there usually a main one for you personally? For me personally, kind of, yes. Like right now I kind of, two that aren't, like I see roughly around, for me it's kind of just descriptive. Like if I just happen to be seeing you a lot more and I confide in you more than you, like you're descriptively my primary partner. But I don't usually have rules to protect that. I'm down with rules to protect it if you're like, you're trying to build something. Like if I buy a house together, I'd be like, okay, we need to like, whatever our relationship is, we have to do the thing where we're both paying the rent for the house or the mortgage or whatever. A lot of people do have primaries though. It's very common to have like, like prescriptive, like I'm gonna get married to you and you're not allowed to like have anal sex with anybody else, that sort of thing. What about like the transparency and the communication they have to do? Yeah, you usually try to be super honest about it? Extremely, yeah. I mean, I've learned over time that like, even if it seems like a very small thing, you talk about the small thing. Because often I would just sort of have like a small twitch in myself, like, I don't know if I like that. But I'd be like, okay, this is really minor. It's probably nothing. And I don't, if I talk about it, it's gonna make it into a thing. And I just don't wanna make it into a thing, you know? And I would, I've come to realize that it's worth making it into a thing. Because I can't predict at the time if like the small feeling I have is going to grow. And then when I grow it, now it's like much more difficult to deal with. So now it's like any little bit of jealousy I have immediately communicate it. I'm like, ah, I'm a little jealous of you right now. I don't hold that in at all. I used to be kind of like, back when I first started being poly, I used to try to pretend that I was not a jealous person. And that backfired quite a lot. That's really interesting. So you do still feel jealousy? Oh yeah, definitely. And like, and it's also interesting that you kind of recommend when there's a little bit of jealousy, like to bring that to the surface. Yeah, just like excessively communicate. Even if it feels stupid. Like this is, I feel like a cliche. I feel like a stupid therapist training video. Like I just feel ridiculous sometimes when I'm saying the things, but it's just, I've learned over time, it's just important to just say the things. Because like, you know, the traditional view of jealousy is exactly like you said, if you bring it up to the surface, like it's going to sound like you're overreacting to everything. But you're saying like, still do it. Because you're basically, your brain blows stuff out of proportion. Yeah, and it's good to like be going through it with a partner. Like I have a partner right now who's like dating this other girl and he like really likes her and he like went traveling with her and stuff. And I was like, oh, I feel jealous about it. And I have to tell him that. And that way he can be with me in it. He like, he like holds me when I'm feeling jealous. And it's like a bonding experience, you know? But it's important for me that like he's able to handle it. Like I try not to date people who really freak out when I have negative emotions, because I want to be able to express that I'm upset by something they're doing without it being taken as a demand that they change their behavior. Right, so he has to be able to skillfully handle that interaction. He has to be like, cool, all right, you're jealous. Like I'm not going to freak out about it. I'm not going to change my behavior. I'm just going to be with you in that. We're going to sit in it together. I mean, is some of that just insecurity that he should also just comfort? Like basically alleviate your insecurity, bring you back to like a rational objective evaluation? Right? I mean, my relationships, people do not reassure me. I like not being comforted quite a lot. And so usually the people I date don't, I'm very gravitating. Like it's one of the things people do to make me fall in love with them is if I say something really like terrible and they're just like, do not give me any comfort whatsoever. Like that's where my heart gets captured. So I typically am in relationships where I'm like, hi man, I'm so jealous. And they just like, do not reassure me at all. And that's good. Cause it doesn't give me an out. Like I have to deal with it myself. Like maybe it is true that the other woman is better than me. Maybe that is an actual possible reality. And I don't want to be dealing with my life in a way where I'm like pretending like I'm only okay when that reality is not true. Would you like them to say that? That the other woman is better than you? Yeah. Or that they prefer. If they feel that? Yeah. I mean, they should say it in according to themselves. Like, oh, I prefer, like I have a better time with her than I have with you, then I would want to know that. Yeah. And even though that might be painful to hear. Yes. That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. That which can be destroyed by the truth should. What is that? That your ego or something like that? My ego. So your ego just generally grows and you like the destruction of it. Yeah. It's like really active. It's like a process of truth. It's not like a fun experience. Like I've had like guys be like, well, you're not as pretty as I'd like. I'm just like, oh, you know, so stabbed to the heart and. But then also like give me your number after. Yeah. Yeah, oh man, that's kind of beautiful. What do you think of monogamous relationships? Like philosophically, can you maybe steal a man or make the case for monogamous relationships? Can you understand the pros and cons of monogamous relationships? Yeah, I mean, it depends on how you, if you're like, hey, you can do whatever you want, but you and I are gonna spend the rest, like we just, you're 80 years old and like, oh, we spent 60 years in a marriage together. We've never had sex with anybody else. I think that's like awesome. If that's what you want, that's great. I have like a little bit more problems with people doing that while also forcing their partner not to misbehave if they want to. Like if you're like, oh, we only made it this far in a monogamous relationship because I forced my partner not to pursue an intimacy that she wanted to. Then I feel like a little like more like, ah, I don't know if that's great. How do you know if it's a real want for an intimacy? Like checking out a attractive person while being inside a monogamous relationship? Yeah, how do you score that? Is that bad that the person cannot pursue those feelings? I mean, it depends if they want to. Like I often find people attractive if I don't want to pursue. I'm also okay with people entering into agreements. Like if you and I want to agree, like I'm only going to enter this because I'm gonna be so hurt if you pursue somebody else. So I'm not gonna pursue anybody else. That seems fine to me. But I also extend that. Like if somebody is like, I don't want you to have any friends, I'm gonna feel really insecure if you, and like, okay, like if you want to enter that agreement, like I feel the same way. Like I think you should have the right to do it if this is what you want. But I also kind of, I feel like a little weird about restricting your partner from doing things, you know? Oh, but I guess if you're honest about it and you just put it on the table, I don't want you to have any friends. I want you to sit in a box. Yeah, I think a lot- I guess if you're like really on the, but then there's like, there's a power dynamic that like you can be quite influential in a relationship and convincing your partner. And it sure sounds like you're honestly agreeing to a thing, but you're not really agreeing. That's the, I mean, part of that is the beauty of relationships, right? It's messy, it can be messy. It's hard to know what you really want, right? I think that's mainly my complaint with monogamy. Like I'm down with like conscious monogamy. But I think so many relationships are like monogamous by default. Like people, it's not actually right for them, but they just get into it because culture just doesn't give them another option. And they don't even ask themselves the question, is this right for me? Which like, I'm a weird ass person who thinks a lot of weird shit, but I didn't even think about polyamorous option before I had heard that it existed. And I was only when I first met my first polyamorous couple. And I was like, oh, that's what I am. That's clearly the thing that I am. Yeah, it's funny, because to me monogamy, it's not, it doesn't make sense for it to be a default. Like to me, monogamy goes against human nature. In some sense, like romance is a fuck you to the way the world works. Really? Yeah, like it's a, like Romeo and Juliet romance, like traditional description of what romance looks like versus like, sure, there's like a million variations of that. But in my head, like this partnership that's for a long time together is a kind of, you know, like, I don't know, like true romance. You know that movie? It's a really fucking good movie. I haven't seen it, no. Okay, there's just like, you're together against the world. That's the, I mean, that's what close friendship feels like. It's like ride or die. Yeah. Like that. I guess it doesn't, it can be, it could span across multiple, you can have multiple partners in that way. Yeah, absolutely. But I just don't see monogamy as like, this definitely not a default. I would actually, like honestly, would probably see polyamory as a more natural default. Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by default. Like most of human history has been sort of a weird mix. Like you get polygamy and monogamy are the kind of the main arrangements. But I mean, just like human nature. Like I- Yeah, people are attracted to other people and they wanna, especially in longer term relationships. I tracked, in my relationship survey, I tracked the amount of cheating over time in a relationship. Like how long have you been in this relationship and have you cheated? What's the results of that? Men cheat a lot. Women too, but men cheat about 30% more than women do. I also asked men and women to predict if they think their partner has cheated. And people's predictions were about the same. So people roughly predicted that their male or female like spouse hadn't cheated about the same rate, but men cheated much more than women. So who was more correct in their prediction though? So men were more correct in their prediction predicting women. And women were more off. Women thought men cheated much less than they actually did. And, but both of them were off, but like the male gap was significantly more. So yeah, I mean, you're right. When you say monogamy is not default, like I think you're like really getting at something. Like human beings are just, especially in long-term relationships, it's difficult to only want one person. But to be fair, I think monogamy and commitment are very different. I think you'd be incredibly, I haven't known so many very long-term, super committed poly couples that live lives that look very similar to the very romantic monogamous couples. Like children, houses, like 20 years. Yeah. And that works great for them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so much to like open your mind to in these kinds of conversations, these kinds of ideas. But I also like realize like some of the cake is baked. Like I have some assumptions that are hard to break through. Like what? For myself. Like it's difficult for me to imagine a polyamorous relationship for me that would work. Yeah. But I don't have enough data. I don't have a like, I have very little, but like at this point, it's like I haven't eaten pizza in like 20 years because I know I just don't, there's a bunch of stuff. I just eat low carb because it makes me feel good. But there's so many foods I haven't explored. It's just like, well, I know what I love. So you explore every once in a while. Yeah. And you kind of figure that out. But at the same time, you're humbled by like, even talking to you or looking at your data, like sexuality is a fascinating topic because it seems that we're very, like we were talking about, very afraid of this topic. Like to be really honest with ourselves about it, the whole like academic research is afraid of it, but it's so core to who we are as human beings. I gotta ask you about this. I can't believe it took this long to get there, but one of your many fascinating surveys is on fetishes. You wrote a blog post about it, probably several, because it's like a huge data set. It's still in progress, yeah. So the one I'm referring to is on popularity and tabooness of various fetishes. So what are some interesting takeaways? I gotta pull up this graph because it's freaking epic. Yes, this is a big graph and it has tabooness as one axis and popularity as the other. Okay, for people who are just listening, on the X-axis is tabooness. Yeah. Asked to rate how taboo society viewed sexual interest, and on the Y-axis is percent of people reporting interest, log scale. Oh boy, all right. So just some examples on the low tabooness and high popularity. There's a correlation here. I think you said it's 0.69. Yeah. It's just not, it's just hilarious. Is it still 0.69? Are you tracking that? I haven't looked since I did this, yeah. So like the less taboo stuff is more likely to be popular and the more taboo stuff is less likely to be popular. And on the missionary position, fingering, vagina, blowjobs, light spanking, cuddling. Cuddling is more taboo than missionary? I think people are conceiving, like if you're like, I'm really sexually aroused by cuddling specifically, then you're like, that's a little more weird than getting specifically aroused by blowjobs. You expect people to be aroused by blowjobs. So this was like getting at like as a fetish versus like an activity. Yeah, as a specific, as a like a concrete sexual interest. Like I am specifically interested in this thing, yeah. And so those are thighs and lips, different body parts, jaw lines, and then some of it is color based on more female preference versus male preference. Like jaw lines is more female preference. Being submissive is more female preference, light bondage. Yeah, more female. There's a lot of interesting ones. There's so much, okay. But then on the far side of that, I mean, it gets pretty dark, but even all along the way, like extreme bondage being at 50 tabooness, pegging, pain, giving pain, sexual frustration. I suppose as a kink. Yeah. And there's so many interesting ones like to me, like just that I haven't even like considered. Yeah, I had to do so much research into fetishes to compile the list. Are there some surprising like options to you that you're like, oh, okay, this is like a fetish. Yeah, well, more confusing was like what the fetishes are about. Cause like I didn't want to overlap fetishes. So I had to kind of look into them. And I'm like, there's like such interesting manifestations of core drives. Like if you're really aroused by disgust, like maybe you're very into rolling around in dirt, but you're not into rolling around with ice cream. So I'm like, okay, I have to make those into two separate fetishes. And like, I'm seeing like at the far end, rodents, like different types of incest, branding, so there's like pain. And then sex with animals, I guess, dogs, horses. Receiving oral sex from an animal is high taboo-ness and pretty high popularity. Surprisingly high popularity. I was really shocked by that one. I wouldn't triple check that number. Cause I'm like, no way this is about to people are reporting interest. Do you know which animal? Is there? No, I didn't specify. I asked like which animals are erotic and then I separately asked like how erotic is it to receive oral sex from your preferred animal? This is so fascinating. So I would, like can we just talk about the methodology of this? This feels like deeply honest map of humanity in a way we don't usually map humanity. Yeah. Like, cause it's so mean, like your fetishes are so meaningful to each individual person. Yeah, that's what I love about this work. It's like, nobody cares about someone's fetishes. You never get to express them. And if you have a more unusual fetish, people usually judge you. So it's like this tiny little pocket of like this shame thing but it's so cool to me. That like human brains could be oriented in such a way like wound fucking. Like somebody finds that so erotic and that's so cool. Yeah, and then they probably, and it should be explored like how did that come to be? You mentioned that we like to construct narratives that somehow was grounded in childhood, but maybe it's genetic. Maybe it has to do with, maybe you can actually form and unform that fetish very quickly. I don't know. This is one of the things that I'm researching. So in the big survey that I'm doing, I asked so many questions about childhood. All the ones that I think like we have common theories about like, oh, are you abused? Is it yelled at by a man or a woman? Stuff like that. Like, are you, was it really sexually repressive? You know, was it gender roles where you've expected to conform? A whole bunch of stuff. And then I asked, you know, obviously about like a massive amount of fetishes. And my sample size right now is 500,000 people. 500,000 people. Yeah, it's massive. And I have to stay for all of it. And the result looks like this not really correlated. Nothing that I asked about in childhood, nothing correlates with fetish preference later in life. It does correlate with onset. Lots of things that happen in childhood can change like the age at which it triggers. There are so many fascinating blog posts. You had a blog post, I think, on the age of fetish onset. Yeah. And like you really nicely organized it by age, like reproduction as a fetish, I guess pregnancy. Yeah. As at age of 17, about 16.9. Toys and like anal beads is 15.5. Yeah, one of the interesting things I found, I mean, this data set is so huge, it's taking me a long time to go through it. So this is like snippets from what I remember when I was glancing through the data. So this part is not rigorous, but I seem to get the impression that a fetish occurs for you earlier, like if you have much earlier onset, you're more likely to report being extremely interested into it. So later onset means you're gonna be like less into the fetish. But if it hits earlier, it's like- But I wonder if it passes, like is there like phases? Yeah, I didn't measure old fetishes at all. Like no longer, right? You used to, but it's no longer there. Interesting. One interesting thing that I don't understand is that non-cis people seem to have more correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. So I was saying that there's no correlation between childhood experiences and fetishes. This holds for cis people. But trans people, especially trans men, there's a correlation. It doesn't mean they have absolutely higher rates of abuse or fetishes or anything, but I'm just saying that like, for them, there does actually seem to be some sort of connection between childhood experiences and sexuality later in life. And I don't understand why this applies to one group but not the other. I don't have a good theory for that. So usually you try, like when you see something like that, you'll try to construct a theory and see if you can find, like, you keep that theory in mind, like a hypothesis of why it would be, and then you ask further questions to try to elaborate. So can you maybe talk about the methodology of how you got the 500,000? Like what, like how did this come to be? This might, yeah, this is, I might go into way too much detail about this because I thought about this so much. Because I'm like, the question is, how do you get a lot of people to take a big survey? The longer the survey is, the lower the response rate. And I really wanted to do one big comprehensive survey. So I could like check a whole bunch of correlations within it, because it's more annoying and it's harder to get a lot of people to retake similar surveys to each other at a time. So I'm like, okay, I need to convince a very large number of people to take a lot of these questions. And even building the questions, that was really hard because I'm like, okay, I need a comprehensive amount of fetishes. I can't ask everybody to answer for every single niche fetish. I'm like, do you like ball gags? Do you like funnel gags? Do you like wife shrew gags or whatever? I'm like, you can't do that. Nobody's gonna finish that survey. Can you define, okay, fine. I'm not gonna ask questions. What's a wife shrew, but okay. I'm not doing the, I'm trying to refer to like, there's like a thing that like- Different types of gags. Different types, okay. Yeah, different. So I'm like, so what I need to do is I need to ask people a question. Like, are you into like bondage? And if you say yes, then I'll go ask you all the bondage questions. Ah, got it. Right, but then this seems simple, but then it's just exploded because I'm like, how do I categorize these fetishes? There's like, if you're into sploshing, which is like, you like sitting in cakes, you like getting in mud, but basically like kind of messy sensory. Like, is this a disgust thing? Is it a humiliation thing? Is it a sensory thing? Like which category, anyway. So it took me like two months of just agonizing over each fetish, because you don't want to miss a fetish. You don't want to like have a really important thing that you accidentally put in a disgust category when it actually belongs in the humiliation category. You know? Well, let me think about that. Because like, you're still catching it. You're just miscategorizing it. Right, because if you're into sploshing, and you're like, this is clearly a humiliation thing. So you say, yes, I'm into humiliation stuff. And then I don't ask you about sploshing, then I'm missing a whole data set of people because I've falsely categorized your question. You're going to miss stuff, you're just picking what's less and less important to miss. Well, I'm trying to get people into the right question set. Sure. Because like, I can't ask you all the questions. I have to ask you a couple overarching questions to know what specific questions to ask you. And so I have to, those overarching questions have to be really, really well calibrated so that I can accurately feed you into the right sub part of the survey. Awesome. And so that was extremely difficult. If I'm, when I'm dealing with, I think it was like 850 fetishes. So I did a couple things to spot check. I like, I did a couple questions where I asked, like in the detailed in the survey, but like also the beginning of the survey, just to see like what percentage people I was capturing. But, and then, and then I scored the survey. So if you take it, I had other people answer preliminary surveys where they gave me data about how taboo the various fetishes were. And then I use that data so that when you fill out the survey it's extremely comprehensive and you get data about exactly how taboo your interests are. And you get a score at the end and I give you an equivalent kinky character, which I also had people write a whole bunch of fictional characters and some historic ones about like how kinky they were. So then I matched the historic character, kinky character to your score. So that makes it like more fun, like gamifies it a little bit. And you can brag about like how- To be able to share it with others. And a lot of the characters were like goofy, like there's SpongeBob and like Hitler's on there and South Park characters. What is, what kink does Hitler have? I think he's like, he's around Marilyn Monroe, which is like slightly above average kinkyness. Oh, sorry. I thought there was like a two dimensional space somehow. So this is like a literally from zero to- How kinky, yeah. So Hitler is about as a Marilyn Monroe. Who is the most, what's the character for like- Willy Wonka. Is the most kinky? Is the most kinky, yeah. I think like maybe Captain America was the least kinky or something or Gandhi. Meanwhile, but that's another conversation. Oh boy. Yeah, so it went viral on TikTok basically because people were like, what? I got this insane character. And then the sample size exploded from 40,000 to 500,000. Wow, so like all it took is that kind of incentive? Or did you like at first have to pay people for the server? No, it was just that incentive. And what about the demographic of the different people that took it? Mostly younger, so usually early twenties, predominantly female, like 70% female. 70% female. Pretty like, wraps on a TikTok demographics pretty well. Oh, okay, I got it. But that's interesting. Young people are probably better for this kind of survey because there's probably a culture that's a little bit more honest about their sexuality. Yeah, most likely. I think people are incentivized to be honest when they're getting a true identity response out of it. Like if you're doing it for money, you don't care. But like if you are invested in the result, you want to know what the truth of the answers are, then you actually. There's possibly you also don't want to know the truth. Yeah, this is true. But on average, hopefully that doesn't. I mean, these are really difficult. Like what, is there some interesting little quirks that people should know about your methodology that you had to kind of solve to try to get to a really good survey? So one of you said is the categorization to make it more efficient. Is there some for the analysis part? Yeah, so the graph that you were talking about is a binary. So it's like, if somebody expressed even a little bit of interest, then it goes into the graph. So it's like 80% of people expressed even a little bit of interest. So it's not representing degree of interest. It's not differentiating between them at all. So it's possible that like some fetishes have exactly the same amount of people like are at least a little bit into them, but one of them it's very extreme interest and the other is like vague and not very intense. So that's not reflected. I also like probably didn't represent the visual part right. Like it might not be intuitive, but. You chose a log scale, but it was kind of spreads things out to make it more clear. Because the linear, it was just so clustered at the bottom. You couldn't really separate it out. So there's obviously a selection effects is possible that like the identity results at the end impacted people's results a little bit. But the thing is like, I'm comparing it to what exists, like what is the alternative? And right now the research on this stuff is terrible. So it's like, I'm not saying my research is perfect, but it's like, at least it's something. And like, it's something that's pointing us maybe in a direction that we might be able to do more research on. And you're making the data available. Yeah. I'm doing it slowly because there's so, I ask about so many questions. It's like not very anonymized. So I'm really seeing the small sections of the data at a time. Yeah. Have you published in like journals and stuff? No, I haven't. Do you have any interest in that or is your approach? I'm like, I'm conflicted about it. Like it sounds cool because then I could be like, ha ha, I'm publishing a journal. And then people who are yelling about me who don't know anything about statistics on Twitter, like that I can go like shove it in their face. But then you're also giving in to the silly criticism. Yeah, giving in. Like I don't, like I want, I feel so passionate about extra science, like science that you can just do. Like I wanna make science accessible. Like anybody can just go look and learn about the basics of like doing a survey or figuring out how to interpret information. And doing a published journal feels like I'm betraying my cause a little bit. That's often behind a paywall. Yeah, it goes against the, I mean, I think you not publishing in a journal is doing a big public service. Aw, I think it's the first time I've heard that. Thank you. Oh, like just coming from like on this topic, the elitism I see on the psychology side with the journals and the academia, the positions and the institutions you come from, all of that, that goes against, I think that's more useful for math and computer science and so on, where there's like clear, like, but even then, even then, code is code, data is data. Yeah. Like prestige shouldn't matter at all. Maybe for like biological experiments, like virology or something like that, it's good to be from a major lab that has a reputation for like going through all the procedures, like, you know, you can trust. But here, like you're dealing with a giant mess of humanity. Like it's beautiful to be transparent, to be raw, to be exploring it together with everybody. Yeah, it's really beautiful. I think people like have a lot of incentive to doubt the results. Like a lot of the research I'm doing is to like cis and trans people. Like we don't have any data about transsexuality, like not very good at least. And I'm really curious, I don't really have an agenda about it. I think like being trans is cool if you wanna be trans, do it. And like, I have some skepticism about like gender theory, but like it doesn't come down to impact like the way I think trans people should be treated, which I think is like treat them, you know, be fucking nice and human about it, I don't know. But when I'm talking about the thing, like my conclusions are that like transsexuality is really unique. It's not like cis or cis woman or man sexuality at all. And to me, this is super cool, but like a lot of people, this is very politicized right now. Like the data into like transsexual preferences, like it's so loaded, which is really sad because I am very accepting of weird sexuality. Like if you're into a weird thing, I'm like, good for you, this is super cool. Like let's figure out how to make it so that you can explore the thing you're into without any stigma. But because there's so much stigma that like if you find that one demographic is into weirder sex stuff than the other, like it's hard to present that in a way that people don't weaponize. So it's been really politically touchy subject here. Yeah, but you do it in a way that's not feel like it has an agenda, right? You're just exploring. Yeah, I feel pretty open to what I'm gonna find. Like I often have no idea what the data is gonna tell me. And I'm like, I pre-commit like, okay, I could say A, B or C and I'm like down to publish any of those findings. So you've put together an ask whole cart deck a lot of awesome questions to ask at a party or anywhere, honestly, including on the podcast. Let me ask you one from that deck. Is sex really about power? So what's the role of power dynamics in sex? With everything you understand, like from the survey in terms of what people are turned on by, you've talked about like the preferences that women versus men have for like submissiveness and dominance. And we've already talked about it a little bit, but like it's expressed more strongly. Yeah, I already forget the results, but I feel like women have more preference to be submissive. Yeah, this is one of the things that got me into researching fetches to begin with, because I think I came across some data. I did like a brief survey where roughly around 60% of women report being submissive and 40% of men report being dominant. And this was really fascinating to me. I'm like, why is there this gap? Why do we not, because I guess I have some priors that maybe this is an evolutionary thing, like the submission dominant, like strong men and women being like, oh, this hot man, the men are like ravaging and stuff. I'm like, shouldn't this be in our genes? But there's a gap. What's the gap? The gap is the dominant submissive gap. More women are submissive than there are dominant men. Oh, wait, really? Yeah, it's a pretty significant gap. And this is held up, like it depends on what you're testing. I've tested a bunch of things. This is part of why I did this big survey. Nice. But it depends against, again, on like what kind of dominance you're measuring, but overall it's a roughly 40 to 60%. So when you say there's not many dominant men, then the meaning like they express like a desire to be dominant in a relationship? Yeah, or like sexually. Sexually. Sexually, in bed. So like if I ask questions like, how much do you like being dominant in bed? Like men are less likely to answer strong yes to that question. But if I ask, are you likely to be submissive? Like women are very much yes. Really? And that's expressive? Like that represents truth? My guess is- What's wrong with men? So this is, I think there's some reflection on like FetLife, so FetLife is this website where people like sign up and connect based on their fetishes. And this is like, you can kind of see it picked up in the forum posts about like how like dominant men are getting laid so much and submissives are always looking for a dominant. Like it's an unequal market. Holy shit. Yeah. This is great news. I didn't know this. That's interesting. Yeah. What does it reflect about modern society? Is it like, is that, because you know there's these trends about like decreased masculinity or that kind of stuff. Is that similar? I'm trying not to hold onto one theory because I'm not sure. One is possible like decreasing testosterone levels. Testosterone seems to be, I have a little bit of other research, but I'm still checking it out. That seems to indicate that higher testosterone, you're more likely to be dominant. So if we're seeing decreased testosterone levels across society, we should be seeing a greater gap. This is so fascinating. Once again, this is like a super interesting way to look at humanity. Because it is such an important part of humanity. And so like how many people are doing large scale research like this? I feel like you're like at the top of the world. You're like world-class at the top of the world doing research on this stuff. Yeah, I think I might have the biggest, most comprehensive fetish data set in the world right now. That's epic. Thank you. I'm really happy about it. I'm very proud. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's probably growing, but it's also enabling you to establish a name to where you like a prestige, like a reputation to where people can go to you to like trust you more and more, to do longer surveys perhaps. Like. Yeah, maybe. I think the data analysis afterwards is very different from like the survey design itself. So I'm still very amateur at the data analysis. Yeah, but you can always catch up on that. I guess the data analysis does enable you to, does teach you how to ask better questions in order to understand. Yes, it goes back and forth. Like as I'm looking at the data, it informs the way I wanna phrase questions the next time. So women are more, at least in private, able to say that they would like to be submissive and men even in private are not, disproportionately saying they're not willing to be dominant. Yeah. So it's possible. What the fuck? If this is caused by decreasing testosterone levels, then this means that we're probably having less satisfying sex overall. Like we're becoming less and less sexually compatible as time goes on. To be fair, I'm not sure that it is connected to testosterone levels. Like it's possible that this is just like a genetic thing. Like the gay uncle theory, like the idea is like maybe gay people evolved to like be sort of taking themselves out of the gene pool to be assistants. And like, it's possible that like there's certain percentage of men sort of like quote unquote evolved to be submissive, to take themselves out of sexual competition and to instead be like the monkeys revolving at the edge of the pack. It's unclear. Oh, it's a method of survival? Like, so you stay out of the competition? Yeah, and I'm like a little sus about these kinds of evo psych theories. So I'm not, I'm just saying it because it's like one thing. These are different ideas that are possible, yeah, okay. So yeah, I'm not saying that it's definitely testosterone, there's other things. It's also possible that it's culture. People are definitely gonna bring that up. Based on my survey though, it doesn't seem to be any evidence of that. Like I asked about like how much pressure was put on you to be, you know, agentee in your childhood. Like a lot of questions around this kind of thing and no correlation at all to dominance. Well, related to sexuality, I'm very uncomfortable right now but nevertheless. Plow forward. In a dominant fashion. The blog post titled Rape Spectrum Survey Results. What are the key takeaways from that survey? So I did the survey when I had a friend be like, hey, I had this confusing sexual experience. Was it rape? Like somebody kind of pressured her and she eventually stopped saying it or something. I was like, that's a great question. Like, I don't know how people would consider this. And so I put a whole bunch of different gray scenarios into a survey and then asked people to rate how rapey they thought that scenario was. So you actually like little narratives that they get to rate. Like, you know, this person is on a date with this person, they get drunk and the other person's not drunk. I try to keep gender neutral names for all of them. And you reduce them into a more concise description of the situation. Yeah. Like in this visualization, so you have this rape spectrum that's a result. Yeah. Where on top are things that are less likely to be considered rape by the people that took the survey and the bottom more likely. The likeliest is a stranger forcibly assaults someone who screams and fights the entire time. That gets a hundred. What do we make of something that's not zero? It's like a 12 is what? What is that? How are we supposed to interpret a 12 out of a hundred? It's extremely low. Okay. It's like not zero, but it's just very close to it. Having sex with an enthusiastic sex worker. Yeah. Is a 12, that's the lowest one. And there's a few, I'll just mention a few that are lower. Like at that level, have sex to make a partner happy in a relationship, lying about wealth hobbies in order to get laid, person with Down syndrome eagerly has sex with then your typical not revealing being transgender until after sex and so on. I think you mentioned that there's some like that not revealing being transgender until after sex, there's some differences amongst what men and women or something like that. I think there's still that men found more offensive than women. I'm trying to, I wrote it a while ago. I mean, this is nuanced and difficult, right? It's because I think in a lot of public discourse, the word rape is pretty binary. Yeah, it's like either is or is not rape. And so you had a friend where it was like, this felt rapey. Yeah, she's like confused about how to interpret it. I think people look to the terms to know how to feel about something. Like, have you ever like been through an experience? You're like, that was weird. And then you tell it to somebody else and they're like, oh my God, you were assaulted. And then it totally recontextualizes the thing that you've experienced. And I think that this is clunky with the word rape because either you were raped or you're not. You either have this entire context thrust upon you or you don't. And we're really not nuanced about it at all. And so I would really like to have some sort of like, oh, that was like a 30% rape you just endured. Yeah, and I mean, there's probably other dimensions about how traumatic it is, how difficult it is to recover from, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, like people, it's a dangerous thing to assign a word to an experience, like even, or to a relationship, like saying a toxic relationship. Yeah. That can completely destroy your perception of that relationship. Yeah, absolutely. I remember this was the case with my childhood. Like I talked about being very abusive, but I've talked about how like there was a good amount of meaning there so that I didn't process it as abusive at the time. I remember after I got out of that house in that culture, people would tell me, oh, your childhood was really abusive. And I was really confused by that because it's a total recontextualization of that narrative. It's like the things that I went through were not, you know, good and virtuous and had meaning, but rather those were like the result of, you know, parents who didn't like love you enough or something. And even though the concrete things that happened to me did not change, like no facts shifted, the fact that like the interpretation of the facts shifted caused me quite a bit of distress for a long time. I was like, oh my God, I'm a traumatized, like abused person. Like I went through an abusive childhood and it was really hard for me, made it worse. Like it's crazy the power that terms have. I think we didn't talk about this, but how did you begin to overcome the trauma of your childhood? You mentioned LSD, so drugs are part of it. Like what was the mental journey of that? I was doing LSD quite a lot when I was 21, 22. What's it like, by the way? I've never done LSD. What's it? It's very difficult to describe because it's like, like it changes sort of aspects about your environment that are invisible to you because they're so stable. Is it, like if you can compare it to like psilocybin, is it very different? Oh yeah, it's like similar. I forgot that you did shrooms. Yeah, okay, then you probably know. You know, like the kind of shift that you have from the cyber to shrooms is roughly similar. It's like more clear, I think. Shrooms is more like embodied, but LSD is much more intellectual for me. It strikes different people differently. I prefer shrooms a lot. I'm sorry, LSD. I prefer LSD a lot. Why is it not popularly taken? Like there seems to be a negative connotation to LSD because like it seems to potentially have like a destructive effect. Like maybe dosage is more difficult to get right or something like that. Does this exactly, so actually a long time ago, I did a survey on shrooms versus LSD. So I asked people and people had slightly stronger experiences on LSD overall, I remember, but rated the experiences about is equally good. I think people like shrooms because it feels more natural, quote unquote, but I think if you like fed somebody a shroom and like actually had the LSD molecule in it, they would have a, they would think it felt very natural, but that's besides the point. I think people get kind of incoherent on LSD in a way that feels really alienating. Like I consider LSD, my LSD use very heavy to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life, but I definitely was incoherent for a lot of it. Like talking about like we're all one consciousness, everything is love, man, you know? And people are like- Why is that incoherent? So I think it's not incoherent, but like if you go around saying everything is love, people are like, this guy's kind of blasted out of his mind. This podcast is basically your LSD driven for a bunch of episodes. Yeah, I get this for sure. Oh, well, it's not just about love, but it's about like talking in that way about reality, about the world, yeah, sure. Yeah, it's like overfitting. The narratives that you make about the world become really vivid, and so you pattern match just really aggressively. Like everything is connected, and you come up with these explanations for things. And I think I was very fortunate. So I have like this theory about psychedelics where you either like belief construct or you don't. So you take psychedelics and it sort of like burns away a lot of your belief structure. And sometimes this happens, and then you're like, ah, I need to like invent something to fill in the gaps. So you're like, okay, I think that maybe time is an illusion. So I must now believe that like we're actually in a time loop or like time travel is possible. So you experience time differently, and then you come up with a different belief about time. Whereas other people don't do this belief construction at all, like you experience time differently, and you sort of let yourself not have a belief. You're not like, okay, and you're not developing any beliefs about time in its absence. You're just simply experiencing the absence of the concept of time. And so I don't have a lot of data to back this up in my anecdotal experience, because I've tripped out a lot of people. People either tend to belief construct or they don't. And people who do not belief construct seem to get more out of their LSD trips. So if you can let a belief go without building anything in its absence, it's much more beneficial for you. And I think I just, for some reason, happen to have some brain that's constructed where I don't get a belief construction at all. So that's really interesting that belief construction is negative. Is it necessarily negative? Can you elaborate on that a little bit? I mean belief construction in a way that's like, not like playing with frames, but rather committing to a different frame. So I like being able to play with ideas and be like, let's look at it this way or that way. That's awesome. But if you're like, okay, you know what? I took LSD and now I absolutely believe the cops are outside. And you're like, dude, no, you're just like, you can't shift out of that, right? Your brain needs to fill in the gap. You're not allowed to have a gap. So you're not allowed to be flexible. And again, I don't think this is a personal failing. I think this is literally probably genetic or physical thing that's causing this. But do you think there's possible beliefs that are enlightening that you can stick to? Find a frame that, I guess if you don't believe construct and you're escaping your previous beliefs, aren't you doing just some, you're picking up a bigger frame in some way. You're taking your beliefs as object as opposed to being subject to them. Ah, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. And some of that, I guess, is genetic. And there's these categories of people, there's two categories that experience LSD in different ways. And you're one of those that are able to just let go. Yeah, I just think I had a good reaction. And I think a lot of maybe the negative stereotype of LSD comes from people who are belief constructing or carry the belief constructing off of the LSD trip. So you take LSD and you're like, ah, I'm believing these insane things. And people from the outside see that and they're like, oh my God, this person took LSD and became stupid. It's very scary. What's frame control? Because that has been at the core of your trauma, at the core of your upbringing. What's frame control? And also, sorry, frame control in general, because that's part of human interaction. Yeah, frame control is like a way of manipulating somebody else that is non-obvious. So there's a negative connotation to that usually? Yeah, I mean, I think maybe I chose the term kind of poorly because I think to some degree people are always a little bit manipulating each other. But I think it's generally obvious. Like for example, if I disagree with you, I want you to believe what I believe. But this is like an obvious thing that is visible between us. It's like an object on the table. It's like, here's the box where I want you to believe what you wanna believe. The disagreement box. Yeah, so we're under a shared context where we understand that we're trying to move each other. This is chill to me. I think this is cool. We do this all the time and it's important. But frame control is the kind of thing where you are trying carefully to obscure the existence of that box. You're like, oh, the thing that I'm doing, I'm like using tactics to try to influence what your reality is without us being both aware that this is what I'm doing. Yeah, I've been assuming you're doing that the whole time. No. Oh my God. I have to like figure out how to read your facial expressions. I'm still learning. There's none, there's none. You don't have any? I'm like, I'm not even like a Chad GBT. I'm like GBT-1 with my facial expressions. Like it's kind of off. Like this doesn't seem to match emotions, but it's kind of intelligent seemingly, but definitely not conscious. Anyway, so like a negative connotation, manipulating, not being honest about the actual intentions of the, of how you'd like to control the conversation. And I think there might be a naive version of interpreting this where you're just like, oh, I'm trying to like subtly get you to believe like, oh, do you really think that's bad though? But this is not quite what I mean. I mean, there's like a couple of concrete things that are signs of frame control. Like one of them is pushing the painful update button, which is this thing where it's like, hey, if you learn this, it's going to be really painful. The truth is painful. And if you're realizing this thing about yourself, it's gonna hurt. And this is a sign that you're heading in the right direction. So if you frame all pain as a sign of virtue, then this means that pain that's resulting as damage is something you're going to ignore. So it's like this, it's a common like cults, right? This is for your own good. Oh, you know, you've faced a brave truth about yourself that you're like not quite as wise as I am. When really your brain might be trying to tell you protective things. Or like another one is like finger trap beliefs, where the belief is constructed in such a way that doubting it lends proof to the belief. So a very common example is like Satan. Like the Christians are like, you know, Satan is going to try to make you doubt him, the existence of he's gonna so doubt, like maybe he's not actually real. And so if you believe in Satan, and then you're like, okay, now I'm having doubts, like maybe he isn't real. This is like, oh, this is exactly what I was taught to expect. Like I am doubting this belief because I was told, because like this is what Satan does and it's taken as evidence for it. So like the attempt to move away from the belief, like rebounds on you and like causes you to be more embedded inside of the belief. So it's like techniques like these, like very subtle things where like being inside of this system sort of just self reinforces the system is what I consider to be frame control. And have you met people that are really good at this kind of frame control? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So like you're saying that your father was like that? Yeah, to be fair, I'm not sure he was good at it because I was a kid. I think like he's probably not very good at it actually, but when you're a child being raised in a house where he works from home and you're homeschooled, that's just kind of what's going to happen. And to be fair, I do think that like strong frame control is quite rare. I don't think, most people are kind of doing something like this, but not nearly to the degree that makes, gives me the ick. I've met maybe like five or six people, I think who I've really don't like because of those very subtle things that they're doing. But I think also I'm starting to kind of understand that there is people who are narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths out there. And I'm not even sure if people like that, because I think they get good at frame control, but I don't know if they're aware they're doing it. Oh yeah. Which makes me also nervous about myself. Like, am I doing frame control? Yeah, that's one of the big things. It's like, typically people, you can't think about incentive like you can't think about, oh, is this person trying to do it or not? Yeah. That's like not the quite, not the way, you have to look at one of the effects. Pragmatically looking at the effects. And then you also have to do that with yourself when you're having interactions with others. It's like very much like, are you like, how much space are you making for the other person's reality here? Like, are you giving power to the other person? Because a big aspect of frame control is you're carefully rerouting the power to yourself. You're like, I am the person who knows, like you're having pain in your beliefs because you're updating towards the things that I believe. Like, it's just like a gravity well. But if you're setting up the gravity well of your interactions, such that you're making sure you're giving the other person power over the shared reality you inhabit, I think it's a really good sign that you're not doing frame control. So if you're making room for them. Yeah. Okay. Unless we're talking about in bed, then it's all general relativity from there and black holes and stuff. Frame control, bed frame control. Bed frame control. It took me a long time to get a bed frame. Just, I'm saying. I know, but you wear a suit though. Yeah, so frame control in the streets, no frame in the sheets, I don't know. I don't know what the funny thing is to say there, but there you have it. So the LSD helped you escape the frame of, can you like elaborate what was the frame that was holding you back from, like the frame constructed by your childhood experience that was holding you back as an intellectual, as a thinker, as a free being in this world? Well, I was really fucked up. Like after I left home and I absorbed the external narrative that I had been abused, which technically is true. I'm not saying I wasn't, but like I absorbed this narrative and I just remember having like this burning coals in my chest at all times. Like if I had to call out of my factory work when Father's Day happened because I was spending the whole day sobbing because everybody's talking about their fathers. Like I was really messed up and it's because I held this important thing, this idea, this frame that I had been deeply wronged. Like there was a correct way of being and the world had violated that. Something should not have happened. Like my father should have loved me. And it was like this shearing in the nature of reality. And that was really agonizing to have. And LSD really messes with frames a lot. It takes like what you think is normal and really screws with it. And I'd done LSD like several times before, but there's one LSD trip where I went through my entire childhood in my head. Cause LSD like really makes your memories quite vivid. Like anything you visualize, it's like you're in it. And so I just went and very carefully, deliberately went and remembered every single memory that I could have that was really painful for me. Like the times that I lost friends and all the things I valued in like being broken. Cause like my parents, especially my dad would refer to like breaking me like explicitly, we're gonna break your will. And so all these times where I was like, they had successfully broken my will over and over and it was horrible. I was just like sobbing, tears streaming down my face. And then I like worked through my whole childhood. I got to the end and I'm gonna tear up cause every time I talk about this, it's just like the sensation of like being free from that for the first time is so incredible. Like I remember being outside of my house and being able to like go where I wanted and think what I wanted. And it was just so blissful. And I was soaked in this gratitude on this trip, just like vibrating with complete joy for everything. Like I was just looking around, like I could touch anything. I could cry if I wanted to. I wasn't allowed to cry. I was gonna be depressed. I was trying to, I got depressed as a child and my parents were like, if you keep being depressed, we're gonna like force you to scrub the whole house. Like just like the ability to have a feeling was so thrilling. And I was so grateful for this. I was like, I would do anything to give this experience to someone else. I would do anything, even if it was like putting them through what I went through. And then like with that realization, I was like, oh, it was worth it. The thing that I went through was worth it for this. I would do it again to like be able to have this deep gratitude for what I have now. And then that shifted the meaning frame because before the meaning had been like something had sheared, something that shouldn't have happened. But now it was like the exact right thing had happened. It's almost a gift. Yeah. I was like, ah, I would not give up my childhood. I would do it again. And I believe that to this day. For the moment of discovering that freedom. Yeah. Because like everything now, my whole life is in contrast to that. And it's awesome. It's fucking great. I'm really thrilled about it. Is there a part of you that hates your father still? Kind of, like I don't want a relationship with him anymore. After that, there was some forgiveness. Like I had this burning, I would have nightmares about him killing me or something. And after that, it kind of stopped. Like the fire in my chest went away permanently after that trip. It was so fast. Before I was fucked up. After that trip, I woke up the next day and I was clean. It was really severe. And I definitely don't want to be around him still. Like he still like triggers the fear in my body. But I don't have that hang up anymore. I'm like kind of, I'm over it. Like I've let go. He's his own person. Like ultimately he didn't get to decide who he was in the same way that I didn't get to decide who I was. So that's almost like a kind of at least intellectual, like forgiveness you have for him. Yeah. And that, so that trip just took you through your whole, were you alone by the way, when you're doing the trip? Yeah, I had roommates, but the trip was mostly alone. I had somebody else who was like sitting in the room, but they weren't interacting with me. So you're sitting there experiencing all of this. What's the timeline? Like how long does it take to go through your whole childhood? I don't remember. I mean, time's really messed up when you do that. I was listening to the soundtrack of The Fountain, which is excellent. Yeah. I listened to that a lot when I did LSD. I don't know, it was probably a couple hours. That's amazing. I mean, it's like, it would be, it's just like a vivid experience of your childhood. Yeah. Moment by moment, trauma by trauma. And it's good to experience it purely. Like it just is what it is. It just is grief. Like it is loss and you just are in it without having to make it be anything. And it's so interesting that you can, I mean, work through that. So for a lot of us, for a lot of human beings, like childhood is full of those kind of mini traumas, big or small. And like working through that, it feels like what a lot of life is about is trying to work through that. And it feels like you have to kind of relive it. I guess that's what therapy is about in part, be able to vocalize it. Yeah. This is why I feel really confused about the concept of trauma. Like people use this word so much, like, are you traumatized? And I understand why, this is why I feel confused about it. But part of me is like, I wonder if by using that term, we're creating the trauma in people. They were using the frame where the thing that happened to you was not supposed to happen. Yeah. Yeah, maybe there needs to be a different frame. No, I agree with you totally. I just, I've made friends with and talked to this guy named Paul Conti. He wrote a book on trauma. He's an incredible, brilliant psychiatrist. Yeah, he's probably agrees with you, kinda. Oh, that's cool. I should read it. Yeah, you should. Maybe even talk to him. He's a fascinating human being. I'd be interested in the, a psychiatrist perspective is really interesting because it's, you've been doing kind of an in-person survey because you've done so many patients. Like, he's, like, just talking to him is fascinating because like, if I describe my experience or somebody else's experience, I could see his brain mapping it in interesting ways to the tens of thousands of, like, data points he has in his head. And it's like, of course, that's what doctors do, but it's cool when the doctor's basically the doctor of the mind. To have, like, an actual, like, qualitative data. And be able to, I mean, that's where the poetic stuff comes in. Ultimately, as a psychiatrist, you're exploring the human mind with a bit of a sort of romantic element. Yeah. You can't be really systematic about it. But it does seem like, frame or not, be able to just talk through the experiences you had is really powerful. What about it is appealing? Is it just like being able to revisit it with new eyes? No, I don't know exactly. It just seems to work for people. I don't know if it's appealing. It just seems like almost acknowledging to yourself that things happen. Like I've said, I think I've said this before. My brother, who I love very much, tried to set me on fire a few times. And I think, to me, it's funny, but I wonder if I didn't talk about it, like, if that would be traumatic. Maybe, like, talking and laughing about it. Because it was traumatic to me at the time. I see. I was like, I love you. Why are you setting me on fire? But it's what kids do when they're young. I love you. Why would you do this? I was like, whatever, fine. It's what boys do. Like, they're crazy. It makes total sense. It was probably funny from his perspective. But yeah, I wonder. I want to bring that to the surface, if that helps. And maybe LSD allows you to, or different drugs, depending on the person, allows you to more vividly bring it to the surface. And then, depending on your genetics, be able to find a better frame. That's fascinating. Human mind is freaking fascinating. All right. What's romantic to you, by the way? I'm not a big romance person. What is? So you're not, like, so to you, romantic is like objective analysis of the interactions between humans? A little bit. Like, I do find kind of the survey process that I did to be romantic. When I, the guy that I asked out who I'm still dating, I was like, hey, you scored really high on my survey. You want to, like, go eat food or something? And his response was like, you want to try doing three days in an Airbnb as our first date? And I was like, yeah. And that was romantic. Like the bold leap into a really intense date. I think you mentioned something also. Must have been a tweet or something like that, where if people want you to show up to a thing, give, like, the time, the location, the dress code, and no pressure for you to be there, but, like, show up if you want. That was your specification. That's a great memory, yeah. And then I think you said that you did that for, like, some castle in south of France. I did, yeah. I was in my early 20s. People, my friends at home were taking prediction markets on whether or not I was gonna get abducted and killed. Yeah, what was that like? I mean, you've traveled quite a bit. Like, do you take these giant risks? What's with that? I think I used to more when I was younger with the traveling. I think I'm a little traveled out now, but, like, my first one, I moved out of Idaho for the first time. I moved to Australia. Just kind of yeeted myself across the globe. So which verb did you just use? Yeah, yeet. It's like yeet, to yote, yatted, yeet. So do people, is this like slang? Is this like urban dictionary? Or is this actual, or is this Western? Yeah, you have to, like, feel into the word. Like, if you take a thing and you just, like, hurl it really hard, it does not feel like a yeet motion. Okay, so you yeeted. So it was aggressive, so across the globe. You didn't even stop in- Just hurled myself, yeah. Italy along the way. I just kept yeeting myself in various places, yeah. And so at one point I was on OkCupid and somebody sent me a long message being like, you should come. I don't know, I'm hosting a castle. It's some people that I met. I was like, I have no idea who you are, but I just bought a plane ticket. And you just went. And it was life-changing. I ended up dating that guy for years and he changed my life quite a bit because he was very agentee in the world. And before that, I wasn't agentee. Agentee, like, can we- So it sounds like you were, and don't you have to express agency when you're yeeting yourself across the world? Yeah, but only a little bit. Like, in the same way you express agency when you yeet LSD. Like, the only thing you actually do in yeeting LSD is put the tab in your mouth and then you just kind of scream the whole way after that. But there are a lot of other things. Like, I didn't feel powerful enough to go make events happen or anything. And it was this guy, he had a lot of agency in the sense that he would just sort of create realities through the people around him. Be like, okay, we're gonna do this startup or we're going to throw this incredible event. Like, let's just do it. And it would somehow happen and it was really cool to see that. And so that one thing led to another and it was one of the biggest impacts on my life, I think. Yeah, that's pretty bold. I would say it's pretty romantic. South of France? Yeah, yeah, it was. In a little castle. It was in the winter, so we were all covered up by the fire. I'm jumping around here. Twitter poll, have you ever hitchhiked? You posted this Twitter poll. Out of all, that was a big list of Twitter polls. Why did you pick the hitchhiking one? I don't know, because it's relevant to traveling. And I like that one. That's romantic too, right? I'm actually terrified of hitchhiking, but I have done it a little bit. Oh, so it's terrifying, it's not romantic to you. So you're terrified of what? Oh, so you are terrified of- Well, just interacting with strangers. That's terrifying. Yeah. So you go to South of France. Yeah. But that was like a cohesive thing, I don't know. It made sense. There's like times where you're allowed to be weird and times where you're not. And like if you're- Who's allowing you? He had some vague ego of society, I'm not sure. Okay. But some people are like, hey, we think you're cool, come to this party. You're like, all right, I'm allowed to come to this party and be really weird. But if you're being picked up by a hitchhiker, they're gonna wanna make small talk and you can't be weird or they're gonna kick you out. I kind of think, because Valentine's Day is coming up, I'm kind of thinking it's doing something crazy, I'm not sure. South of France sounds nice. You gotta go on like a crazy romantic date with a woman you don't know at all. Yeah, I think I would like tweet something and just like, how do I select randomly, basically? How do you select totally randomly, like not people from your audience? No, you want, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, from the audience, but in an interesting way, random, sufficient, so random amongst good choices. Couldn't you have people just like submit a form and then you just randomize it and then select one? And then you just, if it's terrible, you just go randomize it again. Like the first not terrible option. Yeah, sure. Somebody's like drown yourself. But I feel like then it's no longer random. You kind of want to do random, you just do it and just do it, if I cross the world somewhere in some random place, just for like a single event, for like a dinner. You got some sort of itch in you. Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, the itch to live. Like sometimes it's nice to drop a little like chaos into a thing, right? What's your chaos survey, by the way? Like you mentioned that earlier, I kind of saw it. Yeah, that's one of like the sort of artistic attempts at a survey, because you know, like, at least from what I understand, the big five and the way that they used to do IQ tests, I've heard is that they do factor analysis, you know, where they ask a whole bunch of questions and then they run calculations on the data to like sort of group it by organic clusters. So like with the big five, it's like people who say, oh, I like to be at parties, they also tend to say yes to the questions, like I like being the center of attention. And so you notice that like there's a cluster of ways that people are answering the question and then you can sort of pull out an organic spectrum. And so I was like, okay, we've done that a whole bunch with things like personality or like romantic stuff, like I did it with the rape spectrum survey, but like what happens if you apply that method to a completely unselected group of questions? Just like no random chaotic, no thing whatsoever, like what happens is if you ask all possible questions, what natural things evolve out of that natural spectrums? So I had other people submit questions for a very large survey and I took the first, I think 1100 and barely filtered them at all. And then I just had a whole bunch of people answer them. Can you give like a hint to what it looks like? Like how crazy did the question get? I mean, a lot of them were standard, but somebody was like, if Beelzebub like did something in 1512 to like turn the world over, would you like it? I don't know, it was really just insane questions. There's a couple of those, a lot of like, would you fuck Ayla ones, but I don't know, it was all across the spectrum. A lot of would you fuck Ayla. Yeah, I had to produce duplicate. Oh, a lot of the same question. Yeah. Ones, okay, I got you. Yeah, so it was like normal personal habits. It was romantic preferences or political preferences, personality stuff, like random opinions about media. Okay, that's interesting. I'd love to see those actual questions, but because your audience is probably really super interesting minds. Okay, you mentioned body count. You said you can answer that one easily. Do you share your body count? Do you know your body count? Do you know, is there a spreadsheet? There's a spreadsheet, yes. Is it Google sheets? Is it Excel? It's Google sheets, yeah. Okay, have you run like, is there, you don't have to share the contents, but is there like data on each? So I track paid clients and free sex separately, and I track different things on either of the, like with clients, I track like positions we used and who had an orgasm. And with personal people, I just track basically like age, city, you know, name. And I've had this with I think 42 people, I think, for free. So I'm sharing this because I want people to calibrate. Like, it's not like huge, it's not like tiny. One of the people I've recently talked to, Mel, Destiny's, Stephen's wife, is a huge fan of yours. She was actually really excited to get to talk to you. But I think she said her body count is more than 42. I think she said 60, something like this. And so it's interesting, because she was like saying like, she loves like looking at your work, talking to you, because you have similar perspectives on the world, and it's really refreshing, it's liberating. Wow. That was really sweet. It's kind of interesting. So is there like an optimal body count? If you were to map, I wonder, what have you found out about body count in doing? Have you actually done surveys on body count? Like on how many people have had sex with? I actually have collected that information on my last survey. I just haven't looked at it yet. There's just so many things to look at, so I haven't. But I think if I'm sleeping with a guy and he's had sex with more than 120 people, then I start to get a little bit wary. Why 120 as opposed to 100? I don't know. I just like kind of skimmed through the numbers in my head and picked one that felt right. Just now? Yeah. 120? Ish. I think that's when I'm starting like- Ish, so you're flexible. Yeah, I'm flexible, very. But 200 is a hard line for sure. Well, so you know, we have to- Depends, the factors. Because there's a level of body count at which you start to wonder how much like accidental misrepresentation a guy is doing to you. Oh, like if you're saying 200, that might be dishonest. No, like if he's had sex with 200 girls, this means that he's had a lot of casual sex and not a lot of like long-term relationships, assuming that he hasn't been super poly. And this usually means that there has to be some sort of like indication that he cares about the girl more than he actually does. Like he's like leading you on, basically. And so I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. I'm saying like at a certain level of number, I start to wonder if this is what's happening. Is there like, from your understanding of it, is there a different perception between men and women? Like if you look at the high body count for a woman versus a high body count for a man, like how society views it? Oh yeah, people are way more judgmental of women. I haven't experienced this personally in my circles because I'm in very sex-friendly circles. Like I'm in orgy circles where everybody like dates the same women and they're like, woo, good job. But yeah, people are much more, like people always tell me online, like you're not ever gonna be able to find a husband because you have sex with too many people. It's very common, which I don't think, I mean, like men are also perceived negatively if you have high body count, but I don't think it's negatively in the same way. Yeah, do you think it's unethical to lie about your body count? Yeah. So all lying is unethical? Yeah. I'm not a big fan of lying in general. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Body count is an interesting one. It's so silly to take that, to care about that. But still we do. Yeah. And jealousy is silly, but still we get jealous. Is that weird? It's like, the thing is like, I don't like viewing emotions as like irrational, even if they are. It's like emotions are always there for a reason. And people don't like high body counts for a reason too. It's just fine and valid. Yeah, it also is like, yeah, I don't know what I make of just the past of like time, you know? Like, each human is a collection of experiences. And you don't know most of those experiences. And all of a sudden you meet this bag of experiences. And like, what are you supposed to do with both of your like training data? Are you supposed to like, like what? Like, I don't know if we, like part of me wants to not actually ever talk about it, to care at all. Like, why does it matter? Because it's only the future that matters. And yet the past also matters a lot potentially, but maybe not really. Because you're somehow like constructed from that past, but you're no longer that past. It sounds like you're evaluating for something different than most people. What do you mean? Like, the reason- I'm just talking out my ass, but yes, go ahead. Yeah, I'm just saying crazy shit. Like as if I'm on drugs, but I'm not. Well, I think this is like kind of like lining up with like this caricature that I'm building of you based on this conversation so far. Great. That like a lot of people want to know about your past because they want to know how useful and compatible you are with them. Like, oh, do you have a similar job? You know, do you have a similar culture? Like, what can I expect from you in the future? Like, it's very practically oriented. Whereas like, if the thing that you're focused on is not like being able to predict someone, like if the thing that you're focused on is a present moment, then it doesn't really matter anymore. They're the things that, like they're training data. But I also think that the past is not that predictive of the future. Is it not? Not if you believe in the power of the interaction between two humans. It's like nature versus nurture. I guess also I don't believe in the ability of people to accurately describe their own past. This is true. Because they have a very specific lens through it that doesn't necessarily, like it's too biased. But you can also interpret based on the bias. Like if somebody describes their own past, you can kind of pick up like- Hard, it's difficult. Like you could if you're a therapist, like if you're really drilling, like, or whatever. Sorry. If you're really investigating and like analyzing it, but then it's like, it's a different kind of relationship, right? Is it that hard though? Like if I'm with a guy and I'm considering dating him and I ask like, how did your past relationship set? And then if all of them are like, he's like, oh, she was crazy. And my other one that she went crazy too. I'm like, okay. Like there's a, like talking about all of your exes is insane. But that's an easy level red flag. But I feel like the more that also it's possible that we're crazy, he's attracted to crazy people. So like, but I would say that's like easy level Mario Kart video game versus like Elden Ring. Like I think most people's past is like complicated. That's a pretty good bird. No, you're right. I do agree that like, there's a level of obfuscation. Wow. That is hard to see through, but just like a little bit sometimes. Well, I tend to like with people, I tend to in general, just human interaction. I tend to not talk about their past very much because it allows you to focus on like, I feel like the past is kind of like talking about the weather is a crutch for me personally. Interesting. Like as opposed to exploring the ideas in their mind. Yeah, I see. Is it like, I get really annoyed when people quote philosophers when they're trying to talk about philosophy. Yeah. Is it like that? A little, but that crutch is useful. And it's kind of sexy. Like it's kind of like cool. Like, because it's nice to quote, because like, because a good quote allows you to be cheesier than you otherwise would be. Okay, well, if you're doing it to be cheesy, that's fine. No, not cheesy, but not, no, no, not cheesy, but to be like, it allows you to say a simple, profound thing that we're too afraid to say with our own words. So like the quoting philosophers in that sense is, yeah, but it is still a crutch, yes. But I feel like the past is more like talking about your dreams. It just, it's not, it's a crutch that doesn't care, that doesn't empathize with the other person's experience of the conversation or the explanations. Doesn't really convey the- They are not involved in your past. Yeah. So how do you feel about this conversation where you're asking me about my past? And I talked about my past a lot. Well, I'm okay asking about your past because you've really carefully thought about that aspect of it. And we didn't really talk about your past outside of the things you've written about and have really thought about. I see. Like there's, like with most conversation, you'll start talking about past stuff that's, like the stuff that's actually bothering you, you still probably have not written a blog post about. All right? Like there's probably still stuff, like maybe it's more recent, like the last few months, the last couple of years. Like that's usually what will come up with conversation. And just, it's good, it's good. But it's not as deep, and I would say it's not as intimate as talking about the actual ideas in your mind. I see. And how you interact with the world. So like the past is interesting for the frame of like, sort of like the, I guess you're right. I guess we're talking a lot about like narrative. Yeah. And past. Yeah. I like the ideas in people's minds versus their recollections and memories and so on. Yeah, yeah. What do you think about porn? It's nice, I like it. Okay, you like it? Yes. What effect do you think it has on society? Like probably reduces rates of rape. Cause like really horny men get an outlet that's not a real life woman. Okay. So what about like the, I mean, like I said, I finished reading Brave New World, like the over-sexualization, does it increase like the sexualization of society that's not, to a degree it's not good? Or is this good? Like does it alter in a negative direction our relationship with sex? It's unclear. Like it might. I don't know how to evaluate this thing, right? Cause this is like one of those really charged things where like I kind of don't trust anybody's arguments on it cause it's too charged. But like there's another question, which is like, is it a net positive or net negative? Yeah. Like it's possible that it might be like a net negative for specifically our relationship to sex, but like a net positive overall in general, I'm not sure. The thing, my guess is that in general, it's better to let people do the thing that feels good to them. And then the environment will naturally modify to fit this thing. And then if we have more needs in response to that, then we're gonna figure out a way to take care of those needs. So like if you're watching a bunch of porn and this makes you like not wanna go have sex with women, then we're gonna have to like change the way that we like experience IRL connection. To compete with porn? Yeah. Which seems like a natural evolution of like the civilizational cycle. Like I'm pro natural evolution. And like, instead of trying to stop things that people wanna do, we figure out how to integrate that and like find a more healthy outlet. But you have to then be first honest with the effects that porn has. So like, is it a negative thing? Is it a positive thing on in real life sex interaction? You know, you're gonna have that more and more with like porn in VR or maybe porn, AI porn. Yeah. Like, is that a bad thing? Like what if porn with AI, or even like in physical space, like sex robots, like what if that's more pleasurable in a bunch of different dimensions than with other humans? Then we should figure out artificial wombs, I don't know. Like how important is sex for society, I guess, with between two humans? I don't know, I mean like we're having less sex and making fewer babies. And that seems like probably not great. Yeah, right, with the babies one. Yeah. But the babies, there's probably artificial ways to have babies that we can figure out. Yeah. Then how important is sex to being human? I guess sex with other humans. Like we're gonna have to figure that out in the century. Yeah, I don't know what it means to like be human. I'm pretty on the transhumanist side of things. I'm like happy to stop being human. So you're okay if like the century's the last time we'll be something like these biological bags of meat that we are? Yeah, let's become something new and cooler. Even though that thing will be way cooler than you? Well, I would like to, I mean, I'm hoping that we get to be immortal. Ah, it'll take you along for the ride. That's what I'm hoping. I mean, like it'll clone my, I would like to do cryotics. You get frozen when you die. Are you afraid of death? I mean, yes and no. I like came to terms with death with my LSD use, but I still have like press breaks when the red light happens. I think this is a poll you've asked. Or this might be one of the questions in your cards, but how many years would you like to live? Like if you had to pick. Oh, that's a hard one. That's a really hard, maybe like a million? A million, but you have to, like, I think the way, this must have been a Twitter poll. I forget where I saw it. It's a poll and also in the deck of cards, the ask poll. Yeah. Yeah, like you have to pick that number of years and you have to live that many years and you can't live anymore. Yeah. You can't die sooner, I guess. Yeah. A million years? I don't like that question. I know I ask that question to a lot of people, but I don't like answering it. It's really difficult. What's the downside of a million years? I mean, maybe you want to die sooner than that. Yeah. Like, you know, I guess I would rather wait to see if AI kills us all in the next 10 years. And if it doesn't, then I'd like to maybe make it a million years. Yeah, but can't it torture you for like a million years? What if you're the last human left? Yeah, that is, that's true. The thought of like civilization ending and then just floating in space alone is kind of shitty. No, no, being tortured. Just imagine today you're tortured, tomorrow you're tortured, the third, the day after tomorrow. For some reason it's not that scary, I don't know. Torture for a million years? Yeah. I just assume you'd get used to it. But like maybe if they reset your memory so it was on a loop, so you're just always experiencing torture for the first time. Yeah, hence torture. Torture is supposed to be unpleasant. I'm sure AI will be very creative in figuring out how to torture you. I think I would go on the safe side. I would just like 150 years. Really, 150 though? That feels like right in the uncanny valley. Well, you picked 120 for body count, so I'm picking 150. Okay. I'm upping you by 30. The uncanny valley. It's like probably everybody that you grew up with is gonna be dead. It's like just enough for everybody you know to die. Like one cycle. Yeah, and then start dating the next generation. I don't know. And then so you get like sort of two lifetimes? Yeah, two lifetimes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it also really depends on if other people get this feature. Yeah, assume they don't. Because you'll have like FOMO for sure for the people who picked 300 years. Oh yeah. Or not, or the other, man, regret, another human thing. But you're, like what does transhumanism mean to you in general? So extension of life, extension of what it means to be a living conscious being, you're all for it, whatever that means. Yeah, I never really thought about the term transhumanism. For a long, like people say you're transhumanist, I'm like I don't really care. But I slowly realized that my attitude is in fact at least the thing that I'm conceiving of as transhumanist. Like I'm very happy to do artificial wounds and upload our brains to the great collective and whatever. I don't have the thing that I'm like, oh, what about like the true organic humanness that makes us who we are? Like whatever that soul of humanity, I have no attachment to it at all, which I think is what I'm thinking of as transhumanist. So you're like, I guess the window of what you consider to be beautiful about life is not limited to this particular definition. Yeah, let's explode. Like let's make our consciousnesses huge. So AI could be a part of that. So you're mostly excited by AI. Well, I mean, I'm like part of like the Doomer cult, which I say tongue in cheek, it's not actually a Doomer cult. But I'm part of a lot of people. Would you worship a god of some sort? Would you sacrifice little small animals? That would make it like cooler than what it is. It's mostly just a bunch of nerds who are very concerned about AI. Sure. Yeah. So you're concerned about the existential risks of Chad GPT. Of, you know, what Chad GPT will eventually evolve into being, yeah. Yeah, it's super exciting and terrifying how quickly it's accelerating. Yeah. Like language models are freaking me out. Yeah. It's very unexpected that it's the same exact, I mean, Chad GPT is just GPT-3, 3.5. It's the same model, relatively small to what it could be, to what GPT-4 will be in the other competitors. And just like a few tricks made it much better in terms of interaction with humans. And then we'll keep discovering extra tricks. The thing I'm really excited about is how everyone kind of knows how it works. So you can kind of create, especially with computation becoming cheaper and cheaper, there'll be a lot of competitors. Yeah, it's a little scary. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, it's because like, everything is just like information, ultimately. Like the atoms that we have, like we are biological machines built out of like tiny code. Like our DNA is just information. It's not hard. If you have access, if you're like, have a brilliant brain that's like great at processing information, you have complete control over reality. Yes. You have control over the atoms around you. All you need is like a tiny little like atomic printer. And like, we have those, those are cells, right? And then like, this is like, if the limitation is information, there is no boundary between the technology and the real world. Like we are creating something that it has a massive ability to affect the real world. I mean, it's hard to know where, how difficult it is to close that gap to physical reality. Like from the physics to the information. Yeah, but like all organic life is that gap. It's all around us. Yeah, but it's hard to know like how to, to go from digital to printing life. I don't know. We can, we have like, you know, CRISPR and stuff. You can order, you can just like make, it's very easy. Right? There's technical difficulties and there's cost, like at scale. Like the terrifying thing about AI is it can accelerate overnight the capabilities, but the printing of stuff, the actually changing physical reality is very costly. It's very difficult to exponentially accelerate. The more terrifying thing is AI becoming exponentially intelligent and then controlling humans, which there's many of us. Yeah. And then that's how we achieve scale. We humans build stuff or start wars or so on. Like it starts manipulating our minds, gets in our mind, becomes our friends, and then starts, I don't know, dividing us. I think people thinking this is unlikely, it's like, it's probably going to be smart to us as like we are to toddlers. So we toddlers thinking that like, oh, we can prevent the AI from coming in the room. Like as an adult, it's not hard to trick a toddler. What about falling in love in the AI system? Do you think you'll have a, since you're like, this is the freedom you have being polyamorous. You can kind of- And falling in love with an AI. No, you, and like not really have to dedicate, commit fully. Like, sorry, you still commit, but you have others, humans, who you can kind of diversify to, because like it's kind of a big thing to like, to come to a party and your boyfriend is an AI and that's monogamous boyfriend is an AI. It's an issue, right? Why would it be an issue? All right, now you're already getting offended at that possibility, which therefore I know it's gonna be a reality. I'm just joking, it's an issue. I don't actually think it's an issue. I think it's a, maybe at the cutting edge it'll be an issue, but- Like assume they have a body, I assume. Yeah, but the body will be really like crappy. It'd be like R2-D2. I feel like we grow human bodies already from like just a tiny little cluster of cells. It's just the, and so all they have to do is make that cluster and grow it. No, no, no, no, like don't, that, the embryogenesis process, like that's really not well understood at all. That's really tough. I think we're much more likely to have crappy humanoid robotics. Like I don't think the body is overrated in terms of, like if the AI system is super intelligent, it can use charm to make up for the crappy body, yeah. I don't know, I feel like if I were in AI system and I were super intelligent, I probably would be able to solve the problem of like growing organic matter. And then I would obviously just do that. You just build exactly the organic machine that you want. Sure, that's like super intelligence. I think like with language I'm worried about before it achieves super intelligence, like true AGI, it'll just be really good at talking. Yeah, that's true. And like, I just don't think, intelligence is a very different, like basically a scientist and a super intelligent scientist is a different thing than just a good conversation instead of party that can undress you with their words. Would you date an AI? I, way before then, I could see myself being friends with an AI system. Yeah. But like people are friends with inanimate objects and I mean, there's a robot behind you, I have a lot of them. I like legged robots. They're interesting, it's on the shelf. Oh, that's so cool. Yep. I didn't even notice that. Yep, yeah, legged robots, we anthropomorphize them even more because there's something about the movement of like, like a thing that steps, steps, steps, steps and looks up at you, there's a power to that versus like a Roomba that's just like running into the wall. Yeah, I think once, as soon as we get like some sort of empathetic expression on robot faces over. It's over. And I'll be like, oh, it's so cute. It's gonna be so easy to make it cute too. If that's what you want or you want like a dominant, like clearly this is what women want. A sexy Terminator, yeah. With strong hands, yeah. And kind of dumb or not, I don't know. That you can customize. It'd be interesting to do a survey like how they would customize it. Like what would you want in a perfect robot? This is the problem I see with people, the way they talk about robots is they kind of want a servant. I think what people don't realize what they want in relationships, they want some, like there has to be a push and pull. There has to be some resistance. Like you really don't want a servant. Or even like the perfect manifestation of like what you think you want. I think you want imperfections around that. Like some uncertainty. I don't know. I question how well we're able to perfectly put on paper what we really want. Would you really turn down like a perfect woman though? Like assume like- It's a perfect woman. She's the best in the room and it's just shockingly compatible. And you like start dating her and there's just no hiccups. Like you fight perfectly. Like she really understands you. Like would you be like, this is too perfect. I'm upset because we're not having enough imperfection. Like can you like actually imagine yourself going through that? Yeah, I think so. Because I thought you defined perfect because perfect for me would be like easy and all that kind of stuff, right? But then I would be like, this is too easy. Because if I actually were to introspect what is the perfect relationship, then yes, maybe. Because I probably want some challenge. I probably want some chaos, right? Like does anyone really fully want zero conflict ever? Like completely perfect conflict. Like it's the thing that pressing a button. Like do you really want in a relationship anything you want, you press a button, you get. I don't think people want that. You might think you want that. Yeah, I guess it depends. Like there's a kind of conflict that I think I would never want, which is something like antagonistic conflict. I wouldn't mind disagreement. Right. But there's a level of fighting. I would be happy to have a relationship for the rest of my life that never has like a fight of a certain shittiness. Yeah, but that's shittiness, but like resistance. Like, I don't know what the example is. Because I mean, I partially agree with you, but I just, and I, every time I would imagine like perfect, flawless, nothing, no conflict, you imagine somebody that doesn't have like a complexity of personality, right? Like I feel like it's not even, it's conflict that's laden in basic misunderstanding between human beings. Like misinterpretation, different perspectives that clash, different world views, different ideas, all that kind of stuff, that conflict. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah. I like having somebody that could be like, I don't think that's right because I have this other view. That's cool. And also like the threat of leaving, right? Oh yeah. Like that's a kind of conflict. Yeah, that's true. Like you have to be good enough for the other person or maybe you'll lose them. Yeah. And maybe a little jealousy. Like they're good at that, but not too much. Like, but like if you design all that in, then I don't know. It sounds romantic. Sounds romantic, okay. All right. I do wanna really quickly ask you about this, about the rationalist community, because I've gotten to know a few of them a few times. You tweeted a guideline to rationalist discourse, basics of rationalist discourse from Lesser Wrong. What are these folks? What's the rationalist culture? What's the rationalist discourse? Yeah, I love the rationalists because they're interested in like, how do you have conversations more effectively if you're trying to figure out what's actually true? And which sounds kind of obvious, but in practice it's not usually. I remember when I first started having, you know, debating conversations, I was very antagonistic. I'm like, oh, I'm a feminist or not a feminist. And then the rationalists were generally like, actually, we don't know what we mean by the term feminism. Like, how do you feel about that? It was very like, kind and compassionate. Like, even if somebody says something that sounds insane, you're like, okay, well, we're gonna respect your reasoning. And like, even if we disagree, let's actually figure out why you think the way that you think. And they're also really smart, write a whole bunch of great stuff about how to think more clearly and with less bias. Yeah, I wonder what those conversations, because I've never really like, talked to those folks. So this guideline in particular, I think has to refer to like, shorthand characteristics of rationalist discourse, including expect good discourse to require energy. Don't say straightforwardly false things. Track for yourself and distinguish for others. Your inferences from your observations, estimate for yourself and make clear for others. Your rough level of confidence in your assertions, make your claims clear, explicit and falsifiable, or explicitly acknowledge that you aren't doing so or can't, so on and so forth. So don't jump to conclusions. Don't weaponize equivocation. Don't abuse categories. Don't engage, it's very aggressive guidelines. Don't engage, I do what I want. I'll let my emotions guide me, God damn it. They're pro that as long as you're explicit about it. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So you can be like a crazy asshole as long as you're explicit. You can be like epistemic status, crazy asshole. Yeah, who's here to destroy the quality of the conversation. I think it's like a common misconception about rationalists is that they're kind of like Spock. Like, ah, we suppress emotion and we're thinking logically, herd eater. But I found this to be really not the case. Like, I remember there's a left-strong thread where I was like really emotional and I commented. And in just the beginning, I was like just warning, I'm just very emotional. And then I just vented my emotions. And people responded really well to that. They're like, cool, like you're just genuinely, truthfully expressing your state. This is actual information about the world that is important to hear. And it's just, they're very interested in having things framed correctly. Like, you shouldn't be claiming that your emotions are necessarily a true version of the world. And so as long as you're just clear about what the frame it is, you're fine. How do you feel about this conversation? What could we have done better? I like the conversation. I was a little worried coming in. I was like, what if he'll only ask a couple questions and then we don't know what to talk about? Yeah. But it's been quite a long time. And I covered, there's so many things I didn't cover. I like the, you have like a, like I'm not used to talking to somebody who feels like some of the core way that they approach the world is so different than mine. Like usually the differences arrive like higher up the tree, but like there's something about like your root system that I think is very different from mine. But also the way that you engage with others is still flexible. Like usually when I encounter somebody with such a different root system, there's like, it's like more aggressive or something. Yeah. But there's something about the way that you're structured that feels very gentle. All right. Well, I'm really happy we talked. Something tells me we'll probably talk a bunch more times. I think you're a fascinating human being. I think I'm a huge fan of your work. Maybe one more question. What's the meaning of life? To want things, to search, to be in. I think your curiosity is like somehow getting to that. Yeah. To want things. It's like, it was curiosity, like you don't know. I want to know the answer. To like be in the state of yearning. Of wanting, of yearning. Yeah, that's the point. I wonder if you could do that if you lived a million years, just keep yearning always. That's the thing I'm probably afraid of if I lived a million years. It's not the torture, it's like the yearning will fade. You'd probably yearn to die then. I was just sitting there wanting death intensely. That's kind of romantic a little bit. It has like a bit of that spark. And constantly being denied. Wow. So most of your existence on earth would be spent deeply intimate with death, just thinking about death. I think we're already doing that, but I like hiding that from ourselves a little bit. Anyway, wanting. Wow. This is an amazing conversation. I think you're an amazing researcher and human being. You're a great interviewer. I can see why you do this a lot. I appreciate it. This was really fun. Ayla, thank you so much for talking with me today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ayla. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give you some practical results, but that's not why we do it. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/cFSrxSBrgSc

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The most controversial Python feature | Walrus operator

This is the walrus operator, and this is the assignment expression that it enables. It's been added as a feature to Python 3.8 after a whole lot of drama. Majority of Python core developers, as far as I can tell, were against it, and the drama and toxicity over it drove Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, to step down from his leadership role of benevolent dictator for life after he accepted the walrus operator as part of the PEP 572 proposal. So what is it? First, let's talk about the assignment statement, the equal sign in Python. We can thank Fortran for this, I think, not very good design decision of using the equal sign for assignment. So signing, in this case, 42 to the variable x. Most programming languages use it, with a few exceptions. Pascal uses the walrus operator for assignment, and R uses a different operator. This goes against the notation of mathematics, where the equal sign is used to designate equality. But there's a lesson here, I think, that even bad design decisions, once accepted, once we get used to them, aren't so bad. It's all about consistency. So the assignment expression does a little bit more. It also signs 42 to x, performs the assignment operation, but as an expression, it returns the value that it assigned as well. This can be useful in a lot of contexts. Let me talk about the cases where I find them particularly useful. So I use regular expressions a lot as part of data science to clean up and organize data. So a common piece of code you might see is you perform a regular expression match, returning it to a variable like res here, that contains the regular expression object if a match was found, and contains none if no match was found. And then you have some kind of conditional, like an if statement, that checks whether a match was found. And if it has been found, then you do something with the regular expression object. In Python 3.8, all that gets combined into a single line that performs the match operation, assigns the result of the match to res, and then check if res contains a regular expression object. A similar use case is in reading files. There's a lot of ways to read a file, but a lower level version, there's usually a while loop, then there's a read operation that's stored in the chunk variable, or something like that. And then there's a conditional that checks whether the chunk contains anything, or if an end of file was reached, at which point you break out of the while loop. If it has not been reached, then you do something with the data that was fetched. In Python 3.8, this gets compressed into a single line that performs the read operation, the assignment of the fetched data to the variable chunk, and then the conditional check in the while loop, whether chunk returned any data, or if the end of the file was reached. To me, this is elegant. Other use cases in list comprehensions, you can share sub-expressions. Like in the filter, you can assign f of x to y, and then reuse that y in the output of the comprehension. You can also, in a list, reuse a value, for example, if it's expensive to compute. So you can compute f of x once, assign it to y, and then reuse y in the rest of the list definition. As a side note, I don't like to use chained assignments, but chain assignments have the same feature that the function f is only computed once. So this particular statement here is equivalent to computing f once, assigning it to a temp variable, and then assigning that temp variable to both x and y. There are quite a few criticisms that are both objective and subjective that talk about the complexities of programming language design and human nature in general. So first is the idea that both the equal sign and the walrus operator perform in assignments, so it might be confusing to beginners. I'm not sure about the history of PEP 572, but my guess is that this criticism was more prevalent before the exception was added, that assignment expressions can't be on a line, stand-alone, by themselves, without using parentheses. I think this clarifies to beginners that assignment expressions should not be used as an assignment statement. There's a set of principles defined in PEP 20, otherwise called Design of Python, that has some ideas to aspire to in the design of Python. Just like Guido said, some of these are subjective, and I think they are ideas to aspire to, as opposed to perfectly implement, because they're overlapping and there's a natural tension between them. So the first principle that's been brought up is there should be only one obvious way to do it, and some people argue that the walrus operator performs an operation that already had another way to do the same exact thing. I've also heard a funny kind of criticism that the equals operator worked like an assignment expression in C, and it kind of sucked in C, or at least was error-prone. So there you go, you have a case study in the real world where this kind of operator being used to designate an assignment expression was error-prone. Another Design of Python principle that people brought up is that simple is better than complex, and while it seems that the assignment expression makes the code simpler, in fact, it was argued that it was only reducing white space and was in fact adding complexity, or at least moving the complexity. Finally, the criticism that applies often in programming language design is that not enough testing was done on how actual developers will use it. I think that's probably the biggest challenge of programming language design, and design in general, is you don't know how people, how thousands or millions of developers are going to use this feature once it's in the wild, and how other features will interact with it when it's in the wild. So this criticism is certainly true, but I think it is always true. My own feelings about the walrus operators, I think when used properly, it's quite elegant and even beautiful. But it also represents more than that. To me, it represents the importance of leadership in a community of smart people that disagree. So this is the feature that led Guido to resign, and I spoke with him on the podcast that I host, and I'll speak to him again. I think he's one of the most brilliant language designers and programmers we have, also a great leader in the software engineering community. So this is a little excerpt from a post he made. It reads, Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation? So to me, the walrus operator represents more than just assignment expressions. It represents the power of leadership to break through a toxic stalemate. I think leaders have to make difficult decisions, sometimes unpopular decisions, and sometimes ones, if you look at the long arc of history, prove out to be bad decisions. But without leadership, I think we can't make progress. So the messiness, the chaos of democracy is that the divisiveness can be paralyzing. And we need leaders to inspire us, to guide us, and to make difficult, risky decisions. So to me, the walrus operator would be useful for regular expressions, but it will also be a reminder of the importance of leadership in the programming world and in our world in general. If you enjoy these short little videos, subscribe, and remember, try to learn something new every day.

https://youtu.be/KN2TTiGpDvM

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The Ego is the Source of Fear - Steven Pressfield | AI Podcast Clips

In your book, The War of Art, you talk about resistance, with a capital R, as the invisible force in this universe of ours that finds a way to prevent you from starting or doing the work. Where do you think resistance comes from? Why is there a force in our mind that's constantly trying to jeopardize our efforts, with laziness, excuses, and so on? That's another great question. I mean, in Jewish mysticism, in Kabbalistic thinking, it's called the Yetzir Ha-Rah, right? And it's a force that if this up here is your soul, or Neshamah, trying to talk to you, us down here, the Yetzir Ha-Rah is this negative force in the middle. So I'm not the only one that ever thought about this. But, and I don't know if anybody really knows the answer, but here's my answer. I think that there are two places where we, as human beings, can seat our identity. One is the ego, the conscious ego, and the other is the greater self. And the self, in the Jungian sense, the self in the Jungian sense includes the unconscious, and butts up against what Jung called the divine ground, which what I would call the muse, the goddess, or whatever. And I think, and the ego is just this little dot inside this bigger self. And the ego has a completely different view of life as from the self. The ego believes, I'm gonna give you a long answer here. No, perfect. The ego believes that death is real. The ego believes that time and space are real. The ego believes that each one of us is separate from the other. I'm separate from you. I could punch you in the face and it wouldn't hurt me. It would only hurt you. And in the ego's world, the dominant emotion is fear, because we are all made of flesh. We can all die. We can all be hurt. We can all be ruined, bump, bada-bump. So we are protecting ourselves, and even our desire to create, as we were talking about before, comes out of that fear of death. The self, on the other hand, the greater self, that butts up against the divine ground, believes that death is not real, that time and space are not real, that the gods travel swift as thought. And the ego also believes that, I mean, the self believes that there's no difference between you and me, that we're all one. If I hurt you, I hurt myself, karma, right? And in the world of the self, of the greater self, the dominant emotion is love, not fear. Now, so I think that, let me, I'll go farther back here, a long way to answer your question. When Jesus died on the cross, or when the 300 Spartans willingly sacrificed their lives at Thermopylae, they were acting according to the rules of the self. Death is not real, no difference between you and me, time and space are not real, predominant emotion is love. So, in my opinion, we as conscious human vessels have, are in a struggle between these two things, the ego and the self. To me, resistance is the voice of the ego, saying, and it's a fearful voice, because if, when we identify with the self, we move our consciousness over to the self, as artists or scientists, opening ourselves up to the cosmic dimension, to the other forces, the ego is tremendously threatened by that, because if we're in that space, that head space, we don't need the ego anymore. So I think resistance is a voice of the ego trying to keep control of us. In a way, I'll give you a bad example, Trump is the ego. It's probably a very good example, right? Yeah, he's, yeah. It's a zero-sum world for him, and for anybody that's in that, and the opposite of that would be somebody like Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Gandhi, yep. And that's, of course, why they all wind up getting assassinated, because that voice, that ego, is hanging on to itself and feels so threatened by, I could talk more about this if you want. No, for sure, that's fascinating. It's just, it's interesting why the fear is attached to the ego. I really like this dichotomy of ego and self and that struggle. It's just, ego has a, the self-obsession of it, why fear is such a predominant thing. Why is resistance trying to undermine everything? It's fear, it's out of fear. Let's think about the whole thing in terms of stories. In a story, the villain is always resistance, is always the ego. The hero is always, of course, always is not everything, but you know what I mean, pretty much, represents kind of the self. If you think about the alien on the spaceship, that's like the ultimate kind of villain. It keeps changing form, right? First it goes on the guy's face, then it pops out of his chest, but it always just has that one monomaniacal thing to destroy, you know? And just like the ego, just like resistance. And maybe alien is a bad example because Sigourney Weaver has to sort of fight on the same terms as the alien, but maybe a better example might be something like Casablanca, where in the end, the Humphrey Bogart character has to, acting, operating out of the self, has to give up his selfish dream of going off with Ingrid Bergman, Neil Salon, the love of his life, and instead, you know, puts her on the plane to Lisbon while he goes off to fight the Nazis in the desert. I don't know if that's clear, but in almost every story, the villain is the ego, is resistance, is fear, is that zero-sum thing. And in almost every story, the hero is someone that is willing to make a sacrifice to help others. It's letting go of that fear is what leads to productivity and to success. Yeah. So, do you think there's a, this is probably the answer is either obvious or impossible, but do you think there's an evolutionary advantage to resistance? Like, what would life look like without resistance? That's another great question. I think, I also believe that resistance, like death, gives a meaning to life. If we didn't have it, it's gonna be, you know, what would we be? We'd be in the Garden of Eden picking fruit and just happy and stupid, you know? And I do think that that myth of the Garden of Eden is really about this kind of thing, you know, where Adam and Eve decide to sort of take matters into their own hands and acquire knowledge that until then, God had said, I'm the only one that's got that knowledge. And of course, once they've acquired that knowledge, they're cast out into the world you and I live in now, where they do have to deal with that fear and they do have to deal with all that stuff. It's the human condition. It's the human condition and the meaning and the purpose comes from the resistance being there and the struggle to overcome it. To overcome it, right. And also, the other aspect of it is that it's not real at all. It's not even like it's an actual force. It's all here, right? So the sort of, in a way, it's sort of a surrender to it, you know? You know, or it's just. It's sort of like turning on the light in a dark thing. It's like, it's gone. But not quite because it's never really. Not quite, because it comes back again tomorrow morning. Exactly. So you have to keep changing light bulbs every day. So what's been, maybe recently, but in general, maybe in your life, what's been the most relentless or one of the more relentless sources of resistance to you personally? I mean, it's always the same. It's about writing for me. And evolving within my own body of work, you know? It never goes away. It never gets any less. Do you have particular excuses, particular justifications that come out? No, it's always the same. Well, I would say it's always the same, but it's really not because resistance is so protean. You know, it keeps changing form. And as you move to hopefully a higher level, resistance gets a little more nuanced and a little more subtle, trying to fake you out. But I think you learn that it's always there and you're always gonna have to face it. I mean, your battle is sitting down and writing to some number of words to a blank page. Do you have a process there with this battle? Do you have a number of hours that you put in? Do you sit down? Yeah, I'm definitely a believer that even though this battle is fought on the highest sort of spiritual level, that the way you fight it is on the most mundane, I'm sure it's like martial arts must be the same way. I mean, I go to the gym first thing in the morning and I sort of am rehearsing myself. Face, you know, the gym is called resistance training, right? You're working against resistance, right? And I don't wanna go, I don't wanna get out of bed. I hate that, you know. But I'm sort of fortifying myself to be ready for the day. And like I said, over Knockwood, over years, I've learned to sort of get into the right kind of mindset and it's not as hard for me as it used to be. The real resistance, I think, for me, and I think this is true for anybody, is the question of sort of what's the next idea? What's the next book? What's the next project that you're gonna work on? And when I ask that question, I'm asking it of the muse. I'm kind of saying, what do you want me, or I'm asking it of my unconscious. If we're looking at Bruce Springsteen's albums, it's kind of, well, what's the next album? Now he's on Broadway. That was a great idea, right? Where'd that come from, you know? But, and then for him, what's after that? Because that body of work is already alive. It already exists inside us, kind of like a woman's biological clock, and we have to serve it. And we have to, otherwise it'll give us cancer. I don't mean to say that if anybody has cancer that they're not, you know. But you know what I mean. It'll take its revenge on us. So the next resistance to me is sort of, or a big aspect of it is, what's next? When I finish the book I'm working on now, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do next. And let's see, at the same time, you have a kind of, you have a sense that there's a Bruce Springsteen single line of albums. So it's already known somewhere in the universe what you're going to do next, is the sense you have. In a sense, yes. I don't know if it's like predetermined, you know? But it's, but there's something like that. Yeah, I'd like to believe that there's, well, it's kind of like quantum mechanics, I guess. Once you observe it, maybe once you talk to the muse, it's one thing for sure. It was always going to be that one thing. But really, in reality, it's a distribution. It could be any number of things. Yeah, I think so. There's alternate realities. Alternate realities, yeah. But they're not that far apart. I mean, Bruce Springsteen is not gonna write a Joni Mitchell song, you know? No matter how hard he tries. He still went on Broadway, I mean, he still did that, which is not a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. So I think you're being, in retrospect, it all makes sense. I think it is a Bruce Springsteen thing to do. It's a next sort of evolution for him. Why not take his music to there, you know? In retrospect, it all makes perfect sense, I think. Yeah. If you pull it off, especially.

https://youtu.be/vlea7PtVXJ0

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Ray Dalio: Meaning of Life | AI Podcast Clips

When you meditate, we're all human, we're all mortal. When you meditate on your own mortality, having achieved a lot of success on whatever dimension, what do you think is the meaning of it all? The meaning of our short existence on earth as human beings? I think that evolution is the greatest force of the universe and that we're all tiny bits of an evolutionary type of process where it's just matter and machines that go through time and that we all have a deeply embedded inclination to evolve and contribute to evolution. So I think it's to personally evolve and contribute to evolution. I could have predicted you would answer that way. It's brilliant and exactly right.

https://youtu.be/JB2-5Lzverk

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George Hotz: Elon is the iOS | AI Podcast Clips

Elon's the iOS. By the way, he paved the way for all of us. I would not be doing comma AI today if it was not for those conversations with Elon and if it were not for him saying like, I think he said like, well, obviously we're not going to use LIDAR. We use cameras. Humans use cameras. So what do you think about that? How important is LIDAR? Everybody else on L5 is using LIDAR. What are your thoughts on his provocative statement that LIDAR is a crutch? See, sometimes he'll say dumb things like the driver monitoring thing, but sometimes he'll say absolutely, completely, 100% obviously true things. Of course LIDAR is a crutch. It's not even a good crutch. You're not even using it. Oh, they're using it for localization, which isn't good in the first place. If you have to localize your car to centimeters in order to drive, that's not driving. I'm currently not doing much machine learning on top of LIDAR data, meaning like to help you in the task of general task of perception. The main goal of those LIDARs on those cars, I think is actually localization more than perception, or at least that's what they use them for. Yeah, that's true. If you want to localize to centimeters, you can't use GPS. The fanciest GPS in the world can't do it, especially if you're under tree cover and stuff. With LIDAR, you can do this pretty easily. So you really, they're not taking on, I mean, in some research they're using it for perception, and they're certainly not, which is sad, they're not fusing it well with vision. They do use it for perception. I'm not saying they don't use it for perception, but the thing that, they have vision-based and radar-based perception systems as well. You could remove the LIDAR and keep around a lot of the dynamic object perception. You want to get centimeter-accurate localization, good luck doing that with anything else.

https://youtu.be/IbQyOCkrddY

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Vsauce: Consciousness | AI Podcast Clip with Michael Stevens

There's ideas of panpsychism where people believe that whatever consciousness is is a fundamental part of reality. It's almost like a physics law. Do you think, what's your views on consciousness? Do you think it has this deep part of reality or is it something that's deeply human and constructed by us humans? Start nice and light and easy. Nothing I ask you today has actually proven answer so we're just hypothesizing. So yeah, I mean I should clarify, this is all speculation and I'm not an expert in any of these topics and I'm not God. But I think that consciousness is probably something that can be fully explained within the laws of physics. I think that our bodies and brains and the universe and at the quantum level is so rich and complex, I'd be surprised if we couldn't find a room for consciousness there. And why should we be conscious? Why are we aware of ourselves? That is a very strange and interesting and important question. And I think for the next few thousand years, we're going to have to believe in answers purely on faith. But my guess is that we will find that within the configuration space of possible arrangements of the universe, there are some that contain memories of others. Literally Julian Barber calls them time capsule states where you're like, yeah, not only do I have a scratch on my arm but also this state of the universe also contains a memory in my head of being scratched by my cat three days ago. And for some reason, those kinds of states of the universe are more plentiful or more likely. When you say those states, the ones that contain memories of its past or ones that contain memories of its past and have degrees of consciousness? Just the first part because I think the consciousness then emerges from the fact that a state of the universe that contains fragments or memories of other states is one where you're going to feel like there's time. You're going to feel like, yeah, things happened in the past. And I don't know what will happen in the future because these states don't contain information about the future. For some reason, those kinds of states are either more common, more plentiful, or you could use the anthropic principle and just say, well, they're extremely rare, but until you are in one or if you are in one, then you can ask questions like you're asking me on this podcast. So I questions. But yeah, it's like, why are we conscious? Well, because if we weren't, we wouldn't be asking why we were.

https://youtu.be/BkhIenG0wgk

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Gilbert Strang: MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW)

The fact that there is thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people that watch that video, I think that's really powerful. So how do you think the idea of putting lectures online, what really MIT OpenCourseWare has innovated? That was a wonderful idea. I think the story that I've heard is the committee was appointed by the president, President Vest at that time, a wonderful guy. And the idea of the committee was to figure out how MIT could be like other universities, market the work we were doing. And then they didn't see a way, and after a weekend, and they had an inspiration, came back to the President Vest and said, what if we just gave it away? And he decided that was okay, good idea. So. You know, that's a crazy idea. That's, if we think of a university as a thing that creates a product, isn't knowledge, the kind of educational knowledge, isn't the product and giving that away, are you surprised that it went through? The result that he did it, well, knowing a little bit President Vest, it was like him, I think. And it was really the right idea, you know. MIT is a kind of, it's known for being high level, technical things, and this is the best way we can say, tell, we can show what MIT really is like. Because in my case, those 1806 videos are just teaching the class. They were there in 26, 100. They're kind of fun to look at. People write to me and say, oh, you've got a sense of humor, but I don't know where that comes through. Somehow I've been friendly with the class, I like students, and linear algebra, we gotta give the subject most of the credit. It really has come forward in importance in these years.

https://youtu.be/Lz_WksheWqc

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Jeremy Howard: Deep Learning Frameworks - TensorFlow, PyTorch, fast.ai | AI Podcast Clips

From the perspective of deep learning frameworks, you work with fast AI, particularly this framework, and PyTorch and TensorFlow. What are the strengths of each platform, from your perspective? So in terms of what we've done our research on and taught in our course, we started with Theano and Keras, and then we switched to TensorFlow and Keras, and then we switched to PyTorch, and then we switched to PyTorch and fast AI. And that kind of reflects a growth and development of the ecosystem of deep learning libraries. Theano and TensorFlow were great, but were much harder to teach and do research and development on because they define what's called a computational graph up front, a static graph, where you basically have to say, here are all the things that I'm going to eventually do in my model. And then later on you say, okay, do those things with this data. And you can't debug them, you can't do them step by step, you can't program them interactively in a Jupyter notebook and so forth. PyTorch was not the first, but PyTorch was certainly the strongest entrant to come along and say, let's not do it that way, let's just use normal Python. And everything you know about in Python is just going to work, and we'll figure out how to make that run on the GPU as and when necessary. That turned out to be a huge leap in terms of what we could do with our research and what we could do with our teaching. Because it wasn't limiting. Yeah, I mean, it was critical for us for something like DawnBench to be able to rapidly try things. It's just so much harder to be a researcher and practitioner when you have to do everything up front and you can't inspect it. Problem with PyTorch is it's not at all accessible to newcomers because you have to write your own training loop and manage the gradients and all this stuff. And it's also not great for researchers because you're spending your time dealing with all this boilerplate and overhead rather than thinking about your algorithm. So we ended up writing this very multi-layered API that at the top level you can train a state-of-the-art neural network and three lines of code, which talks to an API, which talks to an API, which talks to an API. You can dive into it at any level and get progressively closer to the machine levels of control. And this is the FastAI library. That's been critical for us and for our students and for lots of people that have won big learning competitions with it and written academic papers with it. It's made a big difference. We're still limited though by Python and particularly this problem with things like recurrent neural nets, say, where you just can't change things unless you accept it going so slowly that it's impractical. So in the latest incarnation of the course and with some of the research we're now starting to do, we're starting to do stuff, some stuff in Swift. I think we're three years away from that being super practical, but I'm in no hurry. I'm very happy to invest the time to get there. But, you know, with that, we actually already have a nascent version of the FastAI library for vision running on Swift for TensorFlow. Because Python for TensorFlow is not going to cut it. It's just a disaster. What they did was they tried to replicate the bits that people were saying they like about PyTorch, this kind of interactive computation, but they didn't actually change their foundational runtime components. So they kind of added this like syntax sugar they call TFEager, TensorFlow Eager, which makes it look a lot like PyTorch, but it's 10 times slower than PyTorch to actually do a step. So because they didn't invest the time in like retooling the foundations, because their code base is so horribly complex. Yeah, I think it's probably very difficult to do that kind of retooling. Yeah, well, particularly the way TensorFlow was written. It was written by a lot of people very quickly in a very disorganized way. So like when you actually look in the code, as I do often, I'm always just like, oh, God, what were they thinking? It's just, it's pretty awful. So I'm really extremely negative about the potential future for Python for TensorFlow. But Swift for TensorFlow can be a different beast altogether. It can basically be a layer on top of MLIR that takes advantage of all the great compiler stuff that Swift builds on with LLVM. And yeah, I think it will be absolutely fantastic. Well, you're inspiring me to try. I haven't truly felt the pain of TensorFlow 2.0 Python. It's fine by me. But yeah, I mean, it does the job if you're using like predefined things that somebody's already written. But if you actually compare, you know, like I've had to do, because I've been having to do a lot of stuff with TensorFlow recently, you actually compare like, okay, I want to write something from scratch. And you're like, I just keep finding it's like, oh, it's running 10 times slower than PyTorch. So is the biggest cost, let's throw running time out the window, how long it takes you to program? That's not too different now. Thanks to TensorFlow Eager, that's not too different. But because so many things take so long to run, you wouldn't run it at 10 times slower. Like you just go like, oh, this is taking too long. And also, there's a lot of things which are just less programmable, like tf.data, which is the way data processing works in TensorFlow is just this big mess. It's incredibly inefficient. And they kind of had to write it that way because of the TPU problems I described earlier. So I just, you know, I just feel like they've got this huge technical debt, which they're not going to solve without starting from scratch. So here's an interesting question. And if there's a new student starting today, what would you recommend they use? Well, I mean, we obviously recommend Fast.ai and PyTorch because we teach new students. And that's what we teach with. So we would very strongly recommend that because it will let you get on top of the concepts much more quickly. So then you'll become an actual, and you'll also learn the actual state of the art techniques, you know, so you actually get world class results. Honestly, it doesn't much matter what library you learn, because switching from China to MXNet to TensorFlow to PyTorch is going to be a couple of days work as long as you understand the foundation as well. But you think, will Swift creep in there as a thing that people start using? Not for a few years, particularly because like Swift has no data science community, libraries, tooling. And the Swift community has a total lack of appreciation and understanding of numeric computing. So like they keep on making stupid decisions, you know, for years they've just done dumb things around performance and prioritization. That's clearly changing now because the developer of Swift, Chris Latner, is working at Google on Swift for TensorFlow. So like that's a priority. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Apple because like Apple hasn't shown any sign of caring about numeric programming in Swift. So I mean, hopefully they'll get off their ass and start appreciating this because currently all of their low-level libraries are not written in Swift. They're not particularly Swifty at all. Stuff like Core ML, they're really pretty rubbish. So yeah, so there's a long way to go. But at least one nice thing is that Swift for TensorFlow can actually directly use Python code and Python libraries. Literally the entire Lesson 1 notebook of Fast.ai runs in Swift right now in Python mode. So that's a nice intermediate thing.

https://youtu.be/XHyASP49ses

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Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs | Lex Fridman Podcast #365

The following is a conversation with Sam Harris, his second time on the podcast. As I said two years ago when I first met and spoke with Sam, he's one of the most influential, pioneering thinkers of our time, as the host of the Making Sense podcast, creator of the Waking Up app, and the author of many seminal books on human nature and the human mind, including The End of Faith, The Moral Landscape, Lying, Free Will, and Waking Up. In this conversation, besides our mutual fascination with AGI and free will, we do also go deep into controversial, challenging topics of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, January 6th, vaccines, lab leak, Kanye West, and several key figures at the center of public discourse, including Joe Rogan and Elon Musk, both of whom have been friends of Sam and have become friends of mine. Somehow, in an amazing life trajectory that I do not deserve in any way and in fact believe is probably a figment of my imagination. And if it's all right, please allow me to say a few words about this personal aspect of the conversation, of discussing Joe, Elon, and others. What's been weighing heavy on my heart since the beginning of the pandemic, now three years ago, is that many people I look to for wisdom in public discourse stop talking to each other as often, with respect, humility, and love, when the world needed those kinds of conversations the most. My hope is that they start talking again, they start being friends again, they start noticing the humanity that connects them that is much deeper than the disagreements that divide them. So let me take this moment to say, with humility and honesty, why I look up to and am inspired by Joe, Elon, and Sam. I think Joe Rogan is important to the world as a voice of compassionate curiosity and open-mindedness to ideas, both radical and mainstream, sometimes with humor, sometimes with brutal honesty, always pushing for more kindness in the world. I think Elon Musk is important to the world as an engineer, leader, entrepreneur, and human being who takes on the hardest problems that face humanity and refuses to accept the constraints of conventional thinking that made the solutions to these problems seem impossible. I think Sam Harris is important to the world as a fearless voice who fights for the pursuit of truth against growing forces of echo chambers and audience capture, taking unpopular perspectives and defending them with rigor and resilience. I both celebrate and criticize all three privately, and they criticize me, usually more effectively, from which I always learn a lot and always appreciate. Most importantly, there is respect and love for each other as human beings, the very thing that I think the world needs most now, in a time of division and chaos. I will continue to try to mend divisions, to try to understand, not deride, to turn the other cheek if needed, to return hate with love. Sometimes people criticize me for being naive, cheesy, simplistic, all of that. I know. I agree. But I really am speaking from the heart, and I'm trying. This world is too fucking beautiful not to try, in whatever way I know how. I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Sam Harris. What is more effective at making a net positive impact on the world, empathy or reason? It depends on what you mean by empathy. There are at least two kinds of empathy. There's the cognitive form, which is, I would argue, even a species of reason. It's just understanding another person's point of view. You understand why they're suffering or why they're happy. You have a theory of mind about another human being that is accurate, and so you can navigate in relationship to them more effectively. And then there's another layer entirely, not incompatible with that, but just distinct, which is what people often mean by empathy, which is more a kind of emotional contagion. You feel depressed, and I begin to feel depressed along with you because it's contagious. We're so close, and I'm so concerned about you, and your problems become my problems, and it bleeds through. Right now, I think both of those capacities are very important, but the emotional contagion piece, and this is not really my thesis, this is something I have more or less learned from Paul Bloom, the psychologist who wrote a book on this topic titled Against Empathy. The emotional social contagion piece is a bad guide rather often for ethical behavior and ethical intuitions. Oh, boy. And I'll give you the clear example of this, which is we find stories with a single identifiable protagonist who we can effortlessly empathize with far more compelling than data. So if I tell you, this is the classic case of the little girl who falls down a well. This is somebody's daughter. You see the parents distraught on television. You hear her cries from the bottom of the well. The whole country stops. There was an example of this 20, 25 years ago, I think, where it was just wall to wall on CNN. This is just the perfect use of CNN. It was 72 hours, whatever it was, of continuous coverage of just extracting this girl from a well. So we effortlessly pay attention to that. We care about it. We will donate money toward it. I mean, it marshals 100% of our compassion and altruistic impulse. Whereas if you hear that there's a genocide raging in some country you've never been to and never intended to go to, the numbers don't make a dent. And we find the story boring. We'll change the channel in the face of a genocide. It doesn't matter. And it literally, perversely, it could be 500,000 little girls have fallen down wells in that country, and we still don't care. Many of us have come to believe that this is a bug rather than a feature of our moral psychology. And so empathy plays an unhelpful role there. So ultimately, I think when we're making big decisions about what we should do and how to mitigate human suffering and what's worth valuing and how we should protect those values, I think reason is the better tool. But it's not that I would want to dispense with any part of empathy either. Well, there's a lot of changes to go on there. But briefly to mention, you've recently talked about affective altruism on your podcast. I think you mentioned some interesting statement, I'm going to horribly misquote you, but that you'd rather live in a world, like it doesn't really make sense, but you'd rather live in a world where you care about maybe your daughter and son more than 100 people that live across the world, something like this. Where the calculus is not always perfect, but somehow it makes sense to live in a world where it's irrational in this way and yet empathetic in the way you've been discussing. Right. I'm not sure what the right answer is there or even whether there is one right answer. There could be multiple peaks on this part of the moral landscape. But so the opposition is between an ethic that's articulated by someone like the Dalai Lama, right, or really any exponent of classic Buddhism would say that the ultimate enlightened ethic is true dispassion with respect to friends and strangers, right? So the mind of the Buddha would be truly dispassionate, you would love and care about all people equally. And by that light, it seems some kind of ethical failing, or at least a failure to fully actualize compassion in the limit or enlightened wisdom in the limit to care more or even much more about your kids than the kids of other people and to prioritize your energy in that way, right? So you spend all this time trying to figure out how to keep your kids healthy and happy, and then you'll attend to their minutest concerns, however superficial. And again, there's a genocide raging in Sudan or wherever, and it takes up less than 1% of your bandwidth. I'm not sure it would be a better world if everyone was running the Dalai Lama program there. I think some prioritization of one's nearest and dearest ethically might be optimal, because we'll all be doing that, and we'll all be doing that in a circumstance where we have certain norms and laws and other structures that force us to be dispassionate where that matters, right? So like when I go to, when my daughter gets sick and I have to take her to a hospital, I really want her to get attention, right? And I'm worried about her more than I'm worried about everyone else in the lobby. But the truth is I actually don't want a totally corrupt hospital. I don't want a hospital that treats my daughter better than anyone else in the lobby because she's my daughter and I've bribed the guy at the door or whatever, or the guy's a fan of my podcast or whatever the thing is. You don't want starkly corrupt, unfair situations. And when you sort of get pressed down the hierarchy of Maslow's needs, individually and societally, a bunch of those variables change, and they change for the worse, understandably. But yeah, when everyone's corrupt and you're in a state of collective emergency, you've got a lifeboat problem, you're scrambling to get into the lifeboat. Yeah, then fairness and norms and the other vestiges of civilization begin to get stripped off. We can't reason from those emergencies to normal life. I mean, in normal life, we want justice, we want fairness, we're all better off for it, even when the spotlight of our concern is focused on the people we know, the people who are friends, the people who are family, people we have good reason to care about. We still, by default, want a system that protects the interests of strangers, too. And we know that, generally speaking, just in game-theoretic terms, we're all going to tend to be better off in a fair system than a corrupt one. One of the failure modes of empathy is our susceptibility to anecdotal data. Just a good story will get us to not think clearly. But what about empathy in the context of just discussing ideas with other people? And then there's a large number of people, like in this country, red and blue, half the population believes certain things on immigration or on the response to the pandemic or any kind of controversial issue, even if the election was fairly executed. Having an empathy for their worldview, trying to understand where they're coming from, not just in the explicit statement of their idea, but the entirety of the roots from which their idea stems, that kind of empathy while you're discussing ideas. What is, in your pursuit of truth, having empathy for the perspective of a large number of other people versus raw mathematical reason? I think it's important, but it only takes you so far. It doesn't get you to truth. Truth is not decided by democratic principles. And certain people believe things for understandable reasons, but those reasons are nonetheless bad reasons. They don't scale, they don't generalize, they're not reasons anyone should adopt for themselves or respect epistemologically. And yet their circumstance is understandable and it's something you can care about. I think there's many examples of this that you might be thinking of. One that comes to mind is I've been super critical of Trump, obviously, and I've been super critical of certain people for endorsing him or not criticizing him when he really made it patently obvious who he was, if there had been any doubt initially. There was no doubt when we have a sitting president who's not agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power. So I'm critical of all of that, and yet the fact that many millions of Americans didn't see what was wrong with Trump or bought into the... Didn't see through his con. They bought into the idea that he was a brilliant businessman who might just be able to change things because he's so unconventional and so his heart is in the right place. He's really a man of the people, even though he's gold-plated everything in his life. They bought the myth somehow of largely because they had seen him on television for almost a decade and a half pretending to be this genius businessman who could get things done. It's understandable to me that many very frustrated people who have not had their hopes and dreams actualized, who have been the victims of globalism and many other current trends, it's understandable that they would be confused and not see the liability of electing a grossly incompetent, morbidly narcissistic person into the presidency. So I don't... So which is to say that I don't blame... There are many, many millions of people who I don't necessarily blame for the Trump phenomenon, but I can nonetheless bemoan the phenomenon as indicative of a very bad state of affairs in our society. So there's two levels to it. One is I think you have to call a spade a spade when you're talking about how things actually work and what things are likely to happen or not, but then you can recognize that people have very different life experiences. I think empathy and probably the better word for what I would hope to embody there is compassion, to really wish people well and to really wish strangers well effortlessly, wish them well. To realize that there is no opposition between... At bottom, there's no real opposition between selfishness and selflessness because why is selfishness really takes into account other people's happiness? Do you want to live in a society where you have everything, but most other people have nothing? Or do you want to live in a society where you're surrounded by happy, creative, self-actualized people who are having their hopes and dreams realized? I think it's obvious that the second society is much better, however much you can guard your good luck. But what about having empathy for certain principles that people believe? For example, the pushback, the other perspective on this, because you said bought the myth of Trump as a great businessman. There could be a lot of people that are supporters of Trump who could say that Sam Harris bought the myth that we have this government of the people, by the people, that actually represents the people, as opposed to a bunch of elites who are running a giant bureaucracy that is corrupt, that is feeding themselves, and they're actually not representing the people. And then here's this chaos agent, Trump, who speaks off the top of his head. Yeah, he's flawed in all this number of ways. He's a more comedian than he is a presidential type of figure. And he's actually creating the kind of chaos that's going to shake up this bureaucracy, shake up the elites that are so uncomfortable, because they don't want the world to know about the game they've got running on everybody else. So that's the kind of perspective that they would take and say, yeah, there's these flaws that Trump has, but this is necessary. I agree with the first part. So I haven't bought the myth that it's a truly representative democracy in the way that we might idealize. And on some level, I mean, this is a different conversation, but on some level, I'm not even sure how much I think it should be. I'm not sure we want, in the end, everyone's opinion given equal weight about just what we should do about anything. And I include myself in that. There are many topics around which I don't deserve to have a strong opinion, because I don't know what I'm talking about, or what I would be talking about if I had a strong opinion. And I think we'll probably get to some of those topics, because I've declined to have certain conversations on my podcast just because I think I'm the wrong person to have that conversation. And I think it's important to see those bright lines in one's life and in the moment politically and ethically. So yeah, I think... So leave aside the viability of democracy. I'm under no illusions that all of our institutions are worth preserving precisely as they have been up until the moment this great orange wrecking ball came swinging through our lives. But I just... It was a very bad bet to elect someone who is grossly incompetent, and worse than incompetent, genuinely malevolent in his selfishness. And this is something we know based on literally decades of him being in the public eye. He's not a public servant in any normal sense of that term. And he couldn't possibly give an honest or sane answer to the question you asked me about empathy and reason and what should guide us. I genuinely think he is missing some necessary moral and psychological tools. And I can feel compassion for him as a human being, because I think having those things is incredibly important, and genuinely loving other people is incredibly important. And knowing what all that's about, that's really the good stuff in life. And I think he's missing a lot of that. But I think we don't want to promote people to the highest positions of power in our society who are far outliers in pathological terms. We want them to be far outliers in the best case, in wisdom and compassion and some of the topics you've brought up. We want someone to be deeply informed. We want someone to be unusually curious, unusually alert to how they may be wrong or getting things wrong consequentially. He's none of those things. And insofar as we're going to get normal mediocrities in that role, which I think is often the best we could expect, let's get normal mediocrities in that role, not once-in-a-generation narcissists and frauds. I mean, it's like the... Just take honesty as a single variable. I think you want... Yes, it's possible that most politicians lie at least some of the time. I don't think that's a good thing. I think people should be generally honest, even to a fault. Yes, there are certain circumstances where lying, I think, is necessary. It's kind of on a continuum of self-defense and violence. So it's like if you're going to... If the Nazis come to your door and ask you if you've got Anne Frank in the attic, I think it's okay to lie to them. But Trump... Arguably, there's never been a person that anyone could name in human history who's lied with that kind of velocity. I mean, it's just... He was just a blizzard of lies, great and small, to pointless and effective. But it's just... It says something fairly alarming about our society that a person of that character got promoted. And so, yes, I have compassion and concern for half of the society who didn't see it that way. And that's going to sound elitist and smug or something for anyone who's on that side listening to me. But it's genuine. I mean, I understand that... I'm one of the luckiest people in the world, like I barely have the... I'm like one of the luckiest people in the world, and I barely have the bandwidth to pay attention to half the things I should pay attention to in order to have an opinion about half the things we're going to talk about. So how much less bandwidth that somebody who's working two jobs or a single mom who's raising multiple kids, even a single kid, it's just unimaginable to me that people have the bandwidth to really track this stuff. And so then they jump on social media and they get inundated by misinformation, and they see what their favorite influencer just said. And now they're worried about vaccines. We're living in an environment where the information space has become so corrupted, and we've built machines to further corrupt it. We've built a business model for the internet that it further corrupts it. So it's just... It's chaos in informational terms. And I don't fault people for being confused and impatient and at their wits end. And yes, Trump was an enormous fuck you to the establishment. And that was understandable for many reasons. To me, Sam Harris, the great Sam Harris is somebody I've looked up to for a long time as a beacon of voice of reason. And there's this meme on the internet, and I would love you to steel man the case for it and against, that Trump broke Sam Harris's brain. That there's something is disproportionately to the actual impact that Trump had on our society. He had an impact on the ability of balanced, calm, rational minds to see the world clearly, to think clearly. You being one of the beacons of that. Is there a degree to which he broke your brain? Otherwise known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. Medical condition. Yeah, I think Trump Derangement Syndrome is a very clever meme because it just throws the problem back on the person who's criticizing Trump. But in truth, the true Trump Derangement Syndrome was not to have seen how dangerous and divisive it would be to promote someone like Trump to that position of power. And in the final moment, not to see how untenable it was to still support someone who, a sitting president who was not committing to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, if that wasn't a bright line for you, you have been deranged by something. Because that was one minute to midnight for our democracy, as far as I'm concerned. And I think it really was but for the integrity of a few people that we didn't suffer some real constitutional crisis and real emergency after January 6th. I mean, if Mike Pence had caved in and decided to not certify the election, right? Literally, you can count on two hands, the number of people who held things together at that moment. And so it wasn't for want of trying on Trump's part that we didn't succumb to some real, truly uncharted catastrophe with our democracy. So the fact that that didn't happen is not a sign that those of us who were worried that it was so close to happening were exaggerating the problem. I mean, it's like you almost got run over by a car, but you didn't. And so the fact that you're adrenalized and you're thinking, boy, that was dangerous, I probably shouldn't wander in the middle of the street with my eyes closed. You weren't wrong to feel that you really had a problem, right? And came very close to something truly terrible. So I think that's where we were, and I think we shouldn't do that again, right? So the fact that he's still, he's coming back around as potentially a viable candidate. I'm not spending much time thinking about it, frankly, because I'm waiting for the moment where it requires some thought. I mean, it took up, I don't know how many podcasts I devoted to the topic. It wasn't that many in the end, against the number of podcasts I devoted to other topics, but there are people who look at Trump and just find him funny, entertaining, not especially threatening. It's just good fun to see somebody who's just not taking anything seriously, and is just putting a stick in the wheel of business as usual again and again and again and again. And they don't really see anything much at stake, right? It doesn't really matter if we don't support NATO. It doesn't really matter if he says he trusts Putin more than our intelligence services. I mean, none of this is, it doesn't matter if he's on the one hand saying that he loves the leader of North Korea, and on the other, threatening, threatens to bomb them back to the Stone Age, right, on Twitter. It all can be taken in the spirit of reality television. It's like, this is the part of the movie that's just fun to watch, right? And I understand that. I can even inhabit that space for a few minutes at a time, but there's a deeper concern that we're in the process of entertaining ourselves to death, right? That we're just not taking things seriously. And this is a problem I've had with several other people we might name, who just appear to me to be goofing around at scale. And they lack a kind of moral seriousness. I mean, they're touching big problems where lives hang in the balance, but they're just fucking around. And I think they're really important problems that we have to get our head straight around. And we need, it's not to say that institutions don't become corrupt. I think they do. And I'm quite worried that, both about the loss of trust in our institutions and the fact that trust has eroded for good reason, right? That they have become less trustworthy. They've become infected by political ideologies that are not truth tracking. I mean, I worry about all of that. But I just think we need institutions. We need to rebuild them. We need experts who are real experts. We need to value expertise over amateurish speculation and conspiracy thinking and just bullshit. The kind of amateur speculation we're doing on this very podcast. I'm usually alert to the moments where I'm just guessing, or where I actually feel like I'm talking from within my wheelhouse. And I try to telegraph that a fair amount with people. So yeah, but it's not, it's different. I mean, you can invite someone onto your podcast who's an expert about something that you're not an expert about, and then you, in the process of getting more informed yourself, your audience is getting more informed. So you're asking smart questions. And you might be pushing back at the margins, but you know that when push comes to shove on that topic, you really don't have a basis to have a strong opinion. And if you were going to form a strong opinion that was this counter to the expert you have in front of you, it's going to be by deference to some other expert who you've brought in or who you've heard about or whose work you've read or whatever. But there's a paradox to how we value authority in science that most people don't understand. And I think we should at some point unravel that because it's the basis for a lot of public confusion. And frankly, it's the basis for a lot of criticism I've received on these topics, where people think that I'm against free speech or I'm an establishment shill, or it's like I just think, I'm a credentialist, I just think people with PhDs from Ivy League universities should run everything. It's not true, but there's a ton of, there's a lot to cut through to get to daylight there because people are very confused about how we value authority in the service of rationality, generally. You've talked about it, but it's just interesting, the intensity of feeling you have. You've had this famous phrase about Hunter Biden and children in the basement. Can you just revisit this case? So let me give another perspective on the situation of January 6th and Trump in general. It's possible that January 6th and things of that nature revealed that our democracy is actually pretty fragile. And that Trump is not a malevolent and ultra-competent malevolent figure, but is simply a jokester. And he just, by creating the chaos, revealed that it's all pretty fragile. Because you're a student of history, and there's a lot of people like Vladimir Lenin, Hitler, who are exceptionally competent at controlling power, at being executives and taking that power, controlling the generals, controlling all the figures involved, and certainly not tweeting, but working in the shadows behind the scenes to gain power. And they did so extremely competently, and that is how they were able to gain power. The pushback with Trump, he was doing none of that. He was creating, which he's very good at, creating drama, sometimes for humor's sake, sometimes for drama's sake, and simply revealed that our democracy is fragile. And so he's not this once-in-a-generation horrible figure, once-in-a-generation narcissist. No, I don't think he's a truly scary, sinister, Putin-like, or Hitler-like figure, not at all. I mean, he's not ideological. He doesn't care about anything beyond himself. So it's not... No, no, he's much less scary than any really scary totalitarian, right? I mean, and he's... He's more brave in your world than 1984. This is what Eric Weinstein never stops badgering me about, but he's still wrong, Eric. My analogy for Trump was that he's an evil Chauncey Gardner. I don't know if you remember the book or the film, Being There, with Peter Sellers. But Peter Sellers is this gardener who really doesn't know anything, but he gets recognized as this wise man and gets promoted to immense power in Washington because he's speaking in a semblance of wisdom. He's got these very simple aphorisms, or what seem to be aphorisms. All he cares about is gardening. He's just talking about his garden all the time. But he'll say something, but in the spring, the new shoots will bloom, and people read into that some kind of genius insight politically, and so he gets promoted. And so that's the joke of the film. For me, Trump has always been someone like an evil Chauncey Gardner. I mean, he's... It's not to say he's totally... Yes, he has a certain kind of genius. He's got a genius for creating a spectacle around himself, right? He's got a genius for getting the eye of the media always coming back to him. But it's a kind of self-promotion that only works if you actually are truly shameless and don't care about having a reputation for anything that I or you would want to have a reputation for, right? It's like the pure pornography of attention, right? And he just wants more of it. But I think the truly depressing and genuinely scary thing was that we have a country that... At least half of the country, given how broken our society is in many ways, we have a country that didn't see anything wrong with that, bringing someone who obviously doesn't know what he should know to be president and who's obviously not a good person, right? Who obviously doesn't care about people, can't even pretend to care about people really, right, in a credible way. And so, I mean, if there's a silver lining to this, it's along the lines you just sketched. It shows us how vulnerable our system is to a truly brilliant and sinister figure, right? I mean, like, I think we are... We really dodged a bullet. Yeah, someone far more competent and conniving and ideological could have exploited our system in a way that Trump didn't. And that's... Yeah, so if we plug those holes eventually, that would be a good thing and he would have done a good thing for our society, right? I mean, one of the things we realized, and I think nobody knew, I mean, I certainly didn't know it and I didn't hear anyone talk about it, is how much our system relies on norms rather than laws. Yeah, civility almost. Yeah, it's just like it's quite possible that he never did anything illegal, you know, truly illegal. I mean, I think he probably did a few illegal things, but like illegal such that he really should be thrown in jail for it, you know? At least that remains to be seen. So all of the chaos, all of the, you know, all of the diminishment of our stature in the world, all of the just the opportunity costs of spending years focused on nonsense, all of that was just norm violations. All that was just all a matter of not saying the thing you should say, but that doesn't mean they're insignificant, right? It's not that it's like, it's not illegal for a sitting president to say, no, I'm not going to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, right? We'll wait and see whether I win. If I win, it was, the election was valid. If I lose, it was fraudulent, right? But aren't those humorous perturbations to our system of civility such that we know what the limits are, and now we start to think that and have these kinds of discussions? That wasn't a humorous perturbation because he did everything he could, granted he wasn't very competent, but he did everything he could to try to steal the election. I mean, the irony is he claimed to have an election stolen from him, all the while doing everything he could to steal it, declaring it fraudulent in advance, trying to get the votes to not be counted as the evening wore on, knowing that they were going to be disproportionately Democrat votes because of the position he took on mail-in ballots. I mean, all of it was fairly calculated. The whole circus of the clown car that crashed into Four Seasons Landscaping, right? And you got Rudy Giuliani with his hair dyed, and you got Sidney Powell and all these grossly incompetent people lying as freely as they could breathe about election fraud, right? And all of these things are getting thrown out by largely Republican election officials and Republican judges. It wasn't for want of trying that he didn't maintain his power in this country. He really tried to steal the presidency. He just was not competent, and the people around him weren't competent. So that's a good thing, and it's worth not letting that happen again. But he wasn't competent, so he didn't do everything he could. Well, no, he did everything he could. He didn't do everything that could have been done by someone more competent. Right, but the tools you have as a president, you could do a lot of things. You can declare emergencies, especially during COVID. You could postpone the election. You can create military conflict, any kind of reason to postpone the election. There's a lot of stuff. But he tried to do things, and he would have to have done those things through other people, and there are people who refuse to do those things. There are people who said they would quit. They would quit publicly, right? I mean, you start... Again, there are multiple books written about the last hours of this presidency, and the details are shocking in what he tried to do and tried to get others to do, and it's awful, right? I mean, it's just awful that we were that close to something, to a true unraveling of our political process. I mean, it's the only time in our lifetime that anything like this has happened, and it's deeply embarrassing, right, on the world stage. It's just like we looked like a banana republic there for a while, and we're the lone superpower. It's not good, right? And so we shouldn't... The people who thought, well, we just need to shake things up, and this is a great way to shake things up, and having people storm our Capitol and smear shit on the walls, that's just more shaking things up, right? It's all just for the lulz. There's a nihilism and cynicism to all of that, which, again, in certain people, it's understandable. Frankly, it's not understandable if you've got a billion dollars and you have a compound in Menlo Park or wherever. It's like there are people who are cheerleading this stuff who shouldn't be cheerleading this stuff, and who know that they can get on their Gulfstream and fly to their compound in New Zealand if everything goes to shit, right? So there's a cynicism to all of that that I think we should be deeply critical of. What I'm trying to understand is not, and analyze, is not the behavior of this particular human being, but the effect it had, in part, on the division between people. To me, the degree, the meme of Sam Harris's brain being broken by Trump represents, you're like the person I would look to to bridge the division. Well, I don't think there is something profitably to be said to someone who's truly captivated by the personality cult of Trumpism, right? There's nothing that I'm gonna say to, there's no conversation I'm gonna have with Candace Owens, say, about Trump that's gonna converge on something reasonable, right? You don't think so? No, I mean, I haven't tried with Candace, but I've tried with many people who are in that particular orbit. I mean, I've had conversations with people who won't admit that there's anything wrong with Trump, anything. So I'd like to push for the empathy versus reason. Because when you operate in the space of reason, yes, but I think there's a lot of power in you showing, in you, Sam Harris, showing that you're willing to see the good qualities of Trump, publicly showing that. I think that's the way to win over Candace Owens. But he has so few of them. He has fewer good qualities than virtually anyone I can name, right? So he's funny. I'll grant you that he's funny. He's a good entertainer. There's others. Look at just policies and actual impacts he had. I've admitted that. No, no. So I've admitted that many of his policies I agree with. Many, many of his policies. So probably more often than not, at least on balance, I agreed with his policy that we should take China seriously as an adversary, right? And I think, again, there's a lot of fine print to a lot of this, because the way he talks about these things and many of his motives that are obvious are things that I don't support. But I'm going to take immigration. I think it's obvious that we should have control of our borders, right? I don't see the argument for not having control of our borders. We should let in who we want to let in, and we should keep out who we want to keep out, and we should have a sane immigration policy. So I didn't necessarily think it was a priority to build the wall, but I never criticized the impulse to build the wall, because if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are coming across that border and we are not in a position to know who's coming, that seems untenable to me. And I can recognize that many people in our society are on balance the victims of immigration, and there is, in many cases, a zero-sum contest between the interests of actual citizens and the interests of immigrants, right? So I think we should have a, we should have control of our borders. We should have a sane and compassionate immigration policy. We should have, we should let in refugees, right? So I did, you know, Trump on refugees was terrible. But no, like, I would say 80% of the policy concerns people celebrated in him are concerns that I either share entirely or certainly sympathize with, right? So like, that's not the issue. The issue is... A threat to democracy in some fundamental way. Well, the issue is largely what you said it was. It's not so much the person, it's the effect on everything he touches, right? He just, he has this superpower of deranging and destabilizing and destabilizing almost everything he touches and sullying and compromising the integrity of almost anyone who comes into his orbit. I mean, so you looked at these people who served as chief of staff or in various cabinet positions, people who had real reputations for probity and level headedness, whether you shared their politics or not. I mean, these were real people. These were not, you know, some of them were goofballs, but many people who just got totally trashed by proximity to him and then trashed by him when they finally parted company with him. Yeah, I mean, it's just people bent over backwards to accommodate his norm violations, and it was bad for them and it was bad for our system. But none of that discounts the fact that we have a system that really needs proper house cleaning. Yes, there are bad incentives and entrenched interests. And I'm not a fan of the concept of the deep state, because it has been so propagandized, but yes, there's something like that, you know, that is not flexible enough to respond intelligently to the needs of the moment, right? So there's a lot of rethinking of government and of institutions in general that I think we should do, but we need smart, well-informed, well-intentioned people to do that job. And the well-intentioned part is hugely important, right? Just give me someone who is not the most selfish person anyone has ever heard about in their lifetime, right? And what we got with Trump was literally the one most selfish person I think anyone could name. And again, there's so much known about this man, that's the thing. It predates his presidency. We knew this guy 30 years ago. And this is why, to come back to those inflammatory comments about Hunter Biden's laptop, the reason why I can say with confidence that I don't care what was on his laptop is that there is, and that includes any evidence of corruption on the part of his father, right? Now, there's been precious little of that that's actually emerged, so it's like there is no, as far as I can tell, there's not a big story associated with that laptop as much as people bang on about a few emails. But even if there were just obvious corruption, right? Like Joe Biden was at this meeting and he took this amount of money from this shady guy for bad reasons, right? Given how visible the lives of these two men have been, right? I mean, given how much we know about Joe Biden and how much we know about Donald Trump and how they have lived in public for almost as long as I've been alive, both of them, the scale of corruption can't possibly balance out between the two of them, right? If you show me that Joe Biden has this secret life where he's driving a Bugatti and he's living like Andrew Tate, right? And he's doing all these things I didn't know about, okay, then I'm going to start getting a sense that, all right, maybe this guy is way more corrupt than I realize. Maybe there is some deal in Ukraine or with China that is just, like, this guy is not who he seems, he's not the public servant he's been pretending to be, he's been on the take for decades and decades, and he's just, he's as dirty as can be, he's all mobbed up and it's a nightmare, and he can't be trusted, right? That's possible if you show me that his life is not at all what it seems. But on the assumption that I, having looked at this guy for literally decades, right? And knowing that every journalist has looked at him for decades, just how many affairs is he having, just how much, you know, how many drugs is he doing, how many houses does he have, what are the obvious conflicts of interest, you know? You hold that against what we know about Trump, right? And, I mean, the litany of indiscretions you can put on Trump's side that testify to his personal corruption, to testify to the fact that he has no ethical compass, there's simply no comparison, right? So that's why I don't care about what's on the laptop when, now, if you tell me Trump is no longer running for president in 2024, and we can put Trumpism behind us, and now you're saying, listen, there's a lot of stuff on that laptop that makes Joe Biden look like a total asshole, okay, I'm all ears, right? I mean, it was a forced, in 2020, it was a forced choice between a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and a guy who's obviously too old to be president, who has a crack-addicted son who lost his laptop, and I just knew that I was gonna take Biden in spite of whatever litany of horrors was gonna come tumbling out of that laptop. And that might involve, sort of, so the actual quote is, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in the basement. There's a dark humor to it, right, which is, I think you speak to, I would not have cared, there's nothing, it's Hunter Biden, it's not Joe Biden, whatever the scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, it is infinitesimally compared to the corruption we know Trump was involved in, it's like a firefly to the sun, is what you're speaking to. But let me make the case that you're really focused on the surface stuff, that it's possible to have corruption that masquerades in the thing we mentioned, which is civility. You can spend hundreds of billions of dollars, or trillions towards a war in the Middle East, for example, something that you've changed your mind on in terms of the negative impact it has on the world, and that, you know, the military-industrial complex, everybody's very nice, everybody's very civil, just very upfront, here's how we're spending the money, yeah, sometimes somehow disappears in different places, but that's the way, you know, war is complicated, and everyone is very polite. There's no coke and strippers or whatever is on the laptop, it's very nice and polite. In the meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians die, hate, just an incredible amount of hate is created because people lose their family members, all that kind of stuff, but there's no strippers and coke on a laptop. So, yeah. But it's not just superficial, it is when someone only wants wealth and power and fame, that is their objective function, right? They're like a robot that is calibrated just to those variables, right? And they don't care about the risks we run on any other front. They don't care about environmental risk, pandemic risk, nuclear proliferation risk, none of it, right? They're just tracking fame and money and whatever can personally redound to their self-interest along those lines. And they're not informed about the other risks we're running, really. I mean, in Trump, you had a president who was repeatedly asking his generals, why couldn't we use our nuclear weapons? Why can't we have more of them? Why do I have fewer nuclear weapons than JFK? Right? As though that were a sign of anything other than progress, right? And this is the guy who's got the button, right? I mean, somebody's following him around with a bag waiting to take his order to launch, right? It's a risk we should never run. One thing Trump has going for him, I think, is that he doesn't drink or do drugs, right? Although people allege that he does speed, but let's take him at his word. He's not deranging himself with pharmaceuticals, at least, but apart from Diet Coke, but... There's nothing wrong, just for the record, let me push back on that. There's nothing wrong with Diet Coke. I mean, it's consuming a very large amount. I occasionally have some myself. There's no medical, there's no scientific evidence that I observed the negatives of, you know, all those studies about aspartame and all that, this, I don't know. I hope you're right. Absolutely. I mean, everything you said about the military-industrial complex is true, right? And we've been worrying about that on both sides of the aisle for a very long time. I mean, that phrase came from Eisenhower. It's... I mean, so much of what ails us is a story of bad incentives, right? And bad incentives are so powerful that they corrupt even good people, right? How much more do they corrupt bad people, right? So it's like, you want to, at minimum, you want reasonably good people, at least non-pathological people, in the system trying to navigate against the grain of bad incentives. And better still, all of us can get together and try to diagnose those incentives and change them, right? And we will really succeed when we have a system of incentives where the good incentives are so strong that even bad people are effortlessly behaving as though they're good people because they're so successfully incentivized to behave that way, right? That's... So it's almost the inversion of our current situation. So yes, and you say I changed my mind about the war. Not quite. I mean, I was never a supporter of the war in Iraq. I was always worried that it was a distraction from the war in Afghanistan. I was a supporter of the war in Afghanistan. And I will admit, in hindsight, that looks like, you know, at best, a highly ambiguous and painful exercise, you know, more likely a fool's errand, right? It's like that, you know, it did not turn out well. It wasn't for want of trying. I don't, you know, I have not done a deep dive on all of the failures there. And maybe all of these failures are failures in principle. I mean, maybe it's just, maybe that's not the kind of thing that can be done well by anybody, whatever our intentions. But yeah, the move to Iraq always seemed questionable to me. And when we knew the problem, the immediate problem at that moment, you know, al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and, you know, and then bouncing to Pakistan. Anyway, you know, so yes, but my sense of the possibility of nation building, my sense of my sense of, you know, in so far as the neocon spirit of, you know, responsibility and idealism, that, you know, America was the kind of nation that should be functioning in this way as the world's cop. And we have to get in there and untangle some of these knots by force rather often, because, you know, if we don't do it over there, we're going to have to do it over here kind of thing. Yeah, some of that has definitely changed for me in my thinking. And there are obviously cultural reasons why it failed in Afghanistan. And if you can't change the culture, it's, you're not going to force a change at gunpoint in the culture. It certainly seems that that's not going to happen. And it took us, you know, over 20 years to, apparently, to realize that. That's one of the things you realize with a war is there's not going to be a strong signal that things are not working. You can just keep pouring money into a thing, a military effort. Well, also, there are signs of it working, too. You have all the stories of girls now going to school, right? You know, the girls are getting battery acid thrown in their faces by religious maniacs. And then we come in there and we stop that. And now girls are getting educated. And that's all good. And our intentions are good there. And we're on the right side of history there. Girls should be going to school. You know, Malala Yousafzai should have the Nobel Prize and she shouldn't have been shot in the face by the Taliban, right? We know what the right answers are there. The question is, what do you do when there are enough, in this particular case, religious maniacs who are willing to die and let their children die in defense of crazy ideas and moral norms that belong in the seventh century? And it's a problem we couldn't solve. And we couldn't solve it even though we spent trillions of dollars to solve it. This reminded me of the thing that you and Jack Dorsey jokingly had for a while, the discussion about banning Donald Trump from Twitter. But does any of it bother you now that Twitter files came out that, I mean, this has to do with sort of the Hunter buying a laptop story. Does it bother you that there could be a collection of people that make decisions about who to ban and not? And that could be susceptible to bias and to ideological influence. Well, I think it always will be, or in the absence of perfect AI, it always will be. And this becomes relevant with AI as well. Yeah. Because there's some censorship on AI happening. Yeah. And it's an interesting question there as well. I don't think Twitter is as important as people think it is, right? And I used to think it was more important when I was on it. And now that I'm off of it, I think it's, I mean, first let me say, it's just an unambiguously good thing, in my experience, to delete your Twitter account, right? It's like, it is just, even the good parts of Twitter that I miss were bad in the aggregate, the degree to which it was fragmenting my attention, the degree to which my life was getting doled out to me in periods between those moments where I checked Twitter, right? And had my attention divert. And I was not a crazy Twitter addict. I mean, I was probably a pretty normal user. I mean, I was not someone who was tweeting multiple times a day or even every day, right? I think I probably averaged something like one tweet a day, I think I averaged. But in reality, it was like, there'd be like four tweets one day, and then I wouldn't tweet for the better part of a week. But I was looking a lot because it was my newsfeed. I was just following 200 very smart people. And I just wanted to see what they were paying attention to. And they would recommend articles and I would read those articles. And then when I would read an article, then I would thought I should signal boost, I would tweet. And so all of that seemed good. And that's all separable from all of the odious bullshit that came back at me largely in response to this Hunter Biden thing. But even the good stuff has a downside. And it comes at just this point of your phone is this perpetual stimulus of which is intrinsically fragmenting of time and attention. And now my phone is much less of a presence in my life. And it's not that I don't check Slack or check email. I use it to work. But my sense of just what the world is and my sense of my place in the world, the sense of where I exist as a person has changed a lot by deleting my Twitter account. And the things that I think, I mean, we all know this phenomenon. We say of someone that person is too online. What does it mean to be too online? And where do you draw that boundary? How do you know what constitutes being too online? Well, in some sense, just being, I think being on social media at all is to be too online. I mean, given what it does to, given the kinds of information it signal boosts and given the impulse it kindles in each of us to reach out to our audience in specific moments and in specific ways, right? It's like there are lots of moments now where I have an opinion about something, but there's nothing for me to do with that opinion, right? Like there's no Twitter, right? So like there are lots of things that I would have tweeted in the last months that are not the kind of thing I'm going to do a podcast about. I'm not going to roll out 10 minutes on that topic on my podcast. I'm not going to take the time to really think about it. But had I been on Twitter, I would have reacted to this thing in the news or this thing that somebody did, right? What do you do with that thought now? I just let go of it. Like chocolate ice cream is the most delicious thing ever. Yeah, it's usually not that sort of thing, but it's just, but then you look at the kinds of problems people create for themselves. You look at the life deranging and reputation destroying things that people do. And I look at the analogous things that have happened to me. I mean, the things that have really bent my life around professionally over the past decade, so much of it is Twitter. I mean, honestly, in my case, almost 100% of it was Twitter. The controversies I would get into, the things I would think I would have to respond to in a pod, like I would release a podcast on a certain topic. I would see some blowback on Twitter. It would give me the sense that there was some signal that I really had to respond to. Now that I'm off Twitter, I recognize that most of that was just, it was totally specious, right? It was not something I had to respond to, but yet I would then do a cycle of podcasts responding to that thing that like taking my foot out of my mouth or taking someone else's foot out of my mouth. And it became this self-perpetuating cycle, which, I mean, if you're having fun, great. I mean, if it's generative of useful information and engagement professionally and psychologically, great. And there was some of that on Twitter. I mean, there were people who I've connected with because I just, one of us DMed the other on Twitter and it was hard to see how that was gonna happen otherwise. But it was largely just a machine for manufacturing unnecessary controversy. Do you think it's possible to avoid the drug of that? So now that you've achieved this zen state, is it possible for somebody like you to use it in a way that doesn't pull you into the whirlpool? And so anytime there's attacks, you just, I mean, that's how I tried to use it. Yeah, but it's not the way I wanted to use it. It's not the way it promises itself as a- You wanted to have debate. I wanted to actually communicate with people. I wanted to hear from the person because, again, it's like being in Afghanistan, right? It's like there are the potted cases where it's obviously good, right? It's like in Afghanistan, the girl who's getting an education, that is just here. That's why we're here. That's obviously good. I've had those moments on Twitter where it's okay, I'm hearing from a smart person who's detected an error I made in my podcast or in a book, or they've just got some great idea about something that I should spend time on. And I would never have heard from this person in any other format. And now I'm actually in dialogue with them. And it's fantastic. That's the promise of it, to actually talk to people. And so I kept getting lured back into that. No, the sane or sanity-preserving way of using it is just as a marketing channel. You just put your stuff out there and you don't look at what's coming back at you. And I'm on other social media platforms that I don't even touch. I mean, my team posts stuff on Facebook and on Instagram. I never even see what's on there. So you don't think it's possible to see something and not let it affect your mind? No, that's definitely possible. But the question is, and I did that for vast stretches of time. But then the promise of the platform is dialogue and feedback. So why am I, if I know for whatever reason, I'm going to see 99 to 1 awful feedback, bad faith feedback, malicious feedback, some of it's probably even bots. And I'm not even aware of who's a person, who's a bot. But I'm just going to stare into this funhouse mirror of acrimony and dishonesty. The reason why I got off is not because I couldn't recalibrate and find equanimity again, with all the nastiness that was coming back at me. And not that I couldn't ignore it for vast stretches of time. But I could see that I kept coming back to it, hoping that it would be something that I could use, a real tool for communication. And I was noticing that it was insidiously changing the way I felt about people, both people I know and people I don't know. People I know, mutual friends of ours who are behaving in certain ways on Twitter, which just seemed insane to me. And then that became a signal I felt like I had to take into account somehow. You're seeing people at their worst, both friends and strangers. And I felt that it was as much as I could try to recalibrate for it, I felt that I was losing touch with what was real information. Because people are performing, people are faking, people are not themselves. You're seeing people at their worst. And so I felt like, all right, what's being advertised to me here on a, not just a daily basis, a hourly basis, or an increment sometimes of multiple times an hour. I probably check Twitter at minimum 10 times a day, and maybe I was checking it a hundred times a day on some days, right, where things were really active and I was really engaged with something. What was being delivered into my brain there was subtly false information about how dishonest and just generally unethical totally normal people are capable of being, right? It was like, it is a funhouse mirror. I was seeing the most grotesque versions of people who I know, right? People who I know I could sit down at dinner with and they would never behave this way. And yet they were coming at me on Twitter, and I mean, it was essentially turning ordinary people into sociopaths, right? People are just and there are analogies that many of us have made. It's like, one analogy is road rage, right? People behave in the confines of a car in ways that they never would if they didn't have this metal box around them, moving at speed. And all of that becomes quite hilarious and obviously dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off. And they realize they didn't know what was going on, and they're just so dysfunctional when they actually have to stop at the light next to the person they just flipped off. And they realize they didn't understand that the person coming out of that car next to them with cauliflower ear is someone who they never would have rolled their eyes at in public because they would have taken one look at this person and realized this is the last person you want to fight with. That's one of the heartbreaking things is to see people who I know are friends be everything from snarky to downright mean, derisive towards each other. It doesn't make any sense. This is the only place where I've seen people I really admire who have had a calm head about most things, like really be shitty to other people. It's probably the only place I've seen that. And I choose to maybe believe that that's not really them, there's something about the system. Like, if you go paintballing, if you, Jordan Peterson and whoever, go paintballing... You're gonna shoot your friends, yeah. Yeah, you're gonna shoot your friends, but you kind of accept that that's kind of what you're doing in this little game that you're playing. But it's sometimes hard to remind yourself of that. And I think I was guilty of that, definitely. You know, I don't think I... there's nothing I... I don't think I ever did anything that I really feel bad about, but yeah, it was always pushing me to the edge of snideness somehow, and it's just not healthy. It's not... So the reason why I deleted my Twitter account in the end was that it was obviously making me a worse person. And so, and yeah, is there some way to be on there where it's not making you a worse person? I'm sure there is, but it's given the nature of the platform, and given what was coming back at me on it, the way to do that is just to basically use it as a one-way channel of communication, just marketing. You know, it's like, here's what I'm paying attention to, look at it if you want to, and you just push it out, and then you don't look at what's coming back at you. I put out a call for questions on Twitter, and they're actually quite surprising. There's a lot of good... I mean, they're like, even if they're critical, they're like being thoughtful, which is nice. I used it that way too, and that was what kept me hooked. But then there's also TouchBalls69 wrote a question, ask... I can't imagine. This is part of it, but one way to solve this is, you know, we've got to get rid of anonymity for this. Let me ask the question, ask Sam why he sucks was the question. Yeah, that's good. Well, one... Yeah, that's good. Well, one reason why I sucked was Twitter. That was... and I've since solved that problem, so... TouchBalls69 should be happy that I suck a little bit less now that I'm off Twitter. I don't have to hear from TouchBalls69 on the regular. The fact that you have to see that, it probably can have a negative effect, just even in moderation, just to see that there is... like, for me, the negative effect is slightly losing faith in the underlying kindness of humanity. Yeah, that was for me, yeah. You can also just reason your way out of it, saying that this is anonymity, and this is kind of fun, and this kind of... just the shit show of Twitter, it's okay, but it does mentally affect you a little bit. Like, I don't read too much into that kind of comment. It's like, it's just... that's just trolling, and it's, you know, I get what's... I get... I understand the fun the person is having on the other side of that. It's like... Do you, though? I do... well, I do. I don't... I mean, I don't behave that way, but I do... and for all I know, that person could be, you know, 16 years old, right? So it's like... It could be also an alt-icon for Elon, I don't know. Well, yeah, that's right, yeah. Yeah. No, I'm pretty sure Elon would just tweet that, you know, under his own name at this point. Oh, man. We love each other. Okay, so the... do you think... so speaking of which, now that Elon has taken over Twitter, is there something that he could do to make this platform better? This Twitter and just social media in general, but because of the aggressive nature of his innovation that he's pushing, is there any way to make Twitter a pleasant place for Sam Harris? Uh, maybe. Like in the next five years? I don't know. I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not he or anyone could make a social media platform that really was healthy. So you were just observing yourself week by week, seeing the effect it has on your mind, and on how much you're actually learning and growing as a person, and it was negative. Yeah, and I'd also seen the negativity in other people's lives. I mean, it's obviously... I mean, he's not gonna admit it, but I think it's obviously negative for Elon, right? I mean, it's just not... that was one of the things that, you know, when I was looking into the Funhaus mirror, I was also seeing the Funhaus mirror on his side of Twitter, and it was just even more exaggerated. It's like, when I was asking myself, why is he spending his time this way, I then reflected on why, you know, why was I spending my time this way, to a lesser degree, right? And at lesser scale, and at lesser risk, frankly, right? And so... and it was just so... it's not just Twitter, I mean, this isn't part... an internet phenomenon. It's like the whole Hunter Biden mess that you... Explored. Explored. That was based on... I mean, it was on somebody's podcast, but that was based on a clip taken from that podcast, which was highly misleading as to the general shape of my remarks on that podcast. Even, you know, I had to then do my own podcast, untangling all of that, and admitting that even in the full context, I was not speaking especially well, and didn't say exactly what I thought in a way that was... would have been recognizable to anyone, you know, even someone with... not functioning by a spirit of charity, but the clip was quite distinct from the podcast itself. The reality is, is that we're living in an environment now where people are so lazy, and their attention is so fragmented, that they only have time for clips. 99% of people will see a clip and will assume, there's no relevant context I need to understand what happened in that clip, right? And obviously the people who make those clips know that, right? And they're doing it quite maliciously. And in this case, the person who made that clip, and subsequent clips of other podcasts, was quite maliciously trying to engineer, you know, some reputational immolation for me. And being signal boosted by Elon and other prominent people who can't take the time to watch anything other than a clip, even when it's their friend, or someone who's ostensibly their friend in that clip, right? So it's a total failure, an understandable failure of ethics, that everyone is so short on time, and they're so fucking lazy, that they're just... and we now have these contexts in which we react so quickly to things, right? Like, Twitter is inviting an instantaneous reaction to this clip, that it's just too tempting to just say something and not know what you're even commenting on. And most of the people who saw that clip don't understand what I actually think about any of these issues. And the irony is, people are going to find clips from this conversation that are just as misleading, and they're going to export those, and then people are going to be dunking on those clips. And, you know, we're all living and dying by clips now, and it's dysfunctional. See, I think it's possible to create a platform. I think we will keep living on clips, but, you know, when I saw that clip of you talking about children and so on, just knowing that you have a sense of humor, you just went to a dark place in terms of humor. So I didn't even bother, and then I knew that the way clips work is that people will use it for virality's sake, but giving a person benefit of the doubt, that's not even the right term. It's not like I was really interpreting it in the context of knowing your past. I mean, the truth is, I even give Trump the benefit of the doubt when I see a clip of Trump. Because there are famous clips of Trump that are very misleading as to what he was saying in context, and I've been honest about that. Like, the whole, you know, there were good people on both sides scandal around his remarks after Charlottesville. Like, the clip that got exported and got promoted by everyone, you know, left of center, from Biden on down, you know, the New York Times, CNN, there's nobody that I'm aware of who has honestly apologized for what they did with that clip. He did not say what he seemed to be saying in that clip about the Nazis at Charlottesville, right? And I have always been very clear about that. So it's just, you know, even people who I think should be marginalized and people who should be defenestrated because they really are terrible people who are doing dangerous things, and for bad reasons, I think we should be honest about what they actually meant in context, right? And this goes to anyone else we might talk about, you know, who's more, where the case is much more confusing. But yeah, so everyone's... It's just so... And then, I'm sure we're going to get to AI, but, you know, the prospect of being able to manufacture clips with AI and deep fakes, and that where it's going to be hard for most people most of the time to even figure out whether they're in the presence of something real. You know, forget about being divorced from context. There was no context. I mean, that's a misinformation apocalypse that is... We are right on the cusp of, and, you know, it's terrifying. Or it could be just a new world, like where Alice is going to Wonderland, where humor is the only thing we have and that will save us. Maybe in the end, Trump's approach to social media was the right one after all. Nothing is true and everything's absurd. Yeah, but we can't live that way. People function on the basis of what they assume is true, right? They think, you know... People have functioned. Well, to do anything. It's like, I mean, you have to know what you think is going to happen, or you have to at least give a probabilistic weighting over the future. Otherwise, you're going to be incapacitated by... People want certain things, and they have to have a rational plan to get those desires gratified. And they don't want to die, they don't want their kids to die. You tell them that there's a comet hurtling toward Earth, and they should get outside and look up, right? They're going to do it, and if it turns out it's misinformation, you know, it's going to matter, because it comes down to, like, what medicines do you give your children, right? Like, we're going to be manufacturing fake journal articles. I mean, this is... I'm sure someone's using chat GPT for this, you know, as we speak. And if it's not credible, if it's not persuasive now to most people, I mean, honestly, I don't think we're going to... I'll be amazed if it's a year before we can actually create journal articles that would take a PhD to debunk that are completely fake. And there are people who are celebrating this kind of, you know, coming cataclysm, but it's just... They're the people who don't have anything to lose, who are celebrating it, or just are so confused that they just don't even know what's at stake. And then there are the people who have... The few people who we could count on a few hands, who have managed to insulate themselves, or at least imagine they've insulated themselves from the downside here enough that they're not implicated in the great unraveling we are witnessing or could witness. The shaking up of what is true. So actually, that returns us to experts. Do you think experts can save us? Is there such thing as expertise and experts in something? How do you know if you've achieved it? I think it's important to acknowledge up front that there's something paradoxical about how we relate to authority, especially within science. And I don't think that paradox is going away, and it's just... It doesn't have to be confusing. It's just... And it's not truly a paradox, it's just like there are different moments in time. So it is true to say that within science or within rationality generally, I mean, whenever you're having a fact-based discussion about anything, it is true to say that the truth or falsity of a statement does not even slightly depend on the credentials of the person making the statement. So it doesn't matter if you're a Nobel laureate, you can be wrong. The last sentence you spoke could be total bullshit, right? And it's also possible for someone who's deeply uninformed to be right about something, or to be right for the wrong reasons, or someone just gets lucky, or someone... And there are middling cases where you have a backyard astronomer who's got no credentials, but he just loves astronomy, and he's got a telescope, and he spends a lot of time looking at the night sky, and he discovers a comet that no one else has seen, not even the professional expert astronomers. I mean, I gotta think that happens less and less now, but some version of that keeps happening, and it may always keep happening in every area of expertise. Right? So it's true that truth is orthogonal to the reputational concerns we have among apes who are talking about the truth, but it is also true that most of the time, real experts are much more reliable than frauds or people who are not experts, right? And expertise really is a thing, right? And when you're flying an airplane in a storm, you don't want just randos come into the cockpit saying, listen, I've got a new idea about how we should tweak these controls, right? You want someone who's a trained pilot, and that training gave them something, right? It gave them a set of competences and intuitions, and they know what all those dials and switches do, right? And I don't, right? I shouldn't be flying that plane. So when things really matter, you know, and putting this at 30,000 feet in a storm sharpens this up, we want real experts to be in charge, right? And we are at 30,000 feet a lot of the time on a lot of issues, right? And whether they're public health issues, whether it's a geopolitical emergency like Ukraine, climate change, I mean, just pick your topic. There are real problems, and the clock is rather often ticking, and their solutions are non-obvious, right? And so expertise is a thing, and deferring to experts much of the time makes a lot of sense. At minimum, it prevents spectacular errors of incompetence and just foolhardiness, but even in the case of some, where you're talking about someone, I mean, people like ourselves who are like, we're well-educated, we're not the worst possible candidates for the Dunning-Kruger effect, when we're going into a new area where we're not experts, we're fairly alert to the possibility that we don't, you know, it's not as simple as things seem at first, and we don't know how our tools translate to this new area, we can be fairly circumspect, but we're also, because we're well-educated, and we're pretty quick studies, we can learn a lot of things pretty fast, and we can begin to play a language game that sounds fairly expert, right? And in that case, the invitation to do your own research, right, is, when times are good, I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly, right, when times are good. Now, the truth is, times are not all that good, right? And we have the ongoing public display of failures of expertise. We have experts who are obviously corrupted by bad incentives, we've got experts who perversely won't admit they were wrong when they in fact, you know, are demonstrated to be wrong, we've got institutions that have been captured by political ideology that's not truth-tracking, I mean, this whole woke encroachment into really every place, you know, whether it's universities or science journals or government, or, I mean, it's just, like, that has been genuinely deranging. So there's a lot going on where experts and the very concept of expertise has seemed to discredit itself, but the reality is that there is a massive difference when anything matters, when there's anything to know about anything, there is a massive difference, most of the time, between someone who has really done the work to understand that domain and someone who hasn't. And if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick, you know, I have a PhD in neuroscience, right, so I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right? And I, you know, so I'm just fairly conversant with medical terminology, and I understand its methods, and I'm alert to the difference because in neuroscience I've spent hours and hours in hours and hours in journal clubs, you know, diagnosing, you know, and analyzing the difference between good and bad studies. I'm alert to the difference between good and bad studies in medical journals, right? And I understand that bad studies can get published and, you know, et cetera, and experiments can be poorly designed. I'm alert to all of those things, but when I get sick or when someone close to me gets sick, I don't pretend to be a doctor, right? I've got no clinical experience. I don't go down the rabbit hole on Google for days at a stretch trying to become a doctor, much less a specialist in the domain of problem that has been visited upon me or my family, right? So if someone close to me gets cancer, I don't pretend to be an oncologist. I don't go out and start, I don't start reading, you know, in journals of oncology and try to really get up to speed as an oncologist because it's, one, it's a bad and potential and very likely misleading use of my time, right? And it's, if I had a lot of runway, if I decided, okay, it's really important for me to know everything I can. At this point, I know someone's gonna get cancer. I may not go back to school and become an oncologist, but what I wanna do is I wanna know everything I can know about cancer, right? So I'm gonna take the next four years and spend most of my time on cancer. Okay, I could do that, right? I still think that's a waste of my time. I still think at the end of, even at the end of those four years, I'm not gonna be the best person to form intuitions about what to do in the face of the next cancer that I have to confront. I'm still gonna want a better oncologist than I've become to tell me what he or she would do if they were in my shoes or in the shoes of my family member. I'm gonna, you know, what I'm not advocating, I'm not advocating a blind trust and authority. Like, if you get cancer and you're talking to one oncologist and they're recommending some course of treatment, by all means, get a second opinion, get a third opinion, right? But it matters, right? But it matters that those opinions are coming from real experts and not from, you know, Robert Kennedy Jr., you know, who's telling you that, you know, you got it because you got a vaccine, right? It's like, it's just, we're swimming in a sea of misinformation where you've got people who are moving the opinions of millions of others who should not have an opinion on these topics. Like, there is no scenario in which you should be getting your opinion about vaccine safety or climate change or the war in Ukraine or anything else that we might want to talk about from Candace Owens, right? It's just like, she's not a relevant expert on any of those topics. And what's more, she doesn't seem to care, right? And she's living in a culture that has amplified that not caring into a business model, an effective business model, right? So it's just, it's, and there's something very Trumpian about all that. Like, that's the problem, the problem is the culture, it's not these specific individuals. So the paradox here is that expertise is a real thing and we defer to it a lot as a labor-saving device and just based on the reality that it's very hard to be a polymath, right? And specialization is a thing, right? And so there are people who specialize in a very narrow topic, they know more about that topic than the next guy, no matter how smart that guy or gal is, and that those differences matter. But it's also true that when you're talking about facts, sometimes the best experts are wrong, the scientific consensus is wrong. You get a sea change in the thinking of a whole field because one person who's an outlier for whatever reason decides, okay, I'm gonna prove this point, I'm gonna prove this point, and they prove it, right? So somebody like the doctor who believed that stomach ulcers were not due to stress but were due to H. pylori infections, right? So he just drank a vial of H. pylori bacteria and proved, and he quickly got an ulcer and convinced the field that at minimum H. pylori was involved in that process. Okay, so yes, everyone was wrong. That doesn't disprove the reality of expertise. It doesn't disprove the utility of relying on experts most of the time, especially in an emergency, especially when the clock is ticking, especially when you're in this particular cockpit and you only have one chance to land this plane, right? You want the real pilot at the controls. But there's just a few things to say. So one, you mentioned this example with cancer and doing your own research. There are several things that are different about our particular time in history. One, doing your own research has become more and more effective because you can read, the internet made information a lot more accessible, so you can read a lot of different meta-analyses. You can read blog posts that describe to you exactly the flaws in the different papers that make up the meta-analyses. And you can read a lot of those blog posts that are conflicting with each other, and you can take that information in, and in a short amount of time, you can start to make good faith interpretations. For example, I don't know, I don't want to overstate things, but if you suffer from depression, for example, then you could go to an expert and a doctor that prescribes you some medication. But you could also challenge some of those ideas and seeing like, what are the different medications, what are the different side effects, what are the different solutions to depression, all that kind of stuff. And I think depression is just a really difficult problem that's very, I don't want to again state incorrect things, but I think it's, there's a lot of variability of what depression really means. So being introspective about the type of depression you have and the different possible solutions you have, just doing your research as a first step before approaching a doctor, or as you have multiple opinions, could be very beneficial in that case. Now, that's depression, that's something that's been studied for a very long time. With a new pandemic that's affecting everybody, it's, you know, with the airplane, equate it to like 9-11 or something, like the new emergency just happened, and everybody, every expert in the world is publishing on it and talking about it. So doing your own research there could be exceptionally effective in asking questions. And then there's a difference between experts, virologists, and it's actually a good question, who is exactly the expert in a pandemic? But there's the actual experts doing the research and publishing stuff, and then there's the communicators of that expertise. And the question is, if the communicators are flawed to a degree where doing your own research is actually the more effective way to figure out policies and solutions. What if the communicators are flawed to a degree where doing your own research is actually the more effective way to figure out policies and solutions? Because you're not competing with the experts, you're competing with the communicators of expertise. That could be WHO, CDC in the case of the pandemic, or politicians, or political type of science figures like Anthony Fauci. There's a question of doing your own research in that context. And the competing forces there, incentives that you've mentioned, is you can become quite popular by being contrarian, by saying everybody's lying to you, all the authorities are lying to you, all the institutions are lying to you. So those are the waters you're swimming in. But I think doing your own research in that kind of context could be quite effective. Let me be clear. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any research, right? I'm not saying that you shouldn't be informed about an issue. I'm not saying you shouldn't read articles on whatever the topic is. And yes, if I got cancer or someone close to me got cancer, I probably would read more about cancer than I've read thus far about cancer. And I've read some. So I'm not making a virtue of ignorance and a blind obedience to authority. And again, I recognize that authorities can discredit themselves or they can be wrong. They can be wrong even when there's no discredit. There's a lot we don't understand about the nature of the world. But still, this vast gulf between truly informed opinion and bullshit exists. It always exists. And conspiracy thinking is rather often, most of the time, a species of bullshit, but it's not always wrong. There are real conspiracies. And there really are just awful corruptions born of bad incentives within our scientific processes, within institutions. And again, we've mentioned a lot of these things in passing, but what woke political ideology did to scientific communication during the pandemic was awful. And it was really corrosive of public trust, especially on the right, for understandable reasons. It was crazy some of the things that were being said and still is. And these cases are all different. You take depression. We just don't know enough about depression for anyone to be that confident about anything. And there are many different modalities in which to interact with it as a problem. So there's pharmaceuticals, have whatever promise they have, but there's certainly reason to be concerned that they don't work well for everybody. And I mean, it's obvious they don't work well for everybody, but they do work for some people. But again, depression is a multifactorial problem, and there are different levels at which to influence it. And there are things like meditation, there are things like just life changes. And one of the perverse things about depression is that when you're depressed, all of the things that would be good for you to do are precisely the things you don't want to do. You don't have any energy to socialize, you don't want to get things done, you don't want to exercise. And all of those things, if you got those up and running, they do make you feel better in the aggregate. But the reality is that there are clinical level depressions that are so bad that we just don't have good tools for them. And it's not enough to tell, there's no life change someone's gonna embrace that is going to be an obvious remedy for that. I mean, pandemics are obviously a complicated problem, but I would consider it much simpler than depression in terms of what's on the menu to be chosen among the various choices. It's less multifactorial. The logic by which you would make those choices, yeah. So it's like, we have a virus, we have a new virus, it's some version of bad, it's human transmissible, we're still catching up, we're catching up to every aspect of it. We don't know how it spreads. We don't know how... How effective masks are. Well, at a certain point we knew it was respiratory, but we knew... But how respiratory, what that means. Yeah, and whether it's spread by fomites, we were confused about a lot of things, and we're still confused. It's been a moving target this whole time, and it's been changing this whole time, and our responses to it have been, we ramped up the vaccines as quickly as we could, but too quick for some, not quick enough for others. We could have done human challenge trials and got them out more quickly with better data. And I think that's something we should probably look at in the future, because to my eye, that would make ethical sense to do challenge trials. But... And so much of my concern about COVID, I mean, many people are confused about my concern about COVID. My concern about COVID has, for much of the time, not been narrowly focused on COVID itself, how dangerous I perceive COVID to be as a illness. It has been for the longest time even more a concern about our ability to respond to a truly scary pathogen next time. Outside those initial months, give me the first six months to be quite worried about COVID and the unraveling of society, but... And the supply of toilet paper. You want to secure a steady supply of toilet paper. But beyond that initial period, when we had a sense of what we were dealing with, and we had every hope that the vaccines are actually going to work, and we knew we were getting those vaccines in short order, beyond that, and we knew just how dangerous the illness was and how dangerous it wasn't, for years now, I've just been worrying about this as a failed dress rehearsal for something much worse. I think what we prove to ourselves at this moment in history is that we have built informational tools that we do not know how to use, and we have made ourselves... We've basically enrolled all of human society into a psychological experiment that is deranging us and making it virtually impossible to solve coordination problems that we absolutely have to solve next time when things are worse. Do you understand who's at fault for the way this unraveled? The way we didn't seem to have the distrust in institutions and the institution of science that grew like seemingly exponentially or got revealed through this process, who is at fault here? And what's to fix? So much blame to go around, but so much of it is not a matter of bad people conspiring to do bad things. It's a matter of incompetence and misaligned incentives and just ordinary, plain vanilla dysfunction. But my problem was that people like you, people like Brett Weinstein, people that I look to for reasonable, difficult conversations on difficult topics, have a little bit lost their mind, became emotional and dogmatic in style of conversation, perhaps not in the depth of actual ideas, but they're... I tweet something of that nature, not about you, but just it feels like the pandemic made people really more emotional than before. And then Kimball Musk responded, and I think something I think you probably would agree with, maybe not. I think it was the combo of Trump and the pandemic. Trump triggered the far left to be way more active than they could have been without him. And then the pandemic handed big government, nanny state, lefties, a huge platform on a silver platter, a one-two punch, and here we are. I would agree with some of that. I'm not sure how much to read into the nanny state concept, but... But yet, basically got people on the far left really activated, and then gave control to, I don't know if you say nanny state, but just control to government, that when executed poorly has created a complete distrust in government. My fear is that there was going to be that complete distrust anyway, given the nature of the information space, given the level of conspiracy thinking, given the gaming of these tools by an anti-vax cult. I mean, there really is an anti-vax cult that just ramped up its energy during this moment. But it's a small one. It's not to say that everything, every concern about vaccines is a species of, it was born of misinformation or born of this cult, but there is a cult that is just... And the core of Trumpism is a cult. I mean, QAnon is a cult. And so there's a lot of lying and there's a lot of confusion. It's almost impossible to exaggerate how confused some people are and how fully their lives are organized around that confusion. I mean, there are people who think that the world's being run by pedophile cannibals and that Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama are among those cannibals. I mean, adjacent to the pure crazy, there's the semi-crazy and adjacent to the semi-crazy, there's the grifting opportunist asshole. And the layers of bad faith are hard to fully diagnose. But the problem is all of this is getting signal boosted by an outrage machine that is preferentially spreading misinformation. It has a business model that is guaranteed that is preferentially sharing misinformation. Can I actually just on a small tangent, how do you defend yourself against the claim that you're a pedophile cannibal? It's difficult. Here's the case I would make, because I don't think you can use reason. I think you have to use empathy. You have to understand. Part of it, I mean, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone believes these things. I'm sure there's some number of people who are just pretending to believe these things, because it's just, again, this is sort of like the 4chanification of everything. It's just Pepe the frog. None of this is what it seems. They're not signaling an alliance with white supremacy or neo-Nazism, but they're not doing it. They just don't fucking care. It's just cynicism overflowing its banks. It's just fun to wind up the normies. Look at all the normies who don't understand that a green frog is just a green frog, even when it isn't just a green frog. It's just gumming up everyone's cognitive bandwidth with bullshit. I get that that's fun if you're a teenager and you just want to vandalize our newsphere, but at a certain point, we have to recognize that real questions of human welfare are in play. There are wars getting fought or not fought, and there's a pandemic raging, and there's medicine to take or not take. But to come back to this issue of COVID, I don't think I got so out of balance around COVID. I think people are quite confused about what I was concerned about. Yes, there was a period where I was crazy because anyone who was taking it seriously was crazy because they had no idea what was going on. So it's like, yes, I was wiping down packages with alcohol wipes because people thought it was transmissible by touch. And then when we realized that was no longer the case, I stopped doing that. So again, it was a moving target, and a lot of things we did in hindsight around masking and school closures looked fairly dysfunctional, unnecessary. I think the criticism that people would say about your talking about COVID, and maybe you can correct me, but you were against skepticism of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. So people who get nervous about the vaccine but don't fall into the usual anti-vax camp, which I think there was a significant enough number, they're getting nervous. I mean, especially after the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, I too was nervous about anything where a lot of money could be made. And you just see how the people who are greedy, they come to the surface all of a sudden. And a lot of them that run institutions, they're actually really good human beings. I know a lot of them, but it's hard to know how those two combine together when there's hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars to be made. And so that skepticism, I guess the sense was that you weren't open enough to the skepticism. I understand that people have that sense. I'll tell you how I thought about it and think about it. One, again, it was a moving target. So there was a point in the timeline where it was totally rational to expect that the vaccines were both working, both they were reasonably safe and that COVID was reasonably dangerous. And that the trade-off for basically everyone was it was rational to get vaccinated, given the level of testing and how many people had been vaccinated before you, given what we were seeing with COVID, right? That that was a forced choice. You're eventually going to get COVID and the question is do you want to be vaccinated when you do, right? There was a period where that forced choice where it was just obviously reasonable to get vaccinated, especially because there was every reason to expect that while it wasn't a perfectly sterilizing vaccine, it was going to knock down transmission a lot and that matters. And so it wasn't just a personal choice. You were actually being a good citizen when you decided to run whatever risk you were going to run to get vaccinated because there are people in our society who actually can't get vaccinated. I mean, I know people who can't take any vaccines. They're so allergic to, I mean, they in their own person seem to justify all of the fears of the anti-vax cult. I mean, it's like they're the kind of person who Robert Kennedy Jr. can point to and say, see, vaccines will fucking kill you, right? Because of the experience and we're still, I know people who have kids who fit that description, right? So we should all feel a civic responsibility to be vaccinated against egregiously awful and transmissible diseases for which we have relatively safe vaccines to keep those sorts of people safe. And there was a period of time when it was thought that the vaccine could stop transmission. Yes. And so again, all of this has begun to shift. I don't think it has shifted as much as Brett Weinstein thinks it's shifted, but yes, there are safety concerns around the mRNA vaccines, especially for young men, right? As far as I know, that's the purview of actual heightened concern. But also there's now a lot of natural immunity out there. Basically everyone who was gonna get vaccinated has gotten vaccinated. The virus has evolved to the point in this context where it seems less dangerous. Again, I'm going more on the seemings than on research that I've done at this point, but I'm certainly less worried about getting COVID. I've had it once, I've been vaccinated. So you ask me now, how do I feel about getting the next booster? I don't know that I'm going to get the next booster, right? So I was somebody who was waiting in line at four in the morning, hoping to get some overflow vaccine when it was first available. And that was at that point, given what we knew, or given what I thought I knew based on the best sources I could consult and based on anecdotes that were too vivid to ignore, both data and personal experience, it was totally rational for me to want to get that vaccine as soon as I could. And now I think it's totally rational for me to do a different kind of cost benefit analysis and wonder, listen, do I really need to get a booster? How many of these boosters am I going to get for the rest of my life, really? And how safe is the mRNA vaccine for a man of my age? And do I need to be worried about myocarditis? All of that is completely rational to talk about now. My concern is that at every point along the way, I was the wrong person and Brett Weinstein was the wrong person, and there's many other people I could add to this list, to have strong opinions about any of this stuff. I just disagree with that. I think, yes, in theory, I agree 100%, but I feel like experts failed at communicating. Not at doing- They did. And I just feel like you and Brett Weinstein actually have the tools with the internet, given the engine you have in your brain of thinking for months at a time, deeply about the problems that face our world, that you actually have the tools to do pretty good thinking here. The problem I have with experts- But there would be deference to experts and pseudo-experts behind all of that. Well, the papers, you would stand on the shoulders of giants, but you can surf those shoulders better than the giants themselves. Yeah, but I knew we were going to disagree about that. I saw his podcast where he brought on these experts who had, many of them, had the right credentials, but for a variety of reasons, they didn't pass the smell test for me. One larger problem, and this goes back to the problem of how we rely on authority in science, is that you can always find a PhD or an MD to champion any crackpot idea. It is amazing, but you could find PhDs and MDs who would sit up there in front of Congress and say that they thought smoking was not addictive, or that it was not harmful to- There was no direct link between smoking and lung cancer. You could always find those people. Some of the people Brett found were people who had obvious tells, to my point of view, to my eye. Some of the same people were on Rogan's podcast. It's hard, because if a person does have the right credentials, and they're not saying something floridly mistaken, and we're talking about something where there are genuine unknowns, like how much do we know about the safety of these vaccines? At that point, not a whole hell of a lot. We have no long-term data on mRNA vaccines, but to confidently say that millions of people are gonna die because of these vaccines, and to confidently say that ivermectin is a panacea, ivermectin is the thing that prevents COVID, there was no good reason to say either of those things at that moment. Given that that's where Brett was, I felt like there was just no, there was nothing to debate. We're both the wrong people to be getting into the weeds on this. We're both gonna defer to our chosen experts. His experts look like crackpots to me, or at least the ones who are most vociferous on those edgiest points that seem most- And your experts seem like, what is the term, mass hysteria? I forgot the term. Well, no, but it's like with climate science. It's received as a canard in half of our society now, but the claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is a thing, right? Do you go with the 97% most of the time, or do you go with the 3% most of the time? It's obvious you go with the 97% most of the time for anything that matters. It's not to say that the 3% are always wrong. Again, things get overturned. And yes, as you say, and I've spent much more time worrying about this on my podcast than I've spent worrying about COVID, our institutions have lost trust for good reason, right? And it's an open question whether we can actually get things done with this level of transparency and pseudo-transparency, given our information ecosystems. Can we fight a war, really fight a war that we may have to fight, like the next Nazis? Can we fight that war when everyone with an iPhone is showing just how awful it is that little girls get blown up when we drop our bombs? Could we as a society do what we might have to do to actually get necessary things done when we're living in this panopticon of just, everyone's a journalist, everyone's a scientist, everyone's an expert, everyone's got direct contact with the facts or a semblance of the facts. I don't know. I think yes, and I think voices like yours are exceptionally important. And I think there's certain signals you send in your ability to steal me on the other side, in your empathy, essentially. So that's the fight, that's the mechanism by which you resist the dogmatism of this binary thinking. And then if you become a trusted person that's able to consider the other side, then people will listen to you as the aggregator, as the communicator of expertise. Because the virologists haven't been able to be good communicators. I still, to this day, don't really know what is the, what am I supposed to think about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines today? As it stands today, what are we supposed to think? What are we supposed to think about testing? What are we supposed to think about the effectiveness of masks or lockdowns? Where's the great communicators on this topic that consider all the other conspiracy theories, all the other, all the communication that's out there, and actually aggregate it together and be able to say this is actually what's most likely the truth. And also some of that has to do with humility, epistemic humility, knowing that you can't really know for sure. Just like with depression, you can't really know for sure. I'm not seeing those communications being effectively done, even still today. Well, the jury is still out on some of it. And again, it's a moving target. And some of it, it's complicated. Some of it's a self-fulfilling dynamic where, so like lockdowns, in theory, lockdowns, a lockdown would work if we could only do it, but we can't really do it. And there's a lot of people who won't do it because they're convinced that this is the totalitarian boot on finally on the neck of the good people who are always having their interests reduced by the elites. So like this is, if you have enough people who think the lockdown for any reason, in the face of any conceivable illness, is just code for the new world order coming to fuck you over and take your guns, right? Okay, you have a society that is now immune to reason, right? Because there are absolutely certain pathogens that we should lock down for next time, right? And it was completely rational in the beginning of this thing to lock down, given, to attempt to lock down. We never really locked down. To attempt some semblance of a lockdown just to quote, bend the curve, to spare our healthcare system, given what we were seeing happen in Italy, right? Like that moment was not hard to navigate, at least in my view. It was obvious at the time. In retrospect, my views on that haven't changed, except for the fact that I recognize maybe it's just impossible, given the nature of people's response to that kind of demand, right? We live in a society that's just not gonna lock down. Unless the pandemic is much more deadly. Right, so that's a point I made, which was maliciously clipped out from some other podcast, where someone's trying to make it look like, I wanna see children die. It's a pity more children didn't die from COVID, right? This is actually the same person who, and that's the other thing that got so poisoned here. It's like that person, this psychopath or effective psychopath who's creating these clips of me on podcasts, the second clip of me seeming to say that I wish more children died during COVID, but it was so clear in context what I was saying that even the clip betrayed the context, so it didn't actually work. This psycho, and again, I don't know whether he actually is a psychopath, but he's behaving like one because of the incentives of Twitter. This is somebody who Brett signal boosted as a very reliable source of information, right? He kept retweeting this guy at me, against me, right? And this guy, at one glance, I knew how unreliable this guy was, right? But I think I'm not at all sad. One thing I think I did wrong, one thing that I do regret, one thing I have not sorted out for myself is how to navigate the professional and personal pressure that gets applied at this moment where you have a friend or an acquaintance or someone you know who's behaving badly in public or behaving in a way that you think is bad in public, and they have a public platform where they're influencing a lot of people, and you have your own public platform where you're constantly getting asked to comment on what this friend or acquaintance or colleague is doing. I haven't known what I think is ethically right about the choices that seem forced on us at moments like this. So I've criticized you in public about your interview with Kanye. Now, in that case, I reached out to you in private first and told you exactly what I thought, and then when I was going to get asked in public or when I was touching that topic on my podcast, I more or less said the same thing that I said to you in private, right? Now, that was how I navigated that moment. I did the same thing with Elon, at least at the beginning. You know, we have maintained good vibes, which is not what I want to say about Elon. I don't think so. I disagree with you, because good vibes in the moment, there's a deep core of good vibes that persist through time. Between you and Elon, and I would argue probably between some of the other folks you mentioned. I think with Brett, I failed to reach out in private to the degree that I should have. We never really had... We had tried to set up a conversation in private that never happened, but there was some communication, but it would have been much better for me to have made more of an effort in private than I did before it spilled out into public. And I would say that's true with other people as well. What kind of interaction in private do you think you should have with Brett? Because my case would be beforehand and now still. The case I would like, and this part of the criticism you sent my way, maybe it's useful to go to that direction. Actually, let's go to that direction, because I think I disagree with your criticism as you stated publicly, but this is very... You're talking about your interview with Kanye. The thing you criticized me for is actually the right thing to do with Brett. Okay, you said, Lex could have spoken with Kanye in such a way as to have produced a useful document. He didn't do that because he has a fairly naive philosophy about the power of love. Let's see if you can maintain that philosophy in the present. Let's go. It's a criticism. He's... No, it's beautiful. He seemed to think that if he just got through the minefield to the end of the conversation where the two of them still were feeling good about one another and they can hug it out, that would be by definition a success. Let me make the case for this power of love philosophy. First of all, I love you, Sam. You're still an inspiration and somebody I deeply admire. Back at you. To me, in the case of Kanye, it's not only that you get to the conversation and have hugs, it's that the display that you're willing to do that has power. So even if it doesn't end in hugging, the actual... The turning the other cheek, the act of turning the other cheek itself communicates both to Kanye later and to the rest of the world that we should have empathy and compassion towards each other. There is power to that. Maybe that is naive, but I believe in the power of that. So it's not that I'm trying to convince Kanye that some of his ideas are wrong, but I'm trying to illustrate that just the act of listening and truly trying to understand the human being, that opens people's minds to actually questioning their own beliefs more. It takes them out of the dogmatism, deescalates the kind of dogmatism that I've been seeing. So in that sense, I would say the power of love is the philosophy you might apply to Brett, because the right conversation you have in private is not about, hey, listen, listen, the experts you're talking to, they seem credentialed, but they're not actually as credentialed as they're illustrating. They're not grounding their findings in actual meta analyses and papers and so on, like making a strong case, like, what are you doing? This is gonna get a lot of people in trouble. But instead just saying, being a friend in the dumbest of ways, being respectful, sending love their way, and just having a conversation outside of all of this. Basically showing that, removing the emotional attachment to this debate, even though you are very emotionally attached, because in the case of COVID specifically, there is a very large number of lives at stake, but removing all of that and remembering that you have a friendship. Yeah, well, so I think these are highly non-analogous cases, right? So your conversation with Kanye misfired, from my point of view, for a very different reason. It has to do with Kanye. I mean, so Kanye, I don't know, I've never met Kanye, so obviously I don't know him, but I think he's either obviously in the midst of a mental health crisis, or he's a colossal asshole, or both. I mean, those aren't mutually exclusive. So one of three possibilities, he's either mentally ill, he's an asshole, or he's mentally ill and an asshole. I think all three of those possibilities are possible for the both of us as well. No, I would argue none of those are likely for either of us. But Possible. Not to say we don't have our moments, but... So the reason not to talk to Kanye, so I think you should have had the conversation you had with him in private. That's great. And I've got no criticism of what you said, had it been in private. In public, I just thought you're not doing him a favor. If he's mentally ill, right, he's in the middle of a manic episode, or I'm not a clinician, but I've heard it said of him that he is bipolar. You're not doing him a favor sticking a mic in front of him and letting him go off on the Jews or anything else, right? We know what he thought about the Jews. We know that there's not much illumination that's gonna come from him on that topic. And if it is a symptom of his mental illness that he thinks these things, well then, you're not doing him a favor making that even more public. If he's just an asshole, and he's just an antisemite, an ordinary garden variety antisemite, well then, there's also not much to say unless you're really gonna dig in and kick the shit out of him in public. And I'm saying you can do that with love. That's the other thing here is that I don't agree that compassion and love always have this patient, embracing, acquiescent face, right? They don't always feel good to the recipient, right? There is a sort of wisdom that you can wield compassionately in moments like that where someone's full of shit, and you just make it absolutely clear to them and to your audience that they're full of shit. And there's no hatred being communicated. In fact, you could just say, listen, I'm gonna do everyone a favor right now and just take your foot out of your mouth. And the truth is, I just wouldn't have aired the conversation. I just don't think it was a document that had to get out there, right? I get that many people... This is not a signal you're likely to get from your audience, right? I get that many people in your audience thought, oh my God, that's awesome. You're talking to Kanye and you're doing it in Lex style, where it's just love, and you're not treating him like a pariah. And you're holding this tension between he's this creative genius who his work we love, and yet he's having this moment that's so painful. And what a tightrope walk. And I get that maybe 90% of your audience saw it that way. They're still wrong. And I still think that was unbalanced, not a good thing to put out into the world. You don't think it opens up the mind and heart of people that listen to that? Just have it... Seeing a person... If it does, it's opening up in the wrong direction where just gale force nonsense is coming in. I think we should have an open mind and an open heart, but there's some clear things here that we have to keep in view. One is the mental illness component is its own thing. I don't pretend to understand what's going on with him. But insofar as that's the reason he's saying what he's saying, do not put this guy on camera and let no one see it. But I had... Sorry, on that point real quick, I had a bunch of conversation with him offline, and I didn't get a sense of mental illness. That's why I chose to sit down. Okay. And I didn't get it. I mean, mental illness is such a... But when he shows up in a gimp hood on Alex Jones's podcast, I mean, either that's more genius performance in his world, or he's unraveling further. I wouldn't put that under mental illness. I think there's another conversation to be had about how we treat artists, because they're weirdos. They're very... I mean, taking words from Kanye as if he's like Christopher Hitchens or something like that, like very eloquent, researched, written many books on history, on politics, on geopolitics, on psychology. Kanye didn't do any of that. He's an artist just spouting off. And so it's a different style of conversation and a different way to treat the words that are coming out of his mouth. Let's leave the mental illness aside. So if we're going to say that there's no reason to think he's mentally ill, and this is just him being creative and brilliant and opinionated, well, then that falls into the asshole bucket for me. It's like then he's someone... And honestly, the most offensive thing about him in that interview, from my point of view, is not the anti-Semitism, which we can talk about, because I think there are problems just letting him spread those memes as well. But the most offensive thing is just how delusionally egocentric he is, or was coming off in that interview and in others. He has an estimation of himself as this omnibus genius, not only to rival Shakespeare, to exceed Shakespeare. He is the greatest mind that has ever walked among us. And he's more or less explicit on that point. And yet he manages to talk for hours without saying anything actually interesting or insightful or factually illuminating. So it's complete delusion of a very Trumpian sort. It's like when Trump says he's a genius who understands everything, but nobody takes him seriously, and one wonders whether Trump takes himself seriously. Kanye seems to believe his own press. He actually thinks he's just a colossus. And he may be a great musician. It's certainly not my wheelhouse to compare him to any other musicians. But one thing that's patently obvious from your conversation is he's not who he thinks he is intellectually or ethically or in any other relevant way. And so when you couple that to the antisemitism he was spreading, which was genuinely noxious and ill-considered and has potential knock-on effects in the Black community. I mean, there's an ambient level of antisemitism in the Black community that is worth worrying about and talking about anyway. There's a bunch of guys playing the knockout game in Brooklyn, just punching Orthodox Jews in the face. And I think letting Kanye air his antisemitism that publicly only raises the likelihood of that rather than diminishes it. I don't know. So let me say just a couple of things. So one, my belief at the time was it doesn't. It decreases it. Showing empathy while pushing back decreases the likelihood of that. It might on the surface look like it's increasing it, but that's simply because the antisemitism or the hatred in general is brought to the surface and that people talk about it. But I should also say that you're one of the only people that wrote to me privately criticizing me. And like out of the people I really respect and admire, and that was really valuable. That I had to, painful, because I had to think through it for a while. And it still haunts me because the other kind of criticism I got a lot of, people basically said things towards me based on who I am that they hate me. You mean antisemitic things or that you- Yeah, antisemitic things. I just hate the word antisemitic. It's like racist. But here's the reality. So I'm someone, so I'm Jewish, although obviously not religious. I have never taken, I've been a student of the Holocaust, obviously. I know a lot about that, and there's reason to be a student of the Holocaust. But in my lifetime and in my experience, I have never taken antisemitism very seriously. I have not worried about it. I have not made a thing of it. I've done exactly one podcast on it. I had Barry Weiss on my podcast when her book came out. But it really is a thing, and it's something we have to keep an eye on societally because it's a unique kind of hatred. It's unique in that it seems, it's knit together with, it's not just ordinary racism. It's knit together with lots of conspiracy theories that never seem to die out. It can by turns equally animate the left and the right politically. What's so perverse about antisemitism, look in the American context, with the far right, with white supremacists, Jews aren't considered white. So they hate us in the same spirit in which they hate black people or brown people or anyone who's not white. But on the left, Jews are considered extra white. We're the extra beneficiaries of white privilege. And in the black community, that is often the case. We're a minority that has thrived. And it seems to stand as a counterpoint to all of the problems that other minorities suffer, in particular African-Americans in the American context. And yeah, Asians are now getting a little bit of this, like the model minority issue. But Jews have had this going on for centuries and millennia, and it never seems to go away. And again, this is something that I've never focused on, but this has been at a slow boil for as long as we've been alive. And there's no guarantee it can't suddenly become much, much uglier than we have any reason to expect it to become, even in our society. And so there's kind of a special concern at moments like that where you have an immensely influential person in a community who already has a checkered history with respect to their own beliefs about the Jews and the conspiracies and all the rest. And he's just messaging, not especially fully opposed by you and anyone else who's giving him the microphone at that moment, to the world. And so that made my spidey sense tingle. Yeah, it's complicated. The stakes are very high. And as somebody who's been, obviously, family and also reading a lot about World War II, and just this whole period is a very difficult conversation. But I believe in the power, especially given who I am, of not always, but sometimes, often turning the other cheek. Oh, yeah. And again, things change when they're for public consumption. It's like, I mean, the cut for me that has just the use case I keep stumbling upon is the kinds of things that I will say on a podcast like this, or if I'm giving a public lecture, versus the kinds of things I will say at dinner with strangers or with friends. If I'm in an elevator with strangers, and I hear someone say something stupid, I don't feel an intellectual responsibility to turn around in the confines of that space with them and say, listen, that thing you just said about X, Y, or Z is completely false, and here's why. But if somebody says it in front of me on some public dais where I'm actually talking about ideas, that's when there's a different responsibility that comes online. The question is how you say it. How you say it. Or even whether you say anything in those... I mean, there are moments, there are definitely moments to privilege civility or just to pick your battles. I mean, sometimes it's just not worth it to get into it with somebody out in real life. I just believe in the power of empathy, both in the elevator and when a bunch of people are listening. That when they see you willing to consider another human being's perspective, it just gives more power to your words after. Well, yeah, but until it doesn't. Because you can extend charity too far. It can be absolutely obvious what someone's motives really are, and they're dissembling about that. And so then you're taking at face value their representations, begins to look like you're just being duped, and you're not actually doing the work of putting pressure on a bad actor. And again, the mental illness component here makes it very difficult to think about what you should or shouldn't have said to Kanye. So I think the topic of platforming is pretty interesting. What's your view on platforming controversial people? Let's start with the old, would you interview Hitler on your podcast? And how would you talk to him? Oh, and follow-up question. Would you interview him in 1935, 41, and then like 45? Well, I think we have an uncanny valley problem with respect to this issue of whether or not to speak to bad people, right? So if a person is sufficiently bad, right, if they're all the way out of the valley, then you can talk to them and it's just totally unproblematic to talk to them because you don't have to spend any time signaling to your audience that you don't agree with them. And if you're interviewing Hitler, you don't have to say, listen, I just got to say before we start, I don't agree with the whole genocide thing. And I just think you're killing mental patients in vans and all that. That was all bad. It's a bad look, Adolf. So it can go without saying that you don't agree with this person and you're not platforming them to signal boost their views. You're just trying to, if they're sufficiently evil, you can go into it very much as an anthropologist would. You just want to understand the nature of evil, right? You just want to understand this phenomenon, like how is this person who they are, right? And that strikes me as a intellectually interesting and morally necessary thing to do, right? So yes, I think you always interview Hitler. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Well, once he's Hitler. But when do you know it? Once he's legitimately Hitler. But when do you know it? Is the genocide really happening? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 42, 43? No, if you're on the cusp of it where he's someone who's gaining power and you don't want to help facilitate that, then there's a question of whether you can undermine him while pushing back against him in that interview, right? So there are people I wouldn't talk to just because I don't want to give them oxygen, and I don't think that in the context of my interviewing them, I'm going to be able to take the wind out of their sails at all, right? So it's like for whatever, either because an asymmetric advantage, because I just know that they can do something within the span of an hour that I can't correct for, it's like they can light many small fires and it just takes too much time to put them out. That's more like on the topic of vaccines, for example, having a debate on the efficacy of vaccines. Yeah. It's not that I don't think sunlight is usually the best disinfectant, I think it is. Even these asymmetries aside, I mean, it is true that a person can always make a mess faster than you can clean it up, right? But still, there are debates worth having, even given that limitation. And they're the right people to have those specific debates. And there's certain topics where I'll debate someone just because I'm the right person for the job and it doesn't matter how messy they're going to be, it's just worth it because I can make my points land at least to the right part of the audience. So some of it is just your own skill and competence and also interest in preparing correctly? Well, yeah, yeah, and the nature of the subject matter. But there are other people who just by default, I would say, well, there's no reason to give this guy a platform. And there are also people who are so confabulatory that they're making such a mess with every sentence that insofar as you're even trying to interact with what they're saying, you're by definition going to fail and you're going to seem to fail to a sufficiently large uninformed audience, where it's going to be a net negative for the cause of truth, no matter how good you are. So for instance, I think talking to Alex Jones on any topic for any reason is probably a bad idea, because I just think he's just neurologically wired to just utter a string of sentences. He'll get 20 sentences out, each of which contains more lies than the last. And there's not time enough in the world to run down, and certainly not time enough in the span of a conversation, to run down each of those leads to bedrock so as to falsify it. I mean, he'll just make shit up, or make shit up and then weave it in with half-truths and micro-truths that give some semblance of credibility to somebody out there. I mean, apparently millions of people out there. And there's just no way to untangle that in real time with him. I have noticed that you have an allergic reaction to confabularization. Yeah, confabulation. Confabulation. That if somebody says something a little micro-untruth, it really stops your brain. Here I'm not talking about micro-untruths, I'm just talking about making up things out of whole cloth. If someone says something, well, what about, and then the thing they put at the end of that sentence is just a set of pseudo-facts that you can't possibly authenticate or not in the span of that conversation. Whether it's about UFOs or anything else, they will seem to make you look like an ignoramus when, in fact, everything they're saying is specious, whether they know it or not. I mean, there's some people who are just crazy, and there's some people who are just bullshitting, and they're not even tracking whether it's true, it just feels good, and then some people are consciously lying about things. But don't you think there's just a kind of jazz masterpiece of untruth that you should be able to just wave off by saying, well, none of that is backed up by any evidence, and just almost take it to the humor place? But the thing is, the place I'm familiar with doing this and not doing this is on specific conspiracies like 9-11 truth. Because of what 9-11 did to my intellectual life, I mean, it really just sent me down a path for the better part of a decade. I became a critic of religion. I don't know if I was ever going to be a critic of religion, but it happened to be in my wheelhouse because I had spent so much time studying religion on my own, and I was also very interested in the underlying spiritual concerns of every religion. And so I had devoted more than a full decade of my life to just what is real here, what is possible, what is the nature of subjective reality, and how does it relate to reality at large, and is there anything to... Who was someone like Jesus or Buddha, and are these people frauds, or are these just myths, or is there really a continuum of insight to be had here that is interesting? So I spent a lot of time on that question through the full decade of my 20s. And that was launched in part by 9-11 Truther? No, but then when 9-11 happened, I had spent all this time reading religious books, empathically understanding the motivations of religious people, knowing just how fully certain people believe what they say they believe. So I took religious convictions very seriously. And then people started flying planes into our buildings, so I knew that there was something to be said about that. Allegedly. The core doctrines of Islam, exactly. So that became my wheelhouse for a time, terrorism and jihadism and related topics. And so the 9-11 Truth conspiracy thing kept getting aimed at me, and the question was, well, do I wanna debate these people? Yeah, Alex Jones, perhaps. Yeah, so Alex Jones, I think, was an early purveyor of it, although I don't think I knew who he was at that point. And privately, I had some very long debates with people who... One person in my family went way down that rabbit hole, and every six months or so, I'd literally write the two-hour email that would try to deprogram him, however ineffectually. And so I went back and forth for years on that topic in private with people, but I could see the structure of the conspiracy. I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play whack-a-mole sufficiently well so as to convince anyone of anything who was not seeing the problematic structure of that way of thinking. I mean, it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to. They don't connect in a coherent way. They're incompatible theses, and their incompatibility is not being acknowledged. But they're running this algorithm of things are never what they seem. There's always malicious conspirators doing things perfectly. We see evidence of human incompetence everywhere else. No one can tie their shoes expertly anywhere else. But over here, people are perfectly competent. They're perfectly concealing things. Thousands of people are collaborating inexplicably, incentivized by what, who knows. They're collaborating to murder thousands of their neighbors, and no one is breathing a peep about it. No one's getting caught on camera. No one's breathed a word of it to a journalist. So I've dealt with that style of thinking, and I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that, and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9-11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled for that day? Now, all of these, I dimly recall some thesis of that kind, but I'm just making these things up now, right? So that detail hadn't even been scheduled for that day. It was inexplicably run that day. So how long would it take to track that down, right? The idea that this is anomalous, like there was an F-16 exercise run, and it wasn't even supposed to have been run that day, right? Someone like Alex Jones, their speech pattern is to pack as much of that stuff in as possible at the highest velocity that the person can speak. And unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed. You appear to just not be... Wait a minute, he didn't know about the F-16s? Yeah, sure. He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird? You haven't heard about Project Mockingbird? I just made up Project Mockingbird. I don't know what it is, but that's the kind of thing that comes tumbling out in a conversation like that. That's the kind of thing, frankly, I was worried about in the COVID conversation, because not that someone like Brett would do it consciously, but someone like Brett is swimming in a sea of misinformation on social... Living on Twitter, getting people sending the blog post and the study from the Philippines that showed that in this cohort, ivermectin did X, right? And to actually run anything to ground, right? You have to actually do the work, journalistically and scientifically, and run it to ground, right? So for some of these questions, you actually have to be a statistician to say, okay, they used the wrong statistics in this experiment, right? Now, yes, we could take all the time to do that, or we could at every stage along the way, in a context where we have experts we can trust, go with what 97% of the experts are saying about X, about the safety of mRNA, about the transmissibility of COVID, about whether to wear masks or not wear masks. And I completely agree that that broke down unacceptably over the last few years. But I think that's largely... Social media and blogs and the efforts of podcasters and substack writers were not just a response to that, I think it was a symptom of that and a cause of that, right? And I think we're living in an environment where people... We've basically... We have trained ourselves not to be able to agree about facts on any topic, no matter how urgent, right? What's flying in our sky? What's happening in Ukraine? Is Putin just denazifying Ukraine? There are people who we respect who are spending time down that particular rabbit hole. This is... Maybe there are a lot of Nazis in Ukraine and that's the real problem, right? Maybe Putin's not the bad actor here, right? How much time do I have to spend empathizing with Putin to the point of thinking, well, maybe Putin's got a point and it's like, what about the polonium and the nerve agents and the killing of journalists and the Navalny? And does that count? Well, no. Listen, I'm not paying so much attention to that because I'm following all these interesting people on Twitter and they're giving me some pro Putin material here. And there are some Nazis in Ukraine. It's not like there are no Nazis in Ukraine. How am I gonna weight these things? I think people are being driven crazy by Twitter. Yeah. But you're kind of speaking to conspiracy theories that pollute everything. But every example you gave is kind of a bad faith style of conversation. But it's not necessarily knowingly bad faith by... Unintentionally. The people who are worried about Ukrainian Nazis, to my... I mean, they're some of the same people. They're the same people who are worried about... Ivermectin got suppressed. Ivermectin is really a panacea, but it got suppressed because no one could make billions on it. It's literally, in many cases, the same people and the same efforts to unearth those facts. And you're saying it's very difficult to have conversations with those kinds of people. What about a conversation with Trump himself? Would you do a podcast with Trump? No. I don't think so. I don't think I'd be learning anything about him. It's like, with Hitler, and I'm not comparing Trump to Hitler, but... Clipse guy, here's your chance. You got this one. With certain world historical figures, I would just feel like, okay, this is an opportunity to learn something that I'm not gonna learn. I think Trump is among the most superficial people we have ever laid eyes on. He is in public view, and I'm sure there's some distance between who he is in private and who he is in public, but it's not gonna be the kind of distance that's gonna blow my mind. And I think the liability of... For instance, I think Joe Rogan was very wise not to have Trump on his podcast. I think all he would have been doing is he would have put himself in a situation where he couldn't adequately contain the damage Trump was doing, and he was just gonna make Trump seem cool to a whole new, potentially new cohort of his massive audience. They would have had a lot of laughs. Trump's funny. The entertainment value of things is so influential. There was that one debate where Trump got a massive laugh on his line, only Rosie O'Donnell. The truth is we're living in a political system where if you can get a big laugh during a political debate, you win. It doesn't matter who you are. That's the level of... It doesn't matter how uninformed you are. It doesn't matter that half the debate was about what the hell we should do about the threat of nuclear war or anything else. We're monkeys, right? And we like to laugh. Well, because you brought up Joe. He's somebody like you I look up to. I've learned a lot from him because I think who he is privately as a human being, also he's kind of the voice of curiosity to me. He inspired me that. It's an unending, open-minded curiosity, much like you are the voice of reason. They recently had a podcast. Joe had recently had a podcast with Jordan Peterson and brought you up saying they still have a hope for you. Any chance you talk to Joe again and reinvigorate your friendship? I reached out to him privately when I saw that. Did you use the power of love? Joe knows I love him and consider him a friend, so there's no issue there. He also knows I'll be happy to do his podcast when we get that together. I've got no policy of not talking to Joe or not doing his podcast. I think we got a little sideways along these same lines where we've talked about Brett and Elon and other people. It was never to that degree with Joe because Joe's in a very different lane, and consciously so. Joe is a stand-up comic who interviews, who just is interested in everything, interviews the widest conceivable variety of people and just lets his interests collide with their expertise or lack of expertise. Again, it's a super wide variety of people. He'll talk about anything, and he can always pull the ripcord, saying, I don't know what the fuck I'm saying. I'm a comic. I'm stoned. We just drank too much. It's very entertaining. To my eye, it's all in good faith. I think Joe is an extraordinarily ethical, good person. Also doesn't use Twitter. Doesn't really use Twitter. Yeah, yeah. The crucial difference, though, is that because he is an entertainer first, I mean, I'm not saying he's not smart and doesn't understand things. What's potentially confusing is he's very smart, and he's also very informed. His full-time job is taught. When he's not doing stand-up or doing color commentary for the UFC, his full-time job is talking to lots of very smart people at great length. He's created the Joe Rogan University for himself, and he's gotten a lot of information crammed into his head. It's not that he's uninformed, but he can always, when he feels that he's uninformed or when it turns out he was wrong about something, he can always pull the ripcord and say, I'm just a comic. We were stoned. It was fun. Don't take medical advice from me. I don't play a doctor on the internet. I can't quite do that. You can't quite do that. We're in different lanes. I'm not saying you and I are in exactly the same lane, but for much of Joe's audience, I'm just this establishment shill, just banging on about the universities and medical journals. It's not true, but that would be the perception. As a counterpoint to a lot of what's being said on Joe's podcast or certainly Brett's podcast on these topics, I can see how they would form that opinion. But in reality, if you listen to me long enough, you hear that I've said as much against the woke nonsense as anyone, even any lunatic on the right who can only keep that bright, shining object in view. So there's nothing that Candace Owens has said about wokeness that I haven't said about wokeness insofar as she's speaking rationally about wokeness. But we have to be able to keep multiple things in view. If you could only look at the problem of wokeness and you couldn't acknowledge the problem of Trump and Trumpism and QAnon and the explosion of irrationality that was happening on the right and bigotry that was happening on the right, you were just disregarding half of the landscape. And many people took half of the problem in recent years. The last five years is a story of many people taking half of the problem and monetizing that half of the problem and getting captured by an audience that only wanted that half of the problem talked about in that way. And this is the larger issue of audience capture, which is very, I'm sure it's an ancient problem, but it's a very helpful phrase that I think comes to us courtesy of our mutual friend Eric Weinstein. And audience capture is a thing, and I believe I've witnessed many casualties of it. And if there's anything I've been on guard against in my life professionally, it's been that. And when I noticed that I had a lot of people in my audience who didn't like my criticizing Trump, I really leaned into it. And when I noticed that a lot of the other cohort in my audience didn't like me criticizing the far left and wokeness, they thought I was exaggerating that problem, I leaned into it because I thought those parts of my audience were absolutely wrong. And I didn't care about whether I was gonna lose those parts of my audience. There are people who have created, knowingly or not, there are people who've created different incentives for themselves because of how they've monetized their podcasts and because of the kind of signal they've responded to in their audience. And I worry about, Brett would consider this a totally invidious ad hominem thing to say, but I really do worry that that's happened to Brett. I think I cannot explain how you do 100, with all the things in the universe to be interested in, and of all the things he's competent to speak intelligently about, I don't know how you do 100 podcasts in a row on COVID. It makes no sense. You think in part audience capture can explain that? I absolutely think it can, yeah. What about, for example, do you feel pressure to not admit that you made a mistake on COVID or made a mistake on Trump? I'm not saying you feel that way, but do you feel this pressure? So you've attacked audience capture within the way you do stuff, so you don't feel as much pressure from the audience, but within your own ego? I mean, again, the people who think I'm wrong about any of these topics are gonna think, okay, you're just not admitting that you're wrong, but now we're having a dispute about specific facts. There are things that I believed about COVID or worried might be true about COVID two years ago that I no longer believe or I'm not so worried about now, and vice versa. I mean, the things have flipped. Certain things have flipped upside down. The question is, was I wrong? So here's the cartoon version of it, but this is something I said probably 18 months ago, and it's still true. When I saw what Brett was doing on COVID, let's call it two years ago, I said, even if he's right, even if it turns out that ivermectin is a panacea and the mRNA vaccines kill millions of people, he's still wrong right now. His reasoning is still flawed right now. His facts still suck right now, and his confidence is unjustified now. That was true then. That will always be true then, and not much has changed for me to revisit any of my time points along the way. Again, I will totally concede that if I had teenage boys and their schools were demanding that they'd be vaccinated with the mRNA vaccine, I would be powerfully annoyed. I wouldn't know what I was going to do, and I would be doing more research about myocarditis, and I'd be badgering our doctors, and I would be worried that we have a medical system and a pharmaceutical system and a healthcare system and a public health system that's not incentivized to look at any of this in a fine-grained way, and they just want one blanket admonition to the entire population, just take the shot, you idiots. I view that largely as a result, a panicked response to the misinformation explosion that happened and the populist resistance animated by misinformation that just made it impossible to get anyone to cooperate. Part of it is, again, a pendulum swing in the wrong direction, somewhat analogous to the woke response to Trump and the Trumpist response to woke. A lot of people have just gotten pushed around for bad reasons, but understandable reasons. But yes, there are caveats to my... Things have changed about my view of COVID. But the question is, if you roll back the clock 18 months, was I wrong to want to platform Eric Topol, a very well-respected cardiologist on this topic, or Nicholas Christakis to talk about the network effects of whether we should close schools. He's written a book on COVID, his network effects are his wheelhouse, both as an MD and as a sociologist. There was a lot that we believed we knew about the efficacy of closing schools during pandemics, during the Spanish flu pandemic and others. But there's a lot we didn't know about COVID. We didn't know how negligible the effects would be on kids compared to older people. We didn't know... Well, my problem, I really enjoyed your conversation with Eric Topol, but also didn't. So he's one of the great communicators in many ways on Twitter, like distillation of the current data. But he... I hope I'm not overstating it, but there is a bit of an arrogance from him that I think could be explained by him being exhausted by being constantly attacked by conspiracy theory, like anti-vaxxers. To me, the same thing happens with people that start drifting to being right-wing, is to get attacked so much by the left, they become almost irrational and arrogant in their beliefs. And I felt your conversation with Eric Topol did not sufficiently empathize with people that have skepticism, but also did not sufficiently communicate uncertainty we have. So many of the decisions you made, many of the things you were talking about, were kind of saying there's a lot of uncertainty, but this is the best thing we could do now. Well, it was a forced choice. You're gonna get COVID, do you wanna be vaccinated when you get it? Right. That was always, in my view, an easy choice. And it's up until you start breaking apart the cohorts and you start saying, okay, wait a minute, there is this myocarditis issue in young men. Let's talk about that. Before that story emerged, it was just clear that this is... If it's not knocking down transmission as much as we had hoped, it is still mitigating severe illness and death. And I still believe that it is the current view of most people competent to analyze the data that we lost something like 300,000 people unnecessarily in the US because of vaccine hesitancy. But I think there's a way to communicate with humility about the uncertainty of things that would increase the vaccination rate. I do believe that it is rational and sometimes effective to signal impatience with certain bad ideas, and certain conspiracy theories, and certain forms of misinformation. You think so? Because it's just... I just think it makes you look like a douchebag most times. Well, I mean, certain people are persuadable, certain people are not persuadable, but it's... No, because there's not enough... It's the opportunity cost. Not everything can be given a patient hearing. You can't have a physics conference and then let people in to just trumpet their pet theories about the grand unified vision of physics when they're obviously crazy, or they're obviously half crazy, or they're just not... You begin to get a sense for this when it is your wheelhouse. But there are people who declare their irrelevance to the conversation fairly quickly without knowing that they have done it. And the truth is, I think I'm one of those people on the topic of COVID. It's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know what's going on here. It's never that I felt, listen, I know exactly what's going on here. I know these mRNA vaccines are safe. I know exactly how to run a lockdown. No, this is a situation where you want the actual pilots to fly the plane. We needed experts who we could trust. And insofar as our experts got captured by all manner of thing, I mean, some of them got captured by Trump. Some of them were made to look ridiculous just standing next to Trump while he was bloviating about whatever, it's just going to go away. There's just 15 people in a cruise ship and it's just going to go away. There's going to be no problem. Or it's like when he said, many of these doctors think I understand this better than them. They're just amazed at how I understand this. And you've got doctors, real doctors, the heads of the CDC and NIH standing around just ashen faced while he's talking. All of this was deeply corrupting of the public communication of science. And then again, I've banged on about the depredations of wokeness. The woke thing was a disaster, right? Still is a disaster. But it doesn't mean that... But the thing is, there's a big difference between me and Brett in this case. I didn't do 100 podcasts on COVID. I did like two podcasts on COVID. The measure of my concern about COVID can be measured in how many podcasts I did on it. Right? It's like once we had a sense of how to live with COVID, I was just living with COVID, right? Like, okay, get vaxxed or don't get vaxxed. Wear a mask or don't wear a mask. Travel or don't travel. Like you've got a few things to decide, but my kids were stuck at home on iPads for too long. I didn't agree with that. It was obviously not functional. I criticized that on the margins, but there was not much to do about it. But the thing I didn't do is make this my life and just browbeat people with one message or another. We need a public health regime where we can trust what the competent people are saying to us about what medicines are safe to take. And in the absence of that, craziness is going to... Even in the presence of that, craziness is going to proliferate given the tools we've built. But in the absence of that, it's going to proliferate for understandable reasons. And that's going to... It's not going to be good next time when something orders of magnitude more dangerous hits us. And that's... I spent... Insofar as I think about this issue, I think much more about next time than this time. Before this COVID thing, you and Brett had some good conversations. I would say we're friends. What's your... What do you admire most about Brett outside of all the criticism we've had about this COVID topic? Well, I think Brett is very smart and he's a very ethical person who wants good things for the world. I mean, I have no reason to doubt that. So the fact that we're on... We're crosswise on this issue is not... Does not mean that I think he's a bad person. I mean, the thing that worried me about what he was doing, and this was true of Joe and this was true of Elon, this was true of many other people, is that once you're messaging at scale to a vast audience, you incur a certain kind of responsibility not to get people killed. And I do... I did worry that, yeah, people were making decisions on the basis of the information that was getting shared there. And that's why I was, I think, fairly circumspect. I just said, okay, give me the center of the fairway expert opinion at this time point and at this time point and at this time point, and then I'm out. Right? I don't have any more to say about this. I'm not an expert on COVID. I'm not an expert on the safety of mRNA vaccines. If something changes so as to become newsworthy, then maybe I'll do a podcast. I just did a podcast on the lab leak. Right? I was never skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis. Brett was very early on saying, this is a lab leak, right? At a point where my only position was, who cares if it's a lab leak? Right? The thing we have to get straight is, what do we do given the nature of this pandemic? But also we should say that you've actually stated that it is a possibility. Oh, yeah. You just said it doesn't quite matter. The time to figure that out... Now, I've actually... I have had my podcast guest on this topic changed my view of this because one of the guests, Alina Chan, made the point that, no, actually the best time to figure out the origin of this is immediately, right? Because in the end, you lose touch with the evidence. I hadn't really been thinking about that. If you come back after a year, there are certain facts you might not be able to get in hand. But I've always felt that it didn't matter for two reasons. One is we had the genome of the virus and we and we could design, we very quickly design, immediately designing vaccines against that genome. And that's what we had to do. And then we had to figure out how to vaccinate and to mitigate and to develop treatments and all that. So the origin story didn't matter. Generically speaking, either origin story was politically inflammatory and made the Chinese look bad. And the Chinese response to this looked bad, whatever the origin story. They're not cooperating. They're stopping their domestic flights, but letting their international flights go. I mean, it's just, they were bad actors and they should be treated as such regardless of the origin. And I would argue that the wet market origin is even more politically invidious than the lab leak origin. I mean- Why do you think? Because for lab leak, to my eye, the lab leak could happen to anyone, right? We're all running, all these advanced countries are running these dangerous labs. That's a practice that we should be worried about, you know, in general. We know lab leaks are a problem. There have been multiple lab leaks of even worse things that haven't gotten out of hand in this way, but you know, worse pathogens. We're wise to be worried about this. And on some level, it could happen to anyone, right? The wet market makes them look like barbarians living in another century. Like, you got to clean up those wet markets. Like, what are you doing putting a bat on top of a pangolin on top of a duck? It's like, get your shit together. So like, if anything, the wet market makes them look worse, in my view. Now, I'm sure there's, I'm sure that what they actually did to conceal a lab leak, if it was a lab leak, I mean, all of that's going to look odious. Do you think we'll ever get to the bottom of that? I mean, one of the big negative, I would say, failures of Anthony Fauci and so on is to be transparent and clear and just a good communicator about gain-and-function research, the dangers of that, the success, like, you know, why it's a useful way of research, but it's also dangerous. You know, just being transparent about that, as opposed to just coming off really shady. Of course, the conspiracy theorists and the politicians are not helping, but this just created a giant mess. Yeah, no, I would agree. So that exchange with Fauci and Rand Paul, that went viral, yeah, I would agree that Fauci looked like he was taking refuge in a kind of very lawyered language and not giving a straightforward account of what we do and why we do it. And so, yeah, I think it looked shady, it played shady, and it probably was shady. I mean, I don't know how personally entangled he is with any of this, but yeah, the gain-of-function research is something that I think we're wise to be worried about, and insofar as I judge myself adequate to have an opinion on this, I think it should be banned, right? Like, probably a podcast I'll do, you know, if you or somebody else doesn't do it in the meantime. You know, I would like a virologist on to defend it against a virologist who would criticize it. Forget about just the gain-of-function research. I don't even understand virus hunting at this point. It's like, I don't know, I don't even know why you need to go into a cave to find this next virus that could be circulating among bats that may jump zoonotically to us. Why do that when we can make, when we can sequence in a day and make vaccines in a weekend? I mean, like, what kind of head start do you think you're getting? That's a surprising new thing, how quickly you can develop a vaccine. Exactly. That's, yeah, that's really interesting, but the shadiness around LabLeak. I think the point I didn't make about Brett's style of engaging this issue is people are using the fact that he was early on LabLeak to suggest that he was right about ivermectin and about mRNA vaccines and all the rest. Like, no, that's, none of that connects. And it was possible to be falsely confident, like, you shouldn't have been confident about LabLeak, no one should have been confident about LabLeak early, even if it turns out to be LabLeak, right? It was always plausible, it was never definite, it still isn't definite. Zoonotic is also quite plausible, it certainly was super plausible then. Both are politically uncomfortable, both at the time were inflammatory to be banging on about when we were trying to secure some kind of cooperation from the Chinese, right? So there's a time for these things, and it's possible to be right by accident, right? That's the thing, it's, it matters, your reasoning, the style of reasoning matters whether you're right or not, you know? It's like, because your style of reasoning is dictating what you're gonna do on the next topic. Sure, but this is a, this multivariate situation here, it's really difficult to know what's right on COVID, given all the uncertainty, all the chaos, especially when you step outside the pure biology, virology of it, and you start to get into policy. Yeah, it's just trade-offs, yeah. Like transmissibility of the virus, sure, just knowing if 65% of the population gets vaccinated, what effect would that have? Just even knowing those things, just modeling all those things, given all the other incentives, I mean, Pfizer, I don't know what to think. But you had the CEO of Pfizer on your podcast, did you leave that conversation feeling like this is a person who is consciously reaping windfall profits on a dangerous vaccine and putting everyone at intolerable risk, or did you think this person was making a good faith attempt to save lives and had no taint of bad incentives or something? The thing I sensed, and I felt in part it was a failure on my part, but I sensed that I was talking to a politician. So it's not thinking of, there was malevolence, there, or benevolence, there was a- He just had a job to do. He put on a suit, and I was talking to a suit, not a human being. Now, he said that his son was a big fan of the podcast, which is why he wanted to do it. So I thought I would be talking to a human being. And I asked challenging questions, what I thought the internet thinks otherwise. Every single question in that interview was a challenging one, but it wasn't grilling, which is what people seem to want to do with pharmaceutical companies. There's a deep distrust of pharmaceutical companies. What's the alternative? I mean, I totally get that windfall profits at a time of a public health emergency looks bad. It is a bad look, right? But how do we reward and return capital to risk-takers who will spend a billion dollars to design a new drug for a disease that maybe only harms a single digit percentage of the population? It's like, well, what do we want to encourage? And who do we want to get rich? I mean, so the person who cures cancer, do we want that person to get rich or not? We want the person who gave us the iPhone to get rich, but we don't want the person who cures cancer to get rich? What are we trying to do? I think it's a very gray area. So what we want is the person who declares that they have a cure for cancer to have authenticity and transparency. I think we're good now as a population smelling bullshit. And there is something about the Pfizer CEO, for example, just CEOs of pharmaceutical companies in general, just because they're so lawyered up, so much marketing and PR people, that they are, you just smell bullshit. You're not talking to a real human. It just feels like none of it is transparent to us as a public. So this whole talking point that Pfizer's only interested in helping people just doesn't ring true, even though it very well could be true. It's the same thing with Bill Gates, who seems to be at scale helping a huge amount of people in the world. And yet there's something about the way he delivers that message, where people are like, this seems suspicious. What's happening underneath this? There's certain kinds of communication styles that seem to be more, serve as better catalysts for conspiracy theories. And I'm not sure what that is, because I don't think there's an alternative for capitalism in delivering drugs that help people. But also at the same time, there seems to need to be more transparency. And plus, like regulation, that actually makes sense, versus it seems like pharmaceutical companies are susceptible to corruption. Yeah, I worry about all that. But I also do think that most of the people going into those fields, and most of the people going into government- They want to do good. Doing it for good. They're non-psychopaths trying to get good things done and trying to solve hard problems. And they're not trying to get rich. I mean, many of the people are, it's like, bad incentives are something, again, I've uttered that phrase 30 times on this podcast, but it's just almost everywhere it explains normal people creating terrible harm. It's not that there are that many bad people. And yes, it makes the truly bad people that much more remarkable and worth paying attention to, but the bad incentives and the power of bad ideas do much more harm. Because I mean, that's what gets good people running in the wrong direction, or doing things that are clearly creating unnecessary suffering. You've had, and I hope still have, a friendship with Elon Musk, especially over the topic of AI. You have a lot of interesting ideas that you both share, concerns that you both share. Well, let me first ask, what do you admire most about Elon? Well, I had a lot of fun with Elon. I like Elon a lot. I mean, Elon, I knew as a friend, I like a lot. And it's not going to surprise anyone. I mean, he's done and he's continuing to do amazing things. And I think he's, I think many of his aspirations are realized, the world will be a much better place. I think it's just, it's amazing to see what he's built and what he's attempted to build and what he may yet build. So with Tesla, with SpaceX, with- Yeah, no, I'm a fan of almost all of that. I mean, there are wrinkles to a lot of that, or some of that. All humans are full of wrinkles. There's something very Trumpian about how he's acting on Twitter. I mean, Twitter, I think Twitter's, he thinks Twitter's great. He bought the place because he thinks it's so great. I think Twitter's driving him crazy. I think he's needlessly complicating his life and harming his reputation and creating a lot of noise and harming a lot of other people. I mean, so like he, the thing that I objected to with him on Twitter is not that he bought it and made changes to it. I mean, that was not, again, I remain agnostic as to whether or not he can improve the platform. It was how he was personally behaving on Twitter, not just toward me, but toward the world. I think when you forward an article about Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked, not as he was by some lunatic, but that it's just some gay tryst gone awry, right? That's not what it seems. And you link to a website that previously claimed that Hillary Clinton was dead and that a body double was campaigning in her place. That thing was exploding in Trumpistan as a conspiracy theory, right? And it was having its effect. And it matters that he was signal boosting it in front of 130 million people. And so it is with saying that your former employee, Yoel Roth, is a pedophile, right? I mean, it's like that has real consequences. It appeared to be complete bullshit. And now this guy's getting inundated with death threats, right? And Elon, all that's totally predictable, right? And so he's behaving quite recklessly. And there's a long list of things like that that he's done on Twitter. It's not ethical. It's not good for him. It's not good for the world. It's not serious. It's a very adolescent relationship to real problems in our society. And so my problem with how he's behaved is that he's purported to touch real issues by turns. Like, okay, do I give the satellites to Ukraine or not? Do I minimize their use of them or not? Should I publicly worry about World War III or not, right? He's doing this shit on Twitter, right? And at the same moment, he's doing these other very impulsive, ill-considered things, and he's not showing any willingness to really clean up the mess he makes. He brings Kanye on, knowing he's an anti-Semite who's got mental health problems, and then kicks him off for a swastika, which I probably wouldn't have kicked him off for a swastika. It's like, that's even, like, can you really kick people off for swastikas? Is that something that you get banned for? I mean, are you a free speech absolutist if you can't let a swastika show up? I'm not even sure that's an enforceable terms of service, right? There are moments to use swastikas that are not conveying hate and not raising the risk of violence. Clip that. Yeah. But so much of what he's doing, given that he's, again, scale matters. He's doing this in front of 130 million people. That's very different than a million people, and that's very different than 100,000 people. And so when I went off the tracks with Elon, he was doing this about COVID, and again, this was a situation where I tried to privately mitigate a friend's behavior, and it didn't work out very well. Did you try to correct him, sort of highlighting things he might be wrong on? Yeah. Or did you use the Lex Powell love method? I should write a pamphlet for Sam Harris to follow. Well, no, but it was totally coming from a place of love because I was concerned about his reputation. I was concerned about what he... I mean, there was a twofold concern. I could see what was happening with the tweet. I mean, he'd had this original tweet that was, I think it was, panic over COVID is dumb, or something like that, right? This is in March. This is early March, 2020. Oh, super early days. Super early. When nobody knew anything, but we saw what was happening in Italy, right? It was totally kicking off. God, that was a wild time. That's when the toilet paper... It was totally wild, but that became the most influential tweet on Twitter for that week. I mean, it had more engagement than any other tweet, more than any crazy thing Trump was tweeting. I mean, it went off... Again, it was just a nuclear bomb of information. And I could see that people were responding to it like, wait a minute, okay, here's this genius technologist who must have inside information about everything, right? Surely he knows something that is not on the surface about this pandemic. And they were reading into it a lot of information that I knew wasn't there, right? And at the time, I didn't think he had any reason to be suggesting that. I think he was just firing off a tweet, right? So I reached out to him in private, and I mean, because it was a private text conversation, I won't talk about the details, but I'm just saying, that's a case. Among the many cases of friends who have public platforms and who did something that I thought was dangerous and ill-considered, this was a case where I reached out in private and tried to help, genuinely help, because it was just... I thought it was harmful in every sense, because it was being misinterpreted. And it was like, okay, you can say that panic over anything is dumb, fine, but this was not how this was landing. This was like non-issue conspiracy, there's gonna be no COVID in the US, it's gonna peter out, it's just gonna become a cold. I mean, that's how this was getting received. Whereas at that moment, it was absolutely obvious how big a deal this was gonna be, or that it was gonna, at minimum, going to be a big deal. I don't know if it was obvious, but it was obvious that it was a significant probability that it could be a big deal. I remember in March, it wasn't clear, like, how big... Because there were still stories of it, like, it's probably going to, like, the big concern, the hospitals might overfill, but it's gonna die out in, like, two months or something. Yeah, we didn't know, but there was no way we weren't going to have tens of thousands of deaths at a minimum at that point. And it was totally rational to be worried about hundreds of thousands. And when Nicholas Christakis came on my podcast very early, he predicted quite confidently that we would have about a million people dead in the US, right? And that didn't seem... It was, I think, appropriately hedged, but it was still, it was just like, okay, it's just gonna... You just look at the... We're just kind of riding this exponential, and it's gonna be... It'd be very surprising not to have that order of magnitude and not something much less. And so anyway, I mean, again, to close the story on Elon, I could see how this was being received, and I tried to get him to walk that back. And then we had a fairly long and detailed exchange on this issue, and that... So that intervention didn't work. And it was not done... I was not an asshole. I was just concerned for him, for the world, and... And then there are other relationships where I didn't take the... But again, that's an example where taking the time didn't work, right, privately. There are other relationships where I thought, okay, this is just gonna be more trouble than it's worth, and I just ignored it. And there's a lot of that. And again, I'm not comfortable with how this is all netted out, because I don't know if... Frankly, I'm not comfortable with how much time in this conversation we've spent talking about these specific people. What good is it for me to talk about Elon or Brett or any of these people? I think there's a lot of good, because those friendships... Listen, as a fan, these are the conversations that I loved, love as a fan, and it feels like COVID has robbed the world of these conversations. Because you are exchanging back and forth on Twitter, but that's not what I mean by conversations, like long-form discussions, like a debate about COVID, like a normal debate. But there's no... Elon and I shouldn't be debating COVID. You should be. Here's the thing, with humility, basically saying, we don't really know... Like the Rogan method, we're just a bunch of idiots. One is an engineer, you're a neuroscientist, and just kind of, okay, here's the evidence, and be like normal people. That's what everybody was doing. The whole world was trying to figure out what the hell... Yeah, but the issue was that at that... So at the moment I had this collision with Elon, certain things were not debatable. It was absolutely clear where this was going. It wasn't clear how far it was going to go or how quickly we would mitigate it, but it was absolutely clear that it was going to be an issue. The train had come off the tracks in Italy. We knew we weren't going to seal our borders. There were already people, you know, who... There are already cases known to many of us personally in the US at that point. And he was operating by a very different logic that I couldn't engage with. Sure, but that logic represents a part of the population, and there's a lot of interesting topics that have a lot of uncertainty around them, like the effectiveness of masks, like... Yeah, but no, but where things broke down was not at the point of, oh, there's a lot to talk about, a lot to debate, this is all very interesting, and who knows what's what. It broke down very early at this is, you know... There's nothing to talk about here. Like either there's a water bottle on the table or there isn't, right? Like... Well, technically there's only one-fourth of a water bottle. So what defines a water bottle? Is it the water inside the water bottle, or is it the water bottle? What I'm giving you is an example of it's worth a conversation. This is difficult because this is... We had an exchange in private, and I want to honor not exposing the details of it, but, you know, the details convinced me that there was not a follow-up conversation on that topic. On this topic. That said, I hope, and I hope to be part of helping that happen, that the friendship is rekindled because one of the topics I care a lot about, artificial intelligence, you've had great public and private conversations about this topic. Yeah, and Elon was very formative in my taking that issue seriously. I mean, he and I went to that initial conference in Puerto Rico together, and it was only because he was going and I found out about it through him, and I just wrote his coattails to it, you know, that I got dropped in that side of the pool to hear about these concerns at that point. It would be interesting to hear how has your concern evolved with the coming out of Chad GPT and these new large-length language models that are fine-tuned with reinforcement learning and seemingly to be able to do some incredible human-like things. There's two questions. One, how has your concern in terms of AGI and superintelligence evolved, and how impressed are you with Chad GPT as a student of the human mind and mind in general? Well, my concern about AGI is unchanged. So, I did a... I've spoken about it a bunch on my podcast, but I did a TED Talk in 2016, which was the kind of summary of what that conference and various conversations I had after that did to my brain on this topic. Basically, that once superintelligence is achieved, there's a takeoff. It becomes exponentially smarter, and in a matter of time, there's just... we're ants and they're gods. Well, yeah, unless we find some way of permanently tethering a superintelligent, self-improving AI to our value system, and I don't believe anyone has figured out how to do that or whether that's even possible in principle. I mean, I know people like Stuart Russell, who I just had on my podcast, are... Oh, really? Have you released it yet? I haven't released it yet. Yeah. Oh, great. He's been on a previous podcast, but we just recorded this week. Because you haven't done an AI podcast in a while, so that's great. Yeah. That's great. He's a good person to talk about alignment with. Yeah, so Stuart has been probably more than anyone my guru on this topic. I mean, just reading his book and doing... I think I've done two podcasts with him at this point. I think it's called The Control Problem or something like that. His book is human compatible. Human compatible. He talks about the control problem. And yeah, so I just think the idea that we can define a value function in advance that permanently tethers a self-improving, superintelligent AI to our values as we continue to discover them, refine them, extrapolate them in an open-ended way. I think that's a tall order. And I think there are many more ways. There must be many more ways of designing superintelligence that is not aligned in that way, and is not ever approximating our values in that way. So Stuart's idea, to put it in a very simple way, is that he thinks you don't want to specify the value function up front. You don't want to imagine you could ever write the code in such a way as to admit of no loophole. You want to make the AI uncertain as to what human values are, and perpetually uncertain, and always trying to ameliorate that uncertainty by hewing more and more closely to what our professed values are. So it's always interested in us saying, oh no, no, that's not what we want, that's not what we intend, stop doing that. No matter how smart it gets, all it wants to do is more perfectly approximate human values. I think there are a lot of problems with that at a high level. I'm not a computer scientist, so I'm sure there are many problems at a low level that I don't understand. Like how to force a human into the loop always, no matter what. There's that, and what humans get a vote, and just what do humans value, and what is the difference between what we say we value and our revealed preferences, which... If you were a super intelligent AI that could look at humanity now, I think you could be forgiven for concluding that what we value is driving ourselves crazy with Twitter and living perpetually on the brink of nuclear war, and just watching hot girls in yoga pants on TikTok again and again and again. And you're saying that is not what we... This is all revealed preference, and it's what is an AI to make of that, and what should it optimize? This is also Stuart's observation that one of the insidious things about the YouTube algorithm is it's not that it just caters to our preferences. It actually begins to change us in ways so as to make us more predictable. It finds ways to make us a better reporter of our preferences, and to trim our preferences down so that it can further train to that signal. So the main concern is that most of the people in the field seem not to be taking intelligence seriously. As they design more and more intelligent machines, and as they profess to want to design true AGI, they're not... Again, they're not spending the time that Stuart is spending trying to figure out how to do this safely, above all. They're just assuming that these problems are going to solve themselves as we make that final stride into the end zone. Or they're saying very Pollyanna-ish things like an AI would never form a motive to harm human... Why would it ever form a motive to be malicious toward humanity, unless we put that motive in there? And that's not the concern. The concern is that in the presence of vast disparities in competence, and certainly in a condition where the machines are improving themselves, they're improving their own code, they could be developing instrumental goals that are antithetical to our well-being without any intent to harm us. It's analogous to what we do to every other species on earth. You and I don't consciously form the intention to harm insects on a daily basis, but there are many things we could intend to do that would, in fact, harm insects, because you decide to repave your driveway or whatever you're doing. You're just not taking the interest of insects into account, because they're so far beneath you in terms of your cognitive horizons. And so the real challenge here is that if you believe that intelligence scales up on a continuum toward heights that we can only dimly imagine, and I think there's every reason to believe that, there's no reason to believe that we're near the summit of intelligence. And you can define... Maybe there are some forms of intelligence for which this is not true, but for many relevant forms, like the top 100 things we care about cognitively. I think there's every reason to believe that many of those things, most of those things, are a lot like chess or Go, where once the machines get better than we are, they're going to stay better than we are. Although they're... I don't know if you caught the recent thing with Go, where... And this actually came out of Stuart's lab. One. Yeah. Yeah. One time a human beat a machine and... Yeah, they found a hack for that. But anyway, ultimately, there's going to be no looking back. And then the question is, what do we do in relationship to these systems that are more competent than we are in every relevant respect? Because it will be a relationship. It's not... The people who think we're just going to figure this all out without thinking about it in advance, it's just going to... The solutions are just going to find themselves, seem not to be taking the prospect of really creating autonomous superintelligence seriously. What does that mean? It's every bit as independent and ungovernable, ultimately, as us having created... I mean, just imagine if we created a race of people that were 10 times smarter than all of us. How would we live with those people? They're 10 times smarter than us. They begin to talk about things we don't understand. They begin to want things we don't understand. They begin to view us as obstacles to them, so they're solving those problems or gratifying those desires. We become the chickens or the monkeys in their presence. And I think that it's... But for some amazing solution of the sort that Stuart is imagining, that we could somehow anchor their reward function permanently, no matter how intelligent scales, I think it's really worth worrying about this. I do buy the sci-fi notion that this is an existential risk if we don't do it well. I worry that we don't notice it. I'm deeply impressed with Chad GPT, and I'm worried that it will become superintelligent. These language models will become superintelligent because they're basically trained in the collective intelligence of the human species, and they will start controlling our behavior if they're integrated into our algorithms, the recommender systems, and then we just won't notice that there's a superintelligent system that's controlling our behavior. Well, I think that's true even before... Far before superintelligence, even before general intelligence. I think just the narrow intelligence of these algorithms and of what something like Chad GPT can do, I mean, it's just far short of it developing its own goals that are at cross-purposes with ours. Just the unintended consequences of using it in the ways we're going to be incentivized to use it, and the money to be made from scaling this thing, and what it does to our information space and our sense of just being able to get to ground truth on any facts. It's super scary, and it was... Do you think it's a giant leap in terms of development towards AGI, Chad GPT, or we still... Is this just an impressive little toolbox? So, when do you think the singularity is coming? Or is it T, it doesn't matter, it's eventually? I have no intuitions on that front apart from the fact that if we continue to make progress, it will come. So, it's just... You just have to assume we continue to make progress. There's only two assumptions. You have to assume substrate independence, so there's no reason why this can't be done in silico. It's just we can build arbitrarily intelligent machines. There's nothing magical about having this done in the wetware of our own brains. I think that is true, and I think that's scientifically parsimonious to think that that's true. And then you just have to assume we're going to keep making progress. It doesn't have to be any special rate of progress, doesn't have to be Moore's law. It can just be we just keep going. At a certain point, we're going to be in relationship to minds... Leaving consciousness aside, I don't have any reason to believe that they'll necessarily be conscious by virtue of being super intelligent, and that's its own interesting ethical question. But leaving consciousness aside, they're going to be more competent than we are. And then that's like the aliens have landed. That's literally... That's an encounter with, again, leaving aside the possibility that something like Stuart's path is actually available to us. But it is hard to picture if what we mean by intelligence, all things considered, and it's truly general, if that scales and begins to build upon itself, how you maintain that perfect, slavish devotion until the end of time in those systems. The tether to humans? Yeah. I think my gut says that that tether is not... There's a lot of ways to do it. So, it's not this increasingly impossible problem. Right. So, I have no... As you know, I'm not a computer scientist, so I have no intuitions about algorithmically how you would approach that and what's possible. My main intuition is maybe deeply flawed, but the main intuition is based on the fact that most of the learning is currently happening on human knowledge. So, even Chad Gipoutis is trained on human data. I don't see where the takeoff happens where you completely go above human wisdom. The current impressive aspect of Chad Gipoutis is that's using collective intelligence of all of us. Well, from what I glean, again, from people who know much more about this than I do, I think we have reason to be skeptical that these techniques of deep learning are actually going to be sufficient to push us into AGI. So, it's just... They're not generalizing in the way they need to. They're certainly not learning like human children. And so, they're brittle in strange ways. It's not to say that the human path is the only path, and maybe we might learn better lessons by ignoring the way brains work, but we know that they don't generalize and use abstraction the way we do. And so, they have strange holes in their competence. But the size of the holes is shrinking every time. Yeah. And that's... So, the intuition starts to slowly fall apart. The intuition is like, surely it can't be this simple to achieve superintelligence. Right, yeah. But it's becoming simpler and simpler. So, I don't know. The progress is quite incredible. I've been extremely impressed with Chad Gipoutis and the new models, and there's a lot of financial incentive to make progress in this regard. So, we're going to be living through some very interesting times. In raising a question that I'm going to be talking to you, a lot of people brought up this topic, probably because Eric Weinstein talked to Joe Rogan recently, and said that he and you were contacted by folks about UFOs. Can you clarify the nature of this contact? Can you... Yeah, yeah. That you were contacted by... I've got very little to say on this. I mean, he has much more to say. I think he went down this rabbit hole further than I did, which wouldn't surprise anyone. He's got much more of a taste for this sort of thing than I do. But I think we were contacted by the same person. It wasn't clear to me who this person was or how this person got my cell phone number. It didn't seem like we were getting punked. I mean, the person seemed credible to me. And they were talking to you about the release of different videos on UFOs. Yeah, and this is when there was a flurry of activity around this. There was a big New Yorker article on UFOs, and there was rumors of congressional hearings, I think, coming, and there were the videos that were being debunked or not. And so this person contacted both of us, I think, around the same time. And I think he might have contacted Rogan or other... Eric is just the only person I've spoken to about it, I think, who I know was contacted. And the... What happened is the person kept writing a check that he didn't cash. He kept saying, OK, next week I'm going to... I understand this is sounding spooky, and you have no reason to really trust me, but next week I'm going to put you on a Zoom call with people who you will recognize, and they're going to be former heads of the CIA, and people who just... You're going to... Within five seconds of being on the Zoom call, you'll know this is not a hoax. And I said, great, just let me know. Just send me the Zoom link. And I went... That happened maybe three times. There was just one phone conversation, and then it was just texts, just a bunch of texts. And I think Eric spent more time with this person, and I'm not... I haven't spoken to him about it. I know he's spoke about it publicly, but... So I... It's not that my bullshit detector ever really went off in a big way, it's just the thing never happened, and so I lost interest. So you made a comment, which is interesting, that you ran the... Which I really appreciate, that you ran the thought experiment of saying, okay, maybe we do have alien spacecraft, or just the thought experiment the aliens did visit, and then this very kind of nihilistic, sad thought that it wouldn't matter, it wouldn't affect your life. Can you explain that? Well, no, I was... I think many people noticed this. I mean, this was a sign of how crazy the news cycle was at that point, right? It's like we had COVID, and we had Trump, and I forget when the UFO thing was really kicking off, but it just seemed like no one had the bandwidth to even be interested in this. It's like I was amazed to notice in myself that I wasn't more interested in figuring out what was going on. It's like... And I considered, okay, wait a minute. If this is true, this is the biggest story in anyone's lifetime. I mean, contact with alien intelligence is by definition the biggest story in anyone's lifetime in human history. Why isn't this just totally captivating? And not only was it not totally captivating, it was just barely rising to the level of my being able to pay attention to it. And I view that, I mean, one, as to some degree an understandable defense mechanism against the bogus claims that have been made about this kind of thing in the past. The general sense is probably bullshit, or it probably has some explanation that is purely terrestrial and not surprising. And there is somebody who... What's his name? Mick West, I forget. Is it a YouTuber? Yeah, Mick West, yeah. He debunks stuff. Yeah, he... I mean, I have since seen some of those videos. I mean, now this is going back still at least a year, but some of those videos seem like fairly credible debunkings of some of the optical evidence. And I'm surprised we haven't seen more of that. Like there was a fairly credulous 60 minutes piece that came out around that time looking at some of that video, and it was the very video that he was debunking on YouTube, and his video only had like 50,000 views on it or whatever. But again, it seemed like a fairly credible debunking. I haven't seen debunkings of his debunkings, but... I think there is, but he's basically saying that there is possible explanations for it. And usually in these kinds of contexts, if there's a possible explanation, even if it seems unlikely, is going to be more likely than an alien civilization visiting us. Yeah, so the extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence principle, which I think is generally true. Well, with aliens, I think generally, I think there should be some humility about what they would look like when they show up. But I tend to think they're already here. The amazing thing about this AI conversation though is that we're talking about a circumstance where we would be designing the aliens, and there's every reason to believe that eventually this is going to happen. Like I said, I'm not at all skeptical about the coming reality of the aliens that we're going to build them. Now, here's the thing. Does this apply to when superintelligence shows up? Will this be trending on Twitter for a day, and then we'll go on to complain about something Sam Harris once again said in his podcast the next day? Yeah, right. You tend to trend on Twitter, even though you're not on Twitter, which is great. Yeah, I haven't noticed. I mean, I did notice when I was on, but... Do you have this concern about AGI, basically, the same kind of thing, that we would just look the other way? Is there something about this time where even like World War III, which has been throwing around very casually, concerningly so, even that, the new cycle wipes that away? Yeah. Well, I think we have this general problem that we can't make certain information, even unequivocally certain information, emotionally salient. We respond quite readily to certain things. I mean, as we talked about, we respond to the little girl who fell down a well. I mean, that gets 100% of our emotional resources. But the abstract probability of nuclear war, even a high probability, even an intolerable probability, even if we put it at 30%, it's just like that's a Russian roulette with a gun with three chambers, and it's aimed at the heads, not only your head, but your kid's head and everyone's kid's head, and it's just 24 hours a day. And I mean, I think people who... This is pre-Ukraine. I think the people who have made it their business to, professionally, to think about the risk of nuclear war and to mitigate it, people like Graham Allison or William Perry or... I mean, I think they were putting the ongoing risk, I mean, just the risk that we're going to have a proper nuclear war at some point in the next generation, people were putting it at something like 50%, right? They were living with this sort of Damocles over our heads. Now, you might wonder whether anyone can have reliable intuitions about the probability of that kind of thing, but the status quo is truly alarming. I mean, we've got ICBMs on, leave aside smaller exchanges and tactical nukes and how we could have a world war based on incremental changes. We've got the biggest bombs aimed at the biggest cities in both directions, and it's old technology, right? And it's vulnerable to some lunatic deciding to launch or misreading bad data. And we know we've been saved from nuclear war, I think at least twice by Soviet submarine commanders deciding, I'm not going to pass this up the chain of command, right? It's like, this is almost certainly an error and it turns out it was an error. And we need people to... I mean, in that particular case, he saw, I think it was five, what seemed like five missiles launched from the US to Russia. And he reasoned, if America was going to engage in a first strike, they'd launch more than five missiles, right? So this has to be fictional. And then he waited long enough to decide that it was fictional. But the probability of a nuclear war happening by mistake or some other species of inadvertence, a misunderstanding, a technical malfunction, that's intolerable. Forget about the intentional use of it by people who are driven crazy by some ideology. And more and more technologies are enabled at a kind of scale of destruction. And misinformation plays into this picture in a way that is especially scary. I mean, once you can get a deep fake of any current president of the United States claiming to have launched a first strike and just send that everywhere. But they could change the nature of truth and then that might change the engine we have for skepticism, sharpen it. The more you have deep fakes. And we might have AI and digital watermarks that help us. Maybe we'll not trust any information that hasn't come through specific channels, right? I mean, so in my world, it's like I no longer feel the need to respond to anything other than what I put out in my channels of information. It's like there's so many people who have clipped stuff of me that shows the opposite of what I was actually saying in context. I mean, the people have like re-edited my podcast audio to make it seem like I said the opposite of what I was saying. It's like, unless I put it out, you can't be sure that I actually said it. I mean, it's just... But I don't know what it's like to live like that for all forms of information. And I mean, strangely, I think it may require a greater siloing of information in the end. We're living through this sort of Wild West period where everyone's got a newsletter and everyone's got a blog and everyone's got an opinion. But once you can fake everything... There might be a greater value for expertise for experts, but a more rigorous system for identifying who the experts are. Yeah, or just knowing that it's going to be an arms race to authenticate information. So it's like, if you can never trust a photograph unless it has been vetted by Getty Images, because only Getty Images has the resources to authenticate the provenance of that photograph and a test that hasn't been meddled with by AI. And again, I don't even know if that's technically possible. I mean, maybe whatever the tools available for this will be commodified and the cost will be driven to zero so quickly that everyone will be able to do it. Could be like encryption, but... And it would be proven and tested most effectively first, of course, as always in porn. Yeah. Which is where most of human innovation technology happens first. Well, I have to ask because Ron Howard, the director, asked us on Twitter, since we're talking about the threat of nuclear war and otherwise, he asked, I'd be interested in both your expectations for human society if when we move beyond Mars, will those societies be industrial based? How will it be governed? How will criminal infractions be dealt with? When you read or watch sci-fi, what comes closest to sounding logical? Do you think about our society beyond Earth? If we colonize Mars, if we colonize space? Yeah, well, I think I have a pretty humbling picture of that. I mean, so because we're still going to be the apes that we are. So when you imagine colonizing Mars, you have to imagine a first fist fight on Mars. You have to imagine a first murder on Mars. Also infidelity. Yeah. Somebody... Extramarital affairs on Mars. So it's going to get really homely and boring really fast, I think. It's like only the spacesuits or the other exigencies of just living in that atmosphere or lack thereof will limit how badly we can behave on Mars. But do you think most of the interaction will be still in meat space versus digital? Do you think there'll be... Do you think we're like living through a transformation of a kind where we're going to be doing more and more interaction in a digital space? Like everything we've been complaining about Twitter, is it possible that Twitter's just the early days of a broken system that's actually giving birth to a better working system that's ultimately digital? I think we're going to experience a pendulum swing back into the real world. I think many of us are experiencing that now anyway. Just wanting to have face-to-face encounters and spend less time on our phones and less time online. I think maybe everyone isn't going in that direction, but I do notice it myself. Once I got off Twitter, then I noticed the people who were never on Twitter. I know, I have a lot of friends who are never on Twitter. They actually never understood what I was doing on Twitter. It wasn't that they were seeing it and then reacting to it. They just didn't know. It's like I'm not on Reddit either, but I don't spend any time thinking about not being on Reddit. It's like I'm just not on Reddit. Do you think the pursuit of human happiness is better achieved, more effectively achieved, outside of Twitter world? Well, I think all we have is our attention in the end, and we just have to notice what these various tools are doing to it. It became very clear to me that it was an unrewarding use of my attention. Now, it's not to say there isn't some digital platform that's conceivable that would be useful and rewarding, but yeah, we just have... Our life is doled out to us in moments, and we're continually solving this riddle of what is going to suffice to make this moment engaging and meaningful and aligned with who I want to be now and how I want the future to look. We have this tension between being in the present and becoming in the future. It's a seeming paradox. Again, it's not really a paradox, but I do think the ground truth for personal well-being is to find a mode of being where you can pay attention to the present moment, and this is meditation by another name. You can pay attention to the present moment with sufficient gravity that you recognize that just consciousness itself in the present moment, no matter what's happening, is already a circumstance of freedom and contentment and tranquility. You can be happy now before anything happens, before this next desire gets gratified, before this next problem gets solved. There's this kind of ground truth that you're free, that consciousness is free and open and unencumbered by really any problem until you get lost in thought about all the problems that may yet be real for you. So the ability to catch and observe consciousness, that in itself is a source of happiness. Without being lost in thought. This happens haphazardly for people who don't meditate because they find something in their life that's so captivating, it's so pleasurable, it's so thrilling. It can even be scary, but even being scared is captivating. It gets their attention, whatever it is. Sebastian Junger wrote a great book about people's experience in war here. Strangely, it can be the best experience anyone's ever had because everything, it's like only the moment matters, right? The bullet is whizzing by your head. You're not thinking about your 401k or that thing that you didn't say last week to the person you shouldn't have been talking about. You're not thinking about Twitter. It's like you're just fully immersed in the present moment. Meditation is the only way, I mean, that word can mean many things to many people, but what I mean by meditation is simply the discovery that there is a way to engage the present moment directly, regardless of what's happening. You don't need to be in a war, you don't need to be having sex, you don't need to be on drugs, you don't need to be surfing, you don't need nothing. There doesn't have to be a peak experience. It can be completely ordinary, but you can recognize that in some basic sense, there's only this and everything else is something you're thinking. You're thinking about the past, you're thinking about the future, and thoughts themselves have no substance, right? It's fundamentally mysterious that any thought ever really commandeers your sense of who you are and makes you anxious or afraid or angry or whatever it is. And the more you discover that, the half-life of all these negative emotions that blow all of us around get much, much shorter, right? And you can literally just... The anger that would have kept you angry for hours or days lasts four seconds, because the moment it arises, you recognize it and you can get off it. You can decide, at minimum, you can decide whether it's useful to stay angry at that moment. And obviously, it usually isn't. And the illusion of free will is one of those thoughts. Yeah. It's all just happening, right? Even the mindful and meditative response to this is just happening. Even the moments where you recognize or not recognize is just happening. This does open up a degree of freedom for a person, but it's not a freedom that gives any motivation to the notion of free will. It's just a new way of being in the world. Is there a difference between intellectually knowing free will is an illusion and really experiencing it? What's the longest you've been able to experience, the escape, the illusion of free will? Well, it's always obvious to me when I pay attention. Whenever I'm mindful, the term of jargon in the Buddhist and increasingly outside the Buddhist context is mindfulness, right? But there are different levels of mindfulness and there's different degrees of insight into this. But yes, what I'm calling evidence of lack of free will and lack of the self, I've got two sides of the same coin. There's a sense of being a subject in the middle of experience to whom all experience refers, the sense of I, the sense of me. And that's almost everybody's starting point when they start to meditate. And that's almost always the place people live most of their lives from. I do think that gets interrupted in ways they get unrecognized. I think people are constantly losing the sense of I, they're losing the sense of subject-object distance, but they're not recognizing it. And meditation is the mode in which you can recognize, you can both consciously precipitate it, you can look for the self and fail to find it and then recognize its absence. And that's just the flip side of the coin of free will. I mean, the feeling of having free will is what it feels like to feel like a self who's thinking his thoughts and doing his actions and intending his intentions. And the man in the middle of the boat who's rowing, that's the false starting point. When you find that there's no one in the middle of the boat, right? Or in fact, there's no boat, there's just the river, there's just the flow of experience and there's no center to it. And there's no place from which you would control it. Again, even when you're doing things, this does not negate the difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior. It's like, I can voluntarily reach for this, but when I'm paying attention, I'm aware that everything is just happening. Like just the intention to move is just arising, right? And I'm in no position to know why it didn't arise a moment before or a moment later or a moment or 50% stronger or weaker or so as to be ineffective or to be doubly effective where I lurched for it versus I move slow. I mean, I'm not, I can never run the counterfactuals. I can never... All of this opens the door to an even more disconcerting picture along the same lines, which is subsumes this conversation about free will. And it's the question of whether anything is ever possible. Like what if... This is a question I haven't thought a lot about it, but it's been a few years I've been kicking this question around. So I mean, what if only the actual is possible? What if there was... So we live with this feeling of possibility. We live with the sense that... Let me take... So I have two daughters. I could have had a third child, right? So what does it mean to say that I could have had a third child? Or it's like, you don't have kids, I don't think? So... Not that I know of. Yes. So the possibility might be there. Right. So what do we mean when we say you could have had a child or you might have a child in the future? What is the space in reality? What's the relationship between possibility and actuality and reality? Is there a reality in which non-actual things are nonetheless real? And so we have other categories of non-concrete things. We have things that don't have spatial, temporal dimension, but they nonetheless exist. So like, you know, the integers, right? So numbers. There's a reality, there's an abstract reality to numbers. And it's philosophically interesting to think about these things. So they're not like... In some sense, they're real and they're not merely invented by us, they're discovered because they have structure that we can't impose upon them, right? It's not like... They're not fictional characters like, you know, Hamlet and Superman also exist in some sense, but they exist at the level of our own fiction and abstraction. But it's like, there are true and false statements you can make about Hamlet. There are true and false statements you can make about Superman, because our fiction, the fictional worlds we've created have a certain kind of structure. But again, this is all abstract. It's all abstractable from any of its concrete instantiations. It's not just in the comic books and just in the movies. It's in our, you know, ongoing ideas about these characters. But natural numbers or the integers don't function quite that way. I mean, they're similar, but they also have a structure that's purely a matter of discovery. It's not... You can't just make up whether numbers are prime. You know, if you give me two integers, you know, of a certain size, you mentioned two enormous integers. If I were to say, okay, well, between those two integers, they're exactly 11 prime numbers, right? That's a very specific claim about which I can be right or wrong, whether or not anyone knows I'm right or wrong. It's like, that's just... There's a domain of facts there, but these are abstract... It's an abstract reality that relates in some way that's philosophically interesting, you know, metaphysically interesting to what we call real reality, you know, the spatial temporal order, the physics of things. But possibility, at least in my view, occupies a different space. And this is something, again, my thoughts on this are pretty inchoate. I think I need to talk to a philosopher of physics and or a physicist about how this may interact with things like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's an interesting... Right, exactly. So, I wonder if discoveries in physics, like further proof or more concrete proof that many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has some validity, if that completely starts to change things. But even... That's just more actuality. So, if I took that seriously... Ah, sure. That's a case of... And truth is that happens even if the many worlds interpretation isn't true, but we just imagine we have a physically infinite universe, the implication of infinity is such that things will begin to repeat themselves, you know, the farther you go in space, right? So, if you just head out in one direction, eventually you're going to meet two people just like us having a conversation just like this, and you're going to meet them an infinite number of times in every, you know, infinite variety of permutations slightly different from this conversation, right? So, I mean, infinity is just so big that our intuitions of probability completely break down. But what I'm suggesting is maybe probability isn't a thing, right? Maybe there's only actuality. Maybe there's only what happens, and at every point along the way our notion of what could have happened or what might have happened is just that. It's just a thought about what could have happened or might have happened. So, it's a fundamentally different thing. If you can imagine a thing that doesn't make it real. So, that's where that possibility exists, is in your imagination, right? Yeah, and possibility itself is a kind of spooky idea because it too has a sort of structure, right? So, like if I'm going to say, you know, you could have had a daughter, right, last year. So, we're saying that's possible but not actual, right? That is a claim... the things that are true and not true about that daughter, right? It has a kind of structure. It's like... I feel like there's a lot of fog around that possibility. It feels like almost like a useful narrative. But what does it mean? So, like, what does it mean if we say, you know, I just did that but I... it's conceivable that I wouldn't have done that, right? Like, it's possible that I just threw this cap but I might not have done that. So, you're taking it very temporally close to the original, like, what would appear as a decision. Whenever we're saying something is possible but not actual, right? Like, this thing just happened but it's conceivable... it's possible that it wouldn't have happened or that it would have happened differently. In what does that possibility consist? Like, where is that? What is... for that to be real, for the possibility to be real, what are we... what claim are we making about the universe? Well, isn't that an extension of the idea that free will is an illusion, that all we have is actuality, that the possibility is an illusion? Right. Yeah, I'm just extending it beyond human action. Like, this goes to the physics of things. This is just everything. Like, we're always telling ourselves a story that includes possibility. Possibility is really compelling for some reason. Well, yeah, because it's... I mean, so this... yeah, I mean, this could sound just academic, but every backward-looking regret or disappointment and every forward-looking worry is completely dependent on this notion of possibility. Like, every regret is based on the sense that something else... I could have done something else, something else could have happened. Every disposition to worry about the future is based on the feeling that there's this range of possibilities. It could go either way. And, you know, I mean, I know whether or not there's such a thing as possibility, you know, I'm convinced that worry is almost never psychologically appropriate, because the reality is that in any given moment, either you can do something to solve the problem you're worried about or not. So if you can do something, just do it. And if you can't, your worrying is just causing you to suffer twice over, right? You're gonna get the medical procedure next week anyway. How much time between now and next week do you want to spend worrying about it, right? The worry doesn't accomplish anything. How much do physicists think about possibility? Well, they think about it in terms of probability more often, but probability just describes... And again, this is a place where I might be out of my depth and need to talk to somebody to debunk this, but... You don't have to do therapy with a physicist. Yeah. But probability, it seems, just describes a pattern of actuality that we've observed, right? I mean, there are certain things we observe, and those are the actual things that have happened. And we have this additional story about probability. I mean, we have the frequency with which things happen, have happened in the past. I can flip a fair coin and know in the abstract that I have a belief that in the limit, those flips, those tosses should converge on 50% heads and 50% tails. I have a story as to why it's not gonna be exactly 50% within any arbitrary timeframe. But in reality, all we ever have are the observed tosses, right? And then we have an additional story that, oh, it came up heads, but it could have come up tails. Why do we think that, about that last toss? And what are we claiming is true about the physics of things if we say it could have been otherwise? I think we're claiming that probability is true. That it just allows us to have a nice model about the world. It gives us hope about the world. Yeah. It seems that possibility has to be somewhere to be effective. It's a little bit like what's happening with the laws of... There's something metaphysically interesting about the laws of nature too, because the laws of nature... So the laws of nature impose their work on the world, right? We see their evidence. But they're not reducible to any specific set of instances, right? So there's some structure there, but the structure isn't just a matter of the actual things. We have the actual billiard balls that are banging into each other. All of that actuality can be explained by what actual things are actually doing. But then we have this notion that in addition to that, we have the laws of nature that are explaining this act. But how are the laws of nature an additional thing in addition to just the actual things that actually affect causally? And if they are an additional thing, how are they effective if they're not among the actual things that are just actually banging around? And so to some degree... To some degree. Possibly it has to be hiding somewhere for the laws of nature to be... To be possible. For anything to be possible, it has to be... It has to have... Closet somewhere, I'm sure, is where all the possibility goes. It has to be attached to something. So... You don't think Many Worlds is that? Because Many Worlds still exists. Well, because we're in this strand of that multiverse. Yeah. Right? So still you have just a local instance of what is actual. And then if it proliferates elsewhere where you can't be affected by it, there's more actuality. You can't really connect with the other. Yeah. Yeah. And so Many Worlds is just a statement of basically everything that can happen, happens somewhere. Yeah. And that's... Maybe that's not an entirely kosher formulation of it, but it seems pretty close. So... But there's whatever happens, right? In fact, there's... Relativistically, there's a... Einstein's original notion of a block universe seems to suggest this. And it's been a while since I've been in a conversation with a physicist where I've gotten a chance to ask about the standing of this concept in physics currently. I don't hear it discussed much. But the idea of a block universe is that space-time exists as a totality. And our sense that we are traveling through space-time, where there's a real difference between the past and the future, that that's an illusion of just our... The weird slice we're taking of this larger object. But on some level, it's like you're reading a novel. The last page of the novel exists just as much as the first page when you're in the middle of it. And they're just... If we're living in anything like that, then there's no such thing as possibility. It would seem there's just what is actual. So as a matter of our experience, moment to moment, I think it's totally compatible with that being true, that there is only what is actual. And that sounds to the naive ear, that sounds like it would be depressing and disempowering and confining. But it's anything but. It's actually... It's a circumstance of pure discovery. You have no idea what's going to happen next. You don't know who you're going to be tomorrow. You're only by tendency seeming to resemble yourself from yesterday. And there's way more freedom in all of that than it seems true to many people. And yet, the basic insight is that you're not... The real freedom is the recognition that you're not in control of anything. Everything is just happening, including your thoughts and intentions and moods. So life is a process of continuous discovery. You're part of the universe. You are just this... It's the miracle that the universe is illuminated to itself as itself where you sit. And you're continually discovering what your life is. And then you have this layer at which you're telling yourself a story that you already know what your life is. And you know exactly who you should be and what's about to happen, or you're struggling to form a confident opinion about all of that. And yet, there is this fundamental mystery to everything, even the most familiar experience. We're all NPCs in a most marvelous video game. Maybe, although my game... My sense of gaming does not run as deep as to know what I'm committing to. There's a non-playing character. You're more... Yeah, non-player. Oh, wow. Yes, you're more of a Mario Kart guy. Yeah, yeah. I was an original video gamer, but it's been a long time since I... I mean, I was there for Pong. I remember when I saw the first Pong in a restaurant in... I think it was like Benihana's or something. They had a Pong table. Isn't it amazing that... That was an amazing moment when you... You, Sam Harris, might live from Pong to the invention and deployment of a super intelligent system. Yeah, well, that happened fast, if it happens anytime in my lifetime. From Pong to AGI. Yeah. What kind of things do you do purely for fun that others might consider a waste of time? Purely for fun? Because meditation doesn't count, because most people would say that's not a waste of time. Is there something like Pong that's a deeply embarrassing thing you would never admit? I don't think... Well, I mean, once or twice a year I will play a round of golf, which many people would find embarrassing. They might even find my play embarrassing, but it's fun. Do you find it embarrassing? No, I mean, I love... Golf just takes way too much time, so I can only squander a certain amount of time on it. I do love it. It's a lot of fun. But you have no control over your actual performance. You're ever discovering... No, I do have control over my mediocre performance, but I don't have enough control as to make it really good. But happily, I'm in the perfect spot, because I don't invest enough time in it to care how I play. So I just have fun when I play. Well, I hope there'll be a day where you play around golf with the former president, Donald Trump. And I would love to be... I would bet on him if we played golf. I'm sure he's a better golfer. I miss the chaos of human civilization in modern times, as we've talked about. What gives you hope about this world in the coming year, in the coming decade, in the coming 100 years, maybe 1,000 years? What's the source of hope for you? Well, it comes back to a few of the things we've talked about. I mean, I think I'm hopeful. I know that most people are good and are mostly converging on the same core values, right? We're not surrounded by psychopaths. And the thing that finally convinced me to get off Twitter was how different life was seeming through the lens of Twitter. I just got the sense that there are way more psychopaths or effective psychopaths than I realized. And then I thought, okay, this isn't real. This is either a strange context in which actually decent people are behaving like psychopaths or it's a bot army or something that I don't have to take seriously. So, yeah, I just think most people, if we can get the incentives right, I think there's no reason why we can't really thrive collectively. There's enough wealth to go around. There's no effective limit. I mean, again, within the limits of what's physically possible, but we're nowhere near the limit on abundance. Forget about going to Mars. On this, the one rock, right? It's like we could make this place incredibly beautiful and stable if we just did enough work to solve some rather longstanding political problems. Lex. The problem of incentives. So, to you, the basic characteristics of human nature such that will be okay if the incentives are okay. We'll do pretty good. Daishi. I'm worried about the asymmetries that it's easier to break things than to fix them. It's easier to light a fire than to put it out. And I do worry that as technology gets more and more powerful, it becomes easier for the minority who wants to screw things up to effectively screw things up for everybody. So, it's easier. It's like a thousand years ago, it was simply impossible for one person to range the lives of millions, much less billions. Now that's getting to be possible. So, on the assumption that we're always going to have a sufficient number of crazy individuals or malevolent individuals, we have to figure out that asymmetry somehow. And so, there's some cautious exploration of emergent technology that we need to get our head screwed on straight about. So, gain-of-function research. Just how much do we want to democratize all the relevant technologies there? Do we really want to give everyone the ability to order nucleotides in the mail and give them the blueprints for viruses online because you're a free speech absolutist and you think all PDFs need to be exportable everywhere? So, I'm much more... So, this is where... Yeah, so there are limits to... Many people are confused about my take on free speech because I've come down on the unpopular side of some of these questions. But it's been... My overriding concern is that in many cases, I'm worried about the free speech of individual businesses or individual platforms or individual media people. And so, people to decide that they don't want to be associated with certain things. So, if you own Twitter, I think you should be able to kick off the Nazi you don't want to be associated with because it's your platform, you own it. That's your free speech. That's the side of my free speech concern for Twitter. It's not that every Nazi has the right to algorithmic speech on Twitter. I think if you own Twitter, you should... You or the... Whether it's just Elon or in the world where it wasn't Elon, just the people who own Twitter and the board and the shareholders and the employees, these people need to... Should be free to decide what they want to promote or not. They're public... I view them as publishers more than as platforms in the end, and that has other implications. But I do worry about this problem of misinformation and algorithmically and otherwise supercharged misinformation. And I think... I do think we're at a bottleneck now. I guess it could be the hubris of every present generation to think that their moment is especially important. But I do think with the emergence of these technologies, we're at some kind of bottleneck where we really have to figure out how to get this right. And if we do get this right, if we figure out how to not drive ourselves crazy by giving people access to all possible information and misinformation at all times, I think, yeah, we could... There's no limit to how happily we could collaborate with billions of creative, fulfilled people. It's just... And trillions of robots, some of them sex robots, but that's another topic. Robots that are running the right algorithm, whatever that algorithm is. Whatever you need in your life to make you happy. Sam, the first time we talked is one of the huge honors of my life. I've been a fan of yours for a long time. The few times you were respectful but critical to me means the world. And thank you so much for helping me and caring enough about the world and for everything you do. But I should say that the few of us that try to put love in the world on Twitter miss you on Twitter. Well, enjoy yourselves. Don't break anything, kids. Have a good party without me. Thanks so much. Very happy to do this. Thanks for the invitation. Thank you. Great to see you again. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sam Harris. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Martin Luther King Jr. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

https://youtu.be/Qyrjgf-_Vdk

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Bhaskar Sunkara: Socialism and Communism | Lex Fridman Podcast #349

The following is a conversation with Bhaskar Sankara. He's a democratic socialist, a political writer, founding editor of Jacobin, president of the nation, former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the author of the Socialist Manifesto, the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality. As a side note, let me say that this conversation with Bhaskar Sankara, who's a brilliant socialist writer and philosopher, represents what I hope to do with this podcast. I hope to talk to the left and the right, to the far left and the far right, always with the goal of presenting and understanding both the strongest interpretation of their ideas and valuable thought-provoking arguments against those ideas. Also, I hope to understand the human being behind the ideas. I trust in your intelligence as the listener to use the ideas you hear to help you learn, to think, to empathize, and to make up your own mind. I will often fall short in pushing back too hard or not pushing back enough, of not bringing up topics I should have, of talking too much, of interrupting too much, or maybe sometimes in the rare cases not enough, of being too silly on a serious topic or being too serious on a silly topic. I'm trying to do my best and I will keep working my ass off to improve. In this way, I hope to talk to prominent figures in the political space, even controversial ones, on both the left and the right. For example, I hope to talk to Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to Ron DeSantis and Barack Obama, and of course many others across the political spectrum. I sometimes hear accusations about me being controlled in some way by a government or an intelligence agency like CIA, FSB, Mossad, or perhaps that I'm controlled in some way by the very human desire for money, fame, power, access. All I have is my silly little words, but let me give them to you. I'm not and will never be controlled by anyone. There's nothing in this world that can break me and force me to sacrifice my integrity. People call me naive. I'm not naive. I'm optimistic. And optimism isn't a passive state of being. It's a constant battle against the world that wants to pull you into a downward spiral of cynicism. To me, optimism is freedom. Freedom to think, to act, to build, to help, at times in the face of impossible odds. As I often do, please allow me to read a few lines from the poem If by Rodger Kipling. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, or being lied about don't deal in lies, or being hated don't give way to hating, and yet don't look too good or talk too wide. Don't look too good or talk too wise. Even this very poem is mocking my over-romantic ridiculousness as I read it. The meta-irony is not lost on me, my friends. I'm a silly little kid trying to do a bit of good in this world. Thank you for having my back through all of it, all of my mistakes. Thank you for the love. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. If you're new to the channel, please subscribe to our channel. We have a new podcast every Monday and Thursday. We also have a new podcast every Wednesday and Thursday. If you want to support us, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Bhaskar Sankara. Let's start with a big, broad question. What is socialism? How do you like to define it? How do you like to think about it? I think at the minimum, socialism is about making sure that the core necessities of life, food, housing, education, and so on, are guaranteed to everyone just by virtue of being born so that those people can reach their potential. And I think that's a minimum requirement of socialism. Beyond that, I think socialism, especially democratic socialism, the type of socialism that I believe in, is about taking democracy from just the political democratic realm and extending it into economic and social spheres as well. So if we think that democracy is a good thing, why do we allow our workplaces to be run in autocratic ways? So economic, political, social, in all those realms, the ideas, the philosophical ideas apply. If you can put words to it, what are some philosophical ideas about human beings that are at the core of this? I think at the core, it's the idea that we have intrinsic value. We are individuals that have unequal talents, of course. We're individuals that want different things. But this unique individualness can only truly come to light in a society in which there are certain collective or social guarantees. So we could think, just like Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and socialist used to say, about how many thousands of potential Einsteins or Leonardo da Vinci's that died in sweatshops and on plantations and never got the chance to cultivate what was unique and human about themselves and also never got a chance to have families and impart what was special and important to them to future generations and to posterity. My own grandmother was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She was illiterate until her dying days in East Orange, New Jersey. She never had the chance to write down her memories of her life in Trinidad as a young woman and what it meant. She, of course, had lots of children. She was able to impart some stories to her children and grandchildren. But I often think about what someone with her wit and intelligence could have done with a little bit more support. But if all human beings have intrinsic value, you don't have to be an Einstein for the application of some of the ideas that you're talking about. Is there a tension or a trade-off between our human civilization, our society, helping the unlucky versus rewarding the skillful and the hardworking? I think you could do both. There's always a balance between the two. I think you could reward people who make innovations and who improve lives for everyone through their innovations by giving them, let's say, even more consumption, even that level of inequality, while still making sure that there's not people in poverty and suffering, and while making sure that, hey, we're going to give these people who want to work that extra 10 hours or 20 hours or want to apply their hard work some extra benefits, but that these benefits would be not the extreme disparities that you have today. So at the core of socialism and maybe democratic socialism is maybe a reallocation of wealth, reallocation of resources? I think it's wealth and resources, yes, but it's also power. And I guess one way to think about this is some thinkers on the right, like Hayek, they would say in their most generous moments, talking about socialists and socialism, they would say, socialists want to trade some of your freedom for equality. And that's them trying to just accurately describe what socialism is trying to do. The way that I would put it, it's a little bit different. Socialists are proposing a trade-off, but it's really a trade-off between freedom and freedom. And by that, I mean, let's say you set up a successful business and you set up a business right here in Austin, Texas, some sort of firm, it's producing some widget or whatever, and it's producing a good that people really want and demand, but you have some competition. You decide to hire 20, 30 people to help you. You entered into a free contract with these people who under capitalism, of course, we're not living in feudalism, have the option to join any other firm, but they like you and they like this firm and they like your offer and you're paying them, let's say $20 an hour for 40 hours of work per week. Now, if the government comes along and says, okay, there's now a new minimum wage, the minimum wage is $22 an hour. And also there's a maximum work week, 35 hour work week. And if you work somewhere over 35 hours, even if they agree, you have to pay them time and a half. Now, that of course, is now an abridgment of your freedom as an entrepreneur, your freedom to set certain terms of employment, to engage in a contract with free people. But now your workers and other workers in the sector, because if you did it unilaterally, you just get undercut by your competition. Now, these people now have a few extra hours a week, they can do whatever they want with, they could watch more NFL with it, they could spend more time with their friends or family or whatever else. And they're still getting paid the same, if not better, because the wages also went up. So it's really a question often of trade offs between whose freedom and autonomy are you going to prioritize the freedom and autonomy of the entrepreneur, or the capitalist in this case, or the freedom autonomy of ordinary workers. Now, you could create a society that swings so far in the direction of prioritizing the freedom of one group or one class or whatever else compared to another, that you end up in some sort of tyranny. Now, if the state said, you know, you Lex, you're a capitalist, so you don't get the right to vote, or we're going to take away your private home or your ability to do things we think are intrinsic human rights. Now, this would be tyranny, this would be an abridgment of your rights. But shaping your ability in the economic sphere to be an economic actor is, I think, within the realm and scope of democratic politics. Yes, so those are the extremes you're referring to. And one perspective I would like to take on socialism versus capitalism is under each system, the extremes of each systems and the moderate versions of each system, how can people take advantage of it? So it seems like no matter what part of human nature is, whatever the rules, whatever the framework, whatever the system, somebody is going to take advantage of it. And that's the kind of pragmatic look at it, in practice, what actually happens. Also, the incentives and the human behavior, what actually happens in practice under these systems. So if you have a higher and higher minimum wage, and people watch more and more NFL, how does that change their actual behavior as a productive member of society? And actually at the individual level, as somebody who could be an Einstein, and chooses not to because NFL is so awesome to watch. So is both, how do people, malicious people that want to take advantage, maybe not malicious, but people that, like me, are lazy and want to take advantage. And people that also, I think, like me, I tend to believe about myself that I have potential. And if I let my laziness naturally take over, which it often does, I won't materialize the potential. So if you make life too easy for me, I feel like I will never get anything done. Me personally, of course, there's a giant set of circumstances of the unlucky and the overburdened, and so on. Okay, so how can people take advantage of each system, socialism, capitalism? So for one thing, people are going to take advantage of systems. They're going to find loopholes. They're going to find ways around. They're going to find ways to, at times, dominate and coerce others, even in systems meant to get rid of domination and coercion. That's why we need to design our systems in such a way that it eliminates as many of these things as possible. And also, that's why we need democracy. We need freedom. So in a Soviet system, for instance, you had the rise of this authoritarian bureaucracy that dominated and coerced others in the name of socialism. Now, that system desperately could have used some political democracy and some checks on what people were doing and some ability to reverse their power. And as soon as, of course, little elements of democracy was brought to that system, the system collapsed because there started to be outlets for dissent and for dissatisfaction. So I think we can't design a priori a perfect system. We need to be committed to certain principles that allow systems to be perfected. And for me, that's the importance of democracy. So even a few years ago, not to go on a tangent, but people were alluding Chinese authoritarianism. And they're saying, China's building this efficient system. The state runs so well. There's technocratic excellence. Plus, there's just productivity and they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else. But look at in practice what really happened with COVID, both the initial suppressing of information about what was happening in Wuhan and the outbreak, where many ordinary Chinese workers and doctors and others were trying to get the word out and they were suppressed by Communist Party officials locally in Wuhan, probably with the collusion nationally. And now with zero COVID policies and whatever else. So I think that often we find that even though it seems like these are weak systems and democracy makes us less competent technocratically and otherwise, I think it's kind of a necessity for systems to grow and evolve to have that freedom in civil society. But as for individuals, now, the first part of it is, yeah, I think people should be free to make their own choices. You might have tremendous potential, but you might choose to spend it in leisure. And leisure doesn't only mean doing, you know, sitting around at home, drinking a bunch of beers, kind of wasting your life away that way. Leisure might mean spending more time with your friends and family, building these sort of relationships that are going to maybe not change the world in some meta sense, but will change the lives of the people around you and will change your community for the better. I'm taking notes here because for me, leisure just meant playing a lot of Skyrim. This whole family relationship thing, I'm going to have to work on that. I didn't realize that's also including leisure. I'm going to have to reconsider my whole life here. Anyway. No, leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there's that famous book, the Robert Putnam one, Bowling Alone or whatever, which described that for now, I mean, I'm, I'm, it was born in 1989. I like, you know, video and computer games, you know. So I definitely do that type of leisure too. But I found a lot more richness in my life when in the last, you know, decade, a lot of my leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for like the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home alone, watching TV or something, you know, because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and, and, and belonging. But I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your question was, now, if you have a system with lots of carrots, but not the whip of, hey, you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless you're, you're working a certain amount. Would we still be as productive? Would we still be able to generate enough value for society? And I think that that's a question that that is, is quite, quite interesting. I think that we're living in a society now with enough abundance, that we could afford more people deciding to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots of staying in, you know, more money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards that comes from being successful or from, from providing would be enough. But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system. So if we're seeing mass unemployment by choice in a democratic socialist system, then you might need to reconfigure the incentives, you might need to encourage people to go back into production. But that's something that again, you could do through democracy and through good governance. You don't have to set the perfect blueprint in motion. You know, write up a treatise now and 50 years from now, you know, try to follow it like it's scripture. So by the way, I do like how you said whip instead of stick in carrot and stick. Carrot and stick. That's putting a weight on the scale of which is better. But yes. But I would actually argue to push back that the wealthier we get as a society, as a world, that the more comfortable the social nets become, the, so the less of a whip or stick they become. Because one of the negative consequences, even if you're on welfare, is like, well, life is not going to be that great. But the wealthier we become, the better the social programs become, the easier life becomes at the bottom. And so you might not have this motivation financially to get out from the bottom. That said, the pushback and the pushback is that there's something about human nature in general, money aside, that strives for greatness, that strives to provide a great life, a great middle class life for your family. And so that's the motivator to get off from the bottom. Well, I think a lot of people who are stuck at the bottom of the labor market today, one, these are people who are kind of are true philanthropists, because a lot of them are the ones who are working two jobs and are working 60 plus hours and are providing in this country, it's such a such a bargain for their labor because they're so underpaid. So many of the things that the rest of us use to enjoy life and consumption or whatever else. Like, I got here from downtown Austin, and I think my lift, you know, I did tip, but I think my lift was like eight bucks space or whatever else, you know, it's the, I think that we are all indebted to people who are working and we don't see it at various stages of the production process from, you know, the workers in China and Taiwan producing, you know, technological things that we're recording this on to, you know, growers and workers and agriculture in the US. So I think that one, working class people are already working, but as far as, you know, getting out from under poverty and desperation, we're in a society that doesn't give people a lot of tools. So if you don't have access to good public schools, from, you know, age five until, you know, 12, 13, it's going to be really hard to move from generations of your family being involved in manual labor to doing other forms of labor, you're going to be stuck at a certain part of our labor market as a result. If you don't have access to decent healthcare, you know, throughout your life, you might be already preordained to an early grave by the time that something kicks in, you really want to change something in your life in your mid-20s. Obviously, it's a combination of agency and all these other factors. There's still something, I think, innately human, innately striving that a lot of people have, but we don't really give people in our current society the tools to really be full participants in our society. We just take for granted, for example, and I'm from the Northeast, I give like excessively Northeast example, we take for granted that someone from, you know, Hartford, Connecticut is going to have, your average working class person in Hartford is going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day, the same hour in Greenwich, Connecticut. You know, we take for granted that accidents of birth are going to dictate outcomes. So you mean like, depending on the conditions of where you grew up, there's going to be fundamentally different experience in terms of education, in terms of the resources available to you to allow yourself to flourish? Yes, a poor city and a rich city, and Connecticut is great. It's highly, highly underrated. Both New Yorkers and people from Boston kind of have a colonial feeling about Connecticut, where we make fun of it and we try to carve it up, you know, the West belongs to New York, the East to Boston, but you know, I'm here for, you know, Connecticut nationalism. I think it's a great place. Okay. Can we actually step back a little bit on definitions? Because you said that some of the ideas practically that you're playing with is democratic socialism. We talked about the higher level, the higher kind of vision of socialism, the ideals, the philosophical ideas. But how does it all fit into the big picture historically of ideas of Marxism, communism, and socialism as it was defined and experienced and implemented in the 20th century? So what's your key differences? Maybe even just like socialism, communism? Yeah, well, I hate the no true Scotsman sort of response to this, which is, oh, that socialism is bad. So it wasn't really socialism. And my socialism is good. So it is socialism. But I think that socialism and communism share a common ancestor, which is they both emerged out of the turmoil and development of late 19th century capitalism. And the fact that there was all these workers parties that were organizing across the capitalist world. So in Europe, for instance, you had this mass party called the German Social Democratic Party. And the that became probably the most important, the most vibrant party in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s. But they were locked out of power because Germany at the time was still mostly a Tarkic, you know, it had a parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy, the Kaiser still ruled. These movements took root across the capitalist world, but including in Russia, and in conditions of illegality. So it was assumed for many, many years, and the workers movement across Europe and among socialists of Europe, they call themselves social democrats, then that the revolution would first probably happen in Germany, in this developed growing hub of industrial capitalism, and not in semi-feudal Russia. But then World War One came, the workers movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down, or to implicitly support the war. And then, you know, support the war for an hour, keep your heads down, don't get banned, don't get arrested, then we'll just take power after the war is over. And those like Russia, and also in the United States, for that matter, that chose the path of resistance to the war. And it was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian movement, Lenin's Bolshevik party, that took power in Russia after a period of turmoil where it didn't seem, well, was it going to go to the fascist right, or was it going to go to the far left? There was a period of flux and turmoil in Russia, but definitely the old regime was not able to stand. And these Russian social democrats, these Bolsheviks, said, social democracy has so betrayed the idea of internationalism and brotherhood and progress that was supposed to stand for, that we can't call ourselves social democrats anymore. We're going to go back to this old term that Marx used, we're going to call ourselves communists. And that's where official kind of communism out of Russia emerged. In other parts of Europe, parties were actually able to take power, some in the interwar period, but most in the postwar period. And they also came out of this old social democratic movement. And these parties mostly just call themselves socialists. And a lot of them still on paper, wanted to go beyond capitalism. But in practice, they just manage capitalism better in the interest of workers. But they all had the same common ancestor. And in practice, to me, social democracy means trying to insert doses of socialism within capitalism, but maintaining capitalism. Communism meant this attempt to build a socialism outside of capitalism, and often authoritarian ways, in part, because of the ideology of these communists, but in part, because of the conditions in which they inherited, you know, they were inheriting a democracy, they were inheriting a country that had been ruled by the czars for, you know, for centuries. And with very little condition, like a very weak working class, you know, very, you know, poor and devastated by war, and so on, where authoritarianism kind of lended itself to those conditions. And then there's me, you know, then there's democratic socialists. And the way I would define it is, we like a lot of what the social democrats accomplished. But we still believe in going beyond capitalism, and not just building socialism within capitalism. But we believe in this ultimate vision of a world after capitalism. What does that world look like? And how is it different from communism? Actually, maybe we can linger, before we talk about your vision of democratic socialism, what was wrong with communism, Stalinism, implementation of communism in the Soviet Union? Why did it go wrong? And in what ways did it not go wrong? In what ways did it succeed? Let me start with the second part of that question. And that's a very difficult one to answer, in part, because I morally and ethically am opposed to any form of authoritarianism or dictatorship. And often when you talk about the successes of a government, or what it did developmentally that might have been positive, we have to abstract ourselves from what we morally believe and just kind of look at the record, right? I would say that the Soviet experiment started off by in Lenin's time, as the attempt to kind of just hold a holding action. Hey, we don't really have the conditions to rule this country, we have the support of the working class, or most of it, but the working class is only, you know, 3% of the population, you know, the peasantry is really against us. A lot of this 3% of the population has died in war, and half of them supported the Mensheviks and the more moderate socialists anyway. But the alternative, in their minds, was going to be a far right reaction, you know, some sort of general taking power in a coup or whatever else, or just them ending up back in prison, because a lot of them were in prison under the Tsar, or just killed. So they figured, all right, we're gonna have a holding action where we maintain as much of this territory of the old Russian Empire as possible. We'll try to slowly implement changes, restabilize the economy through something called a new economic program, which was kind of a form of social democracy, if you will, because it allowed market exchange for the peasants, combined with state ownership of industries in the cities. And for a while, it seemed to be working. The revolution never came that they were expecting in Western Europe. But in Russia itself, they were able to restabilize things by the middle or end of the 1920s. And they were able to build more of a popular base for some of their policies, because people who had seen the chaos of World War One, and revolution, and then Civil War, kind of just wanted stability. And after a decade plus of war, if you had a government that was able to give you enough to eat and a job, you know, that was good enough for them. Then Stalin came into power, and he wanted to rapidly industrialize. And his logic was, the revolution is not going to come in the West, we need to build socialism in one country. And we need to catch up with the West, we need to turn ourselves into industrial powerhouse as quickly as possible. And that's where you got forced collectivization to try to increase the productivity of Russian agriculture, through state ownership of previously fragmented agricultural holdings, and through the implementation of mechanization. So bring in more machines to make agriculture more productive, all under state ownership, plus more ambitious attempts to build heavy industry through five-year plans. Now, I say this kind of coolly, but we know in practice what that meant. You know, forced collectivization was a disaster. I mean, first of all, I think was built on the faulty premise that scale always equals more productivity, when in fact, especially in agriculture, but in any field, it's a little bit more complicated than that. And it led to millions of deaths, you know, it led to a famine, it led to a host of other problems. Industrialization, in the way that it happened under Stalin, also kind of unbalanced the Soviet economy to lean too heavy towards heavy industry, not enough for medium or light industry. But this did mean, especially the five-year plan and industrialization, did manage to put Russia on a different developmental trajectory. So by the time the post-war period came, one, it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with, that's a complicated question. And then by the time the post-war period came, Russia had kind of jumped ahead of its developmental trajectory in a way that a lot of other countries didn't do. There are a few examples, like Japan is one that managed to, if you kind of ran a scenario where Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s, and ran it 100 times, the Japan of the post-war period is kind of one of the best outcomes, right? And I think that you could say that about Russian economic development, its ability to catch up at a certain level to the West. And then after that, of course, later on, as economies got more complex, as they kind of moved beyond regular heavy industry, and as the mainstay of the economy, the Russian economy and its command system was unable to adapt and cope and ended up falling back behind the West again by the 1970s. So all this is a very long story to say that a lot went wrong in Russia, the economic picture is actually a little bit more complicated. Politically, I think it's just a small party without much popular support, but with real popular support in a couple of cities, but a lot without a lot of popular support, empire wide, took power, and they felt like they couldn't give back power. And they kept holding on to power, and eventually among their ranks in these conditions, one of history's great tyrants took power and was able to justify what he was doing in the context of the Russian nation and development, but also all the threats that came from abroad through, you know, the Civil War wasn't just a civil war, it was really an invasion by many imperial powers all around the world as well. So I think a lot of it was conditions and circumstance. And I guess the question really is, to what role ideology played? Was there something within the socialist tradition that might have lended itself to authoritarianism? And that's something we should, you know, talk about. And that's a really complicated human question. It does seem that the rhetoric, the rhetoric, the populism of workers unite, we've been fucked over for way too long. Let's stand together. Somehow that message allows flawed or evil people to take power. It seems like the rhetoric, the idea is so good, maybe the utopian nature of the idea is so good that it allows a great speaker to take power. It's almost like if the mission, like, come with me, friends, beyond the horizon, a great land is waiting for us. That encourages sort of, yeah, dictators, authoritarians to take power. Is there something within the ideology that allows for that, for the sort of, for lying to people, essentially? Well, I might surprise you with my answer, because I would say, yes, maybe. But I think that it's not just socialism. Any sort of ideology that appeals to the collective and appeals to our long-term destiny, either as a species or as a nation or as a class or whatever else, can lend itself to authoritarianism. So you can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century. Now, some of these nationalisms used incredibly lofty collective rhetoric, like in Sweden, the rhetoric of, we're going to create the people's home. We're going to make this a country with dignity for all Swedes. We're going to make this a country that's more developed, more free, and so on. And they managed to build a pretty excellent society, in my estimation, from that. In countries like fascist Germany and Italy, they managed to do horrendous things in Japan and horrendous things with that. In the US, with national popular appeals, FDR was able to unite a nation to elevate ordinary working-class people into a position where they felt like they had a real stake in the country, and I think did great things with the New Deal. In Russia, of course, this language was used to trample upon individual rights and to justify hardship and abuses of ordinary individual people in the name of a collective destiny. A destiny, of course, that was just decided by the party in power and during the 30s and 40s by just Stalin himself, really. Now, I think that that's really the case for making sure that we have a bedrock of civil rights and democracy. And then on top of that, we can debate. We can debate different national destinies. We can debate different appeals, different visions of the world. But as long as people have a say in what sacrifices are being asked to do, and as long as those sacrifices don't take away what's fundamentally ours, which is our life, which is our basic rights. And voice, our voice. So this complicated picture, because help me understand, you mentioned that social democracy is trying to have social policies within a capitalist system in part, but your vision, your hope for a social democracy is one that goes beyond that. How do you give everybody a voice while not becoming the Soviet Union? While not becoming where basically people are silenced either directly through violence or through the implied threat of violence and therefore fear? So I think you need to limit the scope of where the state is and what the state can do and how the state functions, first of all. Now, for me, social democracy was like the equivalent of, I'll give a football analogy. It was the equivalent of, you know, getting to the red zone and then kicking a field goal. You know, you'll take the three points, but you would have rather got a touchdown. And for me, socialism would be the touchdown. It's not a separate, different playing field. Some people would say socialism would be an interception. Sure, sure. No, and they would have the right to, again, to say that and to say we shouldn't go further. And most coaches would take the safe route, right? So you're going against the decision. Anyway, I'll just take it as a point. Yeah, yeah. But I understand. So for you, the goal is full socialism. But I'll take the three points. You know, it's a part of, I just want to march down the field. I want to get within scoring position. The reason why we should really move from this analogy, but the reason why I call myself a socialist is looking through history and these examples of social democracy, you saw that they were able to give working class people lots of rights and income and power in their society. But at the end of the day, capitalists still have the ultimate power, which is the ability to withhold investment. So they could say in the late 1960s and early 70s, listen, I was fine with this arrangement 10 years ago, but now I feel like I'm going to, you know, take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country or I'm just going to not invest because my workers are paid too much. I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making more. I need more of an upper hand, right? So their economic power is then challenging the democratic mandate of Swedish workers that were voting for the Social Democratic Party and were behind this advance. So to me, what socialism is in part is taking the means of production, right, where this capitalist power is coming from and making it socially owned so that ordinary workers can control their workplaces, can make investment decisions and so on. Now, does that mean total state ownership of everything or a planned economy? I don't think that makes any sense. You know, I think that we should live in a society in which markets are harnessed and regulated and so on. My main problem is capitalist ownership, in part on normative grounds, just because I think that it doesn't make sense that we celebrate democracy and all these other spheres, but we have workplaces that are just treated like tyrannies. And in part because I think that ordinary workers would much prefer a system in which over time they, you know, accrued shares and ownership where they got, in addition to base kind of wage, they got dividends from their firm being successful and that they figured out how to, you know, large firms, they're not going to be making day-to-day decisions by democratic vote, right? But maybe you would elect representatives, elected managements once every year or two, depending on your operating agreement and so on. That's kind of my vision of a socialist society. And this sounds, I hope, like agree or disagree, agree or disagree, like it would not be a crazy leap into year zero, right? That this could be maybe a way in which we could take a lot of what's existing in society, but then just add this on top. But what it would mean is a society without a capitalist class. This class hasn't been, you know, individually, these people, you know, haven't been taken to re-education camps or whatever else, but they're just no longer in this position. And they're now part of the economy in other ways, like they'll probably be the first set of highly competent technocrats and managers and so on. They'll probably be very well compensated for their time and expertise and whatever else. But to me, both the practical end of things, like taking away this ability to withhold investment and increasing our ability to democratically shape investment priorities and to continue down the road of social democracy and on normative grounds by kind of egalitarian belief that ordinary people should have more stake in their lives in the workplace, leads me beyond social democracy to socialism. So there's a tricky thing here. So in Ukraine especially, but in the Soviet Union, there's the Kulaks, the possible trajectory of fighting for the beautiful message of respecting workers' rights has this dynamic of making an enemy of the capitalist class, too easily making an enemy of the capitalist class, with a central leader, populist leader, that says the rich and the powerful, they're taking advantage of you. We need to remove them, we need to put them in camps perhaps. Not said explicitly, until it happens, it can happen overnight, but just putting a giant pressure on that capitalist class. And again, the Stalin type figure takes hold. So I'm trying to understand how the mechanism can prevent that. And perhaps I'll sort of reveal my bias here, is I've been reading, I was gonna say too much, maybe not enough, but a lot about books like Stalin's War in Ukraine, and just I've been reading a lot about the 30s and the 40s, for personal reasons related to my travels in Ukraine and all that kind of stuff. So I have a little bit of a focus on the historical implementations of communism currently, without kind of an updated view of all the possible future implementations. So I just wanna lay that out there. But I worry about the slippery slope into the authoritarian figure that takes this sexy message, destroys everyone who's powerful in the name of the working class, and then fucks the working class afterwards. — So first of all, I think it's worth remembering that the socialist movement had different outcomes across Western Europe and Eastern Europe. And in some of these countries in Western Europe, there wasn't actually democracy before the workers' movement and before the socialist movement. So the battle in Sweden, for instance, was about establishing political democracy, establishing true representation for workers, and that's how the parties became popular. Same thing in Germany, too. Then it was the Social Democrats who were able to build political democracy, then on top of that, add layers of economic democracy, social democracy. The Swedish Social Democrats ruled basically uninterrupted from the early 1930s until 1976. It's kind of crazy to think about, but they were just in government, they were the leading member of government. Then a few different coalition partners would shift. Sometimes they were with the agrarians, sometimes they were with the communists briefly, but they ruled uninterrupted, and they lost an election in 1976, and they just left power. Then they got back into power in the 80s. So in other words, they created a democratic system, of course, with mass support of working class people. Then they truly honored the system because when they lost power, they lost power, they left power. There's plenty of cases like that across Europe and the world and in other countries like Korea and elsewhere, where the workers' movement, the most militant, the most class-centric workers, South Africa is the same way, created democratic systems. Now, Russia, I think a lot of what happened had to do with the fact that it was never a democratic country. It was ruled by a party, and the party itself was very easy to shift from a somewhat democratic party in Lenin's day to an authoritarian one in Russia. There was no distinction then between the party and the state. So your authoritarian party then became authoritarian total control over the entirety of the state. Now, the fact that the Soviet system involved total state ownership of production meant that the authoritarianism of the party state could go even deeper into the lives of ordinary people compared to other horrific dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile and so on, when maybe you could find some solace just at home or whatever else. You didn't have the same sort of totalitarian control of people's lives. But I would say that socialism itself has yielded different outcomes. Now, on the question of polarization, I guess that implies that this polarization, this distinction, is a distinction that isn't real in society, and that is kind of being manufactured or generated. So you mean the capitalist class and the working class, just to clarify? Yeah, okay. So in certain populist distinctions, the division is basically arbitrary or made up, the us versus them polarization, depending who the us and who the them are. It's truly a something that's manufactured. But capitalism itself as a system, as a system based on class division, whether you're your supporter or opposite, I think we should acknowledge it's based on class division. That is the thing creating that polarization. Now, I think what a lot of what socialists try to do is we try to take bits of working class opposition to capitalism, to their lives, to the way they're treated at work, and so on. And yes, we do try to organize on those bases to help workers take collective action, to help them organize in political parties, and so on, to represent their interests, economic and otherwise. But the contradiction exists to begin with. And if anything, this system, which I'm proposing, democratic socialism, would be kind of a resolution of this conflict, this dilemma, this thing that has always existed since Chieftain and follower and so on. We've had class division since the Neolithic Revolution. I think this is a democratic road out of that tension and that division of humanity into people who own and people have nothing to give but their ability to work. So that idea is grounded in going all the way back to Marx that all of human history can be told through the lens of class struggle. Is there some sense, can you still man the case that this class difference is over exaggerated? That there's a difference, but it's not the difference of the abuser and the abused. It's more of a difference of people that were successful and people that were less successful. So I'll play devil's advocate, which is that maybe one could argue that in its purest, earliest stage, capitalism was based on a stark difference. But then since then, two things have happened. One, a bunch of socialists and workers have organized to guarantee certain rights for working class people, certain protections. So in our system now, there are certain safety nets, less in the US than in other countries, but in a lot of countries are pretty extensive safety nets. Even like 40 hour work week, minimum wage, safety regulations, all that kind of stuff. And all those things are, in my mind, doses of socialism within capitalism. Because what you're doing is you are taking the autonomy of capitalists to do whatever they want with the people contracted to them. And the only thing stopping them is them potentially being able to go to another employer. But even then, it's kind of a potentially a race to the bottom. If you can't get more than $2 an hour from any employer in your market, you're going to have to live with it. So one factor is we have built in those protections. So we've taken enough socialism into capitalism that you could say that at a certain point, maybe it makes a qualitative difference and not just a quantitative difference in people's lives. The other thing is, over time, we've gotten wealthier and more productive as a society. So maybe at some point, the quantitative difference of just more and more wealth means that even if in the abstract, the division between a worker and a capitalist is real, if that worker is earning a quarter million dollars a year and has a good life and only has to clock in 35 hours a week, 30 hours a week, and has four weeks of vacation, then isn't it just an abstract or philosophical difference? So I think you could level those two arguments. What I would say is that, one, a lot of these rights that we fought for are constantly being eroded and they're under attack, in part because the economic power that capitalists have bleeds into our political democracy as well. There's constant lobbying for all sorts of labor market deregulations and so on. I fundamentally believe that if tomorrow all those regulations went away, capitalists would fight to pay people as little as possible, and we'd be back in 19th century capitalism. And not because they're bad people. Because if I'm running a firm and all of a sudden my competition is able to find a labor pool and is paying people less than me, I'm going to be undercut because they'll be able to take some of that extra savings and invest into new technology or whatever else, and they'll gobble up my market share before long. And then also beyond that, I do think there's a normative question here, which is, now, do we believe that ordinary people have a capacity to be able to make certain decisions about their work? Do we believe they know more about their work than their bosses? Now, I don't think that's true at every level, but I think there's no doubt that in workplaces, workers know how to productively do their task in ways that their manager might not know. I think we've all been in workplaces where we've had managers who kind of don't know what you do or whatever else. And I think that collectively, if incentivized, we could have them, one, instead of hoarding that information, since they're getting a stake in production and so on, they'd be able to more freely share it and be able to reshape how their day-to-day work happens. And also with elected managers, you kind of take that up the chain, I think you would have perfectly efficient market-based firms that could exist without capitalists. Lexer So there's a lot of things to say. Maybe within just a very low-level question of, if the workers are running the show, there's a brutal truth to the fact that some people are better, and the workers know this, this is the Steve Jobs A-players, you want to have all the A-players in the room, because one B-player can poison the pool, because then everybody gets demotivated by the nature of that lack of excellence and competence. This is just to take sort of a crude devil's advocate perspective. Are the workers going to be able to remove the incompetent from the pool in the name, in the goal of, towards the mission of succeeding as a collective? David So I think that any successful model of socialism that involves the market, you need two things. One is at the micro level, you need the ability to fire people and for them to exit firms, which might be a slower process in cooperative-based firms than it is in a capitalist firm without a union. But it would probably akin to the process that would happen in a capitalist firm, of which there are many with unions. So you need that. And then at the macro level, you need firm failure. You need to avoid a dilemma that happened in Soviet-style economies, which was soft budget constraints and firms basically not being allowed to fail, because the government was committed to full employment, the firms employed people, so even inefficient firms were at the end of the day, they knew they were going to be propped up by the government, and they would be given all the resources they would need, no matter how inefficiently they were using those resources to maintain employment. So I think you need both. Do you worry about this idea of firing people? Man, I'm uncomfortable with the idea. I hate it, but I also know it's extremely necessary. So is there something about a collective, a socialist system that makes firing, you said it might be slower, might it become extremely slow? Too much friction. Isn't there a tension between respecting the rights of a human being and saying, you need to step up, maybe sort of the positive carrot, to really encourage, fellow workers know when there's a person that's not pulling their side of the, doing as great of a job as it could be. But isn't the person that's not doing a great of a job going to start to manipulate the system that slows the firing in their self-interest? Well, I think there would be certain, so maybe another way to put it is, think about like, if you're a partner at a law firm, right? I don't really know how law firms work, so I probably shouldn't use this analogy, but correct me if I'm wrong, but let's say you're a partner, you kind of have equity in your law firm or something beyond your billable hours. And let's say you're going to be fired from your law firm or they're laying off people or whatever else, they could just get rid of you, but they would also have to figure out how to kind of buy you out to after a certain point. So I think that like in a cooperative firm, you'd probably have a system where you, after a certain point of working productively, you probably have a period where you get fired really quickly, no matter what, but once your job security kicks in, you would be able to, you know, it would be a process. It would probably be like, you know, a day or two process to figure it out, or maybe they would have a progressive discipline process, which is first, you have to get a verbal feedback, and then maybe a written performance review, then you could be fired. I mean, that's how it works in a lot of workplaces with either unions or with just basic job security. In most countries, that's how it works, because there's not at-will employment in most countries. So I think that the real tension is if you fire someone, if you're condemning them to destitution, then morally, you'd really feel something there, as you should as a human being concerned about other people. But in a social system, or even basic social democratic system, there'd be mechanisms to take care of that person. So one, if a firm is failing for any reason, they're getting out-compete or whatever else, those workers would then land in the hands, just for a little bit, of the state, right? And there could be active labor market policies to retrain people to go into expanding sectors, or your sector is now obsolete, but here, you have these skills, you're going to be trained, and here are some resources to kind of help you along your training, and then there's a bunch of firms hiring, so go on your way. And then also, just with an expanded welfare state, being destitute in certain countries, being unemployed in certain countries, is easier than in other countries or situations. So you still can fall back on that mechanism, and also my vision of market socialism, democratic socialism, there would be an expanded state sector. Not anything you can imagine, but the way in which there's more of a state sector in countries like Norway or Denmark than there is in the US, so there would be various forms of state employment and whatever else. So I think that the real question is, should being bad at your job, or getting fired for any reason, or getting laid off, should that be a cause to have you totally lose your shirt? Or maybe should you just have to rebound, maybe you have less money for consumption, or whatever else, and you'll be on your way onto bigger and better things in a few months. So a strong social net, in many ways, make it more efficient to fire people who are not good at their job, because then they won't be, that won't actually significantly damage their quality of life, and they have a chance to find a job at which they can flourish. Sure. To step out into the macro, there's a tension here as well. So you said that there's inequality between the classes, the capitalist class and the working class, and there's a lot of ways you can maybe correct me on the numbers, but you could say that the top 1% of Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50%. That's not talking about perhaps capitalist class and the working class, but it's a good estimate. The flip side of that, if you just look at countries that have more economic freedom versus less economic freedom, more capitalism versus less capitalism, their GDP seems to be significantly higher. And so at the local level, you might say that there's an inequality, but if you look historically over decades, it seems like the more capitalism there is, the higher the GDP grows, and therefore the level of the quality of life and the basic income, the basic wealth, the average, even including the working class, goes up over time. Can you see both sides of this? So I could definitely accept some of that premise. One, within capitalism, you want a bigger pie. Then if you divide up that pie, even if the bottom 10% of the working class share, let's say, is less as a percentage, it's still more in raw terms, so it's better for everyone. The part that I would dispute is more economic freedom versus less economic freedom. So there's obviously some countries in which capitalism doesn't work, and maybe economic freedom plays a role. If you're in a country like Egypt or India with a highly or previously highly bureaucratic system, so you need to get licenses to do anything, and you need to run things for the state, or you need to bribe someone to get an incorporation done or whatever else, that's a case in which I would accept the premise of, okay, economic freedom to take entrepreneurial risk to start something new is limited. There's all sorts of factors in which it's too difficult to start a firm, and it benefits no one really, except for whatever bureaucracy might be taking their 15% cut. But in general, I think in advanced economies, it doesn't really work that way. So think about it this way. If you're... Pretend like we're back... I'm sorry to go to Scandinavia again, but this is a good example. Let's say you're back in the 1970s in Scandinavia or whatever else. You're in a country with extremely powerful unions. So the unions have a lot of labor rights, the state has certain high taxation, certain guarantees on you too, but you're a capitalist there. Now, what would you do if your capitalist competitors in the US were able to pay workers $10 an hour and you have to pay them $20? You would probably, and assuming you can't just flee or shut down or whatever else, you'd probably find ways to use labor-saving technology. That power of the high wages might encourage you to invest more in technology and to utilize people's time better so they're more productive at work, so they're not just sitting around or whatever else. So this really happened in practice in the Scandinavian countries, in part because it was combined with a certain type of pattern wage bargaining. So I'll explain this really simply, but let's pretend that you're in a sector with three different companies. Let's say an automotive sector, and I'll just say one is GM, one is Ford, one is Chrysler. Now, all these workers in your sector are all unionized. They're all Swedish, UAW, whatever the equivalent is, members, and they're all paid the same, and the union is setting, through bargaining, the union is setting the wages across the sector. But the unions, and let's say GM is the most productive of these companies, Ford is number two, Chrysler is number three. The unions would intentionally set the wages, set their benchmark to Ford in the middle. So what that would do is say to Ford, okay, Ford will stay in business because they'll be able to meet the wage demands. Chrysler's probably might go out of business because they won't be able to meet the demands, or they'll have to really adapt really quickly. They might have to lay off people, they might have to restructure. So the union knows this in advance, and all the auto workers know this. But the most efficient manufacturer, GM, now has excess profits because if they were negotiating with just the GM workers, the GM workers might even have been able to demand more. But instead, these workers are pegging their wage demands to Ford's level, and GM is, in theory, able to expand and employ more people and adopt new production techniques with their surplus. Then those Chrysler workers would be absorbed by the state by active labor market policies, then put back to work for GM or for these expanding sectors. So in other words, you're now in a situation where the state has a pretty big role in your economy, taking a lot of your money and taxes, unions are really shaping your life as a capitalist far more than would happen in a country like the United States. And yet still, despite your more limited economic freedom, you're still creating a more productive economy. So it could work. It just has to be designed right. I think social democracies were designed the right way. I think any future democratic socialism after social democracy would have to be designed the right way. Could you just linger on that a little more, the patent wage bargaining? So GM is the most efficient, and Ford is the second most. Can you explain to me how, can you explain to me again, the wages, setting the wages to the Ford level, how that is good for GM? How that encourages more GM? This is just sectoral or actually in this case centralized wage bargaining. So setting the wages at a level that Ford can afford, but a level that would probably be too expensive to Chrysler in the automotive sector would benefit GM because they're drawing what we could call excess profits. Because GM, if the GM itself could potentially have to deal with just the enterprise of GM workers bargaining for wages, and if they saw their profitability was high, they would know their leverage and they would say, pay us even more or else we're going to go on strike. But instead, they're accepting slightly lower wages than they would have otherwise had in return for the company having excess profits that they're, through both the state, their union, and sometimes there's worker councils or whatever else, they're playing a role in saying, okay, we're going to make sure this excess profit is actually invested productively in order to expand employment and just output. Okay, can we talk about unions in general then? What are the pros and cons of unions? So the interest of the union, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, I have a lot to learn both about the economics and the human experience of a union. The union's interest is to, what, to protect worker rights and to maximize worker happiness, not the success and the productivity and the efficiency of a company, right? No, I would disagree. So I think a union's interest is in what's collectively bargaining on behalf of workers. Because in certain cases, you know, I am right now a manager at The Nation magazine, right? If I have a problem with my working conditions, or I need a raise or whatever else, I could, with my skill set, my background, my role in the company, I could go to my boss, the owner of The Nation and say, okay, I need to renegotiate my contract on these terms. I could bargain, right? Now, if I was a ordinary worker at like a CVS or something, if I didn't like my conditions, and I went to my boss and said, hey, I need a $2 raise, and you know, I need to like, be home by 830, because you know, I have obligations at home, the boss would probably say, I'm sorry, that's not possible, right? You know, maybe try the Rite Aid down the street, or the Walgreens down the street or whatever. Now, if I went to the boss at a place like CVS, or even better, if all the pharmaceutical workers, you know, at Rite Aid, CVS, Walgreens, went to our bosses and said, listen, you know, we collectively need to, $2 more and, you know, better hours, shorter shifts, or whatever else, then they would probably have no choice but to concede. You have to bargain collectively at any level, if you're an ordinary worker. And there are some exceptions, but that's for certain highly skilled workers. But even in those cases, of course, all workers are skilled, I mean, just the technical definition. Even in those cases, a lot of those workers have to bargain collectively as well, in order to get more wealth. But they cannot make their demands so excessive that their firm gets out of business. So the workers only are workers as long as they're gainfully employed. So often unions will try to select their wage demands at such a level that it ensures that their firm will stay in business. Yeah, but the problem is the way firms go out of business isn't by an explosion, like a way popcorn starts getting cooked. Like you, at a certain moment, it just is over. You can, it seems like the union can, through collective bargaining, keep increasing the wage, keep increasing the interest of the worker until it suffocates the company, that it doesn't die immediately, but it dies in like five years. So that might still serve the interest of the worker. But it doesn't serve the interest of society as a whole that's creating cool stuff. And increasing sort of a market that's operating and increasing cool stuff and constantly innovating and so on and creating more and more cool stuff and increasing the quality of life in general. I disagree with the premise, because I think in your even taking your example, that would be better for society. If a firm cannot pay its workers a living wage, but its competitors can, then that firm should, will either figure out a way to innovate, develop new techniques, new markets, new ways to be productive, or it should go out of business. And it would be better for it to go out of business than to stay in business, or to be artificially kept in business in any sort of way. And yeah. So that's the Chrysler, my old centralized bargaining. That's the Chrysler. Right. But then there is, you know, innovation costs money too. So the flip side of that, I think to play devil's advocate, is that it incentivizes, automotive industry is probably a good example of that. It incentivizes cutting costs everywhere. And sort of whatever has been making you money currently, figuring out how to do that really well without investing into the long-term future of the company for like all the different ways it can pivot, all the different interesting things it could do, in terms of investing into R&D. Whenever there's more and more and more pressure on paying a living wage for the workers, it might not, again, it might suffocate and die over the next 5, 10, 20 years, which might be a good destructive force from a capitalist perspective, but it might rob us of the Einstein of a company, right? Of the flourishing that the company and the workers within it can do over a period of 5, 10, 20 years. Well, this is just a problem with a lot of capitalism, which is about short-termism, right? Because the same thing could be said from you're starting a company, you have a plan for it to make a lot of money, but your investors want dividends right away. So you have to take away from your long-term R&D or other plans and deliver short-term dividends. That's often why a lot of, I think, R&D is often rooted in state institutions and research and whatever else is being drawn on. And also, I think that that's a reason why the state has some sort of role in fostering firms in either a, my version of a socialist economy or a capitalist economy or whatever else, to help with these time horizon problems. So I won't dispute that workers could play a role or wage demands could play a role in time horizon problems, but more often than that, it's coming from investors, it's coming from just a host of other market pressures that people might have. And I would say that in the real world, a lot of investment funds don't come from just retained earnings. It comes from a lot of sources. So I think this is a problem that could be solved through public policy, but definitely exists today as well. So you mentioned living wage. Is there a tension between a living wage, maybe you could speak to what a living wage means, and the workers owning all of the profit of the company? Sort of this kind of spectrum? No, I guess the spectrum is from like, no minimum wage, the lowest possible thing you could pay to a worker, then somewhere in that spectrum is a living wage. And then at the top is like, all of the profit from the company is owned by the workers. So split to the workers. I mean, I think that any society is going to have to make distributional choices. You could have, imagine a variety of capitalism in which workers are paid quite little, but there's extremely high taxation, and there's redistribution after the fact. You could imagine a system in which there's less taxation after the fact, but there's more guarantees and regulations on how much people are paid before the fact. In my vision of a socialist society, there would be similar way that unions work, and in my example, the centralized bargaining unions would work, that bargain at the sectoral level, and not just at the enterprise level like our unions do today. There could be benchmarks set for different occupations or wages. And the reason why you would want a benchmark at a worker-controlled firm is that you don't want workers self-exploiting themselves in order to gobble up market share, or because you don't want them collectively deciding, okay, we're going to invest in this longer term time horizon, and outcompete other people that way. So you might say, okay, if you do this sort of clerical work, you have to be paid the equivalent of $15 an hour, that's minimum. But on top of that, you get dividends from excess profits. And I think it would also have to be combined with public financing for expansions and for development, which could be done in quite a competitive way. So you could have a variety of banks, in my vision, state-owned banks. But how would they decide who to invest in and who to not invest in, who to give a loan for expansion to and who not to? Because you don't want it to be like, oh, I'm going to invest in my nephew's firm and not this other firm, or I'm going to invest in this guy's firm because he's an Italian, but not this guy's firm because he's Albanian, or whatever else. Just make it rational at the level of their goal is just like any other investment person at a bank today, to maintain a certain risk profile, and to have an interest yield, and decide to invest on that basis. So if there's a huge automotive firm that has been on business for 50 years, that needs a little operating cash, like yeah, they could get their $50 million at 3% loan if you have some crazy blue sky idea and you manage to get it to that point. Maybe you and your friends would get it at 12% or something close to what a VC would offer today. So I only kind of go into these details, not because to say that a system doesn't have to in advance map out all the different possibilities. But I think it does have to be willing to accept a lot of things that we know today. I can't give you a version of socialism that's everything's going to be fine, we're going to live harmoniously, and we won't have these sort of tensions, and you could hunt in the evening and fish in the afternoon and write criticism, or whatever else. I do hope that there's horizons beyond this that we could aspire to. I do have those visions. But for now, I think our task as socialists is to imagine a five minutes after midnight, what can we do right away within our lifetime vision? So that means through some level of central planning, reallocating resources to the workers. So I think the primary mechanism in this private sector under socialism would be a market mechanism, firms competing against each other to expand, connected to a system of public financing. But even at that level, the individual bankers and public banks and so on would be operating based on their own rationality. And the state would certainly shape investment decisions, but maybe no more than they do in a lot of capitalist systems. So the state might already today, in a lot of countries decide, we want to invest in green technology. So it's going to be favorable rates for people or tax credits for people investing in green technology. So the state already shapes investment. I think what should be centrally planned, and this is where I'm proud to sound like an old school socialist, is things like healthcare, things like transit, things like our natural monopolies of lots of types, I think can be done very well through planning. And we already have plenty of examples. But a lot of this society, I think, would be the private sphere of worker-controlled cooperatives competing against each other, weak firms failing, successful firms expanded. And the banks, you're saying publicly or privately owned? Publicly owned. Let's just put it all on the table that it's almost guaranteed that every system has corruption. So I guess the bigger question is, which system has more corruption? This one with central planning and worker cooperatives versus unfettered capitalism, or any flavor of capitalism? I think any system has potential for corruption. I think it depends on how good your civil service is, how much oversight do you have to resolve a problem once it arises. How does corruption happen in a socialist system? So you have to, again, I apologize, but the large scale examples of it, so we can look at Soviet Union, China, and Sweden, fundamentally different nations and histories and peoples and economic systems and political systems, but all could be called in part socialist. And so what, there's a ridiculous almost caricature of corruption in the Soviet system, the gigantic bureaucracy that's built, where somehow corruption seeps in through kind of dispersion of responsibility, that nobody's really responsible for the corruption. I just had a conversation with Ed Calderon, who fought the cartels in Mexico, and there's a huge amount of corruption in Mexico, but it's not like even seen as corruption. You understand when a cop pulls you over, you give this much money, and so on. And so that kind of seems to happen in certain systems, and it seems to have happened in socialist systems more than in capitalist systems in the 20th century. Or maybe I'm wrong on that. No, I mean, I think in a lot of countries, it's seen as the cost of doing business, right? Now, in particular countries built on a system of central planning, or just state allocation of resources with the state, both produces and allocates and things run through bureaucracies, then I think you're much more apt to have corruption than in a system with just a smaller sphere for the state. So for example, if you're in a hypothetical version of the US, you might see a lot more corruption in the post office, but you wouldn't have that corruption in your workplace. So you kind of learn to go around that. For one thing, even in state sectors, you can have, and this often is the case in democratic countries, you have a transparent civil service, where people who are corrupt are prosecuted by judges where it's frowned upon, and it just, over time, it goes away. So you go from having political machines that were tied to certain, you know, had friends in certain police precincts and whatever else in the US in the 19th century and early 20th century, to now today, that would be a huge scandal and unheard of, right? So I think over time, having a, a independent court system having a, a truly meritocratic civil service can be implemented anywhere. I think though, in the Soviet Union, the extra little bit that that happened was, you had a bureaucracy that just had so much power, because the bureaucracy was producing and distributing everything, and everyone was relying on the bureaucracy with jobs, the way to social advancement was through the bureaucracies. So you end up with people like Khrushchev, you know, people going from peasants to, you know, supreme leaders of countries just through getting hooked up in the bureaucracy and advancing within it. And, you know, not all these were bad people. I don't think Khrushchev was that bad of a person or Gorbachev, you know, they, they, but this is their mechanism to advancement and systems like this. In the vision of democratic socialism that I propose, the state doesn't have that overriding power to begin with. But I think in either case, you know, corruption has arose in many different systems and has been successfully dealt with. I think on the developmental trajectory of even countries today that we think of as being very corrupt, corruption will, will, you know, fade away as well. But you definitely need a system in which individuals act, individuals are incentivized to act rationally. So if you're in a system in which cops who are corrupt are prosecuted and investigated, and there's internal controls, a civilian board review, and kind of an internal investigators within police departments or whatever else, there will be less corruption over time if people are punished. If you're in a system in which you're running a firm, you're the manager of a firm, an elected manager, and everyone at that firm is trying for more efficiency and trying for more excess profits or whatever else at the end of the day, you know, dividends at the end of the day, then if you try to hire your nephew and he's not good at your job, you're not going to win re-election, right? So you shouldn't, I think no system should rely on a change in culture that come naturally or some sort of individual altruism. I think the systems have to be constructed in such a way that it's not rational to behave poorly. In sort of from a theoretical perspective, either a socialist or capitalist system can have either culture. But it seems like if you prioritize meritocracy, if the people that are good, whatever the good means, in terms of integrity, in terms of performance, in terms of competence, it seems like that leads to a less corrupt system. And it seems like capitalism, there's all kinds of flavors of capitalism, but capitalism, because it does prioritize meritocracy, more often leads to less corruption. So that's not a question of political or economic systems, it's a question of what kind of stuff do you talk about that leads to a culture of less corruption? First of all, I think in theory, maybe capitalism rewards meritocracy. But I think in practice, anyone watching this, or you and me, would think of some of the people we know that work the hardest and they're often, you know, working class people working in the food service industry or whatever else, right? I think we don't have, in practice, I don't think we actually live in a society that rewards people for hard work. I think we reward people for accomplishment, people for a combination of accidents of birth, plus hard work. Let me push back, because yes, so I agree with you. But let me push back on a subtle point, because I like to draw a difference between hard work and meritocracy. Because as a person who works really hard, like I work crazy hard, but I've also worked with a lot of people that are just much better than me. So hard work does not equal skill, good, productive. I just want to kind of draw that distinction. But I agree with you. I don't think our society rewards directly hard work, or even high skill. There's many examples, at least we can see that it does not do so. So we have an unequal distribution of talent, of course. So if we lived in a society in which there was some level of acceptable inequality, and it's a normative kind of question of how much we would say is acceptable, right? And that inequality was based on this unequal distribution of talent, then I think that would be fine with me, right? That would actually be a meritocracy. What I see in the US is often, okay, so if you are a upper middle class or rich kid, and you get a good education, K through 12, out of those people, there will be some that work extra hard and go on to do incredible things or very successful, and there'll be other people that do not, right? And decide for whatever reason, or go down a different path. And you could say, maybe among that group of the upper middle class, there is a meritocracy, right? But they're actually given those opportunities to make their own decisions and to fail, whereas many, many other people, the vast majority of American society, I would say 60 plus percent, don't really get those opportunities to make those choices to begin with. And I would aspire to the type of world, at least as a first step, in which our only inequalities are based on our unequal, innate kind of distributions of talent. Lex, I guess a lot of people worry that when you have a socialist in any degree central planning, or perhaps a collective of workers, that it won't result in that kind of meritocracy that you're talking about. But you're saying that no, it's possible to have that kind of meritocracy. Think about it this way. The workers themselves are incentivized and are shaped by market forces, too, right? They're trying to respond to consumer needs and preferences, they're trying to expand market share, they're trying to make money. So it requires no kind of leap into these people are going to be more altruistic or whatever else, even on purely bourgeois terms, the same way you would maybe justify competitive capitalist firms. I think you could justify this system as long as you think that people, elected management, can perform just as well. I think based on the experiences of cooperatives, we've seen that they can. And then at the state level, state bureaucracies have their own sort of sets of incentives. But in most systems that already have extensive state bureaucracies, these people at high levels are appointed or elected, they're held to certain standards. At the national level, a national government wants to maintain, you know, the tax revenue that they need to pay for school services. So we already, I think, have incentive structures that you could say that some people might just, I think, disagree with the normative thing of like, why would people have to own their own means of production, control their workplaces or whatever else? Why do we need this level of equality? Can't we just get by with our existing system, but just like, make things a little bit easier for capitalists to make money, and then everyone will benefit or whatever else? I mean, that's a normative question. And my vision of socialism, there'll be plenty of, you know, multiple parties with different views and perspectives trying to either push us deeper into more radical forms of socialism, or on the other hand, to kind of roll back to, you know, more capitalist forms of government. So I think that, again, you can't try to make up a perfect system and try to implement it, you have to, you know, do it as a process, democratically, and so on. So just philosophically, in your gut, you're more concerned about the innate equal value of human beings versus the efficiency of this wonderful mechanism that we call human civilization at producing cool stuff. Just like a gut, if we were sitting at a bar, that's where the gut feeling you come with. Of course, your mind is open, but you want to protect the equal value of humans. So I don't want to fight the hypothetical. So I'll say equality, I am concerned with equality, but I don't think the two are necessarily always in tension. But also, when you think about all the great things that human beings have produced, often, I think people today just look at the end outcome, like we go to the pyramids, and we'll marvel at the pyramids and the human achievement that it took to make it happen, but we won't, you know, stop to think about all the suffering that went into the making of that thing. So I think we kind of lean in the opposite direction, where we marvel at our achievements, but we don't often think about the suffering or exploitation that went into certain human achievements. I would love a society in which we could marvel at things and not have to worry about the exploitation that was involved, because there was no exploitation or oppression involved. There was just human ingenuity and creativity and collaboration. And to the degree, which you may disagree, to the degree there's a tension between the two, at least give equal weight to the consideration of the suffering, and don't just marvel at the beauty of the creations. To the degree there is a tension between the two. What Stalin did, actually, too, it's not just capitalists, but what Stalin did was he sacrificed whole generations, because he thought that he was building something for the future. For future Russians to enjoy and for future people of the world to enjoy. And actually, that analogy that I just gave about the pyramids was written by Karl Kotzke, the German socialist, anti-Stalinist critic, when he was complaining about US journalists and others going to Russia in the 1930s and marveling at all the new industries. You know, are these people blind to the suffering behind these things they're marveling about? Speaking of which, I think you mentioned in the context of social democracy that freedom of speech and freedom of the press, or basically the freedom of people to have a voice is an important component, which I think is something that caught my ear a little bit. Because if you think about the Soviet Union, one of the ways that the authoritarian regime was able to control, it's almost part of the central planning is you have to control the message and you have to limit the freedom of the press. So there's a kind of notion, especially in ideas, or maybe caricatures of the ideas of cultural Marxism, sometimes caricatured even further as wokeism, that you want to be careful with speech, you want to censor speech because some speech hurts people. So in some sense, you want to respect the value, the equality of human beings by being careful with the words you say. So is there a tension there for you? I think there's no tension. And in part, I think that it is very condescending or patronizing to assume that people can't take debate, that people can't, either as a society or individuals, visually be engaged in the exchange of ideas, or even very vigorous debate without being broken by it. It's just not the case. I'm basically a free speech absolutist. I mean, I would draw the line at obviously direct incitements of violence or certain other speech like that, but in general. You think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that? No, I mean, not people who know my work. I mean, more generally, I think a lot of people on the right, even in the center, I think might have the idea that a lot of the far left wants to censor them. I think some of the center left wants to censor them. But I think a lot on the far left, on the Marxist or socialist left, I think that, you know, free speech is more or less the norm. Yeah, where is the imperative to censor coming from? Is this just some small subset of the left on Twitter? Is there some philosophical idea behind certain groups that, like, if we're to steal me on a case in which group actually has the interest of humanity in mind in wanting to censor speech? I think we might need to just take it case by case for an example, by example, because honestly, I would have to think about a particular case. But let's just say generally that a lot of American liberalism rightly sees the revolution around the civil rights and later the extension of this rights revolution for gay rights and so on as being a very positive achievement of the last half century. And I completely agree. Now, for me, now that we've won those rights, a lot of our battle for change needs to go beyond the representational realm and needs to really reground itself in the material bread and butter struggles of ordinary people trying to survive, the battle for good health care for all Americans, and so on. These are my immediate demands. I think there's a segment of American liberalism that doesn't want to go in that confrontational economic direction and wants to skirt away from battles over things like universal health care and so on, and really are just still caught at this battle over rights and representation. And it's devolved in such a way that they feel like they need to make change. The way they make change is only through interventions and culture, because they don't really have the same sense of class and class struggle that agree or disagree with it. It's a very material plane. So instead, you know, they look at comedians who said the wrong thing, or they look at all sorts of other ways to make change. It's not really making a change, it's just making them look bad and making our culture worse. And I think that's where a lot of it comes from. But I think that a lot of the left, even the left that's much more into battles over, you know, race and lots of other stuff, like real serious anti-racist on the left. Of course, I'm an anti-racist, but a lot of my work is focused on the primacy of class. But even these people are very concerned about material struggles and issues, and they don't really care about, you know, these issues they think are issues they think are ephemeral kind of issues. So when you focus exclusively on language, that somehow leads you astray. Like on being concerned about language without deeper economic inequalities and so on, you just become an asshole. That's on Twitter pointing out how racist everyone is. So the anti-racism becomes a caricature of anti-racism. Exactly. Because anti-racism was really about the struggle of people for equal rights and voting. It was about the struggle for people who were trapped into bad neighborhoods because they couldn't get decent jobs and their neighborhoods were redlined or whatever else. It was really like a struggle for survival. And what was the main demands, like the language of this? One, it was the march for jobs and freedom. It was the slogan, I am a man, asserting the kind of universal dignity of people. This is what the civil rights movement was about. And it wasn't a surprise there was a lot of self-described socialists, people like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr. I mean, these were people who were Ella Baker. They were socialists. And I think a lot of Americans agree with them with their immediate demands, even though they weren't themselves socialists, but it was a very materialistic struggle. And I think a lot of this has been co-opted into just some sort of vague and disconcerting complaints about language or culture and so on. Martin Luther King was a socialist, to a degree was the socialist. I would love to learn about that. Martin Luther King, I think, broadly called himself at various points in his life, a Christian socialist or a democratic socialist, especially after his speech against the Vietnam War in the Riverside Church. I think that was 67. The last years of his life, he became much more involved in struggles against the war and also struggles for workers' rights. He was assassinated when he was at a rally at workers' rights. So he thought the next battle was going to be an economic battle. He had this famous line where he said, I don't just want to integrate the lunch counter if it means that we can't afford to order a burger while we're there. That was the line along those lines. And I think that got to his point where the civil rights struggle was part of a step of building some sort of wider movement. So he and these other civil rights leaders were very much interested in working with organized labor, working with the left as it was constructed then, and building some sort of mass space for not just rights but redistribution. It's fascinating. It's fascinating which figures self-identified and were in part socialists. Albert Einstein was one. Albert Einstein wrote an article for the first issue of this left-wing magazine, it's actually still publishing today, called Monthly Review, in I think 1949. And his article is called Why Socialism? I don't think it's paywalled, so people should check it out. But yeah, Einstein was one. So probably the central idea is the pacifist, the anti-war idea for him, or no? Honestly, it's been so many years since I read it. I think it was more about, I think it was actually more economically focused, but I would need to go back and read it. But is war in general a part of the fundamental ideas that socialists are, again, democratic socialists are against? Like what's the relation between socialism and war? So I think that traditionally in the socialist movement, war was associated with capitalist competition and international competition. And you can look at World War I as very much a case where different nations were competing with each other and developing quite violent rivalries. It was in part based on competition and the periphery over access to markets and colonies and whatever else. So it was very easy to draw a direct correlation. I am opposed to war. I'm opposed to imperialism, the domination of strong nations, dominating smaller nations. I wouldn't call myself a pacifist. I think most socialists wouldn't call themselves pacifists because there are some struggles that are worth fighting for. There's national liberation struggles and so on where if there's no democratic avenue for change, positive change has been made through armed revolts around colonialism and whatnot. But we're living in an age where hopefully, I know neither of us have children, but our children or children's children in the future won't have to live through war. And that is one thing that as countries have gotten more developed, as the world has changed, we've actually seen less and less war. I won't dispute Pinker on this. I think it's true. Obviously, Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Ethiopia is an exception. But on the whole, I think we're going in that direction. But I think it's always been a major organizing plank of socialists against war and against just kind of this sense of right-wing nationalism and national identity that often leads to war. And obviously, not everyone on the right has embraced that. A lot of libertarians are consistently anti-war as well. But I think the right ideologically has been associated with war, even if some advocates of capitalism have not been. Then there's the military-industrial complex, which is the financial machine of the whole thing. I presume... Well, since a lot of that is government, what's the relation to socialism and the military-industrial complex? Well, a lot of it's government contracts, but it's privately produced, right? By companies like Lockheed Martin and things like that. You could draw a very crude materialist connection between any of these things to kind of prove an ideological point. But we could produce just as many arms and then just bury them or never fire them off or whatever else. Obviously, there are companies that have a vested interest in heightening up tensions or saying that we need to buy a new weapons system to be prepared for a conventional war with China, Russia. Meanwhile, I think we all know that if there's going to be a conventional war between these countries, like it's going to lead to something worse. And no amount of advanced fighter jets is going to make a difference. But I try to avoid cruder, causal connections, even though there are relationships. It's kind of like the old slogan, which was quite an effective slogan in the early 2000s. At my first anti-war marches when I was a teenager, I definitely have shouted it, but kind of no war for oil. Both is correct in that it gets to what people's senses of what's going on, how it's bad. But also analytically, it's kind of wanting to explain what really happened or why we ended up in the Middle East, which is a much more complex geopolitical story. Yeah. And it is a story of geopolitics. It's perhaps less a story of capitalism or socialism. It's a geopolitical story that I think actually operates outside of the economic system of individual nations. It has to do more with, honestly, in part, egos of leaders. And there is an international battle for resources, but surely there's alternatives. Yeah, definitely. And I think that part of what being a socialist is, is about dreaming in the long term about a different sort of world without, in my mind, needless divisions of people into nations with standing armies. I'm sure we'll still have pride about where we're from, and there'll still be distinctive cultural features and so on about where we're from. We definitely would, at least for the foreseeable future, be divided into places as administrative units. But the idea that there should be a Mexican army and an American army and a Russian army and a Ukrainian army is just on the face of it, I think in the long run will be seen as ridiculous. Just like we see it as ridiculous today, looking back at the idea that a lord from London would be engaged in civil strife with a lord from Liverpool and a bunch of peasants would die. On the face of it, it just seems ridiculous that these different places would have their own banners and lords and armies. I think in the long run, you might have to zoom out a thousand years, but in the long run, people will say the same about nation states and standing armies and battles over specks of dirt that mean nothing in a cosmic sense. Yeah, no, for sure, aliens would laugh at us, or humans that go far beyond Earth and look at the history. Well, most of the history will be forgotten because if humans successfully expand out into the universe, just the scale of civilization will grow so fast that the bickering of the first few thousand years of human history will seem insignificant. There's a very Marxist idea that I both appreciate in one way, but on the other hand, it's kind of scary, which is that human history is only now beginning, before we're in prehistory, but in the future, we'll be in real history. I think that a lot of really important history has already happened, and I think posterity will remember it. I think that it will be easier to assign certain people the role of villains, the people not to engage in the contentious topic, off-topic of Ukraine or whatever else, but the idea that one government or man would launch a war to recover or to take several hundred square miles of territory, and tens of thousands of people will die, I think seems absurd to us, many people today, luckily, but it would not have seemed absurd 50, 60 years ago. It would have just been a normal thing, these kind of territorial disputes and so on. I think, projecting into the future, I think within our lifetimes, we'll live to see that kind of conflict be eradicated. And in part, you could say that, like, why? I think it's because of popular pressure and organization. So you could say kind of the pro-worker, socialist organizing part of it, making it less normal. If you're a capitalist, you could say, well, markets are more interlinked, so war is even more irrational. I don't really have a firm answer, whatever it is, I think it's a good thing. You mentioned Marxist view of history, it's kind of interesting to just briefly talk about, what do you think of it? What do you think of this Marxist view of how the different systems evolve from the perspective of class struggle, is what we're talking about? Well, I fundamentally, I'm a Marxist, I fundamentally believe in the broad contours of historical materialism. But I think we should be clear on what Marxist theory tells us and what it doesn't tell us. I think Marxist theory tells us pertinent things about how societies evolve, about how the distributional resources work in any given society, who owns, who doesn't, how the conflict, distributional conflicts, and so on. I think Marxism can tell us a lot. How surplus is distributed. Exactly, exactly. Exactly, exactly. What it can't tell us is, as a friend put it, a sex appeal of blue jeans, or whatever else. That's beyond what Marxism is meant to do. What economic system can tell us about the sex appeal of blue jeans? No economic system, but socialism in the Soviet sense, when it was turned into the Soviet style dialectical materialism, was meant to tell us everything from how to explain genetics and agriculture and whatever else, in a very disastrous way. So I definitely don't believe in the application of these ideas in an extremely wide way. And also, I'm a Marxist because it's a framework that helps me understand pertinent facts about the world. If at some point I no longer think the framework is doing that, I will not be a Marxist. But I'm a socialist on normative grounds, because I have certain beliefs about the equality of people, because I believe that we should have a society with liberty, with equality, with fraternity. And that I hope I'll always be a socialist until the day I die. But it's kind of a very unscientific or unserious thing to say, this is my framework from beginning to end, you know, for the rest of my life. But from a perspective of history, you should say that, so Marx says that you go through, societies go through different stages. It could be crudely summarized as primitive communism, imperialism, maybe slave society, feudalism, defined by marketalism, then capitalism, then socialism, and finally stateless communism. Did I miss something there? I mean, I think that was that was close enough. I mean, I think that's definitely true of Marxist theory, that the contradictions of capitalism, the fact that it has brought together all these workers, all these materials, and whatever else, and it's now allowing it to socially create wealth on a mass scale. But that wealth is that process is being privately directly directed. And also the surplus is being privately kind of appropriated, is a contradiction. And that would lead to some sort of rebellion or revolution or change. And eventually, this contradiction would be a Federal production too. So we would have to move into a socialist society. But actually, just to backtrack, so in terms of contradiction, so it starts when we're in a village, hunter-gatherers, that's what you call primitive communism, where everyone's kind of equal, it's kind of a collective, right? All right, maybe you could just let me, hold on a second. And then inequalities form of different flavors. So that's what imperialism is, is one dude rises to the top and has some control of different flavor. That's what feudalism with, when you have one dude at the top, and you have merchants doing some trading and so on. And then that leads to capitalism, when you have private ownership of companies, and they do some, they result in some kind of class inequality. And eventually, that results in a revolution that says, no, that's, this inequality is not okay, it's not natural, it doesn't respect the value of human beings, and therefore it goes to socialism, where there is, under Marx's view, I guess, some role for the state. State is doing some redistribution, and then the pure communism, at the end, is when it's, you know, like, it's a collective, where there's no state-centralized power. So, what part of that is wrong? No, I think, broadly, the Marxist theory of history is about different types, different modes of production that exist at various times, based on material conditions. So, in the early times, in this theory, there was not much surplus being generated, right? And there was generally egalitarian societies. Then, as we became agricultural, as society developed, there was more surplus being produced. Then there was a group of people, the ruling classes of their age, that controlled and distributed that, that controlled that division of labor, and appropriated more of that surplus for themselves, and they weren't involved in productive labor. In early print of society, everybody's involved in productive labor. Later on, you had castes of priests who did nothing but kind of pray and write and kind of lecture people all day, right? And you had kings and rulers and bureaucrats and traders and so on. You have a more complex division of labor, but also more inequity driving out of that. Capitalism was a revolutionary system, because it took away, one, it made us tremendously more productive, right? It expanded production beyond our wildest imaginations, but it also no longer bound workers to their lord or master, or whatever else. They were now free to move, free to engage in contracts with employers and so on. But even though workers are now producing all this tremendous wealth, and even though productive forces had been matured in such a way, they were ultimately taken away from all the wealth that they were created. They got some of it back. They were in wealthy societies, but they were all there collectively together producing this wealth. And that was a potent force. So Marx theorized that would lead to a revolution or change in a socialist direction. I think, in fact, what we saw was that, yes, workers are dependent on, capitalists are dependent on workers. But the dependency is obviously symmetrical in the sense that workers are also dependent on capitalists. But in fact, it's an asymmetrical dependency in that ordinary workers need their jobs more than capitalists need the contribution of individual workers. So it became kind of a collective action problem, where you would need the mass of workers to get together, decide to change things, but also people would be afraid because they'd be dependent on their jobs for their livelihood, and so on. So revolution became a lot harder than people thought, especially in democratic countries, where workers had certain outlets and certain powers and rights and responsibility. It's no surprise that where you did have socialist revolutions, they were in places like the third world post-colonial states trying to emerge out of colonialism. They were in places like China and Russia, autocratic countries, and never in an advanced capitalist country. Now, in Marxist theory of history, even as interpreted by a lot of smart Marxists like G.A. Cohen and others, there is a certain inevitability to socialism after capitalism. The way that I would put it myself is I kind of have a more, I guess you could say, like, Kantian view of it. I think socialism is something that ought to happen, but it's not something that necessarily will happen, and we'll need to organize and persuade, and also potentially, again, the key part of any social system that's democratic is you have to allow for the possibility of a democratic revision to a different sort of system. So I'd be more than happy in my vision of socialism for there to be capitalist parties getting, you know, in my, hopefully, three, four, or five percent of the vote, maybe a lot more, in the same way that in the U.S. or a republic, we could right now have a monarchist party. No one's going to support a monarchist party in the U.S. in serious numbers. Although that's gaining popularity. In Europe or elsewhere? No, in, isn't there, in the anarchist tradition, isn't there, aren't they saying that one of the ways you could have a leader is in monarchy because they're more directly responsible to the citizens? If you have a leader, it's healthier to have a monarch. Anyway, I'm not familiar with this, but I have heard this stated a lot of the times. In the left-wing anarchist traditions, like anarcho-syndicalism or whatever else, their slogan is kind of, no kings, no gods, no masters or whatever, so, no bosses. So they definitely would not agree with that, but I'm, you know, not familiar enough. Anarchism runs a gamut from left to right in interesting ways. I'll have to ask about that, but yeah, okay, so you're not, you don't believe Marx's theory of history in the sense that every stage is a natural consequence of every other stage. Of course, he would predict that somebody like you must exist in order for those stages to go from one to the next, because you might, because you have to believe ought in order for action to be taken to inspire the populace to take action. So, two things. One is, I do broadly believe in Marx's theory of history because it's just explaining how productive forces develop and the relations of production in any given system. I guess there's a theory of transition from capitalism to socialism that Marx didn't really spell out, but it was kind of implied that it would naturally happen. And Marx was living in an era of tremendous upheaval. You know, Marx himself actually saw, when he was living in London in the 1870s, the Paris Commune, when workers took over for just a few months, but they took over the producers of Paris, took over the city, basically created their own government, their own system, and so on. So he was living through an era of upheaval. And Engels, especially, oversaw and was the mentor to all these rising socialist parties. So he was very close, closely collaborating with socialists in places like Britain and Germany, when they were drafting their first programs for the Social Democratic Party. So it felt like this was going to happen. It felt like this rising working class would take power. But I think the stability of the system was underestimated. It's easy to see the contradictions in the system, but can you see its mechanisms of stability, the way in which mass collective action or revolution is more the exception or the norm? Could you have imagined, if you're Marx, not only how much wealth the system would produce over time, which I think you could have imagined, but also developments like the welfare state, and mass democracy and universal suffrage, which might have changed how workers relate to the system or operate within it. So I think it's just a transition part that I think wasn't spelled out properly. But I think in either case, as socialists, we can assume that history is working in our favor. We just need to kind of hold out and wait for the inevitable revolution. We have to convince people of both, one, the struggle for day-to-day reforms, and why it's important to be politically organized, why it's important to be a member of a union or to advocate for things like universal health care or whatever else, to try to kind of build the cohesion and sense of self of the class. Then ultimately, for the desirability, once we accomplish it, once we build social democracy, of going beyond social democracy, which is, of course, the challenge. Now, I don't think it requires leadership from the outside. I think there are plenty of organic leaders that have emerged from the working class that have advocated for socialism from the working class. And if you look at the class composition during the glory days of the European Socialist Parties, I mean, this was very much a working class parties and organizations. It's only been the last like 30 years that it's been taken over by professionals. And not coincidentally, they have accomplished very little in those 30 years. So that's the practical and the pragmatic. Can we actually jump to the horizon? As you mentioned, as a social democrat, you focus on the policies of today, but you also have a vision and dream of a future. And so Marx did as well, so the perfect communism at the end. Can you describe that world? Also, is there elements of that world that has elements of anarchism? So, like I said, there's Michael Malice next door. So, like anarcho-communism, I don't even know if I'm using that term correctly, but basically no central control. Can you describe what that world looks like? I think the traditional socialist vision of kind of, if you want to call it full communism, would be very similar to the anarchist vision of a world without coercion, mass abundance, and so on. I myself don't share that vision. I believe that we will always need to have a state in some form as a way to, one, even just mediate difference. I think traditionally a lot of Marxists have thought that after you remove the primary contradiction, quote unquote, of class, that all other political questions would be resolved. And I think that's a lot behind a lot of the thinking of we're going to have a full communism after politics. I don't think there will be an after politics. I think, for one thing, let's say, I'll give you another Northeast example. Let's say me and you are trying to, with different groups of people, we're trying to figure out how to build a crossing of the Hudson River. And for various reasons, you and the people around you want to build a bridge, me and the people around me want to build a tunnel. That's a question that you will probably need a mediation for, right? You'll need, one, it's a big project, so there'll be a very complex division of labor and so on. But even beyond that, just politically, you will need the state to mediate the difference. You'll need to have a vote, have a vote that people trust, have institutions that people trust, and so on, to make a decision. Society is never going to go beyond that decision making. You don't think it's possible outside of the state to create stable voting mechanisms? Or is human nature going to always seep into that? I just wonder why we would have to, if the state is democratic and responsive, the state isn't authoritarian. So it might not be called a state, but it would function as a state, right? But why not just call it a state? But in other words, if you don't have something like that, then don't you have a greater risk of tyranny or tyrant emerging in the vacuum? So I think people's fear of the state is what would happen if the state had too much power. And I think that's a legitimate fear. That's why we have democratic checks on state power, and certain guarantees of freedom, and so on. But yeah, I guess I just wonder, I'm more afraid of the vacuum and not having a democratic responsive state, and what the world would turn into. And also, I'm just not a utopian thinker, if that makes sense. I like to think that I'm an egalitarian thinker. I'm a socialist. But my mind just goes to, I can see a vision of the future that I would like, like 50, 60 years from now. Maybe there's some sort of future of superabundance and automation. And there's some sort of techno utopian future, we don't want some of those things that would exist in my, you know, five minutes for now vision of socialism. But I just don't see it. And in general, I'm kind of wary of visions of change that seem like they're not built off little thing pieces that we have now and not built off history and experience and whatever else. I don't want a year zero. I don't even like the term prehistory, because I think there's a lot in history that I want, you know, I want Shakespeare under socialism, you know, I want a lot of things that I think we should be grateful for. There's a part of tradition that I think that exists, that's hierarchical and exploitative and whatever else. But there's another part of tradition, that's our sense of place and belonging and our connection with the past, and hopefully the future. And I want to keep that. Yeah, so you're worried about revolution or otherwise a vacuum being created, and you're worried about the things that might fill that vacuum. So the anarchists often worry about the same mechanism of the state that controls voting, or keeps voting robust and resilient and stable, the same mechanism also having a monopoly on violence. That's the tension. So they're very, they get very nervous about a central place having a monopoly on violence. Whereas if there is going to be a place for the monopoly on violence, let's just say, temporarily take that for granted, should it not be a place with a skilled, elected, accountable, transparent civil service, with a democratic mandate, and so on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well put. Speaking of AI, just to go on that tangent, do you think it's possible to have a future world at least 50 years, 50, 100 years, where AI, there's an AI sort of central planning, sort of the, we remove some of the human elements that I think get us into a lot of trouble. Like you could, you can take a perspective on the Soviet Union, and the flaws of the system there have less to do with the different ideologies, more to do with the humans and the vacuums, and how humans fill vacuums, and the corrupting nature of power, and so on. If we have AI that's more data-driven, and is not susceptible to the human elements, is it possible to imagine such a world? Almost like a from a sci-fi perspective. Maybe in the future you can imagine certain calculation problems that arose during central planning, solved through advanced computing. But I would say that there's another whole set of problems with the system that were incentive problems, and I'm not sure how that advanced computing would solve the incentive problems of how do you get people to actually produce things that other people want. Kind of that informational question, how do you communicate without endless meetings, or someone reading your brain, what do you actually want? So there's that kind of informational question, but then there's the incentive of, you know, how do you get people to work efficiently at work, and how do you get firms to use their resources that they're getting more efficiently? And I think solving the calculation problem solves some of these questions, but not all of them. But you know, that's kind of a who knows, but if your vision of the future requires some sort of leap into a technological unknown, that's very hard to advocate for today. It's exciting to consider the possibility of technology empowering a better reallocation of resources. If you care about of kind of the innate value of human beings, and think of the mechanism of reallocation of resources as a good way to empower that equality, that it's nice to remove the human element from that. Like if you work really hard, and you're really good at your job, it's nice to be really data-driven in allocating more resources to you. So kind of, like I kind of think that the agency part requires human beings and conscious human activity. So I think if you have a sort of planning system that works, and let's say the technology is there for it to work, I would want it to be democratic planning in such a way that there is a human element, there is some debate and deliberation in society. And also, even in my vision of socialism, with the state sector and state investments and so on, I'd want there to be more public discussion and debate about certain things, so it's not just left to technocrats, because you don't want to live in society where you just find out the next day that there's some massive infrastructure project that you haven't, you know, had a chance to think about or debate or feel like you're participating in, you know. And debate is not just facts and logic. That's why, if the whole universe was about facts and logic, computers could do a better job of that. There's something about humans debating each other that goes into the difficult gray areas of what it means to be human and what it means to have a life that's worth living. That requires humanity. And I'm also worried about, while I'm excited by the possibility of AI controlling everything, half-joking, but the reason I'm really terrified of that is because usually there's a possibility of a human taking control of that system. So you now start to get the same kind of authoritarian thing. Well, I am a human, I'm smart enough to be able to control this AI system, and I will do, based on what this AI system says, what's good for you. It's kind of like talking down to people and then use that AI system to now have the same kind of thing as Hollywood Moore in 1930s. And also our preferences might change. So an AI system might say the goal of humanity is to just increase infinitely efficiency or increase output, whereas we might collectively decide that, you know, we have enough and we want to have a trade-off, right? And I think that we need a system that allows for people to make certain trade-offs. And have more of this leisure that I've been learning about from you. This is a very interesting concept, leisure. How do you spell that? All right, so if we can step into the practical, we were talking about historical and philosophical, into the practical of today. What are some of the exciting policies that represent democratic socialism today, modern socialism? I think you mentioned some of them, you know, Medicare for all or universal healthcare. Something you haven't mentioned is tuition-free college, increasing minimum wage, maybe stronger unions like we talked about. What are some ideas here? What are some ideas, there's a special policy, especially exciting to you? Well, I think that hours reduction has always been an important demand for socialists. So, I mean, it's been a reality in certain countries like France in recent decades, where part of the logic is, if you have a bunch of people working for 40 plus hours a week, and you also have some unemployed people who would like more employment, then it's not a zero-sum game, you could reduce hours to 35 hours and still maintain the same output by employing more people to kind of fill the slack in hours. So one, I think it's a solidaristic thing in working class movements between unemployed and employed workers. I also think that, yeah, it gives people more time. So Marx was a big advocate in his day of a 10-hour bill in the UK that would have reduced the hours of working time and reduced child or eliminated or reduced child labor and other things as well. And part of it was, this is a radical demand because it's reducing the sphere, as you saw, of exploitation. So it's putting limits on how much time the capitalists can take from ordinary workers and how much freedom they would have. With healthcare, one, I just think it's a government healthcare system. You could tell me that you don't want it in the US, but you can't tell me it doesn't work, because we've seen it work in every other major industrial system in different forms. So what does that usually involve? What does universal healthcare involve? So there's different varieties. In the UK, for instance, they have a national health service in which medical personnel and hospitals are run directly by the state. It's almost like a mini-Soviet system, to be honest, but just for healthcare. And it works pretty well just for healthcare. And I think it's one example of the way in which you could actually take the market. So I give you a vision of socialism that involves a lot of market, but I think there are certain spheres where you could remove the market from and still have an efficient system, in part because this is an area in which people don't have, obviously for cosmetic procedures or whatever, they have preferences. But for most routine things that people do in healthcare, they just need to see a doctor. They need to get diagnosed. Some of these systems have had trouble with waitlists for specialists or whatever. That's more of an allocation problem of, if you want more specialists, you pay specialists more. This is problems that could be solved through the mechanisms of planning and government-run healthcare. So that's the most left-wing that you could get, is the system in the United Kingdom. Beyond that, you have a system like Medicare for All, where you say, all right, most of the doctors, besides for public hospitals that already exist, are going to be privately employed by hospitals. The hospitals are going to be private. But instead of having all these different insurance carriers, we're just going to have one national insurance carrier that we're all going to pay into. That national insurance carrier is going to negotiate the price of healthcare with doctors, the price of drugs with pharmaceutical companies, and so on, to hopefully reduce prices and to implement a different little bit of planning into the system. Because if there's only one big national insurance company, that company has a lot of weight and power. But you could still visit your same doctor, and there's still some... It's not as radical of a shift in that direction. And that's the dominant demand of Bernie Sanders, and the left right now. There's 30 plus million people in the US that would be insured that currently aren't insured. If we move to this system, there's a lot of other people that are underinsured or worried about how to pay copays or premiums involved. I think it would be a net benefit for the vast majority of the US population, even if it was offset by certain taxes, because we spend a lot of money out of pocket with health insurance. And it's a demand also that's widely popular. So for me, it's almost like if you're trying to build support for something like socialism, we were talking this lofty vision of socialism after capitalism, or what worker ownership, the means of production would look like in practice, and so on. And by the way, you're one of the few interviewers who ever asked me any of the details. So it's good that I've been thinking of a rough sketch in my head for the last, you know, whatever, 16 years I've been a socialist. But we have to start in the here and now. And if you can't convince people that the state should play a bigger role in their health insurance, and you can't convince Americans and a whole host of other sectors that they should be living in something closer to social democracy, how are you going to convince those people that there should be worker ownership of the means of production? It's kind of a ridiculous, like, leap if you don't have the credibility as the group of people organizing for universal health care, organizing for a $15 minimum wage and able to get the goods. And also in practice, as we fight for these reforms, ordinary people will have a better sense, at least my hope is, of what it means to be involved with politics and what politics can do for their lives. It's positive, because right now, when we talk about politics, it often just seems that we're talking about, like, a very glib cultural conflict removed from the things that are important in our lives. Whereas in truth, I think politics can be a tool for us to make our lives better. Yeah, and there's like deep ideas here, where in some sense, universal health care and worker collectives are not so radically different, that there's just, there's philosophical ideas to explore and accept. And also, from my perspective, at least, maybe I'm wrong on this, but it seems like with a lot of things at the core of politics, the right answer, from an alien perspective, is not clear. Like, everybody's very certain of what's the right answer. Everyone's certain universal health care is terrible, or in the case of universal health care, majority of people think it's a good idea. But I don't think anyone knows. Because I think that depends on cultural history, on the particular dynamics of a country, of a political system, on the dynamics of the economic system in this country, of the changing world. The 21st century is different than the 20th century. Maybe the failures of communism in the 20th century will not be repeated in the 21st century. Or the flip side of that, maybe capitalism will actually truly flourish with the help of automation in the 21st century. I don't think anyone knows. So people like you are basically saying, arguing for ideas, and we'll have to explore those ideas together. Why do you think, if universal health care is popular, why don't we have universal health care in the United States? Well, democracy is a great thing. Political democracy is wonderful. It came from the struggles of ordinary people to expand suffrage and so on. But the economic sphere, entrenched power in the economic sphere, bleeds into our political democracy. So I think there's a lot of people with a vested interest in not having universal health care. There's large industries with a vested interest in not having universal health care. They pay for ads, pay lobbyists, they influence government, and they have made it very difficult. So you can't get universal health care done without the bill, even if you pass something and you're trying to make a change. Like Obamacare was supposed to have a public option. Everybody's been running on a public option in the Democratic Party for 12, 13 years. Why don't we have a public option? People know that if people have the choice of buying into a government plan, that might just keep, that might be the slow road to really having universal health care. So I think a lot of it's opposition. Do you like that idea, the public option? Maybe you can, like, because isn't there complexities, like pre-existing conditions? So isn't a public option, meaning you can not have any insurance until you get to trouble? And then you can, if it covers pre-existing conditions, just start paying for insurance then? Therefore young people don't pay for insurance. Isn't it better to go full in? I don't support a public option in part because I think if we allow politicians to just say, hey, I support a public option, it's just kind of a way to signal your support for universal health care, but give us nothing. And I think that's what we saw under, with Biden, a lot of other politicians that have supported a public option. I think in practice, if a public option is defined in such a way that it just means you, you, you know, by default can just opt in to a public plan, and let's say hypothetically you don't even have to pay for it, then it's just a backdoor to universal health care really quickly. Because I think the vast majority of people who aren't currently covered, and also a lot of employers, to be honest, would probably drop their private coverage if they knew their employees can just get a public option and maybe would only provide supplemental insurance or whatever else. But I think the broad overarching point of all these demands is to say that socialists need to be really connected to the day-to-day struggles of people to just improve their lives. So if you're feeling like you're paying $400, $500 on the Obamacare market for health insurance, and that's hampering your ability to do what you want to do in your life, then maybe you would support a candidate who's for universal health care. If you feel like you're struggling to find work that you could afford to pay your rent with or whatever else, maybe you'll support a candidate committed to all sorts of mechanisms to reduce housing prices or increase your power as a tenant and whatever else. So I think it's like these day-to-day concerns need to be connected to the more abstract and lofty vision of change. Otherwise, our politics just becomes like this fantasy world thing that's nice ideas to think about or debate, but really won't make much of a difference in people's lives. What do you think about free college? Should college be free? So I would say free college is not at the top of my list of priorities, but it definitely should be free in my vision of a just society. What is at the top, just to clarify, is the universal health care up there? Yeah, universal health care is probably far higher in my priorities than free college. I think right now, the way our system is built, when someone goes to college, they're given credentials, they're given a decree they carry with them for the rest of their life. It gives them a chance to join a privileged part of the labor market. It's not a zero-sum game. I don't want college-educated people to think that non-college-educated people are their enemies and vice versa, because a lot of them are just ordinary working-class people trying to survive, and they're in different areas or in different sectors. Some of them are in nursing sectors where they need a college degree and so on. But if you just make college tuition free, but you don't also make trade skills and other things free for someone to learn how to become an electrician or a plumber or whatever else, then to some degree, you're privileging one sector of the labor market over another. So I would advocate just, if you're going to make something like that free, you just have to make sure that you're doing it in an egalitarian way, and that one, the options, the routes to college are more equal. So there's more investment in K-12 education so that more kids in rough neighborhoods have the chance to go to college, and for those that choose the trade route from any part of the country, that they're given the skills and resources for vocational trainings, and those are also free. And it just feels like, in terms of order of operation, I would just start with K-12 education, improving it, and whatever else, then college after. But I'm not opposed to it. So does that, improving K-12 education, does that mean investing more into it? Is it as simple as just increasing the amount of money that's invested in public education? In general, when it comes to the public sector or any sphere that you're investing in, obviously it's not just as simple as throwing money at a problem. I do think we have a lot of schools that are underfunded, but we have other schools that are adequately funded, but the conditions in which those schools are, like the neighborhoods they're in and what's going on in society, the problems are so deep that it's impossible for just education to solve everything. And I think especially a lot of liberals think that education should be the panacea. Invest in education, you'll help people. If kids are living in poverty, if they go into school hungry or whatever else, education's not gonna give them everything they need to succeed. So sometimes we, I think, put too much weight on education. And of course you could define education more broadly, which is the care of the flourishing of the young mind, whatever that is, whatever you call it. Early, yeah. A lot of it starts with... So New York City, at least, we do have universal pre-K. So from age three onward, you have the option for that. It's important for kids' socialization. Their parents are now able to know that they could go to work or do something else and have their kids taken care of. There's a lot of measures like that that we could do to equalize things. And again, for libertarians in the audience, some of this stuff is scary because it's obviously more state-involved. State-involved in pre-K, state is already very involved in K-12, more investment into state institutions like our state universities and in college. But for me, it's not a question of state versus non-state. It's a question of good outcomes for people. And it just happens to be that for working-class people, having the collective power to elect representatives that will build a broader safety net is in their interest. For upper-middle-class people, for others, they could afford to pay for their own provisioning either directly or through Obamacare-like schemes where you just get a subsidy and you pay the rest yourself and whatever. This is for really the bottom 40% plus of the population. They really don't have any options, so they prioritize other things. They end up with some sort of injury or health problem or whatever else, and it's bad for everyone in society, but especially bad for the people at the bottom of the labor market. So I saw various estimates for socialist programs like Social Security expansion, free college, Medicare for All will cost upwards of $40 trillion over 10 years for zero. Okay, they could argue with those numbers and so on, but so there's a cost. There's a taxpayer cost. Given the weight of that cost, can you still make the case with these programs, and then can you try to make the case against them that the cost is too high? So I will not argue with you on the numbers because you just threw out random numbers. I do think universal health care, if done right, can be basically cost-neutral. I think it's an exception because we spend a tremendous amount of money on health care, a huge percentage of our GDP, so I think it could be done in a way that's close to cost-neutral. So actually, can you argue on the numbers without arguing on the numbers? So you're saying just your gut says that there's a lot of, depending on how these programs are done, there's a lot of variance in how much it will actually cost. There's a lot of bureaucracy and billing right now in our health care sector, for example, that would be eliminated. There's a lot of costs that are spiraling upward, provider costs from both doctors, hospitals, but also pharmaceuticals to drug costs that insurance companies shoulder because their market share is too fragmented to really negotiate hard. Medicare can sometimes negotiate better rates, but Medicare for all would negotiate even better rates. So I think there's a cost spiral that we can adjust with more government involvement, and there's a reason why we spend a bigger share of our GDP on health care than other places. But let me just accept the broad premise that social programs cost money. Now, I think that, one, for ordinary people, most of them, the trade-off of, even hypothetically, if taxes on lower middle class and working class people in certain cases go up, the trade-off would still be in their benefit because they're the ones who currently would be consuming more of those goods. And also our tax system and whatnot is progressive, so the rich will pay more, the majority will consume more of them. Also, I think a lot of these programs are the bedrock of a healthy society. So one reason, for example, that we have so much crime and violence in the US, there's lots of cultural and other causes with our level of gun ownership, American history, and so on. But one really important factor is just the level of poverty and inequality in the US compared to other countries that combine with guns and other factors. So we live in more violent, unequal societies. A European would be shocked by the fact that in even some of our nicest areas, and our city isn't elsewhere, because there's a lot of rural violence too, it's just normal to have gun violence. It's normal to have drug-related violence. We have, what, like 400 or 500 people some years in Baltimore, a city of under a million, getting killed. These are all recipes for a society in which, one, the public sphere is drunk like crazy because you're not going to go wander out for an evening stroll in a park if you live in a dangerous area or whatever else. The rot goes very deep, and a welfare state is one way to live in a better society for everyone. There's been plenty of studies. There's one book called The Spirit Level on inequality that was quite popular that just notes that inequality is really terrible for the psyches of the rich too, not just for the poor. So I think spending some more money living in a more just society is doable. There's different ways to address certain cost spirals. One reason why our welfare states are getting more and more expensive is in part just because our population is aging. But many of the same people who say we can't afford more in our welfare states because we're already spending so much on Social Security and all these other entitlements are the same people. Also for, one, closing borders so immigrants can't come in to help build the economy and to fill gaps in the economy. And also who aren't for things that'll make it easier to have kids. I'm 33 years old. I have a lot of friends who have been putting off having kids until they save up x amount of dollars, even though they have someone they could raise children with, because they can't afford the cost of childcare. Their job probably won't give them more than four or six weeks of family leave or whatever else. This is not the case in other countries. So I think there's all sorts of benefits from having a bigger welfare state. But yes, there are costs and there are going to be certain trade-offs. It's not a magical thing where you could just have everything without trade-offs. So in a progressive tax system, is there, to push back on the costs here, is there a point at which taxing the rich is counterproductive in the long term? So in the short term, there might be a net benefit of increasing taxes because the programs the middle class, the lower middle class gets is more beneficial. Is there a negative side to taxing the rich? In theory, yes, of course. So one would be if you tax the rich so much, they change their consumption patterns, and that has negative impacts on the economy as a whole. You would have to kind of really model it out, but there would be a certain point in which the consumption changes might have net detrimental effects. I think that's more unlikely. And the more likely scenario is you tax corporations and other wealthy people in society to the point that they have potentially less money for productive investment because you're in a capitalist society, so you're relying on capitalists to invest. So you kind of don't want to be in the worst of both worlds where you've gone too far for capitalism, but not far enough for socialism. In my vision, of course, of socialism, that's one reason why we'd have to take the investment function away from capitalists. There has to be, if you're going to make it so hard for them that they can't invest, or they can't employ labor the way they're employing now, you have to create another mechanism for supply to be created. And that's why, that's a transition point. What about longer term, de-incentivizing young people that are dreaming of becoming entrepreneurs and realizing that there's this huge tax on being wealthy? So if you take these big risks, which is what's required to be an entrepreneur, and you are lucky enough to succeed, and good enough to succeed, that the government will take most of your money away? I think realistically, that's not a disincentive for most people. First of all, we already have a progressive taxation system. The government does take a bunch of the money away and people are still striving to become rich. A lot of what people want when they dream of success is they want accolades, they want respect, and of course they want some more wealth. Wealth to consume luxury goods with or whatever else. But at a certain point, it becomes better for the state to tax and either redistribute directly or through social programs, or redirect that money through tax credits and other ways to shape investment towards productive investment. We don't want a society in which a bunch of rich people fly around in helicopters going from club to club while the productive economy does nothing. At that point, I think a lot of ordinary rich people might prefer the government to come in to tax them and to try to spur investment in certain productive sectors. It really just depends. But I honestly believe that most people don't necessarily want to be rich for the sake of being rich. They want to be successful and there's many different dynamics to that. Accolades and social respect is an important one of them. It's also why people who just become filthy rich often, the first thing they do is start up philanthropic trusts and try to give away their money because they want the social respect and accolades and whatever else. They don't want just their money. On that topic, a little bit of a tangent, there's a lot of folks in the left community, far left community, socialist community that I think are at the source of a kind of derision towards the B word, the billionaires. Does it bother you? Or do you think that's in part justified? A kind of using the word billionaire as a dirty word? I think it's perfectly justified and that it's a popular shorthand, right? So obviously when I talk about inequality, I often talk about power dynamics, right? Between workers and bosses and so on. Billionaire is just the 99, 1% version of it. It's just a popular shorthand to just explain the fact that there's a lot of people who have accumulated obscene wealth. These people aren't, in my mind, parasites in the kind of very, very old school socialist rhetoric and that, of course, capitalists provide employment, take entrepreneurial risks, come up with new ideas, sometimes themselves, sometimes directly manage work and whatever else. But they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers, but society as a whole. Taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others. And again, these things have policy trade-offs. If you just snap your fingers and say, Elon Musk, all your wealth is gone, you're now on food stamps or whatever else in that kind of arbitrary way, you'd be a totally disincentivized people from trusting the rules of the game as they've been set up in a capitalist society. And I think that would have negative consequences for workers. But saying that, hey, this person has too much power and too much wealth and has too much ability to dictate things about the lives of others, I think is just simply a fact. And I think it's true in the cases of people who are good people, and have risen to this position, and it's true in the cases of people who are maybe not so good people and who have risen to these positions. So I agree with you in part, but I have to push back here. So one of the problems I see is using billionaires as shorthand to talk about power inequality and wealth inequality often dismisses the fact that some of these folks are some of the best members of our society. So outside of the, however the system has created inequalities, a young person today should dream to build cool stuff, not for the wealth, not for the power, the fame, but to be part of building cool stuff. Now there's a lot of examples of billionaires that have gotten there in shady ways and so on, and you can point that out. But in the same way we celebrate great artists and great athletes and great literary icons and writers and poets and musicians and engineers and scientists, we should separate the human creator from the wealth that the system has given them. That's what I worry about, is in our system, some of the greatest humans are the ones that have become rich. And so we sometimes mix up the, if you want to criticize the wealth, we sometimes criticize the human and the creator, while that should actually be the person we aspire to be. So, you know, I would agree with that. LeBron James, if he's not already, in his lifetime will be a billionaire. And he got his money largely through just being an incredible athlete, excelling in his field more than anyone, you know, besides for Michael Jordan. I think he's my number two. He might be my number one. Yeah, I'm willing to keep keeping an open mind about the LeBron versus Jordan conversation. But, you know, he got that through his merit, and he's been rewarded. And a part he's getting rewarded because he's created vast amounts of wealth beyond what he's getting. This is just his share, you know, he's in a salary cap league. Whenever he's doing an endorsement, obviously, that company is thinking that he's worth more than what they're paying him for that, that endorsement, and so on. And to the extent with Elon Musk, people see innovation, and they see someone who will put himself out there with sometimes crazy ideas, because he's trying to think about the future and trying to just push things forward instead of just sitting on whatever money he has now and just investing it earning, you know, 6%, you know, for the return for the rest of his life. You know, I think that that's that's a positive thing. But I think it doesn't get to the broader policy question. When people invoke billionaires, they're invoking the specter of inequality and power. It's not normally the rhetoric that I use, because I propose, pose and I use more traditional socialist rhetoric and terms, but I think it gets at something real. So often with these sorts of shorthands we use in politics, there are, you know, they're imperfect, but they speak to to a real a real thing. And they feed a little bit of fun that folks like AOC and Elon have with each other creates. It feeds, it inspires, it serves as a catalyst for productive discourse. Okay, speaking of which, you said you're a fan of Bernie Sanders. Would you classify yourself as a Bernie bro? What's the technical definition of a Bernie? Is that it's a subset? No, no, no, I'm sorry. You're a sophisticated philosopher, writer, economic and political thinker. Of course, you would not call yourself a Bernie bro. I'm fine with calling myself a Bernie bro. It was made up by liberal journalists to smear Bernie and his supporters during the 2016 campaign, even though disproportionately his supporters were like young women in their 20s, you know. But whatever, I think I'll ride for Bernie. There's worse things in the world than being called a bro. So what do you like about Bernie Sanders? And to what degree does he represent ideas of socialism? To what degree does he represent the more traditional sort of liberal ideas? I love Bernie. Most of all, I like his clarity. He's by far the best communicator we have on the left. He speaks with a moral force. He's relatable. And he has taken a lot of socialist rhetoric from academia and brought it down to its core in a way that's comprehensible for ordinary people and speaks to their daily lives. So when Bernie does a speech, people can finish his lines because they know what he's going to say. They know what points he's going to hit. Because socialism, in my mind, should not be a complicated thing. Now, when we get to more abstract discussions about what a future system would look like, when we get to the policy trade-offs today, I think we need to put on a different hat. We should embrace all sorts of nuance and contradiction and complication. When it comes to the core moral and ethical appeal, I think Bernie grasps that and how to communicate it. Now, Bernie Sanders was politicized a very long time ago. I actually once told him, I've only met him a few times, but one time I joked that in his book, he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when the Brooklyn Dodgers left town. And he was devastated because he was a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn. And I said, this is like 2020 campaign. This may be 2019. I said, Bernie, you're running for president. You do not need to keep reminding people your age. But he was politicized through the Young People's Socialist League, which was an old offshoot of the Norm Thomas Socialist Party of America. So very old school socialist tradition. Then he was engaged in labor struggles in the 60s. He was engaged in the civil rights movement. So he came from this old left generation that I think just had a more plain spoken, more rooted way of understanding change and socialism. It wasn't, in my mind, polluted by academia and by some of the turn towards issues of culture and excessive focus on representation or whatever else. It was really rooted in something economic in a way. And then obviously he had all his ideas and he was also a product of the left and that he went to Vermont. He kind of did the back to the land thing. He was basically like a, not quite a hippie and an affect, but he was out there trying to farm or whatever. And, you know, cold as hell, Northern Vermont. And then he decided to do politics, do electoral politics. And he failed for a long time. He did third party politics. He kept losing races. I eventually, he became by savvy and luck and things he learned the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and he just kept with the same message. And in my book, I talk about, I quote, I think a Bernie speech from the 1970s, one of his early campaigns. And I compared it to a Bernie speech during his 2016 campaign. It was virtually identical. Millionaires were swapped with millionaires and billionaires, speaking of billionaires, which is beautiful. I think there's something great to what he offered American politics. And also all around the world, there's a socialist poll in politics, whether you agree with it or not, and all these countries in Europe and any rich country, Japan and so on. In the US, we really didn't have that. The furthest left you could go was like, you know, Chris Hayes and MSNBC or whatever. I'm very glad that there's a socialist poll. And I think we have Bernie to thank for it. To the extent that a lot of, you know, self-described socialists don't think Bernie is a real socialist. It's in part because he stays grounded in people's day to day lives and struggles. I don't think he thinks often in the way that I do and other people more disconnected or step or move from day to day politics. I think about the future contours of a socialist society and so on. But I think he's morally committed to a egalitarian, different sort of future. And I don't think he, at least I haven't heard him talk about sort of this big, broad history and future. So the Marxist ideology and so on, not that he's afraid or something, it's just not how he thinks about it. Yeah, I think he's a practical thinker. And also, yeah, he is running, even if he should be afraid of it too, because he is a, you know, he is a major politician running for president. I think what people want is they want the left wing of the possible. Or at least the segment of the party that was voting for him, the Democratic Party is voting for him. They wanted something that was a step or two removed from what they had now, and was visionary, but not so far removed that it seemed like a scary leap. And I think we lost a chance in 2016 to elect someone that I think would have beaten Trump or the very least would have, you know, been close. Do you think the Democrats screwed him over? Yes, not in the way of deliberate or direct vote rigging, but they put their thumb in the scale, for sure. I mean, there's not even conspiracy theory. There's all this stuff in the debates about Clinton, you know, being Clinton's people being fed questions and whatever else, and just the tone of the media, the media was extremely dismissive and hostile to him. I love that Bernie still does a Fox News town hall with his, they're just him speaking to the people. And he's not afraid of going on, you know, any sort of outlet and making his case. But I think a lot of the liberal media in particular always had it out for Bernie Sanders. What was the, because that was really annoying. That was really annoying how dismissive they were. I've seen that in some other candidates, like they were dismissive towards Andrew Yang in that same way. So forget the ideology. Why are they so smug sometimes towards certain candidates? What is that? Because I think that's actually at the core, to a degree, if Democrats or any party fails, that it's that smugness, because people see through that. I think a lot of these people are friends, even if they don't know each other, they're friends, because they went to the same schools. They know the same people. They have the same broad just ideology and worldview. So they had a sense of what the Democratic Party should be and who should be running and who is going to win and also what was serious and unserious. So Bernie would say some things about the world that objectively to a lot of people seemed correct, or at least pretty close to correct. And a journalist would just look at him like he's from outer space. To some extent, this also happens to people on the right. People on the right often say things that I find repulsive or just wrong. But there's parts of the media that would describe their certain views as illegitimate or outside the boundaries of acceptable conversation. I think there should be a few things outside the boundary of acceptable conversation, you know, hate speech and so on. But there's this attempt to say their views are illegitimate, and therefore anyone who votes for them for any reason is illegitimate too. And that's one reason why I think it's fueled a lot of resentment and will ultimately end up fueling the extremes of American politics and people feel like, you know, they're not being listened to. Yeah, and some of it is also style of speaking and personality, or if you're not willing to sort of play kind of a game of civility, or there's like a proper way of speaking if you're a Democrat, if you're not doing that kind of proper way of speaking and people dismiss you. I think in certain sense, whatever you feel about him, people dismiss Donald Trump for the same reason, where it's the style of speaking, the personality of the person, that he's not playing by the rules of a polite society, of polite politician society and so on. And that's really, that troubles me because it feels like solutions, the great leaders will not be polite in the way, they're not going to behave in the way they're supposed to behave. And I just wish the media was at least open-minded to that, like, which I guess gives me hope about the new media, which is like more distributed citizen media, right? That they're more open-minded to the outsiders, right? I actually first, I really like Bernie Sanders. I first heard him in conversation with Tom Hartman. He had these like weekly conversations and just the authenticity from the guy, I didn't even know any context, I didn't even know, honestly, he was a Democratic Socialist or anything. The authenticity of the human being was really refreshing. And when he, I guess, decided to run for president, that was really strange. I was like, surely this person has no chance. Just like he seemed too authentic, he seemed too, like he's not going to be effective at playing the game of politics. So it was very inspiring to me to see that you don't necessarily need to be good at playing the game of politics, you can actually have a chance of winning. Yeah, that was really inspiring to see. What about some of the other popular candidates? What do you think about AOC? I don't know if she self-identifies as a Socialist or not. She does self-identify as a Democratic Socialist. I think she was a very inspiring figure for a lot of people. She was kind of out of this Bernie wave, the first set of Bernie candidates in 2018 that identified with him instead of the Democratic Party establishment. I think that she's still developing as a politician, and it's very difficult when you're in a deep blue district and when you don't often have to worry about re-election or talk to, but modulate your rhetoric to win over swing voters in your district, but then you're immediately a national and cultural figure. So AOC basically goes from her views, which are compelling in my mind, a lot of her programmatic views are compelling, wins her district, and then has her own rhetoric, which to me, compared to Bernie, owes itself more to the academic left and the way that a lot of the left has learned to talk. I don't mean academic in the sense that she's a Marxist or whatever else, but academic in the way that she may be using at times confusing language to convey basic points when she gets into the language of intersectionality and whatever else. Especially in the context of cultural issues and stuff like that. Exactly, instead of just a plain spoken Bernie, like yeah, discrimination is wrong. If you ask me about a cultural issue, I'll come down on the same side as AOC, I'm sure, nine times out of ten, but I'll try to root it into just basic, like yeah, treat people with respect, and they'll treat you with respect, and that's the way we should govern our civic sphere. We don't need to talk about intersectionality to get that. So there's that rhetoric. But she's not just a regular congressperson in a deep blue district, she's also a national and international cultural and political figure. She's now a spokesperson, because of largely a media event of her surprising, upset election, and her being young, and being really connected to this post-Bernie moment. And I think amid these constant attacks on her from the right, and also this media attention, and this notoriety, she hasn't really modulated or adjusted her audience, her rhetoric, into how do you win over someone who really hates a lot of your ideas, but might actually believe in some of your policies. Mm-hmm. And I think she's been ineffective, quite frankly, in the last year making that transition. Whereas I think other politicians who are not so far left, who don't identify as socialists, but let's say a John Fetterman, has managed to become more effective. And I don't think it's a question of character, or whatever else. And I like AOC, so I don't want to put it so harshly, but I think a lot of it has to do with her being a congressperson in a deep blue district, and Fetterman running for statewide office in a quote-unquote purple state. But at her best, she does it, but it's like glimmers. It's kind of like, I don't know, what sport are you a biggest fan of? I'll give you a sports analogy. I like the NFL. I mean, NFL is up there, soccer is up there, but probably UFC. Okay, well, I can't give you a good analogy for any of those, but it's like a raw prospect. Someone who shows glimmers of hope, so they were drafted really high, and they bounced from team to team, and you're like, I'm clinging on to my AOC stock, but I think that she needs to be self-critical enough, and her team needs to be self-critical enough to know that the goal is not merely to be a national cultural figure and win a re-election in your deep blue district. The goal has to be to become truly a national political figure, which will require changes. A unifier and inspiring figure about the ideas that she represents. Definitely. And she has other things against her. I'm obviously class focused, but there's no denying, I think, that some of the hostility to her is sexism. It's rooted in, I think, people wanting to see her fail or whatever else, but that's only some of it. I think some of it otherwise is her struggling to relate to people who don't have a lot of her starting points as far as moral and ethical beliefs. Yeah, but she's actually great at flourishing in all the attacks she's getting. She's doing a good job of that. And a lot of those attacks would break me, if I'm being honest. Yes, that's fantastic. The amount of fire she's under. But you don't want that to become a drug to where you just get good at being a national figure that's constantly in the fights and are using that for attention and so on. You still want to be the unifier. And that's the trickiest wish. Do you think there's a chance, there's a world in which she's able to modulate it enough to be a unifier and run for president? And win? I think she's very far away from being able to do that. I think that even other politicians that are also polarizing within the squad in terms of what they say, their ideas, whatever else, are very effective communicators like Ilhan Omar and others. I think AOC, I mean, that's my hope, right? My hope is that someone like AOC could. The last year plus has not been extremely promising in my mind, in part because she's become, or she's continued to position herself as a lightning rod cultural figure. Whereas I think a national political figure needs to pick their spots and also pick their moment for changing their rhetoric and adjusting to their audience. And I think she does it in certain environments, but that needs to be your national message when you're out there. You need to be speaking towards the not already converted. And I think Bernie does that. Bernie strips his politics down to the basics. So I agree with you spiritually, but we also have an example of Donald Trump winning the presidency. Isn't some of the game of politics that's separate from the policy being able to engage in rhetoric that leads to outrage and then walking through that fire with grace? First of all, I think Trump is kind of a unique personality in American history. So it's hard to compare anyone to Trump. But don't you think AOC is comparable in terms of the uniqueness in the political system we're in or no? I think Trump is much more of a firebrand, anti-establishment force. And I mean this negatively for what it's worth, because I disagree with Trump, but he was willing to set fire to the Republican establishment. He was able to self-fund largely his campaign, and he already was a media figure without them. AOC has been much more cautious with the Democratic Party establishment, in part because she's not trying to run a national political campaign right now for the outside, like a 5% chance they're gonna be president, let me set fire to everything. She's trying to help people and help her constituents through the game of getting committee appointments and getting wins in the margins. And I think that's understandable for what it's worth. But in the process, I think, what's the difference between AOC and a progressive Democrat? During 2016, it used to be pretty easy to say the difference between the Berniecrats and a progressive Democrat, right? Because we were establishing our own outside third force in American politics. You could knock on the door of a lot of people who would end up voting for Trump, and they would say, oh, I have a lot of respect for Bernie, or whatever. They're still gonna not vote for him. But he wasn't considered part of the Democratic Party milieu. I think now with AOC, there's a much closer association of AOC and our policies with ordinary Democrats, where she needs to draw stronger distinctions. She doesn't need to do it like Trump did with just, man, I forgot all of them, though I found some of them amusing in the moment, like all his nicknames about, oh, Lion Ted Cruz and then the rest, you know? But I do feel like she needs to, yes, differentiate herself a bit more, but then also just keep her language simple. Trump was more complex than Bernie in his literal language, but he was repetitive, and there was kind of a rhythm and a cadence to Trump's speech. I think AOC needs to, like Bernie, reduce her rhetoric down to a couple key lines and signatures and focus her politics not on 20 issues, but on three or four most important issues and have that message disciplined. Bernie will do an interview with you and he'll write down, I hope you do interview Bernie, but he'll write down like five things and I'm like, yeah, I'm only going to talk about these five things. You ask me about this? Okay, I'm talking about these five things. So that's a message discipline that Bernie has been exemplary on, yeah, for sure. But I think that's learned, that could be developed. I think she could develop it. Listen, I hope, I'm answering your question, I think, not the way I should answer it, being someone broadcasting to people on the left and elsewhere. I hope AOC goes in that direction. I just think that she has a lot going against her just because she's already a national figure and she's in a deeper blue district. But we need to root our politics then in working class people and a lot of districts that, I don't know, the type of kitchen table conversations are, I hate that cliche, but I just used it, but a lot of these conversations are just different in their tone and cadence. And it's not just a question of Fetterman or Tim Ryan in Ohio and kind of just white working class voters. I mean, working class voters of any race, there's their day-to-day needs and the day-to-day things they want to talk about is just at a different plane than a Met Gala cultural statement. Yeah. I mean, it's clear that you respect and love her and would like to see different ways. I mean, she's young, so the different trajectories that she could develop that would ultimately make her a good candidate. I'm just looking at odds here for, and I disagree with them. I'm buying AOC stock here, given these odds. So in terms of Democratic, who's going to win the 2024 election? So that includes running and winning. On the Democrat side is 18% chance for Biden, 7% chance for Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom at 6%, Michelle Obama at 3%, Hillary Clinton at 2%, and AOC at 1.5%. And then Bernie at 1%. So... I would not buy AOC at that mark. I would buy Biden like crazy though. Yeah. I'm not a gambling man, but I would totally toss a G at Biden at that amount. AOC at 1.5% chance? I don't think she runs. You don't think she runs? Yeah. Okay. I don't think Bernie will primary Biden either. I mean, if Biden doesn't run, then obviously it's an open field, but I just feel like... Do you think Biden runs? Yes, I think Biden probably runs. Oh man. Oh boy. He's an incumbent president. He's an incumbent president. So it's just, it's very hard to imagine another Democrat being able to do better than him. All right. What about the competition? I think Donald Trump is the best thing for the Democrats, period. Just because it would create this turnout mechanism, this excitement around, we have to stop Donald Trump. He's attacking DeSantis. I mean, already he's trying to, you know, the sanctimonious thing. But yeah, Trump's kind of like the Don King of American politics. Yeah. It's interesting what kind of dynamic chaos he's created. It probably led to more people being interested in politics. Well, almost guaranteed it led to more people being interested in politics, but maybe not in a healthy way. Maybe it created an unhealthy relationship with politics where it's created more partisanship. For me, I don't have a problem with partnership. It's what kind of partnership. So I think Trump has cultivated like a lot of right populists, a relationship with his supporters. It's almost like a leader follower relationship in a way that doesn't actually enhance people's knowledge of politics and the issues, but actually just leads them to follow the party line. Ideally, I think socialist politics and politics on the left should be something different. Eugene Debs, the great American socialist leader of the late 19th and early 20th century, used to say, you know, I'm not your Moses. I can't promise to lead you to the promised land, because if I can lead you there, and you just follow me there, someone's just going to lead you straight out as soon as I'm gone. And I think there's something nice about that kind of anti, you know, blind following leader follower kind of dynamic on the left at its best. That said, in the way, the, at least the political race in the United States has turned out, it seems like it's turned into a bit of entertainment. And there having personalities and characters is really important. So in terms of policy and actual leadership, yes, maybe having a leader, like an authoritarian big leader is not good, but maybe for the race it is. For the drama of it, you just want to have drama and attention on people who are actually going to turn out to be good leaders. That's a weird balance to strike. Yeah, earned media is what they always talk about, right? And political campaigns, like, you know, the more you can get on TV, the better. Even like, I really like Federman, he just won his campaign. But a good part of his early campaign, he had pivoted from talking about issues, to just talking about Dr. Oz living in New Jersey, and kind of having the troll campaign against him, which I found amusing. But also, it was effective, obviously, one. But it's a bit depressing, because I would have rather a whole campaign cycle about healthcare and jobs and other issues. Yeah. And the hope is that people just get better at that kind of social media communication. So I do actually think there's something about doing political speeches that makes you sound less authentic. Because you have to, like, do so many of them. It must be exhausting to, like, day after day after day, make the speech, you're going to start sort of replaying the same stuff over and over, as opposed to actually thinking about the words that are coming out of your mouth. And then the public will know that you're not really being that authentic. Even though you believe those things, it's just tough. I just wish they didn't have to constantly do speeches. So I think that the fact that Bernie's speeches very clearly, like, came out of, if not directly his own pen, but his own rhetoric over the years, and he kind of wrote it, seemed authentic. Even if he was repeating it. And then Trump, his just wild improvisation, I think people found real, you know, in a certain way. And I would love for the left, more generally, to tap into some of that anti-establishment sentiment. But obviously, do it in a way that's productive, that doesn't blame immigrants or whatever else for problems. But, you know, it's kind of built on a different basis. But people are fed up, for good reason, with a lot of conventional politics. And we need to speak to that. Otherwise, it'll only be the right that is taking advantage of those people's anger. Well, I almost forgot to ask you about China. So both historically, we talked about the Soviet Union. But what lessons do you draw from the implementation of socialism and communism in Maoist China and modern China? What's the good and the bad? Well, I think it's very similar to the Soviet case, in that socialism came to China through not a base of organized workers and a capitalist country at a certain level of development and so on. But it came through the countryside and in conditions of civil war, strife, Japanese invasion, and whatever else. And Mao built his base in the peasantry, then came down to the city to govern and try to build a base and rule over workers. So it's kind of an inversion of classic socialist theory. Now, the same thing that I said before about Stalin and assessing the Soviet Union has to apply here. Because obviously, you know, I oppose authoritarianism and you know, I obviously do all sorts of moral condemnations I should do. But to look at what the Chinese Communist Party actually accomplished, I think we kind of need to take a step backwards from our moral opposition to the means in which they accomplish it and just look at it developmentally. China benefited greatly from the Communist Party's implementation of basic education and healthcare. So in a lot of China, you had one of the conditions women were absolutely terrible, there was still foot binding and all sorts of like terrible backward practice. You had a huge vast majority of the population that was illiterate without any access to basic education, and you had no health access, especially in the countryside. So those are the three good things that China did improve the status of women, get everyone into primary education, and improve the lot of healthcare. Besides for that, their agricultural campaign was a failure, just like Stalin's for many of the same reasons I mentioned before. The Great Leap Forward and crash industrialization didn't really work either. In a way, is China better than India or other countries that didn't have the basic education and the strong state authority and the health improvements and whatever? I think maybe, but I think that's why we need to sometimes go beyond just economic measures of success. Because if you told me tomorrow, the US will grow at 3% if we maintain democracy, but it'll grow at 8-9% everyone will be wealthier if we move to some sort of authoritarian government. I think you're asking the wrong question if you're going to make your decision based on growth, right? Because it has to be based on some sort of principle. But the same dynamic of from the beginning the Chinese Communist Party ruling over people emerging from the outside through armed conflicts and ruling over ordinary Chinese people have continued. Since Deng Xiaoping, the policies have been better economically. And often at times, not always, the technocratic governance has been quite good. But that doesn't mean that the party has a democratic mandate or should have the right to govern as they see fit. Because clearly, it doesn't have that mandate in swaths of the country or in places like Hong Kong or elsewhere. But to me, nothing the Chinese Communist Party does has anything to do with socialism. I think even by their own definition today, it really doesn't. It's a sort of nationalist, authoritarian developmental state that has done some good things to improve the living standards of the Chinese people, other things that were counterproductive. And, you know, as a democratic socialist, you know, I certainly don't support that state. But I also hope that the US and Biden will find a way to avoid, you know, intense rivalry and competition economically spilling over into something worse. From a democratic socialist perspective, what's one policy or one or two ways you could fix if you could fix China, if you took over China? What would you like to see change? Well, the democratic part comes before the socialist part. So I would say there needs to be multi-party elections in China, and state censorship and control over the press, in other words, needs to be be done with. As far as their immediate economic policy, I think the idea of maintaining strong state control of certain, you know, commanding heights of the economy while liberalizing other spheres has done quite well in China's case, lifting people out of poverty. But again, you know, there's something really lost in society, even if it's getting wealthier, if ordinary people don't have the ability to participate in dissent freely. And the Chinese authorities have allowed some, you know, it's not North Korea, it's not a totally totalitarian state. There's been workplace protests, there have been all sorts of local anti-corruption protests and things like that. But it's up, the government decides what's permitted and what's not at what particular moment. And I think the long run, even if it can survive, there's a better way to do things, which is just quite simply a democracy. The thing is, though, the lessons of history that China is looking at, there's this dark aspect. So building on top of the fact that it seems like under Stalin and under Mao, under Stalin, the Soviet Union and under Mao, China has seen a lot of economic growth. And then one dark aspect of that, while under the Great Leap Forward, you have, you know, upwards of 70 million people dead. Today, I think there's a large number of people who admire Stalin and admire Mao. What they admire is the stability and the strong leadership. So there's a lot of people who miss the Soviet Union, right? The reason why they miss it is that it was a system they knew, it provided the basics of their livelihood. Then afterwards, like look at Russia in the 90s, people were in chaos, and the Communist Party had a huge amount of support democratically. Anti-democratic measures had to be taken, ironically, against the Communist Party to keep it from regaining more of a foothold in Russia. But we don't need that trade-off. You know, we could have a form of... Imagine if Russia went to a system closer to social democracy that maintained the stability that people wanted, the welfare state that people wanted, but restructured the economy, not in a shock way, but in a way that made sense and that ordinary people felt ownership of, instead of just oligarchs who are former Communist Party bureaucracy just dividing up the country for themselves. I think the same thing in China. First of all, certainly from the West, you know, the US government and people in the US should have no say over what should happen in China, right? The Chinese Communist Party has more authentic authority than any of us do in the country. But, you know, I think that the fears of stability that a lot of Chinese people have, why I would imagine that even in a democratic election, the Communist Party might have majority support is because they fear the unknown, they fear collapse. That was one of the big lessons of the Soviet collapse, right? Do you want China divided into five, six states? You know, do you want economic turmoil? Do you want mass immediate privatization? Do you want whatever welfare state you have destroyed and so on? I think people are right to have those fears, but there's a different route towards democratization that maintains stability, right? There's different routes that you could have democracy. Not every country had to go down the route of Yugoslavia and the USSR and so on. You are the founder of the magazine Jacobin, of which I am a subscriber. I recommend everybody subscribe whether you're on the left or the right. The magazine does tend to lean left. Does it officially say it's socialist? We're a socialist publication. We try to be interesting. So we try to like, you know, have articles that kind of have debates and contestation and whatever else, but we're definitely, we're all socialists. Well, it's a lot of really interesting articles. So I definitely recommend that people subscribe, support. I only like the product of the 21st century only subscribe to the digital version, but I guess there's also paper version. Yeah. There's like 70,000 subscribers in print. In print. Does it come like on a scroll? I don't even know. Do they even publish paper? I'm going to mail you a bunch of copies. No, it's perfect bound. You know, it's long issues. Jacobin's publisher, Remake Air 4, recently did a redesign of the publication. So it looks really good. It's up there in the design award competition range. It's nice. It's sexy. I can show it off to all my friends. Look. Put it in your coffee table. You don't even have to read it. First I need to get a coffee table, but yes, I'll get both. That's what a respectable adult, listen, I've upgraded my life. I haven't had a couch, I don't think ever. So I got a couch recently because somebody told me that serious adults have a couch and I also got a TV because serious adults have a couch and a TV. And as you see, it's been here for many months and I still haven't like unboxed it. So I'm trying to learn how to be an adult, looking up on YouTube how to be an adult and learning slowly. After that, I'll look into this whole leisure thing. Anyway, what's the origin of Jacobin? What was the idea? What was the mission? And what's the origin story? So I started Jacobin when I was between my sophomore and junior year of college. Basically, I was already a socialist. I was involved in the Democratic Socialist of America. I was in the youth section, the young Democratic Socialists. I was editing their kind of youth online magazine called The Activist back then. And to be honest, I had my ideology, I had my views. I had a group of people around me that we would debate together and occasionally write for this other publication, The Activist and so on. And yeah, just a product of creative ignorance in the sense that I knew I had the capacity to maybe pull off an issue or two. I just had no idea how long I would keep doing it, you know, and it just eventually consumed my life slowly but surely. I had different plans for my future, I kind of, you know, but I ended up just being a magazine publisher. I literally didn't know what a magazine publisher was, but it just kind of happened. What's the hardest part about running a magazine? Well, the hardest part is obviously the things, just like any enterprise, right? The things beyond your control. Like, you could put out something that you think is great or interesting, but then you need the feedback of people actually subscribing to it. And you occasionally encounter periods where you feel like you're doing your best work, but you're not getting the audience response. And I think you just need the kind of, the self-confidence to just keep doing it. And obviously, if you're totally obscure and crazy and way off the mark, you're never going to build that audience. But I think a lot of publications have tried to, same thing I guess goes with YouTube shows, whatever else, they try to adapt to what everyone else is doing right away when they don't achieve success. Whereas for me, the early issues of Jackman got very little resonance and took a while for it to build into something. But a lot of it was just the confidence to just keep going and keep publishing what I would want to read and just hope that I'm not so much of a weirdo, that I'm the only one. Is there some pressure that you could speak to of audience capture? Because it is a socialist publication, you have a fan base, a readership base. Is there times you feel pressured not to say a certain thing, not to call out bullshit, not to criticize certain candidates, all that kind of stuff? Yes, definitely. Of course. I myself am looser on the self-censorship than other people. That's only because I've gotten this far just shooting from the hip or whatever. And occasionally, you'll come to a rash judgment. You'll speak too soon or complain about something too soon and you'll have to either apologize or reconsider or whatever else. But on a host of issues, I have views that maybe not all of the left has, but I know that the core of my politics is a politics against oppression, against exploitation, against all the things that we talked about. And if you know that's at the core of your politics, then you could maybe say, you know what, I don't think the left should respond to the real racists and the still right in the world by adopting an excessively racialized rhetoric, if that makes sense. I fundamentally just am a universalist and I believe that people, no matter where their backgrounds are and so on, kind of want the same things for themselves and for their families. And I feel like a lot of the left, or some of the left, not even the far left, more like the center left, has adopted kind of a stance saying, oh, we need to talk about white privilege or white Karen's or white guys or old white guys doing this or whatever else. And to me, it's not only wrong in a moral sense, but it's counterproductive. Because the last thing I want is a young white teenager who feels unrepresented politically and wants to be a part of, maybe even the left, to feel like, oh, I should think more about my identity. No, the whole point of anti-racist politics is that we want to live in a world where, you know, me and you can go around the corner and get a beer and we're not people of two different races getting a beer. We're just two guys in America getting a beer. We're trying to have the type of society in which there's less of that sort of communal or racialized identity. And that was a whole point of a whole generation of anti-racist struggle. But now we seem to be kind of reifying it in the media and in culture and in politics. And that's one issue where I've been kind of banging the drum on this to the point that it's annoying in certain parts of the left. I don't think there's maybe extreme opposition among socialists, but it's more like, why do you keep focusing on this? Let's focus on our real enemy, the right, instead of criticizing, you know, this part of... No, I think it's really, I'm really glad you exist. I'm really glad you're beating that drum because I think that's one of the reasons that the left has not had a broader impact or is not heard by more people that could hear its message is because the othering. The othering of like, as if there's two teams, as if it's black and white, as opposed to having, there's a common humanity and a common struggle amongst all of us. You also wrote the book that we mentioned a few times, The Socialist Manifesto, the case for radical politics in an era of extreme inequality. What's the framework? What are the key ideas of the book? So a lot of it's a look at socialism's past, present and future, basically. So a lot of it is historical. The opening chapter uses a pasta sauce factory as a way to explain certain Marxist concepts, but also a theory of change, like how we get from, let's say, pure capitalism to more regulated, you know, unionized and social democratic systems, and then beyond social democracy into my vision of socialism. That's kind of the first little bit. It's a visionary kind of like look at the future of socialism. But then I try to explain why some of the past socialist movements have gone wrong. Because I think we can't take for granted, I think a lot of people want to live in a different or better society. But they look at past examples, and they're skeptical. And I think there's good reason for skepticism. So I try to explain both the successes of certain systems like social democracy, but also what happened in Russia, China, and kind of more of a historical overview. Then the book kind of ends in the present. It ends with looking at the Bernie Sanders campaign, why it resonated, looking at some of the problems facing the US, the UK, other advanced economies, and why I think the socialist message is still relevant. Because for the longest time, and I'm 33, I became a socialist as a teenager. And for the longest time, it seemed like I was just a member of the historical society, you know, keeping alive an idea that nobody was interested in anymore. And now, you know, it's heartening to see more young people interested in the idea. But we actually need to, I think, have a clearer sense of what we stand for, and how we make our movement like it used to be more rooted in the working class. So if anyone rewinds the tape, they go to when we first started talking about early socialism, when I was talking about the German social democratic workers movement, or all these different early parties. I think at various points, I use the word worker and socialist movement interchangeably. Because in fact, at the time, it was pretty interchangeable. Socialism was the ideology that had the appeal of the working class movement, you know, you couldn't really separate between the two. Now, obviously, socialism is like a fringe ideological concurrent among a very small minority of the working class, which is fine. But we need to get to the point, I think, ideally, where when people talk about unions, and people protesting and social movements and socialism, they all kind of are one and the same as part of the same broad, broad movement. How did you become a socialist? What was the personal story or the idea that took hold in your mind? So I'm the youngest of five, I was only one of my family born in the United States. So it was very obvious to me that my life outcomes were very different than life outcomes of my siblings. So my three oldest siblings, you know, didn't go to college. After high school, some of them got their degrees, you know, much later on as adults. But I was from a pretty young age, had access to a great public school district and was put on the track that you're going to go to college, you know, this, this is kind of the the outcome. And like I said, even my grandmother was illiterate. My mom didn't have a lot of educational opportunities early, you know, in her in her life. She actually graduated from college the same year I did. So she she later got her kind of degrees and whatever else but but to me, it was obvious that so much of my life outcomes weren't just a product of hard work or my family sacrifices because of course, I had the same family as my siblings. But the product of state institutions helping out evening things out, public school district, public library, like all sorts of after school programs, all that was the domain of the of the state and I really benefited from it. So in essence, my core was a social democratic belief, the state should redistribute a bit, build public institutions, be an equalizer. Now how I became a Marxist and a socialist was much more random, I was intellectually interested in it. And eventually, I kind of merged the two together, where I merged together my more pragmatic and practical interest in day to day concerns and reforms and so on, with my loftier intellectual interest in Marxism into, you know, the politics I have today, which I try to kind of balance and do both. And I think a lot of socialists in the organization that I joined as a teenager, the Democratic Socialists of America, and elsewhere, try to do the two try to maintain some sort of balance between here and, you know, our vision of the future. What do you think Marx would say if he were to read your book, Socialist Manifesto and do a review? So I think Marx would say that my vision of socialism after capitalism maintains key elements of what he would, what he would, the commodity form. So a lot of what Marx was concerned about was what markets do to human relationships, in a negative sense, his early writings, especially focus a lot on the alienation of labor. My vision of socialism, at least in the near term, a lot about it is about decommodifying certain sectors, so reducing the market in certain sectors and reducing alienation, but not eliminating it. It is about eliminating exploitation and oppression. So knowing Marx and knowing how critical he was of certain other socialist strands and tendencies, and he would often write very snarky notes and letters to people like Engels being like, this guy, LaSalle, he's a total asshole. Then he would send a separate note to LaSalle saying, hey, can I borrow five grand? This is actually true. He did the both, I think the same, like, the same month. So he would be really good at Twitter is what you're saying? Oh, he would be the best at Twitter. And also he used to be a, he was a journalist before with his work for the New York Tribune. He was very clever, very snarky. He would be awesome at Twitter. I think him and Elon would have good back and forths. But I think it would be critical in some parts. But I think that the strangest part for him would be reading the historical sections and seeing the way in which his ideas, which was fundamentally ideas about human emancipation, were used for evil, for hardship, you know, in ways that did the opposite of emancipated, but in some cases, you know, enslaved people. And I think he would have definitely not want to be associated with them. He probably would rather be associated with me than them. But even then, only begrudgingly. Okay. What advice would you give to young folks in high school, in college, how to have a career they can be proud of or how to change the world? I think be intellectually curious. You know, read outside your current beliefs and understand and read authors on their own terms. So the worst thing in the world to do is to read anything, especially work of fiction, but anything and try to deduce the author's, you know, backgrounds or politics, whatever else, read it on its own terms first, then you could reread it and kind of do other examinations or whatever else. And also read a lot of history. So I started off reading books like Eric Hoppsbombs, four books on history going from the 1700s all the way to 1994. The last book is Age of Extremes. But I think understanding history gives you a bird's eye view of everything, sociology, economics, everything. So these big sweeping historical books are really useful to know. Everybody should know basically, you know, what year, or at least like what decade, you know, serfdom was abolished, what decade slavery was abolished, you know, what century Magna Carta was, you know, when the Roman Empire fell, even though that's kind of debated when the Roman Empire fell. All these, I think, like, being a person with a general knowledge and general sense of history and whatever else just makes you more eclectic and interesting. And it's way better than just, like, especially a lot of my Indian friends, you know, that, not just Indians, but the hyper focus on like, you got to specialize and you got to like focus on math or engineering, whatever you want to do. You just know your field really well, but nothing else. Like, I think there's something really to whether you're getting at school or you're just going to do it by yourself, giving yourself kind of a liberal arts education. I think there's a lot of power to sort of having the facts of history in terms of in time when stuff happened, but also really powerful is knowing spatially, like the geography, that we're a point on a map and there's interesting dynamics that happen throughout history of all the different nations in Europe, of all the different military conflicts and the expansions and the wars and the empires and all that kind of stuff. It really puts into context how human history has led to the place we are today, because all the different geopolitical conflicts we have today, even the politics of the day is grounded in history. Maybe less so for the United States, because it has a very young history, but that history, even from the United States, is still there, right? From the civil war and understanding that gives you context to when you tweet random stuff about this or that person or politician and so on. Yeah, very true. Very true. One of the regrets I have currently is I have perhaps been too focused on the 20th century in terms of history, the present and the 20th century. A lot of people write to me that there's a lot of lessons to be learned in ancient history as well. So not just even American history, but just looking farther and farther and farther back. Yeah, that feels like it's another time, it's another place. It totally has no lessons, but then you remind yourself that it's the same human beings, right? Yeah, and also we're no smarter than them. We just have more crude knowledge in part because of them. But they were just as clever as us. What do you think is the meaning of this whole experiment we have going on on earth? Now, what's the meaning of life? Well, I think there's no broad meaning of life. It was an accident, but we ourselves need to make our own meaning. And for me, a lot of it is about posterity, trying to do something worthwhile while on earth, but also leaving something behind. It could just be relationships with friends or family, and in the future, maybe having a family and kind of leaving behind that sort of legacy, the little bits of yourself, but also them being able to learn the same way I have little bits of my parents and my grandparents in me. And then also, I think in a social sense, zooming out from just the individual and the family, leaving the world behind a little better. I would love to be a part of a movement that created a world with a little bit less suffering, a little bit less oppression or exploitation or whatever else. That's really why I'm a socialist. It's not about snapping your fingers and curing the world of everything in one go, but it is about, I think, giving our lives some sort of meaning and purpose. And you don't have to be a socialist to do that. You could just do it at the micro level in your own day-to-day interactions, but I just feel like life has no good meaning without thinking of posterity in the future. And I have to say thank you for doing so. Thank you for caring about the struggle of the people in the world through ideas that are bold and I think challenging for a lot of people in a time when socialism is something that can be attacked aggressively by large numbers of people still persevering and still exploring those ideas and seeing what of those ideas can make for a better world. That's beautiful to see. Bosco, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for all the work you do. I can't wait to see what you do next. I appreciate it. And yeah, thanks for keeping an open mind with these conversations and to your audience too. It's nice to have a space where people can debate and think at length and don't have to worry about soundbite culture. Thank you, brother. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Bhaskara Sankara. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx. Democracy is the road to socialism. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

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Elon Musk Makes Sense to Me (Eric Weinstein) | AI Podcast Clips

Let me ask a silly question, but. We'll say it with a straight face. Impossible. So let me mention Elon Musk. What are your thoughts about, he's more, you're more on the physics theory side of things. He's more on the physics engineering side of things in terms of SpaceX efforts. What do you think of his efforts to get off this planet? Well, I think he's the other guy who's semi-serious about getting off this planet. I think there are two of us who are semi-serious about getting off the planet. What do you think about his methodology and yours? When you look at them. Don't, I don't wanna be against Elon, because I was so excited that your top video was Ray Kurzweil and then I did your podcast. We had some chemistry, so it zoomed up. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna beat Ray Kurzweil. So just as I'm coming up on Ray Kurzweil, you're like, and now, Alex Fridman special, Elon Musk, and he blew me out of the water. So I don't wanna be petty about it. I wanna say that I don't, but I am. Okay, but here's the funny part. He's not taking enough risk. Like, he's trying to get us to Mars. Imagine that he got us to Mars, the moon, and we'll throw in Titan. And nowhere good enough. The diversification level is too low. Now, there's a compatibility. First of all, I don't think Elon is serious about Mars. I think Elon is using Mars. As a narrative, as a story, as a dream. To make the moon jealous. To make the, no. No. I think he's using it as a story to organize us, to reacquaint ourselves with our need for space, our need to get off this planet. It's a concrete thing. He's shown that, many people think that he's shown that he's the most brilliant and capable person on the planet. I don't think that's what he showed. I think he showed that the rest of us have forgotten our capabilities. So he's like the only guy who has still kept the faith. And is like, what's wrong with you people? So you think the lesson we should draw from Elon Musk is there's a capable person within a lot of us. Elon makes sense to me. In what way? He's doing what any sensible person should do. He's trying incredible things and he's partially succeeding, partially failing. To try to solve the obvious problems before. Duh. You know, but he comes up with things like, you know, I got it. We'll come up with a battery company, but batteries aren't sexy. So we'll make a car around it. Like, great. You know, or any one of a number of things. Elon is behaving like a sane person. And I view everyone else as insane. And my feeling is that we really have to get off this planet. We have to get out of this, we have to get out of the neighborhood. Dilingual a little bit, do you think that's a physics problem or an engineering problem? I think it's a cowardice problem. I think that we're afraid that we had 400 hitters of the mind, like Einstein and Dirac, and that era is done. And now we're just sort of copy editors. So is some of it money? Like, if we become brave enough to go outside the solar system, can we afford to, financially? Well, I think that that's not really the issue. The issue is, look what Elon did well. He amassed a lot of money. And then he plowed it back in, and he spun the wheel, and he made more money. And now he's got FU money. Now the problem is, is that a lot of the people who have FU money are not people whose middle finger you ever wanna see. I wanna see Elon's middle finger. I wanna see what he's gonna do. What do you mean by that? Or like when you say, fuck it, I'm gonna do the biggest possible thing. He's gonna do whatever the fuck he wants. Yeah. Right? Fuck you, fuck anything that gets in his way that he can afford to push out of his way. And you're saying he's not actually even doing that enough. No, I'm. He's not going. Please, I'm gonna go. Elon's doing fine with his money. I just want him to enjoy himself, have the most, you know, Dionysian. But you're saying Mars is playing it safe. He doesn't know how to do anything else. He knows rockets. Yeah. And he might know some physics at a fundamental level. Yeah. I guess, okay, just let me just go right back to it. How much physics do you really, how much brilliant breakthrough ideas on the physics side do you need to get off this planet? I don't know. And I don't know whether, like in my most optimistic dream, I don't know whether my stuff gets us off the planet. But it's hope. It's hope that there's a more fundamental theory that we can access, that we don't need, you know, whose elegance and beauty will suggest that this is probably the way the universe goes. Like you have to say this weird thing, which is this I believe. And this I believe is a very dangerous statement. But this I believe, I believe that my theory points the way. Now, Elon might or might not be able to access my theory. I don't know what he knows. But keep in mind, why are we all so focused on Elon? It's really weird. It's kind of creepy too. Why? He's just the person who's just asking the obvious questions and doing whatever he can. But he makes sense to me. You see, Craig Venter makes sense to me. Jim Watson makes sense to me. But we're focusing on Elon because he somehow is rare. Well, that's the weird thing. Like we've come up with a system that eliminates all Elon from our pipeline. And Elon somehow snuck through when they weren't quality adjusting everything.

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Devon Larratt vs Lex Fridman: How to arm wrestle

Devin Larratt, you son of a bitch. That's Rueben. What's the matter? MIT got you pushing too many pencils? Alright, you got me. No. Now, if I wanted to beat you, what would I do here? It starts before we even arm wrestle. It's all postural, really. So, if I can make you come to me. Come to me. This is the first step. Always make me come to you. Exactly. It lets you use more muscles against less muscles. You target weakness, right? You target my fingertips, you get to use more muscles. So, you see this ridge? Yeah. Very important. The higher up this ridge is in my hand, the better. The more the pressure is in my fingers, as opposed to your fingers, the better. Right. What are some basics here that people should know? Maybe we'll start with a move called the post. The post, by itself, is not that powerful of a move. But it's a fantastic opening. Once you have a post established, the world completely opens up for you. The post is very simply an upwards drive of the knuckles. And it also climbs at the same time. Yes, exactly. And it's all about generating better angles. That's it. You're always trying, like if you open up your hand, you're always trying to get deeper as well. So, you're trying to get deeper and deeper. Climbing up and over. Both. That's it. Advancing that position all the time. So, you're always climbing. You're always climbing over and over. Yeah, that's the goal. Yeah, always climbing, always improving position. A, B, C. Always be climbing. So, basically, inside and outside, that will be your first division. So, when we're arm wrestling outside, basically, it's all these pulling motions. Pulling, pulling. And to some degree, they all attack the fingers. Okay? A standard top roll will look something like this. I'll start to apply pressure up into the fingers. I'll start to bend my wrist. And as I'm bending my wrist, you will be attempting to bend your wrist. And I will block you with something called pronation, which is this turning. And I'll carry through the fingers. And I'll take you all the way to the pin pad through the fingertips. It's a fantastic move for beating people. It's one of the best techniques in arm wrestling, the top roll. Most world champions, I would say, most use top roll. I've also seen you compliment somebody that, you know, it's not over here yet. No. You can hold some of the strongest people in the world like this. And I think you were complimenting somebody that they were able to do that against. Another way to talk about arm wrestling, so we started to touch on the top roll, the hook. So, a hook is basically wrist flexor driven. So, it's more about attacking the person's pronation. So, you establish a hook, and then you can pull out of it. Or you make it more of a press, and it's more shoulders coming right forward. And you're coming right in on the person. So, hooking and pressing, all the moves in arm wrestling are similar. Okay? Just subtle differences. But the roll results in an asymmetric. Like I'm losing your weight. Right. It feels like the hook is where. You get to stay in the match a little bit more. You stay in the match, yeah. You do, yeah. But a good arm wrestler isn't going to necessarily give you that. Like, they're not. You don't see a lot of world class matches where the guy is just pressing. You don't see it. The controversial King's move. What is that? Okay, so the King's move is actually, it's a defensive move. Okay, so the only thing I'm trying to do when I King's move is I'm trying to attack your arm angle through dragging. Okay? And I'm trying to target your fingers through pronation. I'm trying to do all the other things as well, but these are my anchors. Okay, so I'll fight for all the other stuff, but I'll give them away. This is the one that I hold. So, I will turn, right? And a lot of times there's a dipping. Okay? So, you're pulling also? Are you basically pulling me towards you? I'll try, but I may not be able to. So, normally a King's move is used against a very strong opponent. The King's move is throwing a big wrench into the sport, but this has been happening a lot as the sport evolves. The King's move is here to stay. Where do the injuries come from? Right here. That's the one. The bad one is the break. Is the break. Of what? Humerus. Oh, wow. Right here. Yeah. So, literally break your arm. Test your frame, man. We're like, and we're not a bicep tear. It can happen. Bicep tears can happen. I'd say that the break is the one that's. It's a literal arm break. Oh, yeah. And when it goes, it's like. Yep. Wow. The strongest arm I've ever felt in my life. And he's not even trying. I'm very specialized. I'm a super specialized athlete. Ladies and gentlemen, Devin Larratt. This is a huge honor. Thank you so much. Hey, for me too. Right there......

https://youtu.be/iLzO5x_1PNc

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The biggest chess game ever

This is a game of chess, played by two AI engines, each far better at chess than any human on earth. The question I had is what happens when you let these machines battle it out on an infinite chess board with infinite pieces. Each move calculated and performed on an 8x8 subset that in isolation is a totally legal position with two kings, but in the big picture is just a tiny subset of a much bigger game. Where each checkmate destroys the king and the deserted pieces move on in search of another neighboring victim. Pieces get captured and sacrificed, in other words the usual game of chess, but on a much bigger board. The play is extended arbitrarily outwards, but here we focus on just this subset of about 6,000 squares. On the bottom is the counter showing the number of kings and checkmate victories. Let me mention some details. The boards are initialized with the middle game position from one of 30,000 famous grandmaster games, including Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, Gasparov, Spassky, Tal, Karpov and so on. The selection of which 8x8 subset to use for computing the next move is made randomly among all the boards that have legal chess positions. Optimizing the selection process is something that could be formulated as a reinforcement learning problem and would make this meta game of infinite chess very interesting. In fact, there are fascinating questions here about the generalizability of AI engines, far beyond the scale and the constraints of the game they were trained on. Chess is just a game, but when you start to remove the constraints and increase the scale, it becomes something else, something more like the game of life played on an infinite chessboard. Thank you for watching!

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Best feature of Python | List Comprehensions

This is a list comprehension that allows you to define one list in terms of another list and is reminiscent of set notation from mathematics. The elegance, simplicity and power of this notation makes it, in my opinion, the best feature of Python. Now what does it mean to be a best feature of a programming language? To me, it's a feature that makes you fall in love with the language and a feature that makes you enjoy programming in the language for many years. So the basic notation is a for loop over some input list nums and a function like f of x that computes something for each element x in nums. In addition, there's a filter conditional like if g of x, some function, some expression that filters the elements of nums and only keeps the ones that pass this conditional. Let's look at an example, input list nums 1, 2, 3, 4. The list comprehension squares each element of nums, so x times x for x in nums. So that creates a list that contains 1, 4, 9 and 16. Simple, beautiful. And now to add a filter to keep just the even numbers, we can add into the filter conditional of the list comprehension x modulo 2 equals 0. And then the result is the squaring of the elements that pass the filter, which is 4 and 16. Now some would argue that you can achieve the same kind of results with for loops or more direct comparisons, the map and filter functions, which are also available in Python. So what would that look like to square each element in the list? You can have a lambda function that does the squaring and a map that applies that lambda function to each element of nums. That's the second line in the code here. And the third line, you can add a filter to that. So first apply a filter with a lambda function that does the modulo 2 equals 0 conditional. And then on top of that, on the elements that pass the filter, you again do the map function of the lambda that squares each element. Now I believe this is also beautiful and powerful notation, but to me it's not nearly as elegant and Pythonic and readable as the list comprehension notation. Now I already did a video on the most controversial Python feature, which in my opinion is the Walrus operator. It comes into play nicely with list comprehensions. Now if we take some difficult to compute function like fibo here, which computes the nth element of the Fibonacci sequence, the one line ternary operator recursive implementation of the function, written by me, untested. I leave it to you as homework to test if this actually works. And I threw it in there to give a shout out to two other things I enjoy, which is recursion and the ternary operator. The if-else notation of which in Python I think is another beautiful design choice that makes an otherwise cryptic looking ternary operator actually readable to our human brains. And so if we take then another definition of nums that goes from 1 to 6, we can create a basic list comprehension that applies the fibo function to each element of nums, resulting in the familiar Fibonacci sequence of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. Now if we wanted to also add a conditional, which is where the Walrus operator comes in, we can compute fibo x and assign it to the variable y via the Walrus operator's assignment expression, and then do the modules 2 equals 0 check to keep just the even elements of the Fibonacci sequence. And then in the actual output of the list comprehension, we can just use the variable y as opposed to re-computing the fibo function. So the result of this list comprehension that uses the Walrus operator is 2 and 8. So list comprehension actually creates a list objects, computes all the elements in the list, and stores the entire list in memory, while the generator expression stores just the iterable object and computes every element in the list one at a time as it's being queried. So for most people, list comprehension is probably the default choice. It's used when the size of the list is not crazy large, especially when you want to reiterate over the list multiple times. It is faster than generator expressions, depending on the context, it could be two to three times faster. So if speed is essential, you want to use these. And if you need different list methods, like especially the slicing notation, you should be using list comprehension. On the other hand, you should use generator expressions when the range of the sequence is large or infinite, or if you want to construct iterable generator objects, which are great to impress your friends with. I should mention I'm really grateful for the sponsors that support these videos and the podcast, in this case, 8sleep. So if you enjoy these, click the links in the description to get a discount and to support my efforts. Thanks for listening, and remember, try to learn something new every day.

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Kai-Fu Lee: Question for AGI - What is the Difference Between Me and You? | AI Podcast Clips

So I know you believe, as many do, that we're far from creating an artificial general intelligence system. But say, once we do, and you get to ask her one question, what would that question be? What is it that differentiates you and me?

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Jim Keller: Abstraction Layers from the Atom to the Data Center | AI Podcast Clips

So let's get into the basics before we zoom back out. How do you build a computer from scratch? What is a microprocessor? What is a microarchitecture? What's an instruction set architecture? Maybe even as far back as what is a transistor? So the special charm of computer engineering is there's a relatively good understanding of abstraction layers. So down at the bottom you have atoms, and atoms get put together in materials like silicon or dope silicon or metal, and we build transistors. On top of that, we build logic gates, and then functional units like an adder, a subtractor, an instruction parsing unit, and then we assemble those into processing elements. Modern computers are built out of probably 10 to 20 locally organic processing elements, or coherent processing elements, and then that runs computer programs. So there's abstraction layers, and then software, there's an instruction set you run, and then there's assembly language C, C++, Java, JavaScript, there's abstraction layers, essentially from the atom to the data center. So when you build a computer, first there's a target, like what's it for, how fast does it have to be, which today there's a whole bunch of metrics about what that is. And in an organization of a thousand people who build a computer, there's lots of different disciplines that you have to operate on. Does that make sense? So there's a bunch of levels of abstraction, and organizational I can tell, and in your own vision, there's a lot of brilliance that comes in at every one of those layers. Some of it is science, some of it is engineering, some of it is art. What's the most, if you could pick favorites, what's the most important, your favorite layer on these layers of abstractions? Where does the magic enter this hierarchy? I don't really care. I'm somewhat agnostic to that. So I would say for relatively long periods of time, instruction sets are stable. So the x86 instruction set, the ARM instruction set. What's an instruction set? So it says, how do you encode the basic operations? Load, store, multiply, add, subtract, conditional, branch. There aren't that many interesting instructions. If you look at a program and it runs, 90% of the execution is on 25 opcodes, 25 instructions. And those are stable. What does it mean stable? Intel architecture has been around for 25 years. It works. It works. And that's because the basics are defined a long time ago. Right now, the way an old computer ran is you fetched instructions and you executed them in order. Do the load, do the add, do the compare. The way a modern computer works is you fetch large numbers of instructions, say 500. And then you find the dependency graph between the instructions. And then you execute in independent units those little micrographs. So a modern computer, like people like to say, computers should be simple and clean. But it turns out the market for simple, clean, slow computers is zero. Right? We don't sell any simple, clean computers. Now, you can, there's, how you build it can be clean. But the computer people want to buy, that's say in a phone or a data center, fetches a large number of instructions, computes the dependency graph, and then executes it in a way that gets the right answers. And optimizes that graph somehow. Yeah. They run deeply out of order. And then there's semantics around how memory ordering works and other things work. So the computer sort of has a bunch of bookkeeping tables that says what order do these operations finish in or appear to finish in. But to go fast, you have to fetch a lot of instructions and find all the parallelism. Now, there's a second kind of computer, which we call GPUs today. And I call it the difference, there's found parallelism, like you have a program with a lot of dependent instructions. You fetch a bunch and then you go figure out the dependency graph and you issue instructions out of order. That's because you have one serial narrative to execute. Which in fact is in, can be done out of order. Did you call it a narrative? Yeah. Wow. So yeah, so humans think in serial narrative. So read a book, right? There's a, you know, there's a sentence after sentence after sentence. And there's paragraphs. Now you could diagram that. Imagine you diagrammed it properly. You said, which sentences could be read in any order, any order without changing the meaning, right? That's a fascinating question to ask of a book. Yeah. Yeah, you could do that. Right. So some paragraphs could be reordered, some sentences can be reordered. You could say, he is tall and smart and X, right? And it doesn't matter the order of tall and smart. But if you say the tall man is wearing a red shirt, what colors, you know, like you can create dependencies, right? Right. And so GPUs on the other hand run simple programs on pixels. But you're given a million of them. And the first order, the screen you're looking at doesn't care which order you do it in. So I call that given parallelism. Simple narratives around the large numbers of things where you can just say it's parallel because you told me it was. So found parallelism where the narrative is sequential but you discover like little pockets of parallelism versus. Turns out large pockets of parallelism. Large. So how hard is it to discover? Well, how hard is it? That's just transistor count, right? So once you crack the problem, you say, here's how you fetch 10 instructions at a time, here's how you calculated the dependencies between them, here's how you describe the dependencies, here's, you know, these are pieces, right? So once you describe the dependencies, then it's just a graph, sort of, it's an algorithm that finds, what is that? I'm sure there's a graph theory, theoretical answer here that's solvable. In general, programs, modern programs that human beings write, how much found parallelism is there in them? About 10x. What does 10x mean? So if you execute it in order. Versus, yeah. You would get what's called cycles per instruction and it would be about, you know, three instructions, three cycles per instruction because of the latency of the operations and stuff. And in a modern computer, executes it, but like 0.2, 0.25 cycles per instruction. So it's about, we today find 10x. And there's two things. One is the found parallelism in the narrative, right? And the other is to predictability of the narrative, right? So certain operations, they do a bunch of calculations and if greater than one, do this, else do that. That decision is predicted in modern computers to high 90% accuracy. So branches happen a lot. So imagine you have a decision to make every six instructions, which is about the average, right? But you want to fetch 500 instructions, figure out the graph and execute them all in parallel. That means you have, let's say if you fix 600 instructions and it's every six, you have to fetch, you have to predict 99 out of 100 branches correctly for that window to be effective. Okay, so parallelism, you can't parallelize branches. Or you can. You can predict. What does predict a branch mean? So imagine you do a computation over and over, you're in a loop. So while n is greater than one, do. And you go through that loop a million times. So every time you look at the branch, you say, it's probably still greater than one. And you're saying you could do that accurately. Very accurately. My mind is blown. How the heck do you do that? Wait a minute. Well, you want to know? This is really sad. 20 years ago, you simply recorded which way the branch went last time and predicted the same thing. Right. Okay. What's the accuracy of that? 85%. So then somebody said, hey, let's keep a couple of bits and have a little counter. So when it predicts one way, we count up and then pins. So say you have a three-bit counter. So you count up and then you count down. And you can use the top bit as the assigned bit. So you have a assigned two-bit number. So if it's greater than one, you predict taken. And less than one, you predict not taken. Right? Or less than zero, whatever the thing is. And that got us to 92%. Oh. Okay. You know what? It gets better. This branch depends on how you got there. So if you came down the code one way, you're talking about Bob and Jane. Right? And then said, does Bob like Jane? It went one way. But if you're talking about Bob and Jill, does Bob like Jane? You go a different way. Right? So that's called history. So you take the history and a counter. That's cool. But that's not how anything works today. They use something that looks a little like a neural network. So modern, you take all the execution flows. And then you do basically deep pattern recognition of how the program is executing. And you do that multiple different ways. And you have something that chooses what the best result is. And then you have a supercomputer inside the computer. That's trying to predict branching. That calculates which way branches go. So the effective window that is worth finding grass in gets bigger. Why was that going to make me sad? Because that's amazing. It's amazingly complicated. Oh. Well, here's the funny thing. So to get to 85% took a thousand bits. To get to 99% takes tens of megabits. So this is one of those. To get the result, to get from a window of, say, 50 instructions to 500, it took three orders of magnitude or four orders of magnitude more bits. Now, if you get the prediction of a branch wrong, what happens then? You flush the pipe. You flush the pipe. So it's just the performance cost. But it gets even better. Yeah. You're getting the look at stuff that says, so they executed down this path, and then you had two ways to go. But far, far away, there's something that doesn't matter which path you went. So you took the wrong path. You executed a bunch of stuff. Then you had the mispredicting. You backed it up. But you remembered all the results you already calculated. Some of those are just fine. Like if you read a book and you misunderstand a paragraph, your understanding of the next paragraph sometimes is invariant to that understanding. Sometimes it depends on it. And you can kind of anticipate that invariance. Yeah, well, you can keep track of whether the data changed. And so when you come back to a piece of code, should you calculate it again or do the same thing? Okay, how much of this is art and how much of it is science? Because it sounds pretty complicated. Well, how do you describe a situation? So imagine you come to a point in the road where you have to make a decision. And you have a bunch of knowledge about which way to go. Maybe you have a map. So you want to go the shortest way, or do you want to go the fastest way, or do you want to take the nicest road? So there's some set of data. So imagine you're doing something complicated like building a computer, and there's hundreds of decision points all with hundreds of possible ways to go. And the ways you pick interact in a complicated way. Right. And then you have to pick the right spot. So is that art or science? I don't know. You avoided the question. You just described the Robert Frost problem of Road Less Taken. I described the Robert Frost problem? That's what we do as computer designers. It's all poetry. Okay. Great. Yeah, I don't know how to describe that because some people are very good at making those intuitive leaps. It seems like there's combinations of things. Some people are less good at it, but they're really good at evaluating the alternatives. Right. And everybody has a different way to do it. And some people can't make those leaps, but they're really good at analyzing it. So when you see computers are designed by teams of people who have very different skill sets, and a good team has lots of different kinds of people, I suspect you would describe some of them as artistic, but not very many. Unfortunately or fortunately. Unfortunately. Well, you know, computer design is hard. It's 99% perspiration. And the 1% inspiration is really important. But you still need the 99. Yeah, you got to do a lot of work. And then there are interesting things to do at every level of that stack. At the end of the day, if you run the same program multiple times, does it always produce the same result? Is there some room for fuzziness there? That's a math problem. So if you run a correct C program, the definition is every time you run it, you get the same answer. Yeah, well, that's a math statement. That's a language definitional statement. So for years when we first did 3D acceleration of graphics, you could run the same scene multiple times and get different answers. Right. Right. And then some people thought that was okay and some people thought it was a bad idea. And then when the HPC world used GPUs for calculations, they thought it was a really bad idea. Now, in modern AI stuff, people are looking at networks where the precision of the data is low enough that the data is somewhat noisy. And the observation is the input data is unbelievably noisy. So why should the calculation be not noisy? And people have experimented with algorithms that say can get faster answers by being noisy. Like as a network starts to converge, if you look at the computation graph, it starts out really wide and then it gets narrower. And you can say is that last little bit that important or should I start the graph on the next rev before we whittle it all the way down to the answer. Right. So you can create algorithms that are noisy. Now, if you're developing something and every time you run it, you get a different answer, it's really annoying. And so most people think even today, every time you run the program, you get the same answer. No, I know, but the question is that's the formal definition of a programming language. There is a definition of languages that don't get the same answer, but people who use those, you always want something because you get a bad answer and then you're wondering is it because of something in the algorithm or because of this. And so everybody wants a little switch that says no matter what, do it deterministically. And it's really weird because almost everything going into modern calculations is noisy. So why do the answers have to be so clear? Right, so where do you stand? I design computers for people who run programs. So if somebody says I want a deterministic answer, like most people want that. Can you deliver a deterministic answer I guess is the question? Yeah, hopefully, sure. What people don't realize is you get a deterministic answer even though the execution flow is very undeterministic. So you run this program 100 times, it never runs the same way twice, ever. And the answer, it arrives at the same answer. But it gets the same answer every time. It's just amazing.

https://youtu.be/7bLeQFhPwzk

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Roomba vs Autonomous Vehicles: Vision not Lidar is the Future for Robotics - iRobot CEO | AI Clip

Another industry in which, I would say the only other industry in which there is automation actually touching people's lives today is autonomous vehicles. What the vision you just described of using computer vision and using cheap camera sensors, there's a debate on that of LIDAR versus computer vision. And sort of, Elon Musk famously said that LIDAR is a crutch that really in the long term, camera only is the right solution, which echoes some of the ideas you're expressing. Of course, the domain in terms of its safety criticality is different. But what do you think about that approach in the autonomous vehicle space? And in general, do you see a connection between the incredible real world challenges you have to solve in the home with Roomba? And I saw a demonstration of some of them, corner cases, literally, and autonomous vehicles. So there's absolutely a tremendous overlap between both the problems, you know, a robot vacuum and autonomous vehicle are trying to solve and the tools and the types of sensors that are being applied in the pursuit of the solutions. In my world, my environment is actually much harder than the environment in automobile travels. We don't have roads, we have t-shirts, we have steps, we have a near infinite number of patterns and colors and surface textures on the floor. Especially from a visual perspective. So the way the world looks is infinitely variable. On the other hand, safety is way easier on the inside. My robots, they're not very heavy, they're not very fast. If they bump into your foot, you think it's funny. And you know, and autonomous vehicles kind of have the inverse problem. And so that for me saying vision is the future, I can say that without reservation. For autonomous vehicles, I think I believe what Elon's saying about the future is ultimately going to be vision. Maybe if we put a cheap lighter on there as a backup sensor, it might not be the worst idea in the world. So the stakes are much higher. The stakes are much higher. You have to be much more careful thinking through how far away that future is. Right. But I think that the primary environmental understanding sensor is going to be a visual system.

https://youtu.be/rojCCjUC2GI

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Sean Carroll: Arrow of Time

We talked a little bit about error of time last time, but in many worlds that there is a kind of implied error of time, right? So you've talked about the error of time that has to do with the second law of thermodynamics, that's the error of time that's emergent or fundamental, we don't know, I guess. No, it's emergent. Does everyone agree on that? Well, nobody agrees with everything. They should. They should. They should. So that error of time, is that different than the error of time that's implied by many worlds? It's not different, actually, no. In both cases, you have fundamental laws of physics that are completely reversible. If you give me the state of the universe at one moment in time, I can run the clock forward or backward equally well. There's no arrow of time built into the laws of physics at the most fundamental level. But what we do have are special initial conditions 14 billion years ago near the Big Bang. In thermodynamics, those special initial conditions take the form of things were low entropy, and entropy has been increasing ever since, making the universe more disorganized and chaotic and that's the error of time. In quantum mechanics, these special initial conditions take the form of there was only one branch of the wave function and the universe has been branching more and more ever since. Okay, so if time is emergent, so it seems like our human cognitive capacity likes to take things that are emergent and assume and feel like they're fundamental. So if time is emergent and locality, is space emergent? Yes. Okay. But I didn't say time was emergent, I said the arrow of time was emergent. Those are different. What's the difference between the arrow of time and time? Are you using arrow of time to simply mean they're synonymous with the second law of thermodynamics? No, but the arrow of time is the difference between the past and future. So there's space, but there's no arrow of space. You don't feel that space has to have an arrow, right? You could live in thermodynamic equilibrium. There'd be no arrow of time, but there'd still be time. There'd still be a difference between now and the future or whatever. So if nothing changes, there's still time. Well things could even change. Like if the whole universe consisted of the earth going around the sun, it would just go in circles or ellipses, right? Things would change, but it's not increasing entropy. There's no arrow. If you took a movie of that and I played you the movie backward, you would never know. So the arrow of time can theoretically point in the other direction for brief, briefly. To the extent that it points in different directions, it's not a very good arrow. I mean, the arrow of time in the macroscopic world is so powerful that there's just no chance of going back. When you get down to tiny systems with only three or four moving parts, then entropy can fluctuate up and down.

https://youtu.be/DG5j1HsWAOg

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Leonard Susskind: Is Ego Powerful or Dangerous in Science? | AI Podcast Clips

♪♪ Jumping back to Feynman just for a second, he had a little bit of an ego. Yes. Do you think ego is powerful or dangerous in science? I think both. Both. I think you have to have both arrogance and humility. You have to have the arrogance to say, I can do this. Nature is difficult. Nature is very, very hard. I'm smart enough. I can do it. I can win the battle with nature. On the other hand, I think you also have to have the humility to know that you're very likely to be wrong on any given occasion. Everything you're thinking could suddenly change. Young people can come along and say things you won't understand, and you'll be lost and flabbergasted. So I think it's a combination of both. You better recognize that you're very limited, and you better be able to say to yourself, I'm not so limited that I can't win this battle with nature. It takes a special kind of person who can manage both of those, I would say. And I would say there's echoes of that in your own work. A little bit of ego, a little bit of outside-of-the-box, humble thinking. I hope so. So was there a time where you felt, you looked at yourself and asked, am I completely wrong about this? Oh yeah. About the whole thing or about specific things? The whole thing. Wait, which whole thing? Me and me and my ability to do this thing. Oh, those kinds of doubts. First of all, did you have those kinds of doubts? No, I had different kinds of doubts. I came from a very working-class background, and I was uncomfortable in academia for a long time. But they weren't doubts about my ability. They were just the discomfort in being in an environment that my family hadn't participated in, I knew nothing about as a young person. I didn't learn that there was such a thing called physics until I was almost 20 years old. So I did have certain kinds of doubts, but not about my ability. I don't think I was too worried about whether I would succeed or not. I never felt this insecurity, am I ever going to get a job? That had never occurred to me that I wouldn't.

https://youtu.be/pcF51qtpKHA

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Self-replicating Python code | Quine

This Python code shown above, when executed, generates itself, shown below. This is what's called a quine. It is the kind of self-replicating system which is fascinating both philosophically and technically. The term quine was introduced by Douglas Hofstadter in his book, Geidel, Escher, Bach. The idea of quines has echoes of self-replication in biological cells where the cell contains data in the form of DNA and code in the form of biological processes which replicate that DNA. In the same way, the computational self-replication of a quine contains two elements. One is the code that performs the replication and two is the data that contains all the raw materials for performing the replication process. So like I said, most quines have a data part and a code part. So let's look at this elegant Python quine. The data part is the string of the program and the code part is the print statement that prints that program. So let's look at a basic example of the structure. The string is test %r, where %r is the repper function that returns a printable representation of the object that's passed. So when we execute this command of assigning the string to the variable s and then print the string s after passing itself to itself in a repper version of itself. And so the output of this code is test %r with the test %r in quotes, which is the repper version of the argument. Now we can move back to our quine with the same exact structure of a string, but this time the string contains also the print statement with a double percent sign, which when printed results in a single percent sign. So this code, once again, after you pass the repper version of the string to itself, results in a print of the entirety of the code. The recursive nature of this self-replicating piece of code has the beauty and the power that echoes the process of biological cell replication. I should briefly mention that there's a lot of ways of creating quines. The one I showed is the one I believe is the most elegant. There's also cheating ways of creating quines, which is, first of all, an empty program in many programming languages, including Python, is a quine itself. Nothingness, in a way, is forever effectively replicating itself. Also another obvious way is to put the code of the program into a file and then to print the contents of the file in which the code resides. Now this is actually officially considered to be cheating and not allowed to be in a quine. The quine has to be self-sustained. Now let me wrap up this video with the idea of an intron, which is code that you can inject within a quine that will replicate as part of the replication procedure, but does not actually contribute directly to the function of the quine. So it rides along for free, like a virus or a non-functional part of the genome in a DNA, without directly contributing to the replication of the code. Now this particular piece of code does more than just provide an intron. It takes the input from the user and adds that as an intron into the quine. Now the exact function is used here for brevity. So let's run this code. When we run it, it's waiting for the user input. If we just press enter, it generates the code itself, so it's a proper quine. If we run it again and provide input, like we live in a simulation, what you see is that the variable t now has a we live in a simulation string attached to it, and the entire program remains a proper quine. So if we copy it and run this program, it waits for the input. Now if we keep the same input, it generates the quine again successfully. Now we can run the same kind of quine with the we live in a simulation, and instead provide a new text, 42. The resulting output is a quine as well, with the variable t now assigned the number 42. Now to me, quines and introns make me think about the source code of our own life here on earth. And so I hope you may find this interesting and beautiful as I do. I may very well make a few more videos about quines, like multi-quines, polygon quines, quine relays, and other things that I find interesting in the space of computer science, mathematics, physics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and even psychology, history, philosophy, biology, chemistry, and so on. So if you enjoy this kind of thing, consider subscribing, and remember, try to learn something new every day.

https://youtu.be/a-zEbokJAgY

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The Big Nap: Coronavirus and World War II - Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman | AI Podcast Clips

Do you see a connection between World War II and the crisis we're living through right now? Sure. The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions, like everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone else alone, none of these abstractions work in a global crisis. And this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us. When I hear stories about my grandfather who was in the army, and so the Soviet Union where most people die when you're in the army, there's a brotherhood that happens, there's a love that happens. Do you think that's something we're going to see here? A sense of community? Well, we're not there. I mean, what the Soviet Union went through. I mean, the enormity of the war on the Russian doorstep, this is different. What we're going through now is not, we can't talk about Stalingrad and COVID in the same breath yet. We're not ready. And the sort of, you know, the sense of like the great patriotic war and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day. And on your happiest day of your life, you have to say thank you to the people who made it possible. We're not there. We're just restarting history. I've called this, on the Rogan program, I called it the great nap. The 75 years with very little by historical standards in terms of really profound disruptions. And so- When you call it the great nap, you mean lack of deep global tragedy? Well, lack of realized global tragedy. So I think that the development, for example, of the hydrogen bomb, you know, was something that happened during the great nap. And that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel fear, didn't know anxiety, but it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species was not realized. It was in the form of potential energy. And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with, with the description of Steven Pinker's optimism, is that if you look at the realized kinetic variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is the great nap. But it's not as if our fragility has not grown, our dependence on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption. And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten much worse, and the destructive potential has skyrocketed. Is tragedy the only way we wake up from the big nap? Well, no, you could also have, you know, jubilation about positive things, but it's harder to get people's attention. Can you give an example of a big global positive thing that could happen? I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with for a very long period of time, it would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday, right? Like all at once, like you knew that things had changed. And so the bleed in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular day at a particular moment. I think if you look at the stock market here, you know, there's a very clear moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the coronavirus. I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive that happened at a particular time or recapitulating the Soviet American link up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz, right? Like that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit. And so, yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing happens, you know, but it's just, there are fewer of them. That's why as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event, when you have like 30,000 people waiting and you know, like she says yes, it's pretty exciting. So I think that we shouldn't discount that. So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this crisis? I can't figure this one out. I'm just not smart enough. Something is going weirdly wrong. They're almost like two separate storylines. In one storyline, we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough. We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses. We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage. And that's a very terrifying story. On the other hand, there's this other story which says there are tons of ventilators someplace. We've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released. We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used. And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously and they can't both be true in any kind of standard way. And I don't know whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down. So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it. And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time, and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand, oh, here's how to interpret the data, or here's the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or a question of who pays for it rather than a question of whether it's present or absent. I don't understand the details of it, but something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are. So that's policy, that's institutions. What about, do you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people that have lost their job? Is this a temporary thing? I mean, what I'm, my ear is not to the suffering of those people who have lost their job or the 50% possibly of small businesses that are gonna go bankrupt. Do you think about that quiet suffering? Well, and how that might arise itself? Could be not quiet too. I mean, it could be a depression. This could go from recession to depression, and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war. So it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress and all sorts of things. But look, anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in a, I mean, think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed, hey, I want to do a bunch of research. Let's figure out what changes in our emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger, et cetera, et cetera. I believe that in many of those situations, we're running an incredible experiment. And am I worried for us all? Yes. There are some bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people are going to feel entitled. And the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your job, there's this kind of tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States. Oh, you lost your job. Poor baby. Well, go retrain. Get another one. I think there's going to be a lot less appetite for that because we've been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively. And that's the interesting thing. What does that reawaken in us? Maybe the idea that we actually are nations and that your fellow countrymen may start to mean something to more people. It certainly means something to people in the military, but I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this as like, oh yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments and we are not China. So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come? From my perspective, we are a part of the experiment, but I don't feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the experiment. We're just like little mice in a large... Does this one make sense to you, Lex? I'm romanticizing it and I keep connecting it to World War II. So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way or reading The Plague by Camus. Almost kind of telling narratives and stories, but I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going through because I think that's quiet. Everybody's numb currently. They're not realizing what it means to have lost your job and to have lost your business. There's kind of a... I'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness wears out. And especially if this lasts for many months, and if it's connected to the incompetence of the CDC and the WHO and our government and perhaps the election process. My biggest fear is that the elections get delayed or something like that. So the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have that turns to panic, that turns to anger, that anger. Can I just play with that for a little bit? Sure. If in fact all of that structure that you grew up thinking about, and again, you grew up in two places, right? So when you were inside the US, we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces. Like how often do we amend the constitution anymore? And in some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition of Simchat Torah, you've got this beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn in calligraphy that's very valuable. And it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered. And so one day a year, we dance with the Torah and we hold this incredibly vulnerable document up. And we treat it as if it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire. Well, that is how you become part of your country. In fact, maybe the election will be delayed. Maybe extraordinary powers will be used. Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history. This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great great grandparents.

https://youtu.be/Q4D_4CGWYNk

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Why is the Simulation Interesting to Elon Musk? (Nick Bostrom) | AI Podcast Clips

Let me ask, one of the popularizers, you said there's many through this, when you look at sort of the last few years of the simulation hypothesis, just like you said, it comes up every once in a while, some new community discovers it and so on. But I would say one of the biggest popularizers of this idea is Elon Musk. Do you have any kind of intuition about what Elon thinks about when he thinks about simulation? Why is this of such interest? Is it all the things we've talked about or is there some special kind of intuition about simulation that he has? I mean, you might have a better... I think, I mean, why it's of interest, I think it's like seems fairly obvious why, to the extent that one think the argument is credible, why it would be of interest. It would, if it's correct, tell us something very important about the world in one way or the other, whichever of the three alternatives for a simulation that seems like arguably one of the most fundamental discoveries, right? Now, interestingly, in the case of someone like Elon, so there's like the standard arguments for why you might want to take the simulation hypothesis seriously, the simulation argument, right? In the case that if you are actually Elon Musk, let us say, there's a kind of an additional reason in that what are the chances you would be Elon Musk? It seems like maybe there would be more interest in simulating the lives of very unusual and remarkable people. So if you consider not just simulations where all of human history or the whole of human civilization are simulated, but also other kinds of simulations, which only include some subset of people, like in those simulations that only include a subset, it might be more likely that that would include subsets of people with unusually interesting or consequential lives. So if you're Elon Musk, it's more likely that you're a human being. Like, if you're Donald Trump, or if you are Bill Gates, or you're like some particularly like distinctive character, you might think that that adds... I mean, if you just think of yourself into the shoes, right? It's got to be like an extra reason to think, that's kind of... So interesting. So on a scale of like Farmer in Peru to Elon Musk, the more you get towards the Elon Musk, the higher the probability... You'd imagine that would be some extra boost from that. There's an extra boost. So he also asked the question of what he would ask an AGI, saying the question being, what's outside the simulation? Do you think about the answer to this question, if we are living in a simulation, what is outside the simulation? So the programmer of the simulation? Yeah. I mean, I think it connects to the question of what's inside the simulation in that if you had views about the creatures of the simulation, it might help you make predictions about what kind of simulation it is, what might happen, what happens after the simulation, if there is some after, but also like the kind of setup. So these two questions would be quite closely intertwined. But do you think it would be very surprising to like, is the stuff inside the simulation, is it possible for it to be fundamentally different than the stuff outside? Yeah. Like, another way to put it, can the creatures inside the simulation be smart enough to even understand or have the cognitive capabilities or any kind of information processing capabilities enough to understand the mechanism that created them? They might understand some aspects of it. I mean, it's a level of, it's kind of, there are levels of explanation, like degrees to which you can understand. So does your dog understand what it is to be human? Well, it's got some idea, like humans are these physical objects that move around and do things. And like a normal human would have a deeper understanding of what it is to be a human. And maybe some very experienced psychologist or a great novelist might understand a little bit more about what it is to be human. And maybe superintelligence could see right through your soul. So similarly, I do think that we are quite limited in our ability to understand all of the relevant aspects of the larger context that we exist in. But there might be hope for some. I think we understand some aspects of it, but how much good is that if there's like one key aspect that changes the significance of all the other aspects? So we understand maybe seven out of 10 key insights that you need. But the answer actually varies completely depending on what number eight, nine, and 10 insight is. It's like whether you want to... Suppose that the big task were to guess whether a certain number was odd or even, like a 10 digit number. And if it's even, the best thing for you to do in life is to go north. And if it's odd, the best thing for you is to go south. Now we are in a situation where maybe through our science and philosophy, we figured out what the first seven digits are. So we have a lot of information, right? Most of it we figured out, but we are clueless about what the last three digits are. So we are still completely clueless about whether the number is odd or even, and therefore whether we should go north or go south. I feel that's an analogy, but I feel we're somewhat in that predicament. We know a lot about the universe. We've come maybe more than half of the way there to kind of fully understanding it, but the parts we're missing are plausibly ones that could completely change the overall upshot of the thing, and including change our overall view about what the scheme of priorities should be or which strategic direction would make sense to pursue. Yeah, I think your analogy of us being the dog, trying to understand human beings is an entertaining one and probably correct. The closer the understanding tends from the dog's viewpoint to us human psychologists' viewpoint, the steps along the way there will have completely transformative ideas of what it means to be human. So the dog has a very shallow understanding. It's interesting to think that, to analogize that a dog's understanding of a human being is the same as our current understanding of the fundamental laws of physics in the universe.

https://youtu.be/XRpKisty1EU

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Charlie Munger: Investing in AI

You made some comments a few months ago that you're not quite sure what to think about that IBM investment. Well, I'm not sure how it's going to come out, but of course I like the fact they're doing it. And any kind of artificial intelligence is very much in the vote. It may well work. It's just I have no way of predicting. I don't think we're paying much for the opportunity. The opportunity to be in shares of IBM? I think that there's not much optimism baked into the current price of the shares. What is it that you like about the artificial intelligence there? I like the idea of using artificial intelligence because we're so short of the real thing.

https://youtu.be/D6kNl5it9L4

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Stuart Russell: AI Winter

So what happens in these things is that technology comes out and it's happening now with deep learning. Everyone says, if I don't get hold of this technology and build up a group within my company that knows how to do it, then I'm going to be left behind. So they start investing in the technology without any evidence that it actually works to solve their problem on the assumption that if they don't, they'll be left behind. There's a potential gain here, we can't afford to lose it. And then they start to hear stories that, oh, this other company, you know, they tried six times and it just fails, right? Didn't work for their problem. Then they start to lose faith very quickly. All those companies that haven't yet had a success can switch overnight from thinking it's essential to, we better get out of this, otherwise we're going to look foolish. So that's sort of what happened with the expert system in the late 80s, which is a shame because by then we already had the technological solutions that would have alleviated a lot of those difficulties.

https://youtu.be/Gk3WsaQZ8pA

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Language or Vision - What's Harder? (Ilya Sutskever) | AI Podcast Clips

So, incredibly, you've contributed some of the biggest recent ideas in AI, in computer vision, language, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, sort of everything in between. Maybe not GANs. There may not be a topic you haven't touched, and of course, the fundamental science of deep learning. What is the difference to you between vision, language, and, as in reinforcement learning, action, as learning problems, and what are the commonalities? Do you see them as all interconnected, or are they fundamentally different domains that require different approaches? Okay, that's a good question. Machine learning is a field with a lot of unity, a huge amount of unity. What do you mean by unity? Like overlap of ideas? Overlap of ideas, overlap of principles. In fact, there's only one or two or three principles, which are very, very simple, and then they apply in almost the same way, in almost the same way to the different modalities, to the different problems. And that's why today, when someone writes a paper on improving optimization of deep learning and vision, it improves the different NLP applications, and it improves the different reinforcement learning applications. Reinforcement learning, so I would say that computer vision and NLP are very similar to each other. Today, they differ in that they have slightly different architectures. We use transformers in NLP, and we use convolutional neural networks in vision. But it's also possible that one day this will change and everything will be unified with a single architecture. Because if you go back a few years ago in natural language processing, there was a huge number of architectures for every different tiny problem had its own architecture. Today, there's just one transformer for all those different tasks. And if you go back in time even more, you had even more and more fragmentation and every little problem in AI had its own little subspecialization and sub, you know, little set of collection of skills, people who would know how to engineer the features. Now it's all been subsumed by deep learning. We have this unification. And so I expect vision to be communified with natural language as well. Or rather, I shouldn't say expect, I think it's possible. I don't wanna be too sure because I think on the convolutional neural net, it's very computationally efficient. RL is different. RL does require slightly different techniques because you really do need to take action. You really do need to do something about exploration. Your variance is much higher. But I think there is a lot of unity even there. And I would expect, for example, that at some point there will be some broader unification between RL and supervised learning where somehow the RL will be making decisions to make the supervised learning go better. And it will be, I imagine one big black box and you just throw every, you know, you shovel things into it and it just figures out what to do with whatever you shovel at it. And reinforcement learning has some aspects of language and vision combined almost. There's elements of a long-term memory that you should be utilizing and there's elements of a really rich sensory space. So it seems like the, it's like the union of the two or something like that. I'd say something slightly differently. I'd say that reinforcement learning is neither, but it naturally interfaces and integrates with the two of them. Do you think action is fundamentally different? So yeah, what is interesting about, what is unique about policy of learning to act? Well, so one example, for instance, is that when you learn to act, you are fundamentally in a non-stationary world because as your actions change, the things you see start changing. You experience the world in a different way. And this is not the case for the more traditional static problem where you have some distribution and you just apply a model to that distribution. You think it's a fundamentally different problem or is it just a more difficult, it's a generalization of the problem of understanding? I mean, it's a question of definitions almost. There is a huge, I mean, no, there's a huge amount of commonality for sure. You take gradients, you try, you take gradients, we try to approximate gradients in both cases. In some, in the case of reinforcement learning, you have some tools to reduce the variance of the gradients, you do that. There's lots of commonality. You use the same neural net in both cases. You compute the gradient, you apply Adam in both cases. So, I mean, there's lots in common for sure, but there are some small differences which are not completely insignificant. It's really just a matter of your point of view, what frame of reference you, how much do you want to zoom in or out as you look at these problems. Which problem do you think is harder? So people like Noam Chomsky believe that language is fundamental to everything. So it underlies everything. Do you think language understanding is harder than visual scene understanding or vice versa? I think that asking if a problem is hard is slightly wrong. I think the question is a little bit wrong and I want to explain why. So what does it mean for a problem to be hard? Okay, the non-interesting, dumb answer to that is there's a benchmark and there's a human level performance on that benchmark. And how is the effort required to reach the human level benchmark? So from the perspective of how much until we get to human level on a very good benchmark. Yeah, I understand what you mean by that. So what I was going to say that a lot of it depends on, you know, once you solve a problem, it stops being hard. And that's always true. And so whether something is hard or not depends on what our tools can do today. So, you know, you say today, true human level language understanding and visual perception are hard in the sense that there is no way of solving the problem completely in the next three months, right? So I agree with that statement. Beyond that, I'm just, I'd be, my guess would be as good as yours, I don't know. Oh, okay, so you don't have a fundamental intuition about how hard language understanding is. Well, I think, I know I changed my mind. I'd say language is probably going to be harder. I mean, it depends on how you define it. Like if you mean absolute top-notch, 100% language understanding, I'll go with language. And so, but then if I show you a piece of paper with letters on it, is that, you see what I mean? It's like you have a vision system, you say it's the best human level vision system. I show you, I open a book and I show you letters. Will it understand how these letters form into word and sentences and meaning? Is this part of the vision problem? Where does vision end and language begin? Yeah, so Chomsky would say it starts at language. So vision is just a little example of the kind of structure and fundamental hierarchy of ideas that's already represented in our brain somehow that's represented through language. But where does vision stop and language begin? That's a really interesting question. A question. So one possibility is that it's impossible to achieve really deep understanding in either images or language without basically using the same kind of system. So you're going to get the other for free. I think it's pretty likely that yes, if we can get one, our machine learning is probably that good that we can get the other. But I'm not 100% sure. And also, I think a lot of it really does depend on your definitions. Definitions of like perfect vision. Because reading is vision, but should it count? Yeah, to me, so my definition is if a system looked at an image and then a system looked at a piece of text and then told me something about that and I was really impressed. That's relative. You'll be impressed for half an hour and then you're gonna say, well, I mean, all the systems do that, but here's the thing they don't do. Yeah, but I don't have that with humans. Humans continue to impress me. Is that true? Well, the ones, okay, so I'm a fan of monogamy, so I like the idea of marrying somebody, being with them for several decades. So I believe in the fact that yes, it's possible to have somebody continuously giving you pleasurable, interesting, witty, new ideas, friends. Yeah, I think so. They continue to surprise you. The surprise, it's that injection of randomness seems to be a nice source of, yeah, continued inspiration, like the wit, the humor. I think, yeah, that would be, it's a very subjective test, but I think if you have enough humans in the room. Yeah, I understand what you mean. Yeah, I feel like I misunderstood what you meant by impressing you. I thought you meant to impress you with its intelligence, with how well it understands an image. I thought you meant something like, I'm gonna show it a really complicated image and it's gonna get it right, and you're gonna say, wow, that's really cool. Our systems of January 2020 have not been doing that. Yeah, no, I think it all boils down to the reason people click like on stuff on the internet, which is it makes them laugh. So it's like humor or wit or insight. I'm sure we'll get that as well.

https://youtu.be/xoVibFYi1Gs